(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: tense eerie synth)
Harry Bates biography, non-spoiler discussion
Gretchen:
Hello, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Gretchen, and I'm joined with my co-hosts, Nate and J.M. This is the fifth segment of our first episode, covering the science fiction magazine Astounding Stories. It covers the work "Alas, All Thinking", by Harry Bates, previously an editor for the magazine. If you would like more background on the era of Bates's editorship, you can check out the first segment of this episode, where we also discuss the story "The Cave of Horror by Captain S.P. Meek. For background on the era of F. Orlin Tremaine's editorship, when Bates's story was published, please listen to the segment on Murray Leinster's "Sidewise in Time".
Harry Bates, or Hiram Gilmore Bates, was born on October 9th, 1900, to a family with a tradition of repairing clocks, a skill he himself practiced for some time. He attended both Allegheny College and Pennsylvania University each for one year, but he did not earn a degree from either. He claimed, "I could see no sense in paying other people money to see that I studied."
Eventually, he moved to New York. His first editing job was for the magazine The Beachcomber in 1922. He worked for Clayton magazines and became the editor of Astounding, as J.M. mentioned, as well as Worldwide Danger Trails, Strange Tales, and Soldiers of Fortune. He edited for Clayton up to the point Astounding was sold to Street and Smith. While he had some favorite writers in the genre, including Murray Leinster, Bates was not personally that much of a fan of sci-fi and could be quite a harsh editor, considering himself a Dr. Jekyll while at home and a Mr. Hyde while at work. In fact, he provided one plot idea, something he often did for writers, to a personal friend, Arthur J. Burks, though he would say, "Burks is a hack writer and he turns out some terrible stuff, but I make him write good stories for Astounding."
Besides being an editor, of course, Bates did do some writing. He was a reporter for a Philadelphia newspaper and wrote a number of sci-fi stories himself. His most famous story was "Farewell to the Master", which he sold the rights to to be made into the film "The Day the Earth Stood Still." After his job at Astounding and his selling of "Farewell to the Master", Bates unfortunately did not end up doing well financially. He did not do many interviews nor did he republish any of his works leading to them nearly getting lost to time.
Near the end of his life, he was living in quite impoverished conditions. He died in September of 1981.
"Alas, All Thinking" is from the June 1935 issue of Astounding after his time as editor and it's pretty much as bleak as it seems Bates' life was near the end. This is probably the one that I've heard both of you say also was the most surprising for both of you and it was for me as well.
JM:
The story really surprised me in a lot of ways. I was familiar with Bates a little bit. I've read "Farewell to the Master". Several years ago I got the e-book of the complete Harry Bates and the stories are organized into chronological order and often when I look at short story collections, I will not start at the beginning and I'll just kind of randomly read titles that sound interesting but I don't always do that and I made the unfortunate choice of not doing that this time because the early stories in that collection are his earliest I guess, like 1929 roughly I think is where it starts and they're not very good.
It kind of made me wonder if "Farewell to the Master" was a fluke I guess a little bit because I do like that story quite a bit and it's different than the film as well. But after reading this, I will get into this more later on after we've talked about the story but I did read another story after this. A couple actually, and because this story really had me thinking about what he meant and why he was making this story the way it was and after reading one of his very last stories, I think I do have the answer and I think I understand why like Gallun was saying that he thought yeah, he was a very nice person and I felt bad when he died and also I guess knowing that one of the reasons why he couldn't work afterwards very much was that he was apparently had like severe arthritis in his hands and that just made me wince. Hand injury and hand trauma is my big thing. Probably revealing something now somebody's going to use against me.
Yeah, so I don't know, I just say this like, but yeah, this story was really good. I didn't know what to expect. I mean, none of the stories this time are really bad, I guess. I mean, I guess "Creatures of the Light" is pretty ridiculous but it's still fun to read. But I wouldn't know that any of them would be like this. I don't know, I learned apparently this was one of Philip K. Dick's favorite science fiction stories.
Nate:
You can definitely see that, yeah.
JM:
I don't know, this story made me, it gave me a lot of thoughts and the position I was in when I read this story, okay, so the night before I had gotten together with my buddy and we went to this Mexican restaurant and came back and drank at my place like all night and he had to go to work early next morning, but we stayed up to like three, and I didn't sleep all that well. It was good, I felt good and everything, but I like woke up as soon as he left and I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to get back to sleep. So I read this story in that frame of mind and I was feeling kind of hungover and I was kind of like, I don't know if it just made me more receptive in a way and it made me feel more, but I was like kind of at that kind of point where you're like you just had a night of drinking and you're feeling kind of a little bit like down maybe a little bit and reading this story actually, I'm really like, I don't want to say it made me feel worse but I couldn't stop thinking about it all day. So yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, this definitely has a lot going for it both in terms of the philosophical implications which kind of tie into the themes that were covered in "Creatures of the Light" though I think this handles the material in a much better and more intelligent fashion and also it has really, really cool imagery that it's just very surreal and strange and horrific at times. I mean, it definitely has a lot of the weird fiction kind of gross creature description.
Gretchen:
There's that moment where there's something that isn't even described and it kind of leaves it to your imagination how you're supposed to view it which feels like something that's done in quite a lot of weird fiction and horror when people think of that genre.
JM:
At this time when the protagonist doesn't describe something you kind of feel like he's shying away from it because he's such a piece of crap.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I have to say I didn't know if I should say it because I didn't want to spoil too much but I think it's pretty obvious when you get into it that I didn't mean for both of my stories to feature main characters that are just awful people. That just seemed to just happen.
