Abraham Merritt is one of those writers I’ve long meant to read, and despite owning various paperback editions of his books, and making two attempts to get into The Ship of Ishtar, it’s only now I’ve finally read one—his first—The Moon Pool.

This began life as a short story, published in All-Story Weekly (22 June 1918), where it was popular enough for Merritt to write a longer sequel, “The Conquest of the Moon Pool” (in six instalments from 15 February 1919), and then incorporate the two into a single novel-length work. (Which, for some reason, was published in book form twice in 1919, first by Putnam, then by Liveright—apparently with some revisions to the latter, which included changing the villainous Prussian Von Hetzdorp to a villainous Russian, Marakinoff. Merritt apparently preferred the Putnam text, but I ended up reading the Liveright text.)

The book starts with its narrator, Dr Goodwin (“the foremost of American botanists”), meeting a well-respected colleague, Dr Throckmartin (or “Throck”), who’s evidently in the grip of “some searing shock of mangled rapture and horror”. Throck tells the tale of what happened to him in the ruins of Nan-Matal in the South Pacific: of a certain door that only opens by the light of the full moon, releasing a being of shining light which proceeded to carry off, one by one, everyone else in his expedition, including his young wife. Throck has vowed to return with the necessary resources to rescue them, but having told his tale is himself snatched away by this creature of scintillant moonlight before Goodwin’s very eyes. Goodwin, who has promised to take over the task should Throck be unable to, begins making plans. (This is the point at which the initial short story ended.)

Heading for Nan-Matal armed with, among other things, “a set of Becquerel ray condensers” (an early name for radiation, apparently), Goodwin assembles an odd cast of helpers, including a younger action-hero type in the Irish-American Larry O’Keefe (who’s sceptical of all of the supernatural except, apparently, banshees and leprechauns), the somewhat simple strongman Olaf Huldricksson, and the morally ambiguous (at first, anyway) Russian scientist Marakinoff. All manage to get through the moon-activated door to the chamber of the mysterious and deadly moon pool beyond, but are saved from becoming victims of the “Shining One” by a vision of a beautiful woman and her attendant human-sized frog-creature, who show them how to open a hidden door. Exiting the chamber, the band of adventurers find themselves in Muria (as in Lemuria), a subterranean land presided over by an ancient, advanced civilisation. Muria is ruled by the beautiful Yolara, Priestess of the Shining One, and the stocky-but-strong Lugur, Voice of the Shining One. (In this world, all women are tall and beautiful—though only the blondes seem to attain positions of authority—and all men strong and stocky.)

There’s a healthy dose of Haggard’s She going on here, with O’Keefe as the equivalent of the young heroic Leo, Dr Goodwin as the professorial Holly, and Yolara to some extent as Ayesha. Yolara falls in love with O’Keefe, and while he’s beguiled in turn, he’s really smitten by the visionary woman who guided them by the moon pool, who turns out to be Lakla, Handmaiden of the Silent Ones. This isn’t, though, quite the Ayesha/Ustane set-up from She, as although Yolara has all the fatal allure and power of Ayesha, the morally pure and innocent Lakla is essentially her equal, only serving different—and older—gods. Yolara serves the rapacious Shining One, and when she hears of the upper world from which O’Keefe came, makes plans for her deity’s conquest of it. Lakla’s Silent Ones, on the other hand, are a trio of ancient beings who originally created the Shining One, and though they’ve now lost control of it, and are somewhat fearful of it, nevertheless oppose its hunger for destruction. There are, even, echoes of the scene where Leo steps with Ayesha into a magical flame, only here the flames are “shining coils of moon fire”, and the outcome somewhat different, though just as perilous.

Merritt brings two things to this (by then) standard-feeling adventure formula, to make The Moon Pool distinct from She. One is a much greater degree of fantasy than Haggard employed. Merritt’s subterranean Muria possesses super-weapons including rays that shiver things (and people) to fragments, gravity-destroying bombs, invisibility devices; there’s also frog-people, a landscape of fungi that instantly devour living flesh, and the weird Shining One itself (which I can’t help picturing like the many glittery energy-beings in the original Star Trek series).

