cluffs

[cute little unfulfulled fragments of fascination]

OSS literature is prone to these little tantalising snippets, delightful digressions, frustratingly not followed up, which tempt one to wonder at unanswered questions.

The reader was introduced to this topic in the OSS Diary for 28th August 2016, and later I thought it best to begin a page on which newly discovered CLUFFs could be added as I find them. Also, as time goes on, CLUFFs which have already been mentioned elsewhere on the site can congregate here, joining the new arrivals in one happy family, organized by zone, which, perhaps, can play a part in delineating the characters of worlds.

Because Philip K Dick is particularly prone to throwaway CLUFFs, especially in Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), I have put my copy's cover as the first illustration on this page.

mercurian zone

...Later, as the Earth's span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space - to another stopping place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury...

H P Lovecraft, The Shadow Out of Time (Astounding Stories, June 1936)

...On Mercury, Shelton had found a much simpler way of stopping the voracious hordes of omnivorous, two-foot amoeboids than by blasting them to pieces with small cannon. No poison could affect them. Small gelatin capsules containing solid carbon dioxide were strewn in their stampeding path. The giant single-celled monsters absorbed them, dissolved off the gelatin, and swiftly puffed up into porous balloons by the action of the released gas...

Eando Binder, The Impossible World (Startling Stories, March 1939)

"...at least the natives are human, after a fashion! Shut your eyes and listen to a Mercurian trying to bargain you out of your back teeth and you feel almost chummy..."

Murray Leinster, Space-Can (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1948)

...The Kotolies, a strange, shy little animal native to Mercury, had been brought back to Earth in the fortieth century and crossbred with dogs. The new hybrid, a domesticated pet, could speak and think the language of Earth, while still retaining the lore of Mercury...

Donald Wandrei, Finality Unlimited (Astounding Stories, September 1936)

...He remembered the Mercurian who had valeted one of the friends of his student days. Khambee was the Mercurian's name - a curious elf whose unobtrusive yet insistent indulgence was much the same as that of this mechanical slave.

"Khambee the Second," Van Tyren pronounced good-naturedly, bestowing the nomen on the automaton...

Raymond Z Gallun, Derelict (Astounding Stories, October 1935)

...The Rasi was not particularly large, fast, or efficient, but compared to a spacesuit it was the palace of a Mercurian Butpati...

Dylan T Jeninga, Rimworld Trash (Tales To Astound, September 2018)

Heir to a million-dollar shipping firm which he himself had pyramided into a System-wide monster, he was equally well known as a big game hunter. From the firedrakes of Mercury to the ice crawlers of Pluto, he had bagged them all...

Poul Anderson, Duel on Syrtis (Planet Stories, March 1951)

"...Damn you! May the heat devils of Mercury burn and sear and shrivel you in everlasting torment."

Harl Vincent, The Copper-Clad World (Astounding Stories, September 1931)

Seven-limbed bat-noses from the twilight zone of Mercury...

Stanley Mullen, Gama is Thee (Planet Stories, July 1953)

…The pitifully narrow twilight belt of Mercury, with its violent winds, now oven-hot and now icy-cold, harbored the lowest type of rock-clinging moss and deep-rooted cactus only…

Donald A Wollheim, The Secret of the Martian Moons (1955)

She had crossed the fabulous Purple Ice Mountains of Mercury's Dark Side on the furry back of a three-ton landohr bear...

Hal K Wells, The White Brood (Thrilling Wonder Stories, November 1940)

...the savage and sun-hardened little tribes of Mercury, with their solar-powered cruisers...

Henry Hasse, Trail of the Astrogar (Amazing Stories, October 1947)

A "sensipsych" commentator teaches: "There used to be jungles here on this frozen, night-side hemisphere, Pop. When Mercury still rotated on its axis and there were dense clouds to cut down the blazing sunshine."

Raymond Z Gallun, Passport to Jupiter (Startling Stories, January 1951)

...he sent exploratory receptors toward the planets. Mercury still blazed on the sunward side, unchanged. A peculiar metallic life form still clung to the edge of existence along the twilight border...

Jeff Sutton, After Ixmal (Amazing Stories, October 1962)
[set in the far future, about 700,000,000 years hence]

...the game the Mercurian hillmen play with human skulls...

Leigh Brackett, The Halfling (Astonishing Stories, February 1943, Chapter I)

...A Mercurian cave-tiger screamed...

...Lots of people having fun, lots of kids yelling and getting sick on Mercurian jitsi-beans...

...a Mercurian cave-cat, carrying its twenty-foot body on eight powerful legs and switching a tail that had bone barbs on it...

(ibid., Chapter III)

Stark had been in places before that oppressed him with a sense of their strangeness or their wickedness... the cliff-caves of Arianrhod on the edge of Darkside...

Leigh Brackett, Enchantress of Venus (Planet Stories, Fall 1949)

venusian zone

...I have seen the hoary, sky-confronting walls of Machu Pichu amid the desolate Andes; and the frozen, giant-builded battlements of Uogam on the glacial tundras of the nightward hemisphere of Venus. But these were as things of yesteryear compared to the walls upon which we gazed...

Clark Ashton Smith, The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis (Weird Tales, May 1932)

"By the Great Black Rock of Karsim, he can hear my thoughts!"

Eric Frank Russell, Three To Conquer (1955)

pink-and-white Venusians glistening like four-foot snails under the celloplast sheets that kept them from dehydrating in the dry Martian air...

Roger Dee, Oh Mesmerist from Mimas! (Planet Stories, January 1953)

…There were creatures in the crystal jungles of Venus that were very bright – for animals. Nelson knew that students of evolution considered that in another million years’ time these creatures would work their way up to something like civilization…

Donald A Wollheim, The Secret of the Martian Moons (1955)

For the CLUFF in Van Vogt's Film Library see Venusian Squid Captured on Film.

It was like grappling a dragon-eel of the Venusian marshes...

Manly Wade Wellman, The Solar Invasion (1946)

Deep down inside a tiny, nagging voice said, "Sergeant, do you remember that promise you made your mother about obscene language? Do you remember that time you gave a Venusian guppy a can of condensed milk in exchange for a pinfire opal not as big as the city clock? Repent, sergeant, while yet there is time!"

Eric Frank Russell, Symbiotica (Astounding, Oct 1943)
collected in Men, Martians and Machines (1955)

...The fat, middle-aged landlady in her Venusian whistle-cricket hide dress and wubfur slippers...

Philip K Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)

...hat of Venusian wubfuzz pulled down over his forehead...

Philip K Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)

[re the heatwave of 2004] ...And at the same moment every parakeet and Venusian ming bird in the building had dropped dead.

Philip K Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964)

"...I am told that mnophka, the Venerian narcotic, is far worse, in its effects on the human system, than is any terrestrial alkaloid..."

"...Though allied in a way, to the earth-narcotics, such as opium and hashish, it is of little use for anaesthetic or anodyne purposes. Its chief effects are an extraordinary acceleration of the time-sense, and a heightening and telescoping of all sensations... The user... seems, in a few minutes, to undergo the experiences of years. The physical result is lamentable..."

Clark Ashton Smith, The Plutonian Drug (Amazing Stories, September 1934)

...hell, thought West, we've met plenty of telepaths, and not all animals either. He remembered, smiling, the gas bubbles of Venus...

Tom W Harris, Get Off My Planet (Imaginative Tales, November 1957)

...He had quite a reputation as a big game hunter. He'd stalked the vicious Plutonian ice bears and lain in Venusian swamps waiting for the ten-ton lizards to rise out of the slime. He had knocked over the wildest of animals, a telepathic Uranian mountain wolf and had dropped in flight a Martian radar-bat, a feat duplicated by only three other marksmen on record...

Paul W Fairman, The Beasts in the Void (Imagination, April 1956)

...You will reach out and turn the knob and push in the door and it will all be there... just as you remembered it. The favourite chair, the life-paintings on the wall, the little fountain with the mermaids from Venus...

Clifford D Simak, Time And Again (1951)

"...Gather any flowers, fruits, berries or seeds you see. Few leaves - oh, you know. What we got on Venus. General junk. If you find a small plant, put on your gloves and yank it out. If you see a big one, steer clear. Venus had some peculiarly unpleasant specimens."

Blake groaned. "You telling me. I'm the bright boy that fell for that pretty fruit and climbed right up between the stems of a scissor tree..."

John W Campbell, The Brain Stealers of Mars (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1936)

>> Penton and Blake

lunar zone

During my numerous trips to the inner and outer planets (said Hespire) I saw such marvels and met such adventures as would make the wildest legends of the world's youth appear credible by comparison. Some day, perhaps, I will tell you of my encounter with the frightful but insubstantial giants who infest the hidden side of the moon...

Clark Ashton Smith, Ascharia (fragment of unfinished story)

Now here's a bit of a cross-over from fantasy - a science-fiction-flavoured part of a fantasy tale in which the demon Charnadis tells of his travels:

...I have followed the moon from evening twilight to morning twilight; and I have gazed on the secrets of that Medusean face which she averts eternally from the earth. I have read through filming ice the ithyphallic runes on columns yet extant in her deserts; and I know the hieroglyphs which solve forgotten riddles, or hint eonian histories, on the walls of her cities taken by ineluctable snow.

Clark Ashton Smith, Sadastor (Weird Tales, July 1930)

.....I know the blooms
Of bluish fungus, freaked with mercury,
That bloat within the craters of the moon,
And in one still, selenic hour have shrunk
To pools of slime and fetor...

Clark Ashton Smith, The Hashish Eater (1920)

…The crater bottoms of Luna, where a thin atmosphere sometimes gathered in the heat of the sun, had fast-growing and fast-dying crops of green stuff, part vegetable, part something else – but not animal…

Donald A Wollheim, The Secret of the Martian Moons (1955)

...Spends most of his time working at a treatise on the Lunar ice bugs - grylloblatta campodeiformes, he calls them...

Frederic Arnold Kummer, Jr., Signboard of Space (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1939)

[Speculation on the origins of the Rigel Concourse of 26 planets] ...There are as many theories to the situation as theorists... ...wondered if the planets of the Concourse were not conveyed hither... by a now-dead race of vast scientific achievement... Who? The Hexadelts? Who carved Monument Cliff on Xi Puppis X? Who left the incomprehensible mechanism in Mystery Grotto of Earth's Moon? Fascinating riddles yet to be answered...

Jack Vance, The Killing Machine (1964)

martian zone

..."The building of gigantic projects for ritual purposes - doing a thing for the sake of doing it - is the last act of an already dead culture. Look at the pyramids in Egypt for example. Or an even more idiotic and more enormous example, bigger than anything human beings have accomplished yet, the laying out of the 'Diagram of Power' over the whole face of Mars. If the Martians had put all that energy into survival instead, they'd probably be alive yet."

James Blish, Bridge (Astounding Science-Fiction, February 1952)

...Moreover, I may speak of the living fluids that gather perniciously at the poles of Mhuth; and of certain dark Presences, neither material nor phantasmal, that assail the invader of the red, ruinous Mhuthian cities...

Clark Ashton Smith, Ascharia (fragment of unfinished story)

...on Mars, the very shrubs make noises, weird and shrilling...

Festus Pragnell, A Visit to Venus (Fantastic Story Quarterly, Spring 1950)

"...I will tell you a day in my life that has shaped me; such a day as comes only once, like love, or serving Oyarsa in Meldilorn. Then I was young, not much more than a cub, when I went far, far up the handramit to the land where stars shine at mid-day and even water is cold. A great waterfall I climbed. I stood on the shore of Balki the pool, which is the place of most awe in all worlds. The walls of it go up for ever and ever and huge and holy images are cut in them, the work of old times. There is the fall called the Mountain of Water. Because I have stood there alone, Maleldil and I, for even Oyarsa sent me no word, my heart has been higher, my song deeper, all my days..."

C S Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (1938)

...The rexeroid door disintegrated into molten streams that burst into the air in the form of flaming pellets, like Martian sky birds...

