P. Schuyler Miller: "The Red Plague," "Dust of Destruction," and "'The Man from Mars'"

In our last episode, one full of car wrecks, Hollywood-bashing and dangerous women, we read a good story by the Hugo- and Locus-Award winning P. Schuyler Miller, and thought it good enough that further exploration of the Miller body of work was warranted.  Let's start in Miller's early days with stories he saw printed in Hugo Gernsback's Prophetic Magazine of Mystery, Adventure and Romance, Wonder Stories, in the dawn of that periodical's existence.

(In response to public demand, embedded in the first para of each section below are links to a scan of the early-1930s magazine in which I will be reading the story under discussion so that you can experience the mass destruction, pioneering space journeys and curious social commentary the stories provide with trivial ease.)

"The Red Plague" (1930)

The July 1930 issue of Wonder Stories was only the second issue of the magazine to appear under that title--the magazine was a merger of Air Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories, periodicals that began publication in 1929.  "The Red Plague" bagged Miller $150 by winning first place in a contest announced in the February 1930 issue of Air Wonder Stories that called for stories based on the cover illustration by pioneering SF artist Frank R. Paul of that issue.  Miller was, allegedly, one of over 500 entrants to the contest--damn, imagine reading 500 amateur stories about men in space suits attacking a space ship.

Miller begins "The Red Plague" with an elaborate description that dwells on light and color of what I thought must be a Martian town but turned out to be Earth's first space port--much of the surface of our beloved planet is a red desert because of the plague that arrived on Earth via a meteor.  Three rockets blast off from the port, carrying with them Earth's hope of finding a cure for the plague.

The meteor deposited in the American South West a radioactive element new to Earth, a catalyst that, spread in tiny amounts by the wind or birds or whatever, turns rock and soil to a red dust; this dust renders water unavailable for use by irrevocably adsorbing it.  (I could probably use some of this new element in my basement.)  That really is a "d" in there, by the way--Miller is teaching me some science today.  In five years, much of the New World is covered in red desert, and the Old World's strict embargo has begun to fail and so soon all of humanity is threatened with death through lack of water.

There is hope, however.  The red of the dust is identical to the red we see on most of the surface of Mars, and astronomers' careful observations reveal that the ice caps of Mars are growing--the inhabitants of Mars must be reclaiming their planet from the red plague that first afflicted their world long ago!  Three space ships are built and man takes his first steps outside Terra's atmosphere!  The 21st-century reader will be thrilled to find that one of the three rockets is commanded by a "burly, spectacled Negro."  Miller's depiction of this African-American hero's personality and speech might not win the author 21st-century plaudits, though, and then there is the fact that only one of the three ships makes it through a meteor swarm (these meteors are a real pain in the you-know-what) and it isn't the black guy's.

The sole-surviving rocket crash lands on Mars; only four of its six-man crew emerge alive.  The four astronauts fly in their helicopter towards the poles, over the ruined cities, over the canals, over the red deserts that are slowly being taken back by green foliage.  At the glacier sheet they meet the native Martians, short little guys who fly around in special suits and who live underground.  The Martians telepathically interrogate the humans, putting Terra's representatives on trial to determine if they deserve to learn the solution to the red plague, or deserve to be killed.

The human race passes the test thanks to the fact that we have developed atomic power, which the Martians have not--they rely on the somewhat less efficient solar power.  The Martians relate to the astronauts the history of their people and their long relationship with the red plague, and share with the Earthers the secret of how to reverse the life-threatening adsorption of the plague and how to render the world green again.  The Martians even build the humans a new space ship!  A new era of interplanetary cooperation is inaugurated--the Martians' scrawny bodies are unfit to explore the universe, but their superior intelligence will help us hardy Terrans accomplish this marvelous adventure, and we will bring back to them the wonders we find out there on Venus, beyond the asteroid belt, and beyond the limits of our solar system.

"The Red Plague" has many elements of those old science fiction stories that read like a popular history article written in the future and focus on science speculations and make very little effort to create characters and portray individual human drama.  At the same time, Miller tries to be poetical, giving us some pretty long and somewhat oblique passages, like in the beginning of the story when he works overtime painting a picture of Mankind's first space port without coming right out and telling us what it is till he's used up half a page.  Instead of just saying "a crowd of men" and "a squadron of aircraft" he employs the conceit of a god-like being watching from afar to whom the crowd is a "restless smudge" and the flying machines "a swarm of gnats."  Another example of this oblique approach is the sentence that informs us that the African American's ship and all its crew have been killed in the meteor swarm:

Swerve, leap swerve again, and then a blur of flame in the screen, a tearing of metal, and blackness!

