Richard Sharpe Shaver

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Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06

Richard Sharpe Shaver (born on 8. October 1907 in Berwick Pennsylvania ; died on 5. November 1975 in Summit , Arkansas ) was an American science fiction - writer and artist. He became known through accounts of an extensive underground civilization that met with strong echoes and became known as the Shaver Mystery . A following of the resulting movement known as Shaverism existed for decades.

Life

Early years

Shaver grew up as the fourth child of Ziba and Grace Shaver in rural Pennsylvania. His connection with his four year older brother Taylor or "Tate", who already sold stories to Boy's Life , The American Boy and similar youth magazines, was particularly strong . Shaver's mother Grace is also said to have written and published poetry. Shaver often got into trouble at school, there were failed pranks and arguments with students and teachers, resulting in disqualification from the football team and other sanctions. After school he worked in various jobs, including as a meat packer and gardener's assistant. In 1929 he followed his family to Detroit .

There the jobless shaver began attending courses at the Wicker School of Art , a private art school. He also worked there as a nude model and increased his income further by hiring nude models himself and providing opportunities for life drawing. In addition - since 1920 there had been prohibition in the USA - he brewed alcohol in the bathtub.

In 1930 he became a member of the John Reed Club , a communist organization, and took part in a May demonstration in Detroit. The political commitment did not last long, especially since the consequences of the global economic crisis were becoming increasingly noticeable. Shaver now began to teach at the Wicker School himself and also to make quick sketches of the walkers in the city park for a quarter . At the Wicker School he also met Sophie Gurivinch, who came from Kiev and whom he married in 1933. A daughter was born at the end of 1933.

He had now started working as a welder for Briggs Manufacturing Company in Highland Park . The company made car bodies for the Ford V8 and the work was monotonous, dangerous and noisy. During this time Shavers is said to have become aware of the voices from the subterranean world for the first time, after he had previously started to catch the thoughts of his work colleagues, with his welding gun initially acting as a kind of receiver:

"Due to a strange coincidence in the configuration of its coils, the welding gun did not become a radio, but a teleradio, a thoroughly effective thought amplifier."

Soon, however, he was no longer able to receive thoughts and visions only from the immediate surroundings, but from a world of caves hidden from people on the surface of the earth in the depths of the earth even without aids. What he received from there was nothing friendly, but terrifying and horrific - dark, malicious scraps of thought and the screams and complaints of tortured people, mostly women. This aspect of Shaver's cave or hell visions prompted the opponents of his “message” in later years to qualify them as sadistic fantasies. It was just as obvious for Shaver's later critics to point out that such experiences (“hearing voices”) belong to the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia .

Indeed, Shaver developed a mental health problem and in 1934 there was some sort of breakdown: in February of that year his brother Tate, whom he was very attached to, died and as a result he seems to have got worse. On July 16, 1934, he was taken to the emergency room at Detroit Receiving Hospital , where he said he felt he was being watched and followed and that he feared the doctors would poison him. On July 27, his wife applied for a state nursing home and on August 17, he was admitted to the Ypsilanti State Hospital , a nursing home for the mentally ill.

Shaver's whereabouts for the next eight years remain unclear. It is possible that he spent this time in a " catatonic state" in the institution, as Ray Palmer put it in an interview in 1977, on the other hand, Jim Pobst has no evidence of the time of his release. Doug Skinner said Shaver was released in 1936. In the same year his wife died in an accident in her apartment and the daughter was taken in by her maternal grandparents, who also received custody. Shaver is said to have wandered around, plagued by visions, worked here and there, sometimes came into conflict with the law and married a second time. During this period of confusion, in which he could hardly distinguish dream from reality, Shaver dated his contact with the blind girl Nydia, who introduced him to the subterranean world, its machines from bygone aeons and the demonic inhabitants still lurking there and finally took him there. Shaver claims to have spent years underground. Returning from wherever, he felt the urge to share his experiences.

By the time he wrote a letter to Amazing Stories in 1943 , he had been discharged from Ionia State Hospital , lived with his parents in Barto , a small town in Pennsylvania, worked as a crane operator, and was married for the third and final time to Dorothy Erb , called "Dot", who would stay by his side until his death.

