MPorcius Fiction Log

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Stories of Supermen by H Ellison, G R Dickson and L Niven

Look! Up in the sky! In our last episode, we read a story by Philip E. High about a guy who masqueraded as a telepath by stretching his body-language reading skills to the limit. After debuting in New Worlds, "Pseudopath" was reprinted in 1984 in the anthology Supermen edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh. In 1988, Supermen was reprinted in the UK with what I initially took to be a sort of Conan-type cover. Before experiencing "Pseudopath," we'd already read three other stories that were included in Supermen:

"Angel, Dark Angel" by Roger Zelazny

"What Rough Beast?" by Damon Knight

"Resurrection" AKA "The Monster" by A. E. van Vogt

That still leaves a bunch of stories in the book of interest to us that we have not yet read. I'd really like to change the world, save it from the mess it's in, but I'm too weak, I'm so thin, I'm just going to read three stories from this anthology and call it a day. Put on your cape and fly over to this link and maybe you can read along with the rest of us nine-stone weaklings with knobbly knees.

"Worlds to Kill" by Harlan Ellison (1968)

"Worlds to Kill" in Supermen comes to us in five chapters (other versions may differ.) In Chapter I we witness a spy operation as our protagonist, Jared, disguised as a cripple, watches a human sacrifice in a huge stadium and then proceeds to a place where he can send his message off world without the theocrats' bugs hearing him. This planet has high technology, like high speed walkways like those in Robert Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll," but is also run by religious fanatics. In Chapter II we observe as Jared's space navy conquers the planet using chemical warfare that affects the psychology of the population, surgical strike bombing and commando raids. Then Jared, a mercenary who has conquered over 100 planets for clients this way, accepts payment from squid-headed aliens and these Cthulhu-types take over the planet and murder three-quarters of the humans who have lived there for centuries and enslave the remainder. We see how manly a man Jared is when he outfights the leader of the squid-people when the top mollusk gets on his nerves.

The setting of "Worlds to Kill" is a universe in which hundreds of thousands of planets have intelligent spacefaring populations; many such populations are human, the descendants of Terran colonists, but many are various alien species. In Chapter III we observe Jared in his HQ, a hollowed out moon in a system whose star is dead that he has fashioned into an impregnable fortress and learn about his career. Jared receives a multitude of requests for his planet-conquering services and rejects most of them. One reason he is successful at conquering planets is that he has built a huge computer and it makes accurate predictions and gives great advice. The apparent theme of "Worlds to Kill," that men are terrible, all of them (us!) violent hypocrites, is furthered when Jared is approached by a delegation that is, ostensibly, trying to bring peace to the universe and Jared's spy services reveal that these peaceniks are no better than any other men, will also hire Jared to conquer people. Jared is meant to symbolize all human men, I guess, he being from Earth and surrounding himself with Earth artifacts.

Chapter IV baldly tells us that women are better than men,

It had been made obvious, however, centuries before, that women ruled better than men. Thus, the government of Khaine was almost entirely female, with "the High" a woman elected by a combination of popular vote and computer selection.

and then describes how Jared, on Khaine, captures the leader of that woman-dominated planet, "the High," and brings her to his HQ. In Chapter V, Khaine is conquered and Jared stops the client, a skinny alien, from killing the High in addition to taking possession of the planet. Then we get the twist ending. Jared is conquering all these planets and giving them to creeps like Squidy and Skinny as part of a complicated plan to unify the universe under one government and thus bring peace and order to every single person and planet. The High is recruited to be his wife (to humanize him, to keep him from becoming too much like his super computer) and his successor should he be killed, and to bear him further successors. Jared is compared to a god who works in mysterious ways--how is conquering all these planets going to lead to a one-universe government that maintains order without becoming corrupt and without trampling individual liberty? Ellison doesn't tell us, and suggests that the whole scheme might not work anyway, so that Jared will be thought of by history as what he appears to be, a greedy bastard who kills millions of people for money.

"Worlds to Kill" is acceptable filler; it doesn't generate excitement or any other emotion, but it isn't annoying or boring. The spy and action scenes, and all the high tech jazz like the moving sidewalk and Jared's bed of air jets and the many security measures on Jared's HQ moon are OK; they not bad, but feel sort of perfunctory, like they are just window dressing. The main point of the story, that religion and government are corrupt and kill people for inexplicable reasons and ask of others faith that they don't deserve, but somehow maybe are actually capable of making life better for the fortunate majority of people they don't kill or enslave, is also OK. Pessimistic and cynical, but probably justified by our experiences in life and knowledge of history. The superiority of women theme feels kind of just thrown in there, though there is perhaps the suggestion that the super computer is manipulating events to put a woman in charge of the universe, that five-times married Ellison really thinks women humanize men and are better rulers than men and believes putting a woman in charge of your life and everybody's life is a good enough idea to justify all manner of short term localized hardship.

"Worlds to Kill" debuted in Frederik Pohl's If, where it is at least somewhat different than the later version we read. This March '68 issue of If looks great on the inside, with lots of Virgil Finlay, Jack Gaughan and Vaughan Bode illustrations that are quite good. "Worlds to Kill" found its long term berth in the Ellison collection The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, where it is split into five chapters, like in Supermen.

"In the Bone" by Gordon R. Dickson (1966)

Dickson starts off his story with a didactic page about how it isn't technology that matters when "a time of decision comes," but the man who uses it, his representative example being the armored knight of the medieval period.

