Today, April 4, is the birthday of Stanley G. Weinbaum (1902-1935). Weinbaum had a very short career, only about 18 months or so, but he had a major impact on the science fiction field. He wrote about aliens that were truly alien, and his solar system was imaginative and full of whimsy.
Yes. I know. This is a fantasy blog.
But the two stories I want to look at today are a good fit for this blog because the first one reads like a fantasy for the most part and the second is very much a horror story.
Wonder Stories, June 1935
The first story is “Pygmalion’s Spectales”. It was first published in the June 1935 issue of Wonder Stories. A man from Chicago is on a business trip to New York. He meets a small professor in a bar the night before he has to go home. The professor tells him he has developed a method of making dreams reality.
They go back to the professor’s hotel, where the man gives the protagonist cap with a pair of goggles. The goggles are filled with a liquid which will allow the man to see and experience a dream world the professor has programmed into the cap.
The man finds himself in an idyllic world inhabited by a beautiful young woman and her grandfather. The woman’s name? Galatea.
This part of the story very much had a fantasy feel, drawing as it did on Greek mythology. You know there’s going to be heartbreak from the way Weinbaum set things up. There was a nice twist ate the very end, though, that lessened the tragedy.
The second story I read was “The Adaptive Ultimate”. It was originally published in the November 1935 issue of Astounding Stories under the pen name of John Jessell since Weinbaum’s story “The Red Peri” was the title story.
This has to be one of the darkest stories Weinbaum ever wrote, at least among the ones I’ve read. This was the second time I have read the story. The first time was decades ago when I was in the seventh grade. It has stayed with me a long time.
A doctor has developed serum he believes will enable an organism to adapt to and survive diseases. Unfortunately his serum does more than that. He convinces the head of the hospital where he works to let him try it on a tuberculosis patient who is within hours of death.
The woman starts to recover. Soon she’s dismissed from the hospital. Within hours she’s arrested for murder. An old man had money, and she needed it. So she took it and killed him.
She’s acquitted. Witnesses describe the woman who killed the man as having dark hair and dark eyes. The woman on trial has aluminum hair and light eyes. But it’s the same woman. Her hair, eye, and skin color adapt to the light conditions around her.
Soon she’s decided that she needs power to survive, and sets her sights on getting it. She also has set her sights on the doctor who developed the serum. He’s got to figure out a way to stop her, and he’s falling in love with her, in spite of his revulsion of her complete lack of morals and ethics. I was very impressed with how Weinbaum set this one up. It was written a few years before DNA was discovered, so some of the explanations are a bit dated. Still, it’s one of his best.
Weinbaum is one of those writers whose loss came too soon. I can only wonder what he would have written if he hadn’t died of lung cancer at such an early age.
Both of these stories are available in various electronic collections. I first read them in the Del Rey collection The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum.