"The Plant Revolt," "The Death Lord," and "Pigmy Island" by Edmond Hamilton

The rumors are true!  In an effort to bring purpose to my life, I have embarked on a quest to blog about at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales that appeared in the 1930s.  Of course, I'm not going to pursue this goal in a methodical fashion with spread sheets and schedules and flow charts and check lists and metrics and matrices and anything that might remind me of a job.  Instead, I'm just going to skip around and read whatever I want and some day, as if by chance, voila, I will have achieved my goal.

In this spirit we yet again sample the work of MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton, a man who wrote SF about science that Isaac Asimov admired, pioneering space operas, and horror stories, and married fellow genre fiction star and Hollywood screenwriter Leigh Brackett, looking at three 1930 stories that first appeared in the Unique Magazine edited by Farnsworth Wright.

"The Plant Revolt" 

Remember when we read Hamilton's 1949 story "Alien Earth," in which a French mad scientist pursued his dangerous obsession with living in tune with plants?  Good times, good times.  Well, here we see that Ed had already been on the vegetation menace beat for a long time when he penned that Asimov-approved bit of speculative botany.  

In his correspondence, H. P. Lovecraft would regularly complain that Hamilton would reuse plots, and the plot of "The Plant Revolt" strongly resembles that of "The Life-Masters," which we just read.  Our narrator is a university botanist at Philadelphia university, Edward Harley.  All of a sudden, all over the world, plants stop growing roots and leaves; their roots atrophy, and where they used to grow leaves they now grow long, tough and flexible tendrils.  These plants then starting crawling around, though slowly.  These strange changes seem to happen first, and be most advanced, in Pennsylvania, and it is in the Keystone state that the true magnitude of the horror to be visited on humanity becomes clear, shortly after Harley and another botanist, Holm, arrive in the rural town of Hartville, the epicenter of the phenomenon, to investigate.  The plants in the area around Hartville have gotten fast enough to catch insects and birds with their tendrils, which secrete a digestive acid so the plants can absorb the nutrients of their prey.  At night, a swarm of crawling plants invades the town and busts into people's houses to have a go at devouring those peacefully sleeping inside!  (This gives Hugh Rankin the opportunity to illustrate Hamilton's story with a drawing of women in negligees being clutched in tendrils.  Alas, Rankin's crude drawing is not as sexy as it sounds) Only a few people manage to escape this nightmarish assault with their lives, among them Harley, who fights his way to safety with his "long, thin and keen botanical knife."  Holm, meanwhile, has disappeared.

Harley stumbles in a daze out of the village of death, makes his way up a mountain.  At the top of the mountain he finds a vast artificial pit and a complicated apparatus and discovers the genesis of the plant evolution and revolt, which Hamilton clearly foreshadowed at the start of the story and which we have been expecting.  Two years ago a colleague of Harley and Holm's at the university, botanist Mandall, vanished.  Mandall was very intelligent, but, like so many of these brainiacs, he had crazy ideas.  For one thing, he thought plants were an oppressed class, that it was morally wrong for animals and humans to run plants' lives and exploit them--he insisted that plants were the equal of people and beasts and deserved the same rights.  He also thought that if plants could get various nutrients from the air that today they need to get from the ground, they would shake off their roots and walk around like you and I do, just breathing in all the delicious nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, et al they required.  So Mandall has been spending the last two years building this system to fill the air with those much-needed nutrients, and its operation has now proven his theory--the plants are walking around.  And now that the plants are mobile, Mandall thinks it is time for a little payback!  

Looking through a window, Harley sees that Mandall has captured Holm and listens to that traitor to Kingdom Animalia describe to Holm his plans to help the plants exterminate animal life and take their rightful place as rulers of the world.  Hamilton gets a little repetitious here, telling us a second time all the jazz about how the plants will learn to walk if the elements they need are available in the air that we have already heard.  "The Comet-Drivers" and "The Sun People" suffer from this kind of long-winded repetition as well; was Hamilton trying to reach a certain word count with these stories?

Harley and Holm fight Mandall, and in the struggle Mandall falls into the reach of some monster trees who don't realize he is an ally of the marginalized vegetal-American community who is ashamed of his animal privilege and they kill their benefactor.  Turning a blind eye to the cause of redistributive justice, H & H deactivate Mandall's machine machine and all over the world the plants who have let their roots wither and started walking around die in short order as the nutrients they need are no longer available in the atmosphere.  Back in your lane, plants!

