Frank Belknap Long: "Brown," "To Follow Knowledge" and "Alias the Living"

This heading appears on the contents page of the July 1941 issue of 
Astounding--typeface fans will notice the differences between this 
rendering of the magazine's title and that on its cover

MPoricus Fiction Log's intrepid staff continues its current project--reading Frank Belknap Long's 1940s stories that were selected by John W. Campbell, Jr. for publication in his magazines Astounding and Unknown.  Today, three capers from the seminal Astounding!

"Brown" (1941)

The July 1941 issue of Astounding has some major classics between its covers!  Two stories by Robert A. Heinlein, the Lazarus Long story "Methuselah's Children" as well as "We Also Walk Dogs," and one of A. E. van Vogt's Isher tales, "Seesaw."  Alongside these important works that have reappeared a billion times (often in expanded or altered forms when published in books) was published a story that has never been reprinted on paper--"Brown" by Frank Belknap Long.  Maybe this is an unfairly overlooked gem!  Soon I will be one of the few living people who is familiar with it!

It is the 21st century.  Fred Horn is a great scientist who aspires to be the first man to tread the surface of Mars.  But he can't seem to figure out how to propel a ship to the red planet.

His other project has seen greater success.  He has produced an entire platoon of one-and-a-half foot tall robots, and the most recent one, whom he has named James Brown, seems to have a real personality, to be capable of actual thought!  There is a fly in the ointment though: James Brown is a self-important sarcastic jerk who has contempt for humanity because of our (alleged!) belligerent and criminal nature.  Brown and Horn's beautiful fiancé, Joan Fleming of the blonde hair and green eyes, do not get along at all.

Brown tells Horn that his infallible electronic brain can solve the problem of getting to Mars by designing a spaceship that vibrates through the time-space continuum instead of propelling itself through ordinary space.  And he will do this for Horn, even though Brown doubts the expansion of the human race beyond Earth orbit bodes well for the unsuspecting universe, if Horn promises to bring Brown along on the trip--Brown is a curious character who (ostensibly!) wants to see Mars as much as Horn does.

A month or so later our cast--man, woman, and misanthropic robot--board the ship designed by the little mechanical smart aleck and vibrate their way to a desert next to an astonishing city made up of one titanic tower with a bewildering array of girders and ramps and things that shoot off at all different angles.  Within the city the three explorers observe a scene of horror--a spider bigger than an elephant feasting on human beings!

Brown admits that he hasn't piloted the ship to the Mars of the 21st century.  Instead, the ship he designed is a time machine that can be used to explore the ten thousand possible futures; this future is the one in which spiders evolve into a race superior to humans and build a spider civilization that has humans as its cattle.  

The end of the story is somewhat ambiguous.  Horn and his girlfriend get back to their own time, but Brown manages to steal the ship and he disappears to god knows when.  It is implied that Joan facilitated Brown's escape, because she wanted to get him out of their lives, but it is also hinted that Brown may be able to use the time machine to manipulate events such that the possible future that they will all inhabit is the one in which robots take over the world and inflict monstrous tortures on the last human.

This story is not bad--it is better than five out of the last six Long stories I have read, at least.  The plot flows smoothly, there is little fat and no lame jokes, and the ideas--artificial intelligence and the threat it poses to humanity, complaints about humanity's shortcomings, possible futures, methods of space and time travel, and sexual relationships in tension with the lovers' other ambitions and relationships--are interesting.  Moderate recommendation.  Why this has been kept out of all those Long collections, I don't know.

"To Follow Knowledge" (1942)

Here's another issue of Astounding in which a story by Long appears alongside one of van Vogt's Isher tales; this ish also includes a second story by our man Van, "The Flight that Failed" AKA "Earth: Rebirth," a story van Vogt apparently cowrote with his wife E. Mayne Hull--it is credited here solely to Hull.  (There's a whole mystery and controversy over how much Hull contributed to the stories to which her name was affixed.)  The December '42 installment of Astounding also includes a piece by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, "Piggy Bank;" it appears here under the pen name Lewis Padgett.  (I read "Piggy Bank" back in 2015.)

