Ring Box

cover by Hubert Rogers

I recently had fun writing a short time travel story that is the first chapter from an old novel called Time Portal. In my story, a wedding ring gets sent back through time as the first time travel trip made possible by a newly constructed time machine. Here in this blog post I'll comment on two old time travel stories, "Time Wants a Skeleton" (1941) by Ross Rocklynne and "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" (1943) by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.

This blog post can be viewed as a continuation from an earlier post in 2017 in which I commented on a couple of other old time travel stories ("The Time Axis", "Vintage Season" and "Time Locker"). Like Time Portal, "Time Wants a Skeleton" features a time traveling ring, this one with a distinctive emerald. Rocklynne's story is set in the Asteroid Belt where policeman Lieutenant Tony Crow of the IPF is packing his Luger Hampton. 

asteroid worm

Crow is in hot pursuit of three Bad Guys™, Braker, X and Yates. Braker, X and Yates are hiding on the 20-mile-wide asteroid 1007 where Tony clumsily crashes his spaceship, rupturing its hull and causing the ship's air to leak out.

 One Down. Soon, Tony is having a shoot-out with the Bad Guys™ and Mr. X is killed by Tony. Under fire from Braker and Yates, Tony steps into a nearby cave and finds a giant man-eating worm human skeleton. Upon seeing the skeleton, Tony suddenly knows (as if someone is telling him) that the skeleton is from the far past. But the shoot-out is still in progress. Tony blasts a nearby cliff with his gun, triggering a landslide that destroys the spaceship of the Bad Guys™.

Is this the end? Trapped on asteroid 1007, waiting until the air in their spacesuits is all used up? Tune in next week!

interior art by Elliott Dold for "Man of Iron".

Just then, a third spaceship arrives, lands close to Tony, Braker and Yates and a woman steps out: Miss Laurette, the daughter of Professor Overland. Professor Overland is in the process of proving that most of the asteroids in the Asteroid Belt fit together like puzzle pieces and were once part of a single planet.

 Logical Plot Progression? A story can't have a completely logical progression of events when the author is trying to introduce a loop in time. Safely aboard Overland's spaceship, Tony notices that Braker is wearing the same emerald ring that was on the skeleton. A mystery! Tony starts muttering about not being a ghost and poor Braker thinks that Tony has lost his marbles. 

in the Ekcolir Reality

 Behind door #2. A minute later, Tony and Laurette are together inside a storage closet and caught in an avalanche of falling Christmas packages. Tony does what anyone would do under such festive circumstances and kisses Laurette. She slaps his face, but with her lips now loosened, Laurette explains to Tony that the newfangled HH-drive, which moves Professor Overland's spaceship, works by means of gravitons. And, yes, there is a reason for the closet full of Christmas presents... stay tuned for next week's episode.....

 Sciensy. Now becoming chums, Tony lets Laurette know about the skeleton and Braker's ring. There's some intense cigarette smoking by Tony and Laurette as they ponder the mystery of the ring-wearing skeleton. Laurette then continues her tutorial on gravitons, explaining the the HH-drive sends gravitons into the past and that is what moves a spaceship forward "without acceleration effects".

in the Ekcolir Reality

 Two crash-landings are better than one. When Professor Overland is told about the skeleton and the ring he decides to investigate the mystery. Then, suddenly, they crash into a planet. Now they are suddenly millions of years in the past and on the planet that will be shattered and give rise to the Asteroid Belt. Tony discovers that they have landed close to the cave of the skeleton -the cave that will end up as part of asteroid 1007.

Plot plods on. Professor Overland deduces that if the HH-drive happens to pass through "the spherical type of etheric vacuum" then a spaceship will be sent into the past. The kicker: they have arrived at the pre-asteroidal planet just a few weeks before it will be shattered into fragments by another approaching planet. Trying to make certain that the emerald ring does not end up on the cave skeleton, Tony throws the ring into a nearby river. However, the ring returns in the belly of a fish that Laurette catches, cooks and serves for dinner.

Book 2 of the Lost World trilogy

 Back to the Future. When the pre-asteroidal planet is shattered, a shift in gravitons sends everyone back to the future. But who ends up as the skeleton wearing Braker's emerald ring? That would be Amos, a classroom skeleton that had been mailed to Professor Overland from his university on Earth as a kind of retirement gift.

Much of "Time Wants a Skeleton" concerns the characters agonizing over the mystery of who will become the skeleton wearing the ring and the philosophical question: is it possible to break the loop in time that seems to link the destruction of the pre-asteroidal planet to the mysterious skeleton on asteroid 1007? Rocklynne apparently tried to generate narrative tension with page after page after page after page of the story devoted to this "agonizing" mystery, but I think he (or the magazine editor) would have been well advised to shorten the story from 50 to 40 pages.

Spock brings future technology to 1930

 Almost Back. However, the "slingshot effect" did not send them back to exactly the same point in time. Arriving back in the future, Tony from the past lay trapped in rubble at the back of the cave while pre-time travel Tony first arrived on asteroid 1007. With two copies of Tony on asteroid 1007, a type of telepathic contact developed between the two copies of Tony, providing pre-time travel Tony with the certain knowledge that the skeleton had previously been in the distant past. Sadly, Rocklynne says nothing about how this telepathy between the two copies of Tony worked, although I do like the idea that two identical copies of a person might have some sort of "resonance" between their brains.

In the Ekcolir Reality.

We can place "Time Wants a Skeleton" into the "accidental time travel" category, rather like the Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" in which Dr. McCoy does not try to travel into Earth's history, but ends up being accidentally sent into the past. In the late 1940s, Asimov wrote a story that ended up being published as "Pebble in the Sky" and which for some strange reason included the accidental time traveler, Schwartz, a retired tailor. 

Bottom line. The best thing I can say about "Time Wants a Skeleton" is that we get a time travel story without the added agony of a genius scientists who has to build a time machine in his basement. I suppose warnings will be sent to all users of the HH-drive to carefully avoid "the spherical type of etheric vacuum" lest they accidentally get catapulted through time.

The End of Eternity

 Lucky Laurette. For a story that was published in 1941, Rocklynne provided readers with a fairly interesting female character: Laurette. Yes, we see Laurette preparing meals and serving food to a table full of men, but in the "thrilling climax" of the story when the damaged rockets of Professor Overland's spaceship are struggling to provide enough thrust to lift the ship off of the surface of the doomed pre-asteroidal planet, she jumps out the door to remove her 105 pounds of body weight from the ship. Luck for Laurette, she survives her fall to the ground, struggles back to the landing site, has the presence of mind to open the gift box containing the skeleton and puts the emerald ring on the skeleton's finger, thus completing the Time Loop. Whew! Oh, and in the end, so that something is accomplished by this overly-long story, Laurette ditches her fiancé and takes up with Tony the policeman.

Time Travel

I wonder to what extent Rocklynne's fanciful time-loop influenced Asimov when he eventually created his own time-loop for the story The End of Eternity. For his story, Asimov amplified the time-loop idea by using a loop in time as part of the development of time travel technology.

Toy Box.  "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" quickly transports readers off to the far (millions of years) future when we might hope that there are no cliché genius scientists inventing time machines in their basement. But no. Unthahorston has just built his Time Travel Box™. Success in this project has arrived so suddenly that Unthahorston has given no thought to what he should send into the past. Only AFTER activating the time travel circuits does he rush to the storage closet and randomly grab some items (old toys) to send into the past.

interior art by William Kolliker

After having been appalled by the first page of "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" I carefully avoided reading the rest of the story for 45 years..... until now.

Early in the 1900s, people were making some adjustments to their thinking. "Atoms", originally conceived as the fundamental, irreducible constituents of matter were found to be composed of protons, neutrons and electrons. The flow of time, previously imagined to be universal, was found to be relative to one's rate of movement through space. Some observers threw up their hands and tried to pretend that all human knowledge is nothing more than socially-constructed convention, likely to be wrong. If so, then maybe we should be searching for the correct way to view the universe, after having first thrown conventional science and mathematics in the trash bin of history.

Unthahorston's time machine

Another perspective on the human condition is that we have evolved as biological organisms that are carefully tuned to the universe. Yes, we might fail to recognize the existence of invisibly small things such as electrons, but eventually, by careful and persistent efforts, we can use our conventional thought processes to figure out how the universe works.

The optimist's view is that (given a little time and persistent efforts) we humans can actually understand the universe. But what if some features of the universe can't be understood by we humans using our existing conventional thought patterns? Enter the type of science fiction story in which alternative modes of thought are imagined which make it possible to slip into hidden dimensions or... perform whatever magic the story teller wants to include in their story.

in the Ekcolir Reality

 Callooh! I suppose that for some people, the accomplishments of science and engineering all seem like magic anyhow. If so, then when creating a story about imaginary futuristic science, why not simply depict it as being made possible by a totally inexplicable or unimaginable trick such as by means of speaking magic words?

future toy

"Mimsy Were the Borogoves" champions the idea that only young children would be able to adopt the "advanced" patterns of thinking used by the evolved human descendants of our far future. In that future, there would be sophisticated educational toys that show children how to think in extra dimensions. Such toys are what Unthahorston pulls out of the closet and sends back into the distant past, transforming a couple of 20th century children into Super Children™ who can walk off of Earth and into the 5th dimension. Yes, that's exactly how "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" ends.

The Last Mimzy

My favorite part of "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" is the anatomically correct doll from the future and its mysterious internal organs, only some of which are known to us. I love the idea that the human body might contain nanoscopic components (endosymbionts) as yet unknown to science.

In 2007 there was a film inspired by "Mimsy Were the Borogoves". The film tried to provide a reason for sending toys into the past rather than depict it as some freakish accident.

Related Reading: Charles Proteus Steinmetz and Phaeton

Also: The Last Mimzy

Next: the science fiction stories of Fredric Brown

Revenge

the first issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories

After reading "The Iron World" by Otis Kline and "The Conquest of Life", a story by Otto Binder (both in the August 1937 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories) I went back to the very first issue (August 1936) of Thrilling Wonder Stories and read the "The Hormone Menace" and "Revenge of the Robot". From 1930 to 1936 the magazine had existed as Wonder Stories, but after being sold by Hugo Gernsback, it became Thrilling.

Previously, I became intrigued by Binder's interest in hormones and the possibility that Binder's stories about hormones might have influenced the writing of Robert Heinlein's story, "Methuselah's Children".

In the case of Kline, I suspect that his stories about robots had an influence on Isaac Asimov. 

interior art by Marco Marchioni

Back to the Future. "Revenge of the Robot" begins in the late 20th century when the roboticists of the world are competing to create the first fully autonomous humanoid robot. The competition ended on January 1, 2000. We all know how that turned out.

 Kline imagined that by 1999 it would be possible for passengers to be flown by "stratospheric rocket plane" from Europe to the U.S.A. in less than an hour and that a tunnel under the Atlantic ocean would allow people to zip from London to New York City in just half an hour.

robot contest requirements

 Ho Hum. One of the robots that is entered in the contest operates by telepathy, with a human mind remotely controlling the robot's body. Sadly for the inventor of this model of robot, the contest requires that the winning robot be self-controlled, not externally controlled. Nobody in the year 2000 seems at all impressed that telepathy can be used to control a humanoid robot's actions.

humanoid robots

I'm forced to conclude that in Kline's fictional world of the year 2000, telepathy is a well recognized phenomenon along with other advances like rocket planes and sub-oceanic transportation. Also, by the year 2000, several roboticists have each built humanoid robots that can autonomously move their bodies in a fairly human-like manner. However, only the robots built by Albert Bradshaw truly look like people and can move among humans without being recognized as robots. No roboticist has been able to make a complete artificial intelligence; we hear nothing of computers in "Revenge of the Robot" (computers were not invented until the 1940s).

Much of the plot in "Revenge of the Robot" reminds me of Isaac Asimov's fictional universe of positronic robots in which only one man, Dr. Han Fastolfe can make robot bodies that seem realistically human. Also, Asimov depicted the humaniform robot, Daneel, as having telepathic abilities.

Daneel

 Back to 2000 AD. In "Revenge of the Robot", Albert Bradshaw dies and his two humanoid robots are stolen by Hugh Grimes. Grimes enters the two robots in the competition, but they are unable to think creatively, although they can be controlled remotely by means of radio signals. 

Just before Grimes wins the contest, a third robot that had been created by Albert Bradshaw appears and reveals the fraud (hidden remote controls) being perpetrated by Grimes. This third robot looks exactly like the dead Albert Bradshaw and is intent on making sure that Grimes will not win the contest.

mind-body dualism

The robot that was constructed to have the physical appearance of Bradshaw reveals that inside its mechanical head is Bradshaw's biological brain, connected to the robot body by fine wires. Bradshaw explains that his brain is floating in a special liquid and it should last for 1000 years. Kline's 1937 story, "The Iron World", continues the tale 1000 years in the future, when robots are threatening to take over Earth and exterminate the human species.

interior art by Marchioni

 The Invisible Spy. "The Hormone Menace" begins with secret agent James Wistert, code designation S-23, of United North America being air-dropped into enemy territory on a dark night. The enemy is the Allied States of Europe. Since this is the late 20th century, James Bond has a Hi Tek™ Invisibility Cloak and so he can sneak into the closely guarded enemy base.

Giants. Inside the base, James discovers 8-foot-tall men, brutish and "driven like oxen" by armed guards. For the past 10 years, Director Bergmann (a biologist) has been preparing for war between Europe and North America. Successes of his military research and development plan include the Radio-wave Absorption Screen™ and the Super-Sonic Gun™.

By experimenting on human subjects, Bergmann discovered how to use hormones not only to create the "giants" but also multiple types of hormone-treated people some of whom never forget what they read (eidetists) and others with telepathic abilities, who when looking into the minds of the eidetists, can instantly solve math problems. 

"thrilling" adventure

 

from "The Hormone Menace"

Most important for Bergmann's weapons development program are his thyroid hormone-treated men who have super-human imagination and who write science fiction stories have developed devices such as the Super-Sonic Gun, which will soon allow Europe to defeat North America and rule the world.

interior art for "The Hormone Menace"

The most awesome weapon under development by the super-clever gland-men is an atomic-powered weapon that will shoot down aircraft. Having infiltrated the base a month earlier, secret agent Y-44 talks to the gland-man who is developing the atomic weapon and convinces him to detonate the device, destroying the entire research facility.

The Trilling Conclusion. Agent S-23 is captured and will be executed at dawn, but he is rescued by Y-44 and they escape just as the research facility is destroyed in an atomic explosion. All the talk of hormones must have gotten Otto's hormones flowing... at the end of the story it is revealed that Y-44 is a girl and S-23 plans his next mission to be a careful exploration of Y-44's physical features.

image source

Asimov wrote: "...even the silliest notions can undergo a sea change into something rich and strange in the hands of a skilled science fiction writer". I'm glad I searched back through Binder's stories about hormones to reach "The Hormone Menace". The destination is plenty strange, but for me it is inspiring in the context of a story that I am currently writing about an Interventionist attempt to speed technological advances on Earth by feeding advanced scientific ideas to ancient Greeks.

In my story, Empedocles ends up creating a legacy of strange philosophical ideas that almost seem to have been founded upon misunderstanding of scientific truths. Otto Binder achieved a similar effect in stories such as "The Hormone Menace" by twisting actual endocrinology into a perverted fictional form.

The Rossi Intervention

Back in the 1930s, Binder was seemingly in the story writing mode pioneered by Mary Shelly with the story Frankenstein. I view Frankenstein as a horror story that is anti-scientific in its depiction of the creation of an artificial life form. Similarly, Binder's story "The Hormone Menace" treads the line closer to comic book anti-science nonsense than to science fiction genre scientific plausibility. 

Clearly, Binder was not interested in scientific plausibility. His audience was not well informed about biology and the goal was to create some kind of "thrilling" military/spy adventure story; a bit of disposable fluff that could entertain readers of Thrilling Wonder Stories. It is interesting to contemplate how pulp magazine stories full of fictional biological nonsense must have impacted the young Asimov when he was going to college and learning biology. He must have been simultaneously motivated to avoid making his own science fiction stories not quite as glaringly silly but also lulled into a sense of complacency with respect to what story writers could get away with in the pulp magazines.

cover art by Howard V. Brown

 More Robots. Returning to the topic of old science fiction stories about robots, I read "Robot A-1" by Oscar J. Friend, published in the July 1939 issue of Startling Stories. The story begins in the far-off year of 1940 when a mechanical man, robot A-1 is on trial and ready to defend itself.

