(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: Zinovy Maiman - "Don't Need Nothin'" on bright electric piano)
JM:
Hello and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm JM here with Gretchen and Nate, and once again we are looking at Russian science fiction stories of the 1920s. You can listen to our episodes on "Steckerite", "Aliens", and "The Death of the Happy City".
Now we're going to be talking about a story called "The Lord of Sound". The name of our writer is Mikhail Efimovich Zuev-Ordynets. He was born in Moscow on May 19th, 1900, and his father was a shoemaker, and Mikhail had an office job in an industrial plant before the revolution. He started to work quite young, I guess, and during the Civil War he was, again, by enlisting in the Army, where he moved his way up, eventually commanding an artillery battery. Sort of a similar background to Orlovsky, but after the war he became involved in local police, and he started writing for the Our World newspaper, and his first fiction was published in 1925.
So the Laboratory of Fantastika considers him to be one of the founders of Soviet adventure literature, and it seems he was a fairly prolific author. His novel, "The Legend of the City of Novo-Kitezh", from 1930, appeared to be very popular at that time. Looks like he had a lot of short story credits, series involving adventures in basically the Eastern lands, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, and stuff. But that kind of style was very popular at that time, too. Even a lot of Western magazines published those kinds of adventure stories. You can trace a line right from that to Indiana Jones and stuff like that.
Nate:
Or even further back to Westerns, I mean, there's a lot of similarities there for sure.
JM:
Oh yeah, yeah. I guess he didn't write a lot of science fiction, I mean, all those adventures, but there were some. And the Laboratory website identifies three, which one of which we're doing tonight, "The Lord of Sound". And also, two from 1929, "The Herd" or "Sheep of Panurge", which is obviously a reference to Rabelais. It seems to be a big story about the experiment, again, controlling the higher nervous activity of monkeys. And entrepreneurs in the West decided to use this scientific achievement for personal gain, replacing the factory workers with monkeys, completely obedient to the will of their masters. So where have we seen that before? Well, a few places. Certainly in "The Defeat of Jonathan Govers" comes to mind with the robots. And I guess, again, increasing the encroachment of automation in the workplace is obviously a serious concern for the workers.
So, but like many of the authors from around then, Reserve Ordinates, ended up on the wrong side of the authorities, and he was arrested in, I guess, the early 30s. And he spent 19 years in the gulag system, about which he wrote an autobiography called "Case No. 179888", which was released in 1950, and moved to Karaganda in Kazakhstan. And I guess he was rehabilitated, which probably means he was exonerated of his adding Bolshevik sentiments or something.
Nate:
Right, exactly.
JM:
At any rate, he did die in 1967. Despite his status as one of the pioneers of Soviet adventure fiction, the Fantastika Laboratory entry seems to be one of the few sources of information available on him. And there isn't really much in the way of examination or criticism, even in Russian, of his work. Nothing in English, of course. Nothing in Russian talking about the story we're going to talk about tonight. But it's an interesting tale, nonetheless.
As previously stated, the name of this tale is "The Lord of Sound", and it was published in the November 1926 issue of the Universal Tracker, as we decided to call it. We're just doing this to avoid having to butcher the Russian names, really. That's the whole reason we're going through all this.
Nate:
Yeah, my Russian pronunciation is still bad, so I'm not going to try to say Всемирный следопыт or Мир приключений, and try to make like I know what I'm talking about, because I'm sure I just butchered those two magazine titles.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
You can't butcher it any worse than I did, so.
Nate:
No, you did good. You did really good.
JM:
Well, I don't know, yeah. This is a pretty cool story. I definitely did get those "Jonathan Govers" vibes a little bit from it, but I like this story a little better, personally. But the ending is definitely sort of, I don't know, a little bit questionable, but at the same time, it's kind of interesting, and I'll tell you how my thought process went as the story went on as we talked about this story.
Nate:
Yeah, there's a couple things I just briefly wanted to mention before we get into the summary is we may have a reappearance of our German scientist friend Charles Steinmetz as the villain. That was the first thing that came to my mind. He also made the appearance in "Creatures of the Light", so I don't know, he seems to get around, though he's portrayed in a much, much more negative light in this story than in "Creatures of the Light".
JM:
Okay, yeah.
Nate:
And I don't know, yeah, it's definitely interesting. I'm glad you mentioned that "Jonathan Govers" because we also get the funny duo of, like, I think it's Jim and Jeff in this story, having their adventures.
JM:
Yeah, Jim and Jeff. Yeah, that's it. Wow, those American names. I will say that this out of all the Soviet stuff we've read so far that's set in the West, which is actually quite a lot. It includes, like, "Dowell's Head" as we previously mentioned.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
This one at least seems to do a fair amount of work to convince you of its setting. Like, as you pointed out in the notes, it's not entirely accurate for certain things like the length of Broadway or whatever, but it's actually the author does seem to do a job of trying to be firm about, yeah, this is actually set in New York and not just some, like, random Western place where it could be anywhere, right? Like, even "Dowell's Head" is like, it's America, there's gambling and stuff, and it's bad.
Gretchen:
Yeah, he did put in a lot more work than some of the other stories that we've read in the setting that this takes place in.
Nate:
Yeah, and it does feel like New York. I mean, so what, if the theater that he's talking about was really a set of row houses, you know, so what, if he gets the length of Broadway wrong, I don't know, it's just, it feels New York-y, and I'm kind of curious...
Gretchen:
I mean, I live in New York and I don't know, I don't know.
Nate:
But yeah, I don't know if he ever got the chance to visit or if he's just like into travel books or maybe he was like a big Edith Wharton fan or something like that. So yeah, it's always fun to see appreciations of New York abroad. And we definitely have that here.
JM:
Yeah. Okay, so I'll get into it. I'm going to talk about the story as we go. The thing about this story is I feel that there's a lot of messaging in it. This is really kind of, there are some cool apocalyptic vibes to it and everything, but it really does feel like this is a polemic of almost like trying to say some things about science and about responsibility. But doing it in a way that's, I don't know, it feels a little different than, yeah, because it's so blatantly anti-capitalist, right?
So we're introduced at the beginning to this character named Jim, who's just waking up in the morning and he finds that he's late for work at the Excellence Sausage Distribution Joint Stock Company. What a great place to work, you can tell, right? And he wonders why, thinking the alarm must have not gone off. And in a fit of rage and he smashes the alarm clock. That'll show him.
But wait, there's no sound when he does it. And he panics as he realizes he's gone deaf. And he runs to the landlord and discovers that she's also deaf. And so is everyone else. And there's panic in the streets of New York. The whole place is thrown into chaos in a matter of minutes. Everything shuts down. Nobody thinks to put a message on the billboards or whatever that are probably already filling up the downtown saying, hey, all the engineers are simple here or something like that. It's just total chaos.
And, you know, during this part, I was just kind of thinking, why are they acting like that? Yeah, I couldn't help myself a little bit. But I think that's kind of part of the point of the story is that so many of these people are just out for themselves. They don't think to assemble in a community oriented way.
So the deafness extends just beyond the city and there's no sign of abatement. But nobody really seems to know anything. And Jim meets one of his coworkers. That would be Jeff on the street. And they finally started to write notes to one another because that's how they realized they could communicate. And this guy tries to push his way through a crowd and he's clocked by a big black guy. And it makes a point of this a couple of times in the story, which I thought was kind of interesting. You know, it's not done in a noble savage kind of way. It's just like this guy's obviously had enough so just punches him in the face and clocks him and he falls over. And the moral of this part of the story is clearly that every man for himself capitalists world, nobody can do anything when the chips are down. They can only think of themselves and there's mass panic and hysteria, despite the boys saying, "do not panic. Think only of yourself."
Yeah, we'll do a Hawkwind podcast one of these days.
Jim finally figures out after all that, trying to get somewhere vague that he doesn't know where. He decides the best thing would be to just go home. So he does that and he starts writing a notebook for posterity, I guess, figuring nobody else has even thought of anything similar for all this. Jim's just a bright office clerk.
Meanwhile, there's lots of descriptions of the surrounding chaos, as well as the rich people trying to get away. Billionaires, arch millionaires and just plain millionaires. And besides them, the prisoners at Sing Sing also break out. So the streets are now full of murders and cowardly rich people trying to escape from the city of New York. Luckily, the urban poor and the workers stopped those damn billionaires from escaping, almost. They still managed to do it by jumping on planes and flying out of the city. Those bastards.
