(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: rising synth with echoey flutter)
Gallun biography, non-spoiler discussion
JM:
Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast, once again, and I'm J.M. with Gretchen and Nate. And we are doing a special series on Astounding Magazine. If you want to hear some more of the background, please listen to segment one, where we talk about the early days of the magazine and its editor, Harry Bates. And segment three, if you'd like to hear about the middle period with Orlin Tremaine as editor. And this is what we're going to be talking about now, in fact, with Raymond Zinke Gallun.
So before we start, I'd just like to say that we are bringing up a lot of names in this episode. And there are names that might have come up before, and there are names that if you're a science fiction reader, you'll probably know at least some of them. And we will be tying in a lot of these in the next few episodes. And I think basically since late last year, we've been covering a lot of this stuff. And ever since the Amazing episode, we've been dipping into the American pulp SF field. And this episode, plus the next two, are kind of going to move in a lot of the same circles, you might say. And some familiar names will come up.
So I apologize in advance if we kind of quickly run through name dropping and don't necessarily explain a lot of who these people are. But a lot of this will become clear as we go. I would also like to say that I'm a Canadian and I will make preference towards saying this author's full name, including his middle name, instead of Raymond Z. Gallun, because it's a real struggle for me to say 'Z'. But I do strongly believe in saying things the way people who, I guess, own those things say that they should be said. So I'm sure that Raymond would, I don't know, maybe not. He's a pretty global, worldly person as we'll get to. So actually, he probably didn't really care, because apparently he didn't even care that much if you said "Gallon" instead of "Gallun". And he didn't really go out of his way to correct you.
So according to J.J. Pierce, Raymond Gallun was instrumental, along with John W. Campbell and Stanley G. Weinbaum, who are increasing the overall imaginative and even literary quality of science fiction, at least in the American pulp field. For some reason, Gallun's name isn't as recognized as the other two today. He published something like 80 stories in the 1930s alone and maybe 120 stories between 1930 and 1946, and he continued to write sporadically for decades. He seems to have been a quiet person who didn't much care for self-promotion or aggrandizement.
Like our soon-to-be-discussed writer, Campbell, he was born in the year 1910 in a little town called Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. He attended the University of Wisconsin only for a year and then seems to have caught some kind of wanderlust and spent the next few years traveling, submitting his stories from places like Paris and on merchant ships in the Pacific. He was in Paris during the outbreak of World War II, and according to Pierce, that's kind of a philathropic position, and he was helping to get refugees out of the country, but I couldn't find really anything about that, so I don't know what the story is about that, but it sounds pretty exciting and worthy.
So unlike some other writers, including Campbell, whose experiences abroad seem kind of naive and negligible, Gallun appears to have been a worldly person who always traveled, spent much time in diverse places, knew people all over the world, and immersed himself in foreign cultures. His first stories were submitted in 1929, but it's with our story tonight, "Old Faithful", that he really started to get noticed. It seems that identification with and careful explanation of alien biology and cultures was one of his special interests, which may have been a reflection of his personality and interest in the cultures of the places he visited. Pierce cites many of his stories as being prescient, anticipating things like the imagining of a Dyson Sphere back in 1938, many years before the concept was officially coined by Freeman Dyson. Though it's worth pointing out that Olaf Stapleton also imagined a similar thing in his 1937 "Star Maker", which I definitely think we're going to be bringing up and talking about in a later episode.
Nate:
Yeah, certainly.
JM:
Yeah, but Raymond kept writing into the 1980s and was even publishing stories in analog. His last novel was "Bioblast".
Gallun was born in a house in Beaver Dam, a town of around 7000. Osman House, or Ormund House, as he liked to call it. Mr. Osman, who built the house, had killed himself the previous year, and the Galluns moved in. Mr. Osman was a science teacher and, "half-assed inventor", as Gallun described it, and his books and odds and ends were everywhere in the house. Ray privately refers to him as his spiritual godfather.
Another influence was his uncle Julius Zinke, who was a sailor and had traveled all over the world and had a sea chest full of curias, coins, navy pennant, snakeskins, and all kinds of things from all over the world. This was endlessly fascinating to Raven as he grew up in this little community. His father drifting aimlessly from job to odd job to odd job, never sticking to anything for very long.
Gallun in 1988 said, "I'm good at languages. German was actually my first language as a child. English my second, French my third, and Spanish my fourth. I can't speak German very well anymore, but I spoke only German, up until I was four or five. Then my mother told me I had to learn English because I had to go to school the next year. She stopped speaking German to me, and from then on it was English. I've always had a knack for languages, both spoken and written. I love ancient history, and when I was 12 years old, I taught myself Egyptian hieroglyphs and can read them pretty well. I also studied written Chinese and Japanese, which are pretty similar. Now I'm into computer languages. The only reason I haven't bought a computer is I don't know where to put it."
The interest in Egyptology would carry on through his life. He also took a course in 1960 at San Marcos University in Peru on Hispanic literature. His first exposure to literary science fiction was "Tarzan of the Apes", which a teacher read during class lunch sessions. He got all the John Carter books and moved on to Verne and Wells, mentioning "War of the Worlds" specifically as a remarkable piece of writing. He remembers his first science fiction magazine, an issue of Amazing with a Frank Paul cover of a giant flying thing attacking a navy ship. Have you seen that one?
