He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1922, but rather than working as a chemical engineer, Weinbaum spent the Twenties managing movie palaces. As his ticket to the big time, Weinbaum attempted to write popular fiction. But the best he was able to do was to place a society romance, The Lady Dances, in newspaper syndication under the pseudonym Marge Stanley.
Weinbaum was a longtime fan of SF. He had read Poe, Verne, Wells, Burroughs, and the utopian writers, and he had picked up Amazing Stories from the first issue. But his own attempted science fiction novels, The Mad Brain and The New Adam, were old-fashioned movie-minded variations on the Jekyll-and-Hyde theme, and went unpublished.
As he read the science fiction magazines of the early Thirties, Weinbaum must have felt provoked by the stupidity and simple-mindedness of stories about idyllic planets and fairytale space princesses who recognize the hero’s valor and virtue at first glance. His scientific training told him that the universe was odder and less comprehensible than this. His own continuing lack of success in the pursuit of his dreams may have suggested that victories come as much through chance as from displays of right-minded effort. And his ego surely whispered to him that his own unpublished writings were far superior to tripe like this.
So science fiction readers wanted stories of Mars, did they? Very well, then, he would give them a Mars to remember.
The story that Weinbaum produced was “A Martian Odyssey”—the tale of the first human expedition to land on another planet. This thoroughly bizarre piece of fiction was unlike anything previously published in the SF magazines. It was at one and the same time a good-hearted spoof, a surreal movie cartoon, an expression of cynicism and dismay, and an exercise in personal wish-fulfillment.
One example of this wish-fulfillment at work is the main character of “A Martian Odyssey.” Dick Jarvis is the professional chemist that Weinbaum might have been. And his girlfriend back home on Earth is the famous vision entertainer, Fancy Long.
At the outset of the story, Jarvis, who has been off on a lone scouting trip, has just been rescued after having been missing for ten days. His fellows are gathered close in the cabin of their spaceship, all eager to hear of his adventures.
This will turn out to be a very queer tale indeed, so to draw the reader in and gain his confidence, Weinbaum employs every device he knows to ensure that “A Martian Odyssey” appears plausible. One is this circle of attentive listeners. These are not skeptical folk back home in the tidy little Village who must be convinced, as in Wells’s The Time Machine. These are Jarvis’s companions in this strange world—ready to serve as confirming witnesses for portions of his story.
Weinbaum adds further immediate plausibility with a trick taken from the futuristic utopian story—the setting of his narrative in a historical context. It is a well-known past event that we are asked to contemplate:
Dick Jarvis was chemist of the famous crew, the Ares expedition, first human beings to set foot on the mysterious neighbor of the earth, the planet Mars. This, of course, was in the old days, less than twenty years after the mad American Doheny perfected the atomic blast at the cost of his life, and only a decade after the equally mad Cardoza rode on it to the moon. They were true pioneers, these four of the Ares. Except for a half-dozen moon expeditions and the ill-fated de Lancey flight aimed at the seductive orb of Venus, they were the first men to feel other gravity than earth’s. . . .293
What makes this buildup so effective is not just its historical certitude, but its tone of breezy familiarity. Who could possibly doubt it? And take notice that at the same moment we are accepting these offhand historical references, we are also accepting the impetuosity and imbalance of early space travelers and the mystery of Mars.
But there is more. In the opening pages of “A Martian Odyssey,” Weinbaum deliberately deconstructs familiar romantic expectations of Mars derived from reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and space opera. The Mars he presents has no red-skinned, egg-laying Martian princesses or exotic dying cities. Instead it is given as a prosaic place—a gray plain, a flat and desolate landscape. The air here is thin and cold, and Jarvis has developed a badly frost-bitten nose from exposure.