JM:
Yeah, although the other one had so many other things going on and so many distractions, I don't know, I didn't hate him as much as I could have even though he was an asshole. There was so much other stuff going on.
Gretchen:
In this one you can't really escape it because it is from this person's point of view. He's always there kind of telling you what his thoughts were and I think that's the difference with "Creatures of the Light" and "Alas, All Thinking" is there is a sort of ambiguity of message there but this is definitely much more intentional than "Creatures of the Light" where it just kind of feels like it wasn't handled correctly. Here there is sort of this gray area that you can kind of, you kind of feel that you know how you're supposed to react to the character but there's because it's through the character there is almost again like I said a kind of morally gray area.
Nate:
And I kind of wonder if he avoids some of the black and white flawless hero and then the ultimate evil villain or whatever, those one-dimensional characters, because he had such a disdainful taste for a lot of the science fiction genre writing. I mean presumably during his editorship at Astounding he probably rejected hundreds of stories that were just totally formulaic garbage.
JM:
It's interesting because his earliest stories are definitely more like that. They're more like adventure stories and they feel really derivative and not very good. So it's almost like freeing himself from being editor suddenly let him expand and become more dedicated to writing and writing better stories. It's just weird but like I feel like maybe he thought the other thing was more like Astounding's mandate and he just had to stick to it and then maybe he kind of realized that wasn't so and I don't know I wonder if that kind of coincided with him becoming more of a fan of science fiction as well.
Nate:
Yeah I think he mentioned in that interview piece from the fanzine, what was it, Science Fiction Digest that his science fiction literary taste was acquired and he just thinks a lot of it is total hack work.
Another one of those fanzine commentary pieces they were talking about how even by the mid-30s a lot of the magazine pulp work was just formulaic stuff churned out like a factory, and I was thinking to what you were saying in a couple episodes back, Gretchen, when we covered the E.M. Forster story when he was talking about Samuel Butler disrupting the factory of English literature or whatever, by the early days of the pulp era the factory is already churning out hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of formulaic stories to the point where the editors and the audiences just starting to grow sick of them and kind of waxing nostalgic about the good old days of the Argosy and the All-Story magazine stories.
JM:
Yeah I can definitely see that. Ashley does not speak of Bates well as an editor I think I mentioned that in the Bates segment. He doesn't think that during his time as editor much in the magazine was of value of course that's a personal opinion but from what it sounds it's quite formulaic and the stories we read early on I mean I spoke positively of them I think I've found good things to say about them but they were definitely a bit flat. I think we still chose alright, we chose like interesting stories that were good and S.P. Meek is all over during that time.
Nate:
Oh yeah Dr. Bird was like the house character for the magazine I mean he was in...
JM:
Right but he wrote a lot of other stuff too he's got like three stories in that "Before the Golden Age" anthology edited by Asimov and none of them are Dr. Bird stories either. But yeah Harry Bates. I'll have more to say about that after we talked a little more about the specifics of the story because I had questions that were nagging at me and I think that was why one of the reasons why I was thinking about it so much.
Nate:
Yeah it definitely poses a lot of interesting philosophical questions on, I guess the nature of the human race and what does it mean to have a civilization and to exist and things like that and this story I think is probably the best out of the six that we've covered tonight or at least my favorite, it's kind of hard to judge between this one, the Campbell, and the Gallun because I really liked all three of these a lot but I think I like this one slightly more than the other two I would say.
JM:
Yeah I would say so I mean "Who Goes There?" is very iconic but I don't even know it's almost become larger than itself associated with the Carpenter film and the Howard Hawks film and all that and the story is really good and I'm glad that it exists but I don't know that it's necessarily even my favorite iteration of that story.
Gretchen:
Yeah I think "Who Goes There?" divorced from the adaptations that it inspired and I think is not my favorite when compared to "Alas, All Thinking" just on its own. I think this one is my favorite as well.
Nate:
Yeah really outstanding and I mean I guess Bates isn't that consistent of an author, but this one certainly deserves to be more well known than it probably is.
JM:
The DickHeads podcast did cover this story too. Yeah that was one thing I discovered I've listened to a bunch of their episodes and I know I've seen their posts and stuff and I think they follow us as well.
Gretchen:
I highly recommend that people read this story if they want to read any of the stories we've covered tonight I think this is the one to read.
JM:
Yeah I would agree with that. I definitely think that the three that Nate mentioned all together are the best of a lot and I suppose what one might choose might depend on how they feel, but yeah I would say this is the one that has the most lasting impact and I'm never going to forget this story, which is always a good sign. Sometimes when you read a lot of stories over the years and you forget the details, you might remember the name but you don't really remember what it was about. I don't think I'm ever going to forget this one.
Gretchen:
Although I guess I would say this one is very bleak, so maybe after this one you should read "Old Faithful" because that one is a little bit more hopeful than this.
JM:
So all throughout this talk we've kind of, I think, collectively a little bit made it sound very heavy and almost doomful, but it's actually got a bit of humor to it for sure. It is also kind of funny in a couple parts. So there's one part in particular that makes me chuckle still. I'll make sure to mention it when we get there, but he plays the silly cheesy romance for laughs basically. It's like what we saw in "Creatures of the Light" but like turned on its head and kind of with the silly kick-me message on its back. It's like he edited too many issues of the magazine with that kind of thing in it and so we wanted to make a mockery of it. Here's our Adam and Eve. What do you think of that?
Nate:
It wouldn't surprise me if that's exactly what he was doing is subverting a lot of those tropes that appeared in some of the more formulaic stories and the more unsubtle religious references like Adam and Eve that we saw in "Creatures of the Light" and probably a billion other stories.
