Amazing Stories, August 1938: R Bloch, R M Farley, and T McClusky

Let's take a look at the August 1938 issue of Amazing, edited by Raymond Palmer, an issue which has a pretty wild woman-in-peril cover by Henry F. Kroeger, Jr.  I thought this illustration was a painting, and was impressed by the rendering of the muscles of the male torturer, the expression of the female victim, and the striking composition of the whole thing, which seem more sophisticated than most covers we see that present such material, but then I looked at the magazine's contents page and saw the cover illo being described as a photograph!  Weird.

Another odd and amusing ancillary element of this issue of Amazing is an angry bit of correspondence in the letters column from future supereditor Donald A. Wollheim, who objects to some stories in the magazine he feels were critical of socialism.  Wollheim says that attacks on socialism do not belong in a science fiction magazine, as socialism is scientific and all the best scientists and writers have "confessed a faith" in socialism.  Wollheim is very attached to the idea of faith, finishing his letter by declaring that by including criticisms of socialism in Amazing, Palmer is not keeping faith with his readers.  Sadly, Palmer's response to Wollheim's letter is not a defense of the practice of including diverse viewpoints in his magazine, much less an endorsement of the free market--Palmer instead suggests Wollheim has simply misread the stories he cites, arguing that one of them is actually pro-socialism.  Again, Palmer disappoints me.

Palmer has a story in this issue, but we are going to skip it.  We'll read stories instead by Robert Bloch, Ralph Milne Farley and Thorp McClusky--can these guys, whom in the past we have read in Weird Tales, produce worthwhile fiction that fulfills the promise made on the cover of Amazing--that they be "scientifically accurate"--and satisfy Don Wollheim's demand that they keep faith with socialism?

"Secret of the Observatory" by Robert Bloch

"Secret of the Observatory," which the 21-year-old Bloch in his jokey bio in the back of the mag says is his first foray into science fiction, would have to wait until our own wild and crazy 21st century to be reprinted in 2005's The Fear Planet and Other Unusual Destinations.  This does not augur well, but it is Bloch's story which inspired the issue's remarkable cover art, which gives us hope we may have something exciting here.

"Secret of the Observatory" is a Yellow Peril story of some 24 pages which actually does have science lectures in it, though these are largely confined to long footnotes attributed to the editor and to Roger Sherman Hoar, the birth name of the engineer, lawyer and politician who wrote science fiction under the pen name Ralph Milne Farley. 

Bloch's science fiction debut stars another man who makes it his practice to switch careers, Dan Marlin, a physicist who invented a motion picture camera that can film through walls and then began working as a reporter, taking as his beat Japan's aggression in China.  Something Marlin learned during his two years in the Far East has led him to return to North America, to investigate the goings on at an observatory atop a Canadian mountain.

"Secret of the Observatory" is an amateurish piece of work full of silly coincidences and contrived situations, action scenes which are muddled and not very exciting, and unsuccessful efforts to create drama and tension by killing off the Marlin's friends, people who play no role in the plot other than to get killed.  To top it all off, today's readers may object to how Bloch constantly reminds us that the villains are "yellow," "saffron," "fat," and spider-like.  

On the profit side of the ledger, I actually found the science stuff sort of interesting, and I wasn't bored by the story--I was always curious what would happen next, even if what ended up happening was kind of disappointing.  Maybe in a spirit of generosity we can let this one by with a grade of "barely acceptable."

Here's the plot and some notes for those interested:

A Japanese weapons developer, Hatsuki Okida, acquired the observatory and fired all the white (Bloch capitalizes "White," which is sort of interesting here in the enlightened 2020s, when the trendsetters at the New York Times and the Associated Press are careful to capitalize "Black" and equally scrupulous about not capitalizing "white") employees and started setting up barbed wire fences and deploying guards around the mountain.  Marlin and a buddy spend the first chapter sneaking around the mountain, trying to film the observatory interior with the super camera.  They run afoul of some masked guards and there is a lot of shooting.  Buddy gets killed, but Marlin escapes with a captive--this masked individual turns out not to be a Japanese thug after all but a sexalicious blue-eyed blonde, Lois Dorling.  Dorling explains that her father was an astronomer who worked at the observatory and disappeared after its acquisition by Okida--she assumes Okida had Dad murdered and so she has disguised herself as one of Okida's guards in order to search the mountain for dear old Dad's grave. 

Okida has heard about the camera that can shoot through walls and so has screened the observatory with lead, but there are some gaps and Marlin gets some footage of tacked up plans for and working prototypes of a new weapon, one that can deactivate motors from a distance.  Marlin's paper publishes this blockbuster story, but instead finding himself being hailed as a hero, Marlin is soon informed that he has landed in hot water--that ignition-retarding weapon is not an invention of the Japanese evil genius, but the latest secret weapon of our polite neighbors to the north!  Okida's spies stole the Canadian device and have now tricked Marlin into exposing to the world our beloved maple syrup swilling pals' ace in the hole!  Doh!  Marlin's boss at the paper has no choice but to fire him for punching a hole in Canada's defense plans as big as the hole Wayne Gretzky punched in the defense in that big famous hockey game you all remember.

