A Brand New World by Ray Cummings

When father first arrived, they had respected him and listened to his advice.  But gradually the power of Graff's oratory, his sweeping personality, his incessant propaganda, had its effect.  As this evil genius rose in power, father and his influence waned.

Let's continue our examination of the work of Ray Cummings, recently heralded by Bill Christensen as a "giant of Golden Age scientificiation."  Today's subject: A Brand New World, a novel first serialized in the fall of 1928 in Argosy.  I own two paperback editions of A Brand New World, an Ace copy printed in 1976 as part of Ace's "Science Fiction from the Great Years" line, which I bought some time ago, and an Ace 1964 printing which I received from internet SF maven Joachim Boaz.  The cover on F-313 is embarrassingly amateurish--the composition makes no sense, the people's faces and bodies are lifeless and rudimentary, and the colors are uninspired.  Even the beautiful skyline of Manhattan, the center of the universe and the tomb of my decayed dreams, looks bad on this cover!  Did Donald Wollheim's barber do this?  Did Ace accidentally print Jack Gaughan's initial color sketch?  I don't get it!

The 1976 printing has a solid Vincent DiFate cover featuring an attractive woman with insect wings and rays coming out of her palms who seems to be standing on a pile of my old gaming computers.  This cover is not bad, but I have to say that the fact that neither of these covers includes a gun or a sword has my spider senses tingling.  If A Brand New World turns out to be a mind-numbing utopia I am going to be irritated.  I can take some comfort from the fact that A Brand New World seems to have been popular with editors and readers--not only did Ace publish it twice in paperback, but in 1942 it appeared a second time in magazine form, in Famous Fantastic Mysteries.  How bad can it be if they kept printing it?

Zetta doesn't actually have wings, nor does
she shoot rays from her many-jointed
fingers

Well, let's hit the text and see what this thing is all about.  I have chosen to read the 1976 edition, because the print is bigger (it's 205 pages versus the '64 edition's 158) and my eyes are old.  (This was perhaps a mistake, as the 1976 edition, it turns out, is full of typos.)

Our narrator for A Brand New World is Peter Vanderstufyt, a journalist in the future world of 1966.  (The narrator of the two Tama books we just read was also a journalist--the kind of journalist who engages in zero gravity hand-to-hand combat with aliens!)  He's had to leave New York City for the Middle West (I know your feels, Petey!) to cover a murder trial in Indiana.  While Petey's out there, his father, a famous astronomer, is observing the new planet which is hurtling towards our solar system.  (Remember how in all those Edmond Hamilton stories a star hurtling into our solar system presaged a tremendous space war?)  This new planet, dubbed Xenephrene, takes up an orbit between the Earth and Venus.  Its presence there is going to make a mess of the Earth's climate and weather--this big blue marble's axis shifts so that soon the northern and southern hemispheres will take turns enduring scorching days six months long followed by frigid six-month nights!

The world's governments and the international clerisy of eggheads keep the news of this catastrophe a secret from the masses, but lift their censorship the day Petey gets back to the East Coast (this way Petey can be the broadcaster who breaks the story!)  In one of those strange coincidences we just have to accept if our hobby is going to be reading fiction instead of something logical like gardening or hang gliding, the very same time the news of this world-altering cataclysm is being revealed, down in Puerto Rico, Petey's sister Hulda meets an emissary from Xenephrene, a young woman with white hair who has arrived in a silver sphere and whose name is "Zetta."

I think I played Vanilla Angband on
the one on the left, and Doom with my
brother on the one on the right

The authorities keep Zetta a secret--a leitmotif of this book is elites keeping the masses in the dark.  The US government sends Petey's Dad down to PR to study Zetta and try to communicate with her.  While Dad is spending time with the space girl, the world's governments and populations are making a beeline towards the equator--the American government is moved to Miami, the British and French governments to North Africa, etc.  London, Paris and New York are abandoned wastelands buried in snow.

Larger silver spheres land in New York and in Venezuela, where the multitudes of Latin America have been congregating.  These aliens are apparently hostile, and prove impervious to attack from Earth weapons (their defenses are quite like military equipment that appears in Cummings's Tama, Princess of Mercury--Cummings is a master recycler!)  Just as Petey's Dad is about to share with the government what he has learned from Zetta, the alien ships in New York and Venezuela fly away, and Dad, Zetta, and Hulda are carried off along with them when Zetta's little sphere is hijacked!

