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Henry Kuttner (April 7, 1915 – February 4, 1958) was an American author of science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Early life

Henry Kuttner was born in Los Angeles, California in 1915. His father, Henry Kuttner (1863–1920), whose parents, Naphtaly Kuttner (1829–1904) and Amelia Bush, had come from Prussia and lived in San Francisco since 1859, was a bookseller; the parents of his mother, Annie Lewis (1879–1954), were from Great Britain. Kuttner grew up in relative poverty following the death of his father. As a young man he worked for the literary agency of his uncle ^[1], Laurence D'Orsay, in Los Angeles before selling his first story, "The Graveyard Rats", to Weird Tales in early 1936.

The Graveyard Rats

Synopsis: Salem, Massachusetts — Cemetery caretaker "Old Masson" must deal with a teeming colony of abnormally large rats that are cutting into his graverobbing profits; the subterranean rodents drag away newly buried corpses from holes gnawed into the coffins. Apart from the flesh-eating animals, Masson eventually comes face-to-face with a burrowing zombie-like creature.

This often-anthologized tale made recent appearances in The Gruesome Book (1983, Piccolo/Pan Books) edited by Ramsey Campbell, and Weird Tales - Seven Decades of Terror (1997, Barnes and Noble Books). Other Kuttner stories are also tinged with Lovecraftian, Paganistic horrors. 'Rats was also adapted as part of the made-for-cable anthology film Trilogy of Terror II. Years later, the central premise of abnormally large rats was used in several novels and movies, among these, the acromegalous rats in the film-version of H.G. Wells' story The Food of the Gods, and Stephen King's Graveyard Shift (1970), which deals with a colony of mutated rats nesting beneath a textile mill.

Kuttner and Moore

Kuttner was known for his literary prose and worked in close collaboration with his wife, C. L. Moore. They met through their association with the "Lovecraft Circle", a group of writers and fans who corresponded with H. P. Lovecraft.^[2] Their work together spanned the 1940s and 1950s and most of the work was credited to pseudonyms, mainly Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O'Donnell. Both freely admitted that one reason they worked so much together was because his page rate was higher than hers.^{[citation needed]} In fact, several people have written or said that she wrote three stories which were published under his name.^{[citation needed]} "Clash by Night" and The Portal in the Picture, also known as Beyond Earth's Gates, have both been alleged to have been written by her.

L. Sprague de Camp, who knew Kuttner and Moore well, has stated that their collaboration was so intensive that, after a story was completed, it was often impossible for either Kuttner or Moore to recall who had written which portions. According to de Camp, it was typical for either partner to break off from a story in mid-paragraph or even mid-sentence, with the latest page of the manuscript still in the typewriter. The other spouse would routinely continue the story where the first had left off. They alternated in this manner as many times as necessary until the story was finished.

Among Kuttner's most popular work were the Gallegher stories, published under the Padgett name, about a man who invented hi-tech solutions to client problems (including an insufferably egomaniacal robot) when he was stinking drunk, only to be completely unable to remember exactly what he had built or why after sobering up. These stories were later collected in Robots Have No Tails. In the introduction to the paperback reprint edition after his death, Moore stated that all the Gallegher stories were written by Kuttner alone.

In 2007, New Line Cinema released a feature film loosely based on the Lewis Padgett short story "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" under the title The Last Mimzy. In addition, The Best of Henry Kuttner was republished under the title The Last Mimzy Stories.

Influence

Marion Zimmer Bradley is among many authors who have cited Kuttner as an influence. Her novel The Bloody Sun is dedicated to him. Roger Zelazny has talked about the influence of The Dark World on his Amber series.

Kuttner's friend Richard Matheson dedicated his 1954 novel I Am Legend to Kuttner, with thanks for his help and encouragement. Ray Bradbury likewise dedicated Dark Carnival, his first book, to him, calling him one of his hardest-working and most patient teachers; Bradbury has said that Kuttner actually wrote the last 300 words of Bradbury's first horror story, "The Candle" (Weird Tales, November 1942). Bradbury has referred to Kuttner as a neglected master and a "pomegranate writer: popping with seeds — full of ideas".^[3]

William S. Burroughs's novel The Ticket That Exploded contains direct quotes from Kuttner regarding the "Happy Cloak" parasitic pleasure monster from the Venusian seas.

