Amazing Stories #2, May 1926

I had this review already written, as well, so I'll post it here. If this is of interest to anyone reading this, please leave a comment and I'll continue reviewing the issues I've read so far.

COVER

The cover picture shows a weird butterfly/octopus alien creature in front of what looks like a hive-type city, under a dark blue sky and with a dull red sun in the background. It looks like a creature from the Wells story, The Crystal Egg, and the creature is indeed looking at some kind of egg in the picture.

EDITORIAL

Letters have started to come in, and people are very enthusiastic about the new magazine and its departure from the ‘sex-appeal’ style that was so common in the pulps of the time. As Gernsback says, “Most of our correspondents seemed to heave a great sigh of relief in at last finding a literature that appeals to the imagination, rather than carrying a sensational appeal to the emotions.” Someone also suggests including the scientific facts related to the stories in sidebars or in italics, which sounds like a good idea, except that some of these stories don’t exactly stick to scientific truth. Still, an idea worth exploring, since science is the backdrop of this magazine.

Future stories will include ‘Dr. Hackensaw’s Secrets,’ a popular request from letter-writers, some Burroughs, more Wells and a few other requested authors. Right now, they have a backlog of stories to print, so they’re asking for increased circulation to enable them to enlarge the magazine to include more stories. Looks good so far.

A TRIP TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, Jules Verne

So, there will be two Verne stories in this magazine, both novel-length (and serialized). This is a much more popular and well-known Verne story than Off on a Comet, with several movies and such based on it. The book was originally published in French in 1864, and this translation is the most popular and reprinted translation, although it is also abridged and altered in several respects. Notably, the main characters are all renamed (Professor Ludenbrock is now Professor Hardwigg, and the narrator’s name is changed from Axel to Harry. Having read a more faithful translation previously, it should be interesting to note the changes in this version.

First of all, the book reads much faster in this translation; I think there are at least three chapters taken right out, and the action proceeds much more quickly to the actual descent into the volcano. Second, without referring to the other translation, the changed names don’t really make a difference. The real test, of course, would be to read the book in the original French, something I plan to do at some point.

Okay, so here’s the quick recap: The German scientist and professor Hardwigg discovers a secret cypher in an Icelandic book that, when solved, reveals the existence of a way into the center of the Earth through a dormant volcano in Iceland. Hardwigg and his nephew Harry (the narrator) immediately embark on a trip to Iceland in hopes of finding this entrance and exploring the interior of the world before anyone else can do so. Time is critical, as the entrance will only be revealed at a certain time of the year by the shadow of a mountain, so they make haste and arrive just in time, picking up a guide, Hans, along the way. This first installment ends with the party of three entering the cavern through the dormant volcano, and having descended over ten thousand feet below the surface. The story covers 25 pages and 15 chapters, and is continued next issue.

MESMERIC REVELATION, Edgar Allan Poe

A second consecutive story from Poe about mesmerism, this one takes a slightly different tack. Originally published in 1844, this story has a similar premise to the previous one (hypnotizing a person on the brink of death), but this time the dying person is the one requesting to be hypnotized, and the majority of the tale is a philosophical treatise on the existence and meaning of God. It’s a bit heavy for some readers, and the philosophy definitely doesn’t mesh with the traditional understanding of God through Christianity. There’s a pantheistic feel to it, where all matter is alive and part of the same unique consciousness.

In the end, the subject of the hypnotism is dead, having been dead for some time during the conversation. Okay, then. This story wasn’t really my cup of tea, not by any stretch. This one doesn’t have the horrific overtones of last month’s story, and is a much drier read. Well, they can’t all be winners. At least it was short, at only four pages in length.

THE CRYSTAL EGG, H.G. Wells

Originally published in 1897, this story tells of a strange object in a pawn shop, whose owner, Mr. Cave, has been having strange visions through this crystal. Someone wants to buy it, and he charges an outrageous price, hoping to dissuade them. However, they still want the object, and so he makes up a story about another potential buyer who was there first.

A good chunk of the story is a description of the vision seen by Mr. Cave, as related to his friend, Mr. Wace. The vision is like a videolink to another world, showing scenes like the one on the magazine cover, which from the descriptions provided by Mr. Cave appears to be Mars. Lots of aliens on Mars back then, weren’t there? It’s more crowded than Earth.

In the end, Mr. Cave dies suddenly, the egg ends up being sold off and disappears, leaving Mr. Wace no way to retrieve it and continue Mr. Cave’s explorations into the crystal’s meaning. It’s a good story, and was used several times in future adaptations as a link to Wells’ alien invasion story, War of the Worlds. The story is another quick read, at only six pages long.

THE INFINITE VISION, Charles C. Winn

This story is another crib from Gernsback’s other magazines, in this case Science and Invention from May, 1924. Only four pages long, it tells the tale of a group of scientists who are designing the ultimate telescope, a scope that can look at molecules on the Moon. The telescope works as advertised, after ten years of labor to design and perfect it. Then they turn the telescope toward Mars, and see a great city, inhabited by advanced intelligent beings flying airships.

Unfortunately, the Martians don’t like being observed, and somehow cause a massive storm that destroys the telescope completely, as well as the scientists who were using it. Moral of the story: Don’t spy on Martians, or they’ll kill you dramatically. Okay, then. The story is brief enough not to drag, but the ‘science’ is very heavy on the ‘pseudo’ and light on the actual facts. And that makes two consecutive stories that talk about life on Mars. I’m sure a lot of people were really disappointed when they found out that it was just a dead planet, nothing but a massive desert, with no life whatsoever. Ah, well.

THE MAN FROM THE ATOM, Part 2, G. Peyton Wertenbaker

This continues from the April issue, as the lost explorer is despairing of ever finding his way home (since time has accelerated to the point where it doesn’t exist anymore). He shrinks down to stand on an alien planet, and is promptly captured and imprisoned by the advanced race that inhabits it. He eventually learns, from the alien princess who has fallen in love with him (what is it with alien women and humans, anyway?), that there is a way home, which involves doing what he did before, because time isn’t actually linear; it’s a circle, and everything happens again, so he’ll eventually find Earth pretty much as he left it, having come around to another cycle. Interesting premise. The scientists on this world are advanced enough to calculate the precise timing of his departure and arrival, and it does indeed work.

However, things on this ‘reset’ Earth aren’t exactly the same. America is a monarchy, it’s twelve years earlier than when he left (even though it’s only ‘moments’ after he left in the first place), and he finds that he really misses the alien princess that he loved as well. So what does he do? The scientist who made the device lets him use it again to repeat his journey, so he can find her again. Well, good luck with that.

It’s an interesting theory on time, and I do like that things change and aren’t exactly as they were the previous time around. Only six pages long, the story sticks more to the philosophy of how time works and the burgeoning love story between the alien princess and the time-lost traveler. No real action here to speak of, except for the brief scene where the traveler is captured (and even that is without any violence).

OFF ON A COMET, Part 2, Jules Verne

 And we now conclude the story begun last issue. This installment is labeled as 'Book II,' so the chapters start over again at Chapter I. It turns out that the nearly-frozen man they found is indeed a French astronomer who has been gathering data and doing math to learn more about the comet. The information he provides helps the French soldiers and civilians they are taking care of survive the rest of the journey. The two biggest obstacles they face, aside from the fact that they are flying through the solar system on a comet with no arable land to farm, are the perfidious Jewish merchant, who continues to display all the negative stereotypes assigned to Jews in literature of the time, and the English, who display all the negative stereotypes that Frenchmen of the time thought of them, including their supreme stubbornness and unwillingness to even consider the French data. In the end, their refusal costs them their lives, as the comet manages to have an earthquake (well, it does have a volcano, so why not?) as it's returning to Earth, and a big chunk of it falls off, killing the English soldiers but leaving the Frenchmen alive.

It takes two years for the comet to return to Earth, and the Frenchmen leave the comet on a balloon and return to Earth when the atmospheres collide. Strangely, no one on Earth notices this second comet fly-by, either, and the balloon and its survivors land near where they had originally disappeared from when the comet snatched them up.

This one is an odd story to me, especially coming from Jules Verne, who was noted for being as meticulous as possible in his scientific research for his stories. But this one is so utterly implausible that it reads more like a Burroughs or Merritt story. That's not a criticism; it's just that this story is so fantastic in its premise that it doesn't fit with his more 'realistic' adventures such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or even From the Earth to the Moon, which is utterly impossible by today's standards, but at the time after the American Civil War was seen as entirely plausible by its readers. But this one...no, the notion that a comet of that size (it's 738 km in diameter) could come that close to Earth without causing massive, world-wide catastrophic damage is Independence Day-levels of unrealism. The comet that is credited with wiping out the dinosaurs was only 180 km across; Gallia, the comet of this story, would have cracked the Earth like an egg and wiped everything out.

So, as a fun little romp through the solar system on a strange adventure, the story is...okay. There isn't much action; the English and French soldiers, though enemies, don't ever actually come to blows. The characters are largely stereotypes, even the French. As a shining example of Jules Verne's scientific realism and attention to plausible detail...yeah, this story don't even come close. This is easily the longest story in the magazine, running 43 pages long and covering nineteen chapters.

CONCLUSION

So, after two issues, it's still all reprints, some of them from Gernsback's other magazines. It will be interesting to see when original stories start popping up. So far, it's been a good mix of scientific realism and way-out-there fantastic stuff. I like that even this early in the magazine's run, we can already see that 'scientifiction' isn't the narrow, straitjacketed genre that it would become later on; there's plenty of room for the weird and unexplainable at this point. Let's see how long that pattern continues.