This story is OK.  We can add it to the long list of Hamilton stories about evolution, in many of which evolutionary developments that in real life might take many thousands or millions of years take place very quickly to accommodate an adventure or horror plot, as well as the long list of Hamilton's stories about mad scientists.  I love the mad scientist theme, the idea of one arrogant ambitious guy who is smarter than everybody else challenging the entire world, maybe because he has become obsessed with some idea of improving the world and thinks his innovation is so valuable that all other considerations must be cast aside, or maybe just because he is an outsider who seeks to prove himself or achieve revenge.  I think this theme can generate a lot of dramatic tension because it raises challenging issues of the relationship of the individual to the community and the dangers and limitations posed by both innovation and tradition, and because we (or maybe it's just me) are inclined to admire the man who goes it alone and is willing to take on the whole world. 

Whereas "Alien Earth" was reprinted in an Isaac Asimov anthology, "The Plant Revolt" got the nod from Donald Wollheim for inclusion in his Ace anthology, The Earth in Peril.   

"The Death Lord"

Alright, this one has a good title!  Is it about a vampire?  A necromancer who leads an army of animated corpses?  Let's see!

Well, "The Death Lord" doesn't take place in a fantasy land, but in our world in the time period in which it was written--early in the story Hamilton includes a reference to the post-Great War reparations crises.  Competing with the reparations issue for space in all the major newspapers is the curious story of a typed letter postmarked from New York that all the papers received: by a certain date all the governments of the world must acknowledge the rule of the writer, who calls himself The Death Lord, and if they don't he will demonstrate his power on Chicago.  Everybody treats this as a joke, but when the appointed day arrives every person in Chicago suddenly drops dead!  Investigators find the city streets full of corpses and crashed cars, and the lake full of drifting boats, because everybody died instantly--bizarrely, analysis reveals that all these people died, in scant moments, of diseases like yellow fever, tuberculosis or tetanus that generally takes days or weeks to destroy you. 

Hamilton shifts from a sort of detached journalistic or historical perspective to a focus on the point of two of the six bacteriologists who are assembled in New York to figure out what to do about this Chicago catastrophe, Dr. Randolph Browner, head of an institute in New York and leader of the task force, and his assistant Dr. Walter Huston.  The scientists determine that the Windy City is so full of germs that it must be burned down in its entirety, a task which the Army Air Corps duly performs.  Chi-town is no more!  The germ experts also tell the public that the Death Lord letter could in no way be connected to the horrific tragedy--the letter must have been just a joke written by a crank, the fact that it accurately predicted the death of millions of people just a coincidence!

Anybody who has ever read a newspaper will not be surprised to learn that the bacteriologists are not as certain as they say they are that the Death Lord is a hoax, and anybody who has ever read "The Plant Revolt" or "The Life-Masters" will not be surprised to learn that two years ago a colleague of Browner and Huston's, Dr. Clarence Garnett, mysteriously disappeared.  Garnett had a peculiar theory on how a particular wavelength of radiation might possibly speed the propagation of germs, and Browner wonders if maybe this alleged Death Lord character has proven Garnett's theory sound and put it into practice to atrocious effect.

A few days after the razing of Chicago a second letter arrives from the Death Lord, again demanding submission and this time announcing that it is Philadelphia that is in the crosshairs!  The government and the press, to forestall panic, tell everybody it is just another hoax and advise them to not flee Philly.  The bacteriologists continue to debate among themselves the possibility that the Death Lord is real and head to Philadelphia PA where the six men don germ- and radiation-proof suits and split up, each manning germ detection equipment in different parts of the City of Brotherly Love.  Huston, covering all the bases, also brings a radiation detector.

Sure enough, on the day announced by the Death Lord, Huston detects an increase in radiation, and then 60 minutes later a radical increase in the level of bacteria in the air and water--everybody in Philadelphia except for the six-man team of scientists dies in moments!  Hamilton entertainingly describes all the cars crashing and people falling over and choking and writhing and so forth, and the psychological trauma suffered by Huston as he witnesses the mass death around him.  (Like in "The Plant Revolt" there is a section in which the main character, overwhelmed by grief and horror, wanders around for a while in a daze.)  The six bacteriologists reunite and hunt the silent city for the Death Lord, navigating around carpets of corpses and automobile pile-ups, now certain that Garnett must be in the city someplace, clad in his own protective suit, operating a radiation projector.

DL apparently eludes the scientists, who, as the military burns down Philadelphia behind them, hurry to New York past military cordons and refugee camps to search for the would-be dictator there.  They hunt for days, and then comes the third letter from the Death Lord--NYC is the next target, and this time DL is only giving us a few minutes' notice!  The citizens of the Big Apple panic and the head scientist, Browner, who knew Garnett better than did any of the others, throws on his hazmat suit and dashes out on to the streets of the world's greatest city, saying he may know where to find Garnett; he insists on going alone.            

