C. L. Moore

“Review of Northwest of Earth (1954)”

“Review of Black God's Kiss”

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“Moore at Fantastic Fiction”

“Profile at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame”

“C. L. Moore certainly must be a genius — I liked her "Dust of Gods" almost better than any of the tales so far published. My one objection is the omnipresent ray-gun, whose use seemed particularly unnecessary in this tale, since the dust could better have been ignited by some secret device installed aeons ago to protect it from desecration.”

“The distinctive thing about Miss Moore is her ability to devise conditions & sights & phenomena of utter strangeness & originality, & to describe them in a language conveying something of their outre, phantasmagoric, & dread-filled quality. That in itself is an accomplishment possessed by very few of the contributors to the cheap pulp magazines.”

“As a writer, Miss Moore is certainly the discovery of the last few years. No other newcomer is even in the running.”

“Catherine Leigh Moore shattered the masculine barriers of fantasy and science fiction when she started publishing her remarkable short stories in Weird Tales in the 1930s. Her character Jirel, the ruler of the fiefdom of Joiry in medieval France, was the first female Sword-and-Sorcery hero. And, considering how much competition she faces today from the warrior women who have followed the path she blazed, she remains one of the best.”

“When you’re young you never doubt yourself. You never wonder if you’re justified. But as a man gets older he learns to doubt. Whether he can do a thing—whether he should.”

“There’s no such thing as a theatrical troupe without conflicts.”

“Only fools offend me, woman, and they but once.”

“She turned her face up to the strange stars and wondered in what direction her course lay. The sky looked blankly down upon her with its myriad meaningless eyes.”

“And not until then did she remember how fatal it is said to be to accept a gift from a demon. Buy, or earn it, but never accept the gift.”

“She half expected, despite her brave words, to come out upon the storied and familiar red-hot pave of hell, and this pleasant, starlit land surprised her and made her wary. The things that built the tunnel could not have been human. She had no right to expect men here. She was a little stunned by finding open sky so far underground, though she was intelligent enough to realize that however she had come, she was not underground now. No cavity in the earth could contain this starry sky.”

“All about her, as suddenly as the awakening from a dream, the nothingness had opened out into undreamed-of distances. She stood high on a hilltop under a sky spangled with strange stars. Below she caught glimpses of misty plains and valleys with mountain peaks rising far away. And at her feet a ravening circle of small, slavering, blind things leaped with clashing teeth.”

“The stone walls were incised with those inevitable, mysterious symbols which have become nothing more than queer designs now, though a million years ago they bore deep significance.”

“Beauty is as tangible as blood, in a way. It is a separate, distinct force that inhabits the bodies of men and women. You must have noticed the vacuity that accompanies perfect beauty in so many women...the force so strong that it drives out all other forces and lives vampirishly at the expense of intelligence and goodness and conscience and all else.”

“She was unbinding her turban...He watched, not breathing, a presentiment of something horrible stirring in his brain, inexplicably...The red folds loosened, and—he knew then that he had not dreamed—again a scarlet lock swung down against her cheek...a hair, was it? A lock of hair?... thick as a thick worm it fell, plumply, against that smooth cheek...more scarlet than blood and thick as a crawling worm...and like a worm it crawled.”

“Nothing I have ever written was given the slightest deliberation. It was there in the typewriter and it came out, a total bypassing of the brain.”