Saturday, October 5, 2024

Introduction and story index

Welcome to the Chrononauts blogspot page, where we'll be posting obscure science fiction works in the public domain that either have not been digitized in plaintext, or have not been translated into English. It should be noted that all translations are amateur fan translations and should not meant to be taken as definitive, but we hope we can at least produce something readable that resembles the spirit of the original. 

We will also be posting transcriptions of our episodes here.

Discussions of these works can be found on our podcast - works that have not yet been discussed that are posted here will be discussed some point in the future.

We welcome feedback, comments, corrections, etc. You can contact us at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com

Translations:

Russian Empire/Soviet Union:

Latin America:
Italy:
Germany:
Previously undigitized texts:
Bibliography and other features
Episode transcriptions and links to online stories

Below is a list of stories we've covered in podcast order. Transcripts will be posted when available and links to the stories, when available online, will be posted. We'll be posting links to stories from upcoming episodes when we announce them so you can read them before we discuss them. While we'll be transcribing future episodes going forward, we're pausing on regular transcribing the backlog of earlier episodes for now, but will be happy to generate one on request, so if there is any episode you are particularly interested in seeing a transcription of, please email us. These were edited from the OpenAI transcription software, Whisper, so some of these may contain transcription errors that we missed during the editing process. 

If you would like to see an index of stories we've covered by author last name, scroll down to the bottom of this page.

Regular content episodes:
Bonus episodes:

Index of stories covered, by author last name:
  1. Abbott Edwin Abbott - "Flatland" (1884): 19
  2. Adolph, Anna - "Arqtiq: A Story of the Marvels at the North Pole" (1899): 22
  3. Aligheri, Dante - "Divine Comedy" (1308-20): 1 
  4. Andersen, Hans Christian - "In a Thousand Years" (1852): 16
  5. Anderson, Poul - "The Man Who Came Early" (1956): 34
  6. Anonymous - "Arabian Nights" (800-1300):1
  7. Anonymous - "Urashima Tarō" (8th - 15th c folklore): 6
  8. Anonymous/authorship disputed - "Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery" (1820): 8
  9. Arelsky, Graal - "Tales of Mars" (1925): 37
  10. Asimov, Isaac - "Trends" (1939): 40
  11. Bacon, Francis - "New Atlantis" (1628): 1
  12. Balzac, Honoré de - "Gambara" (1837): 4
  13. Balzac, Honoré de - "Ursule Mirouët" (1841): 11
  14. Barnard, Charles - "Kate - An Electro-mechanical Romance" (1877): 20
  15. Barkova, Anna - "A Steel Husband" (1926): 43
  16. Bates, Harry - "Alas, All Thinking!" (1935): 38
  17. Bellamy, Elizabeth W. - "Ely's Automatic Housemaid" (1899): 35
  18. Belyaev, Alexander - "Professor Dowell's Head" (1925): 29
  19. Bergerac, Cyrano de - "Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon" (1657): 1
  20. Bergerac, Cyrano de - "The States and Empires of the Sun" (1662): 1 
  21. Berman, Ruth - "Star Drek" (1968): 39
  22. Blackwood, Algernon - "The Pikestaffe Case" (1924): 27
  23. Blish, James - "Pursuit into Nowhere: Adopted from the Annals of Space Patrol" (1936): 39
  24. Bond, Nelson S. - "Lightship, Ho!" (1939): 40
  25. Bose, Jagadish Chandra - "Runaway Cyclone" (1896/1921): 15
  26. Brackett, Leigh - "No Man's Land in Space" (1941): 31
  27. Bulgakov, Mikhail - "A Dog's Heart" (1925): 28
  28. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward - "The Coming Race" (1871): 8
  29. Burroughs, Edgar Rice - "At the Earth's Core" (1912): 9
  30. Butler, Octavia E. - "Kindred" (1979): 32
  31. Butler, Samuel - "Erewhon" (1872): 35
  32. Campbell, John W. - "Who Goes There?" (1938): 38
  33. Cavendish, Margaret - "The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World" (1666): 10
  34. Čapek, Karel - "Rossum's Universal Robots" (1920): 36
  35. Chambers, Robert W. - "The Repairer of Reputations" (1895): 15
  36. Chesney, George Tomkyns - "The Battle of Dorking" (1871): 25
  37. Clarín - "Future Story" (1892): 15
  38. Clarín - "Goodbye, Lamb!" (1893): 20
  39. Corelli, Marie - "A Romance of Two Worlds" (1886): 12
  40. Cridge, Annie Denton - "Man's Rights; Or, How Would You Like It?" (1870): 10
  41. De Camp, L. Sprague - "Lest Darkness Fall" (1939): 34
  42. Defontenay, C.I. - "Star ou Psi de Cassiopée" (1854): 3
  43. Dodd, Anna Bowman - "The Republic of the Future: or, Socialism a Reality" (1887): 10
  44. Doyle, Arthur Conan - "The Parasite" (1894): 11
  45. Doyle, Arthur Conan - "The Captain of the Pole-Star" (1890): 22
  46. Doyle, Arthur Conan - "The Maracot Deep" (1928-29): 18
  47. Duane, Diane - "The Wounded Sky" (1983): 41
  48. Dyachkov, Semyon - "A Trip to the Moon in a Wonderful Machine With a Description of the Countries There, Customs and Various Rarities" (1844): 4
  49. Dyalhis, Nictzin - "The Sea-Witch" (1937): 24
  50. Dyalhis, Nictzin - "When the Green Star Waned" (1925): 15
  51. Ellis, Edward S. - "The Steam Man of the Prairies" (1868): 7
  52. Ellis, Sophie Wenzel - "Creatures of the Light" (1930): 38
  53. Epheyre, Charles - "Professor Bakermann's Microbe" (1890): 15
  54. Fabra, Nilo María - "Teitan the Proud - Tale of Things to Come" (1895): 15
  55. Farley, Ralph Milne - "The Rexmel" (1935): 39
  56. Forster, E.M. - "The Machine Stops" (1909): 36
  57. Forster, E.M. - "Little Imber" (1961): 44
  58. Fuller, Alice W. - "A Wife Manufactured to Order" (1895): 35
  59. Gallun, Raymond Z. - "Old Faithful" (1934): 38
  60. Garin-Mikhailovskii, Nikolai Georgievich - "The Genius" (1901): 19
  61. Gaspar y Rimbau, Enrique Lucio Eugenio - "El Anacronópete" (1887): 6
  62. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins - "Herland" (1915): 10
  63. Godwin, Francis - "The Man in the Moone" (1638): 1
  64. Gorriti, Juana Manuela - "He Who Listens May Hear — To His Regret: Confidence of a Confidence" (1865): 11
  65. Gorriti, Juana Manuela - "Herbs and Pins" (1876): 11
  66. Griffith, George - "The Angel of the Revolution" (1893): 17
  67. Griffith, Mary - "Three Hundred Years Hence" (1836): 10
  68. Grunert, Carl - "Mr. Vivacius Style" (1908): 29
  69. Grunert, Carl - "The Martian Spy" (1908): 26
  70. Hamm, George - Cluck Rogers in Astounding (1936): 39
  71. Hansen, Lucile Taylor - "The Undersea Tube" (1929): 31
  72. Harris, Clare Winger - "A Runaway World" (1926): 25
  73. Harris, Clare Winger - "The Fate of the Poseidonia" (1927): 26
  74. Hawthorne, Nathaniel - "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" (1837): 4
  75. Hawthorne, Nathaniel - "Rappacini's Daughter" (1844): 4
  76. Hering, Henry A. - "Silas P. Cornu's Dry Calculator" (1898): 19
  77. Hinton, Charles H. - "An Unfinished Communication" (1885): 27
  78. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Derelict" (1912): 23
  79. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Find" (1947): 30
  80. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Gateway of the Monster" (1910): 30
  81. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Haunted Jarvee" (1929): 30
  82. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Hog" (1947): 30
  83. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Horse of the Invisible" (1910): 30
  84. Hodgson, William Hope - "The House Among the Laurels" (1910): 30
  85. Hodgson, William Hope - "The House on the Borderland" (1908): 27
  86. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Searcher of the End House" (1910): 30
  87. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Thing Invisible" (1912): 30
  88. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Voice in the Night" (1907): 23
  89. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Whistling Room" (1910): 30
  90. Hoevenbergh, Henry Van - "Into the Jaws of Death, A Telegraph Operator's Story" (1877): 20
  91. Hoffmann, E.T.A - "The Automata" (1814): 7
  92. Hoffmann, E.T.A. - "The Sandman" (1816): 4
  93. Holberg, Ludvig - "Niels Klim's Journey Under the Ground" (1741): 8
  94. Holmberg, Eduardo Ladislao - "Horacio Kalibang or the Automata" (1879): 7
  95. Holmberg, Eduardo Ladislao - "The Marvelous Voyage of Mr. Nic-Nac" (1875-76): 12
  96. Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat - "Sultana's Dream" (1905): 10
  97. Irving, Minna - "The Moon Woman" (1929): 31
  98. James, Henry - "In the Cage" (1898): 20
  99. James, P.D. - "Children of Men" (1992): 44
  100. Jarry, Alfred - "Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician" (1898): 19
  101. Kardynalovska, Yelyzaveta - "Death of the Happy City" (1926): 43
  102. Keller, David, MD - "Unto us a Child is Born" (1933): 44
  103. Kepler, Johannes - "Somnium" (1608): 1 
  104. Kipling, Rudyard - "As Easy as A.B.C." (1912): 17
  105. Kipling, Rudyard - "Wireless" (1902): 20
  106. Kipling, Rudyard - "With the Night Mail" (1905): 17
  107. Kuppord, Skelton - "A Fortune From the Sky" (1903): 25
  108. Lang, Herrmann - "The Air Battle" (1859): 16
  109. Latimer, Elizabeth Wormeley - "The Sirdar's Chess-Board" (1885): 19
  110. Leiber, Fritz - "The Big Time" (1958): 42 
  111. Leiber, Fritz - "No Great Magic" (1963): 42
  112. Leiber, Fritz - "The Oldest Soldier" (1960): 42
  113. Leiber, Fritz - "Knight to Move" (1965): 42
  114. Leiber, Fritz - "Damnation Morning" (1959): 42
  115. Leiber, Fritz - "Try and Change the Past" (1958): 42
  116. Leiber, Fritz - "A Deskful of Girls" (1958): 42
  117. Leinster, Murray - "Sidewise in Time" (1934): 38
  118. Lewis, C.S. - "Out of the Silent Planet" (1938): 14
  119. Lindsay, David - "A Voyage to Arcturus" (1920): 13
  120. Locke, Richard - "The Great Moon Hoax" (1835): 5
  121. Long, Amelia Reynolds - "When the Half Gods Go" (1939): 40
  122. Long, Frank Belknap - "The Hounds of Tindalos" (1929): 24
  123. Lovecraft, H.P. - "Dagon" (1917): 24
  124. Lovecraft, H.P. - "Herbert West - Reanimator" (1922): 29
  125. Lucian - "A True Story" (~150): 1
  126. Lugones, Leopoldo - "An Inexplicable Phenomenon" (1906): 12
  127. Lugones, Leopoldo - "The Omega Force" (1906): 25
  128. Lugones, Leopoldo - "The Psychon" (1906): 12
  129. MacInnes, Helen - "Above Suspicion" (1941): 26
  130. Martinson, Harry - "Aniara" (1956): 37
  131. McLandburgh, Florence - "The Automaton Ear" (1876): 7
  132. Meade, L. T. and Eustace, Robert - "Where the Air Quivered" (1898): 15
  133. Meek, Captain S. P. - "The Cave of Horror" (1930): 38
  134. Merrill, Judith - "That Only a Mother" (1948): 44
  135. Mitchell, Edward Page - "Old Squids and Little Speller" (1885): 28
  136. Mitchell, Edward Page - "The Ablest Man in the World" (1879): 36
  137. Mitchell, Edward Page - "The Clock that Went Backward" (1881): 6
  138. Mitchell, Edward Page - "The Inside of the Earth: A Big Hole through the Planet from Pole to Pole" (1876): 9
  139. Mitchell, Edward Page - "The Man Without a Body" (1877): 45
  140. Mitchell, Edward Page - "The Tachypomp" (1873): 19
  141. Moore, C. L. and Henry Kuttner - "Vintage Season" (1946): 34
  142. Moore, C. L. - "Greater Than Gods" (1939): 40
  143. Morrison, Arthur - "The Case of the Dixon Torpedo" (1894): 26
  144. Morrow, W.C. - "The Monster Maker" (1887): 45
  145. Mortimore, Jim - "The Eye of Heaven" (1998): 41
  146. Moskowitz, Sam - "Why Doesn't Our Ship Move" (1937): 39
  147. Nervo, Amado - "The Soul Giver" (1899): 28
  148. Nichols, Joel Martin, Jr. - "The Devil-Ray" (1926): 25
  149. O'Brien, Fitz-James - "The Wondersmith" (1859): 36
  150. O'Brien, Fitz-James - "The Diamond Lens" (1858): 4
  151. Odoevsky, Vladimir - "The Year 4338: The Petersburg Letters" (1835): 4
  152. Orlovsky, Vladimir - "Steckerite" (1929): 43
  153. Peake, Richard Brinsley - "Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein" (1823): 2 
  154. Penrose, Margaret - "The Radio Girls of Roselawn; or, A Strange Message from the Air" (1922): 20
  155. Pestriniero, Renato - "A Night of 21 Hours" (1960): 37
  156. Poe, Edgar Allan - "Mesmeric Revelation" (1844): 11
  157. Poe, Edgar Allan - "Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1844): 11
  158. Poe, Edgar Allan - "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845): 11
  159. Poe, Edgar Allan - "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" (1838): 22
  160. Poe, Edgar Allan - "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" (1835): 5
  161. Pope, Ralph - "$1,000 Reward — My Foot Race with a Telegram" (1877): 20
  162. Ray, Jean - "The Mainz Psalter" (1930): 24
  163. Reade, Philip - "Tom Edison, jr.'s Electric Sea Spider; or, the Wizard of the Submarine World" (1892): 21
  164. Rocklynne, Ross - "The Moth" (1939): 40
  165. Rosny, J.-H. - "Tornadres" (1888): 15
  166. Ross, Ronald - "The Vivisector Vivisected" (1882): 45
  167. Schachner, Nat - "City of the Cosmic Rays" (1939): 40
  168. Scheerbart, Paul - "Malvu the Helmsman: A Story of Vesta" (1912): 27
  169. Schuyler, George - "The Beast of Bradhurst Avenue" (1934): 28
  170. Senarens, Luis - "Frank Reade Jr., and His New Steam Man, or the Young Inventor's Trip to the Far West" (1892?): 21
  171. Serviss, Garrett - "Edison's Conquest of Mars" (1898): 21
  172. Shelley, Mary - "Frankenstein" (1818): 2
  173. Shelley, Mary - "The Last Man" (1826): 2
  174. Shelley, Percy - "The Magnetic Lady to Her Patient" (1822): 11
  175. Shunrō, Oshikawa - "The Undersea Warship" (1900): 18
  176. Sigov, Dmitry - "Journey to the Sun and the Planet Mercury and All the Visible and Invisible Worlds" (1832): 4
  177. Sigov, Dmitry - "The Talk of Moscow Citizens about the Comet of 1832" (1832): 4
  178. Smith, Clark Ashton - "The Primal City" (1934): 39
  179. Spofford, Harriet Elizabeth Prescott - "The Ray of Displacement" (1903): 15
  180. Spofford, Harriet Elizabeth Prescott - "The Moonstone Mass" (1868): 22
  181. Stapledon, Olaf - "Sirius" (1944): 29
  182. Stevens, Francis - "Claimed!" (1920): 24
  183. Stone, Leslie F. - "Out of the Void" (1929): 31
  184. Strobl, Karl Hans - "The Triumph of Mechanics" (1907): 35
  185. Sturgeon, Theodore - "Ether Breather" (1939): 20
  186. Toombs, Robert - "Electric Bob's Big Black Ostrich; or, Lost on the Desert" (1893): 21
  187. Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin - "On the Moon" (1893): 5
  188. Twain, Mark - "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (1889): 33
  189. Two Women of the West - "Unveiling a Parallel: A Romance" (1893): 10
  190. Unamuno, Miguel de - "Mechanopolis" (1913): 15
  191. van Vogt, A. E.  - "Black Destroyer" (1939): 40
  192. Verne, Jules - "Around the Moon" (1869): 5
  193. Verne, Jules - "From the Earth to the Moon" (1865): 5
  194. Verne, Jules - "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (1864): 9
  195. Verne, Jules - "The Sphinx of the Ice Realm" (1897): 22
  196. Verne, Jules - "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: A World Tour Underwater" (1869-70): 18
  197. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de - "Tomorrow's Eve" (1886): 7
  198. Visiak, E.H. - "Medusa" (1929): 23
  199. Vladko, Volodymyr - "The Defeat of Jonathan Govers" (1929): 36
  200. Volkov, Alexey Matveyevich  - "Aliens" (1928): 43
  201. Voltaire - "Micromegas" (1752): 1
  202. Webb, Jane - "The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century" (1827): 3
  203. Wells, H.G. - "The Chronic Argonauts" (1888): 6
  204. Wells, H.G. - "The First Men in the Moon" (1901): 5
  205. Wells, H.G. - "The Island of Doctor Moreau" (1896): 45
  206. Wells, H.G. - "The New Accelerator" (1901): 31
  207. Wells, H.G. - "The Time Machine" (1895): 6
  208. Wells, H.G. - "The War in the Air" (1908): 16
  209. Wells, H.G. - "Under the Knife" (1896): 45
  210. Whelpley, James Davenport - "The Atoms of Chladni" (1860): 4
  211. Wilkins, Mary E. - "An Old Arithmetician" (1885): 19
  212. Williamson, Jack - "The Prince of Space" (1931): 31
  213. Zuev-Ordynets, Mikhail - "The Lord of Sound" (1926): 43

