Amazing, November 1938: T McClusky, E Hamilton and J R Fearn

In our last episode we took a look at the August 1938 issue of Amazing, and remarked that in its fiction and in its cover illustration it seemed to be appealing to readers' interest in fetishistic sex and gruesome violence, depicting women in bondage, women under threat of torture and rape, and, among other things, a recent college grad's efforts to seduce a married woman.  Let's take a look at the November ish of Amazing from that year, which has a cover depicting some poor bastard being reduced to a mere skeleton by a ray projector wielded by a cackling maniac.  At least that is what it looks like is going on to me--we won't be reading the story which inspired the cover, so we may never know exactly what is up.

We noted when we read that August issue that towering SF editor Donald Wollheim, I guess 24 at the time, wrote in to Amazing to complain about what he considered anti-socialist stories appearing in the mag, Wollheim remarking that all the great writers and scientists are socialists and I guess supposing that Amazing should follow suit.  In this November issue some correspondents reply to Wollheim.  Bob Johnson points out that many SF stories support socialism and suggests that stories with a different attitude are in fact welcome outliers, while Louis Goldstone argues that many SF stories have depicted abuses by aristocrats and capitalists, and there is no reason abuses by socialists shouldn't also be depicted.  In one portion of a long letter Isaac Asimov, while not directly mentioning Wollheim or socialism, does complain that too many SF stories spend precious column inches on discussions of politics in general and criticism of despotism in particular, presenting as an example a story from the October issue, "Horror's Head" by Roger Sherman Hoar/Ralph Milne Farley, published under the pen name Lieutenant John Pease.  Asimov judges that "Horror's Head" is not primarily a science story but an attack on the Soviet Union and emphatically states that it is the worst story he has read in a long time.  I was disappointed in editor Raymond Palmer's limp response to Wollheim back in August, but this time around Ray steps up, suggesting in his reply to Asimov that the Soviet Union actually is pretty bad and arguing that literature often addresses the problem of despotism and the response to tyranny is a worthy topic for SF.

We'll read three pieces of fiction from this issue: another piece by Thorp McClusky, one by our longtime friend Edmond Hamilton, and one by a British writer whom I have never read, a man who seems to have a poor reputation, John Russell Fearn.

"Monstrosity of Evolution" by Thorp McClusky

Police Commissioner Charles Ethredge has known Dr. Raymond Traffarn for twenty years, though two years have passed since he last saw the scientist.  As "Monstrosity of Evolution" begins Traffarn arrives in town with an invalided aunt; she is confined to a wheelchair and her face is obscured by a veil.  Ethredge gets a creepy vibe about this aunt he has never heard of before, as does his beautiful wife, Mary.  The Doctor and this mysterious aunt buy an estate in an exclusive suburb nearby, but almost never visit the Ethredges; as the months go by, Mary does a little detective work on this aunt, and comes to the conclusion that she is no aunt at all--in fact, no human being at all!  Mary also connects Traffarn and this weird aunt to the recent series of disappearances of young women that have been taking place near the Traffarns' new digs.  I know it sounds like Ethredge's wife is doing his job for him, but please note that the tony suburb where inhuman aunt are residing and hot chicks are disappearing is outside of Ethredge's jurisdiction.

In Chapter III ("Monstrosity of Evolution" has eight chapters) Ethredge tosses all legal restraint aside and discusses the case with his best man, Peters of Homicide, and in Chapter IV the two cops put into action their constitutionally questionable plan to solve these weird mysteries.  Chuck and Mary Ethredge pay an unexpected visit to the Traffarn estate, and while they are inside being told by Doc Ray that he's too busy to spend the evening with them, Peters sneaks out of the backseat of the Ethredge car and through the unlocked front door so he can investigate the house without a warrant.  What Peters finds, the details of which are kept from us readers, drives him to the very limits of sanity!

In Chapter V we learn what is going on when Ethredge, having received no word from Peter for over nine hours, visits the Traffarn estate again and gets the inside scoop from Doc Ray Traffarn himself.  The Doc has harnessed cosmic rays in order to induce rapid evolutionary changes in human beings!  By playing the rays over himself he has increased his intelligence as well as caused his feet to become hooves!  Gross!  

The monster that has been impersonating Doc Ray's fictional aunt reveals itself--it is the most radical of the Doc's experiments, a Canadian man who has been artificially evolved five-hundred-million years!  A super-genius three feet tall, this freak's noseless and toothless head is foot high.  Super gross!  Super Canuck has hypnotic powers, so when Ethredge reflexively whips out his pistol to cleanse the world of its polluting presence he is powerless to pull the trigger. 

Ray and the creature who graduated from test subject to absolute master, Canada's finest circa year 500,000,000 A.D., raised money to buy this estate by selling an intelligence-boosting service to wealthy men.  And they most definitely are behind the kidnappings of all those young women--they are going to evolve the girls and then breed them with the Canadian fiend to see if the new traits brought out by the radiation are heritable!  Nasty!

Ethredge is unable to resist the telepathic command to accompany Doc Ray and the freak to the room where the girls and Peters are suspended naked in vertical glass tubes, being bathed in cosmic rays--it will be months before the girls are as evolved as the obscene little diable and the breeding experiments can begin.