This stuff shows ambition, but it is harder to read than just bald facts, and I'm afraid it is too clunky to add literary value to the story.

We're judging "The Red Plague" acceptable.  Forrest J. Ackerman reprinted the story in a 2001 anthology whose gimmick is that all the stories have a color in their titles.  Ackerman was a nutty character.

On the left is the issue of Air Wonder Stories whose cover served as the
basis for "The Red Plague"

"Dust of Destruction" (1931)

Miller's name appears prominently on the cover of this issue of Wonder Stories, which also includes stories by Ray Cummings and David H. Keller.  It is likely we'll be coming back to this one.

Our first Miller story today prominently featured red dust that had the power to adsorb water and thus make Earth almost uninhabitable.  Our second story features green dust that is the product of a ray that destroys air and, if allowed to play over the entire Earth's surface, would render Earth uninhabitable by humans.

"Dust of Destruction" has a first-person narrator, Hank, who shares with us the astounding and horrifying adventures he endured in the future of 1967, the year humanity came perilously close to extinction at the hands of malevolent aliens.  As his memoir begins, Hank, a a travelling salesman, and is in the country like ten miles from Norfolk, NE, when a windstorm of apocalyptic power strikes.  Miller goes overboard describing in meticulous detail how the wind knocks over a tree, and then how the narrator's car and then he himself are carried off by the wind.  Our guy Hank gets tangled up in wire and tied to a tree that flies for miles, sometimes flipping end over end, sometimes dragging its base on the ground, at least once smashing through a house, etc.  It's like one of those endless CGI sequences in a recent movie, but also valid SF speculation--what would it be like to experience such winds first hand?

Hank wakes up in Norfolk, next to another man who is still unconscious, a big muscular criminal named Red whom the narrator recognizes from wanted posters.  The narrator seizes Red's firearm before the bank robber wakes up, so when the thief does regain consciousness, our guy has the upper hand.  Red agrees to help look for survivors and Hank promises not to rat him out to the cops, should they meet any.  Part of Miller's literary project with "The Dust of Destruction" is to generate suspense with the character of Red--will Red be reformed and redeemed, or will Hank's tolerance and open-mindedness bite him in the ass?

Hank and Red explore the ruined town of Norfolk, which is covered in a layer of green dust, and find no survivors, but many bodies that have been torn asunder, apparently exploded from within.

A rocket lands nearby--it is mankind's first space ship.  The vessel is manned by Hank's old college pal, Dick, and their physics professor, Jarvis.  Dick's rocket was on a test flight in the upper atmosphere when the disaster struck--low pressure (an "inverted cyclone") in Norfolk which made people explode and vacuumed stuff nearby--including Hank!--into the gore-filled town.  This low pressure event was no natural phenomena, but the work of a ray from the moon!  The four men blast off for Luna on the human race's first interplanetary flight to take care of the source of this ray that destroyed Norfolk and its twenty thousand inhabitants.  Miller does some real science speculation, describing in some detail what Earth might look like from space and how Dick's rocket works and how and why a ray from the Moon might turn the atmosphere into green dust, lowering the Earth's air pressure so our home will be more hospitable to Lunarian colonists.  On the way moonward the men practice maneuvering in their space suits--Red, a natural athlete, turns out to be the most adept.

On Luna we get descriptions of what the Moon's surface is like and the experience of travelling on foot under the lower gravity.  The four humans split up to make their individual ways to the source of the ray.  Eventually, after travelling through the moon people's tunnels, pneumatic subway system, rocket ship factory, and water system, all of which are abandoned and apparently operating automatically, Hank, Red and the professor reunite in a chamber full of voracious insects a foot long.  The swarming insects try to eat them, and the men fight them hand-to-hand and with grenades.  Are these bugs the intelligent aliens who built the ray projector and the rockets, or the vermin who are driving the Lunarians to try to colonize Earth, or a slave race subservient to the true Lunar masters?  Hidden figures fire ray guns at our heroes as they advance upon the giant ray projector that is at that very moment devastating Asia and Europe, killing millions; Red suppresses their ray fire with his conventional slug rifle.

