"The Blue Earthman" by Frank Belknap Long
This is an audaciously crazy story with a wildly bizarre setting and plot; at times the style of the story is convoluted and difficult, making it a little hard to read and comprehend, but maybe we should look on the bright side and say this adds to its dream-like nature and adds a sense of alienness to this tale of the unimaginatively distant future.
Long's tale is set ten million years from now. A few million years ago the Sun began drawing the planets towards itself, altering the Earth's rotation so that one side of our beloved home planet always faces the Sun. The continents became uninhabitable, and the human race constructed huge ships, mobile floating sea cities, upon which to live. The human race experienced divergent evolution, those inhabiting the sea cities on the cold dark side of the Earth developing blue skins; for thousands of years these blue men have waged pitiless war on the white men of the sunny side of Earth, where the ocean never ceases boiling. As if that wasn't enough mayhem, recently city-sized ships have arrived on our big blue marble from Mars--these mysterious Martian sea cities have already destroyed many of our native sea cities, and the white and blue Earthers have forged an alliance and are now working together to try to repel the invaders.
Our protagonist is Kellkall, a white Earthman, and we learn a little about life in his totalitarian sea city where the government decides what job you will have and who will be your spouse. (Cripes, we are always running into these god-forsaken Bolshevist dystopias here at MPorcius Fiction Log, aren't we?) Kellkall was chosen to pilot one of the "death shells," hermetically sealed one-man war boats that serve to protect their city. Kellkall never leaves this boat, and only gets to see his wife Loomono one day a year when she is allowed to visit his boat. This year her visit coincided with an attack by a Martian city, and in the battle she was killed. Kellkall pilots his damaged boat in a ferocious attack on the Martian city as his wife lays dead on the seat behind him. He falls unconscious as his boat is hit again.
Kellkall wakes up in a Earth ship--a vessel manned by blue men. The blue men rescued him but their captain gives him some bad news. This guy is a pirate, a rebel, who has refused to recognize the alliance with the white men. When he was young his siblings were captured by white men and tortured to death, and since then he has captured and tortured to death scores of white men. Kellkall will be his next victim! More bad news: the blue men's medical technology has reanimated Kellkall's wife; her brain is somewhat damaged, but she is in more than good enough condition to serve as the blue pirate captain's sex slave!
Kellkall gets tortured for a while, but so great was Loomono's love for him that she regains her addled wits and grabs a weapon and kills the pirate captain and the torturers and frees Kellkall. They embrace, but Loomono tells Kellkall that damaged brain is giving out and she will soon lapse into zombiedom. No matter--one of the Martian cities sails up and the blue vessel is wrecked and everybody aboard, including our doomed lovers, is killed.
No Earthman has ever seen the Martians, and our shock ending is that the Martians are giants--each of those "cities" is a two-man vessel like Kellkall's boat. A Martian lifts up the blue ship with a tentacle and shakes out all the humans. The Martian marvels at the facial expressions on the two white bodies he finds among all the blue bodies--the Kellkall and Loomono were able to face death calmly, because they knew love, an emotion no Martian has ever experienced.
"The Blue Earthman" is like a frenetic dream, flashing from one incredible melodramatic scene to the next at a blistering pace. I feel like Long must have written this at full speed off the top of his head and never revised it. Yet it is compelling, so I have to give it a thumbs up. It seems that "The Blue Earthman" has never been reprinted, however.
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| One of the advertisers in the April 1935 issue of Astounding was Vicks--wow, sexy shoes. |
Coblentz's tale starts off in the future of 1951, when our narrator, Dr. Bill Ridings of New York City, goes on a six-month pleasure cruise to the South Seas. I keep telling people to never leave New York, but they never listen. If you want to see the water, go to the East River; if you want to see South Seas stuff I'm sure they have a bunch of things at the American Museum of Natural History and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, I just saved you a ton of time and money. And now you can bum around for six months in Manhattan with no job--that's real pleasure, doc!
Doc Ridings's cruise ship hits a reef and sinks, and he is shipwrecked all alone on an uninhabited island for almost eleven years. Finally he is rescued and returned to New York. When he arrives in the Gotham of 1961 he finds a startling change has taken place--everybody moves much faster than before. Coblentz spends page after tedious page describing how people walk faster, talk faster, drive faster, shop faster, etc. Ridings can't even understand most of what people are saying, and they claim they can't understand him because he talks so slowly.
Ridings gets run over by a waiter while trying to get service at a restaurant and ends up in the hospital. There he meets another slow man who was run over, and this guy, a poet, explains why everybody is moving at such a high rate of speed. Some professor invented a drug that speeds users up to triple their normal pace, and almost everybody uses it so they can get three times as much done in a day. The poet has refused to take it.
Now that Ridings has realized what is going on he decides to join the rest of the world in being "triple-geared," and convinces the poet to join him. When they get out of the hospital they take the drug but, for some reason, the drug makes them move six times their natural speed instead of three times. So they still can't interact with everyone else. So they decide to move to the island upon which Riding was marooned.
A one-note joke ("Them city folk always be in a hurry!") that is not funny and is stretched out to ten boring pages, with a plot that is contrived and nonsensical (e. g., the people on the ship that rescued Riding were abstaining from the speed drug for a nonsensical reason and didn't inform him of the drug's widespread use for a nonsensical reason and Coblentz doesn't bother to explain why there is no radio and no books or newspapers on the ship that would reveal to Doc Ridings the radical change that has taken place in society during his absence.) Thumbs down!
If I were hired to defend the story, or assigned the task of defending it because I was in some kind of debate club or something, I would say it was a leftist satire of modern society, in which we are (allegedly) obsessed with efficiency and achieving goals, but, to be honest, this idea only rears its ugly head in two paragraphs, one in which the poet says that "economists recommend it [the drug] as the best method ever devised for efficiency of labor" and another in which the poet says that business people like the drug because they can make three times as many deals and military men like it because they can cause three times as much destruction. So, a quarter-page of feeble satire stretched out to ten pages. Ugh.
This lame piece of filler has never been reprinted, and for good reason.
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| Another of Astounding's advertisers: Fabrix Inc. Drop everything! |
"Life Current" by Donald Wandrei
Alright, a mad scientist story, and a tragic one!
Langston works at the Power Research Laboratories in Manhattan. He loves his work more than anything--alas, even more than his wife Marjorie! He often works late, and his lonely wife tonight walks through a snowstorm to see him at the lab. Down in the basement where all the big machines are, Langston has just made a breakthrough in his research. He has been trying, for months, to reproduce the electrical field generated by the human body. (At least I think that is what he is doing--he gives a long lecture to Marjorie and that is what I got out of it.) Just before Marjorie came by he succeeded in creating such a field, but one of only 500 volts. Langston explains to Marjorie that, when he got the field going, even though he was on its periphery, it had a powerful effect on his body, filling him with ecstasy! So now he is going to create a similar field, but of 500,000 volts, and stand right in the middle of it! Imagine the joy he will feel then!
Marjorie knows this sounds fishy--her husband is talking like a drug addict. She urges him to reconsider, but he doesn't listen. He starts up the field and steps into it. Wandrei tells us that the powerful field "magnetized and polarized" him, a negative charge collecting at his head, a positive one at his feet. The result is that he is rotated so he is parallel to the floor and propelled like a missile into the machinery headfirst, so his head is crushed, and then propelled to the other side of the apparatus at a similar speed, so his legs are crushed. Dead, his life current ceases, so the pulp that is all that remains of Langston falls to the floor.
Marjorie, seeing this horror, commits suicide by stepping into the field herself.
I like it, though I have no idea if any of this science makes any sense. Unlike those deep cuts, "The Blue Earthman" and "Triple-Geared," "Life Current" would reappear in book form at least twice, in 1965's Strange Harvest and in 1989's Colossus.
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Coblentz's story is a total waste of paper and ink. Long's "The Blue Earthman" and Wandrei's "Life Current" on the other hand have value. The science in them provides at least some interest, but what really makes them compelling is their depiction of tragic love affairs and horrible deaths. Sure, Long's story includes talk about orbits and how a planet's rotation affects climate and seasons, and Wandrei's has a lecture about magnetism, electricity, and the human nervous system, but the fact that these stories get their oomph from scenes of a person witnessing his or her spouse suffering physical mutilation makes you wonder how much the ostensibly science-oriented magazines like Astounding have in common with the horror-oriented ones like Weird Tales and the sex and gore exploitation magazines like Spicy Mystery, to what extent all these magazines rely on the same strategies to draw in readers.
Speaking of Spicy Mystery, we'll be checking in with Henry Kuttner in our next episode and reading a bunch of stories he sold to that wild and crazy periodical.
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