Though
less well known today, P. Schuyler Miller was a frequent contributor to a
number of pulp science fiction magazines beginning in the 1930s. At the time, he was a popular writer of short
stories and reviews. As with many pulp
science fiction writers, then and now, an early interest in science fiction and
fantasy led him to begin writing and publishing his own stories in his teen
years. He placed his first story in Wonder
Stories in the summer of 1930.
A chemist
and an amateur archaeologist, he was especially interested in the history of
the Iroquois Indians of his home state of New York. He was also an advocate of historical
preservation and natural resource conservation.
He worked as a technical writer
for General Electric in the 1940s, and later for the Fisher Scientific Company
in the 1950s until his death in 1974.
Most
of Miller’s fiction was published in the 1930s and 1940s, in such magazines as Amazing Stories, Astounding, The Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Weird
Tales, among others. In Weird Tales he published such stories as
Spawn (1939), John Cawder's Wife (1943), Plane
and Fancy (1944), Ship-in-a-Bottle (1945),
and Ghost (1946). A fan and correspondent of Robert E. Howard,
he later helped put together a bibliography of that author’s work. He wrote less fiction after 1945 and shifted
to science fiction book reviews.
Additional
detail about this author may be found at these helpful sites:
Fancyclopedia
http://fancyclopedia.org , (part of
Fanac-the Fan History Project, http://fanac.org/)
Tellers of Weird Tales
SFE—The Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction
Ship-in-a-Bottle (1955) is a “curiosity shop” tale, reminiscent of such stories as E.F.
Benson’s The Witch-Ball (1928), Clark
Ashton Smith’s Ubbo-Sathla (1933),
and many others. (A subcategory of this
type of horror is the “used book store” motif; see for example, H.P.
Lovecraft’s 1938 fragment, The Book). For an earlier discussion of this type of
horror story, see The
Hazards of Curiosity Shops. These stories often begin with a
purchase made from some decrepit, out of the way establishment, typically from
an aged and suspicious representative of some ethnic minority.
Whatever
it is—trinket, figurine, bit of jewelry, ancient tool or weapon—the item contains
strange supernatural powers. It may
transport the new owner to some awful location, conjure a ghost, reveal some
forgotten trauma, invoke an evil supernatural entity, or transform the owner’s
personality by some process of psychic possession. An underlying assumption seems to be that a
gateway to another world can be acquired fairly inexpensively if bought second hand in one of these shops. Readers may wonder whether financially struggling
writers of horror, science fiction, and fantasy literature were forced to
frequent shops like these. The motif
shows up fairly often.
What
is atypical of Ship-in-a-Bottle is
that the shopkeeper has a direct role in the ensuing horror, instead of being
merely the agent of the transaction and nothing more. As the title suggests, the found object is a
weirdly lifelike ship in a bottle, with convincingly depicted sailors enduring some
sort of prolonged predicament at sea. The
story begins with a reminiscence; the narrator first sees the bottle during a childhood
visit to a curiosity shop with his father.
The depiction of the neighborhood and the mysterious shop as seen through the eyes of a child may remind readers of some of Ray Bradbury’s earlier work from the 1950s. The October Country (1955), Dandelion Wine (1957) and especially Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) come to mind.
Ship-in-a-Bottle is difficult to categorize,
because it contains elements of horror, the ghost story, childhood
autobiography, and alternate universe stories.
It is a much stronger story than Miller’s earlier work, The Arrhenius Horror (1931), which was
reviewed in a previous post, (see How
to Make a Silicon Life Form). That
story contained some interesting ideas, (panspermia), but also many of the
weaknesses typical of the pulp science fiction of the time. In Ship-in-a-Bottle,
there is much deeper characterization, a wonderful sense of place, and
careful attention to detail in creating mood and temporal disorientation. The effect is similar to H.P. Lovecraft’s in The Festival (1925), He (1926), and The Silver Key (1929).
The
narrator of Ship-in-a-Bottle returns
to the shop 30 years later and finds that little has changed, although there
are signs of the passage of time.
Readers will suspect that the location of the shop is special in some
way; the narrator, describing the immediate neighborhood, remarks that it “was
like the stern of a galleon crowded between grimy barges.” Details about the interior of the shop
suggest it is more like the cargo hold of some old boat than a used merchandise
store.
Something
has happened to time in this locale.
When the narrator gazes into the bottle again after so many years, he is
startled to see that the ship has also undergone change over time: “The listless sails seemed browner and some
of them were furled as though the captain had given up hope of wind.” The tiny ship and its miniature crew, the
shopkeeper, and the curiosity shop are all linked in this nautical time loop. Justice of
some kind is accomplished near the end of the story, but the author leaves
much unexplained in the wake of the freed ship.
Ship-in-a-Bottle contains some of the same
pleasing symmetry and circularity one finds in stories by Clark Ashton Smith—the
story ends where it began. The type and
quality of the story seems to anticipate the more personal and autobiographical
tone of work by Bradbury and other fantasists.
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