Philip K Dick, Our Friends From Frolix 8 (1970), p.90

...a bowl of soup, lamb chops, green peas, Martian blue moss with egg sauce and a cup of hot coffee...

Philip K Dick, Counter Clock-World (1967)

...His thoughts were very far from Earth, both in space and time. Around him now were the dull, red sands of another world. He was Cardenis, prince of engineers, fighting to save his people from the encroaching deserts. For Bran had looked upon the ravaged face of Mars; he knew the story of its long tragedy and the help from Earth which had come too late...

Arthur C Clarke, Transience (Startling Stories, July 1949)

...on Mars, whose only intelligent inhabitants were crustaceans - 'educated lobsters', as the newspapers are fond of calling them. The aboriginal Martians never came near to achieving space flight, and in any event their civilization died before men existed on Earth...

Arthur C Clarke, Trouble with Time (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July 1960, as "Crime on Mars"; included in Tales of Ten Worlds (1962)

"I'm not a spy!" answered Hans indignantly as the meaning of the words penetrated. "You can't do this! I'm a loyal American citizen!"

The other ignored the outburst. He handed over the photograph.

"Do you recognize this?" he said.

"Yes. It's the inside of Captain Zipp's spaceship."

"And you designed it?"

"Yes."

Another photograph came out of the file.

"And what about this?"

"That's the Martian city of Paldar, as seen from the air."

"Your own idea?"

"Certainly," Hans replied, now too indignant to be cautious...

"I'm sorry," continued the intruder. "But there has been a serious leak. It may be - uh - accidental, even unconscious, but that does not affect the issue. We will have to investigate you. Please come with us..."

Arthur C Clarke, Security Check (in The Other Side of the Sky (1958))

Roger Dee, Oh Mesmerist from Mimas! (Planet Stories, January 1953)

…Surly sand leopards from Mars paced their cages and vented sounds like needles caught in the grooves of antique disc recordings.

...the deadly windharps from Mars...

Stanley Mullen, Gama is Thee (Planet Stories, July 1953)

"To the Matador," Joe said. "We'll have braised fillet of Martian mole cricket." He remembered then that that imported delicacy did not exist in this time period. "Market steak," he said...

Philip K Dick, Ubik (1969)

She had swum the deadly Rainbow Rapids of Mars' Gorge of the Giants...

...a full kandar of Martian green gold...

Hal K Wells, The White Brood (Thrilling Wonder Stories, November 1940)

Once the corporation had collected the dung of the Martian flap bat...

Philip K Dick, Now Wait for Last Year (1966)

The tables groaned with enormous masses of food, huge haunches of Jovian marsh-steers, rosy canal-fruit from Mars, sticky confections looted from Neptunian ships.

Edmond Hamilton, The Three Planeteers (Startling Stories, January 1940)

The tangle gun was the most effective and least lethal weapon ever conceived. It would bring down a butterfly at two hundred yards and hold it there, without crumpling a wing... It would do the same with a Venusian saurian or a Martian windbeast, either of which outbulked an elephant and outsavaged a tiger...

F L Wallace, Tangle Hold (Galaxy, June 1953)

Up goes my Boat among the stars
Through many a breathless field of light,
Through many a long blue field of ether,
Leaving ten thousand stars beneath her:
Up goes my little Boat so bright!
The Crab, the Scorpion, and the Bull--
We pry among them all; have shot
High o'er the red-haired race of Mars,
Covered from top to toe with scars;
Such company I like it not!

William Wordsworth, Peter Bell, A Tale (composed 1798, published 1819)

...Magnificent, ceiling-high tapestries covered the walls. Priceless ornaments from every planet were here in profuse disarray. Some were museum pieces, such as the desk of extinct Martian jragua wood at the end of the room...

Henry Hasse, Trail of the Astrogar (Amazing Stories, October 1947)

Within the huge apt Bunny Hentman lounged in a hand-dyed Martian spider-silk dressing gown...

Philip K Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), p.85

...in the apt to your left there's a wiz-bird from Mars... it has no hands but it can move objects by psychokinesis; it'll want to help, except that for today it's hatching; it's on an egg...

Philip K Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), p.39

"And the Saturday Evening Post," the old lady said, "that I picked up from your newsstand, it was over a year old. What's the matter with you? And the Martian grubworm TV dinner - "

"Next customer," the checker said; it ignored her.

Philip K Dick, Ubik (1969), p.119

"...the Martian poison you speak of is akpaloli, the juice of a common russet-yellow weed that grows in the oases of Mars. It is colorless, and without taste or odor. It kills almost instantly, leaving no trace, and imitating closely the symptoms of heart-disease... But... if used in infinitesimal doses, is... useful in cases of syncope, and serving, not infrequently, to re-animate victims of paralysis in a quite miraculous manner."

Clark Ashton Smith, The Plutonian Drug (Amazing Stories, September 1934)

...He turned to a little Martian sandroot statuette of St.Dismas that stood on the bar...

Poul Anderson, Mirkheim (1977)

"...The ancient Martians, who certainly weren't human physically, had steam-engines fifty million years ago that were almost like the Earthly variety of a couple of centuries back.

"They had radio, television, fluorescent lights. And they destroyed themselves with atomic weapons..."

Raymond Z Gallun, Passport to Jupiter (Startling Stories, January 1951)

...He had quite a reputation as a big game hunter. He'd stalked the vicious Plutonian ice bears and lain in Venusian swamps waiting for the ten-ton lizards to rise out of the slime. He had knocked over the wildest of animals, a telepathic Uranian mountain wolf and had dropped in flight a Martian radar-bat, a feat duplicated by only three other marksmen on record...

Paul W Fairman, The Beasts in the Void (Imagination, April 1956)

"We'd better get out of the way," Jim Planck said, "or they're going to be swarming over us like Martian column ants."

Philip K Dick, The Simulacra (1964) p.74

phobos

...There were three or four little moth-people from Phobos roosting up on the braces so their delicate wings wouldn't get damaged in the crush...

