SFTB 5.2: "The Rotifers" and "Strange Exodus" by Robert Abernathy
By Scott Nicolay
Facing the title page of “The Rotifers” in the March 1953 issue of IF is a [darkly] lovely full-page illustration by legendary artist Virgil Finlay (1941–1971). This image shows a boy peering intently into a microscope while he takes notes, a skeletal death’s head behind him.
I first read both “The Rotifers” and “Strange Exodus” somewhere back around middle school, but although the stories themselves stuck with me, the author’s name, alas, did not. For years—decades in fact—I misremembered “The Rotifers” as a Ray Bradbury story. And in a particularly idiosyncratic example of the Mandela effect, I was long certain that I had seen an illustrated adaptation of “Strange Exodus” in the magazine Heavy Metal, sometime in the late ’70s or early ’80s, though I could remember neither author nor title. About six years ago I even spent most of a sleepless night digging through back issues of Heavy Metal looking for that version, only to conclude that it is nonexistent in this timeline at least. Robert Abernathy deserves more than my faulty recollections, however, especially for these two tales: both are worthy of comparison to Bradbury, and both are worthy of treatments in other media. Instead, neither has seen more than half a dozen reprints, with none in the last two decades.
In “The Rotifers,” Abernathy’s young protagonist asks his father: “if you look through a microscope the wrong way is it a telescope?” The two stories we offer in this installment of Stories from the Borderland present the end of human civilization as viewed through both ends of the lens, from van Leeuwenhoek’s to Galileo’s. Whether or not Abernathy meant them as a matched set, I cannot say, but the pairing certainly works for our purposes. Both are solid stories and straightforward specimens of cosmic horror—even if the author clearly intended them as science fiction, and the horror in one derives from the microcosmic realm.
Photo of Robert Abernathy which appeared with an autobiographical sketch that accompanied "The Ultimate Peril" in the March 1950 issue of Amazing Stories.
Robert Harwood Abernathy (1924–1990) exemplifies in many ways the kind of author whose work Michael Bukowski and I seek to showcase in Stories from the Borderland. Between 1942 and 1956, he published approximately 40 stories in the science fiction pulps and magazines of the time, including Astounding Science Fiction, Planet Stories, If, and the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Several of those stories, including “Pyramid” (1954), “Junior” (1956), and the two we examine here, were anthologized a few times each during the last century, but Abernathy published no novels, and even to this day, his fiction has never been collected in book form. Reprints of his work over the last three decades or so appear limited to print-on-demand editions and public domain versions available online (especially via Project Gutenberg), suggesting that all or most of his copyrights have lapsed and no heir has laid claim to his publishing rights. Thus, more-or-less as with Jane Rice (featured in Stories from the Borderland 5.1), we cannot expect the current generation of Weird Fiction authors and readers to have much experience with his work. As some of the best of it extends strongly into The Weird, we hope to remedy that situation in our own small way.
To be sure, I doubt that Abernathy saw himself as a “Weird” author. The majority of his output falls somewhere between space opera and mostly pre-Hal Clement “hard” science fiction. Some overlap exists with the latter, suggesting the effects of a shared milieu—Clement began publishing shortly after Abernathy, and his three definitive works: Needle, Iceworld, and Mission of Gravity, all first appeared in the early 1950s). Nonetheless, “The Rotifers” and “Strange Exodus,” the two stories that provide our focus here, are deeply Weird in the cosmic horror way, and other standouts in Abernathy’s oeuvre, including the aforementioned “Pyramid” and “Junior,” as well as “Axolotl,” his 1954 tale of deep space travel and transformation, are very much “Weird-adjacent.” “Axolotl” also pounds strongly on the door of the body horror, and deserves admission. Overall, Abernathy’s work contains much to reward the reader with a taste for midcentury Weird Fiction, especially the reader who does not mind distinctly bleak endings: in “Strange Exodus” for instance, imagine H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (which Abernathy references in the story) if Earth’s bacteria did not infect the Martians. For “The Rotifers,” imagine if humanity got infected instead.
Not much biographical information is available on this poorly-remembered author, but a brief autobiographical sketch that accompanied his novella “The Ultimate Peril” in the March 1950 issue of Amazing Stories provides a few helpful details (curiously, the dynamic cover art for this issue by Robert Gibson Jones [1889–1969], which illustrates Abernathy’s contribution, bears a suspiciously strong resemblance to the work of the infamous Fletcher Hanks [1889–1976], although Hanks was no longer active by that time).
