Clare Winger Harris: "The Artificial Man," "The Menace of Mars," and "The Evolutionary Monstrosity"

In our last episode I enjoyed a story by Clare Winger Harris that debuted in Weird Tales, "A Runaway World," a tale full of science and scientists as well as horror and death that I thought conformed to the expectations of a traditional science fiction story as much or more to what we expect of a weird story.  So let's read three Harris pieces from steadfastly science-oriented magazines edited by science fiction pioneer Hugo Gernsback.  All three of these stories were reprinted in the 1947 Harris collection Away from the Here and Now, which you can read at this link to a scan of a signed copy of the book, but I am going to read them in scans of the magazines in which they first saw print.  Here are those links:

"The Artificial Man"   "The Menace of Mars"   "The Evolutionary Monstrosity"

"The Artificial Man" (1929)

The issue of Science Wonder Quarterly that includes "The Artificial Man" also prints Edmond Hamilton's "The Hidden World," which I don't think I have read yet, and a gushing letter from a twelve-year-old Forrest Ackerman who loves Science Wonder magazine more than mere words can express.  The issue also has tons of fun illustrations by Frank R. Paul depicting space craft, people in zero gravity, space suits, creepy aliens, so many of your favorite things--this is a pretty attractive magazine, though the tiny print is a little forbidding; I think the July 1926 ish of Weird Tales has like 51 lines on a page, but this Fall 1929 issue of Science Wonder Quarterly has 68 lines per page!  Gernsback should have marketed a companion magnifying glass with his magazines!

George Gregory is an excellent college student--he's captain of the football team, and he put on a brilliant debate performance, defending the philosophy that guides his life: "bodily perfection is a result of right thinking.”  But then tragedy strikes--injured on the football field (maybe you call it "the gridiron") he has to have one of his legs amputated!  Since GG thinks that mind and body are one, he fears this means that the loss of a limb implies that he has lost part of his soul!  He tells Rosalind, the girl he has been going steady with his entire college career, that they should break up--he doesn't want her to be held back by having to endure a relationship with half a man!

Rosalind isn't buying it, and after GG gets an artificial leg and learns to use it so well that people who do not know him can't even tell he has only one natural leg, they schedule their wedding.  But a week before they are to be bound in holy matrimony, GG is hit by a truck!  George can't catch a break!  One of his arms is amputated, and some of his internal organs are reduced in capacity.  

GG comes from healthy stock and hasn't been hitting the pizzas and ice cream as hard as some of us do, so he largely physically recovers from this second disaster, but he has some odd theories about mental, psychological and spiritual recovery:

“God expresses Himself through the physical world....As much of physical perfection as I have lost, that much of God or Goodness has left me...."

Rosalind can't shake her fiancé's adherence to these self-destructive beliefs, and then there is the fact that GG can tell she is starting to crush on GG's college buddy, Dr. David Bell, who is also his lead physician.  (It's a small world.)  When GG puts his artificial arm around Rosalind, she shudders--is it that she can't marry a man who isn't 100% natural, or that George is not the same man, mentally, with whom she fell in love freshman year?  Either way, she tells him the marriage is off, and he gets rough with her, and David has to rescue her, has to outfight his crippled former friend who now hates him, whose physical suffering has apparently driven him insane.  Rosalind and David get engaged.

GG decides to put his theory about the inseparability of body and mind to the ultimate test--he will have every possible part of his body replaced with an artificial part, and see how it changes his psyche, how much of his original identity he retains.  Obviously, GG is insane.  But mentally ill people who might benefit from therapy or psychiatric medicine can always find doctors willing, for enough of the old moola, to perform radical and unnecessary surgery on depressed or deranged people's bodies.  For five years, Rosalind and David, happily married, hear nothing from their old friend GG, but then he reappears at the hospital where the David works, unrecognizable as almost all his body has been replaced by mechanical parts, including his heart.  Most of his body operates on batteries!  He assaults David and knocks him out.

When David awakes, Rosalind is there, along with the minor character, a colleague of David's, who saved David's life.  After David was knocked unconscious, this doctor and two policemen fought the mechanical man, able to defeat him because the doctor is able to figure out GG's weaknesses.  As he expired, GG's brain in its robot body asked the doctor to tell David and Rosalind that he now realizes his theory was wrong, that if you have strength of character, if you have the right attitude, you need not become evil if your body is damaged.

This is a wild melodrama, and I kind of like it, but there are problems.  My biggest complaint is that a minor character who appears in the second half of the story is the one who defeats the monster and resolves the plot.  Obviously Rosalind and/or David should have slain GG and heard his apology with their own ears.  Why would an author choose a complicated and indirect climax and ending over a straightforward ending?  Authors do this stuff sometimes, and I don't get it.

