Before we get to the stories, I want to say that I really like the illustrations in the magazine by Eliot Dold, Jr. and Marco Enrico Marchioni depicting men and women inside space craft and laboratories, surrounded by machinery and control panels. These drawings are bold and dynamic and full of charming patterns and fun details.
"Greater Glories" by C. L. Moore
The poem is Harry Kemp's poem of three stanzas "Blind," but Moore, without citing Kemp by name, misquotes or paraphrases the poem; in fact, the title of the story comes from a line Moore intentionally or unwittingly changed--Kemp had "Amid such unguessed glories" while Moore has "Amid such greater glories." This snatch of verse apparently so impressed Arthur C. Clarke when he read "Greater Glories" that Clarke quoted Moore's version of the stanza in the essay "More Than Five Senses;" Clarke gushes about how powerful the verse is, without crediting Moore or Kemp, he having forgotten where he first encountered the stanza. (Like "Greater Glories" itself, you can quickly find Kemp's poem and Clarke's essay at the internet archive.)
"Earth Minus" by Donald Wandrei
"Earth Minus" has eight chapters, plus an italicized prologue and epilogue. In the prologue we are introduced to aliens travelling across the galaxy in a disk-shaped vessel, headed for Earth. Wandrei does a good job here of coming up with interesting aliens and alien technology, describes them in a compelling way. It is good Wandrei is adept at describing strange and unusual sights, because that is just about all this story consists of.
In Chapter I we meet two Earth scientists, an American and a German who has emigrated from Europe. The native has a theory that all matter, and even thought, in the universe is connected, and all was once composed of a single unstable element or energy, what he calls monotron; this stuff has evolved or was transformed into all the elements and substances we have today. This brainiac has developed a super powerful ray projector that can generate temperatures hotter than those in the core of the sun and pressures never before known to man, and he wants to use this thing to subject an ordinary substance to tremendous stress--maybe this unprecedented stress will cause the target to revert to monotron and prove his theory. The German cautions him against doing this, as they have no idea whether this reversion to monotron will release dangerous radiation or cause a cataclysmic explosion or something like that.
In Chapter II Wandrei describes in detail the experiment, in which a little cube of steel is subjected to incredible stress and vanishes, perhaps reduced to its component electrons, neutrons and protons or maybe into a form of energy that has not existed since the beginning of the universe--monotronic energy. In Chapter III we see the results of releasing this novel form of energy: weird lights glowing all over the place, animals chirping and howling in distress, and then all the explosives the world over detonating, killing multitudes of people. In Chapter IV we shift to an ocean liner and watch in horror as it and all its passengers and crew lose solidity and melt into nothing as matter returns to its original monotronic state. Chapter V returns us to the two scientists, who discuss the catastrophe the American has wrought and theorize its cause before themselves melting. Chapter VI puts us on an airliner coming in to New York from England: the flight crew witnesses Manhattan skyscrapers melting. Chapter VII is about a homeless thief in San Francisco who witnesses the destruction of that town. In Chapter VIII we hear the scientists' last words as they melt.
In the epilogue we see those aliens again. They watch as the Earth enters a new state, "neither matter nor energy, but a condition between," and then fly away, worried that they and their ship may be caught up in this dangerous transformation.
Wandrei is a good writer so the individual sentences and paragraphs are effective, with all the crazy things people see before they die being sharply and vividly described. But "Earth Minus" lacks character and plot--the characters do very little, they are just spectators. The aliens play no real role in the story at all except to serve as spectators beyond Earth's atmosphere. The descriptions, though effective, get repetitive; once we see one place melt, do we need to see two or three more places melt? I'll call it acceptable.
In 1944 "Earth Minus" would be included in the Arkham House Donald Wandrei collection The Eye and the Finger, and in 1989 the Fedogan & Bremer's Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei.
"Greater Glories" by C. L. Moore
You know how in Moore's 1934 stories "The Black God's Kiss" and "Black God's Shadow" Jirel the French baroness or whatever she is spends a lot of time travelling through weird tunnels and then poking around in other dimensions? Well in this story our nameless protagonist has a similar experience, but "Greater Glories" lacks the sex and violence which makes those Jirel stories entertaining.
This guy wakes up on an uncharted island, the only survivor of a shipwreck! He explores the tiny island and finds no people and no food. Uh oh. Strange sights and sounds scare him, and he runs, right into a masonry wall! But the wall sucks him in, as if through osmosis. He finds himself in a series of circular tunnels and curved rooms that rhythmically throb like a human heart--he realizes he is in a building that mimics an alien life form and is animated by one or multiple noncorporeal alien beings. These superior beings, the main character surmises, have senses that we humans lack, reminding him of a stanza from a poem.
Moore's point in including the verse, I suppose, is to emphasize the idea that the aliens are like angels or gods compared to us lowly humans, and on the sixth page of this sixteen-page story the protagonist gets a telepathic message and we start getting some details on how awesome these aliens are. The mysterious beings install into the protagonist's brain knowledge of how this living building was constructed by an industrious race of people over many generations, and how they then combined all their souls to inhabit the building as a single collective consciousness. Oy, another collective consciousness story.
The consciousness transports the man to a world of gray mist in which he sees brief glimpses of plants, landscape, buildings, etc. Some of the mist congeals and becomes a beautiful girl! She is like a mindless zombie, but the man, by dint of concentration, gives her intelligence. He falls in love with her! But she starts sobbing--she isn't ready to live yet, she wants to return to formless mist! The alien voice explains that the man called the woman's personality forth from the collective consciousness, and she cannot be happy unless she returns to the collective, but since she now has integrated into her part of the human man's soul, she cannot be happy without him, and he cannot be happy without her. A dilemma.
