Weird fiction review: “Ubbo-Sathla”, Clark Ashton Smith

"Ubbo-Sathla" is part of Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborea cycle of short stories. It was first published in Weird Tales, July 1933.

What is Hyperborea? As I've mentioned before, fantasy fiction used to be set at some time on Earth. Using a known historical period, though, requires research and can constrain one's imagination. So some time after Helena Blavatsky popularized her new religious movement Theosophy, some fiction writers who didn't believe a word of it took her concept that humans had developed on a series of lost continents - Hyperborea, Lemuria, then Atlantis - as nearly empty playgrounds to set tales of magic and adventure in.

"For Ubbo-Sathla is the source and the end. Before the coming of Zhothaqquah or Yok-Zothoth or Kthulhut from the stars, Ubbo-Sathla dwelt in the steaming fens of the newmade Earth: a mass without head or members, spawning the grey, formless efts of the prime and the grisly prototypes of terrene life"

We start with some bad theology from The Book of Eibon: Ubbo-Sathla is praised as “the source and the end” because (she?) is the cause of Earth life’s single-celled prototypes, while Yog-Sothoth “came from the stars.”

In 1932, Paul Tregardis found an interesting crystal in the London curio shop of a Jewish small businessman. Asked about it, the owner “gave the impression of being lost to commercial considerations in some web of cabbalistic revery.” (Would this be considered multi-layered stereotyping? “Running a business is boring, I’d much rather think about the Kabbalah!”) It seems “A geologist found it in Greenland, beneath glacial ice, in the Miocene strata. Who knows? It may have belonged to some sorcerer of primeval Thule.”

Tregardis was startled. Sounds like something he read in The Book of Eibon, “strangest and rarest of occult forgotten volumes, which is said to have come down through a series of manifold translations from a prehistoric original written in the lost language of Hyperborea.” (How would one know that a book being the rarest or most obscure has any correlation to truth value? Hipster epistemology?) Tregardis is the sort of guy who owns a medieval French manuscript of it and has collated passages with the Necronomicon. There was a reference to the cloudy scrying crystal of the wizard Zon Mezzamalech, in Mhu Thulan. Dealer, I’ll take it!

Tregardis smiled at himself with inward irony for even conceiving the absurd notion. Such things did not occur—at least, not in present-day London; and in all likelihood, The Book of Eibon was sheer superstitious fantasy, anyway.

At home, he checked the one brief reference in The Book of Eibon: “he could behold many visions of the terrene past, even to the Earth’s beginning, when Ubbo-Sathla, the unbegotten source, lay vast and swollen and yeasty amid the vaporing slime…” but Zon vanished, and the crystal was lost. He stared into the crystal, which glowed with an inner light, and it hypnotized him into a sense of dreamlike duality where Paul Tregardis was also Zon Mezzamalech, who sought the crystal because all past years can be seen in it.

Zon Mezzamalech had dreamt to recover the wisdom of the gods who died before the Earth was born. They had passed to the lightless void, leaving their lore inscribed upon tablets of ultra-stellar stone; and the tablets were guarded in the primal mire by the formless, idiotic demiurge, Ubbo-Sathla.

When Paul regained consciousness as himself, he resolved never to to gaze into the magic crystal again. So of course, the next day, he gazed in!

Zon grew annoyed that he “beheld nothing more than a few fragments of the years of Mhu Thulan immediately posterior to the present-the years of his own life-time;” – time to disregard all dangers of magic and go diving into Deep Time! The orb past-life regresses him through Hyperborea’s rise from savagery to high civilization, then a man-like beast, a pterodactyl, an ichthyosaur, then a serpent-man who “bowed with hissing litanies to great serpent-idols”, then a crawling thing too primitive to build or dream. At last he becomes an amoeba-like thing in the shallows of landless primal Earth, somehow sensing Ubbo-Sathla and tilted in the mire the tablets of “the pre-mundane gods.” But a single cell has no eyes, and will only crawl mindlessly on the tablets, never read them.

Of Paul’s vanishing, there was a curt notice in several of the London papers. No one seems to have known anything about him.

This is a simple short story, condensing the meditation on Deep Time Lovecraft used as an element in several much longer tales. And as short story, its genre seems to be moral fable. Don’t be an occultist or you could die/vanish from what you mess with. 

