(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: robotic Kraftwerk type synth melodies)
JM:
We're back with Chrononauts and our episode about machine intelligence and computing intelligences. And if you would like to listen to our first part of this episode on "Erewhon", we discussed some really cool concepts and "The Book of the Machines", which seem to influence a lot of later writers. Now, "Erewhon" was a very popular book in it's time.
We're going to talk now about an author who is far from popular now and virtually forgotten even though he has a fairly large body of work. His name is Karl Hans Strobl and he was born in 1877 in Iglau, which was then a part of Austro-Hungary and is now in the Czech Republic. I don't know much about his early life, but he studied law at the University of Prague and returned to Czechoslovakia at points later in life.
He started writing pretty early on with some of his stories in his collection, "Lemuria", dating back to 1900. This collection was quite successful and in particular his story, "The Head" featured in a lot of anthologies of the macabre and got some praise. But he already had a flair for both historical writings and humorous journal articles, which he would also continue to write. And he was a war correspondent during the First World War. Strobl relocated to Germany after the war and founded the magazine der Orchideengarten, probably butchering that, der Orchideengarten, Phantastische Blätter, which he formed with his colleague Alfons von Czibulka. And the Orchideengarten is significant and is widely considered the first weird or fantasy fiction magazine. It only ran for three years, starting in 1919, but was supposedly widely read enough and is recognized today for some of its memorable illustrations.
Nate:
I do think it was odd that it's considered to be the first because I figured, you know, we've done all these magazine histories. Ghosts and Gothic stories were very popular during the 19th century. That's something before might have come up, but apparently not.
JM:
Yeah, there were talk about some other ones. I think I brought one up in the weird, when we're talking about Weird Tales, was a Black Cat magazine, just another really early one. But I still think that was not, yeah. So, but according to Mike Ashley, the Orchideengarten didn't contain much science fiction, but specialized in fantasy and surreal stories. And we did have a look at some of the issues. I think Nate, you were able to look at some of them, right?
Nate:
Yeah, a lot of Hoffmann reprints. There is a Dickens ghost story in one. It's a mixture of German authors and non-German authors translated into German. I didn't recognize some of the names, but it appears to be a combination of both serialized novels and short stories, as well as a couple pages of book reviews of, I guess, contemporary weird horror fantasy-type fiction stuff that had come out.
JM:
Yeah, so it ran for 51 issues and apparently did feature a lot of reprints. But he'd been publishing novels, too, and his 1910 book, "Eleagabal Kuperus", described by the science fiction encyclopedia site as a huge apocalyptic vision of a struggle between good and evil principles that involves a science-fictional attempt by the villain to deprive humanity of oxygen and met with some success. And seems to be one of his better-known works in German, though I couldn't find a translation into English.
It was made into the film "Nachtgestalten" in 1920, starring Conrad Veidt of "Dr. Caligari" film. Strobl's biggest influences, a writer he talked about frequently, were E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allen Poe, also possibly a contemporary writer Hans Hanns Heinz Ewers and Gustav Meyrink, two notable 1900s German and Czech fantastic writers, both of whom are featured in "The Weird" anthology, which we've talked about on the podcast before.
So, the story we're going to be talking about tonight is from 1907, and it is "The Triumph of Mechanics". And it was previously not translated into English, but when "The Big Book of Science Fiction" came out, the VanderMeer decided to publish a translation by Gio Clairval. And this is what we read for the podcast.
So, I'm purposefully leaving a little bit of this man's life obscure until after we're done, but there is an elephant in the room. But the thing is, this is a funny story. This is a comic story. It reads very much like a tall tale. And that is on the level that you should appreciate this story. It actually does remind me a lot of some writers that I quite like, like R.A. Lafferty, for example, often writes stories in this kind of comical vein, where it's like you can't quite 100% believe in the world that's being presented to you, but it's still pretty entertaining. So, I don't know. What do you guys think of this fun little story?
Nate:
Yeah, it kind of reminded me of Edward Page Mitchell in that same way, where it's fun and not really quite believable, but it's internally consistent and there's some witty and clever stuff in it.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I agree. And I, yeah, I do think that the Edward Page Mitchell comparison, it works very well for it. I think it's very fun. It's a fun story. It's not anything like to be taken too seriously. And it's quite fantastical. But yeah, it's quite a nice story.
