in the sea, talking protoplasm, and other things usually associated with over-indulgence in opium or heavy cheese late at night.
“About that time Stanley G. Weinbaum was at his peak. Everybody was nuts about his particular slant and so, being a trier, I imitated his style and produced Jo, the ammonia man of the planet Jupiter. This was in the yarn ‘Penal World’ published in Astounding, in 1937. Shortly afterwards I followed it up with a similar type of yarn called ‘Whispering Satellite,’ also in Astounding. On that point my activities with Astounding terminated because everybody was going like Weinbaum and the Editor was plenty sick. Campbell wrote me an explanatory letter and suggested changes of style.
“I chewed things over. The science fiction business was getting a hold on me, and imitation would not do any longer. Why not try the other extreme and find out what had not been done? I felt I had got something there. Well, what hadn’t been done? Mystery!
“Mystery! Of course! So far as I could figure out all the yarns were more or less straight experiments, adventures, theories—or, very rarely—a detective sort of problem. But what about a real juicy mystery woven round with science? Something to explain Mars, for instance, as it had never been explained before?
“So I launched on a style which, I have since found, was unique. I unwittingly brought webwork plots into science fiction with my initial yarn in a new style—’Locked City.’ The praise for that one made me all of a benevolent glow and produced ‘Secret of the Ring’ (which I shall always privately regard as the best yarn I’ve written so far).”
Fearn’s initial stratagem to write stories as Polton Cross in imitation of Weinbaum (who had died in December 1935) would almost certainly have been suggested to him by his U.S. agent, Julius Schwartz. So when shortly thereafter ‘Thornton Ayre’ followed suit, Schwartz would have been quite happy about it.
Schwartz, in fact, had been Weinbaum’s agent, and in 1937 he was also representing 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
