Free Fiction: The Point of View

click image to download story (2.05 MB pdf file)

Now it's time to put on our subjuctivisor and explore alternative time, like Dixon Wells in "The Worlds of If."  And it's doubly appropriate to do so, because the history we're visiting is the one in which we're able to read a preview of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Volume 4—or whatever volume in which I would finally have published "The Point of View," the third and final story of Stanley G. Weinbaum's van Manderpootz series, which began with "The Worlds of If."

This story's Attitudinizor reminds me a little of the Point of View Gun, my favorite new bit in the movie of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  You use it to short-circuit arguments by forcing the other person to see where you're coming from.  If van Manderpootz lived in our actual early 21st century, he would most certainly find a way to make his Attitudinizor work over the Internet.  And it would be the greatest thing that ever happened to that medium.  Sometimes I think the force that runs the World Wide Web is transference.  At least three-quarters of Internet comments wouldn't exist, or would at least be far less bitter and hostile, if the writer weren't subconsciously projecting everything he hates onto the person he's responding to, irrespective of what that person actually posted.

Speaking of the early 21st century, Weinbaum makes a little continuity error in this story.  He sets it in 2015, and says it's the year after the two previous stories.  Evidently, he remembered he'd mentioned 2014 in "The Worlds of If," but forgot that it was in reference to Dixon's college days... which Weinbaum said in that story were eight years past.  I suppose I could just correct it in the text to 2023, but while I'll correct punctuation, like adding the second comma setting off a clause, I draw the line at correcting factual errors in old stories.  (I made a similar decision in proofing the book of In Caverns Below, when Stanton Coblentz's timescale didn't add up.)

Free Fiction: Dr. Hackensaw's Secrets #9: The Secret of Television

[Here's another one, brought back at long last to the land of the downloadable. Originally posted January 25, 2009, under the category of "Sunday Scientifiction."]

I missed last week's Sunday Scientifiction because I was busy finishing up Thrilling Wonder Stories, Volume 2. So this week, enjoy a two-fer!

Here we have one of a long series that ran in Hugo Gernsback's Science and Invention magazine from 1921 to 1925. I thought it would make amusing reading, less than three weeks before the United States makes an epochal change in television, putting an end to full-power analog broadcasting. DTV and HDTV have nothing on what Clement Fezandié imagines.

[UPDATE 2011: As it turned out, the U.S. had one more delay before the big switchover finally occurred on June 12, 2009.]

It also provides a window into scientific fiction as Gernsback pictured it in the early days. As Mike Ashley says in his indispensable volume The Gernsback Days:

[T]he episodes hardly qualify as stories, but rather a series of discourses, just as you might imagine Fezandié lecturing....

Writing in 1961, Gernsback called Fezandié a "titan of science fiction." This is hard to grasp by today's definition of science fiction, but we have to remember that Gernsback was talking about his own definition. These stories more than any others in Science and Invention epitomized Gernsback's model for scientific fiction. They extrapolated from existing known science to suggest future inventions and what they might achieve; and all for the sole purpose of stimulating the everyday man, who had a penchant for experimenting and tinkering with gadgets, into creating that future.

I'm guessing Fezandié was aware that much of what he was writing was, to use the expression of a much later age, technobabble. But in making Hackensaw's television impossibly grandiose, he might "stimulat[e] the everyday man" to a greater degree than he could with a more modest extrapolation.

It's worth pointing out, though, that John Logie Baird first demonstrated monochrome television transmission a bit over three years after the issue containing this story left the newsstands, so any kind of television was still science fiction. What's more, magnetic video recording didn't happen until 1951. (It was on magnetic tape and not wire, of course, but you can hardly blame Fezandié for not forseeing that.)

Click image to download story (489KB pdf file)

Free Fiction: The Worlds of If

It occurred to me... I've already presented the sequel to this story, which was going to appear in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Volume 3, as a Free Fiction item.  Why not give away the story itself, which appears in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Volume 1 (aka Summer 2007), as an inducement to check out the rest of this fine, fine volume?

In addition to "The Worlds of If," Volume 1 features these stories from the original run of Wonder Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories:

"The Moon Era" by Jack Williamson
"The Alien Machine" by Raymond F. Jones (the first of the "This Island Earth" stories)
"Salvage" by Cleve Cartmill
"The Portable Star" by Isaac Asimov (making its first-ever book appearance)
"The Irritated People" by Ray Bradbury (doing likewise)

"Farthest Horizons," a story by Geoffrey A. Landis, previously available only in Science Fiction Age

And these all-new stories:

"Jovian Dreams" by Ben Bova
"Three's a Crowd" by Eric Brown
"Love Seat" by R. Neube
"Enlightenment" by Michael Kandel
"Tomb of the Tyrant Emperor" by Constance Cooper
"Dark Side" by Kevin King

Plus articles, comics, reviews of classic movies on DVD, new and classic artwork, and much, much more!  Check out the Amazon widget to the right and press the button to buy a new or used copy.  Or check out the Amazon product page here.

