"...Sonny Belknap has no job except his writing & revision; but as in my own case, his extremely low fund of nervous & physical energy makes this absolutely all he can handle in the hours he is able to devote to work. He writes incessantly, but meets with consistent rejections from most magazines. Others in his position might turn to something else, but he doggedly adheres to a perhaps vain hope that he will eventually stumble on the formula which opens editorial gates to a certain brand of hokum."
--H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, March 25, 1932
One magazine that opened its editorial gates to Frank Belknap Long was Astounding; Long had like two dozen stories printed in the most important science fiction magazine of the 1930s and 1940s, spanning the pre-Golden Age era of editor F. Orlin Tremaine and the Golden Age editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr., and I have read a proportion of them. Below find a list of the Long stories from 1930s and 1940s issues of Astounding that I have blogged about, with links to my perhaps banal, perhaps idiosyncratic, comments on them.
Frank Belknap Long in Astounding, editor F. Orlin Tremaine
1935
Frank Belknap Long in Astounding, editor John W. Campbell, Jr.
1944
1945
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Today we put three more stories by "low energy Frank" under the MPorcius microscope, stories published in Astounding in the period 1946-47.
"The Critters" (1945)
Most of "The Critters" consists of conversation between two human survivors, decades after the Venusian conquest of Earth--we learn most of that history stuff above in their dialogue. One is an old man who lives in the hills; in a secluded spot, he has cultivated a fair-sized farm for himself and lives a relatively peaceful and secure life--four times in 40 years Venusians have come by and burned his farm and his huts, but each time he has hid from them and then reemerged to rebuild. The other guy is middle-aged, one of the last humans with any technical or medical knowledge. He has a pregnant wife and has no fixed address, and is asking the old geez if he can take refuge on his farm. What we readers learn is that this smarty smart has collected bits and pieces from the ruined cities and thinks, if left alone for some months, he can develop the super weapon that can liberate mother Earth from the tentacles of the Venusians! You see, in the late 20th century, just before the conquest, a form of psychiatric therapy was developed that consisted of shooting a beam into your head to alter your psychology. Our hero thinks he can build such a device and calibrate it to neutralize the Venusians from a long distance.
The climax of the story comes when this would-be savior and his wife are in a hut on the farm and a Venusian walks in. In a close range one-on-one fight, a Venusian always beats a human, even when the human has a gun. Is our hero doomed? No! The old geez in his own right is an expert in Venusian psychology, and he has set a "trap" in the hut against just such an eventuality. When the door to the hut opens it activates a 19th-century cuckoo clock. The Venusian is so distracted by this complex piece of machinery that it ignores the humans in the hut and takes away the clock to study. Remember, the aliens are fascinated by mechanical devices and think of us as annoying bugs--if you found a bug and a treasure in a room, wouldn't you take the treasure away and ignore the bug?
Long includes a superfluous twist ending that had me scratching my noggin in perplexity, revealing that the old guy is blind. I guess we are supposed to be amazed by how this guy knows his land so well he can farm it even though he has been sightless for like 14 years, and it is amazing to hear he is blind, because early in the story he identifies the color of the technician's boots and says that he likes to sit down on a crag and look down over his land.
I kind of like this one, because the aliens really are alien, and not just the generic baddies or goodies we find in so much SF, the space Nazis and space pirates and space commies and space hippies who are there to serve as a satire or allegory of Earth politics or just to push our easily pushed buttons. "The Critters" definitely has odd paragraphs that are confusing and seem to me to be unnecessary, but they don't cripple the story.
Besides the Long collection Rim of the Unknown, "The Critters" shows up in an anthology edited by August Derleth, The Outer Reaches, an abridged version of which appeared in Britain as The Time of Infinity.
"A Guest in the House" (1946)
The previous tenant of the house was a physics professor, and down in the damp basement Roger discovers a vast collection of elaborate and rusty machinery. He accidentally activates this equipment and the house is propelled half a million years into the future. Lazily, Long offers us readers no view of the future of 500,000 years from now, telling us that all the Shevlins can see out their windows is a dense fog.
A dwarfish man with an oversized cranium emerges from the fog and shows himself in by rendering the house's wall permeable t his passage with is little wand or rod. This device can manipulate matter and energy at the atomic level and so serves as a universal tool and a weapon and shield that renders him invincible and invulnerable to 20th-century people and enables the future man to make himself master of the house. The people of his time have not yet developed time travel, and he wants to figure out how the rusty conglomeration of machinery in the basement works. He hints to the Shevlins that once they have mastered time travel the people of this future are going to conquer the 20th century and make sure people start behaving; after all, our wars and so forth have caused all manner of trouble. Roger and Elsie are not thrilled with the idea of the Earth being ruled by these little weirdos; based on her experience with this one, Elsie believes the future people are "petulant...capricious...fretful...sour little spinsters...."
There are plenty of lame jokes before we get there, but in the climax of the story the future man, intently working on the times travel equipment, lays aside the wand and Roger seizes it. The cellar goes dark, and it looks like Roger is doomed, because he really doesn't know how to use the wand, and using it wrongly might blow up the house or the entire Earth, and the future man, though small, can see in the dark and has other mutant powers. But before the future man can slay dear old Dad, Roger's nine-year-old son saves the day. As foreshadowed, Junior is himself a mutant, one of the first in the long line of development which will, after thousands of years, culminate in such men as the one he is right now wrestling in the dark basement! Junior can see in the dark and after subduing the future man he and Dad force him to leave the house. Junior also has an IQ of 270 and has been spying on the future man's work on the time travel machinery, so he knows how to pilot the house back to the 20th century. Our world is saved from tyranny and our wars can go on as scheduled!
The jokes in "A Guest on the House" revolve largely around the contrast between 20th-century and 5,020th-century attitudes about women and children, and may interest scholars of depictions of women and the family in SF. We might also consider that the revelation in the end that Junior is a mutant genius with super powers means that "A Guest in the House" is one of those homo superior stories in which there is tension between homo sapiens parents and their mutant children; Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore wrote a bunch of these, like "When the Bough Breaks," which I called a "Golden Age classic" and "Absalom," which I thought "pretty good."
"A Guest in the House" moves along smoothly, but it is not as good as the aforementioned Kuttner and Moore tales; I'm judging it acceptable. (One of the First World problems I am suffering while reading these Frank Belknap Long stories from Astounding is that I keep being reminded of better writers than Long, like Kuttner and Moore and A. E. van Vogt, and wondering why I am not reading them instead.)
August Derleth did Long a solid and included "A Guest in the House" in his anthology Strange Ports of Call and I suppose he was doing the rest of the SF community a favor as well because Long has much worse stories than this one.
"Collector's Item" (1947)
Neville, an inventor who is paranoid and hypochondriacal, stuck in a bad marriage and in and out of the loony bin, is the star of the first part of the story. He has invented a time-travelling phonograph! The idea is to send the device into the future, where it will record sounds, and then return to the 20th century, where the record will be played and insight gained about the future.
The next part of the story takes place in the future, like 600 years from now. We learn that in the 20th century a scientist, Medlar, invented a force field that has rendered missiles impotent and prevented nuclear war for those 600 years. But a guy has just invented a new weapon that can penetrate the Medlar force field. Long asserts the belief in this story that humans are so violent they will inevitably destroy the world if given access to operable super weapons, and after several pages of dialogue and diplomacy and a maudlin scene in which a guy watches his son play with his super duper future toys we get a scene of a city being destroyed by the new weapon.
Atomic energy and man's innate combativeness were irreconcilable. The human animal went at it hammer and tongs--every instant of every hour. Quarrelling with warring elements in himself, and projecting that inner conflict to others also at war with themselves.
Then comes one of the multiple crazy and unbelievable coincidences upon which this story's plot rests. The time travelling record player appears in the room of the guy who invented the weapon that can penetrate the Medlar field, in the shadows behind him so he can't see it. Moved by the knowledge that his invention has destroyed a city, the guy recites out loud the formula for the super weapon.
Our next scene is back in the 20th century, with the force field inventor, Medlar. Medlar is not only a leading physicist, but a fan of eccentric and esoteric music. Taking a break from working on his not quite completed force field, he is at a record store, looking at the box in the back of the store of strange unclassifiable records. He finds one that has no label but is made of a different material than your typical record. It turns out that Neville has gone bonkers and been institutionalized and his wife has sold all his belongings, and this is the record with the super weapon formula of the future. When Medlar hears it he realizes his force field project is futile, and abandons it. He has a photographic memory and immediately telephones his assistant from a phone across the street from the record store and recites the formula to him, making inevitable the development of the super weapon. Then on the way back to the record store Medlar is hit by truck and killed.
The story is not over! The record goes back into the miscellaneous bin and is purchased by a jazz aficionado who assumes it is a jazz recording. Long gives us a long digression about jazz that is bewildering and totally extraneous. Then at a big dance party the mystery record is played. The record from the future somehow conveys to listeners the feeling of dread that is in the air in that future world in which nuclear weapons, once neutralized, are now in use, chilling the revelers. The end.
"Collector's Item" has never been anthologized and has never appeared in a Long collection printed on paper. It was reprinted in 1948, however, in a British edition of Astounding; it seems the UK edition of Astounding was quite different from its American parent, each issue consisting of an array of reprints from different issues of the US magazine.
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In a 1970s interview, Frank Belknap Long told Stuart D. Schiff that he believed his best short work was the stories he sold to John W. Campbell, Jr. for 1940s issues of Unknown and Astounding. We have now read most of those stories, six from Unknown and nine from Astounding. If we break these stories into three broad categories of good, acceptable and bad, we've got four good ones, five acceptable ones and six bad ones, in my opinion, at least.
A fun little exploration of an intersection of the Lovecraft Circle and the flagship of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. We'll be returning to Astounding and to the vast body of work of "Sonny Belknap," of course, but before then expect explorations of other realms here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
Like you, I've had mixed experiences reading Frank Belknap Long. But I consider Long's "The Hounds of Tindalos" one of the best Lovecraft pastiches ever!
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