For a scenic browse, and an answer-page for Guess The World...
...Tok led the way swiftly, doubling back toward the lower side of the bazaar. Here was a section that Harrah never visited - the Quarter of the Sellers of Dreams. Poetic name for a maze of filthy rat-runs stinking with the breath of nameless substances. The sliding roofs were always closed and what few voices could be heard were beyond human speech.
They came to a house that stood by itself and the end of an alley. It looked as though it had stood a long time by itself, the fecund weeds growing thick around the door, rooting in the chinks of the walls.
There was no light, no sound. But Tok stopped and pointed.
After
a moment Kehlin nodded. With that gesture he dismissed Tok, forgot him
utterly, and the aboriginal went with three loping strides into the
shadows and was gone...
Leigh Brackett, The Dancing Girl of Ganymede (Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1950)
...We were on the move the whole time. I still hadn't managed to take my merit badge tests and I hadn't done much better about getting in to Scout meetings. There was just too much to do. Building a pond, for example - Laguna Serenidad was being infected with plankton and algae but there weren't fish in it yet and it would be a long time, even after the fish were stocked, before fishing would be allowed. So we did fish-pond gardening, Chinese style, after I got the pond built.
And there were always crops to work on. My cover grass had taken hold all right and shortly after we moved in the soil seemed ready to take angle worms. Dad was about to send a sample into town for analysis when Papa Schultz stopped by. Hearing what we were about he took a handful of the worked soil, crumbled it, smelled it, tasted it, and told me to go ahead and plant my worms. I did and they did all right; we encountered them from time to time in working the fields thereafter.
You could see the stripes on the fields which had been planted with pay dirt by the way the grass came up. You could see that the infection was spreading, too, but not much. I had a lot of hard work ahead before the stripes would meet and blend together and then we could think about renting a cud-chewer and finishing off the other acre and a half, using our own field loam and our compost heap to infect the new soil. After that we could see about crushing some more acres, but that was a long way away...
We
hoped to have a hive of bees some day and the entomologists on the
bionomics staff were practically bursting their hearts trying to breed a
strain of bees which would prosper out of doors. You see, among other
things, while our gravity was only a third Earth-normal, our air
pressure was only a little better than a fifth Earth-normal and the bees
resented it; it made flying hard work for them...
Robert A Heinlein, Farmer in the Sky (1950)
...Slowly, they continued down the mountain, reaching now and then a bleak plateau which wind and water had swept to glassy smoothness. The flying mammals which always heralded the flood swooped overhead.
As
they crossed one of the plateaus, above the roar of the wind they heard
a loud beating. A mammoth bird, jet black against the mountain, its
two sets of wings flapping alternately at a spread of thirty feet, came
toward them. Flying the gale, it neared them quickly. For a second,
the men sat transfixed; then, wrenching themselves from the coma of
fear, drew guns...
Stanley G Weinbaum and Helen Weinbaum, Tidal Moon (Thrilling Wonder Stories,
December 1938)
...the
instant he had consumed in rescuing the girl had been enough for the
thing to seize him, and he found himself battling for his very life. No
soft-leaved infant this, but a full-grown monster, well equipped with
mighty weapons of offence and defence. Well it was for the struggling
man that he was encased in armour steel as those saw-edged, hard-spiked
leaves drove against him with crushing force; well it was for him that
he had his own independent air supply, so that that deadly perfume
eddied ineffective about his helmeted head! Hard and fiercely driven as
those terrible thorns were, they could do no more than dent his heavy
armour. His powerful left arm, driving the double-razor-edged dirk in
short, resistless arcs, managed to keep the snaky tendrils from coiling
about his right arm, which was wielding the heavy, trenchant sword.
Every time that mighty blade descended it cleaved its length through
snapping spikes and impotently grinding leaves; but more than once a
flailing tendril coiled about his neck armour and held his helmet
immovable as though in a vice, while those frightful, grinding saws
sought to rip their way through the glass to the living creature inside
the peculiar metal housing. Dirk and sabre and magnificent physique
finally triumphed, but it was not until leaf had been literally severed
from every other leaf that the outlandish organism gave up the ghost...
E E "Doc" Smith, Spacehounds of IPC (1931, 1947)
Other races have always held a feeling of pity for the Ganymedans. Yet, in respect to material things, they are not to be pitied. They are the richest race in the solar system, and if they had not insisted on cherishing dreams which, in their hearts, they must have known as futile, and if the slowly coming death of their race had not been looming above them, they would have known complete happiness.
