Fantastic Adventures editor Raymond Palmer, in his editorial, stresses that the magazine's emphasis is on fantasy, not science, and talks up the upcoming Science Fiction Convention in Chicago, as well as Edmond Hamilton's story "The Horse That Talked," which will appear in the next (the January '41) issue of Fantastic Adventures, and the fanzine Stardust. He tells us about hanging out in Wisconsin with Robert Bloch (he calls him the "idea man of science fiction") and August Derleth (he has "one of the finest sf mag collections.") He also relates some wacky legends I never heard of before and for which he offers no citations--maybe he just made them up?--one about how Moses and Pharaoh are said to have had access to electrical weapons and another about how in the early 15th century an Italian countess was scammed by some rapscallions who sold her a nonfunctional time machine, preying on her hopes of getting back with her dead husband.
The publisher of Fantastic Adventures, William B. Ziff, has his own two-page editorial in which he urges us to write our congressmen and tell them we are willing to pay a pile of taxes for a rearmament program so we don't go the way of the French and the Chinese. Just change a few of the proper nouns and you can probably print this thing again today in your local paper. In the letters column are missives from Duane W. Rimel, friend of H. P. Lovecraft (he praises the magazine's art and fiction) and the famous space opera scribe Edward E. Smith (he engages in a mind-numbing debate with another reader about the possibility that "thought waves" might exist--Smith is not sure they exist, but feels there is not yet sufficient data to rule out their existence.)
"Jongor of Lost Land" by Robert Moore Williams
Ann Hunter is a wealthy young New Yorker whose parents are dead. But something has occurred that has impelled her to leave this enviable situation and risk her life in a wilderness thousands of miles from the bright lights of the Big Apple. You see, some time ago her twin brother Alan decided to take a break from college and explore some remote part of Australia with this joker Richard Varsey, and then Varsey came back to Manhattan without Alan, with a story that the natives had taken Ann's brother captive! So, as the story begins, Ann, Varsey, and their guide Hofer, who doesn't seem to have a first name, are at the edge of a forbidding Australian mountain range, in the middle of a dispute with their "carriers," aborigines whom they call "blackfellows," which I guess you aren't supposed to say anymore but which apparently in 1940 was still on the lips of every paleface down under.
The aborigines refuse to advance any further, and then a mysterious disembodied voice calls to them, tells them in their own tongue to attack the white people! Ann, Varsey and Hofer's rifles take a heavy toll on their now murderous hired men, who only have spears, bows and knives, but there were forty of them at the start of the fight and they threaten to overwhelm the trio. They are saved by Jongor, a brown-skinned giant whose leopard-skin clad body (do they have leopards in Australia, mate?), the product of a youth spent evading death, is like that of a Greek statue. He adds his archery to the gunfire of the three white interlopers and the aborigines are repelled.
The few surviving aborigines have barely had a chance to flee when Varsey, an emotional man whom we have been primed to suspect (e. g., Ann doesn't have a good feeling about him and he almost panicked during the fight) shoots Jongor, the man who just saved their bacon! Jongor falls behind some rocks and disappears. The three adventurers, despite the shaken Varsey's misgivings, continue their search for Alan, marching through the only pass through the mountains into Lost Land, a valley of swamps and jungles teeming with prehistoric reptiles.
Jongor (birthname: John Gordon), whom we learn is the son of an American pilot and his wife who crashed in Lost Land, watches the three white people from concealment. Ann reminds him of his mother, and so he not only forgoes avenging himself on Varsey for winging him, but also rescues the hapless trio a second time, this time from a pterosaur attack. And then a third time, from an attack by some kind of tornado or vortex that is directed by some unseen enemy. Ann wants to make friends with the jungle hunk and get his help in finding Alan, but the three male characters are all deeply suspicious of each other and just can't get along--Jongor can tell that Hofer and Varsey are not Ann's friends, but have come to the Lost Land to pursue their own agendas, and Varsey won't shut up about his conspiracy theory that Jongor is colluding with the aborigines, pterosaurs and vortex operators. So Jongor leaves them, and, lickety-split, Ann and company have been captured by monkey people who drop on them from a dirigible equipped with searchlights.
