Almost six years ago I read the Clark Ashton Smith story from this number of McIlwraith's magazine, "The Enchantress of Sylaire," but there are three more stories from this July 1941 issue that I have my beady little eyes on. Let's check them out!
"The Robot God" by Ray Cummings
The last time we saw Cummings he was regaling us with the exploitation tale of a Canadian driven to rape and murder by a head injury. (Insert hockey joke here.) Maybe today's Cummings production, the menace of which appears not to be one of A. E. van Vogt and Norm MacDonald's countrymen but the cousins of your constant companions and indispensable helpmeets Alexa, Siri and Grok, is a little more respectable.
Ouch. Frederik Pohl in his memoir The Way the Future Was said Cummings was a nice guy but trashed the man's writing, and ugh, "The Robot God" is a strong piece of evidence that backs Pohl's harsh criticism, Cumming's style here being irritatingly bad. One of Cumming's tricks is to fill the story with sentence fragments, just nouns with adjectives, no verbs, I guess to add drama and paint images, but these fragments are just annoying.
Carter stared at the group of buildings. A dozen of them, one or two as large as a hundred feet, others smaller. Weird metal structures. Some were unfinished; others seemingly hastily or inexpertly put together. Crazy, drunken structures.
Cummings also repeats the same words again and again and piles on superfluous visual details.
The style is probably the worst aspect of "The Robot God," but the characters, action scenes, pacing, and structure also leave much to be desired, being poor at best. The plot, while acceptable in outline, is banal. A weak start to this issue of Weird Tales! Thumbs down!
Oh yeah, the plot. It is the 25th century, the human race has colonized Mars and Venus, and recently a great scientist has perfected robots that seem to have real intelligence and feeling. That scientist, Dynne, and his daughter, Dierdre the beautiful blue-eyed blonde, are flying to Mars from Earth to meet with a manufacturer of robots on the red planet. Also on the commercial passenger ship is a good-looking blond guy, chemist Carter, who is being transferred by his employer, a mining company, to Mars. Carter is courting Dierdre. We've also got Carter's assistant and Dynne's head subordinate, a brilliant hunchbacked engineer, a genius who lives like a recluse because he is so ugly.
These passenger ships have been disappearing lately, and on this voyage Carter and Dierdre find out why--the new emotional robots are hijacking the ships and taking them to their asteroid base, where they are ruled by a robot they worship as a god and where the ships' human passengers and crew work as slaves. Their vessel suffers this very fate. The god robot takes a liking to Dierdre, adding a note of bizarre eroticism to the story, giving it some faint stirrings of life, you might say. The robot god puts Dierdre in a robot body with various controls for her to manually operate--she is to be the goddess of the robots, but only the god will know she is a flesh and blood human.
The robot god holds a big ceremony where he introduces the robots' new goddess to his metal worshipers, but Dierdre flubs the controls and the machine falls over and a hatch opens, revealing to the robot hordes that their purported goddess is a sham, one of the humans they have been taught to hate! The robots go berserk, murdering human women and children in their rage, Cummings giving us some real exploitation gore. Of course, none of the robots tries to murder Dierdre, even though that would be the reaction you would expect--she's the female lead, after all.
The robot god grabs up Dierdre and runs off. Somehow Carter and his assistant catch up to the robot god and outfight it with their bare hands without hurting Dierdre. None of the action scenes in "The Robot God" make any sense, the robots being invincible when the plot requires it and vulnerable when the plot requires that, humans being casually killed if they are nobodies and spared if Carter or Dierdre.
Anyway, Carter opens up the god and finds the hunchback inside--like the goddess, the god was not an autonomous robot but a sort of vehicle. Carter kills the lonely and horny deformed genius and he, Dierdre, and his assistant hop in a space ship and escape to Earth. All the other humans on the asteroid are massacred. Carter and Dierdre get married and become luddites, living a 20th-century lifestyle in tropical seclusion.
