For some reason, Shawn over at Pseudopod asked me to perform "Nymph of Darkness" by C.L. Moore and Forrest J. Ackerman, a pulpy story from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, about Northwest Smith and his encounter with a fugitive girl who happens to be invisible.
Catherine Lucille Moore was one of the first women to write Science Fiction and Fantasy, and whose most famous work, "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," got made into that LAST MIMZY movie Marshal keeps threatening to make us watch. She wrote at least thirteen Northwest Smith stories that were published between 1933 and 1940.
Forry Ackerman was the godfather of fandom, and I regret that I didn't get to meet him (or go on his famous house tour) before he died in 2008. But I didn't know he was an oft-published writer (I did know he was the literary agent for a bunch of famous writers, and I guess that makes a bit of sense), and the co-author of this story from 1935.
They use the word "queer" about eleventy times in the story, but it's only jarring the first ten or so. Check it out HERE.
I decided to give the Venusians a different accent than the humans, and being a lazy--if brilliant--audiobook narrator, I just gave them a different Earth accent. I imagine there are narrators out there that would've developed an entirely original accent for their alien characters . . . but sadly, those narrators are now dead.
This was just one story in the Northwest Smith series, and it would be good work to do all the stories (kind of like we had permission to do all the Catastrophe Baker stories on the Dunesteef*), though there's a stark difference between Mike Reznick's stories and this. In case I forgot to link it above, here it is again.
*Do we still?
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