"Under the White Star"
"Liline, The Moon Girl"
"The Moon Menace"
"The Free-Lance of Space"
"Short-Wave Madness"
"The Conqueror's Voice"
"Intelligence Undying"
"The Dimension Terror"
"The Man Who Solved Death"
"No-Man's-Land of Time"
"The Invisible Master"
Wow, of these 14 stories, I think I have only read three, "When the World Slept," "The Man Who Lived Twice" and "The Might-Have-Been"! (Links to my posts about them above in the list.) It looks like Armchair Fiction was going for the deep cuts! Well, let's get started filling in those gaps by reading three of the earlier Hamilton stories represented in Golden Age Wizard, "The Moon Menace," "The Dimension Terror," and "The Invisible Master."
"The Moon Menace" (1927)
"The Moon Menace" is one of Hamilton's disaster stories that feels like a popular history article from a book or magazine of the future. Other examples include "A Conquest of Two Worlds," "The Polar Doom," and "The Life-Masters." Our tale begins with a description of the world famous scientist and inventor Gilbert, a recluse who has kept out of academia and based his career on developing marketable products, thereby amassing huge profits, and sinking those profits into further private research. In mid-career, he claims from his Adirondack lab to have, in the course of developing television, accidentally made contact with people on the Moon! Gilbert schedules a dramatic presentation of his astonishing discoveries at a New York City forum, but when the date rolls around Gilbert does not appear and the world denounces the scientist as a fraud.
Soon after, a weird and terrible disaster strikes our world! The entire planet Earth goes dark--nobody can see anything but blackness, even though the heat from the sun's rays or from a fire can still be felt, and such devices as radios still operate normally. Hamilton proffers us a catalog of disasters that result from universal blindness, car crashes and lootings and so forth, and a solid adventure/horror sequence about a man who walks several blocks in Manhattan, feeling his way home to his apartment.
We learn the answer to the mystery of why the inventor ghosted the public and why Earth is shrouded in darkness via a scene of expository dialogue featuring Gilbert and his friend Manning, who was on his way to see the great man and just miles away when fell the black veil of endless night. You see, via television, Gilbert made friends with the ugly people who live in caves under the lunar surface, members of an ancient race whose technology is far beyond ours. The moon men taught him how to build a teleportation receiver. When he had achieved this feat, the loonies teleported over and took over the lab, murdering the scientist's servants and assistant with ray guns. When Gilbert opened a door to escape, one of the moon men was killed by sunlight. The scientist has been hiding in the woods, observing the loonies as, clad in anti-sun armor, they built a big machine and finally activated it, dampening all light in the spectrum we humans can see. (The moon bastards can see via ultra-violet light the machine does not smother.) Now the moon men are constructing a deluxe teleportation receiver so they can import undocumented migrants wholesale and conquer this big blue marble we call home!
Gilbert has two pairs of spectacles that confer on the human wearer the ability to see in the ultraviolet spectrum, so he and Manning are able to approach the machinery with the aim of sabotaging it. Here's an example of Hamilton's fun adventure/horror story writing.
They were the moon men, as Gilbert had described them, dark, plump, like overripe fungi near to bursting, monstrous flipper-people whose appearance was rendered even more ghastly by the thin violet light by which he saw them.
The human sneak attack does not work out; Manning gets captured and tied up, though Gilbert manages to flee. Manning watches as millions of the flipper-people teleport in and build pre-fab aircraft and walking tanks with which to take over a defenseless Earth. But then Gilbert launches a second attempt and gets in a fire fight with the guards of the light-dampener machine. Gilbert's legs are disintegrated by a ray gun, but, as he lies on the ground dying, with his last breath he shoots the light-neutralizing machine, wrecking it. All the millions of loonies are killed by sunlight (should have kept that armor on, dummies) and the Earth is saved.
A fun story with the science lectures we expect from old timey science fiction and the mayhem we expect from Weird Tales. In 1967 Robert Lowndes reprinted "The Moon Menace" in his magazine Famous Science Fiction, and you can also find it in Haffner Press' 2009 The Metal Giants and Others, the first volume of their Collected Edmond Hamilton series.