Their government, as might be expected, was anarchistic. They were such a closely unified people, with identical ambitions and hopes, that no other form would have worked as well.
Food was plentiful. They had vast fields of several different types of vegetables which grew rapidly, and needed not even the tiny amount of sunlight they received. There was a minimum of physical labor, since they possessed up-to-date, wholly automatic machinery.
They possessed television sets, a public library fed from book and magazine marts on the other planets. They possessed two or three ships of ancient design, which maintained constant commerce with the rest of the solar system, freighting vast supplies of food exports to the markets, where, being considered delicacies by the inhabitants of the other worlds, they commanded fabulous prices.
As for religion, I doubt if they had one, unless it were one centering about their dreams of empire.
Carrist willingly showed me about the city, and even walked with me to the vast agricultural fields. The city, in its prime, must have been huge…
Ross Rocklynne, The Forgotten Dream (Planet Stories, Summer 1940)
>> Guess The World - Third Series
...He led them back, through twisting corridors, through rooms where terrified Lanoor whispered and asked questions. They had heard the screams of the maddened shleath. The news was spreading. Then they reached a barred gate, a grillwork of locked bars that closed off the corridor. Beyond it they looked into a great courtyard a quarter of a mile across. The vast ramifications of the palace surrounded it on every side. And in it half a hundred of the giant shleath wavered and stirred uneasily, crowding down at the gate beyond which they had heard the strange shrieks of their fellows.
Somehow
those giant masses of jelly had a brain and understanding. And they
were restless. The glow-lamps cast only dim sparkles of light on
hulking masses of greenish jelly...
John W Campbell, The Double Minds (Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1937)
>> Guess The World - Third Series
…The wind which blew over the flute-mouthpiece of rock on this side of the mountain was as gentle and variable as a flautist’s breath, and did not stir the enormous tangled stolons and runners which filled the bottom of the great valley, or the wrap-around leaves which were plastered to them like so many thousands of blue-green Möbius strips.
It was not quiet down there, but it seemed quiet. There were many more thrums and rummums of rolling rocks and distant avalanches than one heard during the cold weather. The granite-skinned roots were growing rapidly while their short time was come, burrowing insistently into the walls of the valley, starting new trees and new rocks. In the cliffs, the warm weather changed water-of-crystallisation from Ice IV to Ice III, the bound water snapping suddenly from one volume to another, breaking the rock strata apart….
James Blish, The Seedling Stars (1957)
>> Guess The World - Fourth Series
Pete leaned back in his chair and looked out through the yard-thick
quartz of the dome which enclosed Satellite City, Ganymede's only place of
habitation. That is, if one didn't consider Ganymede prison, which,
technically speaking, probably was a place of habitation. Other than for the
dome which enclosed Satellite City and the one which enclosed the prison,
however, there was no sign of life on the entire moon, a worthless, lifeless
globe only slightly smaller than the planet Mars.
He could see the top of the prison dome, just rising above the western horizon.
To that Alcatraz of Space were sent only the most desperate of the Solar
System's criminals. The toughest prison in the entire system, its proud
tradition was that not a single prisoner had escaped since its establishment
twenty years before. Why risk escape, when only misery and death lurked outside
the dome?
The Chamber of Commerce offices were located in the peak of the city's dome and
from his outer office, against the quartz, Pete had a clear view of the
preparations going forward for the reunion which was to celebrate the fortieth
anniversary of the Battle of Ganymede.
Far below, at the foot of the magnetically anchored dome, work was progressing
on the vast outdoor arena, which would be enclosed in a separate dome, with
heat and atmosphere pumped from the larger dome.
On one of the higher snow-swept hills, a short distance from the arena, reared
a massive block of marble, swarming with space-armored sculptors. That was the
Battle Monument, to be dedicated in the opening ceremonies.
Drift snow, driven by the feeble winds which always stirred restlessly over the surface of this satellite from which the atmosphere was nearly gone, swept over the brown, rolling hills and eddied around the dome. It was cold out there. Pete shivered involuntarily. Down close to 180 degrees below, Fahrenheit. The snow was frozen carbon dioxide.
An inhospitable place to live, but Satellite City was one of the
greatest resorts in the entire System. To it, each year, came thousands of
celebrities, tens of thousands of common tourists. The guest lists of the
better hotels read like the social register and every show house and cafe,
every night club, every concession, every dive was making money.
