The Shaver Mystery Book Two offers up two more vintage Richard S. Shaver yarns about the expansive and utterly bizarre underground world which nearly all of mankind ignores at its peril. Despite being published in a science fiction magazine these Shaver tales are touted by their creator and the editor Ray Palmer as true, for the most part. Names might have been changed but little else.
The first offering is "The Red Legion" and it's another offering from that June issue of Amazing Stories we looked at last time. This time we follow an secret order of Native Americans who are plugged into the truth of the underground world and who are fighting for their very lives against the enemy "Deros" who strike from beneath the Earth. The join forces with good underground forces, especially an ancient mal-formed giant named "Eemeeshee" and his lovely girl assistant "Saba". The fighting is ferocious before (predictably) a small is won with great cost. This story was reputed to be a mess by the publisher, but I found I liked it a lot.
The real highlight of this installment is a reprint of the very first story in the Shaver Mystery, a novella entitled I Remember Lemuria from the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories. This is originally presented by editor Palmer as a race memory yarn, but he corrects that with the next story and goes with a story which was retrieved by means of ancient underworld technology. In this story we are transported back into time to the city of Atlan and an Earth which is just beginning to suffer from the harmful radiations of its older sun. (These radiations are what limit us today in our modern world and make us mortal.) We follow a young citizen named "Mutan Mion" who is out tour guide for the wonders of the city of Atlan and then later for a wild trip into outer space with refuges from the sudden horrors of war. This is a varied and wild gallery of beings, since shape and size were utterly malleable in this society at this time. These survivors find a race of even older and purer and bigger aliens called "Titans" who agree to return to ancient Earth and take up the battle against these Deros who seek to destroy.
I Remember Lemuria is said to have begun when Shaver submitted a vast sprawling letter with the core details of the story titled "A Warning to Future Man", which Palmer and his outfit saw promise in and cobbled into an actual story possessing some more literary aspects. Then according to Palmer an odd series of events allowed Amazing Stories to increase its publication numbers and with the Shaver story the magazine still sold out making it a bonafide hit with fans if not with other sci-fi pros.
One element of these collections I haven't mentioned yet is "Mantong". "Mantong" is an alphabet Shaver "discovered" which allows for a modern reading of ancient Lemurian texts. He actually sent this to Palmer first and the letter second. It's a complicated system with letter equivalents having individual meaning. "D" for instance is a sound associated with bad things, hence the names "Deros" for the critters which are infesting the once highly civilized underground world. ("Dero" is a shortened form of "Detrimental Robots" which didn't mean a mechanized creature, but only one who could not control their actions. In this case they could omnly do evil.) Included in this particular volume is an article title "Proofs" in which Shaver speaks directly to the reader about the material he's presented in his yarns which have appeared in Amazing Stories.
More next time as we take a look at volume three.
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