Read Like A Writer

There are two ways to learn how to write fiction: by reading it and by writing it. Yes, you can learn lots about writing stories in workshops, in writing classes and writing groups, at writers' conferences. You can learn technique and process by reading the dozens of books like this one on fiction writing and by reading articles in writers' magazines. But the best teachers of fiction are the great works of fiction themselves. You can learn more about the structure of a short story by reading Anton Chekhov's 'Heartache' than you can in a semester of Creative Writing 101. If you read like a writer, that is, which means you have to read everything twice, at least. When you read a story or novel the first time, just let it happen. Enjoy the journey. When you've finished, you know where the story took you, and now you can go back and reread, and this time notice how the writer reached that destination. Notice the choices he made at each chapter, each sentence, each word. (Every word is a choice.) You see now how the transitions work, how a character gets across a room. All this time you're learning. You loved the central character in the story, and now you can see how the writer presented the character and rendered her worthy of your love and attention. The first reading is creative—you collaborate with the writer in making the story. The second reading is critical.


John Dufresne, from his book, The Lie That Tells A Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction

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Tuesday, January 3, 2023

The Knowledge Machine by Edmond Hamilton

The knowledge machine by Edmond Hamilton

The Knowledge Machine

 

By EDMOND HAMILTON

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Thrilling Wonder Stories  June 1948.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


I wish now I'd never heard of Electro-Education! Sure, it made me a multi-millionaire. But what else did it do to me? What did it do to everybody?

The trouble with me was that I was too ambitious. I had a nice wife and we were planning on a family. I wasn't satisfied with just being Pete Purdy, the best electric repair-man in New York. I wanted something bigger and better for my family. Boy, did I get it!

It began when I was called over to Gotham University to repair a motor-generator that had gone sour. It was in the laboratory of Doctor Lewis Kindler, the big psycho-physiologist research man there. Of course, I didn't know then who he was. To me, he was just a thin, haggard old guy who looked like a nervous wreck as he told me about the generator.

"It must be repaired immediately—at once!" he shrilled. "We're just completing an epochal research. Epochal, you hear?"

I shrugged. "I'll do the best I can. But this model's complicated. It'll take a week to rip her down and rewind the coils."

"A week?" he screeched. "Impossible! We can't wait that long!"

His colleague, a stocky, bullet-headed young scientist named James Carter, tried to soothe the old boy down.

"Doctor Kindler, you really must rest! You have been working too hard for months on these experiments. You know now it's a success. Why not try to relax?"

"Relax?" screamed the old scientist. And then, all of a sudden, he went clean off his head.

He just collapsed, raving about rays and neurones and a lot of other stuff. Young Carter called doctors and officials of the university quick. They took him away, yelling at the top of his voice.

Next morning as I was working in the laboratory on the generator, Carter came in looking pretty blue.

"Doctor Kindler has had a complete mental breakdown from overwork," he told me. "He's been removed to a sanitarium, and may remain there in a schizophrenic state for years."

"Schizophrenic? That's tough." I wondered what it meant. "I guess the old man was a pretty big shot in science, huh?"

"We had just completed the greatest discovery in the history of psychology," Carter said. "He was tops in the field."

I kept on working at the generator, while young James Carter walked up and down the laboratory looking pretty moody.

He kept staring at a big machine in the corner. It was nothing I could recognize, for I'm a good electrician but these crazy scientific hookups are way over my head. To me, it looked something like a permanent wave machine, with a metal cap like the dames put over their heads.

Carter spoke as though he was talking to himself, gritting his teeth as he looked at that big machine.

"A discovery that means millions, billions! If I only had enough money to develop and exploit it!"


I pricked up my ears at that. Scientific discoveries don't interest me so much, but millions interest anybody.

"What is the thing?" I asked. "Some new kind of rig for atomic power?"

"No, no, it's nothing like that," Carter muttered. "It deals with the mind. I could revolutionize the world with this thing if I had money enough to develop improved apparatus."

"Won't the university put up the dough for the stuff you need?" I asked him.

He laughed kind of sour. "Of course they would. But they would also then appropriate all title to it. Whereas if I could develop it myself, it would make me the richest man in history."

That interested me a lot. Here was I, Pete Purdy, with ambitions for Helen and the family we planned to have, and maybe I'd stumbled on a chance to get in on the ground floor of something big.

I got up and went over to Carter and looked at the machine with him.

"How much dough would you need for new apparatus?" I asked. "And what is the discovery, anyway?"

Carter looked at me, his eyes narrowing a little as though he saw me for the first time.

"You mean that you might be interested in investing in it, Birdy?"

"Purdy," I said, and I hedged a little then. "I don't know. I've saved some money and also my wife's Uncle Dimblewitt left her a legacy last year. We've got thirty thousand and I was figuring to open up my own electric repair-shop when I got a little more."

Carter bit his lip. "Thirty thousand," he muttered. "It might be done with that. It just might."

"Hold on, don't spend my dough so fast!" I told him. "First, what is the gadget?"

He got all eager and excited as he explained. "It's a new method of education."

"Oh!" I said, and I guess my voice was plenty flat. "Well, that's fine. But I don't think there'd be much profit in that."

"You don't know what you're talking about!" Carter blazed. "This method of education is new! It's something entirely undreamed of until now."

He asked me:

"When you learn something, when you learn that the Earth is round, for instance, how does your brain do it?"

"I don't know," I said. "How does it?"

"The nerve-cells of your brain, the neurones, already contain the ideas of Earth and round," he explained. "Constant repetition of 'Earth is round' establishes a connection between the two neurone-groups, by gradually lowering the resistance at the synapses of neurone-contacts. Thus, when in future you think of Earth, the thought-impulse flashes along that low-resistance path to the specific neurones containing round."

Being an electrician, I could dimly understand that.

"So that's how it's done?" I said. "And that's why you have to study things so long to learn them?"

Carter nodded quickly. "Long study and repetition establishes the neural paths necessary for remembering. But suppose, by applying a tiny electronic impulse from outside, you could artificially establish a low-resistance path between those two neurone-groups?"

I got that, too. "Then I'd know that 'Earth is round' without having to bother learning it?"

"That's the idea!" Carter said. "And that's what Doctor Kindler has been working on for years. I worked with him, of course," he added hastily. "The discovery is as much mine as his.

"You see," he went on, "we invented a scanner that can change the labyrinthine neural-connections of the brain by tiny electronic impulses, just as you can rewire that generator's coils. With it, we can set up any desired neural paths in an instant by applying just the right electronic impulses at the right points in the network.

"Any ordinary set of facts requires thousands of new neural paths in the brain. To learn a subject like Sanskrit, for instance, requires tens of thousands. The scanner can put these new neural connections in your brain in a flash, by projecting a pre-determined pattern of electronic impulses."

"Can it be done?" I asked him.

"We proved it could be done!" Carter told me. "Doctor Kindler knew French, and I didn't. The scanner first scanned his neural patterns, isolated those having to do with word-meanings, and recorded them on a moving tape. Then we ran the tape back, reversing the scanner so it would repeat that pattern of electronic impulses on my own brain. It took ten minutes. At the end of that time, I knew French perfectly!"


That was a little hard to swallow.

"You mean, you didn't have to study it or anything?" I said. "You just knew it, all of a sudden?"

"Exactly," said Carter. "I see you look incredulous. I can soon prove the thing by running the same tape through on you."

He grabbed the big metal cap that was connected to the machine by a lot of cables, and jammed it down on my head.

I began to protest. I didn't like the idea of anybody fooling around with my mind. But Carter switched on the machine before I could stop him.

There was a humming, and a tape started unwinding inside the machine. I didn't feel anything except a queer tingling in my head. In a few minutes the humming stopped, and the tingling stopped too.

Carter took the metal cap off me and looked at me.