Then Dick appears, he having approached from a different angle in an aircraft he brought to Luna but kept a secret from Hank.  Dick throws himself into the machinery of the ray projector.  All the Loonies' power production systems were patched into this super weapon, so Dick's his self-sacrifice (immortalized on the cover of this issue of Wonder Stories) sets off a chain reaction that destroys all the moon's native inhabitants.  Earth is preserved from lunaforming and lunar colonization.  Hank, Red and Professor Jarvis survive the explosions and get back to Terra, and as the story ends Hank considers what a bounty the next humans to explore the Moon will find, all those rocket ships and the other technology left by the now extinct natives of our natural satellite.

This is a decent adventure story with lots of science speculation onto which Miller grafts a Christian or progressive social message that perhaps reminds us of the canonization of armed robber George Floyd in our own crazy 21st century.  Immediately, to my mind irrationally, middle-class citizens Hank and Professor Jarvis embrace Red, the armed robber who moans that he has always been on the outside looking in and declare he is no worse than they are, despite his bank-robbing ways.  Dick is skeptical at first, but not for long.

“Come on, Dick,” I said, “loosen up a bit. Don’t be such a crab. Red’s just as good as any of us here, and don’t you forget it! Maybe he slipped up a few times — who hasn’t?"

Miller doesn't fully integrate this theme into his story as well as he might have--shouldn't Red have committed suicide to save humanity, thus earning forgiveness for all those armed robberies?  Instead it is scientist Dick who sacrifices himself to save mankind--must he die to repent his sin of doubting Red?  I feel like Miller doesn't really wrap up the Red story line conclusively; I kept expecting Red to cut a deal with the Moon people or try to steal Dick's rocket or something, and Miller certainly doesn't do that, but neither does he have Red turn out to be the key to the mission or anything.  

Despite my uneasiness with the Red plot line, "Dust of Destruction" is quite a bit better a story than "The Red Plague," with more action, more compelling images, and significant improvement when it comes to characters, but it seems it has not been reprinted.  Ackermann could have included this one in his story, just rename it "Red Hitches a Ride."  

"'The Man from Mars'" (1931)

Here we have a story with a title that, like that of David Bowie's "'Heroes,'" contains quote marks, I guess implying that the man in question is not really what he seems.  "'The Man from Mars'" debuted in an issue of Gernsback's Wonder Stories Quarterly; I guess we'll be getting back to this magazine as well, seeing as it contains a story by Clark Ashton Smith that I don't think I've read.  Miller's story in the issue would reappear in 1939 in Startling Stories as a nominee for the Scientifiction Hall of Fame under the title "The Man from Mars," shorn of those annoying quote marks.  In 1949 an anthology of nominees to the aforementioned Hall of Fame was published and "The Man from Mars" was included in that.  All you Virgil Finlay junkies, and I count myself among you, should check out the ish of Startling linked above, as well as the cover of From Off This World, which I actually saw in real life almost ten years ago, as they both showcase some fine Finlay creations.

"'The Man from Mars" is more recognizable as a "modern" science fiction story than "The Red Plague" or "Dust of Destruction," which are all about cataclysms and men of science who save the human race from them.  "'The Man from Mars'" is more character driven and built on a smaller, more intimate, scale.  Like E.T., its center is a sympathetic alien that is both better than human beings but also so weak that it can be exploited by evil humans and so needs aid from good humans.  I find this kind of thing a drag but I guess it sells because it is not a rare plot by any means.

Our narrator goes to a travelling carnival that advertises a man from Mars.  The Martian in question has a bald oversized head and skinny limbs and sits on a throne and plays a theremin-like musical instrument and by some obscure means makes electricity and water dance around in the air.  Miller describes the Martian's venue and its show in great detail, and it is kind of boring--I find fireworks boring to watch in real life, so reading about fireworks, well, you can imagine.  

The Martian's manager is a college chum of the narrator.  From this guy we learn all about the Martian.  The alien has great psychic powers, but its telepathy only works haltingly with us dumb humans.  Still, the two human heroes of the story can sort of communicate with the alien.  Chum bought the Martian from the religious farmer who found the alien after the alien's ship crashed and chum set the Martian's circus act up.  The Martian sits within a shell, a fake body mounted on the throne, while it performs; the audience never sees anything of its true form.  When not performing the Martian appears as a bald head emerging from a crystal cylinder--the Martian doesn't walk around and manipulate things with hands like you and me, but floats around in the air in this cylinder and manipulates items with telekinesis.  