Our narrator is a PR man working with a ground-breaking space mission. The point of the spear of the mission, Harry Brennan, after two years of training, climbs into his space ship and is the first man to warp through hyperspace ("shift through alternate space") to other solar systems and send back to Earth exciting data on them. The narrator baldly tells us (today's stories so far are lacking in subtilty in making their points) that Brennan becomes arrogant with all the power his training and his space ship give him and that he is about to cometh to a fall. The narrator then recedes and we get what amounts to an omniscient third-person narration of Brennan's astounding adventure. Should we be skeptical of what we hear because we are getting it not directly from Brennan but through the medium of a PR guy?

Brennan finds on an Earth-like planet an alien installation, a pyramid which is the hub for a bunch of machines that are rolling hither and thither, and E. T. proves to have even more power--expressed in rays and beams and lightning bolts--then does Brennan in his super vehicle. The vehicle is wrecked and Brennan ejects and has to face the world naked without technology, even without his normal education and intelligence, as the shock of his disastrous encounter with the aliens has reduced his mind to that of a clever animal acting on instinct! Rest assured, this instinct stands him in good stead--he quickly learns how to find food and water and shelter in the jungle he has been stranded within.

Eventually, after a month or so, I guess, Brennan's memories of being human and of Earth and of his space adventure begin to return to him. He remembers the pyramid that played its rays and beams and lightning on his vehicle, shooting him down and reducing him to an animal. He becomes determined to face his enemy.

Over many days, Brennan, still half animal, studies and through cleverness and cunning overcomes the many obstacles that stand between him and the pyramid. Once inside, he explores, leaving and returning to the pyramid again and again for weeks, learning more and more about its operation and the alien who operates it, using automatic robots of a multitude of types to research the geology and ecosystem of this planet. Full of hatred for the alien, Brennan eventually confronts it and in a fight scene that may be the basis for the cover illustration of the British edition of Supermen, kills the alien, an explorer like himself. His vengeance achieved, and now firmly ensconced in a technological environment, Brennan becomes more fully human, and six months later has figured out how to operate the pyramid, which is in fact a starship. Brennan brings the ship back to Earth, proving that the success of mankind is owed not to technology, but to something innate to the human animal.

"In the Bone" is a pretty good traditional SF story that talks about technology and science and the people who expand our knowledge and mastery of the universe, but focuses not on scientists and sophistication but on inherent human qualities of tenacity and cunning that have their roots in our animalistic past. Dickson, like Ellison, who in "Worlds to Kill" shows us a money-grubbing mass murderer and then reveals that this killer is committing his almost unfathomable sins for a good purpose, gives us a plot twist, leading us to expect a hubristic man to suffer a fall, depicting that fall, but then showing us how he rises from defeat through adversity to conquer and secure for the human race an unprecedented treasure. The man's arrogance is justified, but not because of his advanced training and his modern technology, but because of qualities mankind has possessed for millennia, that have powered man's rise to world domination and will power his rise to further conquests beyond the solar system. Dickson's themes are more interesting and his action scenes more exciting than Ellison's, and the tone and style make the story more immersive, more "real;" also, the things that happen in the story feel integrated into the story's themes, unlike so many of the events in Ellison's story, which I thought felt like "window dressing."

"In the Bone" debuted in If, another issue with lots of illustrations by Virgil Finlay and Jack Gaughan as well as some good ones by Gray Morrow. In the letters column of this October '66 ish of If is a missive from Muriel Eddy, wife of C. M. Eddy, in which she reminisces about spending time with H. P. Lovecraft and gushes that she loves If and the work of Robert Heinlein, David A. Kyle and the aforementioned Morrow. (We read three stories by C. M. Eddy in August and back in 2020 we read four collaborations between Eddy and HPL.) "In the Bone" would go on to be included in the Dickson collections Ancient, My Enemy and In the Bone: The Best Science Fiction of Gordon R. Dickson, among other places.

"Death by Ecstasy" by Larry Niven (1969)

This is apparently the first of the Gil Hamilton stories, of which we have already read "Defenseless Dead," Like so much of Niven's famous work, the Hamilton stories take place in the Known Space. A popular story, "Death by Ecstasy" has been reprinted in quite a few anthologies as well as multiple Niven collections. It first hit the streets in Galaxy under the title "Organleggers;" where it enjoys some pretty good illustrations by Jack Gaughan. In this issue Gaughan also provides comic illustrations for what I guess is a joke story collab between Harlan Ellison and Keith Laumer, while Algis Budrys in the book column proclaims Samuel R. Delany the best science fiction writer in the world after reading Nova.

"Death By Ecstasy" is a good story that integrates a pile of standard science fiction themes--the overcrowded future, asteroid miners forming a distinct society out there in the dangerous environment of space, psychic powers, speculations on the effect on law and society of technological breakthroughs like medical advances, advocacy of free love and nudism--within the context of a detective plot in which the narrator, a hard-boiled detective, investigates the death of one of his comrades, the man who saved his life back when they were living through a perilous adventure together. (Doesn't the first Mike Hammer novel have this kind of plot?) Niven handles the overcrowding and narrator Gil Hamilton's psychic powers quite well, and the flashbacks to Hamilton's time as an asteroid miner before he became a federal police agent are also good, with lots of stuff about space suits and how one mines asteroids and all that, as are the speculations about how culture and society might change in a different milieu (space) and under different conditions (better medical technology.) The stuff about how great promiscuity is and how the federal police force has a woman psyker therapist who comforts all the cops by using her mind-reading ability is less convincing, and less well-integrated into the plot and its themes, butt doesn'tt weriously weaken the story. Niven also gives a shout out to Fritz Leiber, suggesting that in the 22nd century Leiber's novel The Wanderer will be famous, like Lolita or Don Quixote, a cultural touchstone everybody will be familiar with.

The plot of "Death by Ecstasy" revolves around the future phenomena Niven described in his 1967 story "Jigsaw Man," which appeared in the famous Dangerous Visions anthology edited by Harlan Ellison (and apparently financially supported by Niven.) In that story, which I read in 2014, we find that, when organ transplants become so reliable and easy to perform that you can almost achieve immortality by just having failing parts of your body replaced by those from donors, that a shortage of such spare parts results and so the voters push politicians to pass laws mandating the harvesting of parts from criminals condemned to death and then laws that extend the death penalty to relatively modest crimes. "Death by Ecstasy" adds to the mix the latest in addiction--hooking yourself up directly to electric current to stimulate the pleasure centers of your brain.

I'm not going to describe the detective plot blow by blow--we've all read or seen detective fiction, the long discussions of motive, of method, of how the clues fit together, the efforts to get into the head of the victim and the killer, the issues of jurisdiction, the hero tied up in the criminal's lair, etc. Suffice to say, Niven does a decent job and I'm giving "Death by Ecstasy" a thumbs up. I like this story enough that it has me thinking of reading the Gil Hamilton novel Patchwork Girl, a paperback copy of which I own with illustrations by Fernando Fernandez, whose Zora I have long admired.

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Not a bad crop of stories. We've got your old pal Harlan with a fairy tale full of unbelievable cardboard characters who act in unconvincing ways in order to set you up for a radical twist ending and illustrate a point which ends up being pretty ambiguous. Then Dickson who also has a broad point to make, but one that is less sordid and depressing than Ellison's, and who uses science fiction concepts in a more believable way and to buttress his argument rather than just as decoration. Finally we have Niven who does the technology stuff as well as Dickson and also has some success in painting a picture of future societies, of putting the "speculative" into "speculative fiction," and who also tries, again with some success, to portray believable human emotions and human relationships. Bad stuff happens to people in Ellison's and Dickson's stories, but we don't care because Ellison and Dickson aren't writing about real people, but about archetypes who are there to demonstrate their philosophical points. But we have an emotional reaction to things that happen to Gil Hamilton and his comrades, because Niven has put some effort into making Hamilton and his fellow asteroid miners feel like actual human beings.

More Supermen await you in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log. Til then, don't let the gas bills, rent bills, tax bills, and phone bills get you down.

Monday, October 12, 2026

Merril-approved 1959 stories by F Harvey, Z Henderson & P E High

After six or so blog posts about 1920s speculative fiction, let's peek in on the mid-century with Judith Merril and read three more stories she recommended in the back of her fifth Year's Best anthology under the heading "Honorable Mentions." We started the "H"s last time, like a month ago, when we read stories by Harry Harrison, Laurence M. Janifer (working undercover as "Larry M. Harris"), W. T. Haggert, and Jim Harmon. Today we'll finish up the "H"s with three stories. Merril also gave the nod to Robert A. Heinlein's "All You Zombies--," but we already blogged about that one in 2019, when we sampled an anthology of "Great Science Fiction." That 2019 blog post covered work by three titans of SF, Heinlein, Ted Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury, while today's blog post is about three lesser figures, but your humble blogger is fickle and idiosyncratic and the vast library of work we call speculative fiction is riddled with hidden gems, so it is not impossible that I will today enjoy these productions as much as I did those of three Grandmasters seven years ago.

"The Death Dust" by Frank Harvey

Frank Laird Harvey has nine credits for short stories at isfdb; it seems he wrote these stories, apparently about the United States Air Force in the near future, for The Saturday Evening Post, Argosy and Cavalier. "The Death Dust" is the last of these, and after its debut in The Saturday Evening Post it reappeared in the many printings of The Saturday Evening Post Reader of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I am reading "The Death Dust" in a scan of that anthology you can try to access here.

"The Death Dust" is a straightforward and effective classic-type science fiction story full of science that celebrates the bravery of the men who expand the borders of knowledge. It reads like an Arthur C. Clarke story, in my opinion. Maybe a little routine, but short and economical and pretty well written, so thumbs up.

Our narrator is a veteran fighter pilot who fought the Reds in Korea. He is now the captain of the first rocket to the moon. Sharing this historic ride with him are a guy who makes jokes--this guy is a "jet-bombardment expert" and a fellow former jet fighter pilot, so I guess co-pilot and engineer--and a medical man. So we will be affected when something bad happens to them, we learn a little about the guys' families. Harvey makes a good job of describing the experience of blast off and heading to the moon and all that.

The narrator mentions that Werner van Braun wrote a science-fiction story in which astronauts found the moon to be free of dust--I guess this refers to a portion or portions of Braun's 1960 book First Men to the Moon that appeared in The Week in 1958 and 1959. This is ironic foreshadowing, because the men find that the moon is covered in a thick layer of dust. On Luna, the jokester breaks the rules and puts a hole in his suit, and the three-man crew soon learns that the dust of the moon contains a bacteria or virus that kills a man very quickly. The doctor also dies while trying to treat the comedian. The skipper knows he can't bring the rocket back to Earth because the germs will spread over the world, killing everything in short order. So he accelerates into the Earth's atmosphere at such velocity that the ship and everything in it, including himself, will be burned to nothing.

