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The Shaver Mystery #1
The Shaver Mystery, Book One
Crackpot or visionary?
He was considered one of the most controversial authors in the history of science fiction. He claimed his stories were essentially true; but were his writings the nonsensical ravings of a mentally deranged man, or was Richard Sharpe Shaver a true visionary with insight into worlds long forgotten by the surface creatures of Earth?
Then again, there were many who said Shaver and his long-time editor, Raymond A. Palmer were simply scam artists seeking fortune and trying to capitalize on one of the most bizarre concepts ever concocted.
Contents (originally published in Amazing Stories Magazine, June 1947):
"Formula from the Underworld"
"Zigor Mephisto's Collection of Mentalia"
"Witch's Daughter"
"How to Use the Shaver Alphabet" (essay)
He was considered one of the most controversial authors in the history of science fiction. He claimed his stories were essentially true; but were his writings the nonsensical ravings of a mentally deranged man, or was Richard Sharpe Shaver a true visionary with insight into worlds long forgotten by the surface creatures of Earth?
Then again, there were many who said Shaver and his long-time editor, Raymond A. Palmer were simply scam artists seeking fortune and trying to capitalize on one of the most bizarre concepts ever concocted.
Contents (originally published in Amazing Stories Magazine, June 1947):
"Formula from the Underworld"
"Zigor Mephisto's Collection of Mentalia"
"Witch's Daughter"
"How to Use the Shaver Alphabet" (essay)
200 pages, Paperback
First published June 8, 2011
About the author
Richard S. Shaver
101 books16 followersRichard Sharpe Shaver (October 8, 1907 Berwick, Pennsylvania – c. November 1975 Summit, Arkansas) was an American writer and artist.
He achieved notoriety in the years following World War II as the author of controversial stories which were printed in science fiction magazines, (primarily Amazing Stories), wherein Shaver claimed that he had personal experience of a sinister, ancient civilization that lived in caverns under the earth. The controversy stemmed from the fact that Shaver and his editor/publisher Ray Palmer claimed Shaver's writings, while presented in the guise of fiction, were fundamentally true. Shaver's stories were promoted by Ray Palmer as "The Shaver Mystery".
He achieved notoriety in the years following World War II as the author of controversial stories which were printed in science fiction magazines, (primarily Amazing Stories), wherein Shaver claimed that he had personal experience of a sinister, ancient civilization that lived in caverns under the earth. The controversy stemmed from the fact that Shaver and his editor/publisher Ray Palmer claimed Shaver's writings, while presented in the guise of fiction, were fundamentally true. Shaver's stories were promoted by Ray Palmer as "The Shaver Mystery".
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 12, 2021
These three "Shaver mystery" stories are heavy on exposition and generally lack compelling narratives or the adventuresome exuberance found in successful pulps. They are overwritten and can be repetitive to the point of tedium, like many of the more amateurish stories of the era. However, despite all this they are brimming with zany, if not outright nutty, far out SF concepts involving elder alien races, abandoned subterranean civilizations and their feuding modern inhabitants, advanced ancient technology and crazy pseudo-science!
The stories follow similar formulas, featuring men who seek to uncover knowledge and wisdom of the ancients to better humanity, yet get unwittingly caught up in the perennial conflicts that rage between the groups and cults that still inhabit the abandoned underground cities. Most of these are degenerates who insidiously aim to frustrate humanity, or destroy or dominate it outright.
The first story, "Formula from the Underworld", was the best of the bunch and goes most directly I think to the heart of what the "Shaver mystery" stories are all about. It's a man's quest deep into the ancient underground caverns to seek out the forgotten science behind the immortality of the Elder ones of ancient Earth. It's here that Shaver conveys a sense of modern man as an ant living in a bubble on the surface of the Earth - feeble, ignorant, easily susceptible to manipulation and unaware of the insidious influence of the hateful degenerates living beneath us.
The next story, "Zigor Mephisto's Collection of Mentalia" depicts a good vs evil conflict between a man and his son and gives some interesting context for the historical underpinnings of our modern notions of heaven, hell and Satan. Despite the dark nature inherent in much of these stories, this one actually provides some rays of hope for humanity when the immensely powerful ancient machines of the Elder racers are used for good rather than ill.
The final story, "Witch's Daughter", documents a similar good vs evil conflict, but is overly sappy and without much of a compelling context. Of interest however are the mini clones created of people using the ancient machines of the Elders. These function a bit like a real life voodoo doll to control a person's body and/or read their minds. Apparently they can be operated either to the benefit or detriment of the person his/herself, though examples of the former are not readily apparent.
