Edmond Hamilton: "The Mind Master," "The Horror City" and "Snake-Man"

Like a giant snake coiled round a helpless goat, Weird Tales still has an unshakable grip on MPorcius Fiction Log.  Today we explore three stories about scientists making trouble and getting in trouble by Edmond Hamilton, one of this website's particular favorites, that were printed in the unique magazine in the early 1930s and were not reprinted until after humanity had triumphed over the dreaded Y2K bug.  

"The Mind Master" (1930)

My wife grew up in northern Iowa, in a region that is flat and lacking in trees, so she loves to drive through Pennsylvania with its forested mountains, something we have done quite a number of times, having lived in New York City (PBUH), the Des Moines area and in Columbus, Ohio, and having friends and family in all those places and in Pittsburgh as well.  "The Mind Master" begins with just such a drive through central PA, though while the wife and I mostly kept to publicly-maintained highways and stopped at antique stores and reputable hotels, this story's narrator is on a "rude and narrow road" leading to the summit of a "grim and forbidding" mountain.

Our narrator is Darley, a bacteriologist, and he has come to this isolated mountain top to visit Dain, a fellow scientist who has built a laboratory in this remote locale, the location of which he warns Darley to never reveal to their colleagues back at the Foundation.  Powering this guy's extensive and well-appointed lab out here in the boonies are two windmills (I guess nowadays we call them wind turbines)--this guy might be a mad scientist, but he's green!  

After a quick look around the lab--except for one room, which Dain declares temporarily off-limits--Darley and his host sit and smoke pipes and shoot the breeze, not having seen each other in a while.  Darley is just back from a long trip to Africa, during which time Dain left the Foundation.  We readers get a clue about why he might have left those stuffy goody-two-shoes at the Foundation when we hear Dain talking offhandedly about some of his Frankensteinian forays into the unknown, like when he was experimenting with grafting limbs from one species of animal onto another species, and trying to keep the heads of animals alive after they have been separated from their bodies.  Dain asks what's shaking down at the good old Foundation, seeing as he hasn't really been keeping in touch with the boys, and is told that two of the scientists there vanished six months after Dain left, and since then famous scientists from all over North America have been disappearing.  

You know how the one thing in the universe most likely to make you laugh is when your mother or your wife grits her teeth and says "Don't you dare laugh..."?  Well, nothing makes a guy want to explore a room more than being told to keep away from it.  So, when the sound of voices wakes him up later that night, Darley surreptitiously listens at the door to that part of the lab Dain has requested he not enter, and hears the voices of those twelve missing scientists, whom it sounds like are here working at Dain's direction.  And they aren't developing a cancer cure, a way to improve crop yields, or new flavors of ice cream, like good little scientists, either--they are doing R&D on some horrendous new weapons!*  And Dain is going to use these weapons to blackmail and terrorize people into making him world dictator!  (Not unlike the mad scientist in Hamilton's "The Death Lord," which we read earlier this month.)  But why would these geniuses, who all seemed like such nice guys when Darley met them over the years, want to help Dain take over the world?  

*Interestingly, some of these weapons, considered speculative in this story, are today in pretty wide use. 

The illustration on the title page of the story gives the game away--Dain has lured each of the scientists here and decapitated him and attached his head to a machines that will keep him alive.  By inflicting pain on them with the flip of a switch he has been able to persuade them into doing his will, and he plans to do the same to Darley--he wants to add bacteriological warfare agents to the remote control aircraft, cluster bombs, deaths rays, and poisons in his arsenal.  But Darley gets the upper hand in a hand-to-hand struggle, and we are treated to scenes of Dain suffering turnabout-is-fair-play justice as the disembodied boffins bray for revenge, and then for a death that is preferable to life as a bodiless head.

(Note to next of kin--I am not judging these scientists, but personally I would prefer life as a disembodied head to death.) 

An acceptable mad scientist story.  Unfortunately Hamilton doesn't take time to give us a look into the mind of the mad scientist so we can see why he wants to take over the world--those are some of the best parts of these mad scientist stories, like in "The Plant Revolt" when a guy declared he was killing all us oxygen breathers in the interest of dismantling animal supremacy and seeking justice for all the centuries of oppression suffered by plants.

"The Mind Master" would go unreprinted until 2013 when it was included in Haffner Press's The Collected Edmond Hamilton: Volume 4: Reign of the Robots.      

"The Horror City" (1931)

The Arabian desert, an expanse of almost a million square miles, is unexplored and uncharted.  Several expeditions have tried to fly across it, but their planes never returned.  So our narrator, Kirkland, and his two colleagues, Harmon and Hunter, members of the topographical department of some New York museum, are going to fly a plane over the desert in yet another effort to map it from the air.  I can see volunteering for a suicide mission if you were living in Detroit or Gary or something, but leaving the greatest city in the world to die atop a pile of sand?  Well, you gotta be able to suspend disbelief if you are going to read these stories, I guess.

Kirkland and company soon find out why those other expeditions never returned.  A powerful wind seizes their plane and carries them, practically out of control, to a city of black stone entirely covered by an opaque black dome.  The winds almost suck them into a hole in the crown of the dome, but Kirkland, who is at the controls, just barely manages to pull the plane out of those winds and land nearby.  After fixing some minor damage to their plane, Kirkland, Harmon and Hunter spot another plane close by, one that seems to have made a crash landing--it is one of the two planes from the last expedition!  Our heroes decide they have to investigate that domed city to see if any of their predecessors are alive in there.

Unable to find a door or gate in the city wall, our guys climb through a high window and follow a tunnel carved through the thick wall, coming to an opening that looks down into a hall.  They are shocked to see the inhabitants of this hidden city--intelligent black octopus creatures, taller than humans, who have dozens of tentacles, some of which they use to walk while with others they carry and manipulate objects.

The topographers explore the city, keeping to the shadows and peering around corners, and manage to escape notice while they look into laboratories and observatories and power plants, the sort of stuff that would be of interest to any budding scientists and engineers who might have been reading Weird Tales back in the day.  If you blundered into a human city and sneaked around looking into windows you'd mostly see people watching TV or arguing with the spouse, but these ogre-sized cephalopod people have themselves a city of science here.

Eventually Kirkland, Harmon and Hunter are spotted and have to fight with their automatic pistols and then flee through the corridors of the dome-shrouded, artificially illuminated city.  They blunder into the tentacles of two octopus people, and are shocked to hear them speak English, and even more shocked to hear their claims to be Austin and Cooper, two men they know who were members of the most recent lost expedition!  These poor bastards who still self-identify as bipeds relate to Kirkland and the two Hs the fate of their expedition and the Cliffs Notes of the amazing history of this weird city.

The black city was built long long ago by human beings, a race isolated from the rest of humanity that had developed super science and could synthesize food.  They beat the heat of the desert by putting up that dome as a shade, and by developing a super-sized central air conditioning system that sucks cold air from the stratosphere down into the city--it is that powerful AC unit that foils all attempts to fly over the desert.  These desert people also outwitted the Grim Reaper by figuring out how to perform brain transplants and building artificial octopus-like bodies into which to move their brains.  On the rare occasion that outsiders find the city, the natives insist on doing them the favor of putting their brains into octopus bodies; you know, so they will fit in.

Austin and Cooper help Kirkland and the two Hs escape, first guiding them to an exit near their plane and then, while the topographers scurry across the sands, sabotaging the giant AC unit, pushing it to its limit so the winds generated inside the city cause the city to collapse, killing themselves and everybody else inside.  These men would rather die than live eternally in an artificial octopus body.

(Note to next of kin--I am not judging these explorers, but personally I would prefer life in an artificial octopus body to death.)                          

This is an OK story bringing together two common weird themes, the lost city and brain/soul transfers.  Hamilton adds a gruesome sort of horror element, as he often does to his SF stories, by describing how Austin and Cooper had to watch each other having their brains removed from their bodies, and, even more wild perhaps, how they were anesthetized but not rendered unconscious for the transplant operation and so were fully aware as they were separated from their cisbodies. 

Like "The Mind Master," "The Horror City" would have to wait until the 21st century and The Collected Edmond Hamilton: Volume 4: Reign of the Robots before it would again see print.

