(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: main Chrononauts theme)
introductions, non-podcast reads
JM:
Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm JM, and I'm here with Nate and Gretchen, my co-hosts, and you can find us on the web at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com. That should be your one stop for pretty much all of our information as well as links to where you can get the podcasts in all your various podcast players of choice.
You can also email us at chrononautspodcast.com or you can contact us on Twitter or whatever the hell they're calling it nowadays, @ChrononautsSF. And yeah, we also have Goodreads and a Facebook page.
Gretchen:
And whatever Facebook is called as well.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, I don't know, I feel like Twitter is just a joke at this point, but still, people are using it. So it's a good point of contact. I myself tend to stay away from it, but a lot of our fellow podcasters are there too.
Nate:
So I guess it's its own little sci-fi dystopia story at this point.
JM:
Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, so tonight, we're going to be talking about Astounding Magazine or Astounding Stories of Super Science, as it was first called, or Analog Science Fiction and Fact, as it came later to be called. Before we get into all that, how's everybody doing tonight?
Nate:
Doing pretty good. The weather has finally dropped in temperature, so yes, it's not 105 degrees in my attic. It's pretty nice.
JM:
Yeah, so you record our episodes in an attic and it gets pretty hot up there.
Nate:
Certainly during the summer months, which now is the beginning of August. So yeah, it definitely does at times for sure.
JM:
Yeah, it's been pretty rainy here lately. Definitely a little bit cooler than July, so I don't know. It's been a little weird, but you know, normal. I enjoyed some of the crazy thunderstorms the last couple of weeks, but I was thankfully not outside for most of them. So yeah, I'm a little busy with work, but that comes and goes. Reading a lot of short stories and preparing for our episode today.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I've been doing well. I had a little bit of an off month, but I'm doing better now. So looking forward to getting back into Albany and the swing of things.
Nate:
So what have you guys all been reading lately for your non podcast stuff?
JM:
Oh, I haven't really been reading much actually lately. I've mostly been reading, again, short stories, which is kind of my go to when I can't really settle on something long to read. A couple of things I've been thinking about starting, but mainly lately discovered a collection of stories by David Case, who's a writer known for, I guess, horror stories and psychological horror stories in the 70s. But turns out he wrote a lot of other stuff, including science fiction. And I don't know, some of it I may try to sneak on the podcast at some point.
Nate:
Cool. Yeah.
JM:
But yeah, he's a little different. Definitely incorporates a bit of humor into his stories. But it's kind of a little bit, I guess a little bit mean spirited at times. But I kind of like it. His stories are probably a little bit un-PC, but I don't know. I enjoy them. I think they're really clever and well written. And sometimes they're pretty gothic, but very original. And yeah, like I said, he also kind of takes the edge off sometimes with his humor. And he did the writing about some pretty horrific stuff, but he kind of has this sly wink about him sometimes. And funny thing is I first discovered him when I was really young, about 12, I think, and I read a book of his called "The Third Grave". It was a very short novel. And I don't remember a ton about it, but I remember really enjoying it. And so I came across one of his stories in one of those best horror collections of, I don't know, some year in the 70s, and was in there with like some other authors that I enjoy, like Jack Vance and stuff. And I saw this story called "The Hunter". And he really seems to be, I guess, like one of his fixations is evolution. And a lot of the stories he writes have to do with mutations and evolutionary throwbacks and dead ends and stuff like that. And humans sort of trying to bring out, I guess, either psychologically or through physiological experimentations, the animalistic nature of man and stuff like that. So it's pretty thick-blooded sort of stuff a lot of the time. But I don't know, I really, I really enjoy the stories. I think he's a pretty good writer.
And the science fiction stuff, I really wasn't expecting there's even like really cool, clever send up of the entire space opera genre. It starts with the immortal sentence, "robots hate Isaac Asimov". Yeah, a little more about Asimov later this episode, actually. That's it really. I mean, just random short stories. Nothing else really stands out to me lately, I guess, finished "Satanic Verses", which was awesome. And haven't really picked up anything longer since.
Gretchen:
Yes, I also finished up "Satanic Verses" and really enjoyed my first read through of it. I kind of stick by what I said last recording where it's just a really quick read, a lot of fun references and some that I'd like to go back and actually look up now that I, you know, I'm not in the flow of things and can actually kind of search for them. But after that, I ended up reading Charles Dickens "Great Expectations", which I really enjoyed.
JM:
That's a great book.
Gretchen:
Yeah, the balance between like the comedy and like the more dramatic and gothic elements is really interesting and makes me want to read more of his work.
Nate:
He definitely strikes the balance between humor and the gothic very, very well. Yeah. And especially when he has novels that deal more with social classes, he's really good at portraying like the horror of poverty and these like miserable situations that some of the characters are living in. And a lot of his novels are more realistic sometimes, but some of the times you'll get like supernatural hints in some of the stories as well, which is always cool too.
JM:
Nate, you've read a lot of Dickens, haven't you?
Nate:
Yeah, I've read all of his major novels, except for two. I haven't read "Little Dorrit", which is supposed to be one of his best. And I haven't read "Barnaby Rudge", which is considered to be almost universally his worst. He's got a bunch of short stories in a collection that I haven't read. The only Christmas story I read by him is "A Christmas Carol", but I know he has like two or three other ones there too. So yeah, I read a fair amount of his stuff. Certainly a majority of the major novels. Yeah, he's definitely one of my favorite authors and he's got a lot of stuff that I really, really like.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah, I definitely want to read more of his work at some point.
