Edmond Hamilton: "The Metal Giants," "The Atomic Conquerors," and "Evolution Island"

I hope you didn't get your fill of MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton last time when we read his 1929 epic of a genocidal trip to the Earth's hollow center, "The Hidden World," because today we have three stories from Weird Tales by the Ohio-born child prodigy and husband of Leigh Brackett, a man smart enough to graduate high school at 14 and drop out of college at 17--dummies like me wait until their twenties and grad school to escape the receiving end of academia.

I'm reading all these stories in scans of Weird Tales you can find at the following links:  

"The Metal Giants"  "The Atomic Conquerors"  "Evolution Island"

"The Metal Giants" (1926)

Here we have a Weird Tales cover story that went on to be the title story for the first volume of Haffner Press' The Collected Edmond Hamilton.  In 1932 a small press issued "The Metal Giants" as a sort of pamphlet and in 1982 Forrest J. Ackermann included "The Metal Giants" in his anthology The Gernsback Awards.

Professor Detmold is an embarrassment to the University, always coming up with crazy theories that give the alumni pause.  His latest public announcement is that he has invented an artificial brain, a claim that arouses ridicule in the press and even among his fellow scientists.  Even the students want him sacked!  "Testy," "high-strung," "high-tempered" and "impatient," Detmold has not ingratiated himself with the University community and he pays the price, cleaning out his lab and disappearing after he is pressed to resign by the University president, whose priority is not advancing the science that is likely to put us all out of work or put us all in an unmarked grave but raking in those tuition and donation bucks.  Detmold doesn't even tell his only friend, an English professor who warns him that an artificial brain made of metal might be dangerous--what will rein in an intelligence with no soul?--where he is going. 

Four years later come reports from farmers in West Virginia of strange damage and markings in the woods, and of sightings of a huge human-like figure in the distance.  These reports bring that English prof to the region--he suspects his friend Detmold, whom he has not seen nor heard from since his disappearance, is behind whatever crazy thing is going on.  The English professor watches from a hill as twenty-two 300-foot-tall metal giants destroy the local steel town with their metal fists and feet and then exterminate its inhabitants with poison gas!  Now he is sure Detmold is to blame!

The metal giants march on Pittsburgh, their poison gas projectors destroying the ten-thousand-man detachment sent by the Army to stop them.  Meanwhile, back in West Virginia, the English professor has followed clues and found the farmhouse where Detmold made his lab after being driven from the University four years ago.  In it is a diary, and its fragmentary entries tell a horrifying tale!  For three years Detmold worked on the metal brain he had created; when the English professor last saw it the artificial brain had the intelligence of a mere single-celled creature, reacting to light by avoiding the light if it was too bright, but the thing quickly grew in ability as Detmold augmented it with greater brain capacity and with limbs and trained it until it was able to help the scientist perform experiments, and then do experiments itself with unerring precision.  Eventually the metal brain became superior to its creator in scientific endeavor!  The metal intelligence, however, had no interest in art, literature, relationships, or conversation--it was totally emotionless.

Detmold fell ill like three years into his stay in the farmhouse and had to spend time in a Pittsburgh hospital recovering.  When he returned to his remote lab he found that the brain had invented anti-grav and a poison gas that passes harmlessly through your skin and flesh to dissolve your bones!  The brain had also started up a super-modern mining operation, a refinery and a factory to build an army of gargantuan killers, robots with simple artificial brains, controlled via radio by the super brain built by Detmold.  Detmold barely escaped alive from his creation.

Clues in the diary lead the English professor to the site of the artificial brain's HQ.  And he is there when Detmold, having built his own giant war machine in the form of a wheel 350 feet in diameter, attacks the brain, desperate to vanquish the murderous monster he created in his hubris!  Detmold dies in the fight, but the brain is crushed and, without a commander, the giants are rendered inert.

A fun story, thumbs up!  It may be instructive to compare this 1926 story and 1929's "The Hidden World," the subject of my previous blog post.  Both stories have plenty of science and plenty of death and destruction.  But whereas "The Hidden World" is repetitious, "The Metal Giants" is not--we see the metal giants wipe out one city, killing thousands of people and toppling scores of buildings, and we see one big climactic fight between metal war machines, and that is enough--we don't see the giants destroy one city, then another city, and then another, and we don't see multiple fights between gargantuan war machines.  In "The Hidden World" there are three hand-to-hand fights and more aerial dogfights than I can remember, and twice we see the heroes infiltrate a big important meeting--that is too much of a good thing.  Perhaps more importantly, Detmold and the English prof have human emotions and personalities and relationships, something the forgettable protagonists in "The Hidden World" sorely lack.

"The Atomic Conquerors" (1927)

"The Atomic Conquerors" debuted behind the woman-in-bondage cover of the February 1927 issue of your favorite magazine alongside a bunch of stories by people I've never read or never even heard of as well as a brief piece by August Derleth titled "The River" which we'll get to when it rolls along.  "The Atomic Conquerors" lay dormant until critical mass was again achieved in our own 21st century and it was reprinted by Haffner Books in the first volume of their Collected Edmond Hamilton and by Kaye Lynne Booth and Johnathan Maberry in their anthology Weird Tales: Best of the Early Years: 1926-7.

Hamilton starts right out with the superlatives in this story, telling us it is about "an age-old cosmic feud" that erupts into "dreadful war, universe struggling with universe in titanic combat, immense, unthinkable...."  Hamilton tells us that, in this struggle, we humans are "a mass of tiny, frightened pigmies, running about beneath battling giants," pigmies who have no power to influence the war's outcome, but in the same breath he tells us that this unthinkable war between universes was actually triggered by an insane human.  It also seems clear that the Earth and human race survived this mind-bogglingly stupendous conflict.   A lot of weird stories start this way, telling you how the adventure or crisis ends up so that as you follow the narrative, read a blow by blow description of the course of the event with whose salient points you are already familiar, you already know what your destination will be.  After all these years I am still not sure I think this structure is a good idea.

A student on break is bicycling around England.  He spends a few days across the border in bonnie Scotland.  Having heard from some locals about some weird glass-like rocks at some remote ruins (these vitrified forts are apparently real, though this is the first I ever heard of them--every day brings new reminders of my ignorance!), he decides to investigate them.  Those locals also mentioned hearing some odd, regular booms, more like artillery fire than thunder, last night, and that some scientists have been hanging around the ruins.

The student, on the way to the ruins, meets an archaeologist.  This guy tells the student he needs his help saving the world.  But first, he has to tell the student the backstory.  You see, a few years ago, the archaeologist met an irascible and disgraced physics professor and they became friendly because the physicist was passionately interested in archaeology as a hobby.  The physicist had a crazy theory, that the vitrification of those old ruins in Scotland was the result of some super ray weapon being used in the vicinity in the distant past.

Having been thrown out of Cambridge, the physicist has time to explore these vitrified forts, and earlier this year discovered at one of the forts an ancient inscription hidden under cement.  He hired the archaeologist to come decipher the inscription, and after a month of working on the translation, the archaeologist was able to share the astounding story told by the ancient text.  These forts were built not by Earth humans, but by people from one of Earth's innumerable atoms.

It feels like just last week that Clare Winger Harris was telling us about the theory that the nuclei and electrons of our universe are the stars and planets of countless teeny tiny universes, and that Sol and Earth in turn are a nucleus and an electron of a larger universe.  Well, we hear the same theory from Hamilton today.  The civilization on an electron of our universe, a component of an atom of a grain of sand, was feeling population pressure, so developed technology that empowered them to make themselves larger, large enough to shift into our universe and colonize the Earth.  This was long ago, before the rise of Homo Sapiens.  These people were fierce and not content to just colonize the Earth--they wanted to colonize the next universe up, and attacked that universe.  But in this super universe they met a super civilization much superior to their own which stymied their attacks and then launched a counter attack, so that a huge battle raged on the young Earth and the imperialists were forced to retreat back to their overcrowded electron.  The super people set a force field around the grain of sand that short circuited the electron people's ability to change their size, and sealed the grain of sand under the stone with the inscription on it; the text isn't just a history lesson, but implores the reader to not set free the warlike electron people.

The physicist decided to free the belligerent people of that electron, and to do so he learned how to deactivate the force field and to make himself smaller, small enough to visit the people on that bellicose electron.  Why, you ask?  He wants to get revenge on Earth for throwing him out of Cambridge, and what better revenge than summoning an army from the electron to exterminate the human race?  (If you can make yourself giant-sized, guvnah, why not just go Godzilla on Cambridge and leave me out of it--I went to Rutgers!)

