Background

I Remember Lemuria! is a name that tickled my mind as I knew I had seen it mentioned in passing repeatedly (I think it is even on the list of books-to-read I’ve kept since elementary school), and Alexander helps explain why: it presented itself as true and a whole alternate history of the universe, linguistic analysis (of course), and a theory for aging and disease as well, and for some reason, a lot of American readers… seemed to not-entirely-ironically buy into it? And sent in letter after letter, clamoring to know the latest revelation from Shaver, such that:

Amazing Stories began to feel less like a magazine and more like the bulletin of an incipient religion. Why did these stories strike such a nerve?

Some of the credit must go to Shaver. An investigation into where he’d really been during his supposed hollow-earth years turned up a gratifyingly straightforward answer—locked in a Ypsilanti psychiatric hospital. “Thought Records of Lemuria” is one of the most compelling accounts I’ve ever read of what it feels like to be a paranoid schizophrenic. While other science-fiction stories of the era are derivative and campy, “Thought Records” reads like the narrative of a terrified man recounting, as honestly as he can, his brush with things mankind wasn’t meant to know about. Readers of the time were right to find it compelling.

But even more of the credit goes to Palmer. If Shaver was an utterly honest madman, Palmer was the perfect huckster, with a genius for transforming Shaver’s nightmares into magazine sales. He turned the “Letters to the Editor” section into a carefully managed pageant. Each issue would start by hinting that there were thousands of letters confirming Shaver’s stories but that he couldn’t publish them for one reason or another (Space? The letter writers’ safety? His own safety?). Then he would print the “reader” responses (quotation marks because he is accused of writing some of them himself under assumed names). Palmer would try to synthesize all of this into a coherent narrative. Sometimes his analysis was interspersed with debates against (possibly fictional) people who begged him to stop writing for his own safety. Yes (he would write back), he knew he was putting himself at risk by revealing the deros’ secrets, but mankind had a right to know.

Alexander also notes in passing that

Along with schizophrenia, Shaver could also be fairly suspected of sexual sadomasochism. His descriptions of the pleasure slaves of Space-Satan benefited from the same sort of unexpected earnestness as did his description of all the voices he was hearing.

before getting to his primary thesis: the shared aspect of these various world-wide myths and hoaxes about underground abductions (often with a sexual edge), as well as UFO abductions, ultimately stem from sleep paralysis, hypnagogic illusions, and possibly other weird sleep phenomena like sleepwalking or lucid dreams.

This is reasonable because let’s face it, “sleep” is the weirdest things animals do on a daily basis.¹

But I’m not entirely sold on his thesis because these don’t seem that common, like there could be many people suffering terribly from sleep paralysis and abduction dreams, just waiting for a Sharpe Shaver to come along and provide a science-fiction framework. Anyway, it reminded me that I had always meant to read it, and there is a convenient HTML edition online, and I procrastinated by reading it.

Plot Summary

I did so in one sitting because, considering the circumstances, it’s a surprisingly good pulp SF read. Alexander (author of Unsong) describes it as a paranoid-schizophrenic nightmare, and the Wikipedia entry on Shaver summarizes it as:

Shaver wrote of extremely advanced prehistoric races who had built cavern cities inside the Earth before abandoning Earth for another planet due to damaging radiation from the Sun. Those ancients also abandoned some of their own offspring here, a minority of whom remained noble and human “Teros”, while most degenerated over time into a population of mentally impaired sadists known as “Deros”—short for “detrimental robots”. Shaver’s “robots” were not mechanical constructs, but were robot-like due to their savage behavior.