"Well, I don't feel any different," I told him.

"Vous savez le francais maintenant?" he shot at me.

"Oui, parfaitement," I shot right back at him. "Mais—"

I broke off, and goggled. "Holy cats, it worked! I do know French, just like that!"

I did, too. I could speak it as easy as English. And I'd never known a word of it in my life before. The thing floored me.

"Now do you believe?" Carter asked.

"And how!" I managed to say. "But I still don't see how there's millions to be made from it."

"Think, man!" he said. "It takes a student four years and several thousand dollars to get a university education. Suppose he can go in and get it off tapes for a few hundred dollars?"

The possibilities of it hit me, just like that. "Say, there'd be millions of students for prospects, every year!"

"And college students are only a small part of the market," Carter pointed out. "Everybody would like to know more than they do. Everybody would like to know higher mathematics or Latin or architecture or a hundred other subjects. They don't learn them because it takes too much time and work to study them. But if they can just buy them?"

"Why, there's no limit to the market!" I said. "How many different subjects could you pour into a guy's brain with the thing?"

Carter explained that there was a limit to that. "The potential neural paths in each brain are limited in number. We found that the average person has a neural index that will allow him to absorb the equivalent of a Ph.D. education from the tapes, but not much more."

He added quickly:

"But there'd be a chance for repeat business even so. The scanner can erase this new-found knowledge from the brain, by using a neutralizing electronic impulse. Then the student can learn entirely new subjects."

Right then and there, I saw my big opportunity and I grabbed it.

"You can count me in!" I told him. "But mind, if I put up the dough for the apparatus, I get one-third interest."

"One-third?" said Carter, kind of puzzled.

"Sure, one-third for me, a third for you, and a third for Doc Kindler," I reminded him.

"Oh, certainly," Carter said hastily. "I'll put Doctor Kindler's share in trust for him. But you understand we'd better not use his name at all in developing this. It would prejudice people if they learned that the co-inventor of the method is now a mental wreck."

Next day, without telling Helen, I drew out our thirty thousand and Carter and I signed the partnership papers.

He'd kept Doc Kindler's name out, as he said. And he'd decided to call our firm the "Electro-Education Company."

Carter rented a small building up in the Bronx, and there we put up the apparatus that he assembled from the stuff I bought.

"How about those learning-tapes, Carter?" I asked him at the end of the week. "We've got to be able to sell people more than just French."

He grinned at me. "I've got a lot of tapes on every subject, all ready. You see, some of the best scientists and scholars in the world are on Gotham University's faculty. Under pretext of X-raying their brains, I used the scanner to make tapes of everything they know."

That kind of shocked me. "It sounds like stealing their knowledge, without them suspecting it. I don't want anything like that."

"Stealing?" Carter answered quickly. "Why, of course not! We'll pay them a fat royalty every time we use the tapes, of course."

We tried the tapes out on each other. They worked fine. I went home that night, bursting with a dozen professors' knowledge.


Helen had her brother Harry and his wife for dinner that night. Harry has always snooted me, on account I'm an electrician while he went to college and works in an office.

Tonight, I was loaded for bear when he started making one of his highbrow cracks to show off. It was a crack about astronomy.

"Harry, you're a million miles off base," I told him. "The Riemannian conception of space you're talking about is a dead pigeon. It's been proved mathematically—" and here I went into the equations.

Helen and Harry and his wife all looked at me bug-eyed. I kind of enjoyed it, and I carried on from there.

I delved into ancient history, gave some chatty remarks on modern biophysical theory, and then compared a Sanskrit drama with an old Greek tragedy by quoting yards of each in the original.

"Where in the name of all that's holy did you pick up all that, Pete?" gasped Harry.

I just laughed lightly. "Oh, I'm not one to brag about my learning. I kind of like to keep my lamp hid underneath a bushel."

"I notice that your grammar is still hidden under a bushel," Helen, like a wife does, put in.

That dashed me a little. I'd forgotten that my grammar still wasn't so hot. We hadn't had any tape on elementary English Grammar.

That night after the others went, I told Helen the whole story and how our money was now invested in the Electro-Education Company.

She hit the sky. I had been trapped by a swindler, I was an idiot, and we were going to die in the poorhouse. Next morning she went with me to give Carter what-for and demand our money back.

Carter handled her beautifully. He inveigled her to put on the learning-cap, and then shot French, Music, Art and a lot of other stuff into her. From then on, Helen was enthusiastic.


The knowledge machine by Edmond Hamilton

Carter persuaded Helen to put on the learning-cap.

So next week, we hung out a sign and advertised in the newspapers. Carter had written the ad, and it was a good one.

"Do you want to know more?" it asked. "Do you yearn to learn? But are you repelled by the dreary prospect of months and years of study?

"Electro-Education is the answer! Study, classrooms, schools, are now obsolete. We guarantee to bestow on you in a few hours enough higher education to pass any university's graduation examinations."

Next morning we found a half-dozen prospects waiting to get into our Electro-Education shop. Only it turned out they were all reporters who had come to write funny pieces about our project.

Carter was smart. He didn't get mad, he just kidded them along and got one of them to try a sample course. Then he shot a full course of Higher Accounting into that chap.

It seems that that reporter was a guy who never had been able to add two and two, he had such a blind spot for arithmetic. When he got up and realized how much he knew, he let out a yell.

The other newshawks accused him of faking, at first. But the argument induced some of the others to try it. Carter gave them Chinese, Nuclear Physics, anything they asked.

That night Electro-Education hit the front pages of the newspapers with a bang! Some of the articles still claimed it was a fake, but a lot of the writers swore it worked. The result was that we had a crowd around our EE shop next day.

Most of them were just curious, but there were a few with money enough and curiosity enough to try a few tapes. When they went out and told the crowd about it, others started coming in.

Being near Gotham University, in two days we were handling a crowd of students so big they lined up for blocks. They came in with their money clutched in their hot little hands, and they went out crammed with every bit of knowledge their own professors had.

Then after three days, the Better Business Bureau, the District Attorney's office, and the police all came down on us.

"This thing is a barefaced swindle of some kind and I shall see that these two men get prison for it," the D.A. announced.

Carter had been expecting just that, and had a lawyer all ready when the preliminary hearing was held.

He brought in our witnesses—joyful college students who had quit going to classes altogether because they were dead sure of passing anyway.

Then Carter sprung his clincher.

"Your Honor," he said to the judge, "the courtroom janitor has agreed for a consideration to let me demonstrate Electro-Education on him. Is the court agreeable?"


The court was agreeable. So right there in the courtroom, Carter set up our EE apparatus and used it on the janitor.

This janitor was a big fatheaded old guy they called "Puddinghead," on account everyone around court knew how dumb he was.

Well, Carter shot all our law courses into him. He gave him not only Civil Law, Criminal Law, Corporation Law and Theory of Jurisprudence, he also gave him graduate courses in such fancy stuff as the Justinian Code and Medieval Ecclesiastical Law.

When it was over, and it took little more than an hour, old Puddinghead got up and talked. He not only proved that he knew everything now about the law—he proved that the judge himself was woefully ignorant about a lot of it.

"Electro-Education is obviously all it claims to be," said the judge quickly, to stop this painful exposé. "Case dismissed."

The courtroom exploded with excitement. Reporters crowded wildly around Carter. I found the judge himself plucking my arm.

"Mr. Purdy, in confidence, could you give me those courses too?" the judge asked timidly.

Overnight, Electro-Education became the sensation of the country. It was like a bomb going off.

I'll admit that it sort of floored me. I'm a modest kind of a guy. I'd figured on profits, on maybe even a chain of education-shops some day, but I hadn't figured on what EE rapidly became.

