"The Cosmic Pantograph" by Edmond Hamilton (1935)
A few years ago Felton was a college student; one of his professors, Robine, had a habit of lecturing on the nature of the universe, reminding his students that one day the sun would grow cold, that eventually the entire universe will grow cold as all the stars die, and that mankind would thus be doomed. Felton, the optimist, insisted that ever-innovative mankind would figure out a way to endure any such challenge.
Today, Robine has summoned Felton to his mansion with the promise that his former will pupil will be able to see the end of the human race! Robine's huge basement contains a tremendous and complex machine--a machine which can detect the vibrations of every single atom in the universe, catalog them, and then reproduce them in tiny size inside a big metal sphere. In this sphere, the machine can create another universe identical to the real universe, but much smaller! Endorsing the determinist philosophies of such men as Spinoza and d'Holbach, Robine says that since the duplicate universe is identical to the real universe, its history will follow exactly the same course as the real universe. Critically, because it is so much smaller, time moves more quickly in the duplicate universe, millions of years passing in one minute. This means that Felton and Robine can observe the duplicate universe through electromicroscopes and watch the inevitable future unfold! Will the natural decay of the stars lead to the extinction of mankind, or will Man triumph over this cosmic adversity and endure?
Thumbs up for this effort to blow your mind and teach you various philosophical and astronomical principles. "The Cosmic Pantograph" doesn't seem to have been printed a third time in the language of William Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson, but our friends over in Germany recognized its merit and republished it in a magazine in 1959 and in an anthology with a Frank Frazetta cover in 1974.
"Trail Blazer" by Raymond Z. Gallun (1951)
I liked almost all of these stories, and Andre Norton chose to include "Trail Blazer" in her anthology Space Pioneers, so we have every reason to expect I will like "Trail Blazer."
"Trail Blazer" is a good adventure story, and also provides grist for the mills of all you people out there interested in identity politics, decolonization, subaltern studies, and all that, because at the center of the story Gallun places a sympathetic Native American character. Joe Whiteskunk is more or less the hero of the story, but his halting English and subordinate status may rankle the sensibilities of the more advanced 21st-century readers, and I cannot deny that Joe is portrayed as a strange and inscrutable "other" who has access to knowledge and abilities out of reach of white people.
Our narrator is Dave the engineer, a recent college graduate; his twin brother Frank has also recently secured an engineering degree. Their father has recently died, leaving the twins the family's southwestern ranch, from which they can see the rockets taking off that are carrying adventurous young men to the new lunar colony. Frank and the narrator are eager to join the space colonization effort, but what to do about Joe Whiteskunk, the beloved farmhand who taught them how to shoot and to ride, but is sixty-five years old and maybe a little dimwitted, or at least perplexed by modern life? Joe wants to come with the boys into space, but of course that is impossible--or is it?
Like something in a kid's adventure story, or on the news when the United States abandons its friends in Afghanistan to the tender mercies of the Taliban, Joe takes the dangerous expedient of stowing away in the unheated cargo hold of the rocket that carries Dave and Frank to the Moon. Somehow the Indian survives this ordeal--it is implied that, as a primitive man in touch with the natural world, he has instinctual wisdom that saved him. Anyway, Joe Whiteskunk, unlettered senior-citizen Indian, is on the moon among all the college grads, scientists and soldiers. At first the brass wants to send him back home, but when they realize Joe is an expert tracker, they enlist him in the effort to investigate some mysterious marks on the lunar surface that Joe calls "devil tracks."
Joe leads the brothers and a military officer around the lunar surface, following the tracks, and they discover physical evidence that thousands of years ago the Moon was a battleground fought over by Martians and the natives of the asteroid belt, then an intact planet. Gallun presents this ancient war which lead to the destruction of the planet between Mars and Jupiter as a cautionary tale for readers living through tensions between the Western democracies and the communist tyrannies of the East.*
Joe recovers all manner of technological and cultural treasures left on Luna by the Martians and Asteroidians, and then, on a solo mission, disappears. Months later Dave and Frank are selected for the crew of a joint US-Soviet mission to Mars; there is an accident and it looks like they will die on Mars. But then Joe Whiteskunk shows up to save them! The cause of Joe's disappearance was his discovery, and then accidental activation, of a Martian spaceship! The ship's automatic systems brought him from the Moon to the Red Planet where his fieldcraft, and use of ancient Martian technology, enabled him to survive, and proves to be the salvation of the twins and their comrades.