"The Dimension Terror" (1928)
As "The Dimension Terror" begins we are introduced to a sort of renegade scientist who abandons academia, a man brilliant but afflicted with a temper and a tendency to make extravagant claims; this guy, Graham, is like a variation on the Gilbert of "The Moon Menace." Graham posits that other worlds or universes must coexist with ours, in much the same space as ours but separated from ours across a fifth dimension. This concept can be found in lots of SF stories, but I think Hamilton comes up with a better way of explaining the phenomena than we see in most of them. Imagine a shelf or a pedestal; you put Item A on it, then take it off, and put on the shelf Item B. These two items occupy the same space three dimensionally, but are separated by a fourth dimension, time. Graham not only theorizes that other worlds occupy the same first four dimensions as ours and are only distinct from ours across a fifth dimension, but claims that he knows how to get to one of them! Then he disappears.
Soon after his Gilbert's disappearance, a disaster strikes Earth that kills millions of people. In "The Moon Menace," Hamilton introduced an ancillary character to serve as the protagonist during the description of the disaster, and then had Gilbert's friend Manning take over the main character role for the narrative of how the disaster was resolved. In "The Dimension Terror," Hamilton has Graham's assistant and only friend, Harron, fulfill both roles. This economy in use of characters is one reason that "The Dimension Terror" is superior to "The Moon Menace."
Harron is on the southern tip of Manhattan when all the steel and iron in the world abruptly vanishes! All of Gotham's skyscrapers collapse, ships in the harbor sink, aircraft fall from the sky and automobiles fall apart. Hamilton goes to town describing the piles of rubble that are all that is left of the greatest city in the world and how people go insane in response to the sudden unheralded cataclysm. Harron decides to march north across Manhattan, a treacherous journey over hills of stones and bricks, and, by a remarkable coincidence, the one guy he runs into in the ruins of a city that was home to millions is Graham.
Graham describes how he caused the disaster which has destroyed our civilization. Some weeks ago he discovered that our universe touches a neighboring universe at one point, like two spheres touching. (Does this metaphor jive with the metaphor of the items on a shelf? Um, I don't know.) That point is in a remote swamp on Long Island. Graham took a lot of apparatus there and tried to detect precisely where the two worlds met and see if he could send electrical signals or sound waves to the other world. Amazingly, he made contact with people in that other universe!
The aliens explained to Graham how to build a ray projector that would allow movement between the universes. (To work, such a projector had to be activated on both sides of the contact point at the same time. Plotwise, this is a lot like the teleporter system in "The Moon Menace," and of course thematically both remind us of the idea that a vampire cannot cross your threshold uninvited.) Graham built and activated the projector at the time appointed and a dozen hideous insect-men marched onto Long Island, tying Graham up and immediately putting into action their plans to conquer our planet and colonize it, theirs being overpopulated. The bugmen built the machine that would transform all iron on Earth into hydrogen; their occupation with this job provided Graham a chance to escape.
Graham and Harron make their way back to the contact point in the marshes of Long Island and manage to sabotage the ray projector, causing an explosion that shuts down all travel between the two worlds and also kills all the insect men and Graham. Harron survives, and so does the machine that turned all of the iron in the world to hydrogen gas. Reminding us 21st-century readers of Rahm Emmanuel, who told us to never let a serious crisis go to waste but use it to reshape society in ways people would resist in stable times, Graham told Harron that the machine used by the insect men to change iron to hydrogen could be used to create more iron or any other element and give man the ability to "build up a new and fairer world." So you see, Graham's renegade meddling may have killed hundreds of millions of people, but we should thank him as we have less income inequality! Gotta break some eggs to make an omelette, right?
A variation on the themes of "The Moon Menace," but the beetle-like aliens are cooler, the scientist who causes the cataclysm and then dies in the process of saving the day has a little more personality--and then there is the questionable political angle--making this a meatier and more flavorful story.
Like "The Moon Menace," "The Dimension Terror" was reprinted in the Hafner volume The Metal Giants and Others.
