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

Binder

stranger than truth

I recently had reason to re-read the 1941 story "Methuselah's Children" by Robert Heinlein. In that story, Heinlein stated the fictional science idea that "the radioactive qualities of vitamins" have something to do with controlling the human lifespan.This is such a strange statement that I wondered how Heinlein had come to include it in his story.

Isaac Asimov had described the Adam Link stories about robots as having influenced the creation of his own positronic robot stories. Several years ago, I read a few of the Adam Link stories in an attempt to understand how they had contributed to Asimov's robot stories. As was the case for Campbell's robots in "The Last Evolution", the robot named Adam Link was very devoted to the man who designed and built him and, indeed, seemingly "born" with a deep desire to serve humans. 

cover by Ed Emshwiller

Adam Link had a special iridium brain, but Asimov told his readers that a positronic brain was made from platinum and iridium. Asimov also took an extra step towards explaining how a robot might be programmed so as to be loyal to humans (see the Laws of Robotics).

Otto Binder wrote many other stories besides the ones about robots. Another series of stories was about Anton York. In the first Anton York story, "The Conquest of Life", published in 1937, readers are told how Anton's father (Mathew York) had performed an experiment on Anton, injecting him with a mysterious elixir. 

Upon reaching the age of 55 while still having the youthful appearance of a man only 35 years old, Anton digs into the papers of his dead father and discovers mention of experiments involving "radiogens".

from "The Conquest of Life"

When I search the internet for "radiogens", I am led to webpages (example) about George Washington Crile. Crile was a surgeon, and one of his publications (from 1922) concerned the thyroid gland. Much of what was in that published report on the thyroid gland is what you might expect from a surgeon in 1922. However, there was also the following (Image A, below):

Image A. From the 1922 publication about the thyroid gland by Crile.

It is now known that thyroid hormone has receptors in most cells of the human body and it is important for the normal growth and function of the nervous system. Iodine is an atomic constituent of thyroid hormone but does not control "conductivity" of tissues.

timeline for iodine and thyroid (click image to enlarge)

Apparently, thyroid hormone was first isolated in 1915, but until the 1940s there was still debate about chemical structure of circulating thyroid hormone in the blood. In 1922, Crile seemingly had no concept of thyroid hormone and how it influences the body, so there is a huge amount of nonsense in Crile's book about the thyroid gland (see Image A, above).

In 1936, Crile published "The Phenomena of Life". This book was reviewed by the New York Times and it is not surprising if Otto Binder was influenced by Crile's weird views of human physiology. In his 1936 book, Crile presented his theory of "radiogens".

source

York at work in the laboratory

Crile's ideas about ionizing radiation inside cells as a source of energy for creating the electrical signals used to control the body were either ignored by other medical doctors or openly mocked as being crazy. Physiology research has revealed how cell metabolism creates cellular electric signals (action potentials) that rapidly propagate through the body.

Returning to the fictional tale of Anton York, we learn that the York elixir: "protects protoplasm from disease by increasing the energy of radiogens in the body". In his father's notebooks, Anton finds the "chemical formulae" that reveal the secret of longevity (Image B, below):

Image B: the secret of long life

Fictional Chemistry.  This "formula" is nonsense. Otto Binder lifted Grignard Reaction out of a chemistry book and zymase and pituitrin out of a biology book and combine them to create the imaginary Elixir M-7.

magic molecule of immortality

I've previously blogged about fictional chemistry and magic potions in science fiction. There is no objection to the creation of imaginary chemicals, but when devising fictional plot elements in the domain of living organisms, authors should take some care to avoid including outlandish imagined fictional biology. Earlier this year, I blogged about the popularity in science fiction stories that involve "accelerating" biological processes with a magic potion. Where is the boundary between 1) the laughably absurd departure from plausibility and 2) the clever Sci Fi plot element that can be "swallowed" by science fiction fans? In the case of Binder and his linked zymase and pituitrin molecules, I feel that he would have been better off to simply invent and create imaginary names for two new fictional proteins rather than recycle two existing names in a silly way. Binder's fictional science method for attaining immortality is like saying that you could create a faster-than-light spaceship by combining a VW Beetle and a Sopwith Camel.

cosmic rays

What is particularly annoying about Binder's approach to fictional science is that a single man working alone in his basement for a few years can create a spaceship, a time machine, a human-like robot or the Elixir of Life that confers immortality. It is difficult to resist calling such depictions of "scientific" discovery "anti-science fiction".