Click image to download story (1.85MB pdf file)

Free Fiction: The Magnetic Storm

This week, a Free Fiction item that comes from the closet, even though it was once on this site.

Hard as it may be to believe, it's tough to find services that will store your files indefinitely for free in a way you can hotlink them to your blog.  After my pdf file of "The Magnetic Storm" disappeared into the ether for the second or third time, I demonstrated my usual perseverance by declaring, "To hell with it," and deleting the post altogether.

But when I revived the blog, I decided to give another shot to getting something for nothing.  And now, with OpenDrive fitful, but at least there most of the time, I can bring this story back online.  As you'll see below, this was the first bit of free fiction I offered on the blog, then under the category of "Sunday Scientifiction."

(As usual, if OpenDrive is feeling cranky, there will be a question mark below instead of a thumbnail image, and you should try again later.)


(originally posted November 23, 2008)

Click here to download file (386KB pdf)

And what is scientifiction, you may ask? It's the name, a contraction of "scientific fiction," that Hugo Gernsback gave to the nascent genre, back when it began to appear in such magazines of his as Electrical Experimenter and Radio News. (Incidentally, the abbreviation is Stf.) He continued to use it when he founded Amazing Stories, the first true science fiction magazine.

Gernsback lost control of his first group of magazines in 1929, and immediately founded another—of which two titles were Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories. He then popularized the less ungainly term "science fiction" for his new magazines. (He unknowingly reinvented it; it was first used decades earlier, but didn't catch on.) Some fans stuck with the old expression for a while. Note our last Wednesday Feature, about Forrest J Ackerman's "Boys' Scientifiction Club."

Perhaps Gernsback was worried that the new owners of his old magazines would consider "scientifiction" a proprietary phrase. But some years later, Thrilling Wonder Stories' sister magazine Startling Stories billed itself as "Best in Scientifiction" with, presumably, no real protest from the owners of Amazing.

Anyway, what you'll see in Scientifiction Sundays is stories from before the advent of the specifically science fiction magazine, whether published in the Gernsback magazines or not. Every week or two, we will bring you tales, in pdf form, from the formative days of science fiction as a recognized genre.

Today's story is by Gernsback himself, and dates to 1918. As you will read, "scientifiction" at this stage very much fit the name, frequently falling to the far end of what's considered hard SF today, or even what they now call "mundane SF." (This particular one is more on the imaginative side.)  The stories use existing science, or fairly modest extrapolations therefrom, in settings seldom more than a few decades off. Here, Gernsback has the then-ongoing Great War (aka World War I) brought to a victorious conclusion for the Allies in a most amazing, but logical, fashion.

SPOILER WARNING

Perhaps I'm outing my scientific ignorance, but it seems to me what Gernsback is describing here is something akin to an electromagnetic pulse weapon, only one created by a stream of electricity carried by wires and broadcast into the air, rather than through the side effects of a nuclear explosion. And mind you, he's describing this in nineteen-freakin'-eighteen.

Free Fiction: The Ideal

Spring cleaning continues here at Thrilling Wonder Stories.  (It's typical of me that I shouldn't get around to "spring cleaning" until July.)

Thrilling Wonder Stories, Volume 1 (easier to find under its original title, Thrilling Wonder Stories – Summer 2007) featured the classic 1935 novelette "The Worlds of If," by Stanley G. Weinbaum, who had one of the most brilliant short careers in science fiction history.  "The Worlds of If" was the first of three adventures involving the inventions of the brilliant Professor Haskel van Manderpootz, and how they complicate the life of lovelorn young Dixon Wells in the distant future of about 2020.

I  prepared the second, "The Ideal," for print in Volume 2, and was mostly done before I decided to make it a Star Trek-themed issue.  And that's how it was left, an unfinished Quark file... until today, when I polished it up for your cost-free reading pleasure.

In today's Free Fiction, Dixon learns the hard lesson that, to coin a phrase, you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find... you can't get what you need, either.  It strikes me that, for comedies, the endings of these van Manderpootz stories are kind of downers.  But, even more than three-quarters of a century after his extremely untimely death, the writing of Stanley G. Weinbaum remains so intelligent and vibrant, it's a great read even though we wouldn't to be this story's hero.

