Sunday Scientifiction: Whispering Ether

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Here's the story from the March 1920 issue of Electrical Experimenter that I mentioned when I covered the issue in the last Four-Score Wednesday. It appeared on the newsstand 90 years ago last Monday (the 15th).

I seem to keep quoting Mike Ashley's The Gernsback Days, but what can I say, it's indispensable.

One of Gernsback's writers who started to corner this field [of scientific detective stories] was Charles S. Wolfe. Wolfe had been a contributor for a number of years, but it was not until the March 1920 Electrical Experimenter that he hit his stride. In "Whispering Ether," a safecracker, trying to steal Professor Proctor's explosives formula, is caught in the act by Proctor who has also invented a thought-reading machine. It's a short, effective story, marred as fiction only by the necessary explanation of how the device works.

It's interesting Ashley should say that, because before I looked this passage up, I was going to begin by saying that in this story, Wolfe comes up with an ingenious, unique explanation for thought transmission, although it really falls apart upon the slightest reflection. It's an amusing story, though.

Incidentally, this story has something to recommend it right now as a Sunday Scientifiction besides its anniversary. It's another story with a World War I connection. Which gives me yet another opportunity to mention our new edition of the 1919 novel Between Worlds, appearing in a book for the first time since 1929, and for the first time ever as a book in its complete text. The novel ties its story of Venusian travelers to Earth into several then-recent events from the war and its aftermath, as "Whispering Ether" ties into the war's prelude.

Sunday Scientifiction: The Love Machine

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Absolutely not by Jacqueline Susann, "The Love Machine" first appeared in the April 1921 issue of Science and Invention, and I present it to you a little Valentine's Day offering.

That's even though probably all women, and some men, may find its premise of rearranging of emotions a tad creepy. You could argue that the man gets his emotions relandscaped, too--or, as Professor Parsons points out, that Fennimore the client is probably going to end up worse off for loving this particular woman--but the point is, the woman didn't ask.

Er, happy Valentine's Day.

Of course, from the instant I picked this story out, through the present moment, I've had a constant loop going in my head of:

It's just the love machine,

And it won't work for nobody but you.

(By the way, I was beginning to get a little concerned that my title page layouts were boring. So here's the picture et al in the middle of the page. As it happens, the picture was in the middle of the page in the original magazine, too, although the title and author were up top.)

Sunday Scientifiction: Eddy Currents

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I don't pretend to be an expert at... well, anything, really, but not science fiction, either. But it seems to me like there aren't that many science fiction stories written about World War I as it was happening.

I suppose that's not too much of a stretch as observations go, seeing as there were no dedicated science fiction magazines until 1926, but as we know from meeting here each week, there were several venues for what we now call "science fiction" at the time.

Our book release of the month, Between Worlds, doesn't quite count. The Venusian characters are responsible for several events of the war, from the apparition of the Angels of Mons, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the flu pandemic that was still going on as the novel was written in 1919.

We've previously presented in this space "The Magnetic Storm," by Hugo Gernsback, published in his Electrical Experimenter magazine for August 1918. In that story, the Allies win the war through, unsurprisingly, electrical means. What those means are, however, is pretty surprising.

The second installment of "Baron Münchausen's New Scientific Adventures," of which we presented the sixth last month, was also by Gernsback, and published in the June 1915 issue of Electrical Experimenter. It was subtitled "How Münchausen and the Allies Took Berlin." I don't have that issue, but I'll make the bold guess that it had to do with the war.

After all that buildup, I have to tell you that "Eddy Currents," from the May 1917 issue, doesn't specifically mention that it takes place during the same war then ongoing. It clearly takes place in what was then the future, when the United States is at war (as it was not yet in May 1917), and has a considerable submarine fleet. However, the enemy is clearly Germany. America also seems to be alone against overwhelming odds, which suggests to me that in this now-alternative timeline, Germany has won the war in Europe. If it is a World War I story, it's the only one I've read in which the situation is considerably worse than it ever became. You could make the argument that even if this is a future war, it presupposes that World War I went far more badly than it did. After all, even the real World War II was never this bad.

Again, I'm not spoiling the story too much by saying our hero wins the day through electrical means. The "feeler" of the story is, in function, rather like sonar, which was under development in its earliest forms during the war, although how it works is quite different.

Incidentally, "Eddy Currents" sounds to me like either a vaudeville singer, or a member of the old-time Jewish mob. ("Don't cross Eddie Kurantz, or he'll bris you at the stalk.")

Sunday Scientifiction: Dr. Hackensaw's Secrets #2: The Secret of the Atom

We've met Dr. Hackensaw before, and as then, this story is "scientifiction" in the original Gernsbackian sense of fiction about the possibilities of science. The specifics of Hackensaw's inventions may be a bit absurd, but they're meant to be thought-provoking and inspiring for the science practitioners and enthusiasts who were the readership of Science and Invention magazine.

Last time, author Clement Fezandié speculated about television several years before it existed, and about magnetic recording of television about three decades ahead. This time, he has Hackensaw look into the structure of the atom, and produces this fairly startling notion for 1921:

“My idea is—and careful study of these microscopic enlargements convince me of the truth of my views—my idea is that there is only one element, considerably lighter than hydrogen, and that all the other elements are composed of two or more atoms of this original element.”

“And what is that element?”

“I don’t know. I call it ‘Proton’ because it is the first or original element. Every element known to man is a compound of several or many atoms of this proton, and the atomic weight of any of our elements shows how many atoms of proton it contains. Thus hydrogen, whose atomic weight is low, contains very few atoms of proton, while radium, whose atomic weight is high, contains many atoms of proton crowded into each atom of radium.”

Ernest Rutherford had already discovered, in 1919, that other atoms contain hydrogen nuclei (that nucleus turning out to be an individual proton). Langenscheidt's New College Merriam-Webster English Dictionary has a date of 1920 for the word "proton." But I have the feeling Fezandié didn't know about it yet, or he wouldn't have Hackensaw claim to invent the word.

Of course, Fezandié wasn't exactly right about protons. Hydrogen, of course, has one proton, not "few." He would have been exactly right had he related the number of protons to the atomic number. As far as atomic weight goes, it naturally goes up with the number of protons, but not directly. Fezandié was missing out on neutrons. Of course, so was everyone else until Rutherford conceptualized the particles the same year this story was published.

Neutrons carry the nuclear force that holds atomic nuclei together against the mutually repulsive positive charge of their protons. Fezandié had a different theory of what keeps the nucleus together, which also explained wherein the valence of an element lies. I was about to quote it, but heck, read the story; that's what it's there for.

Sunday Scientifiction: Munchhausen Lands on Mars

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As I think I've mentioned before, it's ironic that some critics label Hugo Gernsback, founder of Amazing Stories (and, a few years later, Science Wonder Stories), as the great villain in the history of science fiction. If not for him, they argue, science fiction wouldn't have been set apart as a genre of its own, in gaudy pulp magazines.

It's tough to imagine how, though. Hugo Gernsback didn't invent the pulp magazine, nor did he invent the genre pulp magazine. The world produced the western magazine, the detective magazine, the mystery magazine, and so on, without Gernsback's input. It seems inevitable that someone, at some point, would notice that those "'different' stories," as the Munsey magazines called them, were popular, and take a flyer on a magazine dedicated to them. But that's not the ironic part.

The ironic part is that while the aforementioned Munsey magazines were publishing Edgar Rice Burroughs' tales of sword-swinging Martians, Hugo Gernsback was publishing honest-to-gosh scientific fiction. It wasn't literature, but it sure as soap wasn't pulp, either.

This week's story, by the man himself, is an example of how Gernsback saw scientific fiction (or, as he later dubbed it, scientifiction) a decade before Amazing Stories: as a sort of lightly-dramatized speculative lecture. It says something about the secondary nature of the fiction in scientific fiction that, rather than telling it as a straightforward narrative, Gernsback felt the need not just to have this tale involve one of history's greatest liars, but related to us at second hand by an "I.M. Alier." It's as though writing something that was unabashedly fiction just wouldn't have been cricket.

That Amazing Stories and Gernsback's later magazines weren't all like this, was more a matter of what the public would support... which was the adventure-based stories of Argosy All-Story and the like. Even so, Gernsback maintained a fondness for idea-based science fiction. Science Wonder Stories had room for items like Rev. Louis Tucker's "The Cubic City," more a travelogue/thought experiment about a future city two miles on a side than a plot, per se. Certainly not what Edgar Rice Burroughs would write.

Not that there's anything wrong with Tucker, or Burroughs. As I've paraphrased, science fiction is large; it contains multitudes. And I like it that way.

Sunday Scientifiction: The Hawkinspiral

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To be honest, I'm not sure this counts as science fiction. It's about an unlikely invention, sure, and the resolution hinges on the working of a bit of technology. But I have the feeling that if the author had submitted it to Our Founder, Hugo Gernsback, it would have come back by return post.

Gernsback, especially in the pre-Amazing Stories days that are Sunday Scientifiction's bailiwick, preferred his fiction to demonstrate a scientific idea, or speculate on future technology, sometimes to the near-exclusion of plot. Even when it's a more conventional story, like "The 'Loaded' Line" from a while back, it's definitely the science and technology that's the point of the thing.

I can't even call this story science fiction by virtue of the magazine it appeared in, as I could if it came from one of Gernsback's magazines like Science and Invention. This one is from The Argosy, a general fiction magazine, which only had the occasional story with fantastic content.

But whether it's proper science fiction, or just a vaguely technological tall tale, I found it amusing, and that's good enough for me.

Sunday Scientifiction: The Transformation of Professor Schmitz

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You may have noticed that I've been presenting a lot of material here on the blog with connections to Thrilling Wonder Stories, Volume 2. The Star Trek New Voyages episode "World Enough and Time" (subject of a 21-page feature article) for YouTube Tuesday. Stories by authors in the volume for Friday Radio. And, of course, previews for Thursday Preview. If I could find games with a connection for Monday Game, or a serial with a connection for Saturday Matinee, you know I'd be right on it.

But I really didn't expect to find a connection for Sunday Scientifiction. I found it pretty much by accident; I simply found the earliest story by an author we haven't seen before in my (small) pre-Amazing Stories Gernsback magazine collection, and gave it a read. And hey presto.

This may be the earliest story to deal scientifically with the idea of teleportation—the notion that entered the public mind most indelibly with Star Trek's transporter. And did I mention that all the fiction in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Volume 2, is by writers from the various Star Trek television series? I did? Oh.

Anyway, its primacy forgives it some sins. Like many of the stories in the early Gernsback magazines, it mostly exists to present a scientific idea. And once it's done that—in this case, just when it feels like a plot is about to break out, it kind of slams to a close.

By the way, as a cat owner, I don't think I'd put mine to the use that Prof. Schmitz does his. I find it difficult enough to keep track of them without beaming them all over the place.

Sunday Scientifiction: An Excursion Into the Past

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Again, since we missed last week, you get a bonus this week—in this case, a story from the February 1922 issue of Science and Invention.

It's another in the early Gernsback mold of a scientific thought experiment... although, as he admits himself in the introduction, the science being thought about is pretty much bunk. Incidentally, he should have said that the mass of the ship would be infinite at the speed of light. As it approaches the speed of light, its mass would be increasing, but it would never reach infinity, because it can never reach the speed of light.

It's interesting, though, that the writer and/or Gernsback wouldn't allow faster-than-light travel by technological means even in science fiction. The ship in this story is literally heavenly in nature. As the author of the rules, presumably God can authorize bending them.

A bit of out-of-date terminology: When the angel speaks of leaving the universe and crossing others, he's talking about galaxies.

A bit of accurate-again terminology: Of course, Pluto had not yet been discovered in 1922. But by the recently-updated definition, Neptune is indeed "the farthest planet."

***

During this period, there was some experimentation with simplified spelling. For instance, thru instead of through, tho instead of though, gript instead of gripped, and so on. In this and previous stories, I've been using the more familiar spellings.

I mention it now because the first-person narrator uses some phonetic spellings, such as wuz, and I worried at times if I was correcting the deliberately incorrect. The writer twice uses focust in the first-person narration, but once uses focused in another character's dialogue. Of course, since everything is being told to us by the protagonist, dialogue and all, you'd think that, right or wrong, it would be spelled the same everywhere. Either way, I decided it was editorial inconsistency, and made them all focused.