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C. L. Moore
Cover of the OCtober 1934 issue of Weird Tales featuring "Black God’s Kiss"
Born	Catherine Lucille Moore January 24, 1911(1911-01-24) Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
Died	April 4, 1987 (aged 76) Hollywood, California, United States
Occupation	short story writer; novelist
Genres	Science fiction, Fantasy,

Catherine Lucille Moore (January 24, 1911–April 4, 1987) was an American science fiction and fantasy writer, as C. L. Moore. She was one of the first women to write in the genre, and paved the way for many other female writers in speculative fiction.

Biography

She was born on January 24, 1911 in Indianapolis, Indiana. She was chronically ill as a child and spent much of her time reading literature of the fantastic. She left college during The Great Depression to work as a secretary at the Fletcher Trust Company in Indianapolis. Her first stories appeared in pulp magazines in the 1930s, including two significant series in Weird Tales.

One series concerns the rogue and adventurer, Northwest Smith, and his wanderings through the Solar System; the other is a short fantasy series about Jirel of Joiry (one of the first female protagonists in sword-and-sorcery fiction).

The most famous of the Northwest Smith stories is "Shambleau", which marked Moore’s first professional sale. It appeared in the magazine in November 1933, with the sale netting her a hundred dollars.

The first and most famous of the Jirel of Joiry stories is "Black God’s Kiss", which received the cover illustration (painted by Margaret Brundage) in the October 1934 Weird Tales. Her early stories were notable for their emphasis on the senses and emotions, which was highly unusual at the time.

Moore's work also appeared in Astounding Science Fiction magazine throughout the 1940s. Several stories written for that magazine were later collected in her first published book, Judgment Night, published by Gnome Press in 1952.

Included in that collection were “Judgment Night” (first published in August and September, 1943), the lush rendering of a future galactic empire with a sober meditation on the nature of power and its inevitable loss; “The Code” (July, 1945), an homage to the classic Faust with modern theories and Lovecraftian dread; “Promised Land” (February, 1950) and “Heir Apparent” (July, 1950) both documenting the grim twisting that mankind must undergo in order to spread into the solar system; and “Paradise Street” (September, 1950), a futuristic take on the Old West conflict between lone hunter and wilderness-taming settlers.

Moore met Henry Kuttner, also a science fiction writer, in 1936 when he wrote her a fan letter (mistakenly thinking that "C. L. Moore" was a man), and they married in 1940.

Afterwards, almost all of their stories were written in collaboration under various pseudonyms, most commonly “Lewis Padgett”. (Another pseudonym, one Moore often employed for works that involved little or no collaboration, was "Lawrence O’Donnell".)

In this very prolific partnership they managed to combine Moore's style with Kuttner's more cerebral storytelling. Their stories include the classic "Mimsy were the Borogoves" (the basis for the film The Last Mimzy) and "Vintage Season".

They also collaborated on a story that combined Moore’s signature characters, Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry: "Quest of the Starstone" (1937).

After Kuttner's death in 1958, Moore wrote almost no fiction and taught his writing course at the University of Southern California. She did write for a few television shows under her married name, but upon marrying Thomas Reggie (who was not a writer) in 1963, she ceased writing entirely.

C. L. Moore died on April 4, 1987 at her home in Hollywood, California after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease.

Partial bibliography

• Earth's Last Citadel (with Henry Kuttner; 1943)
• Vintage Season (with Henry Kuttner, as "Lawrence O'Donnell"; 1946) - filmed in 1992 as Timescape [1]
• The Mask of Circe (with Henry Kuttner; 1948)
• Beyond Earth's Gates (1949)
• Judgment Night (stories, 1952)
• Shambleau and Others (stories, 1953)
• Northwest of Earth (stories, 1954)
• No Boundaries (with Henry Kuttner; stories, 1955)
• Doomsday Morning (1957)
• Jirel of Joiry (1969)
• The Best of C. L. Moore, edited by Lester Del Rey. Nelson Doubleday, 1975. Contains an autobiographical afterword by C. L. Moore, and a biographical introduction by Del Rey, which is carefully noncommittal about the influence of her personal life on her writing.
• Black God's Shadow (1977)
• Black God's Kiss. Paizo Publishing, LLC. 2007. ISBN 978-1-60125-045-2. The five Jirel of Joiry stories collected in one volume.
• Northwest of Earth: The Complete Northwest Smith. Paizo Publishing, LLC. 2008. ISBN 978-1-60125-081-0. Thirteen Northwest Smith stories collected in one volume.