Weird Fiction review: "The Challenge From Beyond"

This was a round robin story by Catherine L. Moore (known for medieval French sword and sorcery and Solar system-set Weird SF), Abraham Merritt (a novelist whose staple genre was “lost races”), H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and someone named Frank Belknap Long. It was the brainchild of Julius Schwartz, then a literary agent, but better remembered for his work at DC Comics long after the deaths of Lovecraft, Howard, and Merritt. It was written in the summer of 1935 for the September issue of Fantasy magazine.

C.L. Moore

George Campbell, a geology professor, is camping during summer break. When an animal disturbs his campsite, he picks up a rock to throw at it, but it’s “Square, crystal smooth, obviously artificial, with dull rounded corners.” It’s an age-worn artificial cube of quartz, and inside is a small disc with “Wedge-shaped characters, faintly reminiscent of cuneiform writing.” (He didn’t notice this while making camp?) He’s weirded out by how this could exist, his internal monologue running in the channel we now call “Lovecraftian”, even though it’s not his turn yet. “could there, in a Paleozoic world, have been things with a written language who might have graven these cryptic wedges upon the quartz-enveloped disc he held? Or—might a thing like this have fallen meteor-like out of space into the unformed rock of a still molten world?” He turns off his flashlight… did the cube continue glowing a moment?

Bare summary doesn’t do justice to Moore’s luxurious prose, the positive feature that balances her harebrained plot development.

A. Merritt

Campbell can’t sleep. He gets back up to experiment with the cube. It acts weird when photons hit it, but only if he’s paying attention. “His mind must travel along the ray, fix itself upon the cube’s heart, if its beat were to wax, until … what?” Much unnecessary detail of sights, sounds, etc. follows, then the object absorbs him.

And he passes the baton to…

H.P. Lovecraft

Campbell’s mind traverses the vast physical distance between where he was and some unknown cosmic destination. It’s scary to not have a body, especially if your internal monologue assumes materialism! He tries to think as he moves, and “Some cell-group in the back of his head had seemed to find a cloudily familiar quality in the cube—and that familiarity was fraught with dim terror.” Because of course he remembers that, as a professor, he’s familiar with the Eltdown Shards, cuneiform-like clay tablets geologists found in pre-carboniferous strata in England thirty years ago. While a few scientists “hinted at” their heretical artificiality (in Lovecraft, do academics ever make clear claims rather than hinting or insinuating?), he only remembers something about a cube because he’s also read the far less reputable book by “a deeply learned Sussex clergyman of occultist leanings” purporting to translate the Eltdown Shards. If the Reverend is right (of course he is), on an extra-galactic planet “a mighty order of worm-like beings whose attainments and whose control of nature surpassed anything within the range of terrestrial imagination” gradually colonized their entire galaxy. No technology could let them navigate to other galaxies in person, so in their thirst for knowledge of all space and time “They devised peculiar objects—strangely energized cubes of a curious crystal containing hypnotic talismen and enclosed in space-resisting spherical envelopes of an unknown substance—which could be forcibly expelled beyond the limits of their universe,” and when by chance a mind observed one some indefinite amount of time after it landed on a planet, the hypnotized mind will be beamed to the worm-people’s planet, where one of the natives can perform a mind-swap to go exploring the victim’s extra-galactic space-time coordinates.

Sometimes, when a potentially important race capable of space travel was found, the worm-like folk would employ the cube to capture and annihilate minds by the thousands, and would extirpate the race for diplomatic reasons—using the exploring minds as agents of destruction.

Only a few of the numberless cubes sent forth ever found a landing and response on an inhabited world—since there was no such thing as aiming them at goals beyond sight or knowledge. Only three, ran the story, had ever landed on peopled worlds in our own particular universe. One of these had struck a planet near the galactic rim two thousand billion years ago, while another had lodged three billion years ago on a world near the centre of the galaxy. The third—and the only one ever known to have invaded the solar system—had reached our own earth 150,000,000 years ago.

It was with this latter that Dr. Winters-Hall’s “translation” chiefly dealt.

Fortunately for Earth, it was then dominated by the Great Race, who knew a thing or two about mind transference, so their scientists reacted efficiently and “carefully hid the thing from light and sight, and guarded it as a menace.”

Now and then some rash, unscrupulous adventurer would furtively gain access to it and sample its perilous powers despite the consequences—but all such cases were discovered, and safely and drastically dealt with.

 

(I love the mental image of tentacled, cone-shaped adventures, wielding weapons and bracing their mighty muscles.)