"Mantong" and "Lemurian Alphabet"

In 1936, a certain Albert F. Yeager had published an article in Science World magazine, The True Basis of Today's Alphabet , in which he claimed that six letters of our alphabet represent concepts that can be used to understand the meaning of words. Shaver developed this idea further and wrote to Science World that he had succeeded in deciphering the meaning of not just six, but all 26 letters of the alphabet. This key refers to an original language which is the basis for all human languages , which Shaver called "Mantong".

Science World does not seem to have responded, Shaver kept working and in September 1943 sent a letter to the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories , of which Ray Palmer was the editor at the time . Its editor-in-chief Howard Browne had already thrown the letter, which was obviously from a crank, into the wastebasket, from which Palmer took it and tried to use the key on a few words. After all, he found the results so astonishing that he began a correspondence with Shaver and printed the key list in the issue of January 1944 with an invitation to the readers of Amazing Stories to simply try to decipher it themselves:

  • A - Animal (used AN for short)
  • B - Be (to exist — often command)
  • C - lake
  • D - (also used DE) Disintegrant energy; Detrimental (most important symbol in language)
  • E - Energy (an all concept, including motion)
  • F - Fecund (use FE as in female — fecund man)
  • G - Generate (used GEN)
  • H - Human (some doubt on this one)
  • I - Self; Ego (same as our I)
  • J - (see G) (same as generate)
  • K - Kinetic (force of motion)
  • L - Life
  • M - Man
  • N - child; Spore; Seed (as ninny)
  • O - Orifice (a source concept)
  • P - power
  • Q - Quest (as question)
  • R - (used as AR) Horror (symbol of dangerous quantity of dis force in the object)
  • S - (SIS) (an important symbol of the sun)
  • T - (used as TE) (the most important symbol; origin of the cross symbol) Integration; Force of growth (the intake of T is cause of gravity; the force is T; tic meant science of growth; remains as credit word)
  • U - You
  • V - Vital (used as VI) (the stuff Messmer calls animal magnetism; sex appeal)
  • W - Will
  • X - Conflict (crossed force lines)
  • Y - Why
  • Z - Zero (a quantity of energy of T neutralized by an equal quantity of D)

Derivatives are formed by combining sometimes only the letters, sometimes from individual letters and contained root words of a language, for example the English acid is derived from A = animal ("animal"), C = see ("see." "), I = I (" I "), D = disintegrate (" dissolve "), so you can see that you can dissolve animals with acid. Amass (" pile up , collect") is derived as a combination of A = animal and MASS, where MASS is the root word that has essentially retained its Lemurian meaning, which, according to Shaver, is the case with many words in human languages, after all, Lemurian is the original language. Root words are precisely those words of a language that have retained their Lemurian meaning - or whose current meaning can be used for derivation. Amass therefore stands for an animal that accumulates a mass of things. That such etymological gimmicks can bring joy should come as no surprise. But Palmer was surprised - by the number of letters that flooded the editors with derivations from numerous languages. This mass of “evidence” ( corroboration ) impressed and convinced him that there really had to be something about Shaver's alphabet and the “original language” Mantong.

I Remember Lemuria!

In the meantime, Palmer had received a number of letters and manuscripts from Shaver. Palmer rewrote one of these manuscripts, A Warning to Future Man, with a length of approx. 10,000 words, shortened sexual matters and expanded Shaver's text to a narrative of around 31,000 words, which was entitled I Remember Lemuria! appeared in Amazing Stories in March 1945 . According to Shaver, Palmer's interference with the text was only minor, but what is clear is that Palmer fictionalized Shaver's text: "I spiced the text with action and plot so that it didn't read like a boring lecture," Palmer confessed. Palmer wrote in the editorial of the issue:

“Starting with this issue, we introduce a new kind of narrative from the past. [...] Science has recognized that there is a 'racial memory', one of the unusual abilities of the human mind. Such things exist, says science - without being able to explain what exactly it is. You know: 'I seem to know this place, although I've never been here!' or 'I know that is so without ever having learned it!' In this issue we put 'I remember Lemuria!' before, a short story (?) by Richard S. Shaver. This is the first narrative from the past based on real 'racial memory'. We have found access to one of the most mysterious corners of the human mind here, and the results are amazing, as you will find out from reading this first story. There's something new in science fiction! "

