(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: "Moon, Moon, Moon" by Mr. & Mrs John Wilson Dodge, played on bright synths)
Sophie Wenzel Ellis background and non-spoiler discussion
Nate:
Good evening, this is Chrononauts, a science ifction literature history podcast. I'm Nate, and I'm joined by my co-host Gretchen and J.M., and this month we are taking a look at the magazine Astounding Stories. If you would like to hear more background on the Harry Bates days of the magazine, please listen to segment number one.
This segment will be covering Sophie Wenzel Ellis' Creatures of the Light, which comes from issue number two, which features another Captain SP Meek story, but for now we'll be looking at Sophie Wenzel Ellis. And she is someone who Mike Ashley notes is quite similar to Gertrude Bennett and Claire Winger Harris, in that they were all frequent names in the early pulp science fiction magazines, but only for a very brief period of time, and there's not a great deal of information about their lives.
Sophie Louise Wenzel was born on July 22, 1893 in Memphis, Tennessee, and moves to Little Rock, Arkansas at some point in her life, and she published what is likely her first pulp story, "The Unseen Seventh", which appeared in The Thrill Book in 1919, described as a ghost story. This was published under her maiden name, and in 1922 she married a George E. Ellis. As her first story might indicate, she was quite a fan of ghost stories and weird fiction, and wrote the following letter to Weird Tales, which was published in February of 1927.
It says, "Sophie Wenzel Ellis, of Little Rock, Arkansas, writes to The Eyrie: 'The happiest days of the month for me are those immediately following the first, when I am reading Weird Tales. In my clipping file of short stories there are more distinctive stories from your magazine than any other. Why do you not select a group of your best stories and issue them in book form? I should like to see you publish more stories of the sort which is exquisitely fanciful, such as The Woman of the Wood, by Merritt; The Moon Bog and The Outsider, by Lovecraft ; and The Dreamer of Atlanaat, by Price.'"
JM:
Wow, yeah.
Nate:
That's pretty neat.
JM:
Yeah, all good. The Merritt story is great too.
Nate:
Yeah, and it's nice when authors directly tell you what their favorite stories are and favorite kind of writing is, so you don't have to make guesswork from their own, because sometimes the two don't always match up exactly.
She seemed very much interested and into Weird Tales and weird fiction, and starts writing pulp stories again shortly afterwards, and has seven stories published in the pulps. Two of them appeared in Weird Tales, and two of them appeared in Astounding. One piece appeared in Amazing, Ghost Stories, and Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, and then later in 1958, "The Lily Garden" appeared in The Phantom, and I'm not sure if this was written around this time, meaning the late 1920s, early 1930s, where it was one of those deals where she wrote it in her early life, but the pulps weren't interested in publishing it later, or if she actually wrote it in the late 1950s. Again, not a lot of information on her or her writing career is out there.
So there's not too much else to mention on Ellis herself. She died in 1984, quite a while after she finishing writing stories, even if we assume that "The Lily Garden" was written in 1958. And there is one little poem called "Heard in a Grocery", that's nothing but food puns for a few dozen lines that appeared in the newspaper, the Buffalo Commercial, on November 24th in 1924, which is really, really worth reading.
JM:
Are you going to read it?
Nate:
Yeah, why not?
JM:
Okay, I was thinking about this the other day, and I'm like, I don't know if I really want to.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
So you go ahead.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Sorry.
Nate:
It's pretty brief, and all the puns might not come through verbally, because you really have to, I guess, look at it, but, you know, here goes.
"Ah me!" a sack of flour said,
And heaved a doleful sigh:
"I'd like to marry Peaches there
And turn into a pie."
"You'd better nut get fresh, young man!"
Cried Peaches, blushing red.
"I never sausage nerve as yours;
She's mine!" the sugar said.
"You lye!" and Flour grits his teeth.
"I'll cracker neck, or try.
Sweet Peaches is, as you well know.
The apple of my eye."
"I do not carrot all for you
You're not well-bread," said she,
"Dear Gasoline against me, please;
You are the one for me."
"Oh, mustard be smiled Gasoline,
"Then lettuce not delay,
If you will beet it off with me
I'll marry you today.
My celery is rather small.
But I'll catsup in thyme.
We're such a happy pear, my dear;
Our life will be sublime."
"That snuff!" the milk yelled, pale with wrath.
"Ice cream, protest, 'gainst this.
Sweet Peaches needs some sage advice.
The little silly miss!
There's only one way to bring peas:
I'll cabbage this sweet prize.
Turnip your lips now. Peaches, dear;
Potatoes, hide your eyes!"
Sweet Peaches sighed upon his neck
"This suits me to a tea;
Cress me again-I'm a jam,
But soda like to be!"
So yeah, that's her.
JM:
That was really good, man. I wouldn't be able to keep it up.
Nate:
So that's her rhyming on food for a little bit in the Progressive Grocer, I guess, some newsletter that the Buffalo Commercial reprinted or something. I'm not entirely sure. She seems to have been involved with progressive politics at some point in her life, but it's kind of hard to tell.
So that kind of ties into this story tonight, which again is an issue number two of Astounding. And one of the characters Bleiler notes, that she based on Charles Steinmetz, and I think she kind of does him dirty. I don't really want to go into the full biography of Steinmetz, but he isn't a household name, perhaps to the same degree as Edison and Bell were. But he's an interesting character, so I want to provide a little background here because he's kind of central to this story tonight.
Steinmetz was German born, or at least in what was then Germany, then Breslau and Prussia, which is now Wroclaw and modern Poland. But he came from a Lutheran stock and was a brilliant electrical engineer who suffered from dwarfism and kyphosis, which was historically referred to as having hunchback. He fled Germany in the late 1880s from political persecution to the United States, specifically for his involvement with the Social Democratic Party and his newspaper, The People's Voice.