   
Four years pass without intercourse between Earth and its new neighbor, Xenephrene.  Petey misses his father and his sister, and he also misses Zetta, whom he fell in love with after meeting her for a few minutes right before her disappearance.  (Love is blind--Zetta's extra finger joints don't put him off!)  Then in 1970 a cylinder lands on Earth with a message from Dad!  (Both "Aerita of the Light Country" and Tama of the Light Country feature message cylinders landing on Earth, sent by Earthlings on Mercury.)  The message includes instructions on how to build a space ship so Petey and some minor characters can fly to Xenephrene.  This ship is powered by "Reet," "a force something like electricity...it was also the growing, life-giving essence of all vegetable and animal organisms."

The construction of the ship (done in secret, of course!) and its flight to Xenephrene, like 25 pages in the middle of the novel, is one of the better parts of the book, to my mind, at least.  Once on Xenephrene, Petey and we readers get a lecture on Xenephrene history and society from Dad.  The people of the mysterious wandering planet are ruled by a secretive guild of scientists (naturally, they recognize a comrade in Petey's Dad and so he is privy to their secrets.)  Thousands of years ago, the people of Xenephrene had a high tech civilization, but then the majority decided that the simple life was best, and they abandoned modernity to live in tree houses like god- damned Ewoks.  A small minority wanted to keep their high tech stuff, but a law was passed making it illegal to "preach modernity," and these rebels were exiled to another part of the planet, called Braun (the mainstream society is located in Garla) and over the centuries the two societies have developed separately.  Dad considers Garla to be a paradise, but this utopia of tree house living is threatened because the powers-that-be have been slacking in enforcing their speech codes!

Here we see Zetta, a minor character Hulda is dating,
and Hulda herself

You see, today, Braun, which Dad calls "despotic," is ruled by Graff, a brilliant scientist and orator who wants to conquer the Earth.  Braun and Garla conduct trade, and Graff has spent time in Garla, where he has managed to sway some Garlands into considering the reintroduction of technology and the conquest of Earth.  Graff has also fallen in love with the apparently irresistible Zetta; for her part, Zetta is willing to marry Graff (after all, Dad says Graff has "a magnificent physique") if the tyrant agrees to abandon his plans to conquer the Earth.

(I probably don't have to tell you that "graf" is the German equivalent of "count" or "earl" and that Braun is a common German name.  Is A Brand New World an early indictment of Nazism, or evidence of lingering resentment over German aggression in World War I?)

So, finally, after 140 pages, we have our war and love triangle plot set up, a plot very similar to those we saw in Cummings's Mercury books.  There is even a Braun woman, Brea, in love with Graff who wants to kill Zetta, the way Muta wanted to kill Rowena in Tama, Princess of Mercury and Zara wanted to kill Aerita in "Aerita of the Light Country."

There are some elements in A Brand New World that don't show up in the Mercury stories, like Reet.  More prominent than Reet is Cummings's notion of "the infrared world."  This (I think) is a parallel dimension inhabited by demons that may be the source of human evil.  Xenephrene is somehow connected to the infrared world so that the demons are always faintly evident as sinister red shapes that float around and murmuring, snickering voices.  Dad tells Petey that he'll get used to them!    Radiation from the small purple star that orbits Xenephrene like a moon* has kept the crimson demons in check for time immemorial, but when Xenephrene entered our solar system the demons became more pervasive and powerful, apparently strengthened by the radiation of our sun.  The Garland scientists have been dealing with this by manipulating two spheres kept in their secret lair, "the control globes," one red and one purple, keeping the infrared and ultraviolet forces in balance.

*I was amazed that Cummings waited until page 114 to mention this remarkable astronomical phenomenon.

Anyway, the day before Graff launches his invasion of Earth he and his Brauns steal the two spheres--with the red one Graff can drive everyone on Earth insane by unleashing the crimson demons, while with the purple one he keeps his own people safe.  Of course, if the control globes are removed from Xenephrene everybody on that planet will go insane.  The Brauns also seize our narrator Petey and his lady love Zetta, and these two are aboard Graff's flagship when the Braun fleet flies to Earth.

From Graff's beachhead in Brazil Petey witnesses the war on Earth.  (The war is one of the better parts of the book; it is perhaps noteworthy that Cummings here refrains from the sort of descriptions of horrific gore with which he spiced up the Mercury stories.)  Graff is on the verge of driving everyone on Earth outside his HQ insane when Brea helps Zetta and Petey escape--with Zetta gone she figures Graff will pay her more attention.  But Z & P don't just book it on out of there; they break the red control globe and steal the purple one--it is easy for Petey to kill all the guards because Brea gave him a suit of ray-proof armor and Xenephrene people are much weaker than Earthers (just like the Tama books' Mercurians are much weaker than Earthers.)

Dad and some minor characters arrive from Xenephrene with Xenephere weapons and equipment, so now Graff, lacking his control globes, is no match for Earth's much more numerous military forces.  The Xenephrene invaders are wiped out (including that dope Brea!), the purple control globe is returned to Xenephrene so the Garlands won't go infrared insane, and then Xenephrene unexpectedly breaks out of its new orbit and heads out of our system.  Zetta stays on Earth to bear Pete's half Earthling, half Xenephrene children; one wonders how many joints their digits will have and of they will be so physically weak that all the Earth kids will casually bully them. 