The people of the electron turn out to be lizard men who promise to deal with us humans after they first launch their attack on their old foes in the next universe up.  The behavior of people in this story never makes much sense.  The physicist used a stun gun provided by the reptilians to paralyze the archaeologist, so the archaeologist had to watch, powerless, like all those attractive women in The Black Belly of the Tarantula, now available in limited edition 4K, as the reptile men, an army of them, grew into view from the grain of sand, and then grew huge enough to vanish into the next universe up.  The whole thing makes no sense--are the reptiliads--available from Ral Partha Legacy--gaining mass as they grow?  Do they have to get as big as a star to get to the next universe?  How come nobody in the surrounding countryside sees them growing if they get big enough to obscure the night sky and, at some point, grow beyond the shadow of the Earth so their big crocagator mugs are visible from London and Paris?  How do they breathe once their heads are up in space?  Good grief.

By an improbable lucky chance the stun device stopped working on the archaeologist and he sneaked off to get help and the first person he ran into was the student.  The student and he hurry back to where the physicist is awaiting arrival of the next wave of reptiliads, and attack him.  But lacking guns or even knives, the student and archaeologist are outmatched by the elderly mentally ill physics professor.  Sad!  The student is paralyzed by the stun gun and must watch helplessly while the archeologist and physicist wrestle.  Then the reptile men appear and casually kill the two scientists with a freeze ray before setting out to raid English cities in their flying disks.  The freeze ray wreaks havoc from above on unsuspecting Liverpool and Manchester from, but by the time they reach London the RAF has been forewarned and gives the flying disks a hot reception.  The brave British lads resort to kamikaze attacks against the disks, sacrificing themselves to inflict over 50% losses on the scaly air fleet, sending it back to the land of tartans and haggis to regroup.  I know what you are thinking--if the lizard men can't beat a bunch of biplanes with Vickers .303 machine guns, how can they conquer the people of a superior universe who have all kinds of crazy force fields and energy weapons?

Squamous reinforcements are growing into our universe as the student watches but then the people of the universe above ours appear--they defeated the reptiliad attack and with their superior technology drive the reptile people off Earth and back to their grain of sand, which the superpeople again seal up.

This story is not very good, I'm afraid.  For one thing, there are way too many frame stories between us and the actual story, and our protagonists actually have no role in resolving the plot, something Hamilton tells us on page 1.  If I wanted to read a story about action and tragedy during World War II, I'd want to read a story narrated by or focusing on a fighter pilot or a tank commander or the skipper of a frigate or somebody like that, somebody with agency right there at the tip of the spear, making decisions and running risks.  I wouldn't want to read about a guy going to the library to read a book of second-hand sources about the fighter pilot.  And yet here in "The Atomic Conquerors" we are not addressed by an atomic conqueror or by the embittered physicist who betrays his fellow Earth mammals and tries to sic some reptile men on us, instead we learn about the scaly aliens and the evil physicist through a hiker who learns about them from an archaeologist.   

For another, the whole thing is silly and full of plot holes.  The reptile men from that electron face an overcrowding problem, so they learn how to grow and shrink themselves so they can get to other universes to colonize them.  But if they can grow and shrink themselves to any size, can't they solve the overpopulation problem by shrinking themselves so they use up less room on their native planet?  Or grow themselves so they can just step over to another solar system and colonize that system and every one beyond?  Hamilton hints that the universe above ours is nicer than ours and maybe much nicer than the reptiliads' universe (reminding us perhaps of Jack Vance's Eyes of the Overworld) but this is not elaborated upon.

I've gotta give "The Atomic Conquerors" a moderately negative vote, I'm afraid. Why Maberry and Booth think this is better than "The Metal Giants" is beyond me; maybe they felt the need to include a story with the whole every-atom-is-a-star-system gag.

"Evolution Island" (1927)

Here we have another story in which evolution is conceived not as a bunch of random mutations, some of which propagate through a population because they confer some kind of survival or reproductive benefit, but as the fulfillment of an inevitable plan of constant steady improvement.

We know not where that road leads, for our path of evolution, like the paths all life must follow, was laid down for us, as I believe, by a Power above earth....How much higher the human race today than the savage Neandertal men of fifty thousand years ago! And fifty thousand years from now, men will be as much above us. It is the same with all life, with all forms of life. All go up, up, change and change...We can not swerve aside from the path of change we follow.

The above quote is from a lecture by a biologist who proposes that, while the course of evolution cannot be changed (I guess he never heard of selective breeding), perhaps evolution could be sped up!  We just read a story by Clare Winger Harris on these same themes, and way back when this blog was just a mere speck and not the 1,600-post behemoth it is today, we read a story by Hamilton himself on these themes.  Anyway, this biologist claims evolution is the result of exposure to "the Garner ray," named for the physicist who discovered it, and that the more Garner rays you are exposed to, the faster you evolve.  As evidence, be points to Australia, saying that there must be fewer of the rocks that radiate Garner rays down under than elsewhere, because the Aborigines of that southern continent are "without doubt the lowest form of human being on earth, the least developed of all the races of men."  Well, there is a string of words you won't be seeing in print ever again.  Anyway, the scientist says that it is inevitable that somebody will now artificially produce Garner rays and use them to speed up human evolution so that the human race improves physically and intellectually at a rapid pace, enjoying millions of years of progress in mere hours, becoming like gods!

The biologist's claims meet with almost universal disapproval from all segments of society, and he retreats to the lab behind his mansion--this joker inherited money so doesn't need to stay on the good side of the academic establishment.  He has only one friend whom he allows to enter his lab, a physician; he also has an assistant.  The sawbones comes by for a visit and the biologist tells him he has already invented a Garner ray projector that produces far more powerful rays than appear in nature, and as the physician watches he uses it to make a chicken evolve.  I was pretty disappointed that this did not produce a chicken that can give stirring speeches and lead a civil rights movement against the mass nuggetification of its people; instead, the chicken just gets smaller and dies.  The future of the chicken is not bright, apparently.

Then the biologist reverses the polarity of his ray projector and makes a second chicken devolve; it changes in shape and size into Archaeopteryx, then a succession of reptiles and lesser creatures until nothing is left but slime, the primordial ooze of the cliche.  

A week later the biologist and his assistant head down to the Caribbean, to an uninhabited island he has purchased where he plans to let loose many animals and play the ray over all of them so he can witness hundreds of thousands of years of evolution in just a few weeks or months.  I guess I should note that all these operations are tense for the reader because the ray projector doesn't emit a focused beam, but just sprays rays all over, and the scientists and physician have to put on a protective vest to keep from themselves evolving or devolving.  I kept expecting somebody's suspenders or shoulder strap or something to fail and for him to suddenly evolve into some kind of supersmart dictator or devolve into a poo-flinging monkey or something.

A year passes and the sawbones doesn't hear from the biologist.  Then, one rainy night, the biologist shows up at the doctor's New York apartment to tell him the terrible tale of his year on the island.  He explains how all the different species evolved, following the plan of, I guess, almighty God written in their cells.  Some of the reptiles and insects evolved into huge monsters which is pretty cool, but eventually all species shrank and then died, just like that chicken.  This is pretty anti-climactic after all the talk of evolution bringing species "up" or "higher --the plans in animals' genes have a final destination and that destination is not perfection but oblivion?!

Eventually all the animals on the island have gone extinct, and then the plants evolve into an array of forms until a sort of intelligent mobile cactus has become the sole species on the island.  The biologist feared these smart walking plants might take over the world or something and wanted to turn on the reversing ray and devolve them back to inconsequentiality, but the assistant was fascinated by them and wanted to follow their progress for a few more thousand years.  The biologist went to Kingston for a month-long holiday, leaving the assistant behind to further study the superplants.  When he got back he had a shock--the assistant had taken off his protective gear and evolved into the man of the future, a hairless creature with a huge head and a slug-like body from which sprout four tentacles ending in hands--this man of the year One Million A.D. can walk and manipulate tools with any of the tentacles.  

And then there was the plants, which had evolved into a horde of plant men who embraced the man of One Million A.D. as their leader.  The biologist's assistant planned to lead these vegetable people in a campaign to conquer the world!  And then the galaxy!  The assistant has already used his super brain to devise a special flame gun for his plant legions to use.

The biologist managed to escape the island and get to New York and now he asks the physician for help.  He is confident an attack on the island by a conventional military force will fail, but if two men can sneak onto the island, maybe they can put an end to the future man's evil plans!  