And now the Ganymede reunion!
That had been a clever idea. It had taken some string-pulling back in London to
get the Solar Congress to pass the resolution calling the reunion and to
appropriate the necessary money. But that had not been too hard to do. Just a
little ballyhoo about cementing Earth-Mars friendship for all eternity. Just a
little clever work out in the lobbies.
This year Satellite City would pack them in, would get System-wide publicity, would become a household word on every planet.
He tilted farther back in his chair and stared at the sky. The greatest sight in the entire Solar System! Tourists came millions of miles to gaze in wonder at that sky.
Jupiter rode there against the black of space, a giant disk of orange
and red, flattened at the poles, bulging at the equator. To the right of
Jupiter was the sun, a small globe of white, its searing light and tremendous
heat enfeebled by almost 500 million miles of space. Neither Io nor Europa were
in sight, but against the velvet curtain of space glittered the brilliant, cold
pin-points of distant stars. Pete rocked back and forth in his chair, rubbing
his hands gleefully.
'We'll put Ganymede on the map this year,' he exulted.
Clifford D Simak, Reunion on Ganymede (Astounding Science Fiction, November 1938)
>> Guess The World - Fourth Series
Feeling unusually light he walked over to an enormous tear in the side of his space-cruiser. A bleak scene met his eyes. Short, grotesquely hewn hills and crags. Rocky pitted plains. And a bitter, wild wind blew constantly, streaming his long hair into disarray.
He cursed through tight lips. Fate! He had been on his way to Vesta, largest city of Jupiter, when his fuel had given out. He had forgotten to check it, and here he was.
Despondently he kicked a small rock in front of him. It rose unhindered by the feeble gravitation fully thirty feet in the air.
Suddenly there were a dozen scuffing sounds, and a dozen stones winged themselves painstakingly through the air and began to descend in slow motion.
Surprise struck, he gazed furtively about him. Momentarily his heart seemed caught in some terrible vise.
There was a sudden movement behind a close ridge. Momentarily John Hall was rendered paralyzed. Then he backed slowly toward the ship and safety behind a Johnson heat ray. The vague form abruptly materialized, etched in black against the twilight horizon of Ganymede. The effect was startling. The creature stood upright, on two legs, with two gnarled, lengthy arms dangling from its bony shoulders. Human? The question registered itself on his brain, and the thing in front of him gave unwitting reply, as it moved to a clearer position. No, not human. Maybe not even animal. Two great eyes bulged curiously from a drawn, shrunken, monkey-like face. The body was as warped and distorted as the bole of an old oak tree. With pipe-stem arms and legs, bulging at the joints. Its most natural position seemed to be a crouch, with the arms dragging on the ground. Somehow this travesty of human form struck him as being humorous. He chuckled throatily, and then stopped with a start as the same chuckle crudely vibrated back, echo-like. But it was no echo! No, that wasn't possible. John raised his hand to scratch his head through force of habit; forgetful that this was impossible through the thick glassite helmet he wore. The tall, gangling creature in front of him watched closely for a moment, then stretched one preposterously long limb up and scratched briskly on his leathery skull in imitation of John Hal.
The answer struck him instantly. Why hadn't he thought of it. This animal, this thing, whatever it was, was a natural mimic.
Sam Moskowitz, World of Mockery (Planet Stories, Summer 1941)
>> Guess The World - Fourth Series
The commander’s description of a spinyback was concise and accurate, but it left out several interesting details. For one thing, a spinyback has a long, mobile snout, two large ears that wave back and forth gently, and two emotional purple eyes. The males have pliable spines of a deep crimson color along the backbone that seem to delight the female of the species. Combine these with a scaly, muscular tail and a brain by no means mediocre, and you have a spinyback – or at least you have one if you can catch one.
It was just such a thought that occurred to Olaf Johnson as he sneaked down from the rocky eminence toward the herd of twenty-five spinybacks grazing on the sparse, gritty undergrowth. The nearest spinies looked up as Olaf, bundled in fur and grotesque with attached oxygen nosepiece, approached. However, spinies have no natural enemies, so they merely gazed at the figure with languidly disapproving eyes and returned to their crunchy but nourishing fare.