at No comments:

Episode 45.5 transcription - Edward Page Mitchell - "The Man Without a Body" (1877)

(listen to episode on Spotify)

(music: shimmery matter telephone switching)

Gretchen:

Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Gretchen, joined by my co-host, J.M. and Nate. This is part of our episode, looking at works of medical experimentation from the late 1800s. This segment is about Edward Page Mitchell's "The Man Without a Body". Check the previous segments for discussion on the works, Moreau's "Under the Knife" and "The Island of Dr. Moreau", Ross's "The Vivisector Vivisected" and Morrow's "The Monster Maker".

Edward Page Mitchell has become quite a podcast regular. We've covered multiple stories from him in the past, including the stories, "The Clock That Went Backwards", "The Tachypomp", and "The Ablest Man in the World". The first mentioned story can be found way back in the sixth episode of Chrononauts. The one we'll be looking at tonight, though, is "The Man Without a Body", which appeared in The Sun on March 25th, 1877. And I think this is another hit from Mitchell.

Nate:

Absolutely, yeah. And like with everything he writes, he's astoundingly ahead of his time. Like, ridiculously. You would almost think that there was like a 1940s, 1950s story if you didn't know better. It almost feels like a parody of a genre that doesn't exist yet, which... It's always cool to read. There's obvious comparisons to other severed head stories we did, like the Carl Grunert and Belyaev stories a while back. But yeah, I really like this one, like pretty much everything else we've done by him.

Gretchen:

Yes, yeah. I think this is... he always manages to have... Like, he just knows tropes that aren't tropes yet. I don't know how he knows that.

Nate:

Yeah, if there's evidence for time travel, I think it's in the Edward Page Mitchell stories.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

Really just an incredible, incredible set of science fiction stories across the board. It's not like with Mary Shelley where we have an early story that does one thing. He has like almost every modern science fiction idea crammed in these little newspaper pieces from the 1870s.

JM:

It's early on, but he's not drawing attention to it. It's so upfront and yet honest and not trying to be like, Hey, I got this new awesome thing. Don't you want to hear about it? Like, it's weird reading this guy is interesting because in the collections that you can get online nowadays, not all the stories are science fiction stories, right? Some of them are weird, supernatural. A lot of them have the journalistic feel that especially the precursor to this one had.

Nate:

"Soul Spectroscope". Yeah.

JM:

Yeah, yeah. I've had like journalistic feeling to them. He's writing for the New York Sun and I don't know, he's like a tabloid guy almost. There's at least one more story I want to do at a later time where I think that's really interesting and cool. It's been interesting reading so many Mitchell stories and kind of thinking like, where would they fit in my ranking of Mitchell stories? I think this is not as high as some because it just doesn't have the emotional feeling that some of the stories have. Like "The Clock that Went Backwards" has this kind of got wrenching emotionality to it that he's somehow able to convey. "The Senator's Daughter" is kind of like that too, and that's one that I've read that I want to talk about in the future. But then he's got the funny stories like "The Tachypomp". There's this weird professor who's doing something strange and it's very tongue-in-cheek and kind of goofy but fun. And I don't know. I mean, I guess "The Man Without a Body" is a little bit like that kind of story.

Nate:

It definitely fits into the comic mode for sure. Even though it used this grotesque horror imagery in a comic way, that again feels very ahead of its time.

Gretchen:

When we get to one part of the story, it definitely reminds me of some later works that are a little more irreverent. Even though this isn't my favorite Mitchell story that I've read, I think it speaks to how well his writing is that it's still really great. I mean, he just is consistently a really good writer.

Nate:

Yeah. And once you read a bunch of his stories, he has familiar beats and pacing. This definitely fits his comic, almost newspaper style of exposition. The way the plot unfolds, the way the reveals are and the callback to a previous story that would have appeared, I guess, in the last issue of the Sun or a couple of issues prior? where we get a description of the professor's inventions kind of as an offhand reference here, but they're described in great detail in the previous piece, which is an interesting tie-in to the recurring character.

Gretchen:

Yeah. Should I get into the story?

Nate:

Yeah, definitely. It's an interesting piece all around, I think, like with a lot of Mitchell. There's really a lot to get into with this.

Gretchen:

Yeah. I mean, even though there's like a central sort of idea, there's still a lot of other concepts that he somehow manages to explore in this really short amount of writing.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

The story begins with the narrator in the Arsenal Museum in Central Park coming across a glass display of mummified heads. One of the heads in particular has a certain draw for him. Although its nose and eyes are missing and its skin is shriveled up, revealing its teeth, he finds that it still has character. He also feels that there is something familiar about it, as though he's seen it before. While alone in the museum, a year since he first been aware of and fascinated by the head, it winks at him twice, indicating its intention to speak with him. Curious, the man walks over to the display and opens the glass that sits behind, for which the head thanks him. It has been a while since he's had fresh air.

The narrator asks how it feels to live without a body, and the head laments that he would give anything to be able to move. That a man of science, such as himself, should be able to walk if even the birds on display around him, creatures of no ambition, have the likes to do so. Upon hearing the head's love of science, the narrator places him as Professor Dummkopf, a scientist renowned for his many achievements, including his success at bottling music, photographing smell, and freezing the aurora borealis, which are all just very quickly just there, like he just name drops those things and moves on.

JM:

Professor Dummkopf.

Nate:

Yeah, it's a great German insult. The things that he just name drops in the story are described in more detail in "The Soul Spectroscope", which is one of his, I don't even call them short stories, but we covered one in our Hollow Earth episode, where it's like a pseudo interview with either a quack or a weird scientist who goes off on these ridiculous tangents. And that's what our, Herr Dummkopf is doing in "The Soul Spectroscope", basically, is elaborating on these wacky ideas.

Gretchen:

The Professor tells the narrator, though, that these were minor compared to his final discovery, which also ruined him. He wants to tell the narrator more, but the museumkeeper returns at that point, so the narrator scrambles to shut the glass display and move away from the head. The next time he returns to the museum, Dummkopf tells his story of his invention, the telepomp. Not the tachypomp, mind you.

Nate:

No, it's quite different.