Our guys get to the island and sneak towards the lab, hoping to turn on the reverse ray and devolve the plant men into harmless mindless vegetation, but they are captured, which is not a surprise to us readers, as "Evolution Island" is introduced with an illustration of two men in bondage being harangued by a tentacled freak.  Luckily, the man of the future is busy observing the maiden flight of the Luftwaffe of 100-foot spherical aircraft his plant men have constructed from his designs and this gives our heroes a chance to turn on the reversing ray and reduce the plant men and their diabolical ruler to primordial slime.  The biologist destroys all the Garner ray apparatus and pledges to never tinker with evolution again.  

I can moderately recommend "Evolution Island;" the science is all over the place but at least it is surprising and entertaining and the adventure components are not bad; this one is certainly better than "The Atomic Conquerors."  "Evolution Island" was selected by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Weinberg to represent 1927 in their 1988 anthology Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors, and, in 2023, Frank Festa and Hardy Kettlitz reprinted "Evolution Island" in their anthology of stories from 1920s issues of WT, 100 Jahre Weird Tales Jubiläumsedition: 1923 bis 1929.

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All three of today's Weird Tales offerings from Edmond Hamilton star college professors who are estranged from academia and whose research threatens to destroy the human race, but "The Metal Giants" stands head and shoulders above the other two.  The 1926 story's science is much more believable and internally consistent, its climax is much better, and its characters have more interesting motivations and their behavior is more realistic and better integrated into the plot.  

This has been a profitable foray into the pages of the Unique Magazine.  As you are well aware, I am trying to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales, a feat I have already performed when it comes to the 1930s and portions of the 1920s and 1940s, and today I am closing in on completion of 1926 and have already taken a bite out of 1927.  See the links below for detailed reports on my progress, and brace yourself for more 1920s weirdness next time we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

WEIRD TALES PROJECT

1923  1924   1925

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939  

1940   1941  1942

The Hidden World by Edmond Hamilton

Like a giant replica of some strange anthill was this unutterably alien world hidden here at the heart of earth’s colossal shell, and as we sank downward through its levels in the great well, pausing in our vain search at level after level, gazing across those swarming levels, we could make out vast mechanisms and contrivances some of which were quite incalculable in purpose, others being more or less clear in principle at least to our watching eyes.

In our last episode we read a story by Clare Winger Harris from the Fall 1929 issue of Hugo Gernsback's Science Wonder Quarterly, a caper about a guy in a love triangle who replaced most of his body with mechanical components.  I commented on how attractive the magazine was, adorned with a ton of compelling illustrations by Frank R. Paul, and mentioned the included story by Edmond Hamilton, one of our favorites here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Today let's read that Hamilton piece, which seems long enough to deserve its own blog post--when it was reprinted it was billed as a novel.  Note: Do not confuse Hamilton's 1929 Science Wonder Quarterly story "The Hidden World" with Stanton Coblentz's 1935 story from Wonder Stories "In Caverns Below," which for book publication in 1957 was retitled The Hidden World.  We read that Coblentz piece back in 2015.

Feel free to read this 1929 printing of Hamilton's "The Hidden World" along with us at this internet archive link or here at luminist league.

The inhabitants of an East African village on the equator report seeing rise from the ground a blue shaft of light that reaches fifty feet into the sky and then vanishes after a minute.  Twenty days later, islanders in the Dutch East Indies, again on the equator,  claim to have witnessed a similar phenomena.  Three weeks after that a cruise ship with 1000 passengers is about to cross the equator near Panama and they too see a blue shaft of light leap up 50 feet into the air, this time from below the surface of the water.  Again, the column of light endures only one minute.

Our man characters are four scientists based in Manhattan, two geologists and two physicists who all work at the same Foundation and even live in the same apartment.  This is like some kind of male wish fulfillment fantasy, spending all day every day with three other guys with the same exact interests (I guess women isn't one of their shared interests.)  The narrator is one of the physicists.  Most people in the scientific community think the newspaper stories of the light shafts are a hoax or reports from mixed up people of mundane meteors, but the senior member of the four chums has calculated from those newspaper articles where and when the fourth shaft of light will appear and he proposes all four of the Manhattanite bachelors be there when that fourth column of light arises in the jungles of Brazil.

Our four intrepid NGO employees are there with an array of equipment--cameras and spectrometers and fluoroscopes and more--at the fork where two rivers meet in the Brazilian jungle when the fourth shaft of light appears.  Moments after the column of light has vanished there is an explosion and a perfectly circular hole appears in the earth, 500 feet wide and immeasurably deep.  From this shaft that leads deep into the Earth emerges a fleet of spherical aircraft 25 feet in diameter.  Our narrator and the other physicist are able to find concealment, but the geologists are in the open and seized by the disintegrator ray-wielding individuals who emerge from the spheres, slow clumsy people seven feet tall with boneless, sack-like bodies, tentacles, and a single huge eye.  Hamilton calls these people "flesh-creatures" or "flesh-monsters," which I found annoying, as we human beings are also flesh creatures, aren't we?, but that is what he sticks with.

The geologists are taken down the shaft in one of the flying spheres, while the physicists must wait for hour after hour, perspiring in the heat, unable to leave cover as hundreds of the white sack-people stand guard on foot nearby and hover in their spheres overhead.  With no water or food, the scientists lapse in and out of sanity!  When sane, they theorize on the nature of the technology of the alien race.  Then, the next day, desperate, they launch a scheme to distract the crew of one of the spheres that sits on land near the shaft, seize the sphere and fly it down into the shaft.

Two spheres pursue our heroes, and there is a dog fight in the shaft which the representatives of the human race win by using that trick I saw on Battlestar Galactica as a kid, hitting the brakes so the two monster-piloted craft pass by and can be shot in the back.  The scientists continue downwards, mile after mile, and it grows dangerously hot, but they find the air conditioner controls before expiring from the heat of the molten inner surface of Earth's crust.

The scientists find that Earth is hollow, with a surface crust like a thousand miles thick.  The inner part of that crust is glowing molten rock, a "thundering, roaring sea" of lava, casting light and heat upon a planet 3000 miles in diameter that rotates in the center of Earth's empty core.  The gravity that keeps the H2O on the Earth's outer surface is generated by the center of the crust, and so also keeps the lava on the inner surface.  The inner world generates its own gravity, of course, but less than that humans experience on the outer surface, and the scientists notice that the white sack-people, slow and clumsy up in Brazil, seem sprightly enough on the surface of their own world, which is covered in a single huge densely populated city above which swarm thousands of the spheres going hither and thither on their occupants' business.

The physicists fly around the city, which is built, 100 levels deep, of transparent metal so that the heat and light from the "roof" 1,500 miles above can radiate all the way down to the lowest levels.  Our eggheads study the city's marvelous operations, the endless array of big high tech industrial machines which, for example make food from rock by rearranging the atomic structure of matter to form any desired element.  All the time, of course, they are looking for their friends, and they finally come upon them when the join an armada of spheres that have been summoned to a huge lecture hall.  The supervisory class of the inner world attends the speech in their spheres--I guess its like a drive in movie.  As we readers expect, the topic of the speech, given by the leaders of the race of flesh-creatures, is the two geologists recently captured, who are paraded out onto the stage under heavy guard.  

After the speech the physicists are able to figure out where the geologists are imprisoned and to sneak up on and kill their guards. (The low gravity here gives them great strength and agility, like John carter on Mars or Kal-El on Terra.)  The door to the cell proves impossible to open, however.  They will have to ambush the next group of guards who come by after those guards have opened the door to the cell.  In the meantime, the geologists tell the story of their treatment at the hands of these boneless subterranean people.

The flesh-creatures used a ray machine to write into the geologists' brains fluency in their language in hopes of interrogating the surface men and thus learning of the human race's ability to oppose the invasion the sack-people had planned.  In the course of the interrogation, the geologists learned all about the history of this mysterious race.  We get a speculative astronomy and geology lesson (the formation of the planets and the inner and outer Earth, according to the flesh-people's scientists) and then speculative biology, covering the evolution of life on this inner sphere.  And then we get the reason why the flesh people seek to conquer the surface world--predictions that their little inner sphere is going to break up due to natural causes, the resulting fragments then pulled up into the lava ocean that surrounds this inner region.  This cataclysm will occur very soon.  The blue light columns were like periscopes, looking for a suitable place to use a disintegrator ray to dug the shaft through which the inner world armies could invade the surface world.  Obviously these immigrants cannot coexist with us surface world natives and will disintegrate us, every one.

