Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading the December 1948 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. In our last episode we remarked upon its eye-catching cover and interior illos, a letter from Lin Carter (whose tale of Atlantean sorcery and political upheaval The Black Star we recently read) and the fiction by Murray Leinster, Frank Belknap Long and Charles L. Harness to be found within its pages. But there is a lot more in the ish to talk about!
There are also plenty of fun ads in the issue that threaten to offend some 21st-century readers. Most noteworthy is perhaps the full-page ad for "hi-ball" glasses with George Petty pin-up girls printed on them--we are assured that these glasses will make your parties "the gayest and most hilarious in your crowd." (As I write this, you can see a quite good color photo of the glasses at this link.) For all you students of the history of the pet industry, there is an ad for a book on how to raise hamsters, "the new wonder animals from Syria" that are "often called Toy Bears." Followers of fashion may find themselves intrigued by an offer for silver rings with the image of a wolf on them ("Girls! Give this ring to the wolves you know!") and there is also an ad for Santa Claus masks "made by world's greatest mask artist" that will purportedly make people "gasp amazed" because it is "so real." (If you are naughty rather than nice, the same company has "Satan," "Blackface" and "Idiot" masks available--I have a feeling it is one of these masks that would make the people of today "gasp amazed!")
Now, on to the fiction!
"240,000 Miles Straight Up" by L. Ron Hubbard
The surprise climax of the jocular first chapter of "240,000 Miles Straight Up" is that Angel's trip is cancelled at the last minute because the Soviet Union reveals it has a military base on the moon and the commies blackmail the Earth into submission!
In Chapter II, Angel and we readers learn that the Soviet general on the moon, Slavinsky, has rebelled against Moscow and has declared himself dictator of the world. He has demanded that the USA send him needed supplies the Soviet government is withholding, and the President has decided to comply, as the Russian force on the moon can easily nuke US cities and is immune from retaliation. Slavinsky, and two men he selects, are to take the American rocket to the moon to deliver the supplies and collect intelligence while doing so.
Chapters III to V describe how Angel and his two companions get to the moon, trick the rebels and defeat them with a bazooka, grenades, and poison gas. And then comes the twist ending to the story--the Soviet conquest of the moon and Angel's commando seizure of the Slavinsky base were all a dream! (This was foreshadowed by glaring incongruities in the narrative that I gullibly thought were just authorial and editorial errors. Your humble blogger is a sucker!) Angel wakes up after a night of partying and heads to the moon on schedule.
Hubbard of course gets a lot of guff for his crazy scam religion, but he isn't a bad writer, and this story is quite entertaining before the irritating let down of the it-was-all-a-dream ending. The style is smooth and the little jokes are sort of funny and at least don't distract the reader from the plot or diminish the adventure-story atmosphere. I enjoyed all the SF stuff, the descriptions of space travel and the surface of the moon and so forth. (Presumably the science of what conditions are like on the moon--the deep layers of pumice dust and the rain of meteors and so on, is inaccurate, but it is a good setting for an adventure tale.) This story also attacks the Soviet Union more directly and fiercely than SF stories generally do, which I guess might irritate unreconstructed pinkos but which of course I appreciate; the thing that irritates me is stories that try to push an equivalency between the West and the USSR or have Cold War plots but refer to a vague and undefined "enemy."
While reading the chase scenes and fight scenes and descriptions of the lunar landscape I was expecting to give this one a thumbs up, but after that deflating ending I am just marking this one "acceptable." Why oh why do authors use this frustrating it-was-all-a-dream device? Exasperating!
"240,000 Miles Straight Up" would not be reprinted until 1993 in a hardcover Hubbard collection that seems to have had only a small press run, but would appear in a more conventionally produced collection in 2014, One Was Stubborn.
"The Mobius Trail" by George O. Smith
This story is about inventor Joseph Kingsley, who invents what the story calls a 'teleport" but which perhaps we of 2022 would call a "wormhole." This is a 3-inch broad hole in the universe, one side of which is attached to Kingsley's apparatus; the other hangs in the air, and with his knobs and verniers Kingsley can move that other side of the hole around the world, looking through it and even reaching in to grab items and and pull them into his lab (provided they can fit through a 3-inch wide hole, of course.) Once the test runs of the three-incher have succeeded, Kinglsey builds a teleport large enough for a person to climb through.
I kind of expected the portal to be used to meet aliens or something, but instead of being an Edgar Rice Burroughs-style story in which a guy goes to some foreign environment and meets a princess and fights the princess's enemies, "The Mobius Trail" is a mystery story with police procedural and hard-boiled elements.
When things go through the teleport they are reversed--for example, when Kingsley guides the other end of the hole into a store after hours and buys a pack of cancer sticks by pulling it through the hole and leaving a quarter in its place, the printing on the pack is now backwards. When the store owner opens up in the morning he finds a quarter on which George Washington is facing the wrong direction. Smith unleashes some serious chemistry on us when he explains how passing some sugar cubes through the teleport causes the sugar to taste less sweet.
