I read that I guaranteed to take Loa, the daughter of Professor Tan Torm, as my one and only legal wife; that I agreed to obey the Population Laws and produce as many sons as possible for the benefit of the Motherland; and that I promised to rear my children and conduct my married life according to the best accepted principles of Thoughtlessness.
When I spotted the Airmont paperback of Hidden World in an Iowa antique mall I fell in love with the cover by Ed Emshwiller. Tanks the size of sky scrapers crashing into each other? Infantry men with ray guns charging beneath their proud war banner? Is this Warhammer 40,000? Now here was a book I had to have!
Poor Stan didn't get his name on the cover |
Phillip Clay and Frank Comstock are engineers, and have been hired to inspect a deep mine in Nevada. An earthquake traps them underground, but also opens the way to a vast network of caverns, where resides a high-tech civilization. Clay and Comstock's introduction to this civilization is witnessing a terrific battle between land-battleships.
Comstock, our first-person narrator, is captured by the pale-skinned people of this bellicose society, and is soon taken into the custody of a scholar who teaches him the language of the subterranean people. This is when it becomes evident that Hidden World is not really the Burroughs-style adventure story I was hoping for, but a broad farce and a facile satire of current events. (Coblentz makes his project clear with a reference to Voltaire; a minor character in Hidden World is General Bing, no doubt named after John Byng.)
Comstock has been captured by the people of Wu, a classbound people who are perennially at war with the people of Zu. The two nations of ethnically indistinguishable pale white people (Comstock calls them "chalk-faces") fight their endless stalemated war for honor and to keep the economy, which is based on manufacturing arms and subsidizing families with many children (and taxing families with fewer than seven children), running. The rulers of Wu are a tiny aristocracy so inbred as to be hideously deformed and so lazy their limbs have atrophied to uselessness. Comstock witnesses government workers destroying food and clothing in order to maintain high prices. Wu has a secret police force that stifles any unpatriotic expression, and on the walls are signs listing the "Brass Rules." The third Brass Rule is "Thoughtlessness is next to godliness."
Stan is on the cover this time, but that illustration must be for some other story |
These absurd jokes are not funny, and diminish any excitement or suspense the adventure elements of the story might generate. It is possible that Coblentz meant Hidden World to be a parody of Burroughs' John Carter stories: whereas Carter is able to outfight Martians because Earth's heavier gravity gave him superior strength, Comstock is able to defeat the people of Wu in hand-to-hand combat because of their horrible eyesight; Carter is a fine swordsman because of his military service on Earth, while Comstock credits his time on the college track team with his ability to run away from danger, and his lack of military service also exempts him from marrying the obese wrinkly woman who pursues him (Carter, of course, is pursued by striking beauties); Burroughs glorifies aristocracy and warfare, Coblentz portrays both as disgusting.
(Hidden World also shares similarities with Fritz Leiber's "Lords of Quarmall," which wasn't published until 1964 but was apparently drafted much earlier.)
A 2009 reprint featuring lamentable typography |
Hidden World is not the fun adventure story I was expecting, and the jokes are too broad for my taste. On the other hand, it is competently written, and all the references to 1930s political and economic issues make it an interesting historical document. (I wonder if Jesse would consider this pulp to be "ideologically empty.") So I guess I will give it a marginal thumbs up.
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