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_____________________
Editor, Mary Gnaedinger
Fiction:
The Time Machine • novel by H. G. Wells ∗∗∗
Donovan’s Brain • novel by Curt Siodmak ∗∗∗+
Non-Fiction:
Cover • by Norman Saunders
Interior artwork • by Virgil Finlay (x3), Lawrence (x2)
The Readers’ Viewpoint • editorial by Mary Gnaedinger & reader letters
_____________________
This issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries got my attention because it contains one of this year’s 1943 Retro-Hugo Award finalists, Curt Siodmak’s Donovan’s Brain. This is another of those novels that I’ve been aware of since the mid-seventies1 but have never got around to reading.
Donovan’s Brain is, as its title probably suggests, a ‘brain in a box’ story, the brain in question belonging to the well-known and wealthy businessman Warren Horace Donovan. The person who puts his brain there is narrator Dr Patrick Cory.
Before that key event we make Cory’s acquaintance when he buys a Capuchin monkey from a Mexican organ grinder passing through town. He takes it home to his laboratory, feeds it, and is bitten for his trouble. The monkey then hides in a box and goes to sleep until the next day:
September 14th.
The monkey was still alive this morning and screamed hysterically when I tried to grab it. But after I fed it bananas and raw egg again, it let me pet its head a moment. I had to make it trust me completely. Fear causes an excess secretion of adrenalin, resulting in an abnormal condition of the blood stream. This would throw off my observations.
This afternoon, the Capuchin put its long arms around my chest and pressed its face against my shoulder, in perfect confidence. I stroked it slowly, and it uttered small whimpers of content. I tried its pulse, which was way above normal.
When it began to sleep in my arms, I stabbed it between the occipital bone and the first cervical vertebra. It died instantly. p. 56
Cory removes the monkey’s brain and hooks it up in a tank of fluid. He is then visited by the local (alcoholic) doctor, Schratt, whose primary role seems to be that of Cory’s missing conscience:
Schratt sat down heavily. As he thought of what he had seen, he grew pale under the coarse, brownish skin that loosely covered his drink-sodden face.
“You’re the godfather of this phenomenon,” I said to cheer him up, in spite of my knowing he could not be flattered.
“I don’t want any part of anything you are doing, Patrick,” he answered. “You—with your mechanistic physiology—reduce life to physical chemistry! This brain may still be able to feel pain, it may suffer, though bodyless, eyeless and deprived of any organ to express its feeling. It may be writhing in agony!”
“We know that the brain itself is insensitive,’’ I answered quietly. To please him I added: “At least we believe we know that!”
“You have put it in a nutshell,” Schratt answered. I perceived that he was trembling. The success of my experiment had unnerved him. “You believe and acknowledge only what you are able to observe and measure. You recklessly push through to your discoveries with no thought of the consequences.” p. 57
Early the following morning, and after the monkey’s brain has died, Cory receives a call from Forest Ranger White telling him that a plane has crashed in the nearby hills. White cannot get hold of Schratt, the on-call doctor, so Cory agrees to go in his place.
There follows a grisly chapter describing the journey to the crash scene, the carnage there, and the medical work undertaken. One of the two men Cory attends to is Donovan, whose legs he has to amputate in an emergency operation in the kitchen of the Ranger White’s station. Donovan’s critical condition worsens as they descend the mountain on horseback and, when Cory realises Donovan is going to die, he takes him to his laboratory in town rather than the hospital in Phoenix so he can remove his brain (initially with the aid of his wife Janice):
When the instruments were ready, I picked out the scalpel and made a semicircular incision in the skin just above the right ear, continuing the incision around the back of the head to the upper surface of the left ear. I pulled the scalpel forward until it completely exposed the top of the calvarium. There was very little bleeding from the surfaces I had exposed.
Taking the Gigli saw, I made an incision in the bony vault completely around the skull. To leave the brain uninjured, I was very careful not to cut through the duramater. I then lifted off the entire top of the cranial vault in toto.
The glistening surface of the duramater was still warm to my finger’s touch.
I made the same semi-circular incision in the duramater that I had in the outer skin.
I pulled the dura forward and there lay exposed—Donovan’s brain!
Donovan’s breathing stopped. White asphyxis due to cardiac failure began. There was no time to apply stimulants. That would have taken precious minutes. I had to open his brain while he was still alive.
