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OT: C. L. Moore's Northwest Smith


It's been awhile since I posted one of these. Having just reread the 2008 Paizo Northwest of Earth anthology containing all Moore's stories about the rogue and outlaw Northwest Smith, I decided to return to form.

First off, I want to give some context about the stories. C(atherine) L(ucille) Moore was a Midwestern girl who grew up reading science fiction, primarily by Edgar Rice Burroughs, in her youth. She had to drop out of college in the depths of the Great Depression in 1933 and take a job as a bank teller to help support her family. During this time, she wrote Shambleau, the first Northwest Smith story and the template for the series. Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright--who had fostered the literary careers of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith among others--quickly accepted the story and published it late that year. While the resulting literary career is outside the scope of this post (although at some point I plan to post my thoughts on her Jirel of Joiry series, powerful Judgment Night novella, and possibly other fiction), Shambleau became the most famous story of and template for a series featuring a character who inspired later characters such as Han Solo and Indiana Jones.

Operating in a solar system circa 3500 that feels like a later version of the one in ERB's work, Smith is a smuggler, rogue, and outlaw frequently at odds with the law who often does the right thing despite himself and exhibits a sexual vulnerability rare in the science fiction of the time. He is a complex, layered character often haunted and scarred by the trauma in his adventures. Moore implies drug smuggling and other unsavory activities on his part but places them in the background while focusing on the events propelling the story forward. Unusually for the heroes of the time, he sometimes exhibits fear and doesn't always defeat the monsters striving against him. He provides a solid protagonist through whose eyes to view Moore's vision of our solar system 1500 years from now.

As mentioned before, Shambleau kicks off the series. Moore opens it with an introductory paragraph mentioning Man has conquered space before modern civilization and implying the stranger things of legend are in fact garbled stories handed down from previous encounters with deadly alien beings. This theme recurs throughout the series, its first example being the Shambleau, explicitly linked to Medusa.

In this powerful narrative, Smith rescues a young, strangely beautiful alien girl from a lynching. The mob exhibits disgust when Smith claims her as his own and lets him take her to his room. There, the girl refuses to eat and exhibits strange behavior as Smith goes about his implied illegal activities. Eventually she reveals her true nature and nearly overwhelms him till his trusty friend Yarol the Venusian--the only recurring character in the series other than Smith--bursts in on them, remembers the ancient myths, and saves Smith.

Afterward, Yarol and Smith speculate on the Shambleau's origin, and Yarol tries to get Smith to promise to incinerate any future Shambleau. Smith gives a halfhearted promise, still haunted by the ecstasy of the girl's embrace.

On a number of levels, Shambleau is a remarkable story. Even working within the cultural mores of the time, the explicit sexuality of the Shambleau despite her obviously alien origins is incredibly effective. Unlike other jut jawed heroes of Depression Era fiction, Smith finds something greater than himself in his antagonist, clearly showing Moore was doing her best not to imitate other writers she admired. Even so, Smith doesn't come across as weak or ineffective, and he seems to be capable of dealing with his enemy if prepared. Unfortunately lack of knowledge strips him of his normal advantages and causes the Shambleau to overwhelm him. The story is both beautifully written and haunting in its execution. I have no problem seeing why it's a classic.

Next up in the series is Black Thirst, the first story in the series set on Venus. (Oddly enough, while Yarol is a Venusian, he appears in none of the Venus stories.) In this story, Smith runs into a young, incredibly beautiful girl begging for his help. She is a Minga girl--a type of girl bred on Venus strictly for beauty so as to fetch a high price from some potentate as a member of a zenana.

Reluctantly Smith agrees to go along with her and in the castle she lives in discovers the wonders of the Minga girl operation. He faces off with the diabolical mastermind of the castle and learns his enemy's origin.

Black Thirst expands the scope of the Northwest Smith stories. Whereas Shambleau was a completely mortal enemy, the Alendar is something else entirely. I won't elaborate here because the final revelation works better as a surprise. In addition, Vaudir--the girl who begs Smith to help her--is the first female protagonist of the series and is a fully realized character adding weight to the story. Nearly as well written as Shambleau and fully as ambitious, Black Thirst compliments well its predecessor.

