Edmond Hamilton: "Sea Born," "World Without Sex" and "Murder Asteroid"

One of the 1940 stories we tackled in our last episode was Edmond Hamilton's "City from the Sea," which was printed in Weird Tales.  Hamilton's typewriter was clacking up a storm in this period and he had stories in numerous magazines in 1940; let's check out three others, another from Weird Tales, one from Marvel Tales and one from Thrilling Wonder Stories.  

"Sea Born"

"Sea Born" first saw print in an issue of Weird Tales with perhaps the most surreal of all the covers to appear on the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual, one depicting a squadron of fanciful warplanes whose noses are fashioned to look like skulls attacking a giant devil or something.  "Sea Born," which is accompanied by two pretty good Hannes Bok images of slender people battling a tentacled creature underwater, is a decent adventure story that serves as a kind of wish fulfillment fantasy ("I was born with special powers!") and rumination about identity ("Nowhere in the world do I fit in!") about being a half-breed or biracial or whatever word we want to use, a person who has a foot in two different ethnic or cultural realms but is not wholly of either.  Unlike those Lovecraftian stories in which some poor bastard discovers he is the descendent of evil alien fish-people or a diabolical wizard or whatever, "Sea Born" has a happy ending, though tragedy is mixed up in it.  "Sea Born" is also one of those stories in which the human race, greedy, violent, exploiting the natural world, is contrasted with goody goody non-humans who are in touch with nature and are thus happier.  This pervasive theme of speculative literature always makes me smile and smh, because I moved from the big city to the country and miss the city terribly, and would consider the life of an honest-to-god savage, with no technology--not even books, much less a computer--in which I had to fight and kill my lunch every day, to be a living hell.

Our narrator grows up in a seaside town in sunny Florida.  Another kid his age, Eric Leigh (presumably named for Hamilton's future wife Leigh Brackett, whom wikipedia says Ed met in the summer of 1940), is kind of a recluse, his father keeping a close eye on him.  Eric obviously wants to swim, like all the other kids, but his father has forbade him from entering the water.  Our narrator, in the spirit of teenage hijinks, pushes Eric into the ocean and Eric discovers he can breathe in the water and thus stay under indefinitely!  The narrator doesn't believe this outlandish claim, thinking Eric just has stronger than average lungs, and pulls Eric back to shore.

Much of Hamilton's 20-page story is the narrator's paraphrase of the story Eric tells him some years after this incident, a story the narrator does not really believe.  After realizing his son had been in the water, and knows of his special power, Eric's Dad tells his son that he (Dad), while in the West Indies, met a woman of the sea folk and they fell in love; Eric is their son.  Mom died young from the stress of spending too much time on land.  Dad didn't want Eric to know his true heritage because he knew his son wouldn't be happy among normal humans who would consider him a freak if they found out he was some kind of half breed; Dad doesn't think Eric would fit in among the seafolk, either.

Eric stops hanging around with the narrator, spending all his time swimming near the coast--he finds the ocean beautiful and living underwater more comfortable than living ashore.  After Dad dies, Eric swims far out to sea, looking for the sea folk, and finds them when he is getting killed by a giant squid--a beautiful woman of the sea people rescues him, and the two fall in love.

The sea folk have gender equality (among these people women are just as big as men) and no work or war or any of that--they have knives made of shells and clothes made of seaweed and spend their time hunting and relaxing.  Eric is happy, the loneliness of his life on land behind him.  But he is half-human, remember!  And still prone to the sins that characterize our fallen race!  A few months after Eric's arrival among the sea people, Eric's blue-skinned girlfriend's brother discovers a sunken Spanish galleon and brings back an emerald.  Eric's human greed is excited, and he convinces little bro to guide him to the wreck.  The wreck is haunted by monsters and little bro gets killed.  The sea people blame Eric and his landlubber's greed for the death of this kid and so Eric is exiled back to Florida.  Eric's girlfriend still loves him, and tells Eric that maybe the leader of the sea folk will relent--if he does she will come rushing to tell him.

Back ashore Eric meets the narrator and tells this story.  "Sea Born" ends when the narrator, some months later, is confronted by evidence that Eric has jumped into the sea, never to return--either his crazy story is true and his girl came around to tell him the king of the sea people pardoned him and Eric is now happy, or, he so believed his delusions that he jumped into the ocean and got himself drowned.

A story I can mildly recommend; maybe we should call it competent filler.  I would probably like it better if it had a tragic ending, with Eric committing suicide after having to live in exile among the human race, or redeeming himself by dying in a fight with a giant shark that was going to eat the king of the sea people or something.    

"Sea Born" does not appear to have been reprinted on paper unless we include a shortened version of this 1940 issue of Weird Tales printed in Great Britain in 1942.

"World Without Sex" 

This story debuted under a pen name in Marvel Tales, a magazine that appeared under a series of similar names (Marvel Science Stories being the most common) during its first run from 1938 to 1941 and then during its 1950-52 revival.  The magazine, edited by Robert O. Erisman, seems to have sought to appeal to readers interested in sexualized violence--Erisman's magazine is apparently considered one of the "shudder pulps" or "weird menace magazines;" at least I find that Hamilton's "World Without Sex" is mentioned by name in my copy of Robert Kenneth Jones' The Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Magazines of the 1930s.  The cover of the issue under discussion today depicts a bound blonde in a bra undergoing some horrible fate (being put into suspended animation, I guess) at the hands of monstrous brutes and Hamilton's story within is illustrated by a drawing of brunettes in skimpy outfits being shot dead, manhandled and beaten by muscle men.