It didn't grow—it exploded. Within a month, Carter had branches started or underway in every big city in the country. He'd bought up a factory to turn out the EE apparatus. We trained our own operators. It was simple, since we just ran an EE tape to teach them.

Our advertising plastered the newspapers, the billboards, the radio. We made the whole country EE conscious, overnight. One of our best ads was:

WHY GO TO COLLEGE FOR KNOWLEDGE?

Would You Drive a Horse and Buggy To Work?

GET SMART THE MODERN WAY!

And there was a big billboard picture that showed a guy sitting with one of our EE caps on his head. It advised:

DON'T BE DUMB, CHUM!

Put On Your Learning-Cap Today!

For the classier trade, the advertising men had worked out displays that showed a dumb cluck cringing in the middle of a lot of brilliant-looking conversationalists.

"Do you envy your friends when they discuss learned subjects?" the ad asked. "Why be inferior? EE will make a new man of you mentally."

They poured into our EE shops. They came in such droves that the police had to establish lines at every shop.

Carter and I had big offices down in the Monarch State Building, by now. My work wasn't hard—I arrived at eleven each morning, smoked a cigar, and then went to lunch for a few hours. The afternoon was not quite so tough.

But Carter really worked. I never saw a guy with so much ambition. It kind of scared me, the way he kept EE mushrooming out bigger and bigger each day.

The universities and colleges had gone nuts. They tried first to suppress us but they couldn't. They forbade their professors to sell us knowledge-tapes. But we offered such big money that the professors did let us put their stuff on tapes, on the sly.

So the universities just gave up and closed their doors, all except a few bitter-enders. Then it was the turn of the high schools and the public schools.

Senators got up in the State Legislatures and demanded a new educational system.

"Why should we support a vast, expensive, outmoded school-system when EE can give every child better schooling at a fraction of the cost?" they asked.

The teachers all fought that, of course. But what chance did they have? The taxpayers didn't want to keep up the schools. The parents didn't want to, when their kids could learn it all so easy by EE. And the kids themselves sure were wholehearted for EE from the start.

The result was that the State set up, instead of schools, EE dispensaries in which our own operators gave the kids their stuff. Every kid had to go to school—one hour a year. He got his year's work shot into him by tape, and that was that. And the State paid us a set fee for every pupil.

Money? It came in by tons, by carloads. All over the country, all over most of the world, EE was replacing the schools and colleges. And still Carter wasn't satisfied.

"What we have got to avoid is saturation of the market, Pete," he told me. "As soon as everyone is full of knowledge, they will quit buying education."

"Well, there will still be the new generation of students each year and that brings in a big, steady profit," I said.

"That's not enough," he said in his determined way. "What we need is repeat business, like the movie industry gets. I'll work on that."

And he did. He got big new advertising campaigns planned, that kept the public needled by successive waves of advertising.


For a while, we plugged science. A man couldn't understand the world unless he was full of science. A woman should be ashamed to meet her bridge-club if she couldn't discuss higher physics or colloid chemistry.

It wore people down, all right. A lot of them came in and had us erase other stuff and fill them chock-full of science.

When a man reached his neural capacity we had to erase to put new knowledge in, of course. We'd had a few sad experiences with guys who wanted to know absolutely everything and who went batty from too much EE. To avoid trouble with the law, our operators were strict on that now.

When our sale of science-subjects began to fall off, we switched our advertising to concentrate on art. We made expert knowledge of art all the rage. Sure enough, people came in by thousands to have their science knowledge erased so they could take on a cargo of art.

Carter had worked out advertising that made young people good repeat customers, too. If they didn't feel satisfied in their professions, why not try a new one?

Lots of young lawyers, for instance, would decide they'd rather be doctors. They'd simply come in and have their legal knowledge erased, take on a full course of medical subjects, and hang out a shingle. Maybe two weeks later they'd be back, wanting now to try engineering.

Me, I was on top of the world, literally. I lived in the highest and biggest penthouse in town. And Helen was in the clouds, mainly on account of our new baby boy who had been born a year after we started EE and who was now husky and thriving.

"And little Percival is going to be proud of his father when he attains maturity," I told Helen. "Not only because of my wealth, but because of my erudition."

I really talked like that, by then, for Helen had insisted on me taking a full course in English Grammar soon after we started business. I had also taken all the other advanced EE courses my brain would hold, so that in those days there were few wiser guys than me in the world.

"Yes, dear, it is wonderful to know that Percival can be proud of his parents when he grows up," Helen said happily.

Well, that's all you ever know about the future. For it was the very next morning that the whole thing busted.

It busted when an old guy who looked vaguely professorial came crowding into my office in spite of my four secretaries.

"Are you Peter Purdy, the vice-president of Electro-Education Company?" he asked me.

"Yes, yes, but if you have a knowledge-record to sell you should take it to our Knowledge Purchasing Agent," I told him. "I do not handle details like that."

He just stood and stared at me and then all of a sudden he let out a yell.

"The electrician!" he yelled, pointing at me wildly.

Suddenly I recognized the old boy, and I got my feet down off the desk and got out of my chair.

"Dr. Kindler!" I said, all surprised.

It was him, all right—Carter's colleague that had been in a sanitarium all this time being a schizophreniac. But he didn't look out of his head now, at all. He just looked mad.

"Doctor, I'm overjoyed to see you," I said. "And so will Carter be. We had no idea you were cured—"

Doc Kindler interrupted me by shouting at me every dirty name a scientist could think of.

"You blind fools, to turn my discovery loose on the world without knowing more about it! You don't know what you may have done!"

Then he shouted even louder:

"Police!"

I hate to tell what followed. When Carter came in and saw the old doc, he turned a sickly color and started to scram. But the police were already arriving, and then the whole thing busted wide open.

No need to give you the whole bitter story. It's had publicity enough, and enough people have called me a dope. I suppose at that it's better than to be convicted of theft, like Carter.

Yeah, Carter had just deliberately stolen the old doc's invention and hadn't helped invent it at all, like he told me. He'd figured Doc Kindler was away in the sanitarium for life, not guessing that shock-therapy would finally succeed in restoring the old doc's mind.

I don't blame the old doc for blowing up the way he did when he came back and found out, nor for the names he called me in court. I'd rather be called "a stupid stooge" than a thief, any day.

Sure, they took the penthouse and the big bank-account and everything else away from me. I was lucky that they gave me back my original thirty thousand. Doc Kindler had relented enough to me to stipulate that, when he turned all rights in EE over to the Government.


You know what the first thing was that I did when I got out of court that day? I went into the nearest EE shop and had them erase every course I had, even my grammar.

And I did it because I was worried. I was worried by what Doc Kindler had said that day in the courtroom.

"My crooked assistant and this dolt Purdy whom he deceived didn't realize all they were doing when they exploited my discovery!" Kindler said. "When I collapsed, my experiments with Electro-Education were not yet complete.

"I had discovered that the minute electronic impulses used in Electro-Education have a permanent effect on the germ-plasm as well as the soma, but hadn't yet found out what the effect is."

"Will you state your meaning in less technical terms, doctor?" the judge asked.

Kindler's voice was grave. "I mean that the EE impulses have a powerful mutational effect on the genes that control the brain-development of the unborn child."

I got worried.

"Is my little boy going to be dotty because Helen and I took a lot of EE before he was born?" I asked him.

"That, I can't say yet," Kindler said grimly. "I was trying to determine the nature of the effect when I collapsed, and you let Carter talk you into appropriating my work."

That was what scared me into having all my EE erased before I went home that night. And Helen threw a fit when she heard about it.

"Now don't get hysterical," I begged. "The doc said he didn't know what the effect on Percival would be. It might not be so bad."

"But you and I were almost the first people to take EE, and whatever's going to happen to people's babies because of it, will happen first to Percival!" she sobbed.

