Peter Haining's
The Monster Makers came to mind because its earlier (1974) incarnations reprint Carol Emshwiller's
"Baby," which we just read. ("Baby" was jettisoned when a new edition of
The Monster Makers came out in 1980, but Emshwiller was in good company, as Ray Bradbury's contribution to the '70s printings is also missing. Publishing is a ruthless game!) Besides Emshwiller's, we have also read the story in
The Monster Makers by Richard Matheson,
"Lazarus II," and that by Avram Davidson,
"The Golem." Today let's read stories from Wallace West, Robert Bloch, and Theodore Sturgeon that appeared in the 1974 editions of
The Monster Makers--note that I am reading these three stories from this 1974 book, not the magazine originals or some other reprint
."The Incubator Man" by Wallace West (1928)
West has forty-odd credits at isfdb for short fiction in magazines universally acknowledged as important, like Weird Tales and Astounding, and magazines I like regardless of their critical reputations like Thrilling Wonder and Fantastic Adventures, but it looks like I've never read anything by him. Here we have one of his earliest published stories--let's hope this is the start of a beautiful friendship!
Our narrator is the subject of a radical, and radically successful, experiment. Theorizing that a human being never exposed to germs would enjoy great longevity, a scientist had his son immediately upon birth put in a sealed glass room 100% proof against all microbes and raised without direct physical human contact. Sure enough, the narrator is super healthy. The perfect guinea pig for all manner of experiments, his father fed him a controlled diet and soon learned the best possible combinations of foods to ensure human health--the spread of such information contributed to an impressive increase in human lifespan worldwide. With no distractions, and plenty of time to read and exercise, the narrator becomes the best educated man in the world, and one of the strongest and most handsome. Even at age 150, he looks and feels like a man in his thirties, and academics and government officials from all over come to consult him regularly.
Then, at age 150, a beautiful actress comes to see him through the glass walls of his cage. The narrator falls in love, and can't help but, some days later, break out of his prison. Alas, we learn from a note appended top the narrator's manuscript that the first microbe that got in his body, which had no opportunity to build resistance to attack, killed him before he could reach the actress.
A fun little story. "The Incubator Man" debuted in an issue of Weird Tales with a woman-in-bondage cover--and what is that at the damsel's feet, a dead cat? Oy, you aren't going to make friends on the internet with gruesome content like that! Take-no-prisoners editor Donald Wollheim reprinted "The Incubator Man" in 1951 in an issue of The Avon Science Fiction Reader that also includes stories by Weird Tales stalwarts Edmond Hamilton, Clark Ashton Smith and Frank Belknap Long that we have already read and praised or panned, whichever was appropriate.
"The Strange Island of Dr. Nork" by Robert Bloch (1949)
Here's another
Weird Tales regular who has come in for his fair share of accolades and abuse here at MPorcius Fiction Log--we're all about love here at MPFL, but it's tough love, and if one of our buddies or heroes delivers a substandard performance we will not hesitate to hold him to account. Hopefully we will only have good things to say about Robert Bloch's "The Strange Island of Dr. Nork," which first saw print in the same issue of
Weird Tales as Theodore Sturgeon's
"The Martian and the Moron," which I heartily recommended to you when I read it in October of last year.
Ouch, my relationship with Robert Bloch is hitting a bump in the road today as this is a silly joke story, every line of it some kind of obvious joke. There's the topical humor we associate with mid-century America--e. g., references to Walt Disney and atomic power, complaints that Americans are consumerist and overly concerned with Communism--and literary and pop culture humor--references to The Island of Dr. Moreau, of course, but Robinson Crusoe, Tarzan and Dick Tracy rate mention as well. And then there are Bloch's trademark puns....
The overarching target of Bloch's limp satire is comic books. Bloch thinks comic books are too violent. Our narrator is a reporter sent by his editor to investigate the doings of a mysterious scientist on a remote island. It turns out the scientist is conducting experiments to help render the vast glut of horror and action comics on the market more realistic and thus salable. One example: he hires a masochist so his "Negro" employees can beat the masochist and his white assistant can record what kinds of sounds brass knuckles make when they strike flesh and what kinds of groans a man utters under such treatment. This is the kind of joke a child comes up with! Similarly, the mad scientist has used psychological and surgical techniques to create real zombies, a female Tarzan, a talking ape, a man who can fly, a man who is half-human and half-frog, etc., to serve as models for comic book storyboards and inspirations for plots.
The plot of this story is just a skeleton on which to hang all these lame jokes and Bloch's bargain basement puns--a super villain created by the mad scientist is confronted and the Tarzan girl rescues our narrator, who then gets the girl to fall in love with him and return to New York with him.
Thumbs down!
I think "The Strange Island of Dr. Nork" is a waste of time, but anthologists ranging from Leo Margulies and Helen Hoke to Stuart David Schiff and Marvin Kaye (working in concert with wacky comedian Brother Theodore!) have reprinted this thing. I am out of step with the larger SF community on this one, I guess.
"It" by Theodore Sturgeon (1940)
This is a famous story that has been reprinted a billion times after its debut in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s
Unknown. I read it as a youth in who knows which of the many anthologies in which it has appeared.
I find that the fame of "It" is justified--Sturgeon's tale is a very effective horror and action story, full of human relationships and striking and economical descriptions of life in the forest, beyond the powerful horror and adventure elements.
In brief, a blob monster inexplicably comes to a sort of life in the woods near a farm, growing around the skeleton of a guy who died there years ago. One of Sturgeon's compelling strategies in this story is having this blob monster be intelligent but totally ignorant, so ignorant it doesn't even have a will to survive or a moral compass, just curiosity. We follow the innocent, amoral monster as it haltingly learns about life, its learning process wreaking destruction among the plants and animals of the forest and the people of the nearby farm. These people have their own goals and relationships, their own tragedies to endure, which are also compelling. A subplot involves an additional character searching for the skeleton that is the monster's armature, as finding it may well yield financial reward. It is the farm family that actually acquires the reward, but in keeping with the horror tone of this story, and the prevailing themes of Sturgeon's work, which include the primacy of love, the money does not bring happiness to the farmers, who have suffered terrible losses in the adventure of the blob monster.
Creative, original, brilliantly written and paced, I join everybody else in the speculative fiction community in recommending to you "It" by ol' Ted Sturgeon. Five out of five PTSD-suffering little girls.
The West is good and the Sturgeon is terrific, and if we are being generous maybe the Bloch is a sort of time capsule that paints a picture of the mental world of comics critics before the 1954 publication of left-wing activist and brain expert Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent and the founding of the Comics Code Authority? (Wertham was apparently already talking and writing about the alleged dangers of comics in 1948, before "The Strange Island of Dr. Nork" was published, and maybe had some influence on Bloch?) So here we have some worthwhile reads for the committed aficionado of pre-1950 SF.
We'll probably mine another old horror-themed anthology for our next blog post, so stay tuned!
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