Back in
April I commented on the 1957 science fiction story "Kid Anderson" which was published in the first issue of
Space Science Fiction Magazine, and I was inspired to investigate the only other issue of that magazine which arrived in
August of that year. The August issue included stories by
Jack Vance and
Arthur Clarke.
In the Ekcolir Reality. I like to imagine that in the Ekcolir Reality, Earthlings were carefully prepared for the arrival of the alien Fru'wu on Earth during the 20th century. I've previously depicted the Fru'wu as arriving on Earth sometime around 1950. Sadly, in this Reality, all that we actually got was a large number of silly stories about UFOs and space aliens. The first story in the August issue of Space Science Fiction Magazine was a brutally long and tedious novella called "Flying Saucers Do Exist" by Steve Frazee.
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| interior art for "Flying Saucers Do Exist" |
The interior art that was created for "Flying Saucers Do Exist" by Bruce Minney is shown to the left.
On the subject of Bruce Minney's art for Space Science Fiction Magazine, I feel compelled to mention that in addition to the robot story "Kid Anderson" in the Spring 1957 issue, there was another robot story called "Obedience Guaranteed" by Dallas Reynolds.
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| interior art for "Obedience Guaranteed" |
The interior art for "Obedience Guaranteed" is shown to the right. Reynolds became a prolific science fiction story writer in the 1950s, but I suspect that "Obedience Guaranteed" was rejected by other science fiction magazines with editors who knew that it was too similar to Isaac Asimov's 1947 story "
Little Lost Robot". However, I suppose that
Lyle Engle, the editor of
Space Science Fiction Magazine, might never have read Asimov's story. "Obedience Guaranteed" features a robot who efficiently pilots a spaceship until a passenger tells the robot to get lost.
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Arlez of Mars (left), Hudu (right)
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One other item of interior art by Bruce Minney for the
Spring 1957 issue of
Space Science Fiction Magazine is shown to the left. That's
Arlez, a Martian woman, covering her ears and trying to protect herself from the noise that is being made by a machine that that was built by her uncle, Hudu (owner of the
Paradise restaurant on Mars). I previously blogged about a 1937 story by Russell Winterbotham called "
Clouds over Uranus". For that story, Winterbotham imagined a gaseous lifeform on Uranus. In his 1957 story "The Individualist", Winterbotham depicted Martians as being human in appearance and a salesman from Earth,
Vic, enjoys the way Miss
Arlez fills her bikini. Obviously, because of the balmy climate of Mars, Martian women always wear nothing more than a swimsuit.
In "
The Individualist", readers are told that all Martians are individualists, and on a day when a depressed
Vic arrives at the
Paradise for dinner, the particularly eccentric Hudu is dressed in a tiger skin. As a good host, Hudu tries very hard to cheer up
Vic and in the end, romance blooms between
Vic and
Arlez 💕.
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the age of UFOs
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"
Flying Saucers Do Exist" reads like an attempt by Steve Frazee to take an exciting idea (aliens visit Earth) and turn it into 50 pages of tedious hand-wringing.😖 This story is actually an alien abduction tale. The abducted man, Johnny Rogers, works as a mechanic at Dunlap's Garage in a thriving town where the news is published in the
Daily Mountaineer. The townsfolk don't believe Johnny's story about alien visitors and he ends up killing himself. The story is told from the perspective of the owner of the
Daily Mountaineer who worries that the newspaper will go out of business after publishing an account of the alien abduction and losing adverti$ing revenue.
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| Alien eating Aunt Allie's meloncumbers. |
No news is good news. Mercifully shorter is the second story in the August issue, "
The Thing from Outer Space" by Jean Martin. In this case, the alien visitors to Earth have a good reason for dropping by: they like to eat Aunt Allie's cucumbers. Actually, Jean finally solved the
Fermi Paradox. Aliens will not visit Earth until Aunt Allie creates an exciting new hybrid, the
meloncumber. "The Thing from Outer Space" is much shorter than "Flying Saucers Do Exist" because after her alien encounter, Aunt Allie does not even try to contact the local newspaper and report the loss of her meloncumbers.
"A Practical Man's Guide" by Jack Vance concerns Ralph Banks, the well-seasoned editor of a magazine called Popular Crafts Monthly. Ralph is experienced in sorting through the crank letters he receives from people trying to publish accounts of their "crafts" such as the perpetual motion machines they have devised.
