Insect nation

No, this entry is NOT about the classic cod-rock opera by Bill Bailey.  Instead I'm going to treat you to a discussion of The Beetle Horde, yet another of the classic serials published by Astounding Stories during the early Thirties.   

This unforgettable masterwork was penned by a cult author called Victor Rousseau.  Though he seems to be no relation of either the philosopher or the painter (as far as I can make out, anyway), he nevertheless managed to produce a work of sci fi so demented, it almost approaches genius.

Unlike normal people, I don’t tend to start reading a book at the beginning, go through to the middle and keep going until I reach the end.  Instead I’ll flip it open almost at random, see if it looks interesting – and if it does, carry on from there until the narrative starts to drag a bit or I nod off.  When I return to the story, I employ the same technique all over again.  Eventually I will manage to finish the book by piecing together the narrative a bit like a jigsaw.

Suppose this may explain why I still find it so difficult to construct a basic three act storyline.  And also why I seem to get on so well with surrealism.  Apparently women as a species are meant to naturally gravitate towards realism in fiction.  Well, I’ve never been a fan of soaps or kitchen sink drama, while French windows comedies and vicar’s trousers falling down in front of the mayor continue to leave me cold.   

All of which means you'll have to forgive me.  I'm doing the best I can, even though times is hard.

So far I’ve only managed to read the final part (of four).  Based on that, here is what I deduce the basic plot to consist of.  If it later turns out to be utter bollocks, suppose I'd better delete all this pdq.

Anyway, a pair of explorers get kidnapped while on an expedition to the Antarctic.  They are then hauled down to the secret underground world helpfully known as Submondia for the hard of understanding.

Now the inhabitants of Submondia are by no means your average mob of sinister lurking gnomes.  They just happen to be a race of gigantic, super-intelligent beetles that developed their very own civilization.

Quite why a species with so many natural advantages would choose to be ruled by a mad human archaeologist who went nuts and disappeared off the face of the earth (quite literally, in this case), instead of the insect version of Nelson Mandela or Josef Stalin (please delete according to preferred political and social affiliation) is yet another of those strange mysteries that never even get addressed, let alone explained, in a story like this.

It still seems positively racist, though, not to mention the type of wilful illogic that would drive the most sensible and mature of Vulcans to drink – particularly when it naturally and inevitably transpires that the beetles are in the habit of abducting humans from the surface world to act as their slaves and food source.  I mean - what rational being is going to accept orders from a bacon buttie?

Turns out the nutcase currently occupying the beetle throne is named Bram (in honour of Bram Stoker?).  Like the infamous Fraser from The Floating Island Of Madness, he can best be summed up as a pretty typical ‘mad scientist’ type of boffin.

It seems that the scientific community of 1930 can’t stop laughing at his continued insistence in the face of all the evidence discovered to date in the fossil record that extinct creatures like the marsupial lion lived long before the theory of evolution suggests they must first have appeared.  Stung by all the constant derision, he has of course developed the standard issue massive grudge against all of humanity.

If the two explorers refuse to admit to his face that his idiotic ‘theory’ is right, he tells them during one of his endless loopy rants, he will condemn the entire surface world and everyone on it to death.  The sentence will be carried out by a swarm of several trillion armour-plated beetles that he will order to ravish the face of the earth at his leisure.

Odd that beetles should act more like a plague of locusts – but then, the story does state that the poor things were starving (yet another reason Submondia urgently needs a beetle revolution, you would have thought.  Beetles of the under-world unite!).

Bram intends to direct the horde from the comfort of his battle chariot.  This consists of the upturned shell from a monstrous beetle that’s moulted, in which he lolls in state on plump cushions like a corrupt and decadent Roman emperor.  The chariot is dragged into the air by a specially trained team of eight sleek war steeds (aka really fast, fancy looking beetles with go-faster stripes down the sides).

Yes, that’s right – they fly!

Sorry, but the first picture to come to mind is the buzzing piebald buggalo in that brilliant Futurama episode Where The Buggalo Roam.

Just as no-one in authority takes much notice of Kif Croker, everyone seems to ignore Haida, the human slave the explorers rescued from the depths of Submondia and brought to the surface with them.  However, it turns out that like the timid green lieutenant, she possesses the knowledge and expertise that will eventually save humanity.

To give her her due, Haida does keep trying to explain the simple and unspectacular facts, but just like Zapp Brannigan, the rest of the human race refuses to listen to a word she and the explorers have to say about the danger posed by the immense beetle horde.