"The Hidden World" can be split into three parts.  The first part Hamilton writes with gusto that is infectious, and is pretty entertaining.  The mystery of the blue lights, the four bosom buddies' prep for and examination of the light when it comes, the appearance of the flesh creatures and the capture of the geologists, the seizure of the flying machine by the physicists and their exploration of the world within our world is all fun.  Sure, there are problems.  For example, Hamilton's city is made of transparent metal so our heroes can see everything that is going on, but in an adventure story like this, the heroes have to sneak around and hide from people and ambush people, and such behavior is hard to believe in an environment in which walls, floors and ceilings are all transparent.  A typical adventure story could solve this problem by having the protagonists don captured uniforms, but the seven-foot tall and very wide aliens go around naked.   

Still, the first third of "The Hidden World" is entertaining.  But then comes the long encyclopedia article about the inner world and its inhabitants, which is boring and repetitive and really drags.

In the third part of the story the four humans outfight the guards who come to drag the geologists before the rulers  second time to demand the humans act as guides for the invasion force, which is set to leave in hours.  In their stolen sphere the four men escape, then block the shaft to the surface, battling hundreds and hundreds of spheres of the vanguard of the invasion force that is trying desperately to get through the shaft before their little planet explodes.  Hamilton describes this battle in repetitive detail, and it drags.  His explanation as to how one sphere can outfight hundreds is that the gunners of the invasion force are blinded by the light of the lava ocean and can't get a bead on the stolen flying machine which lurks a few feet within the shadows of the shaft.  Anyway, the scientists use their stolen vehicle's disintegrator rays to annihilate one enemy charge after another, like the British at Waterloo bating back one French cavalry charge after another, destroying hundreds of spheres, all the while dodging a fusillade of ill-aimed rays.  When the hundred spheres that are up in Brazil, guarding the exit of the shaft, come down to help, we get one of those scenes we have seen a hundred times in cartoons and Star Wars movies in which two of the bad guys' units, in this case two squadrons of one hundred spheres each, suffer a head on collision because the good guys got out of the way just in time.  Eventually the little planet explodes, and the blast and debris wipe out all the spheres and seal the shaft, our people only barely escaping up the shaft as it collapses.  Our sense of wonder ending is that, with the technology of the sphere, human society is about to be radically changed.  (Cross your figures that the disintegrator ray technology remains an American monopoly.)

"The Hidden World" has nine chapters, and up through chapter five or six I expected to give it a positive review.  So much of the first half of the story is full of exciting images of vast alien vistas and hairsbreadth escapes and spectacular violence that it is fun to imagine it all in your mind, like you are watching a Lucas or Spielberg film.  But then comes the overly long speculative science lectures, and then the overly long final action sequence.  And of course the story's characters have zero personality and no human feelings or relationships.  Hamilton says they are scared and tells us three times that their faces turn white, but we don't feel it.  "The Hidden World" is a good example of the strengths and weaknesses of pre-Golden Age science fiction--lots of science, lots of ideas, a big big canvas in which entire worlds and civilizations are threatened and destroyed, but a severe lack of some traditional elements of literature and popular entertainment, like memorable characters you can identify with or which otherwise generate emotions in the reader.  A story like "The Hidden World" reminds you of how critical to the success of Edgar Rice Burroughs is the fact that Tarzan and John Carter have personalities, have voices and inner lives.

So, we're just going to award "The Hidden World" with a rating of "Acceptable."  Lots of it is cool and fun, but it is repetitive and would benefit from being cut down by like 25 or 30%.  

"The Hidden World" was reprinted in 1950 in the first issue of a magazine edited by Sam Merwin, Jr., Fantastic Story Quarterly, that largely consisted of reprints.  The issue includes brand new illos for "The Hidden World" by the great Virgil Finlay, however, that are worth a look.  In the 21st century, "The Hidden World" has reappeared in the second volume of Haffner Press' The Collected Edmond Hamilton, an anthology of Hollow Earth Tales, and a "Double Novel" in which Hamilton's epic of the doom of the flesh creatures' stablemate is Dwight V. Swain's You Can't Buy Eternity.  

Clare Winger Harris: "The Artificial Man," "The Menace of Mars," and "The Evolutionary Monstrosity"

In our last episode I enjoyed a story by Clare Winger Harris that debuted in Weird Tales, "A Runaway World," a tale full of science and scientists as well as horror and death that I thought conformed to the expectations of a traditional science fiction story as much or more to what we expect of a weird story.  So let's read three Harris pieces from steadfastly science-oriented magazines edited by science fiction pioneer Hugo Gernsback.  All three of these stories were reprinted in the 1947 Harris collection Away from the Here and Now, which you can read at this link to a scan of a signed copy of the book, but I am going to read them in scans of the magazines in which they first saw print.  Here are those links:

"The Artificial Man"   "The Menace of Mars"   "The Evolutionary Monstrosity"

"The Artificial Man" (1929)

The issue of Science Wonder Quarterly that includes "The Artificial Man" also prints Edmond Hamilton's "The Hidden World," which I don't think I have read yet, and a gushing letter from a twelve-year-old Forrest Ackerman who loves Science Wonder magazine more than mere words can express.  The issue also has tons of fun illustrations by Frank R. Paul depicting space craft, people in zero gravity, space suits, creepy aliens, so many of your favorite things--this is a pretty attractive magazine, though the tiny print is a little forbidding; I think the July 1926 ish of Weird Tales has like 51 lines on a page, but this Fall 1929 issue of Science Wonder Quarterly has 68 lines per page!  Gernsback should have marketed a companion magnifying glass with his magazines!

George Gregory is an excellent college student--he's captain of the football team, and he put on a brilliant debate performance, defending the philosophy that guides his life: "bodily perfection is a result of right thinking.”  But then tragedy strikes--injured on the football field (maybe you call it "the gridiron") he has to have one of his legs amputated!  Since GG thinks that mind and body are one, he fears this means that the loss of a limb implies that he has lost part of his soul!  He tells Rosalind, the girl he has been going steady with his entire college career, that they should break up--he doesn't want her to be held back by having to endure a relationship with half a man!

Rosalind isn't buying it, and after GG gets an artificial leg and learns to use it so well that people who do not know him can't even tell he has only one natural leg, they schedule their wedding.  But a week before they are to be bound in holy matrimony, GG is hit by a truck!  George can't catch a break!  One of his arms is amputated, and some of his internal organs are reduced in capacity.  

GG comes from healthy stock and hasn't been hitting the pizzas and ice cream as hard as some of us do, so he largely physically recovers from this second disaster, but he has some odd theories about mental, psychological and spiritual recovery:

“God expresses Himself through the physical world....As much of physical perfection as I have lost, that much of God or Goodness has left me...."

Rosalind can't shake her fiancé's adherence to these self-destructive beliefs, and then there is the fact that GG can tell she is starting to crush on GG's college buddy, Dr. David Bell, who is also his lead physician.  (It's a small world.)  When GG puts his artificial arm around Rosalind, she shudders--is it that she can't marry a man who isn't 100% natural, or that George is not the same man, mentally, with whom she fell in love freshman year?  Either way, she tells him the marriage is off, and he gets rough with her, and David has to rescue her, has to outfight his crippled former friend who now hates him, whose physical suffering has apparently driven him insane.  Rosalind and David get engaged.

GG decides to put his theory about the inseparability of body and mind to the ultimate test--he will have every possible part of his body replaced with an artificial part, and see how it changes his psyche, how much of his original identity he retains.  Obviously, GG is insane.  But mentally ill people who might benefit from therapy or psychiatric medicine can always find doctors willing, for enough of the old moola, to perform radical and unnecessary surgery on depressed or deranged people's bodies.  For five years, Rosalind and David, happily married, hear nothing from their old friend GG, but then he reappears at the hospital where the David works, unrecognizable as almost all his body has been replaced by mechanical parts, including his heart.  Most of his body operates on batteries!  He assaults David and knocks him out.

When David awakes, Rosalind is there, along with the minor character, a colleague of David's, who saved David's life.  After David was knocked unconscious, this doctor and two policemen fought the mechanical man, able to defeat him because the doctor is able to figure out GG's weaknesses.  As he expired, GG's brain in its robot body asked the doctor to tell David and Rosalind that he now realizes his theory was wrong, that if you have strength of character, if you have the right attitude, you need not become evil if your body is damaged.

This is a wild melodrama, and I kind of like it, but there are problems.  My biggest complaint is that a minor character who appears in the second half of the story is the one who defeats the monster and resolves the plot.  Obviously Rosalind and/or David should have slain GG and heard his apology with their own ears.  Why would an author choose a complicated and indirect climax and ending over a straightforward ending?  Authors do this stuff sometimes, and I don't get it.

We are moderately recommending "The Artificial Man."  Besides in Science Wonder Quarterly and Away from the Here and Now, the tragedy of George Gregory, Big Man on Campus, can be experienced in a 2015 anthology of early SF by women, The Feminine Future, and the 2019 collection for which it serves as title story. 

"The Menace of Mars" (1928)

"The Menace of Mars" bears more than a passing resemblance to the 1926 story we read in our last episode by Harris, "A Runaway World."  She even quotes the exact same lines from Tennyson in both stories, and has a dog be the victtm in a horror scene.  Unfortunately, this 1928 treatment of the material is less entertaining.  In "A Runaway World" we had some real human relationships, and the characters made some decisions that affected the course of their lives, while "The Menace of Mars" lacks such human drama--Harris does not explore relationships, and everybody in the story is just at the mercy of titanic forces and lives or dies based mostly on luck.  Harris doesn't mine the material for horror scenes and images as effectively as she did for "A Runaway World," either.

It is the 1950s.  Our narrator Hildreth is a young astronomer, his girlfriend Vivian Harley is a young chemist whose father is a world-famous chemist.  We get a lecture about how the molecular structures of gasses, liquids and solids differ, and there is talk of how maybe the atoms of our universe are the suns and planets of other smaller universes, and our sun a nucleus and our planets electrons of a larger universe.  Then comes a disaster which makes these theories manifest.  All of a sudden there are earthquakes and floods and the night sky is full of abnormally bright stars and huge planets and people's weight feels different--the universe is apparently contracting!  Our universe was a gas in the universe one step up, but has now become a solid, all the heavenly bodies packed close together.    

To escape the heat as Earth gets closer to Sol, the small number of people who have survived the cataclysm flee to the poles in giant airships.  Harris strikes a blow against superstition with a digression, the episode of the airship Icarus.  Icarus suffered a famous crash some time ago, and people think she is cursed and even though she is fully repaired, so people are afraid to board Icarus.  She and her sister ship Celestia are rated to carry 1000 passengers, but over 1000 crowd onto Celestia and none of them volunteers to move to Icarus, which has fewer than 800 passengers.  Overladen, Celestia crashes on the way to the North Pole and everybody aboard is lost.  Icarus arrives safely.  Our narrator makes sure we don't miss the point:

Her fate should prove a constant reminder of the failure of fear and superstition against the triumph of reason. 

In the confusion, Hildreth and his family go to the North Pole, and Vivian and her father to the South Pole.  The people at the North Pole have to construct floating cities because the ice melts--the people on the South Pole build what they call an Eden or a Utopia on solid land. 

Hildreth and his closest colleague, Miles Tracy, have an unprecedented opportunity to study Venus and Mars, they now being very close.  Venus apparently had a civilization but it was destroyed by the recent cataclysm.  Mars seems to have never fostered life of any kind. 

Or has it?  Yet another scientist in this story full of scientists has a crazy theory--that Mars itself is one big organism, one big intelligent being!  When Earth's orbit begins to change, causing more earthquakes, this guy thinks it is because Mars is sending out a gravity ray to move Earth into position to act as a sunshade for the red planet!  And it gets worse--Mars begins to somehow turn parts of Jupiter and the Earth into red rock just like itself, and Hildreth and Vivian are aboard an aircraft, travelling between the poles over barren North America, when a Martian magnetic force draws their aircraft to the ground right where the red growth is occurring!  Those who touch the spreading red growth become red rock themselves, are integrated into the Martian colony!  Luckily, Hildreth and Vivian run away from the spreading red waste and make it to a river--the spreading Martian cancer is retarded by water.  Our heroes are then rescued by an aircraft.

The equatorial and temperate zones of Earth turn red, but then our universe shifts to a liquid state, the stars and planets now somewhat further apart, and there is a big rainstorm, which arrests the spread of the red rock.  Hildreth brings back a sample of the post-deluge red rock, now a sort of jelly.  He accidentally allows the jelly to come back to life and kill a dog but then neutralizes the spreading Martian rock with a hose.  We are told that the Earth and human society have now reached a stable state, that artificial means of delivering water are employed to keep the red borders of Martian territory on Earth in check.  The story ends on a philosophical note--of life like our own, and the queer-to-us life of the giant rock that is Mars, which is the "normal" life of our universe and which is the anomaly--are we plants and animals merely a fungus that sometimes grows on the surface of the primary life forms of our universe, which are the planets?

Merely acceptable, I'm afraid.  Besides the aforementioned The Artificial Man and Other Stories and Away from the Here and Now, "The Menace of Mars" has been reprinted in the first volume of The Routledge Anthology of Climate Fiction (2025.)  

"The Evolutionary Monstrosity" (1929) 

Harris' name appears on the cover of the Winter 1929 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly in which "The Evolutionary Monstrosity" debuted, and the editor's intro to the story refers to her as "our well known author;" Harris seems to have been a draw for readers.

Ted Marsten grew up in poverty, but his natural talent has made him a success at university.  Ted has a theory about evolution, that it is "a certain bacterial growth which slowly and continuously changes the cellular structure of living organisms, causing the formation of new tissue and organs, and breaking down the old."  One of his friends, our narrator Frank Caldwell, son of a Ioawan factory owner, agrees with me that this theory is bonkers, but Ted's other pal, Irwin Staley, son of a New York broker, finds Ted's brainwave very convincing.  After these three biologists graduate, narrator Frank goes to work for the university, pushing the party line from Darwin,  while Ted and Irwin put Irwin's riches to work trying to prove Ted's it's-bacteria-what-done-it theory of evolution.

Summer rolls around the Ted and Irwin send Frank a written invitation, and Frank goes over to the Staley estate to check in on the independent scholars' progress.  And what progress they have made!  Ted has mutated a normal housecat into a bipedal hairless servant who can talk!  This revolting monster leads Frank to the lab, where Frank suggests that Ted's experiments, his advancing the cat through stages of evolution without the ameliorating influence of the environment, is risky, even the work of the--metaphorical!--devil.  Frank does not believe in Satan, but he does believe in a Creator, and that God has "laws" which man must not "tamper with" or "distort."

Ted angrily storms off, and Irwin informs Frank that things are even worse than they seem--Ted has been evolving himself!

(I shrug off nonsense like hyperspace and psychic powers in stories, but somehow stories that have evolutionary mutations that occur in a living being instead of being realized across generations, and stories that suggest that evolution is not a series of random mutations that propagate through a population because they offer some benefit in sexual selection processes or defense against disease or predators or something like that, but rather that the course of evolution confirms to some kind of plan that slowly unfolds, stick in my craw.)

Frank goes to Europe for like a year, and then is busy working at the university, so doesn't return to the Staley estate for three years.  Irwin's sister, Dorothy, tells Frank that she has not seen Ted in a year, that her brother Irwin is a slave to Ted due to Ted's psychic powers.  But Irwin can speak his own mind on those rare occasions when Ted sleeps.  According to Irwin, Ted has ingested so many evolutionary bacterium that he has advanced to a point to which he no longer resembles a human being!  Ted is in love with Dorothy, and has ordered Irwin to inject her with the evolution germs so that he and she will be on the same rung of the evolutionary ladder!  Ted aspires to rule the world with Dorothy at his side!

Irwin, under psychic control, has injected Dorothy once so far, but she still looks like an attractive young lady, though she reports that the injection had a psychological or mental effect:

"I seemed to understand things in a quiet, impersonal sort of way, and was, so to speak, above petty emotions and passions that had swayed me constantly prior to this experience."

Dorothy asks Frank to help her, and Frank, already falling in love with this beauty in peril, agrees.  I kind of wonder if Harris here is making some kind of comment or joke on men's belief that women are emotional and flighty, that she is suggesting Frank fell in love with Dorothy because--thanks to evolving to a higher form, she now she has a more rational, more "masculine," mind. 

When Irwin emerges from the lab to give his sister her second injection, Frank intercepts him, then marches into the lab to confront Ted, who is now merely a head with tentacles sitting on a cushion, a thing that from a distance looks a little like a big tarantula or maybe an octopus.  Ted can levitate, and read minds, and control people like puppets, but he can only use his psychic powers on one person at a time, so while the would-be world ruler is dealing with Frank, Irwin sneaks up behind Ted and kills him with blows from an iron bar.

