Rays of Life - some stories in Astounding from 1930
I'm about halfway through the second issue of Astounding (February 1930) and there's been an interesting common thread in a three of the stories so far. While vastly different in approach and atmosphere, they all feature the discovery of a 'Life' ray at their heart. There are some spoilers ahead so if you want to read the stories first they can be found here.
The first was Harl Vincent's Old Crompton's Secret. This story didn't go anything like I expected. The blurb describes a rejuvenated old man with the memory of a crime, the illustration is of a fight scene between Old Crompton and a younger man. Then the story opens with a description of the enigmatic town hermit - Crompton - who has been there so long even the old folk can't remember when he arrived or why he's such a grouch. So at this point I was assuming his dark secret/remembered crime was why he was a hermit. But no, the crime happens three-quarters of the way through the story and turns out to not actually have happened ... as in the murder victim isn't dead.
So from that angle I wasn't a particular fan of the story but in other ways it was an intriguing setup. The old hermit gained a new neighbour, a young scientist who turns as hermetic as he is, and the nature of his experiments result in a three-foot-tall rooster. It is finally revealed that the young scientist has discovered the secret to life itself - which he funnels through electric rays in a particular configuration. Most interesting is his motivation. Having discovered this world-changing technology he immediately thinks of all the money and influence he will make offering the use of his rejuvenating machine to old rich people. It's possibly the most mundane motivation for such a scientist I've encountered. Mad ideals, world domination, saving lost loved ones ... nope, just getting rich and influencing people.
The next story's scientist was less materialistic and was probing the mysteries of life and death for the sake of doing so more than anything else. Interestingly he was also a side character in what was, in the end, a form of locked-room horror story. The story was The Corpse on the Grating by Hugh B Cave and is a first-person account of a mysterious night a doctor has when he and a famous scientist are called to visit a professor who proceeds to explain that he was on the verge of discovering the secret of life itself and restoring it to a dead man. He claimed mild success on a corpse but when the narrator called on him to prove it he said it hadn't proved as successful as he'd hoped so he'd dumped the body.
On their way home the doctor and scientist argue over the possibility of the professor being right, then they discover a dead man in a warehouse gate. It's the watchman and he appears to have died of fright. From here the story becomes the haunted house type, the doctor goes inside on a dare and ends up encountering the corpse the professor had disposed of. It turns out the professor should have been more patient.
The third 'life ray' story in the issue is an altogether different affair again. It's Creatures of the Light by Sophie Wenzel Ellis. It follows the adventure of another young scientist with incredible intellect and stunning looks. He is led to discover another scientist's great work. This scientist is an expert in electricity and has discovered the ray of life. He used that ray to create a tropical paradise in a hidden valley in the Antarctic where he has through use of his ray and a eugenic breeding program, advanced human evolution to the point of 'perfection'.
The story has our hero declaim the ideals of the scientific tinkerer of humanity revolting, primarily because of the manipulation of breeding people and using the ray to fast-track growth and development - at 20 years of age 'Eve' had spawned five generations. Indeed, the central villain is one of the 'perfect' humans who despises the lesser humans, except one woman, and his equals who are perfect and thus boring, so he aims to destroy them all. Of course, that doesn't quite pan out, but the paradise is most certainly lost in the end and shown as a foolish quest.
So three very different stories, all within the Frankenstein galaxy if not solar system. Fascinating concepts. In the middle of these three stories was a very different tale of alien invasion by Charles Willard Diffin, Spawn of the Stars. It had monstrous protozoa in near-perfect flying saucers with hydrogen-based attacks that precede the Manhattan Project by a decade which is interesting in itself. In the end the world is saved by sunlight - and good-old American military bravery and self-sacrifice of course.
Keep reading, keep exploring and thinking. And most of all - Keep dreaming!
The first was Harl Vincent's Old Crompton's Secret. This story didn't go anything like I expected. The blurb describes a rejuvenated old man with the memory of a crime, the illustration is of a fight scene between Old Crompton and a younger man. Then the story opens with a description of the enigmatic town hermit - Crompton - who has been there so long even the old folk can't remember when he arrived or why he's such a grouch. So at this point I was assuming his dark secret/remembered crime was why he was a hermit. But no, the crime happens three-quarters of the way through the story and turns out to not actually have happened ... as in the murder victim isn't dead.
So from that angle I wasn't a particular fan of the story but in other ways it was an intriguing setup. The old hermit gained a new neighbour, a young scientist who turns as hermetic as he is, and the nature of his experiments result in a three-foot-tall rooster. It is finally revealed that the young scientist has discovered the secret to life itself - which he funnels through electric rays in a particular configuration. Most interesting is his motivation. Having discovered this world-changing technology he immediately thinks of all the money and influence he will make offering the use of his rejuvenating machine to old rich people. It's possibly the most mundane motivation for such a scientist I've encountered. Mad ideals, world domination, saving lost loved ones ... nope, just getting rich and influencing people.
The next story's scientist was less materialistic and was probing the mysteries of life and death for the sake of doing so more than anything else. Interestingly he was also a side character in what was, in the end, a form of locked-room horror story. The story was The Corpse on the Grating by Hugh B Cave and is a first-person account of a mysterious night a doctor has when he and a famous scientist are called to visit a professor who proceeds to explain that he was on the verge of discovering the secret of life itself and restoring it to a dead man. He claimed mild success on a corpse but when the narrator called on him to prove it he said it hadn't proved as successful as he'd hoped so he'd dumped the body.
On their way home the doctor and scientist argue over the possibility of the professor being right, then they discover a dead man in a warehouse gate. It's the watchman and he appears to have died of fright. From here the story becomes the haunted house type, the doctor goes inside on a dare and ends up encountering the corpse the professor had disposed of. It turns out the professor should have been more patient.
The third 'life ray' story in the issue is an altogether different affair again. It's Creatures of the Light by Sophie Wenzel Ellis. It follows the adventure of another young scientist with incredible intellect and stunning looks. He is led to discover another scientist's great work. This scientist is an expert in electricity and has discovered the ray of life. He used that ray to create a tropical paradise in a hidden valley in the Antarctic where he has through use of his ray and a eugenic breeding program, advanced human evolution to the point of 'perfection'.
The story has our hero declaim the ideals of the scientific tinkerer of humanity revolting, primarily because of the manipulation of breeding people and using the ray to fast-track growth and development - at 20 years of age 'Eve' had spawned five generations. Indeed, the central villain is one of the 'perfect' humans who despises the lesser humans, except one woman, and his equals who are perfect and thus boring, so he aims to destroy them all. Of course, that doesn't quite pan out, but the paradise is most certainly lost in the end and shown as a foolish quest.
So three very different stories, all within the Frankenstein galaxy if not solar system. Fascinating concepts. In the middle of these three stories was a very different tale of alien invasion by Charles Willard Diffin, Spawn of the Stars. It had monstrous protozoa in near-perfect flying saucers with hydrogen-based attacks that precede the Manhattan Project by a decade which is interesting in itself. In the end the world is saved by sunlight - and good-old American military bravery and self-sacrifice of course.
Keep reading, keep exploring and thinking. And most of all - Keep dreaming!
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