The Cthulhu Mythos

A friend of Lovecraft's as well as of Clark Ashton Smith, Kuttner contributed several stories to the Cthulhu Mythos genre invented by those authors (among others). Among these were "The Secret of Kralitz" (Weird Tales, October 1936), "The Eater of Souls" (Weird Tales, January 1937), "The Salem Horror" (Weird Tales, May 1937), "The Invaders" (Strange Stories, February 1939) and "The Hunt" (Strange Stories, June 1939).^[4]

Kuttner added a few lesser-known deities to the Mythos, including Iod ("The Secret of Kralitz"), Vorvadoss ("The Eater of Souls"), and Nyogtha ("The Salem Horror"). Critic Shawn Ramsey suggests that Abigail Prinn, the villain of "The Salem Horror", might have been intended by Kuttner to be a descendant of Ludvig Prinn, author of De Vermis Mysteriis — a book that appears in Kuttner's "The Invaders".^[5]

Later life

Henry Kuttner spent the middle 1950's getting his masters degree before dying of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1958.

Partial bibliography

Short stories

• "The Graveyard Rats" (1936)
• "The Secret of Kralitz" (1936)
• "The Eater of Souls" (1937)
• "The Salem Horror" (1937)

• Tony Quade stories
  • "I. Hollywood on the Moon" (1938)
  • "II. Doom World" (1938)
  • "III. The Star Parade" (1938)
  • "IV. Trouble on Titan" (1941)

• "The Invaders" (1939)
• "Bells of Horror" (1939)
• "The Hunt" (1939)

• Elak of Atlantis stories
  • "Thunder in the Dawn" (1938)
  • "Spawn of Dagon" (1939)
  • "Beyond the Phoenix" (1939)
  • "Dragon Moon" (1940)

• Thunder Jim Wade series (as by Charles Stoddard)
  • "Thunder Jim Wade" (1941)
  • "The Hills of Gold" (1941)
  • "The Poison People" (1941)
  • "The Devil's Glacier" (1941)
  • "Waters of Death" (1941)

• "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" (1943) used as the basis for the 2007 movie The Last Mimzy, and for the French TV adaptation "Tout spliques étaient les Borogoves" (1970)
• "Clash by Night" (with C. L. Moore) (1943)
• "The Proud Robot" (1943)
• "The Time Locker" (1943)
• "Gallegher Plus" (1943)
• "Nothing but Gingerbread Left" (1943)
• "The Twonky" (1940s?), adapted for film in 1953
• "The World Is Mine" (1943)
• Baldie Stories
  • "The Piper's Son" (1945)
  • "Three Blind Mice" (1945)
  • "The Lion And The Unicorn" (1945)
  • "Beggars in Velvet" (1945)
  • "Humpty Dumpty" (1945)

• "The Cure" (1946)
• "Call Him Demon" (1946)
• "Vintage Season" (with C. L. Moore; 1946), filmed in 1992 as Timescape [1]
• "Ex Machina" (1948)
• "Happy Ending" (1949)
• "Satan Sends Flowers" (1953)
• "Or Else" (??), published in the anthology The War Book (edited by James Sallis, 1969).
• The Best of Henry Kuttner anthologizes 17 stories. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975).
• The Eyes of Thar
• Atomic!

Fixups

• Mutant (the Baldie stories) (1953)
• Robots Have No Tails (the Gallegher stories) (1952)

Novels

• The Fairy Chessmen
• The Time Trap (1938)
• Dr. Cyclops (1940)
• A Million Years to Conquer (1940)
• The Creature from Beyond Infinity (1940)
• Earth's Last Citadel (with C. L. Moore) (1943)
• Valley of the Flame (1946)
• The Dark World (1946)
• The Portal in the Picture, also known as Beyond Earth's Gates (with C. L. Moore) (1946)
• Fury, (1947), later published under the title Destination: Infinity (1956)
• Lands of the Earthquake (1947)
• The Time Axis (1948)
• The Well of the Worlds (1952)
• Man Drowning (1952)

Collections

• Ahead of Time
• The Best of Henry Kuttner
• The Best of Kuttner 1
• The Best of Kuttner 2
• The Book of Iod
• Bypass to Otherness
• Chessboard Planet and Other Stories (with C.L. Moore)
• Clash by Night and Other Stories (with C.L. Moore)
• Detour to Otherness (with C.L. Moore)
• Elak of Atlantis
• A Gnome There Was
• Kuttner Times Three
• Line to Tomorrow and Other Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction (with C.L. Moore)
• No Boundaries (with C.L. Moore)
• Prince Raynor
• Return to Otherness
• Secret of the Earth Star and Others
• The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner
• Terror in the House: The Early Kuttner, Volume One
• Thunder Jim Wade
• Two-Handed Engine: The Selected Short Fiction of Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore

Pseudonyms

• Edward J. Bellin
• Paul Edmonds
• Noel Gardner
• Will Garth
• James Hall
• Keith Hammond
• Hudson Hastings
• Peter Horn
• Kelvin Kent
• Robert O. Kenyon
• C. H. Liddell
• Hugh Maepenn
• Scott Morgan
• Lawrence O'Donnell
• Lewis Padgett
• Woodrow Wilson Smith
• Charles Stoddard

Notes

1. ^ According to Robert Bloch in his autobiography Once Around The Bloch (1995).
2. ^ DeCamp, Warlocks and Warriors, p. 167 (NY, Berkley 1971)
3. ^ Ray Bradbury, "Introduction: Henry Kuttner: A Neglected Master." in The Best of Henry Kuttner, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975, pp. vii–xii. "Pomegranate" is on p. vii; Shawn Ramsey, "Henry Kuttner's Cthulhu Mythos Fiction: An Overview", in The Horror of It All, Robert M. Price, ed.
4. ^ His Mythos related stories were published in The Book of Iod in 1995, edited by Robert M. Price.
5. ^ Ramsey, p. 122.

External links

• Henry Kuttner profile at Fantastic Fiction
• Lewis Padgett profile at Fantastic Fiction
• Henry Kuttner at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Two-Handed Engine: The Selected Short Fiction of Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore
• Books by Henry Kuttner from Haffner Press
• Henry Kuttner at the Internet Movie Database
• Past Masters - A Kuttner Above the Rest (But Wait! There's Moore!) by Bud Webster, at Baen's Universe

From Wikiquote

We are all part of some cosmic pattern, and this pattern works toward good and not evil.

Henry Kuttner (7 April 1915 – 4 February 1958) was an American science fiction author. He worked on many stories in close collaboration with his wife, C. L. Moore 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

When I die, I want to die in a Utopia that I have helped to build.

The fire that had come from beyond the stars was harnessed.
Tamed — chained — by the flesh to which it had once, long ago, given life....

I never understood the ultimate answer. That was beyond me.

It took the combined skills of three great civilizations far apart in time to frame that godlike concept in which the tangible universe itself was only a single factor. And even then it was not enough.

Imponderable forces shifted when that cleavage took place...

• When I die, I want to die in a Utopia that I have helped to build.
  • Stephen Court in The Creature from Beyond Infinity (1940)

• We are all part of some cosmic pattern, and this pattern works toward good and not evil. It builds and does not destroy. So I shall go on in my search for a race where I can find kinship and happiness.
  • Ardath in The Creature from Beyond Infinity (1940)

• A casual eye might have seen nothing extraordinary in Wade as he moved lithely across the meadow toward the Thunderbug. He was tall, lean and rangy, looking rather like a college boy on a vacation, with his brown, almost youthful face and tousled dark hair, so deep-black that it was almost blue.
  A closer inspection would have shown more significant details. There was an iron hardness underlying Wade’s face, like iron beneath velvet. His jet eyes were decidedly not those of a boy. There was a curious quality of soft depth to them, although sometimes that black deep could freeze over with deadly purpose.
  • On the character "Thunder Jim Wade" in "The Poison People" in Thrilling Adventures (July 1941) using the pseudonym "Charles Stoddard."

• The fire that had come from beyond the stars was harnessed.
  Tamed — chained — by the flesh to which it had once, long ago, given life....
  • The Valley Of The Flame (1946), published using the pseudonym "Keith Hammond."

• "We need not go back through the cavern of the monsters," she said. "There is a way to reach the unseen road from here."
  • Janissa, in The Valley Of The Flame (1946), published using the pseudonym "Keith Hammond."