These Deros still lived in the cave cities, according to Shaver, kidnapping surface-dwelling people by the thousands for meat or torture. With the sophisticated “ray” machinery that the great ancient races had left behind, they spied on people and projected tormenting thoughts and voices into our minds (reminiscent of schizophrenia’s “influencing machines” such as the air loom). Deros could be blamed for nearly all misfortunes, from minor “accidental” injuries or illnesses to airplane crashes and catastrophic natural disasters. Women especially were singled out for brutal treatment, including rape, and Dash2000 notes that “[s]ado-masochism was one of the prominent themes of Shaver’s writings”. [pg29, Borderlands: The Ultimate Exploration of the Unknown] Though generally confined to their caves, Shaver claimed that the Deros sometimes traveled with spaceships or rockets, and had dealings with equally evil extraterrestrial beings. Shaver claimed to possess first-hand knowledge of the Deros and their caves, insisting he had been their prisoner for several years…The Shaver Mystery Clubs had surprising longevity: Representatives of a club discussed the Shaver Mystery on John Nebel’s popular radio show several times through the late 1950s.

This turns out to be true, as far as it goes, but it left me surprised by reading Lemuria, to the point where I wonder how many of the WP editors have actually read Lemuria, because the emphasis is so different, or if the 1948_77ya Lemuria version is wildly different from the magazine version, or if I am even reading the same book?²

Alexander has since clarified that he was referring to the second Shaver publication in Amazing Stories, “Thought Records of Lemuria”, which ran in June 1945_80ya, and not the first one (March 1945_80ya).³

The actual Lemuria is a fast-paced action-adventure of a naive provincial painter who thousands of years ago in the forgotten prehistory of Earth, is failing artistically and to learn what life really is, travels to the center of the earth to the oldest and greatest Lemurian city, where, he is assured by his master, he will see all that life has to offer. There is only a relatively little bit of paranoid-schizophrenia logic chopping like “Evil is the opposite of live, the inference being that to be evil is to die. Oddly (or importantly?) evil is live spelled backward.”

Instead, the plot starts nearly in media res and doesn’t let up. Within pages, he has gotten there, where he discovers that the city is populated by all manner of creature, of every size and shape (this morphometric freedom being enabled by Lemuria’s total mastery of biology), from 6-armed women to 30-foot long snake-women to purple deer-women—and he soon acquires a deer-girl furry med-student waifu, discovers the capital has been subverted by a hidden conspiracy (who have been driven insane by poisonous radioactive dust from the Sun, which is the true cause of all aging & disease), survive their assassinations by fleeing with his new allies to the stars in a spaceship chase, recruits allies like giant sexy Amazonesses, and is part of a stealth invasion counter-coup and victorious war against the evil-doers; after exterminating them, they emigrate to a sun-free (and thus radioactive-dust-free) planet, and he lives happily ever after with his deer beloved wife. He writes Lemuria as a message to the future (us), to explain to us how radioactive dust causes all bad things (including but far from limited to the Deros), which will be left on tablets and scattered across the Earth to help us save ourselves (as they have all long since left and never returned to the poisoned hellscape of Earth).

I had been rather skeptical of the claims like “[s]ado-masochism was one of the prominent themes”, as literary scholars are always desperately trying to find some sort of homosexuality or lesbianism or something, and don’t always know much about the obsolete science that informs a lot of older science fiction, but I realized within the first few pages of the story that… no. They’re right. In fact, they undersell it: the BDSM themes are much stronger than the ‘paranoid schizophrenia’ themes, and further, a major theme that goes unremarked in both Alexander & WP is that Shaver is… well… a furry.

The BDSM shows up almost immediately when our young protagonist arrives in the city and is greeted by a giant 6-armed Sybil woman, who he immediately begins fantasizing about submitting to her and being crushed by her powerful arms:

The image of a tremendous 6-armed Sibyl female filled the screen and the electrically augmented body appeal of the mighty life within her seized the youth in me and wrung it as no embrace from lesser female ever had. “And what”—her voice shook me as a leaf in an organ pipe—“might a pale and puny male like you want in Tean City? You look as if you never had enough to eat, as if love had passed you by. Did you come down here because no one wanted you elsewhere?”

…I stepped into a rollat at the curb, inspected the directory, then inserted a coin and dialed the number of the building that housed the Hall of Symbols. I leaned back while the automatic drive of the rollat directed the car through the speeding traffic, its electric eye more efficient than my own. Yes, much more efficient than my own at the moment, which were wandering over the figure of a variform female on the walk whose upper part was the perfect torso of a woman and whose lower part was a sinuously gliding 30 feet of brilliantly mottled snake. You could never have escaped her embrace of your own will once she had wrapped those life-generating coils around you!