The other thing Merritt brings to this essentially Haggardian lost world adventure—and also what damned him for the more serious SF crowd of the 1950s and early 1960s—is his prose. Although James Blish (among others) would go on to dismiss it as “windy and cliché-ridden”, I think Merritt’s writing shows a real poetry when he turns it on at the right moment:

“There was no sky—at least no sky such as we know—all was a sparkling nebulosity rising into infinite distances as the azure above the day-world seems to fill all the heavens—through it ran pulsing waves and flashing javelin rays that were like shining shadows of the aurora, echoes, octaves lower, of those brilliant arpeggios and chords that play about the poles.”

(And if this sounds somewhat psychedelic, it may well be. As Douglas A Anderson shows in his essential article fact-checking Merritt’s autobiography, there’s an interview in which Merritt claims to have taken peyote, saying it “results in a color reaction. I remember sitting on the grass and watching it change into a variety of colors. Out of that came geometric patterns. I had a consciousness throughout of music that blended with the colors.” Just the melange of music and colour to be found in the above-quoted example of his prose, then.)

I have to admit that not all of Merritt’s writing excited me to the same level. His non-American characters tend to suffer from a touch of the Van Helsings, not just talking in garbled cod-English, but doing it at great length, which implies the author was really enjoying it, but to me it was just readerly friction. (And O’Keefe, despite speaking English, descends into long, lyrical passages infused with Irish folklore and mythology, as though to so underline his archetypal Irishness that you can’t help feeling he must be compensating for something.)

Lovecraft was an admirer, writing in a letter to Robert H Barlow that Merritt “has a peculiar power of working up an atmosphere and investing a region with an aura of unholy dread”. And there are a few pre-echoes of Lovecraft’s own stories here. Not only does The Moon Pool, like “The Call of Cthulhu”, centre around a ruin on an island in the South Pacific, but the Norwegian captain of a ship found drifting nearby—Huldricksson—recalls, for me, the Norwegian captain Johansen from Lovecraft’s tale, both of whom have survived an encounter with their story’s monster. (Which, made of moonlight as it seems to be, has a touch of “The Colour Out of Space” about it.) And then there’s the theme of the scientifically-created servitor that turns against its makers—the shoggoths in At the Mountains of Madness, the Shining One here—though of course that could be read as just one more variant on the Frankenstein theme inherent in all science fiction. (Or the Morlock/Eloi relationship from The Time Machine.)

Merritt was a tremendously popular author in his day, even having a periodical (A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine) named after him (though only after his death, and only lasting five issues). He was taken up by early SF fans, perhaps to his later detriment as, when SF started getting serious about the science in its fiction, his was found to be lacking, and he had to wait for his re-identification as a fantasy writer for his works to start being republished in paperback. Now he’s settled into place as one of the deep-cut classics of the fantasy field (I read it in an edition with footnotes and an introduction, from the Wesleyan University Press), not quite at the level of Haggard or Edgar Rice Burroughs, but somewhere, perhaps, in the Clark Ashton Smith zone. (CAS on Merritt: “Merritt has an authentic magic, as well as an inexhaustible imagination.”)

Merritt is a clear Romantic—not just in his lush prose, vivid imagination and high adventure, but for his ultimate message that “Love is stronger than all things.” (Even though it doesn’t help Throck, nor Huldricksson.) Although I enjoyed The Moon Pool well enough, the characters and situations were perhaps too archetypal, even clichéd, to really make it work for me. The descriptive prose is definitely good, though, as are the moments of bizarre fantasy. His subsequent output seems to be divided between further lost world adventures and a few occult thrillers. Perhaps if I read some more Merritt, I’ll go for one of the latter.

Instead of the gloomy, neon-lit Tokyo-esque setting of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Pat Cadigan’s 1991 cyberpunk Synners is set in sunny LA, and overall feels less noir-ish than Gibson’s novel. Both use a hard-boiled style, though: dense, slangy, throwing you into the midst of the action and leaving you to work out what sort of world this is, who these people are, and what’s going on, as the action unfolds. (I sometimes wonder if SF’s aversion to info-dumps goes a little too far. It was a while before the characters were anything but names… and too many of them short ones beginning with ‘G’! I’m not asking for a full, formal introduction, just something to hook onto.)

