THE DEEP ONES: "When the Green Star Waned" by Nictzin Dyalhis

"When the Green Star Waned" by Nictzin Dyalhis

Discussion begins January 26, 2022.

First published in the April 1925 issue of Weird Tales.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?58099

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors
Rainbow Fantasia; 35 Spectrumatic Tales of Wonder
The Sapphire Goddess: The Fantasies of Nictzin Dyalhis

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://tinyurl.com/ycknbku8

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

No audio versions found online to date.

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nictzin_Dyalhis
https://www.patreon.com/posts/oddments-nictzin-32531936
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/dyalhis_nictzin
https://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.com/2012/06/nictzin-dyalhis-1873-1942.html
https://tinyurl.com/4psj73y6

This one's online here.

>2 AndreasJ:

For some reason, the original link would not display correctly when I pasted it in, but I didn't think to try TinyUrl!

I think the problem is that LT can’t handle URL’s with an @ in them.

Thanks for correcting the link, this one's online for me.

I'll read this in Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors.

Where to begin?

Well, as a story I didn't like it very much. It sorts of reminds me of CAS's attempts at space-opera, which I count among the weakest of his work. WT readers on the whole evidently disagreed with me, voting it the most popular in the issue.

Speaking of CAS, while Dyalhis doesn't have his vocabulary, he makes up for it with the weirdly mangled names of the planets etc. To what purpose? Some sf stories (The Book of the New Sun comes to mind) do something similar to give an impression of linguistic change, but the characters here surely aren't speaking some future descendant of English.

Speaking of language, acc'd the SFE this is the first story to use the word "blastor" (or "blaster" as usually spelt subsequently). I guess that alone earns it a mention in any history of sf.

The sequel, "The Oath of Jul Hok" is online here.

Incidentally, the idea that the Moon formed by a chunk of the Earth breaking off was scientifically respectable in the ‘20s. Deep Ones may recall it also figures in HPL’s “The Call of Cthulhu”.

And since I sea there’s a work for this particular story I’ll take the opportunity to touchstone it: When the Green Star Waned

This one was kooky. I agree that I "didn't like it" as a fiction reading experience for its own sake, but it was so unusual (and evidently significant to readers at the time) that I'm glad to have read it. It reminded me remotely of the interplanetary aspects of Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell with none of the literary artistry or psychological context.

Are we sure that the Venhezians aren't speaking a mutation of English? It is our future, and it's not clear to me whether the other planets have been peopled by humans or if all of their intelligent races are supposed to be indigenous. The conference of planets seemed rather thinly developed and tacked-on.

The central ensemble of Venhezian superheroes was curious. On the one hand, they represented a sort of pantheon of cultural virtues, but I wondered while reading whether they might also have been intended to reference the author's own circle of friends and/or fellow writers. As literary characters, I found them all (including the narrator) profoundly unsympathetic. On the whole, I didn't come away with a high opinion of the causally genocidal Venhezians (despite my presumable Aerthon self-interest).

Another interesting feature was the account of Aerth history supplied by Jon, which is evidently a gloss of World War I, with England as the "great island kingdom" and the US as the "powerful republic overseas." In retrospect, the discovery of the military application of gold might be rather uranium, and the lunar monsters a metaphor for radioactive pollution. Assigning a culpable role to the "Mongulions" is unsurprising in 1920s US pulp fiction.

Although I thought that the "Lords of the Dark Face" had some fine numinosity as a phrase, this story was the second one I've read in under a year that made the error of thinking that the sun never shines on the "dark side" of the Moon. (The other story, far more recent and thus less forgivable, was in Newland's 2021 collection Cosmogramma.)

>9 paradoxosalpha:

I didn’t express myself very well there, but I too am glad to have read it, albeit not for its quality as a story.

I assumed the inhabitants of the various planets were supposed to be indigenous, but I guess there’s no clear indication. But even if they’re literally human, they evidently aren’t the result of future (from a 1925 perspective) colonialization from Aerth, or the Venehezians should have as much record of the Great War as the Aerthons. If not better, as the historians’ craft may be assumed to have hit a rough patch on Aerth. Rather we’d be looking at prehistoric spread of humanity - which wouldn’t be an unprecedented idea in pulp sf (cf the intro to “Shambleau”). There’s obviously no reason they should speak a descendant of English in such a scenario, though about here I’m starting to fear I’m thinking this through more thoroughly than Dyalhis ever did.

The stories reprinted in Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors also come with what must be an illustration from their original publication, although this isn't stated anywhere in the book, nor are the artists credited.


Yet again, I'm not going to deviate from the consensus opinion. I can't say that I enjoyed the story, but I did find it interesting for several reasons:

This may the first story I've read where I've been aware of a paid-by-the-word pulp writer padding, augmenting, increasing their word count.

By chance I found a short interview with Michael Moorcock for French television uploaded to YouTube (the conversation was conducted in English, luckily). At one point Moorcock mentions the fascistic inclinations of much Golden Age pulp fiction (apropos of the conversation he had during a train journey with Norman Spinrad that led to the novel The Iron Dream). That all seems to be in evidence with this story.

Does Dyalhis still believe in the theory of the aether? I suppose Einstein's theories were still new in 1925 but I had the impression that the pulps generally wanted to be up to the minute with their science - or maybe that only came in with Hugo Gernsback.

