The Men Who Make Science

Figure 0.
interior art for "Kid Anderson"

This is the second of two blog posts about Groff Conklin's anthology called Great Science Fiction by Scientists. In my previous blog post, I discussed 8 of the stories and I comment on the remaining 8 stories, below. The marketing blurb on the front cover of Conklin's book proclaimed: "Imaginative tales by the men who make science." However, some of the assembled story writers such as Miles Breuer never worked as scientists. Maybe in an alternate Reality such as the Ekcolir Reality there were scientifically-trained female writers at the dawn of the science fiction genre and maybe there was another version of this anthology that featured some female scientists.

In the Ekcolir Reality
original cover by Leo Morey

 Story number 9. "The Gostak and the Doshes" by Miles J. Breuer, M.D. Who needs doshes when we have science fiction? Just as some people call Gulliver's Travels science fiction, "The Gostak and the Doshes" was sold to -and published in- the first science fiction magazine. However, in my opinion, merely sprinkling words like "relativity", "dimension" and "Einstein" in your social satire story does not make it a science fiction story. 

Figure 1. Fantasy Travel; interior art by Leo Morey

Breuer has a point to make in "The Gostak and the Doshes", a point that Jack Vance made eloquently: "If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, since they are waged for no tangible gain, but only to impose a set of arbitrary credos upon another's mind." (source: The Face).

Breuer depicts a senseless war that is caused by a meaningless political slogan. The slogan is repeated with religious devotion by the people of one nation, who rally around their shared fantasy and are ready to die in its defense. Breuer also suggests that scientists can be immune to such nonsense because they actually care what words mean.

cover art by Howard V. Brown

Breuer was from a Czech background and published articles in Czech-language newspapers. I suspect that Breuer carefully followed events in Europe, particularly the political situation in 1920s Czechoslovakia. 

When the Nazi propagandist Goebbels was elected in 1928, Breuer was probably appalled. "Whether it was a matter of simplification, constant repetition of memorable slogans, or concentration of propaganda materials in regular campaigns, the principles of mass advertising could easily be applied to political propaganda." (source)

interior art by Elliott Dold, Jr.

 10. "A Martian Adventure" (1937) by Willy Ley. Ley left Germany in 1935, having studied math and science, but as was the case for Breuer, Ley was not a scientist. Ley became well-known as a popularizer of rocketry and space travel and published only a few fictional stories. 

"A Martian Adventure" begins on the surface of Mars in 1978 and Ley asks his readers to pretend that people can breath the atmosphere of Mars and human colonists on Mars must contend with the remaining dominant natives of Mars: giant centipede-like creatures (see the image to the right). In Ley's fictional Mars, there were other Martian natives who built cities a million years in the past, but they went extinct before humans arrived.

The professor, Dan and Nadya. Hot, but still fully clothed. 😞 Interior art by Elliott Dold, Jr.

interior art for "At the Perihelion"

"A Martian Adventure" was originally published as "At the Perihelion". After a bad ending to his relationship with a girl friend, Dan ends up on Mars, digging up ancient Martian jewelry and fighting off dangerous centipedes. Then Dan gets caught up in a Russian project aimed at exterminating all of the centipedes. Dan becomes friends with a Russian professor and his daughter, Nadya. After an armed struggle for control of the Russian colony an Mars, Nadya and her father and Dan leave Mars and head for Earth. Dan pilots a spaceship back to Earth using a trajectory that takes them dangerously close to the Sun. They survive the high temperatures during perihelion by taking a drug that allows them to sleep through the worst of the heat. Dan and Nadya live happily ever after.

In the Ekcolir Reality
cover art by Vincent Di Fate

While "The Gostak and the Doshes" featured fantasy travel to an alternate universe (see Figure 1, above), "A Martian Adventure" gets into some details of orbits and space travel trajectories that only an astronaut could love. Jason felt that "A Martian Adventure" was disappointing, but I think it was pretty good for a planetary romance. Sadly, when the story was published in 1937, readers did not get racy images of the naked and sweaty Nadya during the heat of perihelion. 😞

 11.  "The Neutrino Bomb" (1961) by Ralph S. Cooper (PhD in physics). Cooper worked on nuclear propulsion systems for spacecraft at Los Alamos. The "story" is mercifully brief and it is a kind of spoof article that came in the middle of efforts to put controls on the testing of nuclear weapons. The "story" mentions neutrons, and a neutron bomb had been suggested in 1958.

cover art by Karl Stephan

 12. "The Mother of Necessity" (1955) by Chad Oliver. While reading "A Martian Adventure", I hoped there might be some interesting alien archeology, but Ley only provided some casual tomb robbing and readers learn little about the long-gone Martian society. Oliver was Symmes Chadwick Oliver and apparently he had a career as an anthropologist, but most websites that mention him (such as this one) are concerned with his science fiction stories.

Oliver's Future. "The Mother of Necessity" deals with an imaginary society of the future. It begins in 2062, when it has become common for communities to select their own social systems. There are designers like George Sage who invent interesting new social systems. One rainy day, George slaps together a new social system that is quickly recognized as being good... and eventually it takes over the whole world. 

original cover art by Walt Miller

 13. "John Sze's Future" (1962) by John R. Pierce. After the failed attempt by the CIA to kick Castro out of Cuba, tensions between the USA and the Soviet Union were at a new peak and millions of people around the world lived in fear of nuclear saber rattling. So, why not imagine a future in which there had been a devastating nuclear war in the year 1987? The story "John Sze's Future" provides an account of how a physicist named John is taken to the year 2178, by mistake. 