The focus of Synners is the world of commercial video production in the near future, where talented individuals don “hotsuits” and electronic headgear to create something that’s halfway between a film and a lived experience, whether as a music video, advertising or immersive game-movies where you take part in the action. Small video-production company EyeTraxx has just been taken over by the mega-corporation Diversifications—not for its talent, but for a patent it quietly took out on a new way of producing and interfacing with video: sockets grown directly into the brain. Creators with sockets can effortlessly create much more vivid experiences, and those who plug directly into these new videos get a much more vivid a kick. One such creator, known to the world as Visual Mark, something of a drug burnout as well as being a highly talented artist, finds that using sockets is a medium he’s been waiting for all his life (which reminds me of a quote from one of Gibson’s early stories, about “how many thousands, maybe millions, of phenomenal artists have died mute, down the centuries, people who could never have been poets or painters or saxophone players, but who had this stuff inside, these psychic waveforms waiting for the circuitry required to tap in”).

Visual Mark gets his sockets just in time. Suddenly aware that direct neural access to the net (or the dataline as it’s most often called in this novel) makes it as much a part of his brainspace as his former limited grey matter, he expands into the digital world, just as his much-abused, over-toxed body gives out with a stroke: which itself enters the net as a separate, malicious and virus-like entity with an intent of its own.

For a novel published 35 years ago, there’s a lot that still feels like valid science fiction here. (Perhaps only the same things that Gibson and other early cyberpunk writers missed out on, such as a lack of mobile phones or wi-fi, date it.) Cadigan herself admitted, in a 2016 interview in Locus, that “there’s actually not as much science fiction in it as there used to be”, but there certainly is still relevance. Direct “neural interface equipment” is (I assume) a good way off, as is the use of brain implants as “an accepted treatment for certain depressives”. But such a phrase as “Better business through chemistry”—i.e., drug use—and a belief in what sounds like the much-touted singularity are, certainly, live ideas now, at least among the sort of tech elites who take cyberpunk novels not as warnings but how-to manuals:

“Pretty soon it would all be happening at the speed of thought, before it could actually happen, so that nothing would ever have to happen again. You’d only think things had happened, and if anything ever did happen, you wouldn’t know the difference.”

The dark side of that—the neglect of the real world at the expense of the much-hyped digital one—gets acknowledgement here (it’s post-quake LA, but this could well be taken as a general statement):

“Whole portions of the physical world had yet to be reclaimed from the unusable, unliveable state that negligence and malevolence had consigned them to…”

Faced with the question of whether socket tech should be unleashed on the world, a senator from Michigan comments:

“Funny idea, isn’t it, putting something aside until you’re moral enough to use it.”

Which makes a valid point, I suppose—you’ll only develop the necessary moral maturity if you actually use the technology in question, by which point you’ll already be causing damage. (Apart from the obvious other answer: read more SF.)

Synners doesn’t feel, to me, as much on the raw edge of the cyberpunk aesthetic as Gibson’s earlier novel—though its future is closer to a realistic prediction than his (vat-grown ninjas are still a long way off). But the story has less of Gibson’s noir-ish feel and comes across more as a techno-thriller, with a clearer division between the good (the creatives, the hackers) and the bad (the controlling corporate types). All have that hard-boiled, life-worn, cynical edge to them, but the good guys don’t have as much of that deep-down compromised feel you get in the deeper shades of noir.

One thing the cyberpunks got right: as one of the characters here says, “We’ve become denizens of the net. Homo datum.” To which another adds, “Synners” (a foreshortening of “synthesisers”). Later, someone comments that “Every technology has its original sin”, implying we’re all original-synners now, fallen from the Eden of the real world into a mash-up of the digital and the real. Especially now, even early cyberpunk feels like something to revisit, just to check if there are any other prescient warnings we might do well to be reminded of.

If the “cosy catastrophe” is the archetypal post-WWII English SF story, surely the quiet invasion comes a close second (The Midwich Cuckoos or Quatermass II being prime examples). They’re quiet because they either occur in an isolated location (a cut off village in Cuckoos) or by hiding in plain sight (an industrial processing plant in Quatermass II). John Christopher’s The Possessors (first published in 1965) is of the former type, being set in a ski-chalet high in the Swiss Alps, which is further isolated from its nearest village when an avalanche blocks the one mountain road leading to it.