How sad that you will be embraced only by lesser females, and you will never be strangled by your 30-foot-long Lamia girlfriend straight out of Monster Musume! (Far from the only Lamia one will find in pulp fiction… And then there is “Shambleau”, the 1933_92ya tale where the Medusa snake-woman drains your life away by “addicting its short-lived victims with pure ecstasy”, or the cat-women who will eat you alive) And then we learn that there are furries everywhere, even at the center of the world, as our guide describes his first sight of a deer-woman medic:

What was the use of aspiring to be an artist, my reason said, if those great masters who had placed that mighty picture book on the vaulting walls above were so easily outdone by the life force itself! She was but a girl, younger than myself, but what a girl! Her body was encased in a transparent glitter; her skin a rosy pale purple; her legs, mottled with white, ended in a pair of cloven hooves. And as my brain struggled to grasp her colorful young perfection—she wagged her tail! It was all too much. Speculating about the life-generating force possible in the variform creatures was one thing; but having it materialize beside you was another thing entirely. Such a beautiful tail it was. Of the softest, most beautiful fur. “What were you staring at?” she asked. “The paintings?”…On her arm and breast I saw the medical school insignia; a man’s figure struggling with a great snake, disease. It took brains to study medicine. This exquisite young thing, so full of gen force, so powerfully attractive, was smart too. And almost instantly she proved herself to be extremely friendly and companionable. She went on talking, describing, theorizing in a gush of amiable conversation that left me dizzy, gasping, and admiringly breathless.

…From the moment that I pocketed a disc that bore the faun-legged girl’s name and address, I was no longer an aspiring artist; I wanted to know what she knew, wanted to learn what she was learning. Arl was her name, a short, sweet name for a girl and hard to forget, too. You can’t forget a girl who wags her tail at you just like that.

…I engaged the gnome-like moon-men in conversation in an attempt to still further blanket my turbulent mind. Arl caught my eye and wagged her tail in cheerful encouragement, seeming to divine what was on my mind. How expressive that beautiful tail of hers was; how much it could say; and with no dangerous thought waves to betray its meaning to those who must not receive on their sensitive instruments. With that tail, no language, no thought-transference was needed!

The feel when you’ll never fall in love with “lovely, smiling, brave Arl of the cloven hoofs and defiantly flirting tail!”, she who “wagged her tail in friendly encouragement” (“With that tail, no language, no thought-transference was needed!”), to whom you’ll swear marriage, who is as hot as she is sharp, who goes to war with her fiancee (“It was then that I got a shock—for a big carry-all came riding by and in it, among the warrior maids bearing the crest of Vanue, was Arl…She flashed her teeth at me gaily as though she were on a picnic!”).

It is safe to say that Shaver had a thing for tail.

However, deer-girls aside, you also will never have your brain wiped clean by the sheer life-force and eroticism of 100-foot elder goddesses who have grown for centuries.

I was no longer myself. I was a part of that mighty being before me. My thought was her thought; I was her ro until she chose to release me. Could she release me? I could not even wish it, nor ever would. Within me I knew that, and I felt no resentment, no regret—only joy. All of 80 feet tall she must have been. She towered over our heads as she arose to greet us, a vast cloud of the glittering hair of the Nor [ie. ‘Nordic’] women floating about her head, the sex aura a visible iridescence flashing about her form. I yearned toward that vast beauty which was not hidden for in Nor it is considered impolite to conceal the body greatly, being an offense against art and friendship to take beauty out of life. I was impelled madly toward her until I fell on my knees before her, my hands outstretched to touch the gleaming, ultra-living flesh of her feet. Beside me the other youths from center Mu were in the same condition of ecstatic desire. As our hands touched her flesh, a terrific charge of body electric flowed into us. We fell face downward in unbearable pleasure on the floor.