"Snake-Man" (1933)

The January 1933 issue of Weird Tales includes Robert E. Howard's story "The Scarlet Citadel," in which we learned about Howard and Conan's theory of government when I blogged about it in 2019, as well as Hamilton's "Snake-Man," which I blog about today.  "Snake-Man" was printed under a pseudonym used by Hamilton, I believe, four times, Hugh Davidson.  

John Hemmerick is a middle-aged university professor who travels the world studying snakes.  (Yes, some people do have cool jobs...not safe jobs, maybe, but cool jobs.)  Today he arrives by train in a little inland Florida village, the only passenger on the train taking the spur that leads to the place.  He is met by our narrator, young lawyer Frank Rawlins, and Pete Winton, who owns a garage.  The two local men drive Hemmerick to an old decaying house like five miles out of town, on the edge of the swamp where the herpetologist plans to look for specimens.  

Hemmerick spends a few days finding lots of exciting snakes and caging them up.  Then Rawlins and Winton pay him a visit to tell him a crazy story he might be interested in: a local black farmer saw a huge snake steal away with one of his goats.  Hemmerick examines the foot-wide track left by the serpent and confirms it must have been a snake, but no snake that size is known to live in Florida.  Uncle Wally, a local African-American with a reputation as a conjure-man, suggests it was no normal snake, but a snake-man who seized the goat!  Such a creature lives as a human by day but at night transforms into a big snake!  Hemmerick says he heard many such stories while in Africa, but dismisses them as superstition.  Uncle Wally warns Hemmerick that the snake man may take exception to the way the professor is capturing all those snakes.

A few more days pass, during which the huge snake continues to steal livestock from the local farmers, both black and white; those who see it claim it has glowing red eyes.  After the snake chases a woman and child--they just barely escape into their house--the townspeople decide the monster must be destroyed, and turn to Hemmerick for help tracking it down.  Led by deputy sheriff Ross Sanders and guided by Hemmerick, the white men of the town hunt the swamp for hours and hours, but with no luck.

Rawlins and Winton tell Sanders that they saw some of the huge snake's tracks at the old house where Hemmerick is staying, but the prof discouraged them from hunting for the reptile around there, as it might scare away the snakes he is trying to collect.  Sanders suggests the three of them, without telling the scientist, hang around the rotting house while Hemmerick is away looking for specimens and ambush the snake if it comes by for another visit.  They will make sure to leave before Hemmerick comes back from his nightly forays into the swamp.  (One of the weaknesses of the story is the deference Sanders, who represents the law and government in this town and is responsible for the safety of its inhabitants' lives and property, shows to a strange outsider--if the cops here in suburban Maryland were looking for a suspected murderer on my block I don't think they would honor my request to be quiet because I'm in a Zoom meeting with a client.)

The three amigos spot the snake and blast it with their shotguns, but when they rush over to look at the body they find, as we readers expected, the torn corpse not of a serpent but of a middle-aged college professor. They know no white man will believe their story, so they will have to let the world believe they killed Hemmerick by mistake.  Damn, that's the kind of thing that goes on your permanent record!  

I thought the ending of "Snake-Man" a little anticlimactic and disappointing.  Shouldn't Hemmerick give a speech or put up a fight or something?  We never really learn if he is an enthusiastic snake-man who wants to eat people, or more like a Dr. Jekyll who barely knows what he is doing when in snake form.  Couldn't Uncle Wally be there at the end, using his charms or providing folk wisdom to the skeptical white characters, a sort of van Helsing figure?  There were hints during the main body of the story designed to make you suspicious of Uncle Wally--maybe Uncle Wally and Hemmerick should both have been snake men and should have fought for dominance of the swamp or for the allegiance of the local black community or something.  Oh, well.

Acceptable.  Maybe historians of SF would be interested to compare Hamilton's relatively bland and inoffensive treatment of African-American characters here with that of Robert E. Howard in his striking and quite racist story "Black Canaan."  In 2000 "Snake-Man" was included in Haffner Press's The Vampire Master and Other Tales of Terror.  

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These stories are all competent but I can't help but think that with some more effort--in particular, greater exploration of the character and motive of their villains--they could have been a lot better.   

More 1930s Weird Tales in our next episode!