Star Begotten: A Monstrous Rebuttle [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Star Begotten by HG Wells is one of those novels that you rarely see. The science fiction people tend towards the early stuff: The Time Machine, Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds, while the sociological types prefer the later books like Men Like Gods, The Sleeper Wakes, and The World Set Free. Lastly, the literary types ignore the SF altogether (write it off as a passing phase) and focus on the novels like Wheels of Chance, Ann Veronica, or The Secret Places of the Heart. I can honestly say I am not any of these. I am a monster fan. And Star Begotten is an interesting book to me.

Star Begotten was written in 1937, nine years before Wells’ death. Wells’ reputation by this time was not what it was in 1898 or even 1915. By the late 1920s, he was reprinting his glory days in pulps like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. He must have seemed pretty old fashioned to many. George Orwell described him as being too sane for the mad world of the 20th Century. With the events of the Russian Revolution and afterwards, his socialist ideas were becoming unpopular. (He does address this and many others things in the novel.) I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Star Begotten came and went, only to be resurrected by Manor Books during the 1970s SF paperback boom. (This is the edition I keep encountering in second-hand stores.)

The plot of Star Begotten is easy to describe because there is so little of it. Basically, we follow an idea that a writer comes up with, that Martians are bombarding humanity with cosmic rays in an attempt to “Martianize” us. Wells debates the idea in several long “talking heads” sessions between writers, doctors, and other learned men, but never puts the idea into action. (There is a subplot about how the writer Davis realizes his wife is one of the “Martainized” people and his newborn son is likely one, too.) This static “idea story” had become the norm for him after abandoning the more plot-driven adventures of his early career for dystopic lectures in his later books. As GK Chesterton put it, "Mr Wells is a born storyteller who has sold his birthright for a pot of message..." The exciting moments of the first SF tales - like the descent into the Morlocks’ tunnels, encountering the beast men, fleeing the invisible man, or crossing the devastation of the Martians’ conquered Earth - are not here. Star Begotten is a mental book, filled with many big ideas on humankind, civilization, media, and art. It is as such that we must approach it: Wells’ summing up all his work and ideas.

Now I have been accused of minimizing Wells’ greatness in previous articles. I make no apology for this. I am not a scholar of great literature. I have nothing to add there. I am a student of monsterdom. So if you are looking for tracts on Socialism or Literature or any other higher ideas, move on. I am a monster fan and that is what I do. And here is why Star Begotten is interesting to other monster fans: In this book, Wells gets to look back at his earlier work, The War of the Worlds in particular, (he pokes fun at himself with: “Some of you may have read a book called The War of the Worlds - I forget who wrote it - Jules Verne, Conan Doyle, one of those fellows”) and address how readers took that book, and to rethink the monsters he used in that classic. It’s not often that writers get to do this.

Through the debates on the theoretical Martians, Wells redesigns them. He discards the cruel squidgies with tentacles and blood injections, and instead presents a kinder, gentler Martian:

'Yes, Mars was cool long before earth was. A longer past, a hotter summer and a harder winter—the year of Mars is twice the length of ours—a larger body and a larger brain. With more room for memories—more and better memories—and more space for ideas, more and better ideas. And so the problem comes down to this. What sort of mind would a man have if he had a longer ancestry, an ampler memory, a less hurried Life?'

The gentle giants of Mars are redefined as “quite nice monsters.” Wells no longer wants to shock and horrify as he did in the early years of 1894-8, that great monster-spawning instinct that gave us intelligent ants, killer squid, communal spiders, and a host other great creatures. Instead he wants to extrapolate scientifically, thinking of what Mars was like and how evolution would have sculpted the Martians both mentally and physically. Only after this, once the nominal hero of the story accepts that the Martians exist, do we finally get to see how it affects him. The final chapter confronts a writer who sees all his previous work as misguided nonsense, who destroys his unfinished masterpiece and finally realizes he need not be depressed about the coming new race. Not only is his wife and child part of this new, better kind of human, but he is one of them too.

The obvious stepchild of Star Begotten is John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). Many know it better by its film title, Village of the Damned (1960, and the John Carpenter remake in 1995). Unlike Wells, Wyndham makes the plot move with some energy. The UFO craze of the 1950s supplies the aliens with a more direct access to humanity, visiting the village one night and impregnating all the viable females. The children born of this night are mutants with very similar hair and telepathic abilities. Wyndham does a great job of exploring how humans would feel when homo superior shows up and it is their own children. Wells suggest the idea but never runs with it. Like many 1950s SF films, the subtext seems to be about Communist infiltrators.

As I said at the beginning, Star Begotten has largely been ignored by science fiction and monster fans. But not all writers were unaware of it. One who was familiar is Nigel Kneale in Quatermass and the Pit (1957) in which the discovery of fossils proves that humans were mutated by a dying Martian race. Another is Manly Wade Wellman in Sherlock Holmes’ War of the Worlds (1975) who chooses Wells’ redesigned Martians (or aliens) over the squidgies of 1898. Star Begotten is not the influential masterwork that The War of the Worlds is, but I can recommend it to any writer interested in how to create an alien by extrapolation, or how to re-design one you’ve already created.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

The Little People: A Fantastic Thread [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

History has a strange way of inspiring horror writers. In the records of the Romans there is mention of a strange race that lived in the British Isles before the Celts. Their name was simply the Picts, meaning "picture," for they were heavily tattooed. "The Picts of Galloway" supposedly intermingled with the Gaels, but to a writer of terror tales the idea that these people, and others like them, should go underground and become the inspiration for "The Little People" of legend is too tempting.

The first to grab onto the idea of this primitive and secret survival was Welsh writer, Arthur Machen (1863-1947). Machen liked to imagine that under the bucolic green hills of Wales, terrible and evil things lurked. Amongst these were savage creatures that once ruled the world. He wrote three stories about them that appeared in the same year. The first, "The Red Hand" (Chapman’s Magazine, Christmas 1895) has Dyson, Machen's occult detective of sorts, exploring a grisly murder committed with a primitive, prehistoric axe that hints at the creatures who wield it:

‘My dear fellow, I am sorry to say I have completely failed. I have tried every known device in vain. I have even been so officious as to submit it to a friend at the Museum, but he, though a man of prime authority on the subject, tells me he is quite at fault. It must be some wreckage of a vanished race, almost, I think — a fragment of another world than ours. I am not a superstitious man, Dyson, and you know that I have no truck with even the noble delusions, but I confess I yearn to be rid of this small square of blackish stone. Frankly, it has given me an ill week; it seems to me troglodytic and abhorred.’

"The Novel of the Black Seal" (The Three Imposters, 1895) provides another artifact, a black rock with weird writing:

We had dined without candles; the room had slowly grown from twilight to gloom, and the walls and corners were indistinct in the shadow. But from where I sat I looked out into the street; and as I thought of what I would say to Francis, the sky began to flush and shine, as it had done on a well-remembered evening, and in the gap between two dark masses that were houses an awful pageantry of flame appeared—lurid whorls of writhed cloud, and utter depths burning, grey masses like the fume blown from a smoking city, and an evil glory blazing far above shot with tongues of more ardent fire, and below as if there were a deep pool of blood. I looked down to where my brother sat facing me, and the words were shaped on my lips, when I saw his hand resting on the table. Between the thumb and forefinger of the closed hand there was a mark, a small patch about the size of a sixpence, and somewhat of the colour of a bad bruise. Yet, by some sense I cannot define, I knew that what I saw was no bruise at all; oh! if human flesh could burn with flame, and if flame could be black as pitch, such was that before me. Without thought or fashioning of words grey horror shaped within me at the sight, and in an inner cell it was known to be a brand. For the moment the stained sky became dark as midnight, and when the light returned to me I was alone in the silent room, and soon after I heard my brother go out.

In "The Shining Pyramid" (The Unknown World, May 15, 1895), Machen finally gives us a vivid description of the humanoids that worship the Pyramid:

It did, in truth, stir and seethe like an infernal cauldron. The whole of the sides and bottom tossed and writhed with vague and restless forms that passed to and fro without the sound of feet, and gathered thick here and there and seemed to speak to one another in those tones of horrible sibilance, like the hissing of snakes, that he had heard. It was as if the sweet turf and the cleanly earth had suddenly become quickened with some foul writhing growth. Vaughan could not draw back his face, though he felt Dyson's finger touch him, but he peered into the quaking mass and saw faintly that there were things like faces and human limbs, and yet he felt his inmost soul chill with the sure belief that no fellow soul or human thing stirred in all that tossing and hissing host. He looked aghast, choking back sobs of horror, and at length the loathsome forms gathered thickest about some vague object in the middle of the hollow, and the hissing of their speech grew more venomous, and he saw in the uncertain light the abominable limbs, vague and yet too plainly seen, writhe and intertwine, and he thought he heard, very faint, a low human moan striking through the noise of speech that was not of man. At his heart something seemed to whisper ever "the worm of corruption, the worm that dieth not," and grotesquely the image was pictured to his imagination of a piece of putrid offal stirring through and through with bloated and horrible creeping things. The writhing of the dusky limbs continued, they seemed clustered round the dark form in the middle of the hollow, and the sweat dripped and poured off Vaughan's forehead, and fell cold on his hand beneath his face.

HG Wells (1866-1946) needs mention here. He did not use this idea of ancient creatures for he had little interest in the past. He was a futurist. Despite this, one of his stories seems to have influenced later writers in conjunction with the Little People idea. The story in question was "The Time Machine" (National Observer serial, 1894) and his underground dwelling Morlocks.

In Wells' story these white-skinned cannibals are the future of the suppressed proletariat, living in their machine-run depths. Wells is careful to describe the Morlocks only in snatches, making them more mysterious. “A pair of eyes, luminous by reflection against the daylight without, was watching me out of the darkness... I put out my hand and touched something soft. At once the eyes darted sideways, and something white ran past me. I turned with my heart in my mouth, and saw a queer little ape-like figure, its head held down in a peculiar manner, running across the sunlit space...” The man from the present plumbs their dark tunnels and just barely escapes their cold, wicked plans. This image of the man trapped in the dark, armed only with a light and a solid metal bar has fused with Machen's vision of evil survivals.

Robert E Howard (1906-1936) was the writer who really brought these two together, though he was not the last. Howard's first venture into the world of the Little People was an open pastiche of Machen called "The Little People" (Coven 13, January 1970). This early tale, written in the 1920s, suffers from poor mechanics. The hero, tells his sister the lengthy history of the Little People, after perusing a copy of "The Shining People" by Machen. Later these very creatures invade their home where the narrator gives this description:

"Now I was almost upon those who barred my way. I saw plainly the stunted bodies, the gnarled limbs, the beady reptilian eyes that stared unwinkingly, the grotesque, square faces with their inhuman features, and the shimmer of flint daggers in their crooked hands..."

The narrator dives in for a Howard-sized fight, but the creatures find and attack his sister. Only the sudden appearance of a white-bearded druid saves them from the Little People. This tale contains many of the elements that will later appear in the much better constructed tales of Bran Mak Morn and Conan.

"The Children of the Night" (Weird Tales, April/May 1931) sets up several of Howard's themes for his Little People stories, the first being degeneration and the second: reincarnation. One of Conrad and Kirowan's friends, John O'Donnell, has a strange vision while visiting the occult investigators. He sees himself in the past as Aryara of the Sword People, an ancient Celt, who encounters the Little People and falls fighting them. Upon waking, O'Donnell attacks Ketrick, one of the guests, for he has Serpent blood:

But Ketrick: to me the man always seemed strangely alien. It was in his eyes that this difference showed externally. They were a sort of amber, almost yellow, and slightly oblique. At times, when one looked at his face from certain angles, they seemed to slant like a Chinaman’s. Others than I had noticed this feature, so unusual in a man of pure Anglo-Saxon descent. The usual myths ascribing his slanted eyes to some pre-natal influence had been mooted about, and I remember Professor Hendrik Brooler once remarked that Ketrick was undoubtedly an atavism, representing a reversion of type to some dim and distant ancestor of Mongolian blood–a sort of freak reversion, since none of his family showed such traces.

Howard's dated racism can be offensive today, but within the context of the story O'Donnell would prefer any human of any color or creed over the few humans who still carry the taint of the Little People.

Howard would return to his version of the degraded half-breed creatures in several stories, the best of which was "The Worms of the Earth" (Weird Tales, November 1932). To make things even more interesting, Howard has the Picts, dark warriors living under the Roman radar as well as these even earlier creatures that the Picts displaced. Howard's Worms are half-human hybrids with the evil Serpent Men of ancient times, another lost race that once ruled the world. Bran Mak Morn, the king of the Picts, enters the Worms' tunnels (shades of Wells) to steal their sacred relic and force them to do his bidding:

And he came at last into a vast space where he could stand upright. He could not see the roof of the place, but he got an impression of dizzying vastness. The blackness pressed in on all sides and behind him he could see the entrance to the shaft from which he had just emerged--a black well in the darkness. But in front of him a strange grisly radiance glowed about a grim altar built of human skulls. The source of that light he could not determine, but on the altar lay a sullen night-black object--the Black Stone!

Howard wrote of the Worms again in "Valley of the Lost" (Magazine of Horror, Summer 1966), a tale set during the Texas feuds of the 19th Century. Little John Reynolds is fleeing the McCrills when he takes refuge in the valley where the Little People hide. He spies the strange inhabitants:

It was not their dwarfish figures which caused his shudder, nor even the unnaturally made hands and feet–it was their heads. He knew, now, of what race was the skull found by the prospector. Like it, these heads were peaked and malformed, curiously flattened at the sides. There was no sign of ears, as if their organs of hearing, like a serpent’s, were beneath the skin. The noses were like a python’s snout, the mouth and jaws much less human in appearance than his recollection of the skull would have led him to suppose. The eyes were small, glittering and reptilian. The squamous lips writhed back, showing pointed fangs, and John Reynolds felt that their bite would be as deadly as a rattlesnake’s. Garments they wore none, nor did they bear any weapons.

Reynolds flees the weird caverns, blowing up the door that leads to the outer world, then takes his chances against human enemies, his hair now stark white.

"The People of the Dark" (Strange Tales, June 1932) is a rewrite of sorts of "The Little People" with the narrator, John O'Brien, coming to Dagon's Cave to kill Richard Brent, his rival for Eleanor Bland. Howard has the characters thrust back in time using reincarnation as a method to change O'Brien into a Gaelic warrior, Conan of the reavers. Brent becomes Vertorix, a Briton, and Eleanor a Briton girl named Tamera. All three face the Worms, but only Conan survives; Vertorix and Tamera plunging to their deaths rather than succumb. O'Brien wanders the caves, finally making his way out. He encounters one last denizen of the deep, the snaky remains of the Worms in our time:

Before the Children had vanished, the race must have lost all human semblance, living as they did the life of the reptile. This thing was more like a giant serpent than anything else, but it had aborted legs and snaky arms with hooked talons. It crawled on its belly, writhing back mottled lips to bare needlelike fangs, which I felt must drip with venom. It hissed as it reared up its ghastly head on a horribly long neck, while its yellow slanted eyes glittered with all the horror that is spawned in the black lairs under the earth.

O'Brien shoots it with the revolver he had brought to kill Brent. Brent and Eleanor know they are eternal soul mates and O'Brien lets them go for he too now understands.

Karl Edward Wagner would write further of Howard's Worms in Legion From the Shadows (1975). He added little to Howard's vision, but did combine elements from several different stories, having Serpent Men, Worms, and even the Crawler from the Conan stories. His Serpent leader looks thus:

The figure was as tall as Bran, and of skeletal leanness—although little else could be discerned through the voluminous folds of his robes. The arms that protruded from the flaring sleeves were covered with the pallid scales of some ancient serpent, taloned with long, black nails. The skull above the narrow shoulders was curiously flattened at the temples, and rose to a high peak. That peaked, hairless skull was encircled in a golden band, set with sullen gems of murky hue. His ears were pointed, the nose flared and pitted as a viper’s snout, the face little more than a pallid mask of scales tight across an inhuman skull. Bright and pointed fangs made a double row along the grinning jaw. Those yellow ophidian eyes mirrored a soul of elder evil that had looked unblinking across the expanse of centuries.

Thus the Worms once looked before the long road to degeneration. Wagner would create his own race of subterranean dwellers in his story ".220 Swift" (New Terrors, 1980), borrowing the idea partly from Manly Wade Wellman and his Guardians of the Ancients from “Shiver in the Pines” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1955).

Gerald Kersh (1911-68) was a sophisticated writer of weird tales and mainstream novels, but even he ventured into the world of the Little People in "Voices in the Dust" (1950, for Judith Merrill's Shot in the Dark). An adventurer in a future world (after World War III) goes to the dead city of Annan in an area of ash and stones. Here he discovers a race of white-skinned, large eyed people:

...The light paralyzed it: the thing was glued in the shining, white puddle—it had enormous eyes. I fired at it—I mean, I aimed at it and pressed my trigger, but had forgotten to lift my safety-catch. Holding the thing in the flashlight beam, I struck at it with the barrel of the pistol. I was cruel because I was afraid. It squealed, and something cracked. Then I had it by the neck. If it was not a rat it smelled like a rat. Oh-oooo, oh-oooo, oh-oooo! it wailed, and I heard something scuffle outside. Another voice wailed oh-oooo, oh-oooo, oh-oooo! A third voice picked it up. In five seconds, the hot, dark night was full of a most woebegone crying. Five seconds later there was silence, except for the gasping of the cold little creature under my hand.

Kersh gives a long explanation -- we've heard it before -- about how the Picts had been the source of the fairies in places like Wales. The explorer follows the Little People into their subterranean tunnels, like Wells' Time Traveler, but falls and breaks his leg. The people of the dark do not threaten the man but feed him. Unfortunately, their medical skills are so primitive that the man can do nothing but sit in the darkness and wait for death. Kersh takes his inspiration from Machen and Wells, (though probably not Howard) and adds his tale to the history of the Little People. Who will be next?

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

7 Days in May | John Hughes and Tom Cruise

Mr. Mom (1983)



Started a John Hughes marathon this week. Should've included Vacation as well, but we'll have to go back and pick that one up later. My memory - probably tainted by the sequels (including Christmas Vacation, which I don't like as much as most of my friends) - is that it's overrated, but still funny. I should see it again and make up my mind.

But this is about Mr. Mom, which is also very funny. Michael Keaton is really charming and I always love Terri Garr, too. And the way it deals with gender issues holds up surprisingly well. Sure, the premise is supposed to be funny because stay-at-home dads... that's a disaster waiting to happen, right? But the movie never shames either spouse or suggests that they're better off in their traditional roles. It upholds both business career and homemaking as important, vital work, regardless of the gender of the person doing it. Not all of Hughes' writing stays this fresh, so I was really pleased.

Sixteen Candles (1984)



Here's one that doesn't hold up as well. Anthony Michael Hall is really funny as Farmer Ted and Molly Ringwald is very effective as the awkward Samantha, but I don't ever root for her to end up with Michael Schoeffling's Jake. That's partly Schoeffling's fault, but it's also the script's for the way it introduces him. It suggests that he's noticed Sam before, but doesn't do anything about it until he steals a private note revealing that she wants to have sex with him. Creepy.

I'm not as creeped out by Ted's ending up with Jake's girlfriend, Caroline. I've heard people describe that as date rape, but the movie makes it pretty clear that both characters were drunk and that Ted remembers even less of it than Caroline does. It's not a part of the movie that I cheer about, but I don't find it as problematic as a lot of folks claim.

But then there's Gedde Watanabe's character, who is super troublesome. And the whole theme of the movie seems to be about how graceless teenage life is. And it is, which is why Sixteen Candles resonated with a lot of kids in its day, but as an adult it's kind of hard to watch.

The Breakfast Club (1985)



I don't have the words for how much I love this movie. It is to my teenage years what Star Wars was to my childhood. I don't know how many times I've seen it, but it feels like hundreds. For years, I could quote the whole thing.

The themes in it are profound and I've failed for 30 years to make up my mind about what happened on Monday. A tiny part of me has wanted a sequel to give me the official answer, but I know that's not what I really want. I appreciate being able to waffle back and forth about who stayed friends and who ignored whom. I love thinking about it and changing my mind and I don't want that locked in.

Far and Away (1992)



The Mummy has put us on a bit of a Tom Cruise kick. Not because it was great, but because I want to relive (and share with David) some of the Cruise movies that were great.

Far and Away is one of those. It's a giant, sweeping epic held together by the charisma of its two leads and a beautiful score by John Williams.

Things to Come (1936)



I'd always heard about the wonderful visuals - both in design and effects - of Things to Come, so I wanted to see it for myself. And it sure is cool to look at. But it's barely a story and I certainly don't care about any of the characters it shoots past me at light speed. I'm glad to have checked it off my list, but can't imagine revisiting it.

Stage Fright (1950)



Stage Fright, on the other hand, is amazing. Last year I finally sought out some Marlene Dietrich movies, because I'd never seen any. I feel pretty confident about my handle on her oeuvre now, so I'm not being a completist about it, but Stage Fright was a straggler still on the pile because it's directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I love Alfred Hitchcock, but not every movie, so I'm never 100% confident that one I haven't seen will be a winner. This one is though.

It begins JJ Abrams-style in the middle of the action with Jane Wyman and Richard Todd on the run from the cops. We quickly learn that Todd's the one the cops are after and that he's just enlisted Wyman's help, so after a brief flashback to catch her and us up on what happened, the plot is off and running. Basically, Todd is wanted for the murder of his lover's (Dietrich) husband. He believes that the blame has been shifted onto him because of bad luck and some bad decision-making on his part, but Wyman suspects that it may have been an intentional framing by Dietrich.

After Wyman puts Todd into hiding with her dad (wonderfully played by Alastair Sim, who's becoming one of my favorite actors), Wyman sets out to get a confession from Dietrich and prove Todd's innocence. But what's so cool is that things never unfold the way I expected them to. The story's just similar enough to others I've seen that I think I know how it's going to go, but then someone makes a weird (but always plausible) decision or reveals some new information that takes the story in a new direction. It kept me guessing - and hooked in - every step of the way.

Fire Down Below (1957)



This is another movie that defied my expectations for it. It starts off with Robert Mitchum and Jack Lemmon as co-owners of a boat that they charter to rich people in the Caribbean. When they're paid to help passportless Rita Hayworth escape the authorities by taking her to another island, both are immediately attracted to her and the movie sets itself up as a romantic triangle. But it's not actually about who Hayworth is going to end up with.

I don't even want to reveal what it's really about, because finding that out was such a cool journey, but it's safe to describe Fire Down Below as a fascinating character study of all three leads and that the lead it's most concerned with isn't the one I thought it would be.

Zorro (1957-61)



I quickly jammed through the rest of Season 2 and I'm glad I did it that way. Parceling it out was turning it into kind of a slog, but binge-watching it meant that mediocre episodes were immediately followed by more exciting ones. And there were a few storylines that I enjoyed quite a bit.

The series never did return to the 13-episode arcs of the first season, but there were several multi-part storylines. One of the best starred Annette Funicello, who was given the role as a 16th Birthday present by Walt Disney. She plays a young woman who's come to Los Angeles to meet her estranged father. She's convinced that he lives there and she's even received letters from him postmarked Los Angeles, but no one has heard of the man. It's a cool mystery and Funicello brings a lot of conviction and spunk to her role.

There's still sort of a Season 3 left, so I'm not done with the show, but "Season 3" is only four episodes, so I'm almost there.

Jam of the Week: "Green & Gold" by Lianne La Havas

A great, funky, sultry groove that reminds me of Sade.

The Green Splotches [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Ever see one of those stories that appears in all the anthologies, but you've never read it? For me that was "The Green Splotches" by TS Stribling. Originally published in Adventure (January 3, 1920), it was reprinted in Amazing Stories (March 1927), the four editions of Donald A Wolheim's The Pocket Book of Science Fiction (1943), then in Famous Fantastic Mysteries (August 1952) and finally in Fantastic (September 1967). For forty-seven years this story kept showing up. Why?

The fact that DAW chose it for The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, the very first mass market paperback of SF, is significant. The anthology is roughly divided into three eras: the old classics by Bierce and Wells, a middle period with Stribling and John Collier, and the later pulp era with Weinbaum, Sturgeon, Heinlein, and Campbell. So who was this TS Stribling that DAW thought him important enough to put beside the masters of the Golden Age of Science Fiction? I couldn't recall any other stories by him from the early days when SF had not been named yet but was known as "Off Trail" fiction. The answer was surprising.

Thomas Sigismund Stribling (1881-1965) was a Pulitzer Prize winner! His novel, The Store, about life in the South, had won him America's greatest honor. But like many writers he had started out writing for magazines, including detective stories featuring Henry Poggioli for Adventure, Blue Book, and Red Book. In fact, writing for "The Soft Magazines" as the weeklies were known, had given him enough money to travel to South America. This is important because "The Green Splotches" (and much of his other science fiction) is set there.

The plot of the story has an American geographic expedition come to Peru to explore the Rio Infiernillo, a place so evil only two condemned murderers can be found to guide them. At the beginning of the valley the scientists find a collection of skeleton specimens, including a human, all hung up on display. Later they find a black patch that appears to not have been created by the local lava fumaroles, but is instantaneous enough to roast a nearby rabbit. The mystery deepens when one of their guides, Cesare, goes chasing after a stranger he has shot at, but doesn't return. The mystery man has left behind the green splotches of the title, a liquid filled with chlorophyll.

The scientists later encounter this stranger again and learn that he is a telepathic creature wearing the skin of their lost guide. He calls himself 1753-12,657,109-654-3 which they shorten to Mr. Three. Three explains he is from a place called One and refers to his race as The Firsts. His attitude is one of condescending amusement as the scientists try to imprison him for killing Cesare. Three and his fellows chase all the wildlife through the valley for collection, and they expect one of the geographic expedition to become one of these living specimens. In the end, the Firsts take Pablo, the other guide, leaving the scientists to witness the zeppelin-like ship take off on a shower of radium.

The characters on the expedition have their theories about what it all means. Pethwick thinks the yellow-skinned Firsts are an obscure offshoot of the Incans, possessing lost and secret technology. Professor Demetriovich thinks they are Bolsheviks. Stribling ends the story with a letter written by Gilbert H DeLong , the official administrator of the expedition. In it, he recommends the scientists for the Noble Prize, while giving his own interpretation of the record. He tells how the change in color as the ship flew off shows that the vessel was heading for space and at just above the speed of light. From the numeric name of Mr. Three and his incredible agility, DeLong deduces that the Firsts were headed for either Jupiter or Neptune. He envisions a heavy gravity planet populated by quadrillions of aliens, requiring their military lifestyle, their number names, and their interest in other forms of life (having none other on their planet). The green splotches were the blood drops of the Firsts, whom DeLong believes are plants, not animals. In this way, Stribling reveals all his secrets and finishes with a final sting. DeLong wins the Nobel Prize, not those he is advocating for; one last shot at human stupidity.

The satiric nature of the story becomes obvious when you realize the aliens are a "geographic expedition" as much as the humans. This comparison allows Stribling to make his point as Pethwick begins to associate himself with the other animal specimens. But one character stands out in this story beyond the general jibes. This is the expedition's secretary, a writer named Standifer. The author pokes a lot of fun at certain kinds of writers/critics, self-important authors of poor selling self-published books of non-fiction. Standifer despises fiction, while praising the virtues of facts found in his dull book, Reindeer in Iceland.

The story received several illustrations in its many reprints. Gernsback unwisely gives away the secret of the story by having Frank R Paul draw the spaceship on the cover and again in the illustration. Famous Fantastic Mysteries did better, beginning with the creepy skeletons and only showing the ship at the end. Stribling wrote a letter to FFM about his story. He down-plays its importance at the same time that he clearly indicates that he won't be writing anymore science fiction (that mood has passed). The editor praised his forward vision on rocket ship design, but Stribling confesses this was just dumb luck.

So, now I know what "The Green Splotches" was and why it had been reprinted so often. Stribling offers up several science fiction ideas that will appear again by other authors. The idea of aliens wearing dead people will be used in HP Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness" (Weird Tales, August 1931), aliens who are plants will feature in Murray Leinster's "Proxima Centauri" (Astounding Stories, March 1935),  and humans in an alien zoo will be used in "The Human Pets of Mars" by Leslie Frances Stone (Amazing Stories, October 1936). What strikes me as best about this is that Stribling did all this, but dressed it up like a 19th century adventure story a la Haggard or Conan Doyle. This may have been in part because he wrote the story for Adventure, but it also underpins his comments on the ruthlessness of scientific expeditions and silly notions like The White Man's Burden.

I wonder now why "The Green Splotches" hasn't been seen so often since the 1950s. (I ignore the 1967 reprint which I don't think was done out of care for the story so much as because the publisher was recycling cheap reprints and therefore the motive was mostly economic. In 1967, "The Green Splotches" is cheap filler.) I think the story was cutting edge in the '20s, relevant through to the '40s, explaining why DAW used it. But after that time the number of alien visitors stories multiplies quickly. With the flying saucer period at Amazing Stories and other Ray Palmer magazines, "The Green Splotches" would have become rather mundane by the end of the '50s. (The story was adapted for Escape, the radio show on March 31, 1950, starring William N Robson, William Conrad, and Paul Frees.)

TS Stribling would write more science fiction for Adventure before winning that Pulitzer. A lost race tale, "The Web of the Sun" (January 30, 1922), Fombombo (August 20-September 20, 1923), the dystopic "Christ in Chicago" (April 8, 1926), and a tale of intelligent apes called "Mogglesby" (June 1, 1930). His last novel, These Bars of Flesh (1938) features the same kind of satiric fantasy of his earlier stories. His use of science fiction was Wellsian in that he set up situations where he could look (not always kindly) at how humans behave. (Think of Wells' "The Country of the Blind," also set in South America.) "The Green Splotches" was the first of these examinations and as such deserves its place in the Reprint Hall of Fame.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Locked in Time: Time Machine Classics [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

The fourteenth episode of the popular sit-com The Big Bang Theory, "The Nerdmabelia Scattering," featured a prop from George Pal's 1960 film The Time Machine. The four main characters go in together to buy the original time machine prop, leading to neurotic Sheldon Cooper's dreaming and crying out, "Not flesh-eating Morlocks!" The disk-backed machine is described by Penny as "something Elton John drives through the Everglades!" But my favorite joke was when the guys simulated the sped-up time effect from the movie, pretending to be moving at advanced speed like the people in the street. Besides being hilarious, this cultural reference to the 1960 film is very telling. The show did not feature any references to the 1978 TV movie or the 2002 film. Why? Because no one, despite big budgets and CGI, has surpassed George Pal's film.

Of all the films based on HG Wells' four major SF themes, "The Time Machine" has received the least formal adaptations. This is probably due to the expensive nature of creating a future world. The concept of time travel has become widely familiar though, from comedies to super-hero fare. Anyone from the Three Stooges to the Flash can travel in time. The idea became a mainstream trope while actual adaptations of the story have been sparse.

"The Time Machine" (1895) catapulted HG Wells into the top tier of science fiction writers. The story (some call it a short novel) follows an anonymous inventor who goes to the future, seeking a time when Science will have solved all of humankind's problems. What he finds instead is a garden world populated by two separate races: the Eloi, with their pleasant bovine simplicity, and the evil Morlocks, dwelling below with their sinister machines. The tale works on so many levels that I've re-read it more times than any other of Wells' stories. The SF extrapolation is wonderful, following a split in the human species, as well as a look at the eventual death of the solar system. This post-Morlock portion of the tale has been as inspirational as the first part, influencing writers like William Hope Hodgson and John W Campbell. Wells also uses fantasy tropes like the dream journey and return, but the story also works as a horror tale, with the Morlocks slowly exposed and their terrible secret revealed. Perhaps most important to Wells is that the story is also a socialist cautionary tale about the division between proletariat and those who exploit them.

The very first TV adaptation was made by the BBC and appeared January 25, 1949. No recordings of this show exist. The Time Traveler was played by Russell Napier and Mary Donn was Weena. The script shows a fairly accurate adaptation and the photos look like typical BBC television, shot on a stage but with impressive sets.

Eleven years later, science fiction filmmaker George Pal would bring the story to blazing color with astounding special effects. The classic film starred Rod Taylor as the Time Traveler and Yvette Mimieux as Weena. The film won an Academy Award for its time-lapse photography. It is this film that gave us the chair with the spinning dish that supplied the prop for that episode of Big Bang. Unlike Pal's adaptation of The War of the Worlds (1953), this film did not update the setting but stays in the Victorian age of Wells. Because of this, the time machine does not have a futuristic look, but a quaint Steampunkish one. The only deviation from Wells' vision is the deletion of the scene where he goes beyond the Morlocks to see the end of the Earth.

Pal's film lingered on in TV reruns and re-releases at theaters for decades. It took until 1978 for someone to approach the material again, this time as a television movie, part of Sunn Pictures' Classics Illustrated series. Sadly, the producers updated the background, making the Time Traveler, played by John Beck, a scientist working for the military. The theme of the piece is also updated to being about the military industrial complex and not humanity's overall evolution. The film has numerous strikes against it. First, the almost Western-style music. This, along with jaunts back to a Salem-style witch-burning and the Old West, brand the picture as very American in what was a quintessential British novel. These past episodes take up almost half the movie, leaving only the last 50 minutes for the Eloi. The bad writing is accompanied with much bad acting. Priscilla Barnes, as Weena, is the only convincing performer.

There is a good laugh for people today when we learn that in 2004, in a world with environmental challenges, a three-day work week and test tube babies, World War III breaks out and annihilates the planet. Humans are driven underground and only the Eloi choose to come up again, leaving the underworld to the Morlocks, who look like Frankenstein monsters with glowing eyes. What was a series of fascinating mysteries and reveals in the novel is baldly and boringly stated in this film. Even the message of peace is twisted when the Time Traveler helps the Eloi to destroy the Morlocks. Wells would never have done this for he knew that the Eloi are too docile and stupid to produce clothing, food and other things necessary to survive. The Time Traveler returns to Weena when he learns the corporation he has blindly worked for, wants to use the time machine as a spying tool to keep their competitive edge on all future technology.

If the 1978 film was a disappointment, the 2002 film by Wells' grandson, Simon Wells, was an intriguing failure. Guy Pierce plays the Time Traveler, appropriately set before the turn-of-the-century, but in America. He is Dr. Alexander Hartdegen, a professor of Engineering at Columbia. The film supplies a romantic back-story in which Hartdegen's fiancée is killed. Using the time machine he tries to change the past, but finds doing so only causes her death in other ways. Disconsolate, he goes into the future to find Earth being ravaged by the destruction of the Moon. In this future time he encounters Vox, the computer library, played wonderfully by Orlando Jones. Later in the film he would encounter him again, in the dilapidated library of the Eloi. Jones is funny, singing an imaginary Andrew Lloyd Weber musical based on Wells' book, but he even manages to make us a little sad for the AI personality that can forget nothing. He also supplies the background info that is usually done at this point in the story. In many ways the film is an homage to the 1960 and even the 1978 films. Hartdegen's design has the same levers and spinning disk (though two) that we all know. The time lapse sequences use the same growing plants and passing suns that the other films did. And like the other two, the sequence after the Morlocks is ignored.

Now the bad news: once the time traveler goes 800,000 years into the future, the film stumbles. The success of the recent Tim Burton film, The Planet of the Apes, had a dire influence on the producers. The Morlocks are no longer small, apish creatures but several separate types, one large and brutish and the other thin and vampire-like, their king played well by Jeremy Irons. The Eloi are no longer pleasure-seeking cows but barbarians living in huts built on the sides of cliffs. I imagine the producers did not want the second portion to slow in momentum, taking their time to slowly reveal the Morlocks. Instead they dove Planet of the Apes-style into a world of hunter and hunted. The second half tries to be an action film and loses itself for a while. This said, much is the same as the 1960 film, with the main character's discovering the Morlocks' slaughterhouse and the eventual destruction of the underground caves. Before this, Hartdegen and the Morlock King get to argue about evolution and time paradoxes. They fight it out on the time machine instead of the usual bunch of Morlocks and the film ends with the machine destroyed. Hartdegen, with his Weena (named Mara) at his side, is ready to face an uncertain future. Even though the earlier parts of the film played homage to 1960 (like the dresses in the shop window), the second half tries to satisfy action fans and fails.

One side film I would like to mention is Time After Time (1979). This film featured Malcolm McDowell as HG Wells, who has created an actual time machine, and David Warner as Jack the Ripper. The Ripper's killing spree ends because he steals the time machine and escapes to our time. Wells follows him to the future and has to hunt the madman down. The film was directed and co-written by Nicholas Meyer, who had a bestseller with the Sherlock Holmes pastiche, The Seven Per Cent Solution (1974). The movie also stars Mary Steenbergen as the love interest, Amy, who would appear in another time travel franchise, Back to the Future. Time After Time is a delightful bit of fun for Wells fans, but isn't actually an adaptation. The Ripper's death is similar to that of the Morlock King twenty-three years later and I have to wonder if the film didn't have some influence.

The legacy of Wells' "The Time Machine" is too wide to clearly outline. His idea of traveling in time has been part of so many science fiction novels, TV shows, comic books and films. Without the Time Traveler's adventures there is no Captain Kirk going back to 1968 in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" or saving whales in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. No Red Dwarf. No Doctor Who or Back to the Future. No crappy ending of Superman II. Mainstreamed SF like The Lake House by James Patterson or better yet, Somewhere In Time by Richard Matheson. Classics like The Door Into Summer by Robert A Heinlein, "The Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury, "Behold the Man" by Michael Moorcock, and on and on and on... Time travel is one of the major SF themes and like so many others, the man who gave it to us went by the name of Wells.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

The War of the Worlds: Adapt or Die [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

HG Wells inspired so many branches of the Science Fiction tree: time travel, human-animal hybrids, invisibility, moon men, giant animals, super intelligent animals, and alien invasions. When I skim through The Great Book of Movie Monsters (1983) by Jan Stacy and Ryder Syvertsen, I can identify that at least one third of the films included have Wellsian roots. HG Wells is surely the single most important writer of SF in Hollywood.

That being said, the adaptations of his works have been confused, cheap or downright stupid. Every giant insect drive-in thriller is his legacy as much as objects on strings, giant killer ants chewing up Joan Collins, or men in rubber suits. Not to mention the entire Irwin Allen disaster movie and Godzilla genres. Wells was a great thinker; a controversial social critic, but his films usually come off as silly screamfests.

To my mind, his masterpiece is The War of the Worlds (1898). Wells imagines an invasion of earth by Martians who come in meteor-like canisters that open and produce killing machines on tripod legs and armed with death rays. The narrator journeys through the London landscape, seeing the devastation until the invaders die from earth bacteria. (This is bad Science but Wells was making a comment on Socialism not bacteriology.) This novel, due to its scope, has had fewer adaptations than most: four, not including Orson Welles' famous radio scarefest of 1938 and other media. (The most popular film product is The Invisible Man with twelve.) Destroying all of London (or is it New Jersey?) is a big enterprise, so the low-budget schlock makers have avoided it for the most part.

The first adaptation in film was the 1953 George Pal classic with its saucer-like machines. Garishly brilliant in color, it plays out Wells' novel in a modern setting and philosophically misses the boat with its churchy ending. (Wells must have spun in his grave faster than the Lord of the Dynamos.) An Oscar for special effects proves it typical SF fare in that the effects take center stage, making Gene Barry and Ann Robinson even more forgettable. To my mind, I missed the tripods but understand that flying saucers were all the rage in the 1950s. Pal would have been crazy to use the great stalking machines.

The 1960s and '70s did not produce a new film version. We had the cool, if superhero-sized comic book Amazing Adventures featuring Killraven created Roy Thomas and Neal Adams. This Marvel comic supposed an earth overrun by the Martians and how they would reshape our planet. Even better was the Jeff Wayne musical starring the voice of Richard Burton as the narrator. Wayne leaves the Victorian setting in place with tripods and all, though he did reshape the story a little to create scenes worthy of emotional duets.

The next adaptation on film was the 1988-90 TV series that was begun in the 1970s by George Pal, but took another 10 years to be realized. The Canadian-filmed show starring Jared Martin and Adrian Paul offered a more modern alien invasion. The Martians from 1953 have been sealed up by "the Government" and hidden from the public. Rather than being dead they are actually in suspended animation. Once released they assume the bodies of the terrorists (I didn't know they could do that!) who have stolen and released them. Their plans to take over the world are back on. The themes of government cover-up, UFOs, toxic waste, and terrorism are the flavor of the show rather than Wells, whom they piggybacked rather unnecessarily. Everyone in the first season dies and is replaced (along with the creative team) for a second season that was no more successful. The show was cancelled after two seasons, pretty much guaranteeing nobody would touch the property in the 1990s.

The next adaptation is one of my favorites, despite being reviled by some. This was M Night Shyamalan's Signs (2002) starring Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix. Shyamalan does something amazing and gets no love for it. First, he does an alien invasion movie without showing a thousand buildings falling down, tripods, or ray guns. Instead, he focuses on one family and how it affects them and only hints at the mayhem and destruction. That alone is amazing. This same technique will be used in Cloverfield (2008) (and receive much more praise).

The second and even better thing he does is to play his own philosophical riff from Wells. One of the strongest themes in the novel is that aliens have come therefore everything we thought was real has changed. How can a world with aliens in it believe in religion? Wells uses the character of the curate to explore these ideas. Shyamalan turns this on its head and actually finds a way to say, yes, religious belief is possible. Though I side with Wells on this personally, I still found Signs a wonderful rebuttal to the curate. I may be the only person on the planet that liked Signs, but as a Wellsian I'd love to see more films like it.

The last adaptation of War of the Worlds was the 2005 Steven Spielberger starring Tom Cruise. Now that it's ten years old I think I can look at it with some perspective. Visually the film is stunning. It also does a good job of being truer to Wells, having the Martians injecting human blood directly into their veins and such details, while at the same time being faithful to the New Jersey version of Welles and Pal. It uses the tripods, which is a big thumbs up from me. There were some justifiable criticisms about Cruise being able to drive from New Jersey to Boston without running into car jams. I could make the same criticism about a lot of recent disaster films too. Tim Robbins is great as a combination of the Artillery man and the curate. Cruise and Miranda Otto are able to bring some romantic energy to the tale, most likely inspired by Jeff Wayne's rock opera. Even Wells was not much for romance in his novel.

This film is likely to be the last for a while since it featured cutting edge special effects that haven't dated much. When CGI advances to the point where it can do something more, then perhaps we will get a new version. My personal hope is that the BBC does an incredibly faithful version as they did with The Day of the Triffids in 1981. I'd love to see the Victorian setting with really good CGI. John Wyndham's pal and fellow Wellsian, John Christopher's Tripods series would also be up for a remake with a good special effects budget. Until then, we'll put up with the schlock. Syfy's Sharknado Meets the Martians, anyone?

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Hand-Held Thunder: The History of the Blaster [Guest Post]

It's always a pleasure when G.W. Thomas sends in a guest post, not only because I get to share it with you, but also because I always learn something new. Thanks again to G.W. for this history of ray guns and blasters in scifi literature and film. -- Michael

Martian Heat Ray

It made sense when Science Fiction went to the stars that the brave men and women who plumbed the depths of space would need weapons suited to their new environment. A firearm requiring oxygen or air pressure would not work in the vacuum of space, nor could an adventurer lost on a distant planet find ammunition for a conventional gun. As with so many of Science Fiction's standard props, it fell to H. G. Wells to arm the enemies of Man with such a weapon in The War of the Worlds (1898):

It is still a matter of wonder how the Martians are able to slay men so swiftly and so silently. Many think that in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light. But no one has absolutely proved these details. However it is done, it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of visible, light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam.

Garrett P. Serviss can take credit for inventing "The Distintegrator" in his "Thomas Edison's Conquest of Mars" (1898), America's answer to H. G. Wells:

Another soft whirr in the instrument, a momentary flash of light close around it, and, behold, the crow had turned from black to white! 

"Its feathers are gone," said the inventor; "they have been dissipated into their constituent atoms. Now, we will finish the crow." 

Instantly there was another adjustment of the index, another outshooting of vibratory force, a rapid up and down motion of the index to include a certain range of vibrations, and the crow itself was gone—vanished in empty space! There was the bare twig on which a moment before it had stood. Behind, in the sky, was the white cloud against which its black form had been sharply outlined, but there was no more crow.

Barsoomian Radium Gun

While Serviss and Wells slugged it out in fiction, in the real world, Nikola Tesla was working on the idea of actual direct-energy weapons as early as 1900. In his The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media he discourses on charged particle beams. Still, fiction was slow to follow.

The first big writer to consider what a personal sized space weapon might be was Edgar Rice Burroughs in his maiden flight as a writer, "Under the Moons of Mars" (All-Story, serialization beginning February 1912). ERB realized that Martians would not necessarily have the same weaponry as Earthmen and came up with the "Radium" rifle:

These rifles were of a white metal stocked with wood, which I learned later was a very light and intensely hard growth much prized on Mars, and entirely unknown to us denizens of Earth. The metal of the barrel is an alloy composed principally of aluminum and steel which they have learned to temper to a hardness far exceeding that of the steel with which we are familiar. The weight of these rifles is comparatively little, and with the small caliber, explosive, radium projectiles which they use, and the great length of the barrel, they are deadly in the extreme and at ranges which would be unthinkable on Earth. The theoretic effective radius of this rifle is three hundred miles, but the best they can do in actual service when equipped with their wireless finders and sighters is but a trifle over two hundred miles.

Despite the range, most of the fighting on Mars takes place with swords. So much for logic. Still, it paved the way for other writers to think outside the box.

Buck Rogers

The term "blaster" was coined in April 1925 in Weird Tales (Amazing Stories and Astounding did not yet exist!) in "When the Green Star Waned" by the obscure Nictzin Dyalhis:

"Well, it was for me that, in obedience to Hul Jok's imperative command, I was holding my Blastor pointing ahead of me..." 

Another Weird Tales alumnus was Edmond Hamilton who wrote most the SF in the magazine. He had the Blue Ray of Death in "Across Space" (Weird Tales, September 1926) and the Cold Ray in "The Atomic Conquerors" (Weird Tales, February 1927) and the De-Atomizing Ray in "Crashing Suns" (Weird Tales, August 1928).

Buck Rogers, who was still Anthony Rogers when he appeared in "Armageddon 2419" (Amazing Stories, August 1928) by Philip Francis Nowlan, found the future Americans at war with invading Asians and using rocket launchers called Rocket guns and the following:

I took the weapon from his grasp and examined it hurriedly. It was not unlike the automatic pistol to which I was accustomed, except that it apparently fired with a button instead of a trigger. I inserted several fresh rounds of ammunition into its magazine from my companion's belt, as rapidly as I could, for I soon heard, near us, the suppressed conversation of his pursuers.

In the same issue, in an equally monumental tale, The Skylark of Space by E. E. Doc Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby goes back to the Burroughs' method:

They found that the X-plosive came fully up to expectations. The smallest charge they had prepared, fired by Crane at a great stump a full hundred yards away from the bare, flat-topped knoll that had afforded them a landing-place, tore it bodily from the ground and reduced it to splinters, while the force of the explosion made the two men stagger...The pistol cracked, and when the bullet reached its destination the great stone was obliterated in a vast ball of flame.

"The Girl from Mars"

Hugo Gernsback published "The Girl From Mars" by Jack Williamson and Miles J. Breuer in a pamphlet in 1929. This was the one thing he published in between owning Amazing Stories and his new set of magazines which included Wonder Stories. This tale features three Martians raised on Earth, children sent in capsules like Superman would be in the comics four years later. The two males fight a super-hero proportioned battle for the female using an array of weird weaponry most the size of a coin:

The ultramundane man thrust a hand into his pocket and pulled out one of Worrell's little instruments. I did not see the shape of the thing, but as he clasped it in his hand, a vague green fire flowed out of it and flashed across to Fred. What that force was, I do not know - some form of electric energy, or of ions, perhaps. The green radiance condensed about my son. His brave advance was abruptly checked. An expression of agony came over his face. He tottered and began a scream that ended in a rattling sob. For a moment his body was outlined sharply in the curdling green incandescence. Mason relaxed his grip of the tiny device and calmly returned it to his pocket as my son, burned and distorted, fell heavily to the floor.

"The Crystal Ray" by Raymond Z. Gallun (Air Wonder Stories, November 1929) features another racist war between America and the Yellow Menace. America survives with a final desperate weapon, the Blue Ray:

From the bow of one of America's ships a faint beam of bluish light stabbed out and struck an enemy craft, sweeping it from stem to stern! It passed through the vessel as though she had been made of glass, instead of thousands of tons of metal. Immediately the dreadnaught began to blunder oddly as though completely out of control. What had happened to her occupants? A grim smile passed over Pelton's lips, for he knew!

Brigands of the Moon

In Amazing Stories, November 1930, it was John W. Campbell, still writer, not yet all-important editor, who really figured out how such a weapon would actually work in "Solarite":

“Imagine what would happen if we directed this against the side of a mountain—the entire mass of rock would at once fly off at unimaginable speed, crashing ahead with terrific power, as all the molecules suddenly moved in the same direction. Nothing in all the Universe could hold together against it! It's a disintegration ray of a sort—a ray that will tear, or crush, for we can either make one half move away from the other—or we can reverse the power, and make one half drive toward the other with all the terrific power of its molecules! It is omnipotent—hmmm—” Arcot paused, narrowing his eyes in thought. It has one limitation. Will it reach far in the air? In vacuum it should have an infinite range—in the atmosphere all the molecules of the air will be affected, and it will cause a terrific blast of icy wind, a gale at temperatures far below zero! This will be even more effective here on Venus!

1931 seems to be an important year for ray guns. At Teck's Amazing Stories, April 1931 Nat Schachner and Arthur Leo Zagat came up with the Disruptor in "The Emperor of the Stars". That same month in Hugo Gernsback's Wonder Stories, The Annihilation Beam appeared in Leslie F. Stone's in "The Conquest of Gola," and Clark Ashton Smith had his Zero Ray in "An Adventure in Futurity". Jack Williamson offers another form of weapon, the Matter Annihilation Ray in "Twelve Hours to Live" (Wonder Stories, August 1931).

In wasn't any different over at the Clayton Astounding. Ray Cummings must have had Wells in mind when he created the pencil heat ray in Brigands of the Moon (Astounding, March 1931) :

My pencil ray was in my hand and I pressed its switch. The tiny heat ray stabbed through the air, but I missed. The figure stumbled but did not fall. I saw a bare gray arm come from the cloak, flung up to maintain its balance. Or perhaps my pencil ray had seared his arm...

Flash. Ah-ahhh.

Of all the spacemen to appear in the Clayton Astounding, Hawk Carse was certainly the most famous. In "Hawk Carse" (Astounding, November 1931) he is described as "... Hawk Carse the adventurer, he of the spitting ray-gun and the phenomenal draw, of the reckless space ship maneuverings..." In the story there is little or no explanation of how a ray gun works for by this time none was necessary. The Hawk Carse stories were modeled on the Western and how the gun worked was no longer important, only that the hero was lightning fast. The ray gun had arrived.

C. L. Moore's Northwest Smith in his first appearance "Shambleau" (Weird Tales, November 1933) shows he knows his way around a weapon in the opening scene:

"Smith, lounging negligently against the wall, arms folded and gun-hand draped over his left forearm, looked incapable of swift motion, but at the leader’s first forward step the pistol swept in a practiced half-circle and the dazzle of blue-white heat leaping from its muzzle seared an arc in the slag pavement at his feet..."

By 1934 in Triplanetary (Amazing Stories, January-April 1934), E. E. Doc Smith replaced his X-Plosive with the "Standish", a beam weapon of immense power. Smith would later coined the word "Super-Weapon" in "What a Course!" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1939:

Going up to a blank wall, he manipulated an almost invisible dial set flush with it surface, swung a heavy door aside, and lifted out the Standish - a fearsome weapon. Squat, huge, and heavy, it resembled somewhat an overgrown machine rifle, but one possessing a thick, short telescope, with several opaque condensing lenses and parabolic reflectors...He set his peculiar weapon down, unfolded its three massive legs, crouched down behind it, and threw in a switch. Dull red beams of frightful intensity shot from the reflectors and sparks, almost of lightening proportions, leaped from the shielding screen under their impact.

Pew! Pew!

Disappointing as Buck Roger's initial weaponry in the Pulps, he didn't really get going until he became a comic strip character in January 1929, leaving Earth for outer space. Once out there, Buck's futuristic weapon inspired the generations that followed. The XZ-31 Rocket Pistol appeared at the February 1934 American Toy Fair and sold for 50 cents.

And of course, right on Buck's tracks came Flash Gordon in January 7, 1934. With Buster Crabbe playing him in the serials in 1936, everyone now knew what a space gun was supposed to look like.

The events of 1945 and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki mark the end of fun, futuristic weapons. The real thing had arrived and they weren't so fun. For a while Science Fiction focused on bombardments as everyone worried that the Russians would fill the skies with death. But TV gave us new men in silver underwear and the ray gun became the province of Children's entertainment or the stuff of jokes such as Chuck Jones's brilliant "Duck Dodgers in the 24 and 1/2 century" (Warner Bros., 1953). Daffy whips out his Disintegrator Pistol and pulls the trigger. The gun, of course, disintegrates. But eventually TV shows like Lost in Space, Star Trek, Space 1999, and of course Star Wars would bring these glittering hand-held weapons back into our consciousness. Call it a ray gun, call it a blaster, it doesn't matter. As Han Solo says, perhaps erroneously: "Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."

Additional resources:
Kurogawa's Virtual Ray Gun Exhibition
Technovelgy's Weapons in Science Fiction

 G. W. Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Pass the Comics: To Venus from the Moon

First Men in the Moon



Gold Key Comics! has the comics adaptation of the '60s Ray Harryhausen version of the HG Wells classic.

Mysta of the Moon and the Damp Light



Speaking of the Moon, we need to catch up with Sleestak's presentation of Mysta's adventures. In Part 12, Mysta's still trying to suppress the pursuit of knowledge that can be used for evil purposes. Up to now, I've been giving Mysta the benefit of the doubt concerning her ruthlessness in protecting forbidden areas of exploration, but this story makes me wonder. Rather than stop someone's splitting the atom - something that leads to a consequence I'm very familiar with as a child of the Cold War - this time Mysta's preventing a scientists' exploration of something called Damp Light.

Using a fictional science in the story instead of an actual one has a weird effect. My curiosity gets the better of me and I suddenly want to know more about what Damp Light does. In other words, I'm on the rogue scientist's side on this one. Or would be if he weren't so obviously evil. That he's also a murderer who's raised an equally vile daughter makes the story more exciting, but it's also sort of a moral cop out. It lets Mysta stay the good guy when in other circumstances, she might not be.

No one ever explains why Damp Light is forbidden. It has a nasty effect on a particular kind of insect egg, but my first thought was that that's more the eggs' fault than the light's. Sleestak has a much cooler explanation that also makes more sense of Mysta's objections to Damp Light. He suspects that it mutates insects into giant monsters and postulates that "someone somewhere has a use for giant rampaging bugs...probably the military-industrial complex or a group poised to take over human space."

Sleestak also makes a couple of other fascinating observations in relation to Mysta's sidekick Bron. One I'll leave for my commentary of Part 13, but the other is that - even though Mysta learned he's not the real Bron in Part 11 - "she still refers to her assistant as Bron and not by his true name." Sleestak offers that she maintains the deception in order to protect her positive image in the public eye. I'm not so sure, because she also calls him Bron in private. There's something else going on here, though I'm still trying to figure out what it is. More on this in a minute.

We also learn in this story that Mysta can use her Thought Image form to take control of another person.I don't recall her doing that before, which makes me wonder if it's a recently developed use of her ability or something she's always been able to do, but we just haven't seen yet.

After the break: More Mysta and Adventures on Venus!

And Now the News: Blueprints are Boring

Pirate Batman



So, you've probably heard that Batman supposedly died, but was really holed up in a prehistoric cave somewhere. Amongst a lot of huge announcements from DC this week, the biggest for me was the news that Batman would be fighting his way back through time to rejoin the 21st century. Along the way he'll become a caveman, a witchhunter/Puritan adventurer, a pirate, a cowboy, and a private eye. Ohhh, I think I'll be reading some Batman comics again very soon.

Kill Shakespeare



The young lady above is Juliet. She, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, Falstaff, and Puck are the heroes of a new 12-issue mini-series from IDW called Kill Shakespeare. In it, they search for a reclusive wizard named William Shakespeare who may have the ability to assist them in their battle against the evil forces led by Richard III, Lady Macbeth and Iago. This will probably be the greatest story ever written.

Verne vs. Wells



I've made no secret about my dislike for Jules Verne or my fondness for HG Wells. Kate Beaton explains exactly why that is so much better than I ever could.

The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1937)

While I don't typically go for serious science fiction (much preferring space pulp/Westerns/opera), that's not universally true. I very much, for example, dig HG Wells. Though I suppose you could make the case that he's technically not a science fiction writer, so maybe he's the exception that proves the rule. The Man Who Could Work Miracles certainly isn't science fiction, at any rate.

What I like about Wells is that he's really a philosopher. He's just super talented at making his thoughts interesting to read. Even when nothing all that interesting is happening plot-wise (I mean War of the Worlds is awfully talky for an alien invasion story) Wells' dialogue keeps me captivated. Especially because the ideas in that dialogue are fairly profound, even 100 years later.

I've never read the short story that The Man Who Could Work Miracles is based on, but having seen the movie now, I feel like I have. Wells is credited with writing the "scenario and dialogue" even though the film is much expanded from the short story. IMDB credits Lajos Biró with the actual screenplay and Biró had a good feel for Wells' style. Like Wells' novels that I've read, there's not a ton of plot, but it's fascinating to listen to the characters discuss and debate what poor Mr. Fotheringay should do with his new-found omnipotence.

The story is similar to Bruce Almighty, although instead of the God, it's a subordinate angel or other god of some kind who capriciously decides to bestow almost unlimited power to mankind. A couple of his fellow "angels" talk him into a trial run on a single human first, so the entity randomly selects a man going into an English pub: Mr. George Fotheringay.

By the way, the reason I wanted to watch this movie is because it's an early role for George Sanders, one of my favorite actors. Sanders plays one of the other "angels." That's him on the left.



The rest of the film is Fotheringay's trying to decide how to use his power. I like that he never considers hiding it or keeping it a secret. I'm always irritated when that kind of false drama is forced into these things. Instead, Biró lets the scenario play out as it actually might. Fotheringay is a simple man whose first instinct is to tour music halls as a magician, but as he shares his story with others (happily providing proof of his powers to any who need it), he receives all kinds of contradictory advice about what he should do.



His friend at work thinks he should use his powers to help people and Fotheringay happily makes plans to start visiting hospitals. His boss, however, wants him to use his power for the benefit of the company, and offers a raise and possible partnership as reward. That leads Fotheringay to question the need for money and profit at all. If he can provide everything the world needs, why not do it? His boss is of course horrified by this and explains that without the pursuit of wealth, people would have nothing to do.

There's a girl at work whom Fotheringay likes and she has her own selfish ideas about how the poor guy should use his power. He complies at first, giving her a tiara and pearls and eventually transforming her into Cleopatra herself, but the girl, while grateful, isn't so impressed that she's willing to leave her boyfriend for Fotheringay. He tries using his power to make her, but learns that he's not truly omnipotent after all. Like Bruce Almighty's instruction not to override anyone's free will, Fotheringay also can't directly influence anyone's actions. We're not told why; it's just a weakness that the "angel" wisely built in.

Still at a loss for what to do, Fotheringay visits a local vicar (played by Dr. Pretorius from Bride of Frankenstein). The vicar convinces him that - contrary to his boss' wishes - Fotheringay should create a utopia. Why go around healing people when he could just abolish all illness with a word? He agrees to this until he meets a warmongerer who's so appalled by the plan that he tries to kill Fotheringay.

Fotheringay's powers save him, but he realizes that no one's agreeing about what he should do and decides just to use his powers for himself. Although that - as well - has horrible consequences.

In the midst of all this arguing and discussing are some great questions about power and greed and charity. Wells and Biró don't necessarily provide the answers, but there's plenty to think about, which is what great literature (and great cinema) is all about.

Four out of five Cleopatras.