Huston, radiation detector in hand, figures out a method of estimating where the radiation is coming from and he and the other bacteriologists hit the streets themselves in hopes of finding the Death Lord before he can put to sleep forever the entire population of the city that never sleeps should Browner's hunch prove mistaken.  In less than an hour they discover the projector in Lower Manhattan, not far form the Institute, and discover the horrible truth--DL is the head of their team, the world's greatest bacteriologist, none other than their respected mentor Randolph Browner!  After they smash his projector and shoot him full of holes when he draws a gun on them, Browner tells his colleagues the story of his career as an in-the-closet mad scientist.

Two years ago, Browner murdered Garnett after mastering the details of his fellow bacteriologist's discovery of the germ growing radiation.  Bitter that the people of the world didn't sufficiently appreciate the work of bacteriologists and positive that, as man's foremost benefactors, bacteriologists should rule the world, Browner decided to use this new knowledge to blackmail the world into making him dictator.  Browner expires before he can describe the policy proscriptions he would have enacted with his phone and his pen as chief executive of Earth--too bad.  

This is a better use of the basic plot we saw in "The Life-Masters" and "The Plant Revolt."  The characters are, if only a little, more interesting, the ideas slightly more believable, the text less repetitive and the images more wild and exciting.  I don't have to affix to this one the lukewarm label of "acceptable"--I think "The Death Lord" is a legitimately good story.

I may like it, but the editors of the science fiction and horror worlds apparently were not too keen about "The Death Lord;" the saga of Browner and Huston was not reprinted until 2011 when the good people at Haffner Press included it in The Universe Wreckers, the third volume of their series The Collected Edmond Hamilton.

"Pigmy Island"

This one first appeared in the same issue of Weird Tales as the Lovecraft/Adolphe de Castro collaboration "The Electric Executioner," which I blogged about almost a year ago. Compared to "The Plant Revolt" and "The Death Lord," "Pigmy Island" was a hit with editors!  English anthologist Christine Campbell Thomson included it in both a volume of her Not at Night series, and the later Not at Night Omnibus, which, according to Wikipedia, collected her favorite stories from the series.  "Pigmy Island" was also reprinted in a 1967 issue of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine, heralded on the cover as a "masterpiece."

Russell is a New York lawyer on vacation alone in the Carolinas.  He is sailing a boat off the coast when it is overturned in a squall and he only is barely able to swim to safety on an island.  This island is where seven scientists have been working on experiments on marine invertebrates.  One of these researchers, Garland, greets Russell and provides him food and clothing.  The other six scientists, he tells Russell, are on the mainland taking a break.  In conversation, Garland reveals that the seven scientists have spare time after doing the work for which the university financed the research center here to pursue their own research; his own specialty is figuring out how to manipulate animals' pituitary glands to make them larger or smaller.  He claims that he can inject a dog with a serum and, in 24 hours or so, during which interval the canine is in a coma, the dog will have grown to be five or six times its original size!  A similar serum can be used to shrink the beast to one sixth its normal size, or back to normal if administered to an enlarged pooch .  

Garland shows Russell to his bedroom, and when the attorney wakes up he is only one foot tall and is trapped in a glass tank like the pet lizards I had growing up in New Jersey!  Garland laughs, saying he did the same thing to the other six scientists, but they escaped (this is an understandable problem--my lizards used to escape as well, and not a single one of them had a university degree.)  He vows to take additional precautions to keep Russell form escaping.  

In fact, when Garland is out of the room, the six miniaturized scientists rescue the attorney.  Then the seven 12-inch-high men go on a quest to seize the serum that will return them to normal size, fighting rats and spiders and finally Garland himself in the course of this desperate and almost unbelievable adventure, during much of which our hero Russell is in a daze.  Hamilton does a great job describing life as a foot-high guy, all the fights are engaging, and the pace never lags.  Christine Campbell Thomson and Cylvia Kleinman Margulies (editor of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine and wife of Leo Margulies) were right to favor "Pigmy Island;" it is the best Hamilton story I have read in a while and quite fun.  Thumbs up!

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A better crop of Hamilton stories than the last batch, that is for sure.  I will be reading more Hamilton stories in the future while pursuing my aim to have read from every 1930s issue of Weird Tales, and I hope they will all be as fun as "Pigmy Island" or at least "The Death Lord."