Thrilling Wonder Stories, Oct. 1949, Pt. 1
Wallace West, Leigh Brackett, L. Ron Hubbard, Henry Kuttner, Manly Wade Wellman
Greetings and salutations! In this issue of the Official William Emmons Books Newsletter, we’ll start taking a look at the October 1949 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories (TWS). My inspiration for taking on this beast of a review was that I was underwhelmed with the issue of Astounding Science Fiction I reviewed on Monday. My goal is to see how Astounding holds up against another longstanding magazine that was still active in the field right at the time it was about to blow up with new entrants.
Taking on a whole issue of TWS may be overly ambitious. In 1949, the bimonthly TWS and its companion Startling Stories, both edited by Sam Merwin, Jr., were two of the last true pulp science fiction magazines standing. As such, this issue of TWS has more and bigger pages than the digest-sized magazines we usually deal with here.
For your sake and mine, I’m breaking up the review over two issues of my newsletter—the second installment to follow next Friday, Sept. 20. For this reason, I’ll hold off with any conclusions till next week and just dive straight into fiction reviews.
The Lure of Polaris by Wallace West
I’m interested in Wallace West because I like to imagine I share some kind of common perspective with other people born in Kentucky even if they were born in 1900 and seem to have lived in Michigan. I feel that way about Stanley G. Weinbaum and Terry Bisson, two Kentucky expats who I think just kind of got it in a way related to their place of origin. I’m not sure I sense that same special Kentucky juice in Wallace West but I utterly devoured The Lure of Polaris.
What we have here is a madcap Freudian novella with a protagonist that gets coerced into a state of induced mania. It’s ahead of its time in positing that our civilization’s ecological and social wisdom are running behind its technical knowledge but unfortunately expresses this with the standard mid-century science fiction guy Malthusian pablum.
The story opens on Polaris Three with our human protagonist Captain Jack Harkness, his winged Martian girlfriend Yahna, and a native called Pog of a race also called Pog awaiting a food shipment from Earth by an interstellar teleportation unit. The food has not showed up for some months and the colonists are not able to eat Polarian food. Their comrade Bill Newsome went through the teleportation unit to raise help some months ago and was never heard from again. Harkness decides he must return to Earth to save the colony, which at this point just consists of himself, his girlfriend and the hanger on Pog.
He teleports to Army HQ in New York City to find that in the five years he has been on Polaris Three the world has truly gone to hell. Overpopulation begat over-cultivation causing, e.g., a giant dust bowl to sweep from the Rockies to the Appalachians killing millions including all of the soil scientists. Indeed, the experts in most fields are dead and knowledge has become too specialized for there to be overlapping knowledge among the survivors. In many instances, crackpots have convinced the UN and world governments to let them take the wheel. This has led to projects like attempting to increase the amount of arable land by changing the ecology of the Sahara and melting the Arctic polar ice cap.
The main crackpots driving the quackery are a faction called the Psychos or more properly the Egocrats. They convinced the powers that be that what was holding things back was the presence of the Freudian Super-Ego, which hindered the Ego’s creative power with inherited false wisdom. Now the Psychos administer regular treatments to all leaders of any importance that, while giving full play to the Ego, also give full play to the Id. They also leave the treated party in a quasi-bipolar state of mania until they swing back down to depression when the Super-Ego reasserts itself.
Harkness gets the treatment and forgets about Polaris Three in his mania, thinking only about self-advancement. He is assigned to manage the American end of the polar ice cap project in Greenland where he signs a lot of papers and chases the skirts of female officers. That is until the depressive phase comes crashing down on him.
When he’s admitted to the hospital for his next treatment, he discovers that the Psychos have been medically torturing his comrade Newsome. Newsome tells Harkness his mistake was resisting the treatments directly. In between cries of agony, he informs Harkness how to indirectly resist his next treatment. Harkness focuses on an ancient Martian poem and only pretends to have his Super-Ego suppressed. He and Newsome are then able to escape Greenland with the help of Freudian revolutionaries called the League of Survivors.
This novella is funny overall. This may be because Freudian psychology is inherently funny (if also probably much more accurate than it is currently credited with being). That said, there are some truly ghastly scenes of starvation and the part of the story where the perspective character is manic is evocative. The novella is meant to sound a Malthusian klaxon. The Survivors’ program for restoring the world’s ecology through slow and steady means like reforestation and forced birth control will, by their own estimates, succeed only after half the world’s population has starved.
After a close scrape with the powers that be, Harkness and Newsome teleport back to Polaris Three where Yahna and Pog have finally got the hydroponics producing at a level that can sustain the colonists. Of course, the Psychos can’t let the fugitives be and follow them.
Yahna and Pog, the latter of whose species seems to be something like pure Id, come up with a plan to seduce the Psychos with food. The Psychos are used to subsisting on 1000 calories a day, so are easily won over to letting the fugitives stay behind and tend their hydroponics by this approach.
The aliens also come up with a plan to get the Psychos to change the treatment from suppressing the Super-Ego to retraining it to be more reasonable. For this reason, the Psychos are encouraged to return regularly to enjoy sumptuous meals unavailable on Earth.
It’s fuzzy how the plan succeeds but it does and the Psychos’ grip is finally broken by a peculiar quality in Polarian produce. At the last minute, Pog reveals that while the colonists have been fed from the hydroponics, the Psychos have been fed from food grown under the radiation of Polaris Three’s triple suns. These vegetables have slowly turned the Psychos into beings of pure Id who are easy to sideline into pursuits of harmless pleasure. The novella ends with its main antagonist sitting on the floor playing with his toes.
There only two things that make me hesitate to recommend this one. One is that there are a number of characters with atypical speech patterns or lisps that are rendered in a way that is hard to follow. More importantly, the story is kind of long for something that is more interesting than it is good. That said, I’m glad I read this one and I’ll definitely be reading more Wallace West as the opportunity presents itself.
“The Lake of Gone Forever” by Leigh Brackett
“The Lake of Gone Forever” is about a man haunted by his father’s history that, in the last moment, he is not doomed to repeat. It is a deceptively deep interplanetary adventure where, over 20 pages of a pulp magazine, the conflicts manage to cover man versus nature, man versus man, man versus society, and most deliciously man versus self. Themes include civilization versus barbarism, capitalism versus indigenous traditional society, greed versus love, and the virile proletariat versus the decadent bourgeoisie and its attendant effete technicians. In brief, I’m in danger of having a lot to say about this one.
This is doubly true because I’ve spent a lot of time reading Leigh Brackett and thinking about her. I’ve developed a bad habit of saying she’s like an existentialist and hard boiled Edgar Rice Burroughs which I ought to stop doing. As I’ve started to become a tiny bit more well read in fantasy, I’ve started to suspect there’s some Robert E. Howard in the mix with Brackett that may account for some of what I’m trying to get at with the description above. There’s also a fan letter from Lin Carter in this issue of TWS that states there is continuity between Abraham Merritt and her work. There’s much to consider in terms of antecedents. Moreover, she was just full on a better stylist than Burroughs and generally speaking a better plotter. Case in point, there’s not a moment of this novelette that is wasted and it all congeals credibly.
In this one, the spaceman protagonist Rand Conway’s father committed suicide when he was ten. Even at the moment of his death, the elder Conway continued to talk about something called the Lake of Gone Forever on the planet Iskar. He left behind fragmentary notes about the planet indicating that the Lake contained the ultimate treasure that could have made him a very rich man. Rand spends his waking and dreaming life obsessed with the frozen world and seems to have imagined memories taking place on it.
The set up is that Rand has manipulated a rich man named Rohan through his soon to be son-in-law, an anthropologist named Esmond, to back an expedition to Iskar. The ostensible purpose of the expedition is for Esmond to conduct ethnographic research and Rohan to establish a trade mission. Rand withholds the information about the Lake of Gone Forever from the expedition because he seeks to exploit it himself. Because of his clandestine purposes, Rand is annoyed that Rohan has joined the expedition in person along with his daughter Marcia, Esmond’s fiancé.
This kind of interplanetary adventure makes use of science fiction tropes like interstellar travel and miraculous transuranic elements. This story even throws in just enough anthropology to be interesting. But this is all in the service of something like fantasy. “The Lake of Gone Forever” is about the protagonist’s big feelings and the majesty and terror represented by Iskar’s stark environs and people. A person might call this story and those like it science fantasy for this reason.
The people of Iskar, as embodied in the person of an elder named Krah, reject the Earthmen because of unnamed sins committed by the elder Conway when he lived among them. He was treated as Krah’s own son but betrayed them.
Rand denies knowledge of his own father and pretends to be of no relation. While Esmond and Rohan weakly entreat Krah to accept them by offering trade goods and friendship, Rand succeeds in gaining entry to their city for the party by threatening its destruction with Rohan’s spaceship. Rohan is miffed that Rand seems to have taken command from him but can do nothing about it.
The interactions between the Earthmen and the the men of Iskar are dramatic and suspenseful. I say, “men of Iskar,” because Iskar has a traditional indigenous culture in which the genders have strongly separate spheres. Rand keeps having what he thinks are imagined memories of the city and sweating a lot because he thinks he’s going to get found out as his father’s son. Still he finds time to make furtive eyes at a woman called Ciel who is cooking for Krah’s family.
Things go south when Marcia shows up and the women of the city attempt to stone her for wearing what they perceive to be men’s clothes. Krah is about to cast them out. But Rand knows he’ll never make it to the Lake of Gone Forever if the expedition gets expelled, so he makes the excuse that they’ll die in a blizzard if they have to leave just then. In reality, Rand himself can see in the dark because of a genetic abnormality and is well-suited to the cold from having worked in space.
Rand steals clothes from Krah, who has gone conveniently missing, and secretly connects with Ciel who instantly loves Rand for his strength and more importantly wants to be taken to Earth where she can live free like a man. Ciel reveals that her mother was the adoptive sister of the elder Conway’s mate, the daughter of Krah, and that Rand’s father had taught the two women about women’s emancipation. I’ve read a lot of Brackett and this is the closest I’ve seen her come to feminism.
What follows is that Ciel leads Rand—either disguised as a native or on his way to becoming one, depending upon how one looks at it—under white out conditions to the Lake of Gone Forever as Krah and his five warlike sons give chase. Because of his father, Rand has greed in his heart. He knows that the Lake is a sort of great semiliquid naturally-occurring transuranic computer that the indigenous people use to record their memories telepathically. He wants to get rich off it.
Ciel exhorts Krah not to stop Rand from drawing up memories of his father from the Lake and the elder abides. Rand’s intense emotions draw up two scenes involving his father. One is of his father happy together with Krah’s daughter and a small boy in native dress—himself! The next scene is much darker. The elder Conway changes out of native garb and into the black suit of a spaceman. He knows what he is setting out to do will ultimately destroy the Lake and the natives’ way of life but greed has overcome him. He is attempting to take a sample of the Lake in a lead box when his mate, holding a young Rand, confronts him. In the struggle that ensues, she seized the lead box and is accidentally cast into the Lake where she is immediately killed by the transuranic elements. Heart broken, the elder Conway gathers up Rand and flees.
Seeing his father’s memories—his own early memories—changes Rand. He makes peace with Krah, i.e., his maternal grandfather, and decides to stay on Iskar when the expedition leaves. In the bargain, he also learns that he and Ciel are now legally married because they appeared before the Lake together. Since she is now his, he can elect not to beat her for her social transgressions.
There’s something here for my proletarian science fiction file—about which see Monday’s review of “What Dead Men Tell” by Theodore Sturgeon—involving the figure of the spaceman worker gone native in opposition to capitalist civilization. But for brevity’s sake, I won’t try to develop it at this time.
“The Planet Makers” by L. Ron Hubbard
The last L. Ron Hubbard story I reviewed was frankly bad, so I was pleasantly surprised by how good “The Planet Makers” was. It’s sort of a character sketch of a terraforming engineer named Sleepy McGee with an underdeveloped whodunnit tacked on for good measure. It’s an exhortation to work smart rather than hard and seems to imply that in the right person laziness, drinking, and gambling aren’t vices.
Drinking and gambling are no doubt self-destructive vices. By contrast, laziness is a category that collapses a lot of other things that are probably better described by something else and, in any event, idleness is not a vice. For this last reason, I could get down with this story where a busybody developer named Doyle spends his time riding Sleepy McGee to move faster and not spend all his time playing stud poker over video chat.
Doyle is also on Sleepy McGee to investigate widespread sabotage on the project. Sleepy McGee refuses and the two come to blows causing Doyle to leave the planet under development. At this point, Sleepy McGee has Doyle’s quarters put under guard and actually gets to work. In a truly Promethean moment, he the terraforms the planet in one fell swoop by exploding nine tons of Plutonium near the planet’s core causing worldwide floods and earthquakes.
When Doyle returns with Sleepy McGee’s boss, he finds the planet completed nine days ahead of schedule. Not only is the contractor Sleepy McGee works for entitled to a tremendous bonus that Doyle doesn’t have the money to pay, Doyle is outed as the saboteur when his quarters are finally opened up for inspection. He was trying to get the contractor to do the work for free by stymying the work. Instead Doyle forfeits the planet and Sleepy McGee comes out on top.
My Chinese philosophy sourcebook introduced me to this concept of wu wei which I always remember as meaning acting without acting—the Wikipedia page has some other explanations. There’s a bit of that going on in this story.
Also of note, Sleepy McGee’s Black cook Bartlebar is the only person of color I’ve come across in this issue of TWS and is maybe the second Black character I’ve come across since I started reviewing whole science fiction magazines from this era. He’s portrayed as a loyal servant and practitioner of voodoo. He’s less multivalent than one would like but has at least not been sublimated into a robot or alien.
“Cold War” by Henry Kuttner
This novelette stands on its own but it’s also the final installment in Kuttner’s comedic hillbilly exploitation Hogben series about a family of mountain people who are exceptionally long-lived mutant supermen. The story was funny in a cartoonish way—like, you know, Li’l Abner—but it was a little hard to follow at points and there wasn’t anything like verisimilitude when it came to dialect. I can’t tell exactly how mean spirited this sort of story was in 1949 but I have my suspicions. Neil Gaiman has endorsed these stories as good to read but the science fiction/fantasy community is currently reassessing the extent to which we trust his judgment.
The thrust of “Cold War” is that a good hearted but foolish member of the Hogben family rewrote a late ugly woman’s genetic code so that she could make people sick at will. Her even uglier gorilla-shaped son has inherited this ability and his ugly and gorilla-shaped father has exploited it to gain influence as a headache medicine salesman.
The son uses the full extent of his power to make one of the Hogbens sick and a doctor is about to take him to the hospital where the Hogbens’ secrets will be discovered. In order to make the bad guys agree to cure their sick family member before the doctor gets him, the Hogbens’ patriarch agrees to make the bad guys’ family line last forever. He holds to the letter of his promise but he also sends them far back in time where further tampering with their genes causes their descendants to evolve into viruses.
I like Kuttner comedy stories—give me “The Proud Robot”—but this one is too denigrating of the people of Appalachia for me to get behind it like I would like to.
“Backward, O Time!” by Manly Wade Wellman
This one is a well crafted but ultimately forgettable short story where a World War II veteran meets a version of himself who is 30 years older. The story is a conversation between the two about what a time traveler would have to do to convince another person that he was what he claimed to be.
The main thing that interested me about it was that the older version was coming to warn the younger about an ongoing multi-decade nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The younger version responds by being like yeah that’s basically what everyone already believes is going to happen.
I had known people thought like that back then but it was still jarring to see it put forward so plainly in a magazine with kind of a silly title. It made me feel like at least some number of people were using science fiction to try to find a way to live with death that was as sane as could be managed under the circumstances.
Moving Forward
I’m going to break up the review of this magazine by publishing an issue of the newsletter on something a little different on Monday, Sept. 16, or Tuesday, Sept. 17, next week and then, as stated, be back again on Friday, Sept. 20, with the second part of this review. This issue of TWS still has loads more for us to consider including novelettes by L. Sprague de Camp and Cleve Cartmill; short stories by Murray Leinster, Ray Bradbury, and James Gunn; fanzine and book reviews; and the letter column!
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