World Without Chance: Classic Pulp Science Fiction Stories in the Vein of Stanley G. Weinbaum. John Russell Fearn
many of the most prolific and successful American authors. It was surely no coincidence that many of those in his stable all began to write Weinbaum imitations at about the same time.
In his introduction, “The Wonder of Weinbaum” in the landmark Weinbaum collection, A Martian Odyssey (Lancer, 1962) the leading SF historian Sam Moskowitz outlined just how celebrated and influential Weinbaum’s short career (1934-35, with posthumous stories in the next few years) had been:
“Many devotees of science fiction sincerely believe that the true beginning of modern science fiction with it emphasis on polished writing, otherworldly psychology, philosophy and stronger characterization began with Stanley G. Weinbaum. Certainly few authors in this branch of literature have exercised a more obvious and persuasive influence on the attitudes of his contemporaries and through them on the states of the readers.…
“…what cannot be argued away are the strong influences of Weinbaum to be found in the work of authors as outstanding in science fiction as Henry Kuttner, Eric Frank Russell, Philip Jose Farmer and Clifford D. Simak specifically.”
The full roll call of other authors following in his footsteps is even longer, including, amongst others, Arthur K. Barnes, Eando Binder, Moskowitz himself, and not least John Russell Fearn.
Their borrowings involved not just the stories themselves, but Weinbaum’s astronomical backcloth to his stories. This useful framework was astutely identified by Isaac Asimov in his brilliant introduction to The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum (Del Rey, 1974):
“Weinbaum had a consistent picture of the solar system (his stories never went beyond Pluto) that was astronomically correct in terms of the knowledge of the mid-1930s. He could not be wiser than his time, however, so he gave Venus a day-side and a night-side, and Mars an only moderately thin atmosphere and canals. He also took the chance (though the theory was already pretty well knocked out at the time) of making the outer planets hot rather than cold so that the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn could be habitable.
“On each of the worlds he deals with, then, he allows for the astronomic difference and creates a world of life adapted to the circumstances of that world.”
These two new Fearn collections present all of the Weinbaum pastiches that Fearn published—a dozen in total. And, as a bonus, the second volume also contains a thirteenth story, “Locked City” by Thornton Ayre, his first story marking the radical new direction Fearn was to take when he abandoned the Weinbaum slant. Each story is annotated with further sidelights, setting the stories in the context of the science fiction magazine scene in the late 1930s and early 1940s, one of its most interesting and dynamic periods.
I hope you will enjoy reading these stories as much as I did compiling them…and that they may intrigue you enough to want to seek out Weinbaum’s own stories if you have not already encountered them.
—Philip Harbottle,
Wallsend, England, July 2012
PENAL WORLD
BY THORNTON AYRE
From Astounding Stories, September 1937
That Fearn—and not Frank Jones—was the author of this, the first Ayre story to be published—is proven by the fact that a dozen years later, he incorporated whole swathes of it into his own ‘Golden Amazon’ novel, Lord of Jupiter (1949).
As the Amazon series progressed, the superwoman had been planet-hopping, and in this novel she adventures on the tempest-lashed hell planet of Jupiter, where she meets Relka, a true Jovian. Relka is one of Fearn’s most fascinating alien characters, and he was entirely based on Jo, the ‘Joherc’ Jovian character in “Penal World.”
Stanley G. Weinbaum was universally acknowledged by his peers as the creator of the first really memorable alien in science fiction. The noted SF historian Sam Moskowitz has written in Explorers of the Infinite (1963) that:
“It was Weinbaum’s creative brilliance in making strange creatures seem as real as the characters in David Copperfield that impressed readers most. Tweel, the intelligent Martian, an ostrich-like alien with useful manipular appendages—obviously heir of an advanced technology—is certainly one of the most memorable aliens in science fiction. The author placed great emphasis on the possibility that so alien a being would think differently from a human being and therefore perform actions which would seem paradoxical or completely senseless to us.”
Whilst Fearn’s Joherc is not quite in the same league, he is not so far below it.
On rereading “Penal World”, Fearn had realized that, suitably adapted, much of it could nicely be incorporated into his novel, including his vivid descriptions of the conditions on Jupiter’s surface:
“They afforded him a little shelter from the tycane—technical name for the two-hundred-and-fifty-mile-per-hour wind forever raging from pole to pole of the giant world. Yet by reason of the enormous gravity the effect of the wind on a human being was about equal to a gale of one hundred miles per hour.” (“Penal World”)
“…as they emerged from beyond the protection of the dome’s bulk the full fury of the eternal hurricane of Jove smote them. They both staggered beneath its onslaught, but did not lose their balance. Mightily though it blew they could still make slow, laborious progress, the reason being that the wind, held by the vast gravity, only equalled the pressure of an earthly gale at perhaps ninety miles an hour.” (Lord of Jupiter)
“With lackluster eyes he peered into the shadows beneath the Fishnet Trees. In every direction about their boles sprouted the weird below-zero Jovian plants, bearing not the vaguest relation to Earthly vegetation, but patterned in some incomprehensible surrealist style, full of bars, cubes, oblongs and angles, more crystal than vegetational in form. Flowers there were none. Jovian vegetation, in the main, reproduced itself by fission and lived in the slow, creeping style of the unicell.” (“Penal World”)
“…the trees of the crystalline jungle sprouted branches of much the same pattern as newly woven cobwebs, rings of interlace, glittering crystal, the outermost edges of the rings being octagonal in shape. Here there was weird, fantastic beauty, every atom of it composed of ammonium base. Even the ‘grass’ was composed of fantastic spears of glass-like substance, which cracked to powder as the pair advanced.
“Ever and again, as they stumbled more deeply into the preposterous wilderness, below-zero forms—living by dividing upon themselves in the fission style of a unicell—scudded into safety, looking rather like spiked glass marbles shot through with veins of superb colour.” (Lord of Jupiter)
“Still they watched as the joherc came into complete view—a biped, only two feet tall, with two legs nearly as thick as a man’s body and almost fantastically muscled. Further support was provided by the broad, kangaroo-like tail on which it sat ever and again. Its remaining anatomy was made up of a pear-shaped body, stumpy arms, enormous pectoral muscles and chest—in which, according to description and reconstruction at the settlement bureau, there beat three powerful hearts to create a normal circulation in the enormous drag. On the mighty shoulders was the strange, triple-jointed neck, semi-human face with wide, half-grinning mouth and scaly head. A pure product of ammonia, living in a climate ideally suited to it—a living, thinking creature of superhuman strength and swiftness, mentally active, yet humanly childlike in manner—a veritable cosmic paradox.” (“Penal World”)
“He found himself gazing at an incredible creature. He had the contour of a man standing three feet in height and probably every inch as broad. Short, blocky legs were very powerful. His arms, too, were short and corded with muscles. To this was added a great barrel of a chest, a neck like a pillar and a perfectly round head. He had yellow eyes, broad nose and a fanged mouth. He had neither hair nor raiment, his entire body seeming to be covered in crystalline scales.” (Lord of Jupiter)
Relka also shares the joherc’s passion for consuming crystalline ammonia salts. And like him he has no ears, and is telepathic (“nature’s provision to prevent us being deafened by the vibrations in this heavy atmosphere”) and is highly intelligent. However, Fearn added some new qualities for the purposes of the novel—Relka