"And a Little Child..." by Zenna Henderson

I've avoided Henderson because my spider-sense kept telling me that her work must be sappy, sentimental, precious, preachy, cloying, saccharine, etc. Just look at the title of this one. Do I want to read a story in which adults learn how crummy they are thanks to the example of an innocent widdle child and from then on do the right thing by the sweet kind aliens or whoever? Of course I don't. But maybe I'm doing Henderson a disservice by dismissing her based merely on male intuition. So, let's cross a frontier today and read a Henderson story.

"And a Little Child..." takes up fewer than 16 pages (41 lines per page, much fewer than the 1920s magazines I was estimating the page density of a few days ago) of an issue of F&SF that we've already read stories from, Theodore Sturgeon's "The Man Who Lost the Sea," Charles G. Finney's "The Gilashrikes," and the 1959 version of Alfred Bester's "The Pi Man," which is radically different from later versions. "And a Little Child..." has been reprinted in several European magazines and in the 1965 Henderson collection The Anything Box and the 2020 Henderson collection Believing. People like Henderson--The Anything Box has been reprinted again and again. Will I be joining the legions of Henderson fans today after I read the magazine version available at this link?

Our narrator, a grandmother, on page one talks about how children have "Eyes that see everything new, everything fresh, everything wonderful, before custom can stale or life has twisted awry...." and how some kids have a capital "S" "Seeing eyes" and can see into other dimensions. Then comes the story of Grandma's relationship with a little girl with big eyes whom she meets while camping, the granddaughter of friends. Grandma loves camping, and comes to the same camp grounds year after year, and over the course of this story we get our fill of the wonders of camping, and of cutesy dialogue and interactions between Grandma and the girl with Seeing eyes.

...something about the stillness of the night crowded the noise back into my throat, so I took after her, glad of a good excuse to run, fleet-footed and free, through the crispness of the silver night. A little farther, a little faster, a little lighter and I wouldn’t even have had to touch the ground.
***

"I like you. Gramma,” she said. "You’re warm.”

"You’re warm, too,” I said, feeling heat radiating from the wiry little body.

Little Big-Eyes senses a danger near the women's toilet, and doesn't want to go there. Dad forces her, and an invisible monster almost devours her--Dad and Grandma pull her out of the monster's maw. This isn't the climax of the story--this is on the fifth page. Dad and Grandma don't decide camping this year is a bad idea and decide a better vacation could be had in New York at the art museums--even though they saw Little Big-Eyes almost get sucked into another dimension, they figure they'll stick to the plan of camping in this monster-infested wilderness for two weeks. A week or so later, Grandma acts like she doesn't believe in what she saw, and Dad leaves his daughter in Grandma's care while he returns home. Really?

Big-Eyes can apparently communicate with some of the invisible extra-dimensional monsters, and becomes friends with them, and worries they will freeze to death in winter, and on a cold rainy night leaves the camp to help them return to their dimension. The thing that tried to eat her at the start of the trip was not really a monster but instead a doorway (I guess) that the friendly monsters need to use to go home but have somehow forgotten the location of, so the little girl has to lead them to it. Nosy Grandma of course is there to see it all, and finds that she can see the monsters now, who are like hills. Somehow the little girl's arm gets stuck in the doorway to the other dimension when it closes as the last hill monster passes through. For like an hour Grandma holds Little Big-Eyes, comforting her. Then some creature in the other dimension puts in her hand an item that allows her to escape and temporarily leaves glittering magical dust on her hand. The little girl soon comes to believe this whole adventure was just a dream.

"And a Little Child..." is competently written, but I am just not in the market for stories about feisty nosy grandmas and adorable little children; longtime readers of MPorcius Fiction Log may recall my saying that I am not crazy about stories that romanticize childhood and attribute special powers to children when I blogged about Kuttner and Moore's 1936 "Call Him Demon" back in 2016.) I daresay "And a Little Child..." is a story that might appeal to women, what with all those scenes about holding a little girl who has had a bad dream and helping her unzip her pants so she can use the toilet and all that mothery stuff; maybe people who love camping and have had shivery otherworldly feelings when alone in the woods will also like it. I'm just going to call "And a Little Child..." "acceptable"--it does an OK job of what it is trying to do, but I'm not the audience for it, and some of the actions of the characters and other elements of the plot are not all that credible. Perhaps "And a Little Child..." is a good example of science fiction (or fantasy) penned by a woman in which the female characters behave in the way girls and women typically do in real life--seeking out opportunities to perform the role of mother--instead of trying to inhabit traditional male roles like shooting people and fighting monsters and leading armies and that kind of thing. Lots of female characters in SF are like Tarzan or Conan in drag and we are sometimes enjoined to see them as women fighting the patriarchy by emulating the patriarchy and proving women are as good as men by just doing the same stuff that men (in fiction, at least) do. Henderson's nosy old woman and six-year-old who can see into other dimensions are a lot more convincing than those ass-kicking girl bosses.

"Pseudopath" by Philip E. High

We're going across the pond for this one! In 2016 I read Englishman High's novel The Mad Metropolis and in 2024 I read his short story "Risk Economy" and I think it is fair to say both were acceptable but forgettable. Maybe this one will be more memorable? Read along at this link and we'll see.

It is the future of air-taxis, of restaurants where the half-nude dancing girls might by holograms and you might order your food with a dial at your table instead of talking to a waiter. Our story is set in a densely populated city where two factions fight a secret twilight war, assassinating each other in night clubs and similar locales. Initially, High is kind of vague about the identity of the two groups and why they are fighting, giving hints and fragments and then in the final third of the story spelling it out. Our protagonists are the intelligence and security apparatus of the world government, the last reliable public institution in the world. Things are so bad the good guys can't just arrest the villains or attack them with the army because half the outwardly legitimate judges, politicians and military units are corrupted by highly placed enemy agents--the World security force is reduced to extrajudicial assassinations, to acting just like the bad guys! The mass of ordinary people ("neutrals"), including honest and loyal colonels in the World Army, have no idea such a guerilla war is going on, that the whole of the government is corrupted, because the media is under the total control of the enemy. One of the last things we learn is that the enemy, who are intent on achieving total dictatorial control of society, are not ideologues but just an organized crime syndicate.

The slow and gradual revelation of what is going on is a significant component of "Pseudopath"'s appeal. The conventional plot of High's story follows the appearance on the "battlefield" of a new World Security agent after seven years of training. The loyalist spooks are losing the war to organized crime because the enemy is able to identify them but our guys are unable to distinguish enemy agents from neutrals. The new guy can, somehow, identify the enemy agents; how is not made clear until the penultimate page. The hope of World Security HQ is that this new guy will shake the enemy's morale by tricking the leader of the criminals into thinking the new guy is a telepath, which he is not, and get the villain to expose himself to some kind of unconventional attack.

Among all the chatty scenes of planning and exposition we get two scenes in which the new guy uses his skills to kill baddies in public, and then he uses them across the video phone in a conversation with the leader of organized crime, the man who is almost dictator of the world. This interview provides the protagonists info that gives the World Security service a chance to roll a tank right up to the crime boss' mansion and blow it up while he and his closest cronies are inside. At the end of the story we learn that the new guy's special ability is to figure out every last thing about a person's character from his body language, enough to identify if he is a criminal or a neutral.

The stingy way High shares information with us readers, the secret war behind the scenes, and the emphasis on mental powers and psychology, make "Pseudopath" remind us of the work of MPorcius fave A. E. van Vogt, which we haven't read much of lately. Like van Vogt's typical work, High's story can be a little frustrating and difficult--lots of stuff happens that the reader initially finds hard to believe, and the explanations for why he should accept them are presented in a way that is understated. However, the material is interesting and ultimately I think the story holds together, that things do make internal sense if you think about them. I can mildly recommend "Pseudopath." Maybe I should read more of High's work.

"Pseudopath" debuted in John Carnell's New Worlds and reappeared in America in the short-lived U.S. edition of New Worlds. In the 1980s the story was resuscitated for inclusion in the Isaac Asimov branded anthology Supermen.

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I can't question Merril's choices here; all three stories are competent and sit firmly within traditional SF forms, with Henderson's focus on female characters and concerns putting a twist on the formula that makes her story distinctive.

Merril didn't see fit to recommend any 1959 stories by "I" authors, so next time we advance this project we'll be working with "J" and "K" authors. See you then, mid-century SF fans!

Saturday, October 10, 2026

Edmond Hamilton: "The Comet Doom" and "Cities in the Air"

Let's check out more Edmond Hamilton stories from the 1920s, not from Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales, but from Hugo Gernsback's titles. Just two today, but they are kind of longish. I almost had us deal with three stories today, but then I realized I had already blogged about a 1968 printing of 1929's "Locked Worlds," the saga of an embittered scientist who tries to help spider people conquer the Earth but is foiled by bird people and his former assistant, a couple of years ago.

To read along at scans of the original magazines in which today's stories debuted, try the following links:

"The Comet Doom" "Cities in the Air: Part 1" "Cities in the Air: Part 2"

"The Comet Doom" (1928)

The cover of the January 1928 issue of Amazing Stories illustrates "The Comet Doom," thrilling and chilling us with the sight of two men in chains, menaced by a square-headed robot wielding a phallic symbol, but Hamilton's name is not on the cover, nor is the name of the story. The marketing of magazines is sometimes mysterious to me. As a consumer, I like when there is a picture of something interesting on the cover and next to it the words "See Page XX!" But I guess the editor figures that if you have to hunt through the magazine to find something, maybe you'll stumble upon something else of interest along the way and feel the need to actually buy the magazine and not just read one article while standing there in the store.

The cover does advertise some of Gernsback's other magazines, including French Humor. You can read an issue of French Humor at this link; it looks like the magazine offers (in the language of Voltaire as well as in translation) ribald jokes and one-panel gag comics from French periodicals. Gernsback claims that the jokes in the magazine are not smutty, that humor is humor all the world round and no matter where they come from, people laugh at the same jokes, and that this magazine is dedicated to building understanding between the USA and France. I'd take all these claims with a grain of salt, myself. Here are some sample gags:

“He says that if I’m false to him, he will kill himself.”

“Is your conscience clear?“

"Oh, yes! I hid his revolver."

“This is the first time I've gone out without my husband.”

“Really?”

“Yes. The first time today.”

"What! He really tried to kiss you the first time he met you? I hope you were firm."

"No, he was."

The Jan '28 ish of Amazing also reprints H. G. Wells' "The Stolen Body," a story we recently read in the November 1925 issue of Weird Tales.

Alright, on to the main event, Edmond Hamilton's "The Comet Doom," fourteen densely-packed pages of text. Like some other Hamilton productions*, parts of "The Comet Doom" read like a popular history or magazine feature written in the further future about a cataclysm that takes place in the near future; the story then transitions into a more typical adventure type format. A green comet appears in the sky, gets closer and closer to the Earth, but the scientists calculate it will pass by our planet, never getting closer than a million miles. But then, when the comet is only a few days away from that nearest approach, the Earth's own speed and direction of movement through space change, bringing us into an intercept course with the comet. Spectrographic measurements a day or so later indicate the comet's tail is made of poison gas--we'll all die when the comet tail touches our atmosphere!

