Frank Belknap Long: "The Last Men," "Green Glory," and "The Great Cold"

Let's take a gander at the Astounding of the mid-1930s and read three stories by Frank Belknap Long that isfdb is grouping together as "The Mini-Men" series.  All three would appear in Arkham House's 1972 Long collection The Rim of the Unknown and its 1978 paperback printing, which, if you've got a hundred bucks laying around, are readily available on ebay.  As you have come to expect, I'm reading them from scans of Astounding at the internet archive. 

"The Last Men" (1934)

We might call "The Last Men" a switcheroo story--you know how people collect butterflies and beetles, pinning them to boards and displaying them in shadow boxes?  Well, fifty million years from now the tables may be turned!

In the Year 50,001,934 or thereabouts, insects the size of a PBY Catalina rule the world, and the humans are their slave race and play thing.  Humans are grown in "homoriums," men grown separately from women.  The insects' technology--drugs that affect the glands as well as nourishing rays--allow humans to grow to maturity in a year or so.    

Maljoc, a human male, has reached maturity and is allowed to go to a homorium where live females to choose a mate.  He has never seen a woman in the flesh before, just videos!  He is warned not to choose a pretty wife, as when humans leave their homoriums they are fair game for collectors, and particularly beautiful men and women are plucked up and impaled and used to decorate insects' homes.

In the women's homorium the assembled females compete for Maljoc's attention.  Maljoc ends up doing just the thing he was told not to do, choosing the most lovely of all the women.  Mere moments after he leaves the building with this beauty in his arms one of the masters dives down and seizes her for his collection.  Maljoc, full of love and an atavistic pride in his race, which he knows once lorded it over the six-legged species, resists, but he and his mate are doomed.  He perhaps achieves some kind of symbolic victory when he and his mate escape the flying master's grasp and fall a mile to their deaths--no doubt Maljoc's mate will be too splattered to serve as a decoration for an insect's wall.

Not bad--Long keeps the story brief and to the point.

People seem to have liked "The Last Men;" it is illustrated on the cover of both editions of The Rim of the Unknown, and Damon Knight chose it for his anthology Science Fiction of the Thirties, while Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenburg and Robert Weinberg selected it for 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories, even though Maljoc's masters are native-born Earthers--tsk tsk.  

"Green Glory" (1935)

"Green Glory" takes place in a universe similar to that in "The Last Men," or maybe the same universe but a different time period.  Mankind is this time around the slave race of ants bigger than elephants, and we and our formican masters are at war with giant bees!

Our protagonist is Atasmas, the most loyal to the ants of all the human slaves.  He loves Big Queen!  Atasmas is taken to see the Queen, an ant that towers one hundred feet high!  In recognition of his loyalty, she has selected him for a kamikaze mission to the very heart of the bee hive, where he is to deploy a biological weapon which should wipe out the bees, but just might wipe out all life on Earth!  The Queen also reveals to Atasmas one of the shocking truths about the world that has been kept from him, and us readers.  All the human slaves in the ant colonies are men, reproduced by "laboratory techniques."  But all the human slaves in the bee hives are women!  Women, the creatures Atasmas dreams about every night with an agony of longing, are not just a figment of his imagination--they are real!  

The Queen warns Atasmas to stay loyal to her and the dream of ant conquest of the world and accomplish his mission, the mission which must destroy him, the bees, and the women!  We follow Atasmas on his mission and watch as he has to choose what to do when he meets that most mysterious of creatures, a human woman!  

A good story; the many images of colonies, hives, and gigundo insects are effective, and I really was not sure what Atasmas would do once he got to the bee hive and met a woman.

Super-editor Donald Wollheim put "Green Glory" in the first issue of Avon Science Fiction Reader, but otherwise it has not been anthologized.

For paperback publication in Great Britain, Worlds of Tomorrow was split into 
two volumes; Long's "The Great Cold" appears in the second volume, New Worlds for Old

"The Great Cold" (1935)

If you thought that being ruled by intelligent giant bees or ants was strange, consider me this: the far future humans in "The Great Cold" are ruled and genetically engineered by ginormous intelligent barnacles!  And it gets worse: these are feminist barnacles!  Female barnacles (in this story, at least) are big and intelligent, while the male barnacles are small and contemptible, and the female rulers of the barnacle polity are engineering humans to mirror this--to their barnacle lady minds, meet and just--relationship.  In fact, early in the story, a laboratory slave tells our hero, Clulan, a food gatherer, that soon the male humans will all be given a treatment that will shrivel them.  Clulan worries that his beloved wife won't want to be with a shriveled version of himself.

The human slaves of the barnacles have been engineered to have webbed feet, and the first scene of the story follows Clulan and other slaves as they swim out to a cultivated patch of "spongy shellfish" to harvest them with blades attached to their heels; they bring the food--in their mouths--to the homes under the cliff shore of the hundred-foot tall female barnacles and their five-foot tall moronic male mates.  

Like the ant society in "Green Glory," the barnacles are imperialistic and seek to conquer the world, but in contrast to the regimented and collectivist totalitarianism of the ants, barnacle society is individualistic and decadent, the mentally unstable barnacles driven by malice and a lust for pleasure.  Sometimes a female barnacles will go insane and present a danger, threatening her fellow barnacles and killing humans by the score with her thrashing tentacles.  In such a case one of the human slaves is given poison to put on his heel blades and sent on the dangerous mission of slaying the berserk barnacle.  Clulan is sent on just such a mission in the middle section of the story, and succeeds. 

His fellow humans hail Clulan as a hero, but he feels hollow inside, because he knows the human slaves are soon to have the only pleasure and comfort in their toilsome lives--their marriages--ruined by the shriveling of the men.  When he was getting his heel blades envenomed in the lab he saw the barnacle superweapon, The Great Cold, which has the potential to freeze oceans the world over.  Clulan uses his recently won notoriety to lead a mob of humans to the vat holding this doomsday chemical and they overturn it, killing themselves, the barnacles, and I guess every other marine creature on Earth.  That'll teach you barnacles to try to screw with our sex lives!

A solidly structured piece with crazy ideas and wild images--I like it.

August Derleth included "The Great Cold" in his 1953 anthology Worlds of Tomorrow, and it was also reprinted in a French anthology of SF disaster stories in 1985.

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Again and again I have denounced Frank Belknap Long's later work, but these three stories from F. Orlin Tremaine's Astounding are interesting and entertaining--it is OK that they are all variations on the same theme of a far future man inspired to a suicidal act of rebellion against an oppressive arthropod regime by desire for some woman because that is a good theme and Long does a good job with the ancillary elements of each story.  Oh Frank, what happened to you?

Well, I am glad I have given these early science fiction tales of Long's a try.  No doubt there will be more early Long, and more 1930s Astounding, in our future.