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“The City of Iron Cubes” by H. F. Arnold (Weird Tales, March April 1929) was a two-parter for the “weird-scientific” or “pseudo-scientific” fans. That was what some called “Science Fiction” in 1929. It’s older than Hugo Gernsback’s “scientifiction” and about as old as “off-trail fiction” as a name. No matter what you called it, you will recognize it as an early sample of Science Fiction. Weird Tales fans were often delighted (not everyone) by an SF tale from Edmond Hamilton, J. Schossel or Nictzin Dyalhis. Henry Ferris Arnold (1902-1963) joins their ranks with this story of alien invasion.
Arnold is far better known for his Horror masterwork, “The Night Wire” (Weird Tales, September 1926), which is often reprinted. For more on that story, go here. He wrote two other tales, this one the middle piece. “The City of Iron Cubes” is a fair description of the location of this tale. Unlike “The Night Wire” things begin mysterious but will be explained fully by the end.
Dana Harrod, our narrator, tells how he is summoned to a remote mountain in Peru by his old instructor, Professor Frelinghusen. This venerable scholar is one of the world’s foremost volcanologists. He has been gone for three years studying something mysterious in the Andes. Dana finds a guide, who abandons him once he has arrived at the strange plateau where Frelinghusen is hiding. On that strange flatland rests the giant metal cubes that give the story its title.
Once Dana finds the professor and settles in, he learns more about the cubes. Frelinghusen has determined that they arrive every four years, and each time they land with less force. They form a circle of cubes, seven so far, with one last spot for an eighth. The professor thinks the steel boxes are test vehicles for an alien race that is coming for Earth. This leads the two men to looking at the last cube. Inside they find a glassed-in chamber with two people inside, one a beautiful woman, the other a dead man.
Dana breaks open the glass vault, risking either being poisoned by the escaping atmosphere or killing the woman inside with ours. She survives. The dead man is her father, who has been embalmed. The professor takes a strange book, written in an alien language, while Dana carries out the woman who has fainted.
The woman, who is named Aien, is, of course, gorgeous. Dana falls instantly in love with her. She learns English quickly. Between her information and the book, which strangely, Frelinghusen can read, we piece together Aien’s story. She and her father escaped her own people, who are cruel and plan to take over the Earth. The father and daughter escaped in the sixth prototype cube. The scientist died of his wounds and Aien embalmed his body. The father left an assistant so the invaders have only to wait four years to follow. That arrival date turns out to be that night. Dana, Aien and the professor are too close to the landing site to escape the coming destruction. They wait fatalistically as the last cube lands in a fiery, deafening explosion. Here ends Part One.
The second, and shorter section, gives us the invasion. Our heroes survive the landing and hide out from the invaders. The men from the cube search for the scientist and his daughter. They almost find Dana and Aien hiding in the old shack but Dana disintegrates one with their own tube weapon. The trio hide but are helpless to stop the activity taking place on the plateau. The invaders are building a tower that will serve as a beacon to the armada of ships coming for Earth.
Professor Frelinghusen sends Dana and Aien away after working on something in the secret tunnels under the shack. They run through the jungle, trying to get far enough away before tons of TNT explode, destroying the aliens. All the heroes survive, and Dama and the professor decide to tell no one about any of it. Frelinghusen explains how he was able to read the alien’s book. It was written in Sanskrit, on purpose by the inventor. Frelinghusen is not sure why, and someday they will have to ask Aien about it (I’ll explain later!) Arnold finishes off with a cliche, telling us that Aien’s father borrowed his ideas from ancient Earthmen, one called Adem, who had a woman named Ev.
After I choked down a little vomit taste, I started placing this story into its historical time frame. So much of what is here is cliche by today’s standards. But was it in 1929? Certainly Edmond Hamilton was writing similar tales at this time. Jack Williamson would pen one in 1931 called “The Doom From Planet 4” (Astounding Stories, July 1931) that has a similar plot. This is a Shaggy God Plot (a term coined in 1962 by Brian Aldiss) including stories like Nelson S. Bond’s “The Cunning of the Beast” (The Blue Book Magazine, November 1942) or Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question” (Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1956). These post-date Arnold by a good ten-twenty years. One earlier use was two robots named Adam and Eve in Karl Capek’s influential play, “R.U. R.” (1920) which also gave us the word “robot”. So, even though I groaned, Arnold is one of the first to do this in a Science Fiction story. (Everybody else should stop.)
My other reaction was having a hard time with the “love-at-first-sight” romance in this tale. Arnold certainly isn’t the first to use this one either. In so much early SF the woman is the hero’s prize. I felt that Aien had no choice in her mate. Dana is convenient for her escape, then finding a new life on Earth, but I almost hoped she’s leave him later on and find her own path. This is perhaps a 21st Century reader reacting to an uncomfortable Pulp cliche. Aien is a woman with vast knowledge of Science and the universe, but she settles for domestic bliss is suburban America. Maybe in 1929. She seems far more tragic to me than I think Arnold had planned.
Conclusion
“The City of Iron Cubes” is clearly within the Alien Invasion trope of Science Fiction. It would be followed by dozens of others in Astounding Stories of Super-Science the following year. It had been preceded by a few in Amazing Stories, more likely one of its Quarterlies, where it would have greater length. Since Arnold’s tale appeared in Weird Tales, it was largely ignored by SF fans who disliked the “Weirdies” or Horror fiction (people like Isaac Asimov, for instance).
For the readers of WT, it must have been pretty mild, with no really good monsters in it. The letters in “The Eyrie” never mention the serial. The popular votes go to a Seabury Quinn reprint and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”. “The City of Iron Cubes” was Arnold’s last appearance in Weird Tales (no surprise). His final tale, “When Atlantis Was” would appear in T. O’Conor Sloane’s ailing Amazing Stories, October December 1937, a two-parter with an Atlantis filled with dinosaurs. Farnsworth Wright had published Atlantean stuff and dinosaur stuff before but this one feels a better fit in an SF magazine.
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