I hope you didn't get your fill of MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton last time when we read his 1929 epic of a genocidal trip to the Earth's hollow center, "The Hidden World," because today we have three stories from Weird Tales by the Ohio-born child prodigy and husband of Leigh Brackett, a man smart enough to graduate high school at 14 and drop out of college at 17--dummies like me wait until their twenties and grad school to escape the receiving end of academia.
I'm reading all these stories in scans of Weird Tales you can find at the following links:
"The Metal Giants" "The Atomic Conquerors" "Evolution Island"
"The Metal Giants" (1926)
Professor Detmold is an embarrassment to the University, always coming up with crazy theories that give the alumni pause. His latest public announcement is that he has invented an artificial brain, a claim that arouses ridicule in the press and even among his fellow scientists. Even the students want him sacked! "Testy," "high-strung," "high-tempered" and "impatient," Detmold has not ingratiated himself with the University community and he pays the price, cleaning out his lab and disappearing after he is pressed to resign by the University president, whose priority is not advancing the science that is likely to put us all out of work or put us all in an unmarked grave but raking in those tuition and donation bucks. Detmold doesn't even tell his only friend, an English professor who warns him that an artificial brain made of metal might be dangerous--what will rein in an intelligence with no soul?--where he is going.
Four years later come reports from farmers in West Virginia of strange damage and markings in the woods, and of sightings of a huge human-like figure in the distance. These reports bring that English prof to the region--he suspects his friend Detmold, whom he has not seen nor heard from since his disappearance, is behind whatever crazy thing is going on. The English professor watches from a hill as twenty-two 300-foot-tall metal giants destroy the local steel town with their metal fists and feet and then exterminate its inhabitants with poison gas! Now he is sure Detmold is to blame!
The metal giants march on Pittsburgh, their poison gas projectors destroying the ten-thousand-man detachment sent by the Army to stop them. Meanwhile, back in West Virginia, the English professor has followed clues and found the farmhouse where Detmold made his lab after being driven from the University four years ago. In it is a diary, and its fragmentary entries tell a horrifying tale! For three years Detmold worked on the metal brain he had created; when the English professor last saw it the artificial brain had the intelligence of a mere single-celled creature, reacting to light by avoiding the light if it was too bright, but the thing quickly grew in ability as Detmold augmented it with greater brain capacity and with limbs and trained it until it was able to help the scientist perform experiments, and then do experiments itself with unerring precision. Eventually the metal brain became superior to its creator in scientific endeavor! The metal intelligence, however, had no interest in art, literature, relationships, or conversation--it was totally emotionless.
Detmold fell ill like three years into his stay in the farmhouse and had to spend time in a Pittsburgh hospital recovering. When he returned to his remote lab he found that the brain had invented anti-grav and a poison gas that passes harmlessly through your skin and flesh to dissolve your bones! The brain had also started up a super-modern mining operation, a refinery and a factory to build an army of gargantuan killers, robots with simple artificial brains, controlled via radio by the super brain built by Detmold. Detmold barely escaped alive from his creation.
Clues in the diary lead the English professor to the site of the artificial brain's HQ. And he is there when Detmold, having built his own giant war machine in the form of a wheel 350 feet in diameter, attacks the brain, desperate to vanquish the murderous monster he created in his hubris! Detmold dies in the fight, but the brain is crushed and, without a commander, the giants are rendered inert.
A fun story, thumbs up! It may be instructive to compare this 1926 story and 1929's "The Hidden World," the subject of my previous blog post. Both stories have plenty of science and plenty of death and destruction. But whereas "The Hidden World" is repetitious, "The Metal Giants" is not--we see the metal giants wipe out one city, killing thousands of people and toppling scores of buildings, and we see one big climactic fight between metal war machines, and that is enough--we don't see the giants destroy one city, then another city, and then another, and we don't see multiple fights between gargantuan war machines. In "The Hidden World" there are three hand-to-hand fights and more aerial dogfights than I can remember, and twice we see the heroes infiltrate a big important meeting--that is too much of a good thing. Perhaps more importantly, Detmold and the English prof have human emotions and personalities and relationships, something the forgettable protagonists in "The Hidden World" sorely lack.
"The Atomic Conquerors" (1927)
Hamilton starts right out with the superlatives in this story, telling us it is about "an age-old cosmic feud" that erupts into "dreadful war, universe struggling with universe in titanic combat, immense, unthinkable...." Hamilton tells us that, in this struggle, we humans are "a mass of tiny, frightened pigmies, running about beneath battling giants," pigmies who have no power to influence the war's outcome, but in the same breath he tells us that this unthinkable war between universes was actually triggered by an insane human. It also seems clear that the Earth and human race survived this mind-bogglingly stupendous conflict. A lot of weird stories start this way, telling you how the adventure or crisis ends up so that as you follow the narrative, read a blow by blow description of the course of the event with whose salient points you are already familiar, you already know what your destination will be. After all these years I am still not sure I think this structure is a good idea.
A student on break is bicycling around England. He spends a few days across the border in bonnie Scotland. Having heard from some locals about some weird glass-like rocks at some remote ruins (these vitrified forts are apparently real, though this is the first I ever heard of them--every day brings new reminders of my ignorance!), he decides to investigate them. Those locals also mentioned hearing some odd, regular booms, more like artillery fire than thunder, last night, and that some scientists have been hanging around the ruins.
The student, on the way to the ruins, meets an archaeologist. This guy tells the student he needs his help saving the world. But first, he has to tell the student the backstory. You see, a few years ago, the archaeologist met an irascible and disgraced physics professor and they became friendly because the physicist was passionately interested in archaeology as a hobby. The physicist had a crazy theory, that the vitrification of those old ruins in Scotland was the result of some super ray weapon being used in the vicinity in the distant past.
Having been thrown out of Cambridge, the physicist has time to explore these vitrified forts, and earlier this year discovered at one of the forts an ancient inscription hidden under cement. He hired the archaeologist to come decipher the inscription, and after a month of working on the translation, the archaeologist was able to share the astounding story told by the ancient text. These forts were built not by Earth humans, but by people from one of Earth's innumerable atoms.
It feels like just last week that Clare Winger Harris was telling us about the theory that the nuclei and electrons of our universe are the stars and planets of countless teeny tiny universes, and that Sol and Earth in turn are a nucleus and an electron of a larger universe. Well, we hear the same theory from Hamilton today. The civilization on an electron of our universe, a component of an atom of a grain of sand, was feeling population pressure, so developed technology that empowered them to make themselves larger, large enough to shift into our universe and colonize the Earth. This was long ago, before the rise of Homo Sapiens. These people were fierce and not content to just colonize the Earth--they wanted to colonize the next universe up, and attacked that universe. But in this super universe they met a super civilization much superior to their own which stymied their attacks and then launched a counter attack, so that a huge battle raged on the young Earth and the imperialists were forced to retreat back to their overcrowded electron. The super people set a force field around the grain of sand that short circuited the electron people's ability to change their size, and sealed the grain of sand under the stone with the inscription on it; the text isn't just a history lesson, but implores the reader to not set free the warlike electron people.
The physicist decided to free the belligerent people of that electron, and to do so he learned how to deactivate the force field and to make himself smaller, small enough to visit the people on that bellicose electron. Why, you ask? He wants to get revenge on Earth for throwing him out of Cambridge, and what better revenge than summoning an army from the electron to exterminate the human race? (If you can make yourself giant-sized, guvnah, why not just go Godzilla on Cambridge and leave me out of it--I went to Rutgers!)
The people of the electron turn out to be lizard men who promise to deal with us humans after they first launch their attack on their old foes in the next universe up. The behavior of people in this story never makes much sense. The physicist used a stun gun provided by the reptilians to paralyze the archaeologist, so the archaeologist had to watch, powerless, like all those attractive women in The Black Belly of the Tarantula, now available in limited edition 4K, as the reptile men, an army of them, grew into view from the grain of sand, and then grew huge enough to vanish into the next universe up. The whole thing makes no sense--are the reptiliads--available from Ral Partha Legacy--gaining mass as they grow? Do they have to get as big as a star to get to the next universe? How come nobody in the surrounding countryside sees them growing if they get big enough to obscure the night sky and, at some point, grow beyond the shadow of the Earth so their big crocagator mugs are visible from London and Paris? How do they breathe once their heads are up in space? Good grief.
By an improbable lucky chance the stun device stopped working on the archaeologist and he sneaked off to get help and the first person he ran into was the student. The student and he hurry back to where the physicist is awaiting arrival of the next wave of reptiliads, and attack him. But lacking guns or even knives, the student and archaeologist are outmatched by the elderly mentally ill physics professor. Sad! The student is paralyzed by the stun gun and must watch helplessly while the archeologist and physicist wrestle. Then the reptile men appear and casually kill the two scientists with a freeze ray before setting out to raid English cities in their flying disks. The freeze ray wreaks havoc from above on unsuspecting Liverpool and Manchester from, but by the time they reach London the RAF has been forewarned and gives the flying disks a hot reception. The brave British lads resort to kamikaze attacks against the disks, sacrificing themselves to inflict over 50% losses on the scaly air fleet, sending it back to the land of tartans and haggis to regroup. I know what you are thinking--if the lizard men can't beat a bunch of biplanes with Vickers .303 machine guns, how can they conquer the people of a superior universe who have all kinds of crazy force fields and energy weapons?
Squamous reinforcements are growing into our universe as the student watches but then the people of the universe above ours appear--they defeated the reptiliad attack and with their superior technology drive the reptile people off Earth and back to their grain of sand, which the superpeople again seal up.
This story is not very good, I'm afraid. For one thing, there are way too many frame stories between us and the actual story, and our protagonists actually have no role in resolving the plot, something Hamilton tells us on page 1. If I wanted to read a story about action and tragedy during World War II, I'd want to read a story narrated by or focusing on a fighter pilot or a tank commander or the skipper of a frigate or somebody like that, somebody with agency right there at the tip of the spear, making decisions and running risks. I wouldn't want to read about a guy going to the library to read a book of second-hand sources about the fighter pilot. And yet here in "The Atomic Conquerors" we are not addressed by an atomic conqueror or by the embittered physicist who betrays his fellow Earth mammals and tries to sic some reptile men on us, instead we learn about the scaly aliens and the evil physicist through a hiker who learns about them from an archaeologist.
For another, the whole thing is silly and full of plot holes. The reptile men from that electron face an overcrowding problem, so they learn how to grow and shrink themselves so they can get to other universes to colonize them. But if they can grow and shrink themselves to any size, can't they solve the overpopulation problem by shrinking themselves so they use up less room on their native planet? Or grow themselves so they can just step over to another solar system and colonize that system and every one beyond? Hamilton hints that the universe above ours is nicer than ours and maybe much nicer than the reptiliads' universe (reminding us perhaps of Jack Vance's Eyes of the Overworld) but this is not elaborated upon.
I've gotta give "The Atomic Conquerors" a moderately negative vote, I'm afraid. Why Maberry and Booth think this is better than "The Metal Giants" is beyond me; maybe they felt the need to include a story with the whole every-atom-is-a-star-system gag.
"Evolution Island" (1927)
We know not where that road leads, for our path of evolution, like the paths all life must follow, was laid down for us, as I believe, by a Power above earth....How much higher the human race today than the savage Neandertal men of fifty thousand years ago! And fifty thousand years from now, men will be as much above us. It is the same with all life, with all forms of life. All go up, up, change and change...We can not swerve aside from the path of change we follow.
The above quote is from a lecture by a biologist who proposes that, while the course of evolution cannot be changed (I guess he never heard of selective breeding), perhaps evolution could be sped up! We just read a story by Clare Winger Harris on these same themes, and way back when this blog was just a mere speck and not the 1,600-post behemoth it is today, we read a story by Hamilton himself on these themes. Anyway, this biologist claims evolution is the result of exposure to "the Garner ray," named for the physicist who discovered it, and that the more Garner rays you are exposed to, the faster you evolve. As evidence, be points to Australia, saying that there must be fewer of the rocks that radiate Garner rays down under than elsewhere, because the Aborigines of that southern continent are "without doubt the lowest form of human being on earth, the least developed of all the races of men." Well, there is a string of words you won't be seeing in print ever again. Anyway, the scientist says that it is inevitable that somebody will now artificially produce Garner rays and use them to speed up human evolution so that the human race improves physically and intellectually at a rapid pace, enjoying millions of years of progress in mere hours, becoming like gods!
The biologist's claims meet with almost universal disapproval from all segments of society, and he retreats to the lab behind his mansion--this joker inherited money so doesn't need to stay on the good side of the academic establishment. He has only one friend whom he allows to enter his lab, a physician; he also has an assistant. The sawbones comes by for a visit and the biologist tells him he has already invented a Garner ray projector that produces far more powerful rays than appear in nature, and as the physician watches he uses it to make a chicken evolve. I was pretty disappointed that this did not produce a chicken that can give stirring speeches and lead a civil rights movement against the mass nuggetification of its people; instead, the chicken just gets smaller and dies. The future of the chicken is not bright, apparently.
Then the biologist reverses the polarity of his ray projector and makes a second chicken devolve; it changes in shape and size into Archaeopteryx, then a succession of reptiles and lesser creatures until nothing is left but slime, the primordial ooze of the cliche.
A week later the biologist and his assistant head down to the Caribbean, to an uninhabited island he has purchased where he plans to let loose many animals and play the ray over all of them so he can witness hundreds of thousands of years of evolution in just a few weeks or months. I guess I should note that all these operations are tense for the reader because the ray projector doesn't emit a focused beam, but just sprays rays all over, and the scientists and physician have to put on a protective vest to keep from themselves evolving or devolving. I kept expecting somebody's suspenders or shoulder strap or something to fail and for him to suddenly evolve into some kind of supersmart dictator or devolve into a poo-flinging monkey or something.
A year passes and the sawbones doesn't hear from the biologist. Then, one rainy night, the biologist shows up at the doctor's New York apartment to tell him the terrible tale of his year on the island. He explains how all the different species evolved, following the plan of, I guess, almighty God written in their cells. Some of the reptiles and insects evolved into huge monsters which is pretty cool, but eventually all species shrank and then died, just like that chicken. This is pretty anti-climactic after all the talk of evolution bringing species "up" or "higher --the plans in animals' genes have a final destination and that destination is not perfection but oblivion?!
Eventually all the animals on the island have gone extinct, and then the plants evolve into an array of forms until a sort of intelligent mobile cactus has become the sole species on the island. The biologist feared these smart walking plants might take over the world or something and wanted to turn on the reversing ray and devolve them back to inconsequentiality, but the assistant was fascinated by them and wanted to follow their progress for a few more thousand years. The biologist went to Kingston for a month-long holiday, leaving the assistant behind to further study the superplants. When he got back he had a shock--the assistant had taken off his protective gear and evolved into the man of the future, a hairless creature with a huge head and a slug-like body from which sprout four tentacles ending in hands--this man of the year One Million A.D. can walk and manipulate tools with any of the tentacles.
And then there was the plants, which had evolved into a horde of plant men who embraced the man of One Million A.D. as their leader. The biologist's assistant planned to lead these vegetable people in a campaign to conquer the world! And then the galaxy! The assistant has already used his super brain to devise a special flame gun for his plant legions to use.
The biologist managed to escape the island and get to New York and now he asks the physician for help. He is confident an attack on the island by a conventional military force will fail, but if two men can sneak onto the island, maybe they can put an end to the future man's evil plans!
Our guys get to the island and sneak towards the lab, hoping to turn on the reverse ray and devolve the plant men into harmless mindless vegetation, but they are captured, which is not a surprise to us readers, as "Evolution Island" is introduced with an illustration of two men in bondage being harangued by a tentacled freak. Luckily, the man of the future is busy observing the maiden flight of the Luftwaffe of 100-foot spherical aircraft his plant men have constructed from his designs and this gives our heroes a chance to turn on the reversing ray and reduce the plant men and their diabolical ruler to primordial slime. The biologist destroys all the Garner ray apparatus and pledges to never tinker with evolution again.
I can moderately recommend "Evolution Island;" the science is all over the place but at least it is surprising and entertaining and the adventure components are not bad; this one is certainly better than "The Atomic Conquerors." "Evolution Island" was selected by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Weinberg to represent 1927 in their 1988 anthology Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors, and, in 2023, Frank Festa and Hardy Kettlitz reprinted "Evolution Island" in their anthology of stories from 1920s issues of WT, 100 Jahre Weird Tales Jubiläumsedition: 1923 bis 1929.
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All three of today's Weird Tales offerings from Edmond Hamilton star college professors who are estranged from academia and whose research threatens to destroy the human race, but "The Metal Giants" stands head and shoulders above the other two. The 1926 story's science is much more believable and internally consistent, its climax is much better, and its characters have more interesting motivations and their behavior is more realistic and better integrated into the plot.
This has been a profitable foray into the pages of the Unique Magazine. As you are well aware, I am trying to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales, a feat I have already performed when it comes to the 1930s and portions of the 1920s and 1940s, and today I am closing in on completion of 1926 and have already taken a bite out of 1927. See the links below for detailed reports on my progress, and brace yourself for more 1920s weirdness next time we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
WEIRD TALES PROJECT
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