Fifty million years ago, the beings sent their minds ahead to escape a peril from the inner Earth, and the whereabouts of the cube were lost to Earthly minds ever since. In a delightful bit of self-parody, Lovecraft has Campbell note the length and detail of this “translation” relative to the small number of Eltdown glyphs.

He wakes up and tries to move, bu thoughts like “move my hand” have no coherent output, and his five senses are not what he’s used to. Good ol’ body horror. A fellow being comes in, like a pale grey centipede, and appears to threaten him.

Robert E. Howard

He fought down an unreasoning horror. Judged from a cosmic standpoint, why should his metamorphosis horrify him? Life and consciousness were the only realities in the universe. Form was unimportant. His present body was hideous only according to terrestrial standards.

Campbell mans up (centipedes up?) and thinks of his old body as just a cloak that would have been cast off upon a natural death anyway. What had that life “ever given him save toil, poverty, continual frustration and repression?” The only positive things in memory were “the physical delights of his former life.”

But he had long ago exhausted all the physical possibilities contained in that earthly body. Earth held no new thrills. But in the possession of this new, alien body he felt promises of strange, exotic joys.

Bwah?

Campbell also has access to the neurons of the being who left this body, Tothe of the planet Yekub. “Carved deep in the physical tissues of the brain, they spoke dimly as implanted instincts to George Campbell; and his human consciousness seized them and translated them to show him the way not only to safety and freedom, but to…” power! He’s doing the full Nietzsche.

Understanding that the centipede threatening him with a metal box is Yukth, “supreme lord of science”, he kills him anyway. He uses Tothe’s memories to run to the shrine of a floating white sphere and seize it – the god of Yekub! (though why the aliens worship a dumb old sphere for an idol has been forgotten for a million years.) Conan the Centipede kills the nearby priest and glories in thoughts of how he’ll be king now! He, who dared the easy thing no “man of Yekub” ever would, for as an Earthling he is Beyond Good and Evil as the centipedes subjectively think of them! Muwhahaha!

Frank Belknap Long

In Campbell’s body, Tothe walks around like an idiot, frothing at the mouth. His fingers are clawed now?

Meanwhile Conan the Centipede streaks through fern-planted avenues between the cyclopean buildings under the alien sun. Woo, got your god!

Back on Earth, Tothe is overwhelmed by bestial human brain patterns and tries to eat a live fox.

Meanwhile thousands of worm-shapes prostrate themselves as the ex-Campbell undulates toward the throne of spiritual empire.

Back on Earth, Campbell’s body/Tothe dies by drowning and is found by a fur trapper. He finds it much hairier and beast-like than Campbell left it, and dripping black ichor instead of blood.

Meanwhile the divine sphere acts on Tothe’s body, burning with “a supermundane spirituality all animal dross.” Then it communicates:

“On all earth, living creatures rend one another, and feast with unutterable cruelty on their kith and kin. No worm-mind can control a bestial man-body when it yearns to raven. Only man-minds instinctively conditioned through the course of ten thousand generations can keep the human instincts in thrall. Your body will destroy itself on earth, seeking the blood of its animal kin, seeking the cool water where it can wallow at its ease. Seeking eventually destruction, for the death-instinct is more powerful in it than the instincts of life and it will destroy itself in seeking to return to the slime from which it sprang.”

Thus spoke the round red god of Yekub in a far-off segment of the space-time continuum to George Campbell as the latter, with all human desire purged away, sat on a throne and ruled an empire of worms more wisely kindly, and benevolently than any man of earth had ever ruled an empire of men.

Whoa, he ended it with a huge Take That to Howard’s intentions.

Well, you don’t read a round robin for narrative cohesion. You want to see the different authors’s styles contrasting in small chunks. And this one is better than most, because not everyone just spews their style onto the page with a straight face: Lovecraft in particular has the self-awareness to make fun of himself. Howard might have been doing the same: Conan the Centipede is a more over-the-top power fantasy than actual Conan, who often showed a code of ethics.

Merritt does the least by far. Moore had the job of creating a character and MacGuffin, so she couldn’t run wild like Howard or Howard. And not having read Frank Belknap Long, his section, while very distinct, has the least to contextualize it. How does an alien not understanding human instincts turn the body into a werewolf? What were Long’s psychological preoccupations as an author? That stuff about the unutterable cruelty of Earth life and how humans can only act better because of ten thousand generations of conditioning echoes the French Counter-Revolutionary philosopher Joseph de Maistre (e.g. Seventh St. Petersburg Dialogue), filtered through the later Darwinian paradigm shift.