Scenario: a team of explorers in an exotic, harsh
environment enter an ancient structure and awaken something terrible –
something alien, inimical and implacable. While the explorers have gone in with
the best intentions they discover they have bitten off more than they can chew
and one by one they die in horrific ways before a single survivor makes it out
to an uncertain future, marked indelibly by the ordeal.
Sound familiar?
It should, it’s a tried-and-proven formula. Many would think
of the original Alien, that SF
classic now approaching forty years old. However, I was even more struck with
the formula after watching the more recent instalment in the saga, Prometheus, yet was still not thinking
specifically of that opus.
A few days earlier I had read the self-same theme/motif/concept
in a volume of classic fiction, Return of
the Sorcerer, a 2009 anthology from Prime Books, edited by Robert Weinberg,
bringing together 18 stories by that master of the macabre, Clark Ashton Smith.
Smith’s most intensive writing was in the early to mid-1930s,
and while he is best-known for his fantasy and horror work, he also wrote very
much in the science fiction vein, a number of stories being set apparently on
the Mars envisioned by Percival Lowell, at a time after human explorers have
reached and colonised many worlds in the solar system. The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis is one of these, in which human explorers
travel to an ancient ruin shunned by the living Martians of today with a rigid
taboo, and discover the funerary vaults of a long-lost culture which remain
cursed – with a long-lived alien organism which attaches to the victim’s head
(reminiscent of Alien’s face-hugger,
it must be said) and consumes both body and mind. This is a linear horror
scenario placed into a science fiction context, and one is excused for seeing
it as an archetype for the better-known outings to come.
Smith’s story appeared in Weird Tales for May, 1932, and must have stuck at the back of many
a creative writer’s mind. An organism attaching to the face and taking over the
host’s will featured in a strip story in TV-21
in the late 1960s, a truly strange outing for a kids’ comic, and one which, in
retrospect, seems to echo Smith’s conception as surely as pre-guessing at least
one element of Alien.
So, are these ideas just so timelessly perfect in their
strangeness, their appeal to that in us which appreciates being scared witless,
they are originated independently in different generations? Perhaps. But it
might also be that a high fantasist set this particular ball rolling 84 years
ago and an idea so good just can’t be
left to lie between the long-yellowed pages of magazines from the golden age of
pulps.
Cheers, Mike Adamson
Ye gods, I do remember the TV 21 story, now you come to mention it! Was it a Zero-X story?? Dang. Very thought provoking article, and argument!
ReplyDeleteIt was indeed! And we have the story in one of the Reynolds & Hearn TV-21 collections, freshly scanned from the artwork in the archives, one of Mike Noble's finest stories! The editors called it perhaps the most bizarre TV-21 ever published.
ReplyDeleteI was struck when Alien came out that the whole facehugger aspect was very familiar, especially as in the first conceptions, the critter had an eye in the middle of its back, which, once attached to the face, would have been right where the eye was in the thing in the Zero-X outing too...