Under the domes: Fury (1947) by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

An influential classic of power and revenge on Venus

Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore were one of the preeminent power couples in science fiction. Coming to prominence as writers individually in the 1930s, they met through the circle of figures around H. P. Lovecraft and married in 1940. They formed a highly prolific and unusually close collaboration, working together so intricately that their contributions were often inseparable. Their stories became a fixture of Astounding magazine during World War II, under the editorship of John W. Campbell Jr. Much of their work was credited to the pseudonyms Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O’Donnell.

Fury is one of the duo’s most famous collaborations, although also one of their most unequal - Moore estimated that she wrote only around one eighth of the text. The novel was serialised in the May, June, and July 1947 issues of Astounding and credited to O’Donnell. It built on an earlier story, “Clash by Night” (1943). When it was first published in book form in 1950, it was credited to Kuttner alone and most subsequent editions have preserved this misleading impression.

An enduring classic of the so-called golden age of science fiction, Fury is interesting for its entertainingly old-fashioned depiction of Venus, its ruthless antihero, and its influence on later works.

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Welcome to the Keeps

The novel is set at least two centuries in the future. By this time, Earth has been devastated by nuclear war - possibly even destroyed altogether - and the last bastion for humankind is Venus. Because the surface is a brutally hostile jungle, humans dwell instead in the Keeps - underwater cities enclosed by vast domes made of resilient “impervium”. These societies are run along strict, hierarchical lines. At the bottom is the mass of ordinary people living largely without purpose. At the top are the “Immortals”, an elite class of mutants who enjoy incredible longevity - their lives stretching out for several hundred years.

The novel centres on Sam Harker, a character who is known by various names as the plot progresses. Born to parents from the most powerful Immortal family, the Harkers, Sam inherits their life-extending mutation. Sam’s cruel father mutilates and exiles him as a punishment for the death of Sam’s mother in childbirth. Growing up unaware of his heritage, Sam becomes an opportunistic street criminal, and then a major player in the underworld of the Keeps. 

Eventually betrayed and robbed of 40 years of his life, Sam sets out on a mission of revenge during which he learns more about his past. His efforts to spearhead an effort to colonise the surface of Venus also causes him to transform humankind’s future.

Venus envy

From today’s perspective, one of the most striking aspects of Fury is its depiction of Venus, which is fairly typical for SF in the first half of the 20th century. At that time, knowledge about conditions on Venus was limited, and the planet was often felt to be a likely candidate for extraterrestrial life and habitability. These hopes were dashed in the 1960s, especially by the Soviet probe Venera 4, which indicated that the planet’s atmosphere is toxic and extremely hot.

In Fury, Venus has a hostile but lush jungle environment. Its air and soil are rife with aggressive microorganisms, its seas teem with ravenous creatures, and ferocious land predators lurk within its prolific vegetation. Kuttner and Moore confine their imagined human population to the ocean depths - the immense engineering challenges these cities would present is waved away by the invention of the miracle metal impervium.

The depiction of Venus’ surface seems to have been a clear inspiration for Harry Harrison’s excellent novel Deathworld (1960). That title has since been used to describe similarly hostile planets in various SF contexts, including Warhammer 40,000. The irony, of course, is that the real Venus is more deadly than any science fictional “deathworld”; but its brutal heat, pressure, and toxicity which forbid any form of life are hardly storyable.

Bad before Bester

The setting of Fury is not its only influential element. The character of Sam Harker, vengeful antihero, has also left his mark on later science fiction. In particular, he is a clear precursor for Gully Foyle from Alfred Bester’s better known novel The Stars My Destination (1956). While Bester’s novel takes inspiration from The Count of Monte Cristo (1856), it was also very likely influenced by the work of Kuttner and Moore. Both antiheroes are mutilated, betrayed, and abandoned; both act out of selfishness and a desire for vengeance, but inadvertently trigger wider changes that affect all of humankind.

Between stagnation and the stars

Fury depicts the Keeps as a stagnant society, frozen in meaningless pleasure and directionless labour. Kuttner and Moore imagine a civilisation in which the power of the few is so entrenched, so beyond challenge, that the human spirit itself is threatened. The Keeps are a void, without hope of change; conversely, Sam Harker is an agent of change, a catalyst for upheaval. This kind of conflict is one which writers of SF - a genre acutely concerned with change - have relitigated many times over the decades; but Fury does so engagingly even after all the years that have passed since its publication.

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• We now know that Venus’ atmosphere is almost 97% carbon dioxide, that the surface temperature is over 460 degrees centigrade, and that the entire planet is wreathed in clouds of sulphuric acid.
  
• The term Keep - used by the Science Fiction Encyclopedia to “cover various SF extrapolations of the walled, gated or segregated community” - is lifted from Fury.
  
• In 1968, Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison edited Farewell, Fantastic Venus!, an anthology of stories set in the adventurous, imagined Venus which had been conclusively disproved by the Venera probe programme.
  
• Later, the anthology Old Venus (2015), edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois compiled a further selection of new stories, again set in the kinds of Venusian environments popular with SF writers in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.