"The Evolutionary Monstrosity" is certainly better than "The Menace of Mars," having more human relationships and a plot that is driven by human desires and decisions.  I can mildly recommend it.  The tragic tale of Ted and his germ theory of evolution can be found in the 2016 volume Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction.

**********

These stories are not great, but they are not at all bad, and it is cool to read from these very science-oriented Gernsback publications.  The prominence of religion in the stories is also noteworthy--Harris and the characters attack superstition and specific tenets of the prominent religions, like the existence of the devil, but they acknowledge the existence of a God the Creator, and come up with their own idiosyncratic theories about Him and his Laws.  A lot of people think Harris is important because she is a woman, and maybe she does deal with family life and love triangles in a way that is different than a man would, but I suspect it is Harris' treatment of religion in her science fiction stories that is more worthy of analysis, that is more singular and more of a distinguishing feature that separates her from other science fiction writers.

More from the Gernsback stable next time we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log!

    

Weird Tales, July 1926: E H Price, C W Harris and A Derleth & M Schorer

After a brief break in the year 1980, let's return to the interwar period and read three stories from the July 1926 issue of Weird Tales, which has a cover that looks like one of my recurring pre-adolescent daydreams.  (I mean the guy shooting a gigantic reptile--the rosy cheeked brunette resembles elements of my postpubescent daydreams.)  We'll read a story by E. Hoffmann Price, one by Clare Winger Harris, and a collab between August Derleth and Mark Schorer.  I'll be reading these tales in a scan at the internet archive--click here to join me.  

"The Dreamer of Atlanaat" by E. Hoffmann Price 

This story takes place in the ummah.  A wanderer, Haaj Isfendiyar, arrived in the city of Nippur ten years ago, and over that time has become a close friend of the Calif.  A skilled fighter and a clever and courageous man, today he commands a unit of 1000 cavalry and lives in a beautiful house.  But he has an enemy--the Calif's wazir, Ismail.  Ismail contrives to steal a dagger owned by Isfendiyar and one night while the Calif is out taking a walk, Ismail throws it at the Calif so that it looks like Isfendiyar tried to murder the Calif.  Isfendiyar is exiled and impoverished, his home and belongings given over to the city mob.  

Out in the country, Isfendiyar is accosted by an old man he at first takes to be a beggar.  The man corrects our hero, identifying himself as a darvish and promising to use his occult power to help Isfendiyar achieve revenge.  He leads Isfendiyar to the sinister ruins of a city in a forest to consult a being he refers to as Lord of All the Worlds, whom he says is more powerful even than Allah, a creature of whom the darvish claims his "idle fancy created not only Allah, but all the gods before whom men have bowed!"  All the world, all the universe, is created by this being's dreams, and when he ceases to dream of something, that thing ceases to exist!

This dreamer takes the form of an old sleeping man.  Isfendiyar can see something the old man is dreaming--an assassination attempt on the Calif!  Still sympathetic to the Calif, Isfendiyar kills the dreamer to save his former friend in a high place, even though he exiled him

Then the boring truth is revealed!  The "darvish" is Isfendiyar's grandfather in disguise, and this whole sacrilegious caper has been a test of Isfendiyar's loyalty to the Calif, who has watched the whole thing.  Isfendiyar's visions were induced by drugs fed to him by grandpa.  By killing the dreamer to save the Calif, Isfendiyar has passed the test and their friendship is renewed.  Who was impersonating the dreamer whom Isfedniyar killed?  It was a drugged Ismail, whom the Calif had begun to suspect had faked the assassination attempt to frame Isfendiyar.

Long, somewhat silly, convoluted to the point I'm not sure it even holds together--we're grading "The Dreamer of Atlanaat" merely acceptable.  The improbable saga of Isfendiyar the wanderer would be reprinted in 1975's Far Lands, Other Days, a big collection of Price stories.

"A Runaway World" by Clare Winger Harris

Way back in 2015, when we were young, we read two stories by Clare Winger Harris printed in 1920s issues of Amazing, "The Fate of the Poseidonia" and "The Miracle of the Lily," and I didn't exactly burnish my bona fides as a feminist by saying they were "interesting" as "historical document[s]" but "mediocre as...entertainment or literature."  Still, I didn't say they were bad, so I have no qualms about reading more Harris stories, and here we have one adorned with an illustration of a guy scared out of his mind by something seen through a telescope, which is promising.

"A Runaway World" is set 100 years in the future, in the year 2026.  Two scientists, a French expert on astronomy and an American expert on atomic physics, meet.  Harris' writing reminds me of the over-the-top dialogue of a comic book and a dramatic presentation in which everybody is overacting:

"La Rue is my name; Leon La Rue.”

Henry Shipley’s eyes grew wide with astonishment.

“Indeed I am honored by the visit of so renowned a scientist,” he cried with genuine enthusiasm.

“It is nothing," said La Rue. "I love my work.”

These eggheads talk about the theory that the planets in our universe are subatomic particles in other universes, the sun a nucleus and the planets electrons or something, and that similarly the protons and neutrons and all that here are stars and planets in tiny little universes.  When we cause chemical reactions, we are destroying whole galaxies full of people.

Well, it looks like our turn has come!  In Harris's 2026 there aren't space ships, but we are able to contact the alien civilizations on Mars, Venus, etc., via radio.  Harris has the men talk about the way Earthers figure out how to talk to aliens--by founding a code on universal mathematical principles.  "A Runaway World" is classic science fiction, all about teaching us readers science and romanticizing and valorizing the scientist while denigrating and lampooning religious people, and trying to give us that old sense of wonder as we contemplate the vastness of the universe.  

But "A Runaway World" also has weird horror elements, like those Edmond Hamilton space operas and disaster stories from Weird Tales that include mass death, torture and bondage.  The Martians are reporting that their planet is being pulled away from the sun and soon they will all freeze to death!  Our universe is suffering from chemical reactions in the universe one step larger than ours!  At least, so say the scientists--the common people of Earth think the Martians have offended God by learning too much science and are being punished like some big red Gomorrah.

Abruptly, we find that "A Runaway World" is a first person narrative, our narrator a business professional who works in an office.  Like in a sitcom, the narrator, expert accountant Griffin, reveals that he thinks Mars--before the current catastrophe--was closer to the sun than is Earth, and is humiliated when his assistant and next-door neighbor Zuttell corrects him and expresses astonishment at his boss's ignorance.  

The Zuttells and Mardens come over to watch the President give an address on the TV--the Griffin family has the latest model, and Harris talks a bit about "the televisio" and its operation and capabilities.  In the middle of the President's speech, it starts getting dark and cold outside, and the President tells everyone to tune their radios to the French astronomer whom we readers met earlier--as we readers feared, the Earth is now being pulled away from the sun!

Griffin is humiliated again when Marden, an astronomer from the university across the street, takes charge during the crisis and directs the three families to collect food and clothes and come to his observatory where they have an atomic reactor and thus will have heat longer than most people.

The three families spend months in the observatory as the Earth travels away from the sun, accelerating all the time.  It is so cold outside that to leave the atomic-heated building would mean instant death.  Marden is able to calculate the speed the Earth is travelling, and at the two year mark good ol' Terra is moving at the speed of light!  At the three year mark, the air begins to warm up as the Earth approaches a star--will our big blue marble crash into the star and be annihilated?

People can go outside again and they do so to bury the masses of dead who had no access to atomic energy or who had not stockpiled enough food.  The Earth begins to orbit the alien star--it looks like the human race will survive in a new solar system!  Mars has already arrived, and is now closer to its sun than is Earth, as if Griffin's boneheaded mistake has now been manifested in the real world.

Harris' style is sophomoric at times, but the plot--at least once the scientists are left behind--works and "A Runaway World" is fun, so thumbs up!  The tale of Griffin and the human race's harrowing journey through interstellar space would be reprinted in the 1947 Harris collection Away from the Here and Now, the 2019 collection The Artificial Man and Other Stories, and in 2026 in Stephen Jones' big anthology of stories from 1920s issues of Weird Tales.    

"The Elixir of Life" by Marc Schorer and August Derleth

This two-and-a-half-page story is advertised as a "Five-Minute Story."  We've read a few of these Derleth-Schorer collaborations:

"Pacer"

"They Shall Rise"

"Death Holds the Post" 

"Colonel Markesan"

"The Return of Andrew Bentley"

"Eyes of the Serpent"

"Spawn of the Maelstrom"

"The Woman at Loon Point"

"The Elixir of Life" is an obvious filler story, a trifle I will charitably say is barely acceptable.  