…when a simple ro like myself comes near one of these Elders, his will becomes their will automatically; for it is overcome by the great, all-pervading force of the life within them. One hardly notices this when the Elder is of the same sex, but when that life force is of the opposite sex the attraction is so great as to be irresistible. So true is this that seldom is a ro of one sex allowed too near an Elder of the opposite sex; for never again would the poor ro free himself of love for the Elder. My spirit trembled when I knew the Elder to which we were being taken was a woman; a woman who for unknown centuries had absorbed all the essences of growth-promoting substances. And too, Nor was a place where growth science must be far, far ahead of our own sun-baked sciencon’s [scientists] achievements. Never would I be able to free myself of the spell that: woman-force would cast upon me! I looked desperately at Arl’s sweet face. Never again would I love her if this thing were true. In Arl’s eyes I read the same fear, and I know then that she surely loved me and I was torn by the approaching loss. However, I dimly understood that it must be necessary—for no man near an Elder woman can deny her the truth of love for her.

(This, incidentally, is an example of how older forgotten science now looks like science fiction: projections of much greater lifespan—possibly germ-free—leading to multi-century/millennia-old ‘elders’ who are almost another species compared to us, have been largely abandoned when there were no life-extension breakthroughs to compare with vaccinations, vitamins, or antibiotics, and no l’élan vital which could be amplified or boosted like all other physical energies had been hitherto; eg. Back to Methuselah. Another example is that Shaver, of course, believes in the standard model of the ‘dying sun’, because without nuclear fusion, suns must have short lifespans and die the heat-death, and the radioactive dust is partially driven by this guttering-out process.)

But the goddess is kind enough to relinquish her toy back to Arl, and they are married (or maybe he is just enslaved to her, or is there any difference?):

Her breath was my breath, her thoughts took place in my head stronger than Vanue’s ever had, and the woman-soul of her was so augmented in my mind as to eclipse all other woman’s appeal that my memory had ever recorded. A strange little voice (it must have been Vanue’s speaking over a telethought instrument) whispered beside me: “You will never escape Arl now. You are her slave forever.” And as I listened, I knew that Vanue spoke the truth. Arl’s face, laughing before me in the eye plates, became larger and larger, entered my brain, became the wellspring of my being. I heard Arl’s thought, a vast river of force flowing in my mind, saying: “Where I go, there will you go also. The thing that is my desire is growing in you. My roots are your soul. You are my desire and the slave of my desire!” And I heard my own thought make answer in Arl’s mind: “So it shall be, always, oh maiden of the clicking hooves and swift hands, of the beautiful tail, of the clean will and strong desire!” And I knew that what I said was true.

And then they all lived happily ever after, on “a home in a cold planet, far from any sun’s evil influence…untouched coal deposits”. But before that, the protagonist wrote this memoir to us along with instructional manuals:

In a few short months the first ships took off for New Mu, and the last of the race of Atlan soon followed, abandoning Mu for their new home in space. Arl and I remained on Mu to the last. During this time I finished my telonion message plates and distributed them in the most likely places both in and on the surface of Mu. I pray that the descendants of those few wild men I have seen in the culture forests but have been unable to approach, may someday find these plates and have the sense to read them and heed their message. Someday, I have a feeling, they will be a race of men again. It is good seed they inherit, and they might be worth my effort in spite of the sun. I pray that when they find the plates they will understand!

Review

Considered as a quick pulp SF novel, it holds up surprisingly well. While I would never recommend it over a great SF novel like Blindsight to a contemporary reader, if you have an antiquarian taste or any historical interest in the genealogy of ideas, you could certainly do worse than an hour or two with Lemuria.

You might expect the infodumping to be terrible or the prose to be either wooden or gratingly 1940s American (an increasingly acquired taste), especially with all the neologisms, but it is reasonably well-written and you get used to it. (Hodgson’s The Night Land this is not!) It is too earnest to not earn your suspension of disbelief, and if you do, well, the passages are inherently amusing enough to keep you reading. And it never lingers long enough in any scene to wear out its welcome. (The HTML edition has the occasional typo, but not enough to be a problem.)