*"A Conquest of Two Worlds," and "The Polar Doom" are prime examples.

The personal story of "The Comet Doom" concerns Canadian hiker Marlin. He has walked from Ontario around Lake Erie into Ohio. From Ohio he takes a boat across the lake for home. He is on this fishing boat with its owner when the announcement is made about the poison gas, and so is ignorant of it. The boat is passing an island when a disintegrator ray from the island annihilates half the boat, including its owner. Marlin is not hit, and swims to the island where he meets an entomologist, Coburn, who has been camping on the island with his roommate from New York City and fellow biologist, Hanley, looking for rare insects.

The bug guy tells Marlin an insane story. After spending a few quiet weeks on the uninhabited island, four fifty-foot-high black cones landed near their cabin and the metal figures who emerged from the ships, tall machines with four skinny spider legs and four tentacles, took them captive with a stun ray and chained them up in their cabin. Gifted with perfect memory, the aliens learn the English language quickly from the biologists, and then tell the two captive humans their own crazy story.

The aliens evolved on the comet, just as we humans evolved on Earth. (It seems the comet is bigger than Earth, more like a planet that doesn't orbit a star than what I think of as a comet. Hamilton's stories are of course full of planets and stars on the move in this way--see "Thundering Worlds" and "The Star Stealers.") The comet peoples science far surpasses ours, and they were able to dispense with much of the trouble of acquiring food and getting rid of bodily wastes as well as that time-waster of all time-wasters, sleep, by building robot bodies powered by nuclear reactors and implanting their brains within them; they just have to replace the fluid their brains float in every week. Thus the comet people achieved immortality.

Or so they thought. Eventually the fuel their nuclear reactors require became scarce on the comet. Uh oh. Luckily, they would soon (in a few centuries) pass through our solar system, and so they planned to capture the Earth, where there is still lots of radioactive material. The four cone ships landed on this island to set up a device the size of a house that would neutralize the effect of the Sun's gravity on the Earth--the Earth would then fall within the gravitational field of the comet and be carried off, a new source of natural resources and living room for the comet people.

The comet people proposed a deal with the two scientists--they would remove the two humans' brains and put them in machine bodies, thus conferring upon them immortality. Of course, in return the traitors to Mother Terra would be expected to use their knowledge and expertise to help the comet peeps exploit the newly depopulated Earth. Coburn the entomologist was disgusted by this scheme, but his colleague Hanley signed up with the metal-skinned planet pirates! The entomologist watched as his friend's brain was removed and installed in a black robot body--Hamilton's science fiction adventure stories often include these kinds of scenes of horror.

Hanley the traitor helped build the machine that freed Earth from the gravity of Sol and sent Terra hurtling towards the comet and universal death. Of the whole human race, only the two scientists would survive, one as a traitor, the other as the subject of experiments! Through luck and pluck, Coburn escaped the cabin and has now run into Marlin the Canadian hiker.

The two of them are the only loyal human beings who know about the alien attack and the only people who can do anything about it. Unfortunately, Marlin didn't pack a Thompson submachine gun or a 3-inch mortar in his haversack when he left Ontario for his hike, so our guys have to try to knock out the gravity neutralizer with their bare hands. They attack separately, and futilely; Coburn gets disintegrated by a ray, and Marlin is seized. But their heroism, apparently, makes Hanley, in his immortal mechanical body, regret his treachery. Just moments before the Earth is seized by the gravity field of the titanic comet, Hanley grabs a dial or something, makes the big machine neutralize not the gravity of the Sun, but of the Earth under the machine. The machine, the four cones, Hanley, and all the aliens (those who held Marlin left the Canadian to help their metallic comrades when they saw Hanley up to some shenanigans) are hurled into space. The Earth, again feeling the pull of old Sol, begins moving away from the comet.

This story offers an important life lesson that has nothing to do with gravity or brain surgery or immortality or any of that. Don't expect a person who betrays his or her party or people to join yours to remain loyal to you--he will betray you just as blithely as he betrayed the last institution he was aligned with.

"The Comet Doom" is not great, but it isn't bad. All the science stuff is fun, and Hamilton's style is, as usual, pretty good--he's not at the Gene Wolfe or Tanith Lee or Jack Vance level, obviously, but he does a good job of balancing the quasi-literary descriptions of the sky and the water, the investigations of people's emotions, the science lectures, and the action and horror material. The problems have to do with the fact that we keep hearing the story through one or two frames, from a narrator who heard it from another guy or even yet another guy. In my opinion, this story would have been better told from the point of view of Hanley, a memoir or testimonial from Hanley after his immortal body is picked up from space by the comet people immediately after the events of the story or by an American space program decades after the events of the story.

So, I moderately recommend "The Comet Doom." The saga of Hanley the serial traitor has been presented to the SF-reading public quite a number of times, for example, in a German Hamilton collection, a 1939 British magazine that offered several reprints of stories by American weirdies like Jack Williamson and Clark Ashton Smith, and an issue of Amazing from 1965 full of reprints--back in 2018 we read Chad Oliver's story from that one, "Final Exam."

