The Origins of Horse Hockey - Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the Coming Race

Edward Bulwer-Lytton is sadly best known today for the stupid unfunny award that has his name.  The award is for the funniest, most overblown opening line for a novel, based on the shaky premise that "It was a dark and stormy night" (Lytton's line) is the worst possible opening for a book.  It's not, but it did become a literary cliche along the lines of "the butler did it", thanks mainly to Snoopy.

As someone who actually reads fiction, I've seen plenty of opening stinkers much worse than the award winners.  I always assumed these were actual books, but nope, it's just jokey one-liners written badly on purpose.  This would be like if the Razzies were just clips of people hanging boom mikes into the shot on purpose.

Bulwer-Lytton is far from the worst author ever, and his prose is far more accessible to modern audiences than that of his contemporaries.

I'v spoken about The Haunter and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain and how it was an early occult detective story and inspiration for the Shadow.

Even more inspirational is 1871's The Coming Race.  In this novel, the protagonist finds himself in an underground world populated by an ancient society of beings called the Vril-ya.  These beings channel an energy force called vril through special staffs.  Vril can both heal and destroy.

The novel was very popular in it's time, largely because of the notion of vril.  Bovril gets it's name from the fictional force.

Here are the three major areas on which The Coming Race had a massive influence:

Civilizations within the hollow earth:

Several prior satires had utopian societies living underground.

The Coming Race seemed to very clearly influence HP Lovecraft's "The Mound", which in turn influenced Richard Shaver, which in turn influenced Jack Kirby's Eternals and countless other areas of science fiction.

The Coming Race also had some influence on Helena Blavatsky, who wrote about contacting ascending masters that lived underground.  Blavatsky has influenced everything from the New Age movement to Ufology.

Ufology

I don't think the Vril-ya were aliens, but various ancient alien variations started being slipped into the template beginning with Lovecraft.  Shaver influenced Jason Bishop, who is responsible for a lot of the Dulce Base material.  Pretty much anything today having to do with secret underground bases can be traced back to this.

Nazi Occultism

The Coming Race probably did little for the Nazis, but it shows up in modern myths about Nazi Occultism.  Thanks to various sloppy writers making stuff up (starting with 1960s Morning of the Magicians), The Vril Society supposedly was the secret occult hand behind Hitler.  It wasn't, but it appears in places like the Wolfenstein games and Legend of Overfiend.

The Shaver Mystery - The Herschensohn letters

One can often find gems in the letters pages of old comics and pulp magazines.  The letter writers, often as children, later turn up as fiction writers in their own right decades later.

The Shaver Mystery generated a swell of reader's letters to Amazing Stories, which was probably the reason that Shaver was so prominently featured, much to the chagrin of science fiction purists who started their own campaigns against the inclusion of Shaver and his deros.

One young science fiction fan who didn't care for the Shaver Mystery was the famously mild-mannered Harlan Ellison, who supposedly got an admission from Palmer that the whole thing was a hoax during a friendly conversation in an elevator.

The letters pages of Amazing Stories soon filled with readers giving their own accounts of their interaction with the deros.  Some were borderline psychotic, others were full-blown psychotic, and some, like the one below, were clearly just written as a gag.

Two teenage brothers, Wesley and Bruce Herschensohn, sent in 40 rambling pages of information relayed to them by their dead pet turtle.  Sure.  An excerpt about how the Japanese are moon men plotting in underground bases in Cambodia and Korea was printed in the June 1945 edition of Amazing stories.

Wes Herschensohn later used his fertile imagination as an animator for Walt Disney, Hanna Barbera, and Filmation.

Bruce Herschensohn used his keen insight into Asian politics as a foreign policy author and official in the Nixon and Reagan administrations.

Free Stuff - I Remember Lemuria by Richard Shaver

The original story along with the sequel Return of Sathanas, from the 1948 reprint.  Available at archive.org

Free Stuff - I Remember Lemuria

The Shaver Mystery story that started it all.  Read it free at archive.org.

The Shaver Mystery

The Shaver Mystery refers to series of science fiction stories published by Ray Palmer, supposedly written at least in part by Richard Shaver, and the ostensibly non-fiction reality that Shaver claims to have experienced.

The short version: An ancient civilization of long lived giants lived under the surface, and left behind advanced technology in massive underground cities before departing to the stars to get away from Earth's poisonous sun.  Those that were left behind were degenerated by the sun's rays and turned into Dero, and use the advanced technology to menace us humans on the surface, causing car wrecks, making people hear voices, or killings us outright with death rays.

Shaver claims that while a drill press operator, he could hear voices while running his machine, and could hear the thoughts of those around him.  The voices made him do something to get himself arrested, he was subsequently freed by a tero, which is like a good dero, and he lived many years underground.

Shaver wrote a letter to Amazing Stories with his Mantong alphabet, which he claims is the root of all earth languages.  In the March 1945 issue he is credited with writing "I Remember Lemuria", and Shaver credited stories dominated Amazing Stories and other Palmer edited magazines through 1948.

Shaver credited stories continued to appear in science fiction magazines through the mid 50s, and then in increasingly erratic self-published newsletters as Shaver dwindled into obscurity.

To me the real Shaver Mystery is how much of the material is based on what Richard Shaver truly believed, and how much is Ray Palmer's hucksterism.

There have been several books published recently, many by Richard Toronto, that probably shed some more light than I will on the topic.  A few things are pretty clear:

- Ray Palmer was as carny as Barnum.  This is great for a fiction magazine editor and presenter, not so much for the historical record.

- Richard Shaver was bat-poop crazy.  Even if his account was 100% accurate and there is a massive civilization living underground, he's still certifiable.

- I'll give Shaver his Mantong language, which is the combination of selection bias and a schizophrenic's obsession with puns, though to me it's uninteresting Be You Life Life Sun Human Self Integration.

The rest is an interesting mystery as to how much of the stories credited to Shaver were him, how much were Palmer, or how much by sometimes unidentified third parties.  Sometimes Shaver had a "co-writer", sometimes Shaver is credited as re-writing someone else's work, a good number of Shaver's stories are unrelated to the Shaver Mystery, and there are some pieces he supposedly wrote under a house name.

As far as I can tell, Shaver almost exclusively wrote for Palmer edited publications.  When he did write on his own he was an incoherent mess, so either Palmer cleaned him quite up a bit in editing, submitted other people's stories under Shaver's name, or Shaver could at one time write a presentable story and later descended into madness.  Or a combination thereof.