So, strictly speaking, Palmer is not saying that it is a true story in the usual sense, but that Shaver's story is based on authentic "racial memory". In fact, science has not yet been able to somehow confirm the existence of such a form of memory. Palmer then continues below regarding any doubts:

“It could be a hoax! IF MR. SHAVER WOULD BE THE SMARTEST MAN THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN! But we can't believe that. The alphabet alone cannot be explained away in this way. We confess that we are confused, impressed and excited. "

And he now highlights the literary quality of the Shaver stories:

“These, readers of Amazing Stories , are amazing stories par excellence ! We are absolutely certain that it is a pleasure to read and we put it on a par with the best work of Merritt (whom Mr. Shaver greatly admires and whose stories he believes are more truthful than Merritt ever admit would), and the most famous authors of modern science fiction. "

Shaver's admiration for Merritt was appropriate, whose best-known story The Moon Pool is about dark forces living underground, gods of the past and depraved mutant races, just like in Shaver's tales. The myth developed by Shaver will now be briefly presented.

First of all, Shaver's "Lemuria" is not the Lemuria of the Theosophists , a sunken continent similar to Atlantis , but the ancient name of planet earth. Other names are " Mu " - otherwise known as the fabulous sunken land in the Pacific - and "Pan". Mutan Mion, the protagonist of I Remember Lemuria! lives in Sub Atlan, a large, underground city below Atlantis, 12,000 years ago. In this Lemurian world lived next to human-like beings also members of the "Atlanes" and the "Titans", powerful, almost immortal representatives of two star-traveling races, who had colonized the earth and other planets at a time when the rays of the sun were still pure and were healthy.

This had changed in the meantime, the aging sun was burning - Shaver speaks of “disintegration” - no longer “pure carbon ”, but more and more radioactive metals, so that the sun's rays contaminated the earth with particles that cause disease. The result was not only disease, but also aging and eventual death, for there had been no such thing in the times of pure carbon. As a result, people had increasingly withdrawn to underground cities that lay in huge cavities that reached far down to the core of the earth. In addition, so-called “variforms” also inhabited the subterranean world, hybrid beings created by the atlanes and titans, for example crossings of humans and snakes.

Mutan Mion is RO, which as a noun initially stands for life pattern or way of life or (simple) forms of life. RO is also used as a verb and then means exercising control over the patterns of life. If an entire population is controlled in this way, this form of government is called ROMANTIC (derived from RO + MAN (human) + TIC (science)), i.e. the "science of human management through the control of life patterns". Individuals are RO when they are subject to the mental influences surrounding them, so RO can also be used in the meaning of “subordinate”, “slave”.

Due to the aforementioned harmful influences of the sun, DERO [= D (detrimental) + E (energy) + RO], i.e. detrimental energy robotism, can come about , a state in which a form of life is determined by negative influences. It has even more serious consequences if the influences do not come directly from the sun, but from radiation machines contaminated by radioactive poison particles, which were used by the atlanes and titans to guide people and other lower forms of life by means of ROMANTIC. This happened when hordes of undeveloped SOs seized the abandoned radiation machines in abandoned cavern cities, which were no longer serviced and cleaned by the atlanes. The result was the emergence of a DERO race, a sadistic breed that had become completely dependent on the machines, degenerate and dwarfed, which had nothing else in mind than to kill every foreign living being and to torture it for as long as possible. The machines mentioned were useful, with which different types of rays could be generated, including stim-rays ("stimulation rays " to increase sexual experience and potency), ben-rays ( beneficent rays , "healing rays ", with which torture victims last longer) Life could be kept), as well as other devices such as the telesolidograph , which could project three-dimensional images, or the telaug , the telepathic augmentor , which was used for telepathy and mind reading .

In the Mantong alphabet, the D, which stands for disintegration, destruction and any form of negative influence, is contrasted with the letter T (“the most important symbol”), which stands for positive, integrative forces. Accordingly, those inhabitants of the cave worlds who have not surrendered to the influences of disintegration and who fight DERO are called TERO. The aforementioned blind girl Nydia, through whom Shaver was given direct experience of the underground world, was a TERO.