What Abernathy’s short 1950 essay does tell us is that he wrote his first science fiction story at age 10, and saw his debut publication at 18, with a novelette called “Heritage,” in the June 1942 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction: a rather respectable debut by today’s standards, although it probably wasn’t so impressive outside the genre at the time. Abernathy also writes that he finds it “discouraging…how many people refuse take the science in science fiction seriously,” which suggests that he saw his own work as something equivalent to “hard science fiction.” That phrase did not make its first appearance in print until 1957, however, the year after Abernathy’s last published story. P. Schuyler Miller included it in a book review that appeared in the November issue of Astounding Science Fiction that year, in which he applied it to John W. Campbell’s novel Islands of Space. Thus, although Abernathy’s work belongs to the precise time period that birthed hard science fiction, critics today are unlikely to point to his stories as exemplifying the subgenre, and, of course, his work is eclipsed in this regard by that of his approximate contemporary Hal Clement, which came to define the subgenre.
The cover of the March 1950 issue of Amazing Stories (art by Robert Gibson Jones) which included Abernathy's autobiographical sketch and "The Ultimate Peril."
Robert Abernathy was 25 years old when he published this autobiographical essay. He mentions living in Tucson, attending the University of Arizona, obtaining his M.A. from Harvard, and that he hoped “soon to receive a Ph.D.” (he graduated with his doctorate in 1951). Toward the end of his capsule autobiography, he identifies his discipline as linguistics, and other online sources report his specialty as Slavic languages. Sadly, none of his stories that I have read draw on this background. Linguistics—along with the other branches of Boasian four-fold anthropology—largely had to wait until science fiction’s New Wave of the sixties and seventies to take its place among the “sciences” of science fiction. Abernathy went on to teach Slavic Linguistics and Mathematical Linguistics at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and he stopped publishing fiction a few years later. Although most of Abernathy’s attempts at “proto”-hard science fiction don’t really hold up very well under today’s standards for the subgenre, they are solid enough for their time, and one can usually see how his premises are actually grounded at some level in then-current scientific knowledge.
The intersection between science fiction and horror in Abernathy’s work also emphasizes some recurring themes of Stories from the Borderland. One is that many great Weird Tales were originally published as science fiction, often but not always near the start of an author’s career, rather than once they became more established. Perhaps this suggests that The Weird is more profound as a form than science fiction, a thesis that I have no difficulty accepting. However, if we look at science fiction as a genre, and Weird Fiction as a mode, it becomes easy to see how The Weird moves independently of genre. Thus, although most often associated with horror, it has the capacity to move freely through multiple genres, much like Clement’s protoplasmic alien symbiote in Needle (almost certainly the model for the parasitic creature in Michael Shea’s masterpiece, “The Autopsy”) especially within science fiction, fantasy, and the western. This is also true in cinema, where three of greatest, most successional, and most foundational Weird films operate at the intersection of science fiction and horror: Alien (1979), Phase IV (1974), and The Thing (1982). I would argue—and have done so elsewhere—that this is possible because The Weird does not inherently require any supernatural elements to operate within a narrative. Its defining characteristic is the encounter with elements that cannot be accounted for within human ontologies. This element is why science fiction provides such an excellent host for The Weird, and why Abernathy’s stories offer such excellent examples.
Robert Abernathy's "The Rotifers" first appeared in the March 1953 issue of IF, Worlds of Science Fiction. Cover art by Ken Fagg.
Segueing from this discussion of parasites and symbiotes, let us start off the body of this essay with an examination of “The Rotifers,” Robert Abernathy’s story that my memory attributed to Ray Bradbury for several decades. I realize now that I probably conflated Abernathy’s tale with Bradbury’s “Fever Dream,” in which microbes take over a boy’s body, replacing it cell by cell. “Fever Dream” appeared in Weird Tales in 1948, only five years prior to “The Rotifers,” strongly suggesting that Bradbury’s tale provided some germ of Abernathy’s.