I found the ending a little confusing. It seemed like the man was absorbed into the collective along with the woman, where he found profound serenity. "Nothing troubled him now. The answers to all his doubts and questions and doubts and hesitancies were absorbed unasked in the great calm of that composite brain...." (Ugh, I hate stories in which people surrendering their individuality is celebrated.) But then we see him leaving the building and returning to the beach. I guess part of him joined the collective but part did not? Is the part of him on the beach going to starve to death?
This story is mind-numbingly boring. I'm not just saying that because I prefer stories in which the collective consciousness is malignant and the hero blows it up. And I'm not just saying that because this is one of those stories in which the protagonist is just a spectator who has no personality and doesn't make any decisions. The bare plot outline of the story is actually not that bad, if the story were like five pages long. But it is sixteen-god-damn-pages of repetitive descriptions of empty tunnels and things vaguely seen through mists, which is way way too many. And then the ending is inconclusive--did this jerk surrender his individuality for perfect peace, or did he forgo true happiness to maintain his individuality? It sounds like he did both, which is lame. Gotta give this one a thumbs down.
"Greater Glories" would have to wait until the 21st century to be reprinted in 2008 by Isle Press in the collection Miracle in Three Dimensions and Other Stories. It's no "Shambleau!"
"Skyrock" by Frank Belknap Long
Professor Staubwasser and his assistant Adams Elliot built a high tech helicopter to investigate the crazy rumors of a huge black rock hovering high in the sky over Radir Valley. Our story begins at the site of the crash that killed both of them. The rescue crew that is pulling the wrecked chopper out of the dirt finds something incredible stuck to the nose of the helicopter--a huge black claw! This talon is much like the claw of a bald eagle but must be from a bird with a wingspan of over one hundred feet, a claw big enough to seize an adult man! Staubwesser and Elliot must have crashed because they collided with a flying monster!
Professor Marvin Holt, aeronautical engineer and geologist, and Dan Haldane, sensationalist journalist, are at the crash site when the claw is unearthed. These two don't get along, as Haldane has been promoting the flying rock theory that Holt thinks--or thought--was bogus, but they decide to work together to get another helicopter built to search for this giant bird and the flying rock it presumably roosts on. Thanks to the publicity Haldane drums up, enough donations come in for Holt to build a flying machine even more advanced than the one Staubwasser and Elliot spent their last minutes in.
Long describes the helicopter and the pressure suits the men wear up in the stratosphere in some detail, before and during their maiden voyage straight up into the wild blue yonder. Eighteen miles above the earth, where they can see the stars, a powerful wind grabs the copter and carries them into a huge floating rock. Their precious aircraft is wrecked, but Holt and Haldane survive to clamber out on to the surface of this little island in the sky, where they discuss--via Morse code tappings on each other's helmets--theories of how this rock got up here and has stayed up here, perhaps for millions of years.
When they explore they find a beautiful woman with exotic features entombed in crystal--a representative of a heretofore unknown race that must have flourished in prehistoric times. Then the monster attacks! Holt sees the creature, which I don't think Long describes very well, and runs for the wreck of the copter to get his rifle, but Haldane is hypnotized by the sight of the dead woman and the monster seizes him in its newt-like jaws and kills him.
Holt shoots at the monster, but to no effect. He slips and falls off the island; he falls for eighteen miles, his parachute preserving his life. Instead of telling everybody about the flying island, the gorgeous woman of a million years ago embalmed in crystal, and the monster who ate the journalist, Holt just says the chopper fell apart and Haldane didn't make it out alive. What?
This story is acceptable; the science stuff and adventure stuff isn't terrific, but it isn't boring or irritating, either. And at least the characters' personalities and decisions drive the story, they aren't just victims of fate or other entities, like in the Wandrei and Moore pieces, and the story is the correct length and is not repetitive.
I don't know why Haldane--a scientist for god's sake!--keeps his discoveries, which would revolutionize our understanding of biology, history, geology, and heaven knows what else, a secret. Besides, it's not like somebody else isn't going to build an aircraft or a spacecraft and discover the flying island in the near future. A poor, or at least inexplicable, decision for the ending.
It seems like "Skyrock" has never been printed anywhere else besides this issue of Astounding. Maybe it hasn't been reprinted because the stuff Long says about helicopters has been disproven; judged on literary or entertainment grounds, Long has written and published much worse material than this.
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All three of these stories try to inspire a sense of wonder in the reader, a sense of how vast and strange and fascinating the universe is, how little we know now and how much we might learn. But rather than being hopeful, Wandrei's "Earth Minus" and Long's "Skyrock," and arguably Moore's "Greater Glories," are pessimistic--in the cases of the Wandrei and Long, even horrific. Classic SF stories often glorify and romanticize the scientist and the search for knowledge and the development of new technology, but in these stories learning new things and employing innovative technology can make you miserable or get you--or everybody!--killed.
Wandrei unleashes a crazy theory of matter and energy on the reader, while Smith gives you science and technology facts that were maybe current in 1935 but I think today are exploded, and invokes Einstein and William Beebe in his speculations about the upper atmosphere and the possibilities of a big island floating around up there. Moore, who in a 1976 interview published in the fanzine Chacal which you can read at the internet archive said she had little interest in science and considered her writing fantasy and not science fiction, doesn't bother with any science at all.
You can look forward to more pre-war pulp deep cuts in the future here at MPoricus Fiction Log--stay tuned!
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