JM:
Yeah, and it's possible to do that with some grandeur and cleverness still I would say but I don't think that she really pulled that off in that story.
Gretchen:
No.
JM:
So I just wanted to add that I did want to say like it's a heavy story but it's also kind of silly in a couple of parts in a cool way like he knows because he's been doing this editorial job for a few years probably not liking it very much, and I kind of like to imagine he's trying to look for a new position and he's sitting there one day maybe drinking his coffee and looking through the newspaper and going, man, sometimes I miss that science fiction stuff and just kind of coming back to it as a writer.
"The Complete Works of Harry Bates" that I found most of his stories are actually from around this time or earlier and "Farewell to the Master" and then and yeah after that he slowed down a lot and he only wrote a few stories like after that. The one that I want to mention later is "Death of a Sensitive" from 1951 but we'll get to that after the end of this story. It's not a sequel or anything but it's an interesting follow-up and especially sad I think give it what seemed to have happened to him.
(music: scouring noisy synth over spacey phasing)
spoiler summary and discussion
Gretchen:
"Alas, All Thinking" is in the form of a report from Charles Wayland for the National Lunacy Commission.
JM:
I was just tickled by the fact that there's a National Lunacy Commission in this story.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I do like the name.
JM:
It's like I'm pretty sure that's not a thing but in 1963 it will be and if he was actually thinking about this in 1963 he would have been like, yeah, there should be a National Lunacy Commission.
Gretchen:
I wouldn't be surprised if it did exist at some point.
JM:
It also made me wonder though if this was going to come into it sometime, like I wonder, oh, is there like more lunacy than usual? Like is this a thing now? And I thought he was going to do something with that but he didn't which is fine. Like I think this beginning part is cool for getting you into it and stuff. It doesn't really tie in as much at the end and I kind of like wish it did almost but it's a pretty minor criticism all told.
Gretchen:
Yes, so the National Lunacy Commission is the report this is going to detailing his conversations with the physicist Harlan T. Frick. Wayland says that due to the report Frick should not be called upon to use his talents again that it is reasonable for him to live out his life without utilizing his potential the way he wants to live.
He starts telling of spending an evening out with Frick not for the first time that week and Miles Matson, a chemist, with the intention of psychoanalyzing the former for the committee. While waiting for the other two, Wayland notes that Frick had reacted in their previous conversations when the phrases brains, love, and human progress are mentioned.
He is astonished at how Frick could spend 11 years after his graduation from college and was completely dedicated to his work and produced numerous discoveries only to suddenly leave his lab behind and past the past two years living completely idly. Matson arrives after Wayland has and waiting for Frick, he confesses that he is nervous about meeting the ex-scientist. The two men discuss Frick questioning why he would leave his career behind as he did only to be joined by the subject of their conversation and who, to their surprise, isn't upset by their conversation topic.
Frick declares he will spend the rest of his life away from science and when, emboldened, Wayland asks why.
JM:
He just wants to party all day now.
Gretchen:
Yeah, he just wants to be a playboy.
JM:
Yeah, it's so weird. First I'm like, oh yeah, there must have been some terrible trauma to make him like that and slowly getting more and more exasperated I don't even know if that's the right word. This guy.
Gretchen:
Yes, Frick responds that he has glimpsed into the future and terminated the genus Homo sapiens. So yeah, that does seem like quite a logical trauma that would stop someone from wanting to do anything.
Intending to shock, so Wayland claims, Frick continues to say that he has unfinished business, that of a murder and when Matson suggests it is a joke and refers to Frick's brains, the latter man becomes infuriated, claiming he's dumb. Wayland goads him on asking why he now despises his brains and claiming intelligence is why humans have progressed past other species. Frick argues that humans will not remain the dominant species, that the fish, the Tyrannosaurus rex, and the monkey at one time believed they were the lords of creation, but they were all replaced. Such will be the case with human beings.
Matson challenges Frick, calling him crazy, so Frick offers the two men a further explanation of what he said, as well as the murder he mentioned before, and they leave the restaurant without dining. When they arrive to an empty room in his laboratory building, Frick settles his guests in and he turns serious, beginning his story.
He tells him that he used to be proud of his intelligence and that at one point started to create a device that would allow him to see into the future, a device he never finished, nor ever will. While working on it, a young woman named Pearl appeared in the room the three are currently occupying, coming in a golden cylinder that she stepped out of to reach the floor.
JM:
Her name was actually something unpronounceable, so he's just like, oh, she's Pearl.
Gretchen:
Yeah, that's easier to remember. He notes her appearance, saying her hips were too narrow, her head was too large, and her face was plain and flat, with an extraordinary and forbidding expression of dry intellectuality. When Frick asked her if she was real, she replied it was a question that occupied many of their greatest thinkers, and she sat down onto the floor and launched into deep thought herself, then responded a few minutes later with uncertainty.
Believing this to be a trick, Frick asked her if a magician was outside, and Pearl went into another train of thought that left her sitting and pondering again. While she was in that state, he examined the cylinder she came in, seeing that it contained a pole kept with a plate which had dials and levers on it. Growing scared, he touched her, and she came out of her deep thoughts. Frick asked her her name, and she gave him one that was extremely complex and difficult to master, so he thought of her as Pearl from then on.
She then answered his next question about what the device she arrived in was, replying that it was, in effect, a time machine, and that she came back from the future to see him, for he was something like her. She requested that he take her to see Old New York, but he would only agree if she proved her machine works, which she was happy to do. Frick asked for Pearl to take them back a week, which she does, allowing them to see Frick's past self, who doesn't see them, since the machine had not materialized. Pearl then took them back to Frick's present, and after an outburst from Frick as he's recounting the tale, he tells the other two men that he took Pearl to see New York, as he promised.
She was not impressed, finding people of this era too material, not as focused on living in the realms of the mind.
JM:
She does like some of it, though, that's for sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah, we will be seeing that.
Nate:
She definitely has weird reactions to everything. She's a pretty cool character.
Gretchen:
Yeah, and this is the part that definitely is the lighter part. There are some fun moments here.
JM:
Definitely. Yeah, this whole section is really interesting because you want... I don't know, you almost want to feel more of it. You want to feel more... It sounds like they were having a really busy time, and on top of that, she was doing a lot of reading, and they went and saw all this stuff, and like... I don't know, it's interesting because it's kind of... Hiram there kind of skips over a lot. It doesn't really have that much to say about it.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, in a way, that could have been its own sort of story, is just this... I guess that kind of fits in with some of the utopian narratives where it's just a tour of a certain society, but that would have still been interesting to read more of.
JM:
It would have been interesting ... Well, obviously, I guess it would have been interesting to see this whole story from her perspective. But I'm not saying it's bad that Bates didn't do that. I'm just saying it would be an interesting other take on this. Everything that happened.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
You do kind of see what she's thinking because he talks about what she's saying, but he doesn't really have access to her thoughts. So she's definitely a thinking person.
Gretchen:
Very thoughtful.
JM:
Yeah, and she's quite active for somebody from her time and place, though.
Gretchen:
Pearl promised that if he was a good guide, she would show him what her time was like. She asked him various questions about the city and the people of his time, would sit down anytime, anywhere, when she had to ponder a deep thought, even in the middle of Macy's, and never outwardly expressed any strong emotion besides curiosity.
Pearl then started to grow curious about love and why people dedicated so much time to it. Having come across it in some of the media she had been consuming, including "Romeo and Juliet", she asked Frick to kiss her, and after it was finished, she went into another period of meditation.
She spent the remaining days in New York fascinated by the concept of love, thinking about it and listening to music about it, and then Pearl took Frick to her time about three million years in the future. The time traveler, the machine they used, materialized in a partitioned empty room, and though Frick had many questions, Pearl warned him not to speak, since his presence was not to be known by others. While walking through the room and corridor beyond it, Frick noticed with astonishment that the floor was coated in dust that he shook up as he moved through it.
As they emerged from the building, he was even more shocked to find not some futuristic city, but merely a field. He grew concerned when he realized that Pearl had expected to see this, not having made a mistake. Taking him around the building, Pearl showed him her city, consisting of a dozen square metallic boxes, each one only containing one person. She then revealed that the total population was 40 people and that they were the only community of humans on the planet. When Frick expressed his concern, she called him primitive, obviously expecting quantity of life over quality of life, continuing to say that they have achieved two important things, quality and simplicity.
Frick asked her if he would be able to see the community together in action, to which Pearl replied that they never met in groups, nor did they indulge in actions, but that she could show him two of the older citizens, which wouldn't get her in trouble as adults, unlike the four youths including herself, couldn't see or hear.
Pearl revealed one of the men to him and he gasped in horror at what he saw, a man he describes as a spider with only three legs, who had grown, who had a giant head that was unable to be supported by his weak body, a body which was covered with dust just as the floor of the room was layered with it. Frick then concluded the man was dead, given that he wasn't doing anything, to which Pearl responded that he was meditating. She became indignant when Frick dismissed this, saying that the man represented the peak of human progress.
When Frick questioned how she knew his thoughts were beautiful when she claimed this to be the case, she answered that she could hear them. She explained that they utilized telepathy, which Frick cannot be sensed with, and that unborn children are communicated with in the womb. Pearl was premature, meaning that she didn't receive the same level of training as the other infants, which explained why she was different from them.
The man then opened his slit of a mouth to get a pellet launched into it, which was his sustenance, and this was enough for Frick, who left the house they were in.
Pearl told him that they have an empty house, as one of the elders recently died, and that one of the younger men will replace him, then answered Frick's question about how such people can reproduce by saying that they do so while they are still young like her. He saw one more of the elders, which inspired in him a desire to strangle them, before Pearl started to bring him to the incubators where the infants were.
However, before they could do that, the other youths appeared, and Pearl and Frick had to hide from them. There were three of them, the oldest, a young man leading the group, a younger girl, and a toddler behind them, and Pearl explained that they were heading out for a metaphysics lesson, and that only the youngest two could hear as well as see. Sneaking by the group, Pearl took him to see the babies, which Frick won't describe to his guests, but says he left the room immediately after seeing them.
When Pearl joined him again, she felt maternal towards the infants, then asked if they could kiss again. While they were kissing, the three other youths came in and, in their shock and confusion, broke their necks with their movements.
JM:
That was very shocking.
Gretchen:
Yes, very sudden. Pearl, not emotionally affected by the death, realized her responsibility of looking after the incubators and the elders on her own, and decided to take Frick back to his own time. But Frick refused, claiming he wanted to remain and examine the other devices that might be there besides the time traveler. Pearl eventually agreed to let him stay for three days. On the first day, Pearl came to tell him that something wrong had happened to the incubators and the infants were dead, which Frick confesses he was responsible for, tampering with the machines. Frick also decided to kill the elders, though he wanted to spare Pearl and bring her to his time to live out the rest of her life.
JM:
Yeah, he's like, he puts them on some shitty trial, like some kind of arch magistrate of the world or something like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, he has the same kind of delusions that Minott had in a way. He just really wants to take control of something.
