So, without further ado, the moment you've all been waiting for...
Amazing Stories, Issue 7, October 1926
COVER
So, we've got what looks like a shipwrecked man standing in a field of grass, being overlooked by two insectoid creatures. In the background a third creature is inspecting what appears to be a cigar-shaped spacecraft. In the distance are some snow-capped mountains. This could be two possibilities. First, the insectoids are aliens that have landed somewhere where they've encountered a shipwrecked human. Of course, mountains like that don't normally appear on small, shipwreckable islands, do they? Second, the human is the visitor to their world, but why he's wearing torn clothes instead of a spacesuit is beyond me. I'm sure one of these stories will explain it, though.
Once again, Wells, Verne and Serviss make the cover, which certainly would have drawn attention. That makes four straight issues where Garrett P. Serviss gets cover-billing. I wonder how popular he was back in the day to merit being mentioned along with Wells and Verne so frequently. And then I wonder how he ended up being so utterly forgotten today.
EDITORIAL
The title for this month is 'Imagination and Reality,' and Gernsback name-drops Alexander Graham Bell as an example of someone who sought to design one thing and ended up creating something entirely different. He equates this to writers coming up with wild, scientifically 'plausible' ideas that inspire an inventor to come up with the actual version of whatever the writer was thinking of. He also suggests that the writer, in such a case, would be entitled to the ownership of the patent, since he came up with the idea in the first place. Fortunately, it doesn't work that way. We get paid royalties for the stories themselves; that should be enough.
BEYOND THE POLE, Part One, A. Hyatt Verill
This is an original story, a serial in two parts, that gets the pole position this month.
Okay, that's the last cheesy pun for this review. Maybe.
Verill had a distinguished career as a zoologist, explorer and inventor, as well as writing a whole bunch of books: 115 of them, in fact. Most of them were non-fiction, but he was also prolific in the pulps as a story-teller. This one uses a device that Edgar Rice Burroughs used a few years earlier in the first book of his Caspak trilogy, The Land That Time Forgot. Both stories are written as something that was written by someone else and dropped into the sea in a bottle, to be discovered some time later by the 'author.' In this case, the story is about the cover picture; Verill combines my two ideas, so I was right on both counts. The hero is shipwrecked down near the South Pole, and goes through some similar (though condensed) situations as Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. However, he ends up in a part of Antarctica that is warm and surrounded by some seriously high mountains. He scales them, and winds up on the other side with his provisions exhausted and his clothes tattered (hence his appearance on the cover). It's not really a spoiler that he encounters the creatures from the cover, who are intelligent and treat him as a strange new animal, albeit one they are able to communicate with in a rudimentary fashion. Oh, and they aren't insectoids; they're evolved crustaceans. The crustaceans have a truly alien but plausible society; Verill did an excellent job here. The first part of the story ends on not much of a cliffhanger, just a note that the crustaceans' greatest enemies are the ants.
Gernsback says this is the best scientifiction story of the year; I can't really disagree, since there haven't been too many stories in Amazing that haven't been reprints, so the field of new scientifiction stories for the year is somewhat thin. It runs fifteen pages, including the full-page introduction (and, in a touch of verisimilitude, footnotes from the 'discoverer' of the manuscript). There wasn't much action in this first half of the story; I hope that changes in the second part. The thing that stands out is, as I said, Verill's world-building. Being a zoologist, he obviously had some informed opinions on what such a society would look like.
A COLUMBUS OF SPACE, Part 3, Garrett P. Serviss
Ah, here we go. The conclusion to a great space epic, albeit one with a bit of a surprising ending. After recovering Princess Ala from her abductor, Edmund and his companions end up in yet another aerial chase, although this time the bad guy has stolen their own spacecraft that they used to get to Venus. I won't give a synopsis of the whole thing, but more bad things happen, along with more heroics, and plot threads tied off and resolved. Juba gets to return to his people, while Ala and Edmund are betrothed, of course. However...
Nope, not going to spoil it. Suffice it to say, the narrator returns to Earth, but he's the only one, and the spacecraft is lost forever. Or, until someone thinks to dredge the swamp in the Adirondacks.
Alright, so the third installment does have some repetitive scenes, not only from the second installment but also within a couple of chapters here. But it's still a rip-roaring adventure on another planet, and it's a lot of fun all the way through. While this installment didn't reach the heights of the first two, it's still a great story, and I'm still maintaining that Burroughs read it before he wrote A Princess of Mars. Just shy of twenty pages long, it makes for a great story, one that I highly recommend to anyone who has an interest in the proto-pulp science fiction genre.