Gretchen:

Yes, very different. He starts by revealing his discovery of transmitting sound through electricity and his invention of the telephone. The narrator says that was recently accomplished by another scientist.

JM:

Yeah, what a grim oversight.

Gretchen:

Yeah. It's like, oh, well, someone else got there. So you can't take credit for that one.

Nate:

A lot of people tried, though. Bell's patent, he famously beat Elisha Gray to the office by a matter of hours on the same day. So two people were there pretty much at the same time. And after Bell got the patent, numerous people would try to challenge with nonsense saying, oh, actually, I did it first. All these claims have really no merit. But yeah, it's interesting that this patent war was like a real-life thing between two people. And the telephone had only been introduced a year prior. Bell's patent was in 1876, and this was in 1877. So only about a year.

Gretchen:

Yeah. Add Dummkopf to the list, I guess.

Nate:

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

Gretchen:

Yes, the narrator says that was recently accomplished by another scientist, though he tells the professor they have not reached the level of the telepomp, which turns out to be an invention that would allow matter to be transmitted the same way sound was through the telephone, effectively, than a transporter. The narrator asks how the telepomp had worked in practice, and Dummkopf reveals it was successful. His attempts at transmitting inorganic objects and a cat going off without a hitch. He decided then to test it on a human, namely himself. He set out to transmit himself across the Atlantic, reforming in a room in London. This attempt started similarly as the others, with no problem. His body dematerialized, then began to materialize in London, starting from the top. However, as the process of materialization reached his neck, it stopped.

He explains to the narrator that he realized his error, having not replenished the cups of the battery of the telepomp. Without the sufficient electricity, the rest of his body was unable to reappear. From that point, he assumes his head was found and used for anatomical study, then ineffectively preserved, given the state of his nose. The narrator wishes to do something for the professor, to which he responds he has resigned to his fate, though when the other man begins to take his leave, Dummkopf asks if he could possibly be taken out for a walk. The narrator agrees to help and returns to the museum later, hiding himself until after closing time. He then takes the professor's head from the display, connects it to the body of one of the large birds on display, gives him the glass eyes from an exhibited lion, and dresses him in a blanket and walking stick. They emerge from the museum, walking arm in arm, and I love that image. 

I love that final paragraph. It's so good. It's so whimsical.

Nate:

Yeah, it's such Edward Page Mitchell too.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

Yeah, he writes great scenes like that with these ridiculous images that...

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

He nails the comic thing really, really well, and I think the story is exceedingly good at doing that.

Gretchen:

Yeah. And I think it's a really good choice to end on this image when it comes to our text we've read tonight.

Nate:

Absolutely, yeah. Because like all the others, it's like we've had these horrible monstrosities, these horrors that were supposed to like fear or feel bad for something, but this is such a nice image, like they're just walking together outside, arm in arm. I think that's very sweet. Having a pleasant time in Central Park, you know, I'm sure the weather is lovely this time of year. I'm sure New York in 1877 was a lot cleaner and quieter than it is in 2024. So yeah, nice pleasant night out in the town.

Gretchen:

What it really reminds me of is something from like a surrealist text. Like I could see Leonora Carrington doing this. I could see this as like an "Exquisite Corpse".

Nate:

Totally.

Gretchen:

It's so, it's so good.

Nate:

Yeah. And I think Mitchell is really good at taking this grotesque horror imagery. I mean, we've seen previous stories, I guess not previous because it came decades later, but we talked about them previously on the podcast, like "Professor Dowell's Head" where he gets into like what a horrible feeling it is to be a head trapped in a jar. You know, it feels like you have an itch you can't scratch, you get anxious and nervous and all that, but here it's played up as a comic situation.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

And he's just great at this kind of writing. He does it really well. All the jokes land. It doesn't feel awkward at all. Yeah, he's a natural on this really.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah. He should have been dead when it came through. There probably shouldn't have been any life. But at the same time, it could have been a lot worse. He could have been in the teleportation chamber with a fly, and the fly could have wringled with his DNA and created some kind of terrible hybrid that was mostly fly and that would be bad. I don't know. This is not maybe as bad as that, but at the same time, yeah, we don't know how his head survives. It just does.

And yeah, Professor Dummkopf. So at first I was checking to see if he was in the tachypomp story, but that wasn't him.

Gretchen:

He really likes Dummkopf. Yeah. That name is very popular for him.

Nate:

It is a very good German word. It is. But certainly there were large waves of German immigrants in the United States around that time to the Midwest in particular. And it's an amazing touch. And again, very ahead of its time with a lot of ideas here.

Gretchen:

So what we have here is our first described transporter accident.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

It's pretty incredible.

Gretchen:

Yeah. You know, the stuff that Star Trek is native.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

Yeah. I wonder if the next story we read by him is going to have a character named O'Brien in it.

Gretchen:

This feels like something sadly that would happen to O'Brien.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

I mean, the teleporter thing is just kind of crazy advanced. Even if you look at Bell's telephone and the technology involved with the telephone, it's really like not that complicated if you think about how it's done. Like an electric field is parallel to a magnetic field. And...

JM:

I think that he thought it was like...

Nate:

No, yeah, for sure. But I mean, like it speaks to the nature of the technology at the time where educated literate person could understand the factors involved here. So I mean, like a sound wave and you move the magnet back and forth and it creates the electrical signal, which goes through the wire. And at the other end, that moves the magnet back and forth, which then pushes the air out in the same wave of the electricity, which is just...

JM:

Right.

Nate:

Fascinatingly simple at how it works, but how much it would have felt like magic and something like totally mind-blowing back when you heard it for the first time. And you just take that concept a little further. Well, what if you send more than just electrical pulses through the wire, but you send matter itself? You know, what would that look like? And it's a very modern science fiction concept because we're not remotely very, you know, we're like centuries away from that kind of technology. Well, of course, as I say this, hopefully it doesn't get posted by when we release it next week, but ridiculous how ahead of its time it feels in that little minor plot point. Never mind all the other major plot points of stitching creatures together and heads in a jar and all the other things he mentions offhand that he describes in detail in "The Soul Spectroscope" of spectral analysis to the mind and photographing smell and bottling music and all this other stuff, like crazy science fiction concepts.

JM:

And it's pretty amazing how much is crammed into that.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

In this funny goofy kind of story.

Nate:

Yeah. And this predates all the other ones that we've read for tonight. So, I mean, this is 20 years before "Dr. Moreau" to put it. It always astounds me when I read Edward Page Mitchell because he always comes out with these kind of surprises. And I don't know, when I first read "The Clock That Went Backwards", you feel like, all right, you know, they have one really good story. That's what a lot of authors have, you know, and when it comes down to it, you know, a lot of them really do have the one hit, and were just like kind of like mid range, you know, some positive, some negatives, but like nothing really knocking out of the park where Mitchell just really does it every time. I have to say, like, I'm just like consistently impressed by his range of thought and, yeah, prescience in genre foresight, I guess.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I really love that we've been able to cover so many on the podcast because it is crazy how little he's known. I feel like he should be such a much more renowned author than he is.

Nate:

Absolutely. Yeah. And the Moskowitz rediscovery, I think, was only in the 1970s when that anthology came out, something like that. And I'm not sure how many times it's been republished. I know "The Clock that Went Backwards" has been anthologized in a fair amount of places, but I think his other short stories haven't really got out there as much. But they're all definitely worth checking out. And they're certainly freely available and easily available on Gutenberg and these other public domain sites. Moskowitz has always been very, very thorough in his work. So he was able to get them all really. Yeah. And he really deserves some kind of lifetime achievement award for the amount he's put into science fiction research and biography and bibliography. And he really compared to, I don't know, him and like the Blielers seem to have really done the lion's share of science fiction scholarship, at least when it comes to American authors in the 20th century.

Gretchen:

I mean, in this episode alone, we probably wouldn't be covering two of these authors if it wasn't for him. 

Nate:

Yeah. Yeah. 

JM:

The reason is basically keep your batteries charged on either terminal, right? For some reason, the batteries weren't charged. So the experiment failed and the scientists who decided to himself take part in the experimentation and be the subject of the experiment didn't fully materialize at the other terminal because the batteries weren't charged sufficiently.

Nate:

It's certainly been an early death for a lot of scientists and engineers who experiment with the unknown . You can read all about early x-ray experimenters and all that and how that ended for them.

JM:

Yeah. Yeah, it's funny how that works out with Mitchell because, again, he's always presenting the aspect of reporting something that happened. "The Clock What went Backwards" doesn't really have so much of that, I guess. Compared to the story that we just did by Morrow, "The Clock that Went Backwards" is an example of a story that's a few separate things that don't necessarily feel like they should go together, actually fitting together very well. And it's so interesting Mitchell being this unsung newspaper guy who just seems to be able to come up with this kind of stuff and makes it powerful or funny or both. I don't know if there's ever been an analysis done on how much of his stuff is really done to spec because that would be interesting too. Because, yeah, like even in the 1930s sci-fi period articles, we see some of the early writers from that period that developed into something else like Kornbluth and Clifford Simak and stuff like that. And how they were writing stories just back back then. Somebody told them basically what kind of story to write and they just did it. Sometimes I feel like Mitchell is that contradiction because there might be a bit of that, but at the same time he's able to take it somewhere else and his stuff is really memorable.

Nate:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. 

JM:

No credit, ever.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Dude, his name was nowhere.

Nate:

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Moskowitz basically had to excavate them. And the newspaper in general are from what it seems like, at least from the research that we've been doing and all the stories we've been covering on the podcast are kind of an unlikely source for science fiction stories. I think the only other newspaper story we've done aside from the Edward Page Mitchell stuff in the podcast is "The Beast of Bradhurst Avenue" by Schuyler. I don't think any of the other stuff we've done has been newspaper stuff. I think it's been all magazine stuff or like fanzine stuff, which is both totally different audiences and publication markets and all that stuff. So, I mean, the fact that we get this in like newspaper is, again, another fascinating angle to all this.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah, I mean, there you go. Mitchell again, being ahead of the pack in a lot of so many interesting aspects.

Gretchen:

Another Mitchell win.

Nate:

Yeah, I would say so.

JM:

We're going to be revisiting him. It's kind of interesting because I think that it's easy to say this is some guy that nobody knew about before Sam Moskowitz discovered him in, I guess, probably the 1970s or something like that. It's just really interesting the way somebody like this is unearthed, and it's like a hunting expedition. And it's weird because, yes, he's ahead of his time and he's prognosticating some really interesting things. And you can tell there's a mainstream journalistic impetus as well, pushing him to do certain things that he knows he should do to, I guess, satisfy the audience. And yet, without credit and without people knowing who he was, creating something like "The Clock that Went Backwards", or even some of the other stories, this one, like, it's a cool story. It's an interesting idea. It goes really goofy in the end that makes it like just fun kind of ridiculous. But I mean, I guess that's what he was going for. But hey, the telephone was this new thing. Who knows what you could do with it, right? Maybe if you could somehow transmute every aspect of the human body, bring it across a phone connection. That'd be really cool. That'd be a worthy experiment to make yourself a victim of, I'm sure.

Nate:

Yeah, and it bled over a lot into what, not necessarily teleportation, but other, I guess we consider science fiction or fantastical uses for telephone and wireless technology. So there were a lot of people who tried to build spirit telegraphs to contact the dead by wireless.

JM:

And I think Arthur C. Clarke, whatever, what it was published, but he has a story about, like, the phone network that we have set up around us developing intelligence. Obviously, it's a pretty common concept that you see a few times, right? But I don't know. Here, it's like, yeah, we use that to do more than just conversate. Have conversations. We can somehow reduce human physical patterns to nothing but sound waves and transmit them over the telephone. And it'll take a while. And the battery on the other side of the terminal will have to be definitely fully charged. Or to work, but yeah. So this one failed and this guy was a head without a body. He's not just a man without a body. He's a head without a body. It'd be one thing, like "The Man Without a Body" title suggests that he should be not corporeal.

Nate:

Yeah, it does. Yeah.

JM:

But yeah, that's not the way it is.

Nate:

Yeah, great severed head story. There's a couple of other Mitchell possibilities for the future. To me, the Mitchell phenomenon is really interesting. It's hard to know what to make of it and we'll never have more biographical information. So it is what it is. I just have to speculate. Yeah, I recommend basically either of the seemingly well available Mitchell collections where you can find a lot of his short stories. Certainly didn't write anything very long because his stuff was all, I guess, part of the New York Sun.

Nate:

Yeah, Tachypomp was published elsewhere in Scribner's, but everything else was in the Sun.

JM:

A really interesting figure. I don't know. Moskowitz, I guess, discovered him and not much, there's not much information about what kind of person maybe Edward Page Mitchell was, but we didn't talk about it in the original episode where we discussed "The Clock that Went Backwards" way, way, way, way back. I think it was still 2020, wasn't it?

Nate:

Yeah, maybe. Well, awhile ago.

JM:

We'll come back to him and we'll come back to his forward thinkingness. Yeah, I think we should probably discuss what's happening next time on Chrononauts, and we've decided that because short stories are such a monumental part of the science fiction landscape. I think that generally applies to a lot of genre fiction. I personally would say, for example, that for horror stories, the short story is the best format that is possible. And you should be able to read it in one sitting, that makes it more effective.

However, the point being that we all love short stories. We all love reading them. We all love talking about them. And it's the perfect venue for a lot of this kind of stuff that we do on the podcast. So we've each picked two short stories, and yeah, I would like to go through everything that people picked. So I think we'll go Nate, me, then Gretchen, because I think that's the kind of chronological approach. Nate, why don't you tell us first what the stories that you picked for the next podcast episode are.

Nate:

Sure. I picked something old and something a little bit newer, both from places we've been before on the podcast, but not really that much. So for something old, I picked Kylas Chunder Dutt's, "A Journal of 48 hours in the Year 1945", which was written in 1835. And this is from India, and the first, or at least purported to be the first South Asian story written in English science fiction. Yeah, it'll be an interesting one to take a look at, very anti-British. So if that's your thing, you can get a lot of it here.

But for something newer, and from Japan, I picked Sakyo Komatsu's "The Savage Mouth" from 1979, which was translated by Judith Merrill, who we talked about last time. This is going to be a very grim and intense horror story. So if you like some of the stuff that we did tonight, that's over the top and want to listen to us talk about something that's going to be even more over the top. I think you'll have the opportunity to do that next month.

JM:

Yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to reading both of those. I think honestly, the idea of doing these kind of short story episodes has been really appealing to me. I think that this is one of the greatest forms that the genre can give us. And I've really wanted to talk about some.

Now, because I'm next, I will say that because this is our first short stories host choice episode, I don't want to make it seem like I'm picking these stories because they're my favorite short stories. I really like them, but there's so many to choose from and so many favorites that there's no way that I can ever take that approach. I'm going to talk about the two stories a little bit that I picked, but I don't want to make it seem like there's going to be many more of these, basically, I hope. We're going to have a lot of ground and I'm sure I will have many stories in the future that I will be choosing.

But the two stories I've chosen, the first one is "The Brighton Monster" and the name of the author is Gerald Kersh. Gerald Kersh is a favorite author for me. I really like his stuff. Interestingly, this is one of Harlan Ellison's favorite writers and he'll be coming up in just a few minutes. But I will say Gerald Kersh wrote a lot of novels and short stories. And from what I've seen of his novels, his novels don't really fit into something that would be amenable to the stuff that we cover on Chrononauts. They're really excellent, awesome depictions of the seediness of, I guess, London life and life in, I guess, the underground clubs of England in the 1930s and 40s.

There's a lot of really cool crime stuff. The movie "Night and the City", which was a really cool, weird English noir film from 1950, was based on his book of the same name. I will say that the book is a lot darker, the book is a lot heavier and more intense. But I definitely recommend watching the movie, too, because it's really fun and intense in its way and got an interest in cast. I guess the way I first heard of him was because of that kind of crime fiction style and a book called "Prelude to a Certain Midnight", which was published in, I think, 1935, but it was one of his early books. So basically from the 1930s to the 1960s, Gerald Kersh was writing a lot of interesting stuff.

So the story that we want to talk about is "The Bright Monster", which was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1948. And it's a pretty mainstream publication. I think that Kersch is one of those writers who maybe had a chance in his time to become popular, but nowadays not that many people remember him. And there's a bunch of anthologies of his stuff that you can get, though, and this story was published 10 years after its publication in the Saturday Evening Post. It was published in Kersch's collection "On an Odd Note" in 1958, and it's been published a few times since, including in the collection "Nightshade and Damnations", which I think is one of the newer ones and is probably the easiest place to find this story right now. And yeah, it's a really cool story and I'm looking forward to everybody reading it.

My second story, and I have to apologize in advance for picking this. The story is "We Purchased People" by Frederik Pohl, and we've been talking about Frederik Pohl and his name keeps coming up, so it's time we include some of his fiction. And now this story can be found in the "Foundations of Fear" anthology, which is a follow-up to "The Dark Descent", one of the greatest horror anthologies of all time. And the reason I'm apologizing is this story is skin-crawlingly dark and, I don't know, content warnings all over the place. It's, yeah, Frederik Pohl is normally a really funny guy. He has a quality of sense of humor. Satire is a big part of his fiction, and Nate was talking about reading "Gateway" earlier, and it's supposed to be one of his more, like, new wave.

Nate:

It definitely feels very new wave in its approach, yeah. I wouldn't say it's a comic work, but there are definitely comic elements to it. But I would definitely be curious as to how he writes horror, because there are definitely a couple opportunities for "Gateway" to take a horror direction, and it never really does. So yeah, we'll see how this one goes.

JM:

Yeah. The story is short, and I will say to you guys, you will be happy that it's short. I don't know, I read this just a bit ago because I knew it was coming up, and I remembered, like, feeling it was a really powerful story, and we've been talking so much about Pohl, and I'm like, yeah, let's put one of his stories in there. Yeah, if you're sensitive, be careful with this story. It's dark, and we've covered stories before with, like, ribald sexual humor and weird, like, whatever. It's fine, but in terms of dark subject matter that will make your skin crawl, this story is kind of, I don't know, more forward than some of the things that we've covered so far in the podcast. So if you want to read this, it can be found in "Foundations of Fear" and other sources. It was actually originally published in an anthology called The Final Stage, edited by  Edward L. Ferman and Barry N. Malzberg, and that was published in 1974. It looks like that was the first publication of this story. Yeah, it's the 70s, everything is supposed to be mean and ugly, and I think Gretchen will be talking about a little bit of that shortly, but content warning, everything bad. But if you're willing to deal with that, it's really, really powerful, so we're going to talk about it next time on Chrononauts. Gretchen, what have you got?

Gretchen:

Yes, continuing in the quite disturbing category here. My first work that I'm choosing is "I Have No Mouth" and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison, which is a work that I read quite a while ago. It's been several years since I first read it, and it's been on my mind since a friend of mine recently read it, and I've been thinking about it a lot, so I thought I'd choose it. And also I thought it'd be interesting to talk about some of the adaptations that have come out, specifically the video game and also the radio broadcast of it.

So that's the first story, and the second story I decided on is one I just recently read for the first time, and that is "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" by James Tiptree Jr. Which I just thought was really an interesting work when I was reading it, and I thought it would kind of be interesting to look at both that and the background of Tiptree.

Nate:

Cool, yeah, so I'm glad we all picked one really unsettling story to read. So yeah, will be a fun episode next time.

JM:

Really, really looking forward to it.

One thing I do know, though, is that the beast folk are there demanding to be let in, demanding that I provide them with alcohol, else they'll tear me limb from limb. So I better exceed to their requests, so everything should be fine, I hope. But meanwhile, my friends, you better do whatever it takes to avoid being under the knife, because it's a terrible fate, after all, as it's succumbing to the bestiality that lurks so close to our human experience. Now, though, it is time for us to put away the knives, the tools of the trade, forceps and blades, so skillfully lathed, we're so pleased to maim. Yes, I was going to insert some more carcass lyrics in here, but I forgot to get them, so that's okay, just listen to carcass, and tune in next time. We have been, as always, Chrononauts. 

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Friday, October 4, 2024

Episode 45.4 transcription - W.C. Morrow - "The Monster Maker" (1887)

(listen to episode on Spotify)

(music: fluttery echoes)

Nate:

Good evening and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast.

I'm Nate, and I'm joined by my co-host Gretchen and J.M., and tonight we're taking a look at stories that follow in the wake and legacy of "Frankenstein". If you want to listen to our previous segments on H.G. Wells' "Under the Knife", "Dr. Moreau", and Ronald Ross' "The Vivisector, Vivisected", listen to the previous segments in this episode.

This segment will be focusing on a different Dr. Morrow, and like so many of the other authors we've covered on this podcast, the most comprehensive biographical picture of W.C. Morrow comes from Sam Moskowitz, which can be found in the 50-page article "Forgotten Master of Horror: The First phase", which appears in the 1992 book "Discovering Classic Horror Fiction 1", edited by Darrell Schweitzer. Much of this information is also present in S.T. Joshi's "The Evolution of the Weird Tale", and Morrow wrote a series of autobiographical sketches entitled "Some Queer Experiences" that appeared in the December 28, 1891 issue of the Argonaut, which I don't know if they lost their movable type piece for the letter B, because all the B's are replaced by H's, makes it a little odd to read.

Like the Schachner, the Moskowitz article summarizes pretty much all of its fiction from his early period, and notes that this article is an expansion of his Morrow commentary in his book "Science Fiction in Old San Francisco, Volume 1, History of the Movement from 1854 to 1890", which in addition to Morrow details Robert Duncan Milne, William Henry Rhodes, Emma Frances Daws, and Ambrose Bierce. Bierce in particular became quite well acquainted with Morrow, as Bierce was the editor of the weekly The Argonaut, which bought Morrow's first seven stories and published them in 1879, and was very much Morrow's home for his early period. Moskowitz defines the ending of which as the publication of his story, "The Inmate of the Dungeon", in 1897. He's got an interesting and prolific body of work, so let's take a look at his life for a little bit.

William Chambers Morrow was not a Westerner, but rather born in the Deep South on July 7, 1854, in Selma, Alabama. His family owned several slaves. His father, William Sr., was a Baptist minister who married Martha Ann McCreary, a girl 15 years his junior, literally a girl as she was 14 when they married. William was the fourth child, preceded by three sisters, two younger siblings would die in childhood, and a seventh sibling, Danzilla, which is a strange name, was born later.

Two slaves were registered in William Jr.'s name as early as 1860 when he was six years old, so it definitely gave me flashbacks of Rufus from "Kindred" here. His relations with the slaves during his formative years strongly impacted his life, as in "Some Queer Experiences he writes: 

"My earliest mental development was largely the work of intelligent but highly superstitious Negro women, slaves serving as nurses and housekeepers, that they filled up my keenly sensitive mind with the most dreadful stories of ghosts, witches, devils, and the like, so that my childhood was passed in terror, my youth and morbid fancies, and my manhood down to the present time, under the control of a gloomy and almost unmanageable imagination.

"In my boyhood, the most terrifying dreams would disturb my sleep ; from these, I would often wake with paroxysms of screaming that my parents could not check in an hour. Somnambulism was a common experience, leading me into perilous situations, and giving concern to those charged with my safety. The slightest fever would invariably send me into delirium, when the most grotesque and horrifying hallucinations — which would require a book to describe in detail — would haunt me. 

"From all this, it may he judged that my temperament is abnormal, and that perhaps I have nervous peculiarities not common to the race; and that, this being so, I have certain — permit me to say — faculties which possibly give me capacity to see and hear things not seen and heard by all. In order that I might the better understand my own condition, I have made such study as I could of the human body and mind, giving much attention to obscure mental functions as analyzed and set forth by able writers ; and, while I have learned little with regard to myself, I am convinced that there are extraordinary things often happening and not at all understood, and that upon the imperfect glimpses which we have of them are based those natural (and, in the case of some persons, absolutely necessary) beliefs having spiritualism, theosophy, and some others as their basis."