In the ruined city of the monkey-people they are brought before the monkey king by his majesty's lieutenant, a young monkey-man who openly lusts after Ann's "lithe body." Ann is made to parade before the throne "as though she were a model displaying clothes before a group of prospective purchasers," and she fears that she will be added to the king's harem. Hubba hubba. These furry tailed weirdos speak a language much like that of the aboriginal Australians, and Hofer learns from their chatter that, in fact, they are going to sacrifice her to their sun god. Hofer also realizes that these degenerate monkey-people and their once beautiful, now decrepit, city are the sad remnants of a colony founded by people from Mu. (These Murians are thus much like the Oparians of the Tarzan stories, who are the degenerate descendants of a colony of people from Atlantis.)
While Ann is being prepared for sacrifice--a days-long process--the lieutenant conspires with the sneaky sneaky Varsey. Varsey is given his rifle back, and uses it to murder the monkey king--now the lieutenant can be elevated to the throne and get his paws all over Ann! But when he tries it Ann punches the monkey masher in the face and makes a break for it. The monkey-men--and traitorous Varsey!--are hot on her trail. Ann climbs a cliff and decides to jump to her death rather than let the newly crowned king of the monkey-folk defile her body. Jongor suddenly appears, arresting her suicide attempt and fighting off the horny monkey man, Varsey, and over a dozen rank and file simian sun-worshipers.
Jongor and Ann fall in love and head out of the jungle. On the way they meet an emaciated Alan, who was in the dungeons of the monkey-people but made it out during the chaos following the murder of the king. He explains how months ago Varsey betrayed him and left him for dead; Varsey was determined to get back to Lost Land only because he knew that, like Burroughs's Opar, this monkey town has a huge treasure vault stuffed to the gills with gold and jewels.
Reunited with her brother, and with a world-class muscle man for a boyfriend, Ann thinks she is out of the woods. But she isn't! Among the Mu technology the monkey-men have at their disposal is a remote viewer and two-way communications system much like a crystal ball; those long-tailed bastards used this thing to turn the carriers against the expedition on the first page of the story, and it is also how they aim their tornado weapon. (Fu Cong, the villain in Williams's Zanthar at Trip's End, also has a disembodied voice system and a remote controlled tornado weapon--I guess these are some of Williams's go-to ideas.) Now that the monkey people have dispersed, Hofer, Ann's erstwhile guide, has control of all these high-tech Mu instruments. He speaks to our three heroes, suggesting they return to the monkey city. But Alan knows the terrible (or amazing--you know, opinions may differ on some points) truth about Hofer--he is a madman who is able to hide his insanity from others and he is also an anarchist who has dedicated his life to overthrowing all government! Like Varsey, he was using Ann to finance an expedition to the Mu city, but while Varsey was doing it in hopes of getting some treasure, Hofer's aim was to get a hold of the super weapons of ancient Mu, which he hopes to use to destroy all government the world over! (Here in Fantastic Adventures there is actually a footnote explaining what anarchism is and assessing to what extent Hofer's actions are the result of his mental illness and to what extent his political convictions.)
Before Ann and Alan can even consider freezing Hofer's bank account as punishment for his heretical political beliefs, Hofer aims that tornado weapon at them. In perhaps my favorite paragraph of the story, Hofer makes snide comments about how rich the twins are ("that will fix you, too, you snooty society girl!") as the vortex gets to work on them. Jongor, who you would think would have learned skepticism of government over his lifetime of fending for himself and evading the super weapons of the tyrannical and ultimately unstable monkey regime, nonetheless saves Ann and Alan and foils Hofer's ambitions. When Hofer sets a vortex in the one pass out of the valley, trapping his foes within it, Jongor stampedes a herd of dinosaurs into Hofer's control room, driving him to flee in that airship. Before he can gain an altitude from which he can snipe our heroes from safety, Jongor throws a spear at Hofer with deadly accuracy.
The story ends with Jongor and the twins riding a dinosaur back towards civilization.
"Jongor of Lost Land" is an acceptable Tarzan pastiche with some half-baked science fiction ideas thrown in there; besides the stuff I've mentioned, there are the crystals Jongor uses to command the dinosaurs and that the monkey men use to control the pterosaurs. Williams tries to give the characters motivations and relationships that make sense, and he more or less succeeds. One odd note is that while he describes the pterosaurs in some detail, the author never names the species or type of dinosaurs Jongor commands, or describes them very clearly. References to an "incredibly horned snout," "hoofs" and "horny head plates" lead me to suspect these beasts are ceratopsians, even if cover artist J. Allen St. John depicts Jongor riding some kind of therapod (maybe Ceratosaurus?) and interior artist Robert Fuqua portrays Alan and Ann mounted atop a therapod who lacks horns (Allosaurus, I guess.)
There are two more Jongor stories and it seems quite likely I will be reading them as I continue to explore 1940s and 1950s issues of Fantastic Adventures.
"The Uncanny Power of Edwin Cobalt" by Henry Kuttner
The narrator of the five-page tale, is a lawyer living with his wife in Manhattan. He is a skeptic, a doubter. This story chronicles his shocking discovery that, when he doubts something, it ceases to exist--more than that, the entire universe changes so that the thing he doubted never existed. His wife hangs an ugly picture on their wall; the narrator "started to wonder if the picture was real. That travesty should never have been painted. I felt myself doubting its existence." The picture vanishes, and so does all evidence of its existence, except the narrator's memory of it.
This sort of thing happens again and again, the incidents escalating in scale and importance--buildings disappear, people disappear, finally, the narrator himself disappears. This story doesn't make much sense, as there is no reason for an ordinary person to doubt the existence of a skyscraper he has worked in for years or of his wife, and Kuttner barely even tries to come up with reasons why the narrator might doubt the existence of such familiar quotidian things. Kuttner, I guess, tries to make the narrator's less than credible doubts a little more believable by having the narrator drink a lot, and by suggesting it is possible he is insane. There is also no consideration of how the narrator got this power, or why it began operating all of a sudden.
Thumbs down.
"The Uncanny Power of Edwin Cobalt" would reappear in book form in 2016 in Haffner Press's Kuttner collection The Watcher at the Door.
"The Elixir of Invisibility" by Henry Kuttner
Richard Raleigh works as the assistant and errand boy of a ruthless, perhaps sadistic, scientist, Meek, whose beautiful but dim-witted daughter, Binnie, Raleigh hopes to marry. Meek has invented a drink that makes you (and your clothes, somehow) invisible. Journalists who have scoffed at his efforts receive packages which contain invisible frogs--Meek stole the frogs from Raleigh, who was breeding them to supplement his meager income. When the pressmen burst into the lab after opening their packages, Meek announces he will demonstrate his invention, and instructs the journalos to go back outside and wait on the street--invisible, Meek will pick their pockets and leave in them his calling card, proving his invention works. Meek, who is fat, isn't actually going to perform this feat--he orders Raleigh to drink the elixir and perform it.
Raleigh's demonstration is complicated by the antics of Binnie's big affectionate dog. Even worse, while Raleigh is picking the pockets of the reporters, some other invisible man is robbing a bank. Meek is arrested by the police, but he accuses Raleigh of the crime and Binnie insists Raleigh try to find the real thief. With the help of the dog, Raleigh finds the invisible crook, is held captive by the thug, escapes, enlists the help of a safe cracker he meets while visiting Meek in the big house, traps and captures the crook, clears Meek and convinces Binnie to marry him over the objections of her father.
The slapsticky action scenes are neither exciting nor funny, much of the plot is contrived, the characters and their motivations and relationships are uninteresting, and the story feels very long ("The Elixir of Invisibility" is like 16 pages.)
Totally lame. Thumbs down.
I say it is lame, but "The Elixir of Invisibility" was reprinted in a 1970 issue of Fantastic that has a beautiful Jeff Jones cover. (There was a whole lot of drama about the reprints that appeared in Fantastic and Amazing in the 1960s and '70s, a cost saving measure for the not-exactly-profitable magazines that caused considerable unhappiness among editors, writers and readers.)
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Thanks for taking this little trip to 1940 (and fantasy versions of Australia and Manhattan) with me; there will be more fantasy and insanity in our next episode--see you then.
With all the good stuff I time have time to read I can't imagine finding time to read Robert Moore Williams. This story sounds totally ludicrous. Kuttner wrote a lot of stuff. Some of it very good but he also wrote a lot of forgettable stories. These are among the later.
ReplyDeleteHello again from Sydney, Australia, the island continent where we most definitely do not have leopards nor degenerate monkey-people descendants of the lost land of Mu (although some of our politicians could qualify). It sounds like Williams did zero research on Australia for this story. Kuttner's "The Uncanny Power Of Edwin Cobalt" appears to have potential and the concept might have made a memorable Twilight Zone episode, shame he went for the easy path and ended up with a dud. Keep up the great work MPorcius!
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