The issue of Astonishing in which "Magnus' Disintegrator" appears carries an interesting editor's note (this department is called "Editoramblings.") In it Pohl says that reader feedback has indicated that SF fans want longer stories, and so Astonishing's sister publication, Super Science Stories, is being rechristened Super Science Novels and will have more pages, a higher price, and feature longer works. I'm not sure that I personally favor longer stories (I feel like I often, here at this blog, moan that a story is too long--in related news, when the wife and I are in a hotel room and one of those documentary shows about embezzlers or whatever comes on she has to endure my bitching that "they showed that clip already!" and "they told us this two minutes ago!" and "this show has 10 minutes of information and they are stretching it out to 45 minutes!") but if you go to the SF section of a big chain bookstore today and see how the shelves are full of books two inches thick and series that take up a foot because they consist of six or eight volumes, well, it is hard to disagree with Pohl's assessment of what the mass of customers want.
"Magnus' Disintegrator" takes us to the New York City of the high tech future of the year 2000, where we meet a guy called Rance. Wait, is this the synthetic food salesman from "Personality Plus," the best of the eight Cummings stories I've already written about this week? Apparently not; this dude's first name is Peter, and he is a "private aircar operator," which I think is pronounced "chauffeur." As the story begins our man Rance is in a lab out at Montauk with his employer, inventor and businessman John Magnus, and Magnus has a heat gun trained on poor Rance, and is saying he is going to blow up his experimental "disintegrator," a kind of reactor that can produce cheap energy, killing both of them. It will all be worth it, however, because other eggheads will be able to study the recordings of the explosion and gain the knowledge needed to build a better reactor.
The bulk of the rest of the story consists of a flashback that explains why Magnus wants to die, and why he wants to murder Rance, during which it becomes clear I am supposed to sympathize with the businessman instead of his driver. Magnus committed some business blunders that cost him much of his business empire and some engineering blunders with earlier versions of the reactor that got some peeps killed and got government regulators all up in his grill! Magnus was just about to shoot himself with his heat gun when he learned that his sexy blonde daughter Carole wanted to marry Rance; Rance has a reputation as a womanizer and no doubt the main thing attracting him to Carole is her inheritance! (Three of the five 1940 horror stories we read by Cummings just a few days ago had some jerk scheming to get an inheritance, and here Cummings is playing this tune yet again!) Magnus would rather kill the chauffer than let him break his little princess's heart, so he concocted the plan of blowing Rance up along with himself by messing with the experimental reactor. (For the reactor to operate, two people have to be at the controls, so he couldn't just blow himself up with it.)
The flashback brings us up to the present, to the lab out on the tip of Long Island. Rance doesn't feel like sacrificing his life for science so he tackles Magnus and they wrestle over the heat gun. The weapon goes off and hits the reactor in such a way that it emits poison gas that kills our horn dog chauffeur (the gas just makes the businessman/inventor pass out) and also somehow makes the reactor work smoothly so it doesn't blow up. Magnus's daughter is safe from the womanizing Rance and the now perfected reactor will restore the finances of Magnus's company and slash energy prices and lead to worldwide economic growth.
Besides feeling contrived, "Magnus' Disintegrator" feels like it was constructed out of pieces plucked from the other Cummings stories we've been reading; it's like the Cummings of '40 and '41 has a limited number of Legos and each thing he builds out of them incorporates bricks we've seen already in somewhat different configurations.
The interesting facet of "Magnus' Disintegrator" is that the good guy is a big businessman and the villain is a working-class guy trying to get his mitts on the industrialist's daughter; I feel like most SF stories are written by pinkos who would side with a working-class dude against a magnate, or by libertarian types who would celebrate a young woman striking a blow for independence and fighting for the right to choose her own husband. It is definitely weird that the penultimate paragraph of the story is about how great it is that Magnus will be able to guide his daughter's life--aren't most of the stories we read about individuals who (at least try to) forge their own destinies?
I like that Cummings is airing some unusual points of view in this story, but I wish it was better plotted; as it stands I cannot recommend it.
"Almost Human"
This issue of Super Science has a terrific cover--a man in a wifebeater T-shirt and a gorilla, both armed with elaborate modernistic dart launchers, are trying to rescue a gorgeous babe from the clutches of a giant baboon! (Or is it a bear?) This incredible tableau reminds me of the Schoenherr cover to my copy of A. E. van Vogt's The Battle of Forever, which introduced me to a hero whom I will always hold close to my heart, the rifle-toting HippoMan!