Isaac Asimov, Christmas on Ganymede (Startling Stories, January 1942)
>> Guess The World - Fourth Series
Comment from contributor Lone Wolf:
A funny little story from the early Asimov's OSS
fiction. But it doesn't seem to be related to his other two Ganymedean tales.
One of the differences is that in this version there is native life on
Ganymede.
Captain Hew Mills, UN Space Arm, currently attached to the Solar System Exploration Program to the moons of Jupiter, stood gazing out of the transparent dome that surmounted the two-story Site Operations Control building. The building stood just clear of the ice, on a rocky knoll overlooking the untidy cluster of domes, vehicles, cabins, and storage tanks that went to make up the base he commanded. In the dim gray background around the base, indistinct shadows of rock buttresses and ice cliffs vanished and reappeared through the sullen, shifting vapors of the methane-ammonia haze. Despite his above-average psychological resilience and years of strict training, an involuntary shudder ran down his spine as he thought of the thin triple wall of the dome – all that separated him from this foreboding, poisonous, alien world, cold enough to freeze him as black as coal and as brittle as glass in seconds. Ganymede, largest of the moons of Jupiter, was, he thought, an awful place…
James P Hogan, Inherit the Stars (1977)
>> Guess The World - Fourth Series
Scott
Hernandez paused in his work, as he did at the end of every long day, to watch
Jupiter set and the sky transform from its usual light orange to brief crimson,
and then deep, starry black. It was this magnificent display he was waiting
for; the luminous river of the milky way, the dancing aurora caused by
Jupiter’s colossal magnetic field, the constellations brilliant in the thin
Ganymedean sky. He looked for the roving stars that would be Amalthea,
Pasiphae, bright Callisto, or any of a myriad of sister worldlets orbiting
their shared primary. He imagined, as he always did, what it would have been
like to be one of the early explorers he had idolized as a child, Natasha Hin
or Viron Zuff, and be the first to set foot on one of those spinning orbs.
But he had missed
his chance. He had come home from Occator Flight Academy on Ceres, a certified
astrogator, to discover his mother was sick and his brother Bradley had barely
been keeping the farm together on his own. He was furious with them for keeping
their troubles from him, but his dream of boarding an exploratory rocket and
blasting off for the frontier was well known to them. His brother told him they
would sooner have lost the farm than call him back from school. It was that
very selflessness that made him realize he had to stay, that he couldn't let
them lose the farm.
It wasn’t that he
was too old to make a spacer, he was only forty, and astrogators were welcome
everywhere, from the oldest ice hauler to the most advanced government vessel.
It was that he felt too old. Rocketry had evolved since his days at
Occator, and he suspected his skills, already rusty from disuse, would be
utterly useless on a modern vessel.
Bradley sometimes
half-heartedly suggested he look for a job on one of the “Grand Tour” cruise
ships that luxuriously floated between Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. He would
argue that they would provide a suitably low pressure environment for Scott to
bring his abilities up to date. But they both knew that wouldn’t be enough for
him. Flying several thousand tons of rocket for the entertainment of the rich
wasn’t the same as penetrating the unknown.
Besides, Scott had
learned to be content on the farm. He spent his time trouble-shooting the
harvester drones and going down to New Memphis, the nearby capital, for drinks
with his friends. Sometimes, when his friends had gone home, he would find his
way to the Mary Down Docks and watch the sleek, silver rockets push their way
to the sky.
Dylan Jeninga and Zendexor, Mission to the Tenth Planet [this excerpt from part I, by Dylan]
>> Guess The World - Fourth Series
Lloyd hesitated a moment, then flung open the door. Eagerly we gazed out – upon a great expanse of blue water, reaching to a horizon which was remarkably close. Between the car and the sea a level slope a hundred yards wide led to the shore.
We tumbled out into this home-like landscape, and there, as we stopped to look about, another surprise awaited us. For to our right, a tremendous disk, striped with broad, red bands and whitish-yellow ones, spread over and enormous part of the heavens – fully one-fourth of that quarter of the sky, while on our left shone a beautiful star – the sun – with an apparent diameter of about one-fifth that of the Earth. The sky on the side of the star was of the fairest blue, merging near the gigantic disk until it became a deep blue-black.
Behind us, where our attention was next drawn, rose a forest of titanic green fern-like trees – such flora as must have existed on our own planet during the carboniferous period. A hundred feet and more those huge fronds rose into the air, gracefully swaying in the breeze – giving to the whole scene the aspect of a weird dream.
