Oh dear! Aliens from Venus are invading again! This time they sport human-like heads on spider bodies and are called Shelks. Actually they invaded a few thousand years ago and drove mankind into deep corridors under the earth, where they now exist in a near-primitive state. No, this isn’t a storyline from a comic book or a Hollywood B movie—it’s “Tumithak of the Corridors”, a novella from science fiction’s pre-dawn era. Charles R. Tanner penned it for Amazing Stories in 1932, and he followed it up with “Tumithak in Shawm” (Amazing Stories, 1933), “Tumithak of the Towers of Fire” (Super Science Stories, 1941) and “Tumithak in the Ancient World” (found among the author’s writings after his death in 1974). The four novellas have been collected by John Koblas and A.M. Decker in Tumithak of the Corridors, the last appearing in print for the first time.
Tumithak himself is a Beowulf sort of character. A young man living in an area of the underground corridors known as Loor, he one day finds an ancient book that speaks of humans doing an unheard of thing—fighting against the monstrous and technologically superior Shelks who rule the surface. This determines his course in life, and the rest of the story pretty much unfolds from there—Tumithak and his friends start small, but their little rebellion quickly builds steam, from taking out an individual Shelk to a town to a city and repossessing the heritage of the Ancients (which would be us, give or take a century). He leads a very active life, does Tumithak, and so the book is taken up with lots of exploring, raids, narrow escapes, that sort of thing. A thirteen-year-old would enjoy Tumithak of the Corridors immensely. And adult sci-fi readers may also find themselves captivated, though this is nowhere near the refinement of Bradbury or Ursula Le Guin. Perhaps it’s the epic-heroic tone of the simple prose, so rarely found these days, or the scientific ideas Tanner has left lying about here and there (various human races, for example, have evolved apart from one another due to natural circumstances or Shelk breeding). Or simply the fact that this is a remnant of 1930s-era sci-fi, a bridge between the early speculative masters like Wells and Lovecraft (Tanner’s chief influence) and the “golden age” writers of Asimov’s generation. Somewhere about this time tales about science and the future and aliens from Venus were morphing from literary curiosities to comic book and popcorn movie fare. The science fiction genre was starting to coalesce, coming out of its own underground corridors to become part of popular culture.
Asimov himself was one of those early young readers of Amazing Stories, and he later described “Tumithak of the Corridors” as “far and away the best and most exciting story I had ever read up to that time. I found the characters human and the hero all the more admirable because he could feel fear.” A World War I veteran who lived most of his life in Cincinnati, Tanner never became more than an amateur writer, with the first three Tumithak novellas his major publishing credits. Fortunately for us, there are still science fiction buffs like Decker and Koblas who know enough, and care enough, to bring this minor trail-blazer back into print.
- Joel Van Valin