Intro to GIRLS FOR THE SLIME GOD

ME AND THE SLIME GOD by Mike Resnick

 

November, 1960 was a pretty interesting time to be around.

Kelso was just wrapping up the first of his five Horse of the Year titles.

A womanizer who makes Bill Clinton look like a monk with vows of celibacy won the presidency from a Richard who makes Shakespeare's villain of the same name look like a choir boy.

Ngo Dinh Diem crushed an army revolt in a little country called Vietnam that most Americans couldn't find on a map. (Oh, hell, let's be honest -- most Americans _still_ can't find it.)

America's first submarine armed with nuclear missles put out to sea.

And the November _Playboy_ hit the stands.

Now, you might think that last item is pretty minor, and perhaps it is, but the first four have nothing to do with this book, whereas the November, 1960 _Playboy_ is responsible for it.

I think it was one of the half-dozen or so issues of _Playboy_ I ever bought. It's not a magazine that does much for me, once I get through staring at the photos. In fact, that issue is the only one I've ever kept. I still have it, and I still open it up every year or so.

But not to the photos.

I bought it because, as I was thumbing through it at the newsstand at the ripe old age of 18, I came to a series of science fiction pulp covers in glorious color. Then, as I looked more closely, I realized that they were parodies of pulp covers, drawn by Will Elder of _Mad_ and _Little Annie Fanny_ fame.

They illustrated an article called "Girls for the Slime God", by William Knoles, a wonderful tongue-in-cheek piece of nostalgia about all those old science fiction pulps that featured BEMs (Bug-Eyed Monsters, for the uninitiated) ripping the clothes off the heroine, and usually sporting titles like the one the article itself bore.

As you'll learn, though most of the magazine covers promised such goodies, only one magazine -- _Marvel Science Stories_ -- delivered on that promise, and then only in its first two issues.

Knoles began quoting from the magazine, especially from a story called "The Avengers of Space", which is all about space heroine Lorna's futile attempts to keep her clothes on for more than a page at a time, and a funny thing happened -- I fell everlastingly in love with poor Lorna and her ill-fated obsession to keep getting dressed.

Now, I wasn't the only person who read that article. Isaac Asimov did, too, and he immediately produced an amusing fictional answer entitled "Playboy and the Slime God", which ran in the March, 1961 _Amazing Stories_.

Fast forward to 1963. I finally found the first two issues of _Marvel Science Stories_, which contained "The Avengers of Space", "The Time Trap", and "Dictator of the Americas", the three stories that were quoted extensively in Knoles' article. (They cost 50 cents apiece; I doubt that you could buy the pair of them for much less that $150.00 today.) Carol and I were as dead broke as most young couples, and got our entertainment as cheaply as possible -- and I can still recall the night that we sat down and read "The Avengers of Space" aloud to each other, the rule being that one of us read until he or she cracked up with laughter and then the other took over.

I also noted an interesting thing. Not all the stories, even in these two issues, were the sort Knoles remembered so fondly. In fact, there were just the three I mentioned above. And two of the three were written by the prolific Henry Kuttner, who later went on to write -- in collaboration with his wife, Catherine L. Moore -- the Gallagher stories, the Baldy stories, "A Gnome There Was", _Fury_, "What You Need", and a host of other semi-classics.

Only the short story, "Dictator of the Americas", was written by someone else -- in fact, by a name I'd never encountered before, James Hall. When I went through my various indexes trying to track him down, I discovered that "James Hall" was a pseudonym of Henry Kuttner's.

(Kuttner used a _lot_ of pseudonyms. One legend, perhaps apocryphal though it makes sense given the tenor of the times, is that he had to invent "Lewis Padgett" and "Lawrence O'Donnell" because, after the shocking tales of Lorna and her fellow heroines, no editor would buy from him. In a poll taken in the late 1940s, both Padgett and O'Donnell ranked higher than Kuttner in the readers' affections.)

So _Playboy_ published the article, and Isaac responded to it, and I bought and read the stories, and that was that. Except, as I mentioned, I fell in love with Lorna -- and so, in a very platonic way, did Carol.

Now, Carol had been creating costumes for us to wear in the World Science Fiction Convention masquerades all during the 1970s. We had won in 1973 and 1974, lost in 1976, and won again in 1977. All of them had been beautiful and elaborate, and soon most of the costumers were imitating her approach, so she decided to do one last costume to show everyone that beautiful and eleborate wasn't the only way to go, and then retire from competition. What she came up with was an old-fashioned burlesque skit featuring Lorna, Captain Shawn, the BEM ("a teratological baroque spawned by no sane world"), and a Mime who would hold up speech balloons as the actors froze in pulp poses. Her only criterion was that the entire costume for all four of us had to cost less than $100.00.

"The Avengers of Space" won Best in Show at the 1979 NorthAmeriCon held in Louisville, Kentucky, and suddenly there was renewed interest in Lorna and the Knoles article and Isaac's story and the whole damned Slime God milieu. I was just starting to sell regularly and make a name for myself in the science fiction field, and it occurred to me that I could put together a book called _Girls for the Slime God_ that would begin with the Knoles article, then run the three Kuttner stories (two of which were novellas and would bulk it out), follow them with the Asimov story, and finally maybe even run the script for our costume.

The one thing I knew was that this wasn't a mass market book. Not that sex doesn't sell, but rather that if you don't love the field, if you can't read these with a sense of delight and nostalgia and realize how far we've come, then they're just more fodder for critics who constantly judge science fiction by its worst examples. (Let's be honest here: Kuttner wrote these for a bottom- of-the-barrel market just about 60 years ago.)

One small press after another enthusiastically agreed to publish _Girls for the Slime God_, only to run into problems. Phantasia Press went dormant. Pulphouse closed its doors. Others had other problems. But now Gordie Meyer has elected to make it his company's very first publication, and all's well that ends well.

So she's back, blushing and chilly, eluding BEMs and heroes with equal desperation. Lorna lives!!!