Facing the title page of “The Rotifers” is a [darkly] lovely full-page illustration by legendary artist Virgil Finlay (1941–1971; scroll up for first illustration on this blog post). This image shows a boy peering intently into a microscope while he takes notes, a skeletal death’s head behind him. A swirl in the proportions of the golden ratio begins below and to the left of the boy, and this shows first the pond from which his sample came and then the ciliated microorganisms that presumably represent the subject of his fascination. The creatures in Finlay’s illustration do not much resemble rotifers, however. Instead, they almost certainly depict specimens of either Entoprocta or Stentor. While rotifers are among the smallest of multicellular organisms, Stentor sp., though of roughly similar size, are among the largest single-celled creatures. Entoprocta are multicellular and several times larger than either of the others. With no intent to disparage the great Virgil Finlay, Michael Bukowski has provided us with an image that captures something closer to the actual morphology of a rotifer while also offering hints of its hostile tendencies as described in Abernathy’s tale.
The Apple Tree, A Short Novel and Several Long Stories by Daphne du Maurier, which included the first appearance of "The Birds."
The publication of “The Rotifers” came only a year after that of Daphne du Maurier’s Weird Fiction masterpiece “The Birds” in her 1952 debut collection The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Several Long Stories (republished in 1963 as The Birds and Other Stories as a tie-in with the Alfred Hitchcock [1899–1980] film adaptation). The two works (as well as Hitchcock’s film) share certain elements, including the trope of nature in rebellion, and both have endings that leave humanity’s fate uncertain. Given the timeline, the possibility certainly exists that Abernathy read du Maurier’s novella and derived some influence from it, but my instincts tell me that in this case we most likely observe the effects of a common zeitgeist. Two other potential influences actually postdate Abernathy’s tale: Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s study of the effects of DDT and related pesticides (whose opening and closing scenes of an empty town are deeply Weird) appeared a decade later, in 1962; and American mail-order marketer Harold von Braunhut did not begin marketing brine shrimp (Artemia) as “sea monkeys” until 1957.
If’s tagline for “The Rotifers” reads: “Beneath the stagnant water shadowed by water lilies Harry found the fascinating world of the rotifers—but it was their world, and they resented intrusion.” It is no surprise that “The Rotifers” really registered with me when I read it. Sometime around 1975, my parents bought me my first microscope, and I spent many hours observing Copepoda, Daphnia, Hydra, Euglena, Volvocaceae, and other miniscule creatures from the jars of water I brought back from the mysterious spring-fed swamp we knew as “Lilly Pond” at nearby Thomae Park (and later from the Atlantic). I did so heedless of the rainbow coronas of chromatic aberration, or the frequent accompaniment of a creaking door that heralded the stories of CBS Radio Mystery Theater, which was broadcast on WOR. Old-time radio was experiencing a brief (and its last) revival around that time. Accompanied by the voice of E. G. Marshall, I observed a wide variety of zoo- and phytoplankton, both freshwater and marine. Curiously, however, I do not recall encountering either Rotifera, Stentoridae, or Entoprocta during my long sessions peering into the wonky optics of my department store microscope. Possibly I simply failed to recognize any rotifers; I suspect that like Finlay, I had already begun to confuse them with stentors. Nor did I ever see anything looking back.
Vintage ad for Sea-Monkeys, typical of those that appeared in comic books for decades
Most of the creatures in Weird Fiction are human-sized are larger (in the second half of this essay, we examine another story by Abernathy, which features creatures at the opposite end of the scale). But Abernathy’s rotifers are distinctive in Weird Fiction for their miniscule size and their (fictional, or at least hopefully fictional) malevolence. Harry Chatham’s penultimate words, “they don’t mind being killed, and they lay lots of eggs, and their eggs can stand almost anything, even drying up. And the eggs remember what the old ones knew” (italics Abernathy’s) are important. Though the story remains solidly a science fiction tale, aspiring toward the as-yet undefined category of hard science fiction, this line also propels it solidly into The Weird.
“Strange Exodus,” the second of Abernathy’s stories that we consider here, is perhaps more obviously Weird, with its massive but mindless monsters, extending five miles long or more, and the concept of humans as endoparasites. Recall what I wrote above about a definitive aspect of The Weird being the disruption of human ontology. “Strange Exodus” not only disrupts our conceptual ontology, which places humanity at the top of the food chain, it (fictionally) disrupts our ontological relationships, reducing us from kings and queens of the hill to the equivalent of tapeworms. Although still very much a science fiction tale at heart, “Strange Exodus” takes a very different path from much of midcentury science fiction, which largely—thanks to the dominating influence of John W. Campbell—presented astronauts as problem-solving cowboys in space. Although that problem-solving element still appears in Abernathy’s story, he presents it as something greatly diminished, allowing human survival in a vastly diminished role rather than the conquest of other worlds. In fact, it shows humanity achieving interstellar travel not through engineering skills, but as parasites on a nearly mindless species.