(If there's a question mark below, instead of a thumbnail image, OpenDrive is having one of its moods again, and you should try again later.)

click image to download story (2.06MB pdf)

Notice, by the way, the reference to the "market crash of 2009."  Boy, I'm glad in the 76 years since this story first appeared, we've learned enough about economics to keep that sort of thing from happening in real life.  (Breaks down sobbing.)

Free Fiction: Plan "T"

More closet-cleaning this week, although this one was always intended to be free fiction.  It was going to be the "Sunday Scientifiction" for February 28, 2010, and the only reason it didn't appear was that I accidentally saved it as a draft instead of set it to post automatically.  Here it is, just as it was going to be, both the text below and the pdf file, complete with 2010 copyright date and ad for our then-current publication, Between Worlds.


OpenDrive is still, as they say, "experiencing technical difficulties," so if there's a question mark below instead of a thumbnail image, please try again later.

* * *

click image to download story (287KB pdf)

A big part of the audience of Hugo Gernsback's Electrical Experimenter, it seems, was radio enthusiasts. Gernsback had a separate magazine, Radio News, especially for this audience, featuring, along with the articles, radio-based fiction. Almost none of it was what we would generally call science fiction, except perhaps in the "mundane science fiction" sense of being fiction about contemporary technology.

All the same, Electrical Experimenter had this kind of "radio fiction," as well, particularly Thomas N. Benson's "Wireless Wizz" series. (This week's story isn't one of those.)

To be honest, I usually go by Mike Ashley's The Gernsback Days to determine whether a story is science fiction or not, and therefore whether or not the issue containing it is worth obtaining. The book calls "Plan 'T'" science fiction, but it seems pretty borderline to me, inasmuch as there's nothing in it that couldn't actually be done in 1919. It's mainly the thought process involved in the story, the use of scientific deduction involving technology, that gives it any affinity to the genre as it developed.

But in that very sense, "Plan 'T'" is an interesting example of "scientific fiction" of that era, before "science fiction" developed... and along with it, science fiction fans.  And those fans, through their bibliographies and letters to the magazines, were at the forefront of deciding what the boundaries of the genre would be... what was "science fiction," and what was not—a discussion we're having again in our own time.

(By the way, when the hero/narrator first calls the criminals "probable counterfeiters," I wondered where he'd gotten that idea. I'd missed the significance of Watkins and Short being paper manufacturers. Also, for quite a while, I had no idea what the conversation meant about whether there was "any 'queer' in circulation now." He's talking about funny money.)

Free Fiction: The Second Deluge

(UPDATE 7/25/11: OpenDrive, where I'm keeping my files these days, has been having a little difficulty lately, and is up and down with little rhyme or reason.  So if there are question marks below instead of thumbnails, try again later.)

A man predicts environmental disaster for the Earth. The polar caps will melt. The coastal cities will be inundated. People laugh at him. Politicians dismiss him. Press and entertainers make a laughingstock of him.

Sounds familiar, somehow. Hmm. Can't quite put my finger on it.


Today, we clean the closets here at Thrilling Wonder Stories.

As I said Thursday, we're not publishing anything right now. (This may change, however, and our five releases to date remain in print.) Here's something prepared just before that became the case.

You see, this was going to be Thrilling Wonder Stories Origins Series #3, following up When the Sleeper Wakes and Between Worlds, but frankly, the sales on those two were such that I realized I was probably going to lose money just setting this third one up with the print-on-demand service.

So now, 18 months or so later, let my "to hell with it" be your gain, and enjoy, absolutely free of cost on your end (and loss on mine) The Second Deluge, by Garrett P. Serviss. Originally appearing as a seven-part serial in The Cavalier in July 1911 through January 1912, it quickly (March 1912) saw book publication by McBride, Nast, and Company. It's from a ratty but proud copy of that edition that I scanned the illustrations.

Garrett P. Serviss was a popular speaker and writer on astronomical and scientific topics, as well as a pioneering writer of what Hugo Gernsback would later lastingly call science fiction. Serviss's first novel was Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898), an unauthorized sequel to H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. He wrote five other novels and a short story.

My favorite aspect of the novel is its occasional satirical edge, especially in how Serviss shows what's going on in the wider society before the deluge. I especially enjoy the sequence on pages 13-15, with a vaudeville performer's burlesque of the scientist. It's interesting to see someone, almost exactly a century ago, taking notice of how the mass media decides who it's going to take seriously, and who it's going to make a laughingstock. As I say, things haven't necessarily changed a whole lot.

There's also a bit of irony, unusual for adventure fiction of the time, in the last chapter that I don't want to ruin for you.

And, just to show you that this was meant to be an honest-to-gosh book, I also present the would-be cover.

Click image to download novel (9.35MB pdf)

Click image to download cover (1.02MB jpg)