"Almost Human" is about a robot who develops a personality. Xor-2y4 is a robot pilot, an electronic brain which is interred in a stylized humanoid body which lacks the ability to walk; it is carried from one aircar or spacecraft to another when its duties change—and they have changed recently. You see, Xor was the personal aircar operator of Jon Dekain, famous robot maker and Xor's own creator, and spent a lot of time flying around with the doctor’s lovely daughter Barbara, known as Babs (yes, another Babs—Cummings reuses everything, including names.) An alien from Asteroid 90, Sirrah Gerondli, was scheduled to meet with Dekain, and Xor was chauffeuring this xeno to the meeting and crashed the vehicle, killing the alien. After this accident Xor was checked out (Dekain found nothing wrong) and transferred to the pilot’s seat of a space ship (yes, after killing one guy and wrecking a 100,000 dollar vehicle they gave Xor responsibility for dozens of people and a bazillion dollar vehicle. This is what we call failing upwards.)
The bulk of the rest of the story consists of a flashback that explains why Magnus wants to die, and why he wants to murder Rance, during which it becomes clear I am supposed to sympathize with the businessman instead of his driver. Magnus committed some business blunders that cost him much of his business empire and some engineering blunders with earlier versions of the reactor that got some peeps killed and got government regulators all up in his grill! Magnus was just about to shoot himself with his heat gun when he learned that his sexy blonde daughter Carole wanted to marry Rance; Rance has a reputation as a womanizer and no doubt the main thing attracting him to Carole is her inheritance! (Three of the five 1940 horror stories we read by Cummings just a few days ago had some jerk scheming to get an inheritance, and here Cummings is playing this tune yet again!) Magnus would rather kill the chauffer than let him break his little princess's heart, so he concocted the plan of blowing Rance up along with himself by messing with the experimental reactor. (For the reactor to operate, two people have to be at the controls, so he couldn't just blow himself up with it.)
The flashback brings us up to the present, to the lab out on the tip of Long Island. Rance doesn't feel like sacrificing his life for science so he tackles Magnus and they wrestle over the heat gun. The weapon goes off and hits the reactor in such a way that it emits poison gas that kills our horn dog chauffeur (the gas just makes the businessman/inventor pass out) and also somehow makes the reactor work smoothly so it doesn't blow up. Magnus's daughter is safe from the womanizing Rance and the now perfected reactor will restore the finances of Magnus's company and slash energy prices and lead to worldwide economic growth.
Besides feeling contrived, "Magnus' Disintegrator" feels like it was constructed out of pieces plucked from the other Cummings stories we've been reading; it's like the Cummings of '40 and '41 has a limited number of Legos and each thing he builds out of them incorporates bricks we've seen already in somewhat different configurations.
The interesting facet of "Magnus' Disintegrator" is that the good guy is a big businessman and the villain is a working-class guy trying to get his mitts on the industrialist's daughter; I feel like most SF stories are written by pinkos who would side with a working-class dude against a magnate, or by libertarian types who would celebrate a young woman striking a blow for independence and fighting for the right to choose her own husband. It is definitely weird that the penultimate paragraph of the story is about how great it is that Magnus will be able to guide his daughter's life--aren't most of the stories we read about individuals who (at least try to) forge their own destinies?
I like that Cummings is airing some unusual points of view in this story, but I wish it was better plotted; as it stands I cannot recommend it.
This issue of Super Science has a terrific cover--a man in a wifebeater T-shirt and a gorilla, both armed with elaborate modernistic dart launchers, are trying to rescue a gorgeous babe from the clutches of a giant baboon! (Or is it a bear?) This incredible tableau reminds me of the Schoenherr cover to my copy of A. E. van Vogt's The Battle of Forever, which introduced me to a hero whom I will always hold close to my heart, the rifle-toting HippoMan!
"Almost Human" is about a robot who develops a personality. Xor-2y4 is a robot pilot, an electronic brain which is interred in a stylized humanoid body which lacks the ability to walk; it is carried from one aircar or spacecraft to another when its duties change—and they have changed recently. You see, Xor was the personal aircar operator of Jon Dekain, famous robot maker and Xor's own creator, and spent a lot of time flying around with the doctor’s lovely daughter Barbara, known as Babs (yes, another Babs—Cummings reuses everything, including names.) An alien from Asteroid 90, Sirrah Gerondli, was scheduled to meet with Dekain, and Xor was chauffeuring this xeno to the meeting and crashed the vehicle, killing the alien. After this accident Xor was checked out (Dekain found nothing wrong) and transferred to the pilot’s seat of a space ship (yes, after killing one guy and wrecking a 100,000 dollar vehicle they gave Xor responsibility for dozens of people and a bazillion dollar vehicle. This is what we call failing upwards.)
As our story begins Xor is conning his first flight to Mars, and the passengers aboard include not only Dekain the engineer/businessman and his daughter Babs, but Sirrah Ahli, ambassador to Earth from Asteroid 90 and brother of crash victim Sirrah Gerondli!
Xor has superhearing, and by listening in on conversations in the ship realizes the terrible position Babs and the entire solar system are in. The people of Asteroid 90 are aggressive and want to conquer Mars (evoking the image of Nazi Germany, it is said that the asteroid people "want living space, as they call it....") In response to the burgeoning Asteroid 90 threat, the people of Mars have purchased military hardware from Dekain’s firm, and this very ship is carrying a load of “space-bomb sights” and “rangefinders for space-guns.” Ahli, who has managed to sneak aboard a squad of Asteroid 90 commando stowaways, is plotting to hijack the ship and take its valuable cargo (which includes sexy Babs--"A beautiful little thing--if you like Earthgirls, and I do") to Asteroid 90!
I've already told you Xor can't walk--well, he can't talk either! (This is a serious plot hole—don’t pilots in real life have to communicate to crew and passengers all the time? Who would build a robot that can take orders in English but can't talk back, if only to answer "how long til we get there?" and "does the vehicle require maintenance?" type questions?) Xor can't walk, he can't talk, but he can feel, and he feels a fondness for Babs and even feels that he was created for the singular destiny of being Babs's protector! So Xor takes matters into his own hands! The heroic robot accelerates the ship into the red zone—the asteroid people grew up in less gravity than did the Earthers, so the level of gravity that merely renders the humans unconscious crushes the bodies of the space Nazis, killing them.
I've already told you Xor can't walk--well, he can't talk either! (This is a serious plot hole—don’t pilots in real life have to communicate to crew and passengers all the time? Who would build a robot that can take orders in English but can't talk back, if only to answer "how long til we get there?" and "does the vehicle require maintenance?" type questions?) Xor can't walk, he can't talk, but he can feel, and he feels a fondness for Babs and even feels that he was created for the singular destiny of being Babs's protector! So Xor takes matters into his own hands! The heroic robot accelerates the ship into the red zone—the asteroid people grew up in less gravity than did the Earthers, so the level of gravity that merely renders the humans unconscious crushes the bodies of the space Nazis, killing them.
When the humans wake up they almost deactivate and destroy Xor, but at the last moment uncover the dead imperialist stowaways and realize that Xor has saved them all. In the last column of the tale we learn that Xor killed Gerondli because he had overheard that alien’s plan to kidnap Babs.
"Almost Human" is an acceptable classic SF story, you might call it a space opera, which addresses common SF topics (might a robot or computer become conscious, have emotions?) and employs traditional SF elements (robot and his inventor, hostile aliens, and the use of trickery and science knowledge to defeat the enemy and resolve the plot.) This story is also in the long SF tradition of what we today might call “celebrating diversity;” Xor the robot is an "other" embraced by the flesh creatures and, while there are villainous aliens (Asteroid 90’s space Nazis), there are also good aliens (the Martians) who have treaties and conduct trade with Earth.
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| I never really got an answer on those cellophane pants. |
I'm always hearing how fiction needs to include strong female protagonists; well, if the cover of this issue of Super Science Novels is to be believed, Ray Cummings was working the strong female protagonist beat over 70 years ago! Nothing says "strong female" like a woman blasting a guy with a ray gun while he is testing out his new headphones, immersed in the delicate nuances and rococo intricacies of "The Firth of Fifth."
