“Collapsing Cosmoses“

   Short story fragment (640 words); written in collaboration with R.H.Barlow. First published in Leaves (1938); first collected in MW

   Dam Bor looks through his cosmoscope and sees an enemy fleet advancing through space. He and the narrator go to the Great Council Chamber to alert delegates from other galaxies. Hak Ni, a commander, is asked by Oll Stof, the president of the chamber, to battle the fleet. He does so. The fragment ends at this point.

   The idea was for each author to write alternating paragraphs, although HPL sometimes wrote only a few words before yielding the pen to his younger colleague, so that considerably more than half the piece is Barlow’s, as are a fair number of the better jokes. As a satire on the space operas popularized by Edmond Hamilton, E.E. “Doc” Smith, and others, the story is fairly effective.