Currently Reading Two-Handed Engine by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore

As I mentioned a few days ago on this blog, I am reading a large short story collection of the works, albeit incomplete, of the late husband-wife writing team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore.  The genres of this book, titled Two-Handed Engine, range from science fiction to fantasy to horror.  The thirty-seven stories, most of which are collaborations of the couple, are arranged in their order of first publication starting in 1933 and ending in 1955.  I am also reading the book in that order, and have just finished the first four stories...

The first story in the book is Shambleau, accredited as a solo work of C.L. Moore.  It is a science fiction tale, set on Mars of the future, that spreads the contemporary belief of the author's time that Venus was a wet, marshy planet with its own life forms and that there was life on Mars as well.  But the main character, an adventurer named Northwest Smith (resembling Hans Solo of Star Wars fame), is human through and through.  While on Mars on nefarious smuggling business (like Solo), he encounters a mob of angry Martians chasing down a small, frightened woman.  Smith, being of a gallant nature, holds off the attackers and takes her in.  As the story wears on, this "woman" turns out to be a completely different life form, which she calls "Shambleau" but bears an unmistakable similarity to a monster from old Greek mythology...and Smith finds himself in a life and death crisis...

Henry Kuttner alone wrote The Graveyard Rats, the 1936 second story of the book...you just might guess that this is a horror tale.  And it is, in the tradition of Kuttner's renown predecessors Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.  The title pretty much states what's going on here, and the rats are particularly ferocious and ravenous...

The third story in Two-Handed Engine is A Gnome There Was, a fantasy also by Kuttner, published in 1941.  In it Tim Crockett, a young Californian labor organizer, travels east to a coal mine, where he disguises his intentions while being completely oblivious to that dynamite explosion about to happen...too late...but wait, he's not dead!  Somehow, he has been transformed into a different kind of creature...I suppose you can infer the rest.   Kuttner explores here a hidden society of fanciful creatures with their peculiar and often very funny norms...

Story number four is The Twonky, the first collaboration of Kuttner and Moore in the book and published in 1942 under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett.  I read it many years ago in a "year's best" science fiction anthology.  It struck me then as a forerunner of a much better story of theirs, titled Mimsy Were the Borogoves, published the following year.  Still, it stands well on its own.  A time-traveler from a much more technologically advanced era finds himself accidentally transported to a radio assembly factory in, I suppose, the authors' contemporary time of the early 1940s.  Having temporarily lost his memory through the turbulent time travel, he is ordered by the plant's foreman to go to work, i.e. build radios.  Drawing from his own knowledge, he builds a radio...but one with much more advanced features...and then recovers his memory and vanishes to return to his own time.  Meanwhile, this radio, called a Twonky, is bought by a couple, who subsequently get treated to its more insidious and sinister nature...

Well, that's four stories down and thirty-three to go!