I made that mistake before with the Capuchin, and I could not take any risk now. I heard Janice at the phone talking to Phoenix. Schratt was on his way back. She repeated the information loudly so I could hear.
If Schratt’s Ford didn’t break down!
Janice came in. She stopped, seeing me at work over the body.
“Come here,” I ordered gruffly. I wanted to give her no time to think. She had studied medicine to please me and have the chance to be closer to me. Concentrated, cool, precise even in emergencies, she was an ideal nurse. But, like Schratt, she deeply resented the work I was doing, for it took me away from her and she was jealous. I was married to my apparatus and scalpels. p. 61
Schratt appears part way through the operation and replaces Janice as his assistant:
Schratt impulsively hid his face in his hands and stood motionless for seconds. When he uncovered his face again, his expression had changed. He had known what I was going to do as soon as he entered the laboratory. I was violating his creed and ethics, but he did not refuse to help me, though I had no power to coerce him.
The potential frustrated Pasteur had broken through and Schratt’s vocation was stronger than his conscience. I knew that afterwards he would have pangs of remorse, fits of repentance he would try to drown in tequila. He knew it too but he helped me. p. 61
And after they have finished and put the brain in a fluid tank:
“Better hurry,” Schratt said, pulling off his gloves. “They may come for the body any minute.” His face suddenly looked gray and shriveled. He nodded toward the body.
“Better get him in shape. Stuff some cotton in the skull or the eyes might fall in.”
I filled the skull cavity with cotton bandages and replaced the cranium, taping it with adhesive. I pulled the scalp back over the calvarium, then I bandaged the head carefully and had foresight enough to soak a few drops of Donovan’s blood into the bandages as if a wound from the accident had bled through.
I eagerly turned to see if the brain was still alive but Schratt stopped me.
“We have done all we can,” he said. “Let’s get the body out of here. You wouldn’t want them to see that?” He indicated the brain with a jerky movement of his head. “If we get the body out into the sun, it will decompose fast. I don’t want an autopsy.”
Excitement had fuddled my judgment, and I submitted to Schratt. But he did not seem to enjoy his new authority. p. 62
Schratt is later pressured into signing the death certificate.
So far this probably seems like a standard ‘Mad Scientist’ story—perhaps with more medical detail than usual—but that observation would inaccurately summarise the work. For one thing Cory is no megalomaniacal madman, but a cool and rational if obsessive individual. Also, the surgical language above informs not only the medical procedures undertaken by Cory but also his dispassionate, objective view of humanity.
This is Cory with his wife, Janice, later in the story (she feels sorry for Schratt who has lost his job because he did not attend the crash site):
“May I sit down?” I asked. I had not been in her room for months.
She nodded and went on in the same quiet voice. “Schratt lost his Job.” She looked at me as if I could have prevented his misfortune.
“I know. What could I do?” I replied.
She nodded again, but not in confirmation of my words. “You did nothing to help him,”
For a moment I was stunned. Was this a rebuke from Janice?
“Did he say so?”
“He’s desperate,” she answered.
“Like most drunkards, he shows signs of [Korsakoff’s] psychosis, if you remember the symptoms from your lectures. Lessening of the power of observation, inability to correlate new experiences with the apperceptive mass, conjectures, retrograde amnesia. . . .”
Her face was sad.
“I’ve invited him to live with us,” she said. “I hope you won’t refuse. He can have the room off the back garden, and he won’t disturb you.”
Her kindness had no limits. She would have filled the house with hoboes if I were willing.
“Now we’re stuck with him for the rest of his life! Pretty smart! I have to buy his discretion. He knows that he knows too much about my activities and he means to cash in on it.”
She did not answer, but she paled and her mouth grew very white.
It was her house. She could do whatever she liked with it. She paid for all the machines and experiments. I was completely dependent on her and she never said a word about it. She may even never have thought of it.
But I wanted to be free!
Janice did not want to fight. Her expression grew soft as she withdrew into a shell where no rough word and no hard blow could reach her. She surrendered her personality and won, as she always did, by refusing to defend herself.
“All right,” I said. “Did Schratt tell you Webster offered me his job? Maybe I ought to have taken it. Maybe I will.”