The story itself is about a secret takeover of power by time , an exiled elders of Atlanen and guided by him group of Dero, the (English in abandoned abandoned cave cities) live, so Abandonderos called. The protagonist Mutan Mion succeeds in overcoming the usurper with the help of the Nortan, another old super race that, unlike atlanes and titans, only inhabit planets far from the sun and therefore never run the risk of being poisoned by radioactive solar radiation . The atlanes and titans still surviving on earth are evacuated, mankind remains behind on earth and left to a fate in which it is constantly threatened by degeneration caused by the poisonous solar radiation. Muan Mion is kind enough to deposit numerous plates engraved on Telonion , an indestructible metal, with a corresponding warning in different places on earth, but these seem to have been lost over the eons. As is well known, no such tablets have been found to date. Shaver considers the possibility that the tablets of the Ten Commandments were tablets deposited by Mion to be improbable; according to the Bible's account, the Mosaic tablets of the law were certainly destructible. Mutan Mion's advice to always stay in caves that are kilometers deep and to distill drinking water several times and to filter the breath several times could therefore not be heeded by a humanity that has outgrown barbarism. After all, Shaver himself followed the recommendations as much as possible by distilling his drinking water three times and following a diet of foods such as young vegetables, veal and lamb that were not exposed to sun rays.

Shaverism

The response that Shaver's story met with exceeded all expectations. The first publication of Shaver's Alphabet had attracted a lot of interest, and numerous readers had contributed word derivations from languages ​​other than English. Now a stream of thousands of letters arrived in the editorial office, numerous readers reported of very similar experiences, of hostile rays that manipulated their thoughts and in some cases more substantial, of kidnappings underground - very similar to how later kidnappings by UFOs were reported - and the circulation of Amazing Stories rose from 135,000 to 180,000, which is why Palmer was later accused of allowing himself to be guided purely by economic interests when publishing Shaver’s stories. The numerous (new) readers who were open to the Shaver Mystery , as it was now called, and who came together in Shaver circles or who circulated fanzines like Shaver Mystery Magazine and later Shavertron , faced a growing and vocal group that both The content as well as the perceived preponderance of Shaver contributions in Amazing Stories criticized - hardly a number appeared without a contribution from Shaver and the June issue of 1947 was exclusively dedicated to Shaver. An article by William S. Baring-Gould in Harper’s September issue prompted publisher William Bernard Ziff to finally urge Palmer to limit the number of Shaver stories.

Another vehement critic was Forrest J. Ackerman , who wrote in retrospect in 1997:

“Shaver was a problem. Many authors had published stories whose main characters claimed as an artifice that their stories were based on actual events. The readers simply put their reservations on hold for a while and allowed themselves to be taken on the journey. [...] Hordes of pseudo fans were drawn to Shaver's stories like a swarm of flies to a honey jar. To the delight of Palmer and his publisher, sales skyrocketed and Shaverism turned into good business. "

The local chapter Queens of the Science Fiction League went so far as the reading of Shaver keep stories of a threat to mental health and in the Society for the Suppression of Vice denounce and at a convention in Philadelphia , a petition was seriously discussed with the requests were made to stop the postal distribution of Amazing and Fantastic Adventures . It goes without saying that the opponents did not speak of the Shaver Mystery , but of Shaver Hoax ("Shaver swindle").

After the publisher's intervention regarding the Shaver Stories, Palmer didn't last long with Amazing Stories . In 1948 he founded together with Curtis Fuller, also an employee of Ziff-Davis, the publishing house Clark Publishing , where he appeared together with Fuller under the pseudonym Robert N. Webster as editor of the new magazine Fate . In 1949, Palmer left Ziff-Davis for good. Shaver material hardly played a role with Fate , but the restless Palmer didn't let it go. He founded other magazines, including Other Worlds Science Stories (1949, Flying Saucers from 1957 ), Imagination (1950), Universe Science Fiction (1953), Science Stories (1953) and Mystic Magazine (1953, later as Search ), some of them only very short-lived.

In 1949 Shaver had moved to Amherst , Wisconsin, where he wanted to write a book called The Elder World , but found himself too sick to complete the project. The following year, Palmer and his wife moved to Amherst to a farm in the Shavers' neighborhood. From 1961 Palmer brought out with The Hidden World a collection of the previously published Shaver material as well as new, much less edited Shaver stories in the form of a magazine, of which 11 issues had appeared by 1964. In addition to texts and letters from Shaver, the editions contained editorial contributions from Palmer, in which he takes the position that Shaver's subterranean world does not exist physically, but "astral", coexistent with our world, a position that Shaver himself categorically rejected and based on the real The existence of the Deros persisted in their caves, from where they influenced the people of the surface by means of rays and kept them in spiritual slavery. In addition, the editions contained letters to the editor from the still quite active Shaver following scattered across the country.

