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The Shaver Mystery #3
The Shaver Mystery, Book Three
One can only wonder...
Wanna have some fun? Go onto You Tube and search the words, "Shaver," "Mystery," "Palmer." If it's still available, a video will pop up that says "Shaver Mystery." In this video (from the 1970s) is a short interview with Richard S. Shaver's longtime editor, supporter, and friend, Raymond A. Palmer. In this amazing interview, Palmer talks of Shaver's deros, teros, and even UFOs, which he connects to the whole Shaver Mystery cycle. Even more amazing is that Palmer admits that Richard Shaver was actually in a catatonic state in a mental institution during the eight years Shaver claimed to be in the lost cavers of the underworld. However, like the good showman he always was, Palmer speculates that Shaver's mental state may not have really been catatonic after all. Perhaps there really was some actual mental connection between Shaver and the underworlds he so fervently claimed existed? Read on and decide for yourself in this latest book of Shaver tales.
Contains the stories (originally published in Amazing Stories):
"Thought Records of Lemuria" (June 1945)
"The Masked World" (May 1946)
Wanna have some fun? Go onto You Tube and search the words, "Shaver," "Mystery," "Palmer." If it's still available, a video will pop up that says "Shaver Mystery." In this video (from the 1970s) is a short interview with Richard S. Shaver's longtime editor, supporter, and friend, Raymond A. Palmer. In this amazing interview, Palmer talks of Shaver's deros, teros, and even UFOs, which he connects to the whole Shaver Mystery cycle. Even more amazing is that Palmer admits that Richard Shaver was actually in a catatonic state in a mental institution during the eight years Shaver claimed to be in the lost cavers of the underworld. However, like the good showman he always was, Palmer speculates that Shaver's mental state may not have really been catatonic after all. Perhaps there really was some actual mental connection between Shaver and the underworlds he so fervently claimed existed? Read on and decide for yourself in this latest book of Shaver tales.
Contains the stories (originally published in Amazing Stories):
"Thought Records of Lemuria" (June 1945)
"The Masked World" (May 1946)
- GenresScience FictionPulp
200 pages, Paperback
First published April 16, 2012
2 people are currently reading
33 people want to read
About the author
Richard S. Shaver
93 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 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 25, 2012
It's one thing to leave the reader wondering if some story's events are true. It's another to say outright that they are true. And it's a third thing to go to Shaver lengths and say outright, explicitly, that not only are the story's events fundamentally true, but they are presented as fiction in order to protect the author because presenting them as truth would paint him a crackpot.
Literally: "In order to give my knowledge to the world without being suspected of madness, I must present it in the guise of fiction." It does, I suppose, make a sort of warped sense, which means that I've been reading too much of this stuff lately.
The strength of Shaver's belief is frequently unsettling. All of the stories have that aspect of being a direct message to the reader, and sometimes he breaks his narrative voice to get this across, plus in this volume an "Open Letter to the World" statement and "afterward"[sic] conveying in real-life-crazy-person words his exact viewpoint in unmedicated detail. He does reference the inspirations, of meaningless tragedies and accidents that he casts as being the result of underworld ray-manipulations of circumstance.
Themes repeat themselves throughout this collection and the others. Evil is equated with profound stupidity and an almost mechanical mindset. The other is the idea of the helplessness of the afflicted, in the face of either dero tamper or the oppression of life in the underworld. The police cannot help; the educated do not believe. Those in power are subverted by tamper or are simply corrupt.
Yet this helplessness is not absolute: for each evil dero, there is a good "helper". The stories are about the struggle between forces, and the forces of reason and constructive influence generally succeed. There is enormous potential in the available Ancient technologies to improve life immeasurably.
The fact that I'm starting to sound like him (with better grammar, I hope) means that it's time to stop reading this stuff for a while.
Literally: "In order to give my knowledge to the world without being suspected of madness, I must present it in the guise of fiction." It does, I suppose, make a sort of warped sense, which means that I've been reading too much of this stuff lately.
The strength of Shaver's belief is frequently unsettling. All of the stories have that aspect of being a direct message to the reader, and sometimes he breaks his narrative voice to get this across, plus in this volume an "Open Letter to the World" statement and "afterward"[sic] conveying in real-life-crazy-person words his exact viewpoint in unmedicated detail. He does reference the inspirations, of meaningless tragedies and accidents that he casts as being the result of underworld ray-manipulations of circumstance.
Themes repeat themselves throughout this collection and the others. Evil is equated with profound stupidity and an almost mechanical mindset. The other is the idea of the helplessness of the afflicted, in the face of either dero tamper or the oppression of life in the underworld. The police cannot help; the educated do not believe. Those in power are subverted by tamper or are simply corrupt.
Yet this helplessness is not absolute: for each evil dero, there is a good "helper". The stories are about the struggle between forces, and the forces of reason and constructive influence generally succeed. There is enormous potential in the available Ancient technologies to improve life immeasurably.
The fact that I'm starting to sound like him (with better grammar, I hope) means that it's time to stop reading this stuff for a while.
April 23, 2020
Editor Ray Palmer wants to apologize profusely for having presented “I Remember Lemuria” as a “racial memory story”, for it is now revealed that Shaver got this story by going underground with his blind girlfriend and reading the “Thought Records of Lemuria”.
In a dizzying new level of hallucinatory Shaver madness, the author describes hearing thoughts projected from underground through his welding tool, then the underground conspiracy targeting him, which results in home going to jail (he won't tell us exactly how he got there), and then being broken out by one of the good underground people. We are treated to two “thought records”, and the Shaver says he's going to keep living underground (the editor then explains that he stopped living underground).
The next 90 pages is another Shaver “novel”, called “The Masked World” which tells of an evil city beneath New York, which has troll guys who drive around in mobile homes and shoot rays to the surface at random to cause train derailments and plane crashes. This one meanders in a very strange way between different scenes and characters. As usual, there are evil underground despots who torment peoples' brains with rays and torture folks for power, but the strange part about this one are the scenes of the ordinary good people who live in the underground city and lament it. The normals down there are starving, and somehow more moral than their leaders, yet their coffee tables have big glossy underground magazines depicting the torture that the leaders want to show off.
Reading Shaver is very much like having a feverish and nonsensical dream. There is a kind of story being told, re-stated themes, and even things sometimes connecting to other things, yet it is all a rambling stream of the author's thoughts. The underground world is connected to all surface disappearances, to outbreaks of the flu, to disasters, to outer space, and to those villainous Satanists (pretty sure we learned that Satan was a real guy and an alien in book 1). And don't worry if the inventions and science contradict each other much, it's all true, remember.
Oh! There's also some brand new ways to get immortal in this one. Shaver's specialty is stuff that'll keep you young forever. I already knew about sheltering myself from the sun's harmful rays with “energy ash”, but now I know that if I teleport for short distances from time to time all of the toxins and disease will leave my body and I'll get younger and not die.
You see, the Earth was a space pleasure city before the sun existed, you know, for the ancients. Later, the sun got made and only put out beneficial rays, so everything on earth was immortal and kept growing bigger. True facts.
Shaver's earnest ramblings do sometimes grow tiresome, especially when he sits you on his knee after a story and explains again that it's real and that the censors won't let him portray real evil. This is what it looks like when you get a nearly unfiltered window into somebody's head. The depths of the paranoia are the driving force, they can be fun or they can be irksome, although sometimes one can't help but feel that Palmer might have taken this in hand a tad more and directed these ramblings.
Lookout for them thought rays!
In a dizzying new level of hallucinatory Shaver madness, the author describes hearing thoughts projected from underground through his welding tool, then the underground conspiracy targeting him, which results in home going to jail (he won't tell us exactly how he got there), and then being broken out by one of the good underground people. We are treated to two “thought records”, and the Shaver says he's going to keep living underground (the editor then explains that he stopped living underground).
The next 90 pages is another Shaver “novel”, called “The Masked World” which tells of an evil city beneath New York, which has troll guys who drive around in mobile homes and shoot rays to the surface at random to cause train derailments and plane crashes. This one meanders in a very strange way between different scenes and characters. As usual, there are evil underground despots who torment peoples' brains with rays and torture folks for power, but the strange part about this one are the scenes of the ordinary good people who live in the underground city and lament it. The normals down there are starving, and somehow more moral than their leaders, yet their coffee tables have big glossy underground magazines depicting the torture that the leaders want to show off.
Reading Shaver is very much like having a feverish and nonsensical dream. There is a kind of story being told, re-stated themes, and even things sometimes connecting to other things, yet it is all a rambling stream of the author's thoughts. The underground world is connected to all surface disappearances, to outbreaks of the flu, to disasters, to outer space, and to those villainous Satanists (pretty sure we learned that Satan was a real guy and an alien in book 1). And don't worry if the inventions and science contradict each other much, it's all true, remember.
Oh! There's also some brand new ways to get immortal in this one. Shaver's specialty is stuff that'll keep you young forever. I already knew about sheltering myself from the sun's harmful rays with “energy ash”, but now I know that if I teleport for short distances from time to time all of the toxins and disease will leave my body and I'll get younger and not die.
You see, the Earth was a space pleasure city before the sun existed, you know, for the ancients. Later, the sun got made and only put out beneficial rays, so everything on earth was immortal and kept growing bigger. True facts.
Shaver's earnest ramblings do sometimes grow tiresome, especially when he sits you on his knee after a story and explains again that it's real and that the censors won't let him portray real evil. This is what it looks like when you get a nearly unfiltered window into somebody's head. The depths of the paranoia are the driving force, they can be fun or they can be irksome, although sometimes one can't help but feel that Palmer might have taken this in hand a tad more and directed these ramblings.
Lookout for them thought rays!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews