Amazing Stories #3, June 1926

Well, I’m going to continue with the Amazing Stories magazine reviews, just ‘cause. They’re fun to read, and even though the contents are all reprints so far, I know I have some great stuff to look forward to eventually. Mind you, I haven't read that far into the magazine's run thus far, so don't expect this daily thing to continue for long. With that in mind, issue number three:

COVER

We see three men on a raft in the middle of the sea, lake or ocean, facing off against a sea serpent underneath a red sky. There’s also a giant turtle head looking on in the bottom corner. This, if I’m not mistaken, is taken from the Trip to the Center of the Earth story. It’s definitely evocative, and you just know that someone on that raft is about to be eaten. It’s a pretty flimsy raft, too; waves like that should tear it apart.

EDITORIAL

“The Lure of Scientifiction” is the title, and Gernsback namedrops Poe as one of the founders of sci-fi (in America, certainly, but there were some in Europe, even before Mary Shelley). He also throws in a mention of Leonardo da Vinci as someone with the imagination to write science fiction. He then brings up Roger Bacon, a medieval scientist who had to be careful not to run afoul of the religious authorities. This is, of course, a myth; there were plenty of Catholic clergy involved in scientific research at that time, including Bacon himself, who was a Franciscan friar. Unfortunately, the myth of ‘Catholic Church is anti-science’ has deep roots.

A TRIP TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, Part 2, Jules Verne

In this second part, the intrepid heroes continue their explorations of the deep underground caverns. They do not, of course, actually reach the center of the Earth; that would happen much later, when Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote the Pellucidar books. But they do get significantly deep, and run across some fantastic terrain, including the underground sea shown on the cover, and a mushroom forest that includes the bodies of what can only be prehistoric cavemen of large size. They do get separated, and there’s a terrifying scene where the narrator is lost, with no way to find his way back to the others, miles underground. The terror he feels when he realizes that no one will ever even find his body is palpable. Twenty chapters of underground exploration cover thirty-five pages, the longest story in this issue. A good start to the magazine, and the conclusion of the story will be in the next issue.

THE COMING OF THE ICE, G. Peyton Wertenbaker

Well, I missed something in the previous review. It turns out that the second Man from the Atom story, by this same author, actually was an original story, not a reprint. And so is this one; Wertenbaker has the distinction of being the first author to have a story first printed in this magazine, and he’s done it twice in two issues. And today, he’s such an obscure figure in science fiction that he doesn’t even get his own Wikipedia page.

This one is a sort-of post-apocalyptic story, taking place in an indeterminate future year. All the narrator knows is that he’s immortal through some voluntary experiments, and there aren’t any more people like him; they’ve evolved (or devolved) into something else entirely, while he’s the same as he was back in 1930. Well, that’s a downer. He can’t even see the sky anymore to look at the stars and wonder if there’s anything else out in the cosmos, because it’s constantly snowing. It’s an environmentalist’s direst nightmare: the world devolved into global cooling, the return of the ice age.

But before that dreary, depressing ending, the story shows that humanity does indeed let science reign supreme, and achieves mechanical perfection…until there’s nothing left to discover, nothing left to invent, and society stagnates and falls apart because there’s no reason to go on. But unlike everyone around him, our narrator will go on, even after everything else is gone. It’s an interesting story, warning that science can only go so far to improve human existence. And Wertenbaker was only nineteen when he wrote it. The story is only five-and-a-bit pages long, but packs some solid food for thought in there.

MR. FOSDICK INVENTS THE “SEIDLITZMOBILE”, Jacque Morgan

We move on from the dreary and depressing to the absurd and humorous. This is actually one of five Mr. Fosdick stories that Jacque Morgan wrote, and he was actually dead when this one was published in Amazing Stories, having died the previous year. It’s another reprint story, having first appeared in Modern Electrics back in 1912.

Essentially, this is a story about powering an automobile through the use of…stomach gases. Yes, he’s taking stomach powders to use his own farts to drive his car! This is Swiftian in its savage humor. Fosdick convinces a rich businessman to invest in this insane endeavor, and the drugstore clerk thinks he’s insane when he explains that he needs the carbonic acid to run a car. The resulting ride is quite amusing, and deserves to be read just for the entertainment value. At three pages, the story is as quick as the car, and it’s night-and-day from the previous story. Early sci-fi is great.

THE STAR, H.G. Wells

This one originally showed up in 1897, and had already been reprinted by Gernsback in his March 1923 Science and Invention magazine. So, either he really liked it, or he was just trying to fill space. It’s tough to tell, because this one is almost as depressing as “The Coming of the Ice.” It’s one of the earliest examples, if not the earliest example, of a story where a rogue celestial body (in this case, the titular star) passes through our solar system and threatens the earth with extinction and destruction.

Wells delivers, too; the ice all melts, flooding the coastlines; the Pacific Ocean is inundated with tidal waves, which push the flooding even further, and volcanic lava erupts all over the place as the star’s gravitational effects tear at the earth’s crust. A good chunk of humanity is wiped out, and the survivors migrate north to what is now temperate Greenland and other northern islands. The moon gets moved into a new orbit, and the rogue star ends up running into the sun and being absorbed.

As a bonus, the Martians (who we first met in War of the Worlds a few months before this story was originally published) are watching through their own astronomical instruments, and conclude that nothing much changed on earth except that the polar ice melted. They were probably still pissed that a germ took out their advance scouts. This one packs a lot into a mere four pages, and it’s worth a look. That’s two apocalyptic stories in this issue so far; I hope it’s not the trend.

WHISPERING ETHER, Charles S. Wolfe

Another reprint from Gernsback’s past, this one first appeared in Electrical Experimenter in March of 1920. The narrator is a small-time crook who has the misfortune of trying to rob Proctor, the scientist who invented a ‘mind machine’ that works through controlling the ether. Back then, the ‘ether’ was a big deal to scientific minds; they thought it was what lay between celestial bodies, instead of the vacuum we now know is there.

Anyway, there’s some pseudo-scientific explanation of how this ‘mind machine’ works before it ends up destroyed. No one believes Proctor, who ends up in a mental institution; the narrator doesn’t back up Proctor’s story, even though he knows it works, because Proctor allowed him to listen to the headphones, and he hears the thoughts of someone very far away (in Germany, most likely) discussing the upcoming World War in July 1914, two months before the war actually started.

Another short story, this one is less than three pages, but is much lower-key than the other short stories in this magazine. It’s not a bad story, but it isn’t very memorable. The outdated science doesn’t help the modern reader, but if you can get past that, it’s a decent enough pastime story.

THE RUNAWAY SKYSCRAPER, Murray Leinster

Now we’re talking. Action, certainly, and a wild premise that takes the reader on a fun journey into the distant past. The Runaway Skyscraper was Leinster’s first published sci-fi work, appearing in Argosy back in February of 1919, reprinted seven years later in Amazing Stories. Leinster had quite the career in the pulps, spanning nearly sixty years and over 1,500 stories. That’s one hell of a run.

This early effort gives us some good examples of why he was such a successful pulp author. He doesn’t waste a lot of time delving in the ‘why’ of the story, he just gets straight to the ‘this is what’s going on, and holy cow, how are they going to fix it?’ The main character, Arthur Chamberlain, is an engineer who figures out what actually is causing this skyscraper to move backward in time several thousand years. The explanation, such as it is, is magnificently absurd, as is the solution to the quandary. More interesting, though, is how the people in the skyscraper react; Chamberlain takes charge and, with the help of a few others in the building, organizes the work necessary to get the building back to when it’s supposed to be.

What I liked about this story isn’t the scientific rationalization (such as it is), but the characters themselves. Chamberlain is a man of action, and none of the men in the story spend much time moping and despairing at their impossible plight. Once Chamberlain gets things going, everyone pitches in and does what has to be done to get them home. It’s a great example of the general character of the times, where men weren’t afraid to take action. Stories like this aren’t very common today, but that’s what was great about this era of the pulps. Action and adventure were what people wanted to read. And many of them still do, today. The story runs for fifteen pages, but there’s a lot there.

AN EXPERIMENT IN GYRO-HATS, Ellis Parker Butler

Butler is another prolific pulp writer, though he didn’t write a lot of sci-fi. He wrote over 2,000 stories and essays, as well as thirty books, but only eighteen science fiction stories, all of which were written prior to Amazing Stories’ debut. This one is his first-ever sci-fi story, originally appearing in Hampton’s Magazine in June, 1910. Just over five pages in length, it’s a fun little story.

Gyroscopes were a new thing back in 1910, so writing a story about the possibilities of their usage was a natural thing. Butler imagined them being used in hats to keep people from slipping and falling; the hat’s gyroscope would keep them upright. The inventor of the gyro-hat does so because his daughter is in love with a man who can’t walk straight; he invents the hat so the guy can walk without looking like a drunkard, and so his daughter can stand to be seen in public with him. I love the pulps.

Well, things don’t go exactly as anticipated, which is of course the way it should be, since that’s where the fun and adventure come from. The hat works, but when the gyroscope gets stuck, the hat keeps rotating, along with the guy wearing it. The ending is fun in its silliness, and I won’t spoil it. Suffice to say, it’s a good read.

THE MALIGNANT ENTITY, Otis Adelbert Kline

This one is an interesting selection; it first appeared in Weird Tales in 1924, reprinted here less than two years later. The author, Kline, had several stories appear in Weird Tales in those early years, and was the editor on one of the issues. Why he sold this story to Amazing so soon after its initial publication would be an interesting story to learn. Anyway, the fact that this story appeared in Weird Tales should be sufficient to warn us of what lies ahead.

This one starts out as a murder mystery, as the lead, Dr. Dorp, is asked to investigate a strange murder. A skeleton has been found, completely stripped of any and all fleshy bits. After a second skeleton is found, Dorp eventually realizes that there is some sort of flesh-eating bacteria that is somehow sentient enough to hunt and hide. He eventually finds it, but it escapes through a hole in the floor, and the hunt is on. It’s creepy as hell, as it should be, but it certainly fits in the ‘scientifiction’ genre as much as in the horror genre. It’s only a bit more than eight pages long, but it’s gripping. I recommend it.

DR. HACKENSAW’S SECRETS – SOME MINOR INVENTIONS, Clement Fezandié

This story is original to Amazing Stories, though the author had a long history with Gernsback’s Science and Invention magazine. From 1922 to 1925, Fezandié included a short story in almost every issue of that magazine, most of them about Dr. Hackensaw and his amazing inventions. This one, which closes out this issue, is about some not-so-amazing inventions of the good doctor, sort of like pot-boiler stories that authors write in between serious work. Examples include an autographing machine that can do a hundred autographs at once using a framework holding a hundred pens; a dictation typewriter (a steampunk version of voice-recognition software today); a car-theft alert (in the form of a sign that reads, ‘This car is stolen!’ when someone other than the proper driver starts it up); and an automatic judge that is more in tune with the law than most flesh-and-blood judges.

This story is only four pages long, and doesn’t really have much story to it; it’s just Hackensaw describing these inventions to a rapt listener. It’s almost as if it’s just there to pad the page count, and it’s definitely the least-interesting part of the issue. I have no idea if his earlier stories are any more interesting, but none of them get reprinted in Amazing later, so I’d have to dig up issues of Science and Invention to find out. He does have another original story in the next issue, though, so we shall see what that one’s like.

CONCLUSION

With two original stories and nine stories in total, this one is the most varied issue so far. The variety in the types of stories is quite pronounced, going from the extremely silly ideas of “An Experiment in Gyro-Hats” and “Seidlitzmobile” to the bleak horror of “The Malignant Entity” and the apocalyptic “The Star”, not to mention some exciting adventure stories as well. I’d call this a strong issue, and while there’s only one serial story thus far, I’m sure that will change soon enough.

For more entertaining short stories, you can also check out my anthology, A Universe of Possibilities, which includes some science fiction stories for your entertainment.