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| Ralph Banks reads the "practical guide" |
I suspect that Vance wrote "A Practical Man's Guide" after seeing the
June 1956 issue of
Astounding, in which editor John Campbell claimed that it was possible to detect a new form of radiation, "eloptic energy". Campbell promoted a series of such crank ideas including
Dianetics and the "
Dean Drive".
The Way Out. As told in "A Practical Man's Guide", Ralph receives a letter from Mr. Hunter at the Smithsonian Institute describing a "practical guide" for how to exit from conventional reality. Ralph's secretary has already sorted Hunter's letter into the bin labeled "screwball". However, Ralph is intrigued and so he follows Mr. Hunter's written instructions... and Ralph disappears. His secretary suspects he stepped out of the office for coffee.
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Truck crash near the Establishment.
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The final story in the August 1957 issue of
Space Science Fiction Magazine was called "
Critical Mass" by Arthur C. Clarke; it is one of his
Tales from the White Hart. The story plays off of 1950's fears of all things radioactive (see
The Uranium Age). A truck crashes on the highway near England's
Atomic Energy Research Establishment. As seen from a nearby pub, the crashed truck appears to be covered with a strange black "living cloud". The locals evacuate in a panic, suspecting that the truck was carrying cargo from the atomic research facility and has released something evil and radioactive. ☢
It turns out that the crashed truck was carrying bee hives and upon closer examination, the black cloud is discovered to be only a swarm of bees. Southern England is spared from panic and evacuation.
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click to enlarge - image source
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Here is what Wikipedia has to say about Clarke's White Hart stories: "
The style and nature of the stories was inspired by the Jorkens stories of the writer Lord Dunsany, whom Clarke admired and with whom he corresponded, a fact humorously acknowledged by Clarke in his introduction to the first Jorkens omnibus volume." (
source).
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interior art for "Our Distant Cousins"
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Mars in 1929. I read "
Our Distant Cousins", a Jorkens story by Lord Dunsany. You can download the November 23, 1929 issue of
The Saturday Evening Post here.
Getting fat by eating people. Imagine jumping into your airplane in 1929 and flying to Mars. Absurd? That did not stop The Saturday Evening Post from publishing "Our Distant Cousins" which describes such a journey to the red planet. Arriving on Mars, the intrepid Jorkens discovers that there is a "very refined" type of human living on Mars, but sadly, our "distant cousins" are kept in cages as a source of food for another type of Martian creature which is described as being a giant, horribly flabby beast.
Return Flight. Hurrying to escape from the loathsome human-eating beasts of Mars, Jorkens departs from the red planet. However, he then crash-lands on the asteroid Eros. Last year I investigated the origins of belief in the idea that every asteroid and planet of the galaxy should have life (see this blog post).
For "Our Distant Cousins", Lord Dunsany depicted Eros as having a thin atmosphere (but breathable), swamps and forests of tiny trees where the birds were no bigger than moths and the native elephants were small enough to be held inside a matchbox.
After his brief visit to Eros, finally Jorkens returned to Earth so he could share the story of his interplanetary adventure with us.
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in the Ekcolir Reality
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One more science-fantasy. Apparently written in the mid-1950s, but not published until 2003, is Lord Dunsany's novel The Pleasures of a Futuroscope (this story can be read at the internet archive). Ever since reading Asimov's time travel novel The End of Eternity I've been intrigued by the idea of a device that allows the future to be seen.
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in the new millennium
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The future in one word: CRYSTALS. Let's jump from Lord Dunsany's 1955 futuroscope to the current millennium and the latest Star Trek television show,
Strange New Worlds. I'm particularly intrigued by the possibility that
Star Trek: SNW might introduce viewers to some
interesting new aliens. My hope is that each episode of
Strange New Worlds will bring the crew of the
Enterprise to a new exoplanet where there will be an interesting new alien species. Sadly, when Captain Pike appeared in
Discovery, the writers of that show saw fit to introduce "
time crystals" that allowed Pike to receive a vision from the future. Will
Strange New Worlds be magical fantasy or is there some future science explanation for the seemingly magical time crystals?
Related Reading: to Mars in 1912.
Next: the 2022 Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens.
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