And, in one last ploy adapted from the hoaxes of Edgar Allan Poe, Weinbaum fills the early pages of his story with fact. In particular, with calculation after calculation of distance and time and weight:
“ ‘Weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds earth-weight, which is eighty-five here. Then, besides, my own personal two hundred and ten pounds is only seventy on Mars, so, tank and all, I grossed a hundred and fifty-five, or fifty-five pounds less than my everyday earth-weight.’ ”294
Taken together, all of this amounts to a much heavier freighting of plausibility than pulp science fiction was used to carrying. And the result was that “A Martian Odyssey” appeared far more real to its readers than previous interplanetary SF.
At the same time, however, in the tradition of Poe, the narrative of “A Martian Odyssey” was jokey and quirky and not at all to be relied upon. Two of the crew members talk in music-hall foreign accents and comically misinterpret much of what is said. And one of them even bears the humorous name Putz—like Poe’s Rubadub or Von Underduk.
And the account that Jarvis gives is nothing less than an old-time marvelous journey transplanted to Mars. A real whopper of a traveler’s tale:
Jarvis says that while walking back from his crashed scoutship to rejoin the expedition, he came across an ostrich-like creature on the banks of a Martian canal, struggling to free itself from the grip of a black tentacled dream-beast, a projector of delusions. He shot the monster with his automatic, and he and the birdlike Martian became fast friends.
Tweel the Martian—admired by the likes of H.P. Lovecraft for being so strange yet sympathetic—is probably the best remembered element of “A Martian Odyssey.” He thinks and acts in a manner totally peculiar. He travels by making prodigious leaps through the air and then landing on the point of his beak. But although Tweel is so different that he and Jarvis can hardly communicate, he is not hostile. The two have a natural affinity:
“ ‘Our minds were alien to each other. And yet—we liked each other!’ ”295
Traveling on together, these two unlikely companions encounter a series of mysteries. And all of them involve strange Martian creatures.
First, they stumble across an age-old exercise in futility. This is a half-million-year-long trail of larger and larger empty pyramids built by a creature that does nothing but shit bricks, erect structures around itself, and then move on. Jarvis says:
“That queer creature! Do you picture it? Blind, deaf, nerveless, brainless—just a mechanism, and yet—immortal! Bound to go on making bricks, building pyramids, as long as silicon and oxygen exist, and even afterwards it’ll just stop. It won’t be dead. If the accidents of a million years bring it its food again, there it’ll be, ready to run again, while brains and civilizations are part of the past.”296
Then they have a second encounter with a dream-beast. This time it is Jarvis who is subjected to the power of one of the black tentacled monsters. He is dazzled by an alluring vision of Fancy Long, his video star girlfriend. And it is Tweel who saves him by shooting the dream-beast with a steam-powered glass pistol.
Finally, the two enter a mud-heap city that belongs to odd little barrel-shaped beasts who rush around shoving pushcarts full of rubbish and accomplishing nothing. At the heart of their anthill, there is a great machine. The barrel beasts empty their pushcarts here and then throw themselves under the wheel of the great machine to be ground to pieces.
On a pedestal that stands beside this strange machine, Jarvis finds a fluorescent crystal egg. This proves to have the property of destroying diseased tissue while leaving healthy tissue unharmed. It cures a wart on Jarvis’s hand and soothes his frost-bitten nose.
Just then, however, the barrel beasts attack Tweel and Jarvis while chanting, “ ‘We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!’ ”297 over and over. The two mu
st make a run for it. In the nick of time, Putz the engineer comes along to rescue Jarvis and carry him back to the spaceship, while Tweel escapes, bounding away to safety on his beak.
As proof of this story, Jarvis displays to his friends the cause of the fight with the barrel beasts. It is the wonderful fluorescent crystal—which the captain of the Ares expedition has just suggested “ ‘might be the cancer cure they’ve been hunting for a century and a half.’ ”298
And this was another example of wish-fulfillment. Only eighteen months after the publication of “A Martian Odyssey,” Stanley Weinbaum would be dead from throat cancer.
