This post is brought to you by the upcoming Steel and Stone by Jack Mackenzie. This novel is made up of three parts, “Rolling Stone” which appeared in Ships of Steel last year, plus two further adventures about Stone the secret agent working with Marella, a woman he saves from invisible foes aboard a spaceliner. Later stories feature Steel’s ship Darlin’ (Darling Buds of May), a killerbot like you’ve never experienced before, as well as Marella’s adventure aboard a Niven Ring at the edge of the galaxy. All three parts combine to make a Space Adventure novel that will keep you turning pages as only Jack Mackenzie can make you.
Ray Cummings and Frederik Pohl are both names famous in Science Fiction circles. They represent two very different generations of SF writers. Ray Cummings was born in 1887 (and died in 1957) while Fred Pohl was born in 1919 (and died in 2013). Cummings won his initial fame in the pages of All-Story and Argosy with novels like The Girl in the Golden Atom (All-Story Weekly, March 15, 1919). Ray’s contemporaries were Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Allan England, writers of fantastic romances usually at novel length. Cummings went on from the Weeklies to become a prolific Pulpster, writing for Mystery, Detective, Shudder Pulps and SF magazines. In 1940 alone he wrote at least twenty-five stories including magazines like Amazing Stories, Fantastic Novels, The Phantom Detective, Planet Stories, Terror Tales, Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories. Everyone except John W. Campbell at Astounding Science-Fiction.
Frederik Pohl’s career would include being an editor, writer, collaborator (usually with C. M. Kornbluth) and agent. His contemporaries include Damon Knight, Isaac Asimov, Jack Williamson and other Golden Age writers. In 1940, Pohl was the twenty-one year-old editor of Popular’s Super Science Stories and Astonishing Stories, two low-pay magazines filled mostly with his Futurian friends’ work like C. M.Kornbluth and Robert W. A. Lowndes, or castoffs by bigger writers like Robert A. Heinlein. Pohl would publish Isaac Asimov first including the story “Robbie” (and change the title). Pohl needed manuscripts, for as little as possible.
Enter Ray Cummings. From Pohl’s memoir The Way the Future Was (1978):
I did not understand all this at the time, but I quickly found out that the best stories were not necessarily the ones that cost the most. My principal instructor in this area was a Grand Old Man named Ray Cummings. He was tall, skinny, wore a stock instead of the conventional collar and tie, and was unimaginably old to me—he had actually been too old for World War I, which had ended before I was born. I suppose he must have been around sixty when we met. I respected Ray as a writer very much. He had never been a great writer, but he had been a prolific one, and sf was his specialty. He had a fascinating background—had even worked for Thomas Edison in his youth —and was a personally engaging, roguish human being.
Pohl sums up the Ray Cummings’ work in 1940 thusly:
What he was not was a source of good stories. I don’t think his talent had left him, I think he just didn’t care any more. In the beginning I am sure that he cared about science fiction, but his typewriter was his living and he used it to produce whatever would sell; by and by it must all have seemed the same to him. Before I came to work at Popular, he had been selling them quantities of mystery and horror stories, under a variety of pen names. Horror stories were the dregs of the pulp market, cheap thrill-and-sadism stuff to a precise formula: the buildup involved a fear of the supernatural, but in the end it always had to turn out to be a hoax perpetrated by some criminal, spy, or madman.*
Pohl’s footnote reads:
*Although they were even more awful than I have said, I wrote a few myself. So did even so fine a writer as Henry Kuttner. One likes to flex one’s muscles on a new form, and also one likes to eat. [I’m not sure what stories he is referring to. he never wrote Shudder Pulps. Mostly he wrote for the magazines he edited under pseudonyms.maybe he means “Legal Rites” from Weird Tales which he wrote with Asimov?]
Cummings was a better business man than writer:
When I started there and Ray discovered I was a fan, it was a great day for Ray. Not only could he get back to science fiction, but he quickly perceived that I was his pigeon. I had no way of saying no to so great a man. Worse than that. He would not write for less than a penny a word, and I missed my chance to tell him that that was beyond the limits ordained for me by God and Harry Steeger, because the day he first walked into my office was the day I discovered I had a few extra dollars to play with. So for months he would turn up regularly as clockwork and sell me a new story; I hated them all, and bought them all.
What were these stories that Pohl bought but hated? Here they are for your judgment:
“Arnton’s Metal” (Super Science Stories, May 1940) has the man who stole Arnton’s girl thirty years ago comes back to see if the old inventor has made a rich discovery. Arnton uses the new metal he has created to blow both himself and Blakinston to smithereens. Seems like a very long and complicated way to get revenge.
“The Thought Woman” (Super Science Stories, July 1940) has Stanley Durrant trying to invent a new machine but continues to fail. He loses faith but the girl from next door, Dorothy Livingston, tells him about the Realm of Unthought Things. (Stan completely misses Dot’s hint that she wants to marry him. Schmuck!) Durrant hears a whispering voice that proves to be a thought woman from the Realm. He enters the Realm with her help. There he finds his future machine that he will some day invent. Durrant falls for the thought woman but she is not a person but an Unthought Thing. Returning to the real world, Stanley discovers the thought woman is Dorothy, now that he has thought of her romantically. Pohl must have gagged buying this stinker. More Fantasy than SF.
