Screaming Science Fiction

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I have been asked on several occasions why I cross genres. In fact on one occasion I was asked why I “stagger” between them. (Oh you, you! I remember you and know where you live!) But you know, that’s how it was when I was coming up. I was seeing the movies, reading the comics, and I was into the pulp magazines; so that even before I knew what a “genre” was, it seemed to me that everyone was crossing them. Take a gander at those old EC Comics, you’ll soon see what I’m getting at. The Haunt of Fear and Tales from the Crypt were “horror” horror, but a good many of the tales in Weird Fantasy were “fantasy” horror, and many of those in Weird Science were horror “SF.”

Even H. P. Lovecraft—the Old Gent of Providence himself, known primarily for his superb horror stories—had mixed his genres: The Shadow Out of Time and At the Mountains of Madness in Astounding Science Fiction, for example. (Hey, and HPL took a kicking for it, too!) And then there was Ray Bradbury’s wonderful Martian Chronicles: whimsical, yes, and written as only Bradbury can write them, but the horror undertones were there. In fact those stories were quite literally literary miscegenation, hybrids of all three species of our favorite fictions: Horror, Fantasy, and SF. And, I might add, classics at that.

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