This hunk of junk, though a cover story of one of the most important genre magazines in history, has never been reprinted.
"I Killed Hitler" by Ralph Milne Farley
"I Killed Hitler" is a somewhat silly piece of work, but it excited my curiosity and held my interest, so I guess I have to give it a mildly positive review.
Our narrator is a self-important jerk, an artist in Provincetown, Mass. His fellow Americans, a bunch of "money-grubbers," have not recognized his genius, but he has a fan in a Hindu swami who lives nearby.
Our narrator is a distant cousin of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany, and is full of hate for the warmongering tyrant--why is that talentless hack famous and powerful while our skilled and sensitive narrator is unknown? And now our guy has to put his career as a painter on hold because the war Hitler has started has led our guy being drafted! He tells the swami that all the diplomats who tried to make deals with Hitler should have just murdered the man during a meeting and spared the world this crisis--our narrator would have done it, he claims!
The Hindu uses his Eastern sorcery to send the narrator back in time to 1899, to Europe, so he can murder the boy Hitler. Of course, the swami warns our guy that you can't really change history, but who listens to such warnings? The narrator tracks down ten-year-old Hitler and after winning the lonely little boy's confidence takes him out to the woods to strangle him. But when the narrator returns to the present day he finds that he is the dictator of Germany and is on the eve of launching an invasion of the United States! The Hitler regime and World War II are inevitable--even a time traveler cannot prevent major events, just slightly alter the circumstances that give rise to them.
I have a weakness for the unreliable narrator thing and for narrators who are villains, when an author sort of dares the reader to sympathize with a misbehaving character, creating a sort of tantalizing tension. All the swami and time travel stuff is shoddy, but time travel stuff generally is. The murder of a child is gross exploitation material, of course, but unlike in Cummings' story, when a robot bashes out the brains of a nameless little girl, here in Farley's story the murder of a child has some dramatic and psychological weight, as the murderer is the main character and the victim is a person we know all about--the murder is a challenge to the reader, not merely an appeal to sadism or the childish joy of being shocked, and generates some of that tension I mentioned earlier.
"I Killed Hitler" was included in the 1950 Farley collection Omnibus of Time.
"It All Came True in the Woods" by Manly Wade Wellman
Well, of today's three stories, "It All Came True in the Woods" is the best written, its style perfectly suited to its author's goals. But the plot is a little banal, and the story as a whole sappy and sentimental--"It All Came True in the Woods" is largely about the beautiful relationship between a father and daughter and the power of imagination and the nobility of Native Americans and that sort of jazz, though it has some real horror moments.
Dad and six-year-old girl are taking a walk in the woods. These woods, according to Indian lore, are magical--anything you say in them will come true. The daughter asks about giants and Dad describes giants, but to make sure his daughter doesn't get scared, he tells her giants hate tobacco smoke so his pipe smoking will drive them off should any appear. (Ugh, pipe smoking also drives me off.) Sure enough, giants appear. Dad, stunned, drops his pipe. He tells his daughter to hide and he attracts the monsters' attention and runs off. The giants follow, catch him, and start a fire with which to cook Dad. Dad is just about to be spitted when daughter appears to save the day, smoking Dad's pipe and blowing smoke at the giants, causing them to flee.
This story is a success, even if it is not really to my taste, so we'll call it acceptable but admit that, by an objective measure, it is probably the best of today's three tales. And how many stories feature a six-year-old girl smoking a pipe? 🤮
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Our campaign to sample every 1940s issue of Weird Tales advances another step! I also feel like each of these three stories serves as a piece in the sprawling jigsaw puzzle that is the history of science fiction and fantasy--we're doing more than just putting one foot in front of the other here, we are putting flesh on the bones of the grand story of speculative literature in the English-speaking world. (I offer these lofty assessments of this blog post and its fellows because next time we convene we are probably going to be reading absolute garbage.)
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