Dyalhis does make a mistake when he says the Moon doesn't rotate on its axis but I don't think he's saying one face is always in shadow. He has the Lunarions following a kind of nomadic lifestyle in order to stay in darkness "to keep the Moun's bulk always between them and the hated light of the Sun"; and they "look with envy" at Earth when "the dark of the Moon" is facing it. Let me say, I doubt I would have read closely enough to figure out what's supposed to be going on in that passage, without the prompting of paradoxoalpha's comment in >10 paradoxosalpha: (so thank you for that, and I hope this doesn't like like I'm trying to correct you).

This is a universe explicitly ruled by a Deity - and a real Old Testament type he is, tearing the Moon from the Earth and exiling or imprisoning the Lunarions on it.

For what it's worth I don't see any hint of interplanetary colonisation in the background to this story. Rather that each planet is supposed to have its own flavour of humanoid through parallel evolution (or, perhaps, the will of God working through the aether, or something along those lines?). The timeline of the future history is puzzling, all the same. It does look like Earth goes from WWI to subjugation by the Lunarions isolated from the other Planetary civilisations, but are not spoken of as either unknown or backward by the various characters from the other planets, but rather not simply known but admired. I'm bound to agree that Dyalhis doesn't appear to have thought this through (caveat- I haven't read the sequel).

This is the third story in Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors; hence the selected story from Weird Tales' third year of publication.The first two stories are "A Square of Canvas" by Anthony M. Rud and "The Loved Dead" by C. M. Eddy (revised, as we all know, by H. P. Lovecraft). These first two stories are out to shock but maybe also seemed old fashioned by the twenties, smacking of the Conte Cruel and the Decadent 1890s? Could this kind of science fiction (fantasy, rather) have actually been a breath of fresh air and something the "Unique Magazine" needed to keep it vital in its early years?

Finally, a small synchronicity. Weird Tales ceased publication (of its original run) in 1954. Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors was published 34 years later, in 1988. Which is 34 years ago!

Oh, and of course there's another astronomical goof in the story's title (but a forgivable one considering when this story was written). The Earth isn't a green star, it's a blue one. ("Star" as in "a light in the sky", of course).

>12 housefulofpaper:
I see!

>13 housefulofpaper:
Earth isn't even symbolically green, that would be Venus! Despite the lack of actual images of Earth from space, I think the relative area of the oceans on the surface would suggest a blue planet rather than a green one.

This is the second time, after about eight years, I've read this story. I liked it a bit better this time.

Being interested in WWI and fantastic fiction, I appreciated Dyalhis projecting the effects of the recent war.

I'm going to speculate that the Mongulions are not just a variation on the Yellow Menace. I think they allude to the new USSR.

I was struck, the second time around, by all the Christian elements. The Venetians have a Looped Cross. The humans, unlike those nasty Lunarions whose dark red essences don't survive space, have sparks of light that leave their body. The dark side of the moon is called Hell. The Lunarions, right down to their constantly shifting bodies, symbolize chaos.

Evidently Dyalhis was of Welsh descent through his father though born in America. I was amused to see someone from Welsh descent have harmonious music as a weapon.

I think there may be another historical allusion too. There's that brief bit in the beginning when we hear how the various inhabitants of the Planetary Chain (which sounds kind of like the medieval Great Chain of Being) stay on their own worlds and that's a good thing. I suspect Dyalhis might have been thinking of the recent Immigration Act of 1924 which limited immigration to America.

I will concede that breaching the aether resulting in the Lunarions showing up was kind of novel as was their form. Still, the Michaelson-Morley experiment disproving the existence of aether had been done decades. (Of course, you can find people on the Internet who argue that it in no way did that.) Still, it may be near the beginning of the sf/weird fiction tradition of using dimensional breaches to rationalize menaces from beyond our time or space.

I do kind of wonder how the "wonderous race of Aerthons" is going to restore their civilization when the narrator gives the impression they are all dead.

>15 RandyStafford:
I don't see any Christian reference in the "looped cross," which is just our usual symbol for Venus--just like the "looped dart" is that for Mars.

If WP may be believed, the crossbar in the Venus symbol was added to Christianize it. Not that that means that Dyalhis is making a deliberate Christian reference here, of course.

Another possibility that struck me regarding the mangled names and timeline question is that it’s not set in our future but in a parallel universe. Though that would undermine the Great War reference.

The "looped cross" phrase is often used to reference the ancient Egyptian ankh, which is not a Christian symbol by any standard. That's the way I was picturing it in the story until the "looped dart" was mentioned.

>10 paradoxosalpha: the error of thinking that the sun never shines on the "dark side" of the Moon

A (to me) parallel error in thinking an "inter-spatial" vehicle could arrive in orbit around a planet and consider it a night-time arrival.

IT was black night when Aerth was reached. And it was not until the sickly, wan daylight broke that actual operations commenced.

Maybe it's meant that the expeditionary force landed on that part of the planet that was facing away from the sun, but it seems an awfully awkward way to phrase that.

I got more out of this thread than I did from reading the story itself, though I'll admit I was rushing and skimmed a good deal. I kept thinking of Spaceman Spiff and how much more entertaining are his adventures.