Who Goes There?
James H. Schmitz was born in 1911, in Germany, although both of his parents were American. Schmitz grew up fluent in both English and German, and until 1938 he’d spend most of his life in the country of his birth. (Yes, the good news is that Schmitz and his family moved to the US right before things got really bad in Europe.) Around this time, Schmitz tried his luck at writing fiction, namely “literary” fiction involving man’s relationship with animals—only none of these stories sold. His first sale was today’s story, “Greenface,” for the fantasy-horror magazine Unknown. This would end up being Schmitz’s only published story for six years, and there are actually a few reasons for this. The first is Unknown‘s early demise (“Greenface” appeared in the penultimate issue), and the second is that America entered the war and Schmitz got drafted into the Air Force. Once he was out of the military, another issue sprung up, namely that Schmitz was not instinctively an SF writer—at least at first. He wanted to sell to Astounding but didn’t know how to go about it, in the sense that it took some time for him to find his voice as a writer. Finally, in 1949, Schmitz reappeared on the scene with “Agent of Vega” and “The Witches of Karres,” the latter of which he eventually turned into a novel.
Schmitz came to writing SF a bit late, as “Greenface” stood as a false start, but this first story has a few of what would become hallmarks for Schmitz, not the least of them being a fascination with the natural world and how mankind might succeed or fail in co-existing with it. “Ecology” is a word that comes up a lot with Schmitz, to the point where one of his best stories is even titled “Balanced Ecology.” I have to assume “Greenface” appeared in Unknown instead of Astounding because it’s chiefly a horror narrative, although we do get an SFnal rationalization for the titular monster. This is a good one, albeit a bit longer than it should be.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1943 issue of Unknown. It would not be reprinted at all until The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories (ed. Ray Bradbury) in 1956. Other reprints include Unknown: Tales from Beyond (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Stanley Schmidt), Things Hunting Men (ed. David Drake), The Baen Big Book of Monsters (ed. Hank Davis) and the Schmitz collection A Pride of Monsters.
Enhancing Image
Hogan Masters is a down-on-his-luck boss and owner of Masters Fishing Camp (what a fucking narcissist), who currently is having issues with three things: getting the camp started, his uneasy relationship with his fiancée, and also his drinking problem. Hogan’s alcoholism figures more into the plot than I initually expected, to the point where I wonder if maybe there’s something Schmitz is trying to say about alcoholism by way of allegory, given what’s about to happen to poor Hogan. But it’s probably nothing. In picking up a dying garter snake, which seems to have been struck down by something, Hogan quickly finds what will eventually become his nemesis: Greenface. Of course, Greenface is not the thing’s name, that’s simply what Hogan’s christens it with on finding it. For better or worse, Hogan is a bit tipsy when this happens, because Greenface is a very weird-looking creature, being “a shiny, dark-green lump, the size and shape of a goose egg standing on end among the weeds.” If Hogan were sober during all this he would most likely have browned his pants. Of course, right now Greenface is harmless—at least to humans. But just what Greenface is is a question that’ll only be answered a good while later, though. For the time being, Hogan has bigger fish to fry, including Julia Allison, his fiancée.
“Greenface” has basically the plot of a monster movie, of the sort that would only start to proliferate about a decade after this story’s publication. In that sense it’s ahead of its time. There’s a cornball aspect that escalates alongside the conflict, to the point where it all but overtakes the ending; but we’ll get to that at a later point. “Greenface” has some pacing issues, but I like how we spend little time in establishing the setting (think Camp Crystal Lake) and our hapless protagonist before being introduced to the real star of the show. Indeed Greenface itself (we’re not sure of its gender) is a neat creation, being a carnivorous vegetable that’s also mobile, and which for some reason has the approximation of a human face, albeit without eyes or a mouth. And yet somehow, despite the lack of said mouth, it smiles. To make matters worse, Greenface seems to be growing, and it comes to a point where Hogan is no longer the only one aware of its existence. Like I said, “Greenface” is considerably more horror-tinged than the kind of SF Schmitz would become known for. It helps that this is an unusually violent story, even for Unknown; the scene of Hogan holding the now-dead snake and unwittingly crushing its skull is a bit of a stomach-churner. Oh, and that’s not even getting into what Greenface does to some poor dog.