JM:
But for the several dozenth time since starting this podcast, I'm reminded of "The Clouds" from Aristophanes and all these useless underworld researchers and stuff like that. There's kind of similar situations like, oh, what does he do? Oh, he's observing the underworld by standing on his head or something like that. And he's like, well, why? That's what he does. He's a scholar.
But yeah, I mean, this is it. This is what humanity has come to. And he just ends it. It's not too soon for him, I guess. I don't know. I will definitely say more about this when we get to the end.
Gretchen:
I think that something will all be discussing a little bit more because there is a lot to talk about with that. He discussed the killing of the elders as the humane thing to do with her, but Pearl instead implied that he should mate with her to continue the human race, which he requested to have time to think about overnight. He came to the conclusion that he would mate with Pearl and told her so, but only if the elders were killed. Pearl attempted to persuade him to do otherwise, but eventually gave in and granted Frick permission.
Frick went to each elder and, after giving Pearl a chance to plead their case, snapped all of their necks. After Pearl finished a period of thinking, she asked Frick to court her. He ended up spending two weeks with Pearl, kissing her and crooning love songs to her before she proposed they spend some time away from each other.
JM:
And that's the part that cracks me up so much.
Gretchen:
You get to hear some of the lyrics that she requests him to sing.
JM:
Sing something like this, and he's like, Oh sweetheart, it's true, I only love you, and she's like, okay, keep going, I think I feel something.
Gretchen:
Make sure you rhyme love with above.
JM:
And he's like, oh, you marry me, but I don't know, it's weird. It's like he wants this sexual conquest, I guess. It's kind of nasty, really, but it's funny to put him in this position, because he has these false feelings about being some kind of gentleman, I guess. So even though he's just murdered a bunch of people, he's like, oh, I'm going to keep doing what she says and humor her, and like, oh, this is intolerable, I can't stand this. You can't just walk away.
Gretchen:
Oh, because he wants to be the master of the new race of human beings, his physicality and her intellectual prowess. They could create a whole race of great people, perfect people.
Nate:
A new Adam and Eve.
JM:
Yeah, it's almost like he's, you know, he's become like, I don't know, I mean, he doesn't want to stay in that time, obviously, he wants to go back to his time where shit's happening. He still has this idea that I guess he can take her, this whole thing about him becoming a playboy and stuff like that now, it's like that's what he wants to live for is these sexual conquests. And he's, I guess, he's like, you know, he's going through all this rigmarole of describing how plain she is and how unattractive she is. And yeah, like, after two weeks hanging out with her in New York City, you know, he's kind of, maybe this would be cool. She really is from the future, that's pretty far out.
Gretchen:
Yes, she wants to spend some time away from him because that's something that happened in some of the romance media that she consumed. So she showed him how to operate the time traveler so he could go back to his own time, wait two months, then come back to her. Instead, however, Frick went immediately two months into Pearl's time.
JM:
Yeah, and he does a really stupid thing.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
Again. And to do his credit, I suppose, if you call it that, he keeps talking about how much of an ass he is, but it's like nature made me look like an ass or something like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's not him that's the problem. It's just the circumstances he's in. He's completely fine.
When he met with her, she told him she felt he had made a mistake murdering the elders and wasn't pressed to come to the end of their courting yet. Angry and impatient with her, Frick went another year into the future and found her in one of the houses of the elders and she told him she was thinking of him. He traveled 70 years later and found her in the same state that the other elders had been in and Frick remarks that her early difference didn't prevent a similar fate from the rest of the humans. She then managed to ask him to tell her he loved her, which made Frick run back to the time traveler and go back to his own area.
JM:
What did he expect? He left her. He didn't even leave her the time machine.
Gretchen:
Maybe he thought that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Maybe. I don't know.
JM:
It pissed me off so much.
Gretchen:
Not the course of action I would have taken, but that's what Frick does.
After Frick ends the story, he tells the other two men that there had been enough food for her for five years the last time he went. He implies he is going back to kill her, that Pearl's murder was the one he had promised at the beginning of this narrative. The other two men agree to come with him.
He takes them into the time traveler, which he had concealed since the events he related. They come to the house where Pearl is sheltered and Wayland and Matson see Pearl for only a split second before Frick snaps her neck. And they run back to the traveler, which Frick destroys once they return to their present. And that's the end of the human race.
Nate:
Yeah. Pretty wild ending to go out.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
There's a new supervillain in town. His name is Harlan.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
He's ranting at the end and the narrator is like, yeah, he's gone off his head. He's kind of saying it's only temporary, but I kind of wonder if Miles knows. And this is kind of my other thing about this story. I wonder if, do you guys think that it's good that it ends like this, or do you think there should have been another couple of paragraphs just describing what kind of relationship these three had now?
Nate:
I don't know. I kind of like the way it just ends here. I guess it would be needs for some follow up on the lunacy commission or the fallout between Miles and the other characters, but I don't know. Miles blurting like "she blinked" in horror is kind of like the perfect way to go out, I think.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I don't think the story would have been hurt if there was more context added, but I do like that sudden ending. And it feels almost like it's appropriate for the ending to happen after Pearl is dead. Because it really is the end of the human race that we see. And I think it demonstrates how violent the ending was for all the people that were living in that future. That Frick just ends it all, and he's such an awful guy.
