Astounding May '35: J W Campbell, D Wandrei & R Z Gallun

Let's travel back in time to 1935, via the internet archive and the May issue of Astounding, edited by F. Orlin Tremaine and featuring long reader letters arguing about the Earth's magnetic field, foot pounds and Lenz's Law, ads dramatizing the agonies of women with asthma and men who don't have enough money to get married, and stories by John W. Campbell, Jr., Donald Wandrei, and Raymond Z. Gallun. 

"The Escape" by John W. Campbell, Jr.

"The Escape," written by the man who, in the words of Harry Harrison in the intro to Decade: The 1950s, "was to shape the course of the forties" as editor of Astounding, puts the lie to the idea that women in "old" science fiction were all damsels in distress.  The star of "The Escape," Aies Marlan, is a woman scientist who in her fight for her freedom shoots government employees with the ray gun she designed and hand-built herself!

"The Escape" is set in one of those tyrannical futures in which the government for eugenic reasons decides who you will have sex with.  In this story the government even lubricates the gears of its machinery of imposition on individual liberty by using advanced psychological techniques to make you fall in love with the person they have set you up with.  Independent-minded Aies is having none of this!  She is in love with an artist, Paul Treray, and when the cops come to drag her off to her wedding with fellow scientist Bruce Randall, whom she thinks is ugly, she shoots the fuzz with her paralyzer pistol and she and her sculptor beau steal the government aircar and make a break for it!

Treray gives a whole speech about how it is wrong to run your whole society based on science and efficiency because there are higher values like love and beauty and freedom, and I really thought Aies was going to escape with her true love and/or launch a coup or revolution or something that would liberate people to run their own sex lives.  But Bruce uses his own scientific abilities to invent a defense against Aies's paralyzer gun and helps the government catch Aies; she is brainwashed into loving him and the two live happily ever after within the confines of their authoritarian society.  Cripes!   

This is a decent traditional science fiction story in which the main characters are scientists and use their engineering skills and superior intelligence to overcome plot obstacles, and in which the author speculates on the effect science and technology will have on society--there are automatic aircraft, videophones, all that stuff, in addition to the tyrannical eugenics regime.  Besides the sex and gender stuff I've already mentioned (presumably the feminist interpretation of the story would be that it shows how the patriarchy clamps down on independent-minded women and makes women of ability complicit in their own oppression), the remarkable thing about the story is the question of whether Campbell is really advocating rule of society by scientists who have the authority to tell you who to have sex with, or just presenting a vision of such a society from the inside as a means of forcing us readers to confront our assumptions about science, art and the individual's relationship to society.  

After debuting here in Astounding under the Don A. Stuart pen name, "The Escape" would be reprinted in the Campbell collections Cloak of Aesir and A New Dawn.

"The Whisperers" by Donald Wandrei

This is one of those science fiction stories that reads like a history article in a popular magazine of the future.  The first three pages of the eleven-pages of "The Whisperers" are largely taken up by block quotes from Soviet newspapers, relating how, in the 21st century, a small metal meteor landed in Siberia and gave the villagers who discovered it and cracked it open a strange disease that leaves you dead in two days.  One of the strange things about the disease is that its victims emit a soft rustling sound, like whispering.  The Communist Party claims its ruthless measures have contained the disease (where have we heard that before?) but this claim is proven hollow within days as the plague spreads all over Asia and Europe, killing millions.  

Two American scientists, one an expert on diseases, the other the inventor of a supermicroscope, burn the midnight oil scrambling to figure out the true nature of the plague and how to stop it, offering us readers the opportunity to imbibe some mind-numbing science goop.  ("The various light values of the image will then be converted to electric values of micromillimetric intensity, whose current probably won't exceed .000000001 to .000001 of an ampere.")  It turns out that the disease is no mere virus or bacteria, but a civilization of intelligent beings of infinitesimal size.  The whispers that emanate from sufferers of the plague is the sound of these aliens in their teeming millions going about their lives.  Because they are so small, those lives proceed at an accelerated rate--in one day these microscopic nations experience over a century of history.  The scientists realize that the aliens inhabiting a man will die if he drinks alcohol to excess, and the world is saved when everybody on Earth gets blind drunk. 

Dry and boring, with a climax and a resolution that feel very half baked and are hard to take seriously.  Thumbs down.  

Super-editor Donald A. Wollheim would include "The Whisperers" in a 1951 issue of The Avon Science Fiction Reader and it would be included in later Wandrei collections.

"N'Goc" by Raymond Z. Gallun

Here's another story about tiny invaders from space, but it is a lot more fun that Wandrei's.  (Sorry, Don.)

When the planets were formed, among them was a tiny moon of quartz with gas trapped within it.  For millions of years it orbited the Earth; sunlight penetrated its translucent surface and within its cavity life and then a whole civilization developed.  Early in the rise of man, when our ancestors are ape-like savages who sleep in the trees for fear of saber-toothed cats, this moon's orbit begins to degrade and the little aliens scramble to figure out a way to save their civilization.  At the same time, the chieftain of a tribe of primitive humans has been watching the little moon, having noticed it has appeared larger every day.

Most of the text of the story follows the adventures of the leader of the aliens, who have a sort of ant- or bee-like hive matriarchy, and the headman of that human band.  The tiny aliens build a battery of cannons, load them with shells full of people and their specially bred slave races and domestic animals, and shoot themselves to Earth.  The shells arrive perfectly intact, but the human chief intuits that they are dangerous and he and his tribe, before most of the passengers have recovered from the shock of landing, throw them into a volcano!  At the last moment the matriarch of the aliens is able to open the hatch of her shell and escape with some of her servitor beasts; she is killed, but some of the low-intelligence servant creatures live on to become the ancestors of all the spiders that inhabit the world today.

"N'Goc" is fast-paced, has some cool images, its characters have briefly but sharply sketched personalities that actually drive the plot, and the accompanying science jazz is actually interesting.  Thumbs up!

I thought "N'Goc" was a lot of fun, but it has never been reprinted.  It is a mystery to me why Wollheim plucked the dull "The Whisperers" from this issue instead of "N'Goc." 

Certainly, there is a girl you want to marry!  Click to read how, in your spare time, 
you can lay the foundations of a career that will put marital bliss within your financial reach.