The Baen Big Book of Monsters Read online

  Table of Contents

  Size Matters: Introduction by Hank Davis

  The Shining Ones by Arthur C. Clarke

  All About StrangeMonsters of the Recent Past by Howard Waldrop

  The Monster-God of Mamurth by Edmond Hamilton

  Talent by Robert Bloch

  The End of the Hunt by David Drake

  Ooze by Anthony N. Rud

  The Valley of the Worm by Robert E. Howard

  Whoever Fights Monsters by Wen Spencer

  Deviation from a Theme by Steven Utley

  The Eggs from Lake Tanganyika by Curt Siodmak

  The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft

  From Out The Fire by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Beauty and the Beast by Henry Kuttner

  The Island of the Ud by William Hope Hodgson

  A Single Samurai by Steven Diamond

  Planet of Dread by Murray Leinster

  An Epistle to the Thessalonians by Philip Wylie

  The Monster of Lake Lametrie by Wardon Allan Curtis

  The Giant Cat of Sumatra by Hank Davis

  Greenface by James H. Schmitz

  Tokyo Raider by Larry Correia

  The Baen Big Book of Monsters

  Edited by Hank Davis

  SIZE MATTERS

  From the dragons of legend to Jack the Giant Killer’s colleague to King Kong and Godzilla, people have found the idea of giant creatures both scary and fascinating. Why so many should find accounts of a critter big enough to gulp down a puny human like an insignificantly small hor d’oeuvre or step on said human and leave a grease spot might be explained by the psychologists, but such yarns are undeniable fun, and here’s a book crammed full of things that you can’t outrun because they take bigsteps, by writers with equally large reputations, including:

  David Drake, best-selling author of the Hammer’s Slammers and RCN series, describes the far future plight of an unusual descendant of present-day humans, who’s being pursued by the descendants of another species, which are much larger than they were in our time.

  Robert Bloch, winner of the Hugo award and the lifetime achievement award of the World Fantasy Convention, and author of the classic horror novel Psycho, introduces an unusual orphan and aspiring thespian who was much more than he seemed and was destined to play the biggest role of anyone’s lifetime.

  Philip Wylie, co-author of the SF classic, When Worlds Collide and other imaginative works, tells of the arrival of a very, very tall giant on Earth and what happened next, in a sharp-edged satiric tale.

  Murray Leinster, known as the Dean of Science Fiction Writers, spins a yarn of a stranded starship whose crew must get replacement parts from an abandoned outpost in order to take off again—if they can reach the outpost through the swarming gigantic insect life of the planet.

  H.P. Lovecraft, renowned master of horror, is on board with a story of a star-spawned thing which was not only huge, but invisible as well.

  Plus all-new stories by New York Times best-selling author Larry Correia, and award-winning authors Sarah A. Hoyt and Wen Spencer. And much more.

  BAEN BOOKS EDITED

  BY HANK DAVIS

  The Human Edge by Gordon R. Dickson

  We the Underpeople by Cordwainer Smith

  When the People Fell by Cordwainer Smith

  The Technic Civilization Saga

  The Van Rijn Method by Poul Anderson

  David Falkayn: Star Trader by Poul Anderson

  Rise of the Terran Empire by Poul Anderson

  Young Flandry by Poul Anderson

  Captain Flandry: Defender of the Terran Empire by Poul Anderson

  Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra by Poul Anderson

  Flandry’s Legacy by Poul Anderson

  The Best of the Bolos: Their Finest Hour, created by Keith Laumer

  A Cosmic Christmas

  A Cosmic Christmas 2 You

  In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

  The Baen Big Book of Monsters

  As Time Goes By (forthcoming)

  THE BAEN BIG BOOK OF MONSTERS

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4767-3699-0

  Cover art by Bob Eggleton

  First Baen printing, October 2014

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The Baen big book of monsters / edited by Hank Davis.

  pages cm

  Summary: "From the dragons of legend to Jack the Giant Killer's colleague to King Kong and Godzilla, people have found the idea of giant creatures both scary and fascinating. Here's a book crammed full of large things that you can't outrun by such writers as David Drake, Robert Bloch, Philip Wylie, Murray Leinster, H.P. Lovecraft, Larry Correia, Wen Spencer and more"-- Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-4767-3699-0 (paperback)

  1. Monsters--Fiction. 2. Giants--Fiction. 3. Science fiction. 4. Horror fiction. I. Davis, Hank.

  PN6120.95.S33B34 2014

  813'.087608--dc23

  2014025369

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-316-4

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  copyrights of stories

  Introduction: “Size Matters” © 2014 by Hank Davis

  “The Shining Ones” by Arthur C. Clarke first appeared in Playboy, August 1964 © 1964 by Arthur C. Clarke. Reprinted by permission of Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency, Inc. for the author’s estate.

  “All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past” by Howard Waldrop first appeared in Shayol #4, Winter 1980, © 1980 by Flight Unlimited, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Monster-God of Mamurth” by Edmond Hamilton first appeared in Weird Tales, August 1926, © 1926 by Popular Fiction Publishing, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Spectrum Literary Agency for the author’s estate.