We've read stories in which radiation causes individuals to evolve (like Edmond Hamilton's 1931 "The Man Who Evolved") before, and I always complain that these authors seem to think evolution is an inevitable and predictable process that follows a map inscribed in your DNA instead of an interaction between random mutations and the environment via natural selection.  (Let's put aside the silliness of radiation making your own body change instead of changing the characteristics of your descendants.)  McClusky--and the editor in some of this story's footnotes--actually integrate these sorts of criticisms into "Monstrosity of Evolution."

Under hypnotic control, Ethredge is disrobing to climb into a tube of his own when Mary busts into the room waving around a .25.  Alas, before she can plug some .25 caliber holes in the man of the future, he paralyzes her via his telepathic power and Doc Ray takes her pistol.  The cruel genius then toys with Mary, letting her beg for mercy.  But this is his mistake!  Mary explains that the evolution they are inducing, totally unmoored from changes in the environment, is bogus, and the mutants it produces will not be suited to the Earth's future environment and so will not endure.  And besides, such activity is a blasphemy against God, in whom Mary believes even if the diminutive super genius scoffs.   

Mary's eloquence opens Doctor Ray's eyes and he rebels against the monster he created; fruitlessly at first, but when the police arrive they distract the monster and its telepathic hold on Doc Ray lessens to the extent that Ray can kill him with Mary's automatic.  Peter and the girls are released from their giant test tubes and as the story ends the Ethredges wonder how the girls' increased intelligence will change their lives.

McClusky wrote several Ethredge and Peters stories and most of them were reprinted in the 1975 McClusky collection Loot of the Vampire, but "Monstrosity of Evolution" was left out of that book and seems to have never been reprinted.  The story is pretty poor--the characters have no personality, the style is bland, it feels long, and the resolution of the plot is not very satisfying, relying as it does on the actions of the police and the secondary villain.  Marginal thumbs down.  

"The Man Who Lived Twice" by Edmond Hamilton 

Here we have yet another Edmond Hamilton story about a guy who finds himself in an alien world where he gets involved in the wars of some hot chick who falls in love with him.  "The Man Who Lived Twice" includes fun science fiction concepts and is written in a brisk style and populated by characters who have clear motives and act in a way that is rational and compelling, so I enjoyed it, but it could have used a little editing before seeing print--besides typos, there is an army that marches like 50 miles in a few hours; maybe that "fifty" is a typo for "five?"

Nick Riley is a happy go lucky sort of guy with no family or other ties who applies for a job as a chauffeur at the Long Island residence of some wealthy scientist.  It's a trap!  The mad scientist doesn't need a chauffeur--he just wants a guy nobody will miss upon whom to experiment!  This junior league Frankenstein has kept animal brains alive in a serum, and wants to see if he can do the same with a human brain!

Our boy Nick wakes up to find he is in another body-- 300 years in the future!  A creepy bureaucrat tells him a wild story.  In the 21st century, a small European country invaded and conquered the United States, driving the American people into a primitive subterranean existence--for two hundred years the descendants of Riley's nation have been troglodytes at best, slaves to foreign overlords at worst!  America's foreign ruling class are known as the Air Lords--these settler colonialists keep down the indigenes with their invincible air force, the warplanes of which are powered by a generator station in New York that wirelessly transmits energy to them, radio style.  

Earlier today one of the troglodyte slaves, a beautiful brunette girl, acquired an electric pistol and shot the dictator of this dystopian authoritarian America in the back--the electric bolt ruined the brain of the chief of the Air Lords, killing him, but left his body essentially intact.  The creepy bureaucrat realized that the next dictator wouldn't retain him as top advisor, so he had Nick's brain, which had been residing in its serum bath, alive, in a science museum for three centuries, installed in the dictator's skull.  Nick has little choice but to impersonate the recently deceased ruler--if anybody realizes he is an American imposter he will be killed.

Nick is a patriotic guy and passionately identifies with the rightful rulers of America who are currently living in caves even though he has never met any of them, and is determined to overthrow the Air Lords and put those he considers of his own race back in charge of the land he loves.  And he does so by contacting the native underground through the brunette assassin and outfighting and outwitting the various officials and the host of nameless soldiers and technicians who stand between him and the power transmitter; he grounds the Air Lord air force by deactivating the transmitter and an army of the subterraneans storms New York City and massacres the foreign overlords.  As the story ends it is clear Nick is the new ruler of America and will marry that spunky trigger happy brunette.

There are plot holes, and nowadays people might be uncomfortable with a story in which the animating principle of many of the characters--both heroes and villains--is loyalty to his or her "race," but "The Man Who Lived Twice" is fun and I am giving it a thumbs up.  Lefties might interpret this story as a subtle criticism of European conquest of the Americas, and Hamilton does have a record of penning anti-imperialist stories (see Hamilton's 1931 "Conquest of Two Worlds.")    

"The Man Who Lived Twice" would remerge in a 1969 issue of the reprint magazine Science Fiction Adventure Classics.