Mechanical Man on Trial in 1950

The Tri-octopus made the cover of Startling Stories. Having seen the cover art, the readers must have been puzzled to read the criminal charges against poor old A-1 which involves murder down in the subway tunnels below Times Square.

Hold on to your hat! interior art by Alex Schomberg

Hold on to your hat. But wait! Not only have the well spoken A-1 (who boasts of having "super-mental powers" and a social security number) and the 7-foot tall Tri-octopus (see the image to the right) been on the streets of New York City, there is yet another robot: a gigantic (hundreds of feet tall, each of its three feet weighs 5 tons) Tri-octopus that walks into Manhattan, crossing the Hudson River from New Jersey and malevolently spreading destruction in its wake.

Robot A-1 saves the day by using a raygun to disintegrate the huge Tri-octopus. However, when the giant mechanical monster is destroyed, poor A-1 is crushed under the weight of one of the 5-ton Tri-octopus feet.

interior art by Alex Schomburg

In the September 1940 issue of Super Science Stories, Isaac Asimov's first robot story "Robbie" appeared under the title "Strange Playfellow". It is easy to imagine that "Robot A-1" as one of the stories that annoyed Asimov with their destructive clanking robots, however Asimov claimed that "Robbie" was written in May of 1939, two months before "Robot A-1" was published. 

Asimov also turned away from depictions of genius inventors who created the first man-like robot by working alone in their garage. In "Robbie", Asimov began to develop his thinking about a robotics industry and robots engineered to include protections against them doing harm to humans.

Related Reading: "The Trial of Robot A-1" by G. W. Thomas

Next: two old time travel stories from the 1940s

Thrilling Wonder Stories was only one of many Thrilling pulp magazines

Of Two Minds

"Space Mirror" by Edmond Hamilton (click image to enlarge)

In a recent blog post, I mentioned in passing the science fiction problem of protecting spacecraft from collisions with meteoroids. The 1931 story "The Jameson Satellite" by Neil R. Jones (in Amazing Stories) made use of a Super-Duper™ "radium ray" that would repulse all approaching meteoroids.

Znamya

I also recently blogged about "The Conquest of Life", a story by Otto Binder that was published in the August 1937 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. In that issue was a second story by Binder, one by John Campbell and "Space Mirror" by Edmond Hamilton. I could not resist the opportunity to read most of the August 1937 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.

Solar Power in 1937. In "Space Mirror", Edmond Hamilton imagined a future time in which a 300 mile wide mirror would be constructed in Earth orbit and then be used to send solar energy to the people of Earth. Hamilton credited Hermann Oberth's work as inspiring the story "Space Mirror".

Blofeld's space weapon

Hamilton assured his nervous readers that the giant orbital mirror was protected from meteoroids by a "protonic barrier". The reflected light from Hamilton's imagined mirror was focused on an electricity generating station in Antarctica which could supply Earthlings with all their energy needs. 

I've long wondered why Isaac Asimov made space-based solar energy collectors an integral part of his imagined future of positronic robots. Asimov admitted that it would be possible to trace most of the ideas in his science fiction stories to various stories by other writers that he had previously read. 

Star Wars

Asimov's solar energy harvesting involved converting energy from sunlight into a convenient form of electromagnetic radiation (microwaves) that could be efficiently "beamed" to Earth. Hamilton simply used a giant mirror to reflect light from the Sun to Earth without any space-based converter. 

In the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever, viewers were "treated" to the magical science of using diamonds to convert sunlight into a ray beam that could be aimed at Earth and used as a destructive weapon. 

In "Space Mirror", Hamilton told his readers that there were natives of the planet Mercury who wanted to invade Earth and take up residence there (here!). To facilitate the invasion of Earth by the folks from Mercury, they tried to take control of the Space Mirror and use it as a weapon against the people of Earth. 

interior art for "Space Mirror"

However, Agent James Bond Rab Crane of the Terrestrial Secret Service comes to the rescue and derails the plan of the invasion force from Mercury, using the Space Mirror to destroy the invading fleet and saving the people of Earth. Whew!

I wonder if President Reagan read "Space Mirror" as a young man, igniting his interest in Sci Fi space defense systems.