She smiled kindly, understandingly. She knew my work consumed all my time and thought. Even the fact of our marriage had been dissolved in my work’s acid domination. She knew I could not divert my strength. p. 67
There is more of this clinical observation when Cory meets Chloe Donovan, Donovan’s daughter:
I knew women like this well from my years at the hospital. [They have to have the admiration of a male before they can be at ease with themselves.]2 They are erotomaniacs, only happy as long as they are sure of a man’s adoration.
Her nose, short and turned up, showed a slight thickening of the lesser alar cartilage, a sure sign that it had been worked on by a plastic surgeon.
I remembered her story. She had been a stout, plain girl with a hooked nose, had married three times in quick succession and always big brutal men. After the third unhappy marriage, which ended in a scandal, she had her nose remodeled and changed her character completely.
She dieted away forty pounds and when she found she had become handsome, she enwrapped herself in a new aura as in a cloak, became elusive with her friends, egocentric to the point of mental unbalance. She gave up her promiscuousness and concentrated on herself in a quiet, narcissistic way. p. 65
The above passage is from a visit that Cory makes to Phoenix after Donovan’s death, where the hospital authorities interview him. Cory meets with the medical superintendent, and is present when he dismisses Schratt. Cory also notes, when he visits the morgue, that someone has disturbed the bandages on the head of the corpse.
In the meeting with Donovan’s son and daughter, Cory is asked about what their father said before he died (it later materializes that they are looking for a large sum of money) but he tells them Donovan was unconscious, and leaves. He returns home and rigs up a lighting system that illuminates when the brain is awake.
After this fast-paced, visceral, and proto-Ballardian3 start, the focus turns to Cory’s work in trying to communicate with Donovan’s brain. When Schratt visits the lab he suggests communication by telepathy, introducing what will be a prominent plot driver in the novel, but initially the idea goes nowhere. However, while listening to the radio, Cory has an idea to use an amplifier and aerial to increase the strength of the brain’s electrical transmissions. The brain grows and gets stronger and, in due course, starts communicating with Cory, initially by left-handed automatic handwriting (Cory is right-handed). The information provided by Donovan to Cory sets up the rest of the story.
After this very good beginning the novel unfortunately devolves, to a large extent, into a standard mystery plot (multiple spoilers follow). Donovan eventually achieves limited communication and motor control of Cory and gets him to go to LA to do an errand. Later, there is a blackmail attempt by a reporter, and the discovery of an anonymous bank account that provides Cory with the funds to pay him off; Cory also visits Donovan’s old assistant, Anton Sternli, and picks up a safety box key. After this, Cory goes to see a lawyer called Fuller and gets him to defend a low-life convict called Hinds, who murdered his mother and faces the death penalty.
Throughout all this Donovan gets stronger and increases his control over Cory, who seems broadly happy about this, accepting it as part of his experiment. There is another meeting with Chloe, the daughter, and Cory learns of the connection between Donovan and Hinds, and why the former is attempting to get the murderer released. This particular plot thread brings the story to an over-melodramatic climax, with Donovan taking over complete control of Cory and attempting to kill a thirteen year old girl (one of the prosecution witnesses in the case against Hinds) before later trying to murder Cory’s wife Janice.
Schratt forestalls this attempt on Janice’s life by killing Donovan’s brain, something that he planned for some time but had been unable to do because of the brain’s telepathy—if Donovan had realised what Schratt was planning it would have killed him by stopping his heart, as it did another individual—so he had to wait until the brain was distracted.
Interestingly, Schratt reveals in a note to Cory and Janice how he prevented Donovan from reading his mind, and reveals the secret behind a rhyme that appears several times earlier in the story:
To protect myself from giving away my intention to the brain, I use a very simple trick. I remember a silly tongue twister I learned as a child. My mother practiced it with me to cure me of a lisp.
Now I repeat the lines incessantly, whenever the lamp is burning and the brain awake.
“Amidst the mists and coldest frosts he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts!”
While I say this sentence continuously, no thought can possibly enter my brain. I have connected a buzzer with the lamp to warn me if I should ever overlook the light and go on writing when the brain is awake. p. 118
This passage is from a work published a decade before The Demolished Man, and I wondered if this is where Alfred Bester got the idea.
