Future, May-June 1950, Part 2
Frank Belknap Long's "The Miniature Menace"
My original intent was to review the balance of the May-June 1950 issue of Future Combined With Science Fiction Stories in this edition of William Emmons Books. (I previously reviewed two stories from it here.) But the review below of Frank Belknap Long’s novelette “The Miniature Menace” ran a little long and I also decided to include a preamble about Long’s politics. I felt like these added up to such a length as to constitute a post in their own right. That being the case, the review of this issue of Future will see an additional third installment next week.
“The Miniature Menace” by Frank Belknap Long
A Political Preamble
I have a peculiar interest in Long. Long wrote “The Hounds of Tindalos,” one of the seminal old school cosmic horror stories. He also wrote the antifascist story “The Beast-Helper” about a European dictator who eliminates dissidents with the help of a telepathically controlled ape. I’m told that after he read “The Beast-Helper,” Robert E. Howard wrote to H. P. Lovecraft opining that the story indicated that Long had joined the Communist Party.
I wrote to Bobby Derie to ask him if Long ever actually was a big-c Communist. Derie is an expert in all things weird and the man behind the excellent Deep Cuts In A Lovecraftian Vein blog. He told me we’re still waiting on more of Long’s letters to be published so we don’t really know. In the meantime, perhaps someone could check out the Communist Party USA archive at NYU for me to see if Long’s name was ever on the rolls.
I recognize the query above is based on the wild speculations of an emotional Texan. But these speculations can be enriched by an anecdote involving Long from Damon Knight’s interviews with Robert A. W. Lowndes (editor of the magazine under review) in The Futurians. At some point in the 1930s, Lowndes moved from Connecticut to New York City to participate in the left-leaning Futurian Society. Like many during the Great Depression, Lowndes found himself broke and homeless. One day Long gave Lowndes enough money to buy a square meal.
I’m told that Long himself never had much money and died a pauper. Whether Long’s generosity to a young Lowndes seems socialist-coded or not probably depends on your point of view. In any event, Long did have some kind of association with at least one member of the left-leaning Futurians, a couple of whom were active in the Young Communist League.
The Review Proper
Now one might reasonably ask what this political preamble has to do with the story under review. To this I would answer that “The Miniature Menace” is about a spaceman who defies a superior officer in the name of peace, love, and understanding. Does the story have political implications? I think so, though you can judge for yourself. For my part, I was pretty simpatico to what Long was doing with this story even if I felt like there was an unnecessary subplot used to pad it out to novelette length.
“The Miniature Menace” is a grab bag of science fiction adventure tropes but the main thrust is that a spaceman named Ralph Langford is placed under arrest upon returning to Mars from an outer space mission. His crime? He disobeyed an order to fire on an unknown alien spacecraft.
Once detained at spaceman HQ, Langford pulls a gun on his superior Commander Gurney—this punch is pulled because Langford avows he won’t actually use the weapon on Gurney—and escapes because he wants to investigate the alien spacecraft more fully. From there he picks up his wife Joan, a mutant with clairvoyance and extra-sensory perception. She uses her psi powers to determine that the alien spacecraft has crash landed in the Amazon Basin. Having acquired this knowledge, the Langfords steal Gurney’s private spacecraft and skedaddle to Earth.
There they find that Gurney was alerted to the theft of his ship by silent alarms and used a faster craft to outpace them to the Amazon Basin. The Langfords find Gurney face down in the river. Upon them getting him out of the water, he recounts a horrific story in which he lost all the men he brought with them to a swarm of insectile aliens able to reproduce their numbers exponentially by fission.
A masculine and adventurous type, Langford decides to undress and swim up the river to confront the alien menace alone. Once he gets to the crashed spaceship, he comes into telepathic contact with a kindly and lonesome alien who thanks the man for not firing upon him. The alien tells Langford that he is alone and far from home. The alien explains that Gurney’s men are not dead. He merely used his prodigious psi powers to frighten them into fleeing into the rainforest. Moreover, he was about to rescue Gurney from drowning when the Langfords arrived.
Then the alien reveals his true form, which is that of a tiny Praying Mantis. Not one for long goodbyes, the alien abruptly causes Langford to black out and returns him to Joan and Gurney. For his part, Gurney is very grateful to Langford for saving his life and Langford will see promotions in the coming years.
Can “The Miniature Menace” be understood as a morality play? Yes absolutely. Did I like it? Yes absolutely. The only problem I see is that there’s a basically unrelated subplot involving Langford going to pick up Joan at a hospital after he pulls the gun on Gurney.
In this subplot, the reader is given all this information about how mutants have psi powers but are otherwise blind. Joan is at the hospital waiting, eyes bandaged, for Langford to arrive. She wants him to be there before she finds out if a medical procedure meant to give her eye sight has worked.
Upon his arrival, there’s a tense conversation between Langford and Joan’s doctor. The reader gets the deep point of view of the doctor and learns his many anxieties about treating mutants and his thoughts about how best to treat them.
It turns out Joan gains the ability to see but she immediately rebandages her eyes because it’s easier to use her psi powers that way. She proceeds never to use her newly acquired vision in the story again. Perhaps having her in the hospital was intended to create some kind of drama for Langford. In fact, it’s a diversion in the sense that it takes the plot off course and in the sense that it’s inserted merely to entertain the reader. It doesn’t contribute to the morality play.
Long produced better stories than this one. All the same, I recommend it. Reading it made me feel good. May we all disobey unjust orders and get away with it.