This post is brought to you by Strange Adventures. This collection by G. W. Thomas contains eight stories as well as a frame story that suggests some even stranger adventures lie in wait for Smythe, a thief and a killer who runs into a gentleman’s club to avoid the police. The odd fellows of this Victorian club tell the strange adventures of their own or others. What will Smythe do? They have mistaken him for one of them but he has no story to tell. Can he fake his way through or will he have to fight?
It was Robert E. Howard’s machine in “Almuric” that got me going down this road. That technological device always struck me as odd in a tale of Burroughsian Sword & Sorcery. When I came upon another scientist at the beginning of Witch World by Andre Norton, I started wondering: how many of these machine portals are there? How many got there by some other way? (Just for fun, I thought I’d decorate this one with comic adaptations!)
Precursors
Like so many other topics I dwell upon, this one is a fairly specific splinter from a larger idea. That being the Science Fiction machine that sparks a tale or a supernatural force that sends our hero into a new world. The first and best is, of course, H. G. Wells’s “The Time Machine” (The New Review, January-May 1895) which bred multiple spawn in the genre. The Pulps are full of mad doctors (They are always mad. I’m not sure why?) creating a dimensional bridge, a device that shrinks you to an atom, any number of other gizmos. The portal machine is plucked from this same tree. Alternatively, some magical force may intervene. The difference is that when the subject, usually fleeing persecution, gets to the other side, everything turns Edgar Rice Burroughs.
That’s because ERB is the next big precursor was “Under the Moons of Mars” (The All-Story, February-July 1912) by Edgar Rice Burroughs. John Carter is sent to Mars by some unidentified mumbo jumbo, which is quickly abandoned for sword fights and naked princesses. The Wellsian machine or Burroughs’ mystical bridge, we can get to the adventure usually in one chapter if it is a novel. Burroughs wrote eleven of them in this particular series.
“Through the Dragon Glass” (All-Story Weekly, November 24, 1917) by A. Merritt is our next precursor. In Merritt’s tale, Herndon crosses into a world of fantasy and monsters through a beautiful, stolen mirror. He could have used a machine but Merritt liked the fantastic and exotic. A magical portal offers another way to get to adventure on other planets, dimensions or realities. You have your pick– as they say in advertising–but wait! There’s more!
The Blind Spot (Argosy All-Story Weekly, May 14-June 18, 1921) by Homer Eon Flint and Austin Hall is a classic novel that certainly influenced others later. (See Kinsmen of the Dragon by Stanley Mullen, for instance.) Neil Barron is a scientist studying the Blind Spot (what we Star Trek fans would call a ‘spatial anomaly‘) that turns out to be a portal to other times and universes. This novel was early enough that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ influence did not dominate as it will with later stories. Austin Hall wrote a sequel after Flint was mysteriously killed.
Ralph Milne Farley had a long-running series when he sent a man to Venus by radio waves in “The Radio Man” (Argosy, June 28, 1924). Myles Cabot is working on a transmat machine when an accident happens, sending him to Venus. There he has to deal with a war between the giant ants and giant bees. Farley (who was really Roger Sherman Hoar) was a fan of ERB and the adventures feel a little like Burroughs’ interplanetary stuff though not as much sword-fighting. A comic book version called An Earthman on Venus appeared in 1951 from Avon. The adapter is not known but art by Wally Wood.
The first “transmat” tale was probably by Edward Page Mitchell’s “The Man Without a Body” (The Sun, March 25, 1877) though others used it better. “Professor Vehr’s Electrical Experiment” (The Argonaut, January 24, 1885) by Robert Duncan Milne like Mitchell’s story features the dangers if the process fails, giving us The Fly and several Star Trek transporter malfunctions. Edmond Hamilton used it in the Pulps in “The Moon Menace” and Jack Williamson in “The Cosmic Express”. But these lack the extra ingredient of Burroughsian adventure to follow (with the exception of Farley).