The story ends on a positive note as the West and the Reds work together to colonize Mars and Dave has hopes Earthmen will succeed in exploring the galaxy peacefully and avoiding the catastrophic fate of the warring Martians and Asteroidians.
Thumbs up!
*Gallun never uses words like "communism" or "the Soviet Union" but makes it clear who he means.
"The Reporter" by Chad Oliver
I've read quite a few stories by Oliver over this blog's life, and many times Oliver has made me groan with his denunciations of modern life and romanticizing of life as a stone age savage. (Links to sample groans: "Rite of Passage;" "The Marginal Man.") Well, Oliver is making me groan again, this time because "The Reporter" is a lame "meta," "recursive" joke story. Thumbs down!
George Hartley is a journalist on Mars. When Terrans first explored and colonized Mars, there were plenty of stories for Hartley to write about, but it turned out that the native Martian civilization was extinct and there is now no excitement, so Hartley hates his job, wishes he was on Venus where there are lots of monsters and intelligent natives to write about, and spends his time in a booze hall smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey.
Another journalist, a photographer, introduces himself to Hartley and they drink and smoke together and moan about how hard it is to be a journalist. Hartley tells a long story, paraphrasing another reporter's final dispatch before losing his job. Oliver makes it explicit that the story this third journalist filed and which ruined his career is a parody of a traditional SF adventure story; Hartley suggests the disgraced reporter made up the story, basing it on old SF magazines. The story was about how the reporter discovered that the Martians were not in fact extinct at all, but, because they are peaceful types unable to kill, were hiding from the human colonizers in an underground city; the reporter was shown around their subterranean metropolis and in his story wrote at length about their technology.
The obvious central joke of "The Reporter" is that the disgraced reporter's story was all true, and the man who introduced himself to Hartley as a photographer is in fact a Martian reporter who has come to the surface to collect material for an article of his own.
A waste of time--at least Oliver's stories about how we would be happier with no books and no industry push some kind of controversial ethos that readers can engage with; this story is just a feeble in-joke for SF fans. "The Reporter," understandably, has never been reprinted.
"Displaced Person" by Mack Reynolds (1951)
Reynolds is a leftist among whose claims to fame are the facts that he based much of his science fiction on speculations about political economy and that he was very widely travelled and wrote travel articles for men's magazines. To me, his writing generally seems pretty lame, but he was a success, often appearing in Astounding and even coming in first in some kind of survey of readers of Galaxy and If. (Sample my attacks on Reynolds' work and my jocular commentary on his wild and crazy career at these links: Commune 2000 A.D., "Revolution," "Freedom," "Subversive," and "Pacifist," "Compounded Interest," "The Business, As Usual," "Your Soul Comes C.O.D.," and "Fad.") Like Oliver's "The Reporter," it seems that "Displaced Person" has never escaped the confines of the Fall 1951 issue of Fantastic Story, so again we find ourselves at MPorcius Fiction Log sampling the deep cuts!
"Displaced Person" doesn't have anything to do with utopias or socialism or economic systems, so is perhaps a rarity in Reynolds' body of work. Instead, it is a competent filler story with a predictable twist ending.
Four veterans of wartime service in the space navy, pilots, are sitting around drinking. There are actually only a small number of pilots in the space navy, so it is noteworthy that three of the men have never met the fourth. The fourth explains why, telling what amounts to a little bit of military fiction.
Flying a one-man patrol ship, he detected and was pursued into deep space, far from Earth, by the enemy. He used up all his conventional fuel and all his food in the long chase, so he was basically doomed when the enemy gave up the chase--he had no safe way of getting back to a Terran base before he starved. The only thing he could do was push the ship's warp drive to forbidden limits, so that he would exceed the speed of light, an act that is practically suicidal.
As was foreshadowed in discussions of this warp drive and the speed of light earlier in the story, the final twist is that this pilot, by exceeding the speed of light, propelled himself into another space-time continuum, the universe of the three other pilots, which is quite similar to his home universe.
Acceptable filler; better than a lot of Reynolds' work!
**********
Hamilton and Gallun deliver good stories that speculate about the nature of human history and are full of science; Oliver and Reynolds just try to produce entertaining stories, and Reynolds at least doesn't embarrass himself.
I think this is our sixth blog post in a row to focus on SF short stories. Our next blog post will mix things up a bit, as we read a novel which I suspect will lack such conventional SF elements as space travel, black magic, the living dead, aliens and speculations on what the future will be like. Stay tuned!
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