Nate:
No, but I could imagine.
JM:
You can imagine. Yeah. He was already familiar with Argosy, Blue Book, and Weird Tales, and makes it sound like that was just the expected thing. His first two stories were published in November 1929 in Amazing. "The Space Dwellers" and "The Crystal Ray", the letter of which he had written for his high school English class. Gallun's reason for writing science fiction is as follows:
"It was sort of an interim substitute for a reality we didn't yet have. You see, I was fascinated with the still hidden mysteries about other worlds. I needed some reasonable answers to questions, even if they were only imaginary answers. If you couldn't penetrate such mysteries right away or learn the truth about them, still you had to have some fantasies to fill in the blanks. That remains pretty much my view, but I prefer that such imaginings conform closely to whatever facts we have about other worlds. That way, imagining becomes an aid and a possible guide for actual factual exploring expeditions as soon as the necessary technology is developed. Much of such technology already exists. So why aren't there more moon landings? Why isn't a man Mars landing already in the works? To me, science fiction is primarily a forerunner of potentially near future reality. Sure, yarns about trips to the stars are okay, but the local planets are much nearer within our present reach. They should come first. That's part of my annoyance with a lot of science fiction today. There's just so much of it I can't read. Sometimes I think current writers just aren't doing as well as we did in the old days."
Cantankerous, but sort of charming. Also, he's not all down on his fellow writers and writers of a more modern persuasion. He seems to speak fondly about Henry Kuttner, calling him dapper and pleasant, and admiring his skill and competence. He talks of Samuel Chip Delaney as a more modern writer he likes, although it sounds like "Dhalgren" was too much for him. "Probably his worst", he says.
About those early stories, though, he first sent them to Amazing. Gernsback was on the point of losing control of that, and Gernsback said he'd give him $55 for both stories and asked him outright if he'd sent them to Amazing or to his home address. Seeming to want to nudge him into the right answer, but in his words, Gallun was too dumb to catch on. So, Uncle Hugo sent them back, saying he couldn't use them as he was no longer an editor of Amazing, and Ray could send them anywhere he wanted. This whole process took a few months. He ended up getting them in to Wonder Story somehow.
He was, though, one of those who eventually threatened Gernsback with legal action for payment. It seems that Hugo really did want to pay his people, he just was overstretched and couldn't manage it. But he ended up hiring a lawyer, a woman named Ione Weber, who took a small cut and did good work for him. He then wrote to the writer's digest, and while the magazine omitted Gernsback's name, as Gallun probably knew they would, they published Gallun, and people in the science fiction community recognized it. He said, hire this lady, she did great work.
Gallun never really had contact with other science fiction writers or fans in the 30s, but this did change after he came back from Europe. He and some others would gather at Von Steuben's restaurant in New York. He lists Manly Wade Wellman, who has the most awesome name ever, Henry Kuttner, Otto Binder, and the agent Julius Schwartz, who everybody called Julie. Although he did know Walter Emsting also, who was the German writer of the Perry Rhodan stories, and stayed with him in Switzerland for a bit in the 50s.
He had attempted to write a couple of other American magazine writers, and it had gone nowhere. Gallun expresses regret about Harry Bates. He says he was very nice, and he wished they had met in person, and regretted what he calls the bad circumstances under which he died. The guys at Von Steuben's were what Ray described as a good bunch, women in particular, like to roast John W. Campbell. This, Raymond specifically remembers as being a popular topic at the gatherings. During this time, most of the bunch, besides maybe Binder and Kuttner, were aiming themselves mostly at the Wonder Publications.
At the urging of his soon-to-be wife, he says he wrote two stories for Collier's Magazine in 1946, and later the New York Daily News, and they were sort of a big deal for him. But after that, he kind of dried up, he says. I don't know, I didn't read them or anything, but he described the story the first one he wrote, and it sounds like exactly the kind of thing I would picture for that magazine. A pretty character-driven, morality-oriented story about a single woman who's taking care of her son, and she's had a bad marriage, and she's just been divorced, and she has this uncle that she doesn't, or I guess it's the uncle of a kid or something, and she doesn't really like him, and he keeps sending these carved toys, and she thinks it's just dime-store junk, and when she's on vacation in some place, she breaks one of the toys, and the guy, this person there that she meets, this random, I guess, native of wherever she is, is like, oh no, this is a really fancy piece of work, and this carved train with all these people in it, even this little man probably took weeks to make, and she realized that, oh, maybe this guy's not so bad after all, and you know, kind of like, a feel-good kind of story, I guess, like, probably with some merit, but it seems like maybe he preferred writing science fiction, and he was still writing this during the time, and he picked up Frederick Pohl along with some of the other of the more progressive American science fiction writers of the time as an agent.
He ended up having success in the blossoming of science fiction paperbacks, publishing "People Minus X" with Simon and Schuster, and he decided that, in his words, writing for the slicks was too precarious, and a lot of this stuff comes from a conversation that Gallun had with Eric Leif Davin in 1988, so he's kind of an old guy by now, and some of his statements are a little bit funny, but I find him really charming. He says, the only reason he didn't want to write for the slicks is that everybody he ever met who did was some kind of physical wreck. Like, they were all overwhelmed by drink and stress, and basically their lives were crap, and so that's why he got into technical writing, much like Sprague and some of the others.
Gallun says he didn't have any real problems with John Campbell, just annoyances, and generally had a better relationship with Orlin Tremaine. Campbell wrote long rejection letters full of discussion and still didn't accept the story, and Gallun became more interested in the Thrilling Wonder crowd because he says that they espoused more human values rather than the science stuff which he perceived is what Campbell was more into. Once though, Campbell wrote him a letter asking why he didn't send any more stuff, and Gallun says, "being a bit peeved at him and knowing his right-wing political leanings, I sent a flip response, stating that I was a car-carrying communist, which of course I was not. Politically, I've always been a middle of a roader. It was just to annoy him."
He mostly stopped writing SF for years after 1961. He was always a big traveler, and he met Arthur C. Clarke at his home in Sri Lanka, and he started writing SF again in 1973 and published a few novels. Gallun, while seemingly fairly removed and always somewhat doing his own thing, was still sort of in touch with the community. He's tried his hand at longer, more mainstream work, but not really been successful. The biggest and unpublished novel called "Ormund House", which he was working on in the 80s and had rewritten many times, slowly expanded to over 1200 pages, and he seems to understand why this is commercially unviable, given the kind of fantasy stuff that's published nowadays and the way books have, in a way, expanded, I don't know if it really is, but we'll never know.
His conversation is slightly sad. He seems happy enough in life. He's happy that he's solving and still travels south every winter. That is, in the late 80s. He died in 1994, I believe. He considers himself to be a forgotten writer, which I guess in many ways he is. And he's kind of obsessed with things like manned Mars missions, and he doesn't understand all this obsession with far-star systems where there's no way we can actually get there or even approach anywhere the speed necessary. And he specified $50,000 in his will to be divided among the men of the first manned Mars mission, and it's been invested. So it will accrue. And the State University of New York at Stony Brook has established an award, Outstanding Contributions to the Science Fiction Genre, the Raymond Z. Gallun Award.
Raymond Gallun's most productive years were between 1930 and 1946, like we said. And we're now going to talk about his story, "Old Faithful", which I believe is still his most well-recognized work in many respects.
Nate:
It's the title of the short story collection, so...
JM:
It's been anthologized a bit. Isaac Asimov is apparently a big fan of this story. He includes it in his "Before the Golden Age" anthology. He also includes "Sidewise in Time". The two stories are right next to each other, which I had no idea about before we picked on these. So this is kind of like you said, Nate, it shows I guess we picked pretty well.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
So it was published in Astounding Stories December 1934. It was submitted to Amazing first. T. O'Connor Sloane held onto it for quite a long time. So here's what he said actually about all that. He said the story was written back in 1932.
"'Old Faithful' was written just outside of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, early in 1932, during the deepest part of the Great Depression. I remember the time and circumstances quite well in this instance. For the winter, I got my job in the hemp mill across the fields from where I lived. It was one of the rottenest jobs I've ever had. The mill was a corrugated iron structure, freezing cold near the outer walls where steel rollers spun to crush the hemp stalks and extract the fiber, and torrid hot near the dry kiln, where the sheaves of hemp were brought from the stacks outside to melt out the frost and dry them for processing. One trotted back and forth from kiln to rollers to feeding the stocks. The air was full of black dust, like everyone I was coughing and spitting. I will make no point of socioeconomic unfairness, for the fact that the pay was 17 cents an hour, since the purchasing power of the dollar in terms of groceries was then far superior to that of the present. And secondly, because a little company operating at best under the marginal chance of a small profit in those times, quite likely couldn't have paid much more. And I was lucky to have the employment. The pertinent fact, however, was that it was a miserable, uncomfortable, struggling existence, from which, for me, escape into dreams was compulsive. Mars was then my favorite place for this, and certain real factors heightened this inclination and the effect. At a 10-hour workday's end, I would slog home across the darkened fields. Was the grimy snow extending away in shallow drifts in my flashlight beam a polar part of that other world? It is interesting how longing to know more about something can translate ambient realities into dream elements that fit. Having fun, I might now, at this much later date, suggest another factor for my illusion. Yes, hemp, the large variety grown for its fiber, still is cannabis, same leaf structure, same pungence, and no doubt it contains considerable of the same chemical agents as the smaller marijuana. At the mill, the extracted straw was used to fire the engine boiler from the smokestack issued an aroma like that of burning pot. Was I perhaps, in part, inadvertently hallucinating?"
Well, Ray, I know how I like to read your story.
"Anyway, I needed my faithful Martian. I wanted him and his planet to be as real and possible as I could make them, according to what information and supposition were then current about Mars. Also, I felt that he had to be a friend, not an enemy, just as I longed to know about his world, so he would long to know about Earth. So, evenings at home, on the dining room table. Yes, by the light of a kerosene lamp. Does this seem today a curious incongruity? 'Old Faithful', was painfully written out and typed. Being by then a little doubtful of the shaky journal's back publications, I sent the manuscript to Amazing Stories, which was also struggling to survive. I think it was well over a year before T. O'Connor Sloane, the editor, sent the story back with no comment that I remember. So, I thought I had it done. Too much my own thing, and too much out of formula to interest any editor."
