Jack Williamson: "The Flame from Mars," "Born of the Sun" and "Xandulu"

Today we explore some early work of the second SFWA Grand Master, three 1934 pieces by Jack Williamson, two short stories published in F. Orlin Tremaine's Astounding and a three-part serial published in Hugo Gernsback's Wonder Stories.  I'm reading all these stories at our favorite website, the internet archive, in scans of the original magazines in which they appeared.

"The Flame from Mars" 

Ared Stokes, our narrator, is the 50-year-old business manager of the vast enterprise young Don Belgrand inherited.  Belgrand may have the body of an athlete but he loves science, and got himself an engineering degree.  Don has acquired the mining rights to Meteor Crater in Arizona, and has been spending his time at the crater while Ared is in New York managing Don's business empire.  Don hopes to find the meteor itself down there, and after two months, during which this brainiac invented all new mining equipment, he finds something--and it is no mere meteor!  In response to Don's summons, Ared leaves the towers of beautiful Manhattan (always a perilous course, as I can tell you and have) to meet Don in the desert, where, at the bottom of a shaft a thousand feet deep, Don tells Ared that before him is no mere space rock--that what struck the Earth here thousands of years ago was a projectile launched from our red-faced neighbor Mars!

It takes months for Don's crew to bore through the thick protective outer layer of the Martian shot, but then within its inner chamber they discover something amazing.  There's a pile of treasure, including bars of metal no Earthman has ever seen before.  But that's not the amazing thing.  What is more amazing than money? you might ask?  You already know the answer, my friend!  Sex!  Much like the explorers in Howard Wandrei's "The Other" and Frank Belknap Long's "Skyrock" and "Lichen from Eros," Don has discovered an alien woman, apparently dead, more beautiful than any Earthwoman!  

Besides the red hot Martian babe, and all that silver, gold, and unnamed metal treasure, there are machines that we today might call hologram projectors, and these have taught Don the Martian language and Martian history, particularly all about this woman, Princess Allurova, the Flame Woman.  

Forty thousand years ago Allurova's mother, a genius scientist, married a cad who cheated on her and even tried to poison her to death.  But the scientist survived, though her body was wracked by constant pain.  Her ordeal made her a ferocious misandrist, and to get revenge on all men she used her scientific skills to turn her baby daughter, born soon after she survived that murder attempt, into a superwoman!  Little Allurova was given a power, called colloquially "the Flame," that made her immortal and irresistibly beautiful, but also toxic.  All living things who touched her would die in agony and then decay into dust. Mom told Allurova how to deactivate this power, should she ever fall in love with a man, and then, her work of revenge complete, Mom committed suicide.

For years men, including the smartest and bravest men of Mars, sought Allurova, who was so irresistible.  They couldn't help themselves, and despite all warning touched the Flame Woman and perished.  This was causing so much havoc on Mars, all the best and brightest men killing themselves, that the Martian government put Allurova in a sleep capsule and put the capsule into the giant spherical shell and shot her to Earth, where she has slept for 400 centuries.  And now Don, one of the smartest and bravest men on Earth, is in love with her!

I fully expected Don to wake up this woman, touch her, and die, and Ared and Don expect the same thing.  But when Don touches Allurova he learns that her Flame power has waned over the centuries, and she is no longer toxic.  Equally conveniently, she falls in love with Don after rejecting all those Martian men.  Terra uber alles!  So we get a happy ending when I was expecting a tragic one.

I like this story, though I think I would have preferred the tragic ending I was expecting.

"The Flame from Mars" appeared in the same issue of Astounding that published Donald Wandrei's "Colossus," which we read back in 2017.  "The Flame from Mars" would not be reprinted until the year 2000 in the third volume of Haffner Press's Collected Stories of Jack Williamson; this volume also includes today's other subjects, "Born of the Sun" and "Xandulu," as well as "Wizard's Isle," which we read a few months ago.     

"Born of the Sun" 

Foster Ross is another one of these guys with the body of an athlete and the brain of a scientist; for ages he's been working on a system that will exploit the "omicron effect"* to power Mankind's first space ship.  Tonight he's all alone in the mansion his father left him, the servants having departed for the winter; later today he'll be leaving Pennsylvania for Palm Beach where awaits his fiancé, June Trevor.  Or so he thought!  His Uncle Barron suddenly drops by, after being out of touch for twelve years on a mysterious expedition, to tell Foster that a powerful cabal is trying to murder him (Barron) and only he (Foster) can save the human race by building his space ship tout de suite.

Uncle Barron explains.  During those twelve years he was a member of a secret cult of religious fanatics based in the Gobi desert.  These "orientals" were able to divine a truth that we Westerners, with our "dogmatic minds," were unable to see: the planets of our solar system are about to break up!  The cult and its diabolical leader, L'ao Ku, welcome this cataclysm, for the extermination of mankind is an essential component of their religion.  Of course, Uncle Barron's dogmatic Western mind recoiled at the idea of the extinction of the human race, and he fled the cult, hoping that his clever nephew's plans for a space ship might come to fruition in time to save at least a few members of this human race of ours.  Right on his tail were L'ao Ku's agents, armed with one of the evil genius Lao Ku's inventions, a ray gun that, when it hits you, transforms your blood into poison!

Our heroes have to fight one of the "Mongoloid" assassins on their way out of the mansion to Foster's roadster; Barron is winged by the poison ray, but they make it to Foster's factory where they start construction on the space ship and the selection of the two thousand people who will be allowed aboard when the time comes to leave this doomed world behind.  Months go by, and as the spherical space ship takes shape, and Barron becomes steadily more ill from the poison, the solar system goes haywire, with Pluto, then Neptune, and then the other planets and their major moon in turn changing color and wandering off into interstellar space.  On Earth, increasingly powerful, and oddly regular, earthquakes are felt.  Then one night the people of the Western Hemisphere watch as the mind-blowing truth of what is going on is revealed--the Moon cracks into innumerable pieces and from within emerges a huge bird monster--the planets and moons are eggs!  That's right people, eggs!  Eggs lain by the stars, who are alive!  

The Earth will go the way of Luna in just a few days, and Foster and his people rush to finish the space ship.  An angry mob, whipped up by L'ao Ku and led by his ray weapon wielding acolytes, attacks the factory and overcomes the guards and boards the space craft.  The two thousand picked superior individuals are massacred!  L'ao Ku leaves Foster and Barron alive, so they will live to see the destruction of the Earth, and leaves in his aircraft.   

North America sinks beneath the waves, driving off and drowning everyone in the mob before they can cripple the space ship.  Foster can't find June among the dead, and figures L'ao Ku must have carried her off.  He manages to repair the merely superficial damage inflicted by the mob and launches the ship on its maiden voyage, but before he can get to L'ao Ku's HQ the Earth cracks up and a starbird emerges from the fragments.  Barron is on his last legs, and Foster thinks he is going to be the last survivor of humankind, but then June Trevor appears--one of the men put her in a perfect hiding place when the "chinks" busted into the ship.  As the story ends, Barron expires, but he, and we readers, can be confident that Foster and June will give birth to a new spaceborne human race that will conquer the galaxy.

The big crazy ideas of this story are appealing, and Williamson adeptly manages the pace and tone and all that.  The inclusion of a Yellow Peril villain is perhaps unnecessary--a spontaneous mob would have been believable enough--and L'ao Ku is underused in any case; he never actually appears on screen, we just hear about him from Barron (when L'ao Ku climbs aboard the space ship Foster is already unconscious.)  This isn't a debilitating problem with "Born of the Sun," however.  I like it.  Isaac Asimov included "Born of the Sun" in his anthology of 1930s SF, Before the Golden Age (of which I own a US hardcover edition), and Forrest J. Ackerman put it in his anthology Gosh! Wow!  (Sense of Wonder) Science Fiction.

*Feel free to make your own joke here about how you thought the omicron effect was the closing of your kid's school or cancellation of your family's Christmas party.

"Xandulu"

"Xandulu" made its debut as a serial in Wonder Stories, printed in three installments.  It would be reprinted in 1999 in a Gryphon Books collection of two Williamsons novellas.

Years ago our narrator, Dr. Roscoe Brander, while adventuring all over the world with his pal, expert pilot Miles Kendon, caught a tropical disease, and since then he has been feeble, and has confined himself to his yacht, where he sits inert on the deck while his crew sails him around the world.  (There's not much on TV yet in 1934.)  One night on the Mediterranean, a biplane is spotted in the sky over the yacht, a biplane in extremis--it is in a dog fight with a bunch of transparent spheres a yard or so in diameter!  The spheres are all shot down, but the plane was damaged by the electric bolts they were projecting, and crash lands in the sea.  The yacht's crew rescues the pilot, who turns out to be Dr. Brander's old buddy Kendon, and his passenger, a beautiful babe who speaks a strange musical language.