JM:
And that's the other thing. Okay, they're alive. From our perspective, yes, it sounds very dull, but they were peaceful.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
This is, again, what gets me thinking. If this story were written even 10 years after this, would it be kind of different? Because people are so concerned, like by 1945, Harry Bates included, I think. I mean, even in "The Day of the Earth Stood Still". He's kind of talking about how humanity is going to destroy itself, right? And the fact that Pearl and her culture are still around three billion years in the future, even if there's only 40 of them and they don't do anything. I don't know. I think that's all right. That's better than blowing everyone up indiscriminately in a two-second atomic flash, right? The thing is, I think that Bates was not short-sighted in doing this story the way he did, because I think a lot of people would have thought, oh yeah, these monsters, they deserve to go.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
It's different because, I mean, the human race has evolved to such a point where existence has completely changed. They talk about the telepathic abilities that the human race has in the future. And presumably the thinkers or whatever we want to call them exist on another plane of existence that Frick can't even begin to comprehend. And he's just afraid of it because the physical existence of these people looks horrifying. I mean, the way they're described is very much like Beksinski painting with exaggerated features and dust everywhere and very spidery-looking features and all that.
But the, I guess, real essence of being the mental state is presumably often some higher plane that the physical world just is so dull and pointless in comparison to that people from our time can't even begin to understand or comprehend or relate to.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I think you get that sense, the scene when Frick begins murdering the elders and Pearl and him go and, like, she tells him the thoughts of all the people that they're about to kill, all of the elders, and I'm sure that people could read those thoughts and think, oh, that's ridiculous. One of them is describing the metaphysics of, like, a hole in the ground. But, I mean, those things could be beautiful and, like, profound, but it's like, oh, they smell bad, they smell musty, so I want to strangle them. And it's, like, obviously I think that what Bates is going for, whether or not people would think that, is that you're supposed to think that Frick is a monster for doing this.
Nate:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, he's definitely not portrayed as a sympathetic character that we're supposed to be rooting for at any point in this story.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
I mean, some of his early interactions with Pearl are kind of charming just because the whole situation between them is, like, adorably awkward in a way.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. And he's taking her around New York and stuff like that, and it's really, it sounds fun, right?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
But when you find out what, you know, once he sees what her civilization is really like, but before we get away from their mechanics of thinking and stuff, I do want to say, yeah, that whole, the thing about seeing into their thoughts and seeing what they were thinking about and how, you know, like, yeah, the hole and all that.
But so, you know, how in "Creatures of the Light", there's the advanced humans that they're depicted as being able to think so fast that they, you know, they outthink us, right? So here it's like Harry Bates is going, well, how about you look at it in another way? They're thinking to us actually seems really slow because they're thinking about every aspect of that thing that they're looking at, whereas you or I are only seeing a little bit of that. So we can say, look at something and say, it's a hole, and we're thinking we're done with it. These people see not just a hole, but they see every aspect of that hole and what that hole means in its history and the geological aspects of it. And who knows what else that we can't even imagine, right?
So when you see into their thoughts, it might not seem like they're thinking quickly. It might not seem, like "Creatures of the Light" is associating quick thought with quick action. And here it's not that. And yeah, it seems like it doesn't really seem exciting to us. But yeah, I mean, I just keep thinking, well, what about the contrast of like, there's three million more years. That's that's so much more than history of humanity has been already, right? Like that's there's so much that could happen during that time. And he's just afraid of, I don't know. Yeah, I think it's the monsters. I think it's like, yeah, their physical appearance, the smell, the fact that they they're wasting away and he's probably worried about his youth. And that's probably why he's like suddenly decided, oh, no more science for me. Like, I'm, I'm just going to have fun now while I can. And he's like thinking existential dread about three million years from now, like some kind of, I don't know, it reminds me of me as a kid being terrified as a five year old because I knew at age 10, I had to get another needle. Like, I don't know.
Nate:
Yeah, heat death of the universe in 15 trillion years or whatever. That's something to be concerned about, right? Yeah, no, I mean, three million years in the future is definitely enough time for the species to evolve past what would probably be genetically recognizable as a modern day human, I would think. I mean, that's a pretty large time scale.
JM:
So I think this story has definitely been interpreted the other way of it. This the story has been interpreted as being, oh, yeah, like that he's right. Like we should. This is awful. Right, we should get rid of anything like that that we see. I personally think that that is an unfortunate interpretation to take away from the story. I don't think that Harry Bates is going along those lines at all.
Gretchen:
And I mean, I think that maybe it's one of those stories that I think it reflects how you feel about this personally. Like, I think that because it's from the perspective of Frick, people who go into the story thinking something similar to that would emerge from the story thinking that Frick did the right thing and that what he did was justifiable.
JM:
Yeah, I do think that that shows an interesting contrast in personality. That divide, I suppose. And I guess stories like this, this is why science fiction is important, right? Because a story like this make you think about something like that.
As somebody who has some physical disabilities and whose parents were told when I was a kid that I probably shouldn't have been born. That kind of, I don't know, that hits home. So, you know, and a lot of people don't think about that shit. So it's really, it's kind of heavy. It's kind of heavy. And I do think like, I don't know, the benefit of hindsight does help us think about this story a little differently, too, because in the 30s, things like eugenics and stuff were quite popular in a lot of, well, especially before the 30s, really, like the early part of the 20th century.
Nate:
Yeah, but it was definitely coming to the forefront around this time with, at this point, Hitler was in power, so it was in the Nazi era. So, I mean, that ideology was very much at the forefront of political discourse. And I guess, in a way, this could kind of be seen as commentary on that whole thing, despite the fact that the people are of the future in what would appear to us as a horrible condition or a really degraded state. Is it morally right to terminate their existence?
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
It does feel kind of like taking the mindset of a eugenicist stance and sort of making it the culmination of that and saying, if you're so concerned with like the physical appearance of people and whether or not they should be eradicated, then maybe, you know, if we can evolve to a point where you would think that they're so different from us, they're the sort of people you would want to get rid of.
