(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: "Neptune Rondo" by Sam Beck played on sinewave vibratoed synth)
Tremaine-era Astounding background, Murray Leinster background, non-spoiler discussion
JM:
Hello again, this is Chrononauts, and I'm J.M. and I'm here with Nate and Gretchen, and we are talking about Astounding. If you want to hear a little bit more about the background, listen to part number one. But now, Gernsback wasn't the only one experiencing financial problems, of course, during the difficult months of 1931-32. With June 1932, Clayton decided to put his magazines on an alternating printing schedule, which made Astounding my monthly. William Clayton's solution to his woes was to attempt to buy out his printer, which I think Gernsback had also done, and of course, this backfired when he couldn't afford the final payments. The issue dated March 1933, released in January, was the last one.
No more Astounding, no more Strange Tales.
Frustratingly, the last issue promised quite a few things in the future, including "Triplanetary", a serialized novel from E.E. Doc Smith, who had just become disillusioned with Sloane and Amazing, and offered his new story to Astounding. The illustration of the cover, done by regular, early Astounding cover artist Hans Wessolowski, known as Wesso, to everyone.
But of course, that's not the end. Meanwhile, Wonder Stories just missed a couple of issues, as Gernsback started yet another company and moved it over to that one, firing David Lasser, who was becoming increasingly concerned with issues of workers' rights, and bringing in a teenage assistant editor, Charles Hornig. Meanwhile, Street and Smith bought at auction three of William Clayton's titles, Clues, The Detective Magazine, Cowboy Stories, and Astounding Stories. In October 1933, Astounding was officially back.
Many of the other magazines were downscaling at this time. Pulps focusing on one character, based on the dime novel formula, were becoming very popular. The Shadow obviously led the way with this, and Doc Savage was there too. Both these were Street and Smith publications, and much more popular than Astounding.
October and November 1933 Astoundings were a bit sparse. There were no editorials and no letter sections of these, and according to Mike Ashley, not many standout stories. November included "Dead Star Station by" Jack Williamson, and a "Flatland" type 2d civilization Story, "The Plain People". These issues didn't even list the editor, but that finally changed in November. F. Orlin Tremaine was officially in.
Tremaine had plenty of editorial experience, having worked on stuff with pretty generic titles like True Story and Everybody's Magazine. He'd also edited Clues, which is how he came over from Clayton to Smith. Harry Bates was out, but his name would appear in the magazine still as a writer, as we shall see. It's kind of interesting because apparently he was not a fan of science fiction when he started out, but apparently he was attracted to it enough that even by 1935 it seems like his stories improved a lot, and I mean we'll talk more about Harry Bates a little later, but yeah, it's interesting, but he appeared with "A Matter of Size" in the April 1934 issue.
Although Tremaine had official editorial control, it seems that he was overstretched working on three magazines at once, so most of the actual work was taken on by assistant editor Desmond Hall. Tremaine and Desmond Hall, the latter whom Jack Williamson and Horace Dold specifically said really did most of the work on the magazine, really did a number on it. Even if Street and Smith was mostly interested in clues and detective stuff, and of course their big hero pulps.
So with the Tremaine editorship there was a change to the letter's column, which had been, and would be again, more of a free-ranging discussion under the title Brass Tax. Tremaine wanted it to be a scientific/technical discussion forum.
Tremaine wrote his writers about the type of things he wanted to see in the magazine's fiction. He felt growing a little tired of space opera epics, and hero stuff being handled pretty effectively in the single character pulps. Tremaine and Hall wanted to do something distinctive. Their idea was to present what they called a "thought variant story", and this was of course what many science fiction stories already were all along, but here it was sort of codified in a magazine format. Present a problem with a scientific basis and philosophical ramifications. A novel speculation instead of a gadget, essentially. Stretch the imagination.
So they started publishing some of the work of infamous British weird science guy Charles Ford, and part of the reason may have been to encourage writers to get more imaginative and wild with their ideas. Tremaine had a reputation for being a solid, open-minded, and conscientious editor, and people liked working with him.
The magazine circulation may have been around 50,000 at this time, still only half of what Amazing got in the 20s, but twice that of either Amazing or Wonder now in 1934, during the toughest times.
The covers were usually drawn by Howard V. Brown, now, and were of a slightly more sober nature. The interior illustrations were by Eliot Dold, who had previously worked with his brother upon another short-lived magazine, Miracle Science, and Fantasy Stories.
Around this time is when John W. Campbell started publishing, alongside space opera serials, "The Mightiest Machine", and a different kind of story under the Don A. Stuart name. Here we see what could be called the ascension of Astounding. Wonder Stories was still around, of course, but Astounding was starting to feel like the better market, at least for some of the more experienced writers. Also they guaranteed at least a cent word and paid immediately.
Wonder published the young Stanley Weinbaum story "A Martian Odyssey" as well as its sequel, but lost him to Astounding in 1935 after a rejection. Weinbaum probably would have gone on to great things had he not died so young of cancer. His fiction career lasted only 15 months, and that's considered one of the great tragedies of this era of science fiction, and I certainly do enjoy what I've read of his stories, and I can see why the genre people would have considered him quite a loss.
Nate:
Yeah. We definitely penciled "A Martian Odyssey" in at some point, and I'm sure we're going to be covering that on the road, but it's a very well-acclaimed, definitely.
JM:
It's a pretty fun story. It's definitely still got the pulp adventure feeling, but it's smartly done and a lot of fun. Even though the characters are all stereotypes, they're enjoyable for that.
But Weinbaum and Raymond Gallun are often mentioned as two authors with a similar careful approach to stuff like depicting aliens. Wonder stories under Charles Hornig and an increasingly hands-off Gernsback who believed fandom could sustain the magazine became sort of focused on non-story content, fan stuff and so on, instead of helping the magazine to grow, it stifled it in a way, and Hornig was pandering to a small percentage of the real readership of the magazine, and it was fun stuff, but most of the readers still wanted novel and interesting stories first and foremost.
Astounding was a more sober magazine, and under Tremaine and Hall, the story quality had started to increase, so that was where many turned, and it was still the Depression, of course, so people were pinching their pennies, and with that, why don't we go into our first story of the era by Murray Leinster?
Gretchen:
William F. Jenkins, known later by the pen name Murray Leinster, was born in Norfolk, Virginia on June 16th, 1896. From his youth, he was interested in inventing and new technology, as well as writing. In 1909, he designed and built a working glider which won him a prize from the aeronautical magazine Fly, as well as an article about him.
During the same year, he published his first written work in a local newspaper, Virginia Pilot, which was an article about Robert E. Lee. The article earned him money from a Confederate veteran, the first payment he ever got from his writing.
By the age of 17, Leinster started working for a top magazine at the time called Smartset. He also had a job as a bookkeeper for an insurance company and served with the Committee of Public Information and the U.S. Army during World War II, though after these careers, he dedicated the rest of his life to being a writer and inventor.
Science fiction, along with westerns, was Leinster's primary genre, having written his first sci-fi story in 1919 and getting one of his stories published in the first issue of Astounding, as mentioned during our segment on "The Cave of Horror".
However, he did write for various other genres as well, including romance stories, some of which he wrote for the magazine Love Stories under the pseudonym Louisa Carter Lee. He was a voracious reader, though he didn't keep up much with science fiction literature, speaking of the genre as more of a hobby.
He was friends with various authors of the genre, including Campbell, who was enamored by his skills when it came to inventing, and Theodore Sturgeon. He also continued to invent things, notably front projection for films, the rights of which he sold to Simon Fairchild.
Having married a woman named Mary Mandela in 1921 and being the father of four daughters, he was able to use the money he made on his vast amount of stories to put his children through college and support his family.
He died June 8, 1975 in a nursing home in Gloucester, Virginia.
Many of Leinster's works have introduced or expanded upon ideas that would later become very influential in sci-fi media, such as the universal translator that comes up in his work "First Contact".
The story we are covering tonight is "Sidewise in Time" from the June 1934 issue of Astounding, which is considered one of the earliest stories to cover alternate dimensions. And I think that it does a pretty interesting job at doing so. One thing that I like about his writing is he includes all of these anecdotes throughout the story between, like, the main plot, and I go over a couple of the beginning ones, but there are multiple ones throughout.
Nate:
Yeah, this is an interesting contrast to do with both "Creatures of the Light" and some of the other things we've covered in the time-traveling episodes we did, a little ways back, especially "Lest Darkness Fall", and the Poul Anderson story. There's a lot of the same themes that are present here that are, I guess, expanded upon in different ways in those kind of stories, but it's kind of interesting to see it in this kind of context, too.
JM:
Yeah, I agree. I think I've actually read Murray Leinster a bit before, which is a first for this episode so far, and I think at first, when I had my first experience with him, which I believe may have been the story of "First Contact" because it was in one of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthologies, which I talked about before, I believe. We were doing a bunch of stories in my class around 1999-2000 from that book, and I ended up just getting the whole book from the professor and scanning it all and reading it all pretty much because it was just so much interesting stuff.
I didn't really like the Leinster story at that time, and I think actually a part of it is his style, and we can talk about that a little more as we talk about the story, but it might as well bring it up now.
He's a little bit, I like it. I kind of learned to like it, especially reading "Forgotten Planet" a little while ago, which was a fix-up novel by him, which consists of stories he started in the 20s for Amazing, and like the last one was in the 50s or something like that, and it's basically a bunch of stuff about some people on this planet just start out like really primitive and tribal, and they're descendants of a crashed Earth colony ship, and they have to battle giant insects basically because they're the indigenous life on this planet, and it's all like literally just man versus bugs, but I don't know, he makes it pretty cool, and he has a style that's kind of really choppy, a lot of really short, like it's definitely not flowery like some of the pulp writers can be, he doesn't even make an attempt to be like, I don't know, it's a very down to earth writing style, and I think it's easy to be uncharitable about it, but it has something about it that I kind of enjoy, like it's just so, if I can almost picture somebody speaking like that, I think.
So I don't know, I enjoy it now, but I didn't so much then, I think because I was so obsessed with like Clark Ashton Smith and all this really floored stuff, I don't know, I didn't really, I mean I liked a lot of the other stories in the book, and "Martian Odyssey" was one of the ones in there, as a matter of fact, but I don't know, I just like the Leinster style was a bit too simple or something like that, and although, and it seems to be something that he kept up, at least in his science fiction, the latest stuff I read by him was all from the 50s, I guess, and it's pretty much the same style, like it's very, I don't know, it's very short sentences, some exclamation marks outside of dialogue, which is always kind of funny to see, but sometimes it's fun, and it works, I don't know, I sort of find it enjoyable in a weird way, and his ideas are really cool, definitely.
Gretchen:
Yeah, that's what attracted me to this story, is the two stories that I chose, it was because I was looking through the Bleiler and taking into account some of the stuff he was saying, and it mentioned that this one is like a very early like predecessor of that idea of like alternate universes and multiple dimensions, and it's very, it's kind of endearing to read some of the sections where they spend very intense detail like getting into what it means, and of course as like a modern reader, I do know the concept, so it's like you have to kind of picture someone from that time not understanding what's going on, and like Leinster having to be like, this is very the details of it all.
JM:
And I like you were saying though, the anecdotes are great, like I love those parts, those parts add a lot to it, and you know what, I kind of feel like some pulp editors might have been, oh yeah, cut all that stuff out because it's not focused on the heroes and their journeys, right? It's like it's totally extraneous, but that's almost what makes it good, like it never really ties into the so-called main storyline, and it doesn't have to, like it's just examples of all the stuff that's going on in the world around when all this like huge upheaval and disturbance is happening.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it gives it a scope and a sense of like this is happening everywhere, and it kind of ties into something else that I do maybe want to wait until the spoiler section to talk about, but yeah, I think that that's interesting, that it kind of shows that this is affecting other people and not just our protagonists.
Nate:
It's good world building, and it does work with his style of, JM, you're saying it's a bit choppy and short, and these sections are very short, the little vignettes that sometimes are only like a couple paragraphs long, and it's interesting how he throws them in there in the middle of this very, again, ridiculous over-the-top pulp journey, and I think the first three stories we're covering tonight are going to be the ridiculous pulp over-the-top ones where the last three we're going to get more of a rounded and complex look at some of these issues, so out of those first three pulpy stories, I'd say this one is by far the best. It has a lot going for it in ways that the Meek and the Ellis just don't, even though we do get these ridiculous heroes and villains and some great dialogue between the two, and definitely some questionable actions going forward, but the pieces come together in a way that I think is more satisfying in this one than the previous two.
JM:
Also, whenever he's kind of ready, he's almost tipping over into like stereotypes and like weird racist stuff.
Nate:
Oh yeah.
JM:
He always pulls it back a little bit though, like afterwards, and you're like, oh, okay, so he's actually kind of like treating everybody kind of equally, like it's the same with the, there's like a really, really useless female character in this story who literally does nothing but blubber, but at the same time, there's also a really useless male character who does nothing but like vacillate and like be completely useless and can't handle a gun and can't make any decisions and can't like, so I don't know, it kind of, and he does it at the end too, like you kind of think that, oh, everything's back to normal now, but in the end, it's not quite. He just like, he always slightly pulls back from being ridiculous, I think, in a cool way.
Gretchen:
I think there is some stuff throughout this work that feels a little like subversive when compared to like, how you might expect the trope to go.
Nate:
Sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah, there might be more to talk about, referring to that when we get more into the story.
(music: low rumbling synths, shimmering)
spoiler summary and discussion
Gretchen:
"Sidewise in Time" opens with an account of some strange things happening leading up to June 5th, 1935, such as the Ohio River flowing upstream and a male giraffe at the Bronx Zoo undergoing mitosis to become two identical giraffes before the narrative introduces Professor Minott, a professor of mathematics who predicted the events that would take place on the aforementioned day.
JM:
And he really hates his job so much.
Gretchen:
Yeah, he really does. You'll be hearing quite a bit about that.
JM:
But he dates it right away too, he makes it like 1935, just a few months after the story is published, so.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know, I think many science fiction writers try to avoid that now, but again, like it doesn't matter, this is an alternate timeline kind of story anyway, so it could happen in a few months and you might not even know because you might be replaced.
Gretchen:
All those multiple universes out there, you know, maybe this did happen, it came true.
He is particularly versed in the laws of probability, which is how he was able to come to his conclusions about the strange events that happened, and his remaining notes are intensely studied by others to be made sense of, though his most important notes are very likely with him wherever he is now.
He also, it is noted, has a fascination with Maida Haynes, the daughter of a professor of romance languages. This will play a role later.
Nate:
I did like how it was a nice touch that it's specifically romance languages.
Gretchen:
Yeah, romance languages. That is very good. I noticed that, too. You have to wonder if that was Louisa Carter Lee coming through the room.
Nate:
It could be.
JM:
Maybe, yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, I would be curious to read some of those love story fiction things that he wrote under the pseudonym.
JM:
Yeah. According to his daughter and stuff, he was pretty prudish, so I don't know, I'm guessing maybe they were that spicy.
JM:
Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what they printed in magazine format at the time, if it really got as far as, I don't know, some of the other stuff.
Gretchen:
A kiss.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
Gretchen:
Just a kiss on the cheek.
JM:
I think they could get pretty spicy, but there was always a lot of innuendo, I guess, but it could still get pretty intense. I guess not in the way that people would be used to nowadays, maybe. Even we found was it that anonymous Victorian-era, erotic novel about mesmerism?
Nate:
Yeah, right. I mean, there's always been pornography written in a kind of underground circuit, but something that you see...
Gretchen:
I'm sure as long as humanity has been around, I'm sure there's been pornography.
Nate:
Oh, yeah, definitely. But on the magazine newsracks, I don't think they were publishing erotica in 1935 or anything like that, though. In public libraries today, there's definitely some erotica authors there that are pretty forward for, I guess, what you could just find on the shelf in a public building.
Gretchen:
When the story reaches June 5th, 1935, bizarre occurrences happened throughout the entire world. Leinster includes a couple at this point, including an army of Roman soldiers invading the town of Joplin, Missouri, one man crossing into a territory apparently owned by the Confederate states of North America, and Vikings attacking North Centerville, Massachusetts.
All of these events occurred when those involved were hit with a sense of vertigo. In Fredericksburg, Virginia, however, Professor Minott stands in front of a group of students wielding his revolvers. He says he's anticipated this situation and believes the human race might be wiped out, but he's going to fight for the smallest chance of survival. He urges the students to follow him, not that they have any choice. Those who don't will be shot, because he can't have mutinies.
Fredericksburg has been surrounded by a massive forest, and Minott, plus the four young women and three young men that are students, arrive at its edge on horseback. A police officer stops the group, but Minott claims they are going to get botanical samples for the college, so they are let through.
After traveling for a few hours, one student, Blake, advises they turn back for the women's sake. Minott, though, pulls out his revolvers, refusing to let anyone go back. Eventually, they find a road and follow it to a village that appears to be in the style of Chinese architecture. Minott explains that the Chinese must have colonized America first in the area they've come to, but that they need to find something else. As they ride away from the village, they get a sense of vertigo.
The students wonder if they have traveled in time, but Minott says they've actually, instead, traveled sideways in time. When they settle down to lunch, during which Maida, one of the students who happened to be on the expedition, what a coincidence.
JM:
Yeah, I remember the first time I heard a concept like that. I was pretty blown away, like, wow, that can happen, too. Sideways in time.
Gretchen:
"Inferno".
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. "Inferno"'s great.
JM:
And "Battlefield", which was new around that time, I think I must have probably seen it around the same time, maybe, I don't know, so yeah, alternate universe, Knights of Camelot or something like that.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
With laser guns.
Gretchen:
Yeah, and then, of course, the Mirrorverse and Star Trek, so it has been quite an influential idea after Leinster's story.
Nate:
Yeah, there is one interesting line in here where he, I'm not sure if he's trying to imply that it was in an alternate universe or in the one that we're in now, but he says that the Chinese reached the shores of California in the Middle Ages sometime, and I was looking for the historiography of that claim, but couldn't find anything in 1935.
JM:
Yeah, it sounds like he just pulled that one out of somewhere, and then he was talking about, like, because I'm talking about once they got to the Chinese run, apparently Chinese run North American state or whatever, and they were speculating on it, and that's when somebody said that, I think.
Nate:
Yeah, right, but there was some fringe author from like 15 or 20 years ago that wrote a book speculating that, but apparently there's like no basis for that claim whatsoever, and I was trying to find examples of people referencing that in 1935, but came up empty, so I'm not exactly sure, like, where that came from.
JM:
Oh, Leinster.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, just throwing in a little theory there.
Nate:
Yeah, why not?
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yes, but Maida, one of the students who happens to be there, just coincidentally, expresses fear of Minott to Blake, and Blake is chosen by Minott to be second in command, and after this the professor further explains what has been happening.
He claims that time, like the other dimensions people are familiar with, is not a straight line, but a variety of paths of different coordinates that all of the presence caused by various paths have been jumbled up, and they are now traveling between them the way they travel through space, basically explaining the idea of multiple universes. When he starts to talk about how he chose each student based on their particular field of expertise, Maida asks why he would take them from their home, never to see it again.
JM:
Yeah, here's another academic who's just picking and choosing and thinking that he knows what's right.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
This time he's very blatantly selfish about it, he's not like, I want to create a new race of humanoids.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
And that is the thing I did want to mention is, yeah, I do not like Minott, I think that he's, and you're not supposed to, and I think that's one of the things I found sort of subversive about this story is that he's awful, and he's the person that in the beginning knows what's happening, so you assume like any of the perfect men in our other stories, like, oh, he's going to be the good guy, and then it turns out he's awful.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
He's like, I just want a nicer position in life from math professor to ruler of the empire, and then I'll write a book from math teacher to oligarch, and I'll share the proceeds with you guys, and it'll be great.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's like, I'm the main character here, so obviously I should go out and conquer everything. It sounds like something that would happen in other pulp story like this, but it's like turned around.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely delusions of grandeur far beyond the deCamp and the Poul Anderson stories here.
Gretchen:
Yes.
Nate:
And another thing I did like about this part is that he specifically chose the students for their specialized knowledge in a field, like he's putting together a Dungeons and Dragons party, or it's a Kung Fu movie or something like that, where everybody's got their own set of moves or whatever, even though in reality they'd probably just be like a bunch of 19-year-old freshmen that have taken the same introductory courses.
JM:
So I wonder what was going on at Mammoth Cave during the time of slippage.
Gretchen:
Yes. You know, all those students, it's like botany 101, and it's like you have a very particular set of skills that will be useful in taking over an entire world.
Nate:
Yeah, not entire civilization, but an entire like sideways realm of civilization, I guess.
JM:
And he's particularly fixated on Vikings for some reason?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Like, it's never really gone into that much, but I guess he thinks they're the easiest to dominate, maybe?
Nate:
Yeah, which seems strange, because they're most known as being like these berserker warriors who plunder and kill everybody they come across.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, we saw what happened in "The Man Who Came Early", right, like, we know.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
I don't know.
Gretchen:
But yes, Maida asked why he would take them from their home, never to see it again, and he responds by saying he would never amount to anything besides a mathematician in their own world, so he wants to find a world where their skills will help them conquer it. He describes having the most power of all and glancing towards Maida, another certain possession he wishes. She is frightened, though Blake tells her that he will kill him before he makes any advances towards her.
Later, the group is eating dinner besides a fire after encountering a group of Native Americans who had wounded one of the women with an arrow, causing her immense distress, and that's Hilda who blubbers all the time, unfortunately.
JM:
Yeah, and one of the characters is really like annoying because he says, oh, we'd be better off in the, we'd be better off in the CSA.
Gretchen:
Yeah, that's going to come up. That is something I did remark upon.
JM:
But yeah. He's probably right, though, sadly enough.
Gretchen:
Blake, confused about how they have entered this new territory without Chinese colonization, asks Minott about it, who then explains that the shifts in universes have continued but with borders between them, which remain constant, and he refers to as false.
They're interrupted by the sound of a plane, a plane which must have come from their own time. Blake concludes the pilot had seen their fire and is attempting to crash land near them, and when it does, he takes charge, going out with another male student, Hunter, to find the wreck.
JM:
Yeah, I was a little disappointed that he didn't go all out with this and have it be something really strange. Most of, I mean, he does imagine some pretty cool alternate history kind of situations, but it's interesting how a lot of it's not as good technology or something like that. Well, there's hints, like, you know, what happened to the thing at the end, you know, the vanished town, like, you know, there's, there's hints that there are stranger continuums or time paths that could be taken, right? Not just like, oh, the Confederates won.
Gretchen:
Yeah, because it is very convenient that the Chinese civilization and the Native Americans, like they haven't.
JM:
And the Roman. Yeah.
Gretchen:
They were evolved at all past what they were in, like, the time periods that Leinster's talking about.
JM:
That we know about. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
There's no super advanced society in here where they have, like, futuristic flying vessels and lasers and things like that, too, which also makes it convenient for trying to take over things because, you know, there's nobody else that's going to take over you.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Blake takes charge, going out with another male student, Hunter, to find the wreck. After an explosion, the two come back with the pilot who has died. Before he did, he told Blake and Hunter that he had headed out from Washington and found no sign of any civilization until coming across a viking settlement, but kept flying until he came across the group's fire. Blake says they should try to find the fault near Washington, which might have a better chance of getting them back to a civilization like the Confederacy. After all, he says, being among our own people, speaking our own language, would be better than to be marooned forever among Indians or among Chinese and Norsemen.
Nate:
Right.
Gretchen:
Which, sure.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
He does specifically mention the Confederacy.
Nate:
Oh, yeah. Multiple times, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. One of the papers that I read when looking up, Leinster, was about him and the tradition of, like, a Southern author. And yeah, it is sort of interesting how the Confederates play a role, though. We'll see some more of that later on.
JM:
Yeah. And I admit, I didn't really give a lot of thought to that when I read it. And then maybe it's just, I don't know, I don't know if it's just because I'm Canadian or something, but I didn't really, like, the significance of that didn't really hit me that much. It was just like, oh, it's just another cool, temporal thing that he did. But there is a lot of stuff about slavery in here, although interestingly, it's mostly in the Roman zone coming up, but I don't know, maybe 1934, it's still not, I don't know, not that far in the distant past, I guess. So yeah.
Nate:
No, I mean, especially if you talk to a veteran of the Confederacy in his personal life, you know, it's somebody that still was alive that fought in the Civil War, which I guess at this time would have been seven years before the story was written. I'm not sure when the alternate Confederacy genre really starts to take off, but it seems like there are a fair amount of entries in that kind of story for whatever reason.
JM:
Oh yeah. Well, it's just as many. I mean, I think the alternate Nazis are the most popular and alternate Confederates are probably just behind that.
Nate:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And there's also, I guess, the Confederacy plays a role in some of the Burroughs stories with the John Carter character, I think is like a Confederate person or something like that.
JM:
Yeah, I guess he is a Confederate soldier.
Nate:
Yeah. So I don't kind of interesting how it does pop up from time to time, even long after the Civil War ended.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Minott reacts in anger caused by Blake both taking charge and encouraging them to all head back to their own time, wanting instead to find a universe where Norsemen have settled in America and live among them.
He pulls out his gun on Blake. Maida flings herself between Blake and Minott and the student Harris throws a cooking piece of meat at Minott's hand, causing him to drop the gun. Minott stalks off after saying he was merely trying to threaten Blake while considering leaving the group on its own.
JM:
Yeah, I think you did a pretty decent job of even though you're you can be pretty sure that the person that looks like they're going to be the hero is not going to get it. I think you did a pretty decent job of making this tense between that like the tension between them.
Nate:
Yeah. He's definitely not a bad author.
Gretchen:
No, he does a good job. I think that the, you know, we mentioned the style being kind of stripped back, but I think that it works well.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
Gretchen:
I think he gets a lot of his concepts and stuff across.
Knowing they need Minott for information. The student Lucy offers to talk to Minott, who had been kind to her in class. Native Americans then try to ambush them, but Minott scares them away and criticizes Blake's leadership skills for not having someone stand watch.
Lucy tends to his burnt hand, soon Maida spots of forest fire heading for them, which had been caused by the exploding gas tanks of the wrecked plane. The group leaves their camping site heading onwards to escape the fire and find another universe.
They find land that has clearly been plowed by man and reach stone roads that Minott determines from the style to be made by Romans. Soon after they realize they are in the middle of an area where a battle took place, seemingly between Romans and the Confederate army. They find a Roman slave who tells Minott, who knows Latin, that strange men arrived and killed the guards of the Roman estate.
Minott heads towards the estate to see if the Confederates conquered it. He wants to be near the time fault so they can sooner find a Norse settlement. As they come to the villa, the group itself is ambushed by slaves acting on the orders of the Roman who owns the estate and now considers the newcomers property as well, except for Blake who manages to escape.
Thrown into slave barracks, the group starts getting harassed by the other slaves and a fight breaks out. The fight is interrupted by Blake who comes to save the others, shooting down some of their attackers.
He had set fire to one of the sheds as a distraction so the group heads to the horses. Among the chaos on the estate caused by the fire and Blake's murder of its owner, the vertigo associated with a shift of universes hit them, and the forest they had left for the Roman area has been replaced with a swamp.
Blake and the others head into the Carboniferous Period forest, I know how to say that word, sending to the arms that they looted from the Confederate soldiers before they arrived in this area. Blake asks Minott if the universes have stopped shifting, deciding that if they have, they will try to find others like them who are stranded in the forest.
Minott, however, informs them the shifts should occur for he predicts about two weeks. Minott then tells them that the shifts have been caused by one universe coming too close to theirs, and that he predicted a one-in-four chance that it wouldn't result in cataclysm. He still wants to find a Norse settlement and take control of it, but everyone except Lucy just wants to go home.
As Minott berates them for their lack of ambition, there is another shift which reveals what looks like their own universe. The students head towards it, leaving the professor behind, though Blake spares him their supplies. Lucy at the last moment starts to head back, and is across the fault as the shift starts again.
Back in their own universe, Blake and Harris transmit Minott's knowledge to other parts of the world using radio waves, which prevents certain expeditions from occurring. However, 5,000 people are believed to have been lost through the phenomenon, while multiple groups from other universes remain now in this one. Some areas also never return to their initial state, resulting in this universe's version of Rio and Tokyo being wiped from existence and Detroit returning, but without any of its population. Scientists persist in trying to understand more of the event with the help of the little of Minott's papers that remain.
JM:
Yeah, so Detroit is the new Mary Celeste of cities. That's pretty eerie. Somebody is probably going to write a video game to take you into the depths of abandoned Detroit now.
Nate:
Yeah, or the Russian village in mining town, Colorado, some of the other weird remnants we get all over the place.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, pretty cool ending.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting. As J.M. said, you know, it doesn't go just back to normal, like there is repercussions from what's happened.
JM:
And who knows, you know, maybe there's more things that haven't been reported yet. Like, it's kind of like the "Roadside Picnic" thing, right, where it's like, you don't know what's there necessarily, and this is what you're seeing afterward. He doesn't make it like a doomful ending, like it seems like they're back in their proper time and place and everything's more or less fine, except for some really big strange things like missing cities, but like, who knows what other small things have been affected, right? Maybe some people are not who they once were, right? I don't know.
It's interesting, because at first it's, and I really did think, oh, he's just going to leave it like that, like, everything's cool now, but not really.
Nate:
Yeah. And Minott and Lucy are, I guess, are on their way to try to conquer the Vikings, maybe. It's a very weird plan.
JM:
For some reason, I can't remember who was saying this. I didn't write any down. And maybe it was in one of the Ashley hooks on the pulps, or maybe it was on, I don't remember, but they said, like, they thought the point of this was not so much the time slippage and that, but they, like, way the professor character is influenced by things like, like, maybe he's, he's himself changed by this experience and he's different now, but I don't really see, I don't know, I don't see a lot of evidence of that. I actually do think the cool alternate worlds and the, the cool idea of the time slip and how these people deal with it, but also just seeing the anecdotes of people in the wrong place at time, literally, and how they cope with it. I mean, there's like a dinosaur submarine encountering a dinosaur or something like that.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
The British Science Commission getting almost burned alive. I don't know. It's, it's, there's all this fun stuff in here that makes it stand out and it's not even so much the main story. It's all that stuff, I think.
It actually does remind me, I was going to say earlier, but now is probably a better time anyway, but it reminds me of this book I read a couple years ago called "The Fog" by James Herbert and it's just like a horror novel about this English town where this evil fog that's, I think in the end it's a product of a biological, that is some kind of experiment of course, but it comes out and affects the whole town, it seems to come out of under the ground and it's this like fog that makes people violent and makes people like do all these crazy things like it suggested some inner subconscious part of them has really always wanted to do.
And so the writer James Herbert spends all this time just describing all the different people in the town and how the fog affects them and most of them die, but it's like, and it doesn't really add the plot, it's just a whole bunch of stuff and it's fun. These kind of stories don't have, they don't have to be 100% plot focused, it adds to the atmosphere, it adds to the enjoyment factor where you can just see the world around you and I definitely think writer's picked up on that a lot more later on.
"The Fog" is not the only example, but that's from like the 70s or something like that. It's got a lot of fun stories about normally harmless and unassuming people in this town basically going nuts and killing people and smashing shit and having a great time doing it.
Nate:
Yeah, we definitely do get a lot of violence and chaos in those anecdotes too, a lot of dinosaurs and explosions and all kinds of weird time clashes.
Gretchen:
Yeah. The first time you encounter the Romans, they like drag a person out of their car and stab them to death.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
Gretchen:
It's like, that's the first encounter that is really described and it's like, really brutal.
Nate:
Yeah. It's a pretty bloody story.
JM:
This poor, brainless animal getting smashed to bits and like getting really angry and not sure what to do and it's like, yeah, they really abject description of the slaves too. Like it's kind of, I don't know, it's not really subtle or like, I don't know, it doesn't really convey the pathos that like Twain did in "Connecticut Yankee", but it's pretty brutal and it's hard to imagine without wincing. He does a good job of that, I think.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, ancient Rome had a huge slave population. I think maybe one-third of the population at its height or something like that. It's just kind of insane to think about those numbers, but that's how the entire empire was basically run and he does capture that, its brutality and nastiness fairly well in those scenes. And, you know, a lot of nasty stuff about the main plot too. I mean, Gretchen, as you were saying, Minott is just like an awful character through and through.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
And poor Lucy, I mean, she's going off probably trapped up in Stockholm syndrome is now going to be in this abusive relationship with this guy trying to conquer the Vikings. And who knows how that's going to fare for Lucy.
Gretchen:
Yeah. It seems like obviously Minott was interested in Maida, so he's probably not going to show that much interest in Lucy.
Nate:
Yeah, right, exactly.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Not going to go very well for her, but yeah, I think that that's just, we talked a little bit in the last section about how many of these stories are like power fantasies.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
And I just, I really do like that Minott is this character who kidnaps basically a bunch of youths from their homes without them knowing and like drags them off into a dangerous situation because of his own weird little power fantasy that he wants to do. Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, it's an interesting take on it because, I mean, he doesn't get the girl in the end and he's not the hero of the story, but he's the villain.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
And yeah, like you were saying, it was a little subversive in that way.
Gretchen:
And I think even the anecdotes kind of go a bit of a weight of showing that subversion because it's like we have these protagonists who maybe during the story we don't know, maybe you're going to conquer a world and have power and everything and then you see all of these other people who are affected so negatively by this occurrence that are just incomplete shambles because of people invading and people committing these acts of violence against them.
Nate:
They're powerless to stop Rio from disappearing.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. And you kind of like, it's weird because it's almost like we're supposed to feel wistful about the two of them being off there still in the transitioning dimensions and we're supposed to kind of, I think because maybe because Leinster just likes adventure stories, like it's kind of like, oh, isn't it more fun there with like all the dinosaurs and ships and weird planes and strange timelines that you don't know anything about? Like, don't you want to be there too? Like at the end, it's kind of like that. It's like, no, I don't necessarily want to be in Lucy's place, but I get what you're saying. I mean, yeah, it would be kind of crazy and fun, I guess.
So yeah, I don't know. This was a really interesting one. It was a really fun romp. Again, it was pretty easy to read quite quickly, which is I think something that all these stories have in common, actually. And I think although we didn't like, you know, we kind of chose at random a little bit. A lot of the stories we chose at least had a couple of mentions somewhere of this being decent, and I think that they do all have this quality of being pretty readable, even if we might not always have complimentary things to say about some of them, especially maybe like the Wenzel Ellis.
And I don't know, I mean, this one is great fun. This is like a blockbuster in writing, right? And the thing is, it's all because of the side stuff, a lot of it. Not to say that I don't entirely dislike the main story. It's good. Like, it's engaging enough, especially the tension. But all the side stuff almost feels like it gives him a chance to experiment. And like, there's this weird things that he doesn't have to do, like in the story where there's the husband and wife and the guy goes out and instantly gets killed by a lizard and like the, like a giant lizard and the woman's like, she's kind of terrified, but she's also like, well, at least he's gone now. Like he was treating me like crap forever and then it's just, well, that's kind of brutal.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Cause some of the stories, they are kind of presented in more humorous tones, but then you do get those really, like they are very disturbing and have, like we said, those brutal moments in them.
The one that I did enjoy was this telephone operator who was just trying to figure out how to reach any other area than the one she's in and kind of showing, like that one feels especially like showing the scope of how people are affected by it.
JM:
I really liked that you focused on the main story, but now like there's all these side things that we could still talk about that aren't really part of the plot at all, but they're just, I love that he included those and nobody told them, hey, you should take all that out. Like that's, I think that's a difference between, I think that I could be wrong, but I think that some of these more stringent pulp editors might be like, yeah, don't put all that in there. Like that has nothing to do with the story and we're paying you by the word. So fuck off with all that. But he just did it.
And I don't know if it was because he's Murray Leinster, like, don't forget, he'd be doing this for a long time already when this came out. Like Leinster was not somebody who got his start in the science fiction field and he already was familiar with writing for larger magazines. So he knew, at least to an extent, what he was doing and his style is just deceptively very, very straightforward.
Gretchen:
And even in like sci-fi circles, his writing seemed very respected. And I do mention this later when I talk about Bates, but Bates, who seemed very harsh on a lot of the works that he came across, did mention that Leinster was one of his favorite writers.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, interesting too, because it definitely seems like, and I'll definitely bring this up when we talk about Bates in a little bit, but like Bates definitely got his start, kind of adventure stories too, which is, it seems to be where Leinster, a lot of the time, is at when he's not necessarily writing for the science fiction magazines.
So yeah, really likable. There is some kind of dated language, I guess, but I don't know. It's okay. I think he doesn't stretch over the line, I think, unlike somebody we'll be talking about later, even if it's not in the story, per se, but yeah.
Gretchen:
So yeah, I feel like the stuff that is there is almost like, it's worthy of an eye roll, but not like, you know, anything too egregious.
Nate:
Yeah. It's not like "The New Steam Man" or anything like that.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Cool. Yeah. I like this one. Good story. Like I said, this one is my favorite out of these first three that we've covered so far.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I think that the stories seem to go up in quality as we continue along.
Nate:
Yeah. Kind of interesting trend.
JM:
Yeah. Definitely. I mean, I have my own ideas, I guess, about, I don't know exactly which would be my pick for best story, but this is, it does seem like now, I mean, obviously we're not reading all the magazine issues. So I mean, we don't know what we might be missing, but it does seem like the quality is slowly increasing and what we'll see that moving forward as well.
But there is some interesting things to talk about all surrounding that and we've got a lot to cover yet. So why don't we go to the end of 1934?
Bibliography:
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)
Davin, Eric Leif - "Pioneers of Wonder: Conversations With the Founders of Science Fiction Hardcover" (1999)
Duncan, Andy - "It's All SF: Science Fiction, Southern Fiction, and the Case of Murray Leinster" (2000)
Science Fiction Book Club - "Interview with Steven Silver and Billee Stallings" (2022) https://middletownpubliclib.org/wp-co...
Tymn, Marshall B. and Ashley, Mike (eds.) - "Science Fiction, Fantasy and Weird Fiction magazines" (1985)
Music:
Beck, Sam - "Neptune Rondo" (1845) https://www.loc.gov/resource/sm1845.0...
No comments:
Post a Comment