Tim Martin's Reviews > Northwest of Earth: The Complete Northwest Smith

Billed on the back cover as “science fiction’s original outlaw,” this book definitely contains a Han Solo type main reoccurring character, one Northwest Smith (occasionally referred to as N.W. by his frequent companion from Venus, Yarol). Author C.L. Moore described his life as “a perilous affair outside the law and ruled by the ray-gun only,” his appearance “all leather and sunburn and his scarred face keen and wary” and sporting “scars that ray-guns had left, and the mark of knife and talon, and the tracks of wild years along the spaceways.” Living as a combination bounty hunter, mercenary, smuggler, and at one point briefly hinted robber, he is shown dealing with criminals and avoiding the law (which in the stories is simply called the Patrol) with his most often solution to a problem his ray-gun.

In thirteen short stories, all but one copyright between 1933 and 1938 (the last in the book is copyright 1957), author Catherine Lucille Moore (1911-1987) tells the reader of various adventures of Northwest Smith and his often companion Yarol. Writing at a time when there were very few women writers and also achieving some fame as the creator of the first female sword and sorcery protagonist (Jirel of Joiry), Moore created a series of stories that gave glimpses into some great worldbuilding, a setting of “milk-white,” blonde, cherubic Venusian humans in a world of perpetual cloud cover, of a million-plus year old inhabited Mars inhabited by two different races (canal Martians – their women “coral pink, sweet as honey, murmurous under the moving moons” and Martian drylanders – one described as “grim-jawed, leathery,” both very different yet still human), of a universe that felt big and gritty and used and lived in, really interstellar in the way Han Solo would know, as life wasn’t limited to Earth, Mars, and Venus but multiple other bodies in the solar system had life (in one story the main characters are on a jungle-clad wilderness moon of Jupiter).

Having said that though, this isn’t a collection of stories about N.W. being a smuggler or a bounty hunter or a mercenary or getting in bar fights in some remote Martian settlement or a seedy Venusian tavern near the docks. These things are hinted at, existing on the periphery, or prelude to a tale. No, this is an almost Lovecraftian collection of tales of N.W. being traumatized by mind-bending horrors that are difficult to comprehend. In most of the stories N.W. encounters some sort of femme fatale, often in many ways the main driver of events in that tale, and either is a monster herself, or introduces N.W. (and the reader) to some emotionally traumatizing experience where Bad Things happen to the woman and to N.W. Several of the stories are horror tales that one is glad N.W. survives, while others are sad, tragic tales where the thing N.W. wishes he had encountered wasn’t (just) gibbering mind-blasting cosmic horrors, but a super sad tale of a civilization or of one woman, tragic tales that end in sadness and heartbreak, of someone sacrificing themselves or struggling against a cosmic horror and it be all for naught. While the former tales or elements of cosmic horror felt very Lovecraftian, the latter weren’t something I associated at all with Lovecraft or those who wrote in his style and I think that sets Moore apart. Several of the very sad endings really stuck with me and I think will always stick with me (“Scarlet Dream” especially, that had such a haunting and sad ending), a type of evocative writing that seems very much ahead of its time.

Some of the tales belong more in the fantasy camp than science fiction (I would call the story “Quest of the Starstone” straight up fantasy though most stories are science fiction), though all are tinged by horror to one degree or another. N.W. fights monsters, gods, and those that would use them, though many times N.W. is more an observer than an active protagonist, as either whatever happens, happens, or a character in the story other than him is the driver of events, with that character pretty much always coming to a very bad end and it is Northwest Smith that survives as a witness. A few times Moore could fall into the Lovecraftian tendency for purple prose and overly long descriptions, though unlike Lovecraft I think she did a better job of describing what the characters felt as well as including actual dialogue. She was fond of the words queer, queerly, and once I noticed their frequency I couldn’t stop noticing them, but it wasn’t a big issue for me. One of the tales near the end of the collection was very arty and dream-like, some evocative writing but also rather confusing (“Werewoman”). Overall though the tales felt surprisingly modern and if one changed the settings from Venus, Mars, that moon of Jupiter, to some other planets out amongst the stars, they definitely could pass for modern science fiction (with horror and fantasy elements).