Nate:
And not just the physical horror of it, but also tying into their utility as laborers or feeding into a capitalist system. These people don't produce anything or do any work or do any labor. They just kind of sit in this meditative state for literally their entire lives. So they wouldn't be able to function in any kind of society that exists in the 20th century.
JM:
Oh, no.
Nate:
No kind of infrastructure or anything like that.
JM:
He's not thinking about bringing them back. So I don't know. You could have just left them. Like there's only 40 of them left. They're eventually going to die out anyway, right?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know. Let them be in peace. That's all.
Nate:
Yeah. But I guess the mindset that Frick has is that people have to do something to be physically active to, I don't know, not sit around all day to be of use or value of worth of existence. And I think he's probably criticizing that attitude with this.
JM:
It wouldn't be wrong to say that people should strive to be more than that. But again, like, yeah, this is a different time or this is a different society. So it's what's left after all the other degredations, all the other degredations of humanity.
And like I keep coming back to in just a few years, we'll learn a lot more about that in real life.
Nate:
Sure.
JM:
Science fiction will be obsessed with the end of the world, like permanently. I mean, it was a little bit before, but I would say after World War II, it was so much more like, you know, apocalypse is around every corner pretty much.
Gretchen:
Yeah, especially with the Cold War and what nuclear war could mean for civilization.
Nate:
Yeah. The entire world saw Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whereas the 19th century comet apocalypse stories and all that were just kind of theoretical and panicking rather than any kind of concrete possibility of this actually happening.
JM:
Yeah, and they were all about nature. And usually anyway, nature was the cause of the apocalypse. It was some uncontrollable thing. Humans could not conceive, until science became powerful enough, I suppose humans could not conceive that they might actually do something to cause the apocalypse and bring it about.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
And so maybe it's a good thing that Harlan's not going to be doing any science anymore.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
You know, maybe. I mean, he was supposed to be a brilliant scientist and seeing that part of the future apparently scared him from doing more science. So maybe the atomic bomb was set back like another 10 years or maybe some biological agent didn't get invented or something. Who knows, right? Like I said, by the end, he's basically descended into a ranting supervillain. Like he's screaming Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Reminds me of a villain in this Frank Belknap Long story where he's just like randomly screaming out Nietzsche quotes while he powers up this giant cannon that's going to like destroy the world or something like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Why? It can be fun though. The 1951 story I wanted to briefly mention, it's called "The Death of a Sensitive". And it is from this short-lived magazine that Hugo Gernsback started up with Sam Moskowitz as editor. And it's, I don't know how many issues it lasted. It wasn't very long though. And Bates had two stories in the magazine and they were the first stories in science fiction he had written since like, I think just after "Farewell to the Master" or something like that.
And "Death of a Sensitive" is, I'll try to be brief, but it's a story about a guy who works on a newspaper who visits this psychic that he knows and that he's, it sounds like it's kind of one of these like sort of tabloid-y newspapers. They do a lot of stories on like psychics and weird phenomenon stuff. But this guy's a believer and he believes that this guy has true powers. And he's heard a report that he's from the superintendent of the shitty apartment building where he lives, which I kind of wonder if that mirrors Bates' living situation kind of because Gallun was talking about that in his conversation and he's like picturing Bates in this really bad apartment, just sort of dying in poverty and feeling really bad about it.
And it was like, so this guy is living in this apartment and he started having a positive attitude toward cockroaches in his apartment. He's put planks on the floor so that he doesn't walk on them because they're like starting to accumulate on his floor and there's lots of ones that are living and or dead and he's not like, he doesn't seem interested in stopping them or anything like that. And he doesn't go out ever. He barely talks to anyone. The psychic knows and trusts the reporter and so he has him alone in a room and he shows him how these cockroaches wrote on the floor a message. And because he's a psychic, he also feels that he's getting a message, but it won't come clear. And he shows him this message on the floor and it says, "do not kill us".
So interesting kind of, I don't know, it definitely brought home that he'd been thinking about this ever since writing this story almost. Because I guess these creatures that somehow have a psychic link to the earth, like they're so hideous and ugly, right? And they probably look kind of like giant cockroaches and people are like, oh, that's terrible and like bring out the military, just we got to destroy them and like, I just think it's so interesting that Bates started out writing stories that were completely different from this, like really more like stories that we read at the beginning of this episode, like very simple, kind of silly, bad dialogue, like that's the kind of stuff he was writing in the beginning. But something got into his head, something started obsessing him and I think he started kind of seeing how important science fiction really was. And I think maybe in his life, his struggles and stuff, especially after being the editor, he didn't write very much.
But when he did, he was focusing on those concepts, although he did also bring back his Hawk Carse characters, just like Space Adventurer, I don't know, it's like it's like it's Wild West Space Adventure kind of series. I read one of the stories, that was the other story I read by Bates recently, and that was a much earlier one. And yeah, it was pretty silly. He has a black sidekick character who's named Friday, who speaks in dialect and you know, I mean, it's very much of its time. Very silly. And he has this Fu Manchu, like villain character that he always faces off against too.
Mike Ashley thinks that these are like some of the worst stories in the early 30s pulps. Like, I don't necessarily know if I've read enough to agree with him on that, but he seems to have strong opinions about that. And I guess that's what he thought the science fiction readers wanted at the time, and maybe they did. But as we were seeing when we were doing the background to the Tremaine installment, Tremaine was saying, I don't think the readers want that, I think they want more thoughtful stories. So he tried to say, don't write any more space opera, that's kind of what he was saying to his writers, right? And I guess Bates got the message.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, this is certainly above the level of the two stories that we covered in the beginning of the episode, for sure. It's interesting, I guess, that Bates rejected a whole bunch of stories and the stories that he did let through were what they were, I guess an interesting contrast there that he probably grew as a writer out of that whole experience, especially as he said he was pretty disillusioned with the editing of magazines and didn't want to do anything related to editing or production of magazines after Astounding crashed the first time.