  “Talent” by Robert Bloch first appeared in If: Worlds of Science Fiction, July 1960, © 1960 by Digest Productions Corporation. Reprinted by permission of Richard Henshaw Group, LLC, for the author’s estate.

  “The End of the Hunt” by David Drake first appeared in New Destinies VIII, Baen Books, 1989. © 1989 by David A. Drake. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Ooze” by Anthony N. Rud first appeared in Weird Tales, March 1923, © 1923 by Popular Fiction Publishing, Inc. All attempts to locate the holder of rights to this story have been unsuccessful. If a holder will get in touch with Baen Books, payment will be made.

  “The Valley of the Worm” by Robert E. Howard first appeared in Weird Tales. February 1934, © 1934 by Popular Fiction Publishing, Inc. The story is in the public domain.

  “Whoever Fights Monsters” by Wen Spencer appears here for the first time. © 2014 by Wen Spencer. Published by permission of the author.

  “Deviation from a Theme” by Steven Utley first appeared in Galaxy, May 1976, © 1976 by UPD Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of Jessica Reisman for the author’s estate.

  “The Eggs from Lake Tanganyika” by Curt Siodmak first appeared in Amazing Stories, July 1926, © 1926 by Experimenter Publishing Company. The story is in the public domain.

  “The Dunwich Horror” by H P Lovecraft reprinted by permission of Lovecraft Holdings, LLC.

  “From Out the Fire” by Sarah A. Hoyt appears here for the first time. © 2014 by Sarah A. Hoyt. Published by permission of the author.

  “Beauty and the Beast” by Henry Kuttner first appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1940, © 1940 by Better Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the Harold Matson Agency for the author’s estate.

  “The Island of the Ud” by William Hope Hodgson first appeared in The Red Magazine, May 15, 1912. The story is in the public domain.

  “A Single Samurai” by Steven Diamond appears here for the first time. © 2014 by Steven Diamond. Published by permission of the author.

  “Planet of Dread” by Murray Leinster first appeared in Fantastic, May 1962, © 1962 by Ziff-Davis Publications. Reprinted by permission of Virginia Kidd Agency for the author’s estate.

  “An Epistle to the Thessalonians” from FINNLEY WREN. Copyright 1934, 1961 by Philip Wylie. From the forthcoming Dalkey Archive edition. By permission of Harold Ober Associates Incoported.

  “The Monster of Lake Lametrie” by Wardon Allan Curtis first appeared in Pearson’s magazine, September 1899. The story is in the public domain.

  “The Giant Cat of Sumatra” by Hank Davis appears here for the first time. © 2014 by Hank Davis. Published by permission of the author.

  “Greenface” by James H. Schmitz originally appeared in Unknown Worlds, August 1943. © 1943 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Barry Malzberg for the author’s estate.

  “Tokyo Raider” by Larry Correia appears here for the first time. © 2014 by Larry Correia. Published by permission of the author.

  Dedication

  For the guys who brought big critters to

  gigantic, scary life on the silver screen:

  Willis O’Brien

 
Ray Harryhausen

  Merian C. Cooper

  Eiji Tsuburaya

  Ishirô Honda

  Haruo Nakajima

  Katsumi Tezuka

  Jiro Suzuki

  And all the unsung heroes and heroines who painstakingly built miniatures and puppets, sweated over special effects, and sweated inside rubber suits.

  Plus a rueful nod to Bert I. Gordon. Sorry, Mr. B.I.G., but filming a close up of an iguana and calling it a T-Rex doesn’t cut the giant monster mustard.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to all the contributors, as well as those who helped with advice, permissions, contact information, and other kindnesses, including Ann Behar, Cristina Concepcion, Carol Chamberlain, Martha Grenon, Jessica Reisman, Justin Bell, David Drake, Moshe Feder, Barbara Hambly and her friend, Sitemistress Deb, Vaughne Hansen, Robert C. Harrall, Rich Henshaw, Barry Malzberg, Craig Tenney, Bud Webster, Joakim Zetterberg, and probably other helpful carbon units which my decrepit memory has unforgivably overlooked. And finally, thanks to Bob Eggleton, whose idea the whole thing was. (He loves to do giant monster covers.)

  Size Matters

  INTRODUCTION

  by Hank Davis

  Read any good monsters lately? Here’s a big book full of even bigger monsters, one in a story over a century old, others in newly written stories, and a generous helping of stories from the years between.

  I don’t want to rehash the points I made in my introduction to In Space No One Can Hear You Scream, since I’m sure you already have that book on your shelf or in your to-be-read stack. (If you somehow overlooked it, fortunately it’s still available, both in dead tree and e-book versions.) As I wrote there, briefly, people who don’t read science fiction but get their notion of SF from movies and TV have a tendency to think that SF equals horror. In particular, the SF movies of the 1950s, many of which were also horror movies, laid a foundation for that perception, and a lot of them involved giant critters of all sorts: revived dinosaurs, enlarged insects and spiders and at least one giant lobster from outer space (in the awesomely awful Teenagers from Outer Space), giant snails, giant leeches, giant amoebae, giant crabs (no jokes, please), a giant octopus, and even giant people.

