Henry Kuttner- Two Novels
Fury, published 1947
The Time-Axis, published 1948
Like much pulp science fiction of the 1940s, the novels and stories of Henry Kuttner and his wife C.L. Moore were written at high speed. Some top genre writers of the era used to boast that they never revised their work. This often makes for some dated and boilerplate stuff and the characters are rarely fully sketched, serving as mouthpieces for ideas.
Kuttner and Moore collaborated on their writing, one typing until he or she lost inspiration and other picking up at the point on the page that the other left off. Though this sounds more like an exercise for a creative writing class than a process for producing lasting art, Kuttner and Moore’s work is still stunning. Perhaps the relative obscurity of the writers makes their work less prone to disappoint than that of canonized grandmasters like Asimov or Heinlein.
These are works of “Super Science”–a little known sub-species of SF back in the golden (or silver) years. Its stories concerned themselves less with near-future alien first contact or gadget-based adventure than with building unrecognizable worlds in the distant future in which questions about individuality and free will are argued out while hard physics armeggedons loom.
I recommend beginning with Fury, Kuttner’s most famous novel. In the introduction, Moore admits that all she added to the manuscript were a few passages of colorful description. Society is divided between an immortal upper class and a mortal working class. The protagonist is a criminal–an immortal whose father, insane with grief, allowed him be brought up in orphanages thinking he was mortal. His underworld cunning and intuitive decision-making come in handy when he leads a rebellion against the delibertive and hesitant immortals. His story prefigures the great anti-hero SF of Alfred Bester in the 1950s.