In the next story, Scarlet Dream, Smith buys a tapestry with a curious red design on it that sucks him into a pocket dimension lorded over by a malevolent entity. This could have been a routine story, but by infusing it with a sympathetic (though unnamed) heroine, Moore makes it grimly compelling. The final line fully displays how haunted Smith is after his misadventures inside the tapestry dimension.

After Scarlet Dream, the series briefly changes focus.

In Dust of Gods, Moore explores the origins of the Martian God Pharol, otherwise present only as an oath in the stories. In this, Smith and Yarol are sitting in a tavern and notice two hard bitten scoundrels who are scared witless after a previous job. A man approaches our heroes and asks them to seek what the other two men were looking for. It seems Pharol is the last of a trinity of Martian gods to have any physical presence on our plane of existence. The man intends to draw Pharol fully back to Mars and use him for his own ends. Smith and Yarol agree. Naturally they find the sanctuary of his remains (the titular dust of the title) and--well, I don't want to give away too much.

Following Dust of Gods is Julhi, in which Moore returns to the theme of alien femme fatale. Here, the title female character is an antagonist like Shambleau. Julhi is a curiously compelling transdimentional cyclops-vampire whose presence in our dimension is possible because of one of her servants, whom Smith agrees to help. Once again Smith reveals his sexual vulnerability as Julhi works to overwhelm him.

Nymph of Darkness is our next story and the first collaboration in the series. Forrest Ackerman and Moore wrote the story together. In this story, as in Julhi, Smith is on Venus and encounters a young girl, naked and wholly invisible, being pursued by a shadowy Lovecraftian monster serving a cult. It seems Nyusa--the nymph of the title--is the product of the mating between the Venusian God of darkness and a Venusian woman. The cult controls her and forces her to dance periodically under special lights that alone make her visible. She eventually realizes the full potential of her parentage.

In The Cold Gray God, Smith is back on Mars, here stumbling across the mystery of a beautiful singer who vanished only to reappear and seek Smith himself out. It seems Mars in the distant past had an even darker God than Pharol who very much now wants to return home.

Yvala is the next story and features the return of Yarol. Our heroes take a contract to go to an unnamed Jovian moon and bring back a beautiful girl to a man who very much wants her. An offhand reference to the Minga girls hints Smith is not completely over that incident. On the moon, Yvala proves to be the origin of the Greek myth of Circe.

Lost Paradise is one of only two stories in the series with Earth as a significant setting. In it, Smith and Yarol encounter a man descended from a long-vanished lunarian civilization and learn the sad secret of his race's downfall.

In The Tree of Life, Smith stumbles into some ruins in the Martian desert and faces off with Thag, the malevolent embodiment of a being brought into our plane of existence millennia ago by a Martian king seeking greater power for himself.

After Tree of Life, Quest of the Starstone soon appeared. This is the second series collaboration. Noteworthily Henry Kuttner, another member of the Weird Tales stable, wrote a fan letter to Moore, addressed as MR. C. L. Moore. Despite his near certain embarrassment at misidentifying her gender, Kuttner nonetheless got a collaboration out of the letter. A few years later, the two would marry.

In Quest of the Starstone, the redoubtable Jirel of Joiry--the other series protagonist created by C. L. Moore in the 1930s--takes from the wizard Franga a powerful jewel. Determined to regain it, Franga searches space and time to find Northwest Smith--of course. He convinces Smith and Yarol to try to seize the jewel from Jirel. The interaction between these hotheaded characters is interesting to say the least.

Werewoman is an oddball in the series. Its setting is unclear. It also lacks the planetary romance feel of the other stories. In this story, Smith ventures into a sort of forbidden land and faces off with a pack of female werewolves and something darker. It is perhaps the most hauntingly written story in the series after Shambleau and Black Thirst.

Song in a Minor Key completes the sequence. In this tale, Northwest Smith reflects on the tragic event that led to his becoming who he is. It's by far the shortest story in the series--but also one of the most powerful. We learn all we will ever know about the hero's background before appropriately he ventures off to further adventures.