For example, during their enforced stay in Submondia, the explorers soon discovered that the shells of the beetles were completely impervious to bullets.  If you want to escape being eaten alive by a marauding beetle, the best thing to do is dress up in the discarded shell left by one that’s moulted.  Then you will both smell and look like a beetle to the other beetles, so they will leave you alone.

Failing that, your best bet is to hole yourself up somewhere they can’t get in – like a nuclear bunker.  Or you can outfly them by zooming to the top of the stratosphere in an aeroplane.

Problem is, fear makes the human race both stupid and stubborn.

When the Australian air force takes to the skies to repel the invaders, it soon becomes apparent that bullets are less than useless against the vile creatures.  Yet the Aussie pilots keep on pumping them out.

Another pilot later finds out that human planes can reach much greater heights than the beetles – yet no-one seems prepared to act on that discovery, either.

Presumably people back in 1930 knew of many methods of exterminating normal-sized beetles, so why didn’t any scientists try to apply or adapt them to killing enormous mutant ones too?  In the dire circumstances described here, you’ve got to admit calling in Rentokil is worth a shot.

And even if the Australians were somewhat distracted battling off the hordes, why couldn’t people living elsewhere on the globe look for a solution that might help them?

The main reason must be that if any of the above scenarios actually happened, the action would be likely to get resolved a fair bit sooner.  This would deprive us of much-needed narrative tension and urgency – and the explorers of their opportunity to finally save the day in the typical heroic fashion.

Nor would the readers have half so many lurid setpieces of sickening horror and revulsion to look forward to.  The beetle attacks Down Under must rank with the most gore-ridden zombie and chainsaw killer B-movies out there.

The carnage kicks off with the beetles chasing and devouring alive the poor group of Australian aborigines who try to help the explorers and Haida when they eventually emerge from the depths in the middle of an extinct volcano in the outback, instead of Antarctica, like they were expecting.  By the time they've finished their little feast, there isn't much left for the funeral.  

Later the beetles place both Melbourne and Adelaide under siege.  As a result, Bram is despised by 99.9% of people round the globe as the very Anti-Christ, even those who belong to other religions.

No wonder retro-nerds across the States escaped the worst of the Depression by devouring such trash on a monthly basis.  If you live in the Dustbowl and can’t even get a job as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, you either hitch a lift on the back of a rickety truck to go and pick oranges in California – or you sit it out, pretending in your head that you are Bram, unleashing the full might and fury of your ravaging beetle horde on the world that has deprived you of your birthright to the pursuit of happiness.   

What a load of old teapot! Inside The Floating Island Of Madness again

Can now report back that I have now finally finished reading The Floating Island Of Madness - somewhat earlier than expected, mainly because the bloody thing is only 24 pages long.

Yes, that's right - 24 pages.

Now, many great works of past and present are on the shorter side, it's true.  But usually something of this length would be described as a 'short story', rather than a 'book'.  A book needs to have enough heft to it to prop up a wonky dining room table in an emergency.  24 pages of pulp fiction is simply not enough to do it.

According to a quick Google search I've just done, The Floating Island Of Madness was originally published as a short story in one of these Astounding Fiction type magazines.  So why wasn't it then included in some 'best of ... ' collection of their short stories and novellas?  That would have made a lot more sense than reprinting it as a standalone.

But then, what do I know?  I'm not what Ben Aaronovitch would no doubt refer to as one of the gibbons of the publishing trade.

To compound the offence, they then had the cheek to describe it on Amazon as a 'classic'.

It isn't!

It's pants!

Well, I did warn you that if it continued to keep up the good work, then I would probably let you know all about it.  If we swap the word 'good' for the word 'bad', then I can in all conscience keep my original promise to you.

You'll no doubt recall that author Jason Kirby prefers not to bother himself with those extraneous little fripperies of the story-telling trade such as character and motivation.  He is also enough of a radical to dispense entirely with narrative tension and an action-packed ending as well.

Returning to the story at the point where we left off last time, after the three captive secret agents had injected themselves with harmless vials of water in order to pretend to be mad, they were summoned before mad Algy Fraser (makes him sound like he's Franky's brother or cousin, doesn't it?  Have visions of him parading down the East End in the Sixties, dressed up to the nines in the sharpest cut and narrowest lapelled of Italian-tailored mod suits, and drinking at the bar of the Blind Beggar, arm wrapped firmly round Barbara Windsor's waist.  But anyway!).

