"Doom Over Venus" (1940)
On the sunward side of Mercury is a huge solar power plant that generates electricity via "photo-electric cells" and then transmits the energy to the other planets via radio waves. This installation is manned by engineers and technicians from all nine planets. Recently, Venusian staff have been disappearing, and apparently being killed, as only little shreds of their bodies are ever found. On Venus there is a fervent nationalist faction, an influential secret society called "The Friends of Venus," that wants Venus to take over Mercury, and the murder of all these Venusians on Mercury is being used by them to press their case. (Presumably Hamilton means to remind readers of the recent Sudeten crisis.)
The government of Earth has sent to Mercury a secret agent, Clark Stanton, to try to figure out what is happening to these Venusians; after all, if Venus conquers Mercury and that power station the whole system will be at Venus's mercy. Stanton has noticed a common thread that ties together all the dead Venusians--they were all regular patrons of "dream palaces." When Stanton tells this to the Venusian ambassador, the ambassador scoffs at the idea--nearly all Venusians are fans of the dream palaces. Just as he admits that he himself is a dream palace regular, the ambassador explodes! Being the only person near the ambassador when he went boom, Stanton is the prime suspect in his murder, but Stanton doesn't want to lose any valuable time with lawyers and red tape and all that--hey, he's got a job to do!--so he steals a spaceship and blasts off Mercury and heads for Venus to investigate those dream palaces, which he assumes are somehow in cahoots with The Friends of Venus.
I just read two stories by Hamilton's buddy Henry Kuttner (The Best of Leigh Brackett, edited by Hamilton, is dedicated to Kuttner, and in the introduction Hamilton mentions a 1949 road trip he and Leigh took with Kuttner and his wife and collaborator on so many stories, Weird Tales and Astounding star C. L. Moore) in which induced dreams figure prominently, 1941's "The Land of Time to Come" and 1945's "Sword of Tomorrow" (I guess induced dreams were a sort of TWS staple) and I was dreading that Hamilton would inflict on me a long tedious surrealist dream sequence like the ones I bitched about in that blog post on Kuttner. Fortunately we only get one page's worth of dreams, and these are not pointless surrealistic dreams, but dreams that are full of sword-swinging adventure and spine-chillling horror. We also get a paragraph of science, all about how the brain works on electrical impulses and the dream machines take advantage of this fact. In this story, to use a dream machine, you have to have electrodes surgically implanted into your skull--it is obvious from the beginning to us readers how the Friends are murdering people.
(In the "The Story Behind the Story" column in this issue Hamilton talks about solar power and about the possibility of these dream machines.)
In the dream palace Stanton not only discovers a top official of the Venus government, cabinet minister Kendall Klain, and kidnaps him, but meets a secret agent from Jupiter and another from Mars who are also working on the Friends of Venus case. Classic/Golden Age/"old" or whatever you want to call it SF often is thought of as xenophobic, but if you actually read old SF space operas and adventure stories like Hamilton's you find the Earth human hero often making friends with aliens and nonhumans and that various races and polities often work together to fight dangerous enemies or overcome problems. (I apologize if you read my blog post on Barry Malzberg's Herovit's World and have thus heard me ride this hobby horse of mine before.) Stanton here quickly joins forces with the Martian and the Jovian to try to break the influence of the Friends, and they have to hurry--in two days time the Venus legislature will vote on whether or not to take over Mercury!
When Kendall Klain's mobile phone rings the three spies learn that KK is scheduled to meet the anonymous and unknown head of the Friends tomorrow. The Martian spy is a genius biologist and surgeon and he puts Stanton's brain in KK's body so Stanton can make the meeting and learn who the sinister secret society's leader is and perhaps capture him.
In Kendall Klain's body Stanton has to meet KK's butler, and his fiancee, and has to attend a cabinet meeting, the whole time striving to convince everybody that he is the real KK, even though before the brain switch he didn't know that KK had a fiance or even where the cabinet meeting room was! These scenes of Stanton blundering around were quite entertaining.
Stanton, as KK, attends a ball with the fiancee, a gorgeous chick who hates KK--their relationship is a sham! It seems that most members of the cabinet and legislature are actually against taking over Mercury, but will vote for war out of fear of being murdered by the Friends, who have assassinated a few politicians already, and blow up another one at the ball. After the ball, Stanton as KK and the fiancee meet the leader of the Friends, whose identity is hidden by a mask, in his old ruined fortress in the swamps. We learn that the woman is only helping the Friends because they are holding her father, a scientist, hostage in their dungeon, and how the Friends are killing all those people.
There are more fun hi-jinks--escapes and fights--and revelations--for example, the figure they think is the leader of the Friends is in fact a remote-controlled robot operated by the leader from a distance--but in the end the Friends are defeated, Mercury is saved, Stanton is back in his real body, and KK's fiancee becomes Stanton's girlfriend.
This is a fun story. Looking at our other two TWS writers, Brackett's three stories have a level of emotion higher than that of "Doom Over Venus," and Kuttner's three stories have all that social science (psychology and sociology), but Hamilton is a pro at plotting an adventure story and "Doom Over Venus" is sharp and clear and moves at a brisk pace; it is never vague or boring and there is no fat. The horror scenes and the fight scenes and the scenes of suspense as Stanton tries to fool his enemies are genuinely disturbing or exciting, and everything that happens follows logically from what happened before--you never wonder why Hamilton has included this element or that element in the story; nothing ever feels arbitrary or like a kludge. As for science, the hard science stuff is good. Thumbs up for "Doom Over Venus," and let's hope the next two pieces I have selected for today are equally as enjoyable.
"Through Invisible Barriers" (1942)
Percival Withers is a 37-year-old physicist at the New England university of which his late father was president. He is dominated by his mother and his fiancee of three years. He has developed a ray projector that changes ordinary matter into contraterrene matter by reversing the charges of its electrons. Contraterrene matter cannot interact with ordinary matter, so, after Withers rays a cube of copper he can't pick it up--his hand passes right through it. (Hamilton has a lame explanation for why the cube doesn't fall through the floor to the center of the Earth.) The ray projector can also reverse the process.
The whole story, which is pretty long, consists of gags based on the fact that people who are contraterrene cannot interact with ordinary matter, so they can walk through walls and so forth, and that if you are in a contraterrene state you need to have an airtank with you that contains contraterrene air. After an episode in which Withers's fiancee's dog causes a stir in town when it is in a contraterrene state, Withers goes to New York City to be alone to conduct his experiments in private. He ends up rooming in a boarding house patronized by show people--a midget, a guy who has a trained seal, etc. A beautiful girl, a former knife thrower's assistant, now down on her luck, learns of Withers's invention, and she cooks up a magic act that they perform in a nightclub. German spies accompanied by a physicist (?) learn of the act and, realizing Withers's ability to walk through walls and invulnerability to thrown daggers is not magic but the work of technology, try to steal and duplicate the device. There follow chases, fights, misunderstandings with the police, etc. In the end the Germans are all dead or in NYPD custody, Withers hands the ray projector over to the Feds and abandons his fiancee, an upper-middle-class snob, for the show biz girl.
Withers is not really a Caspar Milquetoast--while he doesn't drink and knows nothing of popular culture and his mother and fiancee have great influence over him, all through the story he resists those snooty women and boldly pursues his goals as a scientist and, as a soon as the Germans show up, his patriotic duty. I guess that subtitle was just some marketing ploy.
This story isn't offensively bad, but as I read it I just kept hoping it would end. The final death struggle between Withers and the German who has his own knock off copy of the ray projector, so that he and Withers are both contraterrene and can both walk through walls and ignore NYPD bullets, almost brings "Through the Invisible Barrier" to the "acceptable filler" level, but not quite. Gotta give this one a marginal thumbs down.
Hamilton writes in the "The Story Behind the Story" column about how he first heard about the possibility of "contraterrene" matter and describes how he set out to write an epic drama set in a whole contraterrene world but as the story developed ended up with this more earthbound tale.
"Lords of the Morning" (1952)
Martin has become an archaeologist and is in Guatemala examining Mayan ruins. He hasn't used his power to cast his mind back to the past in years, but he is so eager to get some clues about the Maya that he performs the stunt again. He finds himself in the brain pan of Spanish soldier Pedro Yanez, one of the conquerors of the Maya; Yanez has suffered heatstroke and is out of his mind. Because the original owner's mind is essentially absent, Martin's consciousness gets stuck in its place, and our 20th-century archaeologist finds himself a permanent tenant in this 16th-century fighting man's body! He marches with the Spanish company and its native auxiliary army and participates in the capture of a Mayan walled town. Inside the town Martin sees a gorgeous woman who looks nothing like a Native American--she has green eyes and everything!--and he figures that if he is going to live out the rest of his life as a conquistador he may as well enjoy it, so he grabs her. She pulls out an electric gun, stuns him, and escapes! For our randy pal Martin/Pedro, "no" means "no," even in the 1500s!
Eventually the Spanish capture the beauty, who goes by the name of Aryll, and by torturing some of the Indians learn she is from a city a week's march away. Aryll has a jeweled necklace, and hoping to find other jewels, the Spaniards send an expedition to this city. Martin is the only white guy in the area who can speak the language of the local Indians (many of the Spaniards know Aztec, but Martin knows Quiche (wikipedia spells it "K'iche'") thanks to his research focus on the Maya) so he goes along on the expedition, and is glad to do so, because not only is he excited to see a city of which there is no modern knowledge, and to find out about the high technology of Aryll's people, but also because he is falling in love with Aryll!
When the Spanish get to Aryll's city they try to take over, but Martin switches sides, joining the city dwellers and helping them repel the first Spanish assault. (Like in all those Moorcock stories about Oswald Bastable and John Daker, and those Kevin Costner and Tom Cruise movies, here we have a guy turning against his own race's imperialism.) Aryll's people are peace-loving, and so their only weapons are those electric stun guns, which have a very short range--shorter than that of a crossbow or arquebus--so the city is in trouble as the Spaniards begin their second attack.
Luck is with the city, however, as just as the Spanish are busting in, the scheduled supply ship from Venus arrives and scares off the attackers. You see, Aryll and her fellows are an expeditionary force from Venus! As she explains to Martin, a human space empire once ruled the galaxy, but then collapsed into civil war. The people of Earth and Venus were cut off from galactic civilization, and sank into primitivism; the Earth sank further than did Venus. For thousands of years Venusians have been coming to Earth in an effort to teach Earth people to be peaceful so they could share their technology with us; but always Earth people turn out to be violent. Aryll relates how the Venusians taught the Egyptians and Sumerians how to write and work metal, but they only used writing to spread superstition and metal to make weapons. The Maya were the Venusians last hope of cultivating a peaceful Earth society, and the arrival of the Spanish has put paid to this final effort--the Venusians are going to destroy their city via high-tech means, so there is no trace, and return to Venus.
One of the themes of "Lords of the Morning" is that the Spanish are greedy and ruthless jerks who torture and rape people, and are subject to Christian superstitions--believing in witches, for example, and letting that belief affect their decisions--but, that their bravery is admirable. I'm no expert on Spanish history or the history of Latin America, but this "feels right" and works on a literary level, creating dramatic tension and making the Spanish interesting characters with interesting motivations.
In contrast, the Maya are depicted as peace-loving and kind of ineffectual, the more or less passive victims of the Spanish and beneficiaries of the Venusians. When the Maya find out the Venusians, whom they see as gods (the Venusians are the "Lords of the Morning" of the title), are leaving, they are thrown into despair and beg them to stay.
"Lord, we are your children! What can children do without a father? How shall we live, if you are gone?"Again, I'm no expert on Native American civilizations, but I'm pretty skeptical that the Maya were substantially more peaceful that other civilizations, and they seem to have built all kinds of cities with diplomatic and trade networks and so on, so I doubt they were particularly ineffectual. Thus this doesn't "feel right" to me. (In Hamilton's defense, maybe we are just supposed to think that this one little geographic component of Mayan civilization is peaceful and lame because of Venusian influence, and that most of the Mayans are waging war and engaging in human sacrifice with the best of 'em.) It also doesn't work well on a literary level--wretched children begging for help from daddy are not the engaging characters we want to see in an adventure story. I'm afraid Hamilton here, in trying to make the Mayans sympathetic, has taken away their agency and rendered them much less exciting than they were in real life.
The affrighting of the Spaniards and the revelation of Venus's role in Earth's development feels like a climax, but it occurs only three-quarters of the way into the story. In that last quarter Martin tries to get Aryll to fall in love with him and to convince the leader Venusian to let him come with them to Venus. The Spanish attack as the Venusians are boarding their space ship. Martin saves Aryll from a Spaniard, but dies in the process--as he dies he sees the Venusian ship blast off. Martin's consciousness returns to his 20th-century body, where his comrade is relieved to see him recover after several days of unconsciousness. Martin announces his intention to abandon archaeology and join the space program, as he wants to be one of the first Earthmen to land on Venus.
This story is OK. Like so many SF tales, it denounces humanity for being so violent, presenting a more peaceful culture as a foil for our own, and tells you religion is a stupid scam. All the references to rape and torture, in this real world setting and not some fantasy land, give "Lords of the Morning" a grittiness and uneasiness that suits its themes; it was pretty wild to have the main character contemplating rape with a "when in Rome" self-justification--you have to hand it to Hamilton for showing his hero is not exempt from the faults for which the story is indicting the human race. But the piece is not striking or fun enough to deserve a ringing endorsement--like I said, it is just OK.
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It is disappointing when the first story of the three in a blog post is by far the most entertaining, but that is life, I guess, one disappointment after another. This concludes our current series of posts about Thrilling Wonder Stories, but I expect we'll be back, maybe for a Ray Bradbury-focused look at TWS.
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