Illustration that accompanied "Strange Exodus" by Alden Spurr McWilliams, which presents one of the creatures more as vast worm than slug, as emphasized by the annular rings, and its proportionate size.
The illustration for “Strange Exodus” presents one of the creatures more as vast worm than slug, as emphasized by the annular rings, and its proportionate size in this picture does not really fit with the rest of the narrative. This is not to criticize artist Alden Spurr McWilliams (1916–1993) or his style, which gives distinctively Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) vibes, but to point out its overall mismatch with Abernathy’s descriptions. McWilliams, in fact, deserves special note as the co-creator (with writer John Saunders) of the first Black lead character in a comic strip in 1969: Danny Raven in Dateline: Danger!
Even today, the premise of “Strange Exodus” remains largely valid, even if the minimal science it incorporates has grown a bit hoary: swarm of Brobdingnagian monsters descend from space and begin devouring everything that doesn’t move. Eventually, they launch themselves back into space in search of some other, unspoiled world. In this method of alien transportation, we see something similar to Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers (originally serialized in Collier’s in 1954, and later adapted into several films), although notably Finney reduces the scale of the invasion to a decidedly human scale.
The vast size of Abernathy’s monsters invokes H.P. Lovecraft, especially when his protagonist goes mad from living atop one: “Westover's mind was beginning to function again; it was as though the cessation of the rock and sway had exorcised the lethargy that had lain upon him. He knew now that he had been almost insane for the time he had passed here, touched by the madness that takes hermits and men lost in deserts or oceans. And his was a stranger solitude than any of those.” Importantly here, however, this example is not another of the Lovecraftian cliché “I saw something monstrous and I went insane.” Westover does not lose his mind at the sight of the creatures; instead, it is extended proximity and a repetitive and mind-numbing existence that erodes his sanity.
1955 Dell paperback edition of The Body Snatchers, by Jack Finney.
One plot hole in this story is as enormous as its antagonists, and deserves attention. A better writer—Bradbury perhaps—might have figured out a way to resolve this. I mention this not to diminish Abernathy’s accomplishment here, but simply to acknowledge his limitations. On the final page of “Strange Exodus,” one of Abernathy’s characters gives the total number of the vast and voracious invaders as a “few thousand.” Considering this large number, Westover’s encounter with a colony of human survivors living inside one of the creatures that actually includes his close friend and colleague, Sutton, seems a stretch. To paraphrase the famous line that Humphrey Bogart’s character Rick Blaine delivers in Michael Curtiz’s ultra-iconic 1942 film Casablanca: “Of all the Leviathans in all the world, you walk into mine” Here the reader must suspend disbelief. It’s an old story though—a pulp story. Far better remembered tales commit far worse sins.
These two stories by a single author provide excellent examples of how The Weird often lurks in science fiction, even where the author intended his work as examples of something like “hard” science fiction, which was fomenting in Abernathy’s day and in some of the same venues that published him, and even if his work is not remembered as examples thereof. Both “The Rotifers” and “Strange Exodus” work especially well as cosmic horror, the aspect of The Weird that provides its most frequent intersection with science fiction. The grand spatial scales of science fiction, usually very large, but also microscopic, provide a great breeding ground for The Weird. Whether intentionally or not, Robert Abernathy achieved this symbiosis at least twice, and arguably came close several other times as well, and he deserves our recognition.
Michael Bukowski has provided us with images of both a “rotifer” chez Abernathy (HERE), along with one of the enormous invaders of “Strange Exodus” (HERE), the latter less Rockwell Kentian than the original illustration, but I believe more faithful to the minimal descriptions in the story.
We hope that you are enjoying this return of Stories from the Borderland, that you will share both my essays and Michael’s artwork on social media, and most of all that you will continue to follow our collaboration. Our next installment features the auspicious 1951 debut of an author who not only illustrated her own story but also appears to have sold the television rights prior to its publication! In fact, this enduring narrative has been adapted for television, radio, and the big screen, though with somewhat diminishing returns. And after a long string of reprints, it has only been anthologized once in the last 30 years. Without consulting Michael’s page, can you identify this story? If yes, please email The Outer Dark with your snailmail address for a chance to win a complimentary 4 in. decal of Shane Morton’s amazing “The Call of The Weird” artwork which we have been using to promote our 2024 activities in Atlanta and NecronomiCon!