1949
SHOWDOWN AT STEAM TOWN
A man named Leo hitches a ride with two young men named
Dean and Sal. Sal says that Dean has problems with his family on his father’s
side, and therefore he is tense when meeting people from Britain. They are
nearly crushed by a massive creature. They are led to a place called Steam Town
by an elderly Native American named Little Beaver. They meet a young woman
named Fran Reade, whose grandfather built Steam Town. Little Beaver refers to
atomic bomb testing sites such as Los Alamos, White Sands, and Gamma Base. The
creature that attacked Leo, Dean, and Sal turns out to be an ant that has grown
to gigantic size due to exposure to radiation. Fran helps drive off the ant (as
well as another of its kind) with a steam-powered automaton built by her
great-grandfather.
Short story by Travis Hiltz in Night of the
Nyctalope, Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier, eds., Black Coat Press, 2012;
reprinted in French in Les Compagnons de l’Ombre (Tome 12),
Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier, eds., Rivière Blanche, 2013. Leo is Jean de La
Hire’s hero Leo Saint-Clair, aka the Nyctalope. Dean and Sal are Dean Moriarty
and Sal Paradise from Jack Kerouac’s classic Beat novel On the Road. Win
Scott Eckert’s essay “Who’s Going to Take Over the World When I’m Gone? (A Look
at the Genealogies of Wold Newton Family Super-Villains and Their Nemeses)” (Myths
for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe, Win Scott
Eckert, MonkeyBrain Books, 2005) argued that Dean was the great-nephew of
Professor Moriarty. As a boy, Little Beaver was the sidekick of the title character
of Stephen Slesinger and Fred Harman’s Western comic strip Red Ryder.
Fran Reade is the great-granddaughter of dime novel inventor Frank Reade, and
the granddaughter of his son Frank Jr, both of whom built steam-men. Gamma Base
is from the exploits of Marvel Comics’ the Hulk, although the CU version of the
Hulk is much less powerful than his Marvel Universe counterpart, and his
rampages are much less destructive. The giant ants are from the movie Them!
I wonder how come the giant ants from them aren't well known in the CU. If there were giant ants in the real world everyone would have heard of them. Of course, everyone should have heard of the Martian Invasion, too.
ReplyDeleteAt the Yahoo Groups WN site, I have a post on the crossovers in The Executioner: Artic Kill.