The TIme Axis (1949)

• The whole thing never happened and I can prove it — now. But Ira De Kalb made me wait a billion years to write the story.
  So we start with a paradox. But the strangest thing of all is that there are no real paradoxes involved, not one. This is a record of logic. Not human logic, of course, not the logic of this time or this space.
  • Ch. 1 : Encounter In Rio

• I don't know if men will ever journey again, as we journeyed, to that intersection of latitude and longitude where a shell hangs forever — forever and yet not forever, in space and out of space — on the axis stretching through time from beginning to end.
  From the dawn of the nebulae to the twilight of absolute entropy, when the framework of the cosmos has broken down into chaos, still that axis will stretch from dawn to dusk, from beginning to end. For as this world spins on an axis through space, so the sphere of time spins on its own axis.
  • Ch. 1 : Encounter In Rio

• I never understood the ultimate answer. That was beyond me. It took the combined skills of three great civilizations far apart in time to frame that godlike concept in which the tangible universe itself was only a single factor.
  And even then it was not enough. It took the Face of Ea — which I shall never be able to describe fully.
  I saw it, though. I saw it...
  • Ch. 1 : Encounter In Rio

• I closed my eyes again, thinking of the Face. I had to force my mind to turn around in its tracks and look, for it didn't want to confront that infinite complexity again. The Face was painful to see. It was too intricate, too involved with emotions complex beyond our grasp. It was painful for the mind to think of it, straining to understand the inscrutable things that experience had etched upon those mountain-high features.
  "Is it a portrait?" I asked suddenly. "Or a composite? What is the Face?"
  "A city," De Kalb said. "A nation. The ultimate in human destiny — and a call for help. And much more that we'll never understand."
  • Ch. 3 : The Vision Of Time

• This isn't my world, now. Not any more. Not the world I left. This is a world in which no nekronic flash leaped from a box that Ira De Kalb opened and dropped to his hearthstone to infect the world, De Kalb and me. All that did happen once, in another world that hasn't existed since the four of us, a doubled weapon wielded by the Face of Ea, wrought the cleaving apart of two universes.
  Imponderable forces shifted when that cleavage took place. You and I know nothing about it, for it happened far beyond the perceptions of any sentient creature. But it happened. Oh yes, it happened.
  • Ch. 25 : Return Voyage

• I'm going forward. I know — because I went. It was a wonderful world they had. I want to see more of it. I want to wake up in a time when the race of man is spreading through the galaxy, leaping across the gulfs between the stars, opening the gates to all the worlds. I want to and I will.
  • Ch. 25 : Return Voyage

• Well, all this belongs to the future. And so do I. Even before the cosmic cleavage altered all history I was a misfit in this civilization. And now it just isn't my world anymore. I don't belong here. So I think I'll take my chances in that other place, where I won't have to get used to the little things that keep bothering me here and bother nobody but me...
  • Ch. 25 : Return Voyage

The Dark World (1954)

I felt the gateway open.

• "I believe in things I never used to. I think someone is trying to find me — has found me. And is calling. Who it is I don't know. What they want I don't know. But a little while ago I found out one more thing — this sword."
  I picked the sword up from the table.
  "It isn't what I want," I went on, "But sometimes, when my mind is — abstract, something from outside floats into it. Like the need for a sword. And not any sword — just one. I don't know what the sword looks like, but I'd know if I held it in my hand." I laughed a little. "And if I drew it a few inches from the sheath, I could put out that fire up there as if I'd blown on it like a candleflame. And if I drew the sword all the way out — the world would come to an end!"
  • Ch. 1 : Fire in the Night

• "There is a sword," I said. "A sword that is — is not quite a sword as we think of weapons. My mind is cloudy there still. But I know that Ghast Rhymi can tell me where it is. A weapon, yet not a weapon. The Sword Called Llyr."
  • Ch. 9 : Realm of the Superconscious

• Her hands came out of her sleeves. There was a rod of blinding silver in each. Before I could stir she had brought the rods together, crossing them before her smiling face. At the intersection forces of tremendous power blazed into an instant's being, forces that streamed from the poles of the world and could touch only for the beat of a second if that world were not to be shaken into fragments. I felt the building reel below me.
  I felt the gateway open.
  • Ch. 16 : Self Against Self

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

Henry Kuttner

• Henry Kuttner profile at Fantastic Fiction
• Lewis Padgett profile at Fantastic Fiction
• Henry Kuttner at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• 4 Copyright expired books online in various downloadable formats
• The Time Axis Complete book : Arthur's Classic Novels
• The Dark Word Complete book : Arthur's Classic Novels
• The Valley Of The Flame Complete book : Arthur's Classic Novels
• The Creature From Beyond Infinity e-book of a 1940 novella whose copyright expired about 40 years ago.
• Two-Handed Engine: The Selected Short Fiction of Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore