About Thomas Kent Miller

Contact e-mail: thomaskentmiller@gmail.com

In the Beginning—the Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook

"Travelers afoot in hot deserts should set their course toward shade!"

—Junior Woodchucks' Guidebook

This is a quote from the Dell comic book Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge # 7 (1954). That one comic book, which I read when I was nine or ten, has in many ways informed the direction of my imagination for the whole of my life. It is a splendidly written and drawn tale by Carl Barks of Uncle Scrooge McDuck and his nephews, Donald Duck and Huey, Dewey, and Louie, discovering the Seven Cities of Cibola in the American Southwest.

            In every possible way, all my books are tributes or homages to Uncle Scrooge # 7.

 

            While the cover of the Scrooge comic books prominently displayed Walt Disney’s name, what I did not know as a child was that Mr. Disney had little to do with Uncle Scrooge. Scrooge was the creation of a man named Carl Barks and the best Scrooge stories—the ones that haunted me were the ones in which the ducks stumbled on a succession of lost lands and cities—Atlantis, the Shangri-La inspired Tralla La, the mountain kingdom of the Incas, the underground land of Terry Fermy, the Labyrinth of the Minotaur, among many others.

            It was a full two decades later that I realized that these stories were mainly conceptual pastiches of Sir H. Rider Haggard’s many tales of lost cities. Barks drew from the Haggard (and his offspring, such as, Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, and James Hilton) as surely as desert nomads draw water from an oasis well. The magic Barks touched me with—as glorious as it was—was, in a way, recycled magic. Haggard invented the magic, the subgenre of fantasy that has come to be known as the “lost race adventure.” (Yes, while I know that other 18th and 19th century authors are sometimes touted as the originators of this type of story, I am unhesitant in bestowing the honor onto Haggard.)

            Once I realized this, I began to collect Haggard and found that it was the 18 “memoirs” (12 novels, 2 novellas, and 4 short stories) of Allan Quatermain (especially those featuring his Hottentot aide-de-camp Hans) that resonated with me the most. It was inevitable, then, that I discovered other Quatermain lost memoirs locked inside my own head. The trick was to get them out!

            Looking back again, to that same period, to 1953, when I was eight years old and in third grade, two marvelous things happened. My older brother took me to two movies, the sum experience of which affected my life dramatically. In February we saw The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms at the Manor Theater on 25th avenue in San Mateo, California. I’d never seen anything like this! A giant dinosaur destroying a city right in front of my eyes! The movie was magical to my child mind because even then I was pretty clear that everything around me was ordinary and prosaic, and a giant monster destroying a city was certainly not ordinary.

In the background from left to right: On ottoman, my Mars book; on desk, my three "Holmes Behind the Veil" books; a photo with my wife and granddaughter; a Martian war machine from The War of the Worlds (1953); a framed reminder of the dream that kick-started my Holmes/Haggard books; Wilkie and Rider. In the foreground: me, Zero, and Ellie.

              Then came October and The War of the Worlds. If seeing a dinosaur destroying a city in black and white so thrilled me, can you imagine how I felt about Martians destroying the whole world in brilliant Technicolor?

            It is worth gauging my immediate reactions to these two movies. While I left the theater in February wide-eyed and satisfactorily in awe of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the names of the makers of that film had not made an impression on my 8-year-old mind and it would be a few years before I realized that it was the genius Ray Harryhausen who had animated the beast of the title. However, in October I exited the theater very much aware that The War of the Worlds was a George Pal movie—and I became a lifelong George Pal fan, and incidentally, a lover of Mars movies.

            Beyond that, I’ve been married to one beautiful woman for 40 years (and counting) and have an awesome son and granddaughter.

            Otherwise, I am a former employee of NASA and a retired magazine editor. I’ve written for The Weird Tales Collector, The Ghosts & Scholars M. R. James Newsletter, Faunus: The Journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen, Wormwood, HarperCollins, Borgo Press, Wildside Press, and Hippocampus Press. I love Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories, 19th-century Hudson River School landscape paintings, and home theater.  Oh!   Let us not forget Forbidden Planet!