"Cities in the Air" (1929)

This is a long one, 38 pages of text, 68 lines per page, spread over two issues of Air Wonder Stories, the November and December 1929 issues. Gernsback really packs the words into his magazines--by way of comparison, a page of the November 1926 issue of Weird Tales, in which we just read E. Hoffmann Price's "The Peacock's Shadow," has like 52 lines. And I think the margins in Gernsback's magazine are smaller! Look for yourself:

It is 2069! Earth is divided into three polities. We've got the American Federation that consists of the entire New World--capitol: New York City. We've got the European Federation of Europe and Africa--capitol: Berlin. And we've got the Asiatic Federation of China, Japan, Russia east of the Caucasus, Australia, etc.--capitol: Peking. These three alliances have gone to war with each other again and again, and, during the era of Air War Three, the great cities were moved to the sky! New York City, like all human habitations, now rests on a disk five miles in diameter that hovers five miles above the ground. The land below, once densely populated, is today green wilderness! The cities can move slowly, to respond to weather events and enemy attack, and are each defended by air forts armed with heat guns and fleets of flying warships similarly armed.

After thirty years of peace, the Euros and Asiatics have formed an alliance and are attacking America. Our narrator is Captain Btrant, skipper of one of America's air cruisers, a torpedo-shaped warship capable of speeds in excess of 1000mph, like the air cities and air forts powered by the "electrostatic or atmospheric electricity surrounding the earth," an inexhaustible resource. His ship joins the fleet of 2000 massing at New York, and then they battle the Euro fleet of 4000 air ships over and under the Atlantic, the ships being capable of travel underwater as well as in the air. Hamilton often includes fleet actions in his stories, battles reminiscent of naval battles but in three dimensions, and he expends a lot of ink here as elsewhere talking about the formations of the fleets and their maneuvers. (The aforementioned "Locked Worlds" includes just such a fleet action between aircraft, and there are several large scale naval battles set in space in the Interstellar Patrol stories we read back in 2015, 2016, and 2021.) I'm going to have to tell you that Hamilton's repeated use of "detonate" instead of "discharge" as in

Slowed and halted there in two great masses of cruisers in mid-air, our own to the west and the European one to the east, and then, with every heat-gun detonating and with the air between them seemingly filled with shining, hurtling shells, they were hanging motionless in a mighty death-grip!

got on my nerves. I also kind of object to "heat-gun" for a gun that fires shells--in SF, a heat gun is generally a heat ray projector or something of that nature. These guns just fire a shell that generates tremendous heat when they explode upon hitting the target, enough heat to melt the hull and inner workings of a ship. Presumably these guns could fire shells that were not heat shells, so the name is a little inappropriate.

The battle drags on for page after page. Finally, the Americans trick the Euros into falling into an ambush--air forts dispatched from New York are hiding in a huge artificial cloud bank. (Didn't Kuttner and Moore in "Clash by Night" resolve a naval battle with a similar gag, luring the enemy into range of some kind of monitor or mobile fortress?) The Euros turn tail, having lost half their fleet, but the American fleet has similarly been reduced to half size.

The next day, Brant is given command of a task force of 250 airships. Intelligence reports indicate that at Berlin a superweapon is being developed, and the narrator's task force is to attack Berlin and do whatever can be done to prevent the completion and use of this secret weapon.

Brant's squadron makes its way to Berlin, avoiding European patrols and navigating fields of air mines along the way. They drop heat-bombs on the military installations of the big airborne city, causing considerable damage, but suicidally vengeful Euros ram the narrator's ship after his bombing run. (There is a lot of kamikaze behavior in these 1920s Hamilton stories, and multiple instances in this very story.) Brant and the rest of the bridge crew, two other guys, survive the crash within the city and are captured; all the lower deck officers and ratings are killed.

The narrator and his two comrades are imprisoned in the same cell as an American secret agent they knew a few years ago when he was a fellow air naval officer. The spy tells a wild story, as people you meet in prison are apt to do. In disguise, he infiltrated berlin and over a course of months joined the Euro air navy and eventually got himself assigned to the secret project. That project: the development of a new kind of propellor system that will allow their cities to move much faster than the American cities. Fast cities can be used as super-dreadnaughts and gang up on the slow American cities and destroy them piecemeal.in an overwhelming sneak attack.

So ends the first part of the two-part serial. Part Two, in the December issue, starts off with some psychological stuff and some little insight into life in the late 21st century. Imprisoned in a skyscraper 1000-feet above the streets of Berlin, our heroes are in a black despair, "a state of half-lassitude," knowing that within weeks the new city propellors will be ready and the Euro and Asiatic forces will attack America and destroy all human life in the New World. Hamilton describes their routine in the prison and we get this bit of gastronomic horror:

Twice each day, at dawn and at dusk, our door was opened by the guards that brought our food, that food being as in our own air-cities the paste-like synthetic compounds of artificial proteins and fats and carbohydrates which had decades before replaced the old natural foods.
Hamilton doesn't in "Cities in the Air" draw any distinctions between life and culture in the American Federation and the European Federation--these two societies' technology and food and the way their militaries are organized seem to be the same, and there is very little suggestion that one Federation or another has more religious freedom or less free speech or more tax-payer funded handouts for the poor or a less democratic government than either of the others or anything like that. The Europeans, we are told, have a "European tongue...[a] Latin-Teutonic combination of languages which was universal throughout the European Federation," their service members where green uniforms unlike the American black, and the TV screen in the control center of Berlin is a sphere while that in New York is flat, but that is about it. What are these people fighting for in a world in which everybody is totally deracinated and every single meal consists of disgusting artificial goop?