Late years

In the mid-1960s, Shaver and his wife moved to Summit, Arkansas. There - in the meantime increasingly forgotten - he began work on the Rokfogos or Rock Books . According to this, the ancient inhabitants of the underworld are said to have inscribed numerous messages in certain rocks through an unknown process before they left the earth. These messages should now be found and made visible. So he wrote about the rock messages, took photographs of polished stone slabs and - where the images in the rock were not clearly recognizable - he created paintings of what he saw in the stones. The resulting works appear detached from the shaver mystery background, viewed as works of art like works of erotically saturated surrealism or like accumulations of pareidolia with a special emphasis on naked women. For Shaver, however, they were material evidence of his theses and he offered a kind of loan service with which an interested party could have a polished agate plate with a detailed interpretation of Shaver sent by post.

In 1975 Shaver died of a heart attack in Summit at the age of 68. He was buried in Layton Cemetery in Yellville, Marion County .

reception

Shavers Rokfogos met with little interest during his lifetime. Since then, however, there has been a series of exhibitions of his visual works and photographs, namely at the California Institute of the Arts (1989), at the Curt Marcus Gallery in New York (1989), at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (1994), at the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University in Orange , California (2002), Christine Burgin's New York Gallery (2002) and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (2004). The newspaper LA Weekly wrote in a review of the exhibition in Orange that, in purely visual terms, Shaver's paintings can be compared with works by Max Ernst and Jean Dubuffet .

The Japanese horror film Marebito (2004) by Takashi Shimizu is based on Shaver's theses.

