SFTB 6.1: “Greenface” by James H. Schmitz

“A monster, essentially, is something which appears more formidable than you, with intentions toward you that are at best unguessable. Perhaps we are trying to regain our monsters. The real ones...”

—James H. Schmitz, Introduction to A Pride of Monsters (1970)

“Greenface,” as illustrated by (William) Kolliker for the story’s first appearance in Unknown Worlds.

Regular readers of Stories from the Borderland might recall that we have previously mentioned how some writers who went on to establish solid careers in science fiction made their first commercial sale, or at least one of their earliest, with a real zinger of a Weird Tale. “The Dune Roller” by Julian C. May, which we recently covered in SFTB 5.3, is an especially good example. Here we offer another such specimen: “Greenface” by James H. Schmitz. Both tales first appeared in pulps edited by John W. Campbell, Jr.: “Greenface” in the August 1943 issue of Unknown Worlds, and “Dune Roller” eight years later in the December 1951 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Yet neither May nor Schmitz is remembered as a Weird Fiction author.

We can point to other examples, some of which we might eventually cover here as well. Are we looking at pure coincidence here, or does it reflect some deeper underlying pattern? I can suggest several possible reasons why this might be a genuine phenomenon, none of them mutually exclusive. Firstly, and probably most likely, I believe we are observing the effects of market forces: authors who may have begun their careers with a story that included Weird and/or cosmic horror elements went on to find the market more open to science fiction. In May’s case, however, she stopped publishing science fiction for more than two decades after her first two stories, although she remained active in fandom. When she returned, her work reflected a range of themes she probably absorbed during her fandom years. Secondly, I think it is worth considering that Weird Fiction and/or cosmic horror was—at least during the decades when the pulps ruled—a more natural, even primal approach for the novice author (and one that had not yet been fully branded). After that initial sale, however, the aforementioned market forces likely prevailed. Market forces can swing both ways though, and back in the pulp era, even toward its end, a good creature was often enough to sell a story, so long as the writing was up to snuff, depending on the venue.

“Greenface” and “Dune Roller” share several other elements. Both stories utilize rural settings, and both incorporate romantic relationships to enhance their plots—and in both cases the tension is complicated when the woman in the relationship shows up unexpectedly at the climax of the story, compounding the tension and the danger that the reader is meant to share. This is pretty standard in genre fiction, of course, but it stands out here because one author (May) was a woman, and the other (Schmitz) is especially remembered for his strong female characters. Although both of these are early career stories, we can still see that the female love interests—Jeanne in “Dune Roller” and Julia in “Greenface”—are better fleshed-out, stronger, and more fearless than their counterparts in the average pulp stories of their time—or even for most of twentieth-century genre fiction. They don’t stumble into harm’s way—they exercise their own agency and choose to stand beside their partners.

The cover of Unknown Worlds, August 1943, featured a blurb for “Greenface".”

Additionally, as with so many of the best monsters, from Dr. Frankenstein’s creation to Godzilla, the monster in each of these stories is a monad, a singularity, at least in its current environment, which is not its native habitat (there are, of course, many smaller dune rollers, but these are not offspring but fragments, and the entity’s whole purpose is to reunite with them). Their actions, no matter how destructive, deadly, even downright carnivorous, are portrayed as the behavior of creatures, which although possessed of some degree of intelligence, are simply attempting to live their best lives in worlds they never made. Both authors thus allow a certain limited sympathy for their monsters. Much of this is characteristic of The Weird when it operates within science fiction, especially midcentury American Campbellian science fiction.

Finally, both writers also had careers nearly as unique as their debut creations. We have already examined Julian May’s unusual career trajectory. James H. Schmitz (1911–1981) was born in what was then the Free Hanseatic City of Hamburg in the German Empire. His family left Germany before World War I, but he returned during the Great Depression. He came back once more to the United States prior to the World War II, and during that conflict he published his first story, “Greenface,” in 1943.

Although Schmitz never became an iconic writer within the science fiction world, nor even exactly a cult figure, his work did inspire a certain abiding affection amongst his readers, at least for a time. Today he is best remembered for his final novel, The Witches of Karres (1966) and for two aspects of his work. First off, he was one of the very first SF writers, male or female, to depict strong, confident female characters in his work. Women in his fiction are often fully the equals of any male characters in both ability and agency. In this regard, he anticipated by full decades the feminist science fiction writers of the 1970s. Secondly, many readers fondly remember Schmitz for his monsters, of which “Greenface” was only the first of many, though to be sure most of the others occupy realms of outer space, and as bizarre as Greenface appears in the story, Schmitz never suggests that this creature is of extraterrestrial origin.

A short piece available on the Wayback Machine lists “The very best Schmitz monsters” as:

This Schmitz’s collection (Macmillan, 1970) emphasized his monster stories, including “Greenface,” although most of his monsters are extraterrestrial in origin and not Weird. Cover art by Richard Dawson Jones

Many of these monsters, some fully sentient, are extraterrestrial in origin and belong to the worlds that Schmitz built up over the course of multiple interconnected stories and novels, especially his “Hub Universe.” Note, however, that Greenface, in “Greenface” did not even make this list, although a perusal of online reviews of his 1970 collection A Pride of Monsters and other publications in which it appears shows that the story remains popular with his readers.

The apparent terrestrial origins of Greenface, the creature, thus make it atypical within Schmitz’s oeuvre overall. As bizarre and beyond any familiar earthly biology as this little-then-not-so-little creature, appears to be, Schmitz never suggests in any way that it came from a meteor or a flying saucer. Unlike the dune roller or The Blob (1958), this carnivorous menace is a product of the South American jungle, courtesy of the United Fruit Company. Such origins place it in the company of Gerald Kersh’s men with no bones (see SFTB 6/2.1) and the unnamed invertebrate in Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s “The Black Stone Statue” (SFTB 5.5). Schmitz likely references this origin in the introduction to A Pride of Monsters, wherein he writes: “Even more thrilling were the shadowy, mysterious creatures reported to be living in sketchily explored areas of the globe—Antarctica, the Matto Grosso, or on remote mountain ranges and in the desiccated hearts of deserts.”

For “Greenface,” we can put a checkmark beside “Matto Grosso” (a heavily rainforested state of Brazil). Schmitz likely drew inspiration from reports of “tarantulas” shipped to Europe and North America in bunches of bananas, as in the famous line in “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),” a traditional Jamaican song best known from the popular 1956 version recorded by Harry Belafonte and re-popularized by the film Beetlejuice in 1988. Although large spiders rarely make it to the markets of the Global North in banana bunches today, it does still happen occasionally. Several species of large spiders have been reported, including potentially deadly Brazilian wandering spiders of the genus Phoneutria.  Most turn out to be huntsman spiders, however, whose bite, though painful, is not nearly as medically significant. Actual tarantulas are not among the species recorded as hitchhiking among the bananas.

The first edition of The Witches of Karres (Chilton, 1966). Cover art by Jeff Zinggeler.

I have little doubt that such reports and urban legends inspired Greenface, which becomes clear when Hogan Masters, Schmitz’s protagonist, finds the desiccated remains of a tropical hummingbird in a cluster of bananas he had previously purchased: “When that banana cluster was shipped from Brazil or some island in the Caribbean, Greenface—a seedling Greenface, very much smaller even than when Hogan first saw it—had come along with it, clinging to its hummingbird prey!” This same plot device shows up again almost 50 years later, in the 1990 summer blockbuster Arachnophobia, although with a more gruesome means of transport than bananas and a dead hummingbird.

Greenface’s many-appendaged nature also points to a likely arachnid conceptual origin, but Schmitz quickly transforms his creature into something without any identifiable analogs in terrestrial biology: “creatures of such size and conforming to no recognizable pattern of either the vegetable or the animal kingdoms, couldn’t very well be in existence anywhere without finally attracting human attention” (145). However, Schmitz, via his protagonist Hogan, goes on to suggest that Greenface only grew so large because of his relocation from his natural jungle setting, thus implying once again that he is not altogether ontologically fabulous. Thus, we know a bit about Greenface’s origins, and his eventual demise, with the concomitant implication that the cold of the North American winter would have done him in eventually anyway. Hogan undergoes a brief moment of pity for the creature at the end of the story: “Well, in a way,” Hogan admitted. He kicked a cindered two-by-four apart with his foot and stood there frowning. “It was just a big crazy freak shooting up all alone in a world where it didn’t fit in, and where it could only blunder around and do a lot of damage and die. I wonder how smart it really was and whether it ever understood the fix it was in” (162). Julia, his once and future fiancée and lover, quickly calls him away from this sympathetic reverie and back to the world of terrestrial romance and mutual commitment.

The September 1968 issue of Analog featured “The Tuvela,” on its cover. This two-part novel (published in book form as The Demon Breed and part of The Hub Universe series) included the Parahuans and the Tarm, both noted on Wayback Machine’s list of Schmitz’s best monsters. Cover art by John Schoenherr.

Thus, for all its weirdness—its myriad tentacles, prodigious growth, strange behaviors, and limited invisibility power—Greenface is perhaps not fully Weird. Schmitz offers a partial outline of its probable ontology, and we observe much of its ontogeny over the course of the study, albeit with repeated reminders that Greenface is only growing so large because he is an invasive species far-removed from his natural environs. This positions Greenface as a prototype for Schmitz’s later monsters, as his protagonists defeat them by understanding them, their habits and ways. Julia, again, is also likely a model for the strong female characters for which Schmitz later became known, though to be sure, he portrays her as somewhat more stubborn than strong, at least from the narrator’s perspective. Perhaps his introspection regarding this character was one factor that led him to create stronger, more capable, and more independent female characters later in his career.

Nonetheless, Greenface remains at least ontologically exotic, unique and inexplicable beyond a limited range of guesses. And he’s got a whole lot of tentacles, a characteristic that China Miéville, in his seminal 2009 essay “M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?” suggested represent the original diagnostic indicator for the presence of The Weird, especially in conjunction with a skull—what he calls the “skulltopus.” Greenface has no skull—no solid parts whatsoever, it seems—but he does consist of a grotesque head with tentacles, which I suspect Miéville would accept, especially by 1943 several years after the date he positions as the end of the “Golden Age of the Weird.” Which is not to say that I altogether agree with Miéville’s essay and its chronology, although it remains intriguing and does offer a critical baseline.

Michael Bukowski and I hope that you are enjoying the return of Stories from the Borderland, and that now you will follow this link to his rendering of Greenface, the creature. We also hope that you will join us again in two weeks for a story by a once-prominent science fiction author who has dwindled into undeserved obscurity since his passing early in this century. The story we have selected to share with you as a monument to this author deals with Italian Renaissance art and extraterrestrial zoo animals, some rather sad, one very deadly. Some of his other work contains elements that are at least Weird-adjacent, especially a novel from the ’70s about the lights going off throughout the universe. Comment if you can guess the author and/or tale, and you might win a prize. We might even let you name your prize.

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