The youngest and least discouraged of the four men comes up with a desperate scheme to help the spy and one other man escape to get back to New York to warn America about the new propellor and help build an American version of this war-winning device. The two men get away from the building, hijack a Euro air vessel, but are dramatically shot down in view of the cell window. Even greater depression sets in among the survivors!

Like ten days later the props are ready and the European cities, 100 of them, mass to attack the East Coast of America. Brant comes up with a desperate scheme of his own! He makes grappling hooks out of pieces of metal torn from a bed and the belts of their uniforms and he and his fellow officer rappel down 1000 feet to the street and hijack a Euro air ship themselves. Nobody locks the doors to these heavily armed ships--maybe 2069 is a period of low crime. Pursued across the Atlantic, our guys are rescued by American air cruisers. Amazingly, they find that their friends were not shot down but faked being shot down--the spy got to New York and the American cities have new advanced propellors of their own and will be able to mass together to fight the massed European cities on an equal footing.

The final cataclysmic struggle near the Great Lakes, in which the densely packed skyscrapers of many cities are reduced to molten slag by heat shells and then those cities fall to Earth when their propulsion systems are damaged by succeeding bombardments, takes up like nine pages. Our narrator has a front row seat to the action, he having been given command of the flagship American city, New York. America is outnumbered two to one, our 100 cities facing 100 Euro cities coming from the East and 100 Asian cities coming across the Pacific from the West. (Maybe they should have hurried East to fight the Euros before the Asians arrived?) Hamilton describes the various formations adopted and maneuvers attempted by the three fleets and the monotonous fusillade of heat shells, lists off the names of world famous cities as they crash down to the Earth. The European and Asiatic cities carry only military personnel, those aggressors having left their civilian population behind in newly built shelters on the vacant surface, but the American cities still carry their ordinary citizens and when St. Louis, Seattle, and Miami are reduced to melted wrecks and crash, millions of people are slain, never to enjoy their goop again.

Atlanta and Cleveland and Mexico City were whirling downward, giant masses of lights in which glowed countless great fusing craters of metal, gyrating insanely down through the darkness to crash in awful destruction on the surface of the affrighted earth far below!

So severely outnumbered, it doesn't look like the New World can beat the Old in this slugfest, so Brant gives up his post as pilot of New York City to lead the last ditch attack of a squadron of cruisers he has held back in reserve. They fly to Berlin, only like 20% of the cruisers surviving the brief flight, seeing as the air is full of crisscrossing heat shells, and Brant and his men commando-style jump from their ships into Berlin's central tower, where they kill everybody they encounter with their heat pistols. Again and again Hamilton reminds us that the rounds from the pistols reduce those hit by them to "scorched, burned heaps of flesh." Brant seizes the controls of Berlin and intentionally collides with the other Euro and Asiatic cities, wrecking their superstructures with the German city's base--those superstructures house the apparatus that collects static electricity and powers the cities, and its destruction sends the cities, one after the other, crashing to earth. (This apparatus is immune to heat shells, by the way, so you can't just shoot it.) The narrator, having destroyed all the lesser foreign cities, sets the controls of Berlin to crash and he and his crew jump out into their cruiser and escape moments before impact.

The Asian and European cities are wiped out, while fifty American cities survive. (The Upper Midwest is now carpeted with the melted wreckage of 250 cities, each 5 miles in diameter.) The final lines of "Cities in the Air" suggest that this was the last Air War, that the American Federation will make an enduring peace with the grounded peoples of the Old World. One hopes that, stuck on the ground, the Europeans will rediscover the joys of bangers and mash, spaghetti and meatballs, and lamb gyros, while the Asians reacquaint themselves with chicken fried rice and pork gyoza.

This story is long, and the characters and societies depicted have almost no personality or relationships to each other. Hamilton tells the story with enthusiasm and there are cool images (lots of stuff that happens in this story reminds you of stuff that happens in the first Star Wars movie or in the Space Battleship Yamato material I saw as a kid under the Starblazers moniker) but we get the same images of thundering artillery and crashing cities, of aircraft whizzing here and there and then getting crumpled and falling inert to Earth, again and again, and it gets stale. Shortening the story by making the battles briefer or having fewer battles would have been an improvement. The best section of the story is the stuff in the cell, where we get some human feeling.

We're judging "Cities in the Air" acceptable. The epic of the Last Air War would have to wait until the 21st century to see reprint in the third volume of Haffner Press' The Collected Edmond Hamilton and in a double novel (paired with Harl Vincent's The War of the Planets) put out by Armchair Fiction. John Betancourt included "Cities in the Air" in the genre fiction internet magazine Black Cat Weekly in 2022. Maybe people besides me really are reading these things in the current era.

Friday, October 9, 2026

Weird Tales Project: 1926

1926 saw the launch of the first liquid fuel rocket, labor unrest in Great Britain, and the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh. And the publication of 12 issues of your favorite magazine, Weird Tales!

Like the spider in that Scottish story, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are not abandoning the apparently impossible task of reading at least one story from each issue of the Unique Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual. And today we can make a verifiable claim of progress--we have now read a story from each issue of WT printed with a 1926 cover date, all of which were edited by Farnsworth Wright.

Immediately below, find links to blog posts about all the other years for which we have already achieved this amazing feat. And then come links to my blog posts about all the 1926 Weird Tales stories I have read.

Thank you for your attention to this matter, and brace yourself for a weird 1927!

1923 1924 1925

1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939

1940 1941 1942