JM:
Also, Carl Grunert.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
It gave me a definite, like, I mean, not to say that after reading two very short stories by him, I don't know precisely what kind of other stuff he might have written, but I could imagine him writing a story like this. Like, it feels, it feels like something that he would have been familiar with. Interestingly, "The Big Book of Science Fiction", I will well say in advance, kind of the intro that they write about Strobl, kind of frames him as the anti-Paul Scheerbert. It's kind of an interesting way of putting it. I don't know if those two ever met or knew about each other. I kind of suspect not. It seems like they would move in different circles, but I don't know. But it's interesting. I did like this story. I thought it was fun. It's not long enough to be like obnoxious with its silliness.
Nate:
No, it's extremely short.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like eight pages, I believe.
Nate:
Yeah. Less than 3,000 words, I want to say.
JM:
Yeah. So you can read this online and you can see this in "The Big Book of Science Fiction". It's readily available. It's worth a read. I thought it was, it's a fun inclusion to that anthology, which is probably mostly where you'll see it. So without further ado, I think we'll just get right into it and we'll talk a bit more about it afterwards.
So the Triumph of Mechanics, like I was saying, was first published in 1907. I'm not sure actually in what collection it was published or where it was published at the time. There doesn't seem to be a lot of info on that. I didn't really check all the, everything was in German.
So it's, it's kind of hard to find information about him, except he does have a pretty extensive bibliography, but we'll get more, a little bit more into that a bit later.
But somewhere in Austria or Germany somewhere is the toy factory of Stricker and Vorderteil. And their exciting act of toys are famous all over the world. And to illustrate this and that this will be a humorous story, Strobl tells an anecdote of a European explorer in Africa who got excited when he saw a monkey in a tree thinking it was some undiscovered species only to see a bottle number on it and have his hopes of fame dashed.
Now, their first most popular toy is a mechanical rabbit that you wind up and springs around for a bit and then either slows down or falls over with that. But the guy who designed it is of course an American working for the company. Now, we all know how industrious Americans are, but we also know how good they are at sensing opportunity. And when Hopkins sees how popular the rabbits have gotten, he goes to two bosses and makes some righteous demands. I want double the pay, half the hours, my own personal laboratory and a vacation property paid for by the company. And Stricker is a meek wimpy sort of guy and he's liable to be all, oh, yes, yes, of course, sure. But Vorderteil is more like outrageous. We can't in six months. He'll just be asking for more. All right. Then suckers says Hopkins the Yankee. All right, I quit.
Luckily, the firm has enough documentation to keep producing rabbits without him. But what the poor Stricker and Vorderteil don't realize is that Hopkins has an ace up his sleeve, an automation secret. Of course, they fear that Hopkins might start something on his own and then they'd be in trouble. And I guess there are no competitors for him to go to as yet. These guys just make these really awesome wide up toys and everybody loves them.
So Vorderteil luckily knows the mayor. He has lots of connections and he soothes his fretful partner saying he'll take care of everything. Meanwhile, though, Hopkins is nice enough not to just up and leave and there's a usual couple of weeks of him winding down his stuff after he gives his notice because he's a good employee and things seem to carry on as normal at the factory till his last day. But they've had an awful lot of orders and they've had to step up production and maybe not quite noticing a bunch of things that are happening in the background. And Hopkins does put an apartment to the mayor's office and he has a new process for making colorful glass toys. He calls it glazed glass, which is a bit redundant and maybe a joke on his part.
Vorderteil thinks this is ridiculous and Stricker just seems scared. And Vorderteil says it's not really glazed glass he is into but some kind of solidified air that is virtually unbreakable. And I don't know how he knows this, but I guess maybe Hopkins wasn't very good like with maybe there was a keylogger on his computer or something. I don't know, but they know about all this that he's planned. So Vorderteil is so animated that he destroys some of the office furniture and files and stuff in this really slapstick way that I thought was fun. And this is like papers falling all over his head because this is being file cabinet on the wall or something. And he's like pounding his fist on the desk and knocking everything over.
I don't know some of these some of these stories like have especially another one that's coming up later. They have this like slapstick quality to them that I can't help but sort of enjoy sometimes.
But Vorderteil colludes with the mayor and they turn the bureaucracy against Hopkins. And the wiley American has to take drastic measures. He shows up at the mayor's office leading to gigantic dogs and they break in and the dogs cause chaos while Hopkins messes with them and generally acts intimidating.
Oh, no dogs allowed. No problem. These aren't dogs, Mr. Mayor. They're machines.
And he demonstrates by unscrewing a mastiff head and revealing gears and stuff. But they can understand him calling them though apparently. And that seems more incredible to me than the tail wagging apparatus which he's very eager to demonstrate. And this is kind of a funny thing that I can't help but laugh at sometimes in really old like descriptions of futuristic technology and things like that. Like the weird things they focus on, right? Like it's I don't know.
It's really funny to me that these machines can do some remarkable things but the characters seem focused on like things that don't seem like they would be that challenging for a machine to accomplish. I don't know.
It's something that makes me laugh.
Gretchen:
Yeah, more of that coming up. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, a cool sentence from Strobl here or translated by Clairval anyway. "The three creatures that fenced the mayor within a magical circle resembled receptacles of accumulated force waiting for a switch on to explode into action unleashing destruction. And Hopkins suavely says he will release a billion mechanical rabbits into the town."
And when the mayor can't help but laugh in his face, despite being seriously intimidated, Hopkins says you have no idea what a billion is. That you have no idea of the immense power of mechanics. It will triumph and soon you will behold a rectilaga superior.
And Hopkins turns on his dogs and leaves. And the mayor is sure he has nothing to fear, can't wait to tell his wife and siding a mechanical white rabbit by his door only seems like a nice cherry on top. But soon rabbits are hopping and piling up everywhere getting underfoot all over town knocking things over invading everyone's personal space disarranging the sacred order of the newspapers at the gentlemen's club.
They seem to be multiplying all by themselves. That's the truly scary thing. I guess like the dogs, they're also battery operated. So you don't need to wind them up anymore. And they keep hopping and hopping. And several amusing scenes are described. Not even being run over by big trucks stops them. And the mayor is ready to damn mechanics forever. Vorderteil grimly predicts that the automatic rabbit population will exponentially multiply and that within a couple of days the town will be overrun by nearly two billion of the horrible beasts.
The town is now full of bonfires where people are trying to burn the invaders. And the mayor thinks of the great Napoleon III and his fondness for spectacles. Maybe if they throw a big party, it'll help keep people's minds off the wampaging wabbits. It's supposed to be a celebration of Schiller, which I guess normally really gets people going in the German lands around this time because you always hear Germans talking about Schiller and how great he is.
Nate:
He's been mentioned by a couple of the authors previously, I think.
JM:
Yeah. There's some musical entertainment marred by the bunnies blocking the bells of the bugles and hopping into the cleavage of a Chanteuse. And not just any rabbit either, but one with a whole set of nine little horrible bunny babies dangling from it. And suddenly, as if by magic, who should hop onto the stage but Hopkins dominating the scene, I regret to inform you all, ladies and gentlemen, that if my demands are not met, I shall be forced to introduce the rabbits that eat.
And with that, he pulls out a squirmy rabbit and feeds it some clover.
Oh my God! An unstoppable army of masticating and asexual multiplying rabbits!
But apparently it's eating that's the really scary thing and the mayor says after a meeting where they presumably agree to grant Mr. Hopkins what he wants. Oh, I think I understand your science. But there's one thing I don't get. The eating. How did you master it? And Hopkins admits that after all, the rabbit was in his demonstration was a real one flesh and blood, my friends. That is what triumphs in the end. So I think that's it. I think that's what he's saying. The riddle of flesh is greater than the riddle of steel. If you watch Conan, you know.
Gretchen:
I suppose that consumption apparently is harder to master than production.
JM:
The idea of the multiplying vermin, I guess.
Nate:
Breeding like rabbits.
JM:
Yes, breeding like rabbits. That's kind of the most fun, weird thing about this story. And that does remind me of a few things in looking up some stuff about this story. There was somebody who was writing that it reminded them of the flat cats, which are in a Robert Heinlein story, "The Rolling Stones". And it's also reminiscent of a story from 1905, I believe, called "Pigs is Pigs", which is about weird getting pigs taking, multiplying like crazy in a train station somewhere. And also, of course, there's a Star Trek episode, "The Trouble with Tribbles".
Nate:
Yes, definitely.
JM:
Nobody can't help but think of when they see something like this, right?
Of course, here, the electric glass rabbits quickly become not cute and not endearing. Like, their fur is all stuck on and fake and nasty. And they're made out of weird, glassy shit and they're like jumping everywhere.
Gretchen:
I bet they don't even make nice sounds like Tribbles do.
Nate:
No, probably not.
Yeah, I guess another interesting theme that comes up in a lot of later science fiction is this idea of artificial animals or artificial toys. You see that in "Blade Runner". There's the Doctor Who "Celestial Toymaker" episode. Oh, yeah. I think even one of the stories next month is kind of a toy type story.
JM:
Toys coming to life and being real.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, a lot of stuff going on there.
JM:
Here, it's like the beings, the creatures themselves are very obviously not conscious. They're like, it's just literally a whole bunch of self-replicating machines that are just going to take the town by storm at the end. I guess, I mean, the ending of the story is a little bit weak. You know, it's just like, it just stops the mayor and everybody's just like, oh, well, I guess he's, I guess he's got us now. Like, we can't do anything. So we better just agree to everything he says, right? And hope that he can put all the machines in a giant bag somewhere. And I guess eventually their batteries will run out.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, a billion rabbits does sound like a lot of rabbits to dispose of. Yeah, I wouldn't be wanting to be in charge of that cleanup. But I don't know. I kind of like the ending. I like the final quip it ends on. It does again feel like a very Edward Page Mitchell type note to end on with a bluff.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
A nice little twist.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah.
JM:
True. And Isaac Asimov likes to write short stories like that too, that end with this kind of like twist. It's almost like a pun, right? And it's like, ohI don't know. I kind of liked it at the same time. It was sort of, it just sort of ended, right? Like they, nothing, nothing really got resolved or anything, right? It's just, oh I guess the American has the cout de gras, right?
Like this is, that was it. And it was fun though. Like I had been reading through "The Big Book of Science Fiction" over the past couple of years and kind of pretty much randomly, I guess. And I had sort of skipped this one till fairly recently. And likeand then like, yeah, I'll check this one out and write it for the podcast. And it was, it was fun. I enjoyed it.
And I think I was very struck by the multiplication and how that didn't seem to be the thing that interested any of the characters. Like, I don't know. It was so weird that that was taken for granted and everything else wasn't like, it was very strange way of writing that. And I think in a lot of ways the story felt like a tall tale or almost like a folk tale or something like that. And I kind of like that.
Like I like when stories are told like that, even when they're science fiction stories and they're kind of told in this way that's almost unbelievable, like on purpose, you know, it's very surreal. And I think this kind of surreal story was very popular in Europe in like the early 1900s, 1910s.
Gretchen:
So that's sort of interesting thinking of that and that comment about him sort of being the antithesis to Scheerbert, because Scheerbert likes to create entire worlds that are so completely alien from our own, that it's like we kind of have to believe in them in a sort of separate way than we would. Yeah. Something like this where it's still sort of set within our own world, but it's given that like fantastic feel to it.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
It's kind of realism versus surrealism.
JM:
So I do want to put the coda on Strobl now and it's the thing that we have to talk about.
Nate:
So it is a pretty big elephant in the room and yeah, to their credit, the VanderMeers do address it and they discuss it in context of the story, which I think is good for them to do because I was very disappointed and I think it was the Ashley anthology where "The Professor Bakerman's Microbe" story appeared?
JM:
No, it was the "Scientific Romances" anthology edited by Brian Stableford.
Nate:
Okay, yeah, right. I guess they're both sci-fi critics in their own right. But yeah, the guy was a huge like eugenics proponent and that just was totally absent from the little blurb we got in the biography at the beginning of the anthology and we only discovered that doing background research on the guy where the VanderMeers put the elephant in the room very upfront. So I guess why don't we, I guess probably isn't too difficult to figure out given that this guy was a German author in the mid 20th century.
JM:
Yeah. Strobl was a German nationalist and this tendency openly seemed to increase in the 1920s. Even early on, he was an ardent fan of the English Aryanist and anti-Semite Houston Stuart Chamberlain, who was basically a extreme Germanophile who included all Europeans and even some North Africans in the Aryan race but said that Germans were like the ultimate distillation of pure Aryan blood at all this and Strobl got involved in the NSDAP party politics by the late 20s before the rise to power and prominence.
So we kind of know by that that he was pretty into it and hardcore because it's not like he was forced into anything. And I'm going to bring up somebody in a little bit who I think is an example of somebody else that we might do on the podcast at a later time, who is an interesting contrast to this guy.
But during the First World War, Strobl was already writing historical novels and continued to do so for decades afterwards. These included a trilogy about Otto von Bismarck, the German national hero. And in the early 30s, he advocated the annexation of the Sudetenland by Germany, including his native land of Austria, of course, and was expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1934 for disseminating propaganda and other Nazi-related activities.
He became official in the Reichsschrifttumskammer, which was the Nazi party's writer's organization, and although Strobl kept writing nearly right up till his death, most of his output seems to be novels. Most sources claim from this point on his work was solely aimed towards political interests and propaganda.
Nevertheless, in 1939, the Oklahoma University publication Books Abroad published an article called "My Debt to Books", which was, I guess, maybe a regular column. This was a magazine dedicated to world literature, which I guess was probably mostly European literature at that time, but this article included a whole bunch of German writers, including some paragraphs from Strobl, talking about his work and his literary influences, in which he focused largely on the fantastic, even claiming that he thought maybe the fantastic stuff was of more literary merit than his other output.
And he also made an apropos statement, which seems to have a double meaning now, based on what we know about him, and I'll just quote that. He says, and then just keep in mind, this is from 1939, but he's mostly talking about his fantastic works and his childhood and his literate influences. He says, "the poet had the strongest influence on my literary development is the German romanticist E.T.A. Hoffmann. In my parents' house, there was a little collection of the German classics, and among them I found a volume of the best tales of Hoffmann. With wonder and terror, I made my way into this world of strangeness and grotesquery. And when I read of magic arts and alliances with the devil, half-grown youngster that I was, a helpless prey of my overactive imagination, I was not far from concluding a pact with the evil one myself. The only reason why I did not was that I did not know how to go about it. But I found out, eventually, how it is done. I began to write, and it often seems to me today that in the beginning I signed myself over, hide and hair, to the father of evil."
And I know that's fun and melodramatic, but it almost is eerily, I don't know, it feels appropriate considering, I guess, what he was.
Nate:
No, I would certainly say so, yeah.
JM:
And I think that it really does kind of put things into perspective, like we can point the finger at somebody like Lovecraft, who was always broke, and Sprague, who always just thought he was being funny, and talk about how they could be assholes sometimes, but like, this is on a whole other level.
So during the final days of the war, Strobl's house in Vienna was looted by Soviet soldiers, and Strobl himself was forced into a work gang to conduct road repairs. And at this point, he was nearly 70 years old and in very ill health. He was released in 1946, early in the year, and died as winter turned to spring, languishing in a poor house. And I don't know, it's still really tragic coda on this whole thing, I must say.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, it raises a lot of issues that I think is good that the VanderMeers put this up front in the anthology, but one interesting thing to note is that you could comb through this story with the finest tooth comb, and not pull any racism, Nazi ideology out of it at all, because there just really isn't any in here.
JM:
No, and I mean, to be fair, a lot of his stuff does sound interesting. He did do stuff early on like that "Lemuria" collection includes a lot of cool sounding stories dating back to 1900. And I guess the nationalism really started to take him over and I like the word that they use in the intro, the Vandermeers there, they use the word "metastatizing", which is like cancerous growth, right? And I don't know, it just seems like, yeah, although again, we're getting into Butlerian territory here where we should like, we didn't say our people don't know who are just engaged in shitty behavior, should they be like treated like people who are ill? But I don't know, it's just it's funny how that kind of stuff manifests and it seems like he was always a German nationalist, but when the climate got just right, he like it just blossomed and he took advantage of it. So, but I think it's interesting that they also frame him as the anti-Scheerbeert.