External links

• Profile at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame
• A brief biography of C.L. Moore
• Moore at Fantastic Fiction
• More biographical information, and discrepancies in records
• C. L. Moore at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Moore at IMDb
• Review of Black God's Kiss
• Rosemarie Arbur: Literary Descendants of C.L. Moore
• Past Masters - A Kuttner Above the Rest (But Wait! There's Moore!) by Bud Webster, at Baen's Universe

From Wikiquote

Nothing I have ever written was given the slightest deliberation. It was there in the typewriter and it came out, a total bypassing of the brain.

Catherine Lucille Moore (24 January 1911 – 4 April 1987) was an American science fiction and fantasy writer, as C. L. Moore. She was one of the first women to write in the genre. After marrying fellow writer Henry Kuttner she worked on many stories in close collaboration him, most often using the joint pseudonym "Lewis Padgett." In 2007 their most famous collaboration "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" was adapted into a film The Last Mimzy.

Sourced

She felt intuitively that the bend and slant of the way she went were somehow outside any other angles or bends she had ever known.

All about her, as suddenly as the awakening from a dream, the nothingness had opened out into undreamed-of distances.

• She was unbinding her turban...
  He watched, not breathing, a presentiment of something horrible stirring in his brain, inexplicably... The red folds loosened and — he knew then that he had not dreamed — again a scarlet lock swung down against her cheek... a hair, was it? A lock of hair?... thick as a thick worm it fell, plumply, against that smooth cheek... more scarlet than blood and thick as a crawling worm... and like a worm it crawled.
  • "Shambleau" (1933); later published in Shambleau, and Others‎ (1953)

• Death in your eyes, Earthman. Nothing in your mind but murder. Can that brain of yours comprehend nothing but battle? Is there no curiosity there?...Let me look deeper — if there are depths. Your death will be — useful and, in a way, pleasant. Otherwise — well, the black beasts hunger. And flesh must feed them, as a sweeter drink feeds me...
  • "Black Thirst" (1934); later published in Shambleau, and Others‎ (1953)

• Nothing I have ever written was given the slightest deliberation. It was there in the typewriter and it came out, a total bypassing of the brain.
  • In a 1980 interview with Jean W. Ross, published in Contemporary Authors Vol. 104 (1982)

Black God's Kiss (1934)

She was a little stunned by finding open sky so far underground, though she was intelligent enough to realize that however she had come, she was not underground now.

• Now she took the sword back into her hand and knelt on the rim of the invisible blackness below. She had gone this path once before and once only, and never thought to find any necessity in life strong enough to drive her down again. The way was the strangest she had ever known. There was, she thought, no such passage in all the world save here. It had not been built for human feet to travel. It had not been built for feet at all. It was a narrow, polished shaft that corkscrewed round and round. A snake might have slipped in it and gone shooting down, round and round in dizzy circles — but no snake on earth was big enough to fill that shaft. No human travelers had worn the sides of the spiral so smooth, and she did not care to speculate on what creatures had polished it so, through what ages of passage.

• It was a long way down. Before she had gone very far the curious dizziness she had known before came over her again, a dizziness not entirely induced by the spirals she whirled around, but a deeper, atomic unsteadiness as if not only she but also the substances around her were shifting. There was something queer about the angles of those curves. She was no scholar in geometry or aught else, but she felt intuitively that the bend and slant of the way she went were somehow outside any other angles or bends she had ever known. They led into the unknown and the dark, but it seemed to her obscurely that they led into deeper darkness and mystery than the merely physical, as if, though she could not put it clearly even into thoughts, the peculiar and exact lines of the tunnel had been carefully angled to lead through poly-dimensional space as well as through the underground — perhaps through time, too.

• All about her, as suddenly as the awakening from a dream, the nothingness had opened out into undreamed-of distances. She stood high on a hilltop under a sky spangled with strange stars. Below she caught glimpses of misty plains and valleys with mountain peaks rising far away. And at her feet a ravening circle of small, slavering, blind things leaped with clashing teeth.

• She half expected, despite her brave words, to come out upon the storied and familiar red-hot pave of hell, and this pleasant, starlit land surprised her and made her wary. The things that built the tunnel could not have been human. She had no right to expect men here. She was a little stunned by finding open sky so far underground, though she was intelligent enough to realize that however she had come, she was not underground now.

Quotes about Moore

• Catherine Leigh Moore shattered the masculine barriers of fantasy and science fiction when she started publishing her remarkable short stories in Weird Tales in the 1930s. Her character Jirel, the ruler of the fiefdom of Joiry in medieval France, was the first female Sword-and-Sorcery hero. And, considering how much competition she faces today from the warrior women who have followed the path she blazed, she remains one of the best.
  • Ryan Harvey in a review of Black God's Kiss

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

C. L. Moore

• Profile at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame
• Moore at Fantastic Fiction
• C. L. Moore at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Moore at IMDb
• Review of Black God's Kiss
• Review of Northwest of Earth (1954)