We are moderately recommending "The Artificial Man."  Besides in Science Wonder Quarterly and Away from the Here and Now, the tragedy of George Gregory, Big Man on Campus, can be experienced in a 2015 anthology of early SF by women, The Feminine Future, and the 2019 collection for which it serves as title story. 

"The Menace of Mars" (1928)

"The Menace of Mars" bears more than a passing resemblance to the 1926 story we read in our last episode by Harris, "A Runaway World."  She even quotes the exact same lines from Tennyson in both stories, and has a dog be the victtm in a horror scene.  Unfortunately, this 1928 treatment of the material is less entertaining.  In "A Runaway World" we had some real human relationships, and the characters made some decisions that affected the course of their lives, while "The Menace of Mars" lacks such human drama--Harris does not explore relationships, and everybody in the story is just at the mercy of titanic forces and lives or dies based mostly on luck.  Harris doesn't mine the material for horror scenes and images as effectively as she did for "A Runaway World," either.

It is the 1950s.  Our narrator Hildreth is a young astronomer, his girlfriend Vivian Harley is a young chemist whose father is a world-famous chemist.  We get a lecture about how the molecular structures of gasses, liquids and solids differ, and there is talk of how maybe the atoms of our universe are the suns and planets of other smaller universes, and our sun a nucleus and our planets electrons of a larger universe.  Then comes a disaster which makes these theories manifest.  All of a sudden there are earthquakes and floods and the night sky is full of abnormally bright stars and huge planets and people's weight feels different--the universe is apparently contracting!  Our universe was a gas in the universe one step up, but has now become a solid, all the heavenly bodies packed close together.    

To escape the heat as Earth gets closer to Sol, the small number of people who have survived the cataclysm flee to the poles in giant airships.  Harris strikes a blow against superstition with a digression, the episode of the airship Icarus.  Icarus suffered a famous crash some time ago, and people think she is cursed and even though she is fully repaired, so people are afraid to board Icarus.  She and her sister ship Celestia are rated to carry 1000 passengers, but over 1000 crowd onto Celestia and none of them volunteers to move to Icarus, which has fewer than 800 passengers.  Overladen, Celestia crashes on the way to the North Pole and everybody aboard is lost.  Icarus arrives safely.  Our narrator makes sure we don't miss the point:

Her fate should prove a constant reminder of the failure of fear and superstition against the triumph of reason. 

In the confusion, Hildreth and his family go to the North Pole, and Vivian and her father to the South Pole.  The people at the North Pole have to construct floating cities because the ice melts--the people on the South Pole build what they call an Eden or a Utopia on solid land. 

Hildreth and his closest colleague, Miles Tracy, have an unprecedented opportunity to study Venus and Mars, they now being very close.  Venus apparently had a civilization but it was destroyed by the recent cataclysm.  Mars seems to have never fostered life of any kind. 

Or has it?  Yet another scientist in this story full of scientists has a crazy theory--that Mars itself is one big organism, one big intelligent being!  When Earth's orbit begins to change, causing more earthquakes, this guy thinks it is because Mars is sending out a gravity ray to move Earth into position to act as a sunshade for the red planet!  And it gets worse--Mars begins to somehow turn parts of Jupiter and the Earth into red rock just like itself, and Hildreth and Vivian are aboard an aircraft, travelling between the poles over barren North America, when a Martian magnetic force draws their aircraft to the ground right where the red growth is occurring!  Those who touch the spreading red growth become red rock themselves, are integrated into the Martian colony!  Luckily, Hildreth and Vivian run away from the spreading red waste and make it to a river--the spreading Martian cancer is retarded by water.  Our heroes are then rescued by an aircraft.

The equatorial and temperate zones of Earth turn red, but then our universe shifts to a liquid state, the stars and planets now somewhat further apart, and there is a big rainstorm, which arrests the spread of the red rock.  Hildreth brings back a sample of the post-deluge red rock, now a sort of jelly.  He accidentally allows the jelly to come back to life and kill a dog but then neutralizes the spreading Martian rock with a hose.  We are told that the Earth and human society have now reached a stable state, that artificial means of delivering water are employed to keep the red borders of Martian territory on Earth in check.  The story ends on a philosophical note--of life like our own, and the queer-to-us life of the giant rock that is Mars, which is the "normal" life of our universe and which is the anomaly--are we plants and animals merely a fungus that sometimes grows on the surface of the primary life forms of our universe, which are the planets?

Merely acceptable, I'm afraid.  Besides the aforementioned The Artificial Man and Other Stories and Away from the Here and Now, "The Menace of Mars" has been reprinted in the first volume of The Routledge Anthology of Climate Fiction (2025.)  