...I half carried her out, with the moth-people fluttering their gorgeous wings around our heads and praising her in their soft, furry little voices...

...there were half a dozen little moth-people bouncing in the air over my head, squeaking with fear and shining their great eyes at me...

Leigh Brackett, The Halfling (Astonishing Stories, February 1943)

asteroidal zone

...It came to me that this was the language used by a captive mind I had known slightly in my dreams - a mind from a large asteroid on which had survived much of the archaic life and lore of the primal planet whereof it formed a fragment...

H P Lovecraft, The Shadow Out Of Time (Astounding Stories, June 1936)

...The planetoids were great airless chunks of rock - fragments of a world that had exploded fifty million years ago. A world the size of Mars. A few chunks of carven rock, and bits of intricately wrought metal, hinting at a highly-advanced science among the now-dead inhabitants, had been discovered out there and brought back to Earth.
Even some charred and dried fragments of strange bodies and fernlike vegetation had been found. And bits of pictures glazed on shards of bright-colored porcelain. It must have been a beautiful world once...

Raymond Z Gallun, Passport to Jupiter (Startling Stories, January 1951)

JOVIAN ZONE

...on Jupiter, the air is full of flying things without wings...

Festus Pragnell, A Visit to Venus (Fantastic Story Quarterly, Spring 1950)

"Here's the breakdown of figures," Thomas went on calmly. "Half our steel, as well as the billion tons we sell to Mars, is mined with great difficulty on Jupiter. We couldn't operate those mines in case of war because the mines are hopelessly vulnerable to attack..."

A E van Vogt, Repetition (Astounding Science Fiction, April 1940)

...A tiny Terran-controlled state might function for a limited time in the Cheyenne vicinity, shelled and bombed day and night by the 'Starmen. But then it, too, would capitulate. Its shield of Jupiter-obtained rexeroid compounds would not protect it forever....

Philip K Dick, Now Wait For Last Year (1966), p.171

...Rerexoid, a compound from Jupiter, generally could penetrate anything...

Philip K Dick, The Penultimate Truth (1964)

....old Dunbar was as crazy as a Jovian juke-bird...

Bryce Walton, To Each His Star (1953)

...That stone, protected by an envelope of white pinardium, contained a compressed particle of the light-active rock which formed Jupiter's great red spot. And this stone contained sufficient inexhaustible power to move the factories and industrial plants of half the solar system.

Carl Jacobi, Tepondicon (Planet Stories, Winter 1946).

"...I can't stand Venerians, they're so slimy and fat and repulsive! - and then that leathery horned toad from Mars and that Jovian hippopotamus..."

E E "Doc" Smith, First Lensman (1950)

...Concar, made from the bark of the towering Jovian concar tree, attacked crimson fever as Earth's quinine battled malaria...

Hal K Wells, The White Brood (Thrilling Wonder Stories, November 1940)

"You have no poetry in your soul, Gunner," retorted the little Venusian with a grin. "A poetic genius like myself doesn't make up his songs — they come to him out of the great ether."

"They sound uncommonly like the bellowing of a Jovian marsh-calf when they do force themselves out," said Gunner Welk dourly...

...The tables groaned with enormous masses of food, huge haunches of Jovian marsh-steers, rosy canal-fruit from Mars, sticky confections looted from Neptunian ships...

......a bumper of raw, potent marsh-apple brandy from Jupiter...

Edmond Hamilton, The Three Planeteers (Startling Stories, January 1940)

"There's the House of Far Worlds, where you can feel the actual soil of Mars and Venus, touch the moss of Jupiter and Saturn, walk through imaginative conceptions of other worlds..."

Jack Vance, To Live Forever (1956)

Great Jove is full of stately bowers...

William Wordsworth, Peter Bell, A Tale (composed 1798, published 1819)

...And down the hall there's a molten metal life form from Jupiter called Edgar...

Philip K Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), p.39

"Virgilia! Where does she fit into this picture? What do you know about her—and how?"

"A mind would be incompetent indeed who could not visualize, from even the most fleeting contact with you, a fact which has been in existence for some twenty three of your years. Her doctorate in psychology; her intensive studies under Martian and Venerian masters—even under one reformed Adept of North Polar Jupiter—of the involuntary, uncontrollable, almost unknown and hence highly revealing muscles of the face, the hands, and other parts of the human body. You will remember that poker game for a long time."

E E "Doc" Smith, First Lensman (1950)

the galilean satellites (in general)

…Two or three of the larger satellites of Jupiter had tough hardy forms of plant life, and even a few very queer and sluggish animal forms fighting for a foothold against the intolerable cold at that distance from the sun…

Donald A Wollheim, The Secret of the Martian Moons (1955)

io

...Io, Jupiter's moon, was scoured sweet from its deadly, tenacious fungi by a tongue of protonic flame...

Eando Binder, Anton York, Immortal (1965), p. 44

...Pale, with glasses, his long hair carefully combed, wearing expensive, tasteful Io-fabric clothing, seemingly a trifle ill-at-ease, stood the Taoist authority from San Francisco, Marm Hastings...

Philip K Dick, Now Wait For Last Year (1966), p.43

A big uniped from Io gave an exhibition of its marvelous hopping abilities, bouncing straight up and down on its one leg until at last its flat head was touching the lofty ceiling...

Edmond Hamilton, Doom Over Venus (Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1940)

And there was an astounding variety of animals from all planets, some chained, others running free. Solernn-eyed, furry Martian vardaks, green Venusian swamppups, a big, hopping uniped from Io, and many others — all of them brought home here by the far-ranging pirate crews.

Edmond Hamilton, The Three Planeteers (Startling Stories, January 1940)

...Then there was the celebrated occasion of his robbing the crypts of Nakor, the Moon Goddess of Io. From Io he swiped several golden idols of inestimable value, which was just as well, for they were not doing the natives the least bit of good, despite their complaints...

Chas. A Stearns, The Grave of Solon Regh (Planet Stories, Winter 1954)

"A drink?" She went to the sideboard, opened a pre-Columbian wood and gold cabinet, revealing bottle after bottle. "What about an Ionian Wuzzball? It's the snig; you must try it. I bet it hasn't got up into Northern California..."