Among the Ray Cummings novels I recently received from Joachim Boaz are Tama of the Light Country and Tama, Princess of Mercury, novels originally serialized in Argosy magazine in 1930 and 1931. Is the "Complete Book-Length Novel" under discussion today a sequel to those capers? Is Aerita Tama's daughter or niece or something? And what is up with the transparent bloomers? Well, let's see.
The year is 2093, the place, a small town in upstate New York. Alan Grant, 24, a towering hunk of an aircraft battery salesman who is just passing through, goes to a freak show to kill time and is entranced by a five-foot tall girl in her late teens with a beautiful face of mysterious ethnicity, silver hair and blue-feathered wings! When he realizes she is being held captive by the freak show owner, he liberates her and she leads him to her space ship. (Earth once had spacecraft, but no longer--there is a hint that Cummings's Tama books explain in greater detail why there are no human spacecraft in 2093.) I guess being an airplane parts salesman is not as fun as it sounds, because Alan agrees to accompany the winged girl, Aerita, to Mercury.
Because of hi-tech wars in the past, studying science is forbidden on Mercury, but Aerita's grandfather Polter, like Aerita herself, is a freethinker! He built the spaceship, the only one of its kind, that brought Aerita to Earth due to a malfunction. Why did it malfunction? Because another independent-minded scientist, Rahgg, not a kindly grandpapa but a dangerous criminal (Cummings hints that he is a rapist or pedophile; maybe he belongs on Planet Hollywood instead of Planet Mercury) who was exiled to the Dark Country, where he became leader of the savages there, hijacked the ship and kidnapped Aerita, and in the course of escaping his clutches Aerita accidentally directed the vessel into interplanetary space and couldn't figure out the controls until she was near our own big blue marble.
Rahgg not only captures Aerita and Alan Grant, but captures the space ship again! (Sometimes it feels like Rahgg is the only person in the story who can get things done!) Directed by poor Alan, whom he gets to spill the beans on Earth by threatening to torture Aerita, Rahgg and company fly to Earth where they loot government munitions factories on the Hudson in upstate New York, including the ray artillery plant where Alan's brother Phil Grant, an eighteen-year-old scientist, is working. Phil gets captured and taken back to Mercury along with all those ray pistols and ray cannons!
Alan and Aerita are reunited with Phil and the 1000 flying virgins, and they attack Rahgg's army, which is marching on the Light Country's capital city. A ray gun battle ensues, in which hundreds of people, including Phil, are killed or dismembered, but eventually the Earth brothers and the flying girls prevail. Women having saved the Light Country, the working classes accept that they won't be clipping wives' wings anymore, and Alan and one-armed Phil set an example by marrying winged girls of their own.
"Aerita of the Light Country" is an entertaining Edgar Rice Burroughs/Edmond Hamilton/Leigh Brackett type of adventure story in which a modern Earther ends up making friends with people on another world and fighting in their wars; Cummings adds some interest to the story with all that gender conflict, class conflict, racial conflict, and luddism we've been talking about. Brackett often electrifies her planetary romances with harsh violence and/or sexual energy, and Cummings does the same here; it seems Cummings didn't confine the topics of rape, torture and murderous love triangles to the fiction he produced for Horror Stories and Terror Tales, but integrated them into his more science-fictiony work. It will be interesting to see if Cummings included this edge of sadism and eroticism in the two Tama novels, which appeared a decade before "Aerita."
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More Cummings soon, but first some more recent fiction from a book on the shelves of the Joachim Boaz Wing of the MPorcius Library!
I remember reading THE SHADOW GIRL (which I though was a pretty cool title when I was a kid) in the ACE Books edition. I also read TAMA OF THE LIGHT COUNTRY and TAMA, PRINCESS OF MERCURY. These are SF novels from the beginning years of the genre. They would be struggle to read today.
ReplyDeleteHere's some advice for my readers: don't do a google image search for "cummings shadow girl" if you are at the office or your spouse or children are in the room. If you want to see the cover of the Ace edition of The Shadow Girl to which George refers, just go straight to isfdb here:
Deletehttp://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/7/75/THSDWGRL1962.jpg
I like the cover (by Emsh) and would probably buy it if I saw it for a few bucks at a store.
As for the Tama books being a struggle to read, in the foreseeable future I will have a first hand report on them! I am definitely curious about how they differ from the Aerita story, which are set in the same milieu but which appeared ten years later.