This Amazon ain’t no princess

So, while working on cutting down my own shelf of shame this summer, I finally got around to reading the late ‘70s anthology Superheroes – which, appropriately enough, I found out about from a column written many years ago by Greg Hatcher, the coiner of the term ‘shelf of shame’ (more recently reposted at the AJS).

And the entry that grabbed my imagination more than any other in that tome was not Larry Niven’s (in)famous essay about Superman’s sex life, nor Robert Bloch’s “Stuporman” nor even the contributions by seasoned SF hands like Norman Spinrad or George Alec Effinger. Nope, I was most fascinated by a story from the early 1940s, “The Golden Amazon Returns” by British writer John Russell Fearn (who back then had these stories published under the pseudonym Thornton Ayre).

In fact, this one led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, because after I read it, I wanted more – and as it turns out, the story in this anthology is actually the third one to feature the titular heroine. All four of the original Golden Amazon stories appeared in a pulp magazine called Fantastic Adventures: the first one (“The Golden Amazon”) in the July 1939 issue (over 2 years before a certain Amazonian princess), the second (“The Amazon Fights Again”) in the June 1940 issue, the third (the aforementioned “The Golden Amazon Returns”) in the January 1941 issue and the fourth (“Children of the Golden Amazon”) in the April 1943 issue.

I should probably explain why the Golden Amazon is such a cool character. She is an Earth woman named Violet Ray, who – in the mid-21^st century – was raised from infancy by the weird-looking natives of Venus when the spaceship carrying her family crashed on the planet. The nature of the Venusian environment and the way solar radiation refracts through its atmosphere gave her super strength, virtual invulnerability and her skin a golden/amber hue. Violet grows up to become a planet hopping heroine who fights space-faring organized crime gangs and pirates.

What I like about her is that she’s a swashbuckling, wisecracking adventurer who – in a manner rather reminiscent of the Golden Age Superman – has no compunction about using her superior strength to pretty mercilessly slap around bad guys (and she’s not above breaking bones or even killing them if necessary). Another thing I found interesting is that she has a male sidekick/love interest, an ordinary Earthman named Chris Wilson, who often functions as a male version of a damsel in distress, thus turning the classic formula on its head. And Violet is not above taunting him for not being able to take punishment like she can.

The first three stories are really fun, as reflected in the illustrations by Julian Krupa from the magazine that I’ve included here. I highly recommend tracking them down – they’re easy enough to find in digital form online. (The fourth story, which focuses on her teenage daughter and son, is really not that good for a number of reasons.)

But those stories were it for the Golden Amazon in that form, as in 1944, Fearn revamped the character, altering her origin (her powers were the result of scientific experimentation) and setting (mid-20^th century rather than mid-21^st) and even changed her hair color from raven-black to blonde. And she’s apparently some kind of super scientist.

Fearn went on to write nearly 30 novels of this iteration of the Golden Amazon – you can find more information at a blog called the Pulp Super-Fan. There are two posts, an introductory one and then a review of the first three books ( and more recently, these Golden Amazon novels have been republished in new paperback/ebook editions). I have to be honest, though, that I have little interest in this version of the character based on the description. I prefer the rough-and-tumble Amazon we get in the first three stories, and kind of regret that she never jumped over to the comics, or other media, in that form.