A Duke, residing in Milan, has hired a wizard to make him an elixir that will prolong his life.  He comes to the wizard's abode on a narrow alley in the city and gets pissed off that the elixir isn't quite ready.  The wizard admits he has not yet acquired the final ingredient--the blood of a child.  The duke angrily orders the wizard's black servant ("Nubian servitor") to just go out and seize the first child he sees.  Then the Duke leaves, saying he will return in three hours and the elixir better be ready.

When the Duke returns he drinks the elixir and then makes some comment on how his son has escaped his nurse.  Everybody realizes the elixir includes the blood of the Duke's son's, and the Duke is responsible for the murder of his own son.  

A banal and pedestrian thing, but not exactly bad.  It doesn't look like it has reappeared in any Derleth collections or anthologies.

**********

Clare Winger Harris is today's big winner.  While Price and the Mssrs. Derleth and Schorer give us tired and obvious twist ending wizard murder stories that, I guess, they mean to elevate by setting them in the exotic and diabolical worlds of the Muslim Near East and the Italy of the Borgias, Harris, while her writing is a little childish, lays a lot of big science theories on us, tries to predict the roles of television and nuclear power in our future, and gives us actual human relationships we as middle-class Americans of the 20th century can identify with, along with horrible danger, privation and death.  Maybe I should read more of Harris' stories from the Gernsback magazines. 

Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log for more stories published before you were born about wizards, scientists, and murderers.

Crystal Phoenix by Michael Berlyn

To her, his job began and ended with supplying rich, empty people with poor, desperate victims.  She only looked at the negative side of his job--never saw the good side, the kindness and help it let him give....the dust addicts who wanted and needed another chance; the working people who had sunk all their earnings into paying for the memory crystals; the victims of disease whose bodies were no more than mockeries of the human form; none of them would have had any hope of reconstruction if it weren't for procurers. 

Someone's collection of 1970s and 1980s SF paperbacks ended up at the Goodwill in Middletown, MD, and I recently came upon it.  Lots of Fred Pohl and Poul Anderson, as well as other authors you've heard of, solid representatives of the respectable mainstream of SF, both the pinko end of the spectrum and the libertarian end, people who care about science, history, economics, politics, and actually know about that stuff.  Not to take anything away from Pohl or Anderson, I found more intriguing, more strange and mysterious, a bunch of books by people I'd never heard of (or forgotten--I have a bad memory), books that looked like they were novels about future dystopias that are full of sex, or maybe novels full of sex that are about future dystopias.  Either way, I got five of those for one dollar each.  One dollar!  A bargain, even if the covers are marred by those $0.99 stickers.  

Am I actually going to read these?  Well, I'm going to read at least one of them!  Right now!  But which?  Let's go with the blue one.  Under the Goodwill sticker, Joe Haldeman, a good writer whose work I respect and often like, says Crystal Phoenix by Michael Berlyn "grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go until the last page."  The publisher tells you that Crystal Phoenix is "in the tradition of A Clockwork Orange."  Well, A Clockwork Orange is a good book--maybe this book will be in that tradition, the tradition of books that are good?  Crystal Phoenix is like 214 pages long, which sounds long, but we are putting our trust in Joe Haldeman and the topless brunette who is impervious to fire on the cover and reading this artifact of 1980 by a guy whose main claim to fame is that he created video games I have never heard of.  (Also, there are 32 chapters and lots of white space between chapters, so actual text is significantly less than 200 pages.)

My copy doesn't smell too bad, so I'm going to read this book the way people read books in 1980, turning the pages with my own hands.  You can read like a 21st-century person by clicking the links to a scan of Crystal Phoenix at the internet archive here or here.

From Chapter 1, we know we're reading a book that is totally insane when we meet olive-skinned, 213-centimeter-tall Oleo.  Oleo tortures people to death for fun, either jerking off with one hand while he flays them alive with the other or fucking them while keeping a hand free to hold a pistol with which to shooting them in the head just as he is about to achieve orgasm.  Equipping himself with a glove that has needles in its palm, he sets out from his home, which is furnished with coffins and electric chairs, for a bit of fun.  But first he takes a minute to record his mind in his crystal--if he gets killed tonight, his mind will be uploaded in a new body and he'll still, sort of, be alive, only having lost a few hours.

Over the next few chapters we meet a bunch more unsavory characters and learn how this insane future world operates.  We've got Dennis the "procurer," who operates out of Bentwell's. We've got the disgustingly obese Bentwell, who runs a night club where people meet to drink, drug, have sex and hire the services of procurers like Dennis.  Dennis has a wife, Kira, who thinks Dennis' job is a disgrace, and whom Bentwell is always pursuing, groping her when she gets drunk and high.  Dennis also has to deal with rival procurers, the married couple Frank and Mara, inferior operators who blame Dennis for stealing their clients and angels.  In these early chapters of Crystal Phoenix Mara tries to steal a potential angel, Warren, from Dennis.

"Angels" are people who enjoy abusing and killing people--Oleo is an angel, and Warren, an office clerk who lives in a slum apartment with his fat wife, aspires to become one.  A procurer's clients are people who are, for whatever reason, tired of their current bodies and want to have their minds uploaded to a new body created in a lab that looks just like them at a healthy 25.  This whole "reconstruction" process is expensive, so many people contact a procurer who hooks them up with an angel--the angel pays to rape or torture or whatever the client and ultimately kill him or her, and the client gets enough money from the deal to have his or her most recent save state uploaded from his or her crystal to a new body.  Obviously, the procurer gets a percentage.  Wealthy people like Oleo kill again and again and again, become addicted to the thrill, while less affluent types like Warren save up and only kill somebody once in their lifetimes.  Another such wealthy angel is Mary, a sixteen-year-old girl, the daughter of a rich and powerful couple of businesspeople who are also angels who work with Dennis--each member of this prominent family regularly pays Dennis to connect her or him to somebody they can legally torture and kill, but keeps this habit a secret from the other two.  When Mom and Dad cut off Mary's allowance, Mary comes to Dennis as a client so she can make the money she wants by being killed.

This society is obsessed with untimely, violent death.  People pay to watch the angels torture and slay the clients.  In Chapter 4 we see how Dennis relaxes--by strapping on a dream helmet and living out a scenario in which he rides a roller coaster which malfunctions and kills the riders, including him.  Dennis believes he loves Kira, but when he is angry at her, when they have an argument, he has elaborate fantasies of murdering her.  While all moat of our characters are upper middle-class, there are apparently lots of slums full of impoverished people who murder each other.

Adding to the stress of this future world in which everybody is obsessed with death is the fact that jobs are hard to find and so businesses can dock your pay for the smallest inefficiencies and fire you at will.  Warren's job offers as one of its perks a crystal for him and one for his fat spouse who hates him, making it imperative he not lose his job.  Another source of stress is class distinctions reflected in fashion choices.  Fashions change in intervals as short as a month, and wealthy people have to keep up with the fashions or lose face.  Warren, who is just a clerk, wears his latest suit to Bentwell's and almost everyone ignores him because his clothes indicate he is a nobody.  (Warren has a cousin in show biz who leant him his membership card to Bentwell's.)  Berlyn does a little satire of fashions at the time he was writing, having the disgusting Frank wear a polo shirt with a little crocodile on it even though he doesn't really know what a crocodile is, a reference to preppies and Izod/Lacoste shirts.

OK, the plot.  Oleo is a stockbroker and makes lots of dough.  He hires Frank's services and rapes and kills a teenaged girl; Frank, being essentially incompetent, screws up the paperwork and can't pay his fee at Bentwell's, so Dennis pays it for him, which Frank, who is already brainstorming ways to put Dennis out of business so he can pick up Dennis' angels and enjoy less competition for clients, takes as an insult.  Meanwhile, Oleo has a problem.  He killed a girl like five years ago, absolutely legally, but the girl's father has come out of the woodwork and wants revenge.  Worried this guy might murder him, Oleo contacts Frank to see if Frank will preemptively murder the bitter father.  

Halfway through the novel, somewhat abruptly, Kira and Dennis's troubled marriage seems to be revived when Kira convinces Dennis to quit being a procurer by insisting they go to a shopping mall and look down at the glassed-in bit of nature where he proposed to her--overcome by nostalgia about the happy days before Dennis took on the job of procurer, they have the best sex in years and he agrees to quit.  But first he has to settle Mary's case, hook her up with an angel with lots of money so she can score a profit from being raped and killed.  He settles on Oleo, an angel with whom he has worked before.