"The Invisible Master" (1930)
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They say one should write what he knows, and I guess that is why so many of the stories we read have as their protagonists a writer. The main character of "The Invisible Master"'s third-person narrative is Carston, a reporter with a New York newspaper, who is sent by his editor to a university in Manhattan to meet a physicist, Grantham, who claims to have achieved invisibility. Carston himself doesn't do a hell of a lot, mostly just observes. "The Invisible Master," as we might have guessed considering the venue it debuted in, is structured like a detective mystery story, with lots of suspects and victims and crimes and a final scene in which a police detective explains how he figured out whodunit. There is also a bunch of science lectures (as I've told you a hundred times, old timey science fiction editors and writers really wanted to use fiction as a tool for teaching people science and getting people excited about how science could improve the life of the individual and of society, though you should feel free to object that half the stories we read seem to be about how science is going to kill everybody), and an ambitious and (to me at least) surprising twist ending.
Grantham the scientist and his assistant Gray demonstrate to Carston and other assembled journalos their invisibility device by making a paperweight invisible and then visible again. That evening the reporters and the university president and the police assemble because Grantham was knocked out by some person unknown and both Gray and a backpack-sized invisibility device that can render a man invisible have disappeared! A note is found, addressed to the recovering Grantham--it seems to be in Gray's handwriting and is signed "The Invisible Master" and its text suggests the person who stole the invisibility device is going to use it to terrorize New York City.
Hamilton describes the three sensational crimes that follow in some detail--a bank and two different businesses suffer robberies, and several people are murdered with firearms. We learn about these crimes from the point of view of Carston; they are not "on screen." Physicist Grantham, police dick Wade (who chews gum) and the university president all get screen time; unfortunately, none of these characters is very interesting. It is theorized that Gray is the Invisible Master and is trying to collect money to conduct research, he being, apparently, some kind of technocrat leftist who thinks the money society spends on luxuries should instead be devoted to the kind of life-improving scientific research he himself wants to perform. Sure enough, after the third murderous robbery a letter from the Invisible Master arrives at the mayor's office, demanding five million dollars be left in a specific spot in Long Island.
In fiction, private citizens always end up being at the center of police operations and Grantham and Carston are there out on the Island when the money is dropped off on top of a boulder near a tree near a mile marker. Elaborate efforts to catch the Invisible Master fail and the money is lost.
Then Wade solves the case and we find Hamilton has sprung upon us an audacious surprise ending and that "The Invisible Master" is not only a science fiction story that speculates about optics and sight, but about human psychology! You see, there is no Invisible Master, and there is no invisibility device! Grantham and Gray hoaxed the entire thing! Those three robberies were committed by unscrupulous people who then blamed them on the Invisible Master, in whom they, like everybody else, believed! Grantham and Gray knew enough psychology to know people would believe them because of their credentials, and knew evil people would take advantage of the Invisible Master scare to commit crimes that would, in a vicious cycle, generate more fear, and that that fear would lead the government and business leaders to knuckle under to threats and demands for money. (Gray didn't know Grantham well enough to predict the physicist would murder his assistant and dissolve his body in acid.)
This is a pretty cynical story, portraying both elites and the masses as evil or cowardly (though recent events around coronavirus, George Floyd mania and transsexual mania seem to bear out this bleak assessment) but has a sort of soft spot for the police and delivers a message about the value of systematic routine. Though he was facing extraordinary circumstances, Wade followed the routine procedures used in ordinary police work, and this mundane practice produced the facts that cracked the case and brought the villain to justice and liberated the Big Apple from a reign of terror. I guess it is in the spirit of old-fashioned science fiction and detective fiction to remind readers that you achieve success by plodding away, dotting all the "i"s and crossing all the "t"s, methodically following all the rules and best practices.
While reading this story I mostly found it kind of dull, but the twist ending is so surprising I have to admire it, and the story's ideology is sort of interesting if not romantic or life-affirming. We'll call "The Invisible Master" mildly recommendable.
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Three stories on the theme of scientific breakthroughs causing disasters, though the third story's breakthrough is a hoax and the scientist in question is not unwittingly putting the populace in danger but deliberately doing so. While about science, and trying to teach you science, the story encourages skepticism of actual scientists and suggests that scientific advances can come at a terrible cost.
Lots more Edmond Hamilton and Weird Tales lie in the future for MPorcius Fiction Log, but we'll be taking a break from speculative fiction for our next blog post.
I enjoyed your analysis of Edmond Hamilton, Golden Age Wizard. You're right about Hamilton devoting a number stories to warning about the "unintended consequences" of science.
ReplyDeleteThanks! More to come! (Who knows when?)
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