It's time to head back to the 1930s, spacefarers! To sign on to this exploratory expedition you can spend $100 on ebay for a copy of the December 1936 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, or just do what I am going to do, click on over to the internet archive, world's greatest website, to read a scanned copy of "The Magazine of Prophetic Fiction" whose contents are "Stranger Than Truth."
This issue has lots of great ads that will guide you to the solutions of your romantic problems. Pimples? Eat three cakes of Fleischman's Yeast a day. (Mmmmm...cake.) Too skinny to pick up chicks? Start taking regular doses of Ironized Yeast tablets, made from "special cultured ale yeast imported from Europe." (Better stock up, I have a feeling the supply chain from Europe is about to be seriously disrupted.) Once you've cleared your skin and packed on the pounds, if you still aren't a hit at parties you can learn how to play the piano--"in just a few months"!--via the U. S. School of Music's special "short cut" method; once you know how to tickle those ivories, you'll be surrounded by "admiring throngs."
Now that your social life is in order you probably need some alone time; all those parties and dates can tire a guy out! Let's kick back and read some of the fiction in this ish of Thrilling Wonder, namely the stories contributed by Edmond Hamilton, Ray Cummings and Raymond Z. Gallun. We've already read the John W. Campbell, Jr. story from this issue, "The Brain Stealers of Mars."
"Mutiny on Europa" by Edmond Hamilton
The jungle moon of Europa is Earth's furthest-flung outpost, a penal colony where the solar system's worst criminals are forced to work in the mines! Our narrator is one of those convicts, Captain John Allan, an officer of the colonial service who was wrongfully convicted of the crime of selling weapons to Venusians! As our story begins, Allan is toiling away in the mines when a party on a tour of the colony comes by; among the tourists is an adorable young woman, Nura Cain, and her fiancé--Carse Lasser, the very officer who framed Allan!
Driven by an obsessive desire for vengeance on Lasser, Allan leads an escape which involves digging a tunnel under the deadly force screen that surrounds the prison barracks and then sneaking up on the guards and staff. Once the mutineers are in total control of the colony, Allan challenges Lasser to a duel to the death, but seconds before the death match begins, the native Europans attack the colony en masse and all the humans have to fall back behind that force screen. The convicts figure out how to escape to the rocket ship that brought Nura Cain and Carse Lasser, but the governor and the other colonial service personnel--and even the woman Nura Cain!--refuse to abandon Europa. In the end, Allan uses his leadership ability and ingenuity to preserve the colony; luckily for Allan, as Lasser lays dying, a Europan spear in his side, he confesses his crime to the governor and Nura Cain and Allan's record is cleared. Allan is going to return to the Colonial Service and it looks like he might start making time with Nura Cain himself!
Hamilton does a good job of depicting the narrator's single-minded lust for revenge--he's like the protagonist of a hard-boiled detective story--and with the escape attempt and the fight with the flipper-handed, spear-throwing natives. So this is an entertaining tale of violence.
Another thing to consider is that "Mutiny on Europa" is another of Hamilton's nuanced or skeptical takes on space exploration and space imperialism, like "What's It Like Out There?" and "A Conquest of Two Worlds." Allan gives a whole speech about he devoted his life to the Colonial Service and Earth and he was betrayed by them, though in the end he does realize his duty lies with the service and the people of Earth and he returns to the fold. In the "The Story Behind the Story" section of this issue Hamilton suggests "science fiction has made too light of the terrible difficulties such colonial expeditions will encounter" and goes on to enumerate the psychological and political obstacles he expects explorers and colonists will face when expanding Man's empire to the planets and interacting with alien civilizations.
"Trapped in Eternity" by Ray Cummings
Here's a story that, it appears, has never been reprinted. Cummings had an interesting career and an interesting relationship with Frederik Pohl, as I talked about briefly back in 2018. Let's see what Cummings, some of whose science fiction tales as well as salacious horror stories we have read, is serving up for Thrilling Wonder's audience here.