Interpretation

John Bruno Hare (creator of the linked 2007-11 version) summarizes Lemuria as

Taken at face value, this is a pretty good (but not great) pair of late Golden Age sci-fi stories, albeit with more footnotes than one would expect in the genre. The writing (or editing) is punchy. The plot drives the story, rather than the need for constant exposition, as is too often the case in texts like this. However, the real importance of these texts is historic. The Shaver mythos had a huge tacit influence on 1950s and successive UFO belief systems. For instance, Shavers’ ‘Nor’, blonde demigods from outer space, suggest the ‘Nordic’ aliens of UFO lore. The tunnels of the dero became subterranean alien bases. Embedded in this short science fiction story were many of the themes which would later become accepted UFO canon.

Here again, I’m not quite sure I buy either explanation of Lemuria’s influence.

If the paranoid-schizophrenia and sleep paralysis were a major draw, and there was a large latent audience for it, why was the first story, which is almost devoid of that, such an apparent hit, according to Palmer?

Or let’s take the Nordic aliens. I am not a UFO buff by any means, but I thought I was fairly familiar with it and I had no idea what “Nordic aliens” are until I read the WP entry, which notes that they were popular in the 1950s but quickly obsoleted by the grays we all know. That is also when WP notes the last Shaver fan clubs disbanding. If the Nordic aliens were so important to UFO lore, why could they be superseded so quickly, when many UFO myths then, like the Roswell incident, remain firmly cemented? And why would the “Nor”, which appear so late in the book, and are just large Amazonesses, be such a major influence on UFO fans to begin with? And why would the tunnels, which appear even less, in fact, scarcely at all, in Lemuria, be a major hit? (Not that tunnels are terribly important to current UFO lore as it is, and their role seems fully explicable by ordinary technical considerations, of the sort which are the reason the real-life Area 51 has an extensive tunnel system.) And when I read accounts of Shaverism intersecting with UFO crazes, like the 1947_78ya UFO craze, it sounds like, rather than Shaverism creating the UFO craze, Palmer & Shaver are desperately trying to latch onto them—and failing. Indeed, Amazing Stories itself had moved on to generic inchoate flying saucer news (as opposed to some clear successor story). And that was that, aside from the occasional later story like “The Fall of Lemuria” (the cover featuring a giant Lamia, of course).

By an interesting temporal coincidence, the 1940s & 1950s are also when Wonder Woman was launched (1941_84ya) the leather BDSM subculture rocketed to prominence, with parallel gestation in things like pulp fiction with its covers & plots filled with men tying up women (where do you think the “slave Leia” idea or design comes from?) or being tied up or both; and there are some claims that try to place the origins of furries around roughly then in the “funny animal” comic fandom which would grow overtly sexualized within a few decades.

I find it odd that a few stray elements are given such prominence and said to father entire belief systems, while the most prominent parts of Lemuria, the parts that Shaver rapturously rhapsodizes on, the parts he is most unironically earnest about, are given short shrift.

Unidentified Furry Obsessions

I am left wondering if Shaver in fact had much of any causal influence on later UFO culture, or if the whole thesis is a case of naively swallowing Palmer’s marketing combined with post hoc, ergo proper hoc reasoning and a general incredulity—“I, who am interested in UFOs, can’t see anything else in it that resonates with me, so it has to be the UFOs. Why else would it be popular?”

Why would it be popular? Why can’t you see why it would be popular?

Perhaps it is because your soul is dead (due to the Dero!) to the call of the gen force, and you have never seen the rosy pale purple (then mottled with pale white) of her side, nor stroked the soft (nay, softest) and beautiful (nay, most beautiful) fur of the wagging tail—

Of Arl! Arl, the lovely, smiling, brave Arl of the cloven hoofs and defiantly flirting tail—who could forget those flashing eyes whose thought enslaved your willing soul? Forget her?

Forget her not for a thousand years, nor for ten thousand years—no, no, never could Shaver forget her!

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