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Page 149
expand and enrich the Kuttners' best work. Kuttner provided insights into the minds of childrenhe seemed to have a particular fondness for what has become known as the generation gapand his literary references, perhaps appropriately, were almost entirely restricted to Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
James Gunn, "Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Lewis Padgett et al.," Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers, ed. Thomas D. Clareson (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976), Vol. 1, pp. 19495
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Susan Gubar
("Shambleau") perfectly epitomizes the nature of Moore's contribution to the history of SF: what is striking is first the lack of technological hardware; secondly, the revisionary myth-making, specifically of a myth central to women's identity; and finally, the concomitant portrait of the woman as alien, specifically the obsession with the ways in which her body is experienced as foreign and dangerous. This last motif finds expression not only in the monstrous Shambleau, but in the exceptionally beautiful heroines of Moore's stories too; in the Minga girls on Venus in "Black Thirst" (1933), for example, who have been bred to such exquisite grace that their loveliness is almost "soul-destroying" to Northwest Smith when he attempts to help one member of the harem escape the prison guarded by their keeper-creator. Both the ugly and the beautiful heroinesperhaps especially the latteruse their looks as a tactic for survival and retribution in a fallen world where female assertion and autonomy are defined as impossible or unnatural. The beauty of many of Moore's heroines is especially potent through the alluring adornments of costuming, cosmetology, and cosmetics, as they are exotically practiced in extraterrestrial worlds. In a story she published in Astounding (March 1944), "The Children's Hour,'' Moore describes the fated infatuation of a soldier for a lovely alien girl who is closely identified with Danae, divine in a shower of gold.
Moore's sensitivity to the ethical issues surrounding the mystique of female beauty is probably best illustrated by "Vintage Season" (1946), her most frequently anthologized story, in which she creates a race of aesthetes whose physical perfection and sensitivity lead to a narcissistic quest for sensation: time-travelling to spectacular disasters in history, this race of beautiful people has lost all sense of responsibility or sympathy. The human hero of this story is destroyed when the aliensmost conspicuously the girl he falls in

 
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