In America, he became employed at General Electric, where he spent the majority of his career. In both Germany and America, Steinmetz was a devout socialist and remained active in local socialist politics in Schenectady, New York, where General Electric was located, and where he worked from 1894 on. He served in George Lund's administration, where he held the post of president of city council, George Lund being the mayor of Schenectady, the first socialist mayor to be elected anywhere in the state of New York.
So the character in the Sophie Wenzel Ellis story is very much a proponent of eugenics and creating the perfect human. Steinmetz himself realized that his disabilities were genetic and deliberately chose not to marry or procreate as he didn't want to pass it on to any children. He did, however, adopt his lab assistant as his son and live with him and his wife and family unil his death.
With his socialist politics, he was a big fan of Lenin and referred to him in Einstein as, "the two greatest men of our time." And it might be important to note that Steinmetz died in 1923, so that was a little bit after the Russian Civil War ended and while Lenin was still alive. And before many people in the West became disillusioned with the Soviet Union, who would have otherwise been sympathetic to socialist policies. The full extent of Lenin's atrocities likely were not known in America at that time. And their scale was nowhere near the level of Stalin's atrocities, which would follow in the 1930s and 1940s.
Still, Lenin era Soviets had some complex and conflicting views on race and eugenics. The Russian Eugenics Society was founded in 1920 and according to M.B. Adams in the paper, the "Politics of Human Heredity in the USSR, 1920 to 1940," "in 1929, Marxist geneticist Alexander Serebrovsky was stimulated by the forthcoming five year plan to urge a massive eugenics program of human artificial insemination. With the advent of Stalinism, such attempts to biologize social phenomenon became ideologically untenable and the society was abolished in 1930."
JM:
I was prompted to think there's a couple of stories here where, and this is perhaps one of them, especially now that you bring up this background, where I wonder if they had come out after the Second World War, would they have come out at all the same? Probably not. Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, it is kind of a interesting parallel with the German character and what would happen in the Second World War, especially with the eugenics and all that stuff like that. This eugenics stuff was happening around the time Sophie Ellis wrote this story, which was around 1930 and seven years after the death of Steinmetz. So it's possible that she was conflating what was happening in the USSR at the time with Steinmetz's personal views. Steinmetz, as previously mentioned, was German born, and 1930, again, does seem a little early for Ellis to be attaching what would become Nazi ideology to German stereotypes, like we would probably see after World War II for these kind of stories of eugenics and race science. Given that Hitler was not in power yet, I mean, he was kind of making his way there in 1930, but I don't know if he would have really been known in America at that time. So it's not entirely clear where she was going with this. With this, I can't find any evidence that Steinmetz himself was a eugenics proponent or any hint of racism. Certainly his early German newspaper articles are characterized as being anti-racist. I couldn't actually find any of them to read them, but it looks like his desire not to propagate his own genetics was personal rather than like some lab experiment or policy he was interested in. So I don't know, it's a complicated issue. It really seems out of character for Steinmetz to hold these views the way he's depicted in the story. So if you're unfamiliar with the man, don't let this taint your opinion of him. He's certainly a fascinating figure.
In addition to all that I previously mentioned, he chained smoked cigars and in pretty much every photograph that exists of him, he has one in his hand. Maybe the best photograph of him is a group shot outside of RCA in Somerset, New Jersey. The RCA site itself doesn't exist there anymore, but I think there's a plaque somewhere nearby. But this photograph shows Steinmetz and Albert Einstein with a bunch of other prominent figures of the time, including Marconi, Lee deForrest, David Sarnoff, and has a common misidentification. One of the figures is Johnny Carson, not the TV show host Johnny Carson, but an otherwise unknown figure who looks a little bit like Nikola Tesla. And this photograph frequently misattributes Carson to being Tesla, despite the fact that at this time Tesla would have been much older than the figure depicted here. But it's a great photograph, freely available everywhere, and like always, Steinmetz is smoking a cigar.
So kind of an interesting tangent on the background of one of the characters here, and perhaps notable that there's more to say about this angle than about Ellis herself.
Gretchen:
Yeah, interesting that both of the stories that we've had so far have had these kind of real life inspirations attached to them.
Nate:
Yeah, I guess life imitates art and vice versa. You know, a good figure to inspire your science fiction story, this chain-smoking electrical engineering eccentric genius with, I guess, at the time still radical politics. Socialism in elected positions in America probably dropped off significantly after the Second World War for obvious reasons. But there was definitely a brief period during this time where mayors get elected that belong to the Socialist Party and Steinmetz served under one of those administrations. So it's kind of neat.
JM:
Yeah, and it does seem like, I don't know, that message on the Clayton standard about it being guaranteed manufactured in union shops. I don't know, that's pretty fine print these days.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
So interesting. And a bit more on that later, but yeah, we also mentioned Wonder Stories earlier and it's perhaps Astounding, perhaps developed a political position later on and probably be the opposite of socialism.
Nate:
Yeah, and I think that is probably going to be the trend throughout American science fiction that we're going to see from this point on again, especially after World War II, at least for a couple of decades.
It's kind of interesting tangent there with relation to the Soviet Union and all that. I was looking at the Bleiler entry for Vladimir Orlovsky, who I posted the story of Steckerite on the blogspot that I recently translated. And I guess when Bleiler put together the book, "The Gernsback Years", which is, again, a fascinating and fantastic reference work for this period in science fiction genre history. That's basically a catalog of every author that appeared in the pulps during this time. But the entry for Orlovsky doesn't contain any useful information about his life at all. It's even speculated that he's a pseudonym of an American, as at that time he only had one story translated that appeared in Amazing. And I think that's a real rarity for a Soviet author to be published in American pulps and certainly would probably be unheard of after 1945, at least for a while. I think that that kind of stuff was almost totally unheard of and unknown in the United States. Again, probably until, well, we're working it through at the present day. So there's kind of a huge gap in the speaking knowledge of the early stuff anyway.
JM:
Yeah, and as we know, there was plenty of Soviet science fiction after the 1920s as well, although so far we've been doing mostly stuff from the 20s.
Nate:
Yeah, certainly after Stalin dies and the Khrushchev era relaxes some of the censors, you get that kind of resurgence in the 1960s where some of the more well-known Soviet science fiction authors start writing their stuff. Yeah, interesting cluster of stories in the 1920s and early 1930s there that for whatever reason have been ignored by American audiences until relatively recently. But yeah, interesting side little tangent there.
As far as this story, it is absolutely ridiculous in every way. I have no other way to describe it other than that. Like over the top, pulp villains, again, very silly pulp writing.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's very interesting that there are two stories that will be covering that kind of dabble in like similar ideas about human progress that are completely different in tone. It's very different between the two. And of course I do prefer the other one we'll be talking about this one.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean this one was, yeah, absurd and over the top pulpy. I mean, we get a lot of over the top villain speeches here that are reminiscent of what we were talking about during "The Wondersmith" just absolutely ridiculous villainy with no other character traits.
JM:
Yeah, I think there's a little bit of a hint that she's going to make them all like tragic or something like that. I don't know, I want to say, a Byronic hero.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
But it doesn't happen that way. Yeah, it's pretty enjoyable though in his cold, cold villainy. She describes him like flying this aircraft, this weird looking aircraft and he's invisible and he's smoking a cigarette or a cigar or something like that.
Gretchen:
This story also features a protagonist that makes me question one of at least one of their actions and that will be a theme that runs through a couple of these stories.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Absolutely.
Nate:
There's a lot of questionable stuff about this one, I have to say. It's definitely fun in places, but yeah, it's all over the place.
JM:
I can definitely see the influence of her weird fiction excitement there with the stories about mysterious Atlantean civilizations and stuff like that. Abraham Merritt and his like lost world societies which usually have all kinds of weird technology and stuff like that. But here it's just some guy who works at a university and it's kind of, I don't know, it's kind of weird.
It doesn't entirely seem to make a lot of sense. It's just like all these people hanging out in Antarctica or whatever and it's like totally inhospitable and he's got this secret. I don't really, he's not really the villain of the story, he's kind of the irresponsible scientist and "his son" is the evil one. I don't know, I enjoyed the tropes, but I just don't think they were executed maybe as well here as in some other stories, but I actually did have fun reading it. And especially the beginning, I thought it was very intriguing. She set up the mystery and apparently she did write straight mystery stories as well. And you can kind of tell like there's, you know, the way everything is set up.
Gretchen:
Yeah, that first scene of the story is like a good hook. I really liked that beginning. It kind of does introduce like this intrigue about where it's going to go.
Nate:
It was a kind of similar setup that reminded me of "Fortune from the Sky" where like we have this like weird character trailing our main hero or whatever and they knock into one another and there's a lost wallet and we got to return it and all that stuff. I'm sure it's like a common setup.
JM:
Yeah, it's exactly like that.
Gretchen:
I hadn't thought about that connection, but it is. Yeah, it's very similar to that.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of stuff in here and she really kind of covers a lot of ground and not that much time again in a very ridiculous way, but it feels like she most feels at home in that weird fiction vein. There are some passages in here where it's I wouldn't necessarily say horror imagery but the more death and destruction stuff like that she really seems to feel at home writing that stuff. So I guess sometimes more than the stereotypical science fiction things of lying ships and adventure type narratives.
So I've been interested to check out some of her stories that appeared in Weird Tales to see how they play out. Bleiler isn't very kind to her other science fiction stories and he's kind of mixed on this one. I don't know. This one was fine. Like again, it's not a literary masterpiece, but for what it is, which is like a fun pulpy romp that just like gets to some pretty crazy places. I have to say I did enjoy it.
Gretchen:
I can imagine Bleiler, you know, his comments are probably something like "below average" just in that sense, which he likes using a lot.
JM:
He's got like thousands of stories to talk about. So he's got like two words, comments on each one.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I think he probably reached a point where he was just sick of having to explain and elaborate his thoughts on it.
Nate:
And I mean, there is a certain point where slogging through some of this stuff becomes work. I can't imagine being a Bleiler or Jess Nevins or those kind of people who are literally cataloging thousands of stories. And the amount of time it would take you to just crunch through all that stuff, especially if you're on a deadline and have to get a book done within two years or whatever, getting through like a thousand stories in that time just seems like it would be totally, totally tedious. And start to be not fun after probably a little while. So I do like the pace that we're going of doing maybe like five or six of these a month. It definitely makes it not feel like work and feels like fun when we do get a chance to cover some of the sillier things that aren't like clear literary masterpieces.
JM:
Right. But I did think this was fun. And I did think that, but I guess I can basically sum it up by saying I like this kind of story quite a lot. But I do think that maybe a few other writers might be better at this kind of thing. And I actually really like the mix of weird super science and kind of more fantastical, I don't know, like weird gothic hints. You know, there's all the religious imagery in this and stuff like that. It's not very subtle, but it's fine.
Nate:
No, its not very subtle at all.
JM:
I don't know. I think Moore could have written a story like this and she would have made it a bit more grandiose and a bit more passionate somehow. Like, I don't know. But I like this. I read it in one sitting and it's not, I don't know, it's not bad. It's still no Abraham Merritt or more though.