Philip K Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)

His legs wobbled and he walked unsteadily across his miniature living-room and seated himself on his Ionian fnoolfur (imitation) couch...

Philip K Dick, The Zap Gun (1967)

...His words made us thoughtful as we considered the various types of life we had encountered during our years of vagabondage around the system, two foot-loose fellows with a wanderer’s itch. There had been the plant-men of Ganymede, the crawling things that had spawned upon Titan, the blind-bat creatures of Io, the diabolical red snakes of Hyperion...

Leslie F Stone, The Rape of the Solar System (Amazing Stories, December 1934)

europa

ponderous Europans rolling on the little three-wheeled carts they used to carry their barrel-bellied tonnage…

Roger Dee, Oh Mesmerist from Mimas! (Planet Stories, January 1953)

...He had loaded the automatic with those mushroom bullets for possible use against certain rumoured Europan monsters, whose diffused vital spots could be injured little by anything less barbarous. Such monsters had remained shy and aloof during his sojourn on the moon...

Clark Ashton Smith, Mnemoka (fragment, in Steve Behrends, Clark Ashton Smith, A Critical Guide to the Man and his Work (2nd ed., 2013)

ganymede

...on Ganymede, protective mimicry has been developed to such an extent that one never knows when any plant or stone may suddenly spring away upon one's approach...

Festus Pragnell, A Visit to Venus (Fantastic Story Quarterly, Spring 1950)

"...I've seen frequent mention, recently, of a mineral water from Ganymede whose effects are like those of the mythical Fountain of Youth."

"You mean clilthni, as the stuff is called by the Ganymedians. It is a clear, emerald liquid, rising in lofty geysers from the craters of quiescent volcanoes. Scientists believe that the drinking of clithni is the secret of the almost fabulous longevity of the Ganymedians..."

Clark Ashton Smith, The Plutonian Drug (Amazing Stories, September 1934)

"...Finish your Ganymedean wap-frog croquette and let's get back to the office."

Philip K Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964)

...It was nine in the morning. Nat Flieger reflexively poured water in a cup and fed the living protoplasm incorporated into the Ampek F-a2 recording system which he kept in his office; the Ganymedean life form did not experience pain and had not yet objected to being made over into a portion of an electronic system... neurologically it was primitive, but as an auditory receptor it was unexcelled...

Philip K Dick, The Simulacra (1964)

...I remember as a child finding a Ganymedian toad in our garden. It was so beautiful with its shining flame and its long smooth hair...

Philip K Dick, A Maze of Death (1970)

...There was the time, for instance, that he had made off with the crown jewels of the Tsarn Princess of Ganymede. The people loved it. All of them excepting, of course, the Ganymedians. They were considerably upset, but being a minority group, there was not much that they could do, once Seeling had escaped with the jewels.

Chas. A Stearns, The Grave of Solon Regh (Planet Stories, Winter 1954)

...a Ganymedian honey bear stepped daintily into view. It was about the size of a fox, had sleek, heavy brown wool interspersed with longer black hairs, and a round, intelligent face...

Robert Moore Williams, Quest on Io (Planet Stories, Fall 1940)

...He sat in his car reading the morning New York Times. He kept his attention on the newspaper instead of the grinding, never-stopping environment which surrounded him, meditating on an article dealing with a further discovery of unicellular fossils on Ganymede...

Philip K Dick, The Simulacra (1964)

“Nice place to come to!" growled Henshaw argumentatively. “I’ve seen zinrota on Ganymede and johercs on Jupiter, but this lot’s got’em beat."

Thornton Ayre [= John Russell Fearn], Whispering Satellite
(Astounding Stories, January 1938)

- note: for the Jovian johercs see Penal World (Astounding Stories, October 1937):
https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v20n02_1937-10_frankenscan/page/n115/mode/2up

...His linguistic aptitude had been the means of saving us in at least one scrape. There was that time on Ganymede, among the plant-men. We were trapped, in one of their barred cages, and it was Cart’s ability in learning a few words of their language from our guard that rescued us from their horrible flesh-eating tree-god. But that’s another story...

Leslie F Stone, The Rape of the Solar System (Amazing Stories, December 1934)

...There was a sudden spangle of lights in the high darkness, balls of crimson and green and vicious yellow tumbling towards us, spots of death no bigger than your fist - the stinging fireflies of Ganymede.

Leigh Brackett, The Halfling (Astonishing Stories, February 1943)

callisto

"...It is not permitted to me to tell your waking earth-self of your real self, but we are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages. Next year I may be dwelling in the Egypt which you call ancient, or in the cruel empire of Tsan Chan which is to come three thousand years hence. You and I have drifted to the worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and dwelt in the bodies of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter. How little does the earth self know life and its extent..."

H P Lovecraft, Beyond the Wall of Sleep (first appeared in the amateur publication Pine Cones, October 1919)

...Captain Creed had neglected to hire replacements. Thus, the only other man aboard beside Captain Creed, Blaine and Holderlin, was Farjoram, the half-mad Callistonian cook.

Jack Vance, Planet of the Black Dust (Startling Stories, Summer 1946)

...There was the time, for instance, he had led the insurrection of the native Callistans against the domineering Earthmen, purely for the diversion of espousing a lost cause...

Eando Binder, Anton York, Immortal (1965), p. 27-8

...It happened too fast. He backed away out of instinct, but too slowly and too late. The gelatinlike Callisto cuddle sponge with its fifty feeding tubes clung to him, anchored itself to his chest. Already he felt the feeding tubes dig into him, into his chest.

He leaped to the overhead kitchen cabinets, grabbed out a half-filled bottle of scotch, unscrewed the lid with flying fingers, and poured the scotch onto the gelatinlike creature...

- Philip K Dick, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974), p.20

"...I’m a collector of alien cultural items,” he explained proudly. “I’ve got the most complete arrangement of Callistan prayer shrouds in the system.”

