Ralph Milne Farley: "Liquid Life," "Horror's Head" and "The Stratosphere Menace"

Continuing our look at late 1930s SF magazines, let's read three stories by Ralph Milne Farley, including one Isaac Asimov denounced in a letter published in the November 1938 issue of Amazing.

"Liquid Life" (1936)

We kick things off with a pretty well known story.  isfdb tells me that "Liquid Life" is on the "NEFSA Core Reading List," and that it has appeared in anthologies edited by Groff Conklin, Murray Leinster, and Robert Silverberg.  Exciting!  Here I am, immersing myself in the mainstream of science fiction history.

"Liquid Life" is a good science and horror story--mainstream of science fiction is vindicated!  Don't listen to the haters!

A millionaire has loaned a lot of money to three scientists so they can start a small research firm and they are having trouble paying it back, so moneybags decides to put them to work on a job for him, investigating a weird body of water on his property.  This pond has no life in it, and dissolves any plant or animal unlucky enough to blunder into it.  Even more oddly, it seems to ripple even when there is no wind.

The scientists collect a sample and study it.  The water seems to have the same chemical composition as salt water--how to explain its acidic properties?  One of the three guys has been conducting experiments on cats, cutting them up and connecting electrodes to their brains and trying to access their sense impressions--for example, trying to get sounds picked up by a cat's ears to play through a loud speaker.  He sticks the electrodes in the acidic water and, astonishingly, through the loud speaker comes a voice!  The "water" is alive, and intelligent!  In fact, more intelligent than the three scientists!

In exchange for salt and dead animals to eat, the creature, some kind of virus, helps the three scientists solve problems brought to them by clients, and soon the firm has a high reputation and scads of customers and is raking in record profits.  But will the virus continue to serve a race it considers inferior?  Or will it evolve to climb out of its container?  Bribe or threaten or trick some or all of the scientists into doing its bidding?  Perhaps crawl to the ocean and grow to a size that will allow it to conquer the world?

Thumbs up for "Liquid Life."  Farley's human characters aren't very well delineated, but the three of them each has a different attitude towards the virus, and Farley doesn't foreclose on the possibility of readers sympathizing with the virus, which adds tension to the story--we readers don't know which of the four characters to identify with nor who is going to survive to the end of the story, if anybody.  Sure, the story ain't perfect--the ending is a little bit of a deus ex machina cop out, and one wonders how the virus learned English, but I can be forgiving.

"Liquid Life" debuted in an issue of Thrilling Wonder that looks pretty good--it has several cool illustrations by M. Marchioni, a great ad for Thrilling Mystery, and stories by Ray Cummings and Edmond Hamilton I haven't read yet.  Its cover illustration would later be used as the cover for David Kyle's A Pictorial History of Science Fiction, a book I own.

"Horror's Head" (1938)

Here's the story Isaac Asimov emphatically declared was the worst he had read in a long time and cited as an example of a story which spent too much energy making a political argument.  "Horror's Head"'s sole appearance is under a pseudonym in an issue of Amazing with a male nude on its cover (like prog rock, science fiction has a tradition of male nudes on covers) and one of Donald Wollheim's missives accusing Amazing of anti-socialist deviationism in its letters column.

The place: The USSR!  The man: Doctor Ivan Petrov!  Petrov's father had the Czar as a patient, and he himself has treated patients of dubious political reliability, so our hero is in trouble!  Dragged before a tribunal of three prominent members of the Communist Party, his life is only saved because one of the three is the grossly obese scientist Doctor Grodski, and Grodski suspects he can make use of Petrov's skills.  Grodski has Petrov remanded to his custody, puts the man up in his nice big house and has him conduct biological experiments, the results of which Grodski himself will take credit for.  Petrov is not only relieved to be alive, but enjoys spending time with Grodski's curvaceous daughter Katerina.  Katerina seems to return Petrov's affections and soon Petrov is asking Grodski for his approval of their marriage.  Grodski, a good communist, says that it is the government which has to approve marriages, one of Farley's many efforts in the story to portray the monstrous evil of the Soviet Union, no doubt to the consternation of Donald Wollheim and Isaac Asimov!

The very night Petrov and Katerina reveal to Dad the nature of their feelings for each other, a handsome commissar, Bucholtz, comes over with his squad of goons to investigate rumors that Grodski is performing unauthorized private research.  Bucholtz was the guy on the three-man tribunal who wanted to execute Petrov, and when he gets an eyeful of Katerina he has yet another reason to wish Petrov was six feet under!    

Petrov very soon finds himself in prison; as he is escorted away he sees the mercenary Katerina in Bucholtz's arms with a big smile on her face--I guess it is not only the commies who have reason to blacken the reputation of Farley's hard-hitting story but the feminists as well!  