Arriving in the future, John meets a man of the future, Crawden, who had hoped that the time machine would bring B. F. Skinner into the future. John tells Crawden, "I've done some experimental work myself on Hieronymous machines." "John Sze's Future" was apparently Pierce's way of mocking editor John W. Campbell's (John "C" = John Sze) interest in "psionics".

cover art by Frank R. Paul

Crawden lives in a future society where "experimental psychology" dominates science and where mentioning "nuclear physics" is taboo. Although computer driven cars of this future are quickly summoned by radio, using the language of the future, Crawden explains such future technologies to John as being made possible by "psi". After a short time in the future, John is returned to the past, where he writes an editorial proclaiming that the future will dominated by the application of "psi powers".

You might wonder why Pierce would mock Campbell in this way. Pierce had published an essay called "How to Build a Thinking Machine" in the same 1950 issue of Astounding where Campbell had proclaimed Dianetics as a great advance in medical science.

1929 contest cover art by Frank R. Paul. 1930 biographical blurb about Pierce (right).

Pierce's first published science fiction story was "The Relics from the Earth", about a trip to Earth during a time many thousands of years in the future, after Earth had long since been abandoned (everyone moved to Triton). Why, you ask, did humans abandon Earth? So as not to have to contend with pesky insects.

Astounding interior art by M. Marchioni

Pierce published "Pre-Vision" in Astounding in 1936, before John Campbell took over control of the magazine. At the start of his story, Pierce quotes a line from an article, Leigh Page's 1924 "Advanced Potentials and their Application to Atomic Models".

As told in "Pre-Vision", Hardy is a brilliant pulp science hero who invents a device that allows him to View future events. Using the Viewer, he is able to change the course of Time and Hardy saves a woman from being killed in an accident.

I think "John Sze's Future" is a daring story because Campbell was still a powerful force in the science fiction world in 1962. In his introduction to the story, Groff Conklin noted that several publishers had previously turned the story down. Conklin was amazed that other people had refused the story and he praised it as being "subtle and sharp".

cover art by Tom Ryan

 14. "Kid Anderson" (1956) by R. S. Richardson. I've previously blogged about "The Aphrodite Project", a fake astronomy article by Richardson. "Kid Anderson" features a robot that gets used for training a boxer (see Figure 0, at the top of this page). The story was originally published in Space Science Fiction Magazine, but it is hard for me to imagine why Conklin thought it was worthy of being re-published in his anthology.

 15. "Pilot Lights of the Apocalypse" (1946) by Louis N. Ridenour. Apparently, "Pilot Lights of the Apocalypse" was first published in January 1946 in Fortune. The story depicts a future planet Earth at a time when all industrialized nations have atomic bombs ready for retaliatory strikes on anyone who starts a war. 

cover art by Carolus Thole

Loss of communications to San Francisco (caused by an earthquake) is mistakenly interpreted as an act of war and that triggers a cascade of strikes and counter-strikes that lead to the destruction of every city on Earth. 

Sadly, in 1946, "Pilot Lights of the Apocalypse" was too "far out" for most Americans to understand. Ridenour could not precisely envision the future of the nuclear arms race, but he invented a fairly good approximation of where the world got to with Mutually Assured Destruction. Later, in 1959, Level 7 was published, and I suspect that most people could finally understand that it made no sense to keep building more and more nuclear weapons that could be delivered to targets ever more quickly.

1947 cover art by Charles Schneeman

 16. "Last Year's Grave Undug" (1962) by Chandler Davis. When Groff Conklin was assembling Great Science Fiction by Scientists, he was able to arrange to publish "Last Year's Grave Undug" for the first time. The story takes place after a nuclear war has destroyed modern society. Given his path through life, I suppose Davis had to write a story about blaming communists for nuclear war, but I did not enjoy "Last Year's Grave Undug".

I've long wondered what Karel Čapek has in mind for the "manufacturing" of the "robots" in R. U. Robots. In 1947, Davis published "Letter to Ellen" in Astounding. That story is set in a future time when artificial life can be crafted in laboratories. The narrator of the story has discovered that he is a "robot", an artificial man who was made in a lab.

interior art by Edd Cartier

The fictional genetics in "Letter to Ellen" reminds me of "Heisenberg's Eyes" by Frank Herbert (1966). It would be interesting to know if Herbert had read "Letter to Ellen".

I have to wonder why Davis, a mathematician, tried to write a science fiction story about a futuristic genetic engineering project. In 1962, nobody had any idea how to actually make an artificial organism, so I'll award Davis bonus points for going ahead an writing "Letter to Ellen" from such a position of ignorance.

I've previously described 1950 - 1983 as the "Uranium Age" of science fiction. Groff Conklin's 1962 anthology Great Science Fiction by Scientists was caught up in the political concerns of that "age". Just because a story is "timely", that does not mean it is "great". Sadly, while Conklin claimed to be collecting great science fiction, I think his choice of stories like "Last Year's Grave Undug" was unduly influenced by issues that were timely, leading to inclusion in the anthology of some stories that were not great.

cover art by Joel Naprstek

In my previous blog post, I raised the question: were the 16 authors collected by Conklin in Great Science Fiction by Scientists really all scientists? By my count, 9 can be called scientists, three were mathematicians (Wiener, Bell, Davis), two were space enthusiasts (Clarke, Ley), Breuer was a medical doctor and Pierce was an engineer.

 Related Reading: "Invariant" by John R. Pierce... an interesting story about memory storage in brains.

Next: Lefty Baker

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