  That was what was playing at your local drive-in theater, but for written SF, the 1950s was a period of the genre taking itself Very Seriously (and maybe even Constructively), with the emphasis on possible futures, logical extrapolations of current social trends and realistic technologies, no more beautiful Martian princesses (*sigh*), increased attention to psychology and sociology, and did I mention being Very Serious? Space opera in general was mostly confined to four minor magazines and Ace Double-Novels, while the onetime space adventure pulps Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories cut back on covers by Earle Bergey with his celebrated babes in brass bras menaced by loathsome alien creatures and instead displayed serious covers illustrating serious stories inside. Alas, it didn’t help those two venerable magazines, which soon shuffled off to the pulp Valhalla accompanied by the space opera pulp, Planet Stories. Nothing gold can stay . . .

  All this seriousness wasn’t conducive to stories of giant monsters. For one thing, with all the attention paid to using authentic science (with rivets), any story about giant monsters had to work around what’s usually called the square-cube law. If you wanted to write a story about giant ants, you had the problem that insects, including ants, breathe through holes in their chassis called spiracles that let air circulate inside. This works fine for something the size of an insect, but if an ant is somehow doubled in its size, the surface inside its air passages increases by four times (the square of the size) while the volume of its body increases by eight times (the cube of the size), so that its respiration quickly becomes less efficient. An ant the size of a man or larger would suffocate. If an author wrote about ants as big as a man, he’d have to somehow give them something like lungs (Frederik Pohl did that in his 1949 story, “Let the Ants Try”—and they did, too).

  There’s also the problem that instead of an internal skeleton, insects have an exoskeleton, a setup that works very well for tiny critters, but, once again, double the size of an ant, say, and the volume of its exoskeleton increases eightfold. Increase its size ten times—still much smaller than a man—and its exoskeleton’s volume and weight increases a thousand times. The exoskeleton would become very heavy if an ant somehow became as big as a man. There’s also the problem that the strength of a muscle is proportional to the size of its cross-section. Double the size and the muscular strength is squared, but (again) the weight of the body is cubed. That man-sized ant might not even be able to stand up on its spindly legs . . . before it fell over from suffocation.

  The square-cube law works in the other direction, too, and is responsible for the apparent feats of super-strength that insects routinely demonstrate. A flea can jump a distance that corresponds to a human leaping over a tall building in a single bound (I hope that phrase isn’t copyrighted). An ant can lift a pebble half its size not because it’s unusually strong, but because that pebble’s inside volume shrinks faster than its surface area, so it’s not as proportionately heavy as it looks. An ant-sized man would be able to lift the same pebble—of course, a man that size would have problems, such as freezing because his surface area is rapidly radiating heat away from his comparatively small-volume innards, his eyes not being designed to function at such a tiny size, and other things.

  Evolution has shaped insects to operate efficiently at one size and humans to operate at a much larger size, and everything is not relative. (By the way, I’m certain that Einstein never said that, “Everything is relative,” if only because the speed of light not being relative is the basis for special relativity.)

  So giant insects are impossible, really giant humans wouldn’t be able to function (nor would giant apes—sorry, Kong), and if a human shrank to insect size, he’d have more immediate problems than just having to fight off regular sized insects or spiders.

  But that’s no fun.

  Before things got so serious, stories in the SF pulps of the 1920s and into the 1940s had stories about people who had shrunk down to microscopic size, such as Paul Ernst’s “The Raid on the Termites” in the June 1932 Astounding Stories and “He Who Shrank” by Henry Hasse, in the August 1936 Amazing Stories, and even subatomic size—Ray Cummings made a cottage industry of the latter, writing “The Girl in the Golden Atom,” “Beyond the Vanishing Point,” and others. Other stories starred enormously enlarged insects, as in Victor Rosseau’s “The Beetle Horde,” in the very first issue of Astounding. The same month, in the January 1930 Amazing Stories, saw a story by Miles J. Breuer, M.D., “The Hungry Guinea Pig,” which was hungry because it was very, very big. (Don’t get between it and a warehouse full of grain.)

  Even earlier, H.G. Wells wrote The Food of the Gods, which is mostly about giant people, but also had a side order of giant rats and wasps, IIRC. (Maybe somebody will someday make a good movie of that novel, and we can forget about the bloody awful three movies that Bert I. Gordon perpetrated.) Much later, in the middle of the seriousness of the 1950s, Richard Matheson wrote The Shrinking Man, which opens with its microscopic protagonist running for his life from a regular-sized spider. It was published as a paperback original by Gold Medal books, a paperback line known for westerns, mysteries, suspense—but not for science fiction. Although Matheson had sold numerous stories to most of the SF magazines of the time, I doubt that any of them would have serialized the novel, even without the harsh language and controversial scenes (which read as very mild now). Damon Knight wrote a killer review of the book, bringing his heaviest artillery to bear—and it didn’t matter. The novel became a popular movie, The Incredible Shrinking Man, with a screenplay by Matheson, and the book has been in print almost constantly for nearly sixty years, because (here’s that word again) it’s fun.