SFTB 5.3: "Dune Roller" by Julian May
Julian May's first published short story, also a Weird Tale, was in the December 1951 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.
“There were only two who saw the meteor fall into Lake Michigan, long ago. One was a Pottawatomie brave hunting rabbit among the dunes on the shore; he saw the firestreak arc down over the water and was afraid, because it was an omen of ill favor when the stars drowned themselves in the Great Water. The other who saw was a sturgeon who snapped greedily at the meteor as it fell—quite reduced in size by now—to the bottom of the fresh water sea. The big fish took it into his mouth and then spat it out again in disdain. It was not good to eat. The meteor drifted down through the cold black water and disappeared. The sturgeon swam away, and presently, he died . . .”
—Astounding Science Fiction, December 1951, page 7
Imagine this: you are an aspiring author who has just published your debut story in the leading science fiction magazine of your day, accompanied by four illustrations you drew yourself, and you have already sold the story’s television rights, with a reasonably faithful adaptation slated to appear only a month after the story’s debut in print. Actually, I expect that many aspiring genre writers do indeed privately picture scenarios much like this, however minuscule their chances of achieving anything of the sort might be. Perhaps I did so myself at one time.
Ted Dikty and Julian May at Midwestcon 2 in 1951.
Julian May (1931–2017) was 20 years old when she accomplished this feat with the publication of “Dune Roller” in the December 1951 issue of Astounding Science Fiction (read it HERE). The fact that she was a woman, writing in the middle of the twentieth century, makes her achievement even more impressive. Although she published her story and its accompanying images under the “gender-neutral” name of J. C. May, editor John W. Campbell probably knew he was dealing with a woman, as May was already active in science fiction fandom and had published several letters in Astounding. If Campbell did not know her full identity then, he and most of the science fiction community certainly must have become aware of it the following year, when May was appointed the chair of the tenth World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) in Chicago in 1952 (to May’s credit, a very successful convention, and a rather historic one as well, as the Hugos were first proposed and approved there, and Sturgeon’s Law—or more properly “Sturgeon’s Revelation”—was first shared with a large audience).
Moving on from the pages of Astounding, “Dune Roller” next appeared as the fifteenth episode of the television show Tales of Tomorrow (Watch HERE), an important predecessor of Science Fiction Theatre, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits. A decade later, in 1961, BBC Home Service Radio produced a very effective and faithful adaptation of “Dune Roller” (Listen HERE). Slightly over a decade after that, the third, final, and least successful adaptation was released by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures in 1972 as The Cremators. This feature film version has a very poor reputation, largely justified alas, and is best-remembered today as one of the first films with special effects by Doug Beswick, who is much better known (and I would daresay prefers it that way) for his later work on better-funded films such as Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope (1977), The Terminator (1984), and Aliens (1986).
The Cremators (1972) was based on "Dune Roller" and featured SFX by Doug Beswick of Star Wars fame.
The film does remain recognizably May’s story, retaining some key plot elements and character names. It even uses the opening narrative (quoted above), although it changes “Pottawatomie brave” to “Indian brave” (and makes him the dune roller’s first victim) and the sturgeon becomes simply “a fish,” depicted on the screen by stock footage of a hammerhead shark (in Lake Michigan, of all places). Things go downhill from there, although The Cremators deserves at least some note as an early attempt to discuss environmental and ecological degradation in a B-movie. Otherwise, the further the film strays from May’s story, the weaker and more pointless it becomes. In contrast, the Tales from Tomorrow version tightens up one of the weakest parts of the story, replacing the Mr. Gimpy Zandbergen, who appears in the story only to be burned to death and under somewhat farfetched circumstances, with a more intrinsic character whose death is much more plausibly justified.
Not surprisingly, “Dune Roller” also has seen about two dozen reprints, although different editions of the Alfred Hitchcock anthology Stories NOT for the Nervous account for about half of these. Its only print appearance in the last three decades was in a special science fiction edition of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #45 in 2013. As with other once semi-ubiquitous stories that we have presented here in Stories from the Borderland, “Dune Roller,” despite its availability in four different media, has largely fallen by the wayside. Although, McSweeney’s is not too shabby after all.
What is surprising, however, is that during the next three decades, Julian May published only one other science fiction story, the rather lightweight “Star of Wonder,” in the February 1953 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. She eventually returned to writing science fiction with the proverbial vengeance in the eighties, with multiple novels in two popular and related series: the Galactic Milieu and the Saga of Pliocene Exile. What then was she up to in the interim?
The Creature from the Black Lagoon movie tie-in book for junior readers written by "Ian Thorne," a pseudonym for Julian May.
Julian May did not stop writing during this 30-year gap in her fiction output, and she remained active in fandom as well. In 1953, she married editor Thaddeus Maxim Eugene (Ted) Dikty (1920–1991), whom she met at a con in Ohio. As they both had professional experience with publishing houses, they decided to create their own editorial service, Publication Associates, which specialized in producing children’s books from soup to nuts for direct sale to schools and libraries. May handled the writing; Dikty covered the design and production. Together they published hundreds of books, serving a market that proved significantly more reliable than science fiction, if ultimately, even more ephemeral. Among their publications were the junior reader photobook tie-ins for films including It Came from Outer Space (1953), The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), The Deadly Mantis (1957), and The Blob (1958). May employed the pseudonym “Ian Thorne” for all of these—the same name as the scientist-protagonist of “Dune Roller”—he of the “Hawaiian shirt and shorts of delicious magenta color, decorated with most unbotanical green hibiscus.” Like the great Belgian fantasist Jean Ray, May employed close to a dozen pseudonyms over the course of her career, including “Wolfgang Amadeus Futslog,” and “Lee N. Falconer,” which she used for The Gazeteer of the Hyborian World of Conan, published by her husband’s own Starmont House imprint in 1977.
Returning to “Dune Roller,” the story with which May made her bones, we have a rather straightforward tale—initially at least—of a meteorite that plunges into Lake Michigan sometime during the seventeenth century, in the process losing much of its mass in the form of glassy golden droplets. This extraterrestrial visitor then spends the next 300 years struggling to reabsorb its scattered fragments, ultimately using intense infrared radiation to burn through anything that gets in its way. Rather surprisingly, this story predates by only a few years the first recorded example of a meteorite actually striking a human being, Mrs. Ann Elizabeth Fowler Hodges of Sylacauga, Alabama. Mrs. Hodges survived her encounter with a high-velocity space rock on November 30, 1954, though not without severe bruising and some degree of PTSD. The latter is important to note: PTSD is an aspect of encounters with things from outside that is usually neglected in Weird Fiction, despite all of H.P. Lovecraft’s generic invocations of “insanity.” Theodore Sturgeon’s “IT,” which we considered in Stories from the Borderland #8, represents an early exception.
Intro art from the original publication of "Dune Roller" in Astounding, which was fully illustrated by Julian May.
The dune roller, and here I refer to the glowing vitreous globe rather than to the story itself, exemplifies rather well the true Weird creature as I have defined it before. Both its ontology and its teleology remain enigmatic. As with the Cotton-Eyed Joe, we can only ask, “Where did it come from / where did it go?” Although Dr. Thorne and his colleagues make some attempt to understand it, the nature of the dune roller remain largely outside whatever science and philosophy still rattles around inside poor Horatio’s hollowed skull. May’s story is thus a legitimate—and influential—Weird Tale.
I will argue that the influence of “Dune Roller” extends well beyond mid-century science fiction and the pulps, most likely thanks to its adaptations in multiple media. Certainly 1957’s underrated The Monolith Monsters owes something to May’s story in the meteoritic origin of its eponymous monsters, as well as their crystalline nature. Less obvious is the probable connection between “Dune Roller” and The Blob. Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.’s iconic 1958 film (available on bluray from Shout! Factory), is generally recognized as an unattributed adaptation of the very similar 1953 novelette “Slime” by Joseph Payne Brennan (1918–90), with which Michael and I began Stories from the Borderland #1 almost a decade ago. As obvious as the connection between “Slime” and The Blob appears to be (obvious enough that Brennan allegedly obtained some minimal settlement from the studio), the major difference between the two works resides in the origins of the monster: Brennan’s gelatinous menace is vomited up from the ocean floor, while the Blob arrives inside a knobbly little meteorite—its first victim notably a fellow cut from the same cloth as Mr. Gimpy Zandbergen, the dune roller’s only confirmed kill in May’s story.
1957’s underrated The Monolith Monsters owes something to May’s story in the meteoritic origin of its eponymous monsters, as well as their crystalline nature.
This is not to say that “Dune Roller” provided the model for every subsequent film featuring monsters of meteoric origin, but it certainly offered an early and prominent model, with a television adaptation on an influential program. One can, of course, point to H. P. Lovecraft’s 1927 tale “The Colour Out of Space,” or even further back to H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1897). However, the meteorite that hatches the Blob displays more than a little resemblance to the medium-sized dune roller that appeared at the end of the Tales from Tomorrow episode only seven years earlier, while Lovecraft’s story did not receive its first film adaptation until 1965’s Die, Monster, Die! This does, however, raise the question of whether May’s story drew some inspiration from Lovecraft’s tale. I would say maybe, even probably, but only because their similarities are limited to the most general: A) meteorite, and B) monster, it’s hard to say more.
For Julian C. May, “Dune Roller” was the little story that could, helping her break through the glass ceiling of mid-century science fiction and delivering dividends for several decades more, at least until The Cremators killed it harder than Dr. Thorne’s dynamite. Fortunately by then she had other income streams, and in the early eighties she returned to science fiction with a steady stream of well-received novels.
In “Dune Roller,” Stories from the Borderland presents you with a career-opening story by an accomplished science fiction author who went on in time to more conventional and less Weird narratives within the genre. This is not the first time we have shared an example like this; nor, if all goes well, will it be the last. We have seen a definite pattern of authors who go on to establish themselves in science fiction making one of—if not their very first—professional sales with a story that falls solidly in the realm of Weird fiction—almost as if The Weird represents a more primal category of the imagination. Perhaps it is simply a category—genre, mode, call it what you will—that did not until more recently fit easily into a marketable framework. Yet when novice writers combine science fiction and horror, they quite often activate the alchemy of The Weird.
Michael Bukowski provides us with an excellent illustration of a dune roller (see it HERE!), taking close note of the author’s description of its resemblance to a Prince Rupert drop, that enigmatic glass object that is nearly indestructible at its thicker end. His creature differs somewhat from the lightbulb-like examples that May drew herself, but I actually prefer the image of Bukowski’s eerie flagellate whipping and rolling its way over the sands, fast and bulbous. His image also reminds me strongly of certain key works by one of my favorite artists, Leo Amino, especially Parasite, which I used to visit regularly at the Zimmerli Art Museum during my undergrad years. Amino was one of the first sculptors to employ plastic as a medium in his work, and his oeuvre is finally beginning to receive some of the attention it deserves. If you like Michael’s image, I encourage you to look up more of Amino’s work as well.
Stories from the Borderland will return next week with a retro-pulpy and slightly satirical tale by an essential cyberpunk author, one that has perhaps taken on some unintended and weighted associations since its original publication.