JM:
Also it might be worth pointing out that all his early stories were written under pseudonyms.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
He only published a few stories under the Harry Bates name, which was still not his real name, because his name was Hiram.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
But there's only a few stories he published under the Harry Bates name and they're mostly the later ones. I don't know, I guess he felt confident and proud of them enough that in the early ones, also being editor, I think, in Astounding at least, but I mean he did, I think he was in a couple of Amazing issues early on too, although he spoke very disparagingly of that magazine, I don't know, that might have been in something to do with payment at the time as well though, color people's opinions.
But I think obviously being editor sometimes means you probably have to use a pseudonym when you want to get something else done, so it looks weird if your editor has all your stories, you can just use a pseudonym and have as many stories in there as you want. And they did things like that at the time. So many names that you don't recognize and you're like, oh it could be somebody who I just don't know and who only wrote a few stories, but it could also be a name that's familiar to me just writing under something else, right?
Nate:
I know he wrote under Anthony Gilmore and HG Winter with Desmond Hall.
JM:
Yeah, he has a couple of stories in those Golden Age Halcyon anthologies and they're under the name Anthony Gilmore and like I was saying earlier, the annoying thing about these collections is there's no attributions at all, so you pretty much don't know what you're reading and you look it up and you're like, oh I see what year it was published, you kind of guess. It just goes by the names that they were using in the original magazines too. So it's like, they didn't put any extra work into compiling these digital editions, that's for sure, but I don't know, sometimes I guess that's okay, it depends, you know, some of the quality of the stories is sometimes not great and they don't necessarily vouch for all of them, but I mean, it's still good to have this stuff collected somewhere that you can read easily.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, and I definitely would like to read more of Bates, especially the later Bates. I have not read "Farewell to the Master", even though "The Day the Earth Stood Still" was one of the earlier science fiction films I saw when I was pretty young and got me much more into sci-fi than I was before seeing it.
Nate:
Yeah, that's the only one that I'm familiar with that's adjacent to his work, but haven't read any of his other stories, so yeah, would definitely be interested in checking that one out at the very least. It looks like he has a couple other stories published around 1940-ish or so that might also be interesting as well.
JM:
Yeah, "Farewell to the Master" is quite different from the film, it's very short, like it's shorter than this story and it definitely doesn't really have kind of the sentimental feeling that the film has, like the film added the kind of family dynamic aspect to it and the thing about having to experience life with this boy character and stuff like that. It's not really part of a story originally, but it's a really good story with a different tack and the ending is, it kind of explains the title of the story, which is not "The Day the Earth Stood Still", and you know, you wouldn't have any association with that title and understanding, like it's a very different story, but it still tackles a lot of the same themes and I think that, again, the fact that the film came out after World War II was over probably did make a difference, like 1951 was a different time than 1940 and I think that they obviously wanted to pad it out to make it into full film length, so I don't know, it's fine, I mean, it sounds like they didn't really compensate Bates that much for it, but I don't know, I like the film too.
It had interesting development in science fiction and I think that definitely made me undervalued in a way, and yeah, if you want the best of Bates, don't start at the beginning, probably. I wouldn't advise it.
Gretchen:
Check out some of the later ones first.
JM:
Yeah, but again, kind of makes me think like he was a busy editor and he also probably thought, oh, you know, I mean, this is just page filler, right? I don't know, it's just hard to imagine how you could grow from that to something so much bigger so quickly, but he just seems to have done that, and yeah, I mean, I still, I summon the early stuff is fun and, you know, it's silly, pulpy fun, but it's not particularly well written and sometimes it's pretty bad utopian stuff with all kinds of gadgetry and it's the kind of stuff that I think William Gibson was making fun of a little bit in the story "The Gernsback Continuum".
That's why he wasn't a fan of science fiction, I think, because he thought it was all like that. He probably didn't like writing that stuff either.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And I think that can definitely be a problem when you write for the magazines because like, even if it's not the pulp magazines, maybe in their way, the slick magazines were like this too, but you're writing to a formula a lot of the time and the audience and the editorship is supposed to expect a certain thing. So if you can't deliver that thing, you're not accepted into the pages. So it's almost like when somebody told Bates, hey, you can do different, you know, if you want to. I was like, yeah, okay, I guess so. I'd like to picture it like that.
Nate:
And I guess if somebody else's head on the line, if the story doesn't do well when he's writing it versus when he's trying to stuff his own magazine of stories and if it affects sales, there's a problem.
Gretchen:
It's someone else's problem.
Nate:
Pretty much, yeah.
Gretchen:
At that point.
JM:
Yeah. So yeah, we all like this a lot.
Nate:
Yeah, this is great.
Gretchen:
I'm really glad that I chose this one.
JM:
Yeah, me too. Definitely didn't really come across this. Like I had made a list of stories that I might look into and this wasn't really one of them. So it was definitely a good find.
Nate:
No, great one. Yeah, definitely.
JM:
All right. Well, I think it's time to bring up one of the most influential figures in science fiction literature and talk about him at some length. So why don't we do that when we come back?
Bibliography:
"The Astounding Harry Bates" featurette, from "The Day the Earth Stood Still" DVD (2008)
Schwartz, Julian and Weisinger, Mortimer - "Titans of Science Fiction: Interview with Harry Bates", Science Fiction Digest #6, February 1933 https://www.fanac.org/fanzines/SF_Digest_2/SF_Digest_0106-09.html?
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