Unable to leave the "radiogen" theory alone, Binder went on to suggest that the tiny radiogen furnaces inside cells could capture energy from cosmic rays. In April 1937 the story "A Million Years Ahead" by Edmond Hamilton was published. I have no idea if that story by Hamilton influenced Binder; I suppose cosmic rays were "in the air" and if you wanted a Sci Fi energy source, why not use cosmic rays? Even if it makes no biological sense.

the power of cells

What I love about the non-nonsensical "radiogen" theory is that it seems similar to the femtobot endosymbionts that I imagine existing inside our bodies. In "The Conquest of Life", Binder goes on to state the hypothesis that immortality can be had through avoiding diseases and "resistance to disease is the electrocution of germs by radiogens". Binder champions this fictional science of radiogens over the conventional view that immune system cells such as macrophages combat bacteria and viruses.

It became popular in science fiction to imagine interstellar spaceships that were powered by atomic energy. In biology, it was not until the 1940s that mitochondria were shown to be the tiny components of "protoplasm" responsible for generating most of the human body's useful chemical energy in the form of ATP. In 1937, I suppose it was to be expected that some science fiction story teller such as Otto Binder would pretend that living cells are powered by atomic energy.

in the Ekcolir Reality

The "radiogen theory" and the idea that ionizing radiation was a key source of energy in cells is long forgotten among biologists, but its ghostly presence still exists in old science fiction stories such as "The Conquest of Life" and "Methuselah's Children".

I'm glad I read "The Conquest of Life" since it holds clues to origin of Heinlein's odd ideas about radioactive vitamins. 

By the end of "The Conquest of Life", Anton York has become an immortal god-like being who does not even need to eat. I suppose we are expected to accept that York's M-7 Elixir-boosted radiogens produce all the energy that his body needs by absorbing cosmic rays.

Time Portal

In my own stories set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe, I imagine that humans can be converted into artificial life forms composed of femtobots. Such "replicoid" copies of humans do not need to eat.

Having complained (above) about Otto Binder's unrealistic depiction of science and technological advances, the question must be asked: can I do any better? Recently, I imagined a science fiction novel called Time Portal that was written by Emma Phillips in one of the past Realities of Earth. In Time Portal, a research scientist and his assistant discover how to travel into the past. However, Time Portal was written in the early 1800s and we can't expect its author to have been very sophisticated in her thinking about the style of scientific research that would be common in the 20th century.

Related Reading: more cosmic rays and Gladiator

Next: more stories from Thrilling Wonder Stories

The Thrilling Science Test! The "two types of hormones" are found in "The Iron World" by Otis Kline.

Long-Range Telepathy

image source

Last year, I read the 1939 science fiction story "Cosmic Engineers" by Clifford D. Simak which was published in Astounding Science-Fiction magazine. In that story, Simak imagined that humans were somehow related to "ancient astronauts" from Pluto who evolved billions of years before we humans. The remnants of the folks from Pluto, the Cosmic Engineers, are telepathic robots who, now in need of our help, telepathically communicate with Earthlings from the far edge of the universe.

Under the "guidance" of editor John Campbell, Astounding was full of stories about telepathy including Slan, by A. E. van Vogt (1940).

image source

While being mentored by Campbell, Isaac Asimov could not resist the temptation to make his own telepathic robots, humans and aliens for inclusion in some of his science fiction stories. In 1952 he published "The Deep" which featured telepathic communication over interstellar distances.

I recently commented on a few short science fiction stories by John D. MacDonald who dabbled in Sci Fi for a few years then became famous for his Travis McGee series. 

For my Exode Saga, I've had fun imagining that in a previous Reality, the analogue of MacDonald (Joanna) was able to make use of telepathy for obtaining Sci Fi story ideas.

interior art for "Wine of the Dreamers"

Here, in this blog post, I'm going to comment on MacDonald's Sci Fi novel Wine of the Dreamers as originally published in the May 1950 issue of Startling Stories. The story is built around telepathic contact between humans on Earth and "aliens" who reside on a distant planet. We have to wonder: why do these "aliens" just happen to have a special interest in we Earthlings? The answer provided by MacDonald is the same answer that was given by Simak in "Cosmic Engineers".

 In reviewing "Wine of the Dreamers" for Galaxy Science Fiction in 1951, Edward Conklin made the explicit point that the basic plot and many of the story ideas in "Wine of the Dreamers" were not original to MacDonald. I have no problem with writers borrowing story ideas from each-other, particularly when an old story idea is taken in a new direction or simply decorated with better writing. 

using sweet cupcakes to sell
science fiction magazines

Question #1. So, how does "Wine of the Dreamers" hold up as a science fiction story?

 

A Second Question

When previously reading some of MacDonald's short Sci Fi stories, I was puzzled by his approach to including female characters in the stories. In "The Mechanical Answer", a gigantic government project tries to solve the problem of making an artificial intelligence with a human-like mind. All of the assembled experts are stumped by the problem. MacDonald does not state exactly when the story takes place, but I'll imagine that the events of the story take place in the 1960s and we know that male engineers dominated NASA during the race to land "a man" on the Moon. I'll not complain that it is a group of men who are working to solve the artificial intelligence problem. 

 

selling books

I'll even give credit to MacDonald for including a female character (Jane) in "The Mechanical Answer" who is mostly off-stage during the story, but it is her knowledge of the human brain that leads to success in the all-male government project aimed at building a Thinking Machine™. 

 

Sadly, while on stage in "The Mechanical Answer", Jane is only shown getting tears on her pretty face because her man is going away to work on the super-secret project. Did MacDonald provide readers with more interesting female characters in the novel-length "Wine of the Dreamers"?

interior art for "Wine of the Dreamers"

image source

Editor Samuel Merwin ran "Wine of the Dreamers" as the lead story of the May 1950 issue of Startling Stories and took pains to provide interior art depicting scantily clad women right at the start of the story. MacDonald quickly introduces readers to the long-legged Sharan Inly, travel companion of Dr. Bard Lane. They are driving across a parched desert with an unconscious man (Project physicist Bill Kornal) in the back seat of the car, some time in the future after the failed first rocket trip to Mars. On the car radio are news stories about horrible events such as mass-shootings and celebrity suicides.

 

The X-Factor Files

Sharan is Dr. Inly, who is in charge of psycho-adjustment for The Project. The dialog between Bard and Sharan is soon bubbling with words like "Freud", "dementia praecox", and "psycho-neurotic". 

 

"it must be aliens"

For some inexplicable reason, the previously stable Bill suddenly snapped and sabotaged The Project. It all feels like the start of an episode of The X-Files, particularly when Bard says, "... it was as though something quite alien took over his mind." Struggling to explain the mystery of how people such as Bill can so suddenly snap, Brad adds, "... floating around somewhere is an X factor".

Hypnotic cupcakes in Hollywood

As described previously, in MacDonald's 1948 short story "Cosmetics", the amazing power of hypnosis was the core pillar of the fictional science that allows people to transform their appearance on a whim. For "Wine of the Dreamers", the super important Project relies on hypnosis to make sure that the Project personnel can be trusted.

For a time in the previous millennium, many author's and film makers were deeply in love with hypnosis. For example, in 1947 there was Fear in the Night in which deployed the fantastic power of fictional hypnosis wielded by an Evil™ hypnotist against poor DeForest Kelley. 

 

another failure

The film critic for the New York Times called Fear in the Night ridiculous, but I think the common saying "there's a sucker born every minute" is what wins the day when it comes to belief in the power of hypnosis and authors such as MacDonald deploying fantasy hypnosis as a plot element.

