Stories from the Sept. 1948 Weird Tales by A Derleth, R Bradbury, S A Coblentz, E Hamilton and E F Russell

Let's surf on over to the internet archive and take a look at the September 1948 issue of Weird Tales, edited by Dorothy McIlwraith.  In the list of new members of the Weird Tales Club we see the name of Jack Gaughan, who was then just beginning his successful career as a SF illustrator, and on the table of contents page we see the names of five writers we have already opined about here at MPorcius Fiction Log: August Derleth, Ray Bradbury, Stanton A. Coblentz, Edmond Hamilton, and Eric Frank Russell.  Let's read those five stories and get a taste of what Jack Gaughan and other readers of Weird Tales in 1948 were getting for their 20 cents.

"The Whippoorwills in the Hills" by August Derleth

1958 hardcover

Dan Harrop, narrator of "The Whippoorwills in the Hills," tells us that when his oddball cousin Abel Harrop, who had had almost no intercourse with Dan and the rest of the family, vanished, the authorities were of no help, so he decided to investigate the disappearance himself.  Dan moved into Abel's isolated house, finding there a bunch of weird books.  Abel's phone is on a party line, and Dan is able to listen in on the local women gossiping about him and about his lost cousin--it seems they feared Abel, and are glad he is gone.

At night, a huge flock of whippoorwills settles in the valley where lies the Harrop house, and make so much noise with their cries that the narrator cannot sleep.  The next day when he eavesdrops on the neighbors' phone convos, Dan finds that they are all talking about the whippoorwills--they could hear their racket, even though their homes are quite distant, and fear the bird's activity foreshadows an imminent death.

Sure enough, cattle and even people in the area start getting killed in the dark of night.  During the day Dan conducts his investigations, looking into Abel's strange old books and talking to the locals, who refuse to help him, some quite angrily.  Whenever he is near Abel's queer library Dan has visions, like unbidden memories, of weird landscapes and creatures.  During the night Dan does his best to sleep while the whippoorwills alight on and around the house and make their interminable racket, and when he does sleep he dreams of monolithic towers and fungoid trees and the amoeba-like beings that live among them.  As the story progresses we are given clear clues that Abel was casting spells from the books in order to "open a Gate" through which to contact or summon monsters from that other dimension, ansd that he himself was sucked bodily into that alien plane.  Dan himself, by reading aloud a passage of one of Abel's books, got the attention of alien creatures and the murders of animals and people are being conducted by him in a state of stupefaction or alien possession, their blood a sacrifice to the extradimensional monsters that perhaps appeases them and saves him from being taken away as was his cousin. 

We learn at the story's end that Dan is writing this memoir in captivity, having been captured by the local police in the vicinity of the dead body of a murdered woman--Dan refuses to admit he is the culprit, instead blaming the whippoorwills.

Derleth fills this story with direct references to people, places and things in Mythos stories by H. P. Lovecraft and in at least once instance Robert E. Howard.  The towns of Dunwich and Arkham are mentioned, minor characters have names like Whateley, Abel's books bear titles like Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and the creatures in Dan's dreams have names like Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.

"The Whippoorwills in the Hills" starts out alright; the pacing and tone and style are good.  But Derleth fails to tie everything up together in the end; at least I didn't quite understand the role of the whippoorwills in the story.  All the stuff with the books and monsters from another dimension and the murders works as a discrete unit, it all makes internal sense, so the whippoorwills feel like a superfluous element just added on top of the story instead of integrated with the rest of it.  I guess the birds are a manifestation of the aliens (whom we are told can take any shape) and it is they that drink the blood that Dan spills, or somehow direct him to spill the blood.  It is possible that the whippoorwills seemed out of place to me because I was not very familiar with the folklore about them, and had forgotten that these birds played a role in Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror."

Another problem with the story is that it doesn't build up to a striking climax, it just sort of sails along and then ends, the tone and pace, which were perfectly adequate at the start, never changing, so it feels like the story just abruptly ends.

Merely acceptable. "The Whippoorwills in the Hills" would be included in the oft-reprinted Derleth collection, The Mask of Cthulhu.

British paperback editions, 1951 and 1976

"Fever Dream" by Ray Bradbury

In the days when a doctor would make house calls in his horse-drawn carriage, a fifteen-year-old boy lies in bed suffering what the sawbones thinks is scarlet fever.  But the boy knows that his body is being taken over, bit by bit, by germs, that he will die and his body be animated by a new creature, a creature of unfathomable evil!  Sure enough, at the end of the brief tale the doctor is astonished to find the boy fully recovered and eager to go to school and touch all the other kids and their clothes--no doubt to spread disease and death!

Bradbury's dialogue is chilling, his metaphors powerful and illuminating (as metaphors, which so often are showy cliches that waste your time, should be), and the story is a perfect length, short and to the point.  Quite good.

"Fever Dream" was first reprinted in 1959, in the collection A Medicine for Melancholy, and has since been widely anthologized.

           
"The Daughter of Urzun" by Stanton A. Coblentz

Most of the stories in this 1964 magazine were
written by Coblentz, though many appear under
pseudonyms

Remember when we read Stanton A. Coblentz's broad satire The Hidden World (AKA In Caverns Below), or when we read his anti-war poem "On A Weird Planet?"  Damn, that was long ago.  Well, let's get reacquainted with old Stanton.

Out of the starting gate, Stanton gets me on his side by reminding me of my New York days and relating a horror-story version of a typical New York experience--being mesmerized by an attractive woman on the subway!  Our narrator and his blue-eyed wife Marjorie are riding the world's most famous mass-transit system when a "swarthy" "Oriental" woman with big hypnotic black eyes and a "cynical" mouth sits down across from them, and the narrator is disturbingly captivated by her--he can't stop looking at her, and her presence fills him with a weird dread.  Later in the day, he and Marjorie get on a different train and the "Oriental" sits across from them again!  After the sinister figure gets off, Marjorie tells the narrator that she was also fascinated and horrified by the woman, the sight of whom conjured up unaccountably bad feelings, like those associated with a terrible experience in the past.

That night our hero has a vivid dream, like a vision, in which he and Marjorie are dark-skinned people themselves, living in an ancient exotic city where animal-headed gods are worshiped.  (At the end of the story we learn it is a city in "ancient Babylonia.")  He and Marjorie are workers, he a brick mason and she a tender of the fires in a bakery, but a seductive noblewoman has taken notice of him--she has been summoning him to her palace to engage in a torrid affair that is ruining the narrator's marriage!  As you have already guessed, this aristocratic lady, this homewrecker who "throbs" in the narrator's embrace, who is "lithe, sinuous, panther-like, a thing of curves and fire" is the woman from the subway, and this dream is a recovered memory of one of the narrator's past lives which was intimately associated with the past lives of Marjorie and the subway woman!

The main plot of the story is how the ancient incarnation of the narrator was forced to choose between his work-worn wife--the mother of his child--and the rich sexy lady who offered him a life of luxury, and the crimes and tragedies that are the product of this love triangle.

I am a sucker for stories about femmes fatale and stories about dangerous sexual relationships, about men being carried away by desire and doing things that are stupid or immoral, and so I found "The Daughter of Urzun" entertaining.  Judged with cold objectivity, it is probably just average.

I sometimes wonder what value my blog provides when I praise universally acknowledged geniuses like Ray Bradbury--everybody and his brother can tell you Ray Bradbury's early stories are good, so I'm not adding much to the discourse by agreeing.  I feel more confident that I am doing something worthwhile when I talk about stories and writers who have been forgotten or who are controversial, and "The Daughter of Urzun" falls into that forgotten category--isfdb indicates that it has never appeared in book form, and was only ever reprinted in an odd magazine in 1964--it is practically a lost relic from our literary past!

"The Watcher of the Ages" by Edmond Hamilton

Dutch edition of What's It Like Out There?

In a March 16, 1934 letter to Duane W. Rimel, H. P. Lovecraft wrote "Hamilton is very brilliant, but has allowed popular magazine taste to injure his writing," and Lovecraft's correspondence is full of complaints that Hamilton uses the same plots again and again; HPL, like Bertie Wooster and George W. Bush, loved giving nicknames to people, and in his letters he calls Hamilton "Hectograph Eddie" and "Single-Plot Hamilton."  In a September 12, 1934 letter to Rimel he even blames Hamilton for an alleged decline in the quality of Jack Williamson's work: "Williamson started out well, but his close friendship with Hamilton has caused him to adopt cheap pulp standards & fall into the usual trivial rut."  Ouch!

(I recently bought Volumes 7, 9 and 10 of Hippocampus Press's Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and highly recommend them to those interested in speculative fiction of the 1930s--among the letters in these three volumes are those to Robert Bloch, Donald A. Wollheim, Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber, and C. L. Moore, as well as letters written by Moore to Lovecraft.  Each of these three books is over 400 pages long and full of personality, insight, gossip, and helpful notes by editors David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi--I paid $25.00 for each and they are totally worth it.)

As regular readers of MPorcius Fiction Log know, I consider Edmond Hamilton a favorite--though I have panned some of his productions and Lovecraft certainly has a point about his reusing plots--and am curious to read this tale, one which Lovecraft, who died eleven years before it was published, never had a chance to pass judgement on.

The narrator of "The Watcher of the Ages" is Lane Adams, a geologist, a member of a team of eggheads accompanied by a mining executive exploring an ancient city in the "Matto Grosso" region of Brazil--rumor has it this city, lost in the jungle for centuries, is the site of valuable radioactive elements and other minerals.  Adams is familiar with this part of Brazil and can communicate to the Indian porters and read the inscriptions on the ruined walls of the thousands-years-old metropolis.  Both the native porters and the ancient inscriptions say the city is hellishly dangerous because it is guarded by an inhuman being and you should get out while you still can, but you don't think a bunch of American scientists and businessmen are going to believe that mumbo jumbo, do you?   

At night, somebody sabotages the expedition's Geiger counters, but luckily the mining executive has kept one Geiger counter separate from the others and it is still serviceable.  Using it, the expedition discovers a source of radiation deep in a mountain.  Clad in protective suits, the men descend an ancient stairway to find a pit full of radioactive material--on the edge of this pit is a sort of laboratory where the scientists of six thousand years ago created an artificial man, the inhuman guardian the inscriptions and Indians warned them of!  The mining exec comes up with the scheme of selling the golem-making apparatus to the highest bidder--Hamilton doesn't name names but I'm betting Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao would be in the market for a process that could build an invincible army with which to put those paper tigers and running dogs in their place!   Of course, the businessman will first have to murder the do-gooder scientists who came on this expedition not to get rich but to expand the frontier of knowledge.

This is when Lane Adams reveals the astounding truth--he is the inhuman guardian, in disguise as an American geologist!  For six thousand years he has guarded the city and the ancient lab, sabotaging and diverting expeditions hunting for it because he feared the human race was not yet ready to shoulder the responsibility that comes with the ability to create life.  The mining exec and his henchmen try to kill him but the guardian has super strength and is practically invulnerable to bullets and blows, and the fight ends with the unscrupulous business people being thrown down into the radioactive pit to die a horrible death.

"Adams" lets the scientists go after they promise to keep the ancient lab and radioactive pit a secret.  Then, weary of life, in despair of mankind ever developing to the point that he can safely hand over to them the secret of creating synthetic people, the immortal guardian sets a bomb to collapse the mountain, thus burying the lab and pit for the foreseeable future, and commits suicide by jumping into the radioactive pit from which he sprang sixty centuries ago.

This story feels underdeveloped; its numerous fertile ideas--exploring a jungle and ancient city, how would people react to learning that they could create synthetic people, the psychology of a superior inhuman being living in disguise among humans for thousands of years--could form the basis for all kinds of adventures and thought-provoking discussions and dramatic scenes, but in this short story they amount to little.  A lost opportunity.  I'm judging "The Watcher of the Ages" barely acceptable.

"The Watcher of the Ages" would go on to be reprinted in the 1974 collection What's It Like Out There?  

"Displaced Person" by Eric Frank Russell

This one has been reprinted many times in Russell collections and in anthologies edited by people like Terry Carr, Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg.  "Displaced Person" is one of those "short shorts" and takes up less than two pages in Weird Tales.

Ohhh, another New York story, this one set in Central Park!  I know I don't have to tell you how much I miss Central Park...Bethesda Fountain, the Ramble, Turtle Pond...those were the days....

Anyway, this is a silly gimmicky story, as these short shorts tend to be.  The narrator is sitting on a park bench when a well-dressed man sits next to him.  The narrator gets the impression that this is some refugee from Europe, a political dissident driven out of his country, and in conversation the man relates that he led a failed revolt against a "leader" who had "delusions of grandeur" and "posed as the final arbiter on everything from birth to death." The man expresses his frustration over the fact that his enemy controls all the propaganda and has suppressed all his attempts for to make his case before the public.  When the narrator assures him that in America we have free speech and the dissident can say what he likes, the defeated rebel murmurs, "My name is Lucifer."

Oh, brother!

Is this story just a goofy joke?  Or an attack on Christianity and Christian institutions?  Does it make sense to equate God and/or Christian churches with Hitler and Lenin and Stalin, and Satan (and Satanists?) with people who opposed or fled totalitarian regimes?  The story is so brief, Russell can't make a case for his strange argument (if it is an argument), so it just comes across as a sort of cheap thumbing of the nose at religious people.

Or maybe I am so used to SF writers goofing on religion that I am missing Russell's point--maybe the story is supposed to be an example of the Devil's audacity and trickery, maybe we are expected to bristle at the rank presumption of Lucifer playing the victim and the effrontery of his assumption of the mantle of real victims of real tyranny and oppression.

Whatever Russell is trying to do here I don't get it and I don't enjoy it--have to give this thing a thumbs down. 

I have now read sixteen stories by Eric Frank Russell over the course of this blog's unlikely life, and here are handy links to my blog posts that address the other fifteen (I liked some of them):

"Mana," "Jay Score," and "Homo Saps"
"Metamorphosite," "Hobbyist," "Late Night Final," and "Dear Devil"
"Fast Falls the Eventide," "I Am Nothing," and "Weak Spot"
"Allamagoosa," "Into Your Tent I'll Creep," and "Study in Still Life"
"Exposure"
"Love Story"

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I guess we shouldn't be surprised that Ray Bradbury's story is, by a wide margin, the best of this lot.  The conventional wisdom wins again!

In our next episode a 1970s novel about travel in outer space.

Four stories by August Derleth from 1940s issues of Weird Tales

I feel like I have a sort of a relationship with Belmont, the people who put out my beloved Novelets of Science Fiction, Ben Haas' Quest of the Dark Lady, Edmond Hamilton's Doomstar, and Frank Belknap Long's It Was the Day of the Robot and Odd Science-Fiction.  (All relationships have their ups and downs.)  I actually find myself looking for "BELMONT" on spines and covers when rotating those Half Price Books spinner racks, and on a recent visit to a Lexington, Kentucky HPB, my eyes alit upon a copy of Belmont's paperback edition of August Derleth's Mr. George and Other Odd Persons.  On the same rack was a signed (and water damaged) copy of local author Andrew J. Offutt's King Dragon.  I left the Offutt (I own a copy in good shape) and bought the Derleth, as well as two other odd titles.

August Derleth is a controversial figure in Lovecraftian circles.  On the one hand, he was an enthusiastic supporter of Lovecraft's, playing a critical role in founding Arkham House, which did so much to keep Lovcraft's work accessible after his death, and so is worthy of the gratitude of all devotees of Yog-Sothery.  On the other hand, his own writings in the Cthulhu Mythos and his "posthumous collaborations" with Lovecraft have raised some people's ire; in particular, people seem to think that Derleth's own Christian faith, apparently reflected in his writings, conflicts with the genuine spirit of Lovecraft's work, which is materialist and devoid of hope.  Even though I think of myself as a Lovecraft fan, and have read Mythos fiction by many of Lovecraft's other colleagues, like the aforementioned Long, Robert Howard, Henry Kuttner, and Robert Bloch, I've never actually read anything by Derleth.  Well, today that changes!  Now, the stories in Mr. George and Other Odd Persons aren't actually set in the Cthulhu Mythos, but I think they will give me an idea of what Derleth's writing is all about, and in the cover blurb the New York Times says they "rank among Derleth's best tales of the supernatural," and I can't recall the New York Times ever getting anything wrong, can you?

In an introduction Derleth tells us a little about the stories included in Mr. George and Other Odd Persons, which was first put out as a hardcover by Arkham House in 1963 (my copy, part of the "Belmont Future Series," L 92-594, is from 1964.)  He claims he wrote each in a single sitting while distracted by students and never had time to revise them...Augie, baby, are you trying to encourage me or discourage me from reading them?  Well, let's put our faith in the infallible geniuses at the New York Times and read four stories I selected based on an irrational and esoteric attraction to their titles, stories that appeared in Weird Tales under the pen name Stephen Grendon not long after the end of the Second World War.

"Mr. George" (1947)

Somebody at Weird Tales pulled a boner
and put Derleth's real name on the cover

Gotta read the title story, right?

Priscilla is a five-year-old orphan, her mother and then her guardian, George Newell, I guess her mother's friend or perhaps boyfriend, having died recently.  Priscilla is in the care of three of her mother's cousins, the Lecketts, three jerk offs who find Priscilla a nuisance and covet Priscilla's inheritance of three hundred thousand dollars.  If Priscilla dies, they get the money, and it is not long before they are plotting the little girl's untimely demise.

Priscilla misses "Mr. George," as she calls Newell, and does things like writing him notes asking him to come back and riding the streetcar alone to the cemetery to put them on his grave. She begins hearing Newell's voice, and, sure enough, he begins manifesting himself in the Leckett household.  As the three Lecketts one by one set death traps for Priscilla, Newell's ghost warns Priscilla away from them and tricks each creepo in turn into getting killed by his or her own trap.  Then the ghost bids Priscilla a final farewell and she moves to the home of a nice lady friend of Newell's.

This story is competent, if a little obvious and predictable.  Perhaps Derleth's view of money and class is of interest; the "nice lady" has the kind of free and easy attitude towards the filthy lucre that apparently earns Derleth's approval ("She dressed well, having money and knowing how to use it, knowing it was only a means to an end, not an end in itself....[she] was colorful and jeweled as against their [the two female Lecketts'] almost offensive plainness"), while the evil would-be-child-murderers are cheap and grasping.  It is strange to see an intellectual type praising a woman for spending money on jewels and condemning women for dressing unostentatiously, but there it is.

The Canadian edition of the issue of Weird Tales that featured "Mr. George" is available at the Internet Archive; this looks like a good issue, with lots of fun illustrations and stories by Ted Sturgeon, Robert Bloch and Eric Frank Russell, as well as a poem by Stanton Coblentz!

Eat your heart out Wilfred Owen!

"Dead Man's Shoes" (1946)

I just bought shoes at Banana Republic that have wooden heels, which means everybody in downtown Columbus can hear me coming as I clop clop on the cobblestones.

"Dead Man's Shoes" is more to my taste than "Mr. George."  Jack and Howard Sherman joined the same paratrooper unit and served side by side in World War II until Jack was killed.  Howard was wounded and sent stateside, where he started making time with Jack's widow and sold his brother's service boots to Doug Lynn.  When Lynn wears the boots while out in the countryside collecting mushrooms, he has brief but emotionally powerful flashbacks to the battle in which Jack was killed.  He begins to get the idea that it wasn't a "Jap" who killed Jack, but Howard!  Stressed out by these horrifying visions, Lynn surreptitiously switches boots with Howard.  Howard doesn't realize he is wearing Jack's boots, and one day, while he is in the wilderness near a cliff, his dead brother exacts his revenge!

Shorter, and more unusual than "Mr. George"-- I like this one.

Like a foreshadowing of horrors to come, this 1964 book exhibits a grammatical error
 which has become alarmingly common in our own decadent digital age

"The Blue Spectacles" (1949)

I wear glasses--gotta read this one in solidarity with all the other people with poor eyesight out there who are too squeamish to wear contacts.

Through an unlikely series of coincidences, New Orleans divorce lawyer and womanizer Alan Verneul acquires a centuries-old pair of blue Chinese glasses and puts them on during Mardi Gras.  These glasses, when worn by an immoral person, give that person a vision of an earlier incarnation of his life(force?) and punish him.  This horny lawyer's punishment is not to merely suffer disbarment and the spectacle of his wife screwing up the interview for the job she has been dreaming of her entire life--no, he experiences immersive visions of the New Orleans of 1811, where Jean Lafitte (famous pirate and hero of the 1812 war) lynched his ancestor for raping and seducing various women.  When 19th-century Verneul is killed in this vision, the Verneul of the 20th-century also dies.

This one feels a little contrived, from how the lawyer gets the glasses to the "powers" of the glasses.  If you are looking for a short story about apparel which metes out vigilante justice, "Dead Man's Shoes" is the superior.  "Blue Spectacles" is merely acceptable.  

The issue of Weird Tales in which "The Blue Spectacles" first appeared is available to read at the Internet Archive.  This issue's illustrations are leaving me cold, but it does include stories by Fredric Brown, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch and your new favorite poet, Stanton Coblentz.

"The Extra Passenger" (1947)

I was just telling my brother that riding the subway every day is like a paradise compared to driving every day.

Simon Arodias is a sophisticated Londoner who has long supported himself via crime.  He decides the time has come to kill his eccentric Uncle Thaddeus who lives in the country, so that he can inherit Unc's pile of money. Arodias comes up with the scheme of booking a private compartment on a Scotland-bound train, sneaking off at Unc's village en-route and murdering the old bird, then stealing an automobile and driving to the next train station and getting back on the train, into his private compartment.  Nobody will know he left the train, and he'll have a perfect alibi.

All goes according to plan until Arodias gets back into his private compartment to discover a man there, sleeping, a hat over his face.  This mysterious character, Arodias gradually learns, is the animated corpse of his Uncle Thaddeus--Thaddeus was a wizard, and was able to ensure that his own corpse could achieve vengeance on his killer (one of Thaddeus' familiars flew the corpse to the train.)

This story isn't bad; about as good, I reckon, as "Dead Man's Shoes."

The issue of Weird Tales with "The Extra Passenger" is another one you can read for free at the Internet Archive, and it is populated by SF giants: Edmond Hamilton, Theodore Sturgeon, and Ray Bradbury, plus two poems by H. P. Lovecraft.  One of the Lovecraft poems, and its accompanying illustration, appear to describe exactly the kind of familiar mentioned in "The Extra Passenger."

**********

Looked at as a body, what is noteworthy about these stories is how each is structured as a kind of morality play or tale of crime and condign punishment: in each, somebody plots a reprehensible sin and then some supernatural force kills him, achieving a sort of rough justice.  These stories all depict a moral universe in which transgressions against other people and the social order are punished via supernatural means; perhaps surprisingly (given the back cover text about "unholy creatures which cross dimensions to destroy") the supernatural element in each of these four stories is not a radical menace, but an agent of conservatism that defends the weak and preserves the social order--the real villain in each story is a mortal human driven by lust or greed, somebody who covets his neighbor's property or wife.  Obviously this is a contrast to typical Lovecraftian horror, which is full of collapsing societies and degenerating races, individuals who go insane, and alien forces which overturn all established orders, even the conventional laws of physics; Lovecraftian horror gets its "kick" from reminding us that the universe is in a state of amoral chaos, while these Derleth stories assure us that the universe is just, though it may work in mysterious ways.

Even if Derleth really did just dash these four stories off while University of Wisconsin co-eds were badgering him for help on their exams, and never bothered to revise them, none is so shoddily put together that it isn't an acceptable entertainment, though "The Blue Spectacles" is kind of teetering on the brink.  None of them feels particularly distinctive or memorable, either; they feel kind of like filler.  I have to admit that the fact that each features a supernatural element which works for justice and each ends with the evildoer punished weakens them as horror stories in my eyes....they feel like a domesticated breed of horror story.  Like detective stories (wikipedia is telling me Derleth wrote over 70 detective stories) in which the cops always get their man, the four Derleth stories we discussed today, while nominally "horror" stories, depict the orderly and just world we wished we lived in rather than the arbitrary and miserable world we fear we live in, and are more comforting than disturbing.  I prefer my horror stories to be suspenseful, surprising and unsettling, and so I don't think I'll be reading any more Derleth stories any time soon.

**********

Check out the way Belmont's crack marketing staff appealed to 1964's science fiction community (this page appears opposite the title page of my copy of Mr. George and Other Odd Persons.)  Everybody loves center aligned text, amirite?

Hidden World by Stanton A. Coblentz

I read that I guaranteed to take Loa, the daughter of Professor Tan Torm, as my one and only legal wife; that I agreed to obey the Population Laws and produce as many sons as possible for the benefit of the Motherland; and that I promised to rear my children and conduct my married life according to the best accepted principles of Thoughtlessness.

When I spotted the Airmont paperback of Hidden World in an Iowa antique mall I fell in love with the cover by Ed Emshwiller.  Tanks the size of sky scrapers crashing into each other?  Infantry men with ray guns charging beneath their proud war banner?  Is this Warhammer 40,000?  Now here was a book I had to have!

Poor Stan didn't get his name on the cover

Hidden World first appeared in 1935, under the title In Caverns Below, as a three-part serial in Hugo Gernsback's Wonder Stories.  It has been reprinted numerous times; I think mine is a 1976 printing.  (I'm not sure if this version was revised, an unspecific reference to the Second World War may have been added later, or may be Coblentz simply predicting such a war.) I had never read any Coblentz before, and so when I started the book I had no idea if the story could live up to the terrific cover.

Phillip Clay and Frank Comstock are engineers, and have been hired to inspect a deep mine in Nevada.  An earthquake traps them underground, but also opens the way to a vast network of caverns, where resides a high-tech civilization.  Clay and Comstock's introduction to this civilization is witnessing a terrific battle between land-battleships.

Comstock, our first-person narrator, is captured by the pale-skinned people of this bellicose society, and is soon taken into the custody of a scholar who teaches him the language of the subterranean people.  This is when it becomes evident that Hidden World is not really the Burroughs-style adventure story I was hoping for, but a broad farce and a facile satire of current events.  (Coblentz makes his project clear with a reference to Voltaire; a minor character in Hidden World is General Bing, no doubt named after John Byng.)

Comstock has been captured by the people of Wu, a classbound people who are perennially at war with the people of Zu.  The two nations of ethnically indistinguishable pale white people (Comstock calls them "chalk-faces") fight their endless stalemated war for honor and to keep the economy, which is based on manufacturing arms and subsidizing families with many children (and taxing families with fewer than seven children), running.  The rulers of Wu are a tiny aristocracy so inbred as to be hideously deformed and so lazy their limbs have atrophied to uselessness.  Comstock witnesses government workers destroying food and clothing in order to maintain high prices.  Wu has a secret police force that stifles any unpatriotic expression, and on the walls are signs listing the "Brass Rules."  The third Brass Rule is "Thoughtlessness is next to godliness."

Stan is on the cover this time, but that
illustration must be for some other story

The novel is full of weak "Bizarro World" jokes that might constitute some kind of mockery of early 20th century society.  The people of Wu have bad eyesight at short range, and so have to read a book from twenty yards away with a pair of binoculars.  They drive little cars at reckless speeds.  Men wear skirts and women trousers.  The men consider wrinkled faces and obese bodies attractive, so all the young women spread on their faces wrinkle-inducing cream and powder their bodies with "producing powder" guaranteed to make them fat.  The scholar's fat wrinkly daughter wants to marry Comstock, and gives him a wedding bracelet; this is followed by a visit from the government eugenicist, who rates Comstock 99 and 44/100%.

These absurd jokes are not funny, and diminish any excitement or suspense the adventure elements of the story might generate.  It is possible that Coblentz meant Hidden World to be a parody of Burroughs' John Carter stories: whereas Carter is able to outfight Martians because Earth's heavier gravity gave him superior strength, Comstock is able to defeat the people of Wu in hand-to-hand combat because of their horrible eyesight; Carter is a fine swordsman because of his military service on Earth, while Comstock credits his time on the college track team with his ability to run away from danger, and his lack of military service also exempts him from marrying the obese wrinkly woman who pursues him (Carter, of course, is pursued by striking beauties); Burroughs glorifies aristocracy and warfare, Coblentz portrays both as disgusting.

(Hidden World also shares similarities with Fritz Leiber's "Lords of Quarmall," which wasn't published until 1964 but was apparently drafted much earlier.)

A 2009 reprint featuring lamentable typography

After escaping marriage, Comstock, by helping to break a strike by the workers who keep the air of Wu fresh, achieves fame and a good job.  When he gets sick of life in Wu he comes up with a scheme to escape.  Like the protagonists of so many of these old SF books, Comstock uses his engineering ability to resolve his problems and employs audacious trickery to outmaneuver his foes and manipulate the masses.  Comstock becomes ruler of Wu and tries to launch a societal revolution, but the people of Wu resist all his reforms (e.g., speed limits and traffic lights are denounced by the multitudes as interference in "the rights of private property.")  At the end of the book Comstock discovers that his friend, Clay, has become dictator of Zu, and the two of them try to make peace between the two nations.  But, exhibiting the contempt SF writers so often demonstrate for the common man, the subterranean people--aristocracy, bourgeoisie and proletariat--are all committed to the wasteful war, and Comstock and Clay are overthrown and must flee to the surface.    

Hidden World is not the fun adventure story I was expecting, and the jokes are too broad for my taste.  On the other hand, it is competently written, and all the references to 1930s political and economic issues make it an interesting historical document.  (I wonder if Jesse would consider this pulp to be "ideologically empty.")  So I guess I will give it a marginal thumbs up.