THE PURCHASE OF THE NORTH POLE, Part 2, Jules Verne
So, this installment concludes the Vernian tale of a group of armament and explosive enthusiasts and their attempt to reorient the earth's axis to melt the polar ice so they can access the coal. As Gernsback says, Verne is a very skilled writer who knows his science and knows his math. Unfortunately, this story falls short in the 'adventure' part of the 'science fiction adventure' label. The majority of it is spent with people scared of what will happen when the Gun Club does what it says it's going to do. And sure enough, they build another humongous gun, this time in southern Africa, and fire it off, expecting the recoil to push the earth on its axis. Obviously, that didn't happen, and again, that's not really a spoiler.
I enjoyed A Trip to the Center of the Earth, and even Off on a Comet was fun, though it was a bit out there for Verne. But this one...no. I can't help but think that Gernsback could have gotten the rights to better Verne stories if he hadn't been the cheapskate that he is known as today. You get what you pay for, though, and this time, he didn't get anything near Verne's best effort. This installment runs nineteen pages.
HAIL AND GOOD-BY, Leland S. Copeland
A surprise here, as at the bottom of the last page of the previous story, there's a short poem, which I will copy verbatim here:
Where counter star-streams meet and blend,
Where suns and comets fly,
We wake at last in human form
To ponder whence and why.
A billion billion ages lapsed,
A trillion worlds went by,
Ere we could rise from light and dust
To labor, love, and die.
Far out within the Milky Way
Our pellet Earth is cast,
Whose children dream that mind will live
When all the stars have passed.
We cannot glimpse the future's gift,
But one thought holds us fast--
To think, to try, is good, and then
To vanish in the Vast.
I somehow missed Copeland's previous entry, another poem in the August issue. I'm not good at analyzing poetry; it's always been a weak spot in my creative writing efforts. I'll just leave it to the reader to decide what to think of it. This is, by the way, another original writing appearing in this magazine (as was Copeland's first poem in August, his first pulp-published work). He will appear in this magazine again, and again.
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, Part I, H.G. Wells
Ah, this one is a classic. Surprisingly, I've never read it; I've never read much of Wells, to be honest. I've never even gone all the way through War of the Worlds, though I know the story well enough. This one I don't know, but a lot of people do, so my review of it will be brief, focusing more on my own thoughts on the work. This one was originally published in 1896, but never reprinted until now. The installment runs to just under twenty pages as well.
Again, this one is written as a 'found' work, albeit this time it's found in the narrator's papers after his death rather than in a bottle floating in the sea. It's definitely science fiction, dealing with experimentation on animals to make them more 'human.' Moreau is a serious creep, and there's a lot of psychological horror in this one. It's definitely a page-turner, and I'm curious to see how it ends up.
Oh, and at the very end is another poem by Leland Copeland, called 'Lullaby'. I won't copy this one, but suffice to say it's...different. It's a lullaby, as the title indicates, but it's not a lullaby for a child; it's a lullaby for a baby nebula that will someday turn into a star. As I read it, I'm singing along to it with the tune from 'Hush, Little Baby'. You will, too.
BLASPHEMER'S PLATEAU, Alexander Snyder
Another original, this one is also self-contained; it's a novella, the only one by Snyder that was published in the pulps; the rest of his oeuvre is a few short stories. It's only twelve pages long, easily the shortest story in this issue.
But boy, does it pack a lot in those twelve pages. The scientist in this story, Dr. Santurn, is the absolute epitome of the 'mad scientist.' His goal is to disprove the existence of the human soul, thereby abrogating the need for religion and a belief in God. He's already creating animals when the other main character (there really isn't a hero in this one), Mason, arrives to visit his old friend. Santurn goes so far as to create a human being, an experiment that Mason disrupts, causing Santurn to use his magic 'Neo Rays' on Mason to regress him to the mental level of a toddler. In the end, Santurn ends up contracting cancer and thus commits suicide by really big lab explosion.
This one has a lot of religious overtones, with Mason repeatedly referencing Sodom and Gomorrah (the biblical cities that God nuked in the book of Genesis for their immorality (if you don't know what they were doing, the name of the first city should provide a big clue). In the end, the plateau on which Santurn's lab sits does get wiped out, although not from any heavenly action, but rather Santurn's own insanity and self-destruction. It's an interesting story, definitely thought-provoking, but not one that holds up for repeated readings.
CONCLUSION
No short stories here; it's all novella-length stuff, and all but one of the stories are installments in longer serials. I don't know if this is going to be the theme going forward, but I'm looking forward to finding out. I still liked the Serviss entry the best, and with two original tales, a classic of science fiction and a lesser writing from a grand master of the field, I'd say this is one of the stronger issues thus far.
No comments:
Post a Comment