Astounding, Dec. 1934: Donald Wandrei and John W. Campbell, Jr.

The December 1934 issue of Astounding, edited by F. Orlin Tremaine, seems to have been a particularly impressive one.  We've already read Raymond Z. Gallun's "Old Faithful" (back at the dawn of time, 2013) and Howard Wandrei's "The Other" and given them passing grades.  The issue also includes a story by Howard's brother Donald, future co-founder of Arkham House, and three pieces of fiction and a letter from future Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.  One of Campbell's contributions is the first installment of the five-part serial The Mightiest Machine; we'll maybe look at The Mightiest Machine some day, but not today.  What we will be talking about is D. Wandrei's piece, "Colossus Eternalm" and then Campbell's two pseudonymous stories, "Atomic Power" and "The Irrelevant."

"Colossus Eternal" by Donald Wandrei 

This is a sequel to "Colossus," the cover story of the January 1934 ish of Astounding; we read it a few years ago.  At the end of "Colossus," Earthman Duane Sharon, who had travelled to a different universe (a "superuniverse" of which our universe was just a single atom!) and been captured by the giant inhabitants of planet Qythyalos, whom he called the Titans, was sent to planet Valadom to investigate the people there, who look quite human.  "Colossus Eternal" describes what happens to Sharon on Valadom.

The people of Valadom have amazing electromagnetic powers--Shyrna, the gorgeous woman Sharon meets after he steps out of his space ship, is able to examine the molecules in Sharon's brain and thus learn all about him, his life, and our universe, because inscribed upon the eternal sub-particles that make up every atom is its history from the beginning of time.  With ease she can project her thoughts into Sharon's mind.

Sharon of course falls in love with this superwoman immediately, and is upset to learn she is slated to be married to her planet's current ruler, Nrm 17'1, the "race-being-entity" of whom Shyrna says "he is as real as I am, but he is also the symbol of our race, the most perfect expression of our physical and mental traits.  He controls all our lives."  Of all the women of Valadom, Shyrna has been chosen to be the ruler's bride and mother of the next race-being-entity--she is a perfect specimen.  Every woman on Valadom would be thrilled to be chosen, but now that she has met Duane Sharon, Shyrna refuses to cooperate--she wants to marry her fortunes with Sharon's, not those of her monarch and her people.

The Shyrna-Nrm 17'1 plot element of "Colossus Eternal" is surprisingly similar to that the plot of C. L. Moore's "The Dark Land," which we just read.  Nrm 17'1 has astonishing powers--for example, he teleports himself and other people with ease--but he won't just rape an unwilling Shyrna; rather, he tries to win her consent, first in a sort of psychic battle.  Shyrna's resistance is fierce, so Nrm 17'1 imprisons her in his palace-citadel-museum, the repository of all knowledge of the Valadomian race, thinking she will eventually change her mind.  Meanwhile, the ruler incarcerates an unwitting Sharon in a "space-bend island" in which time does not pass.

Marrying Shyrna isn't Nrm 17'1's only ambition--he also hopes to figure out how to predict the future.  The Titans of Qythyalos, the only people in the superuniverse with more knowledge and power than the Valadomians, have this wisdom, and the dictator of Valadom seeks to get them to share it through threats of violence or conquest.  Nrm 17'1 has been using his powers to uplift the million inferior intelligent species in this superuniverse so they are powerful enough to help him take on the Titans.  A space navy of millions of ships with an array of planet- and star- and civilization-busting weapons converges on Qythyalos while a captive Shyrna watches from within Nrm 17'1's citadel.  (Wandrei gleefully lists all these super weapons over several paragraphs--"diseases contagious with the speed of light," "heat rays with a maximum of twenty million degrees," "a poison that caused blood to vaporize," and on and on.)  

Months pass as the space armada masses and Shyrna explores the vast museum, looking at records that remind the 21st-century reader of floppy disks or flash drives:  

...the recording of literature in pin-point electronic structures which, inserted in transcription machines, simultaneously presented audible sounds, visual picture meanings, and visible words.

(This is just one of a number of advanced technologies Wandrei describes in this story; another, more creepy one, is a computer made up of the dead brains of all the many Nrms that preceded Nrm 17'1 on the throne--this computer achieves consciousness and rebels against Nrm 17'1.)

One of Nrm 17'1's assistants falls in love with Shyrna, and Nrm 17'1 teleports this rival to a desert; while the ruler is thus distracted Shyrna liberates Sharon from the bubble of timelessness, but Nrm 17'1 just teleports Earthman to the same desert, thinking he'll get killed there.  Instead the two men, human and Valadomian, join forces, return to the palace, and, protected by forces projected from Qythyalos by the all-knowing Titans, rescue Shyrna (in the fight, the ruler's treacherous assistant is killed.)  Sharon and Shyrna go to Qythyalos in Sharon's ship, and then after conferring with the Titans, blast out of this superuniverse altogether, just before the war between Valadom and Qythyalos destroys the entire superuniverse.  (The Titans, in theory, could win the war with their superpowers or just surrender and thus preserve themselves and the superuniverse, but since they can see the future and have foreseen the superuniverse's destruction, they don't wipe out Nrm 17'1's space armada, just clear a path through it for Sharon and Shyrna.)

Sharon and Shyrna arrive in the next universe, of which the Titans' superuniverse was but a single atom, just after its big bang.  The lovers know they must die here soon, as no habitable planets have yet formed, but they are happy to die together and be onlookers at the beginning of all things.      

