Surely you remember that popular science fiction author from the first half of the 20th century who invented a pseudo-scientific “religion” complete with ancient extraterrestrial overlords and convoluted psychological analytics, then convinced a wide swath of the public to sign on, mightily fattening his own wallet in the process.
No, I’m not talking L. Ron Hubbard and scientolenetics; today we’re pointing our pen at Richard Shaver and the fiercely controversial and now almost entirely forgotten “Shaver Mystery.”
Howdy, thetans and deros, it is I, Pinky Tourette, dabbler in curiosa and inconsequence, with a peek back at an unjustly unremembered crackpot of yore.
Like Hubbard, Dick Sharpe Shaver (and ain’t that a porn name if you ever heard one?) was championed by a powerful editor of contemporaneous science fiction periodicals. In Hubbard’s case it was John W. Campbell, Jr., author of the classic story “Who Goes There?” – source material for Carpenter and Hawks’ cinematic gems “The Thing [from Another World.]” Campbell, for all his unassailable accomplishments as an editor and mentor to the greatest of the SF greats in the 30s, 40s, and into the 50s, was a classic Ol’ Boys’ Club member complete with a cigarette holder clamped between his stern white jaws, vigorously espousing racist/sexist leanings and not above indulging in pseudoscience and supremacist dialectics.
(As an aside, Hubbard was preceded in the early-to-mid 1940s by yet another rogue SF psychotic, Claude Degler, with his “cosmic circle” championing a super race of “Cosmen” bred from an intellectually superior species, vaguely echoing the “master race” taking shape concurrently across the ocean in Nazi Germany. Only in Degler’s case, the superior species was science fiction fans, harbingers of the next evolutionary step of mankind. True story; Google it)
Back to Richard Shaver, whose editorial champion was Ray Palmer. No, not the alter-ego of DC’s shrinking violent The Atom, but the real Raymond A. Palmer, the one whose name was lifted for the comic character by creator Gardner Fox, a fellow pulp/SF fan and author. The real-life RAP, as he was known, was a four-foot-tall hunchback who edited Amazing Stories from the late 30s through the 40s as well as other less notable publications. One day RAP plucked a rambling, strident letter from the inbox and was intrigued enough to write back to its author, Richard Shaver, asking for more details on the proto-human language of “Mantong” that Shaver claimed to have discovered and posited as an underlying structural basis for all human language.
Shaver shot back with another massive missive, this one labeled “A Warning to Future Man,” laying out the history of an ancient race that once dwelt within caverns deep inside the Earth before largely abandoning the planet, leaving behind only a smattering of heroic good guys (“teros”) and sadistic villains (“deros,” short for “detrimental robots”). In Shaver’s telling, deros controlled monstrous machines and evil rays that projected damaging thoughts and voices into our minds and were the cause of everything from commonplace accidents to cataclysmic disasters. They also kidnapped and dragged unlucky humans into their caverns – Shaver among them, as he later revealed, explaining he lived in captivity for years and learned how to tap into the mind-controlling rays.
Shaver shot back with another massive missive, this one labeled “A Warning to Future Man,” laying out the history of an ancient race that had dwelt within caverns deep inside the Earth before largely abandoning the planet, leaving behind only a smattering of heroic good guys (“teros”) and sadistic villains (“deros,” short for “detrimental robots”). In Shaver’s telling, deros controlled monstrous machines and evil rays that projected damaging thoughts and voices into our minds and were the cause of everything from commonplace accidents to cataclysmic disasters. They also kidnapped and dragged unlucky humans into their caverns – Shaver among them, as he later revealed, explaining he lived in captivity for years and learned how to tap into the mind-controlling rays.
It's important to note that to Shaver this was fact, not fiction. It’s probably no surprise that he had spent time in mental institutions, and would do so again later in life. Little did that matter to RAP, who cobbled Shaver’s ramblings into a linear storyline and published the result in the March 1945 edition of Amazing Stories as “I Remember Lemuria.” The issue sold out and reader response was surprisingly enthusiastic, so RAP solicited more writing from Shaver – publishing an ongoing series with the added caveat to readers that while the structure may be fictional, the underlying story was pure unadulterated truth.
And the audience ate it up. Circulation skyrocketed, with people writing in to document their own encounters with controlling voices and deros and underground dwellers. The resulting furor – the “Shaver Mystery” – divided science fiction, with newcomers savoring the salacious conspiratorial buzz while established fans excoriated RAP (already a bit of pariah for having dragged Amazing backwards in time with his preference for cheesy space opera rather than the more literate SF that flourished elsewhere; under Campbell, for instance) as pandering to a lowest common denominator.
Shaver, meanwhile, offered braindump after braindump of Hollow Earth stories (a longstanding trope dating back centuries, source for fictioneers including Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Casanova) until eventually the cycle burnt out and the audience migrated to UFOs – the next big thing, beginning in 1947 with pilot Kenneth Arnold’s published encounter with a “flying saucer,” completely subsuming written and filmed SF for the next decade plus.
As Amazing’s circulation declined, RAP moved on to other publications like the short-lived fiction digests Imagination and Other Worlds, and the pseudo-factual Fate and The Hidden World, continuing to feature Shaver but largely pivoting to cash in on the UFO trend and other paranormal offshoots. Shaver followed suit, self-publishing his own The Shaver Mystery Magazine (eight issues, 1947-48) and boasting that the UFO craze confirmed the authenticity of his stories of otherworldly visitors to planet Earth.
Later, in the 60s and 70s as the Shaver Mystery lost its remaining luster and cult appeal, Shaver moved on to his next and final obsession: rock books. Not what you’re thinking; nothing to do with songs and bands: he obsessed over literal rocks that he claimed had been imprinted with sophisticated secret messages from – you guessed it – ancient races. Without a patron, however, this obsession never quite caught on with the public, and Shaver’s days as a beacon of lunacy were over. He died in 1975.
RAP followed him to the grave in 1977. While there’s little question nowadays that Shaver was a paranoid schizophrenic with a tenuous grasp of reality, there’s still much controversy over whether RAP truly believed in Shaver’s rantings or if it was simply a craven (and hugely successful) ploy to sell boatloads of magazines.
That question will perhaps never be answered. Was RAP a true believer, a John W. Campbell Jr. completely duped by the smooth patter of a sci-fi carny showman with a diamond tongue, or was he the Tucker Hannity of his day, a greedy, unscrupulous huckster pitching shit at walls and selling tickets to whatever sticks?
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