"The Secret of the Ring" by John Russel Fearn 

Fearn was a prolific producer of genre fiction whose work often appeared under pseudonyms like Vargo Statten; "The Secret of the Ring" is credited here in Amazing to Thornton Ayre.  "The Secret of the Ring" would go on to be reprinted in later issues of Amazing as well as a 1971 issue of Science Fiction Adventure Classics.  I have a sense that Fearn's reputation is a bad one, but everybody deserves a chance and sometimes I like authors who have many detractors (sui generis writers like MPorcius favorites van Vogt and Malzberg are obvious examples, and even iconic figures like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Robert A. Heinlein go in and out of fashion and attract passionate criticism) so we'll see.  

It is the high-tech future--the 1960s!  Elsa Dallaway is head of the Stratosphere Corporation, a New York-based firm founded by her dearly departed Dad back in 1950.  The corporation operates spherical aircraft that can soar one hundred miles above the Earth's surface where they can observe weather phenomena from the other side and monitor cosmic rays.  Elsa's biggest client, the US government, makes a desperate call for information about the current spike in extreme weather and destructive seismic and volcanic activity that is killing thousands of people world-wide.  Elsa's fiancé, Terry Marsden, is also the Stratosphere Corp's top pilot, and she joins him on a trip up up up up up as his copilot because his usual mate is delayed by an automobile accident.

While up above the clouds, Elsa and Terry talk about the strange ring Elsa wears.  Given to her by her now-dead mother six years ago, the ring has a stone that reflects light brilliantly, a stone no scientist has been able to identify.  

Elsa falls ill--has she been overcome by cosmic rays?  Terry rushes his fiancé to the hospital, but within a day she is dead of heart failure!  Terry becomes chief of Strat Corp and has his hands full as they continue to respond to the natural disasters that are threatening civilization; for example, a hundred of the globular aircraft are sent to Africa to rescue people when the Mediterranean overflows its banks and floods Libya, Niger and Nigeria.

While South America and the Western United States are sinking beneath the waves, Terry gets a message from the Sahara from his replacement as top pilot--this flyboy has spotted a mysterious metal dome in the desert and Terry and SC's top scientist fly out in one of the spheres to study it.  The dome turns out to be the end of a lozenge-shaped space ship over 100 feet long buried in the sand long long ago.  Our heroes cut a hole in its hull and descend to the sealed control room, where they find a prone motionless woman--a woman who looks just like Elsa!  She even wears Elsa's mysterious ring!  The reintroduction of air to the ship's cockpit causes the inert woman's body and clothes disintegrate into dust, leaving only the ring behind.

By cutting open things, conducting tests on things, and deciphering things, the scientists of SC figure everything out and resolve the plot.  Three thousand years ago a high-tech civilization thrived (throve?) in what is now the Sahara.  Every three thousand years the pressures inside the Earth boil over and cause cataclysmic earthquakes and hurricanes that remake the surface of this big blue marble and threaten to wipe out any civilizations currently living on it.  When these Saharans faced such natural disasters, they dug a shaft down to the Earth's core, thinking to relieve the pressure and short circuit the cataclysm.  They kept the shaft capped, thinking to release the pressure at just the right moment.  Another of their wild ideas was to put a spaceship in the mouth of this ginormous safety valve, like the bullet in a gun or the dart in a blowpipe--when the pressure was released from the Earth's core, it would hurl the space ship to Venus.  To survive the trip to Venus, the people in the ship would wear special rings; when exposed to the cosmic rays above the troposphere, these rings would drug the passengers into suspended animation.  On arrival at Venus a radio signal would trigger the rings to wake up the sleepers with a different drug.

For some reason, the safety valve was never opened and the ship was never launched to Venus, even though one person--the Elsa lookalike--had boarded the ship.  The hurricanes brought sand to the Sahara that buried the city until this current bout of seismic activity uncovered it.  Elsa is the reincarnation of that woman who was left alone in the ship to die, and somehow the fates guided one of those rings to her--obviously she is not dead, but just in suspended animation in her tomb.  

The white lab coat crew figures out the radio frequency that both uncaps the pressure valve and activates the rings' wakey wakey subroutine, and they use it to revive Terry's fiancé, send the now empty space ship to Venus, and end the current tectonic spasms.

This story isn't terrible, but the style, characters and atmosphere are pretty mediocre.  The science content is not bad, but I am not crazy about these plots in which the antagonist is not a person or animal but instead a natural force.  Neither do I appreciate plots in which it is secondary and minor characters and not the principals who overcome the obstacles; Elsa and Terry actually do nothing to solve the mystery and save the world, and their love plot is parallel to the cataclysm/space ship plot rather than intertwined with it and they could be removed from the story entirely.  As for the space ship itself, it is a tease, like a gun that doesn't go off--why include a space ship launch in a story if nobody is on the ship?

We'll say "The Secret of the Ring" is barely acceptable.     

**********

Hamilton's is the best of the three, the most professional and competent and the best at handling the characters--they have personalities and these personalities actually drive the plot.  The characters in the McClusky and Fearn stories are lacking in life and are more like spectators than the engines that propel the stories in which they appear.  

Still more 1930s shenanigans await in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.