Nate:
Yeah, there's a fair amount of good editions floating around online that have all the original illustrations and stuff like that, which are also a very nice companion to the text as some of the Penguin mass market paperbacks don't always include them.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I ended up giving it to my mom to read because she was so interested when I was telling her about it. And she happened to be reading it a few days back. And she came into my room at the point when Pip's sister gets attacked. And she was just in shock at what happened that she was like, I thought I read it wrong. I had to go back and reread it.
JM:
Yeah, that is actually one of the Dickens books that I have read. I've read that one twice actually the first time I was very young. So I know it might be one book to reread again, like you know, I've been kind of feeling the rereadings lately and enjoying them, especially as I kind of realize now that a lot of my favorite books I read over 20 years ago in some cases. So things change, your perspective changes a lot the way you feel about things. The reading of "Satanic Verses" this time felt very different from the previous time. It's almost almost like a new book in some ways.
Gretchen:
So I started reading another book that's completely different from Dickens called "Frankenstein in Baghdad", which is you can kind of tell what that's supposed to be. And I haven't gotten too far into it, but I'm interested to see where it goes as it's supposed to take the story of Mary Shelley's novel and sort of make a criticism of like war and violence in the Middle East. So it sounds like it's going to be interesting.
Nate:
Yeah, that's pretty cool, especially because all those early characters like Frankenstein and Dracula are well into the public domain. So people could just do whatever they want with them and put them in any situation and it's fine.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, that book sounds really cool. Actually, I've heard a little bit about it. So I'd like to check it out sometime too.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Nice.
Nate:
I guess for me, I've also been doing a lot of rereading stuff. I finished up "The King and Yellow". I really liked that one a lot. The horror stories are great. The non horror stories are great. And audiobook production that did them HorrorBabble is pretty good for the most part, I think, as I mentioned last time.
And after that, I did back to back William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" and "Absalom, Absalom!", which are kind of related in that they both feature the character of Quentin Compson. He's like a main character in "The Sound and the Fury", but kind of just a framing character in Absalom, Absalom!. And like you were saying, JM, when I haven't read for a good 20 years or so. So revisiting it, "The Sound and the Fury", I didn't really remember any of the plot points. And I just kind of forgot how really dark and intense it gets at times. And "Absalom, Absalom!" also goes to some pretty wild places. And it's much more of a roller coaster of a ride. They're both really, really good books, definitely not for everybody. The difficulty is pretty high, even for Faulkner. And it can be kind of bewildering at times, especially...
JM:
Isn't there some kind of, I hesitate to use the word gimmick, but some kind of writing style gimmick with "The Sound and the Fury", where there's two kind of narratives going on at the same time. And they're distinguished by like, I don't know if it's typeface or something else in the text.
Nate:
Kind of, like the first chapter is stream of conscious narrative from a mentally disabled character who just isn't able to keep his thoughts in a time period. So it kind of bounces back and forth between three different time periods.
JM:
It doesn't continue through the book.
Nate:
No, the other three chapters are point of view from different characters. And the all three characters have very wildly different like approaches to how they think about things and things like that. The character of Quentin Conson, who is also in "Absalom, Absalom!" is very, I guess, moody and his thoughts are also all over the place. But the concurrent narrative he does in another one of his works, which wasn't originally published that way, "The Old Man" and "The Wild Palms". And both of them were published together as, "If I forget the Jerusalem", which is two separate stories, but in a book form that contains both of them. It interleaves chapters back and forth. So you get one of one story and then one of the other. And then the second, it goes like that. And I don't really, I guess I understand the logic behind it. But yeah, these two are really, really good. The guy that does the audiobook Grover Gardner does the audiobook for both of them. And he does a really good narration of them. Yeah, definitely really recommended if you're into the whole Southern Gothic thing.
And then after that, I wanted something a little lighter. So I'm currently in the middle of rereading "The Hobbit". And the narrator, there is the same guy, Rob Inglis, that did "The Lord of the Rings". And he really, really gets into "The Hobbit", especially the goblin songs he puts on.
JM:
Yeah, I was going to ask if he sings the songs.
Nate:
Oh, he definitely sings the songs. Pretty impressively, I have to say. Like he definitely sounds like a very enthusiastic goblin during some of the parts.
JM:
Nice, nice.
Nate:
Yeah. Not all the way through it yet, but I'm at the part where they're engaging with Smaug. So I probably have a third of it left or something like that. But yeah, it's a lot of fun. Again, couldn't it be more different than Faulkner in both its tone and its difficulty level? But yeah, I like Tolkien a lot. He's got a lot of stuff to offer. So that's pretty much all I had. The other reading I've done has been podcast related. And I have some interesting stuff coming up on the blogspot as far as translations goes. Maybe by the time that you're listening to this, we'll have Anna Barkova's "A Steel Husband" posted. And I got, I don't know, maybe three quarters of the way through the first pass of Simon Belsky's "Under the Comet", which is interesting to say the least. So yeah, look forward to that up on the blogspot. There's going to be some cool stuff posted there over the next month or so.
So yeah, that's pretty much what I've been up to readingwise.
JM:
Cool. All right. Well, with that then, why don't we start talking about this magazine?
Nate:
Yeah.
(music: "Pluto Polka" by Harry Robelen on bright electric synths)
Astounding Stories background, Captain S.P. Meek biography, non-spoiler discussion
Astounding is arguably the most influential and longstanding magazine in the science fiction field. And it did change its name to Analog Science Fiction and Fact or just Analog in 1960. And remarkably, it's still around. Many people have hailed the magazine, Carl Sagan, George R. R. Martin, who specifically names John Campbell as a major influence, Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, and many more, including scientists who were duly influenced by as many authors. The John Campbell period of editorship lasted from 1938 till his death in 1971. And it was arguably the most influential period of the magazine's existence, for better or worse.
Although many drifted away from Campbell and Astounding, Isaac Asimov in particular always seemed to feel gratitude for Campbell, even though the two men were quite different and politically opposed. But let's start with the very beginning, shall we?
The magazine was started by publisher William Clayton and his Clayton Corporation, which had a history of pulpy magazines going back to 1912 with stuff like Snappy Stories, which was supposed to be some kind of men's magazine. It was apparently quite saucy. Clayton was looking at the big sheet of column paper that they printed all the covers on. And noticed there were three blank spaces, space for three more covers to be squeezed in there. And the cover was the most expensive part of the magazine.
By 1930, he'd been moving into the western and detective fields. And although the idea of a pseudo science sheet had been bandied around as early as 1928, by 1930, and possibly with the persuasion of editor Harry Bates, as Clayton had been thinking of doing a historical period type magazine, the time for a science fiction mag was right. Harry suggested, how about Astounding Stories of Super Science?
Astounding in the beginning had one aim, and one aim only, to tell pulp adventure stories with a science fiction gloss. Unlike Gernsback, they had no interest in educating anyone. Also unlike Gernsback, they paid well and on time. So writers and agents were sometimes more attracted to their pages. As well as some of Hugo's discoveries, Astounding was attracting the attention of some general adventure pulp writers, some of whom had been popular in the Munsey papers for a while. Murray Leinster was one of these. Although he contributed to Amazing, he was discouraged by the payments or lack thereof. And his agent recommended that he not send any more stuff there. Bates himself wrote some stories. His consulting editor was Dr. Douglas M. Dold, a man who had gone blind due to an accident during World War I. Dold and his brother Elliot would later on start their own short-lived science fiction magazine.
The first issue was January 1931. It cost 20 cents in the United States, 25 cents in Canada, and went on sale the first Thursday of every month. It included a statement of the Clayton Standard, which was probably on all his magazines, and it went as follows.
"The Clayton Standard on a magazine guarantees that the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors League of America. That such magazines are manufactured in union shops by American workmen. That each news dealer and agent is insured a fair profit. That an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages."
One thing that really hammers home during this period is how fast things were changing. So for the purpose of this discussion, when we refer to the early 30s, we basically mean 1930 to 33. Things changed a lot and quickly as we will see.
According to Mike Ashley around this time, the early 30s, when science fiction was becoming recognized as a viable market. Paradoxically, it was felt that science emblazoned on the covers was an obstacle. Gernsback even merged Science and Air Wonder Stories into simply Wonder Stories, then Thrilling Wonder Stories when it was taken over by a different corporation. A pulp adventure title to be sure. Harry Bates was publishing stories and Astounding stories of Super Science, and it quickly was changed to Astounding stories. These stories cared little for science and accuracy, and just wanted to tell rip roaring adventures about space chases, ray guns, and, according to Ashley, damsels in distress. He doesn't speak too fondly of Harry Bates as an editor or writer in the early days. Now, maybe the depression has something to do with this as well.
At the same time, "super science" was dropped from the name in October 1931, Clayton issued another magazine, Strange Tales, which was supposed to be a direct competition with Weird Tales, and they also published some science fiction. According to both Ashley and, surprisingly, people like Raymond Gallun, it was Gernsback's Wonder Stories in the early 1930s that was promising originality and thought in science fiction, under the editorship of David Lasser and then Charles Hornig, with Gernsback possibly taking a heavy hand at times.
Despite Gernsback's notorious payment issues, Bates apparently didn't at this time want experimental fiction, and Sloane, at Amazing, was so slow it was awful. The letter column of Wonder Stories around this time, 1931-32, was also particularly lively. Clark Ashton Smith published many popular stories there until "Dweller in Martian Depths", when David Lasser annoyed him by removing some of his detailed and nasty descriptive text. This was very much a horror story.
Wonder Stories wanted to publish serious stuff in line with the heralded past developments of those who had influenced Amazing in the first place. Thus, Lasser, a socialist, published quite a few cautionary tales and utopias, including feminist ones, and interesting sounding stuff like Laurence Manning's "The Man Who Awoke" in 1933, which warned, through the vehicle of a man awaking from suspended animation 2,000 years in the future, to a world where everything was recycled due to the age of waste, the time of course of the 20th century. But now, let's turn to that first issue of Astounding, January 1930, and look at one of the stories therein. This is going to be Captain S.P. Meek's, "The Cave of Horror".
Nate:
Were you to pick up this magazine, or take a look at it, you will see the rather, I guess, garish cover much in line with some of the stuff that you might see on the Amazing covers, which we talked about last time, of a very masculine man punching a beetle in the face while a damsel in distress in a very high-cut dress is kind of looking on in a look of horror. This apparently is illustrating "The Beetle Horde", a startling story by Victor Rousseau.
JM:
Yeah, he who wrote all the Tom Swift stories, I think.
Nate:
Yeah, I'm not really familiar with him or any of the other authors that appear in this issue of the magazine, except for one of the other ones which we'll be covering later tonight, a certain Murray Leinster. But also appearing in the issue of January 1930 is an opening editorial, which tells us the purpose of the magazine and what it's all about. So it states:
"What are "astounding" stories?
Well, if you lived in Europe in 1490, and someone told you the earth was round and moved around the sun—that would have been an "astounding" story.
Or if you lived in 1840, and were told that some day men a thousand miles apart would be able to talk to each other through a little wire—or without any wire at all—that would have been another.
Or if, in 1900, they predicted ocean-crossing airplanes and submarines, world-girdling Zeppelins, sixty-story buildings, radio, metal that can be made to resist gravity and float in the air—these would have been other "astounding" stories.
To-day, time has gone by, and all these things are commonplace. That is the only real difference between the astounding and the commonplace—Time.
To-morrow, more astounding things are going to happen. Your children—or their children—are going to take a trip to the moon. They will be able to render themselves invisible—a problem that has already been partly solved. They will be able to disintegrate their bodies in New York and reintegrate them in China—and in a matter of seconds.
Astounding? Indeed, yes.
Impossible? Well—television would have been impossible, almost unthinkable, ten years ago.
Now you will see the kind of magazine that it is our pleasure to offer you beginning with this, the first number of Astounding Stories.
It is a magazine whose stories will anticipate the super-scientific achievements of To-morrow—whose stories will not only be strictly accurate in their science but will be vividly, dramatically and thrillingly told.
Already we have secured stories by some of the finest writers of fantasy in the world—men such as Ray Cummings, Murray Leinster, Captain S. P. Meek, Harl Vincent, R. F. Starzl and Victor Rousseau.
So—order your next month's copy of Astounding Stories in advance!"
JM:
Sounds good. Where do I sign up?
Nate:
Yeah, right. So in addition to all these stories, you also get tons of ads for all kinds of cool stuff like guns, saxophones, weight loss, tobacco cessation, and all that other stuff. As for the authors in this issue, we'll be talking about Murray Leinster a little bit later on, but we'll be opening up, again, as mentioned, with the Captain S.P. Meek story.
So I had first encountered Captain S.P. Meek when doing some background research for our Amazing Stories episode, and he had a bunch of stories published there in the 1920s, and his name stuck out to me.
JM:
Yeah, because he always has Captain on it. People have to know he's important.
Nate:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I can't think of anybody else we've covered or even come across that has a military rank attached to their authorial title, but there might be some others. Who knows, I don't know.
JM:
Not even in "The Battle of Dorking" episode did we come across that.
Nate:
Right, yeah. So definitely a career military guy, as we'll see. But yeah, when we were putting the others episode, I wanted to pick out something from issue number one, and with a little bit of name familiarity there, and with a story title like "Cave of Horror", how could I not pick this one? Bleiler states in "The Gernsback Years" that from the period between 1927 and 1930, about one quarter of all American magazine pulp stories were written by six men, one of those being the Captain. Despite this, he wasn't active writing science fiction for very long, less than 10 years, as he pivoted to children's literature in the early 1930s.
Writing seemed to be a side job for him, as his credited name would imply he was a career military officer. So Sterner St. Paul Meek, who was born on April 8, 1894, and sources conflict as to exactly where he studied and what his education was in, but he at least attended MIT for some time and had background in chemistry and engineering. He joined the army in 1917 and retired in 1947. Most of his military career was spent in ordinance, spending the early part of his career in the Philippines.
He has authored 22 children's books, mostly about dogs, and also wrote the book, "So You're Going to Get a Puppy: A Dog Lover's Handbook". So it would appear he had quite a fondness for dogs. It looks like his children writing stops around 1956, and he died in 1972.
For his science fiction literary-related output, he had a few dozen stories appearing in the pulps from 1929's "The Murgatroyd Experiment" in Amazing, to the 1934's "That Fellow, Nankivell" in Fantasy Magazine, before he started his pivot to children's literature.
By far his longest series was his Doctor Bird series, the first of which is the one we're looking at tonight. So "Cave of Horror" is the first in a series of 13 stories that appeared in Astounding between issue number one and the May 1932 issue, and a 14th installment appeared in the Wonder Stories issue of the same month.
Apparently the later entries reflect his military background and are like ridiculously over-the-top anti-communist. Bleiler states that they're usually the culprit in most of his stories, and his arch-nemesis is a Soviet scientist named Saranoff, obviously not to be confused with Sarnoff at RCA.
Eleven of the stories, not including this one, the next one to appear in Astounding, "The Radio Robbery", or the last one from Wonder Stories, "Vanishing Gold", were republished in a 2010 anthology, "The Astounding Adventures of Dr. Bird". So it's kind of strange they omitted those three and didn't publish the full set of them, so this one remains I believe unpublished in book form and is just available in the magazine.
He also had two repubications in 1961, his novels "The Drums of Tapajos" and "Troyana", both of which were serialized in Amazing, and more recently "Giants on the Earth" from 2007. But aside from that, it doesn't look like too much of his stuff has been reprinted.
There might be a reason for that, of course, and I want to read an interesting quote from Samuel Delany. He says: "Now, there’ve been serious writers of SF ever since SF developed its own publishing outlets among the paraliterary texts that trickled out on their own toward the end of the 19th century and that, thanks to technical developments in printing methods, became a flood by the end of World War I and today are an ocean. Some of those SF writers, like Stanley G. Weinbaum, were extraordinarily fine. Some of them, like Captain S. P. Meek, were unbelievably bad. And others, like Edward E. Smith, while bad, still had something going. But what they were all doing, both the bad ones and the good ones, was developing a new way of reading, a new way of making texts make sense—collectively producing a new set of codes. And they did it, in their good, bad, and indifferent ways, by writing new kinds of sentences, and embedding them in contexts in which those sentences were readable. And whether their intentions were serious or not, a new way of reading is serious business."
So I wouldn't go so far as to call this one unbelievably bad, perhaps his other later stuff is. This one certainly is not a literary masterpiece, and it's really quite silly. But with that in mind, I thought it was a lot of fun, and I tend to think I am more forgiving of this stuff when it's in short story format. This also applies to the next one we'll be covering tonight. So when I started doing the podcast, I felt that when it comes to this like ridiculous, pulpy, silly kind of writing, I always preferred film for those sort of stories. And I think that's still relatively true when it comes to novels, but in short stories like this one, it does work a lot better, especially when read in the way we've been largely consuming them, which has been a handful of them thematically tied together at each month and not just like necessarily the entire series by the same author, though we have done that a couple of times. And well, I wouldn't particularly want to read all 14 Bird stories in a row, maybe one or two here and there, especially combined with other stuff, I'm sure would be fine. Certainly this one feels fun in a way that doesn't get tedious in the same way that a 300 page novel of this stuff would likely be.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I agree that it was a fun read. And it's, I definitely don't know if I could also read multiple stories and one sitting, you know, but for one story and one sitting, it is a fun read and it goes quickly. And I know that both you and JM had mentioned that it's sort of in the tradition of like a Carnacki story, it has some similar elements to that. So I think that also kind of endears me to it, although I do enjoy Carnacki more. I still think that this was a nice story in that sort of vein.
Nate:
Yeah, Carnacki is definitely a more, I don't know, I like Carnacki as a character better than Bird, but it does come from that same vein of like scientific detective story where he has his cool gadgets and his like neat photo equipment and he's taking these pictures of, you know, what this weird thing could be in a location that only he gets called out because he's the expert that nobody else can trust because he gets the job done. It definitely feels like a major influence. And I don't know if he was aware of Carnacki or just kind of ended up in the same place at the same time. I assume a lot of detective stories like that were big in the pulps during the 20s and 30s, though I really haven't read any pulp detective stuff from that time. So I'm not exactly sure how much crosses over with like weird type stuff.
JM:
I definitely think this was, this was a growing trend. And it would only continue to grow. I mean, it reminds me of so many things that even reminds me of Dr. Who in the 70s, right? Right. Oh, there's a scientific advisor of UNIT being called in to check up on this strange, invincible monster in a cave. Like that sounds familiar, right?
And I don't know, I really actually did kind of like this. Like I, again, I'm probably with you guys like I'm glad it was short. But because of that too, unlike some other, I guess notoriously pulp things, it doesn't seem pattern or anything like that. And it just, it was a quick read. Yeah, like it wasn't one that you think about a lot afterwards. Some of the stories we'll get to later, I think are a lot more, they have a lot more consideration put into the philosophy and the emotion behind the story. You don't, you expect not to see that in a 1930s pulp story anyway, I guess. So it's like, yeah, I don't know, it's fine. I liked it. The tension was cool. The monster, even though you knowing, especially that he would be the hero of 13 stories, I knew nothing bad was going to happen to him. But some of the other characters kind of got it. And the thing was threatening. And I did enjoy Dr. Bird's reaction at the end. Like I enjoyed, I enjoyed his annoyance that not being able to relate his phenomenon to the world and knowing that it was impossible and nobody would believe it.
I think a lot of the detectives, obviously in the regular pulps, you know, they wouldn't have all the scientific apparatus. But at the same time, I think the fascination with gadgets wasn't necessarily just limited to the science fiction magazines. No, certainly not. So yeah, this guy has a lot of cool gadgets. Also, I recognize the name of the cave. And I learned something actually else that was cool that I didn't know. This is based on an actual cave system in Kentucky. And it was cool that I recognized that. And I'm like, Oh, yeah, I remember hearing about this. Cool. Because I didn't know about this story, right?
Nate:
Yeah. So the same cave system that inspired "Adventure" or "Colossal Cave" you were saying, which is a nice little tie in.
JM:
Yeah. And that's, and I didn't know that either. I don't know where I heard about it, though, now that I think about it. Yeah. Or when I looked into it.
Gretchen:
Maybe not the safest cave system, then if we've got some stories based on it.
JM:
Yeah. And in the "Adventure" game that Nate's talking about, you just wander around the cave system. And it can be pretty confusing. And there's all these like annoying mazes and stuff like that. And apparently, the actual caves have mazes like that. They have like passages that don't seem to make any sense. And you have to like, you could easily get lost in there and stuff. And like, it's probably more annoying than actually dangerous. At least I would hope so. But I don't know, maybe for newbies.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know. Those kind of deep cave diving sites. Hobbyists sound like just really bad ideas to me.
JM:
It seems like tourists go there and stuff like that. Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah. No, I know some caves are very well maintained and I guess make sure they're structurally sound. But yeah, some of the amateur cave divers go to like ridiculously deep places that you have to like pass through water and stuff like that. And yeah, not my kind of hobby.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I've seen too many news stories and videos of people getting stuck in these caves that I don't think I would ever do it as a hobby.
JM:
Yeah, too many monsters in there.
Nate:
Yeah, there's definitely monsters in all sorts of these caves has been seen from these stories, from Doctor Who. I'm sure there's a couple other good cave monsters that we'll encounter later on too.
JM:
Just urban legends.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
Right. I shouldn't say urban.
Nate:
Rural legends, maybe.
JM:
What's the scientific word for cave legends? Anyway, you know what I mean.
Nate:
Yeah, so kind of an interesting touch on the story there, that real life tie. The Russians are not the villain in this one. It's just the monster we get. And it's pretty cool monster, I have to say. It's kind of an interesting concept. I'm not sure how like ridiculously plausible it would be as far as that opening editorial states that all the stories will adhere to the strictest principles of science. It is kind of interesting how they do refer to their writers as writing fantasy. We'll, I guess, talk more about the genre distinctions, perhaps in our next episode, where those start to be kind of explicitly made clear by the magazines and the readership.
But yeah, this one, I don't know. We spent a lot of time, the last couple episodes, talking about stories that feel very ahead of their time. And this story and the next one, we're going to be covering feel very much of their time in that, you know, it's kind of this sort of over the top monster pulp story that you'd expect from a magazine like this in the 1920s, 1930s. Like you were saying, JM, I'm not too much to think about with this one. No big issues to really ponder over. Just a cool monster story.
JM:
I don't know. I liked it. Yeah. It's still, you can find a lot of his stuff. And there's these big collections that you can get online, e-books, I think they're called Halcyon Classics. And they have like these impossibly huge series of collections of all these old sci-fi stories, like basically random stuff. There's no annotation, no introduction, nothing. It's just like a million random pulp stories from 1915 to 1949, roughly. And his name shows up a lot of those. Yeah. I'm guessing a lot of his stuff is in the public domain.
Nate:
Yep.
JM:
So you can just read, I don't know, I might read some more of these Dr. Bird stories.
Nate:
Yeah, you'll have to let us know how he fares against the Soviets.
JM:
His description of bird is funny. It's very homerotic. In fact, there's a lot of that in many of these stories.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah.
Gretchen:
All these handsome men.
Nate:
Yeah, they really are.
JM:
Yeah. He says, 206 pounds stripped. So you take off his clothes and oh yeah, he's tall too. And his hands are beautiful.
Nate:
Yeah. He's very physically attractive. He's very strong. He's very smart. There's nothing this guy can't do.
JM:
Oh, yeah.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Тhe dream guy.
Nate:
Yeah, he really is. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
(music: sparse delayed eerie string with worming bass tone)
spoiler plot summary/spoiler discussion
Nate:
Dr. Bird has a private laboratory in the Bureau of Standards, and he's just hanging out there when this operative Carnes comes in. So addition to being this brilliant scientist, he's enormous. He's muscular, strong. He's like a prize fighter, but he's also rugged with his acid burnt hands. We don't get any descriptions, or if he's good looking or not, or anything like that, but the reader can most absurdly assume that he is, of course, because why wouldn't he be? Carnes asked Bird if he's heard about the rumors of Mammoth Cave, and Bird laughs it off saying it's all nonsense, but Carnes isn't so sure. He's going to check it out himself and he wants Bird to come along, and it seems strange to Bird that the Secret Service would be getting involved here, but Carnes says the feds have gotten involved at the request of the governor. Bird wants to know the story before he decides to go and is firm on this point, so Carnes reluctantly gives in even though he's in a great hurry.
Mammoth Caves is a series of caves in central Kentucky. Natural limestone caverns with the customary stalactite and stalagmite formation, but are unusually large and very beautiful. A month ago, a husband and wife with two children went into the caves with a guide. The husband and wife sat down to rest, and the guide and children went missing. The wife said she heard some faint screams 10 minutes afterwards, but isn't so sure, so the thing has been a great mystery. A bracelet belonging to one of the children is found nearby and a reward is offered, but then two people searching for them disappear.
Gunshots are heard and a revolver with a discharge shot is found, but no signs of the people, just a strange musky smell. The governor sends in the National Guard. Paras of guards are posted, but a guard in one of the pairs goes missing, and his partner says he heard a strange slipping and sliding noise before he fled.
JM:
I just want to say, yeah, but the word musky is used in both this story and the next one, and it means opposite things in each one. Here it's like, uh-oh, it's the musk of a just a loose reptile. Everybody beware, right?
Nate:
Yeah. We get a lot of musk in this one for sure.
Gretchen:
The versatility of the English language.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Cool thing Bird says at one point. He says, "science is an art, but more complex and true than the other arts."
Nate:
Yeah, there's some pretty funny lines in here and some really funny lines in the next one. Again, lots of fun pulpy prose. And these are like surprisingly, I don't know if it's just the stories we selected this month versus the stories that we covered when we did Amazing, but these ones are pretty bloody and don't hesitate in killing all their minor characters off, which I don't know. I was kind of surprised at, but yeah. So this one, the infantry then are sent in because it's such a problem, and they lose two of them, and an officer finds a crack in the walls with a whole bunch of blood on each side. So he enters with explosives and never returns, and a crew is posted up with a machine gun, have to crack, but one night they again smell the musk, and a guard is flung up in the air. Gunfire goes off in the confusion and blood is splashed around everywhere.
So that's the story, and Bird decides to come and check it out, but says he's leaving. Lots of important work behind, so it better be worth it. The military posted there says the musk is like a rattlesnake den, and only allows them to enter the cave at their own peril, with the requested guide of Lieutenant Pierce, who doesn't really want to go in.
They examine the machine gun that was pointed at the crack in the wall. It seems strange and looks like it was gripped by a huge giant, and as they're checking out the cave, they smell the musky smell again, and realize it's in the cave, and they decide to run for it. Bird pauses to throw a grenade, and easily catches up to the other two because he's such an excellent athlete. His heroics are pretty awesome, I have to say.
It seems to be gaining on them, though, and Bert can't see anything with his flashlight, so he throws a second grenade, and it appears to bounce off an invisible obstruction and explodes, and they hear a scream of pain. They make it out of the cave and tell the army the pursuing creature was momentarily stopped by the phosphorus grenades.
The doctor is unable to describe it, but it's something new in science, and he goes to phone the Bureau of Standards to get an apparatus, and wants some livestock cattle preferred, but sheep or hogs will do in a pinch, so they just come out with his whole flock of cattle, and they hear some screams and hope that this will keep the beast well fed.
Gretchen:
I guess Meek is a big fan of dogs, but not of cattle.
Nate:
Yeah, exactly. It's kind of the opposite of the Carnacki story. Yeah, I was going to say that's another parallel with Carnacki, but it's not a dog.
Gretchen:
Animals have to die.
Nate:
And the creature here is definitely going to eat a lot of these cows.
JM:
Cows take up too much space anyway.
Nate:
I guess it also gives them a good idea about how big the beast is going to be. If it could easily eat a cow or two, you'll know how big it is versus if it has a lot of trouble with it. Yeah, good thinking on the doctor's part.
He also wants a tank, which is a pretty good request, and he gets an apparatus, and he puts this inside the tank. So the apparatus hooks up to the tank motor and generates an ultraviolet light beam, which presumably can reveal the hidden creature, but it also severely burns your skin, so be careful. But before they can fight the creature, they need to look at it.
So the creature sounds like an ultraviolet creature, and Bird has some cool x-ray cameras and stuff that allow them to see it. They have the tank ready and usher some sheep into the cave and monitor them. When something happens to the livestock, they'll move on in.
Again, the musk comes out, and a sheep is lifted to the air, and its head is just ripped right off. So they know the creature is out and feeding, and they fire the UV beam at it and get their camera out and then back out with their tank. The creature, however, doesn't want to let them go, and grabs the tank. Bird has to throw a few phosphorus grenades to get it to stop holding on to them. They usher in some more cattle while developing the film, because why not? After 15 minutes they see, "such a monster as even the drug-laden brain of an opium smoker never pictured."
JM:
I wrote that down, that's so good.
Nate:
Yeah. What a description. It has huge toothless jaws of bare bone, a long snake-like body, but with vicious claws and enormous forelegs. However, it must be only a few inches wide, allowing it to get through these small cracks, and the jaw must be gums. They assume this is a baby and not full-grown yet. Bird wants to study it, so they don't want to totally destroy it, but has an idea.
JM:
I don't really see that they have any evidence of that, necessarily.
Nate:
No, no, they're just kind of making stuff up, I think. Birds always right, so.
JM:
A fascinating thing about this story is like, I could see exactly where the line where the, I don't know, the woo-woo began, like where it kind of became. It's like, I was following along with you, but then you said something about the generated field in the, what? It's just, it's very sudden drop into techno-babble nonsense. And yeah, they make all these, so Bird, I guess, makes all these suppositions, but it's also pretty cool.
Again, it reminds me of, like, I don't know, a Star Trek episode or something like that, where like, they think, you know, that the creature that's killing all the miners is evil, but actually it's, I don't know, there's been a couple of episodes where they meet like childlike aliens, and it's just an obvious misunderstanding, but at the same time, the thing is a million tons and giant, flat reptile that can get anywhere, it's invisible, so.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, this is presumably also going to grow up to be a man-eating monster, so it's going to be a problem regardless. Yeah, I don't know, tapeworm-sized, giant, invisible monster, so that's, that's pretty cool. You don't see too many monsters like that, and these, I guess.
JM:
Did they, did they determine, I forget, did they determine that the monster couldn't hear anything?
Nate:
I don't know, I didn't write that down, whether it can hear or not.
JM:
I don't think that was, because it just occurred to me, like, they were talking about everything they had set up, and like, they mentioned that they had, like, these, all these generators set up, and I'm thinking, oh, it must be really noisy in that cave right now, and like, the monster's not going to come out if it just hears (rattling noises).
