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Creator / Henry Kuttner
aka: Edward J Bellin

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Henry Kuttner (April 7, 1915 – February 3, 1958) was an American author of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror short stories in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s.

He was one of the "Lovecraft Circle", and contributed a number of elements to the Cthulhu Mythos.

Kuttner liked the writing of fellow sci-fi author C. L. Moore, so a mutual acquaintance, H. P. Lovecraft, gave him Moore's address. Lovecraft failed to mention that 'C. L.' stood for 'Catherine Lucille', so Kuttner addressed his fan letter to 'Mr. C. L. Moore'. Even so, Kuttner and Moore fell in love and eventually married, frequently working as a Creator Couple thereafter.

Among his works are the comedic Galloway Gallegher stories, which concern an inventor who reaches unimaginable heights of genius while drunk, which invariably causes trouble when he wakes up the day after with a hangover and no idea what his latest creation is supposed to do. These stories are collected in Robots Have No Tails.

Some of Kuttner's works have been adapted for film. Written with C. L. Moore, their short story "The Twonky" was filmed in 1953, while "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" was adapted into The Last Mimzy in 2007. Their "What You Need" was adapted as an episode of The Twilight Zone. Kutter's "The Graveyard Rats" was adapted as a segment of Trilogy of Terror II and an episode of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities.

Kuttner is not as well-known as many of his contemporaries, mostly due to his death at the relatively young age of 42 and the fact that he wrote under at least 17 different pseudonyms.


Tropes that appear in Kuttner's works include:

  • After the End: The Black Sun Rises is set in the dark age following a nuclear war.
  • A.I. Getting High: "The Ego Machine" has a robot putting his fingers in a light bulb socket. Apparently, it's the robot's analogue of taking a shot of whiskey.
  • Alternative Number System: In "The Iron Standard", the six-fingered Venusians use base-12.
  • Asshole Victim: Virtually all the characters in Kuttner's comedy stories are completely self-interested and come to some misfortune, sometimes consequently but also sometimes merely subsequently. See also Sadist Show below.
  • Atlantis:
    • The setting of the Elak of Atlantis sword-and-sorcery tales.
    • Part of the backstory of the Hogben Family series, with the patriarch of the family supposedly being a survivor from Atlantis.
  • Be Careful What You Wish For: After exploiting "Norman", a slave with great psi powers but little to no willpower, John Fowler asks for the same powers. His brain cannot handle it, and the upshot is that he gets sent back in time and is Norman.
  • Becoming the Mask: In "Private Eye" by C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, the main character radically changes his identity in order to give himself an alibi for a murder he is planning. Since the police have chronoscopes in the future, he needs to play the role to the hilt. At the end he realizes he liked his new identity better.
  • Bizarre Baby Boom:
    • The 1953 novel Mutant has the "baldies", bald telepathic humans who were born after a nuclear war and subsequent fallout.
    • A story called "Absalom" where more and more smarter and smarter children are born every generation. There is a problem with the older generations being envious and afraid.
  • Brain in a Jar: Bart Quentin, one of the central characters in “Camouflage,” has become a brain-in-a-box called a Transplant after a research accident. It doesn’t prevent him from fighting very effectively against an attempt to hijack the spaceship he’s plugged into.
  • Brown Note: In "Nothing But Gingerbread Left", a semantics professor develops a German-language ditty so catchy that a person hearing it will be able to do nothing but think about it. It is broadcast in occupied Europe as weapon against the Nazis.
  • Chrome Dome Psi: The 1953 Fix Up Novel Mutant by C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner compiled five short stories about a race of post-nuclear mutated humans called "Baldies" who are telepathic and completely hairless.
  • Combat Clairvoyance: A telepathic mutant in “The Piper’s Son” gets out of a duel after demonstrating how mind-reading would let him anticipate and counter all his opponent’s moves, no matter how instinctive.
  • Conqueror from the Future: "Endowment Policy" has a variant: a person tries to set his own past self as the world dictator.
  • Conspiracy Theorist: Satirized in Don't Look Now
  • Dark World: The setting of the novel The Dark World, an alternate version of Earth which has drifted into a fantasy world, although the magic is given a scientific explanation.
  • Deal with the Devil:
    • In "By These Presents", a man sells his soul to the devil in exchange for immortality and invulnerability — with two conditions, the combination of which gets him in the end.
    • "Threshold", a man gets two wishes from the devil. The first wish is fulfilled once he passes a blue door, the second once he passes a yellow door, then the devil will mark him as his, and then, once he passes a third door, the devil will have him (not his soul; the devil cares not for such things, he merely wants to eat the man). The man manages to determine the third door is red, and is now confident he can stay ahead of the devil. The devil's mark turns out to be color-blindness.
  • For Want Of A Nail: "What You Need" by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore) features what might be called a "nail salesman". He provides, for a significant fee, rather mundane items to a restricted clientele. These items turn out to be exactly what the clients need shortly thereafter (for example, a man receives a pair of scissors, which he uses to snip his tie when it gets caught in machinery; had he not had the scissors on him at the time, he would have been killed).
  • Genetic Memory: In The Mask of Circe, a 20th-century descendant of the mythic hero Jason gains his ancestor's memories.
  • Heroic Fantasy:
    • Elak of Atlantis
    • Valley of Flame
    • The Dark World
  • Ignore the Disability: Discussed in "Nothing But Gingerbread Left".
  • Laser-Guided Karma:
    • The Furies are programmed to enforce this in Two-Handed Engine.
    • In "The Prisoner in the Skull", Fowler exploits this major telepath devoid of volition for his own gain, only for it to turn out that "Norman" is really Fowler himself given powers his brain cannot handle and sent back in time.
  • Literary Allusion Title: "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" is a line from the surreal first verse of the poem "Jabberwocky", the secret meaning of which is a plot point in the story.
  • The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday: "What You Need": Despite the protagonists not noticing the store before, the proprietor insists that he's been there; it's just a very low-key place.
  • Make Wrong What Once Went Right: "Endowment Policy"; see Conqueror from the Future for details.
  • Obstructive Bureaucrat: In "The Iron Standard", Venus is ruled by the tarkomars, which are what centuries of Motive Decay would turn a union or guild into. Anything that even looks like it could threaten their power has to be suppressed.
  • Off with His Head!: Done posthumously by the headhunters in Home Is the Hunter.
  • Pineal Weirdness: Magic in The Dark World is really Psychic Powers caused by using 90% of Your Brain and "the ancient third eye that is the pineal gland".
  • Pride Before a Fall: Implied with Goebbels' reciting the Gingerbread Left rhyme in his head—but only to prove that he was stronger than it.
  • Proportional Aging: The Hogbens. The narrator is a boy who looks and behaves like a teenager, and lost count of his age during Cromwell's times, while his younger brother is teething at the age of four hundred.
  • Sadist Show: The default tactic of Kuttner's comedy stories is to make the protagonist suffer and suffer without surcease.
  • Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Book of Iod, in his Cthulhu Mythos stories.
  • Those Wacky Nazis: Get knocked for a loop by "Nothing But Gingerbread Left".
  • Venus Is Wet: In "Clash By Night" and Fury, Venus is an ocean world where the landmasses are dominated by uninhabitable jungle, forcing the colonists from Earth to live in underwater cities.
  • Vorpal Pillow: In "By These Presents", a man kills his disabled mother this way after selling his soul to the Devil.
  • Was Once a Man: Gnomes in A Gnome There Was
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: The neo-Viking leader in The Black Sun Rises started out this way.
  • What Measure Is a Non-Human?: A theme in "Camouflage", which features a cyborg implanted into a starship as its central character.
  • Worthless Yellow Rocks: In "The Iron Standard", a spaceship crew is starving on Venus because gold and silver are too common there, the society is too conservative to buy any of their devices, and the main medium of exchange is iron, which they only have as alloys.
  • Zeerust: Inevitable.

Alternative Title(s): Edward J Bellin

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