I've
previously described the influence that Ed Smith's
Lensman stories had on me. Back in the 1970s when I started hunting for science fiction novels, many stores near where I lived only stocked a few Sci Fi titles, usually those by just the most famous authors. It is no surprise that many of the first books that I bought were by
Smith,
Asimov and
Heinlein. Often there were no other options available to me.
Cosmic Engineers by Clifford Simak
Asimov was quite transparent about the fact that many of his own story ideas can be traced back to the stories he read in the early Sci Fi magazines when he was a kid. It is tempting to theorize about which of
Simak's old stories could have most influenced the young Isaac Asimov (
example).
Increasingly, those old magazines are available for download off of file servers of the internet, so I now occasionally come across old Sci Fi stories from the 1920s and 1930s that can easily be imagined to have influenced the writing of a science fiction story that I have previously read or seen in a film.
"
Cosmic Engineers" by
Clifford D. Simak was published in the 1939 Feb.,
March and April issues of
Astounding Science-Fiction magazine. You can download these issues from
archive.org. It is fun trying to imagine what Asimov thought when he first read "Cosmic Engineers".
My advice is to skip over part one of the story and just read the summary of part one that is provided at the beginning of part 2 (in
the March installment).
In Part 1
Part 1 begins with two roving news reporters (Harper and Nelson) who I suspect influenced the creation of Asimov's characters
Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan. Harper and Nelson live in the far future, a time when while
driving across town flying through the Solar System you must be on the lookout for space junk that was left behind by the folks from previous centuries. Inside one such hunk of junk, Harper and Nelson discover Caroline Martin (see the cover image to the right), a scientist from the past who has been drifting through space in suspended animation.
Mind-Body Dualism
 |
| on Pluto |
As a biologist with interest in the human brain, I immediately have problems with the idea that Miss Martin's brain has been continuously active during the past 1000 years. According to Simak, "only" her body was in suspension, leaving Caroline's brain (not a part of her body?) free to do a lot of thinking during those 1000 years:
"
I thought and thought for almost a thousand years. My mind set up problems and worked them out. I developed a flair for pure deduction, since my mind was the only thing left for me to work with. I believe I even developed telepathic powers." (
source)
Harper and Nelson revive Caroline and take her to Pluto, a base of operations from which she is able to launch a mission to the edge of our universe seeking out the mysterious Cosmic Engineers.
 |
| Astounding! |
The writing style that was deployed by Simak never allows you to forget that you are inside of a 1930s pulp magazine. Exclamation points fly in swarms through the vacuum of space!
 |
Hi Tek communications of the year 6948!
Mamas, don't let your babies grow up
and name their spacecraft "Space Pup"! | |
The first few pages of "Cosmic Engineers" are amusing because Simak carefully explains the super advanced spaceship technology that allows people to fly around the Solar System with ease. The advanced space travel technology of the future has now positioned Humanity at the brink of making faster-than-light trips to nearby stars. However, when radio transmissions are sent to spaceships, the messages get printed out IN ALL CAPS by klunky
teletype machines.
 |
| arrival at the city of the Cosmic Engineers |
I was amused to discover that much of the plot for the 1997 film
Contact can be found on the old and yellowed pages of "Cosmic Engineers" as published in 1939. Simak places his alien-designed space warp "
Machine" on Pluto and Caroline, just like
Ellie Arroway, goes through some kind of space warp tunnel in order to travel a vast distance through outer space and chat with space aliens. There is a scene in
Contact where Ellie pops out of a worm hole and finds herself in a new star system with multiple stars and giant alien cities on the planet below...
 |
| The 1997 film Contact. In the top panel, Ellie as a radio astronomer who obtains instructions from aliens for how to build a space warp-generating Machine. In the middle panel, Ellie travels through a space warp that is opened up by the Machine. Bottom panel: on her trip to the Galactic Core, Ellie gets a glimpse of an alien city on a distant exoplanet. These scenes in Contact seem quite similar to events in "Cosmic Engineers". |
For Simak, in 1939, the idea of making
First Contact by detecting radio signals from a distant alien civilization would have been far too pedestrian (radio waves from the black hole at the center of our galaxy were actually detected in
1933). In
Contact, Ellie is a radio astronomer who detects a message from the stars. In "Cosmic Engineers", the aliens send a message across space in the form of mysterious signals that at first are confused with cosmic rays. At the base on Pluto, scientists have slowly discovered how to decode this alien broadcast that was hidden among the cosmic rays.