This climax is, to be honest, the weakest part of the entire novel. Not only is it rather contrived, but it has a couple of plot holes you could drive a bus through (why does Schratt wait for the entire novel before making his move? Why not kill the brain when it was asleep?) Some of the other telepathy detail is a bit odd too, such as Cort tasting nothing when he smokes Donavan’s favourite cigars, or staying sober no matter how much he drinks.
Notwithstanding these criticisms, this is quite a good novel, and one that provides sufficient rewards even for a modern reader. Once beyond the excellent beginning there is much perceptive and philosophical observation to propel one past the shakier parts.
Although I started with the Siodmak novel, the issue actually leads off with the better known The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. This opens at a Victorian dinner party where the subject of time is being discussed. Some of this is conceptually high-end, especially (I suspect) for the period: time as a fourth dimension, remembrance as a form of time travel, etc. However, it is still a huge data dump, and parts read like something from Jules Verne and not H. G. Wells:4
“Now, It Is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked,” continued the Philosophical Inventor, with a slight accession of cheerfulness. “Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension, though some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at Time. There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it. But some foolish people have got hold of the wrong side of that idea. You have all heard what they have to say about this Fourth Dimension?”
“I have not,” said the Provincial Mayor.
“It is simply this, that space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness, and is always definable by reference to these planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly—why not another direction at right angles to the other three?—and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimensional geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago. You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a Three-Dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four—if they could master the perspective of the thing: See?”
“I think so,” murmured the Provincial Mayor [. . .]” p. 13
The above illustrates another irritation of this chapter in that, in common with a lot of SF, the characters are not only ciphers but here are even labelled as such (the others are the “Psychologist”, the “Very Young Man”, the “Medical Man”, etc.), all of which gives it an unrealistic, stilted feel.
After quite a lot of discussion, the Inventor goes and gets a small device and returns with it, explaining that it is a model before sending it into the future. He then shows them the full size model he has constructed. This setup chapter finishes with a leap forward to the next week’s dinner party, where the Inventor turns up late, dishevelled, and famished. He agrees to tell them his story, but only after he has tidied himself up and eaten.
After they retire to the smoking room, he begins his tale, starting with the physical sensations felt and seen as he travelled forward in time:
“I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both my hands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs. Watchett came in, and walked, apparently without seeing me, toward the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. To-morrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still.
[. . .]
“As I put on pace, day followed night, like the flap, flap, flap of some rotating body. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I suppose the laboratory had been destroyed, and I had come into the open air.
[. . .]
“Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous grayness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch In space, the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.
“The landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the hillside upon which this house now stands, and the shoulder rose above me gray and dim. I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapor, now brown, now green; they grew, spread, fluctuated, and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changing—melting and flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials that registered my speed raced round faster and faster. Presently I noted that the sun belt swayed up and down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that, consequently, my pace was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring. p. 18-19
When he arrives in the future he appears beside the white marble statue of a sphinx, and in the middle of a hail storm. After the weather clears a group of small child-like people come to him and, garland him in flowers, and take him to one of their buildings.
The rest of the chapter provides a description of his surroundings and the people he has met. As well as the latter’s diminutive stature, they are childish in nature, vegetarians, and have a short attention span (I thought for a moment he had arrived in 2018). Interspersed with the (at times rather boring) descriptive matter are a number of philosophical musings about the social and scientific changes that may have spawned this era:
“Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was, after all, what one would expect; for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of an age of physical force. Where population is balanced and abundant, much child-bearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the State; where violence comes but rarely and offspring are secure, there is less necessity—indeed there is no necessity—of an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children’s needs disappears. We see some beginnings of this even in our own time, and in this future age it was complete. p. 24
Radical stuff for its time, I imagine.
Matters take a darker turn when the Inventor realises that his time machine has gone missing. He starts searching for it, alarming and upsetting the natives, but he manages to repair relations by saving one of the women, Weena, from drowning, and later befriends her.
The Inventor also notices ghostly figures in the dawn, and later sees one close up—an albino, ape-like creature, with huge eyes and a dislike for the light. When he later sees one disappear down a huge ventilation shaft, he theorises that this future society has stratified into two forms, and names the two races the Eloi (the surface dwellers) and the Morlocks (the subterranean apes):
“But at first, starting from the problems of our own age, it seemed as clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference of the capitalist from the laborer was the key to the explanation.
“No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you and wildly incredible, and yet even now there are circumstances that point in the way things have gone. There is a tendency plainly enough to utilize underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, and all these new electric railways; there are subways, and underground workrooms, restaurants, and so forth.
“Evidently, I thought, this tendency had increased until industry had gradually lost sight of the day, going into larger and larger underground factories, in which the workers would spend an increasing amount of their time. Even now, an East End worker lives in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural/surface of the earth and the clear sky altogether.
“Then again, the exclusive tendency of richer people, due, no doubt, to the increasing refinement of their education and the widening gulf between them and the rude violence of the poor, is already leading to the closing of considerable portions of the surface of the country against these latter. About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut up from such intrusion. And the same widening gulf, due to the length and expense of the higher education process and the increased facilities for, and temptation toward, forming refined habits among the rich, will make that frequent exchange between class and class, that promotion and intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along the lines of social stratification, less and less frequent. p. 34
The problems of social mobility in the Nineteenth Century.
We learn more about the Morlocks when the Inventor goes down the one of the shafts and has a close encounter with them in the dark, only just escaping their clutches by using his matches to create light and drive them away.
Next, he makes for the Palace of the Green Pavilion, a building he saw on an earlier expedition. He and Weena fail to reach it before nightfall, and they sleep overnight in a forest:
“Above me shone the stars, for the night was clear. I felt a certain sense of friendly comfort in their twinkling. All the old constellations had gone from the sky, however, for that slow movement that is imperceptible in a dozen human lifetimes, had long ago rearranged them in unfamiliar groupings. But the Milky Way, it seemed to me, was still the same tattered streamer of star dust as of yore. Southward—as I judged it—was a very bright red star that was new to me. It was even more splendid than our own green Sirius. Amid all these scintillating points of light, one planet shone kindly and steadily like the face of an old friend.
“Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow, inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future. I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth describes in the heavens. Only forty times had that silent revolution occurred during all the years I had traversed. And during those few revolutions, all the activity, all the traditions, the carefully planned organizations, the nations, languages, literature, aspirations, even the mere memory of man as I knew man, had been swept out of existence. p. 40
Later that night the Inventor recalls a memory from his underground trip among the Morlocks: the meat he saw on one of their tables was an Eloi . . . . These degenerate workers are eating the degenerate rich.
The next day the pair tour the Pavillion, a ruined museum, and the Inventor picks up a number of useful items: camphor, matches, an iron bar, etc., which sets him up for the story’s climax: on their way back the Morlocks catch up with the pair in the dark so he lights some of the camphor, which eventually results in a hellish forest fire that kills Weena and many of the Morlocks. The Inventor kills more of them on a knoll, as they blindly attempt to take shelter with him.
The Morlocks launch one final attack on the Inventor when he gets back to the Sphinx, where he finds the doors open and the time machine inside. He escapes their trap.
The story ends with a trip to the far future, where the Inventor provides an interesting description of an Earth that is dying:
“I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine looking around me.
“The sky was no longer blue. Northeastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red, and starless, and southeastward it grew brighter to where, cut by the horizon, lay the motionless hull of the huge red sun.
“The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish color, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on its southeastern side. It was the same rich green that one sees on forest moss or on the lichen in caves, plants which, like these, grow in a perpetual twilight.
“The Machine was standing on a sloping beach. The sea stretched away to the southwest to rise into a sharp bright horizon against the wan sky. There were no breakers and no waves, for not a breath of wind was stirring. Only a slight oily swell rose and fell like a gentle breathing, and showed that the eternal sea was still moving and living. And along the margin where the water sometimes broke was a thick incrustation of salt—pink under the lurid sky.
“There was a sense of oppression in my head and I noticed that I was breathing fast. The sensations reminded me of my only experience of mountaineering, and from that I judged the air was more rarifled than it is now. p. 49-50
A couple of the giant crabs attack the Inventor but are unsuccessful.
Overall this, like the Siodmak, is an uneven piece (in among the scientific detail and social commentary there are some quite tedious descriptive passages) but, once again, it has enough nuggets of interest to keep the reader going.
The Cover is by an artist I’ve never heard of before, Norman Saunders. I can’t say I am particularly impressed by its inaccurate and clichéd portrayal of what I presume is a scene from Well’s novel, nor its execution. The original improves on the latter as it isn’t marred by the magazine’s masthead.5
The Interior artwork has a fine, if overly romanticised, title page by Virgil Finlay for the Wells. Lawrence is the artist for the Siodmak.
The Readers’ Viewpoint, essentially the letters column, starts off with a brief introduction by Mary Gnaedinger which namechecks several fantasy collectors and the suggestions they have made for stories in future issues of Famous Fantastic Mysteries (there appears to have been a change of sourcing policy that has prompted these communications), and notes the magazine’s popularity in various fan magazines and polls.
The first letter is from a 15-year-old Bob Silverberg:
Dear Editress:
The stories in the April 1950 issue of F.F.M. were most enjoyable: “The Secret People” and the novelette by Clarke. John Beynon is, of course, the pen name of John Beynon Harris, a British author who flourished in stf until the war.
The change in policy is most welcome. I suggest publication of “The Time Stream” by John Taine. One of the most popular serials ever to appear in Gernsback’s Wonder Stories. Dec. 1931, Jan. Feb. Mar. 1932 issues.
Also, I recommend a few of the remaining Haggard Stories (“She and Alan,” “ Wisdom’s Daughter” ) and “The Land That Time Forgot,” a rare one by Burroughs, which appeared, for one place, in Amazing Stories Feb. Mar. April 1927.
He goes on mention the issues of the magazine he is looking for, and plugs his fanzine, Spaceship.
A long letters column follows. Most of the letters are in response to what seems a superlative April issue, with raves for the Benyon (Wyndham) novel, and good notices for the Clarke story, and even the Coblentz poem! There are more raves for the Bok illustrations. A few comment that they thought Finlay’s work was subpar.
There are also many suggestions for novels and stories to run, including one from Jim Fleming in Sharon, KA, who requests Donovan’s Brain. Done.
Joseph Jensky, from Hartford, CO, provides a letter that sheds some light on the acquisitions policy change:
Congratulations!
The word is so simple and yet it conveys all your readers’ heartfelt thanks. Your new policy of printing stories from other sources than the publications of the old Munsey group and stories never appearing in magazines before, will be greeted with three loud cheers, I am sure.
[. . .]
If you are to use stories from other mags, use those that are hard to get, such as stories from the old Unusual Stories and Marvel Tales. From Blue Book, Saturday Evening Post, Colliers and other similar slicks, you can really gain some of the finer stories. p. 124
He goes on to add how he managed to improve magazine’s distribution at his local Greyhound Bus Terminal from no issues at all to eight, and that in three hours five of them had gone. Give that man a job in the publisher’s distribution office and we may not have the magazine crash of the late 50s.
Bruce Lane from Minneapolis, MN, has a complaint about the covers:
I will make another appeal for less flashy covers: if Lawrence must draw pin-ups, can’t he confine them to the inner pages? Every time I buy a copy of F.F.M. I have the feeling that people are making little circles with their fingers to their temples. What’s more, I get plenty of sidewise glances here at home. I’ll grant that a pretty girl does liven up a sometimes dull cover, but can’t she wear enough clothes to keep from being arrested, or freezing? p. 122
An interesting issue, and definitely one for those interested in the history of the field. ●
_____________________
1. Perhaps I was particularly aware of Siodmak’s novel because he had a rare SF short story in the third issue of F&SF I ever bought (September 1976). I also have a vague memory of its New English Library SF Masterworks book cover staring out at me, but cannot find any trace of it ever being published in this series.
Siodmak had a very interesting life and career. His Wikipedia page is here, and SFE page here. If you can get hold of it, there is an fascinating interview in Eric Leif Davin’s Pioneers of Wonder: Conversations With the Founders of Science Fiction (Amazon USA).
2. The bracketed text is in the book but not the magazine version. The text differences between the magazine and book versions run to three thousand words of cuts in the former (~50,000 vs. ~53,000 for uncorrected scans).
There are minor edits throughout the book, with the bulk missing from the entries for November 22nd, 28th, 29th, and December 12th (approx. 500, 550, 200, and 150 words cut); there are another 300 words cut from the ending (from May 15th onwards).