The Pulps
“Kaldar, World of Antares” (Magic Carpet, April 1933) by Edmond Hamilton is the first of three tales set on Kaldar. The next tale is “The Snake-Men of Kaldar” (Magic Carpet, October 1933) and finishing with “The Great Brain of Kaldar” (Weird Tales, December 1933). Magic Carpet was a sister magazine to Weird Tales, beginning as Oriental Tales. It was cancelled after October 1933 so the trilogy finished in WT. In Hamilton’s series, the subject is not fleeing the police but one who answers a strange advertisement. The idea is to send and then retrieve Stuart Merrick in three days. But would you want to give up the wasp-waisted princess? I think not. One of the scientific panel explains how it works:
“Briefly, our way is to split up the body of the chosen man into the electrons that compose it, and of using a terrific vibratory beam to drive those electrons together out toward the star or world decided on. An electron, a mere tiny particle of electricity, can travel faster than anything in the universe, with sufficient force behind it. Our projector’s forcebeam drives the dissembled electrons of that man out to the world of any star in moments only. On reaching that world, the projector’s force halting, the electrons will combine instantly again into the living man.
“The Sapphire Goddess” (Weird Tales, February 1934) by Nictzin Dyalhis is a portal Fantasy with the hero being a king who has been hidden in our world until Zarf shows up to save Karan on the point of suicide. There is an audible ‘click” and a panel reveals a corridor from one world to the other. The Earthman follows the wizard and let the Fantasy begin with a battle against dwarves… The normal world of the reader is not as important than the fact that Karan forgets vital information about his native world while in exile. The best use of Dyalhis’s ideas came decades later when Dan Mishkin, Gary Cohn and Ernie Colon created Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld, another heir hidden in our reality before returning to her own colorful realm of magic. These creators made our world equally as important with Amethyst living in both.
“Almuric” (Weird Tales, May June-July August 1939) by Robert E. Howard is intriguing as there are unsubstantiated rumors that Otis Adelbert Kline, Howard’s agent, may have finished or revised the story. The strange opening section feels tacked on to me. Esua Cairn is no elegant inventor. He is a brute of a man and a criminal. He flees into the savage world of Almuric and finds it better suits his barbarous nature. His machine is the invention of a definitely “mad scientist”. Cairn describes what the transition feels like:
The Transition was so swift and brief, that it seemed less than a tick of time lay between the moment I placed myself in Professor Hildebrand’s strange machine, and the instant when I found myself standing upright in the clear sunlight that flooded a broad plain. I could not doubt that I had indeed been transported to another world. The landscape was not so grotesque and fantastic as I might have supposed, but it was indisputably alien to anything existing on the Earth.
Roy Thomas and Tim Conrad adapted Howard’s short novel for Epic Illustrated #2-5, Summer 1980-April 1981. There was later a sequel by Thomas and Mark Winchell called Ironhand of Almuric.
“Lorelei of the Red Mists” (Planet Stories, Summer 1946) by Leigh Brackett & Ray Bradbury goes back to the Edgar Rice Burroughs method of the supernatural. Hugh Starke is dying, but is drawn from one body to another. That of the traitor, Conan (no, not that guy!) This is done by the magic of Lorelei, the witch of the Red Mists. The story that follows is good old fashioned Burroughsian adventure, which shouldn’t really surprise anyone, since it was written by two ERB fans. Brackett started the story but had to drop it because she got called back to Hollywood to work on a movie. Ray Bradbury, old-time friend, offered to finish it even though there was no outline. (Leigh was a good ol’ panster!) The second half was Ray’s own based on the first half. Brackett’s use of “Conan” for a name shows how forgotten Howard’s hero was by 1946. That would change, of course. Conquest Comics did an adaptation of Lorelei of the Red Mists in 1992 with Kristy Marx doing the story and Dell Barras and Butch Durcham the art.
The concept of people jumping in and out of other’s bodies is a slightly different one but Brackett’s husband, Edmond Hamilton would use it for one of his famous series, The Star-Kings the next year. In these stories, the transfer is short-lived, setting up such shows as Quantum Leap in the 1980-1990s. That idea deserves a post of its own.
“The Portal in the Picture” (aka Beyond Earth’s Gates) (Startling Stories, September 1949) by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore is a late Pulp exploration of the portal Fantasy with Eddie Burton traveling to the world of Malesco by magic. Eddie has a rough time of it, remarking on the works of H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. He realizes he is no John Carter. Kuttner and Moore’s tone is reminiscent of Homer Eon Flint and Austin Hall’s The Blind Spot and A. Merritt. The authors’ lack of Burroughsian daring-do may show the style was harder to sell in 1949. Post World War II Science Fiction was less naive and mostly about nuclear bombs.