"
And then we figured maybe we were getting pure thought. Thought telepathed across the light years of unimaginable space. Just what the speed of thought would be no one could even guess. It might be instantaneous... It took us months to build that machine you saw in the other room. Briefly, it picks up the signals, translates them from the pure energy of thought into actual thought, into symbols our mind can read." (
source)
The first time I read a story about "pure thought" was in a story by Ed Smith in which space travel "
at the speed of thought" could move people across vast intergalactic distances. Radio waves are simply too slow for many science fiction stories that are set among the stars!
Upon reaching the base on Pluto, Caroline is discovered to have "the right stuff" to telepathically communicate with the Cosmic Engineers. The aliens provide Caroline with instructions for building a space warp machine. These instructions include mysterious equations for high-dimensional physics. I suspect that during the 1930's, if you submitted a story to
Astounding editor John Campbell that included telepathy and equations then he was likely to publish it.
"
They want us to build a machine," said Caroline, "a machine that will serve as an anchor post for one end of a space-time contortion. The other end will be on the world of the Engineers. Between those two machines, or anchor posts, will be built up a short-cut through the billions of light-years that separate us from them." (
source)
Caroline decodes the telepathic alien signals that explain how to make a Machine that will open a tunnel through space, allowing our intrepid human crusaders to visit the Cosmic Engineers who reside somewhere far away from Earth, near the edge of our universe.
Part 2
When Caroline and her friends from Pluto reach the city of the Cosmic Engineers, the aliens appear to be composed of metal, not carbon-based cellular tissues. These robotic beings communicate with our Earthly heroes by some form of telepathy.
 |
| Viewing future Earth |
One of these metal creatures, Engineer #1824, explains to the visiting humans that our universe is doomed to destruction. Even worse, after our universe is destroyed, it will be resurrected as the toy and plaything of the evil
Hellhounds, a dastardly alien species.
Part 3
After a quick time travel journey to the far future of Earth, Caroline has all the knowledge that she needs to solve some tricky 5th-dimensional astrophysics problems and she manages to devise a way to save our universe and defeat the evil
Hellhounds. We readers finally learn that the robotic Engineers were made three billion years ago by an alien species that once lived on Pluto.
 |
by divine fiat, Campbell
put his own story on the cover
of the March 1939 issue |
The Cosmic Engineers believe that humans evolved on Earth, but are related to the ancient beings who created the Engineers. The Cosmic Engineers are ready to share with Earth all of their advanced technology, but Caroline and the others fear that humans are not yet ready for that much technological power.
There is a story called "Cloak of Aesir" by
John Campbell in the March 1939 issue of
Astounding. That story is set in the far future of Earth after alien invaders have taken control of Earth and, of course, telepathy plays a big role in Campbell's story.
 |
| Daneel |
Eventually, starting on June 10, 1939, Isaac Asimov began writing his own stories about robots. His most famous robot is the telepathic robot
Daneel. How much influence did Simak's robot #1824 have on the development of Asimov's imaginary tribe of positronic robots?
 |
| Contact by Carl Sagan |
"Cosmic Engineers" was first published in book format in 1950. I wonder if a young Carl Sagan read that book and was influenced by it. Sagan eventually wrote the science fiction novel
Contact, in which a woman scientist travels through space warps, chats with aliens and learns that our universe was created by beings who designed the physical properties of the universe so as to encode a message that new species such as we humans can find and decode.
 |
| a future edition, without teletype |
Related reading:
Next:
telling the Secret History of Humanity
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