The federal government very quickly gets a hold of the freak coin and starts an investigation into who is monkeying with the Uncle Sam's currency, and we get plenty of scenes of cops jawing about fingerprints and interviewing people and pursuing leads and all that. Meanwhile, a dangerous criminal, currently incarcerated, and his sexy partner, who is still on the streets, find out about the teleport, and the girl pretends to be a journalist and uses her feminine wiles to get Kingsley to explain and demonstrate the secret device to her. When Kingsley isn't looking, she uses the egghead's invention to help the convict escape the big house. We get a scene of sexualized violence against women as the criminal mastermind smacks his girlfriend around as part of a ruse to keep Kingsley from suspecting the two are in cahoots.
The most science-fictiony, sensawunda thing about the story is how people who go through the portal see the world as reversed; after you go through the portal you have to hold books up to a mirror to comfortably read them, and if somebody tells you to turn right at an intersection you have to remember to take the fork that appears to you to be the left one. This confusion leads to the capture of the criminals after a pretty lengthy series of scenes of pursuit, capture, escape, and fighting; the criminals have a fortified hideout and the government has to beak out the bazookas to penetrate its walls (lots of bazookas in this episode of MPorcius Fiction Log) and these dastardly fiends have even mined the hideout to explode and kill any investigators who might make their way inside, like its HMS Campbeltown or something. After committing so many atrocities I expected the criminals, or at least the man, to be killed, but Smith refuses to give us this catharsis--the two crooks are merely captured, though I suppose in 1948 we can hope they get the death penalty.
I personally don't care much about clues and all that, so the mechanics of how the cops figure out where the criminals are didn't do anything for me, though I recognize Smith did a competent job of this stuff, just like he does a decent job with the science lectures about sugar molecules and how the curvature of space makes the teleport possible. What interests me in crime stories is the psychology of the characters--the fear of the victims, the evil or warped desires of the criminals, the righteous and perhaps unhealthy anger of the avengers. Unfortunately Smith does very little to give his characters personality--we have little idea what exactly is driving Kingsley to invent the teleport, what drove the criminals to devote their lives to robbing and murdering people, and what drove the lead Fed to become a cop--and Smith doesn't do much with their emotions during the chases and fights, either. So, we'll grade "The Mobius Trail" acceptable.
"The Mobius Trail" has never been reprinted, it seems.
"The Off Season" by Ray Bradbury
(I still remember going to the Virgin Megastore on Union Square to get the Beth Gibbons CD Out of Season when it came out. Good times, good times.)
"The Off Season" is one of the famous Martian Chronicles stories and so has been reprinted a million times in over a dozen languages. As with all three of today's stories, I am reading it in the 1948 magazine via a scan at the internet archive; maybe the story was revised for book publication."The Off Season," like a high proportion of SF stories, portrays human beings as violent hotheaded jerks, contrasting us with some noble aliens with a more admirable psychology and sociology. I guess this story is also a sort of allegory of European conquest of the Americas and maybe Western imperialism in general.
An aggressive and excitable New Yorker and his wife are among the first colonists of Mars. This guy has opened the first hot dog stand on Mars, putting it at the intersection of two ancient Martian highways which he assumes will be used by thousands upon thousands of Earth colonists any moment now. The hot dog stand was built of parts from a crashed rocket, and the sidewalk to it is decorated with broken glass taken from one of the many abandoned Martian cities--I guess we are supposed to see this hot dog guy as a scavenger and a looter. (Ray seems to be taking swipes at New York and business people in this story--ouch!)
Mars is littered with many ancient highways and cities, but less than two hundred actual Martians are left, and Bradbury describes these survivors in a way that makes them seem as brittle and frail as their cities, which collapse at the slightest blow. Some of these Martians try to talk to the hot dog man, but he is dismissive of them; when one produces an item from his robe the Earthman, thinking it a weapon, overreacts, whipping out his own gun and killing the innocent native. The Earth couple flees in a stolen Martian sailboat that travels over the dry ocean basins, and Martians take up the pursuit in similar boats. With his slug pistol the New Yorker destroys those fragile Martian cities they sail by and kills some of his pursuers but the Terrans are finally caught; the peace-loving Martians, however, do not harm them physically. Instead they formally, and apparently sarcastically, award the hot dog man ownership of half of the planet; then they encourage him to get his restaurant ready, as it is going to be a big important night, which they know because with their telepathy they always know what is going on on Earth. The eager beaver restauranteur assumes the big event is going to be the arrival of a fleet of rockets full of hungry customers, but that night, as the first page of the story foreshadowed (and Thrilling Wonder Stories' editorial spoiled), Earth is destroyed in a nuclear war--making a mistake or just exercising poetic license, Bradbury has his characters watch the Earth go to pieces from the surface of the red planet with their naked eyes.
Acceptable.
**********
Today's stories are not bad, but they are not as good as the three stories from Thrilling Wonder December '48 that we read for our last blogpost; I feel like there was a lot more going on in those stories, and that they had more human feeling and that they concluded in a satisfying way. Bradbury's story is well put together, but do I need another of these humans-are-jerks anti-imperialism stories? Not really. Hubbard's story follows the form of the commando adventure story, and Smith's that of the hard-boiled crime story, but then they fail to deliver on the promises of those conventional templates without actually subverting their conventions in a way that is interesting or exciting.
Still, this is a great issue of Thrilling Wonder and if I had a George Petty high ball glass I would raise it in honor of all the people who contributed to it.
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