The owner and the manager of the circus know that the Martian has psychic powers.  They want to lay off their manual laborers and have the Martian pitch and strike the tents telekinetically, perform an act in which the alien lifts an elephant off the ground with its mind, and so forth.  Unlike for Yoda, for the Martian size matters, and such feats would wear it out.  The people who run this carnival won't take no for an answer, so chum enlists the aid of the narrator in escaping the circus.

Electrical fields inhibit the Martian's powers, so when our three heroes try to escape the exploitive carnival, the carnival staff try to stop them by firing up a "Wimshurst static machine" with "a dozen big condensers."  (This thing is real--Miller is schooling me yet again.)  Our heroes outwit the carnies and escape.  But then there is a thunderstorm, which builds up a charge in the Martian's cylinder and causes an explosion that destroys the narrator's car.  Its crystal cylinder gone, the Martian's body below the bald head is revealed to be that of a yard-long slug!  With tentacles!  Yuck!  But in a diversity-celebrating moment, the narrator cradles this monster in his arms--this slug-thing is just as human as he is, he realizes!

The alien takes control over the narrator's body by sticking its tentacles into a wound he suffered in the explosion and connecting to his nerves.  The Martian works him like a puppet and he runs, carrying the slug-creature, with speed and agility the narrator could not have himself achieved, to the Martian's chosen destination.  This sounds like something out of a horror story, but the narrator assures us he enjoyed it, even though running at 110% capacity through a forest and through a swamp, leaping over fences and all that, exhausted and damaged his body.

The Martian and its helpless human steed arrive at a buried spaceship--inside is a baby Martian in a vat!  The narrator's enslaved body moves the baby from one vat to another, manipulates controls, and otherwise ensures the baby slug-person's health.  The narrator, released from alien control, collapses, but the Martian puts on a spare cylinder and nurses him back to health before leaving for Mars with its baby.  The last line of the story reveals in italics that the Martian was a woman!  "'The Man from Mars'" is a diversity-celebrapalooza!

This kind of story is not really my thing, and beyond that, I'm not sure the plot really works.  Why is the Martian woman performing at the carnival at all?  Why didn't she direct the farmer or the narrator's chum to take her to her baby?  Or just fly to the baby itself via her cylinder's motive power?  Could the space ship at the end of the story be an additional shipwreck and the baby some other Martian slug's offspring whose incubator sent out a distress signal coincidentally just when our favorite Martian escaped the carnival?  How is she able to just fly away now, but not earlier?  Has Miller's sometimes oblique writing left me confused?  Or is my confusion due to the fact that our narrator can't really understand what is going on himself, not being fluent in Martian?   

We might also want to look at the story's feminist bona fides.  Obviously Miller meant to strike a blow for the fair sex by depicting a female who exhibited special powers and willpower and compassion.  But do our 21st-century feminists want to see a woman honored for caring for a child?  Shouldn't a woman in fiction be judged by how much money she makes or how many men she kills, like men in fiction are judged?    

With the exception of the overly long and tedious music and light show at the carnival, ""The Man from Mars'" is well written and constructed, and the crazy stuff that goes on is provocative, so we're giving it a passing grade.

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These three stories have problems, but none is bad and I think they demonstrate that science fiction has long been home to stories that argue either explicitly or implicitly for "tolerance" and for racial and sexual equality.  "'The Man from Mars'" puts the lie to the oft-heard claim that aliens in "old" science fiction stories are always evil monsters while women are always damsels in distress.  (These critics sometimes seem to be basing their attacks on SF on the covers of old magazines, which are so often so much more exciting and sexy than the contents.)  Today's three stories by Miller also demonstrate the commitment of early science fiction writers to teaching science to readers, and to airing speculations on what the future will be like with Miller's presentations of what space travel might be like and what the moon's surface could be like.  I think some of Miller's descriptive passages also demonstrate a commitment to literary achievement on his part, though I am skeptical this commitment bears fruit in any of today's stories.  (Miller's literary efforts are more successful in his 1943 horror story "John Cawder's Wife," with its references to Shakespeare's sonnets, one of the stories we read in our last episode.)

Expect to see more coverage of P. Schuyler Miller in the future, and until then stay tuned for explorations of a diverse selection of SF writers here at MPorcius Fiction Log.