"To Follow Knowledge" is a talky and boring story dramatizing the idea that there are many universes and many of these are only slight variations on each other, though in this story it kind of seems like Long is equating different universes with different planets.  The story is somewhat confusing and not very entertaining, so I am not inclined to carefully read it again to puzzle out the nuances.  Thumbs down!

Temple, Cummings, and Morrison were friends in college.  After graduating, Temple lived the life of a playboy, he being from a rich family, while Cummings worked around the world as an engineer and Morrison embarked on a career as an innovative physicist and inventor.  In their late thirties, Morrison invites Temple and Cummings to attend the display of his latest invention in a museum.  The invention is a time machine, and Temple and Cummings, plus Temple's girlfriend Joan, and a group of teenage girls, are all in the machine when somebody, goofing around, activates it, sending them all on a trip through a sort of chaos in which multiple times and places coexist.  A giant insect attacks, they spot a pterosaur, the current Cummings is replaced by the Cummings of fifteen years ago, the constellations in the sky seem to shift as if thousands of years are passing, etc.

The second part of the story takes place on another planet, one where versions of Temple, Joan, Cummings and Morrison all exist, but Cummings is an old man while Temple is a young space explorer.  We listen as these versions of Temple and Cummings discuss the theory that different planets' ecosystems and cultures may evolve in a parallel fashion and closely resemble each other.  Temple tells a story about getting mixed up in the chaos universe by a Morrison time machine, a similar adventure to the one described in the first part of the story.  During his odyssey through multiple dangerous universes, he held the hand of a woman, a version of Joan, and, due to the chaotic nature of things, their hands got fused together and they were literally stuck together for an extended period and had to be surgically separated when they were finally back to this universe.  They had fallen in love during their enforced intimacy and so got married.  

My little summary makes "To Follow Knowledge" sound kind of interesting, but the science talk is tedious, the narrative is disjointed, and the characters and their relationships lack any human feeling.    

"To Follow Knowledge" has received a lot more attention than "Brown," even though I find the latter far more satisfactory.  "To Follow Knowledge" has been reprinted in Long collections, and Groff Conklin included it in his anthology Science Fiction Adventures in Dimension; Science Fiction Adventures in Dimension appeared in Britain in an abridged edition, and Long's story was apparently one of the survivors.  

"Alias the Living" (1944)

Here we have another Long story which was never again printed on paper after its debut in Astounding.  This issue of Campbell's magazine also includes a famous van Vogt story, "Far Centaurus," which would be reprinted in a billion collections and anthologies, and even integrated into van Vogt's wild and fun fix-up novel Quest for the Future, which I read back in 2016.  (Reading my six-year-old blog post about Quest for the Future makes me want to reread that novel and "Far Centaurus"--I may be the only one, but I find my own writing pretty persuasive!)

"Alias the Living" depicts United States Marines in gory combat against Japanese soldiers in a jungle, and is full of unflattering descriptions of Japanese people and their culture as well as ethnic jokes and ethnic slurs at the expense of the people who won the rapt attention of the world with One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, Neon Genesis Evangelion and the Rape of Nanking.

America's scientists have provided the U.S. military with a genius piece of equipment, and we see it used in battle.  A soldier or marine wears a projector that throws an image of himself some 50 or 100 feet away; this image is like a 3D film, made up of a force field, and can draw enemy fire, tricking the enemy into exposing his position.  In the story an astonishing thing happens--somehow, the projector device reads not only its wearer's physical image but the electrical patterns of his brain, so that when he is hit and falls the projection continues to act autonomously, as he would have had he not been injured.  This doesn't make a lot of sense, but it is sort of entertaining.

Acceptable.  This story probably has value to all you historians of pop culture as a depiction of Japanese people actually written and published by Americans during the Pacific War.   

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Only one of these stories was bad, and one was actually good, so I feel like I got off pretty easy after our last excursion into the corpus of Frank Belknap Long.  I believe Long had ten stories printed in 1940s issues of Astounding.  We've read three today, and back in 2020 I read 1943's "Willie."  That leaves six more, which we'll cover in our next two blog posts.