But one thing that I came across that I just kind of like to mention off him is a few weeks ago, I don't know, I was looking through one of our resources that was talking about science fiction books, and it has a handy thing at the end where it like relates famous works to ones that might not be as known, and one that got mentioned was "The Glass Bees" by Ernst Jünger, and I saw this mention and I thought to myself, Ernst Jünger, I know that name. And then I remembered, so Ernst Jünger is somebody that I want to contrast a little bit with Strobl at the end of our talk here, because I think we might want to do this book on the podcast at some point, maybe, maybe not, we'll see, I mean, there's so many things that we could cover, right?
But Ernst Jünger was somebody who lived for 103 years, he was born in 1895, so he was pretty much the following generation to Strobl, and he died way up in 1998. And he was a German who was basically considered a nationalist, but he served in the First and Second World War.
His book, "Storm of Steel", was basically his war diary from World War I, and in this book he describes what it was like to serve on the front, and this was a highly decorated person who, in the end, when World War II came, did serve his country, but he also was not one to swear allegiance to the Nazi Party, and he refused a lot of... the thing is they courted German national heroes, and he was a German national hero, but he pretty much refused every opportunity they gave him to be on any committees or boards to speak on Josef Goebbels' radio program or anything like that.
And what I find really interesting is that, yes, this is somebody who did what he had to do, and the thing is, there is a lot of talk about Germans around this time period, and I came across this a couple of times regarding certain influential, I guess, German philosophers and thinkers of the time period who were swept under the rug because of wartime activities and so on, and some of that makes sense.
But I think that Jünger, who lived for a really long time, kept writing pretty much right up until his death, did LSD with Albert Hoffman, was an entomologist, wrote magic realism, and continued pretty much just being a cool person up till the end, even though, yeah, maybe he wasn't perfect, and yes, he did serve on the wrong side of the war, but I think that the fact that we can talk about this person and hold him aloft a little bit, then we can, somebody like a Strobl, shows that it's not just like Germans, we're not gonna talk about those guys, and we're not gonna, like, venerate them or anything like that. I think that it's interesting to show a contrast, and I kind of came up on that just at the right time, and I was just kind of thinking, well, it's interesting. I looked around a lot for Strobl stuff, and I just couldn't find, his stuff hasn't been translated in English for the most part, it was banned after the war, and a lot of it seems like it was informed by his philosophies and his anti-Semitism and stuff like that.
Doing a writer like this is kind of sobering, I guess, than just to think, right, like, it was an interesting experience because, yeah, just reading the story, it's so funny and kind of endearing, and then, like, I debated with myself for a long time before doing the Chrononauts podcast, whether I really wanted to get into backgrounds of writers and know a lot about them and stuff like that, because I'd been disappointed before, right? So, I don't know, a part of me kind of thinks, like, I'd like to read some novel at Strobl wrote just to see what it's like, like, "Eleagabal Kuperus", sounds kind of awesome, but a part of me is like, yeah, I'm not surprised there's not an English translation, and whatever, right?
Nate:
I mean, the whole thing kind of ties back to what we were talking about in the "Kindred" segment of the banality of evil. I mean, we don't like to think of Nazis as people who could write these light-hearted stories that we can enjoy totally divorced at the context of who wrote them, but it does happen, and it makes us uncomfortable, and I guess it should make us uncomfortable.
JM:
I think ending on the possible hope of maybe returning to a subject like this in a more hopeful vein and talking about "The Glass Bees" by Junger at some point in the podcast, I don't really have anything else to say about this silly little story. I think maybe it's time for us to start discussing domestic relations.
Bibliography:
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - "Karl Hans Strobl" https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/strobl_karl_hans
Schoolfield, George C. - "Young Rilke and His Time" (2009)
Strobl, Karl Hans - "My Debt to Books", Books Abroad vol. 13 no. 2, Spring 1939
VanderMeer, Ann and Jeff (eds.) - "The Big Book of Science Fiction" (2016)
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