Seven pages into the story, MacDonald finally tells readers that The Project is "Project Tempo", a government-funded attempt to create a practical method for interstellar space travel based on "folding space" (hand-wave). Actually, MacDonald provides readers with pages of painful hand-waving that "explains" the fictional science of his warp drive.

 

Bill Kornal "snapped" and did serious damage to critical equipment for Project Tempo, but this was not an isolated incident. Dr. Lane provides an info dump and tells us that "the history of space travel has been a long record of failure" with many cases of sabotage.

cover by Carolus Thole

When questioned, Kornal explains "his" act of "sabotage" by saying that something briefly took over control of his body and destroyed the delicate Project equipment. The exact same thing had previously happened to another person who had been working on a past failed space flight to Mars. Houston, we have a Mystery™.

World of Dreamers

Ten pages into the story, readers finally meet one of the "aliens" (Raul) who have been sabotaging the attempts of Earthlings to develop space travel. As a child, Raul realizes that he is some kind of mutant, different from the other children. He quickly learns that everyone around him is living a lie, trapped in a dying society where nobody knows the truth about their "dreams" which are a form of technology-assisted telepathy which can be used to take control of the minds of people on the distant planets 1, 2 (Earth) and 3. 

 

cover art by Herbert Bruck

Raul slowly learns that all the people of worlds 1, 2 and 3 are "colonists" who came from the ancient world of the "Watchers". Raul's people, the "Watchers" were part of a great Plan™ by which they were to monitor worlds 1, 2 and 3 until the time when they could be linked and united in harmony. Until then, the "Law™" of the Watchers is that they must prevent the people of colony worlds 1, 2 and 3 from traveling through space.

Dr. Lane then becomes the target of another "mind take-over" attempt on Earth, this one carried out by the well-intentioned Raul who wants to help The Project. At first, the good Dr. Inly is confident that Lane, under stress from the Project, "simply" imagined his experience of an "alien" inside his mind. Eventually, Dr. Inly has her own telepathic contact with Raul. Rather than believe Raul's "crazy story" about interstellar telepathy, she invents her own delusion: that evil Russian hypnotists are trying to discredit she and Lane and foil The Project.

Raul's sister

cover by Herbert Bruck

Using her telepathic powers, Raul's sister, Leesa destroys the interstellar spaceship being built by The Project. Leesa also rats out her brother to their fellow Watchers and he is soon going to be put to death for the heresy of helping Earthlings. Tune in next week for the thrilling conclusion...

But "seriously"... having written our heroes into a corner, suddenly MacDonald makes the tide turn. Leesa falls in love with Dr. Lane💗. Similarly, Raul is smitten by Sharan and he decides that he must travel across interstellar space to find Dr. Inly💕. The enforcer of the "Law™" among the Watchers who had ordered Raul's execution now has a sudden change of heart and helps Raul and Leesa jump in a 10,000 year-old spaceship and head for Earth. The "alien" spaceship arrives on Earth and everyone lives happily ever after.

the shocking plot twist

cover art by Edward Valigursky

 Contrived and Silly

MacDonald tries to have readers believe that humans evolved on a distant planet and first arrived on Earth (and two other colony worlds) 10 to 50 thousand years ago. Folks on the original planet of the humans devised a Plan™ for Watching the 3 colony worlds and eventually bringing them together. Then they "forgot" the Plan™. Only through the heroic efforts of Raul is the Plan™ rediscovered and Earth saved from the "Watchers" who delight in causing havoc on Earth, believing their telepathic contacts with Earthlings to only be "dreams".

If it is broken, don't fix it

How do the "Watchers" manage to forget their Plan™? The "Watchers" all live and work in a tall office building with escalators between the floors of the building. MacDonald tells readers that at some point in the far past, one of the escalators broke. 

 

1953 book cover

The "Watchers" were too lazy to walk up the steps of the broken escalator which now separated them from the school on the upper floors where young "Watchers" could learn to read and could learn the history of the Plan™. 