"The Evolutionary Monstrosity" (1929) 

Harris' name appears on the cover of the Winter 1929 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly in which "The Evolutionary Monstrosity" debuted, and the editor's intro to the story refers to her as "our well known author;" Harris seems to have been a draw for readers.

Ted Marsten grew up in poverty, but his natural talent has made him a success at university.  Ted has a theory about evolution, that it is "a certain bacterial growth which slowly and continuously changes the cellular structure of living organisms, causing the formation of new tissue and organs, and breaking down the old."  One of his friends, our narrator Frank Caldwell, son of a Ioawan factory owner, agrees with me that this theory is bonkers, but Ted's other pal, Irwin Staley, son of a New York broker, finds Ted's brainwave very convincing.  After these three biologists graduate, narrator Frank goes to work for the university, pushing the party line from Darwin,  while Ted and Irwin put Irwin's riches to work trying to prove Ted's it's-bacteria-what-done-it theory of evolution.

Summer rolls around the Ted and Irwin send Frank a written invitation, and Frank goes over to the Staley estate to check in on the independent scholars' progress.  And what progress they have made!  Ted has mutated a normal housecat into a bipedal hairless servant who can talk!  This revolting monster leads Frank to the lab, where Frank suggests that Ted's experiments, his advancing the cat through stages of evolution without the ameliorating influence of the environment, is risky, even the work of the--metaphorical!--devil.  Frank does not believe in Satan, but he does believe in a Creator, and that God has "laws" which man must not "tamper with" or "distort."

Ted angrily storms off, and Irwin informs Frank that things are even worse than they seem--Ted has been evolving himself!

(I shrug off nonsense like hyperspace and psychic powers in stories, but somehow stories that have evolutionary mutations that occur in a living being instead of being realized across generations, and stories that suggest that evolution is not a series of random mutations that propagate through a population because they offer some benefit in sexual selection processes or defense against disease or predators or something like that, but rather that the course of evolution confirms to some kind of plan that slowly unfolds, stick in my craw.)

Frank goes to Europe for like a year, and then is busy working at the university, so doesn't return to the Staley estate for three years.  Irwin's sister, Dorothy, tells Frank that she has not seen Ted in a year, that her brother Irwin is a slave to Ted due to Ted's psychic powers.  But Irwin can speak his own mind on those rare occasions when Ted sleeps.  According to Irwin, Ted has ingested so many evolutionary bacterium that he has advanced to a point to which he no longer resembles a human being!  Ted is in love with Dorothy, and has ordered Irwin to inject her with the evolution germs so that he and she will be on the same rung of the evolutionary ladder!  Ted aspires to rule the world with Dorothy at his side!

Irwin, under psychic control, has injected Dorothy once so far, but she still looks like an attractive young lady, though she reports that the injection had a psychological or mental effect:

"I seemed to understand things in a quiet, impersonal sort of way, and was, so to speak, above petty emotions and passions that had swayed me constantly prior to this experience."

Dorothy asks Frank to help her, and Frank, already falling in love with this beauty in peril, agrees.  I kind of wonder if Harris here is making some kind of comment or joke on men's belief that women are emotional and flighty, that she is suggesting Frank fell in love with Dorothy because--thanks to evolving to a higher form, she now she has a more rational, more "masculine," mind. 

When Irwin emerges from the lab to give his sister her second injection, Frank intercepts him, then marches into the lab to confront Ted, who is now merely a head with tentacles sitting on a cushion, a thing that from a distance looks a little like a big tarantula or maybe an octopus.  Ted can levitate, and read minds, and control people like puppets, but he can only use his psychic powers on one person at a time, so while the would-be world ruler is dealing with Frank, Irwin sneaks up behind Ted and kills him with blows from an iron bar.

"The Evolutionary Monstrosity" is certainly better than "The Menace of Mars," having more human relationships and a plot that is driven by human desires and decisions.  I can mildly recommend it.  The tragic tale of Ted and his germ theory of evolution can be found in the 2016 volume Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction.

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These stories are not great, but they are not at all bad, and it is cool to read from these very science-oriented Gernsback publications.  The prominence of religion in the stories is also noteworthy--Harris and the characters attack superstition and specific tenets of the prominent religions, like the existence of the devil, but they acknowledge the existence of a God the Creator, and come up with their own idiosyncratic theories about Him and his Laws.  A lot of people think Harris is important because she is a woman, and maybe she does deal with family life and love triangles in a way that is different than a man would, but I suspect it is Harris' treatment of religion in her science fiction stories that is more worthy of analysis, that is more singular and more of a distinguishing feature that separates her from other science fiction writers.

More from the Gernsback stable next time we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log!