A Brand New World by Ray Cummings

When father first arrived, they had respected him and listened to his advice.  But gradually the power of Graff's oratory, his sweeping personality, his incessant propaganda, had its effect.  As this evil genius rose in power, father and his influence waned.

Let's continue our examination of the work of Ray Cummings, recently heralded by Bill Christensen as a "giant of Golden Age scientificiation."  Today's subject: A Brand New World, a novel first serialized in the fall of 1928 in Argosy.  I own two paperback editions of A Brand New World, an Ace copy printed in 1976 as part of Ace's "Science Fiction from the Great Years" line, which I bought some time ago, and an Ace 1964 printing which I received from internet SF maven Joachim Boaz.  The cover on F-313 is embarrassingly amateurish--the composition makes no sense, the people's faces and bodies are lifeless and rudimentary, and the colors are uninspired.  Even the beautiful skyline of Manhattan, the center of the universe and the tomb of my decayed dreams, looks bad on this cover!  Did Donald Wollheim's barber do this?  Did Ace accidentally print Jack Gaughan's initial color sketch?  I don't get it!

The 1976 printing has a solid Vincent DiFate cover featuring an attractive woman with insect wings and rays coming out of her palms who seems to be standing on a pile of my old gaming computers.  This cover is not bad, but I have to say that the fact that neither of these covers includes a gun or a sword has my spider senses tingling.  If A Brand New World turns out to be a mind-numbing utopia I am going to be irritated.  I can take some comfort from the fact that A Brand New World seems to have been popular with editors and readers--not only did Ace publish it twice in paperback, but in 1942 it appeared a second time in magazine form, in Famous Fantastic Mysteries.  How bad can it be if they kept printing it?

Zetta doesn't actually have wings, nor does
she shoot rays from her many-jointed
fingers

Well, let's hit the text and see what this thing is all about.  I have chosen to read the 1976 edition, because the print is bigger (it's 205 pages versus the '64 edition's 158) and my eyes are old.  (This was perhaps a mistake, as the 1976 edition, it turns out, is full of typos.)

Our narrator for A Brand New World is Peter Vanderstufyt, a journalist in the future world of 1966.  (The narrator of the two Tama books we just read was also a journalist--the kind of journalist who engages in zero gravity hand-to-hand combat with aliens!)  He's had to leave New York City for the Middle West (I know your feels, Petey!) to cover a murder trial in Indiana.  While Petey's out there, his father, a famous astronomer, is observing the new planet which is hurtling towards our solar system.  (Remember how in all those Edmond Hamilton stories a star hurtling into our solar system presaged a tremendous space war?)  This new planet, dubbed Xenephrene, takes up an orbit between the Earth and Venus.  Its presence there is going to make a mess of the Earth's climate and weather--this big blue marble's axis shifts so that soon the northern and southern hemispheres will take turns enduring scorching days six months long followed by frigid six-month nights!

The world's governments and the international clerisy of eggheads keep the news of this catastrophe a secret from the masses, but lift their censorship the day Petey gets back to the East Coast (this way Petey can be the broadcaster who breaks the story!)  In one of those strange coincidences we just have to accept if our hobby is going to be reading fiction instead of something logical like gardening or hang gliding, the very same time the news of this world-altering cataclysm is being revealed, down in Puerto Rico, Petey's sister Hulda meets an emissary from Xenephrene, a young woman with white hair who has arrived in a silver sphere and whose name is "Zetta."

I think I played Vanilla Angband on
the one on the left, and Doom with my
brother on the one on the right

The authorities keep Zetta a secret--a leitmotif of this book is elites keeping the masses in the dark.  The US government sends Petey's Dad down to PR to study Zetta and try to communicate with her.  While Dad is spending time with the space girl, the world's governments and populations are making a beeline towards the equator--the American government is moved to Miami, the British and French governments to North Africa, etc.  London, Paris and New York are abandoned wastelands buried in snow.

Larger silver spheres land in New York and in Venezuela, where the multitudes of Latin America have been congregating.  These aliens are apparently hostile, and prove impervious to attack from Earth weapons (their defenses are quite like military equipment that appears in Cummings's Tama, Princess of Mercury--Cummings is a master recycler!)  Just as Petey's Dad is about to share with the government what he has learned from Zetta, the alien ships in New York and Venezuela fly away, and Dad, Zetta, and Hulda are carried off along with them when Zetta's little sphere is hijacked!

   
Four years pass without intercourse between Earth and its new neighbor, Xenephrene.  Petey misses his father and his sister, and he also misses Zetta, whom he fell in love with after meeting her for a few minutes right before her disappearance.  (Love is blind--Zetta's extra finger joints don't put him off!)  Then in 1970 a cylinder lands on Earth with a message from Dad!  (Both "Aerita of the Light Country" and Tama of the Light Country feature message cylinders landing on Earth, sent by Earthlings on Mercury.)  The message includes instructions on how to build a space ship so Petey and some minor characters can fly to Xenephrene.  This ship is powered by "Reet," "a force something like electricity...it was also the growing, life-giving essence of all vegetable and animal organisms."

The construction of the ship (done in secret, of course!) and its flight to Xenephrene, like 25 pages in the middle of the novel, is one of the better parts of the book, to my mind, at least.  Once on Xenephrene, Petey and we readers get a lecture on Xenephrene history and society from Dad.  The people of the mysterious wandering planet are ruled by a secretive guild of scientists (naturally, they recognize a comrade in Petey's Dad and so he is privy to their secrets.)  Thousands of years ago, the people of Xenephrene had a high tech civilization, but then the majority decided that the simple life was best, and they abandoned modernity to live in tree houses like god- damned Ewoks.  A small minority wanted to keep their high tech stuff, but a law was passed making it illegal to "preach modernity," and these rebels were exiled to another part of the planet, called Braun (the mainstream society is located in Garla) and over the centuries the two societies have developed separately.  Dad considers Garla to be a paradise, but this utopia of tree house living is threatened because the powers-that-be have been slacking in enforcing their speech codes!

Here we see Zetta, a minor character Hulda is dating,
and Hulda herself

You see, today, Braun, which Dad calls "despotic," is ruled by Graff, a brilliant scientist and orator who wants to conquer the Earth.  Braun and Garla conduct trade, and Graff has spent time in Garla, where he has managed to sway some Garlands into considering the reintroduction of technology and the conquest of Earth.  Graff has also fallen in love with the apparently irresistible Zetta; for her part, Zetta is willing to marry Graff (after all, Dad says Graff has "a magnificent physique") if the tyrant agrees to abandon his plans to conquer the Earth.

(I probably don't have to tell you that "graf" is the German equivalent of "count" or "earl" and that Braun is a common German name.  Is A Brand New World an early indictment of Nazism, or evidence of lingering resentment over German aggression in World War I?)

So, finally, after 140 pages, we have our war and love triangle plot set up, a plot very similar to those we saw in Cummings's Mercury books.  There is even a Braun woman, Brea, in love with Graff who wants to kill Zetta, the way Muta wanted to kill Rowena in Tama, Princess of Mercury and Zara wanted to kill Aerita in "Aerita of the Light Country."

There are some elements in A Brand New World that don't show up in the Mercury stories, like Reet.  More prominent than Reet is Cummings's notion of "the infrared world."  This (I think) is a parallel dimension inhabited by demons that may be the source of human evil.  Xenephrene is somehow connected to the infrared world so that the demons are always faintly evident as sinister red shapes that float around and murmuring, snickering voices.  Dad tells Petey that he'll get used to them!    Radiation from the small purple star that orbits Xenephrene like a moon* has kept the crimson demons in check for time immemorial, but when Xenephrene entered our solar system the demons became more pervasive and powerful, apparently strengthened by the radiation of our sun.  The Garland scientists have been dealing with this by manipulating two spheres kept in their secret lair, "the control globes," one red and one purple, keeping the infrared and ultraviolet forces in balance.

*I was amazed that Cummings waited until page 114 to mention this remarkable astronomical phenomenon.

Anyway, the day before Graff launches his invasion of Earth he and his Brauns steal the two spheres--with the red one Graff can drive everyone on Earth insane by unleashing the crimson demons, while with the purple one he keeps his own people safe.  Of course, if the control globes are removed from Xenephrene everybody on that planet will go insane.  The Brauns also seize our narrator Petey and his lady love Zetta, and these two are aboard Graff's flagship when the Braun fleet flies to Earth.

From Graff's beachhead in Brazil Petey witnesses the war on Earth.  (The war is one of the better parts of the book; it is perhaps noteworthy that Cummings here refrains from the sort of descriptions of horrific gore with which he spiced up the Mercury stories.)  Graff is on the verge of driving everyone on Earth outside his HQ insane when Brea helps Zetta and Petey escape--with Zetta gone she figures Graff will pay her more attention.  But Z & P don't just book it on out of there; they break the red control globe and steal the purple one--it is easy for Petey to kill all the guards because Brea gave him a suit of ray-proof armor and Xenephrene people are much weaker than Earthers (just like the Tama books' Mercurians are much weaker than Earthers.)

Dad and some minor characters arrive from Xenephrene with Xenephere weapons and equipment, so now Graff, lacking his control globes, is no match for Earth's much more numerous military forces.  The Xenephrene invaders are wiped out (including that dope Brea!), the purple control globe is returned to Xenephrene so the Garlands won't go infrared insane, and then Xenephrene unexpectedly breaks out of its new orbit and heads out of our system.  Zetta stays on Earth to bear Pete's half Earthling, half Xenephrene children; one wonders how many joints their digits will have and of they will be so physically weak that all the Earth kids will casually bully them. 

A theme of my blog post here has been that Cummings would reuse plot elements and ideas that appeared in A Brand New World in his later Mercury stories.  Those 1930, 1931 and 1941 Mercury stories were shorter, more focused on sex and violence, and more fun than 1928's A Brand New World, which is a little more thoughtful and tries to put across some arguments about politics and societal evolution, arguments that we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are not prepared to endorse.

A Brand New World exhibits the belief that is de rigeur in SF that ordinary people are mindless dolts and that their "betters," here primarily scientists but also journalists and to some extent even(!) politicians, have an obligation to lead the masses by the nose.  Cummings argues that a big part of the role of the elite is to control the flow of information, and I have pointed out numerous examples in the text of Earth and Garland elites withholding information from the people, allegedly for their own good.  But Cummings doesn't stop there--he suggests that the common people's judgement is so suspect that the rulers of society should keep from the hoi polloi's ears dangerous beliefs by silencing dissenters and making it illegal to express certain ideas.  Remember how at the start of the novel Petey was covering a murder in the Middle West?  A woman had massacred her husband and children, and, instead of being condemned by the public, this murderess hosts a radio talk show and becomes a celebrity:

She was a handsome woman, and a good talker.  She was taking full advantage of the new law regarding free speech, and every night from the jail she was broadcasting little talks to the public.

This murderess, of course, is a parallel to Graff, another good-looking smooth talker who should have been silenced by the establishment.  According to Cummings, some people shouldn't be permitted a platform to speak, and the voicing of some ideas must be legally forbidden; this is an attitude I personally find despicable.

We shouldn't be surprised, I suppose, that Cummings, a professional writer who also worked with Thomas Edison, should feel that scientists and writers should run the world and have a monopoly on information and power, but it is still hard to take.  More mature and interesting is the related attitude displayed by Cummings in the horror story "Corpses from Canvas," which foregrounds the reality that publishers and creative people are not selfless saints who should be given power and privileges but rather corruptible individuals out to make a buck like everybody else, and even hints that Cummings felt a little guilty about some of his more exploitative work.  (I say "related" because both attitudes show contempt for the credulous masses, portraying them as sheep who lack agency and don't know what is good for them.)

The episode of the Indiana murderess also lays the groundwork for Cummings's theme of societal change.  The common people fail to condemn the murderess, and the government fails to convict her--I think Cummings is using this crime story to signal to us that Earth society is decadent.  In the same vein, Petey later moans that Earth is not ready to face the threat posed by Graff because of "the apathy of the people."  But over the course of the book Earth society, guided by the eggheads and politicians, improves (at least in Petey's opinion) in response to adversity.  On page 80 our narrator talks about the worldwide response to the changes in climate:

The important word here, I believe, is "rational," a word which implies planning from above by scientists--the eggheads will be the fathers of the "one big family" that is the world, telling us children what to do.  Cummings (and/or Petey) reiterate this on the last page of the novel:

The Great Change brought all the nations, all the people of every race into a keen realization of values, an enforced community of interest.  Like brothers in a family sorely pressed, they fought united.... 

The final sentence of A Brand New World is "This Earth has become a good place on which to live."

I don't know about you, but I don't want to be treated as a child, forced into a community and told what my interests are.  And I am certainly not crazy about the government, especially a government of unelected "experts," deciding who gets to speak and what things we are allowed to say.

Alright, so am I giving A Brand New World the thumbs up or the thumbs down?  I suppose it is interesting that a guy would write a science fiction novel that argues against freedom of speech, but it is also distasteful.  Some of the space travel and war content here is good, but that stuff makes up but a small proportion of the text.  Cummings's innovative and weird science ideas, like the Reet life force (which of course reminds a 2018 reader of Star Wars) and the infrared dimension of demons (which reminded me a little of Lovecraft stories like "From Beyond" and "the warp" in Warhammer 40,000) are convoluted and poorly integrated into the rest of the material--'The Force" in Star Wars and the warp in WH40K are foundational to what goes on in those universes, while Reet and the infrared dimension feel tacked on to this novel.

A Brand New World is an important piece of the "Who is Ray Cummings and what is he all about?" puzzle, so I'm glad I read it--I am curious about the half-forgotten heroes of SF's early history and the controversial fringe members of the SF community (I think MPorcius Fiction Log faves A. E. van Vogt, Edmond Hamilton, and Barry Malzberg all fit into one or both of these somewhat arbitrary categories, and that Cummings does as well), but I can't quite recommend this novel on its own merits.         

Tama, Princess of Mercury by Ray Cummings

"I want Tama, that is all.  Your Earth does not interest me.  I never liked my father's plan to populate Mercury with your Earthwomen.  But the virgins of the Light Country are rebellious.  They fly off in revolt if one crosses them."

Less than a year after publishing Tama of the Light Country in late 1930, Argosy presented to its readers the sequel to Ray Cummings's tale of Mercurian winged girls and interplanetary kidnappers, Tama, Princess of Mercury.  There was no talk of Tama having royal blood in that earlier novel, and I actually thought that book afforded Tama less screen time than three or four other characters, so let's check out the 1966 Ace book printing of Tama, Princess of Mercury, and see if Tama is going to get some kind of promotion.  My copy of Ace F-406 was one of the five Ray Cummings books donated to the MPorcius Library recently by Joachim Boaz, and has an interior illo by Jack Gaughan and a cool cover by Jerome Podwil.  (I'm looking forward to seeing Tama fight that bizarre monster!)

Tama, Princess of Mercury picks up the Tama saga some months after the events of Tama of the Light Country.  Journalist Jack Dean and scientific assistant Rowena Palisse ("a very tall girl, with the regal aspect of a Nordic queen") have been married, and Tama of Mercury, leader of the rebellious winged girls of Mercury, and inventor Guy Palisse are engaged--they will be married on Mercury once the inferior conjunction arrives and Bolton Industries' Flying Cube whisks them thither.  Our cast of characters is hanging out in a cabin in the woods, looking forward to boarding the Cube in a week, when a Mercurian spacecraft ("a huge silver ball, thirty feet or so in diameter") appears and carries off Rowena and Tama!

Jack, Guy, and some minor characters rush to Bolton Industries in New Jersey (yay!), board the Cube and take off after the raiders.

In a two chapter flashback we learn that Roc, son of Croat, is in command of the silver ball, and he figured out where our heroes were relaxing by kidnapping Jimmy Turk and using a truth drug on him.  Jimmy is a federal cop and Jack's best friend--like most federal workers Jimmy spends much of his time leaking scoops to the media, in Jimmy's case, our hero and narrator, Jack.

The Cube catches up to the Mercurian space boat, but because Tama, Rowena, and Jimmy are aboard the sphere, the Earthlings can't just blast it out of the ether.  So Jack spacewalks over to negotiate, and finds himself in the middle of a tense situation!  You see, Roc is not the man his father was.  Croat built up an army of Cold Country savages to conquer his native Light Country, from which he had been exiled for his crimes.  Jack killed Croat in the last book, and Roc has taken up his dad's plans of conquest--his major modification to the plan involves making Tama, winged beauty and leading political activist of the Light Country, his queen--he has been in love with Tama for years.  However, the Cold Country peeps don't respect Roc, and Roc expects that the eight savages he has aboard the sphere are going to mutiny and kill him as soon as they get back home (the savages don't know how to operate the boat in outer space, so need Roc's technical expertise until they hit the atmosphere of Mercury.)  Roc allies with the Earthlings and Tama against the dangerous barbarians.  Adding additional complexity to this ticklish situation, the chieftain of the savage people of the Cold Country, Dorrek, is on the boat and has fallen in love with Rowena and this is driving Dorrek's Mercurian girlfriend, Muta, who is ugly like all Cold Country women, violent with a jealous rage.  (Readers of "Aerita of the Light Country" may remember that there was a similar love triangle on a space ship in that 1941 Mercurian story--Cummings was an early devotee of the cult of "reuse and recycle!")

This Italian omnibus edition 
includes both Tama books 

When the two spacecraft get to Mercury they find that the Cold Country barbarians, in the absence of Roc and Dorrek's leadership, have launched their invasion of the Light Country early.  A fight breaks out inside the sphere and Tama, Roc and Jimmy escape into a provincial city devastated by the murderous barbarians--Cummings really goes to town describing gruesome wounds and dead bodies and ruined buildings, and a fight between Tama and friends and one of the giant insects that accompanies the savages' army is quite gory.  Roc is knocked unconscious and Jimmy suffers a broken leg, but Guy and some minor characters from the Cube arrive just in time to help Tama overcome the huge beast.

Newlyweds Jack and Rowena are still on the sphere with Dorrek and Muta, which Dorrek directs into the eternal night of the Cold Country to prepare for the next phase of the barbarian invasion.  Rather than wait for the barbarians to march on them, the people of the Light Country, their force augmented by the Earthlings and their Flying Cube, attack Dorrek's camp.  Cummings does a decent job with the battle, which features interesting ray artillery and defensive countermeasures on both sides, the flying girls on the Light Country side and the giant earthbound bugs on the Cold Country side, and lots of sneaking around behind enemy lines on the parts of our heroes.  Jimmy even manages to fight despite his broken leg (we are told the low Mercurian gravity facilitiates this feat of heroism), and we witness the final fates of the duplicitous Roc and Muta.  Lots of Mercurians get killed; Cummings, like so many creators of fiction, seems to be appealing to people's fascination with blood and death at the same time he makes an anti-war statement. 

In the end the Cold Country army is wiped out and Guy and Tama get married.  Narrator Jack Dean suggests that a new era of interplanetary travel is about to begin, but we who have read "Aerita of the Light Country" know that this did not happen.

While it seems to be the same length as Tama of the Light Country, Tama, Princess of Mercury
 was serialized across four weekly issues of Argosy instead of three

Not a bad planetary adventure story, though not as good as Burroughs or Brackett or Hamilton--but better than Lin Carter.  There are too many bland characters; to my mind, this kind of material works better with a single remarkable character, like John Carter or Eric John Stark.  It is strange that Tama, the title character, is just one of three or five equally important characters, but I guess the titles of these Tama books are a marketing ploy, meant to remind readers of the first Barsoom book, A Princess of Mars, and such succeeding volumes as Thuvia, Maid of Mars.

**********

Ray Cummings fans rejoice--more Ray Cummings from Argosy in our next episode!

Tama of the Light Country by Ray Cummings

"This girl--Rowena Palisse, is she not?  By your gods, a woman worthy of mastering Mercury.  They will say, 'Croat's mate chosen from all the Universe could be no better suited to him.'  I had no idea!"

Sadly, Tama never wields a saber in this novel

Here it is, the fifth of my reads from the Joachim Boaz wing of the MPorcius Library, the Ace 1965 printing of Tama of the Light Country, a novel by Ray Cummings that was serialized over three December issues of the weekly magazine Argosy in 1930.  I enjoyed "Aerita of the Light Country," a 1941 story set in the same universe as Cummings's Tama books that included not only space travel and gory ray gun fights but also feminism and class conflict, and have been looking forward to reading Cummings's earlier treatments of the theme of flying Mercurian girls.  This edition of Tama of the Light Country has a charming cover by Jerome Podwil, and a fun interior illustration by Jack Gaughan, as well as four pages of ads in the back that I will append to the bottom of this blog post in the interest of making widely available these fascinating primary sources of SF history.

Our narrator for the first 33 pages of Tama of the Light Country is Jack Dean, broadcast journalist!  A friend in the federal police force, Jimmy Turk, leaks to Jack that there is a big scoop up in Maine, so Jack hops in his private aircraft and flies up there from the New York studio from which he broadcasts the news of the day to Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea.  The scoop: five mysterious murders at a girls' summer camp, and the disappearance of ten girls presumably kidnapped by the assassins.  By page 17 of the 124-page book Jack has figured out what those of us who have seen the cover of the book have long known--the girls were kidnapped by honest-to-goodness space aliens!

Scientists figure out that the attack must have come from Mercury, and the world prepares for the next attack in a few months, when Mercury will again be at "inferior conjunction" (defined by Cummings as its closest approach to Earth.)  Fortunately, the Palisse family and the Bolton Society for Astronomical Research have been developing a means of space travel for years and are just about to launch their new cubical ship on its maiden voyage.  Our heroes Jack and Jimmy are aboard the Cube with "slender" and "regal" Rowena Palisse and a bunch of eggheads as it orbits the Earth for the first time and recovers a mysterious object.  This object turns out to be a small rocket bearing a message from Guy Palisse, Rowena's brother--Guy disappeared ten years ago while on the maiden voyage of space ship he invented!  The next 50 pages of Tama of the Light Country consist of the text of this message from Guy, who has been on Mercury all this time.

I was a little disappointed to find that some of the same plot elements from "Aerita of the Light Country" were prominent here in Tama of the Light Country.  I guess Cummings figured that, ten years later, people wouldn't notice or care, but for me it's only been ten days!

Wikipedia says that Argosy was the first of the pulps

Anyway, the females of the civilized people of the twilight zone of Mercury (known as the "Light Country") are born with wings and can fly, but, in order to assuage a male inferiority complex, upon marriage these Mercurian girls have their wings clipped.  Nine years into Guy's stay on Mercury the girls began refusing marriage in order to keep their wings--the leader of this movement was Tama.  Frustrated by this recalcitrance, and urged on by the commander of the Light Country military, an unscrupulous dude called Roc, the government passed a new law requiring that all girls have their wings clipped at the age of sixteen.  In response, Tama and hundreds of girls, accompanied by a small number of male supporters, Earthman Guy among them, fled to the barren countryside.

Both Tama of the Light Country and "Aerita of the Light Country" feature a title character who leads an anti-wing-clipping protest movement, and both stories feature as a villain a treacherous criminal scientist who leads an army of savages from the Cold Country; in the 1941 story this role was played by Rahgg, and here in Tama of the Light Country the evil scientist is Croat, Roc's father.  (That's right, the same establishment which sent Croat into exile for his crimes put their army under the command of Croat's kid.)  Croat has built a space ship of his own and some ray guns (in defiance of Mercury's strict gun control; Roc's own government troops are armed with knives and darts they project with something like a sling or sling shot.)

Roc and Croat's forces besieged the cave system where Tama's girls were hiding out, and we get the kind of fights and sneaking around we expect in an account of a siege.  It is always day in the Light Country, of course, but luckily a powerful storm rolled in that facilitated all the sneaking around behind enemy lines that are needed to move the plot forward.  (Another of the similarities between this 1930 Mercurian tale and the 1941 one I read last week is Cummings's long descriptions of the dramatic Mercurian weather.)  Tama and Guy eavesdropped on Croat and Roc, and learned of Croat's plan to fly to Earth to kidnap Guy's sister Rowena and some other wingless Earthgirls to be his and his minions' wives.  (The women of the Cold Country, it seems, are ugly.)  Guy, who had managed to smuggle his little messenger rocket out of the capital city, wrote this 50-page warning and launched it into Earth orbit in hopes Rowena and the Bolton Society for Astronomical Research would retrieve and read it.  They have, but, unfortunately, only after Croat's raid.

The Bolton people quickly load their Cube up with supplies and weapons and Rowena, Jack, Jimmy, and the Bolton scientists take off for Mercury to help Guy and attack Croat's ship before he can launch his second raid.  But Croat has outsmarted them!  Croat was left on Earth after the raid, and his ship has been hiding behind the moon!  Croat stowed away on the Cube before liftoff, and, near the orbit of the moon, he grabs Rowena as a hostage (and future bride!) and radios his ship!  The Mercurian vessel approaches and, in space suits, Croat and Rowena go out the Cube's airlock.

Parts 2 and 3 of the serialized version of Tama of the Light Country appeared behind these evocative covers

Croat's plans are scuppered when Jack puts on a space suit and jumps out after them and out-wrestles Croat (Earthmen are stronger than Mercurians.)  As for Croat's ship, it was carrying Guy and Tama captive after they stowed aboard on Mercury, and in the confusion they escape and kill the criminals and savages aboard it and wreck the ship; they then fly in its boat to join the Cube.

Tama of the Light Country is an acceptable adventure story but it has some "issues" that we might characterize as problems.  For one thing, there are too many characters, especially for a novel only 124 pages long, and only one of them is really interesting.  Tama, even though she is the title character, has a quite small part.  The Earthman hero role is divided between Guy and Jack, and neither one of them is a particularly interesting person.  I don't even know why Jimmy is in there.  If I was co-writing this novel I would have gotten rid of Jimmy, combined Guy and Jack, combined Croat and Roc, and made the human interest part of the story revolve around the hero's having to choose between Rowena, the smart Earthwoman who shares his love of science and his cultural background, and Tama, the exotic and bold beauty from another world.

The sole interesting person in the novel, of course, is Croat the evil scientist.  He's the one who makes big plans and takes big risks and his adventure on Earth--avoiding capture, familiarizing himself with our society, stealing an aircraft so he can travel from Maine to New Jersey to sneak aboard the Bolton Cube--is the most compelling part of the novel.  Cummings even makes a big deal about his cremation when his dead body burns up in the Earth's atmosphere.  This is a phenomena I regularly observe in genre fiction, that the bad guy is more fun than the hero.  If I was co-writing this novel I would have expanded Croat's part and had him try to seduce Rowena with a lot of talk about how she could be his partner in ruling a technocratic utopia based on science before he resorted to treating her like a Sabine. 

We'll be reading the second Tama book for our next blog post; maybe Tama will take center stage in that one!       

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The four pages at the end of Tama of the Light Country provide valuable insight into the extensive line of Ace books available in 1965 about hitting people with swords and shooting them with energy guns.  The perhaps-not-quite-legal Ace edition of Lord of the Rings gets a full page ad which includes gushing praise for the trilogy from Anthony Boucher.  Andre Norton also gets a full page of her own.

Squint or click to read 

There are also two pages listing "Classics of Great Science-Fiction" and "recent releases" from Ace.  I own and/or have read a few of these.  I own the very edition of Edmond Hamilton's Crashing Suns listed, and read about half the stories included therein.  I own the listed editions of Maza of the Moon and A Brand New World but have not read them yet.  I read a 1959 hardcover edition of Journey to the Centre of the Earth when I was a kid and just last week my brother was joking about how disappointed I was that there wasn't more dinosaur material.  (As a kid I thought all fiction should be like The Empire Strikes Back and Gamera vs Guiron, nonstop monsters and violence.)  I am a fan of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, but when I read The Well of the Worlds, The Dark World, and Earth's Last Citadel I wasn't crazy about them.  I own a Mayflower Dell edition of Behold the Stars and thought it one of Ken Bulmer's better books, with an interesting take on space travel and space warfare.  The Jack Vance Ace Double listed, Monsters in Orbit and The World Between, includes some very entertaining stories, including the brilliant "The Moon Moth" and "Abercrombie Station."   

If you have any opinions about the Ace 1965 line don't hesitate to share them in the comments!

Three science fiction tales by Ray Cummings from 1941

We’re still reading Ray Cummings stories purchased by Fred Pohl for inclusion in SF magazines, stories Pohl intimated (in his memoir The Way the Future Was) that he published even though he didn't like them. Today it’s three stories from 1941 issues of Astonishing and Super Science.  I read them all at the internet archive, and you can do the same--I don't think these pieces ever saw book publication, so the internet archive is probably your best option!

"Magnus' Disintegrator" 

The issue of Astonishing in which "Magnus' Disintegrator" appears carries an interesting editor's note (this department is called "Editoramblings.")  In it Pohl says that reader feedback has indicated that SF fans want longer stories, and so Astonishing's sister publication, Super Science Stories, is being rechristened Super Science Novels and will have more pages, a higher price, and feature longer works.  I'm not sure that I personally favor longer stories (I feel like I often, here at this blog, moan that a story is too long--in related news, when the wife and I are in a hotel room and one of those documentary shows about embezzlers or whatever comes on she has to endure my bitching that "they showed that clip already!" and "they told us this two minutes ago!" and "this show has 10 minutes of information and they are stretching it out to 45 minutes!") but if you go to the SF section of a big chain bookstore today and see how the shelves are full of books two inches thick and series that take up a foot because they consist of six or eight volumes, well, it is hard to disagree with Pohl's assessment of what the mass of customers want. 

"Magnus' Disintegrator" takes us to the New York City of the high tech future of the year 2000, where we meet a guy called Rance.  Wait, is this the synthetic food salesman from "Personality Plus," the best of the eight Cummings stories I've already written about this week?  Apparently not; this dude's first name is Peter, and he is a "private aircar operator," which I think is pronounced "chauffeur."  As the story begins our man Rance is in a lab out at Montauk with his employer, inventor and businessman John Magnus, and Magnus has a heat gun trained on poor Rance, and is saying he is going to blow up his experimental "disintegrator," a kind of reactor that can produce cheap energy, killing both of them.  It will all be worth it, however, because other eggheads will be able to study the recordings of the explosion and gain the knowledge needed to build a better reactor.

The bulk of the rest of the story consists of a flashback that explains why Magnus wants to die, and why he wants to murder Rance, during which it becomes clear I am supposed to sympathize with the businessman instead of his driver.  Magnus committed some business blunders that cost him much of his business empire and some engineering blunders with earlier versions of the reactor that got some peeps killed and got government regulators all up in his grill!  Magnus was just about to shoot himself with his heat gun when he learned that his sexy blonde daughter Carole wanted to marry Rance; Rance has a reputation as a womanizer and no doubt the main thing attracting him to Carole is her inheritance!  (Three of the five 1940 horror stories we read by Cummings just a few days ago had some jerk scheming to get an inheritance, and here Cummings is playing this tune yet again!)  Magnus would rather kill the chauffer than let him break his little princess's heart, so he concocted the plan of blowing Rance up along with himself by messing with the experimental reactor.  (For the reactor to operate, two people have to be at the controls, so he couldn't just blow himself up with it.)

The flashback brings us up to the present, to the lab out on the tip of Long Island.  Rance doesn't feel like sacrificing his life for science so he tackles Magnus and they wrestle over the heat gun.  The weapon goes off and hits the reactor in such a way that it emits poison gas that kills our horn dog chauffeur (the gas just makes the businessman/inventor pass out) and also somehow makes the reactor work smoothly so it doesn't blow up.  Magnus's daughter is safe from the womanizing Rance and the now perfected reactor will restore the finances of Magnus's company and slash energy prices and lead to worldwide economic growth.

Besides feeling contrived, "Magnus' Disintegrator" feels like it was constructed out of pieces plucked from the other Cummings stories we've been reading; it's like the Cummings of '40 and '41 has a limited number of Legos and each thing he builds out of them incorporates bricks we've seen already in somewhat different configurations.

The interesting facet of "Magnus' Disintegrator" is that the good guy is a big businessman and the villain is a working-class guy trying to get his mitts on the industrialist's daughter; I feel like most SF stories are written by pinkos who would side with a working-class dude against a magnate, or by libertarian types who would celebrate a young woman striking a blow for independence and fighting for the right to choose her own husband.  It is definitely weird that the penultimate paragraph of the story is about how great it is that Magnus will be able to guide his daughter's life--aren't most of the stories we read about individuals who (at least try to) forge their own destinies?

I like that Cummings is airing some unusual points of view in this story, but I wish it was better plotted; as it stands I cannot recommend it.

"Almost Human"

This issue of Super Science has a terrific cover--a man in a wifebeater T-shirt and a gorilla, both armed with elaborate modernistic dart launchers, are trying to rescue a gorgeous babe from the clutches of a giant baboon!  (Or is it a bear?)  This incredible tableau reminds me of the Schoenherr cover to my copy of A. E. van Vogt's The Battle of Forever, which introduced me to a hero whom I will always hold close to my heart, the rifle-toting HippoMan!

"Almost Human" is about a robot who develops a personality. Xor-2y4 is a robot pilot, an electronic brain which is interred in a stylized humanoid body which lacks the ability to walk; it is carried from one aircar or spacecraft to another when its duties change—and they have changed recently. You see, Xor was the personal aircar operator of Jon Dekain, famous robot maker and Xor's own creator, and spent a lot of time flying around with the doctor’s lovely daughter Barbara, known as Babs (yes, another Babs—Cummings reuses everything, including names.)  An alien from Asteroid 90, Sirrah Gerondli, was scheduled to meet with Dekain, and Xor was chauffeuring this xeno to the meeting and crashed the vehicle, killing the alien.  After this accident Xor was checked out (Dekain found nothing wrong) and transferred to the pilot’s seat of a space ship (yes, after killing one guy and wrecking a 100,000 dollar vehicle they gave Xor responsibility for dozens of people and a bazillion dollar vehicle. This is what we call failing upwards.)

As our story begins Xor is conning his first flight to Mars, and the passengers aboard include not only Dekain the engineer/businessman and his daughter Babs, but Sirrah Ahli, ambassador to Earth from Asteroid 90 and brother of crash victim Sirrah Gerondli!  

Xor has superhearing, and by listening in on conversations in the ship realizes the terrible position Babs and the entire solar system are in. The people of Asteroid 90 are aggressive and want to conquer Mars (evoking the image of Nazi Germany, it is said that the asteroid people "want living space, as they call it....")  In response to the burgeoning Asteroid 90 threat, the people of Mars have purchased military hardware from Dekain’s firm, and this very ship is carrying a load of “space-bomb sights” and “rangefinders for space-guns.” Ahli, who has managed to sneak aboard a squad of Asteroid 90 commando stowaways, is plotting to hijack the ship and take its valuable cargo (which includes sexy Babs--"A beautiful little thing--if you like Earthgirls, and I do") to Asteroid 90!

I've already told you Xor can't walk--well, he can't talk either!  (This is a serious plot hole—don’t pilots in real life have to communicate to crew and passengers all the time?  Who would build a robot that can take orders in English but can't talk back, if only to answer "how long til we get there?" and "does the vehicle require maintenance?" type questions?)  Xor can't walk, he can't talk, but he can feel, and he feels a fondness for Babs and even feels that he was created for the singular destiny of being Babs's protector!  So Xor takes matters into his own hands! The heroic robot accelerates the ship into the red zone—the asteroid people grew up in less gravity than did the Earthers, so the level of gravity that merely renders the humans unconscious crushes the bodies of the space Nazis, killing them.

When the humans wake up they almost deactivate and destroy Xor, but at the last moment uncover the dead imperialist stowaways and realize that Xor has saved them all.  In the last column of the tale we learn that Xor killed Gerondli because he had overheard that alien’s plan to kidnap Babs.

"Almost Human" is an acceptable classic SF story, you might call it a space opera, which addresses common SF topics (might a robot or computer become conscious, have emotions?) and employs traditional SF elements (robot and his inventor, hostile aliens, and the use of trickery and science knowledge to defeat the enemy and resolve the plot.)  This story is also in the long SF tradition of what we today might call “celebrating diversity;” Xor the robot is an "other" embraced by the flesh creatures and, while there are villainous aliens (Asteroid 90’s space Nazis), there are also good aliens (the Martians) who have treaties and conduct trade with Earth.

I never really got an answer on those cellophane pants.

"Aerita of the Light Country"

I'm always hearing how fiction needs to include strong female protagonists; well, if the cover of this issue of Super Science Novels is to be believed, Ray Cummings was working the strong female protagonist beat over 70 years ago!  Nothing says "strong female" like a woman blasting a  guy with a ray gun while he is testing out his new headphones, immersed in the delicate nuances and rococo intricacies of "The Firth of Fifth."

Among the Ray Cummings novels I recently received from Joachim Boaz are Tama of the Light Country and Tama, Princess of Mercury, novels originally serialized in Argosy magazine in 1930 and 1931.  Is the "Complete Book-Length Novel" under discussion today a sequel to those capers?  Is Aerita Tama's daughter or niece or something?  And what is up with the transparent bloomers?  Well, let's see.

The year is 2093, the place, a small town in upstate New York.  Alan Grant, 24, a towering hunk of an aircraft battery salesman who is just passing through, goes to a freak show to kill time and is entranced by a five-foot tall girl in her late teens with a beautiful face of mysterious ethnicity, silver hair and blue-feathered wings!  When he realizes she is being held captive by the freak show owner, he liberates her and she leads him to her space ship.  (Earth once had spacecraft, but no longer--there is a hint that Cummings's Tama books explain in greater detail why there are no human spacecraft in 2093.)  I guess being an airplane parts salesman is not as fun as it sounds, because Alan agrees to accompany the winged girl, Aerita, to Mercury.

On the flight Alan learns all about Mercury.  "The Light Country" is Mercury's twilight zone--it is bordered by the Fire Country on one side and the Dark Country on the other.  (When these old SF stories were written people thought Mercury was tidally locked to the Sun, with one permanently dark side and one perpetually roasted side; wikipedia is telling me that it was not until 1965 that radar revealed the truth about Mercury's rotation.)  Aerita is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Tama and an Earthman who traveled to Mercury long ago (or maybe the great-great-great-great-granddaughter.)  The hot little planet is going through a period of political crisis and change.  Mercurian men don't have wings, which gives them something of an inferiority complex, so, by law, when they get married, Mercurian women have their wings clipped so they can't fly anymore.  (Whoa, this is a real feminist story!)  Aerita is the head of a protest movement, leader of a thousand girls who have declared they will not marry until the law is changed and they will be permitted to keep their ability to fly after being wed.  These reformers have left the city and set up a camp in mountains only accessible by those who can fly.

Because of hi-tech wars in the past, studying science is forbidden on Mercury, but Aerita's grandfather Polter, like Aerita herself, is a freethinker!  He built the spaceship, the only one of its kind, that brought Aerita to Earth due to a malfunction.  Why did it malfunction?  Because another independent-minded scientist, Rahgg, not a kindly grandpapa but a dangerous criminal (Cummings hints that he is a rapist or pedophile; maybe he belongs on Planet Hollywood instead of Planet Mercury) who was exiled to the Dark Country, where he became leader of the savages there, hijacked the ship and kidnapped Aerita, and in the course of escaping his clutches Aerita accidentally directed the vessel into interplanetary space and couldn't figure out the controls until she was near our own big blue marble.

Alan quickly finds himself in the middle of all these political crises.  First he quells a working class riot (these incels want the government to force Aerita's adamant virgins to abandon their protest and get their wings clipped marry them) with his Earth ray gun.  Having the only firearm on the planet gives Alan a big advantage over the forces of evil, but then the gun-control crazy Mercurian government confiscates the pistol!  Doh!  So when a Light Country official who is colluding with Rahgg kidnaps Aerita and Alan joins a squad of flying girls in their effort to rescue her, he has to fight with a knife, just like the native Mercurians!  You'd think that 6' 4" Alan would be able to handle a bunch of Mercurian men (average height: 5' 6") in a knife fight, especially when his Earth muscles give him what amounts to super strength on Mercury, but things don't work out for our man--the winged girls get killed and Grant joins Aerita in captivity!  Doh!

Rahgg not only captures Aerita and Alan Grant, but captures the space ship again!  (Sometimes it feels like Rahgg is the only person in the story who can get things done!)  Directed by poor Alan, whom he gets to spill the beans on Earth by threatening to torture Aerita, Rahgg and company fly to Earth where they loot government munitions factories on the Hudson in upstate New York, including the ray artillery plant where Alan's brother Phil Grant, an eighteen-year-old scientist, is working.  Phil gets captured and taken back to Mercury along with all those ray pistols and ray cannons!

Alan may not know how to handle a knife, but he knows how to handle the ladies!  Among Rahgg's retinue of Dark Country savages is Zara, a sexy servant woman who brings everybody on the ship their meals.  (The people of the Dark Country are ethnically distinct from Aelita's people; among other differences, they lack wings.)  Zara is infatuated with big strong Alan, so she helps him move some of the Earth pistols onto a glider in the ship's hold; shortly after the ship enters Mercury's atmosphere Phil escapes on the glider and flies to the hideout of the protesting virgins.  When the ship lands at Rahgg's lair Zara helps Alan escape--much to Zara's displeasure Alan also springs her rival for Alan's affections, Aerita, leading to something of a cat fight.

Alan and Aerita are reunited with Phil and the 1000 flying virgins, and they attack Rahgg's army, which is marching on the Light Country's capital city.  A ray gun battle ensues, in which hundreds of people, including Phil, are killed or dismembered, but eventually the Earth brothers and the flying girls prevail.  Women having saved the Light Country, the working classes accept that they won't be clipping wives' wings anymore, and Alan and one-armed Phil set an example by marrying winged girls of their own.

"Aerita of the Light Country" is an entertaining Edgar Rice Burroughs/Edmond Hamilton/Leigh Brackett type of adventure story in which a modern Earther ends up making friends with people on another world and fighting in their wars; Cummings adds some interest to the story with all that gender conflict, class conflict, racial conflict, and luddism we've been talking about.  Brackett often electrifies her planetary romances with harsh violence and/or sexual energy, and Cummings does the same here; it seems Cummings didn't confine the topics of rape, torture and murderous love triangles to the fiction he produced for Horror Stories and Terror Tales, but integrated them into his more science-fictiony work.  It will be interesting to see if Cummings included this edge of sadism and eroticism in the two Tama novels, which appeared a decade before "Aerita."

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More Cummings soon, but first some more recent fiction from a book on the shelves of the Joachim Boaz Wing of the MPorcius Library!

Three science fiction stories by Ray Cummings from 1940

In our last episode we read five tales of gore, female nudity and inheritance schemes penned by Ray Cummings, who in his youth worked with Thomas Edison and who wrote quite a few SF adventures like Brigands of the Moon, a novel full of energy guns and futuristic vehicles which has the MPorcius Seal of Approval.  In 1940 Frederik Pohl began editing Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, and during his 20-month reign over these periodicals Pohl purchased numerous SF stories from Cummings.  In his fun memoir The Way the Future Was, which I recommend to anybody interested in classic SF, New York intellectual life in the 1930s and '40s, and what it is like to follow a career centered on the printed word, Pohl makes it clear that he thought all of the stories he bought from Cummings sucked--he bought them because he liked Cummings as a guy and wanted to do him a solid.  "[Cummings] was a personally engaging, roguish human being.  What he was not was a source of good stories."

When we think at all here at MPorcius Fiction Log, we think for ourselves, and I'm not going to just take Pohl's word for it that Cummings's 1940 and 1941 stories were bad.  So today we are reading three stories by Cummings that were printed in 1940 in magazines Pohl edited.  I read all of these at the internet archive, a treasure trove for all of us interested in the popular culture of the early 20th century. 

"Arton’s Metal" 

This piece appeared in Super Science Stories.  The cover of this issue is too cramped, crowded, confusing.

In 1939 James Blakinson stole Georg Arton’s wife! Our story is set forty years later, in the futuristic world of 1979, as Blakinson arrives at Arton’s laboratory, where Arton is said to be producing a new material of tremendous value!  Blakinson, who carries a cane and wears a cape, doesn’t just steal wives—he steals money, and has embezzled enough funds from the bank that employs him to end up in the "ghastly Polar Prisons of Antarctica" should the authorities uncover his crime.  So he needs cash, fast, and has come to see Arton for the first time in four decades in hopes of getting it!

After this set up, which has some dramatic potential, Cummings craps out on us. Arton demonstrates to Blakinson the process, which involves glowing electrodes, showers of sparks, and clouds of acerbic fumes, by which he creates or condenses, apparently out of the air or maybe from an almost invisibly thin wire, hunks of gold, platinum and radium. I couldn’t understand this whole system, and think Cummings did a poor job of explaining it, or just didn't bother to do so.  In any case, Arton, who, by the way, is in very poor health, uses his apparatus as a trap for Blakinson, as a means of revenge. Arton sets his machinery up to malfunction in such a way that both men are, I think, killed, perhaps totally annihilated, and the lab is destroyed in an explosion that produces lots of valuable metal.  The last part of the story has a chemist and a journalist examining the rubble; there are no human remains and the chemist suspects Arton’s apparatus led to "two material bodies...trying to occupy the same space art the same time," which of course causes an explosion.  (Cummings, I guess, is presenting this idea of "two bodies in the same space" as linked, poetically and metaphorically, to the way Blakinson had sex with or won the love of Arton's wife, this woman's body or affection being the space they were both trying to occupy.)

I didn’t understand what was going on with the apparatus, and I thought the "occupying the same space" poetic justice angle was weak, so I have to give this one a thumbs down.

"The Thought-Woman" 

Here's another story from Super Science, this one named on the cover.  This cover is better than the last one, with a dynamic and easy to "read" cover with more expressive and interesting faces and slightly less silly monsters.

At the center of "The Thought-Woman" is a strange conceit: that in another parallel dimension are stored all the ideas that people will ever have, put there by God Almighty, and that when an idea pops into our heads, we are withdrawing it from this idea warehouse.  (Cummings compares this to the realm of unborn children from Maurice Maeterlink's 1908 play, The Blue Bird, the basis of numerous movies.)

Stanley Durrant is a young inventor, wracking his brain to complete the big invention that will make his fortune. His childhood friend, Dorothy Livingston, is always hanging around—she has a crush on Stan, but he doesn’t see her as a woman, just a platonic buddy. She brings up the theory of the realm of unthought things, then goes home to pray or hope or something that Stan will receive the ideas he needs from that unearthly realm. And, wouldn’t you know it, after she has departed the inventor has a dream or vision of going to this place, giving Cummings an opportunity to bore us with a rapturous and sentimental (and tedious) celebration of technology and invention. Billions of empty shelves and galleries represent ideas that have already been thought up— Cummings refers to Edison, the Wright brothers, Fulton, blah blah blah. Some niches are filled with vague outlines of objects—inventions that have not yet been thought up, and Stan recognizes his own half conceived invention among them.

The realm of unthought things doesn’t just feature technological advances—a ghostly figure guides Stan among the galleries, and he eventually realizes it is the idea of Dorothy (or, as he calls her, "Dot") seen not merely as a platonic chum, but as a sexually mature, sexually attractive woman. When he wakes up and sees Dot again he immediately recognizes her nubility and embraces her, and we have every reason to expect they will live happily ever after.

A childish, boring, feckless (remember a few weeks ago when that was everybody’s favorite word?) fairy tale with no drama or surprises or compelling ideas, "The Thought-Woman" is no more than a sterile celebration of things (technological advance and erotic love) we all already think are good that gives short shrift to the challenges associated with these good things, which of course cripples the story because and it is those challenges that make good fiction!

"Personality Plus" 

"Personality Plus" appeared in Astonishing, behind a pretty bland cover.  Fortunately, here we have a legitimate SF story with a comedic edge.  There was science in "Arton's Metal," but all the fluorescing bulbs and calipers and sparks were just pointless window dressing, and in "The Thought-Woman" the science was mind-numbing romanticizing of inventors. "Personality Plus," on the other hand, not only addresses interesting science (the perennial nature vs nurture debate) but pokes fun at scientists. Also, the jokes are actually funny!

It is the year 2000 in New York City—I myself was living in NYC in 2000 (good times, good times...) though of course the Gotham of my salad says didn’t have slidewalks and aircars and criminals armed with heat guns.

Our narrator is Jack Rance, a synthetic food salesman. He gets mixed up in the work of Dr. Butterworth, whom I guess we would call a (research?) psychiatrist. Butterworth believes that your personality is determined by your experiences, and is bitterly opposed to the thinking of scientists who argue that personality is determined by genetic inheritance. Butterworth’s niece Dot (that's right, "Dot" again) has married a man Butterworth describes as a real jerk, George Trent, known to one and all as "Georgie," a man who, because of his superior intelligence and good looks, has become arrogant, selfish and totally unlikable.  Butterworth has invented an amnesia machine (Jack tells us it is a "gruesome apparatus" that looks like the “death chair at Sing Sing”) and tricked Georgie into sitting in it (Doc B told him it was a headache cure!) The machine erased Georgie’s memory of the past eight years, when he allegedly evolved into the jerk everyone detests, and fogged up earlier memories, leaving Georgie's character practically a blank slate! Butterworth says that Georgie will now be able to develop a whole new, more agreeable, personality, and asks Jack to observe this development.

In short order Georgie is acting like a dangerously selfish jerk, a man brimming with confidence who fears no personal risks and does not care if he puts others in jeopardy. He runs an insane scam, like something out of a Wodehouse novel or a Desilu production, and our narrator Jack is right there in the middle of it. Georgie, who doesn’t seem to take his marriage vows overly seriously, has attracted the adoration of an heiress who wants to be a famous actress in nude films. She isn’t very good-looking (“got a figure like an ironing board”) so she and Georgie plan a publicity stunt to jump start her career: Georgie is going to pretend to kidnap her, and a corrupt cop friend of his will then rescue her and allow him to escape. (Jack gets pulled into this dangerous ruse because Georgie needs a stooge to hold the ladder steady while he carries the aspiring actress down from the second story window of her suburban mansion.)

This stunt is a total disaster, and leads to the twist ending in which Dr. Butterworth reveals the true nature of his experimental treatment of Georgie!

It was a relief to read this entertaining story after those two inert clunkers "Arton's Metal" and "The Thought-Woman." Why can’t all of Cummings's stories be like this?  Maybe because Cummings needed to mass produce stories to pay the bills and thus didn't have time to carefully craft all of his stories.  Pohl theorizes that this is the case.

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In a letter to Super Science, printed in the February 1943 issue, Chad Oliver, the guy who writes all those SF stories about anthropologists going native among primitive aliens, grouses that Cummings includes a “female” in every story he writes, and it is true that all the Cummings horror stories we read in our last blog post included courtship and/or marriage as a plot element, and it is also true of all the SF stories we read today. I actually think sexual relationships are a very good topic for literature, but, unfortunately, in only one of today’s stories does Cummings do anything actually entertaining with this classic subject. One out of three is not good, but let’s give Cummings another chance—in our next episode we'll look at Cummings stories from Astonishing and Super Science issues printed in 1941!

Five horror stories from 1940 by Ray Cummings

A British edition

In his fascinating memoir, The Way The Future Was, writer, editor, literary agent, Bolshevist and high school dropout Frederik Pohl talks a little about Ray Cummings. Pohl tells us that Cummings, who was born in 1887 and had some success as an SF writer earlier in his career, in the late 1930s was making his living by selling mystery and horror stories to Popular Publications, printers of numerous (at one point, according to wikipedia, 42) pulp magazines.  "Horror stories," according to Pohl, "were the dregs of the pulp market, cheap thrill-and-sadism stuff to a precise formula...."  The formula Pohl describes will remind people my age of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!--what at first appears to be a supernatural menace turns out to be a hoax perpetrated by some mundane ne'er-do-well.  When Pohl came to work at Popular as editor of Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories it was, he says, "a great day for Ray" because Pohl admired Cummings as a person and would buy actual SF stories from him, even if Pohl didn't care for them.  "...for months he would turn up regularly as clockwork and sell me a new story; I hated them all, and bought them all."

"Dregs?"  He "hated" them all?  Ouch!  Were these stories really so bad?  I liked Cummings's 1931 novel of piracy and firefights in the future, Brigands of the Moon, and was pleased to see several Cummings volumes among the 21 pounds of books donated to the MPorcius library recently by Joachim Boaz.  I don’t trust Pohl’s judgement when it comes to the proper role of the state in the economy, so why should I trust his judgement of Cummings's written work?  It’s not like I love every single thing Pohl has written (though I do think very highly of Gateway and "The Fiend," and The Way The Future Was is very readable.)  The only thing to do is to investigate first hand!  Trawling through the internet archive, I have picked out five horror stories by Cummings (some co-written with Gabrielle Cummings, whom I believe was Cumming’s wife) published in magazines in 1940. Let’s see what these stories--and the horror pulps--for which Pohl has such disdain are all about!  (In a later blog post I'll read some of the SF stories by Cummings which appeared in Astonishing and Super Science issues edited by Pohl.)

"Perfume of Dark Desire" (as by Ray King)

Our first three stories all appeared in the same issue of Horror Stories, one with a naked blonde on the cover about to suffer a quadruple dismemberment!  Yikes!

In "Perfume of Dark Desire" New York lawyer John Holden travels from the Big Apple to a tiny village in upstate New York to do some kind of real estate related business with a wealthy hermit guy, Robert Martin.  This of course reminds us of Johnathan Harker's trip to Transylvania in Dracula, one of the foundational texts of our modern culture of horror fiction.  Holden even receives a warning from a local before he reaches Martin's isolated house--the naked corpses of young ladies are being found in the woods around Martin's pad, and it is said they are the victims of some kind of creature that seduces them before murdering them.  Also, mysterious fires are associated with these heinous crimes.

Holden walks to Martin's house, where, through the window, he sees a beautiful brunette putting perfume all over her body--Holden actually saw this hot chick furtively purchasing that perfume back in the village's drug store!  This exhibitionist turns out to be Martin's niece, Barbara Jones, whom Martin calls "Babs."  Holden is pretty good-looking himself, and he and Babs are immediately consumed with lust for each other!

The monster, an apparition wreathed in smoke, murders another beautiful girl just outside Martin's house, and instead of calling the cops, Martin and Babs enlist Holden's aid in concealing the body in the coal bin down in the cellar!  There's also a strange scene in which a scared Babs drops an oil lamp, setting her clothes on fire so Holden has to rip her smoldering duds off and jump on top of her to quench the flames. 

At night Babs comes to Holden's room to strip and offer him her body if he will promise to keep the corpse in the cellar a secret!  She explains that her uncle Robert has a mental illness, a strange and compelling fetish--to him, smoke is a powerful aphrodisiac and if a girl smells of smoke he can hardly resist molesting her!  That is why she wears so much perfume, because the smell of perfume repels him!  One of Martin's enemies has learned of his perversion, and is blackmailing him--this villain has been running around the woods, setting piles of leaves on fire and murdering young women, then threatening to pin these atrocities on Martin if the old perv doesn't cough up the shekels.

Before Holden and Babs can consummate their relationship they hear a scream and rush off to find that the blackmailer has murdered Martin the pervert and put him in a smoke monster costume.  The blackmailer (revealed to be the drug store clerk who sells Babs that special perfume) knocks Holden unconcious, ties him up, and starts molesting Babs--he brags he will rape her and then murder her and the authorities will think Martin is to blame.  But Martin is still alive, just barely!  The old freak pulls the murder weapon, a knife, out of his own chest and uses it to free Holden, so Holden can kill the blackmailer.  After this good deed Babs's sex criminal uncle expires, and she goes on to marry the New York lawyer and they live happily ever after.

"Perfume of Dark Desire" is contrived and ridiculous, and appeals to people's fascination with violence and rough sex.  Again and again in the story people perform actions which are anti-social  but which gratify sexual desires, and are relieved of responsibility for these actions because unlikely circumstances have "forced" them to engage in them.  Ronald Martin's mental illness forces him to grope young women, the fire forces John Holden to rip off Barbara Jones's clothes and climb on top of her, fear of exposure to the police forces Babs to bare her body before Holden, etc.  The perfume the blackmailer invented and with which Babs covers herself (out of the blameless motive of protecting herself from her uncle's irrational lust) turns out to be a powerful aphrodisiac--thus Holden and Babs's animalistic desire for each other is not a reflection of their characters, not a sign they are "easy," but the work of the evil blackmailer!

Fiction allows people to vicariously participate in acts which are objectively pretty terrible and often elides any guilt the consumer might feel over deriving pleasure from such participation by providing in-story justifications for the actions.  Many people have fantasies of killing other people, and the first Star Wars movie and the first Indiana Jones movie--to provide two famous, popular, and critically acclaimed examples--allow people to indulge in fantasies of killing people by the dozens, and viewers never need feel guilty about their enjoyment because it is OK (more than OK--you get a medal for doing it!) to shoot down Nazis and space Nazis.  Similarly, many people have fantasies of denuding and groping young ladies or of disrobing and exciting the lust of strangers and "Perfume of Dark Desire" has characters who indulge in these more or less unacceptable behaviors "against their wills."

I can't call this story good, but it is crazy enough to be entertaining, and it isn't boring. 

"When the Werewolf Howls" (as by Emerson Graves)

Irma Lowe, a beautiful young woman, works at the mountain lodge owned by her blind grandfather (Irma’s parents are dead.) Also working at the lodge, managing the boats that take tourists off on excursions on the big nearby lake, is George Harvey. George and Irma have crushes on each other. Living in a cottage on the estate is another guy who has a crush on Irma, Lester Sands, a big ugly guy who has weird eyes. It is vaguely suggested that Lester is a refugee from "mid-Europe."  Irma is preparing steaks in the lodge kitchen when Lester starts pawing her; George appears and intervenes. On his way out Lester steals a raw bloody steak, and Irma sneaks to his cottage to look in the window--she sees Lester eating the uncooked slab of beef!

Grandpa has Lester thrown off the property. A few weeks later a big seeing-eye dog arrives at the lodge, accompanied by a note saying it is a gift from an old friend of Grandpa’s in Latvia. (Cumming’s choice of Latvia is an interesting one, as the year this story was published Latvia was conquered by the Soviet Union.) Grandpa is thrilled by this gift, but Irma and George don’t trust the beast—it has eyes just like Lester’s!  Eventually a message arrives from Latvia, indicating that Grandpa's old crony sent no such dog, but too late--Grandpa has already gone into the forest for a walk, guided by man’s best friend! The dog returns to the lodge without him, and, Lassie-style, leads Irma into the woods; she hopes the service animal is taking her to Grandpa's side so she can help him, but instead the beast leads her into a pitch black cave! In the dark she hears Lester’s voice! Lester tells her he can see in the dark and has been watching her through her window every night as she stands naked in her unlit room, savoring the caressing touch of the cool night air on her supple young body! (Who does she think she is, Ben Franklin?)  Lester also lets her know he sent the dog and that Grandpa's little stroll ended with a fall from a cliff!

Lester molests Irma, even biting her neck, but before he can go all the way George and a posse arrive, and Lester takes to his heels. Cummings leaves ambiguous the question of whether Lester is a werewolf or just a nut who thinks he is a werewolf, and whether the seeing-eye dog is really a dog trained by Lester or in fact Lester in another form.

"When the Werewolf Howls" feels a little perfunctory, maybe because it is shorter than "Perfume of Dark Desire."  We have here another young woman living with an older male relative who ends up murdered, and another interrupted rape in the story's climax.  Keep your eyes open--we may see these elements again!

"Corpses from Canvas" (with Gabrielle Cummings, as by Gabriel Wilson)

When I was a kid I watched a lot of TV, partly because my mother, who loved mystery novels and TV detective shows, always had the TV on.  One of the reoccurring "tropes" I found silly and annoying, even as a child, was when a detective novelist's story appeared to be "coming true," with murders much like those in his or her book(s) taking place.  I'm also not crazy about all those cartoons and horror stories in which a guy's characters jump off the drawing board and interact with real people.  (Yes, I'm brimming over with pet peeves like these.)  So, the title of this story, which promises to be about a painter whose paintings "come to life," has me shaking my head before I even start it.

Jack Blake is a painter!  He unveils his latest work to a Robert P. Norton, a "slender, dandified little fellow, with sleek grey-black hair and an effeminate waxed mustache," who is a "publisher of art novelties."  The painting is a life-sized portrait of a degenerate criminal in the act of fleeing the scene of the crime, clutching the severed hand of his victim!  Cummings describes this painting in great detail, from the "pig eyes" and "low, retreating forehead" to the "twisted shoulder" and "club foot."  This sinister apparition is lacking one of his own hands, and presumably is collecting other people's hands as a means of achieving psychological compensation as well as revenge on the world.

Norton wants to mass market one-dollar color reproductions of this horrifying image; if they sell as well as he expects them to he and Blake will make a mint, and Blake will have enough money to marry his fiance Elsa Jarrod, a "dark-haired beautiful young girl."  The unveiling of the painting has taken place at the rambling old mansion of Elsa's grandfather, with whom she, and her cousin George, one of Norton's employees, live.  Blake and Norton spend the night in the mansion, and in the venerable edifice's dark halls and humid rooms a gruesome melodrama plays out!  George convinces Norton to dress up as the killer from the painting and scare people--this will be, he asserts, a genius publicity stunt!  But it is a trap!  George murders Grandfather Jarrod and even cuts Gramps's hand off!  George then stabs Norton and leaves him for dead--he hopes to blame Norton for Gramps's murder (this is all in service of a harebrained scheme to get not only Gramps's but also Norton's money.)  But before George can tell his lies to Elsa and Blake, the fatally injured Norton drags himself to the painter and his fiance and, with his dying breath, tells them the truth.  Exposed, George tries to kill Blake, but Blake outfights him, and when George makes a break for it he is panicked by an hallucination of the killer from the painting and goes over a balcony, breaking his neck.

With George gone, Elsa inherits Gramps's entire estate, and Norton's death does not prevent Blake from making money from the sales of reproductions of his macabre painting.  These two lovebirds get married, but sometimes the painting of the killer makes them shudder and Blake no longer paints horror subjects.

The descriptions of the painting and of Norton are good, but the plot is a contrived mess and the effort Cummings puts into portraying Norton as an exploitative, greedy, and effete fairy ends up feeling like a cheap trick; obviously he is setting us up to expect Norton to be the villain, but the actual villain, George, gets no interesting description at all!  Giving both Norton and George equally detailed (preferably equally distasteful) descriptions would have improved the story.

On a sort of "meta" level we have to wonder if Blake represents Cummings himself and Norton his employers at Popular Publications, and if "Corpses from Canvas" reflects Cummings' uneasiness about making his living by appealing to the lust for blood and sex of the public, bitterness at his paymasters, and perhaps a dream of striking it rich through his creative work and retiring from the sex and gore game.

"Forked Horror"

This one actually appeared under Cummings's own name.  Maybe "Forked Horror" is a story he was proud of?  This tale was published in an issue of Terror Tales, the cover of which depicts a blonde bound and confined to a coffin!  Unlike the woman on the cover of the May 1940 issue of Horror Stories, whose situation appears to be hopeless, this blonde has at least some reason to hold on to a glimmer of hope, as a man is reaching for an automatic pistol with which to perforate her tormentors, step one in effecting his rescue of her.  Of course, her savior is himself being perforated by a portcullis, but I'm an optimistic sort; I hope blondie is as well.

"Forked Horror" is a first-persona narrative written in the voice of a woman, Gloria Allen.  When she was 17, Gloria married Dr. Paul Levant, a scientist who was an expert on snakes and the medicinal use of their venom.  Paul's hobby was "oriental occultism," and he believed that the dead could possess the bodies of animals and "come back."  He told Gloria that, should he die, he would try to come back in the body of a snake!

In the very first year of their marriage, Paul was killed (it was believed) by one of his snakes, and Gloria proceeded to marry Paul's best friend, Tom Allen, just a few months later.  As our story begins, Gloria is in the woods taking a stroll and a little garter snake approaches her!  She picks it up and caresses it, calling it "Paul," and brings it home, secreting the reptile in a box where Tom won't see it.  But when Tom wakes up at night and finds his wife on the veranda cuddling with the snake, he kills it with a shoe!

Tom accuses Gloria of not loving him, of still being in love with the dead Paul, and their young marriage collapses.  Gloria is torn psychologically, unsure who she really loves--is her heart devoted to Paul or to Tom--and haunted both by a fear of snakes and an undeniable urge to be reunited with Paul, even if he has taken the form of a snake!  On the brink of madness, she wonders if Paul's shade is trying to drive her to suicide so they can be united in the afterlife--or maybe he will just come to her in the body of a poisonous serpent and murder her so they will be together in the grave! 

Gloria's memoir is a legitimately good horror story, incorporating some of my favorite themes--difficult sexual relationships, immortality, and the movement of minds/souls/consciousnesses between bodies.  Cummings includes psychological theories I guess we aren't supposed to believe today (that women act on their irrational emotions and don't even know their own minds) as well as references to Cleopatra's suicide.

Unfortunately, "Forked Terror" suffers grievously in its last two pages, which consist primarily of a journal written by Tom during his last moments in an asylum.  Tom explains how he murdered Paul, making it look like the scientist died from a snake bite, and then worked deceptions in an effort to drive Gloria insane so he could get her money. (Perhaps it is significant that Gaslight, the play that would hit Broadway in 1941 and be made into an Ingrid Bergman film in 1944, premiered in London in 1938.)  Tom’s writing features clues that lead the reader to believe that he himself is insane, and Tom admits he believes it possible that Paul really has come back in the body of a snake, his object being to kill Tom. The story ends with a brief third person section in which we learn Tom died in the asylum immediately after writing the journal; we are presented with evidence that Tom committed suicide, as well as contrary evidence that suggests he was killed by a snake!

"I Am the Tiger Girl!"  (with Gabrielle Cummings, as by Gabriel Wilson)

"I Am the Tiger Girl!" was published in Horror Stories.  The blonde on the cover of this magazine is rocking the latest in riveted steel haute couture, but it looks like some pitiless fashion critics do not appreciate her look and are mere moments from ripping her to shreds.

Our narrator for "I Am the Tiger Girl!" is Landa Maine, a refugee from “mid-Europe,” where her parents were executed as spies—Landa has grown up in America, raised by two legal guardians, unrelated to her, whom she calls "uncles."  Landa has always known she was different; her finger nails and toe nails grow with preternatural speed and are very hard and sharp, and she feels a close affinity with cats—her pet cat Fluff is her only friend! The sight of blood, especially blood drawn by her own nails, sexually arouses her. When she was 17 she was laying naked in bed with the window open, enjoying the feel of the breeze on her body (one of Cummings's recurring ideas, I guess, maybe one of his own turn-ons?), when a figure in a black hood climbed in through the window to grope her and scratch her thigh. Nobody else saw him, and her uncles assured Landa it was just a vivid dream, during which she had scratched herself.  But after this event Landa suffered a constant feeling of being watched, hungrily, by a black cloaked figure that lurked in shadows.

The plot of "I Am the Tiger Girl!" involves Landa’s relationship with a man, Burt, who falls in love with her. Landa loves him in turn, but fears one day she will be overcome by her weird lusts and kill him with her nails; to be sure, the first time Landa and Burt kiss she scratches him and greedily licks the blood off her nails when he isn't looking!  Cummings also gives us a very gory dream sequence in which Landa claws out Burt’s eyes--blood oozes out of Burt's empty sockets and the eyes roll around the floor like marbles, following Landa with an accusatory gaze!  Landa and Burt do get married in the end, but only after the uncles' efforts to destroy them and get Landa’s inheritance (always with the inheritances) are foiled.

The meanie uncle, who outs himself as that black cloaked groper, murders the softie uncle and makes it look like Landa was the killer.  He then knocks Burt out and ties him up.  Burt must watch as the evil uncle subdues and strips Landa and then molests her—his plan, after he has had his fun with Landa’s body, is to murder Burt and Landa with a special glove made from the claws of a huge wild cat; it will thus appear that Landa clawed Burt to death and then committed suicide. Luckily, Fluff the cat comes to the rescue, killing the uncle and then disappearing forever so Burt and Landa can wed. The story’s last paragraph suggests that while her outre lusts are currently under control, one night Landa’s perversion will overwhelm her and she will murder her husband in his sleep with her bare hands.

This is one of the better of these five horror stories, because, as with "Forked Terror," it involves a person wracked by contradictory impulses, struggling with a bizarre mental illness and involved in a potentially disastrous erotic relationship, and like "Corpses from Canvas" has a disturbing vision of bodily mutilation.

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I don’t think these stories are quite as bad as Pohl seems to have thought them, but they definitely appeal to readers’ baser impulses, show signs of being hastily thrown together, and shamelessly recycle plot structures, plot elements, and salacious scenes.  As far as I can tell, nobody ever saw fit to print them in book form, even though Cummings had many books published over the decades, so I guess Pohl wasn't the only editor to look askance at them.