The evils of communism and the perfidy of women are not the only horrors we witness in "Horror's Head."  The experiments Petrov has been conducting and for which Grodski hopes to take credit involve chopping dogs' heads off (the fur-babies are really getting it in today's episode of MPorcius Fiction Log) and them keeping the heads alive Dr. Frankenstein-style, and Farley describes these gruesome processes in some detail--in one memorable scene a bodiless dog is fed a treat and we hear the food plop on the floor after poochie swallows.  (These scenes are apparently based on real life experiments of this nature conducted in the USSR and reported on by famous leftist journalist Walter Duranty.)  Farley also offers us a torture scene during Petrov's time in prison.  Naked inmates, crowded into a tiny cell, are subjected to steam heat by the prison staff so that "sweat poured down their glistening bodies" and "the stench became almost unbearable."  Gross!

This torture scene seems kind of gratuitous, seeing as Petrov is soon back with the Grodskis; Grodski, while a capable surgeon, isn't creative and can't do much experimenting by himself and needs Petrov's help.  Inconstant Katerina even pretends she is really in love with Petrov and was only playing nice to hunky Bucholtz so the commissar wouldn't imprison or execute the lot of them.  Grodski has Petrov teach him all the techniques of keeping severed dog heads alive, and then takes the next step--while Petrov watches, Grodski cuts off the head of a man (the third guy on that three-man tribunal) and endeavors to keep it alive.  The operation is only a qualified success--the head lives, but the man is totally insane.

If at first you don't succeed, try try again.  Grodski and Petrov assay the experiment on another man, a healthy peasant, and fail again.  Bucholtz then steps in and insists that the third test subject be Petrov himself.  Third time is the charm, as they say, and the experiment is a success--Petrov remains sane as a disembodied head, partly because he himself offers advice on what hormones be added to his blood to keep him on an even keel.

After Petrov has mastered the ability to speak with the supplementary devices employed to substitute for lungs, Stalin himself is brought in to see Grodski's triumph.  But here Petrov gets his revenge.  Petrov plays dead, and Stalin angrily has Grodski and Bucholtz dragged off to prison and we hope death.  Katerina angrily tears away the tubes that keep Petrov alive, but Petrov dies with a smile on his disembodied face.

I think this story is actually pretty good, with lots of science, lots of grue, and engaging relationships between the various characters.  Asimov is correct to see this story as an attack on the USSR, but, when he suggests it is worse than all the other stories to be found in the SF magazines of the period, or has less science, he is full of it.  Thumbs down for the CCCP and thumbs up for "Horror's Head"!  

"The Stratosphere Menace" (1939)

Here we have another Farley story which has apparently never been reprinted.  Maybe because of its unflattering depiction of the French but more probably because its science seems particularly unbelievable.  "The Stratosphere Menace" debuted in an issue of Weird Tales from which we have already read four stories: Duane W. Rimel's "The Metal Chamber," August Derleth's "The Return of Hastur," Edmond Hamilton's "Comrades of Time" and H. P. Lovecraft's "The Quest of Iranon."  This issue of Farnsworth Wright's magazine of the bizarre and unusual has a surprisingly mundane cover by Virgil Finlay, who usually offers up something more inspired--his numerous drawings of men, women and monsters inside this issue, for example, are quite good.  I guess you can't hit one out of the park every time you are up at bat, and maybe Finlay's particular virtues as an artist are not best expressed in color painting.

We just read a story by John Russell Fearn that featured spherical aircraft ascending to the stratosphere, and Farley here makes that his central theme.  Maybe stratospheric exploration was prominent in the news in the late 1930s?    

A French scientist has built a vehicle for exploring the stratosphere, an elaborate instrument-filled pod or compartment lifted aloft by a balloon.  The ostensible plan is for him to take off from an American military base and transmit a live TV report to the surface of all he discovers.  But an Irish-American sergeant has figured out that this Frenchman is insane and is going to exterminate the human race by setting fire to the stratosphere, where the proportion of hydrogen to oxygen is such that the air is very inflammable.  (I thought this absolutely incredible, but Farley was actually ready for my immediate objections about lightning and meteors.)  The Army officers don't realize the Frenchman's monstrous intentions until after he has already taken off, and they scramble to stop him.

"The Stratosphere Menace" is a joke story in which the Irish-American NCO repeatedly proves he is better prepared and quicker-witted than his superiors.  After many ploys to shoot down the balloon fail, it is the Irishman's foresight which saves the world.  Ay, bagorah!

One of the interesting elements of this story is the Frenchman's neutralizing of a US Army Air Force airplane sent after him through use of a device which can, from a great distance, interrupt the operation of an internal combustion motor.  The same sort of weapon appeared in Robert Bloch's "Secret of the Observatory," which appeared in Amazing a few months after "The Stratosphere Menace" was printed in Weird Tales.  A footnote to Bloch's story suggests a prototype of just such a weapon was produced in 1933 but proved impractical for combat use.

"The Stratosphere Menace" is an OK filler story; the science is interesting and the joke element isn't that annoying.  

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These science fiction horror stories range from competent to good, all of them employ science speculations and horrible gore and death in a way that is entertaining, and all of them portray personalities in conflict with each other.  Today Ralph Milne Farley is definitely on my good side.

More 1930s madness in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.