We're skipping that Kline story, a story by Ray Cummings, and the joke story by Arthur K. Barnes and Henry Kuttner, as well as various stories by people we don't know. Instead, we will be grappling with one story each ("novelets" is what the table of contents calls them) by the aforementioned Coblentz, Robert Moore Williams and Frank Belknap Long. It is true that in the past I have ofttimes found the work of these gentlemen to be sub par, and that, as far as isfdb is aware, not one of these three stories has ever been reprinted, which might give us pause, but in honor and emulation of the wrestling saurians on that blood-drenched cover, let's give these three rare stories a tumble.
"The Man from Xenern" by Stanton A. Coblentz
If memory serves, Coblentz's 1935 In Caverns Below AKA The Hidden World was an anti-war satire that included reference to people so habitually lazy their limbs atrophied. "The Man from Xenern" strikes some of these same notes. Our narrator is a bipedal alien with a tail, and he describes how his race long ago developed a technological civilization but then became warlike and decadent, so that another intelligent race of his planet, bird-men three or four times as tall as the tailed men, took over, enslaving the majority of tailed men, though a small number of bands lived on in the wilderness, eluding capture by the bird-men. Our narrator was born a member of one of these nomadic tribes of free men, but as a child was captured by the bird-men and enslaved. He describes at some length his adventures in captivity, giving us a view of bird-man society, which maybe is in part a satire of 1930s Earth society. Our narrator moves from episode to episode, enslaved in some fashion in one strata of bird-man society for a period, then escaping and finding himself enslaved in some other capacity in a different segment of bird-man society. Eventually he is shanghaied into serving as crew aboard the bird-people's first star ship. The ship eventually leaves out narrator on Earth, on a remote island. This story is his memoir, penned in the last days of his life; he fears he will die soon as Earth's atmosphere is not rich enough in oxygen for his blood.
Lacking a conventional climax and other features of a traditional plot, I can't really call "The Man from Xenern" good. But individual scenes are competent, and the humor is not so over the top as to overwhelm the story or irritate the reader. We'll call it acceptable.
"The Warning from the Past" by Robert Moore Williams
Here we have a piece advertised on the cover, a science-fiction story that romanticizes science and the scientist pretty extravagantly, and slathers on a pretty thick helping of the contempt for ordinary people we see in so much science fiction, contempt for simple country folk, contempt for the idle rich, contempt for grasping business people and contempt for dim-witted military men. The proles and the peasants, the merchants and the aristocrats, in this story they all suck--only the scientist is admirable, and the scientist in "The Warning from the Past" gets to play both the ubermensch and the Christ role, being both a man who is permitted absolute latitude to achieve his world-saving goals and a man who sacrifices himself for humanity!
In the first scene of "The Warning from the Past," we meet a booze-loving farmer and his nagging wife. They are astonished when some hulk, belching smoke and emitting brilliant beams of light, explodes out of their corn field. The farmer thinks it must be the devil! Next we meet an ignorant rural cop quixotically studying to be a G-man--he hurries out to the farm when the farmwife telephones. This guy doesn't reappear that I recall and I don't know why Williams introduced us to him.
We then meet a rich inventor who hates his wife's friends, idle society people who play bridge. The inventor sneaks away to the attic and his ham radio sets, and we get a sentimental description of how this guy, as a kid, built his own crude ham radio and this set him on the path to becoming the world's greatest inventor. The farm where all the excitement is taking place lies 100 miles south of Chicago, and the beams of light the mystery artifact flashes up into the sky can be seen from the inventor's suburban Chi-town window. The newspapers and the government call the inventor up on the phone looking for help investigating this novel phenomena, and he hurries down there.
Our cast is rounded out by a buffonish businessman who plays no role in the plot but is just there for Williams to humiliate, and a general with a lame joke name (General Warsin) who at least talks to the scientist.
The disturbance in the corn field is a time capsule left by a forgotten advanced race that preceded our own human race as rulers of the Earth. These ancients were attacked by hostile aliens from Sirius over ten thousand years ago; they defeated the Sirians, but biological warfare agents the Sirians employed went on to slowly kill the victors. Before they expired, however, this prehistoric race set up time capsules that would emerge when their detectors sensed another Sirian invasion fleet, in hopes that a successor intelligent race could benefit from their wisdom and experience.
Sure enough, Sirian ships are approaching! Info in the time capsule enables 20th-century man to build the ray cannons and nuclear missiles the ancients used to shoot down the Sirian ships in the forgotten past. But when the Sirians arrive today their vessels are equipped with a forcefield that frustrates the ray projectors and atomic warheads directed against them--the Sirian bastards have upgraded their defenses, rendering the weapons that foiled them last time obsolete! Many cities and millions of people are killed by the Sirian bombing campaign, the foolish tycoon and the inventor's social-climbing wife among them.