But, Raymond had already sold a few stories to Astounding. So, thought he would dig Old Faithful out of the file and send it along, but internet, his story was well liked, both by the editors and later the reading audience.
So, that's kind of the history of this tale of a lone Martian.
Nate:
Yeah, it's a really good story, and it ties in not with only the story of his life and how this came about, but also Astounding as a whole. This is all happening in the middle of the Great Depression, and Astounding stops for a while and has to be revived. And it's just fascinating how science fiction, fandom, and the pulp readership, and the number of magazines greatly expand during this time in the early 1930s when the depression is at its height. It's kind of an interesting juxtaposition of the scene starting to really thrive when everything else is kind of going downhill really fast. People took it as a form of escapism, like he was saying there.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, even when you think of like the movies that were being made during the 30s that were so grandiose, it seems like that people needed that escapism at that time.
JM:
Yeah, that makes sense. And I think it definitely seems like science fiction and imagining better futures and imagining more possibilities for people, and also what kind of strange things might lie out there in the universe would have been really exciting to people. I mean, it still is now.
Gretchen:
Yeah, and the way that Gallun captures alien cultures is really great. I mean, he has like something that feels very nuanced for the time that it was being written in.
Nate:
Yeah, no, this is a great story. And number 774, our character here is an awesome science fiction character. And unlike the first three stories where I felt that they were very much a product of this time, it feels, yeah, like you were saying, more nuanced and complex and more something that we would expect from the Golden Age or later, a more mature look at an alien civilization where they're not just like some mutant beetle to be punched in the head by a big muscular looking guy.
JM:
"The Beetle Horde".
Gretchen:
Yeah. And it's like you spend most of the story not examining this character through the eyes of humanity. It is through his own eyes and it allows him to be his own person and to express that culture better than if it were just a human that would have just seen, oh, it's a big bug or like some creature that's just an ugly lump of something.
Nate:
It is truly alien to its thought patterns or alien as biology is alien. Parts of it did remind me of "Voyage to Arcturus" in that way of the different senses and how it's perceiving its environment versus how we perceive our environment here on Earth is totally different conforming to how things may evolve in a geological environment like Mars that's just so drastically different from Earth.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
And some things can't be explained, like definitely the omniscient narrator of the story is kind of looking at this from a human perspective. So every so often he'll say, well, if you were looking at this, it might be really horrible and strange, and he kind of acknowledges that he acknowledges that you might feel those things. But then he goes on to say, but this is just, you know, this is how they were. And in their own way, they're just as as sapient as you reader are. And he's directly addressing the readership, I think.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. I mean, and his interest definitely in communication and language does come through in this pretty well as well, I think.
Gretchen:
The paragraphs kind of describing the thought process of how these two very different species learn to communicate with each other is really interesting to read.
Nate:
It is through and through a first contact story and a lot of the tropes of first contact stories are this trying to understand one another. But he really does a good job at capturing like how difficult it is to explain more than just mathematical basics and the very fundamentals of communication like you wouldn't be able to transmit words or anything like that. Even yes or no will take you a while to arrive at an agreed on form of...
JM:
He says the Martians have this method of communication that's nonverbal.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
Essentially. So that whole avenue is difficult to begin with.
Nate:
Right. Yeah.
JM:
And then I guess you could argue that it's only because the characters in story are like the kind of really smart people you usually see in these stories that they're able to even begin some kind of dialogue. But it's pretty convincingly done. And I even think like although 774 is definitely the most interesting part of the story, even the human side wasn't that bad. It was kind of typical of the era and style, but at the same time, there was just a little bit more work than charm to it than I think I necessarily expected to see. So I didn't mind it like it was definitely not quite as compelling as hearing about 774's journey and thoughts. But that really took up the bulk of the story anyway. I think so.
Gretchen:
And what I think is interesting when you you mentioned the communication kind of succeeds because they're very intelligent. I also think it's just because it's more than just that they're these kind of perfect people that we see in the other stories. It's because they're they're very persistent and they have that drive to do so that.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
The same thing that Gallun probably felt towards writing this and the desire to know whether the people he thinks of on Mars are real.
Nate:
Yeah, I'm sure if it was Bird, he'd have the language deciphered in five minutes and be sending Shakespeare to the Martian.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, the Martian would be reciting "Paradise Lost".
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, there is actually interplanetary travel in "Paradise Lost", so it's not too far off.
JM:
True. Yeah.
(music: space synth with engine-like ambiance)
spoiler summary and discussion
JM:
We begin with number 774's time is nearly up. The rulers of his people have decided his work is not useful. And moreover, he has lived out the allotted lifespan set by them, because food and water on Mars is scarce. In 40 days, 774 must die.
Number 774 stares out into the Martian sky atop a parapet in his home and workshop. The stars shine even by day. Mars is old and dying. And number 774 wastes impractical time and resource in gazing and cataloging the third planet. He knows there are intelligent beings there and for years has exchanged signal flashes with them. But so far, there hasn't been anything more. And there's lots of beautiful descriptions of Earth from the perspective of a strange alien life form on a distant, nearly dead world.
774 hopes for a time when the atmospheric pockets will clear enough so he can get a good look under high magnification from his telescope. He activates something and under his home, some giant battery charges up and sends out a massive detonation into space that lights up the area for miles. His attention is wholly aimed at the third stone from the sun.
Earth signals 774 in Morse code. Of course, he recognizes it as a repeating pattern, but doesn't know the code as such.
"Hello Mars. Hello Mars. Earth calling. Man of Mars is late."
The numbers from 1 to 10. Some multiplication sequences. It's very difficult for 774 to understand anything because every concept between them is mostly different and 774 does not have words.
Nate:
Even their instrumentation is totally different. He uses this touch-based mercury telescope or something like that. It's pretty cool.
Gretchen:
It uses colors and different parts of the color spectrum.
JM:
Yeah, the potentiometer.
Gretchen:
Another kind of thing that feels sort of like "Voyage to Arcturus", that idea of different... Because it mentions colors that humans can't necessarily see.
JM:
Yeah, and the potentiometer that works by color. Which I think it's really cool. I think he over-explains it a little bit, actually. He pretty much explains how it works and then summarizes it just in case you didn't really understand. Maybe he could have taken that out, but I don't know. It's fine. I really like the way he imagines it anyway.
And he doesn't understand the concept of readings, so Hello Mars is sort of baffling. Numbers fascinate him. And the base 10 is totally unfamiliar to him. The Earth signalers teach him about decimal numbering. Another pattern in science fiction, perhaps. Then he proceeds to learn Earth math. What's the system?
Then they talk about the solar system and the number of moons for each planet. It's Morse, and so the words are actually best. Four times four, etc. And he has an idea, maybe about hitching a ride on a comet that's approaching. The Earth people keep sending him messages about solar phenomena and atmospheric conditions. And the message "comet coming toward Earth and Mars" seems significant.
Nate:
I thought he was going to go in a totally different direction with this, because I guess I've just been preparing myself for comet apocalypse stories and things like that.
JM:
Oh, yeah. I kind of thought that, maybe.
JM:
But then I thought, well, yeah, but it would make sense for him to... Like, that would be so Jules Verne too, just hitching a ride on the comet.
Nate:
Yeah, it's an awesome image.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
He learns about Earth time as they designate ascending period, as it takes four and a half minutes for light to travel between the planets. 774 has giant robot servitors carrying stuff as he flies aloft in an ornithopter. I don't know where the first iteration of an ornithopter is, but I thought this was cool.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
The flying craft that everybody uses in "Dune" to get around, and among many other things.
And he heads for a distant valley that hasn't been visited by anyone else for perhaps thousands of years. And there's descriptions of the canals, which are artificial gorges. And a huge machine is constructed by his robots. Now on Earth, the Professor Waters, his daughter Yvonne and Jack Cantrill have been receiving signals from old faithful for nine years. Now he's gone silent. The professor has an observatory somewhere in the United States, I think, in the desert somewhere. This is where they have been monitoring Martian communications. As yet, the humans have no spaceflight.
On Mars, no one has ever disobeyed the command from the authorities. But 774 is convinced of the relevance and value of his work, even if the authorities are not. And he has decided to rebel. Cantrill thinks he knows what's up. Old faithful, 774, is telling them to expect him.
Now 774 goes to an underground Martian city where there are weird boxes containing eggs, one of which contains his offspring. And there's some loving touching. And he returns to his secret valley encampment and blasts off towards his comet.
Nate:
I thought he was going to have more obstacles leaving. I mean, they set up this whole rulers system, I guess, the shadowy agency who...
JM:
But it's almost like they don't care. I mean, he's gone. But I mean, there are sequels to the story that go a bit more into that. And I don't know, we'll talk about that briefly, but I didn't read the sequels. According to Bleiler, they're both inferior to the story.
Gretchen:
I did want to mention concerning Bleiler, you know that Gallun is a good writer, because for the most part, all of the stories do have longer comments talking about how good they are. Which is not something you see with many other writers.
JM:
Yeah, that is true. Yeah, there's been a little bit extra time on him. And I do think he deserves it. I actually did read another story of his, "Davy Jones Ambassador". And it was very similar to this one, except the alien was under the sea.
Gretchen:
That was actually one of the other choices that I had for this episode before I found out you were doing Gallun.
JM:
Yeah, that's cool. That would have been a good one to do as well. I really enjoyed that. The forward by Pierce in "The Best of Raymond Gallun" actually quotes that story. And it was so fascinating to me that I wanted to read it because this alien had actually come into possession of books from humans and had learned to communicate by reading books and figuring out what the language was in the books. But it didn't have any other way of communicating either. So the story has this one explorer going into this bathysphere and coming against this weird undersea culture. And the one representative who's like, I am your student, do not die before I get to you. And he's communicating with him in this really weird way and he can only do it by writing. So that's the only way they can communicate. And it's interesting.
Again, strange hints at some very different thought processes, which seems to be something that Gallun is into portraying.
Nate:
So yeah, I mean, I'm not saying it was a bad point of the story. I just thought I guess the expectations are is that there would be kind of some kind of conflict between 774 and the rulers where he just like pretty much walks off and this goes away.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I think that Gallun even like handwaves it away where like everyone just knew that 774 was like too obedient of a citizen to really try to avoid his order, this order that he was going to die.
Nate:
Yeah. And the order like has been obeyed always like that somebody would disobey the order is like totally unheard of, which I thought was another interesting touch.
JM:
Well, it seems like there maybe aren't that many Martians left. It's like, I don't know, I mean, things have gotten into such a pattern that again, it doesn't occur to anybody to disobey. And this person is just remarkable in his way. And like the people of Earth, he is an explorer and he's curious about things and he wants to learn things. And so it's almost like it's suggesting that nobody else on the planet is engaged in the kind of work that he's engaged in. So even the idea of blasting off into space is like unfamiliar to his neighbors. So the fact that he might do that doesn't really occur to them. And so they don't really do anything to stop him.
Like I said, the sequels do go into his fellow Martians a little bit more. And they, I think by the third one, they pretty much become like pulp villains.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know that I don't think that was in the agenda here.
So, but the acceleration is very intense and his wispy form almost doesn't make it. And he is battered and bruised and some of his limbs are broken. Still, he remains conscious long enough to manipulate the controls. The whole world is watching now and Waters thinks he detects a disturbance in the comet's gaseous atmosphere after a dot speeds away from Mars.
The comet passes over and nothing seems to happen. And the three observers in their stockades start to think nothing's doing. But a mile away from the observatory, something crashes to Earth. No one's around to see it anymore. Yvonne though hears a noise in the night and quickly she figures out that something is up and something is on the barbed wire fence. So she pulls a gun out of her drawer and goes to get the others saying something is trying to break in.
And I kind of like how proactive she is about all this. Like she doesn't really, you know, she's just like, just grabs her guns like, hey, something's coming.
Gretchen:
Yeah. It's kind of a refreshing character compared to some of the other female characters we've gotten through these weeks.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely true.
Nate:
This scene specifically reminded me of the scene in "Back to the Future" where he just crashes the DeLorean into the farmhouse and gets kind of chased away. But then he comes up on his father who is, I guess, sees him in the suit and gets freaked out. And he has like been reading a copy of, it's not Amazing Stories. I forget whatever pulp fake name they made up for the movie, but it's something along those lines. Like clearly one of these pulp magazines.
JM:
Oh man, I must have, I must have missed all that.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
So they see 774 on his mobility machine and they approach the cylindrical thing that has weird appendages and a head on top and Jack starts sending out "Hello Man of Mars" signals.
Old Faithful does signal back but weakly. He's not doing too well and can't control his robot, which falls over and strikes the house pretty much eviscerating most of the building. I think it's kind of cool as kind of ahead of the time that this guy's basically in this like giant travel machine. This is like hulking great robot and it could be pretty scary looking, but it's just like, you know, it's just a conveyance, nothing more really. These people have obviously figured out ways to build machines that build other machines that can basically like, I don't know how their forms have evolved over time. Maybe they used to be more like resilient, but it seems now that they're a little bit fragile creatures, perhaps because Mars is so old and desiccated and they've been like used to breathing this extremely rarefied atmosphere.
But Old Faithful himself tumbles out of the burnt out machine and he looks very weird and alien to the humans. It's blood though is red like theirs. Yvonne can see that the creature is hurt, but the idea of getting a doctor's absurdity, she notes as soon as she blurts it out.
Old Faithful is in agony and having trouble breathing, which it takes him a while to realize the atmosphere is much thicker than that of Mars and he's literally drowning in it. And unfortunately, though they rig up a vacuum tank in a shed, Old Faithful number 774 does not make it and this is really sad.
The omniscient narrator speculates on what 774 might have been thinking in his final moments and about his offspring waiting in the buried nursery on Mars. Jack is oddly touched and feels bad about turning the dead Martian into a specimen for study. They notice Old Faithful has a tattoo on his skin and they decide to go and look for the spacecraft he came in on.
They examine the wreckage, which is quite mysterious. It's hard to determine what anything is for. There is a drum that contains charts and drawings and other useful paraphernalia and Dr. Waters thinks in here are some plans for constructing a spaceship.
Professor asks Yvonne and Jack, now married, if they'd like to go to Mars with him someday. They think it'd be a fine honeymoon, a million times better than Seattle. Even if they were pickled and put in a museum like Old Faithful was. And that's the end of the story.
Gretchen:
A bit of a sitcom moment at the end. It's kind of like those TOS episodes where they have a more lighthearted moment at the end right before the credits.
Nate:
On the whole, the end was kind of sad. I'm glad they just didn't shoot Old Faithful.
JM:
Well, yeah, that's kind of what Gallun was going for. He didn't want that. He thought there was enough of that, so he wanted to do something different. And Asimov said, in his opinion, it was this story. And I guess probably Weinbaum's, which was published around a similar time, "The Martian Odyssey" sometime in 1934. I don't know what the month was offhand, but he said like "Old Faithful" kind of set the pattern for more sympathetic portrayals of aliens. And he said that was kind of in the air as well. I don't know how, sometimes with Asimov, he's very chatty and very convincing and fun to listen to. Sometimes I have to say, take some of what he says with a grain of salt. But he says that because of World War II, people were really thinking about these kind of things. It wasn't that time yet, but Hitler's rise to power was well known as well as some of his ideas. The extremity of it was not even anticipated by anyone, I think, in the United States at that time. And I think that's something that we now keep in mind as reading all of these. And we started commenting on this when we were doing the Wenzel Ellis story. But like the Second World War might have influenced a lot of these stories in different ways had they been written afterwards. But they were written before. And I think there's a lot of uncertainty in the air about things like this.