After a rest, Kendon tells the story of how he met the pale copper-haired beauty, Su-Ildra.  Flying over the mountains between Marrakesh and the Sahara one day, he spotted a ruined city on a plateau, a city so old it must have been founded before the last Ice Age, a city so huge and composed of buildings so tall it makes New York look like a village of mud huts!  Kendon couldn't resist the urge to land and explore.  Among the ruins Kendon found a shaft a thousand feet across, a shaft that seemed bottomless.  Out of this Well flew a giant bird, Su-Ildra mounted on its back; upon landing the huge eagle died of exhaustion.

Kendon and the alabaster beauty spent weeks clearing a big enough runway from which Kendon could take off, in the process learning enough of each other's languages to communicate.  Su-Ildra, the pilot learned, fled up to the surface because of a war down in her subterranean world, Xandulu, between her peace-loving race, the Ara, and an evil race that worships a god of destruction, the Ryka.  Among the Ryka the women are tall powerful warriors, the men short skinny priests.

One of the transparent spheres came out of the Well, looking for Su-Ildra; these spheres are bubbles of energy, operated remotely, and at close range one can see in them a sort of holographic projection of the operator--the high priest of the Ryka, Bak-Toreg.  Fortunately, these spheres are fragile; they cannot persist in direct sunlight, and pop if hit by gunfire.  After destroying the sphere, Kendon and Su-Ildra took off and by an amazing coincidence ended up by Brander's yacht.

It is not long after relating the story that night falls and a swarm of the bubbles appear, more than Kendon can shoot down; Kendon is stunned by an electric bolt and one of the bubbles expands and seizes Su-Ildra and carries her off.   After the yacht gets to France, Kendon (who, like Brander, is rich) buys another plane, bids our narrator farewell, and heads for the Well and Xandulu.  

As the second installment begins it is some months later and Dr. Brander has sailed into Algiers; Kendon comes aboard and tells him of his adventure in Xandulu, where he saw, but could not extract, Su-Ildra.

Kendon flew back to the plateau city, but before he could land, his plane suffered a catastrophic malfunction and he had to bail out without his supplies and equipment.  He used his parachute to descend the Well, which is like ten miles deep and opens up in the ceiling of the vast (two hundred mile wide) circular cavern that is Xandulu, an inner world lit by artificial suns.  He landed in a sea and swam to a tiny island rock and, another amazing coincidence, found Su-Ildra all alone on this rock.  This island was the prison to which Bak-Toreg had exiled her.  

Su-Ildra is the quasi-leader/high priestess of the peaceful and almost governmentless Ara, and as such she bears a crystal in a bag about her neck.  The crystal is a communications device that, every few generations, flickers to life and puts the Ara in touch with the Flame Folk, the ancient reptile people who created Xandulu.  (The only reason that Bak-Toreg hadn't already sacrificed Su-Ildra to his god of destruction was that he had some fear of the once-mighty Flame Folk.)  When Su-Ildra unwrapped the crystal to show it to Kendon, it glowed and the Flame Folk spoke telepathically to Kendon, telling him the history of Xandulu and laying a tremendous charge on the pilot's shoulders!

The Flame Folk built that magnificent mountain city that looks down on the Sahara when they ruled the world during the before the Ice Ages.  During their rule two other intelligent races arose on Earth, our human race and the Ryka.  When the Ice Ages came, the Flame Folk created Xandulu and retreated down there, bringing with them some humans, the Ara, and some Ryka, portioning out Xandulu into three countries.  The Ryka left the surface died out during the Ice Age, though the humans left behind endured and became your and my ancestors.

Down in Xandulu, where the living was easy, the Ara became peaceful hippies, losing interest in technology and complex social organization, while the once super powerful Flame Folk's civilization lost its vitality, evolving into peaceniks psychologically unable to commit violence, even in defense of their own lives.  The Ryka, conversely, developed all kinds of high tech weaponry and took to worshipping destruction, even creating a monster god, a personification of destruction, to serve as the focus of their worship.  Embracing imperialism and a lust to destroy, the only thing holding the Ryka back from taking over all of Xandulu was their residual fear of the Flame Folk, whose technology was still much more advanced than their own.  Recently, under the rule of high priest Bak-Toreg, the Ryka's fear of the Flame Folk has eased and they have attacked and almost wiped out the Ara.  The Flame Folk tell Kendon that, as they lack the ability to fight, that he will have to stop the Ryka, whose ambitions are not confined to Xandulu--Bak-Toreg aspires to destroy the entire Earth in sacrifice to his monster god.

One of the force bubbles seizes Kendon and carries him to the high-tech city of the Ryka and deposits him in a pit in a sort of amphitheater with tens of thousands of seats, where he will be sacrificed to the monster god.  Before the crowds and the monster arrive, the Flame Folk teleport to him an invisible sword, which he uses to kill the god, a giant scorpion, as its worshippers watch in horror.  The Flame Folk spirit Kendon away with their super science before the Ryka mob can murder Kendon, but he is teleported not to that island where Su-Ildra awaits him, but back in North Africa!

As the second installment of the serial ends Kendon has purchased another plane and tells Dr. Brander that he is going back to Xandulu to find Su-Ildra.

In the third installment, eight months after Kendon bid him good-bye, Brander receives a radio message from Kendon, who is down in Xandulu.  Kendon describes over the radio his recent adventures in the underground world, in which he has decided to stay.

When he got to the little island again he found that Su-Ildra had vanished, and fell into a trap set by Bak-Toreg.  An artificial life form, like wires or vines, seizes him and starts strangling him; Kendon would have died if the Flame Folk hadn't teleported him out of the monster's clutches and to their city.  

The Flame Folk tell Kendon that Bak-Toreg has lost all fear of them, that in hours he is going to attack this city from the air and bomb it into rubble.  Just in case somebody decides to shoot back, Bak-Toreg has Su-Ildra chained up in his flier as a human shield!

Centuries ago, before the Flame Folk had become such pacifists, they built an arsenal of AFVs and bombers and anti-aircraft ray projectors against such an occasion as this.  This arsenal is still stored in a tower none of these reptilian conscientious objectors has visited in hundreds of years, the Tower of Dread.  Kendon hurries to this Tower, where a hologram teaches him how to operate an AA energy cannon.  When the Ryka Luftwaffe strikes, Kendon shoots down all of the Ryka aircraft except for the one with Bak-Toreg and Su-Ildra aboard; the head priest turns his aircraft around and heads for home.

Kendon has the Flame Folk teleport him onto the aircraft of Bak-Toreg.  He takes the powerful female Ryka aboard by surprise, pushing her over the rail to die below as she hits the surface.  Bak-Toreg has a box with a switch on it, and says that if he throws the switch it will destroy the universe.  Dramatizing the triumph of the science of psychology over the superstition that is religion, Kendon dares the High Priest to throw the switch, confident that Bak-Toreg is too scared of death to follow through on his professed beliefs.  Kendon is right, of course, takes the box and throws it overboard and then kills the dwarfish little priest with his bare hands.  Kendon has saved the world and his girlfriend!     

"Xandulu" is almost twice as long as "Born of the Sun."  Unfortunately, I don't feel like it delivers twice as much entertaining content.  Why is Brander even in the story?  Instead of having Miles Kendon tell Brander his adventures, why not just have Kendon tell his adventures to us directly in a memoir or something?  Or just have Brander at the very beginning and very end of the story, not the end and beginning of each episode?  For a while I expected Xanduluan super science to cure Brander of his malady so he could join in the fighting in Xandulu, but such a thing never happens--Brander is a cripple from start to finish of this story and he does just about nothing besides make the story longer.

Another thing that adds to the word count without adding entertainment value is how Kendon keeps leaving Xandulu and returning to it.  The plot would have been the same and more compact if, instead of going to France after Su-Idra was captured and then going back to Africa after he slew the giant scorpion, Kendon had just never left Xandulu.

A problem with the plot that has nothing to do with length is how the Flame Folk are always saving Kendon's bacon and telling him what to do.  I guess I say this all the time and here I am saying it again--stories are better when the main character's personality and decisions drive the plot, when he succeeds or fails based on his own character and ability and judgements.  

There are good things in "Xandulu," but the ratio of good stuff to sterile padding is lower than it should be.  Merely acceptable.

**********

It is easy to see some recurring themes in the 1934 Williamson stories we have now read, today's three plus "Wizard's Isle," like religious fanatics who want to destroy the world, giant scorpions, Asian mad scientists, and wealthy young men who inherit their wealth and use it to go on adventures.  It is interesting to see Williamson working within various SF traditions and subgenres, sometimes in the same story at once: the Burroughs tradition in which a man of action finds another world and rescues a princess, the elitist traditions in which men of science are opposed by mobs of the common folk and by religious people, the Yellow Peril genre, and the sort of stories associated with "weird menace" or "shudder pulp" magazines whose appeal lies in the depiction of gore and women in peril.

Williamson has a competent writing style and does come up with engaging SF ideas, and I enjoyed these stories despite all their shortcomings, and you can be sure we'll be reading more of his work here at MPorcius Fiction Log.