Knocked unconscious by unseen assailants, Marlin wakes to find both his super camera and Lois gone.  He can always build another such super camera, so the thing that really upsets him is that he now has a pile of evidence that beautiful Lois, whom he has fallen for, is working for Okida!  But then he gets some good news.  His boss had to bow to official pressure and give him the sack, but boss believes in Marlin and finances the physicist's one-man crusade against Okida.  Boss soon gets his reward for his faith, turning up dead hours later with a message for Marlin pinned to his chest, a warning that Marlin should cut out his nosy investigations.  I'm not sure that Bloch makes clear why the Japanese are comfortable murdering this newspaper magnate but not Marlin himself.

Marlin, after building another camera, shoots more film of the observatory.  (I always find it a little annoying when characters do the exact same thing three times in the course of a single story.)  Okida's work in the great white north is complete and he has taken down the lead screens in preparation for his return to the land of the rising sun, so Marlin is able to get extensive footage of the observatory, including elaborate messages penned by Okida, addressed to his god, thanking him for his success in developing a telescope that can bend light and thus observe things that are outside its direct line of sight, a potentially war-winning piece of equipment.  Even more shocking, in the lower rooms of the observatory Marlin sees that Lois is being tortured!  I guess she wasn't working for the Japanese after all!  

Marlin returns to the mountain yet again, and this time busts into the observatory, where he outfights the guards and the huge Mongol torturer to rescue Lois, and then in a final fight kills Okida, saving the world from Japanese domination.

"Time for Sale" by Ralph Milne Farley 

As noted earlier, Ralph Milne Farley is the pseudonym of Roger Sherman Hoar, a man who served in the artillery in World War I, taught engineering classes, practiced law, and was elected to the Massachusetts state legislature.  Wikipedia suggests much of Hoar's science fiction output was written in collaboration with his daughter, a fellow engineer, but isfdb does not corroborate this claim, the source of which seems to be editor Ray Palmer, who, while a likable and fun guy, is also famous for making fanciful and sensationalist claims, so who knows?  We liked Farley's oft-reprinted contribution to Weird Tales, "House of Ecstasy," so we have reason to hope we'll like this as well.

Did you have fun in college?  Sports, Greek life, parties?  Well, so did Tom Porter!  In fact, Tom has spent so much time enjoying himself that he is totally unprepared for tomorrow's Physics final!  If he fails, he won't get his Engineering degree!  But, like our Canadian friends, he has a secret weapon, an ace in the hole!  He knows of a scientist, P. Lanford Hatch, a member of Tom's fraternity and a fellow veteran of the football field (they call that "the grid iron," right?), who has just invented an entropy machine!  This is a glass room in which the experience of time can be slowed down, or maybe we should say that periods of time can be stretched out.  Tom takes a physics professor into the entropy machine with him, pays Hatch two grand, and spends two weeks in the glass room being tutored by the prof.  When they emerge, Tom's skull filled to the brim Physics facts, only a few hours have passed in the outside world and so Tom has time to get to the exam and pass it.

Tom can now report to his rich father that the entropy machine is a success, and dear old Dad invests a pile of money in the project.  This smooths the way for Tom, now a credentialed engineer, to go to work for Hatch as his assistant.  But is Tom's passion centered on the entropy machine, or on Hatch's sexy young wife Evelyn?  At first Hatch doesn't notice Tom's flirtations with his better half, and at first Evelyn rejects all his advances, but Tom is verrrrry charming.  Witness how much the Hatches' eight-year-old daughter comes to adore the charismatic Tom!   

Hatch and Tom develop another entropy machine, a room in which, when it is activated, time moves more quickly than on the outside, or maybe we should say is compressed--you can spend what feels like an hour in the machine and come out to find a year has passed for everybody else!

Hatch finally realizes Tom is after his hot young wife, and comes to suspect Evelyn's resistance to the young charmer may be flagging.  So the scientist locks Tom in the new machine, setting the timer for thirty years--for Tom only a few days will pass, but when he gets out Evelyn will be an old woman and Tom won't want her.  But an accident ten or twelve years later damages the machine and Tom gets out early.  Everyone lives happily ever after, though, because the Hatch daughter is now of marriageable age, the spitting image of her mother when Tom met her, and very eager to give herself to Tom!

While I think the main appeal of this story is to readers' interest in cuckoldry and pedophilia, there are science lectures, again largely in the footnotes, that refer to Arthur Eddington's theories of entropy and time.  It all adds up to an OK story, mildly entertaining and engagingly "edgy" with all its morally questionable characters.   

"Time for Sale" would be reprinted in 1950 in the Farley collection Omnibus of Time and in a 1973 Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia anthology, Androids, Time Machines and Blue Giraffes.

"Kidnappers of Space" by Thorp McClusky

This will be the fourth McClusky story the staff of MPorcius Fiction Log has grappled with; in 2020 we contended with "The Crawling Horror," in 2022 we paid a visit to "The Woman in Room 607," and earlier this year we were confronted by "The Thing on the Floor." 