And I don't know, like it's just interesting reading about Gallun because yeah, I mean, when we hear a lot from him, he is kind of old and cantankerous and funny. But he does seem like a genuinely pretty open-minded and like progressive person who doesn't really like, you know, subscribe to... I mean, we'll get into it a little more towards the end of the episode, but his ideas about like the way he was kind of annoyed with Campbell and he kind of made fun of his beliefs and stuff like that, he didn't really fit in with that crowd too much. I think that also could be part of why he's an almost forgotten author and it's kind of interesting to read his reflections on that. He is a little sad, but at the same time, he seems grateful to have seen a lot of the world and to be, as he put it, solvent in his old age.
In that conversation in 1988, he is pretty close to being in his 80s and, you know, it's like definitely the perspective of a very old person looking back on his past. And, you know, also still thinking about the future, though, like his comments about computers are funny, not knowing where to put it and thinking about computers in the 80s. Yeah, they were bigger.
Gretchen:
And I like that it kind of also gives the mental image of him having just so much stuff like memorabilia and stuff around his house or something.
JM:
Yeah, I kind of picture that too.
Nate:
Yeah, certainly a career in science fiction like some of the other authors, and I'm glad that interviews like that exist with these kind of people at the end of their careers where they can really look back on everything and just kind of give you a tour through their lives. Like some of the other authors that we've covered so far, we don't really have that. We're just kind of guessing at their motivations and why they were writing stuff.
JM:
Yeah. And the way he works in the scientific description here is pretty good. Like I said earlier, there's only one point where I think he gets overboard and that's not because of anything he describes. Like I think it's really charming the way he just like describes how the Martian potentiometer works. But he just, I don't know, goes, he describes it and then he just summarizes what he said. It's almost like he's just making sure he's thinking about like, okay, how young are some of the readers here? Maybe they don't quite grasp what I'm trying to say. Maybe I don't entirely. Let me just summarize it.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it does feel similar to "Sidewise in Time" when talking about the multiple universes. It's almost like the writer has to check in with you to make sure you got it all and like, do you get it after I've described it? Do you want me to say more? Should I say more about it?
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah. I know some of the magazines have tried to do like reader surveys to capture demographics and things like that. But as we'll see in the next episode, some of the fanzine creators and early authors and readers of this stuff are like in their young teens.
JM:
Oh, yeah.
Nate:
That's when some of them become like super fans who are...
JM:
We are seeing as we move through the thirties how a lot of these people are growing up.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I have more to say about that as we get into the Campbell era. So there's actually quite a lot. It's really interesting looking at pretty much this entire decade in miniature in science fiction magazines. And in a couple of episodes, I want to focus on one specific issue. But for now, I think this is a really good approach. But here we see a story that was apparently quite well appreciated and well liked by the readership. And I don't know, some of those other stories from around this time seem like they're also really cool.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, I definitely want to read more of Gallun. He seems like he really captured different species in a way that you don't see other writers around this time doing.
Nate:
Yeah, likewise. I really enjoyed this one a lot and I was impressed with his handling of the subject matter because, you know, like you said, it's quite atypical of the things that you see in the pulps at the time.
JM:
Yeah. It also reminded me of the first of the Arelsky stories we did recently.
Nate:
Oh yeah, definitely.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah. There's some interesting parallels with that. There's some interesting parallels with "Edison's Conquest of Mars", where we get these descriptions of all the canals on Mars, which is seem to be a running theme for all the Martian stories we've done, more or less, is using them in some way, either speculating what they are or what have you.
JM:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, Mars as an old and dying civilization, like that seems to be the general, like it's almost, it's really interesting to me. Like, first off, he's kind of harping on a bit in his older years about how science fiction got too into interstellar travel.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I kind of think it's funny because I can see what he's saying, but at the same time, it's like, I know that's a reaction to the fact that we did actually take a pretty good look at Mars that we kind of are pretty sure that no intelligent life could exist there. And so obviously, like, in order to keep science fiction thinking about strange new worlds and strange life and new civilizations, we have to look outward, right?
But Gallun's answer to this would be, well, you're just not imagining an alien enough life form that can survive in a way that you can't even envisage.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And he even blamed some of the science fiction editors of the time for being too short-sighted to see things like that. Like, T. O'Connor Sloane, for example, he was an old man in the 30s. He didn't believe that humanity would ever travel into space.
Nate:
It's kind of interesting, some of the attitudes at the time. We looked at the letters for when we did the Amazing episode and that one person wrote in saying that they don't think a rocket will ever reach the moon. I've seen some other complaining about other rocketry things like that, where we did accomplish that. And I think it's kind of nitpicking and pedantic to sometimes criticize science fiction for failing to predict the future. As it's not like science fiction, only purpose is to accurately predict the future.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I think that it's important to think about how science fiction doesn't just talk about the future, but also the present.
Nate:
Yeah, exactly. And I think that is really the sole purpose of science fiction is to talk about the present, but use the future or other fantastic concepts that rely on science in order to do that. And that's when the genre is really at its best. But it is kind of interesting how forward thinking some of these authors are early on in some ways and how they aren't in other ways.
JM:
Oh, yeah.
Nate:
It's kind of charming to read sometimes.