“Where are we?” I asked Lloyd.
He was gazing about him with the light of growing conviction in his eyes.
“We are on Ganymede – the largest of Jupiter's nine known moons” he replied, and both Lenhardt and Rosonoff nodded their agreement.
Ganymede is the third of Jupiter's satellites, is 3,550 miles in diameter, and revolves about its primary in 7 days, 3 hours, and 42 minutes, at a distance of 664,000 miles.
For several seconds we gazed silently about us, then came an exclamation of surprise from Lenhardt. Following his pointing finger with our eyes, we were amazed to see, barely a hundred feet away, among the tall, thick reeds along the shore, a titanic grotesque creature – a veritable dragon, it seemed, from some ancient folk-tale.
The monster measured at least eighty feet in length, and the highest part of its back was some twenty-five feet from the ground. Its color was slate-blue, and its whole skin was a mass of great armor scales. A row of sharp horns ran along its spine, to taper down gradually along the massive tail. The head was about two feet long and one foot wide, and the most hideous I had ever seen. Besides a powerful beak, the head was armed with six long horns, three on each side, and two long, sharp saber-teeth protruded from the upper jaw. One of these, I noticed, had been broken, no doubt in some fierce battle.
That fiendish beast regarded us a minute, then it advanced, its giant feet striking the earth with dull and even thuds.
Frank Brueckel, Jr., The Moon Men (Amazing Stories, November 1928)
>> Guess The World - Fourth Series
Comment from contributor Lone Wolf:
The title of the story is a bit misleading - it's not about our Moon,
but that of Jupiter. An interplanetary adventure in the classic old style of
planetary romance. The end is left open and it feels as if there will be a
sequel, but it seems that such was never written..
Comment from Zendexor:
Evidently Burroughs' The Moon Men (second of three novels in the Julian saga), though already in print, had not yet appeared under that title - else surely the Brueckel story would have been named differently.
“…Brute strength isn’t enough, nor agility. A tiger or a deer wouldn’t last long here. In the Forest, the survival of the fittest means the plant or animal that can get the most food. That sort of thing has been going on here for a million years. The beasts developed super-quick reactions. They could smell danger a mile away. So they had to have strength, agility, and something else — to get close to their prey.”
Brown stared. “What?”
“Invisibility. Or its equivalent. Ever heard of protective coloration? Camouflage? Well, the creatures of the Forest are the most perfect camouflage experts that exist. They don’t simply trick your eyes, either. They trick the other senses. If you smell perfume, take it easy, or you’ll find yourself asleep, while your head’s being chewed off by a lizard that looks as nasty as it smells good. If you see a path and it feels solid, don’t walk too far on it. Things have made that path. A carnivorous moss that feels exactly like smooth dirt underfoot — till their digestive juices start working. If you hear me yelling your name, take it easy. There are birds like harpies here that imitate sounds the way parrots do.” Garth’s grin was tight. “You’ll find out. It’s camouflage carried to the last degree, for offense and defense. I know the Forest pretty well ; you don’t. You haven’t developed a sort of sixth sense — an instinct — that tells you when something smells bad, even though it looks like a six-course dinner.”
“All right,” the Captain said. “This is your territory, not mine. It’s up to you.”
It was. Garth decided later as he led the way through the black columns of the trees, very much up to him. Brown and the others were tough, hard fighters, but they didn’t know the subtleties of this hell-hole, where death lurked everywhere disguised...
It was warmer in the Forest; the trees seemed to exhale heat and moisture, and there was no snow on the ground. Great ebony pillars of giant trees, rising hundreds of feet into the air, made the place a labyrinth. And the deceptive reddish twilight made walking difficult, even to Garth’s trained senses...
Henry Kuttner, Crypt-City of the Deathless One (Planet Stories, Winter 1943)
>> Guess The World - Fifth Series
…There were a good many Ganymedians on hand. From overhead, the innumerable clumps of grass had seemed without life. Gannygrass grew thirty feet high in semi-floating islands that were roughly two hundred feet across. In between the clumps was swamp. The Ganymedians lived in what amounted to borrows in their floating islands, and progressed from one grass patch to another in queer, skittering hops startlingly like the running steps of a heavy bird just about to take off upwind.