Our narrator is engaged to a beautiful blonde who is blind. A time machine appears, and the guy from the future who steps out of it immediately takes a shine to blondie. He takes our hero and heroine along with him back to his native time, where/when he gets a surgeon to fix her glazzies, which in the 26th century is trivially easy same-day surgery. But when some of his colleagues suggest to our heroes' benefactor that bringing people from the 1930s to the 2530s is against the rules, said time traveller starts murdering them with a ray gun. He forces the narrator and blondie into the time machine and sets it for the far distant future, saying he is going to sire a new human race with the latter in the period after the one we know and love has gone extinct--the former will make a nice servant. Blondie turns out to be pretty resourceful, and she and the narrator work together to overpower the chronojaunting kidnapper--he turns out to be a cyborg who has gone haywire. The three find themselves at the end of the universe, "a great soundless blurred chaos," where/when the cyborg falls out of the time machine into "the silent grey void of Eternity;" our heroes, we are to presume, will be able to travel back in time and live happily ever after.
The plot of "Trapped in Eternity" is pedestrian and Cummings' writing style doesn't elevate it; instead, the story feels like a draft that needed a little editing. For example, Cummings uses "queer" and "queerly" again and again, like eight times total; he uses the word appropriately enough each time, but the whole story is less than eight pages long, so its overuse is distracting; somebody should have struck out some of those "queer"s with a red pencil and replaced them with "odd"s or "eerie"s or "unnerving"s or something, and it is queer that the editor didn't do it.
Barely acceptable.
"Saturn's Ringmaster" by Raymond Z. Gallun
This is one of those old-fashioned SF stories in which a scientist uses his engineering ability and access to high technology and/or a smart guy uses trickery to overcome plot obstacles and defeat the villain. "Saturn's Ringmaster" also, to use our 21st-century parlance, demonstrates that "diversity is our strength!"
Raff Orethon is a space pilot in the period during which the human race is colonizing the solar system and interacting with the natives of the various planets and moons. He is accompanied by Ruzza, a Uranian scientist, who is a creature like a fuzzy softball with tentacles and eye stalks; Orethon finds Ruzza's physique grotesque and his speech irritating, but the Uranian wants to see the solar system and is paying the Earthman good money to be his passenger, so he puts up with the little weirdo.
Orethon was hired by the government to use his fast space boat to carry a model of a brand new style of forcefield generator from Mars to the colony on Titan, which needs protection from a band of human and Martian space pirates lead by Korse Bradlow, who calls himself "The Ringmaster." But as the story begins Bradlow has shot down Orethon's boat and the odd couple have crash landed on one of the many meteors which make up Saturn's rings. Bradlow seizes the model from the wreckage while Orethon and Ruzza are still recovering, and flies off, leaving them to die. Titan is in trouble, because if the pirates can start deploying that cutting edge force field they will be practically invincible!
Ruzza figures out a way to escape the Rings and catch up to Bradlow and Orethon figures out how to outfight the space pirates; our heroes are saved from death, the colonists on Titan are saved from slavery and Orethon's prejudices against and resentments of Ruzza disappear and a true friendship blossoms between Earther and Uranian.
Not bad. Like Hamilton's "Mutiny on Europa," though, Gallun's "Saturn's Ringmaster" has only ever been reprinted in the first issue of the Argentinian magazine Hombres del Futuro.
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We've already remarked upon the ads in this issue of Thrilling Wonder, but there is still more noteworthy stuff in the magazine beyond the fiction. For example, Henry Kuttner provides a film review, a pretty harsh assessment of Tod Browning's The Devil Doll starring Lionel Barrymore, a picture based upon A. Merrit's Burn, Witch, Burn! And Robert A. Lowndes has a letter critiquing the August and October issues of Thrilling Wonder, and he doesn't pull any punches, for example, declaring the cover of the August issue "vile." He does have plenty of praise, though, including for Stanley Weinbaum and M. Marchioni.
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A decent issue from the entertainment standpoint, and I will point out more explicitly what I have already hinted above; all three of today's stories give us reason to question the caricature you sometimes hear of "old" science fiction that suggests women in SF stories printed before some date are always depicted as helpless and aliens are always depicted as murderous monsters and Earth imperialism is always celebrated. Hamilton's essay in the issue about his story indicates debates about SF's depiction of space exploration were ongoing before World War II. So we've got some diverting adventure material and perhaps some food for thought for the SF historian.
This issue of Thrilling Wonder has been so rewarding that we're going to tackle another in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, so stay tuned!
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