A theme of my blog post here has been that Cummings would reuse plot elements and ideas that appeared in A Brand New World in his later Mercury stories.  Those 1930, 1931 and 1941 Mercury stories were shorter, more focused on sex and violence, and more fun than 1928's A Brand New World, which is a little more thoughtful and tries to put across some arguments about politics and societal evolution, arguments that we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are not prepared to endorse.

A Brand New World exhibits the belief that is de rigeur in SF that ordinary people are mindless dolts and that their "betters," here primarily scientists but also journalists and to some extent even(!) politicians, have an obligation to lead the masses by the nose.  Cummings argues that a big part of the role of the elite is to control the flow of information, and I have pointed out numerous examples in the text of Earth and Garland elites withholding information from the people, allegedly for their own good.  But Cummings doesn't stop there--he suggests that the common people's judgement is so suspect that the rulers of society should keep from the hoi polloi's ears dangerous beliefs by silencing dissenters and making it illegal to express certain ideas.  Remember how at the start of the novel Petey was covering a murder in the Middle West?  A woman had massacred her husband and children, and, instead of being condemned by the public, this murderess hosts a radio talk show and becomes a celebrity:

She was a handsome woman, and a good talker.  She was taking full advantage of the new law regarding free speech, and every night from the jail she was broadcasting little talks to the public.

This murderess, of course, is a parallel to Graff, another good-looking smooth talker who should have been silenced by the establishment.  According to Cummings, some people shouldn't be permitted a platform to speak, and the voicing of some ideas must be legally forbidden; this is an attitude I personally find despicable.

We shouldn't be surprised, I suppose, that Cummings, a professional writer who also worked with Thomas Edison, should feel that scientists and writers should run the world and have a monopoly on information and power, but it is still hard to take.  More mature and interesting is the related attitude displayed by Cummings in the horror story "Corpses from Canvas," which foregrounds the reality that publishers and creative people are not selfless saints who should be given power and privileges but rather corruptible individuals out to make a buck like everybody else, and even hints that Cummings felt a little guilty about some of his more exploitative work.  (I say "related" because both attitudes show contempt for the credulous masses, portraying them as sheep who lack agency and don't know what is good for them.)

The episode of the Indiana murderess also lays the groundwork for Cummings's theme of societal change.  The common people fail to condemn the murderess, and the government fails to convict her--I think Cummings is using this crime story to signal to us that Earth society is decadent.  In the same vein, Petey later moans that Earth is not ready to face the threat posed by Graff because of "the apathy of the people."  But over the course of the book Earth society, guided by the eggheads and politicians, improves (at least in Petey's opinion) in response to adversity.  On page 80 our narrator talks about the worldwide response to the changes in climate:

The important word here, I believe, is "rational," a word which implies planning from above by scientists--the eggheads will be the fathers of the "one big family" that is the world, telling us children what to do.  Cummings (and/or Petey) reiterate this on the last page of the novel:

The Great Change brought all the nations, all the people of every race into a keen realization of values, an enforced community of interest.  Like brothers in a family sorely pressed, they fought united.... 

The final sentence of A Brand New World is "This Earth has become a good place on which to live."

I don't know about you, but I don't want to be treated as a child, forced into a community and told what my interests are.  And I am certainly not crazy about the government, especially a government of unelected "experts," deciding who gets to speak and what things we are allowed to say.

Alright, so am I giving A Brand New World the thumbs up or the thumbs down?  I suppose it is interesting that a guy would write a science fiction novel that argues against freedom of speech, but it is also distasteful.  Some of the space travel and war content here is good, but that stuff makes up but a small proportion of the text.  Cummings's innovative and weird science ideas, like the Reet life force (which of course reminds a 2018 reader of Star Wars) and the infrared dimension of demons (which reminded me a little of Lovecraft stories like "From Beyond" and "the warp" in Warhammer 40,000) are convoluted and poorly integrated into the rest of the material--'The Force" in Star Wars and the warp in WH40K are foundational to what goes on in those universes, while Reet and the infrared dimension feel tacked on to this novel.

A Brand New World is an important piece of the "Who is Ray Cummings and what is he all about?" puzzle, so I'm glad I read it--I am curious about the half-forgotten heroes of SF's early history and the controversial fringe members of the SF community (I think MPorcius Fiction Log faves A. E. van Vogt, Edmond Hamilton, and Barry Malzberg all fit into one or both of these somewhat arbitrary categories, and that Cummings does as well), but I can't quite recommend this novel on its own merits.