At first, the holidaymakers (all Brits, having chosen this chalet for the English-American couple who run it) continue as normal, expecting the pass to be cleared in a couple of days. They’re a hung-up bunch, many of them recovering (or not recovering) from a variety of losses: Jane Winchmore is a widow in her thirties, Douglas Poole is on the rebound from an abruptly ended affair, while hostess Mandy Hamilton left the three children from her first marriage behind in America. Others have clear compromises or unbalances in their relationships: plastic surgeon Selby Grainger is the eternal dallier-with-women, while his wife, the cooly beautiful Elizabeth, puts up with it, confident he won’t actually leave her, and Ruth Deeping clearly favours her younger son Andy over ten-year-old Stephen, whom she constantly nags. Perhaps the only fully happy one of the bunch, in fact, is eight-year-old Andy, so beloved by his mother, which is perhaps why he’s the first victim of the alien invasion. Thinking he’s found a glowing blue ball in the snow, he touches it and instantly drops to the ground. Selby declares him dead, and he’s put in a makeshift coffin in the cellar—only for him to get up and leave the chalet sometime in the night. Everyone joins in the search, though only his mother, Ruth, has any faith that a boy in so few clothes and no shoes can survive for any length of time in the snow. But he does return—only, not quite himself. Significantly colder to the touch and slightly less human, he has (as we, the readers, know from the book’s opening section) been taken over by an alien spore, flung out from its dying home planet millions of years ago, which landed by chance on the Earth and was uncovered by the recent avalanche.

The alien—symbiotic or parasitic, depending on whether you take its point of view or ours—needs to isolate the humans, one by one, so as to infect them. And of course the humans take a long time working out what’s happening, speculating first of all that it’s some new kind of illness, or an infectious mass hysteria, or even demonic possession. And all the time, the survivors are becoming increasingly besieged in the chalet, boarding themselves up against the possessors trying to get in, get them alone, and take them over.

For most of the book the story is driven by suspense and the increasing tensions between the already flawed characters. In this, there’s an obvious contrast to be drawn between the aliens (who work effortlessly together, and tempt in at least one character with the promise of an end to human struggles) and the humans, whose only working relationships are those founded on long-held compromises. Chalet owner George Hamilton, for instance, is a good husband to his wife Mandy because he ignores the bottles of gin she’s got stashed about the place, and is pretty much an alcoholic himself. (There’s a lot of drinking in the book. Interviewed in a special issue of Interzone, Sam Youd—the real name of John Christopher, and meant to rhyme with “cloud”, apparently—admitted: “It’s the way I live, yes, I do drink alcohol, and quite a bit of alcohol, though only wine…” Though it seems to have been pretty much part of the times anyway.)

It’s hard not to compare Christopher with his contemporary John Wyndham, both of whom were the face of general-readership SF in Britain at the time. Christopher’s characters are much more evidently flawed, and come with a greater dose of cynicism about human relationships, a sense that there can never be anything more than a “total failure of comprehension” between people. Offered the slightest sign of sympathy for her widowhood, young Jane just wants to escape, and instantly regrets it the one time she shares her feelings of despair with someone else. The sense is that isolation and compromise are built-in to the human condition, whereas the characters in, say, Day of the Triffids, though they have to overcome external difficulties and the occasional dangerous human, will eventually find some sense of community, even family, in the end. For Wyndham, decency is a struggle but a worthwhile one; for Christopher it feels, at times, like a lost cause.

But there are resonances with other SF-horror, too. The most obvious to me was The Thing, for its icy setting and its alien that takes on human form, but also for its sense that if the invasion isn’t stopped here, the whole of the human race is at risk: “there can be no question of toleration between it and us. We have to wipe it out, if we are not going to be assimilated by it.” Invasion of the Body Snatchers is another, as is one of my favourite Doctor Who serials, The Horror of Fang Rock (where, as here, the isolation is prolonged by a lingering thick fog).

It’s certainly a suspenseful read, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been filmed (it was optioned, apparently), because it could surely be made on a reasonable budget. (Special effects: one glowing blue sphere.) It perhaps has less of the weird feeling I might have liked—I’d have preferred more of what seems to be promised by the German translation of the book, titled Die Unheimlichen (“The Uncanny Ones”). This is far more of an adventure/disaster tale (and the cast of flawed characters, each with their cross to bear, recalls the set-up to so many 70s disaster movies), and a successful one, at that. I’d definitely like to read more by Christopher. I’ve been meaning to read The Tripods since around the end of the 1970s…