There are quite a few inconsistencies presented in these stories of the landscape and history of Shaver's vast hidden underground world. He frequently uses different names to refer to what may or may not be the same, or similar, groups. Yet the ancient technology represented throughout is remarkably consistent, mainly based on ancient indestructible machines created by the Elder races that generate "rays" of immensely varying capabilities, many of which are still undiscovered or not understood. These rays enable the viewing and/or control of minds and/or matter over vast distances. They can be as simple as a remote viewing or heat ray, or as complex as a ray that speeds the process of evolution in a living organism. In the hands of the degenerate groups these are put to nefarious purposes, but in right hands can be used to effect positive change among humanity.
My interest in Shaver has been piqued by these stories and I will certainly be reading more!
The stories follow similar formulas, featuring men who seek to uncover knowledge and wisdom of the ancients to better humanity, yet get unwittingly caught up in the perennial conflicts that rage between the groups and cults that still inhabit the abandoned underground cities. Most of these are degenerates who insidiously aim to frustrate humanity, or destroy or dominate it outright.
The first story, "Formula from the Underworld", was the best of the bunch and goes most directly I think to the heart of what the "Shaver mystery" stories are all about. It's a man's quest deep into the ancient underground caverns to seek out the forgotten science behind the immortality of the Elder ones of ancient Earth. It's here that Shaver conveys a sense of modern man as an ant living in a bubble on the surface of the Earth - feeble, ignorant, easily susceptible to manipulation and unaware of the insidious influence of the hateful degenerates living beneath us.
The next story, "Zigor Mephisto's Collection of Mentalia" depicts a good vs evil conflict between a man and his son and gives some interesting context for the historical underpinnings of our modern notions of heaven, hell and Satan. Despite the dark nature inherent in much of these stories, this one actually provides some rays of hope for humanity when the immensely powerful ancient machines of the Elder racers are used for good rather than ill.
The final story, "Witch's Daughter", documents a similar good vs evil conflict, but is overly sappy and without much of a compelling context. Of interest however are the mini clones created of people using the ancient machines of the Elders. These function a bit like a real life voodoo doll to control a person's body and/or read their minds. Apparently they can be operated either to the benefit or detriment of the person his/herself, though examples of the former are not readily apparent.
There are quite a few inconsistencies presented in these stories of the landscape and history of Shaver's vast hidden underground world. He frequently uses different names to refer to what may or may not be the same, or similar, groups. Yet the ancient technology represented throughout is remarkably consistent, mainly based on ancient indestructible machines created by the Elder races that generate "rays" of immensely varying capabilities, many of which are still undiscovered or not understood. These rays enable the viewing and/or control of minds and/or matter over vast distances. They can be as simple as a remote viewing or heat ray, or as complex as a ray that speeds the process of evolution in a living organism. In the hands of the degenerate groups these are put to nefarious purposes, but in right hands can be used to effect positive change among humanity.
My interest in Shaver has been piqued by these stories and I will certainly be reading more!
May 13, 2015
Oh boy oh boy what a load of mad fun this was!
I'll admit, I always become interested when a piece of writing is infamous, when it's considered somehow lurid, prurient, distasteful, or schlocky. It's probably why I'm such an out and out pulp fan. When I first read about “The Shaver Mystery” being either the exploited raving of a madman or a hoax, it set all the right bells off. On reading it those bells are still ringing!
I don't mind my science-fantasy being filled with wild speculation and big doses of pseudo-science, and “The Shaver Mystery” contains what is probably an overdose. Through speedy and endearingly amateurish prose, Shaver delivers to us the sinister world of the underground where the indestructible machinery of the ancients holds the secrets of the power of the sun to age us, mindless races that use rays to hold back progress on the surface world, witches, pleasure rays, cars that never break down, dungeons, evolution-rays, and the ever-dangerous ro-mech!
These stories of surface men stumbling into the sinister underground forces and adeptly learning their histories brought back “Chariots of the Gods” flashbacks. It's like the jargon of some new-age conspiracy cult that plays in scientific sounding language but is always vague with details.
The first story, “Formula from the Underworld”, has a narrator easily penetrating burred ruins in search of the secret of immortality. In true amateur fashion, machines and characters roll out fast and furious to keep up the flow, the growing portrait of an ancient world where enduring evil thrives.
“Zigor Mephisto's Collection of Mentalia” gives us the straight dope on Satanism, on “deros”, and the “Ro-Mech”, a kind of VCR that plays back events using real live people.
Finally in “Witch's Daughter” an inventor gets caught up in the underground lair of alien witch, Tanil. We get pleasure rays, dream rays, death rays, and a power harness that makes the wearer as strong as 4 men simply through the application of electricity.
In the hands of a “real” science fiction writer these concepts would have all become stuffy and merely boringly dated. In the hands of Shaver they retain the wild freshness of an amateur who may or may not be completely mad. For me this was a treat and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it.