Fraser naturally wants to make sure that the official insanity juice is taking its due effect.

Luckily Foulet the French agent has already studied abnormal psychopathology in some depth, being a pretentious Gallic intellectual by trade, and so the other two decide to copy him in both gesture and word, just to be on the safe side.

Fraser appears to be reasonably satisfied with progress so far, but informs the three that Brice the Brit has to undergo a second dose of loopy latte at the hands of Doctor Semple because his brain is much tougher than those of the other two (yes, you heard it here second).

Meanwhile, Fraser will put Ainslee the Yank and Foulet 'under the nourishment ray'.

This involves installing them in a tiny room kitted out with a device similar to a sunray lamp that bathes them in a deep orange light which feeds, waters and relaxes you all at the same time.  Quite why Fraser couldn't have flooded the market with these marvellous contraptions, even back in the Thirties, and made an absolute mint we don't know.  But then, he is supposed to be stark, utter, raving bonkers, so perhaps a bit of simple market research and business forecasting might be slightly beyond his mental capabilities at the moment.

Once they have topped up their stomachs and their tans sufficiently, Fraser starts interrogating them.  He insists they tell him what their respective countries have found out about him and his evil plans for total world domination.  Naturally he’s extremely proud of his nefarious plots, so he doesn't exactly neglect the full and detailed explanations of them that we have all come to expect from the malevolent mad genius of popular imagination.

Of course they realise that being ‘mad’, they are now supposed to have forgotten everything about their previous lives. So they look really vacant and don't reply.

Then Fraser demands to know whether the nations are afraid of him.  Do they realise that it is he who brought about the Wall Street crash?  (This is seriously no joke - he most definitely claims that he and his agents were the ones responsible, rather than the world's bankers and politicians, or the global economy buffeted by the vicissitudes of recent history.)

The men answer in dull monotones.

But does the world KNOW that Fraser is its master?

"Master," drones Foulet, just to drive the point home.

Abruptly, Fraser announces he has now changed his mind, and takes them outside again.

There he releases a secret catch.

A trapdoor swings open in the bottom of the island.

They peer through it at the desert plain two thousand feet below.  Surely mad Algy is not going to pitch them straight through the opening to their certain death?

Er, no.

Even Algy Fraser is a bit too subtle for that.

Instead, he points to a small metal ladder running down from the trapdoor to who knows where.

He forces them to climb down this into a small chamber that hangs off the underside of the island just like a gondola off the bottom of an airship.

Then he locks them in there for the next three days.

Because they suspect that Fraser may have also invented his own version of CCTV and even now be monitoring them round the clock, they still have to pretend to be mad.  This involves looking dense as pigshit whilst moving and speaking as little as possible.  Again, Ainslee follows Foulet's expert lead.

Due to the need for caution, conversation is necessarily somewhat limited.

On the third day, Fraser returns.

Addressing them as sane men this time, he demands to know how they are now feeling.  Apparently, the first dose of the madness serum only last three days.  However, successive doses will prove cumulative in their effects.  As he has so abundantly proved already with all the prisoners he took earlier.  So - are they finally ready to talk?

At this point, the modern reader may be heartened by such splendid evidence of devious mind-screws and good old-fashioned emotional manipulation.  Perhaps Algy will match Hannibal Lecter and co yet!

Ainslee and Foulet both vow never to give in to the demands of the 'cruel, power-loving, scientific machine', even if they have to die in order to save their respective countries from the depredations of his vile plots. 

Coming as it does after a soothing session in the tanning salon and three whole days vegging out in the Thirties version of an isolation tank, you would hope (indeed, you would probably be praying by this juncture) that this difference of opinion might do something to rachet up the emotional tension level a bit.

Basically, their dilemma boils down to this.

Fraser will only let them out if they talk.  If they don’t, then he will use his handy mad genius Swiss pocket knife to cut through the four cables that attach the isolation pod to the underside of the island.

No prizes for guessing that Fraser rejects Foulet’s attempts to reason with him, fearing a trick.  The men both refuse pointblank to talk – and so he starts cutting the cables, one by one.

Just as he has almost finished severing the third cable, rescue arrives!

Yes, it’s Brice the Brit.

Clamping a handy pair of steel cables to the roof of the pod, he opens the roof hatch and proffers them a ladder.  While Algy is distracted with his efforts to cut through the final cable, they climb out back onto the island.

He launches forthwith into his lengthy explanation of events.  (Lengthy explanations of events seem to be a favourite narrative device in pulp sci-fi from the Thirties, judging by the various short story collections I’ve downloaded from the Manybooks site so far.  More on this topic at a future date, maybe.)

While they were locked away in the isolation chamber, Brice did receive a second injection of the madness medicine – but this didn’t bother him because he’d spotted a phial of the antidote just casually lying on barmy Dr Semple’s desk.  Why Fraser isn’t concerned about the possible security ramifications of such terrible carelessness isn’t explained, though I suppose if you happen to be a mad genius, locking dangerous medications away safely when not in use probably isn’t high on your agenda of things to do to achieve total world domination.

When the doctor was distracted, Brice simply injected himself with this to reverse the effects.  Wonder how he knew for sure that this was the antidote?  Was the bottle clearly labeled ‘ANTIDOTE TO MADNESS SERUM – DO NOT EXCEED STATED DOSE’?

Next he spent the next three days doing his best impression of Foulet’s Method acting style ersatz insane slave.  This seems to have gone down pretty well with the captive audience, as he was given liberty to go wherever he liked around the island.

He discovered that in fact the weight of all the people and machinery is not sufficient to keep the island from flying all the way up into space.  Four giant lamps situated at each corner of the desert beam up more of the mysterious rays discovered by Fraser.  The rays meet just underneath the island and combine their forces to anchor it down into a stationary floating position (technical explanation courtesy of Jason Kirby and his personal interpretation of Seriously Bad Science).

Yes, there is an off switch.  Yes, Brice discovered where it was.  And yes, he’s just managed to turn it off.   

Without losing any time, he urges them to climb into the plane they originally came in.

As the island and its inhabitants soar off to their certain deaths in space, the agents calmly fly off into the sunset.  Brice jumps off the edge – but he’s okay because he’s managed to find a parachute and attach it to his back without anyone noticing.  The other two simply land on the desert floor and pick him up when he touches down.

And, that’s it, folks.

So, let’s take a moment to quickly summarise what we’ve just learnt:

1.)  If you are a genius, no one else understands what the hell you are on about – including the author.  Therefore, you tend to talk in what sci fi great Larry S. Niven refers to as ‘bolonium’ (aka industrial strength professional jargon bollockese).

2.)  When you are mad, you tend to do things just for the sheer hell of it.  Your normal powers of logic have been suspended for the duration.  Therefore, you build a floating island and live and work on it purely because it seems incredibly cool, not for any scientific or strategic benefits that this might bring you.

3.)  Mad people deserve no understanding or sympathy.  Even though most of the nutters living on the island were brought there against their will and have been driven insane thanks to regular doses of the medically unlikely serum, none of the three agents makes any attempt to help or save them.  This is despite the fact that Brice has discovered the antidote.  Instead, they must all fly off to their death along with Fraser and the island.

4.)  Either the local tribespeople living in the desert underneath the floating island haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary (very unlikely indeed, when you consider the fact that Fraser has installed four enormous arc lights in each corner of their domain) – or nobody in the English-speaking world of the Thirties considers their opinions to be worth listening to.

5.)  Many readers during the Thirties must have thought that pulp fiction counted for nothing as an art form.  Hence the endless proliferation of tired tropes, such as mad scientists, and constant lapses in narrative logic, like the business with the  insanity serum antidote.     

Ha ha teapot! Inside The Floating Island Of Madness

Remember I told you that I'd been downloading some really promising looking free e-books off the Internet?

Well, now I can report back to you that I've actually started reading them.

The Floating Island Of Madness made an ideal companion on the Intercity journey from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston - not least because it is a classic example of total sci-fi schlock and roll.

It recounts the exciting and vital tale of an American secret service agent who gets together with his counterparts from the British and French secret services to investigate the mysterious disappearances of a number of people in the vicinity of Constantinople (note that the book seems to be set in the present-day of the period at which it was written, the Thirties, yet the author still refers to the city as 'Constantinople').

As this is meant to be a premier slice of riproaring techno-adventure, writer Jason Kirby prefers to cut straight to the chase, so he doesn't bother wasting any of his valuable narrative time and energy with any poncey niceties of more mainstream literature, such as characterisation and motivation.

Instead, the three agents simply climb into a plane and zoom off in the direction of the Arabian Desert (er, how close is this to Istanbul 'not Constantinople', exactly?  Will have to get round to looking it up, but can't imagine it being exactly next door or anything).

After flying around all day attempting to catch up with the elusive gliders that have apparently been spiriting people away from the city rooftops, at sunset they reluctantly decide to turn back and head for the airport.  

However, this sensible plan fails to come to fruition - because their plane has now been caught by one of the mysterious tractor beams emanating from the floating island of madness.

Helpless, but not hopeless (if they were, then there would be no basis for a story), they are dragged miles and miles off-course, right up to the notorious island itself.

Despite the fact that this island is several acres in diameter and floats two thousand feet above the Arabian Desert, the mad scientist that runs the joint is convinced that nobody back down on the ground has the slightest idea what he's up to!

Yes, this place has been created by a classic barmy boffin.

Although he is named Fraser and looks more like Hercule Poirot than Albert Einstein, this delightful individual is indeed a classic example of the genre.  With a mind the equal of someone like Stephen Hawking, he originally came to prominence via some fascinating discoveries connected with 'light'.  What these were precisely we are never told, quite possibly because Jason Kirby himself knew five fifths of bugger-all about science, and doubted his target audience would care, either.

Anyway, Fraser then lost no time in going nuts, so he was promptly consigned to one of the best bins in the business. 

Everybody thought that would be the last of him - until he very conveniently escaped.

The men in white coats wielding the massive butterfly nets failed to catch him, and he was thus registered as a missing person.

Of course, Fraser is one of those barking mad scientists who believe in giving full value for money.  Therefore he indulges himself to the max explaining all his fiendish and unspeakably evil plans to his three prisoners in almost mind-boggling detail.

According to his own incredibly self-indulgent monologues, the floating island of madness owes its very existence to that world-beating combination of raving genius and what Ben Goldacre from The Guardian would call Seriously Bad Science.

Defying the very laws of physics, Fraser has invented an almost weightless new element called 'fleolite' (sic).  This you can pour into moulds and let set like concrete.  The entire island has been constructed from it, and the only reason it doesn't float right off the planet altogether and up into space is because there are enough people and vehicles living on it to weigh it down a bit.

Now, at this point the reader, very much like the three secret agents themselves, may be wondering just how Fraser managed to persuade all his many and varied personnel to come and work for him on such a ricketty, out-of-the-way structure.

Time to introduce technical innovation number two.  Fraser's strange discoveries about light inevitably led him to develop the tractor beam - several centuries before the characters in Star Trek thought up the idea.

But that's not all this amazing boffin keeps up his sleeve ...

To ensure that his unwilling guests don't cause any more trouble once he's brought them there, he gets every last one of them injected as soon as possible with a secret serum that he developed on his day off.

This unlikely substance is what sends you mad.  Your intellect keeps working as per normal, but all your emotions are permanently switched off.

Fraser went teapot quite naturally, but everybody else who works for him has been treated with this horrible drug (wonder how he persuaded the first one of them to take it, then?  Now THAT would be an interesting story and a half ... ).

The three agents are next on the list for conversion - until they manage to trip Fraser's looney doctor assistant up, causing the contents of the syringe to spill out onto the floor.  They then fill it back up again with harmless water.

This is as far as I've got at the moment, but I'll be sure to keep you posted on subsequent developments (assuming the rest of the book lives up to this early promise.  If not, then I probably won't be arsed and will just talk about something completely different instead).

Still, it's nice to know that the stock literary figure of the Mad Scientist was not only alive and well, but cooking on gas at such a relatively early date.

I'm sure someone somewhere must have bothered to study the phenomenon in relentless and bum-numbing detail, so I'm off now to look up their work and see what it says.

In the meantime, what continues to perplex me is the issue of who precisely would have read this stuff when it first came out.  Presumably people who knew so little about real science and technology that they were easily overawed by Kirby's crap theorising and so took it on face value.

Yet in his classic study New Maps Of Hell, veteran sci-fi aficionado Kingsley Amis states quite clearly and unequivocally that many of the readers of the genre from the late Twenties on actually were trained in some sort of scientific or technological based discipline as part of their jobs or careers, so you'd reckon that they would have been able to recognise that Fraser's inventions were total and utter bollocks.

And back in the late nineteenth century, no less a writer than Jules Verne himself declared that there is no point in writing science fiction unless you make quite sure to get the science bit right.

Maybe it was easily over-impressed teenagers, then ...