Of the three stories we are reading today, McClusky's is the closest one to realizing a young Don Wollheim's dream of SF stories pushing socialism.  "Kidnappers of Space" is a pirate melodrama which plays with issues of class (greedy big businesses that exploit their employees and put third parties at risk to make an extra buck; embittered criminals who seek revenge on members of the bourgeoisie) and sex and gender (there's a spunky girl over whom hangs the threat of rape as well as a cowardly man who betrays everyone in an effort to save his own skin.)  People shoot each other with stun guns, hit each other with pistol butts, get captured and then escape, that sort of thing.  In a footnote we get a lecture on radium (radium is used as a currency in this future, along with platinum, gold and silver.)

A skilled writer, like Jack Vance or Leigh Brackett, could have made a fun little story, or a harrowing thriller, or a disturbing and salacious horror tale, out of this sex and violence crime material, but McClusky fails utterly to wring any entertainment out of it.  For one thing, "Kidnappers of Space" doesn't really fit together as a cohesive whole: the various scenes are merely strung loosely together, and the connections between characters' personalities and motives, the decisions they make, and their eventual fates, are quite weak.  Worse, none of these individual scenes is interesting or well-written.  McClusky offers no engaging speculations about science or society and no memorable images, his setting is not believable and his characters are not compelling, and the action scenes and dialogue scenes fail to inspire any kind of excitement.  Gotta give "Kidnappers of Space" the thumbs down.   

The plot:

The space ship Arcturus, owned by the Gilead company, has landed on Venus for refueling.  Venus is a famously high-crime neighborhood, so the captain of the ship would prefer that beautiful Myrna Gilead, daughter of the owner of the company, stay aboard during their three day stopover, but she is headstrong and determined to paint the town red with her fiancé, an effete guy named Tommy Burgess.  So the captain orders his hunk of a third officer, Hugh Allison, to shadow the rich couple while they bar hop.  Allison dresses up in shabby clothes so he will go unnoticed among all the "space rats," which I guess is the customary slang for space pirates, underclass scum, and deserters from space crews who scrape together a living through begging and petty crime.

Also on Venus is Hellstones Phipps, a space pirate who hates the Gilead family after working for twenty years in the Gilead mines on Titan.  Hellstones is attacked by a mob of space rats and his pistol jams so he can't just gun them down; luckily Hugh is nearby, hears the fight, and saves Hellstones by shooting the space rats with his stun pistol.  Hellstones thinks Hugh is a fellow pirate and tries to recruit him, without success.

Later, Hellstones and his scurvy crew kidnap Myrna, Tommy and Hugh and they blast off with them in their pirate ship.  Hellstones continues to hope Allison, a real he-man with lots of space experience, will join his pirate crew.  As for the rich couple, Hellstones plans to ransom them for 100 lbs of radium.  Myrna breaks the bad news that Dad probably can't raise more than ten pounds.  So, Hellstone taking note of how good-looking Myrna is, decides the way to get his revenge on Papa Gilead is to make daughter Myrna his wife!  As for Tommy, the pirates will just murder him out of hand!  Tommy buys his life by spilling the beans about the cargo of the Arcturus--over 100 lbs of radium plus eighty tons of platinum--and the vulnerabilities of the Arcturus--to carry more cargo and more paying customers, the Gilead company has reduced the defense capabilities of the ship, so Hellstones' pirate ship should be able to take it!

Over a course of some days the pirate ship waits to ambush the Arcturus, and Hellstones gets drunk and tries to rape Myrna, but he only has half her clothes off before Hugh rescues her.  Myrna falls in love with Hugh and Tommy drops right out of the narrative, never to be heard from again.

Hellstones is a pirate, but he has a sense of honor.  He doesn't kill Hugh, who saved his life on Venus, just locks him up.  And Hellstones doesn't try to rape Myrna again--it was drink that made him try to force her, now he wants her to willingly marry him.  Myrna gets Hellstones to promise to only stun, not slay, the crew and passengers on Arcturus.  When the pirates eventually catch up with Arcturus, Hellstones proves as good as his word, stunning everybody on the Gilead company ship and leading the boarding party that takes control if it.  In Hellstones' absence, Hugh figures out how to take over the pirate ship and uses the vessel's weapons to stun the pirates who are aboard Arcturus.  (One of the things that is lame about "Kidnappers of Space" is that people keep getting stunned instead of killed, so the stakes feel low and neither the villains nor the heroes really face up to the moral reality of having to take human life to pursue their goals.)  Thus, the day is saved and we are assured Hugh and Myrna will get married.

Unsurprisingly, this damp squib has never been reprinted.

**********

These three stories are an illustration of the fact that people who read science fiction magazines in the period before World War II were legitimately interested in the hard sciences (and as Wollheim's letter suggests, interested in using science to remake the world in every way) but at the same time magazines like Amazing sought readership by appealing to people's fascination with violence and fetishistic sex.  

More 1938 Amazing in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log; maybe we should place bets on how much bondage, torture, and bloodshed we will find, and how many science lectures.