But the strangest thing of all is that “A Martian Odyssey” proved to be the great success that had always previously eluded Weinbaum. Whatever Weinbaum may have intended this surreal series of encounters with the alien, the delusory, the futile and the incomprehensible to mean, it was interpreted by the SF audience as a wonderful new sort of science fiction.
Readers delighted in its realism, its breezy charm and screwball humor, its glamour, and its bizarre creatures. Above all, they appreciated the eccentric but lovable Tweel. “A Martian Odyssey” was the best-liked piece of fiction ever published in Wonder Stories.
The underlying darkness of the story, its conservatism, and its futilitarian philosophy went completely unnoticed. All that the SF audience of the Thirties was prepared to see was that “A Martian Odyssey” was faster and funnier, more plausible and yet more mysterious than other science fiction.
“A Martian Odyssey” was immensely influential. Its virtues were copied over and over, and refined both by Weinbaum himself and by other writers, including E.E. Smith. This story would set new standards for both detail and inventiveness in fiction about other planets.
But it was not the dimension of space alone that took on heightened definition and greater mystery during the early Thirties—as in almost all of the stories we have been considering thus far. It was every dimension of the scientific multiverse.
Just as there was a quickening of space, so was there a parallel quickening of time. Formerly thought of as static and inert, time now began to pulse and shimmer and assume a dynamic quality it had never had before.
We can see this happening in the very first piece of fiction selected by F. Orlin Tremaine as a thought-variant, Nat Schachner’s time travel story, “Ancestral Voices” (Astounding, Dec. 1933). In earlier stories of travel through time, like Wells’s The Time Machine, time was fixed. What had happened, would happen. The coming and going of the traveler had only obvious first-order consequences. But in Schachner’s story, a time traveler to the year 452 A.D. kills a Hun in a fight—and the result is to cause his own disappearance plus the complete elimination of 50,000 more people from our time.
The dimension of time had now suddenly become fluid and subject to alteration. Messing with the past might change the present. Decisions made in the present might determine the nature of the future. Writers began to play around with the paradoxical possibilities inherent in interference with the course of time.
But also in the SF of the last decade of the Age of Technology, new definition and structure were projected onto time. A larger and more inclusive history was invented for mankind that carried men up from the caves and out to the stars. We can see this new consensus history in the making in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, in Edmond Hamilton’s Interstellar Patrol stories, and in E.E. Smith’s Lensman series. But it is also visible in such things as the easy historical detailing thrown off in a short story like “A Martian Odyssey.”
And there was enough disagreement among the historians and sufficient gaps in the account that almost anything might still be imagined to happen. Writers in Weird Tales even invented a new genre—sword-and-sorcery—that preserved magic, the occult, and the materials of the lost race story by removing them to remote moments in time. Clark Ashton Smith at times wrote of a magic-haunted dying Earth—a flat Earth—under the red sun of the far future. And, in his Conan stories (1932-36), Robert E. Howard, a Texan, recounted the adventures of a vigorous young barbarian in a world of black magic and sorcery located between the fall of Atlantis and the rise of known history.
Among the most intriguing and fruitful speculations on time published in the SF of the Thirties were the ideas presented by Jack Williamson in another romantic adventure, The Legion of Time (Astounding, May-July 1938). In this short novel, there are “two conflicting possible worlds of futurity”299—the utopian city of Jonbar, which may lead to the further perfection and glory of man, and the black city of Gyronchi, which spells the way to man’s dehumanization and extinction. Which of the two comes into permanent existence will ultimately depend on whether a 12-year-old Ozark country boy in 1921 pauses to pick up a rusty magnet or a stone.
The beautiful red-haired Lethonee, spokeswoman for Jonbar and for the even more glorious New Jonbar that lies beyond it, explains to Williamson’s hero, Denny Lanning:
“The world is a long corridor, from the beginning of existence to the end. Events are groups in a sculptured frieze that runs endlessly along the walls. And time is a lantern carried steadily through the hall, to illuminate the groups one by one. It is the light of awareness, the subjective reality of consciousness.