It’s appropriate that with Schmitz’s first published story we also get the first of his many monsters, and Greenface doesn’t disappoint. While the arc of its development from a little golf ball on stalks to a thirty-foot-high roaming carnivore, along with the interior artwork depicting its almost humanlike face, would make one think of it as like a giant monster in an old-school creature feature, Schmitz goes a long way to make Greenface sound plausible. We’re never told where it came from (it’s implied to have come from a tropical climate), but the idea seems to be that Greenface is like a member of an invasive species—possibly the only member of its kind. Hogan’s increasing obsession with the creature (incidentally his obsession grows in proportion with Greenface’s size) involves studying the thing’s habits and what makes it tick. As is typical of plant life, Greenface relies on photosynthesis (on top of its diet of small animals) for nourishment; in broad daylight it’s mobile, but on a pitch-black night or in a sunless enclosure it becomes more or less stationary. It’s also resilient, evidently, limping away harmed but alive even after Hogan entraps it and pumps it “with enough shot to lay out a township.” Then there’s the most curious implication: the idea that Greenface, on top of having a face which uncannily resembles a man’s, has almost humanlike intelligence. Ultimately it’s both flora and fauna, with a size and appetite becoming too big to be sustainable.
Less interesting is the human angle, which is robust but nothing to write home about. Julia spends much of the story offscreen, although she works as a precursor to the type of no-nonsense proactive woman Schmitz would come to write on a regular basis. I do like the irony of Hogan, who at the start is said to be a bit of an alcoholic, drinking less as he becomes more fixated on catching or killing Greenface. He becomes paranoid to the point where Julia accuses him of taking up the bottle again late in the story, yet by that point he couldn’t be more sober if he tried. Tangential, but I’m not sure how old Hogan and Julia are supposed to be. They’re set to be married, like a young couple, and Julia’s young enough to still be taking orders from her petit bourgeois dad, but Hogan has the stance and weary worldview (and drinking problem) of a middle-aged man.
There Be Spoilers Here
The last act of “Greenface” plays out like the big showdown the human heroes have with the giant monster in a creature feature, complete with Hogan’s lodge burning down as a set piece. I’m conflicted on this ending, because on the one hand the final exchange between Hogan and Julia is cheesy—as in, just a little too gosh-wow for my taste. On the other hand, I was surprised that Greenface’s death is framed as tragic—the tragedy ultimately being that Greenface had invaded an ecosystem unsuited for its survival. It would have died of cold, once winter came, and Julia even points out that by the time of their final encounter, Greenface had some red spots on its massive body, indicating the onset of disease. It was already dying. And yet the burning lodge with Greenface inside it is described as a “funeral pyre […] worthy of a titan.” There’s something magnificent, if also horrifying about Greenface, such that despite having it as the villain of the story, Schmitz wants us to know he also respects his creation in a way. We’ll see this theme of environmentalism (a curious theme indeed, considering Schmitz regularly appeared in the famously reactionary Astounding/Analog) pop up again in greater detail in Schmitz’s future work.
A Step Farther Out
This is a good place to start with Schmitz, which is fitting given it was also his debut, even if he didn’t start running SF in earnest until years later. Apparently when James Blish reviewed “Greenface” as part of a later collection he dismissed it as a pulpy knockoff of Algernon Blackwood’s rural horror, which I think is an unfair comparison—never mind that Schmitz did see Blackwood as one of his chief influences. Blackwood was easily the more elegant storyteller, but something he didn’t do that Schmitz does is place the monster in the larger context of an ecosystem with its checks and balances. This, more than anything, is what makes “Greenface” science fiction, despite it appearing in a fantasy magazine.
See you next time.