So after the Civil War, their slaves were freed, and the Morrows actually had to do work for themselves, rather than relying on the exploited labor of others, so they went into the hotel owning business.

The Gulf City Hotel was constructed in Mobile, Alabama in 1868. This building was demolished in 1934. Some sources say the building was built in 1837, but this is not true, as a book published by the Mobile First National Bank in 1940, entitled "Highlights of 75 Years in Mobile" states, "Mobile's first sewer was laid down Conti street in 1868, at the time the famous old Gulf City Hotel, later known as the Southern Hotel, was erected at the southeast corner of Conti and Water Streets. And goes on to say, the hotel being constructed by Mr. D.O. Grady at the southeast corner of Conti and Water Streets is rapidly approaching completion, and when finished will present a very credible appearance.

And indeed, a photograph of the building a few months before it was demolished exists, and it does have a very credible appearance. The Morrows managed the hotel for some time, with William Sr.'s health rapidly declining, and William Jr., his sister, Georgiana, and his mother assume the management role in 1869.

From 1869 to 1879, aside from this hotel management piece, details are rather sparse about his life. He graduates from Howard College in 1869 and also attended the University of Tuscaloosa for some time, and it's almost certain that he started writing during this period, though it doesn't appear that he had anything published. The family opens up another hotel in 1878 in Meridian, Mississippi, and William Sr. dies in 1879, a few months after William Jr. moves to the west coast, with Moskowitz speculating that his family continued in the hotel management business after William Jr. left.

Upon his move to the west coast, he immediately impressed Ambrose Bierce and Fred Somers, who was one of the founders of the Argonaut, and his material started appearing in the Argonaut shortly afterwards. Bierce resigned from the Argonaut in late 1879 and starts a magazine called The Californian, which also publishes a bunch of Morrow's stuff along with Milne, so it seems that the three were playing off one another for a while. Morrow publishes two novels in the early 1880s, "A Strange Confession", which was serialized in The Californian in 1880 and 1881.

JM:

A novel probably is what this should have been.

Nate:

Yeah, yeah, I'd say so. Yeah, this is definitely an interesting one in a lot of ways, but we'll get to that in a minute.

"Blood Money" was the other one in 1882, which was published in standalone book form. And while his productivity lulled in the mid 1880s, he wrote a number of his best received stories in the late 1880s and early 1890s, including the one we're doing tonight.

By 1899, he had moved on to teaching writing, which Ambrose Bierce remarked, "Yes, it's a pity that Morrow teaches others to write badly instead of himself writing well." The end of his career, he switches to adventure novels and doesn't look like he published anything after 1908. Ironically, the largest bibliography of his stories is on fantlab.ru, which lists nearly 70 short stories and four novels, with some of them having been translated into Russian. The one we're looking at tonight having four separate Russian translations all done in 2016, which is kind of strange.

In anthology of his best stories, "The Ape, The Idiot, and Other People" was published in 1897, and early on became a bit of a collector's item for those interested in weird fiction, and is one of the many republications of the story that we're reading tonight.

The story we're looking at tonight was originally published as "The Surgeon's Experiment" in the October 15, 1887 issue of the Argonaut, and was retitled "The Monster Maker" when published in the 1897 anthology, and apparently all subsequent republications afterwards. It was republished in Weird Tales in the December 1928 issue, and what appears like countless anthologies, including one called "Christopher Lee's X Certificate".

So yeah, I don't know, "The Monster Maker"? I thought it was fun, again a little silly, but I enjoyed the ride.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I agree with that. I think that the pacing is a little weird, but I think it's a fun story as well.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Well, it's too bad. There are certain aspects of this story that are really good, but it doesn't want to commit to being what it needs to be, which is a short story that packs a punch to it and focuses on something, and I think the best parts of this story are all pretty much in the first part of the story. And I don't know, I think that the entire way it's structured just undermines how good the story could be.

Nate:

I agree, yeah.

JM:

And it's funny because I had forgotten about this, but I actually did read most of "The Ape, The Idiot, and Other People" collection about somewhere between 20 and 25 years ago. It was a long time ago. It was one of those things that was available on Project Gutenberg, and they go like, you know, sounds kind of interesting, I wonder what this is like, and I read it. I don't know, I'm a big fan of short stories, I'm a big fan of classic short stories, I'm a big fan of people who love to write short stories, and Morrow is definitely one of those guys. And I like the compilation, but I don't remember any of the stories particularly standing out to me as being great. And I think that this story should have been great. I really liked certain aspects of it. I really liked the description of the guy dying.

Nate:

Yeah, there's some great over-the-top villain moments. Again, they all come in the first half. The shift to the detective stuff in the second half, I don't know, it just doesn't really work for me, I don't think.

JM:

The best things about this were definitely made me think of Poe, but also the hint of something new and something maybe a little bit more modern. There's aspects of the story that are really cool.

Nate:

Yeah, this is not a bad story. I mean, it's not a great story. I had fun with it. It could be better for sure. But yeah, there's definitely a lot of positives here. And I think, again, if you're a fan of 19th-century horror stories, you could do a lot worse than this one.

JM:

Yeah, he even seems to acknowledge some of the faults of the story. He doesn't really apologize for it and don't do anything about it. It's really weird. He's like saying at the beginning, you know, oh, this person's part of the story doesn't matter. And you have to be okay with that because this is the kind of story that this is. And I can't tell if he's being like facetious or just kind of, I don't know. It's really strange. It's really strange. Let's get into that.

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, my notes on this aren't really that long. It's not that long of a story. Again, it's one of these ones that are going to take you 20, 30 minutes to read. But this young man calls upon a mysterious old reclusive surgeon who lives in a scary gloomy house. And it's just one of these classic spooky mansions that are dreadful to look at and behold and all that. It's a great spooky horror story house.

But this young man wants a surgeon to do a job for a high price. Something the surgeon initially rejects and spurs an argument between the two of them. It's going to be quite the serious undertaking and the young man has even faked his own death and made sure that there can be no connection between the two.

So he's immediately ready to go. His body seems okay. And he's given a glass to drink and the young man thanks the surgeon profoundly. The glass knocks him out and this is the surgeon's first step. But he wonders if his wife heard anything. Suddenly framing it, of course, he gets confirmation that she didn't. So all is well, though the wife did hear somebody knock at the door initially.

The surgeon, however, is giddy as this is a perfect specimen. The young man paid him $5,000 to kill him. The fool, he doesn't realize he's still alive and will be used for horrible experimentation. And he jokes, "how should you feel without a head?" He begins to operate.

The story could have ended here and it would have been great, I think. Great over the top horror villain, ridiculous setup, nice little twist for our young man who apparently is just hell bent on dying and killing himself, but he has to do it in this overly convoluted way that involves paying $5,000.

JM:

He's like a useless sad boy. I enjoyed this entire aspect of the story. I thought it was cool. It was like he was trying to make a point too with the wife's non-involvement in the story. It was like he was trying to highlight that it wasn't right and it wasn't good. And the first half of the story is amazingly good, actually.

Gretchen:

I gotta say, I do think I prefer "The Vivisector Vivisected" just because I think it's fun and I like a lot of the absurd moments. And this had just been this story, I would have liked this one more.

Nate:

Yeah, I agree, yeah.

Gretchen:

But I think the latter part just kind of bogs it down.

Nate:

It feels extraneous and almost tacked on in a way.

JM:

It's two different stories basically and it needs to focus on one of the two and be that. And it seems to not be able to decide that that's what it needs to do.

Nate:

Yeah, so I mean we get this shift between two of them by a time skip, so it's now three years later and these two cops are talking about the wife and her story, which is probably insane maybe. But there could be something to it, so it seems like the husband is keeping something prisoner, but what?

And the detective needs more evidence and a few days later the wife sends him pages torn out from his manuscript which detailed progress notes on the experiment from three years ago.

Gretchen:

This reminds me a little bit of that section of "Heart of a Dog". Yeah, I will say like those notes. I just thought of "Heart of a Dog" when he's like updating the progress on his experiment.

Nate:

And it's cool to have details like that integrated in the story when they can be like epistolary novels that have the notes published for us like in text when the author gets really into that. I think is a cool aspect of the story which could have been utilized a lot more here. We don't really get to see too much from the mad surgeon of how he keeps his notebook. That might be a nice personality touch to add to the surgeon, you know what I mean?