Nate:
Or it might draw it out more, I mean, presumably they keep the creature well-fed with cattle, so I don't know if the entire thing, driving it out of wherever it lives in the depths is just as hunger.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
But yeah, so while it's well-fed, they, I guess, use this downtime to hook up another apparatus to the tank, which is this whole series of generators that are attached to a platform by copper bars on which they tie a steer with copper straps, so some nice bait for the monster. And using the ultraviolet beam to see it in real time, the creature takes the bait, and indeed they do see that it is a largely two dimensional monster.
The creature goes to eat the steer, but is given a shock by the copper, which makes it run away. They try to stun it with the phosphorus grenades, but it gets away and goes through the crack. They put on gas masks and try to smoke it out, but no luck, it got away. The gas they pumped in will be enough to kill it, but that may take days, and Bird isn't going to bother filing a report for fear that he'll be bonked for not producing such a fantastic creature. They seal up the crack, so the cave should be safe, hopefully, and hopefully tourism can resume.
So yeah, smoke the monster out, seal up the opening, and Bird solves the case - off the books.
JM:
Yep. And it's going to die in there in pain and loneliness, he says. Yeah, so yeah, not a great one for the animal life, either known or unknown.
Gretchen:
At least it was no dogs, no dogs were hurt.
Nate:
I think a couple dozen sheep and maybe some cows too.
JM:
Yeah, I don't know if it was just me, but when Bird says to turn on the gas, that seemed like the first mention that they had gas set up as well.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know that I missed that.
Gretchen:
I think I did lose track of all the stuff they had set up. I just sort of like, I guess I missed that.
Nate:
It's quite the series of apparatuses and devices they have. I know they had the phosphorous grenades, but presumably they would need some kind of tank of cyanide, but yeah, they have a lot of gear and a tank to drive into the caves with. So that's pretty neat.
JM:
Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I don't know, it's fun. I like it. I think we actually, I tried to kind of make comments as we're describing it because it kind of makes sense. It was a quality adventure kind of weird detective story, like some of the Carnacki stories, I would say, yeah, I like Carnacki better, but there were some Carnacki stories that were worse than this.
Nate:
Yeah, I agree.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, I think that Carnacki is like a mixed bag, but it's because of his character that overall thinking about them, I enjoy them more.
JM:
Yeah. This guy's like, all pally-pally with the military and stuff like that. Like he can basically get anything done, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah, I think that's another thing is I think that here we have Bird who seems a lot more, he's just really perfect. And I feel like Carnacki isn't really perfect. He kind of even like makes mistakes and like causes more problems sometimes than he means to solve. And I kind of like that a little bit more.
Nate:
Yeah, Carnacki has a lot of vulnerabilities both in terms of his personal well-being and his character. You know, he doesn't get along with everybody and he's kind of, you know, rough around the edges where Bird feels very much like a Mary Sue type character. I mean, the trope obviously didn't exist at that point with that name, but, you know, he's perfect in every way. He's huge. He's muscular. He's athletic. He's incredibly intelligent. He can outwit the monster and know what it's doing before it does it. You know, he's probably really good looking too. And, you know, I'm sure in the other 13 stories, he outwits the best of the Soviet scientists and engineers who would probably find their way into a Vladko story or something like that.
JM:
Yeah, probably. I mean, there are definitely some heroes that are kind of eventually after a bunch of stories, you start to you start to see different sides of the stories. I don't know. These aren't very well known. That doesn't mean they don't go in some cool directions, but that's all I'm a little bit curious, I guess. But yeah, I don't know. I liked it.
Nate:
Yeah, it's fun.
Gretchen:
I mean, I would read some, you know, some time, you know, just to see where things go and to have a fun little story to read after maybe something reading something more heavy or something like that.
JM:
Yeah, as we will see as we go on with this episode and talk about the background, especially heroes do come in a lot in this. And we're about to go into the later 1930s, which is the real birth of like the superhero as a, you know, comic creations and stuff like that. And guys who but also many, many pulp magazines published in the 30s, especially about individual hero characters. We'll be talking about a couple of them later on, but like there are some really famous ones like "The Shadow", for example, where it's like hundreds and hundreds of issues about this one character and his like solving weird crimes or yes, a lot of things that seem to have weird explanations, but turn out to be kind of rational. And of course, the Shadow has a superpower where it can become invisible. Cloud men's minds. So yeah, this guy doesn't have anything like that. He's just really good looking.
Gretchen:
He's athletic. He's extremely athletic.
Nate:
That's all he needs, because you know, that's what a good old American character comes through in the end.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
But yeah, so this guy was pretty much the, I guess, house serial for Astounding in the initial run before it briefly folded during the depression. The first 13 stories appeared in the first three years of Astounding. So it wasn't one every month, but it was basically like one every other month or so. And Meek featured other stories in Astounding quite a bit, including in the next issue as well.
Bibliography:
Astounding Stories of Super Science, January 1930 issue https://archive.org/details/Astounding_Stories_of_Super_Science_1930/asf1930-01/
Ashley, Mike - "The History of the Science Fiction Magazine - Part 1 (1926-1935)" (1976)
Ashley, Mike - "The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950" (2001)
Bleiler, Everett - "Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years" (1998)
Nevala-Lee, Alec - "Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction" (2018)
Music:
Robelen, Harry - "Pluto Polka" (1874) https://www.loc.gov/item/sm1874.04744/
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