New on Archive.org for the first time, a good scan of Tales of Wonder No. 8, for Autumn 1939.

The SF Encyclopedia states the magazine gave Arthur C. Clarke his first professional published articles, and as we see above it also gave British readers the strong taste of the other Clark, Clark Ashton Smith. Tales of Wonder also had…

“The Smile of the Sphinx” (Autumn 1938, No. 4) – where cats are discovered to be aliens observing humans – was one of the most popular stories the magazine published.

A pity Lovecraft could not have lived to chuckle at that one. The title may even have been a nod to Lovecraft… “the smile of the Sphinx vaguely displeased us, and made us wonder about the legends of subterranean passages beneath” (“Under the Pyramids”).

The 12,000-word cat tale was such a success that the fanzine Tomorrow No. 7 (August 1938) published a “making of…” article by the author.

The story itself can be found reprinted in Worlds Beyond 1 (December 1950), available as an open PDF download at Archive.org. A poor scan, but readable. An amusing story, with a British setting that reminds me of Wells’s War of the Worlds, plus we get a thinly disguised Arthur C. Clarke as a story character.

Sadly, it can’t be made into an audiobook and AI will botch it due to the poor OCR underlying the poor Archive.org scan. The author only died relatively recently, in 1989, and thus it is still in copyright. Presumably the rights are what has prevented it from being included in various ‘SF with cats’ anthologies over the years, since I can find no trace of it in such.