Weird Tales, July 1926: E H Price, C W Harris and A Derleth & M Schorer

After a brief break in the year 1980, let's return to the interwar period and read three stories from the July 1926 issue of Weird Tales, which has a cover that looks like one of my recurring pre-adolescent daydreams.  (I mean the guy shooting a gigantic reptile--the rosy cheeked brunette resembles elements of my postpubescent daydreams.)  We'll read a story by E. Hoffmann Price, one by Clare Winger Harris, and a collab between August Derleth and Mark Schorer.  I'll be reading these tales in a scan at the internet archive--click here to join me.  

"The Dreamer of Atlanaat" by E. Hoffmann Price 

This story takes place in the ummah.  A wanderer, Haaj Isfendiyar, arrived in the city of Nippur ten years ago, and over that time has become a close friend of the Calif.  A skilled fighter and a clever and courageous man, today he commands a unit of 1000 cavalry and lives in a beautiful house.  But he has an enemy--the Calif's wazir, Ismail.  Ismail contrives to steal a dagger owned by Isfendiyar and one night while the Calif is out taking a walk, Ismail throws it at the Calif so that it looks like Isfendiyar tried to murder the Calif.  Isfendiyar is exiled and impoverished, his home and belongings given over to the city mob.  

Out in the country, Isfendiyar is accosted by an old man he at first takes to be a beggar.  The man corrects our hero, identifying himself as a darvish and promising to use his occult power to help Isfendiyar achieve revenge.  He leads Isfendiyar to the sinister ruins of a city in a forest to consult a being he refers to as Lord of All the Worlds, whom he says is more powerful even than Allah, a creature of whom the darvish claims his "idle fancy created not only Allah, but all the gods before whom men have bowed!"  All the world, all the universe, is created by this being's dreams, and when he ceases to dream of something, that thing ceases to exist!

This dreamer takes the form of an old sleeping man.  Isfendiyar can see something the old man is dreaming--an assassination attempt on the Calif!  Still sympathetic to the Calif, Isfendiyar kills the dreamer to save his former friend in a high place, even though he exiled him

Then the boring truth is revealed!  The "darvish" is Isfendiyar's grandfather in disguise, and this whole sacrilegious caper has been a test of Isfendiyar's loyalty to the Calif, who has watched the whole thing.  Isfendiyar's visions were induced by drugs fed to him by grandpa.  By killing the dreamer to save the Calif, Isfendiyar has passed the test and their friendship is renewed.  Who was impersonating the dreamer whom Isfedniyar killed?  It was a drugged Ismail, whom the Calif had begun to suspect had faked the assassination attempt to frame Isfendiyar.

Long, somewhat silly, convoluted to the point I'm not sure it even holds together--we're grading "The Dreamer of Atlanaat" merely acceptable.  The improbable saga of Isfendiyar the wanderer would be reprinted in 1975's Far Lands, Other Days, a big collection of Price stories.

"A Runaway World" by Clare Winger Harris

Way back in 2015, when we were young, we read two stories by Clare Winger Harris printed in 1920s issues of Amazing, "The Fate of the Poseidonia" and "The Miracle of the Lily," and I didn't exactly burnish my bona fides as a feminist by saying they were "interesting" as "historical document[s]" but "mediocre as...entertainment or literature."  Still, I didn't say they were bad, so I have no qualms about reading more Harris stories, and here we have one adorned with an illustration of a guy scared out of his mind by something seen through a telescope, which is promising.

"A Runaway World" is set 100 years in the future, in the year 2026.  Two scientists, a French expert on astronomy and an American expert on atomic physics, meet.  Harris' writing reminds me of the over-the-top dialogue of a comic book and a dramatic presentation in which everybody is overacting:

"La Rue is my name; Leon La Rue.”

Henry Shipley’s eyes grew wide with astonishment.

“Indeed I am honored by the visit of so renowned a scientist,” he cried with genuine enthusiasm.

“It is nothing," said La Rue. "I love my work.”

These eggheads talk about the theory that the planets in our universe are subatomic particles in other universes, the sun a nucleus and the planets electrons or something, and that similarly the protons and neutrons and all that here are stars and planets in tiny little universes.  When we cause chemical reactions, we are destroying whole galaxies full of people.

Well, it looks like our turn has come!  In Harris's 2026 there aren't space ships, but we are able to contact the alien civilizations on Mars, Venus, etc., via radio.  Harris has the men talk about the way Earthers figure out how to talk to aliens--by founding a code on universal mathematical principles.  "A Runaway World" is classic science fiction, all about teaching us readers science and romanticizing and valorizing the scientist while denigrating and lampooning religious people, and trying to give us that old sense of wonder as we contemplate the vastness of the universe.  

But "A Runaway World" also has weird horror elements, like those Edmond Hamilton space operas and disaster stories from Weird Tales that include mass death, torture and bondage.  The Martians are reporting that their planet is being pulled away from the sun and soon they will all freeze to death!  Our universe is suffering from chemical reactions in the universe one step larger than ours!  At least, so say the scientists--the common people of Earth think the Martians have offended God by learning too much science and are being punished like some big red Gomorrah.

Abruptly, we find that "A Runaway World" is a first person narrative, our narrator a business professional who works in an office.  Like in a sitcom, the narrator, expert accountant Griffin, reveals that he thinks Mars--before the current catastrophe--was closer to the sun than is Earth, and is humiliated when his assistant and next-door neighbor Zuttell corrects him and expresses astonishment at his boss's ignorance.  

The Zuttells and Mardens come over to watch the President give an address on the TV--the Griffin family has the latest model, and Harris talks a bit about "the televisio" and its operation and capabilities.  In the middle of the President's speech, it starts getting dark and cold outside, and the President tells everyone to tune their radios to the French astronomer whom we readers met earlier--as we readers feared, the Earth is now being pulled away from the sun!

Griffin is humiliated again when Marden, an astronomer from the university across the street, takes charge during the crisis and directs the three families to collect food and clothes and come to his observatory where they have an atomic reactor and thus will have heat longer than most people.

The three families spend months in the observatory as the Earth travels away from the sun, accelerating all the time.  It is so cold outside that to leave the atomic-heated building would mean instant death.  Marden is able to calculate the speed the Earth is travelling, and at the two year mark good ol' Terra is moving at the speed of light!  At the three year mark, the air begins to warm up as the Earth approaches a star--will our big blue marble crash into the star and be annihilated?

People can go outside again and they do so to bury the masses of dead who had no access to atomic energy or who had not stockpiled enough food.  The Earth begins to orbit the alien star--it looks like the human race will survive in a new solar system!  Mars has already arrived, and is now closer to its sun than is Earth, as if Griffin's boneheaded mistake has now been manifested in the real world.

Harris' style is sophomoric at times, but the plot--at least once the scientists are left behind--works and "A Runaway World" is fun, so thumbs up!  The tale of Griffin and the human race's harrowing journey through interstellar space would be reprinted in the 1947 Harris collection Away from the Here and Now, the 2019 collection The Artificial Man and Other Stories, and in 2026 in Stephen Jones' big anthology of stories from 1920s issues of Weird Tales.    

"The Elixir of Life" by Marc Schorer and August Derleth

This two-and-a-half-page story is advertised as a "Five-Minute Story."  We've read a few of these Derleth-Schorer collaborations:

"Pacer"

"They Shall Rise"

"Death Holds the Post" 

"Colonel Markesan"

"The Return of Andrew Bentley"

"Eyes of the Serpent"

"Spawn of the Maelstrom"

"The Woman at Loon Point"

"The Elixir of Life" is an obvious filler story, a trifle I will charitably say is barely acceptable.  

A Duke, residing in Milan, has hired a wizard to make him an elixir that will prolong his life.  He comes to the wizard's abode on a narrow alley in the city and gets pissed off that the elixir isn't quite ready.  The wizard admits he has not yet acquired the final ingredient--the blood of a child.  The duke angrily orders the wizard's black servant ("Nubian servitor") to just go out and seize the first child he sees.  Then the Duke leaves, saying he will return in three hours and the elixir better be ready.

When the Duke returns he drinks the elixir and then makes some comment on how his son has escaped his nurse.  Everybody realizes the elixir includes the blood of the Duke's son's, and the Duke is responsible for the murder of his own son.  

A banal and pedestrian thing, but not exactly bad.  It doesn't look like it has reappeared in any Derleth collections or anthologies.

**********

Clare Winger Harris is today's big winner.  While Price and the Mssrs. Derleth and Schorer give us tired and obvious twist ending wizard murder stories that, I guess, they mean to elevate by setting them in the exotic and diabolical worlds of the Muslim Near East and the Italy of the Borgias, Harris, while her writing is a little childish, lays a lot of big science theories on us, tries to predict the roles of television and nuclear power in our future, and gives us actual human relationships we as middle-class Americans of the 20th century can identify with, along with horrible danger, privation and death.  Maybe I should read more of Harris' stories from the Gernsback magazines. 

Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log for more stories published before you were born about wizards, scientists, and murderers.