JM:
Yeah, definitely. I also think he was probably influenced by the fact that, yeah, he said something like, well, people at this time thought that thinking about space travel was as reasonable and relevant to society as making mud pies. Or something like that. And I mean, I remember the mud pies part specifically, and he was just basically saying that to illustrate that at that time. It was so frustrating because people like him were all into this idea of traveling into space and how interesting and important it really was. And nobody was really on board. And I think that would sort of change, especially as the so-called golden age went on in the 40s and into the 1950s. Rocketry became a really big thing and the United States, NASA, was important. And we had people like German rocket scientist Willie Lee who will come up later on and in the Campbell years. And I don't know, it's just, it's really interesting to me how all this ties together. I feel like, in a way, even though nobody told Raymond Gallun that he had to die, in fact he had many great years ahead of him, he was kind of feeling like nobody's understanding how important this is. So he was kind of pointing himself in Old Faithful's shoes a little bit too. And being like, what if this culture on Mars, like nobody thinks that's important too, but they're dying. And if only they could spread to other planets, maybe they would survive. And maybe that'll be our position in a few years.
And he did write two sequels. One was "The Son of Old Faithful", which came out in, I believe, July 1935. So not long after this story. And the third one was "Child of the Stars" and both these stories concerned a lot more the Martians and their civilization. Son of 774 is indeed the offspring mentioned in this story. So Gallun figured out a way to, again, I don't really think that his intention was to do a series. I think that this story was just really popular and people were asking for more.
Nate:
Were those both in Astounding?
JM:
They were all in Astounding. Yeah. So, I don't know. Again, I did not read them. I read "Davy Jones", which is a totally different, like, not, you know, not part of the same thing. But like I said, according to Bleiler, they're not as good as this. And his descriptions definitely seem like, especially by the third one, it's a lot more standard.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
The standard stuff. I don't know that his heart was as... I feel like this was coming from a place of passion anyway. So it's not unusual that people want sequels and then the sequels are just not not desirable, which is, again, something we may talk about soon.
Nate:
Yep, absolutely.
JM:
Definitely recommended. Definitely one of the best of the 30s magazine stories I think that we've read so far.
Nate:
Yeah, I thought this was great. Definitely again, recommended very much.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
I think that's that's pretty much all I have to say, but I definitely think that the listeners should read this. I thought this story was a revelation in a way like it definitely make me think of the reason why people really get into stuff like Star Trek 30 years later, over 30 years later for like the exploration of strange life and so on. And it became kind of mainstream, but even so, like, not really. I mean, I don't know. I mean, even now, a lot of people think of science fiction in terms of alien invasion stories, and those are a lot of fun. But I mean, when they're done well anyway. But I also think making contact with the sympathetic alien is the dream of a lot of people, right? Especially if you're a certain mindset that you like to daydream about this kind of thing. And maybe you feel a little bit frustrated by society, and you think there should be a shakeup. And you're like, what would happen if we came into contact with something otherworldly that was very strange, but not necessarily inimical. It didn't hate us.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I feel like you definitely see more of that even since like new wave science fiction. It does feel like that became a little more popular. I think, you know, like we were saying with Gallun, he was one of the first, I think, that led to that.
JM:
Yeah, absolutely.
Nate:
You know, one thing that is pretty cool is he does keep the kind of grotesque nature of the creature. Like I was picturing 774 to look like inside of a Dalek or whatever when it just spills out of the metal spacesuit. Kind of interesting, gross, Weird Tales type of imagery there.
Gretchen:
Yeah, just kind of a bit of a blob with these tentacles.
JM:
Yeah. And I kind of enjoy how he like, he does kind of revel in the fact that the audience, he thinks the audience would probably find it unappealing. And he kind of goes on at that a little bit and then he draws back and tries to be like, but imagine how it thinks about you.
Nate:
Right.
Gretchen:
Yeah. He recoils when the others try to reach out to him.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. I think definitely in the sequels, it does seem like there gets to be some very casual interaction between the species. So even though they may not be up to the standard of this story, I don't know, but it does seem like he's kind of developing that familiarity over the trilogy. And the last one, there is actually a little girl kidnapped and she's kidnapped because she stows away on the son of Old Faithful's ship. And she's kind of obsessed with him, like not in a romantic way. She's like nine or something like that, but she's like so fascinated by the alien that she doesn't want to leave him. And she ends up being endangered because like now the Martians are, they've discovered 774's experiments and they've learned from them. And now they're like expansionists and colonialists all of a sudden.
Nate:
Yeah. Of course.
JM:
Yeah. So that's pretty much, I think, part of the plot.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Sounds like fun, but a little more standard, maybe.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. "Old Faithful" was awesome. And I'm glad to have discovered this and the next story are completely new to me. And I think both of them are revelations in their own right, especially the next story, which it's not really like a spoiler or anything like that. But I think it's probably the most impactful story that we're reading this month.
Nate:
Yeah. It's going to be a lot to think about for sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
And that is Harry Bates and his story, "Alas, All Thinking".
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)
Pierce, J.J. - introduction to "The Best of Raymond Z. Gallun" (1978)
Tymn, Marshall B. and Ashley, Mike (eds.) - "Science Fiction, Fantasy and Weird Fiction magazines" (1985)
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