- Dylan Jeninga, Whom Gods Destroy (Vintage Worlds 2)

…Callistans teetering like scaly green sawhorses on their four stiff-jointed legs and walking-stick tails…

Roger Dee, Oh Mesmerist from Mimas! (Planet Stories, January 1953)

Wrigglers from the mercury mines of Callisto…

Stanley Mullen, Gama is Thee (Planet Stories, July 1953)

There was something too prominently predatory about the dashing good looks of his aquiline face, the gleam of his white teeth. His rich black synthesilk suit was of finest cut, and a beautiful Callistan fire opal smoldered on his slender white hand.

Edmond Hamilton, Treasure on Thunder Moon (1942)

The girl was tall, trim, supple; built like a symphony. Her Callistan vexto-silk gown, of the newest and most violent shade of "radioactive" green, was phosphorescently luminous; gleaming and glowing...

E E "Doc" Smith, First Lensman (1950)

"No, they won't wait to fight. They run like rock-rats on Callisto..."

Manly Wade Wellman, The Solar Invasion (1946)

"And," Joan said, "on the floor below you is a greeb-sloth from Callisto; it's all wound around a three-way floor lamp that's standard equipment in these conapts... circa 1960. It'll wake up as soon as the sun sets; then it goes out and shops for food..."

Philip K Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)

Stark had been in places before that oppressed him with a sense of their strangeness or their wickedness... the cliff-caves of Arianrhod on the edge of Darkside, the buried tomb-cities of Callisto...

Leigh Brackett, Enchantress of Venus (Planet Stories, Fall 1949)

saturnian zone

...In vain the Martian squirmed and struggled. The glowing tentacles were more destructive than sear-blades. Their corrosive writhings were more merciless than the pallid noose fungi that brought swift destruction to man, beast and Martian on the bleak Saturnian plateaus.

Frank Belknap Long, Red Moon (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1940)

...one's notions of weight tended to be somewhat wild when for some weeks one's own weight has shot far up or far down in between periods of weightlessness. The most reasonable estimate had to be based on muscular reaction. If you felt as sluggish as a Saturnian sloth, your weight was way up...

Eric Frank Russell, Hobbyist (Astounding Science Fiction, September 1947)

..."He says that militarism is ruining their race... it has weighed every Jovian down with an immense burden of guilt because of what their armies and military administration have done to alien life-forms on Ganymede, Titan, and Europa, not to mention the half-sentient bubbles of the Saturnian core..."

William Tenn, The Deserter (Star Science Fiction Stories, 1953)

...Those touches included such things as sufficient wealth to create the ultimate setting in coiffure and gown, as well as the single Saturnian paeaea stone glowing in priceless black splendour between her breasts...

William Tenn, Time In Advance (Galaxy, August 1956)

Home again, the old familiar Earth! He could scarcely believe it! Perhaps it was only a dream, and he'd wake up among the unhuman glittering cylinders of Saturn, shuddering and crawling with the iciness of their fixed regard...

Nat Schachner, Slaves of Mercury (Astounding Stories, September 1932)

...interplanetary wars had weakened the race. Invasions from outer space finished the destruction. Man survived on Saturn only through hybrid amalgamation with the conquerors. He vanished from the surface of Earth where sulphuric gases had poisoned the atmosphere for him but made it safe for the invaders...

Donald Wandrei, Finality Unlimited (Astounding Stories, September 1936)

From the fantasy-with-science-fictional-overtones in which the demon Charnadis tells us of his interplanetary rovings:

...I have flown through the triple ring of Saturn, and have mated with lovely basilisks, on isles towering league-high from stupendous oceans where each wave is like the rise and fall of Himalayas...

Clark Ashton Smith, Sadastor (Weird Tales, July 1930)

...and the livid seed
Of some black fruit a king in Saturn ate,
Which, cast upon his tinkling palace-floor,
Took root between the burnished flags, and now
Hath mounted and become a hellish tree,
Whose lithe and hairy branches, lined with mouths,
Net like a hundred ropes his lurching throne,
And strain at starting pillars...

Clark Ashton Smith, The Hashish Eater (1920)

"That's enough for today," he roared. "I can't stand to see any more piloting that that. I may be able to make real Rocketeers out of you, but I doubt it." As he turned away, puffing, his eye fell balefully on Curt Newton. "Wants to pilot in the Race! By the fourteen devil-gods of Saturn, I never thought I'd live to see such gall."

Edmond Hamilton, Star Trail to Glory (Captain Future, Spring 1941)

...A goblet of musty-tasting wine from the fungus-fruits of Saturn...

Edmond Hamilton, The Three Planeteers (Startling Stories, January 1940)

"There's the House of Far Worlds, where you can feel the actual soil of Mars and Venus, touch the moss of Jupiter and Saturn, walk through imaginative conceptions of other worlds..."

Jack Vance, To Live Forever (1956)

The towns in Saturn are decayed,
And melancholy Spectres throng them...

William Wordsworth, Peter Bell, A Tale (composed 1798, published 1819)

...On misted Saturn's surface were a few scattered settlements that gathered the valuable medicinal herbs that grew there...

Eando Binder, The Impossible World (Startling Stories, March 1939)

...Crane stood against the bar where he had been drinking Saturnian fungus-liquor a moment before...

Edmond Hamilton, The Revolt on the Tenth World (Amazing Stories, November 1940)

saturn / titan

“It’s a tree peculiar to Titan. I’ve seen it work and it’s mighty weird. A camivorous tree, of course.’

The girl studied its drooping branches, in particular the one to which her wrists were fastened.

“Looks harmless enough,” she said. “In fact, I’d say it’s asleep.”

“That’s just it,” he muttered. “It is asleep. Listen; you have seen an earthly sunflower turn its face to follow the sun, haven’t you?”

“Who hasn’t? What’s the connection?”

“This tree’s pretty similar. While the moon Titan is below the horizon, this tree is limp and resistless — biit once Titan rises, it comes to life! — something to do with its origin, it came, in the first place, by seed spores blown across space from Titan’s Whispering Forest. On tins world it starts to move and consume whatever living prey is near it the moment Titan comes over the horizon. Certain radiations from Titan stimulate its inner organs, just the same as the moon affects certain plants on Earth.”

The color fled from Lena’s face. “Then you mean it will attack us? Consume us?”

Lanning’s jaw squared. “That seems to be the idea..."

John Cotton (John Russell Fearn), Outlaw of Saturn (Science Fiction, March 1939)

rhea

...Rhea, about to be exploited for its sulphur and mercury, was soon to be given its first bio-conditioned citizens...

Eando Binder, The Impossible World (Startling Stories, March 1939)

titan

"...a carefully maintained culture of a lichen very much resembling the Titanian lichen from which Can-D is derived..."

Philip K Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964)

...His words made us thoughtful as we considered the various types of life we had encountered during our years of vagabondage around the system, two foot-loose fellows with a wanderer’s itch. There had been the plant-men of Ganymede, the crawling things that had spawned upon Titan, the blind-bat creatures of Io, the diabolical red snakes of Hyperion...

Leslie F Stone, The Rape of the Solar System (Amazing Stories, December 1934)

…woolly blue tree men from Titan…

Roger Dee, Oh Mesmerist from Mimas! (Planet Stories, January 1953)

...Somnolian, the powerful soporific powder found in the White Caves of Titan...

Hal K Wells, The White Brood (Thrilling Wonder Stories, November 1940)

...A snake-headed kibi from Titan sneaked up and tried to rip me open with its double-pointed tail...

Leigh Brackett, The Halfling (Astonishing Stories, February 1943)

hyperion

...His words made us thoughtful as we considered the various types of life we had encountered during our years of vagabondage around the system, two foot-loose fellows with a wanderer’s itch. There had been the plant-men of Ganymede, the crawling things that had spawned upon Titan, the blind-bat creatures of Io, the diabolical red snakes of Hyperion...

Leslie F Stone, The Rape of the Solar System (Amazing Stories, December 1934)

phoebe

“I am Fo-Peta,” he said, “from the Satellite Efrania, and these, my fellow-voyagers, are from Bar-Zee, the ninth moon. We have visited you as you see, in our space ships.”

Francis Flagg [George Henry Weiss], Tyrants of Saturn
(Science Fiction Digest, October 1933)

the satellites of saturn (in general)

Amiably imbecilic moondogs from the satellites of Saturn pressed flat faces against the walls of their insulated glass tanks…

Stanley Mullen, Gama is Thee (Planet Stories, July 1953)

uranian zone

I know
What clammy blossoms, blanched and cavern-grown,
Are proffered to their gods in Uranus
By mole-eyed peoples...

Clark Ashton Smith, The Hashish Eater (1920)

To flaunt
Before the blind in immarcesible purple
Won from the murex of Uranian seas...

Clark Ashton Smith, Soliloquy in an Ebon Tower (in The Dark Chateau (1951))

[note: should be "inmarcesible" according to the dictionary]

...He had quite a reputation as a big game hunter. He'd stalked the vicious Plutonian ice bears and lain in Venusian swamps waiting for the ten-ton lizards to rise out of the slime. He had knocked over the wildest of animals, a telepathic Uranian mountain wolf and had dropped in flight a Martian radar-bat, a feat duplicated by only three other marksmen on record...

Paul W Fairman, The Beasts in the Void (Imagination, April 1956)

"...Think of those horrible quick-acting fungi that destroyed the explorers of the first Uranus expedition..."

Fletcher Pratt and Lawrence Manning, Expedition to Pluto (Planet Stories, Winter 1939)

...Her fancy gown was iridescent, changing from blue to red to green. Must be pure Uranian silque, at a dollar an inch.

Eando Binder, Mystery World (Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1941)

"Here's Ziggy Trots, a secret agent... trenchcoat make of Uranian molecricket fur..."

Philip K Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), p.87

"I can't be seeing these things for I haven't been drinking!" gasped Otho. "Last time I saw anything like these was when I had too many radium highballs on Uranus!"

Edmond Hamilton, Quest Beyond the Stars (1941)

umbriel

...Even carbon and oxygen could be maintained and increased on Earth through utilization of the methane atmosphere of Titan and the frozen oxygen of Umbriel.

Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel (1954), chapter XIII

neptunian zone

"What? I'm sorry, darling. I was reading the report of that scout ship that was grounded on Neptune for a month and three days. Lord, it must be awful out there. Those ice-cold planets, no air and no light, just dead rock."

- Philip K Dick, The World Jones Made (1956), p.32.

...Captain Saunders, like all spacemen, was fundamentally a romantic. Even on a milk run like this he would sometimes dream of the ringed glory of Saturn or the somber Neptunian wastes, lit by the distant fires of the shrunken sun.

- Arthur C Clarke, Refugee (1955), in the collection The Other Side of the Sky (1961)

...You see there are four different sorts of beings represented in those cylinders up there. Three humans, six fungoid beings who can't navigate space corporeally, two beings from Neptune (God! if you could see the body this type has on its own planet!), and the rest entities from the central caverns of an especially interesting dark star beyond the galaxy...

H P Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness (Weird Tales, August 1931)

Iceworms from Neptune and Pluto...

Stanley Mullen, Gama is Thee (Planet Stories, July 1953)

The tables groaned with enormous masses of food, huge haunches of Jovian marsh-steers, rosy canal-fruit from Mars, sticky confections looted from Neptunian ships...

...finally a last goblet of sweet, cloying Neptunian sacra liqueur...

Edmond Hamilton, The Three Planeteers (Startling Stories, January 1940)

Drowsily, Riordan thought of past hunts. ...the grandeur and desolation of Neptune's liquid-gas swamps and the huge blind thing that screamed and blundered after him -

Poul Anderson, Duel on Syrtis (Planet Stories, March 1951)

...The fat little meteor-mimic instantly shifted his body cells and became a perfect imitation of a giant Neptunian oyster.