Some of these edits should probably have remained in—the passage below shows what is cut (underlined) from a telephone call between Schratt and Cory on November 22nd, a passage that reinforces the idea of the former’s plot to kill Donovan:
I phoned Schratt before I packed to leave for Washington Junction, to tell him I was on the way. The operator had to ring several times before there was an answer.
“I was asleep,” Schratt explained, but his voice sounded wide awake.
“How are you Patrick?”
I told him I would be home next day. He indicated no enthusiasm; I had the impression my return embarrassed him. I was afraid something had gone wrong with the brain.
“Oh no,” Schratt answered hastily. “Everything is fine. I just measured the electric discharge. It increases rapidly in output, close to five thousand microvolts now. The brain has grown twice its original size, too. If this continues, we shall have to have a bigger flask. I have enough brain ash for the serum. You needn’t worry, Patrick!”
He was very eager to dispel my uneasiness, but did not encourage me to return He wanted me to stay in Los Angeles and go wherever the brain told me to. He talked as if he were carrying out the experiment and I were the apprentice.
“But there is no reason to stay here.” I was surprised to find myself on the defensive. “I have found out everything I wanted to know. No use hunting down facts I already have.”
Schratt objected as glibly as if he had thought this out in advance: “But you still don’t know why Donovan ordered you to Los Angeles! Is the brain’s thinking logical or not? Have you found out whether it works according to a preconceived plan? Are its orders just a blurred outburst, void of reason, or is it proceeding systematically toward a fixed conclusion? I think you are obliged to find out whether this apparently exuberant growth of cell tissues destroys the organized process of thinking or augments it. Only then you will know whether the brain alone can carry out the process of thought or the whole central nervous system is interdependent.”
I was at a loss to answer. Schratt had swamped me with questions.
His feverish interest puzzled me and I could not dismiss the suspicion that he assumed this urgency to keep me away.
“By the way,” he went on, “how is Janice? Did you see her? She is at Cedars of Lebanon”
“I’ve talked to her,” I answered, “but haven’t seen her yet.”
“You ought to,” he said. This time there was honest concern in his voice
“I may,” I answered, “but even so, I’ll be back tomorrow.”
He had nothing to reply. We hung up.
Other cuts are more inconsequential, such as this passage about Cory and Janice’s relationship from the end of the November 28th passage, which reiterates previous subject matter:
I asked Janice. Finally, after thinking it over for a day, she came to the conclusion it must be a rhyme to cure people of lisping. That sounds likely, but why should the brain repeat such a line? Janice and I avoid mentioning the brain. She is waiting for me to speak first, but I have not the slightest intention of bringing up the subject. She knows too much already; it disturbs me to see her ponder about it. Whatever comes into Janice’s mind is written all over her face. She would be the worst secret agent in the world.
But I am getting used again to having her around. Actually during the few hours she leaves me with another nurse in her place I feel uneasy, as if something might happen and only she could help me.
When she is not around I sometimes become sentimental about her. I recall the day when I was hitchhiking my way back from Santa Barbara to the hospital and she gave me a lift. How often she waited patiently in her car to chauffeur me around; I had to live on the twenty dollars the hospital paid its interns.
She had always been willing to give me a lift. That seems to be her function in life.
She is patient. She always was. And persistent.
She made up her mind to marry me. She did. She wanted to get me away from Washington Junction—here I am. Now she is waiting to win me back to her.
She knows when to be around and when to leave me alone. She is like a fine voltmeter, recording the slightest variations in current.
How much happiness she could give to some people, instead of wasting her strength on me!
I must talk to her about that one day.
3. By proto-Ballardian I mean (a) the clinical language and viewpoint, and (b) the obsessive narrator and his embrace of, or at least indifference to, the increasing control Donovan exerts over him. (What is it they say about Ballard protagonists: they embrace their catastrophes rather than fight them?)
If J. G. Ballard had been a pulp writer in 1940s America using the ‘Mad Scientist’ trope, you wonder if this is the kind of thing he would be writing, albeit with better prose.
4. From my hazy memories of Brian W. Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree, I seem to recall that Vernian fiction (the US model of SF) is idea driven, Wellsian fiction (the occasional UK model) more focused on social concerns and character. I shall add Aldiss’s book to my reading list and correct this no-doubt mangled paraphrase in due course.
5. There is a good selection of Sanders’ work at the Pulpcovers website. The original cover painting and cover are here; a collection of his work is here. ●