So after four days, the government finally steps in and they send in more police and soldiers who machine gun looters because capitalism.
Nate:
Yeah, that's what they do. That's what they have done.
JM:
Exactly.
Nate:
He's not lying here.
JM:
Yeah, he's not wrong. In fact, the Bolsheviks are blamed in some quarters for the deafness. It must be some kind of weapon, they figure.
Nate:
Another sinister commie plot.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yes.
Gretchen:
The Reds.
Nate:
Under every bed.
JM:
Yeah. And so some of the local factory workers or union representatives, I guess, organize a thing to send a petition to surrender to Moscow. Meanwhile, Senator Outson of the subcommittee examining the New York deafness problem is feeling discouraged. And there's not been any explanation or indication of what's been going on, even though the chaos is being quelled by authorities with guns. So there is a hint that only humans are affected. And I had wondered about all the animals and whether they were also affected. I had a lot of questions during all this and how it was working, but nobody seemed to want to explain, I guess, because there was just so much chaos, right? So I guess the whole idea was nobody was thinking of these things, probably. And I guess I get it. I don't know. I feel maybe my position is a little different. I was just able to come up with something based around what you still have available. It took a while and it took the evil government to step in to make it happen, unfortunately.
So we get a lecture on sound and the human ear, and theories about how the New York acoustic field weapon, or whatever it is, has altered all the sounds to an infra or probably ultrasonic variety. That's the least likely possibility. The other is some kind of noise cancelling way, something which has indeed been demonstrated to work. And you see that in your noise cancelling headphones, the sound out of phase with the first sound and oppositional sound layer. But they can't figure out how such a broad spectrum noise cancelling could possibly exist. After all, it would have to account for all the sounds of New York. Modern noise cancelling headphones use small microphones to pick up nearby sounds. But there's also the question of distance, and the distance must be exact as well. Obviously, they don't know where the emitter is.
So it's now that someone brings in a business card from a professor Art Buckmeister, a radiology expert who sounds like an evil capitalist if I've ever heard one, and claims to have the answer to the sound cancellation problem, and he will reveal all for a high price. And again, very typical capitalist. So the Buckmeister comes into Outson's office, and he is described as a hideous hunchback, and was very disquieting and unpleasant individual. And he's demanding a million dollars, and he speaks only in notes, which is weird, because I thought they were in Washington at this point, but I don't know, I'm not sure. We find out later something about the associate of this guy, but I don't know. This guy seems like he can hear, so I don't really know why they're communicating notes.
But Buckmeister is from Denmark, and he is singularly unimpressed by the report of the scientific subcommittee. He talks or writes, reading this Professor Holgersen character, a brilliant amateur to whom Buckmeister became more or less an apprentice. Now, the whole thing goes "Fortune from the Sky" on us, and it seems like Buckmeister had plans for this sound annihilator they were working on, and wanted to make big money from it. Buckmeister figured it would be an awesome weapon, but Holgersen was a sniveling pacifist and not interested. So, nevertheless, it seems the weapon was used. Anyway, Buckmeister and Holgersen had a huge fight, and the latter cleared off, leaving Buckmeister without a hope in the world of exploiting the machine of the work. And so here's why he wants to get the attention of the authorities. He hopes to sell it now to the American government, if he can show them Holgersen. And he didn't succeed in building the acoustic annihilator, but he was able to come up with a humming device to track the origin of the cancellation emissions.
So, now the Senator and Buckmeister are in New York, somewhere in Yonkers, and they, of course, can hear nothing. Buckmeister has pinpointed the location to an address on Park Avenue, so they go there. And it seems to be a disused theater. Buckmeister showing some of his thievish wildiness picks the lock, and it's indeed Holgersen's home base. The two men are armed, and this assistant guy ushers them in. And there's the lord of sound himself, who happens to be a deaf man. So there's some interesting social commentary, I guess.
But the question of whether he's muted in New York gets asked, and the Dane nods. And he indicates a large machine in the center of the room, and it's the canceling apparatus. It's a complex array of mirrors and coils and cones and stuff, which I think is displayed in one of the illustrations. And Holgersen stops the machine instantly when asked, and boom, suddenly everyone can hear again. Except for Holgersen, of course. His deafness is fairly new, and was brought about by experimenting on himself. And just as he's experimenting now on New York, although on him the effect was permanent.
Holgersen is horrified at the toll his really unethical tinkering has caused. He feels great remorse for all the deaths indirectly caused by him. He just didn't seem to realize the chaos that would be caused. Hey, maybe I get it, maybe I didn't realize either, because I'm like kind of impatient with these guys. Come on, get on with it, do something about this. But no. So he hadn't left the room in three weeks, and he was just watching the machine. Totally oblivious to what was going on outside, even though his assistant had been out there a lot and was trying to tell him. But the problem with that is that his assistant can't read, so I guess they have a communication problem.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Not a very good thing to have with an assistant.
Nate:
No.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
I kind of like that it does boil down a bit to just Holgersen being like, "oh, my bad."
JM:
It's like people are dying out there, and he's just kind of saying...
Gretchen:
Whoops.
JM:
Look at the way the light moves between these columns. No, you don't understand. Breakfast is on the way. The senator said he forgives him utterly, but Holgersen must reveal how the machine works. And the senator senses advantage. Not for any sum of money, though, will Holgersen do this, and he decides to just destroy his device. And he's even presented with half the year's federal budget. And if he doesn't comply, then go to the electric chair. No, that says Holgersen. Get out of here. And the old black assistant shoes them away. And that's it.
I guess he doesn't go to the electric chair. Probably because they can't prove anything. I don't know. The machine's destroyed, so now it's just their word against his. But considering that Outson is a senator, we should be able to prosecute him. But we never hear about that. Instead, we return to Jim, who we haven't seen for a little while, who just writes that everybody can hear again. And the whole thing lasted three weeks. And yeah, that's it. Jim didn't really have anything much to do in the story. But I don't know. His alarm clock anecdote at the beginning was pretty interesting.
Gretchen:
Yeah, well, now he has to go to work again.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
He has to be part of the capitalist system again.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. And he's like, don't be late for the office. And he says it aloud to himself, because it's just so nice to be able to hear himself talking again. So that was cute.
Nate:
Definitely. Definitely a little comic relief.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
But if we just interspersed nicely with the apocalypse scenes in New York, which I think are pretty well done, all the people in panic and vehicles suspended in midair, and just like nothing's working. And what happens when a system as complex as New York just breaks down. I think that part's definitely really well done. And probably the best part of the story.
JM:
But if they had strong workers unions, they would have been able to fix all this within a matter of hours. Yeah, definitely. It is well done. And I'm, despite, I don't know, but there being some kind of funny elements to the story, I did find it quite enjoyable.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Buckmeister is obviously the shady, capoist guy, the one who's like, wants to control the purse strings, but he doesn't really do all the technical work. He's the Steve Jobs, basically.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
Yeah. Oh, shots fired.
Nate:
He's definitely not the real world Steinmetz, because Steinmetz was pretty involved technical genius, even though his contributions were a bit more abstract than somebody like an Edison where you can point to say, like, yes, this is the phonograph. Yeah, it's kind of interesting how this figure comes up again. And it's not my favorite trope of using an ugly deformed person as the villain.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
What can you do?
JM:
Who's not really the villain is Hogerson, who's a deaf person who can't hear anything. So when the experiment goes off, he just kind of, he's like, yeah, everybody's in the same boat as me now and everything's fine.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
And he doesn't really think that much about it. So again, it's just kind of this, oh, we respect this person. He may have something that sets him apart from his fellow human beings, but he's still brilliant. And again, it kind of has this feeling of it where it's like, a guy like that needs a guiding hand. Somebody who's not like a capitalist bastard, and somebody who's not so absent minded, then he's going to lose touch with the world completely and throw a switch. And suddenly nobody can hear anything for like thousands of, I don't know, it just kind of feels like almost, you know, okay, what's it trying to say by the fact that this, this guy did this, this, I guess irresponsible, but not necessarily evil natured scientists. He's not a capitalist. He's just kind of absent minded. And maybe his mind isn't quite centered enough on what would be good for the people. So he needs a little bit of correction and everything would be fine.
I'm sorry. I'm reading too much into it anyway, but it just kind of feels like that to me. But I didn't mind it. I thought it was fun. So yeah, this does that. It's the second story where we have a weapon, basically, although, I mean, it doesn't seem like that was really what Holgerson was into researching.
Nate:
No, it just seems to be research for the sake of doing research on a scientific problem.
JM:
Yeah, it's like doing cool stuff with acoustics, I guess. He's like, I'm going to make this awesome sound-cancelling way, but like blankets an entire city. That's kind of reminded me of that Doctor Who story "Logopolis" where the Master uses that kind of device to stop an entire planet from doing computations that keep the universe running. And he doesn't realize that what he's done has more terrible consequences than he thought it would. And, you know, he turns it off and the universe is crumbling and there's entropy everywhere and everything's dying. Oh shit, I went too far. Yeah.
Nate:
Another one we covered on the podcast, Lugones' "Omega Force", where he develops this weird sound device that has a different effect, but similarly destructive.
JM:
Yeah, that would be an interesting thing. This definitely had that air to it. A couple of the other ones we've done. We did the covers, like I mentioned before. I don't know, the story about the monkeys that was described, that Zuev-Ordynets wrote, definitely sounds like it has that kind of feeling to it as well. We don't need to hire workers, we can just use monkeys.
Gretchen:
Same thing.
JM:
Or robots. What's the difference?
Nate:
Yeah. And it'd be interesting to see, again, I found the text for that one, the other science fiction story that Fantlab describes "The Mad company" I was not able to find text for, and I don't even have a description for. So I'd imagine it's not well known within Russia. But it's tagged as another anti-war science fiction story, so probably similar themes that come up in this one.
JM:
Yeah. I don't know, I like the acoustic stuff. I like the humor in this one, it was kind of fun. There's obviously a lot of what was meant to be kind of funny. The apocalyptic stuff was grim, but it was also a little bit humorous, like the descriptions of how all the rich people tried to escape, like, oh, they pulled out their guns, but then they walked into the clearing and they saw a bunch of other rich people hanging from the rooftops or whatever, and they're like, oh, yeah, maybe we better not do that.
Starting off with smashing alarm clocks, pretty powerful. We wouldn't want to do that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I enjoyed this one. Really fun, even the parts that are a little silly, unintentionally, are still fun in the story.
JM:
Yeah, I thought this one was a lot of fun. It's probably my third favorite, I guess. I do think "Steckerite" was just a more effective, horror story, and this one was interesting. I don't know, maybe the adding was just a little weak, like this sort of...
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Peter's out.
Gretchen:
It's a bit anticlimactic.
JM:
Yeah, it is. Yeah.
Nate:
But again, it contrasts with an American version of what this story would be, the noble, if not a little bit absent-minded professor, not wanting to sell his invention to the government, or not wanting to be the patriotic American who uses the machine to destroy the evil people.
JM:
The American version of this would be, he would be persuaded somehow to do that.
Nate:
Right. Yeah.
JM:
It's like that movie "Invasion USA" from the early 50s, where it's like a bunch of people sitting at a bar, and they're like, I don't really think I should give my expertise to the military. I mean, that would be really silly, wouldn't it? And then this guy hypnotizes them, and they have a dream of being taken over by the Russians, and it goes very badly, and then they all wake up, and they're like looking at each other, and they're like, maybe we were wrong. We should devote our factories to the military from now on. That would be good.
I would recommend this one, but there's not... I mean, again, it's a short story, and I had fun with it. I think it was fun to relate and talk about. To read it, it's maybe not as powerful an anti-war statement as "Steckerite", but it's an amusing story with some cool apocalyptic images.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Definitely enjoy "Steckerite" more, but still a good story.
JM:
Definitely.
Why don't we talk about the most interesting story of all of them.
Bibliography:
Laboratory of Fantastika "Mikhail Zuev-Ordynets" https://fantlab.ru/autor3217
Music:
Maiman, Zinovy - "Don't Need Nothin'" (c. 1920s) https://dpul.princeton.edu/slavic/catalog/9p290d60k
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