JM:

Like there's two distinct half of the story and they relate to one another, but they're also like completely separate things and he's like trying to change the nature of the story halfway through into something else. And I don't get it. The thing that I like most about this story was where he was pretty much dying and describing what it was feeling like, I guess. And again, I really got vibes of "The Case of Monseur Valdemar from Poe. And it was definitely my favorite part about this story. And I wish that, I don't know, like that had been maintained because I actually got chills a little bit reading that part. Like that was really well done. And I wanted to see more of that, that kind of macabre quality of the story that's really dark. Like just saying, okay, this guy wants to commit suicide and this mysterious physician is acting all moral and wanting to do it. But he's putting up an act because that's not really the way he is. You know what I mean? He's not like that at all. He actually just wants to make sure that this is a good guy to experiment on and, you know, he does this thing and it's powerful and it's well done. And I just don't really, like, this is just too short to really convey all the power of that and it changes so quickly to something else. I mean, I remember the story a little bit from back then when I first read it, but I don't remember that well. And I don't remember exactly why I didn't maybe like it as much as I could have. And I guess that's probably why because, yeah, it just has that switch over suddenly. And it doesn't really like it turns into a psychic detective story, which is cool. I mean, I could get into that, but it should be one or the other.

Nate:

Yeah, I don't know why he went in this direction either. It doesn't really work for me.

But yeah, I guess they figure out that some creature is increasing in strength and hunger. And the detective wants to make a raid on the house and he needs three men. But when they get there, they can't find the surgeon. The wife is living in fear of her husband. And here's them come in and ends up tripping over a huge body that crushes the life out of her. And the surgeon is alerted by all this racket and grabs his knife and encounters a monster who has...

Gretchen:

I've got to say, I love this. None of the characters have names. I know that. But like my favorite part of this and it's like the part that made me laugh is even when she's like dying and like dead. He shouts out "wife!", like you can't.... He can't even like, I mean, you could have just said like "dear!" or something, but it's so.

Nate:

It's like they're almost archetypes rather than actual characters. "The Detective, the Surgeon and the Wife". It sounds like a romantic comedy or something like that.

And I don't know, the monster reveal that we get here makes the experiment feel a little bit sillier because it's this huge hulking creature. Who has no head but a steel ball. And I don't know, it's kind of a silly image where the first half of the story just leaves it on a nebulous note. Like what is this mad scientist going to do when your mind goes to like all these like horrible situations that it could be. And I don't know, I could see cases where a lumbering creature with a steel ball for a head could be terrifying. But it just feels a little silly.

Gretchen:

You expect something more grizzly. It's just such a kind of clean. It feels kind of sterile. And so you're like, oh, well, that's not what I thought.

Nate:

Yeah, why a steel ball? What kind of experiment's that?

JM:

I don't understand why he keeps highlighting how the wife should have a part of the story. And then in the end she sort of does, but it's still like...


Gretchen:

She dies.

Nate:

So like in a really stupid way.

Gretchen:

Yeah, this story could have been fixed if instead of just going right to the police's perspectives, we got the wife's.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

I think it would have been a lot better to see her trying to get this evidence.

JM:

It's so weird. It was like making exquisite pains to make sure we noticed that.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

I don't know. I guess that's cool in its way that he is doing that, but it doesn't follow through with it. The second part of the story is like it's something you could almost imagine in Carnaki or something like that, right?

Nate:

Yeah. There's really not much meat to it though, because I mean, this is right at the end here where we get the monster reveal and the surgeon tries to stab the monster to death. But breaks his lantern and the house blows up with everybody inside, but the officers and it's a very Carnaki like ending. But even, I don't know, the weakest Carnaki stories have a bit more personality, I guess, in atmosphere than the second half. It just feels very flat.

Gretchen:

You know, "The Horse Invisible" is a really silly story, but it's fun. I would prefer to read that again than this.

JM:

I mean, while it's worth pointing out that the wife doesn't get a name, none of the other new characters do either.

Gretchen:

Yeah, no one gets a name in this. There's no names.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

The anonymous horse story, I guess.

JM:

Captain something.

Nate:

Yeah, Captain, Detective. Surgeon, young man.

JM:

That's what it comes down to. The story could have worked pretty well as either of those things than it was. It's two distinct parts. They never came together at any point, really, in terms of the mood of the story.

Nate:

Yeah, I don't know. The detective portion would need a lot of work, I think. The first portion is just great as a standalone, I think. You could easily read that and just stop at the time skip and have a satisfying experience, I think. Whereas the detective portion, I don't know, just none of it really works.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

The first part could have almost worked as its own story. Like, maybe it didn't even need the second part.

Nate:

Yeah, I'd argue it doesn't, yeah.

JM:

There are certain aspects of that that were just really well put together and well done. I don't know. It's like, where do you cut off a story, right? What happens...?

Gretchen:

Yeah, I mean, even if they had used those notes that we see, instead of the police, we had gotten those notes, and I think it could have worked if it was expanded more, but it just doesn't work in the form that it's taken.

Nate:

Yeah, a perspective that's switched to the wife and just eliminate the cops altogether would have been a great second half. Now we have this person who we're in her head. We can sympathize with her plight. She's in a horrific situation, you know, there's opportunities for suspense and like that kind of thing. You could easily see it playing out in a very satisfying way. It just doesn't.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

That's also weird because she just like finds...

Nate:

She literally trips over the creature. That's what does her in.

Gretchen:

You know, a lot of horror characters get flack when they're like running and they trip over a branch or something and then, you know, whatever murder it is gets them, but she actually trips over the murderer.

Nate:

It's impressive when you think about it. Considering she's been suspicious for three years, you know, wouldn't you be like on the lookout for a murderer?

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

I don't know.

Gretchen:

Yeah. Overall, I think, again, the story could have worked and choices were made and it kind of ruins it a little bit.

Nate:

Well, none of all more perfect. It's fun. Again, it's short. Can't really complain too much.

JM:

Yeah. It's an interesting collection if you want to get into something like the sort of forgotten 19th century horror, chiller kind of writer, right? I feel like this story, "The Monster Maker", is probably his most well-known story.

Nate:

It seems that way. It definitely seems that way, yeah.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

I'm not sure what else is in "Christopher Lee's X Certificate", but I kind of want to get the table of contents because that's a really good title for anthology.

JM:

Yeah. It kind of seems like one of these writers who's capable of putting together some cool atmosphere and phrases, but maybe not necessarily able to put it all together. I really like the first part. I thought that the way he described the physician and his kind of coldness and unwillingness to actually help someone. And it was like, it felt like he was testing him. It was testing to see whether he was serious about wanting to die. But then also, like, he's right to get so upset about it and be like, who are you to get all moralizing about me wanting to commit suicide? You have a horrible reputation for whatever experiments that you're committing. It doesn't really go into that, but I don't know. Apparently this doctor has a reputation for euthanasia, I think.

Nate:

He seems to be doing some favors under the table. That's the impression that I'm getting.

JM:

Yeah, probably.

Nate:

Yeah, that's all right. Bierce seems to like him. He definitely seems to be competent enough. I'm not sure what the other authors are like that Sam Moskowitz talks about in those books. Really, the only person that I'm familiar with is Bierce. Yeah, interesting stuff, I guess. So all right, I guess in this one we are presented with a man without a head, but now let's get into a man without a body.

Gretchen:

Yes. 

Bibliography:

Joshi, S.T. - "The Evolution of the Weird Tale" (2004)

Mobile, AL First National Bank - "Highlights of 75 Years in Mobile" (1940) https://archive.org/download/75yearsinmobile/75yearsinmobile.pdf

Morrow, W.C. - "Some Queer Experiences" (1891) https://archive.org/details/1891somequeerexperiencesmorrowargonaut

Moskowitz, Sam - "Forgotten Master of Horror - The First Phase" in "Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I" (1992)

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Introduction and story index

Welcome to the Chrononauts blogspot page, where we'll be posting obscure science fiction works in the public domain that either have not...