Edmond Hamilton, Star Trail to Glory (Captain Future, Spring 1941)

triton

Morbau-spawn from the honeycombed caverns of Triton…

Stanley Mullen, Gama is Thee (Planet Stories, July 1953)

"...On the moon of Neptune our scientists discovered purely gaseous entities in an advanced state of evolution..."

Henry Hasse, Trail of the Astrogar (Amazing Stories, October 1947)

plutonian zone

...Dorn was a frozen idol to the spiral beings of Pluto...

Nat Schachner, Slaves of Mercury (Astounding Stories, September 1932)

George Hartley shuffled dispiritedly along the rock walk and watched the two moons of Mars floating through the night. Phobos and Deimos - romantic twins of space sailing around the mysterious Red Planet. Silver worlds crying over a dead land of dust and sadness and lonely canals... nuts! He had ground out so much stinking copy about them - at five bucks a column inch - that he was sick of them both. He wished vaguely that they would buzz off into space and plough into the Sun. Yeah, that would be nice.

Then all the tremulous dames back on Earth would have to find something else to sigh over - axe murders, for instance, or the Lost Treasure of the Plutonian Caverns...

Chad Oliver, The Reporter (Fantastic Story Magazine, Fall 1951)

From the firedrakes of Mercury to the ice crawlers of Pluto, he had bagged them all...

Poul Anderson, Duel on Syrtis (Planet Stories, March 1951)

...Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window on all time and space, and tracing its history from the days it was fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought it to earth...

H P Lovecraft, The Haunter of the Dark (Weird Tales, December 1936)

Iceworms from Neptune and Pluto...

Stanley Mullen, Gama is Thee (Planet Stories, July 1953)

His proton pistol leaped from its holster of black Plutonian leather as he plunged recklessly forward.

Edmond Hamilton, Star Trail to Glory (Captain Future, Spring 1941)

...He had quite a reputation as a big game hunter. He'd stalked the vicious Plutonian ice bears and lain in Venusian swamps waiting for the ten-ton lizards to rise out of the slime. He had knocked over the wildest of animals, a telepathic Uranian mountain wolf and had dropped in flight a Martian radar-bat, a feat duplicated by only three other marksmen on record...

Paul W Fairman, The Beasts in the Void (Imagination, April 1956)

charon:

"Life Two is inherently incompatible with Life One, if I may so term all organic life with which we have heretofore been familiar, including the lichens from Charon..."

Keith Laumer, Rogue Bolo (1986)

outermost zone

...In that hall the captive mind of an incredible entity - a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future - had kept a certain thing which it had modeled from clay...

H P Lovecraft, The Shadow Out of Time (Astounding Stories, June 1936)

cluff-clusters ("cluffters")

…Cargo Declarations is a regular Mecca for Eetee traders from the outlands. I saw both kinds of Martians, the cat-whiskered, man-like, yellow city-dwellers and their wilder, little, brown babboon-faced cousins from the red upland deserts; pink-and-white Venusians glistening like four-foot snails under the celloplast sheets that kept them from dehydrating in the dry Martian air; Callistans teetering like scaly green sawhorses on their four stiff-jointed legs and walking-stick tails; woolly blue tree men from Titan and ponderous Europans rolling on the little three-wheeled carts they used to carry their barrel-bellied tonnage…

Roger Dee, Oh Mesmerist from Mimas! (Planet Stories, January 1953)

…They moved amid a nightmarish cacophony of sounds. In memory roused by the various elements of the uproar, Bar Ferris revisited the far planets. Fortunately the light was too dim to see all the sources of sound, but Ferris mentally identified many of the caged dwellers by ear or nose.

…Surly sand leopards from Mars paced their cages and vented sounds like needles caught in the grooves of antique disc recordings. Partially gaseous life forms from Saturn had no vocal apparatus, but showed their uneasy displeasures by flaring into sudden crimsons and bruised purples of luminosity…

Wrigglers from the mercury mines of Callisto… Morbau-spawn from the honeycombed caverns of Triton… Seven-limbed bat-noses from the twilight zone of Mercury. Iceworms from Neptune and Pluto, and the deadly windharps from Mars. Amiably imbecilic moondogs from the satellites of Saturn pressed flat faces against the walls of their insulated glass tanks…

Stanley Mullen, Gama is Thee (Planet Stories, July 1953)

...We visited your Earth when the seas were first cooling. We taught the plant-like creatures of Mars to build their civilizations under water. We helped the creatures of your planet Pluto to escape to a planet of the binary star Sirius when their own world lost its atmosphere...

Colin Wilson, The Space Vampires (1976)

She had crossed the fabulous Purple Ice Mountains of Mercury’s Dark Side on the furry back of a three-ton landohr bear. She had swum the deadly Rainbow Rapids of Mars’ Gorge of the Giants. She had lived for a month with the savage tortoise people of Luna’s inner caverns.

Hal K Wells, The White Brood (Thrilling Wonder Stories, November 1940)

The tables groaned with enormous masses of food, huge haunches of Jovian marsh-steers, rosy canal-fruit from Mars, sticky confections looted from Neptunian ships.

Edmond Hamilton, The Three Planeteers (Startling Stories, January 1940)

"There's the House of Far Worlds, where you can feel the actual soil of Mars and Venus, touch the moss of Jupiter and Saturn, walk through imaginative conceptions of other worlds..."

Jack Vance, To Live Forever (1956)

...He had quite a reputation as a big game hunter. He'd stalked the vicious Plutonian ice bears and lain in Venusian swamps waiting for the ten-ton lizards to rise out of the slime. He had knocked over the wildest of animals, a telepathic Uranian mountain wolf and had dropped in flight a Martian radar-bat, a feat duplicated by only three other marksmen on record...

Paul W Fairman, The Beasts in the Void (Imagination, April 1956)

...His words made us thoughtful as we considered the various types of life we had encountered during our years of vagabondage around the system, two foot-loose fellows with a wanderer’s itch. There had been the plant-men of Ganymede, the crawling things that had spawned upon Titan, the blind-bat creatures of Io, the diabolical red snakes of Hyperion...

Leslie F Stone, The Rape of the Solar System (Amazing Stories, December 1934)