bibliography

Novels
  • The Masked World (1946)
  • Cult of the Witch Queen (1946, with Bob McKenna)
  • Gods of Venus (1948)
  • Titan's Daughter (1948)
  • The Sun-Smiths (1952)
  • Beyond the Barrier (1952)
Collections
  • I Remember Lemuria, and the Return of Sathanas (1948)
  • The Hidden World: The True Story of the Shaver Mysteries (11 issues, 1961 ff., New issue # 1–10 as The Hidden World: The True Story Of The Shaver & Inner Earth Mysteries , 2008–2014)
  • The Secret World: The Diary of a Lifetime of Questioning the Facts (1975)
  • The Shaver Mystery (6 volumes, 2011–2015)
  • The Sea People / Witch's Daughter (2012)
Short stories
  • Return of a Demon (1943, as Alexander Blade)
  • "I Remember Lemuria!" (1945)
  • Thought Records of Lemuria (1945)
  • Cave City of Hel (1945)
  • Quest of Brail (1945)
  • Invasion of the Micro-Men (1946)
  • An Adam from the Sixth (1946)
  • Luder Valley (1946)
  • The Tale of the Last Man (1946)
  • The Sea People (1946)
  • Earth Slaves to Space (1946)
  • The Return of Sathanas (1946, with Bob McKenna)
  • The Land of Kui (1946)
  • Death Seems So Final (1947, as Alexander Blade)
  • First Rocket (1947, as D. Richard Sharpe)
  • The Tale of the Red Dwarf Who Writes With His Tail (1947, as The Red Dwarf)
  • The Vanishing Spaceman (1947, as Alexander Blade)
  • The Mind Rovers (1947)
  • Joe Dannon, Pioneer (1947)
  • The Princess and Her Pig (1947)
  • The Crystalline Sarcophagus (1947)
  • Formula from the Underworld (1947)
  • The Red Legion (1947)
  • Witch's Daughter (1947)
  • Zigor Mephisto's Collection of Mentalia (1947)
  • Mer-Witch of Ether "18" (1947)
  • Witch of the Andes (1947)
  • Of Gods and Goats (1947)
  • Flesh Against Spirit (1948, as Alexander Blade)
  • Lair of the Grimalkin (1948, as GH Irwin)
  • The Monster from Mars (1948, as Alexander Blade)
  • The Plotters (1948, as Alexander Blade)
  • "Slaves of the Worm" (1948)
  • The Thin Woman (1948)
  • Ice City of the Gorgon (1948, with Chester S. Geier)
  • The Valley of Madness (1948, as Alexander Blade)
  • Mirrors of the Queen (1948)
  • Daughter of the Night (1948)
  • Fountain of Change (1948, with Chester S. Geier)
  • Dynasty of the Devil (1949, as Alexander Blade)
  • Pillars of Delight (1949, as Stan Raycraft)
  • Prometheus' Daughter (1949, as Alexander Blade)
  • The Jinx (1949, as Alexander Blade)
  • When the Moon Bounced (1949, as Frank Patton)
  • The Cyclopeans (1949)
  • Exiles of the Elfmounds (1949)
  • Erdis Cliff (1949)
  • Battle in Eternity (1949, with Chester S. Geier)
  • The Fall of Lemuria (1949)
  • Where No Foot Walks (1949, as GH Irwin)
  • The Devil in a Box (1950, as Gerald Vance)
  • The World of the Lost (1950, as Paul Lohrman)
  • Sons of the Serpent (1950, as Wes Amherst)
  • We Dance for the Dom (1950)
  • Lady (1950)
  • Marai's Wife (1950, as Edwin Benson)
  • The Gamin (1950, as Peter Dexter)
  • Palace of Darkness (1950, as Peter Dexter)
  • Glass Woman of Venus (1951, as GH Irwin)
  • Green Man's Grief (1951)
  • Journey to Nowhere (1951)
  • Lightning Over Saturn (1951, with Chester S. Geier)
  • Yelisen (1951)
  • Of Stegner's Folly (1952)
  • The Scarpein of Delta Sira (1952, as GH Irwin)
  • The Dark Goddess (1953)
  • Paradise Planet (1953)
  • The Heart of the Game (1953, as Richard English)
  • She Was Sitting in the Dark (1953, as Richard Dorot)
  • Why Skeets Malloy Has Two Heads (1954)
  • The Rescue of Atlantis and Lemuria by the Flying Saucers (1956, with Raymond A. Palmer)
  • The Dream Makers (1958)
  • A Taste of Heaven (1961)
  • A Witch in the Night (1961)
  • Disaster and Escape (1961)
  • Flight into Futility (1961)
  • I Enter the Caves (1961)
  • The Living Library (1961)
  • The Tormenting Voices (1961)
Essays
  • Mantong, the Language of Lemuria (1945, with Raymond A. Palmer)
  • Open Letter to the World (1945)
  • Proofs (1947)
  • Medieval Illicit (1948)
  • Shaver on Inertia (1948)
  • If we get a chance! (1948)
  • The Cyclops (1949)
  • The People Who Make Other Worlds No. 4: Richard S. Shaver (1952)
  • How I Discovered the Caves (1955)
  • I Contacted an Unknown Race (1955)
  • Why Do We Die? (1956, with Raymond A. Palmer)
  • The Secret Caves of the Dero (1956)
  • The Flying Saucers (1956)
  • Historical Aspect of the Saucers (1957)
  • The Key to Mantong — The Ancient Language (1958, with Joel Kos)
  • The Shaver Mystery — A Defense (1958)
  • A Dictionary of the Manthong Language (1961)
  • The Ancient Alphabet (1961, with Raymond A. Palmer)
  • Why the Caves Are Secret (1961)
  • The Shaver Papers (1974)