We went in and hung over his crib. I couldn't see a thing wrong with him and I said so. He was as fat, healthy-looking a year-old baby as you'd want to see, as he lay there looking up at us.

"Yes, but what about his mind?" Helen sobbed. "He should be trying to talk by now, but he hasn't said a word."

"Maybe I could get him to talk, if I worked hard enough with him," I said desperately. I chucked Percival under the chin. "Say mama, Percival! Kuchy, kuchy—say mama!"

Percival opened his mouth and spoke. He spoke in a rather wobbly and shrill little voice.

"I presume, Father," he said, "that the encouraging sounds you are directing at me are onomatopoeic in origin and are designed to stimulate the faculty of imitation. Nevertheless, I must beg you not to continue making such utterances."

Helen and I gaped at each other. "He talked!" I choked out. "He talked like a professor! You heard him!"

Helen stared, wide-eyed. "But he never said a word before—not a word!"

Percival appeared to be bored. "Really, you could hardly expect me to join in the sort of unintelligent conversation that goes on in this house!"

Yeah, that was the effect of EE's electronic impulses on the unborn. Every EE course that Helen and I had ever taken was in Percival's brain when he was born! The fact that we'd had our own knowledge erased hadn't affected him in the least.

And I was going to have a son that would look up to me. That is a laugh. Our Percival loves his parents, but we will never see the day when we know half as much as he did when he was born!

It was the same with all the other kids born after EE, of course. Every last one of them came into the world equipped with a full cargo of knowledge.

You know how it's changed things. They had to cut the voting and office-holding age to zero, of course.

We couldn't restrict office to adults, when our own kids were ten times smarter than we were.

Half of Congress is under ten years old these days, and the big offices are mostly filled with kid geniuses. I hear there's a twelve-year old out in California that they're grooming for President.

What gets me, though, is this:

These kids of ours still keep piling new knowledge into their brains with EE. Now, twenty or thirty years from now, what are their kids going to be like? I do some wondering about that.

 

About the Author 


Edmond Moore Hamilton
Edmond Moore Hamilton was an American writer of science fiction during the mid-twentieth century. Wikipedia
 
Born: October 21, 1904, Youngstown, OH
Died: February 1, 1977, Lancaster, CA
Spouse: Leigh Brackett (m. 1946–1977)
Short stories: The Man Who Evolved, The Shores of Infinity, Exile, and more

Edmond Hamilton Books at Amazon

Monday, January 2, 2023

The Fantasy Fan Magazine Volume 1 March, 1934 Number 7

THE FANTASY FAN
 
THE FANS’ OWN MAGAZINE

Published Monthly
Editor: Charles D. Hornig
(Managing Editor: Wonder Stories)
10 cents a copy
$1.00 per year
137 West Grand Street, Elizabeth, New Jersey

Volume 1 March, 1934 Number 7

OUR READERS SAY

“Clark Ashton Smith’s story ‘The Ghoul’ is fascinating all the way through and the plot one that fits in with the treatment. I am anxiously waiting for more poems by him.

“‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ grows even more absorbing with the dawn of the Horror Tale. It is certainly something to tuck away and think over. Especially interesting is how the germ started and gained force in our own country from the European elements and the fact that superstition is more prevalent in northern blood than in southern, speaking racially—Latin and the like.

“The ‘Annals of the Jinns’ continues well and R. H. Barlow can get quite a story in so few words.”

—Duane W. Rimel

You will notice an excellent long poem by Clark Ashton Smith in this issue. We intend to lengthen the installments of Lovecraft’s article in future issues—the next part will take over two full pages. Barlow’s sixth “Annals” will probably appear next month.

“Very glad to see the new issue. Smith’s article is extremely apt and timely. I find that James tends to be popularly under-appreciated. Barlow’s tale is the best yet—he seems to improve constantly. The verses of Messrs. Lumley and Searight are haunting and excellent. It’s a good idea to substitute a department of general discussion for ‘The Boiling Point’.”

—H. P.

“I enjoyed the January issue of THE FANTASY FAN. Barlow’s little tales are certainly clever, and I hope you will print many of them. I second the wish that you express in your note at the end of the current ‘Boiling Point’ column.”

—Clark Ashton Smith

“I just got the February issue of THE FANTASY FAN and I find that it’s o.k., as usual. Marianne Ferguson’s article was great!”

—Ted. H. Lutwin

“Just finished the February issue of THE FANTASY FAN, and in common words, it’s a honey! Marianne Ferguson’s article about her visit to Jules de Grandin was superb! I want to cast my vote right now for another article by Miss Ferguson real soon!

“THE FANTASY FAN is now six months old and should celebrate! ‘The Dweller’ by William Lumley was a masterpiece, and Richard F. Searight’s poem takes high honors in this issue.

“All in all; I think this semi-birthday issue is fine. But there are a few things I would like to make comments about. ‘The Boiling Point’ should be eliminated, but the readers’ column should not be shortened! I agree with Mrs. Wooley—you should not insert a contents page, and thus cut out some interesting feature that could occupy the space. THE FANTASY FAN is going places!”

—Bob Tucker

As this is only our seventh issue, we don’t believe it’s quite time to celebrate our success(?)—however, we will be one year old in September and might be better off by then and feel justified in whooping it up.

We take great pleasure in presenting the following letter from H. Koenig. His letters are always thoroughly interesting and instructive and we value them as much as some of our articles:

“The February issue of THE FANTASY FAN was splendid and a marked improvement over the previous issue. It is rather difficult to pick out any high spot; but the articles and stories by Lovecraft, Barlow, Smith, and Petaja were all fine, to say nothing of the column, ‘Howl from the Ether.’

“I particularly enjoyed Clark Ashton Smith’s article on M. R. James. It was an admirable essay on an author who is far too little known and appreciated on this side of the water, and I dare say, on the other side also. Dr. James, who apparently has a tremendous amount of antiquarian and archeological information at his fingertips, is also, in my humble opinion, the greatest modern exponent of the ghost story. I heartily second Smith’s recommendation that all lovers of the weird and supernatural procure a copy of the Longman’s Green and Company volume. They will not be disappointed. Incidentally, for the information of readers who are perhaps interested in the separate volumes of James’ work rather than in the complete collection, the individual titles of his books (not mentioned in Smith’s article) are as follows:

1. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
2. More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
3. A Thin Ghost and Others
4. A Warning to the Curious

“By the way, M. R. James should not be confused with G. P. R. James who wrote that interesting romance, ‘The Castle of Ehrenstein, Its Lords Spiritual and Temporal; Its Inhabitants Earthly and Unearthly.’ This is a book, which, while probably somewhat tiresome to the general reader, should prove of considerable interest to the student of the ghost story (I am fortunate to have a first edition of this book in three volumes published in 1847).

“Emil Petaja’s article on ‘Famous Fantasy Fiction’ was also fine but to me far too short. I could add dozens of other interesting anthologies to his list but a few of the more important ones will suffice. Mr. Petaja called attention to Dorothy Sayers’ ‘Omnibus of Crime.’ It should be noted that Miss Sayers edited a second series of stories entitled, ‘Detection, Mystery, and Horror.’ Another worth-while group of stories has been collected and edited by Montague Summers under the title, ‘The Supernatural Omnibus.’ This volume has a splendid introduction by the Rev. Summers and contains, among other stories, ‘The Upper Berth’ by Crawford, and ‘The Damned Thing’ by Bierce. Another well-rounded collection was gotten together by Colin de la Mare under the title, ‘They Walk Again.’ This book contains ‘The Voice of the Night’ by Hodgson and ‘The Beckoning Fair One’ by Oliver Onions.

“Perhaps at times I have been somewhat harsh in my criticisms, but I am glad that you have taken them in the right spirit.”

We know that you will be pleased to note that we are lengthening the installments of Lovecraft’s article hereafter.