(We may come back to this issue of Marvel Tales in the future as another science fiction pioneer, Hamilton's friend Jack Williamson, also has a pseudonymous story in it, "Mistress of Machine-Age Madness.") 

It is the totalitarian future!  Four thousand years ago, scientists developed a means to create babies in the lab; the sex of these babies can be predetermined.  People stopped having sexual intercourse, and came to find the idea of sexual relations disgusting.  The government handled all reproduction at industrial-style facilities and all child rearing at state nurseries.  Conniving women in positions of authority gradually diminished the proportion of male babies produced until only a thousand men survived in a world dominated by women!  Realizing their sex was doomed, the men rebelled and tried to seize a birth-facility, but were defeated.  As our story begins only a dozen men survive in the entire world!  And the gynocracy has just sentenced them to death!

The story's action plot concerns these twelve men busting out of prison on the eve of execution; multiple people of both sexes are reduced to "scorched heaps" by ray pistol fire but eight of the men escape in a stolen aircraft (this is one of those futures in which everybody has an air car and swarms of these "fliers" crisscross over the city of skyscrapers) with four women captives.  The men find a cave in the wilderness and hide there; their leader declares that the only way for the male sex to endure is for them to have sex with the four captives, like people did in the "animalistic past."  The men are almost as appalled by this prospect as the women, and which of the men will be forced to have sex is chosen at random, as nobody volunteers.

At first the women keep trying to kill the men and escape, but when they have babies the women calm down, softened by a woman's natural love of her own child.  Similarly, the natural feelings of affection of men for women and vice versa assert themselves, and there develops in the cave something like the normal family life enjoyed by human beings before the rise of the test tube baby.  The men who have no women get envious and go out to capture women of their own, then return with an entire company of women.  There is civil war among the women who now run the world and the rebel faction wants to ally with the eight men; the last eight adult men in the world will be pardoned if they agree to fight, and these rebel women even agree to allow an equal number of male and female babies be produced in the reproduction factories once they take over.

But the couples refuse to join the rebel army when they realize these rebel women are not revolutionaries or reactionaries who want to revive the family unit; if they sign up with the rebels the four families will be broken up, their kids put into state nurseries.  The four couples would rather live as man and wife and raise their kids themselves in a cave than live as atomized individuals in the cities.  The rebel women leave, though three of their number, enticed by what they have heard about family life, join the little settlement.  The story ends, leaving us with the idea that the civil war will exhaust the totalitarian state and in a few generations the atavistic society of natural-born people the protagonists have founded will be able to take it over the world and reintroduce to humanity the joys of sexual intercourse and family life.

I'm OK with the themes of this story, the idea that cold-hearted scientists and ambitious feminists pose a threat to the simple joys of heterosexual sex and raising children in a two-parent family, joys that most ordinary people have a natural affinity for, but the plot feels a little iffy, and one suspects that while Hamilton tries to talk about psychological and sociological themes, the story exists primarily to serve as a vehicle for the scenes of violence against women and oblique references to rape.  These two elements of the story's content--the philosophical and the exploitative--are, like the plot, dealt with in a way that is not irritatingly bad, but is sort of half-assed, presumably due to editorial pressures and deadlines; a better story would have gone all in, with deeper explorations of human relationships and the way technology and the state can interfere with them or with more explicit sex and violence scenes, or both, but Hamilton probably didn't have the opportunity to do this, and maybe lacked the inclination besides.  We'll call "World Without Sex" acceptable filler.  

"World Without Sex" would be reprinted in an anthology from a university press, Sheldon Jaffery's Sensuous Science Fiction from the Weird and Spicy Pulps.

"Murder Asteroid"

The October 1940 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories prints fiction by plenty of people we are interested in, including Henry Kuttner, Manly Wade Wellman and Robert Moore Williams, so maybe we'll get back to it, but today we'll just look at Hamilton's contribution, "Murder Asteroid."  I guess we might call this a short-short, it taking up less than two pages, and the little tale is accompanied by a sort of logo that says, I think, "A WONDER STORIETTE."  I don't think "Murder Asteroid" has ever been reprinted.

This is a crime story the twist ending of which rests on a scientific foundation.  Two asteroid miners have filled the hold of their little craft with a half million dollars worth of metal.  One of the two prospectors is a diabolical cheat, and murders his partner and leaves his corpse on a tiny asteroid, the bloody murder weapon jutting out of his victim's space suit.  He'll claim his pal died in an accident and get to keep all the dough.  Or so he thinks.  When he gets back to base, the police immediately see the victim's body because the fully laden mining ship has more mass and thus more gravity than the asteroid upon which the slaying was committed, so the corpse adhered to the ship and was carried along on the outside of the vessel.  Doh!

Acceptable filler.  Does this story accurately portray how gravity works?  I have no idea.  Still, it is fun seeing how classic era science fiction authors tried to teach science in their stories, even stories that are essentially detective stories set in space.  Many science fiction writers of the past saw science fiction as a project with a point, with a mission--teaching people science, preparing people for the high tech future, denouncing religion and pushing socialism or libertarianism, etc.  Do SF writers of today similarly pursue some mission?  Again,  I have no idea.

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These are minor stories but I enjoyed them; Hamilton is one of the writers I am always curious about, and I enjoy the way these old stories act as a lens into the world of the past, its attitudes and preoccupations.  And these stories are competently put together, and full of ray guns and space suits and sea monsters, things that still hold a childlike fascination for me.

More 1940 Weird Tales next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.