I'll admit, I always become interested when a piece of writing is infamous, when it's considered somehow lurid, prurient, distasteful, or schlocky. It's probably why I'm such an out and out pulp fan. When I first read about “The Shaver Mystery” being either the exploited raving of a madman or a hoax, it set all the right bells off. On reading it those bells are still ringing!
I don't mind my science-fantasy being filled with wild speculation and big doses of pseudo-science, and “The Shaver Mystery” contains what is probably an overdose. Through speedy and endearingly amateurish prose, Shaver delivers to us the sinister world of the underground where the indestructible machinery of the ancients holds the secrets of the power of the sun to age us, mindless races that use rays to hold back progress on the surface world, witches, pleasure rays, cars that never break down, dungeons, evolution-rays, and the ever-dangerous ro-mech!
These stories of surface men stumbling into the sinister underground forces and adeptly learning their histories brought back “Chariots of the Gods” flashbacks. It's like the jargon of some new-age conspiracy cult that plays in scientific sounding language but is always vague with details.
The first story, “Formula from the Underworld”, has a narrator easily penetrating burred ruins in search of the secret of immortality. In true amateur fashion, machines and characters roll out fast and furious to keep up the flow, the growing portrait of an ancient world where enduring evil thrives.
“Zigor Mephisto's Collection of Mentalia” gives us the straight dope on Satanism, on “deros”, and the “Ro-Mech”, a kind of VCR that plays back events using real live people.
Finally in “Witch's Daughter” an inventor gets caught up in the underground lair of alien witch, Tanil. We get pleasure rays, dream rays, death rays, and a power harness that makes the wearer as strong as 4 men simply through the application of electricity.
In the hands of a “real” science fiction writer these concepts would have all become stuffy and merely boringly dated. In the hands of Shaver they retain the wild freshness of an amateur who may or may not be completely mad. For me this was a treat and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it.
August 23, 2012
There's a huge place in my heart for the Shaver Mystery (a fact that explains my frequent shortness of breath and angina): the whole history of Richard Shaver's involvement in Amazing Stories (possibly born of long-lasting mental illness), the publicity stunt pushed by Raymond Palmer, and the backlash and warfare in the reader's pages. This is to say, a crackpot story earnestly presented as fact; a flame war rages in a public forum between vehement nerds; more crackpots gather to corroborate and add details; trolls fan the flames; the whole thing collapses under its own weight. It proves that there truly is nothing new under the sun--the Internet only allows people to be weird and nasty in real time, instead of by return post.
When I learned that Armchair Fiction had collected a quantity of the Shaver Mystery fiction, I couldn't order it quickly enough (and the other two volumes). And it was thoroughly satisfying. The writing is unpolished and frequently amateurish, and the rationale of the science requires mental gymnastics or chemical enhancement to understand, but its feral energy radiates from the page.
If you can get past the footnotes and increasingly Timecube-ish info-dumps, that is: (p. 113) "A dero is a thing that has never received any thought correctly, never understood any syllogism, is a mass of completely incorrect thought due to the reversal of polarity of the magnetic fields of thought about the mind cells, which in a dero are sun-polared into detrimental due to induction of disintegrant energy-flows from the sun..."
These are the first Shaver Mystery stories I've read that are set explicitly in the present day, and I think that these are generally more successful than the Mutan Mion series (I Remember Lemuria and others). I found myself agog at the imagery: a secret subterranean world of abandoned technological cities, explorers trying to locate scientific marvels within, nomadic clans of insane degenerates lurking, city inhabitants clinging tenuously to sanity due to the vast energies they command.
When I learned that Armchair Fiction had collected a quantity of the Shaver Mystery fiction, I couldn't order it quickly enough (and the other two volumes). And it was thoroughly satisfying. The writing is unpolished and frequently amateurish, and the rationale of the science requires mental gymnastics or chemical enhancement to understand, but its feral energy radiates from the page.
If you can get past the footnotes and increasingly Timecube-ish info-dumps, that is: (p. 113) "A dero is a thing that has never received any thought correctly, never understood any syllogism, is a mass of completely incorrect thought due to the reversal of polarity of the magnetic fields of thought about the mind cells, which in a dero are sun-polared into detrimental due to induction of disintegrant energy-flows from the sun..."
These are the first Shaver Mystery stories I've read that are set explicitly in the present day, and I think that these are generally more successful than the Mutan Mion series (I Remember Lemuria and others). I found myself agog at the imagery: a secret subterranean world of abandoned technological cities, explorers trying to locate scientific marvels within, nomadic clans of insane degenerates lurking, city inhabitants clinging tenuously to sanity due to the vast energies they command.
November 30, 2015
The Shaver Mystery is the overarching title of a series of writings- some allegedly true, some allegedly just thinly-veiled fiction. Before getting to the merits (or not) of the stories, there are two questions that are always asked.