Gods of the North
 
by Robert E. Howard

The clangor of the swords had died away, the shouting of the slaughter was hushed; silence lay on the red-stained snow. The pale bleak sun that glittered so blindingly from the ice-fields and the snow-covered plains struck sheens of silver from rent corselet and broken blade, where the dead lay in heaps. The nerveless hand yet gripped the broken hilt; helmeted heads, back-drawn in the death throes, tilted red beards and golden beards grimly upward, as if in last invocation to Ymir the frost-giant.

Across the red drifts and mail-clad forms, two figures approached one another. In that utter desolation only they moved. The frosty sky was over them, the white illimitable plain around them, the dead men at their feet. Slowly through the corpses they came, as ghosts might come to a tryst through the shambles of a world.

Their shields were gone, their corselets dinted. Blood smeared their mail; their swords were red. Their horned helmets showed the marks of fierce strokes.

One spoke, he whose locks and beard were red as the blood on the sunlit snow.

“Man of the raven locks,” said he, “tell me your name, so that my brothers in Vanaheim may know who was the last of Wulfhere’s band to fall before the sword of Heimdul.”

“This is my answer,” replied the black-haired warrior: “Not in Vanaheim, but in Vallhalla will you tell your brothers the name of Amra of Akbitana.”

Heimdul roared and sprang, and his sword swung in a mighty arc. Amra staggered and his vision was filled with red sparks as the blade shivered into bits of blue fire on his helmet. But as he reeled he thrust with all the power of his great shoulders. The sharp point drove through brass scales and bones and heart, and the red-haired warrior died at Amra’s feet.

Amra stood swaying, trailing his sword, a sudden sick weariness assailing him. The glare of the sun on the snow cut his eyes like a knife and the sky seemed shrunken and strangely far. He turned away from the trampled expanse where yellow-bearded warriors lay locked with red-haired slayers in the embrace of death. A few steps he took, and the glare of the snow fields was suddenly dimmed. A rushing wave of blindness engulfed him, and he sank down into the snow, supporting himself on one mailed arm, seeking to shake the blindness out of his eyes as a lion might shake his mane.

A silvery laugh cut through his dizziness, and his sight cleared slowly. There was a strangeness about all the landscape that he could not place or define—an unfamiliar tinge to earth and sky. But he did not think long of this. Before him, swaying like a sapling in the wind, stood a woman. Her body was like ivory, and save for a veil of gossamer, she was naked as the day. Her slender bare feet were whiter than the snow they spurned. She laughed, and her laughter was sweeter than the rippling of silvery fountains, and poisonous with cruel mockery.

“Who are you?” demanded the warrior.

“What matter?” Her voice was more musical than a silver-stringed harp, but it was edged with cruelty.

“Call up your men,” he growled, grasping his sword. “Though my strength fail me, yet they shall not take me alive. I see that you are of the Vanir.”

“Have I said so?”

He looked again at her unruly locks, which he had thought to be red. Now he saw that they were neither red nor yellow, but a glorious compound of both colors. He gazed spell-bound. Her hair was like elfin-gold, striking which, the sun dazzled him. Her eyes were neither wholly blue nor wholly grey, but of shifting colors and dancing lights and clouds of colors he could not recognize. Her full red lips smiled, and from her slim feet to the blinding crown of her billowy hair, her ivory body was as perfect as the dream of a god. Amra’s pulse hammered in his temples.

“I can not tell,” said he, “whether you are of Vanaheim and mine enemy, or of Asgard and my friend. Far have I wandered, from Zingara to the Sea of Vilayet, in Stygia and Kush, and the country of the Hyrkanians; but a woman like you I have never seen. Your locks blind me with their brightness. Not even among the fairest daughters of the Aesir have I seen such hair, by Ymir!”

“Who are you to swear by Ymir?” she mocked. “What know you of the gods of ice and snow, you who have come up from the south to adventure among strangers?”

“By the dark gods of my own race!” he cried in anger. “Have I been backward in the sword-play, stranger or no? This day I have seen four score warriors fall, and I alone survive the field where Wulfhere’s reavers met the men of Bragi. Tell me, woman, have you caught the flash of mail across the snow-plains, or seen armed men moving upon the ice?”

“I have seen the hoar-frost glittering in the sun,” she answered. “I have heard the wind whispering across the everlasting snows.”

He shook his head.

“Niord should have come up with us before the battle joined. I fear he and his warriors have been ambushed. Wulfhere lies dead with all his weapon-men.

“I had thought there was no village within many leagues of this spot, for the war carried us far, but you can have come no great distance over these snows, naked as you are. Lead me to your tribe, if you are of Asgard, for I am faint with the weariness of strife.”

“My dwelling place is further than you can walk, Amra of Akbitana!” she laughed. Spreading wide her arms she swayed before him, her golden head lolling wantonly, her scintillant eyes shadowed beneath long silken lashes. “Am I not beautiful, man?”

“Like Dawn running naked on the snows,” he muttered, his eyes burning like those of a wolf.

“Then why do you not rise and follow me? Who is the strong warrior who falls down before me?” she chanted in maddening mockery. “Lie down and die in the snow with the other fools, Amra of the black hair. You can not follow where I would lead.”

With an oath the man heaved himself upon his feet, his blue eyes blazing, his dark scarred face convulsed. Rage shook his soul, but desire for the taunting figure before him hammered at his temples and drove his wild blood riotiously through his veins. Passion fierce as physical agony flooded his whole being so that earth and sky swam red to his dizzy gaze, and weariness and faintness were swept from him in madness.

He spoke no word as he drove at her, fingers hooked like talons. With a shriek of laughter she leaped back and ran, laughing at him over her white shoulder. With a low growl Amra followed. He had forgotten the fight, forgotten the mailed warriors who lay in their blood, forgotten Niord’s belated reavers. He had thought only for the slender white shape which seemed to float rather than run before him.

Out across the white blinding plain she led him. The trampled red field fell out of sight behind him, but still Amra kept on with the silent tenacity of his race. His mailed feet broke through the frozen crust; he sank deep in the drifts and forged through them by sheer strength. But the girl danced across the snow as light as a feather floating across a pool; her naked feet scarcely left their imprint on the hoar-frost. In spite of the fire in his veins, the cold bit through the warrior’s mail and furs; but the girl in her gossamer veil ran as lightly and as gaily as if she danced through the palms and rose gardens of Poitain.

Black curses drooled through the warrior’s parched lips. The great veins swelled and throbbed in his temples, and his teeth gnashed spasmodically.

“You can not escape me!” he roared. “Lead me into a trap and I’ll pile the heads of your kinsmen at your feet. Hide from me and I’ll tear apart the mountains to find you! I’ll follow you to hell and beyond hell!”

Her maddening laughter floated back to him, and foam flew from the warrior’s lips. Further and further into the wastes she led him, till he saw the wide plains give way to low hills, marching upward in broken ranges. Far to the north he caught a glimpse of towering mountains, blue with the distance, or white with the eternal snows. Above these mountains shone the flaring rays of the borealis. They spread fan-wise into the sky, frosty blades of cold flaming light, changing in color, growing and brightening.

Above him the skies glowed and crackled with strange lights and gleams. The snow shone weirdly, now frosty blue, now icy crimson, now cold silver. Through a shimmering icy realm of enchantment Amra plunged doggedly onward, in a crystalline maze where the only reality was the white body dancing across the glittering snow beyond his reach—ever beyond his reach.

Yet he did not wonder at the necromantic strangeness of it all, not even when two gigantic figures rose up to bar his way. The scales of their mail were white with hoar-frost; their helmets and their axes were sheathed in ice. Snow sprinkled their locks; in their beards were spikes of icicles; their eyes were cold as the lights that streamed above them.