“Personality Plus” (Astonishing Stories, October 1940) is another story that is only SF by the very slightest degree. Dr. Butterworth uses Georgie Trent for an experiment with a machine that shrinks memories causing amnesia. Georgie was such an overpowering personality, he gets a life reset by Butterworth. Getting to restart his life, he grows more and more aggressive and out-of-control. The narrator suffers a car crash while Geogie plans to kidnap an heiress, goes back to Butterworth. He learns Georgie wasn’t a cad but a sissy. The Doctor had erased his memory then gave him a suggestion that he was an aggressive type. Butterworth now needs to find a way to deal with the suggestion. This story could have been told as easily with hypnotism as a machine.
“The Door at the Opera” (Astonishing Stories, December 1940) features milquetoast Henry Macomber, who finds a magical portal in his box at the opera. While being ignored by his wife and her friends, Henry sees a diminutive beauty and follows her into her world. In that other place Henry is a giant of a man. His great size and strength allows him to lead the army against the invading Mogrubs:
And then the first rank of the Mogrubs appeared in the defile–weird-looking, savage little creatures, half naked, with contorted, goggling faces and spindly jointed bodies that looked almost as though they were some form of big upright insect. They came shouting ferociously, brandishing their weapons at the pallid, supposedly empty canyon.
Of course, Henry kicks their butts and wins the hand of any woman he desires including the princess. Unfortunately, the portal re-opens and he has to return to the opera. Henry becomes very fond of the opera, going three nights a week, just hoping…
I like this one, partly because it has some actual action and monsters but because it is obviously a Walter Mitty tale. James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” had appeared just over a year earlier in The New Yorker, March 18, 1939. This will not be the last of the Mitty power fancies to appear in Pulps and comics.
“Almost Human” (Super Science Stories, March 1941) is another tale that I like. This one features the nav-robot on board the Starflight known as Xor 2y4. Xor has a human guard because he was responsible for the death of a passenger and now can’t be trusted. The humans are flying in space along with a Asturian named Sirrah Ahli. This alien is gruesome but intelligent:
…A big, spindly fellow of grey-blue skin, and blue-white hair which flowed down to frame his goggling ugly face. Born on the little asteroid, in the belt between Mars and the earth, his body was fragile, light in weight. But his sleek flesh did not show its fragility. Earth’s normal gravity was maintained here on the Starflight, and Sirrah Ahli’s muscles–powerfully developed–enabled him to walk seemingly with not much more effort than the Earthmen. He drew his pallid silver cloak around him, and his slit of mouth ironically was smiling as he bowed to the Earth people.
Xor sees another Asturian sneaking around the ship and realizes Sirrah Ahli is up to no good. The robot spins the ship wildly knocking the alien out. This allows the humans to discover the plot to kidnap Miss Barbara. Further evidence shows that the person Xor killed before was Sirrah Ahli’s brother, also bent on kidnapping the girl. Xor is thanked, released from his guard. He is complimented with the declaration that he is almost human. I liked this one more than the earlier tales but I do notice that the bad guy’s name sounds like that of a Hindu or Arab character, making the ugly alien a thin disguise for a non-white character.
“Imp of the Theremin” (Astonishing Stories, April 1941) is a real stinker. Arthur Cantrell plays the theremin. He loves classical music but teaches lessons for money. A magical imp appears from his instrument. He tells how he used to live in a violin but since the new “twitch” dance music doesn’t use violin he moved to the theremin. The imp begs Cantrell to play only good music. But money and Cantrell’s wife enter the picture and Arthur becomes a performing star, doing the new fad in music with his theremin. The imp is upset but eventually goes modern, becoming a “twitcher-bug”, a “foot-blistered, dancin’ fool”. Cantrell sighs and looks at his theremin fondly. You have to remember that Cummings was born in 1887. By 1940, he was fifty-four, and no fan of Jazz. This same story could have featured old Jazz fan and the music of Frank Sinatra, or the old Sinatra fan and the new Hippie misc, or the old Hippy and the New Wave of the 1980s, or the New Wave fan and Rap, etc. It’s an old and rather dull tale.
“Aerita of the Light Country” (Super Science Stories, August 1941) was Pohl’s publishing coup. This sequel to Tama of the Light Country (Argosy, December 13-27, 1930) is set in the years long after Tama’s fame. Mercury is threatened again and Aerita, one of the winged women, goes to Earth to look for help. She ends up in a traveling circus as a freak before she is rescued. Alan Grant, Earthman, goes with her back to Mercury to save the day. Only ten years later, Cummings’ style of Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche is not selling at Argosy anymore. I wonder if Ray got his 1 cent a word for the novel?
Conclusion
After August 1941, Pohl was fired from his job as editor, to be replaced by Alden H. Norton. Norton re-hired him as an assistant at higher pay. Norton and Pohl continued to buy from Cummings. “Monster of the Moon” (Super Science Stories, November 1941), “Machines of Destiny” (Astonishing Stories, November 1941) “The Shadow People” (Astonishing Stories, March 1942), “Miracle” (Astonishing Stories, October 1942), “Beyond the End of Time ” (Super Science Stories, November 1942) and “The Man From 2890” (Astonishing Stories, April 1943). What Alden H. Norton’s opinion of Ray Cummings was is not known. He must have recognized that though Cummings was no longer the super star of Argosy, he was a recognizable name. Novels like “The Shadow People” should have appeared in that weekly as it was pat of a series of “People” tales. Argosy still had fifteen years to go before it closed its doors, but Cummings was no longer one of its stars. This was good news for Norton and Pohl, even if they hated every single word of Cummings’ they published.
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