Nate:
Yeah, I guess one minor thing that I did want to mention before we get into the story itself that it does involve the plot point of having a sort of laser beam being swung wildly around in the middle of a fight. And pretty much right after I finished reading this one, I watched the Peter Cushing film "Corruption", which has the exact same plot device at the end. So I thought that was a neat little coincidence there.
JM:
Yeah, I've watched that one. So that's kind of a riff on "The Eyes Without a Face", right?
Nate:
I'm not familiar with "Eyes Without a Face".
JM:
Oh, it's a movie about this scientist who's our surgeon, I guess he is, and his daughter is she suffered a terrible accident and she's pretty much, I don't know how disabled she actually is. She certainly gets shut away and she like looks horrible.
Gretchen:
And she wears a mask throughout the entire movie.
JM:
Yeah, his business is to try to repair her. So it's the original story of the mad scientist who's like killing especially women so he can preserve either his love interest or his daughter or something like that. There's a whole bunch of movies like that.
Nate:
Yeah, that's pretty much the plot of "Corruption". Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. And in "Corruption", it's Cushing's fashion model girlfriend or something. It's just really like a disagreeable person on purpose. And I don't know, it's pretty sleazy for a movie with Peter Cushing in it.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely is.
JM:
Apparently he thought so too.
Nate:
But yeah, fun little coincidence there.
(music: eerie, echoey and flashing synths)
spoiler summary and discussion
Nate:
John Northwood is eating dinner at a restaurant and this ugly and deformed man is staring right at him.
JM:
Once again, right at the beginning, a description of a absolutely gorgeous man.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Gretchen:
I do think maybe Mary Sues, they did come from the pulps. I think that's what I'm learning.
Nate:
Yeah, so this guy is exactly like Bird in that he's not only just good looking, but magnificent and compelling, plus a brilliant scientist. And he's absolutely used to being stared at.
JM:
Yeah, and she goes one step further and she calls him scenery.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
She says like he's like a beautiful piece of scenery.
Nate:
Yeah, she has lots of ridiculous pulpy descriptions here for her characters here.
JM:
It almost seems like she's doing that on purpose, like taking it to the next level. This guy's literally part of it. It's a part of beautiful picture.
Gretchen:
This time the female gaze strikes.
Nate:
Yeah, right. I think she knew the audience she was writing for. Yeah, a lot of power fantasy stuff in these stories for sure. It's kind of obvious in these early ones here, especially that are more pulpy romps. I think these are, I don't know, these aren't great, but I mean, they're fun. And the other stories we'll be covering tonight, I think are a little bit different in tone than these two. But presumably Astounding published a lot of these stories as well, better just like these ridiculous pulpy romps.
JM:
And you can find a lot of them in those anthologies that I was talking about.
Nate:
Sure, yeah.
JM:
Some of them are very bad.
Nate:
Yeah, I bet.
JM:
But a lot of them are interesting and cool, like you just never know. You just literally don't, because some of these haven't been anthologized very much.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, this one appears in "The Feminine Future", which is one of the anthologies that Ashley edited and did the commentary for, which is where I found out about this story to begin with. I wanted to do something from one of those anthologies and this one hit the theme. So, you know, that worked out nicely.
So here in the restaurant, the stare from this ugly man is just chilling our beautiful, intelligent, perfect hero to the bone. And on his way out, the hunchbacked man follows him and bumps into him and drops his wallet. So Northwood calls out to him before he enters a taxi, but the taxi speeds away.
JM:
She did this whole thing really well. I thought all this stuff was good.
Nate:
Yeah. And a handsome man shortly appears afterwards, mysterious, who's also been trailing the pair. And he approaches Northwood and he wants the wallet back. Northwood says the wallet is not his. And the man says it's not Northwood's either and says, if he doesn't give it back, he'll be sorry. Northwood says he can't threaten him, but the man calls him "Worm of the Black Age".
JM:
Yeah, and he says this repeatedly. Yeah, it's so great. I really want to call someone that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I want to add that to my own lexicon there.
Nate:
It is a good insult.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's a good band name. I think, you know, you've got Queens of the Stone Age and then Worm of the Black Age.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah. Kind of nice sludgy style there. Yeah. Time traveling through a phaser and wah wah pedal.
And we got some interesting time travel here, which we'll see in a little bit as the mysterious figure just disappears. His voice reappears behind him and Northwood is struck in the face. The man tells Northwood he can keep the wallet, but his contents will never be his.
JM:
Yeah, he's a really mean guy. We'll see more of him.
Nate:
He's our villian if you couldn't tell.
JM:
You know right away that his villainous look is not just a look.
Nate:
No complex characters here. No unreliable narrators. We just get our heroes and our bad guys. We do have this weird scientist character, the Charles Steinmetz insertion. Mysteriously, Northwood's handkerchief has no blood on it from wiping his face. Later, Northwood examines the wallet. It contains the photograph of a beautiful woman with the words, "your future wife" written on the back.
JM:
So you know what's really funny about this part is that I thought, oh, he either knows something about the future or he's very presumptuous.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Which one is it?
Nate:
Kind of an ominous note there too. But he also finds in close with a photograph, the calling card of Emil Mundson, the famous electrical wizard in the same hand. And Northwood now knows why the hunchback man was familiar. It's of course, Mundson, who is a professor at his university. And he had written an article in New Science recently called "Creatures of the Light". It says that man has always been a creature of the light and is grasping towards some point of future evolution. But perhaps that point has been artificially reached now through the knowledge of modern chemistry and electricity. Professor Michael says that self-betterment and improvement are natural instincts towards guiding this evolution. It seems that Mundson has written this article in preparation for something as if he's discovered something profound.
It's clear that they must meet. Fortunately, Northwood has his calling card and he goes to his address. The wallet was a test of Northwood's curiosity to see if he would follow up in person, which he clearly passed. Mundson is impressed with Northwood. He's what all men should be. But somehow the undesirables are breeding instead. And Mundson wants to make a new race of godlike people. And Mundson says the girl in the photograph is created for him, Athalia from Paradise.
JM:
He's arranged it all.
Nate:
He has. Yeah, future of arranged eugenics marriages. Yeah, probably not what Steinmetz would have had in mind here. But Mundson has arranged for the two of them to go to the new Garden of Eden. He has some ball-shaped aircraft with no wings, but a series of propellers in which they board. However, Mundson says that a stowaway has been there in the bunk intended for Northwood. And he wants to tell him about the man who just disappeared a few days ago, but it would sound so ridiculous.
The craft takes off and Mundson says it's solar powered. It goes extremely fast over a thousand miles an hour and puts them in the Florida Keys in an hour. Athalia's picture produces a feeling in Northwood that his girlfriend Mary Burns never could. But suddenly he gets an eerie feeling and suddenly Athalia's picture vanishes. At daybreak, they're over the unexplored Antarctic and they land in disembark. However, they hear a familiar whistle and as they turn in horror, the ship takes off. Stranded in the coldest spot on Earth, Mundson knows it's no accident and someone stole the ship.
JM:
Yeah, so here's my, I guess, one of my gripes with this story. The base is like in the inhospitable polar regions, right? And she's got a simple way of getting around that, that many other stories have done. And it turns out, though, that this professor is just some guy. He's not from some distant civilization or some far future time or anything like that. It's kind of, I don't know, there's no reason for anything to be like this. Like he didn't have to pick, I don't know, like let's say he was from a civilization that used to live in that region like centuries ago or something like that. And he's like trying to, I don't know, rebuild his empire of his people or something like that. Like it would work better, I think.
Gretchen:
He's not, it's not like he needs like a fortress of solitude, or anything right?
Nate:
Yeah, you could easily do this in like the desert in America.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
He'd be just fine or the Canadian wilderness or...
JM:
And we'll see that later on this episode.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And yeah, I don't know, it's just like, she could have easily circumvented that. Like, I don't know, I'm not convinced by the professor. Like he doesn't, I don't know, he's not a very good character because he doesn't seem all that unlikable. But he's like, just kind of, oh, yeah, you know, I want to build my new race and don't you like her? Isn't my plan great then?
Gretchen:
Even though he's already engaged to someone else.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
He's not a very ethical scientist at all.
JM:
No, and again, like, I don't know, he could have been, he could have been driven by something a little more, I don't know, a little more interesting, a little more like, there's a reason for this place to be there. And there's a reason for like, why he has this awesome futuristic aircraft and all this futuristic breeding technology and stuff like that. Like, just, I don't know, it definitely stretches, stretches credulity, I think.
Nate:
Yeah, it does. I guess he's just that much of a genius beyond everybody else, where he can make this stuff in his garage. And that's cool, you know, build a base in the Antarctic where you can grow his lab people. Yeah, why not?
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's just a cool place to be.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. But not a lost race story. We haven't done a lot of those on the podcast. We'll probably cover some in the future as that was a big thing in the 19th century and well until the pulp era. So there's probably no shortage of those kind of stories we could cover. But yeah, this isn't one of them. He artificially creates his own Eden.
But they're not there now. They are now stranded because their ships stole off because for whatever reason, the brilliant scientists could not predict that the stowaway might still be on board. Maybe high in intelligence and low in wisdom.
JM:
Yeah, we've known he was on board for quite a while and they haven't figured it out. I guess we've had, we've had a lot of intervening years of stories of, I don't know, invisible supermen, I guess.
Nate:
So Northwood figures this is a good time as any to describe the mystery of the disappearing man. And Mundson is shocked because he hasn't met Adam yet. And that's where they're going.
Northwood tells him about the experience in the Mad Hatter's Club the other night and relates the incident. And Mundson is muttering these cryptic things to himself and then exclaims that he's brought a creature from the light from the unborn future and brought him into this world. Since the people of the present day are barbarians to Adam, he'll conquer and kill them all. Surely the man is mad, but cheerfully suggests they build an Eskimo house and they can live on penguins for days and a few hours have shelter going, so why not?
Not long after, however, the ship returns and Adam gets out and says some real pulp villian stuff and again calls them, you worm of the black age. He tells the men to get in the ship as he has some use for them. His one weakness is Athalia, who is expecting to meet with the two of them. So therefore, he must bring them to her and she'll flock to him and he delivers all this in the most over-the-top villain speech.
Mundson asks, what about Eve? And we get more villain speech before he vanishes. They pass a mountain range and they reach an oasis from the ice, lush forests with a tropical climate, and there's a large city inside. This is made possible by storing solar energy in accordance to the different seasons, the over-abundance of the life ray creates New Eden. As they disembark, they meet a man and a woman, similar to Adam, but less horrifying. Adam calls the woman grandmother, as she is the ancestress of Adam, the first generation of those created, even though she's only five years old.
New human embryos are ready, to this knowledge Adam is quite pleased and Athalia approaches, otherworldly beautiful. Athalia refers to him as daddy and relates her story of how he rescued her from a New York City sweatshop, dying from consumption. The life ray healed her and Northwood says she's loved her since he saw her photograph, and she also loves him and they're about to kiss when all of a sudden Adam comes between the two of them and pushes them apart. He gives some evil laughter and says, "since the beginning of time, gods and archangels have looked upon the daughters of men and found them fair. Mate with me, Athalia, and I, 50,000 years beyond the creature Mundson has selected for you, will make you as I am, the deathless overlord of life and all nature."
So what an offer. She says she can't because she loves Northwood, even though the two like, just met, and Northwood already has a girlfriend.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I have to say throughout the entire story, I was sure that the fiance was going to come back. I don't know why they introduced that he had a fiance. So I was thinking, you know, oh, well he's going to realize that despite her flaws, he wants to be with her, but that just doesn't happen.
JM:
Yeah, I kind of thought it might go there too, but no, she really is that great.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I guess their love was not true.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
And I guess they were just destined to be together. You know, Mundson was right and perfect people should just be with perfect people.
Nate:
Yeah, it's almost divinely inspired, you could say. The whole Adam and Eve thing. And yeah, an interesting contrast to the Arelskys with these like one dimensional characters here where, I don't know, we get a love triangle introduced in "Towards a New Sun" and it's kind of like weirdly emotional and tearful in places. And I don't know, the last scene with Arri and Magir is kind of touching, but here it just seems like Sophie kind of forgot all about Northwood's girlfriend. I don't know, like, I don't know what happened here. It just seems like such a weird throwaway thing. And he meets his love of his life who was also this perfect, of course, flawless character.
JM:
Yeah, but the nice thing is we picked a story after this where it's exactly the reverse of this.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
It is a nice contrast, but it is kind of, I guess, fun how sometimes the absurd one dimensionality of the characters plays out in an actual story because sometimes the pieces don't like logically fit together of how it would remotely play out like in any kind of realistic situation.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Maybe including his fiance was supposed to give his character more complexity, but it just wasn't fleshed out enough. I don't know.
Nate:
I don't think he has any internal conflict about, you know, what he's going to do. You know, what's Mary going to say after he shacks up with Athalia and brings her home and is. Yeah.
JM:
Who knows.
Gretchen:
I think he spends like one paragraph feeling guilty and then he's like, ah never mind.
Nate:
Yeah. I had this cool ball aircraft now.
JM:
Yeah. And Dr. Mundson is just slightly delusional. He's not like, you know, terrible or anything like that. He's just a poor delusional old scientist. Yeah. But he was basically right.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Because it turns out they are perfect for each other.
Nate:
Pretty much. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Well, he's right about everything.
But yeah, all this love triangle business is no problem for Adam and he'll get her in his own fashion. And he forcefully kisses Athalia, the two of them phase out in a set of electric sparks. Adam's disembodied voice gives some more evil villainy threats. And Mundson says they need to go to the laboratory to rest under the life ray and they must use its power to defeat Adam.
In the laboratory, a bunch of people are resting under orange lights and only three minutes is what is needed. Mundson says he'll one day cure his hump with it, but for now he's overwhelmingly conscious of the importance of perfection. He then shows Northwood to the baby laboratory where several children are recuperating from an educational period and are soon to go to the growing room. The life ray accelerates growth rates rapidly and a three month old will look like someone who is 20. It also works on plants and animals too, so thats pretty cool.
JM:
It gets rid of all that painful, irritated baby parenting stuff.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Who needs that?
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
The new race is going to dispense with all that stuff.
Nate:
Yeah. No diapers, no moody teenagers. You just kind of skip to adulthood.
JM:
No Mantas demo tapes.
Nate:
Yeah. But a pretty useful thing is this life ray. It accelerates the growth, heals all kinds of stuff. And the fact that it also works on plants and animals is very useful for growing livestock and food and all that kind of stuff. But Northwood sees the potential for it to fall into the wrong hands to be used as some kind of terrible weapon. And somehow he didn't think of this before. And of course Adam has been listening in on them.
Mundson shows him the laboratory where the workers seem to be normal people. Ones not enhanced by the life ray. They're perfect couples Mundson scoured the world to find. And through the process of eugenics has created subsequent generations under the life ray. Saying, "I had dreamed of having the children of you and Athalia to help strengthen the new race."
Northwood is horrified by all of this. Mundson calls Lilith to show him the Leyden jar mother, which is kind of a weird like term to apply to the incubator used by the life ray. The Leyden jar being like a primitive capacitor from a couple hundred years ago. So not exactly the current technology with this, but you know, whatever.
The young children are reading things like "Paradise Lost" and Euclid in Latin and capable of total mastery of the text quite quickly. So pretty good skill to have there. This of course negates the long years of expensive schooling. So no Samuel Butler is being produced in this life ray environment.
JM:
I would imagine not.
Nate:
Likewise, mastery of musical instruments can happen instantly. Eve in particular is a violin prodigy. Eve wants Northwood and has since she saw his picture. Northwood starts back saying he loves Athalia and that her and Adam were created for one another. Eve saying, "created for each other. Who wants a made to measure lover?" And then we get another sentence. "The luscious lips trembled slightly and into the vivid eyes crept a suspicion of moisture. Eternal Eve's a weapons."
JM:
Yeah. So there's some sort of slightly weird erotic language. Like, yeah, I can't remember if it's Athalia or Eve. Maybe both are described as having humid lips. And that's like good.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know. I think it's unusual word choice.
Nate:
It is. Yeah. And in a sense, I get that she might be a slightly unusual author for Astounding. I don't know how many times we see these kind of romance type plots and love triangles in these stories. We do get one bit in the stories we're covering later.
JM:
Definitely Planet Stories had a lot more of that kind of stuff.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
It was published by Love Story magazine as after all. Or Love Romance magazines or something like that.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
So I don't know if that was the reason, but yeah, they tended to have more of that. I think especially in the Campbell years of Astounding, there was a lot less of that.
Nate:
Yeah. Certainly the Amazing readers that we talked about in our Amazing episode were not too keen on romance plots in the stories. And Gernsback was like, "no, don't worry. That's not going to be our magazine." So I'm not sure if the early days of Astounding took on similar sentiments or what their attitude was towards romance and stuff. It doesn't really come through a lot in these kind of stories here. I don't think there are like any women characters in the SP Meek story. Maybe like the disposable mother from the beginning or whatever that lost her kids. But certainly nobody working in the science bureau or anything like that.
JM:
Oh yeah. That would be something we continue to see a lot in this magazine for sure.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Compared to Amazing, there does seem to be fewer women writers working for Astounding besides Wenzel and Moore, I don't recall if I saw many others when I was looking through some of the stories.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
"Partners in Wonder" catalogs them all. I didn't do a count between who appeared in Astounding and who appeared in Amazing. But yeah, certainly flipping through these early issues, you don't see a lot of women's names in the author columns at all. I'm not sure if that is more of a thing when Campbell takes over.
JM:
I think he definitely thought he was writing for the boys and we'll get into that.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I mean, even like that first special first issue that we're considering taking a look at. I believe it's the July 1939 issue. It does have two stories by women in it. And he didn't seem to rule it out. Of course, that Eric Leif Davin guy pretty much denies that there was any sexism altogether because, you know, he points to all this evidence of all kinds of stories written by women. But like, you know, it's kind of hard. But there were definitely some and most of them are not as well known as the big guns.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
So they were there, but they were a minority and they didn't necessarily get anthologized as much as some of the others. That's I think that is definitely starting to change.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, certainly Moore seems to be well respected both in her time and in the modern era. And we covered "Vintage Season" a couple episodes ago, we're probably going to cover some more stuff in future episodes. So yeah, at least she's there writing a lot of these stories. You know, Sophie only had two in Astounding. And again, I think Bleiler was a bit dismissive of the other one.
But here, Athalia wants to kiss our hero and tells him that doing so will bring him a new power. Adam has developed a sixth sense, the sense of time perception, which allows them to travel along the fourth dimension. Likewise, sensing thought vibration from the brain's radioactive waves will be possible.
JM:
And this is definitely an idea that she has that's pretty cool. Apparently, this is one of the first stories to do this kind of existing or very, very short time in the future. And thus being able to avoid being seen and kind of operating in your own space.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
That definitely became a thing you'd see a lot more of. I'm not going to say she was necessarily the first one to do that, but it's pretty cool. I don't remember any earlier examples.
Nate:
It's kind of hard to quantify, but it is kind of, I guess, difficult to think about, you know, exactly where these people are and how it would physically play out, you know, the logistics of that. But it's kind of a fun device.
JM:
And always a step ahead of you.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
But for the practical purposes here, they just kind of blink out of time in a cool shower of sparks and light and electricity and stuff. So, you know, it makes them appear all mysterious and powerful, which, you know, I guess they are, it'd be a pretty useful skill to have if you were able to do it right and not, I guess, accidentally mess up the time and where you are and all that stuff.
So yeah, the kiss will be able to transfer this power to him or something. I'm not entirely sure how that would work, but they go five minutes into the future to spy on Adam's plans, which is, of course, to destroy everything. Since Adam is only one minute into the future versus they're five, they need to hurry up, lest they are seen by Adam.
JM:
So I wonder how far any of them has gone into the future? Like, is there something they experiment with? Like, I don't know. There's a lot of things I wonder about how things happened behind the scenes.
Nate:
Yeah. I got the sense that he was from, like, the far future and we're going to see the far future at some point, but we never really go there. We only get kind of a couple minutes into the future to...
JM:
Yeah, it's kind of metaphorical.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
All this talk about the future.
Nate:
Yeah, right. Like, I was assuming the black age that he's the worm of was, you know, a primitive bygone era, millennia in the past, but I guess it's only five minutes.
So that's what a kiss from Eve will do through all the sparks and the atoms flying asunder. You know, you've got to be five minutes ahead of Adam, or I guess four minutes, because that's what five minus one is. So they're able to reach his laboratory before he does. And it's filled with these strange apparatuses with cages and live animals and all that kind of stuff.
JM:
Yeah, more cruelty to animals.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Guinea pigs got it.
Nate:
Yeah, right. Like I was saying with the Meek story, this one also gets pretty bloody and has a high death toll here. Despite the fact that it's like ridiculous and pulpy, it feels like the deaths are a little more mean-spirited and gritty than some of the stuff.
JM:
Yeah, well, they were just jarbabies anyway.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
Yeah. We're going to see this again, and then we're going to have World War II happening. And I don't know. I don't know. And people's... It's really interesting how much this was in the air in the 30s. I mean, we talked about "Brave New World" before, and that's also like, I guess that's the thing with the jarbabies.
Nate:
Sure.
JM:
That has two babies. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. It was in the air, alright.
Nate:
Yep. But with a kiss, they switch back into the third dimension, and Eve demonstrates one of Adam's machines, which is the death ray in contrast to the life ray, of course. And here is where they just start blasting the caged animals. So goodbye to the guinea pigs.
Adam comes in, and Eve reaches for the lever, but Northwood asks her not to harm Athalia. She doesn't seem to care about this, as she wants her to die too, and to start fighting over the lever.
JM:
I don't care about your Athalia. She should die.
Nate:
Yeah. Again, more pulpy villainy speech. The lever is switched on, and the struggle is wildly flinging the beam around the room, slicing into Adam, and then Eve trips and falls into the beam.
JM:
Oh.
Nate:
Athalia is unhurt, but the laboratory is collapsing, and when they get outside, it's very cold, like the sunshine projector has been stopped.
JM:
Yeah, see, if they just thought to put the place in a better location.
Nate:
Yeah, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah. It's almost like you didn't have to go all the way to the Arctic to do this.
Nate:
Yeah, literally the coldest place on Earth, and the most windiest place on Earth.
JM:
Because other writers did that.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know.
Gretchen:
And we'll be coming back to the Arctic again.
Nate:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Although for much more reasonable circumstances.
Nate:
Yeah, I would say so. But it definitely remains a place of, I guess, mystery and adventure, even long after the poles are reached.
JM:
Oh, yeah. And I'm not saying it shouldn't be, but like, just, yeah, the fact that he's just some weird eccentric professor, like, why does he have a lair in the end? I don't know.
Nate:
No Symmes hole to come out of here. Just a guy, Charles Steinmetz.
JM:
But it turns out it's all right because, yeah, they make it pretty easily. And not only that, but the first time they got stranded when Adam just took off on them, he was just joking.
Nate:
Yep.
JM:
So he came back for them and everything.
Nate:
Yeah. That's pretty much what happens here. So they go to go to the sunship and they find out that it's gone. And on the way just, they see the vast devastation that the death ray has wreaked everywhere. But they embrace and resign themselves to their fate when Mundson comes down in the sunship, saving them at the last second. He's surveyed the land and says that they're only survivors and says his efforts were not wasted as he brought together this perfect couple.
And we get this line, "and who can say to what extent you have thus further natural evolution? Northwood slipped his arm around Athalia. Our children might be more than geniuses, doctor." So our hero gets the girl and sorry, Mary.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Mary just has to find someone who is just, you know, her level, someone who is in her own league.
Nate:
A more average scientist, someone who isn't perfect looking and, you know, doesn't go to the gym every day and all that stuff.
JM:
I just like to say, though, I do think she was trying to, I don't know, like she keeps saying repeatedly that Northwood feels bad for Adam. Like that he really sympathizes with him.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Like she says that several times and yet he's not portrayed in a very sympathetic way.
Nate:
No, not at all.
Gretchen:
Maybe it's the whole thing where, again, it feels like maybe she's trying to add depth to character, but she's just not good at it. It's more in saying rather than showing.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. I guess he feels that way because he didn't choose to be born that way and all this stuff. It's not his fault that he's an ego maniacal dick. He was born that way and it's a dead end. And yeah. Thank you, Professor Mundson, for making my future wife available to me.
Gretchen:
Yeah. You know, I guess the imperfect, those who are as perfect as us, they should be pitied, but so too should the too perfect people. You have to get that right, nice balance of imperfect and perfect or else you're either evil or you don't matter.
Nate:
You don't want to take the eugenics too far, I guess, because then you'll have a whole new race of people that are just too good and going to replace the old one with a death ray. I mean, Adam and Eve symbolism is, again, really not subtle at all. They kind of beat you over the head with it, though neither Adam nor Eve are very good people and they seem to be almost pure evil in a way. There is almost no redeeming qualities about either of them whatsoever.
JM:
They've gained all this knowledge within minutes and they haven't had a chance to develop any kind of emotional stability whatsoever. They have the emotional stability of like three year olds or something.
Nate:
Pretty much, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Isn't it like around like six or seven before a child even knows right from wrong and they're just like toddlers who have just learned the secrets of the universe.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
There's just huge death rays to play with, I mean.
JM:
And I just like to point out that that girl don't think she gets a name, but when they're in the educational facility, she reads Northwood "Paradise Lost" like in its entirety.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
So they must have been there for a while.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Sophie says that they read the whole thing anyway.
Gretchen:
Except, wasn't it like the last few like verses she couldn't do because she hadn't read them yet or something?
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
It would be, I think, I listened to the Simon Vance reading of it not too long ago, and I want to say it was like 10 hours.
JM:
Yeah, sounds about right.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
It's like, it's like she thought it was just some short poem or something like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, like "The Raven" or something.
JM:
Yeah. Oh, Sophie.
Nate:
The stuff on "Paradise Lost" about the devil I think is far more interesting than the Adam and Eve stuff, though I guess the Adam and Eve in "Paradise Lost" is a lot different than the Adam and Eve we get here.
JM:
Yeah. And it's all that setting man on its course kind of stuff and then the foretelling of the actions of the fallen angels by God and all this. I don't know. It doesn't really connect that closely to anything in this.
Nate:
No. It doesn't, but I guess it's a good text for the children to read along with the Euclid, which I thought was an interesting choice.
JM:
Yeah. And the violin concert completely without any trace of emotion or passion.
Nate:
Yeah, like that Star Trek: Next Generation episode where Data's playing the violin and classical concerts and stuff.
JM:
Or his poetry.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
Oh, poor guy. None of them made it. None of them made it. Not even Eve.
Nate:
Nope. Nope, they're all dead.
JM:
Eve and Adam, they're both dead. The future Eve and the future Adam are no more.
Nate:
We do get the future Athalia, so at least that's something.
Yeah, I don't have too much to say about this one. Again, it's a fun, ridiculous pulpy romp. It's probably the right length for this sort of story, maybe pushing the upper end of it. I don't know if I'd be into reading something that was like twice as long, but for what it is and for how long. It doesn't really have a chance to get boring or tedious, even though again...
JM:
I just think there are some other writers who are better at this.
Nate:
Oh yeah, there definitely are.
Gretchen:
Yeah, and also have a clear sort of statement they're trying to make. And you know, again, because it's very strange about, I guess the lesson is like, you know, you have to have a balance between the sort of people you want to be.
Nate:
The messaging is definitely mixed for sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. And yeah, it's a little confused, perhaps, yeah.
Bibliography:
Adams, M.B. - "The politics of human heredity in the USSR, 1920-1940" (1989)
Ashley, Mike - "The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers" (2015)
Bleiler, Everett - "Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years" (1998)
Davin, Eric Leif - "Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965" (2005)
Gilbert, James B. - "Collectivism and Charles Steinmetz" (1974)
Music:
Dodge, Mr. & Mrs John Wilson - "Moon, Moon, Moon" (1910) https://www.loc.gov/resource/musm1508.10020387.0/
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