Paperbacks
The paperback replaced the Pulp after WWII. Several writers spent the majority of their careers writing paperbacks, only becoming hard cover writers late in their long careers. Andre Norton certainly was one of these. Her wonderful novels were to be found in ACE Doubles then singles for decades before her work was collected in Science Fiction Book Club hard cover volumes.
Witch World (1962) by Andre Norton has Simon Tregarth on the run and looking to escape ala Esua Cairn. He uses Dr. Petronius’s discovery to leave the Earth for another, where witches fight with armies. Petronius doesn’t use a machine exactly but four sacred stones:
…Petronius pushed a switch and a light fanned out from the back door. Three gray stones formed an arch which topped Simon’s head by a few scant inches. And before that lay a fourth stone, as unpolished, unshaped and angular as the others. Beyond that arch was a wooden fence, high, unpainted, rotted with age, grimed with city dirt, and a foot or two of sour slum soil, nothing else.
In this way Norton uses both the supernatural and scientific to send Tregarth outward. The stones of the Siege Perilous are mystical but Petronius is a scientist who studies them. Magic or Science, Simon is sent to another universe and immediately has to help in the rescue of one of the witches, setting us on a course that will contain a dozen books and a long history that is neither quite Sword & Sorcery nor SF.
Warriors of Mars (1965) by Walter P. Bradbury (Michael Moorcock) is an early pastiche trilogy by an author who would become famous for other books. Michael Kane goes to Varnal (Mars) by machine, taking a page from Wells before the Burroughs can start:
The neon lights in the lab ceiling illuminated the shining steel and plastic cabinet, the great ‘translator cone’ directed down at it, and all the other equipment and instruments that filled the place almost to capacity. There were five of us working three technicians and Doctor Logon, my chief assistant.
Again this is an accident with Kane working on Transmat technology. Moorcock actually uses the term “matter transmitter” since we are now in the 1960s. Star Trek hasn’t appeared on TV yet so “transporter” is shortly to come but Doctor Who has been on for two years. What is the T. A. R. D. I. S. if not a time and space transmitter?
The Bronze Axe (1969) by Jeffrey Lord (Manning Lee Stokes) was the first novel in a series of thirty-seven. Pinnacle Books used a house name since the books were written by Stokes, Roland J. Green and Ray Nelson. The concept was to send a man similar to James Bond into different universes with a machine. Each book would have its own setting and different plot. The first one sends Richard Blade to a barbaric world where he must fights bears in the arena. The series became more SF in tone as it marched on.
Lord Leighton of MI6 explains the machine:
He swept his hand around in a circle, indicating the giant computer that loomed over them like some silent and monstrous gray beast. “This is the ultimate in computers, Mr. Blade. I have spent nearly all my life perfecting it. I have spent the last year programming it. It is fully programmed now, Mr. Blade, with a mass of highly specialized material. Material that is esoteric and sophisticated, in the form of symbols and words, and in combinations of both, and at this moment, Mr. Blade, with your brain as it now is, you could not even faintly begin to comprehend it. This machine, Mr. Blade, is programmed to solve problems and utilize knowledge that even / do not understand! Do you begin to understand at all?”
Under the Green Star (1972) was the first of several Edgar Rice Burroughs-like series by Lin Carter, as well as ones that resemble Robert E. Howard and Leigh Brackett. For his Green Star series, it is ERB and A. Merritt who get mention for all the mystical stuff at the beginning. Our Earthman, now Lord Chong, is off to Venus-like Green Star but not in a rocket. Carter resorts to Himalayan magic. This Burroughs pastiche only ran to five volumes unlike Carter’s Callisto books or the even longer-running Alan Burt Akers novels of Kenneth Bulmer. It’s the 1970s and Burroughsian darning-do is back, baby!
Conclusion
There are many examples I haven’t included here. Science Fiction and Fantasy are vast genres. I could have pointed to a certain wardrobe that links an English country house and a forest. Or later in that series, a painting of a ship. Joy Chant’s Red Moon, Black Mountain (1970), Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, are just three examples, all from Children’s literature. Stories for young people seem to naturally allow the shift between our world and some faerie realm without much difficulty. As we get older, it is up to Science Fiction to come up with glittering machines of steel and glass and polished crystal to do this. We need that new faith in technology to replace the fairy rings and elderly magicians. The effect is the same though: a door opens and adventure begins.
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