Hamilton was audacious in featuring humanoid aliens from Mercury, a planet with no atmosphere and temperatures swinging between -170C (night) and +400C (day). However, nothing could prevent story tellers from imagining that every planet from Mercury to Uranus was populated by human-like creatures. And don't forget all those moons and asteroids!

a shleath (bottom); angry protoplasm

"The Double Minds" by John W. Campbell was part of a series of stories featuring Penton and Blake. Campbell set the story on Ganymede, which has an average surface temperature of about -160C. Penton had (in a previous adventure) learned how to read minds when he visited Mars. Using telepathy, Penton was able to quickly learn the native language that is spoken by the 7-foot-tall P'holkuun of Ganymede. When he walks on stage, P'holkuun is wearing a Shaloor uniform. 

At the start of the story as told by Campbell, Penton and Blake are already on Ganymede and sitting in jail. The jailor is a Lanoor. After readers learn about Penton's telepathic connection to P'holkuun which in "five minutes" allowed him to learn the Lanoorian language and P'holkuun's political views, P'holkuun must then engage in a verbal explanation of the difference between the Shaloor and the Lanoor.

interior art for "The Double Minds"

 Brain Science. P'holkuun explains that in a Lanoor, only one half of the brain is actively used for thinking. Ten years before the arrival of Penton and Blake, a technique was found that allowed use of both sides of a Lanoor's brain for reasoning; such "double-brain" folks are called the Shaloor. P'holkuun states that a Shaloor is "over 10,000 times more keen-minded than a Lanoor".  

The clever Shaloor want to learn the secrets of the spacecraft that brought Penton and Blake to Ganymede. 

in the Ekcolir Reality

 Scientific Adventure.
With nothing better to do in their jail cell, Penton uses the Martian technique of "hypnotic teaching" to teach Blake the Lanoorian language. Doing so takes 5 minutes. The Martian telepathy and alien neuroscience is cool, but you can't have much of an adventure while sitting in jail. Penton talks the jailor into supplying some chemicals that can be used to dissolve the wall of the prison and then Penton and Blake walk out of the jail. 

Hold on to your hat! Clearly Campbell is not going to let anything (even prison walls) stand in the way of a rollicking adventure on Ganymede. Penton and Blake stroll out into the Ganymede city, their only problem being that the air is a bit low in oxygen. Since it is night, nobody notices the two humans walking through the city streets.

in the Ekcolir Reality

In the Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action" an attempt was made to create a funny scene with Captain Kirk driving an old-fashioned car on an alien planet. In "The Double Minds", Campbell has Penton and Blake steal a car, but they have no idea how to drive it and soon crash.

There in no electricity on Ganymede. Penton is nearly captured by a grethlanth, a kind of Ganymedian police dog, but he is able to use a spark from the battery in his electric flashlight to drive it off. Electricity is unknown on Ganymede where collections of glowing bacteria are used for lighting.

In the 1930s, no prisoners are ever searched. In particular, aliens arriving from outer space are simply thrown into a jail cell and allowed to keep any Hi Tek™ devices that they have in their pockets. I have to confess: it is very painful to read these old "Thrilling" Wonder Stories, but I persist in doing so because of my interest in understanding how Isaac Asimov was able to read them all and then, with his valuable experience as a science student, begin writing his own style of (slightly) more plausible stories.

Science: June 25th, 2999

P'holkuun is some sort of Lanoorian special agent who always knows what the Shaloor are doing. P'holkuun tells Penton and Blake that their spaceship is at the Palace of the Shaloor and being guarded by shleath, ameboid creatures created by the Shaloor. P'holkuun has been planning an attack on the Shaloor and begins working with Penton and Blake. Penton shows the Lanoorians how to make small devices that deliver 50 volt shocks and are powerful enough to defeat the dreaded shleath.