literature

  • Michael Barkun: A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. University of California Press Berkeley, Los Angeles 2003, ISBN 0-520-23805-2 , pp. 115-117.
  • Jerome Clark: Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds. Visible Ink Press, Detroit 2010, ISBN 978-1-57859-175-6 , pp. 55-76.
  • Dennis Crenshaw: Shaver & Palmer. 1997 ( Part 1 ( Memento of December 24, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), Part 2 ( Memento of December 24, 2007 in the Internet Archive )).
  • Mike Dash : Borderlands. Overlook, Woodstock, NY 2000, ISBN 0-87951-724-7 , pp. 228-230.
  • Claudio Foti: Lo Strano Caso di Richard Sharpe Shaver. Weirdbooks, 2018, ISBN 978-88-99507-60-2 , publisher page .
  • Martin Gardner : The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher. Prometheus, Buffalo, NY 1991, p. 220.
  • John Keel: The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers. In: Fortean Times , 1983, online ( September 24, 2009 memento in the Internet Archive ).
  • Fred Nadis: The Man from Mars. Ray Palmer's Amazing Pulp Journey. Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-399-16054-7 .
  • Jim Pobst: Shaver: The early years. Arcturus Book Service, Stone Mountain, Georgia 1989, OCLC 20855481 .
  • Richard Sharpe Shaver, William Michael Mott (Eds.): This Tragic Earth: The Art and World of Richard Sharpe Shaver. Hidden Mysteries TGS Publishers 2007, ISBN 978-0-9786249-5-8 .
  • Doug Skinner: What's This? A shaver revival? In: FATE Magazine , June 2005, online ( August 23, 2009 memento in the Internet Archive ).
  • Richard Toronto: War over Lemuria: Richard Shaver, Ray Palmer and the strangest chapter of 1940s science fiction. McFarland & Company, Jefferson, North Carolina 2013, ISBN 978-0-7864-7307-6 ( review ).
  • Richard Toronto: Shaverology: A Shaver Mystery Home Companion. Shavertron Press, San Francisco 2013, ISBN 978-0-6158-6691-8 .
  • Richard Toronto: Rokfogo: The mysterious pre-deluge art of Richard S. Shaver. 2 Vols. Shavertron Press, San Francisco 2014, ISBN 978-0-9911396-2-0 (Vol. 1), ISBN 978-0-9911396-3-7 (Vol. 2).
  • Richard Toronto: The Shaver Mystery. In: FATE. March 1998, online ( memento of September 24, 2009 in the Internet Archive ).
  • Bruce Lanier Wright: Fear Down Below: The Curious History of the Shaver Mystery. In: Fortean Studies # 6. John Brown, 1999, ISBN 1-902212-20-7 , online ( July 18, 2009 memento on the Internet Archive ).
Lexicons

