Henry Kuttner
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Henry Kuttner was the author of many sci-fi and fantasy short stories in The Thirties, Forties, and Fifties. He is not well known today both due to his use of over a dozen pen names (his most famous ones are Lawrence O'Donnell and Lewis Padgett, both used in collaboration with his wife C. L. Moore), and to his untimely death at the age of 42. Several of his stories were adapted for film or TV:
- "Mimsy Were the Borogroves" (adapted as The Last Mimzy)
- "The Twonky"
- "What You Need" (adapted for The Twilight Zone)
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Henry Kuttner provides examples of the following tropes:
- After the End: The Black Sun Rises is set in the dark age following a nuclear war.
- Alternative Number System: In The Iron Standard, the six-fingered Venusians use base-12.
- Conspiracy Theorist: Satirized in Don't Look Now
- Creator Couple: With his wife, C. L. Moore.
- Death by Irony: Vanning in Time Locker
- Drunken Master: Gallegher's genius is activated only when drunk.
- Everything's Better with Penguins: MacDuff in The Voice of the Lobster
- I Need a Freaking Drink: Galloway/Gallegher in Time Locker, when he realizes that Vanning had reached into the future and crushed himself.
- Just Before the End: Vintage Season is about time travelling tourists who visit the past before disasters occur. In the story, they are visiting the 20th Century just prior to the beginning of a world wide plague.
- Laser-Guided Karma: The Furies are programmed to enforce this in Two-Handed Engine.
- Meet Cute: Real Life example. Kuttner liked the writing of fellow science-fiction writer C. L. Moore, so a mutual acquaintance, H.P. Lovecraft, gave him Moore's address. Lovecraft failed to mention that 'C. L.' stood for 'Catherine Lucille', so Kuttner addressed his fan letter to 'Mr. C. L. Moore'. Even so, Kuttner and Moore fell in love and eventually married.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: The Iron Standard
- Off with His Head: Done posthumously by the headhunters in Home Is the Hunter.
- Those Wacky Nazis: Get knocked for a loop by Nothing But Gingerbread Left
- Was Once a Man: Gnomes in A Gnome There Was
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: The neo-Viking leader in The Black Sun Rises started out this way.
- Zeerust: Inevitable