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!

Dark Moon by Charles W Diffin

While I was reading Henry Kuttner’s first novel The Creature from Beyond Infinity (originally published in Startling Stories November 1940 as One Million Years to Conquer) I decided to have a look for some more of his work – not necessarily a common response to the book but there you go. I didn’t actually find anything I didn’t already have but I stumbled across a series of issues of Astounding Stories from 1930 and 1931. So of course I downloaded them all. They’re on Project Gutenberg but also a number of ‘free book sites’.

I chose one to read at random the other day; saying that I must admit the classic image of a bug-eyed monster on the cover may have influenced my selection.

It was May 1931 and it opens with a novelette by Charles W Diffin called Dark Moon. As it happens the cover image with the bug-eyed monster is from this story, although I pictured the monster slightly differently when I read the description.

In many respects Dark Moon seemed to me to be classic pulp science fiction. It’s a grand adventure for a billionaire, his friend and a mysterious woman who is of course a mixture of brave heroine and fragile feminine beauty. Yes, the story is sexist, but it could be a lot worse than it is, she isn’t totally helpless no matter how helplessly she falls in love for the hero she just met.

It opens with a business transaction then there’s an earthquake that kills the lawyer whom our hero has known all his life and wipes out most of New York in a monster tsunami, which smashes the hero’s port facilities. In the face of all this death and destruction our hero laments – the loss of all his property. Not the most sympathetic hero in the world but he’s a good guy really.

The cause of this earthquake, which was actually a global phenomenon and cause even more devastation than he originally witnessed, was the sudden arrival of a new moon in our orbit. Apparently it was flying through space by itself then fell into our orbit, causing a momentary shifting of plates and tides.

Our hero immediately sets to work on his amazing flying machine – the world is dominated by helicopters – which he believes will allow space travel. As the finishing touches are done by his friend he goes to sort out his crumbling business fortune. Long story short, it doesn’t go well, luckily for him the world is attacked by mysterious creatures.

These semi-permeable serpents fly around above the Heaviside layer, which is what keeps Earth pilots from going to space apparently, very few ships can go beyond it and only with the best licensed pilots. Their interruption allows a daring escape and our hero and friend head for the ‘Dark Moon’ as the new satellite is known as no light or radio or anything else can penetrate its atmosphere.

En route they rescue the heroine from the serpents and discover that space is like a giant ocean filled with bizarre life. The impenetrable atmosphere is just a strange gas that works like one-way glass so the surface of the moon itself is bursting with life.

That life is of course bizarre, what roaming planetoid with a mysterious gas in its atmosphere wouldn’t have bizarre life on it? There are a number of encounters with various creatures – including primitive ape-men because all evolution leads to humans doesn’t it? – which I won’t detail here but are as fun as they are ridiculous.

After a daring … well, hurried escape, the heroes return to Earth and our billionaire knows he’s redeemed because of the fortune he’ll make mining the new moon. His rival tries to argue with the idea, at which point we learn that the heroine is a wealthy heiress who has been the rival’s ward, but she turned 21 while on the moon and dismisses him.

So yes, it’s absurd, implausible and deals with things very simplistically. It also promotes free enterprise over nationalism and encourages a get-up and go attitude right in the midst of the Depression, while offering excitement and intrigue to brighten things up. Should we therefore write it off as a bad story or accept it as product of its time and a useful story for people in need of escape? (see Neil Gaiman’s comments on escape versus escapism). I think the latter.

Keep dreaming.