Mara and Frank win Warren as an angel, stealing him away from Dennis, largely because Kira, the procurer-hater, interfered with the deal Dennis was trying to make with Warren.  Then comes our big horror/fetishistic sex scene--Frank tricks Dennis into watching as Oleo and Warren torture, rape and murder Kira, burning her alive as the finale.  In return for Oleo's help in torturing Kira (Oleo is the best torturer in town, it appears), they provide that embittered and vengeful father to Oleo.  Mara plotted out this whole thing, and Frank realizes how clever, how dangerous, she is, and begins to think he has to kill her, and probably torture expert Oleo and torture neophyte Warren as well.

The depths of Mara's diabolical plot become apparent to us readers as the final third of the novel begins.  She kidnapped Kira but set things up so that Kira Number 2, after Kira's most recently saved consciousness was uploaded into a fresh 25-year old clone of her body, would believe she had volunteered to be raped and killed while Dennis watched as a way to spice up their sex life.  This is the lie the doctors tell her, the lie they think is fact because of forged legal documents Mara got from an ex-husband from an earlier incarnation who now is a government administrator.  (The Mara in this novel is like Mara Number 4.)  Luckily for Dennis, Kira doesn't believe this lie, even though her last crystal save was before the shopping mall, before Dennis promised to quit being a procurer, before their marriage was rejuvenated.  Unfortunately, he has to try to rejuvenate their marriage again, even though it was she who rejuvenated it the first time, and it isn't easy, and it doesn't help that he keeps remembering watching her burned to death by Oleo--in this future world people use drugs all the time, and when Dennis drinks "mescanol" and looks at Kira he has hallucinations that she is burning even as she is sitting there talking to him.  

Dennis again promises to quit procuring, and again says he has to finish up some business.  But this time that business includes getting revenge on the people who murdered Kira!   First, he gets Warren fired from his job; Warren blames Frank and goes to confront Frank and is gunned down by a trigger-happy associate of Frank's.  (Just a couple of weeks after driving Dennis out of the business, Mara and Frank, on the brink of bankruptcy at the start of the novel, are now big wigs with a big entourage, having gotten all of Dennis' former angels, apparently due to Mara's skillful operating, not that of dullard Frank--Mara didn't hire the trigger happy goofball, Frank did without consulting her.)  

Next comes Oleo.  Berlyn wraps up Mary's fate off screen, telling us that, in Dennis' absence, she ended up getting Oleo as an angel--uh oh, Oleo hates Mary's family for business reasons.  Oleo the sadist tortured Mary with a knife while updating her crystal so that she, in her new body, will remember the pain and terror of being carved up.  How Oleo got a hold of Mary's crystal, when she lives with her rich parents, is left unexplained.  Dennis breaks into Oleo's house and sabotages Oleo's crystal so it kills him and erases itself when Oleo tries to use it, killing him permanently.  In a world whose culture revolves around killing people you'd think wealthy people like Mary's parents and Oleo would have better security, but breaking and entering and kidnapping are childishly easy in this novel.

Dennis has an elaborate plan to drug Mara and Frank and toss them in a swimming pool of sulfuric acid; he even has an old book about fighting techniques, weapons, drugs and acids that he consults, and Berlyn includes passages from this book in the text, for some reason.  But then Dennis just junks the plan after finding it difficult to locate a suitable pool and acquire the drugs and acid.  I find it annoying when fiction includes these kinds of abortive plans--I spent page after page reading about this plan and it was for nothing?  Maybe Berlyn had to pad out the length of the book here.  A similar frustrating thing Berlyn does a few times in the novel is lead us to believe that Kira is going to leave Dennis and then perfunctorily reveal that no, that is not what Kira is thinking at all.  Maybe that is supposed to make us readers realize Dennis is bad at reading other people, or at least reading his wife.

Anyway, Dennis captures Frank and Mara and takes them out to the country.  Mara tries to seduce him and Dennis grabs her by the ankles, spins in place so Mara is whipping around in a circle above the ground, and hits her head against a tree so her blood and brains splatter all over.  Maybe this was supposed to be funny?  Dennis tricks Frank into thinking he and Frank can be friends now that the evil Mara is out of the way.  Frank helps Dennis dig a grave and toss Mara in, and then Dennis breaks Frank's legs and buries him alive with Mara's body.

In the final chapter it seems like Kira and Dennis will stay together, but uneasily--Dennis still sees and smells Kira burning when he looks at her, and while he is no longer going to be a procurer, he will still be in that evil world, working as Bentwell's partner, still indirectly profiting from the whole angel business.  Dennis has killed a bunch of people, and Kira has died and been reborn, physically better but psychologically worse than before, but their relationship is right back where it was when we met them in Chapter 2, he doing a job she will, presumably, find degrading and immoral, in proximity to the fat disgusting Bentwell and all kinds of desperate wretches and noxious killer perverts.

"Crystal Phoenix" isn't terrible.  It is an easy read, as the sentences are short and straightforward and the chapters are similarly brief and direct.  The setting is sort of interesting, the plot more or less works, and the crazy stuff that goes on is a little shocking, which keeps you reading as you wonder what crazy thing will happen next.  Unfortunately, the most shocking bit is in the first chapter, on the second page; all the killing and torture after that is a little bit of a let down.

One of the good things Berlyn does in Crystal Phoenix is describe this world in its own terms--he doesn't tell you that all the stuff going on is revolting and evil, he lets it speak for itself.  The business with the angels and killing and torturing people so they can finance their rebirth in cloned bodies of themselves is treated by the characters in the novel the way people in our own world treat issues like abortion, sex change drugs and surgery for minors, and affirmative action: lots of people just casually accept this stuff as a normal part of the landscape, plenty of people passionately fight for these things as essential to a just society, and plenty of people find these things revolting and monstrous injustices that must be ended, and these three types of people try to coexist.

The characters and their relationships in Crystal Phoenix are not great.  Dennis' character feels all over the place--is he a normal guy of this world who loves his wife and wants to make his marriage work, or is he some kind of criminal genius who knows how to manipulate the system and outwit dangerous criminals and who is always on the verge of beating up his annoying wife?  In the start of the novel I just thought he was one of many procurers, a regular joe procurer, but as things go on I guess we are supposed to see him as the best procurer, one of very few at Bentwell's, a top dog whose success dominates the market and makes things hard for people like Mara and Frank.  Or maybe that is just in dim-witted and envious Frank's head?  The way Dennis skillfully kills off all his enemies in the last quarter of the book comes as sort of a surprise, because earlier in the book he doesn't run any complicated operations or anything--in fact, he is screwing up his relationships with everybody.  (One of the smarter things Berlyn does with Dennis' character is hint that he and Frank are really the same kind of person--we see Frank consider killing Mara, Oleo and Warren, and then we see Dennis actually do it.)  

Another character issue is how so many minor characters pop into view to fulfill some plot requirement and then are dropped--examples include the rich girl Mary, the bitter and vengeful father of one of Oleo's victims, Mara's ex-husband, and the trigger happy guy who shoots Warren down.

Crystal Phoenix is tolerable.  It is more like a crime novel in a bizarre setting than a traditional science-fiction novel.  In a classic-style SF novel the protagonist would start out ignorant of some astounding fact, learn that fact, and then lead or at least witness a paradigm shift--Kira would convince Dennis that the whole angel and reconstruction business was evil and he would launch or join a revolution leading to a liberal democratic or socialist dictatorship regime that would end the angels and make crystals and cloning available to all or to none.  As it is, the novel describes a circle--Dennis and Kira are firmly enmeshed in a wacky society and have a troubled marriage and at the end after an adventure full of trauma and death they are still enmeshed in the same wacky society and still in their troubled marriage.  Maybe we should see this book, published in 1980, as a product of 1970s pessimism and as a representative of the elite intellectual class's hostility to American prosperity and consumerism, signaled by the satire of shopping malls, Izod/Lacoste polo shirts, and quick changing fashions.  (Michael Berlyn, contributor to Accolade's Snoopy's Game Club and Bend Studio's Columbo's Mystery Capers, doesn't have to be a member of the intellectual elite to ape their pronouncements.)

Will I read any more of the five novels I bought at Goodwill this recent weekend?  The three novels by Mark Adlard appear to be a series, and I don't know if I want to embark on a series, even if this series looks to be more popular and respectable than my other two Goodwill finds (Crystal Phoenix has never been reprinted.)  So probably of this Goodwill haul we'll next experience Rick DeMarinis' Scimitar.  Is there any chance Scimitar is about Islam?  We may soon know.