Astounding Dec '35: Raymond Z. Gallun and Murray Leinster

The December 1935 issue of Astounding includes three stories by Raymond Z. Gallun, two appearing under pseudonyms.  It's like a sub rosa special Gallun issue!  Let's see what these three tales are all about.  Plus, as a special bonus, let's read the included story by Murray Leinster, even though editor Orlin F. Tremaine warns us it is a "delightful satire."

"Davey Jones' Ambassador" by Raymond Z. Gallun

This is a traditional old time science fiction tale in which the author envisions an alien society, portrays human first contact with that society, and in which a scientist, the protagonist, uses his brains--his science and engineering knowledge and his ability to outwit others--to overcome plot obstacles.  There are no swords or sexy princesses--this is true hard science fiction that glorifies the search for knowledge and Man's ability to improve life by manipulating His environment through application of that knowledge.

Clifford Rodney is in his one-man submarine on the bottom of the Atlantic when he is attacked by the heretofore unknown local intelligent race, people with crustacean-like bodies, eyes on eye-stalks, and lots of fins and tentacles.  These people have developed a whole technology based on selective breeding--they use specially bred beasts as vehicles and weapons and construction machinery, for example.  These submarine people have no way to refine or work metal, so some of their most complex devices integrate metal components from sunken ships--while we on the surface know nothing about the submarine civilization, from these wrecked vessels--and especially from the books that sank with them--the undersea people know quite a bit about us.

And want to learn more.  Rodney and his submarine are put into a dome made from mollusk shell and pumped full of air--this terrarium has been specially prepared for the human the ocean floor's natives have been hoping to capture someday.  One of the sea people, a scientist who like Tarzan learned written English entirely from books, communicates with Rodney by writing notes on the clear surface of the dome--Rodney writes back in sand left in the terrarium for the purpose.

It seems like the submarine people expect to keep Rodney until he dies, learning from him while he survives, but Rodney, of course, wants to get back home, and figures out how to do so, employing his vast knowledge of chemistry and physics and engineering.  It is a longshot, but he gets the unexpected aid of that scientist whose desire to see the surface world for himself Rodney has encouraged.

The ideas and themes of the story are good, but it is a little dry--his story lives up to the stereotype that old SF is all about ideas and its authors neglected (or, if you want to be a jerk about it, were incompetent to provide) literary values.  This is one of those stories that doesn't feel like hot stuff while you are reading it because it doesn't push any of your buttons, seeing as it lacks sex, violence, surprises or poetic sentences, but after you've read it you have fond memories of the story's meaty substance.  We'll say it is on the high end of "Acceptable."  A good example of its type, "Davey Jones' Ambassador" has been reprinted in quite a few anthologies as well as in The Best of Raymond Z. Gallun.

"Nova Solis" by Raymond Z. Gallun

"Nova Solis" appeared under the pen name E. V. Raymond and has never been reprinted.  Soon I will be one of the few people who has read this story since the 1930s!

Brad Keyston awakes after spending two thousand years in suspended animation!  It is explained to us, via flashback exposition and in a speech from luxuriously bearded scientist Dr. Elias Heth, that in the 1950s a "cloud of meteoric refuse from interstellar space" drifted into the solar system and was sucked up by the Sun, causing old Sol to go nova on us!  What did the government do to try to save our civilization?  Who knows?  Luckily, private industry stepped into the breach!  The chemical company Keyston co-owned with Dr. Heth had discovered a gas called "hibernite" and here was just the opportunity to test it out!  The company dug a miles-deep shaft and sheltered three hundred employees of the company down there; after setting the alarm clock for twenty centuries they put everybody into a state of suspended animation.

Those centuries are up and Keyston and his blonde wife and her brother put on sealed and armored suits and ascend the shaft to explore.  They find that the Earth's surface is a hell of temperatures exceeding 130 degrees Centigrade!  The three hundred survivors only have one year's worth of preserved food, and they won't be able to cultivate any crops in these conditions, so it looks like it is all over for the human race.

But wait!  Keyston and the two beneficiaries of his nepotism see some kind of weird flying thing--like "Davey Jones' Ambassador," "Nova Solis" is a story of first contact.  Our heroes learn that aliens, beings of superheated gas, colonized the Earth during the centuries after the nova, but as the Earth cools they are departing, leaving behind domes of superinsulation.  Within these domes the aliens maintained the kinds of conditions they find comfortable, temperatures around 4,000 degrees Centigrade, but the humans can use them to create cool microclimates in which they can live and grow crops.  Within these domes the human race can endure!

A competent filler story.  In describing Dr. Heth's beard, Gallun mentions Sennacherib, assuming his audience has a level of education or familiarity with the Bible that I for one lack.  Did a majority of readers of Astounding in 1935 know who Sennacherib was?  The past was a different world!

"Avalanche" by Raymond Z. Gallun 

Here's another story that has never been reprinted.  

Fai Toran and his "Negro servitor" Nareth are "the greatest wizards of the period," master scientists and the leaders of the resistance to the Rothel.  The Rothel are the product of a centuries-long eugenics program, a race of seven-foot-tall warriors who are conquering the world.  With bombs they level the last city to hold out against them, with poison gas they exterminate its citizens.  Fai Toran and Nareth, the town's only survivors, the only living foes of the Rothel, are temporarily safe within their specially shielded HQ, which is shortly surrounded by the Rothel soldiers, half of whom are women.  The Rothel may be committed to conquest and genocide, but you gotta hand it to them, they have a progressive attitude about gender roles.

The scientists have built two spherical flying robots, one animated by a perfect mechanical replica of Fai Toran's brain, the other by a similarly exact mechanical duplicate of Nareth's.  Fai Toran delivers a speech to the surrounding Rothel, explaining what these spheres are, and warning the conquerors that they will face a doom in three years' time.  The robots fly off into space and then Fai Toran detonates an atomic bomb that kills them and many of the Rothel.

Three years later a horde of millions and millions of self-replicating spherical robots, lead by the Fai Toran and Nreth robots, devours not only the Earth but every significant body in the solar system, converting the raw material of the Sun, and every planet, moon and asteroid, into still more robots.  These robots will, it seems, conquer and destroy the galaxy, maybe the universe.  In the final scene the Fai Toran robot muses on the meaning of progress and the meaning of life, not sure if his accomplishment is a source of pride or regret.

This is an acceptable sense-of-wonder story that depicts an alien milieu and has as its themes amazing technology and the planet-shattering physical implications and norms-shattering philosophical implications of such technology.  The thing people today will find noteworthy about the story, of course, is that Nareth the black scientist is the slave of Fai Toran instead of his equal partner or his trusty lieutenant or something.  What role does Nareth play in the story, why is he even included?  It sort of makes structural sense for Fai Toran to have somebody to talk to, so that the story's themes can be presented in dialogue form, but why a black guy and why a slave?  One possibility is that the inclusion of a black slave is a device to sort of make the story seem like an "Oriental" fable; the same motive is likely behind the fact that the scientists Fai Toran and Nareth are introduced as "wizards."  Another possibility is to make the distant future of Fai Toran seem more alien, to indicate that Fai Toran's values are not the values of 1935 Americans, and to foreshadow that, while Fai Toran is an enemy of those destructive conquerors, the Rothel, he is not some freedom fighter deeply opposed to destruction and conquest, but perhaps sees such achievements as a form of progress and is not averse to committing destruction and conquest  on a scale even greater than that of the Earth-conquering Rothel. 

"The Fourth Dimensional Demonstrator" by Murray Leinster

This story seems to be well-liked, appearing in many Leinster collections and anthologies, in multiple languages.  This is where I have the opportunity to go against the grain--I didn't like "The Fourth Dimensional Demonstrator," finding it a tedious waste of time.  It is introduced as a satire, but, while I suppose it satirizes government employees (corrupt and incompetent goofballs) and women (greedy and petty bitches) and men (ensorcelled by pretty girls, no matter how greedy and petty they might be) it is more like a slapstick comedy.  

Pete is in love with Daisy, sexy performer in the "Green Paradise floor show" and owner of a pet kangaroo.  Daisy will marry Pete if he has money, a lot of money.  Pete's uncle, a scientist with a butler or valet or whatever the guy is, has just died, and Pete has inherited everything, but it turns out Unk was deep in debt, so there is no money.  Will Daisy abandon Pete?

The valet points out that Unk completed his time machine just before he died.  In a conventional SF satire, you jump in the time machine to visit the future, to see how the commies that the author hates or the capitalists that the author hates have screwed up the world.  In a conventional SF adventure story, you jump in the time machine to visit the past and sword fight with Vikings or hunt a tyrannosaur.  In a conventional blow-your-mind SF story you jump in the time machine and have sex and become your own ancestor.  In "The Fourth Dimensional Demonstrator" you don't do any of that stuff, stuff that conventional readers might find interesting.  Instead, the time machine performs as a duplicator.  You put an object into the machine, turn it on, and the machine reaches back in time to snatch the same item from the past and bring it to the present, meaning you now have two such items, for all purposes totally identical.  This sounds so convoluted and lame that I fear I am getting it wrong, but I'm not going to read the story again to figure it out (and "convoluted and lame" describes the story as a whole, anyway, so it fits.)

Anyway, Pete and the valet do the obvious thing and duplicate precious metals, jewelry, and cash.  Daisy is of course thrilled.  Then comes the slapstick.  Duplicating cash was stupid, because the police eventually are alerted by a concerned citizen to the fact that the local economy has been flooded with many bills bearing the same serial number.  Some Irish cops come by, and get mixed up in a fracas with Daisy's kangaroo--the kangaroo likes to eat cigarettes, and it hops at these doughty sons of Erin because one of them is smoking.  At the same time, Daisy has accidentally duplicated herself several times over and all these greedy bitches are squabbling.  In the ensuing chaos lots of people, kangaroos and items fall in and out of the time machine, and animals and people accidentally turn the machine on, off, into reverse, etc., with the final result that there is only one Daisy and the counterfeit cash has vanished so that there is no case against Pete and the valet.  Pete is still rich and free because the gold and jewels he duplicated do not expose him to legal risk, but Daisy is still angry the money is gone.  The end.

Obviously this story offers nothing worthwhile in the speculative or satirical departments; unlike the Gallun stories we've read from this issue of Astounding, "The Fourth Dimensional Demonstrator" does not reflect any innovative thinking on the part of the author or spur any thought upon the part of the reader.  Even worse, there is no human feeling and the jokes are not funny.  Thumbs down!

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The Leinster we can forget about, but the Gallun stories are full of paradigm shifts, speculations about new technology and alien societies, the glorification of the scientist and his quest for knowledge, and the philosophical implications of high technology, the very stuff of old school classic SF.