The inventor returns home to dig his wife's body out of the rubble. He also finds his childhood ham radio. He realizes that, using info he read in some documents in the time capsule from thousands of years ago, he can make minor adjustments to this artifact of his adolescence that will enable it to neutralize the Sirian invasion fleet's forcefield! General Warsin thinks the inventor is insane when the scientist shows up with his crude scratch built children's toy and sends the inventor away.
Having laid waste to Europe, the Sirian space craft approach General Warsin's position on the New Jersey coast. His ray cannon and atomic missiles have no effect on the alien ships. The inventor snatches up a pistol, murders the crew of a ray cannon, and hooks his modified ham radio to the ray projector's power source. Then he uses the ham radio to deactivate the forcefields of the alien ships. US Army and Navy units shoot down the now vulnerable alien fleet, delivering the human race from extinction, though the explosions of the space craft wipe out much of the surrounding area and General Warsin and the inventor are among the dead. Luckily the word gets out somehow that it was the inventor who saved the world, and it is suggested he will be immortalized in the history books and honored by statues that will no doubt be toppled in a future period of Sirian Lives Matter hysteria.
"The Warning from the Past" is like a parody of a snobby science fiction wish-fulfillment story aimed at science nerds who are alienated from the rest of society, but it is not terrible; I like the plot outline and Williams propels his story forward at a rapid pace. We'll grade it barely acceptable.
"The Dweller in Outer Darkness" by Frank Belknap Long
Of the three writers we are reading today Long, a close associate of H. P. Lovecraft, is by far closest to my heart, I having read so many of his bizarre productions. Long justifies my interest immediately today as "The Dweller in Outer Darkness" begins in medias res in a Terran space craft landed on Pluto and reveals Long's theme to be that of the love triangle! Among biologists, no less! Slim, dark-eyed and black-haired Helen Torrey uses her Cupid's bow mouth to snarl that our cautious narrator Mark Banner is a coward for staying in the ship while handsome Peter Miles ventures out onto the surface into a scary tunnel to bring back a magnificent sample of native life. For his part, our narrator considers Peter a "foolhardy showoff" and Helen a "romantic nitwit" with no appreciation for the "stern discipline" required of space farers.
We learn how Helen got on this expedition (she is taking the place of her father, who organized the mission but then broke his leg) and hear all about how dedicated Mark is to planning and safety, unlike Peter, who has been acting recklessly in order to impress Helen. Then Peter brings in his specimen, a hideous little freak, apparently dead. Helen's response to Peter's success fills poor Mark with jealousy.
Soon after blasting off from Pluto the three scientists are confronted by the ship of Delcha, the famous space pirate! Delcha boards the expedition's vessel, and we find him to be a small effeminate man with some Chinese ancestry, accompanied by a huge "Negro" with the "evilest smile" the narrator has ever seen.
As we might have predicted, in the crisis Mark proves a better man than Peter and Helen realizes she really loves Mark, not Peter, and the Plutonian specimen comes to life and plays a pivotal role in the fracas in which the giant "Negro" dies a horrible death of one kind and Delcha dies an equally horrible death of a different kind.
Long's story is written extravagantly and sort of childishly. There's the behavior of the three elements of the love triangle, which is like that of teenagers in a TV show. There's Long's repeated reminders that Miles' body is like that of a Greek god. There's the sex angle (Helen has to take off her space suit to put on some other high-tech equipment and Mark stares at her bare limbs) and the Yellow-Peril, homophobic and racist angles in the descriptions of Delcha and his black subordinate. Long also includes all kinds of wacky speculative science about radiation and atomic particles far smaller than the electron and how these phenomena might kill you or be used as a weapon with which to kill your enemies. The sex and race stuff is unsophisticated and the science stuff is faux-sophisticated, but in a life-and-death who-will-get-the-girl adventure context I found it all fun. The gore is also off the charts.
So, I can mildly recommend "The Dweller in Outer Darkness" as a fun, fast-paced, vigorous sex-and-violence space opera that is never boring.
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Having never been reprinted since their publication in 1939, I am probably one of the few living people who has read any of these stories, and you are probably one of the few people to have even heard of them. Should more people read them? Well, these stories are not terribly impressive, all of them suffering from severe weaknesses, but they are also full of action, wild images, and strongly held points of view which many may find offensive. I guess they all qualify as filler, but it is not lazy boring filler; Coblentz, Williams and Long blunder and demonstrate strange, even repulsive, attitudes, but they are committed to producing entertainment and to arguing their points and they write with brio. Energy and commitment can go some distance in making up for a lack of skill and for disreputable content and so I enjoyed reading these three stories, and maybe other people will as well, or, at least, find their attitudes about science, women and non-whites illustrative of a past era.
More SF stories from an earlier age in our next episode, but from a writer who has earned more awards and accolades than Messrs. Coblentz, Williams and Long.
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