Thus we have the Classic Northwest Smith series. Smith himself is something of a combination of Conan and John Carter with nuanced aspects thrown in to make him a unique character. He has a number of attributes lifted by George Lucas for Han Solo and Indiana Jones. The legendary Leigh Brackett would also translate facets of Smith's character to her own primary hero and Han Solo template, Eric John Stark. He was a Sui Genesis character featuring both incredible competence and incredible vulnerability at a time when Burroughsian near supermen and ineffective Lovecraftian heroes were pretty much the extent of the heroes. (Of course I'm not denigrating either Burroughs or Lovecraft, but rather only pointing out Northwest Smith is something different from their heroes.)

The stories themselves cover a host of themes and ideas in appropriately exotic, alien settings with compellingly realized side characters and hints of rich backstory for the various otherworldly venues.The carefully crafted words and dreamy visuals serve to undergird the storytelling.

A somewhat frequent criticism I see of the tales is of the languid pacing. Admittedly Moore avoids frenetic pacing, but she does so to build a mood. Constant action scenes and derring-do would only undermine the elegiac beauty of the series. It's intended to be contemplative and thoughtful rather than fast paced and hectic.

Ultimately this series was a great way for C. L. Moore to begin her writing career, which lasted 25 years till Henry Kuttner's death at a relatively young age in 1958. She took inspiration from those like ERB and built on that inspiration to create something unusual even to this day in the Sci Fi/fantasy field. Others who came after her acknowledged her own inspiration of them in creating their worlds. As such, Northwest Smith is a pivotal character in 20th Century fiction and one whose adventures I wholeheartedly recommend to aficionados of the genre.








Requiescat in pace, Krystle Papile. I'll always miss you. Justice was finally served.

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Another excellent write-up, and about an author who may have provided a slightly different perspective on things in a very male-dominated field at the time (especially in her early days and solo work). As a side-note, in 1992 a little film called “Timescape” (also called “Grand Tour: Disaster in Time”, which is what I saw it as on VHS) was released (an early directing effort by David Twohy who went on to write and direct “Pitch Black”, the Riddick films, “Below”, etc. as well as some writing such as “Waterworld”, “The Fugitive”, etc.). “Timescape” drew me in despite its modest budget, with a solid performance from Jeff Daniels, and it was the story itself that stuck with me. While looking into the movie I mentally logged Twohy's name as someone to watch (and who has since both impressed me and provided a few misses for me as well, both in his directing and screenwriting efforts).

But more relevant to your superb historical and informative post here is that “Timescape” was an adaptation of “Vintage Season”, one of a number of stories (in this case a novella) C.L. Moore co-wrote with her husband (they published it under the pseudonym of Lawrence O'Donnell). I never went on to seek out or read any of her work other than “Vintage Season” (which some suspect was primarily her work, with only small contributions from Kuttner), unfortunately, but your post here, which invoked nostalgia of Timescape's story (for which a number of elements were altered, and the sullen ending of “Vintage Season” was changed into a happier, and for me sweetly haunting, ending for the film) as soon as I saw your title, may just lead me to do so.

Her body of work appears to have been a larger influence on sci-fi literature than I realized until your summation here. It reminds me a bit of Andre Norton, another female writer often mistaken for male.

So yet again, a very fine read, something rare to find in IMDB forums. Nice work on this.
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I'm something new entirely. With my own set of rules. I'm Dexter. Boo.

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Well, thank you, Warrior Poet. I try to make these as informative and helpful as possible. If you do plan to read Moore's work, some of her collections such as Judgment Night and The Best of C. L. Moore are available for reasonable prices on the secondary market. Recently several collections and novels from her and Henry Kuttner also became available as e-books. Northwest Smith, Judgment Night, and Jirel are among these.

Requiescat in pace, Krystle Papile. I'll always miss you. Justice was finally served.

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You picked another forum yet where you might post this stuff regularly like you did here? I still haven't found a great option, but I'm curious what https://hashed.io/ will turn out to be like once they get it up and going.
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I'm something new entirely. With my own set of rules. I'm Dexter. Boo.

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