C. L. Moore’s Judgment Night (SF Masterworks collection)

Catherine L. Moore (1911-1987) is best remembered for her Jirel of Joiry sword-and-sorcery stories and her Northwest Smith sword-and-planet tales published in pulp magazines in the 1930s. As a pulp writer she was certainly in the same league as Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. After the death of her husband Henry Kuttner in 1958 she retired from fiction writing. Judgment Night in the SF Masterworks series includes five of her longer works from her later career in the 1940s and 50s.

Her novella Paradise Street (published in Astounding Science Fiction in September 1950) is a western set in space, or at least it’s a frontier story. This is a future in which humans have colonised distant planets but have encountered no other intelligent species. The setting is the planet Loki, once the domain of fiercely independent trappers and prospectors. The story’s hero, Jaime Morgan, is one of the last of that breed. Now the settlers have come, much to Morgan’s disgust. Loki is becoming a civilised planet. Morgan wants nothing to do with civilisation. Civilisation is for those who care nothing for freedom.

Morgan has arrived in his spaceship with a cargo to sell - a very valuable perfectly legal substance but now it’s become valueless. Or maybe it hasn’t. Either way it’s now impossible for Morgan to sell it on Loki, and he’s broke and he has no fuel for his rocket. Then he gets an offer. He doesn’t like the offer but he has no choice. It means working for people he neither likes nor trust. It means taking orders.

Morgan is a frontiersman. He knows how to survive in the wilderness. In the civilised world he is helpless. His world will soon no longer exist, so this is very much a story of the vanishing of the frontier, and the consequences of that. Civilisation is all well and good, but it comes at a price.

Morgan knows he is being lied to but he doesn’t know just how many lies he is being told and just how vast the web of deception in which he is entangled really is. What he thinks is going on is not at all what is really going on. There are various factions and alliances and conspiracies. And Morgan just isn’t equipped to deal with this new world of complex machinations and manipulations. He is however well equipped to deal with action and he gets plenty of that.

Morgan is a likeable flawed hero. Most of his problems are of his own creation but he can’t help being the man he is, and that man is in many ways rather admirable. He refuses to face the future, but we admire him for that. Nothing matters more to him than his freedom and he is willing to pay the price to remain a free man. His judgment is often poor, but he cherishes the right to make his own mistakes. He drinks too much and he gambles too much. Paradise Street is excellent.

Promised Land is a novelette published in Astounding Science Fiction in February 1950. It deals with posthumanism. The solar system is being colonised but survival on the other planets and the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn is near impossible. Two solutions have been tried - altering people to suit the conditions on those planets and altering the conditions on those planets to suit people.

The incompatibility of these approaches is now evident on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. The present population is composed of humans heavily modified for local conditions (know as Ganymedans) but as the terraforming of the planet advances it will become habitable for normal humans but no longer habitable for the Ganymedans. That is likely to set off a power struggle. Another story with a flawed hero, and an ambiguous villain. Moore had a knack for taking ideas that were around at the time but taking them in unexpected and provocative directions. Fascinating story.

The 1945 novelette The Code appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in July 1945. Again she takes a straightforward idea, scientists trying to reverse the ageing process. Then she veers off into wild crazy directions involving the nature of time, parallel universes, evolution, alchemy, the nature of personality, the nature of memory and Faust’s bargain with Mephistopheles! And she makes it work. Bizarre but brilliant story.

Heir Apparent appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in July 1950. It’s set in the same universe as Promised Land. Earth’s empire is controlled by Integrator Teams - seven humans and a computer linked together functioning as one mind. Two outcasts from such a Team are at the centre of a vast power struggle. They may be the prime overs or they may be pawns. These two men hate each other but there is still a weird link between them, the legacy of having been on the same Integrator Team. A superb story.

C. L. Moore’s 1940s and 1950s SF was very cutting edge indeed. She mixes philosophical and even spiritual themes with SF and in a couple of these tales she is playing around with proto-cyberpunk concepts - group minds, man-machine interfaces, virtual reality, posthumanism. She was ahead of her time. These stories also display her ability to write cerebral SF with emotional depth.

Catherine L. Moore was one of the giant of science fiction, a dazzling talent with a formidably varies output. This collection is very highly recommended.

I reviewed the lead story in the collection, the novel Judgment Night, separately a couple of years ago. And I've reviewed her Jirel of Joiry sword-and-sorcery stories and her Northwest Smith stories.