Q- Are the stories true? Richard Shaver claimed they were.
A- No. Clearly and obviously no.
Q- Did Shaver believe them, or was it all just a ploy for publicity?
A- It doesn’t really matter. The stories are the same either way.
So, let’s take the stories on their own merits. On the whole, they read as decently written, below average pulp sci-fi. They are tales of underground worlds, beautiful damsels, ancient machines, and evil overlords. You’ve read stories like these before, and odds are they were better written. Edgar Rice Burroughs fans will recognize these stories as distant echoes of better tales by a better writer.
In fact, there is nothing original here. HP Lovecraft and even L. Ron Hubbard are obvious influences. And while others may want to give the benefit of the doubt and say that Shaver was merely influenced by the same things that influenced Lovecraft, there is just too much Lovecraft in these tales for it not to be lifted from Lovecraft, down to the Elder Gods.
And the Shaver Alphabet presented in the end of the book is enough to send a linguist into peals of laughter.
Despite all of this, there is an element of fun here. There is enough earnestness and sci-fi goofiness to be OK reads. Just know what you are getting. These may not be on the high end of the pulp fiction spectrum, but you can enjoy a few hours in the reading.
Q- Are the stories true? Richard Shaver claimed they were.
A- No. Clearly and obviously no.
Q- Did Shaver believe them, or was it all just a ploy for publicity?
A- It doesn’t really matter. The stories are the same either way.
So, let’s take the stories on their own merits. On the whole, they read as decently written, below average pulp sci-fi. They are tales of underground worlds, beautiful damsels, ancient machines, and evil overlords. You’ve read stories like these before, and odds are they were better written. Edgar Rice Burroughs fans will recognize these stories as distant echoes of better tales by a better writer.
In fact, there is nothing original here. HP Lovecraft and even L. Ron Hubbard are obvious influences. And while others may want to give the benefit of the doubt and say that Shaver was merely influenced by the same things that influenced Lovecraft, there is just too much Lovecraft in these tales for it not to be lifted from Lovecraft, down to the Elder Gods.
And the Shaver Alphabet presented in the end of the book is enough to send a linguist into peals of laughter.
Despite all of this, there is an element of fun here. There is enough earnestness and sci-fi goofiness to be OK reads. Just know what you are getting. These may not be on the high end of the pulp fiction spectrum, but you can enjoy a few hours in the reading.
November 25, 2022
I first found out about Shaver on a eccentric movie made by The Grudge franchise director Takashi Shimizu based on the novel Marebito by Chiaki Konaka. It openly mentions not only this author but his Deros as well are oddly portrayed in documentary form. I know now that Philip K. Dick was heavily influenced by him too if not anymore writers from the New Wave generation. So Shaver was definitely one of the first 'fantasy' writers that started out by making space opera and Lovecraft pastiches (Actually he only mentions Merrit which seems to be a early precursor of both Shaver and Lovecraft. Whatever.) that went beyond this and make something very sui generis, to say the least. The beginning excerpt of Thought Records of Lemuria about the welder, telepathy and underground torture is one of the greatest things I have ever read in sci fi and in general. The author really seems like those Targeted Individuals who complain about electronic harassment and torture made by unindentified people or groups and for undisclosed reasons but he is very compeling in his descriptions, nonetheless. There is no doubt for me some sort of personal life experience was involved in his fantastical writing. The setbacks that I realized in this story itself and throughout the rest of the compendium are obvious enough for me. The editor Palmer and the pulp magazine appeal that Shaver had to impose in himself were really drawnbacks for his great potential. In a word, there's just too much bullshit that is copious nowadays in movie franchises and TV shows and there is a lack of personally uncanny stories like the one in Thought Records. His influence lives on, despite all that.
December 4, 2024
I wanted to love this, as I'm a big fan of alternative history and hollow earth theory. I have enjoyed some of Shaver's work previous to this, as well. I think the insult to injury here is how hard the book's editor attempts to make this real. My disbelief just could not suspend so far, and then I was reading something frustrating and a little juvenile instead of just a sci-fi romp. There were some good moments in this book, though I will not be picking up volume 2.
May 29, 2014
I've been doing a lot of research about the Shaver Mystery for one of my own projects, so it was logical to start reading some of the original stories. They actually aren't nearly as bad as most folks seem to think ... simple pulp sci-fi and good examples of the average output of the various magazines back in the forties and early fifties. They do tend to rely far too much on various deus ex machina for plot twists and resolutions, and the point-of-view isn't always constant in the narrative, but the ones in this volume (put out from the people responsible for Sinister Cinema) are easy reads. I wouldn't pay collector prices for them, that's for certain.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews