As you know too well, I am trying to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales printed in the 1940s, having already read at least one story from each 1930s ish of the unique magazine.  Today we look at the July 1941 issue.  I praised the last issue we looked at, May '41, for the many fine Hannes Bok illustrations it contained, and this July issue has a Bok cover with two masterly human figures--I love their faces and hair, their long necks and wacky futuristic attire--but the robot, I am afraid, looks kind of silly.  Students of Weird Tales illustration may also be interested to see this issue's interior illos by Margaret Brundage, famous for the female nudes and near-nudes that graced WT's covers so often during the period of Farnsworth Wright's editorship--D. McIlwraith's reign saw a decline in the blatant use of sexuality to appeal to readers, at least in the illustrations.     

Almost six years ago I read the Clark Ashton Smith story from this number of McIlwraith's magazine, "The Enchantress of Sylaire," but there are three more stories from this July 1941 issue that I have my beady little eyes on.  Let's check them out!

"The Robot God" by Ray Cummings

The last time we saw Cummings he was regaling us with the exploitation tale of a Canadian driven to rape and murder by a head injury.  (Insert hockey joke here.)  Maybe today's Cummings production, the menace of which appears not to be one of A. E. van Vogt and Norm MacDonald's countrymen but the cousins of your constant companions and indispensable helpmeets Alexa, Siri and Grok, is a little more respectable.

Ouch.  Frederik Pohl in his memoir The Way the Future Was said Cummings was a nice guy but trashed the man's writing, and ugh, "The Robot God" is a strong piece of evidence that backs Pohl's harsh criticism, Cumming's style here being irritatingly bad.  One of Cumming's tricks is to fill the story with sentence fragments, just nouns with adjectives, no verbs, I guess to add drama and paint images, but these fragments are just annoying.

Carter stared at the group of buildings. A dozen of them, one or two as large as a hundred feet, others smaller. Weird metal structures. Some were unfinished; others seemingly hastily or inexpertly put together. Crazy, drunken structures.

Cummings also repeats the same words again and again and piles on superfluous visual details.

The style is probably the worst aspect of "The Robot God," but the characters, action scenes, pacing, and structure also leave much to be desired, being poor at best.  The plot, while acceptable in outline, is banal.  A weak start to this issue of Weird Tales!  Thumbs down!

Oh yeah, the plot.  It is the 25th century, the human race has colonized Mars and Venus, and recently a great scientist has perfected robots that seem to have real intelligence and feeling.  That scientist, Dynne, and his daughter, Dierdre the beautiful blue-eyed blonde, are flying to Mars from Earth to meet with a manufacturer of robots on the red planet.  Also on the commercial passenger ship is a good-looking blond guy, chemist Carter, who is being transferred by his employer, a mining company, to Mars.  Carter is courting Dierdre.  We've also got Carter's assistant and Dynne's head subordinate, a brilliant hunchbacked engineer, a genius who lives like a recluse because he is so ugly. 

These passenger ships have been disappearing lately, and on this voyage Carter and Dierdre find out why--the new emotional robots are hijacking the ships and taking them to their asteroid base, where they are ruled by a robot they worship as a god and where the ships' human passengers and crew work as slaves.  Their vessel suffers this very fate.  The god robot takes a liking to Dierdre, adding a note of bizarre eroticism to the story, giving it some faint stirrings of life, you might say.  The robot god puts Dierdre in a robot body with various controls for her to manually operate--she is to be the goddess of the robots, but only the god will know she is a flesh and blood human.

The robot god holds a big ceremony where he introduces the robots' new goddess to his metal worshipers, but Dierdre flubs the controls and the machine falls over and a hatch opens, revealing to the robot hordes that their purported goddess is a sham, one of the humans they have been taught to hate!  The robots go berserk, murdering human women and children in their rage, Cummings giving us some real exploitation gore.  Of course, none of the robots tries to murder Dierdre, even though that would be the reaction you would expect--she's the female lead, after all. 

The robot god grabs up Dierdre and runs off.  Somehow Carter and his assistant catch up to the robot god and outfight it with their bare hands without hurting Dierdre.  None of the action scenes in "The Robot God" make any sense, the robots being invincible when the plot requires it and vulnerable when the plot requires that, humans being casually killed if they are nobodies and spared if Carter or Dierdre.  

Anyway, Carter opens up the god and finds the hunchback inside--like the goddess, the god was not an autonomous robot but a sort of vehicle.  Carter kills the lonely and horny deformed genius and he, Dierdre, and his assistant hop in a space ship and escape to Earth.  All the other humans on the asteroid are massacred.  Carter and Dierdre get married and become luddites, living a 20th-century lifestyle in tropical seclusion.

This hunk of junk, though a cover story of one of the most important genre magazines in history, has never been reprinted.

"I Killed Hitler" by Ralph Milne Farley

Remember when we read that story by Farley which Isaac Asimov condemned in the pages of Amazing because it was insufficiently respectful of the Soviet Union?  Well, this time Farley takes up Nazi Germany as his subject.  I wonder if Asimov read "I Killed Hitler;" in Before the Golden Age, Asimov denounces Weird Tales and its imitators, so probably not.

"I Killed Hitler" is a somewhat silly piece of work, but it excited my curiosity and held my interest, so I guess I have to give it a mildly positive review.

Our narrator is a self-important jerk, an artist in Provincetown, Mass.  His fellow Americans, a bunch of "money-grubbers," have not recognized his genius, but he has a fan in a Hindu swami who lives nearby.

Our narrator is a distant cousin of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany, and is full of hate for the warmongering tyrant--why is that talentless hack famous and powerful while our skilled and sensitive narrator is unknown?  And now our guy has to put his career as a painter on hold because the war Hitler has started has led our guy being drafted!  He tells the swami that all the diplomats who tried to make deals with Hitler should have just murdered the man during a meeting and spared the world this crisis--our narrator would have done it, he claims!

The Hindu uses his Eastern sorcery to send the narrator back in time to 1899, to Europe, so he can murder the boy Hitler.  Of course, the swami warns our guy that you can't really change history, but who listens to such warnings?  The narrator tracks down ten-year-old Hitler and after winning the lonely little boy's confidence takes him out to the woods to strangle him.  But when the narrator returns to the present day he finds that he is the dictator of Germany and is on the eve of launching an invasion of the United States!  The Hitler regime and World War II are inevitable--even a time traveler cannot prevent major events, just slightly alter the circumstances that give rise to them.

I have a weakness for the unreliable narrator thing and for narrators who are villains, when an author sort of dares the reader to sympathize with a misbehaving character, creating a sort of tantalizing tension.  All the swami and time travel stuff is shoddy, but time travel stuff generally is.  The murder of a child is gross exploitation material, of course, but unlike in Cummings' story, when a robot bashes out the brains of a nameless little girl, here in Farley's story the murder of a child has some dramatic and psychological weight, as the murderer is the main character and the victim is a person we know all about--the murder is a challenge to the reader, not merely an appeal to sadism or the childish joy of being shocked, and generates some of that tension I mentioned earlier.       

"I Killed Hitler" was included in the 1950 Farley collection Omnibus of Time.

"It All Came True in the Woods" by Manly Wade Wellman

Of the three writers we are reading today, I'm pretty sure Wellman has the best critical reputation, so maybe we are in for a treat here.  "It All Came True in the Woods" had to wait until our own wild and crazy 21st century to be reprinted, however.

Well, of today's three stories, "It All Came True in the Woods" is the best written, its style perfectly suited to its author's goals.  But the plot is a little banal, and the story as a whole sappy and sentimental--"It All Came True in the Woods" is largely about the beautiful relationship between a father and daughter and the power of imagination and the nobility of Native Americans and that sort of jazz, though it has some real horror moments.

Dad and six-year-old girl are taking a walk in the woods.  These woods, according to Indian lore, are magical--anything you say in them will come true.  The daughter asks about giants and Dad describes giants, but to make sure his daughter doesn't get scared, he tells her giants hate tobacco smoke so his pipe smoking will drive them off should any appear.  (Ugh, pipe smoking also drives me off.)  Sure enough, giants appear.  Dad, stunned, drops his pipe.  He tells his daughter to hide and he attracts the monsters' attention and runs off.  The giants follow, catch him, and start a fire with which to cook Dad.  Dad is just about to be spitted when daughter appears to save the day, smoking Dad's pipe and blowing smoke at the giants, causing them to flee.

This story is a success, even if it is not really to my taste, so we'll call it acceptable but admit that, by an objective measure, it is probably the best of today's three tales.  And how many stories feature a six-year-old girl smoking a pipe?  🤮

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Our campaign to sample every 1940s issue of Weird Tales advances another step!  I also feel like each of these three stories serves as a piece in the sprawling jigsaw puzzle that is the history of science fiction and fantasy--we're doing more than just putting one foot in front of the other here, we are putting flesh on the bones of the grand story of speculative literature in the English-speaking world.  (I offer these lofty assessments of this blog post and its fellows because next time we convene we are probably going to be reading absolute garbage.)

The good people who put out Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories had another arrow in their quiver in the years 1939-1941, during that period tempting the magazine-reading public with thirteen issues of Strange Stories.  Let's surf on over to the internet archive and check out the October 1939 number, which features five pieces by people, most of them Weird Tales regulars, with whom we at MPorcius Fiction Log have some familiarity.

"The Cult of the Dead" by Gabrielle and Ray Cummings 

Remember August 2018, when I read eleven short stories and three novels by Ray Cummings?  Wow, we've had some real adventures at this blog, haven't we?  Here are links so you can effortlessly relive those happy days!

"Perfume of Dark Desire," "When the Werewolf Howls," "Corpses from Canvas," "Forked Horror," and "I Am the Tiger Girl" 

"Arton's Metal," "The Thought-Woman," and "Personality Plus"  

"Magnus' Disintegrator," "Almost Human" and "Aerita of the Light Country" 

Tama of the Light Country

Tama, Princess of Mercury

A Brand New World

That's enough advertising for today--let's get to the matter at hand, "The Cult of the Dead," which appears in Strange Stories under the pen name Gabriel Wilson, which I am told is a pseudonym applied to works on which Ray Cummings and his second wife, Gabrielle Wilson, collaborated.

This story takes place during the American occupation of Haiti.  Our narrator lives at his villa in Haiti, and is friends with a local physician, Dr. Bané, a highly respected black man who is not personally involved in necromancy or voodoo or other occult phenomena, but is very familiar with such practices, which are prevalent across the troubled island nation.  The narrator's nephew, Harry, a journalist, comes from New York for an extended visit, intent on learning all about the religion and sorcery of Haiti and getting a scoop that will make his career.  His uncle and that kindly doctor warn him not to get mixed up in esoteric local customs, as it could be dangerous, but they also feed his fascination.  The narrator has a huge library of occult books which Harry devours, and Dr. Bané tells the young newshound some thrilling accounts of magic in Haiti.  For example, the story of a woman whose father was murdered, who wore as a talisman a severed human hand; when her father's killer came after her, the hand defended her, slaying the assassin and securing justice.  

After absorbing all this second-hand knowledge, Harry sets out to get some firsthand experience, dyeing his skin black and donning native garb and sneaking into a necromantic ritual attended by a hundred Haitians and presided over by a guy in smoked goggles and a top hat.  When the narrator learns of this he rushes over to the ceremony, recognizing the danger Harry is in, and the cultists, knowing the narrator is a friend of Dr. Bané, take the unprecedented step of allowing a white man to attend their ceremony.

While the narrator watches, his reckless nephew snaps a photo with a flash bulb, disrupting the ceremony, and one of the severed hands that is part and parcel of this necromantic ritual strangles Harry to death.  (How many times do I have to tell people not to leave New York?)  The narrator can't do much to help Harry because, in the middle of the excitement, his malaria acts up.  

"The Cult of the Dead" has the kind of standard plot that will work in the hands of a skilled and conscientious writer, but I have to give it a thumbs down because the story is poorly written.  Many sentences are clumsy, words are used in unconventional ways, and there are what I consider punctuation errors.  In my career on the fringes of academia I have had to copyedit and proofread many rough drafts by more or less competent writers as well as many assignments by students for whom English is a second language, and reading "The Cult of the Dead" was like reading one of those things--I was rewriting every second or third sentence in my head, which is not something I enjoy doing for free.  If the Cummings had revised this thing, or an editor at Strange Stories had rolled up his sleeves and done some real work on it, I would have probably judged it acceptable or marginally good, but as it stands I cannot give it a passing grade.

"The Cult of the Dead" does not seem to have ever been reprinted.

"He Waits Beneath the Sea" by Robert Bloch

This one appears under the pseudonym Tarleton Fiske, a pen name used by Bloch on quite a few occasions.  it would be nearly sixty years before "He Waits Beneath the Sea" would be reprinted under its author's true name, in Arkham House's 1998 Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies.

Bloch starts his story with a little joke I guess directed at science fiction fans.  A young scientist kisses his girlfriend, and we are told it is a scientific kiss, conducted with expertise and efficiency.  I expected this jape to presage a series of such jokes, but there aren't any more, and in fact the story that follows is quite gruesome; I am entertaining a theory that this little bit of humor hints at a theme of the story that Bloch didn't really flesh out, an argument that a full person and a full life require passion and feeling as well as logic and intelligence.

Ames is the scientist, and I guess his young lady, Jean, is also a scientist, or at least a hanger on of scientists; the two lovers are aboard the submarine of a scientific expedition headed by Jean's scientist uncle, taking a break from scientific work to make out in the privacy of an otherwise untenanted chamber.  The sub is resting on the ocean floor, but as our hero and heroine are sucking face it inexplicably descends radically and erratically, somehow drawn down into an unexpected fissure.  When the boat finally comes to rest, Ames opens the chamber door to find the rest of the sub has been totally wrecked, all their comrades presumably killed; even more strangely, Ames can smell fresh air and see light coming through the holes in the hull!

"He Who Waits Beneath the Sea" is kind of like one of those Edmond Hamilton or Henry Kuttner adventures in which a guy is transported to some weird place where he ends up fighting with a sword.  Ames and Jean find that the incapacitated research sub is shipwrecked in an underground world beneath the waves; littering the floors of all the caverns and tunnels they explore are the corpses of sailors, men from all periods of history and representing all races.  From the body of a Roman soldier Ames picks up a sword, its edge still keen after over a thousand years, which is lucky for him and Jean, because some of the many corpses laying around spring to life and attack them!  In this tale of horror Bloch offers readers many grotesque images, and we are treated here to descriptions of slimy headless bodies grappling with our heroes and being hacked to pieces by the horrified surface dwellers.

Some of Bloch's descriptions could get him into deep doo doo today.  Ames and Jean's most fearsome assailant is the animated corpse of a large naked black man whose legs were lost at some point in his tragic history.  This menacing figure, whose "snarling African face" is also described as a "bestial countenance," propels himself on his "ape-like arms" and snatches Jean, and then, when Ames strikes him with the Roman sword, drops the woman to start strangling Ames.  The resourceful Jean picks up the sword and decapitates the cadaver of color.  (There is the idea abroad that women in old pulp magazines who aren't femmes fatale are all damsels in distress that need to be saved by men, but Jean saves Ames more than once in this story--she is right there in the thick of things, wielding a sword and operating machinery as need be.)  Ames comes back from the brink of unconsciousness as the hands around his throat relax, but the African's head speaks to them, foreshadowing later developments in the story.

Eventually, Ames and Jean meet the last survivor of an advanced civilization that throve far below the Earth's surface for millions of years; a few thousand years ago this race evolved into bodiless beings of pure intelligence!  These beings of pure energy, having lost all connection to the material world, became decadent and forgot all the science knowledge and engineering techniques they had amassed, with the exception of the wisest among their number, this particular individual whom Ames and Jean have met.  After all his fellows had expired, during the heyday of Atlantis, this sole survivor began the long term project of figuring out how to animate the dead bodies of sailors and then forming from them an army and navy with which to conquer the surface world.  His zombie slaves have built a fleet of submarines and for the last few hundred years the bodiless being has been waiting for the fortuitous arrival of an undamaged human body into which to pour his own consciousness.  Such a body has finally arrived--that of the young and healthy Jean!

Overcoming various obstacles, including a fight with the animated corpse of Jean's uncle, Ames and Jean destroy the energy being and escape in one of its submarines, saving themselves and the surface world that you and I call home.

I like the plot of "He Waits Beneath the Sea" and the gore is effective, but this story has problems similar to those in the Cummings' "The Cult of the Dead," poor sentences and errors which some revising or editing could have fixed.  One example is that the ancient intelligence laughs at Ames when the scientist threatens him, and then remarks that he has never laughed before, because a being of pure intelligence has no emotions.  The problem with this is that the decapitated head of the legless black giant laughed at them a few pages ago, right before the ancient intelligence explained that it animated the dead bodies by injecting a small part of its intelligence into them.  A similar niggling issue is that the energy entity explains that it uses a powerful magnet to draw ships down into the fissure, but most of the dead sailors we see are from wooden ships.  

Bloch's story has fewer such problems than the Cummings', however, and the plot and action are more entertaining, so I'm grading this one OK.  

(A side note.  A scan of Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies is available at the internet archive, world's greatest website, and I looked at the text there of "He Waits Beneath the Sea" to see if there had been any obvious revisions; specifically, I checked to see if "ape-like arms" and "bestial countenance" were still there.  They were there alright, but there was a change that caught my eye.  Where the scan of Strange Stories has "the iciness of death," the scan of the 1998 collection has "the leiness of death," presumably some kind of OCR error.  For shame, Arkham House!)   

"A Message for His Majesty" by August Derleth   

I don't know much of anything about King Louis XI of France, but this story suggests he was on a quest to unify France and one of his strategies for achieving this goal was to torture opponents by imprisoning them in cages which were specially constructed so that those within them could neither stand, nor sit, nor lie down, but must hold their bodies in terribly uncomfortable positions.  Derleth's simple story depicts some noble whom Louis has had on his $#!7 list for months brazenly coming to the court and being thrown into one of these cages.  Somehow, despite the cage's cunning design, the noble is able to rest comfortably.  Louis orders the aristocrat be executed, but the executioners report that the man vanished before they could do the job.  Then comes the obvious twist ending as a  messenger arrives with the news that the noble died two days ago--the man the king and his court saw was a ghost!

Acceptable filler, competent but forgettable.

"A Message for His Majesty" would be reprinted seventy years after its appearance in Strange Stories with the publication of the Derleth collection The Sleepers and Other Wakeful Things, a copy of which sold last year for $500.00, a fact I discovered while looking for a sharper image of its cover.  I guess the weird is a good long term investment.

"Half Bull" by Manly Wade Wellman

This tale takes place in the Old West, I guess prior to the Civil War.  A prologue tells of an Indian cairn and the local custom of adding a stone to it as one passes, and then the main body of the story describes the origin of the cairn and custom.

Twenty-two-year-old Philip Matlock is a hunter armed with a Hawken rifle (though the text here calls it a "Hawkens rifle") travelling through Cheyenne territory.  Game has been scarce, and he is hungry, so when he sees some teepees he does what most white men would not do--he approaches the Cheyenne, as he is fond of Indians and can speak the tongues of the Cheyenne and Pawnee.  Soon he is sharing a meal with the Cheyenne, and Wellman says a lot of complimentary but perhaps stereotyped things about the Indians, that they are brave and stoic and so forth.  We also learn that among the tribe is also a beautiful young woman.

The Cheyenne are hungry and expect to starve soon; they explain that a monster has driven away the local game and they can't get anyplace where there might be food because the monster scared off their horses.  This monster is like the front half of a buffalo, a sort of two-legged demon.  The dauntless Cheyenne are less distressed over the likelihood of dying of hunger than they are of the fact that if they die near the Half Bull the monster will devour their souls before their souls can get to "the Shining Lodge."  

Matlock declares he will destroy this monster, and the second half of the story details his efforts, eventually successful, to do so, and how this fight between good and evil spawned that cairn and the custom of passersby tossing a rock on it.

This is an entertaining story, Wellman doing a good job with the action scenes as well as offering a vivid portrait of the Indians, the white man who admires them, the monster from native folklore and the environment in which these three entities meet.  Wellman's Old West and its inhabitants feel real, and this story is the best we are reading today.

While Wellman portrays the Cheyenne as admirable, his story conforms to the sort of pro-imperialist model we see in, for example, Edgar Rice Burroughs' work, in which Tarzan and John Carter are white men who are not only better savages than the noble savages they encounter and naturally become the savages' leaders, but teach said savages a better way to live.  Matlock embodies what critics might call a "white savior" trope; as heroic as the natives are, it is the Christian white man who solves their problem for them, and the power of Jesus Christ, whom Matlock teaches the Indians about, plays a role in the defeat of the monster.

You can find "Half Bull" in 2003's Sin's Doorway and Other Ominous Entrances.

"Spawn of Blackness" by Carl Jacobi

"Spawn of Blackness" is the dead name of the story that would be titled "Study in Darkness" when it was reprinted in such Jacobi collections as Arkham House's Revelations in Black, Panther's The Tomb From Beyond, which has a brilliant violence-against-women cover by Les Edwards, and the recent Mive and Others, edited by the prolific S. T. Joshi.

Stephen Fay is a scientist and inventor, working on a theory that the seven notes of music correspond to seven colors and a projector that can shine appropriate colors in conjunction with a piece of music.  He lives in a big old house in the city with his beautiful niece Jane Barron and his lab assistant, Italian immigrant Corelli.  Our narrator, Fay's friend and physician Dr. James Haxton, receives a desperate phone call from Fay one evening--Fay needs medical attention!

At the Fay household, Haxton finds that his friend has some terrible flesh wounds--Fay says a giant rat inflicted the bloody injuries!  The rat looked a lot like a creepy wooden artifact Fay has in his office, a crudely carved rat the size of a paperweight, the product of some Polynesians who live on a remote island and worship the rat!  Fay purchased this thing on a trip to the Middle East in an Arab shop because it "caught his eye."  Niece Jane found the thing so hideous that she insisted it not be within her view, but covered with a black cloth.    

Haxton hangs around the old house, and has a chance to talk to Corelli, the Italian.  I have remarked a number of times at this blog that Italians in these early 20th-century weird stories often play the role of the exotic other (see my blog post which covers Frank Belknap Long's "Grab Bags Are Dangerous"), people who are superstitious and/or have esoteric knowledge WASPs don't have, and Corelli fits this mold.  Corelli has a theory that the colors black and white closely correspond with evil and good.

Jacobi's somewhat convoluted story follows Haxton as he figures out what is up and instructs Fay in how to use his color projector to resolve the plot.  Jacobi and Haxton wait to the end of the story to explain everything.  Basically, Corelli asked Fay if he could marry Jane, and Fay dismissed the very idea as ridiculous.  This "injured his Latin pride," as Haxton puts it, and so Corelli plotted a means of achieving his revenge and at the same time proving his theory.  Black, of course, is the absence of color, the absence of light--an item appears black because it absorbs light; light of course is a form of energy.  Corelli recognized that the rat carving was a fetish item from a temple of devil worshippers, and so must be charged with evil Satanic energy.  The black cloth put over it would absorb some of that evil energy.  Corelli took the cloth, put it in a wooden frame and attached this, as a sort of lens, to Fay's light projector.  When the projector was activated it (somehow) made material the Satanic energy in the cloth, bringing into being the murderous giant rat!  Corelli painted the door to Jane's bedroom with reflective paint that would protect her from the monster, but Fay and Corelli himself were left unprotected, and in the end of the story Corelli is himself slain by the supersized rat.  Fay and Haxton use the projector, set to emit bright pure white light, to defeat the rat monster.

I kind of like this one, with all its wacky theories and devices and a spurned lover as the instigation of the plot.

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As a group, these stories are pretty entertaining, with crazy monsters and plenty of gore.  And if we want to play college professor, we can see that they serve to illustrate the ways weird and horror authors writing in English for an Anglophone audience make use of the exotic other.  We've got the noble and sympathetic Native Americans of Manly Wade Wellman's tale, a people who have a rich culture of their own but who need the white man's help and would certainly benefit from exposure to the Gospel.  Carl Jacobi illustrates the hot-bloodedness of Italians--they are quick to fall in love and quick to turn to sneaky violence to achieve vengeance if their desires are obstructed; these Mediterraneans also seem to have knowledge of the supernatural which the more rational Northern European lacks.  There's the Cummings' treatment of the blacks of Haiti, who have an inexplicable and dangerous sorcery which white people probably should steer clear of.  We see Robert Bloch just brazenly use the strategy of likening him to an animal to make a physically powerful black man even more scary.  And, least starkly, we have August Derleth's tale of torture in medieval France, perhaps a reflection of how American and British people typically see the arrogant and self-important frog- and snail-eating fancy boys of Gaul as heirs to a long history of cruel tyranny and violent radicalism symbolized best by their most famous invention, the guillotine.

The 1930s weird may be under our skin, but we'll be taking a break from the topic to read a 1970s science fiction novel that, I suspect, will be about computers in the next exciting installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.

It's time to head back to the 1930s, spacefarers!  To sign on to this exploratory expedition you can spend $100 on ebay for a copy of the December 1936 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, or just do what I am going to do, click on over to the internet archive, world's greatest website, to read a scanned copy of "The Magazine of Prophetic Fiction" whose contents are "Stranger Than Truth." 

This issue has lots of great ads that will guide you to the solutions of your romantic problems.  Pimples?  Eat three cakes of Fleischman's Yeast a day.  (Mmmmm...cake.)  Too skinny to pick up chicks?  Start taking regular doses of Ironized Yeast tablets, made from "special cultured ale yeast imported from Europe."  (Better stock up, I have a feeling the supply chain from Europe is about to be seriously disrupted.)  Once you've cleared your skin and packed on the pounds, if you still aren't a hit at parties you can learn how to play the piano--"in just a few months"!--via the U. S. School of Music's special "short cut" method; once you know how to tickle those ivories, you'll be surrounded by "admiring throngs." 

Now that your social life is in order you probably need some alone time; all those parties and dates can tire a guy out!  Let's kick back and read some of the fiction in this ish of Thrilling Wonder, namely the stories contributed by Edmond Hamilton, Ray Cummings and Raymond Z. Gallun.  We've already read the John W. Campbell, Jr. story from this issue, "The Brain Stealers of Mars."  

"Mutiny on Europa" by Edmond Hamilton

At the time of writing, the wikipedia page on Frank Belknap Long includes an image of the sexalicious cover of the 13th issue of Donald A. Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader, a periodical that reprinted old stories and ran for 18 issues from 1947 to 1952.  Those blonde bombshells are hard to resist, and seeing as the MPorcius Fiction Log staff has been investigating the writing of Long anyway, we have the perfect excuse to give in to their charms.  With the help of everybody's favorite website, the internet archive, let's flip through this 1950 magazine and read stories Wollheim thought worth reprinting by people whose names we recognize.

(Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 also reprints Donald Wandrei's 1932 "Raiders of the Universes," which we talked about back in 2017.)  

"The Body-Masters" AKA "The Love Slave and the Scientists" by Frank Belknap Long (1935) 

"The Love Slave and the Scientists" first appeared under its less salacious original title, "The Body-Masters," in Weird Tales, alongside stories by Robert E. Howard (one I've written about), Edmond Hamilton and August Derleth.  Wollheim here in Avon Fantasy Reader suggests it is a serious science fiction story, asking the question of how science might help solve the problems of loneliness and stale marriages, and how people might react to a scientific resolution to their sexual relationship problems.  Sounds good--I've got my fingers crossed! 

Long sets his tale in the 57th century, a time when high divorce rates are a major cause of concern for the authorities.  The "Dictator of Emotional Arts" diagnoses the problem: men want variety in sex partners, but when a man cheats on his wife, she gets jealous.  So a means is found to allow men to experience novelty in their sexual relations that will not arouse their wives' jealousy--sex robots!  No sensible woman would be jealous over a machine, the men of the world reason.

The plot of the story follows a surgeon, V67, who embraces the idea of the "Mechanical Companions," and spends his free time with one, relieving tension and introducing variety into his love life.  As we follow him from the "garden" where the Mechanical Companions are to be enjoyed to work and then  home, we learn a little about life in the 57th century, like the mass transit system of the future and the way the government uses eugenic breeding and surgery on the glands of excitable people to keep the population docile.  Back home V67 gets a surprise and we get our predictable twist ending--V67's wife is being visited by one of the newest line of sex robots, Mechanical Companions built in the form of men with the purpose of improving the lives of women who are bored with or ignored by their husbands!  V67's liberal attitude about Mechanical Companions goes right out the window and he destroys the masculine robot in a fit of rage!

The "points" of the story seem to be that both men and women are responsible for relationship problems and that no government, no matter how invasive and tyrannical, can do much to change human nature.  As my father learned that time he suggested to my mother that they watch a Gloria Estefan concert on TV, and I learned when I suggested to my wife that we watch a Sophia Loren movie, women really will get jealous over a machine, and men are probably no better.  I can't argue with Long's themes, but I can't say that they are surprising or exciting, either, and I also can't say his prose style, pacing or atmosphere are anything better than serviceable. 

We'll judge this story, which isn't doesn't quite wear out its welcome, to be merely acceptable filler.  For some reason Leo Margolies chose "The Body-Masters" for his 1964 anthology of stories from Weird Tales, which was also printed in a (truncated) German edition.

"The Curious Case of Norton Hoorne" by Ray Cummings (1921)

Norton Hoorne was one of the world's great concert pianists.  In this story our narrator, music lover Dr. William Manning (a medical doctor, not an Ed.D. or whatever) and one of Hoorne's best friends, tells us the heretofore secret truth about Hoorne's death!

The year is 1900!  Manning and another of Hoorne's closest friends, Dr. Johns (also a medical doctor and not a doctor of education or something), are called to Hoorne's beautiful Manhattan flat on Riverside Drive by his distraught housekeeper to find their buddy in a cataleptic state!  The musician doesn't seem to be breathing, and he has no pulse, but there is no positive sign he is dead, either.  Johns has an inkling of what is going on.  You see, just a week ago, Hoorne told Johns that he (Hoorne) had developed a new kind of music that could facilitate the departure of his soul from his body so he could travel in the astral plane!

The two sawbones do some detective work and experiment by playing the piano--by tickling just the right ivories Manning can bring Hoorne's soul closer to his body so he can, haltingly, talk to them--and solve the mystery.  Hoorne was in love with one of his pupils, the beautiful blonde daughter of a rich financier, but said moneybags wanted his little girl to marry some English baron, rendering the dreams of these piano-playing lovebirds null and void.  Just this morning, the docs discover via their sleuthing, that Hoorne's sweetheart was found dead by her family--the docs suspect she is not really most sincerely dead, but just travelling the astral plane hoping to be reunited with Hoorne!  Hoorne tried to join her on the other side, but something went awry and his soul is still anchored to his body.  With Manning's help at the keys, Hoorne completely severs his ties to this mortal realm and joins his beloved in some other universe.

Acceptable filler, I suppose.  "The Curious Case of Norton Hoorne" made its debut in Argosy and was only ever reprinted in the Avon Fantasy Reader.  

"The Thing That Walked on the Wind" by August Derleth (1933)

This one debuted in Strange Tales alongside stories by Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard and has reappeared in several Derleth collections and some odd theme anthologies, like one that collects SF stories by non-Canadians set in the Great White North, another about the Wendigo, and one full of stories about Ithaqua.  (You'll remember I read a story by Brian Lumley about Ithaqua, "Born of the Winds.")  I guess Derleth invented Ithaqua, but based it on Algernon Blackwood's story "The Wendigo."

Wollheim comes right out in his intro to the story in Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 and admits "The Thing That Walked on the Wind" is a pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft and Blackwood, and Derleth lazily mentions these big names in his story, waving his inspirations in our faces.  Derleth's tale, like so many Lovecraftian stories, consists of documents like official statements, testimonials and/or newspaper clippings.  This time out the primary frame is the statement of a Mountie, division chief John Dalhousie; most of Dalhousie's statement is a reproduction of a report from Constable Robert Norris; Norris in turn includes some brief newspaper stories in his report.  Norris, Dalhousie tells us, disappeared soon after submitting that report, and his body was found in a snow bank seven or eight months later.

In February of 1930 the entire population of the little town of Stillwater mysteriously vanished.  Exactly one year later, Constable Norris was near Stillwater and saw something moving in the sky--three bodies then fell to the earth near him, one that of a dead woman, the other two men who still barely clung to life.  The men turned out to be guys who were visiting Stillwater on that day everybody vanished.

By interrogating one of these guys, Allison Wentworth, when he briefly wakes up before dying, as well as the local doctor (of medicine) called upon to examine these three airborne Canadians, Norris learned that the people of Stillwater worshipped an air elemental, Ithaqua, going so far as to dedicate human sacrifices to this monster.  Wentworth and his friend had the bad luck to arrive in Stillwater the night of the big sacrifice; when they tried to rescue the sacrificial victim, a young woman, the monster was so angry it carried away all the inhabitants of Stillwater as well as the two would-be-heroes!  Wentworth and his friend were held captive by Ithaqua up in the stratosphere for an entire year, and accompanied the monster on its journeys around the world, visiting Ithaqua-worshipers in many occult (like R'lyeh or the Plateau of Leng) and mundane (like London or Lebanon) locations.  The year long world tour over, Wentworth and his pal were gently left on the Earth's surface, doomed to die in the warmth because Ithaqua had changed their body chemistry to be more suitable to the cold of the upper air.  (Don't ask why they didn't die in London or R'lyeh--Ithaqua works in mysterious ways!)  Wentworth informed Norris that since he too had glimpsed the air elemental, Ithaqua would no doubt kill him as well.    

After Norris's report, Dalhousie presents the evidence that Norris was also taken around the world by Ithaqua for some months before being left to die in Canada.

The core plot of this story is standard and obvious, but classic stuff that a good writer struck by inspiration and willing to put in some labor can turn into a fun and/or striking piece of fiction.  Derleth unfortunately buries that workable core under layer after layer of dry frame story and does nothing to add emotion or excitement to the traditional framework he is working with--he doesn't tweak or subvert or embroider the standard-issue plot at all, and his style and tone are bland.  None of the characters have personality or motivation, there are no memorable images, Derleth doesn't create any atmosphere or paint a picture of the setting, etc.

"The Thing That Walked on the Wind" is a formulaic, by-the-numbers Lovecraftian story to which the author adds nothing new or special.  Barely acceptable filler. 

"The Street That Wasn't There" AKA "The Lost Street" by Clifford Simak and Carl Jacobi (1941)

The famous coronavirus, the mass looting and rioting, and the increase in violent crime in cities we have witnessed in the last year or so have had me thinking about Clifford D. Simak's foreword to Roger Elwood's 1973 Future City.  (You can read Future City at the indispensable internet archive.)  Simak suggested that the city had outlived its usefulness--it was full of crime, commuting to it was an expensive hassle, and you could do all your work from home via electronic communication anyway--so maybe the city was doomed to extinction as people fled urban life for the suburbs and rural areas.  I have to wonder if Simak's prediction might not be coming true.

But I digress.  Wollheim says that "The Street That Wasn't There," which first appeared in the short-lived magazine Comet under the title "The Lost Street," is a "fascinating mental game" and a "really off-trail story" that is based on the tension between the foundational philosophical concepts of materialism and idealism.  Our man Wollheim is a real salesman!

It is the horrible future world of 1960!  The Old World of Europe, Asia and Africa are wracked by war and plague, and these blights are beginning to afflict South America.  But American Johnathan Chambers knows almost nothing about the world crisis--he's been a recluse who refuses to read newspapers or listen to the radio for like twenty years.  Two decades ago he published a book on metaphysics that was so revolutionary his colleagues and the public hounded him out of the university!  This victim of cancel culture lives alone and talks to nobody; every night he takes a 45-minute walk on the same route at the same time, and all his neighbors have learned to not bother addressing him, even the store clerk who sells him a cigar every night at the exact same time.

But tonight Chambers gets home and looks at his watch to find he has come home 15 minutes early!  How did this happen?  Chambers lives by the clock; for years and years his walks have always begun at precisely 7:00 PM and ended precisely at 7:45!  Also, somehow, he forgot to buy his cigar!  

The next day Chambers figures out the psyche-breaking and world-shattering truth.  That career-ending book he wrote twenty years ago posited that the world is the way it is because our minds force order upon matter--that bunch of molecules over there takes the form of a tree because we all expect it to be a tree, that bunch of molecules over there is an automobile because we expect to see an automobile there, etc.  Pushing this already dumb idea all the way out to la-la land, Chambers suggested that aliens from another dimension who had superior brain power could impose upon our universe their own vision of what our world should be like, and this way take over our dimension.  So the next night when Chambers goes out on his walk and realizes that the block with the cigar store has simply vanished he realizes that his speculation of an alien invasion has come to pass!  The world war and global plague that have yet to reach the United States must have killed off so many people that there are no longer enough human brains to enforce their will on this universe's matter, giving those evil aliens an opportunity to start crafting our matter into a world more suited to them!  (Or maybe twenty years of not talking to another human being has just driven Chambers insane?)

Chambers rushes home as the world around him changes.  There is no hope, smh, soon his house will vanish like all the other houses, and he will vanish like all the other Earth people.  Chambers knows that matter is never destroyed, only changed, so the molecules that are now him will soon be something else and he wonders if in his new form he will have consciousness or be a mere inert object.  

Better written and better structured than the rest of the stories I have talked about today, but still not exactly good; I guess I can give "The Lost Street" a grade of "OK."  "The Lost Street" has appeared in numerous Simak collections as well as a 1940s anthology edited by August Derleth and a 1970s one edited by Terry Carr.

**********

I'm feeling wishy washy today; I'm not comfortable definitively praising any of these stories or consigning them to the junk heap.  I have lost my passion...why should I need to keep it since what is kept must be adulterated?

Let's look for some fun in the back of the magazine!

In the back pages of Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 are some pages of ads, one of them listing dozens of Avon paperback books.  Some of these books are serious literature, what we might even call classics, like D. H. Lawrence's The First Lady Chatterley and A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (we all love "When I Was One and Twenty," don't we?), and many are respectable mainstream fiction, like the works of W. Somerset Maughan or Howard Fast, or respectable genre literature, like the novels of Raymond Chandler or Cornell Woolrich ("William Irish" is one of Woolrich's pen names; I read I Married a Dead Man before I started this blog and I guess I liked it OK, though I remember very little of it; I actually remember the Barbara Stanwyck film of the novel more vividly.)  As you might say of Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 itself, the cover art of many of these publications seems to indicate that Avon saw as its target market those in search of salacious material.  Below I have reproduced some interesting specimens of such art.

As I write this, you can see several pages from the Naughty 90's Joke Book at an ebay auction  here (scroll down) and judge how many belly laughs it might have provided

       

Four luscious women and one sinister man sounds like a good recipe; maybe I'll read the edition of Bloch's The Scarf available at the internet archive soon

So many questions...