 

The entire plot of "Wine of the Dreamers" is silly and contrived and impossible for me to "buy into". Worse, MacDonald's depiction of the "Watchers" in "Wine of the Dreamers" is sickening. Ten hours each day, "Watchers" such as Leesa use their telepathic powers to rape helpless women and commit other ghastly crimes on Earth 🤯. For the "Watchers" it is all great fun. The rest of the day, while not "dreaming", the "Watchers" get together with their friends and brag to each other about the horrific things they did during their last "dream". 

 

 Readers of "Wine of the Dreamers" must ask themselves, what kind of person imagines such a fictional society, let alone writes it into their novel? My advice: if you want to sell horror stories, then market them as horror stories, not science fiction.

1952

A review of "Wine of the Dreamers" by Damon Knight correctly predicted that since MacDonald had begun selling stories in more profitable genres, it was unlikely that he would continue writing science fiction. Knight felt it was problematical that in "Wine of the Dreamers" MacDonald had depicted only 900 "Watchers". I don't agree. The population of the inbred "Watchers" had been in decline for thousands of years. We can infer that because of the declining population of the "Watchers", civilization on Earth has finally begun to rise towards the stars. 

 

Knight was apparently quite comfortable with the silly and unexplained "Raul is a mutant" premise that is at the heart of "Wine of the Dreamers". Raul and his sister look nothing like the rest of the "Dreamers".

Having published "Wine of the Dreamers" in magazine format in 1950, Merwin later reviewed the book format story for Amazing Stories, in the January 1952 issue. Reading his review, it is evident that Merwin was quite enamored of "Wine of the Dreamers". He calls MacDonald, "... one of the country's ablest all-around young writers".

Clarity of the Concept

Merwin praised "Wine of the Dreamers" and MacDonald for the "clarity of the concept" behind the story. However, the story never explains how the illiterate "Watchers" on a planet light years away can take control of the minds of Earthlings. 

 

1953

Planet 3 

There were three worlds colonized by the "Watchers". Planet #1 has a barbaric civilization at about the level of Mesopotamia 4,000 years ago. Planet #2 is Earth. Planet three is a world where the people have telepathic powers and can defend themselves against the "Watchers". Telepathy and technology-assisted telepathy are facts within this imaginary fictional universe. But why are the "Watchers" and the folks on Planet #3 blessed with telepathic powers while the people on planets 1 and 2 are not? Turn off your brain. Apparently we are expected to not ask such questions... by doing so, you will only cloud the great "clarity" of the story.

 

Why did MacDonald write page-long descriptions of the fictional physics behind his imagined space drive and say nothing about the physical basis of telepathy? I have to suspect that for MacDonald his imagined telepathy was magical fantasy, not something to be explained by science. 

1957

In a short review of "Wine of the Dreamers" published in the April 1952 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, Peter Miller praised the story for its "likable characters". Leesa displays disgusting cruelty through most of the story as do all of the other "Watchers" except for the mutant Raul. What about Dr. Inly? Towards the end of the story, she is almost redeemed by finally accepting that she has been in telepathic contact with Raul, but I'd be hard pressed to put her (or anyone else in this story) on a list of likable characters. Maybe Miller liked the way that Sharan drinks a glass of beer by holding the glass in two hands "like a child". 

 

Maybe the story was improved and modified before being published in book format. Starting in 1953 the story was published as Planet of the Dreamers. I only read the Startling Stories version.

1954

MacDonald expended a lot of energy waving his hands to "explain" how Raul was able to travel through space at a rate faster than light. At the same time, the telepathic signals instantaneously pass from the World of the Dreamers to Earth, but this miracle does not even receive comment from MacDonald. Thus, "Wine of the Dreamers" is a strange mix of fantasy and science fiction in which both of the two main characters (Raul and Bard) work for decades with single-minded determination towards their goals until suddenly they don't. They both reach a point where they give up on their life's work and they have to be rescued by their female companion (Leesa or Sharan). Ho, hum.

Next: the short story format

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