Only after their attack on the Palace is underway (and after several days of telepathic contact with P'holkuun) does Penton finally learn from P'holkuun that although the Shaloor are brilliant thinkers, their altered brains cannot correctly process sensory information. Penton's sonic screwdriver flashlight is atomic powered, so he can use it for all sorts of things, including a quick job of melting the metal bolts that bar their way into the inner sanctum of the Palace. With the help of their Lanoorian pals, Penton and Blake fight their way through the Palace and reach their spaceship. The End.

the story behind "The Double Minds" by John Campbell

Pseudoscience Adventure. One of the interesting features in Thrilling Wonder Stories was that it had a section called "The story behind the story". Campbell wrote the blurb shown to the right on this page. In 1937, Campbell was busy propagating the false idea that people could increase their "brain capacity". Years later, he would champion Dianetics as a means to unleash the "infinite" power of the mind.

Laboratory Magic!

Iron World. Also in the August 1937 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories was "The Iron World" by Otis Kline. The story begins in the year 2990 with Hugh Grimes at work in his laboratory where he is trying to perfect a method for transferring his mind into an artificial brain. After reading this issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories magazine, I'm now sad that there was never a pulp science fiction magazine called "Laboratory Magic". 😕

thrilling interior art

Grimes is described as being a robot, but his robotic body is controlled by his biological brain which was extracted from his biological body back in the year 2000. Apparently a human brain can exist in the "glass skull case" of a robot for 1000 years, but then it will grow old and die. Grimes is pretty much a stereotypical "mad scientist" who is eager to become a completely artificial robot and then exterminate all humans, leaving robots in control of Earth.

I love the science fiction story idea of mind transfer, but what is the method for mind transfer that Grimes had developed after 1000 years of research? According to Kline, the way to transfer a human mind into an artificial brain is to make use of a Hi Tek™ "telastral projector". Grimes and his fellow robots begin transferring their minds into new, artificial brains.

For "The Iron World", since we are in the post-World War I era, the robots plan to use poison gas to kill the human population of Earth.

from "The Iron World"

Struggling against the Evil Robots™ who want to exterminate the human population of Earth are Allen Jennings and the blue-eyed blonde, Ruth Randal, both of the International Secret Service. The two secret agents first meet after flying their stratoplanes deep into dangerous robot territory.

interior art

 007. Allen is agent C-14 and Ruth is secret agent E-36. They are assisted by agent Z-1, head of the Oriental Branch of the ISS. Z-1 provides Allen and Ruth with disguises that allow them to infiltrate the secret research facility of Grimes. Illustrating the dangers of including a female on a mission to infiltrate a robot base, Ruth falls off of her high heel shoe, reveling that she is a human, not a robot!

Cyborgs ᴙ Us. In full Evil Scientist mode, rather than simply kill the ISS agents, Grimes begins to subject Allen and Ruth to a form of torture that will last weeks. Concentrated acid is to be dripped onto their bodies, starting at their toes and then slowly, day by day, working all the way up to their heads.

Artificial biological brains. Just as the two-week-long torture session begins, the evil plot of Grimes begins to unravel. It is discovered that the new-fangled artificial robot brains have a defect: they grow in an uncontrolled fashion, soon consuming their nutrient solution and pressing outwards against the glass robot brain cases.

hormones out of balance

 A Great Scientist. Coming to the rescue of Allen and Ruth, Z-1 arrives at the secret base of Grimes with a human army. We also learn that Grimes made a terrible error and did not keep the "pineal hormone" properly balanced with the "pituitary hormone", causing the artificial brains to grow "like a cancer".

I suspect that "The Iron World" can be listed as one of the "murderous robot" stories that Asimov grew tired of reading in the years leading up to the creation of his own stories about robots. 

from "Vision of the Hydra"

When writing his own stories about positronic robots, Asimov imagined careful engineering that would inhibit robots from turning against humans.

The second story in the August 1937 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories by Otto Binder was called "Vision of the Hydra" and it used the same starting point as Campbell's "The Double Minds". Apparently, Binder had read Man the Unknown by Alexis Carre and been inspired to write a story about a man who learned to use all of his brain's capacity, achieving the powers of telepathy and telekinesis. 

Next

I'm of two minds with respect to the old Sci Fi stories in Thrilling Wonder Stories. It is fun to see the stories that had so much importance for the young Isaac Asimov. However, some of the stories are poorly written and very difficult to read. The ratio of science to magical fantasy in the stories is very low. 😒

Related Reading: aliens from Mercury in "Tetrahedra of Space"

Next: More hormones and robots in the August 1936 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories

The wonders of atomic energy! (August 1937) Jack Binder