The Asteroid of Gold by Clifford D Simak

First published in Wonder Stories, November 1932.

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This is exactly the type of story that I loved when I was a kid: tough guys in a realistic future with a an exciting problem. It’s the sort of thing that filled up the junior anthologies I used to get from the school library or the children’s sections of Titahi Bay and Porirua libraries.

We've left the era of obscure journey men and we're into the Golden Age proper now. I wouldn’t say I was ever a particular fan of Clifford D Simak, but his was one of those names I’d spot in the contents list – alongside other reliables like Asimov, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Pohl, Le Guin, Sheckley, Moorcock or Dick that would indicate an anthology was probably worth picking up. It’s a name that I associate indelibly with what I think of as ‘real’ science fiction, and this is a great example of what I mean.

The Voice From the Ether by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach

First published in Amazing Stories, May 1931.

You can download this story from this link. I'm not sure if it's  in the public domain: if you're the copyright holder let me know and I'll take this link down if you want. Otherwise I'll leave it up as a service to readers.

My favourite pulp-era cliché is the ranting mad scientist super villain. The best pulp villains are like tragic romantic heroes, driven to extreme acts by the power of their passions. Spurned in love or by society, they exact their revenge.

'The Voice From the Ether' tells the story of Tuol Oro, one of the greatest scientists on Mars. When his latest amazing discovery is dismissed as a mistake by the Martian scientific establishment, Oro decides to exact  ironic revenge – he will destroy them using the very discovery they mocked so cruelly! Like the scientists in Out of the Sub Universe, he’s discovered life in the sub-atomic realm and using Mad Science he’s able to grow the sub-atomic creepy crawlies to a macro-scale and unleash them against his tormentors.

Oro’s spirited description of his ghastly revenge makes this an enjoyable take on a story that never gets old. Tuol Oro is just a vehicle for the legendary forces of retribution that have been in existence since ancient times. Like a storm from the heavens, he merely unleashes the forces that destroys a decadent society.

The Power and the Glory by Willard Diffin

First published in Astounding Stories, July 1930.

This story is in the public domain. You can download it from Project Gutenberg by following this link.

 I have to say, I would not normally touch a story with a name like ‘The Power and the Glory’ unless it was an obvious piss-take. I guess it felt sombre and deep to the author at the time, but today it just seems ridiculously portentous, the sort of meaningless thing that Jeffrey Archer or Ken Follet might call a novel – in fact a google search reveals a Graham Greene novel of 1940 and a Spencer Tracy melodrama from 1933. Yeah, that fits.

The title fits this story, too. Like in The Eternal Man, we’re being talked down to here, given a good stiff talking to about important stuff.

The Eternal Man by D D Sharp

First published in Science Wonder Stories August 1929

First appearance, August 1929

Some of these stories succeed despite their slightly corny and old fashioned ways. The stagey monologues, the weird willingness to self-experiment, the slab of mad science that justifies some arbitrary set of so-called scientific laws rules for the protagonists to fall foul of or all now the corniest of SF cliches. But sometimes it all works – Out of theSub Universe and The Machine of Ardathia are both pretty good.

When it doesn’t work, though, when the story’s po-faced and static, the quaint temporality of the writing shows through. It doesn’t help that this is a classic idiot story.

Out of the Sub-Universe by R F Starzl

First published in Amazing Stories Quarterly, summer 1928

This story is an example of the anthropic principle in SF: where ever you go in the universe, no matter how far in the future, how remote in time or how distant the alien galaxy, every where is more or less like our world now.

It relies on the idea that that the structure of the atom is not just metaphorically a solar system but literally one, too. I remember this being quite common in comics and movies when I was a kid, but by then even I knew that the concentric circles we were drawing in our science books told only a part of the story, that the reality was far more complicated.

Even for the 1920s this would have been a very simplistic interpretation of atomic structure. Despite the authoritative tone of Professor Halley, the story doesn’t depend on even contemporary science. It’s more like a fairy tale – the plot is a consequence of clear but entirely arbitrary boundaries that the characters are encouraged to break.

Instead of scientific speculation, this is a propagandistic fable about power of scientific discovery.

The Machine Man of Ardathia by by Francis Flagg

First published in Amazing Stories, November 1987

If you thought transhumanism and the singularity were new ideas, think again! 1927 is the year that that Fritz Lang released Metropolis, Charles Lindberg made his first tarns-Atlantic flight and The Jazz Singer came out in the cinemas. Radio was still radical and new, and even evolution was a relatively novel - and dangerous  - concept. But SF writers were already imagining the creature that these two new and forces could bring about and the consequences of such a profound change.

While studying, the narrator suddenly sits up from his desk to see a bizarre apparition before him: a shrivelled human form encased in a mechanical cylinder. Glass and metal tubes ‘run at places into the body’ apparently sustaining it’s life. It claims to be from 28,000 years in the future and appeared in the narrator’s study by accident while travelling in time on a study trip elsewhen. 

It’s hard to imagine how extraordinary this idea must have felt to the readership at the time. A plausible demon or angel – not really either, but a man as unlike the man of today as the caveman was from the pulp-reading classes of the USA.

Poor prehistoric mammal, how could you, groping in the dawn of human existence, comprehend what is beyond your lowly environment! Compared to you, we are as gods.

Thousands of years of evolution don’t appear to have improved humanity’s manners. Perhaps the consequence of merging with its tools has made humanity a bit of a tool in the process.

The Coming of the Ice by G Peyton Wertenbaker

First published in Amazing Stories, June 1926.

This story is in the public domain. You can download it from Project Gutenberg by following this link.

This story starts with the idea that our regenerative energies are somehow dissipated through the process of reproduction. The mad scientist figure in this story – a sober establishment type called Sir John Granden – explains it thus:

You have heard, of course, that our bodies are continually changing, hour by hour, minute by minute, so that every few years we have been literally re-born. Some such principle as this seems to operate in reproduction, except that, instead of the old body being replaced by the new,and in its form, approximately, the new body is created apart form it. It is the creation of children that causes us to die, it would seem, because this activity is, dammed up or turned aside into new channels, the reproduction operates on the old body, renewing it continually.

When Sir John tells his flatmate about this, he’s immediately keen to give it a go. But there’s a price to pay:

One must give up love and all sensual pleasure. This operation not only takes away the mere fact of reproduction, but it deprives one of all things that go with sex, all love, all sense of beauty, all feeling for poetry and the arts.

Young Dennell is engaged and decides he should ask his girlfriend if it would be okay if he was to have an operation that denied him access to any tender emotion in the name of immortality. She readily assents and says she’d like to go through with it too, which suggests their relationship was perhaps not as passionate as it could be.