“Again and again the corridor branches, for it is the museum of all that is possible. The bearer of the lantern may take one turning, or another. And always, many halls that might have been illuminated with reality are left forever in the dark.”300
It remains an open question whether Lethonee and Jonbar will prevail—or the blonde and malevolent Sorainya, ruler of the slave legions of the city of Gyronchi. But if one of these two comes into existence, the other will not.
The balance between these two possible futures has been disturbed by the temporal probings of Denny Lanning’s one-time Harvard roommate, the mathematician and inventor Wil McLan. In his book Probability and Determination, McLan writes:
“Probability, in the unfolding future, must be substituted for determination. The elementary particles of the old physics may be retained, in the new continuum of five dimensions. But any consideration of this hyperspace-time continuum must take note of a conflicting infinitude of possible worlds, only one of which, at the intersection of their geodesics with the advancing plane of the present, can ever claim physical reality.”301
After many adventures, much effort and suffering, Wil McLan, Denny Lanning, and the brave companions of the Legion of Time manage to retrieve the crucial rusty magnet from the possession of Sorainya, who has stolen it. They replace it in the path of John Barr, the Ozark country boy in 1921, and he picks it up.
But the result of all their interference with time is that it is neither Jonbar nor Gyronchi that comes into permanent existence, but rather a blending of the two. This state of neither utopia nor extinction is symbolized by Lanning receiving the love of a girl who is a fusion of Lethonee and Sorainya.
In pulp science fiction and fantasy stories of the Thirties, dimensionality itself became interconnected in wholly new ways. C.L. Moore wrote a series of stories in Weird Tales about Jirel of Joiry, a warrior maid in a medieval world that is not necessarily our own past, who has adventures in a number of different realms.
In the third of these stories, “Jirel Meets Magic” (Weird Tales, July 1935), Jirel finds herself in a hall belonging to the sorceress Jarisme. The hall is filled with doors. And each door opens into a different time or place. Jirel thinks:
It must be from here that Jarisme by her magical knowledge journeyed into other lands and times and worlds through the doors that opened between her domain and those strange, outland places. Perhaps she had sorcerer friends there, and paid them visits and brought back greater knowledge, stepping from world to world, from century to century, through her enchanted doorways.302
In yet another story of the period, “Sidewise in Time” (Astounding, June 1934)—a thought-variant by old pro Murray Leinster, whose first SF story had appeared in Argosy in 1919—dimens
ionality comes all unhinged. In this novelet a professor of mathematics says:
“We talk of three dimensions and one present and one future. There is a theoretic necessity—a mathematical necessity—for assuming more than one future. There are an indefinite number of possible futures, any one of which we would encounter if we took the proper ‘forks,’ in time.”303
But it is not merely a number of possible futures that are given to exist in “Sidewise in Time,” but any number of possible pasts and alternate presents. A variety of worlds of possibility exist, of which ours is only one. And in a cosmic disaster—a time-quake—a scrambling together of all these worlds takes place. Until things settle back down to something like normal, contemporary Virginians find themselves co-existing with Chinese colonists of America, Confederates, wild Indians, Roman legionaries, Vikings, and even dinosaurs.
In these American SF stories of the Thirties, former notions of stability and certainty were gradually abandoned in keeping with the new ideas of quantum physics. In Williamson’s The Legion of Time, mathematician Wil McLan puts it like this:
“Certainty is abolished. Let a man stand on a concrete floor. It is no longer certain that he will not fall through it. For he is sustained only by the continual reaction of atomic forces, and they are governed by probability alone.
“It is merely a very excellent statistical probability that keeps the man from radiating heat until his body is frozen solid, or absorbing it until he bursts into flame, or flying upward into space in defiance of Newtonian gravitation, or dissolving into a cloud of molecular particles.
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Page 33