“Brothers!” cried the girl, dancing between them. “Look who follows! I have brought you a man for the feasting! Take his heart that we may lay it smoking on our father’s board!”

The giants answered with roars like the grinding of ice-bergs on a frozen shore, and heaved up their shining axes as the maddened Akbitanan hurled himself upon them. A frosty blade flashed before his eyes, blinding him with its brightness, and he gave back a terrible stroke that sheared through his foe’s thigh. With a groan the victim fell, and at the instant Amra was dashed into the snow, his left shoulder numb from the blow of the survivor, from which the warrior’s mail had barely saved his life. Amra saw the remaining giant looming above him like a colossus carved of ice, etched against the glowing sky. The axe fell, to sink through the snow and deep into the frozen earth as Amra hurled himself aside and leaped to his feet. The giant roared and wrenched the axe-head free, but even as he did so, Amra’s sword sank down. The giant’s knees bent and he sank slowly into the snow which turned crimson with the blood that gushed from his half-severed neck.

Amra wheeled, to see the girl standing a short distance away, staring in wide-eyed horror, all mockery gone from her face. He cried out fiercely and the blood-drops flew from his sword as his hand shook in the intensity of his passion.

“Call the rest of your brothers!” he roared. “Call the dogs! I’ll give their hearts to the wolves!”

With a cry of fright she turned and fled. She did not laugh now, nor mock him over her shoulder. She ran as for her life, and though he strained every nerve and thew, until his temples were like to burst and the snow swam red to his gaze, she drew away from him, dwindling in the witch-fire of the skies, until she was a figure no bigger than a child, then a dancing white flame on the snow, then a dim blur in the distance. But grinding his teeth until the blood started from his gums, he reeled on, and he saw the blur grow to a dancing white flame, and the flame to a figure big as a child; and then she was running less than a hundred paces ahead of him, and slowly the space narrowed, foot by foot.

She was running with effort now, her golden locks blowing free; he heard the quick panting of her breath, and saw a flash of fear in the look she cast over her alabaster shoulder. The grim endurance of the warrior had served him well. The speed ebbed from her flashing white legs; she reeled in her gait. In his untamed soul flamed up the fires of hell she had fanned so well. With an inhuman roar he closed in on her, just as she wheeled with a haunting cry and flung out her arms to fend him off.

His sword fell into the snow as he crushed her to him. Her supple body bent backward as she fought with desperate frenzy in his iron arms. Her golden hair blew about his face, blinding him with its sheen; the feel of her slender figure twisting in his mailed arms drove him to blinder madness. His strong fingers sank deep into her smooth flesh, and that flesh was cold as ice. It was as if he embraced not a woman of human flesh and blood, but a woman of flaming ice. She writhed her golden head aside, striving to avoid the savage kisses that bruised her red lips.

“You are cold as the snows,” he mumbled dazedly. “I will warm you with the fire in my own blood—”

With a desperate wrench she twisted from his arms, leaving her single gossamer garment in his grasp. She sprang back and faced him, her golden locks in wild disarray, her white bosom heaving, her beautiful eyes blazing with terror. For an instant he stood frozen, awed by her terrible beauty as she posed naked against the snows.

And in that instant she flung her arms toward the lights that glowed in the skies above her and cried out in a voice that rang in Amra’s ears for ever after:

Ymir! Oh, my father, save me!

Amra was leaping forward, arms spread to seize her, when with a crack like the breaking of an ice mountain, the whole skies leaped into icy fire. The girl’s ivory body was suddenly enveloped in a cold blue flame so blinding that the warrior threw up his hands to shield his eyes. A fleeting instant, skies and snowy hills were bathed in crackling white flames, blue darts of icy light, and frozen crimson fires. Then Amra staggered and cried out. The girl was gone. The glowing snow lay empty and bare; high above him the witch-lights flashed and played in a frosty sky gone mad, and among the distant blue mountains there sounded a rolling thunder as of a gigantic war-chariot rushing behind steeds whose frantic hoofs struck lightning from the snows and echoes from the skies.

Then suddenly the borealis, the snowy hills and the blazing heavens reeled drunkenly to Amra’s sight; thousands of fireballs burst with showers of sparks, and the sky itself became a titanic wheel which rained stars as it spun. Under his feet the snowy hills heaved up like a wave, and the Akbitanan crumpled into the snows to lie motionless.

In a cold dark universe, whose sun was extinguished eons ago, Amra felt the movement of life, alien and unguessed. An earthquake had him in its grip and was shaking him to and fro, at the same time chafing his hands and feet until he yelled in pain and fury and groped for his sword.

“He’s coming to, Horsa,” grunted a voice. “Haste—we must rub the frost out of his limbs, if he’s ever to wield sword again.”

“He won’t open his left hand,” growled another, his voice indicating muscular strain. “He’s clutching something—”

Amra opened his eyes and stared into the bearded faces that bent over him. He was surrounded by tall golden-haired warriors in mail and furs.

“Amra! You live!”

“By Crom, Niord,” gasped he, “am I alive, or are we all dead and in Valhalla?”

“We live,” grunted the Aesir, busy over Amra’s half-frozen feet. “We had to fight our way through an ambush, else we had come up with you before the battle was joined. The corpses were scarce cold when we came upon the field. We did not find you among the dead, so we followed your spoor. In Ymir’s name, Amra, why did you wander off into the wastes of the north? We have followed your tracks in the snow for hours. Had a blizzard come up and hidden them, we had never found you, by Ymir!”

“Swear not so often by Ymir,” muttered a warrior, glancing at the distant mountains. “This is his land and the god bides among yonder mountains, the legends say.”

“I followed a woman,” Amra answered hazily. “We met Bragi’s men in the plains. I know not how long we fought. I alone lived. I was dizzy and faint. The land lay like a dream before me. Only now do all things seem natural and familiar. The woman came and taunted me. She was beautiful as a frozen flame from hell. When I looked at her I was as one mad, and forgot all else in the world. I followed her. Did you not find her tracks. Or the giants in icy mail I slew?”

Niord shook his head.

“We found only your tracks in the snow, Amra.”

“Then it may be I was mad,” said Amra dazedly. “Yet you yourself are no more real to me than was the golden haired witch who fled naked across the snows before me. Yet from my very hands she vanished in icy flame.”

“He is delirious,” whispered a warrior.

“Not so!” cried an older man, whose eyes were wild and weird. “It was Atali, the daughter of Ymir, the frost-giant! To fields of the dead she comes, and shows herself to the dying! Myself when a boy I saw her, when I lay half-slain on the bloody field of Wolraven. I saw her walk among the dead in the snows, her naked body gleaming like ivory and her golden hair like a blinding flame in the moonlight. I lay and howled like a dying dog because I could not crawl after her. She lures men from stricken fields into the wastelands to be slain by her brothers, the ice-giants, who lay men’s red hearts smoking on Ymir’s board. Amra has seen Atali, the frost-giant’s daughter!”

“Bah!” grunted Horsa. “Old Gorm’s mind was turned in his youth by a sword cut on the head. Amra was delirious with the fury of battle. Look how his helmet is dinted. Any of those blows might have addled his brain. It was an hallucination he followed into the wastes. He is from the south; what does he know of Atali?”

“You speak truth, perhaps,” muttered Amra. “It was all strange and weird—by Crom!”

He broke off, glaring at the object that still dangled from his clenched left fist; the others gaped silently at the veil he held up—a wisp of gossamer that was never spun by human distaff.


FANTASY BOOK
 
by Lester Anderson

“Gandle Follows His Nose” by Heywood Broun (Boni & Liveright 1926). Our Scripps-Howard correspondent turns out a short allegorical fantasy which concerns itself with the adventures of one Bunny Gandle who, when 18 years of age, was taken, by his uncle, to the sorcerer Boaz, wherefrom he managed to escape with the cape of invisibility. We travel with him to strange lands. We hear of his finding and the subsequent loss of the magic lamp, his victory over the God Kla, the repulsion of the armies of King Helgas, and his sojourn in the Land of the Flying Sword. We meet our old friend, Yom, the genie who is much perturbed when Gandle orders him to bring a poached egg, of all things. Yom, incidentally, tenders young Gandle some sage advice concerning Life which the youth cannot grasp. Who can blame him, as the genie had 5694 years of experience? The underlying current in this piece is that of “wishfulfilment,” which I think, was what Broun primarily had in mind. It makes novel reading from all angles.


SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE
 
Part Six
 
by H. P. Lovecraft
 
(Copyright 1927, W. Paul Cook)

Through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, we behold a growing mass of fugitive legendry and balladry of darksome cast; still, however, held down beneath the surface of polite and accepted literature. Chap-books of horror and weirdness multiplied, and we glimpse the eager interest of the people through fragments like DeFoe’s Apparition of Mrs. Veal, a homely tale of a dead woman’s spectral visit to a distant friend, written to advertise covertly a badly selling theological disquisition on death. The upper orders of society were now losing faith in the supernatural, and indulging in a period of classic rationalism. Then, beginning with the translations of Eastern tales in Queen Anne’s reign and taking definite form toward the middle of the century, comes the revival of romantic feeling—the era of new joy in Nature, and in the radiance of past times, strange scenes, bold deeds, and incredible marvels. We feel it first in the poets, whose utterances take on new qualities of wonder, strangeness, and shuddering. And finally, after the timid appearance of a few weird scenes in the novels of the day—such as Smollett’s Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom—the released instinct precipitates itself in the birth of a new school of writing; the “Gothic” school of horrible and fantastic prose fiction, long and short, whose literary posterity is destined to become so numerous, and in many cases so resplendent in artistic merit. It is, when one reflects upon it, genuinely remarkable that weird narration as a fixed and academically recognized literary form should have been so late of final birth. The impulse and atmosphere are as old as man, but the typical weird tale of standard literature is a child of the eighteenth century.

(Next month we will give you a much longer installment of this article, in which Mr. Lovecraft takes up the third section, “The Early Gothic Novel.”)


YOUR VIEWS

You will remember that, in the closing statement in the last department of “The Boiling Point” last month, we asked you, the readers, to tell us what you think of horror stories. Is there any virtue to them? Why do people delight in being horrified?—etc. suggested by Forrest J. Ackerman. H. P. Lovecraft honors us with the first opinion, which we present to you as follows:

“It can be said that anything which vividly embodies a basic human emotion or captures a definite and typical human mood is genuine art. The subject matter is immaterial. It requires an especial morbidity to enjoy any authentic word-depiction, whether it is conventionally ‘pleasant’ or not. Indeed, it argues a somewhat immature and narrow prospection when our judgment is by the mere conventional appeal of its subject-matter or its supposed social effects. The question to ask is not whether it is ‘healthy’ or ‘pleasant,’ but whether it is genuine and powerful.”

Have you another idea concerning the horror story? If so, let us know what it is. However, if your opinion differs, don’t tell Mr. Lovecraft that he is crazy or has a diseased mind for thinking as he does, or this department will just become another ‘Boiling Point.’ Or bring up something new, if you will. This is your department, and anything you wish to say concerning weird fiction in general or any of its branches in particular will be printed here. Here’s hoping to hear from you.


REVENANT
 
by Clark Ashton Smith

I am the specter who returns
Unto some desolate world in ruin borne afar
On the black flowing of Lethean skies:
Ever I search, in cryptic galleries,
The void sarcophagi, the broken urns
Of many a vanished avatar:
Or haunt the gloom of grumbling pylons vast
In temples that enshrine the shadowy past.
Viewless, impalpable and fleet,
I roam stupendous avenues, and greet
Familiar sphinxes carved from everlasting stone,
Or the fair, brittle gods of long ago,
Decayed and fallen low.
And there I mark the tall clepsammiae
That time has overthrown,
And empty clepsydrae,
And dials drowned in umbrage never-lifting;
And there, on rusty parapegms,
I read the ephemerides
Of antique stars and elder planets drifting
Oblivionward in night.
And there, with purples of the tomb bedight,
And crowned with funeral gems,
I hold awhile the throne
Whereon mine immemorial selves have sate,
Canopied by the triple-tinted glory
Of the three suns forever paled and flown.
I am the specter who returns
And dwells content with his forlorn estate
In mansions lost and hoary
Where no lamp burns;
Who feasts within the sepulcher,
And finds the ancient shadows lovelier
Than gardens all emblazed with sevenfold noon,
Or topaz-builded towers
That throng below some iris-pouring moon.
Exiled and homeless in the younger stars,
Henceforth I shall inhabit that grey clime
Whose days belong to primal calendars;
Nor would I come again
Back to the garish terrene hours;
For I am free of vaults unfathomable
And treasures lost from time:
With bat and vampire there
I flit through somber skies immeasurable
Or fly adown the unending subterranes;
Mummied and ceremented,
I sit in councils of the kingly dead;
And oftentimes for vestiture I wear
The granite of great idols looming darkly
In atlantean fanes;
Or closely now and starkly
I cling as clings the attenuating air
About the ruins bare.

THE WORDS IN THE SKY
 
(A True Experience)
 
by Kenneth B. Pritchard

On one evening in 1916, before the United States had entered the World War, I happened to be out with my mother. The place was Bridgeport, Connecticut, near the corner of Main and State Streets. The stars were shining, as usual, though I gave them no particular notice.

We had turned the corner and traversed several feet, when I chanced to look up into the sky. Lo and behold, the stars had formed themselves into one great patch in the heavens, in the form of letters, and those letters spelled words!

I could read some, at the time, but I tugged at my mother’s arm and asked her what it said. I am hazy as to her answer. Perhaps she told me that there was nothing there, or ignored the childish gesture entirely. At any rate, I looked up again and the words were still there. I don’t believe that my mother even glanced at them.

You are anxious to learn what it said? Well, it took years for that memory to come back to me, but I now have it, in what I am fairly sure are the correct words. The exact ones do not make any difference, for I am sure of their meaning. The message in the sky read, “The United States of America will run red with blood!”

A short time after peering at the stars, some invisible forces took hold of them. The brilliant orbs were shifted as by a mighty hand. They moved like checkers on a vast board. And then, the stars ceased their journeyings; they were once more on their accustomed courses. I lowered my head; the gigantic show was over!

Delusion, you say? I’m afraid I don’t agree with you.


HOW TO WRITE A WEIRD TALE
 
by Hoy Ping Pong

Unlike its sister, the science fiction story, the weird tale needs a plot. To go about this, select the plot which has been used most since 1926 and write your tale around it. I said around. Don’t touch the plot itself; editors won’t stand for that! Above all, don’t invent an original one. Readers won’t know what you’re talking about if you don’t use one that has been plotted 6,438,900 and a fraction times, more or less. At this point, you can discard the plot altogether, because the editor would send your brain-child back if you didn’t, on the grounds that there are too many stories with plots in them as it is. They would rather have action.

Action—that is the keynote! The hero must dash hither and thither over the landscape, saving the beautiful blue eyed heroine, who lisps in baby-talk, from the snakey clutches of the villain who, incidentally, is about to let loose on the city a horde of terrible monsters. Where he got them from is none of your business, so you’d do much better to worry yourself about something else—where your next meal is coming from, for instance. I would suggest that pre-historic monsters be used, for they are easier to account for than ones from other dimensions. Editors have an annoying habit of asking authors where their monsters came from. You had better have the monsters destroy New York City. The inhabitants of this city are so used to being destroyed that they now take it with a chuckle of droll humor. The tax payers might protest a bit though, but don’t mind them.

Here to add a bit of flavor to the tale, bring in a new plot. Discard it and bring in a third. Throw that one away too. Plots are cheap—$1.75 an acre in Missouri. Small plots will do. Then, while the stunned readers are still gasping over the plots, throw in a barrage of big words that none of them will understand, including Webster and Clark Ashton Smith. This will stupefy them.

About this time, put in something really weird and spine-chilling. Ice might do, but it melts too rapidly in warm climes, and a southern reader wouldn’t get his spine thoroughly chilled, so you had better devise something else.

As a final bit of advice, it would be best to have some sort of recommendation to the editor in order to have your story more readily acceptable. So have your Uncle Silas, who has a friend that knows a friend who is an acquaintance with someone that knows the printer who publishes the said editor’s magazine, put in a good word for you.

If this fails (as it undoubtedly will) take your brain-child to him in person. This will save postage both ways, because editors never fail to reject manuscripts from beginners (I object—Editor). Don’t worry over this tho. Let it lay around home a few weeks mellowing with age, and then send it in again, untouched. This time it will be accepted. Maybe.

If you go in person, buy a plot in a local cemetery.


A SAD STORY OF THE FUTURE
 
by Forrest J. Ackerman

(Following is a brief summary of a recent radio broadcast taken from the story “We Buy Us a Robot—and What Happened” in the American Weekly.)

A married couple had an eight year old robot, and decided that it was about time to get a new one as ‘Willy’ was becoming worn and creaky and inefficient; so, they went to look over the newest models. They selected Julius, a most capable iron-man who could not tell a lie. This proved a disadvantage, however, as, upon entering their home he declared in his deep, hollow, mechanical voice: “Dust—much dust!”

As the wife would grow lonely when her husband was away, she had a phonograph record made of him assuring her how much he loved her. This she inserted into Julius, and listened to him. But this made Julius become very pensive and sad. One day he was found reading love poems and crying. Julius was in love! He realized the hopelessness of the situation.

One day he was found missing. “Oh! He’s committed suicide!” the wife cried, “I know it!”

“But that’s impossible!” her husband assured her, “if he tries to drown himself, he will only be short-circuited and rusted, and could be revitalized and polished up just like new. If he shoots himself, but a few parts need be replaced. Jumping from a window would merely dent him a little. He cannot hang himself; he cannot poison himself; he cannot die by fire. Anyhow, our contract guarantees us against loss by suicide.”

Just then the televisor flashed on. It was an upstairs neighbor.

“My son’s all dirty and greasy,” he bellowed, “and it’s your fault!”

“Our fault? How so?” they asked.

He gave a serial number. “That’s your robot, isn’t it? Well, he went out into the park and called a lot of kids around him; told them he wasn’t feeling well; gave them screw-drivers and asked to find out what was the matter with him. In a few minutes he was scattered all over six blocks.”

Julius, the mechanical man, had taken the only method an automaton knew of committing suicide.——


THE TIME MACHINE
 
(A Bibliographical Note)
 
by R. H. Barlow

The first publication of the tale that later became Wells’ most famous short novel, was in a paper issued at his school. The magazine, The Science Schools Quarterly, serialized a story of the same underlying plot, dealing with a Welsh professor. This was, broadly speaking, the debut of the story. It was later re-written, and some decade afterwards, after being published in both the National Observer and The New Review, appeared in a modest little volume published by Wm. Heinomann. Preceding it were two text-books and Conversations With An Uncle came out the day immediately before.

The book in its first English edition, was a modest duodecimo volume measuring approximately 7 X 5 X 1 ins. It was bound in a coarse linen-like grey cloth, and bore in purple lettering as well as the title a peculiar device of a rather emaciated sphinx. It contained pages 152 and XVI. The text, besides the title page was virtually the same as that recently issued in Short Stories of H. G. Wells, but differed in several respects from that Amazing Stories used in their May, 1927 issue.

It appeared simultaneously both in the bound edition and wrappers, the former at the price of 3s, and the latter at 2s 6d.


 

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IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE


In the April issue of Fantasy:

THE DEAD WOMAN
by David H. Keller, M. D.

The beloved Dr. Keller has produced, in this story, one of the greatest weird-psychological stories he has ever written. The unusual, horrifying, tale of the terrible thing conceived in the mind of a husband, written as only Dr. Keller can write.

“The Last Poet and the Robots”
A. Merritt’s beautiful chapter of the Super-Novel, COSMOS
An Interview with Leo Morey
“Science Friction” a poem by J. Harvey Haggard
Another installment of the interesting “Scientific Hoaxes”

Alicia, the sweet sophisticated young lady whose misadventures in Blunderland have been amusing FM readers, says farewell.

The four news columns:
The Science Fiction Eye
The Ether Vibrates
Spilling the Atoms
Scientifilm Snapshots

keep you well informed on coming events in the fantasy field and other features

In future issues
Poetry, stories, and articles by
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Donald Wandrei
Edmond Hamilton
David H. Keller, M. D.
P. Schuyler Miller
L. A. Eshbach
Fletcher Pratt
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Punctuation has been normalized.

Variations in hyphenation were maintained.

Portions of articles that were separated from the main in the layout of the periodical have been rejoined.

The following typographical or printers’ errors have been corrected:

As printed: Changed to:
 
accout account
ane and
Annes Anne’s
arttcle article
bo by
cemetary cemetery
collecton collection
contaics contains
crme came
crystaline crystalline
dan day
deceased diseased
extiuguished extinguished
floatee floated
geip grip
ha he
I It
immersurable immeasurable
incidently incidentally
interestiug interesting
Literaature Literature
mens men
National Observor National Observer
racilly racially
ratonalism rationalism
re-wrttten re-written
sang sank
Sayer Sayers
searate separate
she she had
sneathed sheathed
stupify stupefy
that than
Vallahalla Vallhalla
villian villain
weild wield
Welesh Welsh
whidh which
wouldd’t wouldn’t


  
  

Sunday, January 1, 2023

Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 by Various (PDF)

 

Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 by Various


The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees:

  • That the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors’ League of America;
  • That such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen;
  • That each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit;
  • That an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages.

 

The other Clayton magazines are:

ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, and WESTERN LOVE STORIES.

More Than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines.

VOL. V, No. 1    CONTENTS    JANUARY, 1931

 

COVER DESIGN    H. W. WESSO   

Painted in Water-Colors from a Scene in “The Gate to Xoran.”

THE DARK SIDE OF ANTRI    SEWELL PEASLEE WRIGHT    9

Commander John Hanson Relates an Interplanetary Adventure Illustrating the Splendid Service Spirit of the Men of the Special Patrol.

THE SUNKEN EMPIRE    H. THOMPSON RICH    24

Concerning the Strange Adventures of Professor Stevens with the Antillians on the Floor of the Mysterious Sargasso Sea.

THE GATE TO XORAN    HAL K. WELLS    46

A Strange Man of Metal Comes to Earth on a Dreadful Mission.

THE EYE OF ALLAH    C. D. WILLARD    58

On the Fatal Seventh of September a Certain Secret Service Man Sat in the President’s Chair and—Looked Back into the Eye of Allah.

THE FIFTH-DIMENSION CATAPULT    MURRAY LEINSTER    72

The Story of Tommy Reames’ Extraordinary Rescue of Professor Denham and his Daughter—Marooned in the Fifth Dimension. (A Complete Novelette.)

THE PIRATE PLANET    CHARLES W. DIFFIN    109

Two Fighting Yankees—War-Torn Earth’s Sole Representatives on Venus—Set Out to Spike the Greatest Gun of All Time. (Part Three of a Four-Part Novel.)

THE READERS’ CORNER    ALL OF US    132

A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories.

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