"The Earth in Peril" by Donald A Wollheim
At first glance "Things Pass By" is more of an adventure and less of the thought-variant class of story which Leinster long since had proved he was capable of creating — yet its suggested extension of scientific method is fascinating, and its main plot-challenge is a doozy. This opening catastrophe is only a symptom.
"I'm really a sort of psychologist, you know. My specialty is the mechanics of research. But I test my theories about how to make discoveries by using them to make discoveries."
Even laying aside a writer's necessity for fast footwork to keep his plot going, it would have been nice to hear more about how this works, in the mind of the psychologist-scientist, or philosopher-inventor!
Now back to the cosmoquakes. What causes them is the arrival of outriders or scouts of a large formation of objects approaching the Solar System at extremely high speed, and hence possessing Einsteinian mass of appropriately high order — in this case, each object masses about twelve sols, or twelve times the mass of our Sun. This of course is a disaster of astronomical magnitude, a Doomsday scenario.
In "Things Pass By" we take for granted the Einsteinian "obverse" spacetime theory and its associated invention, the mass-nullifier developed decades earlier in "The Eternal Now". Adapting this to power a spaceship, Braddick heads out to attempt to neutralize the super-sol approaching entities. Leinster's solution is dramatic but thinly developed; and seems a stretch, to put it kindly.
Leinster's major failing here, though, is that his visualization of the damage to the Earth is merely on the order of the planetary gravity in Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer's When Worlds Collide (1933). Even though Leinster includes gravitational effects upon our Sun, the tidal damage actually required by his setup, even from the first super-sol "scout" passing by so closely, should destabilize our Sun altogether, resulting in a Solar Doomsday in which cosmoquakes and what-not would be "really very mild indeed", because the Sun would explode and the planets vaporized about as soon as any quakes occurred.
Fortunately for the world, even Leinster's very bright characters are unaware of any imaginative implausibilities. In Leinster's characterizations, however, we see that Braddick's spaceship construction and journey to deal with the on-rushing super-sols shows the reader some interesting people. The heroine, rather unusually for a Leinster story, brings considerable scientific training and initiative of her own to the action. And she still has some time for romantic thoughts. The two bad guys the hero has forced upon his project as the spaceship is built are well differentiated, one being a nasty organization-climber and the other a make-no-waves technician.
Fifteen years later, Murray Leinster returned to the approaching super-sols challenge at novel length in The Wailing Asteroid (1960), a far more plausible and engaging work. But you can see its roots in "Things Pass By". (Robert Wilfred Franson, troynovant.com)
This short epistolary Science Fiction story, "Letter From The Stars" (aka "Dear Pen Pal"), is about a foolish person who writes to an alien criminal. Like many episodes of PPP lately it is straight-up pulpy fun, but with a twist. (Jesse Wills, SFAudio)
"The Silly Seasons" is a variation of the boy cries wolf too often & villagers get weary & won't come to help when the wolf really arrives.
Satire is on the mass media. Mysterious phenomena are observed every July/August in various parts of US over several years - transparent domes that kill anyone who touches them but vanish by the time news reporters reach, mysterious spheres floating around that are seen by one group but cannot be verified later, ...
First year, the media milks it to the hilt with silly jokes of incredulity. Next year, fewer people are attracted towards the news, & media is forced to not play along far. Forth year, no one believes in the phenomenon but this time it's the real Martian invaders! (Tinkoo Valia, Variety SF)
“The Plant Revolt” was first published in Weird Tales, April 1930. Two scientists, Harley and Holm, go to Hartville to discover what is causing all the plants in the world to become ambulatory, shedding their leaves for tendrils. At first the world takes little notice, but eventually the plants combine into large predatory masses that kill and digest animal life.
“Plant masses in hordes, in hundreds, in thousands, that thronged thick in the street before me, that swarmed through all the village. Plant-masses that had gathered in a mass at one place in the street, their numberless tendrils gripping the dead, crushed body of one of the villagers, exuding sticky green fluid upon it. Plant-masses that had swiftly gripped with those tendrils the astounded, half-clad people who had ventured into the street in answer to those wild screams, and who now were themselves screaming as the hordes of plant-things pulled them down…” Harley escapes the destroyed village of Hartville by climbing the nearby mountain, in search of barren ground. There he discovers Holm, who he had assumed died in the attack, has been captured by Dr. Mandall, a colleague who had disappeared. Mandall has an atomic pile powering a machine deep in the mountain that releases the necessary nutrients into the air that allows the plants to become mobile. Harley tries to free Holm but is knocked out. When he wakes he finds Mandall and Holm fighting to the death. Mandall dies when he ventures too close to a mountainside tree that eats him. The two remaining men destroy Mandall’s machine. (GW Thomas, Dark Worlds Quarterly)
I read "Mary Anonymous", by Bryce Walton … It's not too bad -- Walton's stories didn't usually impress me much, but he could show some real ambition. Mars and Earth have been at war for decades, and Earth has just figured out the weapon to exterminate the Martians. But as they launch it, Mary suddenly rebels, and, as it turns out conditioned by the Martians, destroys the Earth spaceship. It's a surprisingly cynical story -- both Earth and Mars come off as irredeemably evil. Mary is sympathetic but does bad things too. The story ends with a twist revelation about Mary that seemed obvious to me (but then I had read the story before!) (Rich Horton, Strange At Ectaban)
In the selected readings by H.G. Wells, the stories show very compellingly what happens when a person tinkers with science, visibility, control, biology and religion. These stories are powerful and frightening at times and challenge our notions about humanity, ethics and social structure. “The Star”, however, is distinctly different in that it shows how powerless mankind is in reality to the might of the universe. It shows what nature can do to us and not how mankind can control nature.
Wells wants to contrast the immensity and size of the universe to the inconsequential incidentals with which mankind concerns itself. The narrator expounds that “few people without a training in science can realize the huge isolation of the solar system.”
The seriousness of the new star is noticed at first only by scientists, while the average person failed to care past their own little world to give much notice to the event taking place. “’What is a new star to me?’ cried the weeping woman, kneeling beside her dead”, while “pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the news told jestingly between the dances, and feigned an intelligent interest they did not feel.” As the star grew nearer, people continued to be nonplussed, and “save for the talk of idle moments and the splendor of the night, nine human beings out of ten were still busy at their common occupations.” Wells is suggesting that humans are merely interested in what directly affects their own lives: “Do we come in the way? I wonder —” asks the school boy.
The devastation sustained by the star was inevitable, and there was nothing, not even the learned scientists, could do to stop it. Prayer was futile. The havoc and destruction changed the earth irreversibly.
Comments
Post a Comment