Introduction to the Golden Amazon series

UPDATED: An interesting and long-running series that I think many might not know about is the Golden Amazon series by John Russell Fearn (1908-1960).

Most of the series is ready available, but there is also a lot of misinformation about it. I have gotten some of the works and plan on doing detailed posts on stories as I read them. So here I basically introduce this series overall.

Fearn was a British author, though surprisingly, many of his works were actually published first mainly in the United States, and then later in Canada. He first created a character named Violet Ray, known as the “Golden Amazon,” in a quartet of stories in Fantastic Adventures, from 1939-43.

This Golden Amazon is more of a Tarzan story, with Violet a child of Earth who survives a crash on Venus that kills her parents. She becomes a sort of superhuman thanks to the Venusian environment and grows up among the natives to later fight the bad guys who caused her ship to crash on Venus.

If you want to read these stories, the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box has reprinted the four, and there is another collection titled The Golden Amazon of Venus from Gryphon Books. Sadly, both are hard to find.

Fearn revamped the character of Violet Ray for a series of books in 1944. Some sources claim he reworked the stories, but that is not so if you take a deeper look at the character. Now, Violet Ray Brant was the subject of a glandular experiment as a baby that turned her into a superhuman during the German Blitz of World War II. She would have increased strength and intelligence, golden skin and hair, with the hope that she’d lead the world into peace. Instead she nearly destroys the world with atomic power, and is able to escape the world’s wraith by creating a synthetic duplicate of herself who dies in her place in the first book.

In the next few stories, she starts working to stop menaces to the Earth, and helps with the conquest of Venus, Mars, and other planets of the solar system. With the seventh novel, a new character is introduced — Abna the Atlantean — and a new direction for the series begins that is more based in the stars, as well as jumping further into the future. The series would be serialized in the Toronto Star Weekly, then later reprinted in book form. But later stories in the series would never originally be published in book form.

Golden Amazon Series:

• “The Golden Amazon” (1944)
• “The Golden Amazon Returns” (1948)
• “The Golden Amazon’s Triumph” (1953)
• “The Amazon’s Diamond Quest” (1953)
• “The Amazon Strikes Again” (1954)
• “Twin of the Amazon” (1954)
• “Conquest of the Amazon/World of Ice” (1949)
• “Lord of Atlantis” (1949)
• “Triangle of Power” (1950)
• “The Amethyst City” (1951)
• “Daughter of the Golden Amazon” (1952)
• “Quorne Returns” (1952)
• “The Central Intelligence” (1953)
• “The Cosmic Crusaders” (1955)
• “Parasite Planet” (1955)
• “World Out of Step” (1956)
• “The Shadow People” (1957)
• “Kingpin Planet” (1957)
• “World in Reverse” (1958)
• “Dwellers in Darkness” (1958)
• “World in Duplicate” (1959)
• “Lords of Creation” (2005)
• “Duel with Colossus” (2005)
• “Standstill Planet” (1960)
• “Ghost World” (1960)
• “Earth Divided” (1961)
• “Chameleon Planet” (2006) with Philip Harbottle

Now, if you want to read this series, it’s a little tricky. Philip Harbottle became the literary executor of Fearn’s works, and helped to bring many of them back into print in book form for the first time for many. Harbottle was the right person for the job, as he had written a bio-bibliography of Fearn (The Multi-Man in 1968).

With the Golden Amazon series, Harbottle worked with reprinting the series at Gryphon Books, along with four sequels by John Glasby.  Unfortunately, the Gryphon editions are hard to find, as there were only 500 copies of each printed and the unsold stock was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. Harbottle later got with Wildside/Borgo Press to re-reprint them, and those should be available.  However, Harbottle had this series start with #7, as this started a new phase in the series.  And chose not to include the later ones by Glasby.

What about #1 through 6? More recently (around 2016), Harbottle worked with Venture Press/Endeavour Press to bring those back in print (no idea why not Wildside/Borgo). The plan was to have them available in print (via print-on-demand) and ebook editions. An added bonus would have been a forward giving the full history of the Golden Amazon series by Harbottle.

However, as best I can tell, only #1-3 are available in print form, and #1-5 in ebook form and Venture/Endeavour seems defunct, though you can still purchase these via Amazon. I would hope this can be addressed at some point. One of the owners of Endeavour has started a new concern called Endeavor Media that include Venture as their sf line, and they will make the books available in ebook form, with #6 coming soon.  Hopefully someone can bring the first six out in print form.

So there you have it. As noted, I hope to start reading these book soon, and will post follow-ups on the series, probably covering a few books at a time.