They had a civilization of sorts, but nobody could gather more than minor information about it. Questioned, they either answered exactly and literally, or else ignored the questioner. They had no manners at all by earth standards, and their morals were not matters of interest to anybody who had ever seen a Ganymedian female.
Ordinarily there would be one family group to a grass-clump, and one grass-clump to a family group. Here, though, there were very many on hand…
Murray Leinster, Space-Can (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1948)
>> Guess The World - Fifth Series
The ship… came down on Ganymede in the middle of that fabulous valley.
Wearing space-armor the three men stepped forth… It was early morning here. The frost on the rocky ground was not of water – it was part of the thin atmosphere which had congealed during the fearfully cold night.
Nitrogen, carbon-dioxide, methane – threads of white vapor, rising under the feeble warmth of the far-off sun, coiled around their weird attire and made a thin stratified layer of fog at knee level. Through it loomed great metal piers that must have supported something massive – something that must have been removed, since it could not otherwise have vanished without a trace.
And there were tracks in the dusty soil – like the prints of caterpillar treads. Here, on an all-but-dead world with little weather, they could have lasted for centuries – but no more. The evidence of some great migration was plain to see.
From the dust, full of broken crystal shards, Carpenter picked up what may have been a piece of petrified wood – relic of a time when Jupiter, looming gigantic on the horizon, had radiated heat, almost like the sun, to a system of living moons…
Raymond Z Gallun, Passport to Jupiter (Startling Stories, January 1951)
>> Guess The World - Fifth Series
Gaining the top of the little slope leading to the refuelling station, Smithy paused for a moment. Ahead of him, stretching to the near horizon, was the empty plain, coal black under the terrible cold, marred only by pits and craters where the deadly zinrots, second highest form of Ganymedian life, had burrowed underground with their claw nails and scissor teeth.
Touching the eastern horizon loomed vast Jove, visibly turning slowly in the cloudless star and moon-riddled sky. To the west stabbed the upper peaks of the Mountains of Excelsior, dominated by the Thunder Molar rearing to 8000 feet. Selby, the Earth explorer, had called it that because it had reminded him of the back tooth of mythical Jove, God of Thunder...
These were familiar sights to Smithy as he started to plod on again, but he had the advantage of knowing that the Excelsiors were not really true mountains, but vast glaciers, flung to their great heights by Ganymede's slight gravity. Upon them rested the whole secret of the satellite's small colonization. By electrolyzing the water frozen into their masses and adding to it an element with scant nitrogen content, both Settlement and refuelling station – by underground pipes of lanium metal – possessed breathable atmosphere. Jong, the Martian engineer, was responsible for the miracle.
Dennis Clive (= John Russell Fearn), Frigid Moon (Future Fiction, November 1939)
>> Guess The World - Fifth Series
Comment by contributor Lone Wolf:
I finally found the Ganymedean story by John Russel Fearn about the zinrots! ...I couldn't find Future Fiction magazine online; it seems it is very rare (like that magazine Science Fiction, of which there were only a few issues on the Internet Archive, upon which I stumbled quite by chance). So I searched the bibliography and found two anthologies of Fearn's stories (or rather one anthology in two parts, because they have the same Introduction by the compiler Philip Harbottle) with titles (taken from the stories) "World Without Chance" and "Valley of Pretenders", both advertised as "classic pulp science fiction stories in the vein of Stanley G. Weinbaum" and published in 2013. They contained altogether 13 stories, most of which I had already found online, except two and this is one of them. 11 of those stories are set in the OSS and only two related stories are interstellar....
All the stories in this double anthology have commentaries, which together with the Introduction give a lot of information and trivia about Fearn, his life and the era when they were written. It seems that then, in the late 1930s, there was a fad among the SF authors to write in imitation of Stanley G. Weinbaum, hence all those stories by Arthur K. Barnes, Henry Kuttner and Eando Binder (thus "The Moon of Intoxication" of the latter, which is so obvious a pastiche of Weinbaum's "Mad Moon", wasn't just a coincidence after all). So Fearn wrote these stories then under different pseudonyms, until John W. Campbell decided not to publish such type of pastiches in his magazine anymore (I don't know why, probably the market was already saturated with them and the interest of the readers was fading). Other interesting fact is that Fearn claimed that "Thornton Ayre" was a pseudonym of his friend Frank Jones; he carefully wrote his stories under that name in a different style and even maintained his correspondence with William F. Temple under two different names in order to keep up the illusion that they were two different persons!