Inside the amazing world of Astounding Stories
Seriously bad science continued
This crucial guiding principle of pulp fiction is illustrated perfectly in the description of Mercury given in the story about the interplanetary policeman [The Earthman's Burden by R F Starzl from Astounding Stories June 1931].
Okay, so admittedly astronomers back in 1930 didn’t know half as much about the conditions prevailing on the other planets of the solar system as they do these days. However this ignorance obviously didn't matter a jot to the writers, as it simply provided much more room to manoeuvre for seriously bad science.
So, what's life like on Mercury, according to R F Starzl?
Despite the Arctic blizzards screaming at one extreme of the planet and the howling desert wastes at the other, the equatorial band is surprisingly habitable. This relatively temperate zone is filled with dense tropical rainforests – a bit like Venus, allegedly (or the Amazon on earth, if you want to be totally boring and pedantic about it, a la David Gerrold).
On Mercury, rivers begin in the far north and run right down to the far south. They start off freezing cold, then gradually warm up, so that by the time they reach the desert region, they have become boiling hot. This doesn’t happen on any of the continents on this planet, you note, despite the considerable range of temperatures prevailing here. So why should it be any different on Mercury?
'Cos it's exotical, that's why. We're on a totally different planet now, so to make sure that basic fact is fully established in the reader's tiny mind, the place has to look pretty weird compared to our home ground.
And when we say 'weird', we certainly mean 'weird'. David Attenborough would have a field day chronicling the wildlife round these parts.
Take the Mercurian louse. According to Starzl's story, Mercurian lice live up trees, rather than under stones in your back garden. A tree louse basically looks like a 'big disc' with legs round the edge (in other words, a lot like a crab). Is it called a ‘louse’ because it looks like the earth creature – or is it actually related to it in some way? If the latter, then that’s extremely interesting …
The bacteria are so big that they can be seen with the naked eye. When you manage to pull one off you, it leaves small red marks that can fester a bit if you don’t treat them pretty smartish. Why have these buggers managed to grow so big on such a small planet? Surely they can manage to sneak up on us better when we can’t see them - like the ones on earth. Perhaps it is the increased level of solar radiation caused by the planet being closer to the sun than Earth that does it.
Whatever the reason, we are not told - probably for the self-same reasons detailed in the next section.
Your most interesting questions not answered
Many of the stories published in Astounding Stories beg a never-ending string of breathless queries.
Sometimes the author does make some sort of attempt to address the issues raised by these. Quite often they don't. Starzl's story is absolutely typical of the latter type.
According to his narrative, it takes his interplanetary policeman hero no less than two weeks to travel to Mercury from Earth. He makes his way to the first planet of the solar system in a small ovoid craft that is started with an activation key (similar to the ignition key of a car, I suppose) and fitted with oxygen tanks and viewing periscope. Otherwise, we don’t learn anything more about this nifty little vehicle.
Amongst the numerous vitally important questions that sprang to my personal mind whilst reading were:
How is this craft fuelled?
What happens if he runs out of fuel on the way?
What does he eat while he is travelling?
Does he have an autopilot that flies the craft while he gets some much-needed kip?
How and where does he go to the toilet en route?
I suppose Starzl might well argue that as his protagonist is a policeman, he would not be expected to know all that much about the science and technology behind his craft. Well, yes, I'll accept that as an excuse - but surely a copper must still have some idea of how he goes to the bog during the journey?
Clichesville Arizona ahoy!
Much of the academic and critical study of the early Astounding Stories that I have been able to track down so far centres round the undeniable fact that many of the tales included in each issue are based fairly and squarely on creaky old popular fiction tropes.
Once again, this particular story provides a splendid example of this tendency.
The native people of Mercury may look like a cross between human beings and frogs – but they speak just like all those preternaturally wise Native Americans from the creakiest cowboy fiction on the range [Earthlings = ‘Lords of the Green Star’, for a start. Plutonians = ‘Lords of the Dark Star’, which inevitably makes you start thinking of Star Wars … ].
Even though their apparently worthless plants produce what is to Earth people an extremely valuable cure for cancer, it never occurs to them to start charging the Earthlings serious money for it. Nor do these fine beings bother to ask us to try respecting their environment a bit more, instead of so steadfastly exploiting it.
People from Pluto, on the other hand, look just like the devil – only they are as black as hell, rather than red as sin. Like the devil, they are the incarnation of evil – and incredibly manipulative into the bargain.
Why it is acceptable for Earthlings to screw the hell out of Mercury while a single Plutonian interloper is harshly and summarily dealt with remains yet another one of those pressing questions that somehow never get answered in the narrative. If you ask me to hazard a guess, however, my money would be placed firmly on the fact that our hero the policeman is an upstanding specimen of Thirties WASP American manhood - so of COURSE he's got the undisputed right to support and condone others of his kind in their unrelenting attempts to get rich (not).
One rule for the States, another for the rest of the world
And here's the answer to the above dilemma.
Following this unspoken real-life assumption from the time, we can extend the basic principle to cover the rest of the solar system. Therefore, it is fine for the Earthlings to exploit the people and environment of Mercury – but not at all acceptable for the interloper from Pluto to start muscling in [the mere title of The Earthman's Burden alone makes this attitude quite explicit].
As you already know, Bob
As mentioned previously in Ben Aaronovitch's Temporarily Significant entry on Primeval, this seems to be another extremely common trope in pulp fiction.
In the four part novel The Exile Of Time by Ray Cummings, there is supposedly a robot uprising against the human race taking place in the ancient cellars of New York in the year 2930. Surely you think the reader would like nothing better than to be in the very thick of such gripping and fantastic action. They would love to be right there with the central characters as the narrative surges on around and about them.
But do we get to see any of these thrills and spills for ourselves? Do we buggery!
Instead, many of the events are narrated by one character to another, instead of being recounted directly by an omniscient narrator.
Now sometimes this technique does work very well. Indeed, one of the best sections of the entire series occurs when the present-day protagonist describes the way in which the skyline of New York constantly changes during the journey through time that he makes with the princess from the future. As they travel, she explains the historical context of all these changes to him.
This makes perfect sense in narrative terms.
However, instead of actually seeing the robots from the future when they come crashing into the New York of the American Revolution during the eighteenth century, we only hear about it through the account that the girl from those times gives to our twentieth century hero. Why? Surely it would make far more of a dramatic impact if we were there with her and her contemporaries when it happened, sharing their horror and bewilderment as the strange invaders march on remorselessly?
So what the hell was the point of using a first person narrator if they cannot actually be present at many of the most exciting and vital scenes in the story the author is telling? Is it because the reader’s need to identify with the narrator is assumed to rank above all else – including narrative tension?
Part of me wonders whether American magazines back in the Thirties were already publishing guidance notes for prospective contributors. If so, what did those for Astounding Stories say? Would it be something along the lines of "No matter how strange your tale and how weird the word you set it in, above all else, our readers must identify with your protagonist or narrator. This therefore means that they need to be a nice, sensible, all-American just like you and me."?
Dictator of the month
Hardly surprisingly for a publication produced during the Thirties, there is a complete obsession with raving megalomaniac dictators.
Over a period of 1 year [? Confirm this], they published no less than [?] stories on this theme alone.
Some of these dictators are fascists, while others are Communist. For example, Paul Stravoinski in Holocaust is Communist, and Moyen in Monsters Of Moyen is Fascist. Because this was a mainstream American magazine, the authors of these stories are usually quite upfront about displaying their intense fear of the Red Menace [see Holocaust by Charles Willard Diffin from June 1931 issue, and Werewolves of War by D W Hall in Astounding Stories February 1931 issue].
Equally sadly, racism doesn't take long to rear its ugly head either. Hence the nasty undertone of the Yellow Peril displayed in Monsters Of Moyen by Arthur J Burks from Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 (and also the Buck Rogers classic novel The Air Lords Of Han by Philip Francis Nowlan).
Presumably the rampant racism would go some way towards explaining the fact that, even though Mussolini was already ruling Italy by 1930, there is no mention of any of these fictional dictators starting out their rule in a Western European country. This also tends to suggest that both authors and magazine editorial staff assumed that Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa are all considered slightly savage, backward countries by all ‘right-thinking’ English speaking people of the era in which these stories were written.
No matter where they might individually come from, every single last one of these dictators quickly manages to set up an incredibly efficient war machine. In these stories, wave upon wave of planes, tanks, ships or submarines swarms over the horizon to deal death and destruction to the American people.
If this is true, then there must be endless factories in these dictatorships churning out nothing but armaments and military equipment. And naturally this begs more of the classic awkward questions on the intelligent reader's part:
Where do these factories get all the raw materials to produce this stuff?
How do these regimes manage to train all their soldiers, sailors and airmen so efficiently and rapidly?
Why don’t the raw materials ever run out?
Or the factory workers go on strike?
Once again, we never hear the answers. All we are told is that the invasions are eventually repulsed - not by Bolshevik workers downing tools and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat over in the snowy wastes of another continent, but by a lone Yankee warrior of some sort, proving that the American way of life is so ineffably superior to anything else that it can turn any old Joe Schmo off the street into Horatio on the bridge.
Mind you, it's impossible to come away from these stories without the distinct impression that secretly the authors and their all-American characters sometimes seem to quite envy the dictatorships for solving all the terrible economic and social problems faced by capitalist economies during the Twenties and Thirties ...
Looney geniuses running amok
This is another one of the ropey old workhorses of narrative device that never fail to get a good airing in Astounding Stories.
The standard way of making a genius into not just an overt threat but the covert epitome of coolness is to portray him (9 times out of 10 it is a 'him') as a stark staring nutter
Hence we have our old favourite Fraser the mad scientist in The Floating Island Of Madness, Into Space by Sterner St Paul in Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930, The Beetle Horde by Victor Rousseau in the same issue (trillions of famished beetles led by a madman sweep down over the entire human race - great stuff!); Mad Music by Anthony Pelcher in the same issue (a barmy violinist employs his instrument to knock down a 60 storey skyscraper. Why? Because he's stark staring teapot); Old Crompton's Secret by Harl Vincent in the same issue again (an eccentric rich youth becomes a recluse and invents a machine that restores lost youth to the old - but neglects to turn it into a serum to sell on the cosmetics counter at Maceys); Ivan Saranoff in The Port Of Missing Planes by Captain S P Meek in Astounding Stories August 1931 and When Caverns Yawned in the May 1931 issue.
There are so many mad scientists on the loose in these stories that you do have to wonder if the authors were promised an extra percentage on top of the standard fee if they remembered to include at least one in each story.
Never trust an extraterrestrial
Of course, this goes without saying - but that doesn't stop all of these boffins and their mates from falling into the trap every single sodding time.
In Monsters Of Mars by Edmond Hamilton in Astounding Stories April 1931 , the head scientist and his colleagues are amazed and delighted when they manage to establish contact with beings from Mars. As a result of their curiosity, they spend several months engaged in an indepth exchange of ideas with the extraterrestrials.
They really believe that they are working to further the noble causes of human knowledge and co-operation and harmony between the different species of the solar system. So when the Martians send them across plans for a teleportation unit and ask them to come over for a quick visit, they're ready to jump at the chance.
Oooooo dearrrrrrrrrr.
BIG mistake!
Not only do the Martians look just like crocodiles walking about on two legs - they also want to invade the Earth.
As you do.
Mind you, seeing as their planet is slowly dying from global environmental failure, you can't exactly blame them for feeling a tad desperate, even though their method of dealing with the problem isn't exactly to be recommended. And their leader may have three giant heads sitting on top of one enormous body - but they do drive the most marvellous vehicles shaped like robot centipedes.
Did the astronomers in The Doom From Planet 4 by Jack Williamson in Astounding Stories July 1931 pay any attention to the lesson learned so painfully by the characters in Monsters Of Mars?
No way, Jose.
This mob decided to go and observe a rare eclipse from an isolated island in the middle of the ocean. When the extraterrestrials contacted them there, they found it every bit as profound and cool an experience as the scientists in the previous story.
So when they were sent over some blueprints and asked to build the devices depicted, they were only too happy to comply as well.
In this second story, Mars has been taken over by the sentient robots created by the original inhabitants. The droids lost no time in marmolising their former masters - and their next stop is Earth.
To keep curious Earthlings away from their secret base on our planet, they persuaded the astronomers to construct a giant laser cannon just like something straight out of a James Bond film, which they use to zap the buggery out of anyone who threatens them.
The only way to combat the menace in both tales is to destroy the nasty alien technology that has brought the threat to the Earth. Whether it is the teleport device in the first story or the laser cannon in the second, sorry mate, it's got to go. Not just the machine itself, but all the plans and blueprints as well.
After that the interstellar communication devices must be smashed as well, so that we can never talk to those sneaky conniving extra-terrestrials ever again.
And while we're still on the subject, don't trust the wildlife or the vegetation on another world either. Yes, the David Attenboroughs and Bellamies amongst us would adore the opportunity to investigate all that fabulous exobiology. But the characters in The World Behind The Moon by Paul Ernst in Astounding Stories April 1931 faced constant and overwhelming threats on all sides from the very moment their hydro-powered atomic craft touched down on the surface of Zeud [another highlight of seriously bad science, incidentally - a planet that hides behind the dark side of the moon, which is why it wasn't discovered until the Thirties.].
