The Rest of Astounding Stories May 1931

Following Dark Moon which I discussed earlier, comes the short story When Caverns Yawned by SP Meek. It’s one of his Doctor Bird and Operative Carnes stories, the first I’ve encountered, and I have to say it was terrible. The villain was a one-dimensional evil genius and he has an infallible plan for world domination – or giving America over to Soviet Russia at least. Doctor Bird matches wits with this scheme and of course comes up with a way to stop it.

The story is bland, the characters cardboard cut-outs and the writing gets lost in useless explanations of scientific theories. Apparently he was a popular contributor to the SF pulps in the early ’30s but as tastes turned to more literarily acceptable fare he gave up science fiction and wrote children’s stories.

Then came part two of a four-part novel by Ray Cummings, The Exile of Time. I’ll go back, read the other parts, then get back to you.

Next came Hal K Wells’ When the Moon Turned Green, which was about a scientist who’d been in his underground lab for three days working on a new explosive based on radium. He comes out to test a small charge of it and finds the moon is green and every living thing is in a sort of living death, totally immobile but not dead.

Then he’s attacked by a monstrous spider with a half-human face. Story short, aliens from Alpha Centauri were bathing the moon in a green glow that was sapping the life from everything on Earth to make them mindless so they can be used to make hybrids, like the monstrous spider, and so rule the world.

Thankfully for us, the scientist has discovered this powerful explosive and his friend has invented a radio-seeking missile that’s already locked on to the space ship. His friend (and his friend’s daughter who is his fiancée) escaped the “Green sickness” because they were interrogated by the Centaurians on Earth who used a crystal thing to bring them out of it. The alien base was of course on his property. Talk about a string of lucky coincidences.

Plot aside, it’s a fun story with some nice monsters and aliens. Okay, so I’m a sucker for pulp tropes, so sue me.

Finally there was The Death-Cloud by Nat Schachner and Arthur L Zagat. This is a war story set in The Last War, where almost the entire planet has fallen under the Red Flag except for America, of course. The action takes place before the Big Push of ’92 (1992), and sees a secret agent infiltrate a mysterious enemy location.

It’s a fairly exciting cross-genre story but not all that gripping. The best part for me was the war was not being fought on land but in airships and with submarines. Interestingly, as with When the Moon Turned Green and When Caverns Yawned, the principal weapon and scientific concept was a ray gun. There seemed to be a lot of belief in the powers of rays yet to be discovered at the time. Not sure I’m sorry it didn’t turn out to be true though.

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.