Web links

Commons : Richard Sharpe Shaver  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Doug Skinner: What's This? A shaver revival? In: FATE Magazine , June 2005.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Dennis Crenshaw: Shaver & Palmer. 1997, part 1.
  3. ↑ Jerome Clark: Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds. 2010, p. 55.
  4. ↑ Orator Haranguing Crowd. In: The Detroit Times. May 2, 1930 (with a photo by Shaver).
  5. ↑ "The welding gun was, by some freak of its coils' field attunements, not a radio, but a teleradio, a thought augmentor of some power." Quoted from: Jerome Clark: Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds . Visible Ink Press, Detroit 2010, ISBN 978-1-57859-175-6 , p. 60.
  6. ↑ Interview with Raymond A. Palmer (1977, from 3m: 10s)
  7. ↑ Jerome Clark: Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds. 2010, p. 57.
  8. ↑ Jerome Clark: Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds. Visible Ink Press, 2010, p. 58.
  9. ↑ List below from: Richard Sharpe Shaver: I Remember Lemuria and The Return of Sathanas. Venture, 1948, p. 214.
  10. ↑ So to amass is descriptive of an animal who gathers together a large quantity of anything. Mantong - The Language of Lemuria. In: Amazing Stories. Vol. 19, No. 1 (March 1945), p. 71.
  11. ↑ [I] added the 'action' and 'plot flavor' that would make it read less like a dull recitation. Quoted from: Michael Barkun: A Culture of Conspiracy. University of California Press Berkeley, 2003, p. 116.
  12. ↑ Beginning with this issue we are introducing something new in stories of the past. We are taking the strange things that have always made Man wonder, those weird things that happen to him which he cannot understand, yet which disturb him greatly, and are projecting them into a field of logic in an effort to arrive at truth by beginning with what is accepted as fantasy. Science has placed its stamp of recognition on one of the weird things in the mind of Man, that faculty known as "racial memory." Such a thing does exist, science says - without being able to explain just what it is. You know many instances of the feeling that "this place is familiar, yet I have never been here before!" or "I know a thing is so, yet I have never learned it!" In this issue we present a story (?) Called "I Remember Lemuria!" by Richard S. Shaver. This is the first of the stories of the past, based on actual racial memory. We have begun to tap one of the most mysterious corners of Man's mind, and with truly amazing results, as you will discover when you read this first story. Something new in science fiction is here! Ray Palmer: The Obervatory [Editorial]. In: Amazing Stories. Vol. 19, No. 1 (March 1945), p. 6.
  13. ↑ It could be a hoax! IF MR. SHAVER WERE THE CLEVEREST MAN THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN! But we can't believe this is so. The alphabet alone is too much to explain away in such a manner. We confess we are bewildered, impressed, and excited. And at the very least, we are delighted at the series of stories from the typewriter of Mr. Shaver. These, readers of Amazing Stories, are amazing stories par excellence! We feel most sure of the fact that you will enjoy them than of anything else. We place them on a level with the best works of Merritt (whom Mr. Shaver greatly admires, and whom Mr. Shaver gives credit for having more truth in his stories than even Merritt himself would have admitted), and the most popular of modern science fiction writers. Ray Palmer: The Obervatory [Editorial]. In: Amazing Stories. Vol. 19, No. 1 (March 1945), p. 10 f.
  14. ^ Richard S. Shaver: I Remember Lemuria, and the Return of Sathanas. Venture Books, 1948, p. 5.
  15. ↑ Right in the first chapter of I Remember Lemurai! Mutan Mion goes to the low-lying city of Tean, which is so close to the core of the earth that the force of gravity is significantly lower there.
  16. ^ Richard S. Shaver: I Remember Lemuria, and the Return of Sathanas. Venture Books, 1948, chap. 1, footnote 9, p. 14 f.
  17. ^ Richard S. Shaver: I Remember Lemuria, and the Return of Sathanas. Venture Books, 1948, chapter 3, footnote 17, p. 31 f.
  18. ↑ a b c d Bruce Lanier Wright: Fear Down Below: The Curious History of the Shaver Mystery. In: Fortean Studies # 6. 1999.
  19. ↑ At least, science has no record of any such plates having been unearthed; nor is there any such record in legend or history beyond the possibility of the plates of the Ten Commandments given (found?) by Moses upon the mount. However this seems unlikely, since they are described as being of stone, which seems true since they were smashed by Moses in his anger. Apparently the message over which Mutan Mion labored so mightily has never been found. Richard S. Shaver: I Remember Lemuria, and the Return of Sathanas. Venture Books, 1948, chap. 10, footnote 32, p. 97.
  20. ↑ Palmer spoke at times of 50,000 letters to the editor, but that is hardly credible. See Jerome Clark: Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds. Visible Ink Press, 2010, p. 58.
  21. ↑ The Shaver Mystery Magazine was published by the Shaver Mystery Club . See The Shaver Mystery Magazine , ZineWiki, accessed August 4, 2018. See also The Shaver Mystery Magazine , Fancyclopedia 3, accessed August 4, 2018.
  22. ^ William S. Baring-Gould: Little Superman, What Now? In: The Harpers Monthly , September 1946, pp. 283-287. Abridged version in: Fantasy Review. Vol. 1, No. 4, August / September 1947, online .
  23. ^ Forrest J. Ackerman: Science-fiction. Translated by Ronald M. Hahn . Taschen, Cologne 1998, ISBN 3-8228-7295-4 , p. 117.
  24. ↑ Richard Shaver , Fancyclopedia 3 , accessed August 4, 2018.
  25. ↑ 1955 Palmer sold his shares in Fate to Fuller. The magazine appears to this day.
  26. ↑ One of the pseudonyms used by Shaver was Wes Amherst
  27. ↑ a b C. L. Bledsoe: Richard Sharpe Shaver (1907–1975). In: The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. 2010.
  28. ↑ Brian Tucker: Shaver Declared a Master Surrealist! ( Memento from September 16, 2008 in the Internet Archive ).
personal data
SURNAME Shaver, Richard Sharpe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Shaver, Richard S. (alternative spelling); Amherst, Wes (pseudonym); Benson, Edwin (pseudonym); Blade, Alexander (pen name); Dexter, Peter (pseudonym); Dorot, Richard (pseudonym); Dwarf, The Red (pseudonym); English, Richard (pseudonym); Irwin, GH (pseudonym); Lohrman, Paul (pseudonym); Patton, Frank (pseudonym); Raycraft, Stan (pseudonym); Sharpe, D. Richard (pen name); Shaver, Richard (pseudonym); Vance, Gerald (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American science fiction writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 8, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Berwick Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH 5th November 1975
Place of death Summit , Arkansas