In "Colossus Eternal" Wandrei seems to be trying to inspire a sense of wonder with his time paradoxes and descriptions of entire universes being destroyed and created, and his lists of high technologies, psychic powers, alien races, and subatomic particle phenomena; he offers the reader an encyclopedic catalog of the diverse glories of the natural universe and the innumerable accomplishments possible to human intelligence.  At times the lists and descriptions and explanations feel a little long, but the individual ideas are all good, and Wandrei enumerates his marvels with a gusto that is contagious, so I enjoyed "Colossus Eternal."

"Colossus Eternal" did not set the SF world on fire, it seems; it wasn't reprinted until 1989 in Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei.  The "Notes" section at isfdb for "Colossus Eternal" says it is "not a close sequel" to "Colossus," which I do not understand--the protagonist is the same, the narrative picks up where "Colossus" left off, and the plot of "Colossus Eternal" has some of the same beats as its predecessor--in both a guy leaves a place that is being destroyed by war to explore a radically wider environment, and in both he leaves one universe for another.

"Atomic Power" by John W. Campbell, Jr.  

This story appears under the name Don A. Stuart and has been anthologized by Groff Conklin and by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.  In fact, I am going to read it in Hartwell and Cramer's The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF because the scan of the December 1934 Astounding at the internet archive is kind of hard on my 51-year-old eyes.

In their intro to "Atomic Power," the editors of The Ascent of Wonder suggest that, as editor of Astounding from 1937, Campbell was reluctant to print disaster stories, a mainstay of speculative fiction from its early days and a form that would be embraced by the New Wave, and this sets up the reader for an experience of irony because "Atomic Power" is in fact a gruesome and apocalyptic disaster story!

"Atomic Power" starts with a little sort of prologue about students visiting a nuclear power plant, and while their professor tries to convey to them the "grandeur" of the plant, Campbell seems to be undermining the prof by describing the installation as looking like a "mighty temple to an unknown, evil, god" and saying the blue light from the "tubes" makes the faces of students look "distorted and ghastly."

In the story proper we meet some scientists who have made a reality-defying discovery--the power of gravity and of "intermolecular bonds" is steadily decreasing!  So everything is losing weight (but not mass) all across the universe, and solid objects are becoming less durable.  The Earth begins to spiral away from the sun, so that temperatures drop rapidly and New York is buried under many yards of snow.  Buildings, bridges and machines fail as their metal components weaken and break.  Campbell throws lots of science at us, but also horrific vignettes of panicked crowds boarding the last ocean liner out of New York and causing it to capsize, and individuals whose limbs come off and whose hearts burst because they have exerted themselves and "the chemical power of muscles remained undiminished, while their tensile strength declined...people tore themselves apart by the violence of their struggles."

As the Earth becomes a frozen Hell and people die in droves, the scientists struggle to figure out why this is happening and how to fix it.  They invent a nuclear reactor and propagate a "counterfield" throughout the universe that restores gravity and intermolecular bonds to normal.  The day is saved, but more amazing yet is the sense of wonder ending we get which was foreshadowed in that prologue about the students: our universe is a molecule of a superuniverse, in which atomic reactors power a civilization by breaking down molecules--the diminution of intermolecular bonds was the start of the process of that superuniverse reactor breaking down our universe!  (A year in our universe is a millionth of a second in that superuniverse.)  Our universe was saved by building a nuclear reactor that operates by annihilating other universes!  Our own civilization's survival is predicated on committing mass genocide of other universes!  Mind blown!

This is a pretty good example of a hard SF story in which scientists save the day and the text of which tries to teach you science concepts.  "Atomic Power" also exhibits the propensity we see throughout Campbell's career to challenge the reader by contriving situations in which doing something dreadful is necessary or has beneficial consequences--we've read Campbell stories like "The Invaders" in which we are invited to consider the positive effects of aliens enslaving us and selectively breeding us, and of course Campbell is responsible for the ending of Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations," in which a young woman has to be sacrificed to save a large number of people.  "Atomic Power" also shares with "The Invaders" and "The Cold Equations" the use of violence against women to add drama to a story--one of the people whose body, having lost its tensile strength, comes apart is a girl on that ocean liner!

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

Campbell committed this caper while undercover as "Karl van Campen."  It looks like it has never been reprinted. 

Kent Barrett wants to be the first man to see the far side of the moon, and he builds Earth's first rocket ship to achieve this dream.  His ship won't have enough fuel to get him back to Earth, but he doesn't care--some things are more valuable than life itself, he tells those who question his suicidal venture, and I guess one of those things is knowledge.  Once he has blasted off we get lots of talk about how the astronaut and ship respond to Earth's atmosphere, the cold of space, weightlessness, and other conditions, which is entertaining enough.  The main point of the story, however, is how the ship's fuel turns out to be more efficient than expected and Barrett actually gets back to Earth alive.  This phenomena is explained in passages which I found essentially incomprehensible.

Acceptable.

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Very sciency stories that, in the case of Wandrei's "Colossus Eternal" and Campbell's "Atomic Power,"  are enlivened by apocalypticism, sense-of-wonder stuff about our universe being no more than an atom of a higher universe and individuals confronting death.  Campbell's "The Irrelevant" is set on a smaller scale and its appeal is limited because the science it focuses on is not quite so mind-blowing and it largely dispenses with the appeals to reader interest in sex and violence that "Colossus Eternal" and "Atomic Power" indulge.

More short stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log; next time some things from the 1970s that will likely be a lot less sciency.