Aborigen

Dispatches from a Size Fantasy Writer

collage of four vintage pulp fiction covers featuring gigantic women

Vintage Size Fantasy

Vintage Size Fantasy work published before mid-20th century.

Aborigen
4–6 minutes
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This is a collection page for Size Fantasy-appropriate works, both books and short stories, published prior to mid-20th century. My concern is that there’s a ton of vintage, Golden Age work that could be lost to time because 1) there’s new stuff coming out all the time, and 2) no one knows how to find this stuff.

This is going to be my personal record of links to stories, so you can read Size Fantasy before it was even a thing. Some of these are really fantastic and deserve renewed attention.

Collage of vintage pulp fiction illustrations. An astronaut stands upon the breast of a giantess in a bikini; a giant man in futuristic clothes fends off an aerial assault while stumbling through a city; a giant woman in loincloth playfully hoists a man like a baby.

Giant People

Collage of vintage pulp fiction illustrations featuring tiny people. A tiny man fights off a rat; a princess is startled by a tiny knight on a horse; a ham radio operator regards a tiny woman materializing on a small platform.

Tiny People

13 responses to “Vintage Size Fantasy”

  1. Undersquid Avatar
    Undersquid

    Good lord, that “Six Inches” was extraordinarily difficult to finish. There are eighteen different ways I’d have written that differently.

    Thank you for compiling these works! You do good things.

    Liked by 2 people

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    1. Aborigen Avatar
      Aborigen

      Thank you! I kept seeing these stories flash by and I’m like, “No, people should know about these. More people than me.”

      Yeah, Bukowski would write a very specific kind of Size story, wouldn’t he.

      Liked by 1 person

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  2. Olo Avatar
    Olo

    I don’t know if it’s available online, but the translations of J.C. Mardrus (Arabic->French) and Edward Mathers (French->English) of One Thousand and One Nights contains at least one tale featuring giants, including one in which a giant princess receives intimate comfort from the protagonist. Mardrus’s translation is widely considered to include his own additions to the collection of Arabic folktales. I read somewhere that the giant princess scene was “no doubt influenced by Swift and the Maids of Brobdingnag.”

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    1. Aborigen Avatar
      Aborigen

      That’s true, I forgot all about that. And recently I was reading some folklore about some Middle Eastern hero who fell in love with a giantess princess, and he has to break into an underground fortress to see her again. Wonder if I can find that.

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    2. Aborigen Avatar
      Aborigen

      I’m unable to locate that translation in Gutenberg. I found a Spanish translation of Mardrus, but in three volumes of tales it doesn’t seem to mention a giant princess.

      The Library of Congress seems to be working on an Arabic > French > banned Japanese copy, but don’t hold your breath.
      https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchCode=LCCN&searchArg=98838163&searchType=1&permalink=y

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      1. Olo Avatar
        Olo

        As I recall, the giant king decides that the protagonist must be some kind of talking bird and gives him to his daughter. In the Mathers (re-)translation, she calls him her “cock,” which eventually lends itself to a double-meaning, which might not have made it into the Spanish translation. I also seem to recall it might be Night #804.

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        1. Aborigen Avatar
          Aborigen

          I’ve just found something a lot like that, in a 1964 edition, at the end of the Giant People list.

          Liked by 1 person

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          1. Olo Avatar
            Olo

            That’s it! Night #604! Rest from your labours, O Scholar! My long-sought quarry is brought to earth.

            Liked by 1 person

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    3. T. W, Ciarlariello Avatar
      T. W, Ciarlariello

      “Little Everyman” by Deborah Needleman Armintor suggested other sources where she even describes how “Dildo” referred to a British story about Italians being tiny enough to crawl into a lady’s bodily crevices.

      Also a painting by Francois Boucher shows how 18th Century sanitation of how a lady stuck a gravy boat up under her skirt.

      Still when I was a teenager I fell in love with Asimov’s annotated illustrations so go see “Az Oriasok Orsazagaban”(1980) starring Agi Szirtes as Glumdalitch and Andrea Drahota as a Brobdingnagian Queen.

      Read “Cosmic Sisters” by Leroy Yerxa in of Sept. 1946 “Amazing Stories”.

      Liked by 2 people

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      1. Aborigen Avatar
        Aborigen

        Fascinating! I found the Boucher painting immediately, it’s a crack-up. I’m looking for ‘Little Everyman,’ it’s not in my library system, but I might be able to order it for $35. I’m adding Yerxa’s “The Cosmic Sisters” to the collection right now. Thank you so much for sharing!

        Liked by 1 person

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        1. Olo Avatar
          Olo

          Last night I suggested that my local library acquire Little Everyman via ILL.

          Liked by 1 person

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          1. T. W. Ciarlariello Avatar
            T. W. Ciarlariello

            “Az Oriasok Orszagaban” (1980) has “Brobdingnagian maids” scene so if one is interested in of greater adventurous I would like to recommend D. L. Site and DrCreep on Deviantart of how “Melisande” by Edith Nesbit like Disney’s canceled “Gigantic” of “Princess Inma” were indicative of being too bowdlerized as if Fredric Wertham ran Disney since I like how Olo had written a sequel to “Heer Der Drei Welten” (1960) of what happened when a protagonist was away under a Catholic nun habit clad Queen’s blanket from his red headed Elizabeth clad in of “Princess Jasmine” style translucent nickers with golden bra garb closer to what previous voyage chapter wore.

            Please remember how Swift in of 1726 described Brobdingnag as located in what today is Korea and Kamchatka so just imagine what it would have been like if the North Pacific had such a continent east of Russian Siberia China and west of British Columbia California?

            There is a Birobdizhan along the Amur River between China & Russia.

            Still Arthur C. Clarke’s “Cosmic Casanova” is noteworthy to have a giantess “Leia Lau” decades before “Star Wars” had “Leia” and Dr Who had “Leela” since he reasoned and noticed how humans have evolved larger to survive rigorous horrors of childbirth.

            There are energy anomalies of the North Pacific and giant squids only have been found along such shores after intense storms of energies where according to Steven Hawking nuclear electromagnetic and gravity can exchange properties for transit between parallel universes of how Dr. Paul Steinhardt of Princeton claims to have found hyperdimensional aperiodic quasicrystals in Kamchatka while a CIA agent died trying to locate such a mineral in of Eastern North Korea to remember how Jack Kirby claimed WWII FBI agents raided Marvel Comics about how what vaporized Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been a Nikola Tesla particle beam of who knows why high energy research labs dominate around the Pacific Ocean.

            Even Irwin Allen claimed is show “Land of the Giants” was based on some distant memory since by Square Cube a gigantic creature could only exist aboard a spacecraft o inside space station or exist being a living airship.

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  3. The Little Everyman – El Amante Menguante Avatar
    The Little Everyman – El Amante Menguante

    […] years later a fellow Size scholar alerted us to the fact that that Armintor had expanded this article into The Little Everyman: Stature and […]

    Liked by 1 person

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