This is great stuff, especially if you're at all curious about Barsoom's topography, or would like to build a usable map of Barsoom for gaming or even a bit of fiction...like for the forthcoming Heroes of Mars project...from Pulp Empire...
"A lost city in the Cambodian jungles run by a pint-sized tyrant wearing a gem-encrusted belt buckle; Beautiful women who lure Dillon and his rival, rock musician Sly Gantlet, into a clash of alpha males and a deadly set-up; a deceitful queen and a backstabbing friend; a quest for an evil artifact linked to the betrayer of Christ. Four Bullets for Dillon includes four hard to find and never before seen stories ripped from the life of global adventurer and instigator, Dillon."
Four Bullets for Dillon includes the story,Dead Beat in La Esca, that was co-written by Derrick Ferguson and Joel Jenkins and features Dillon's first encounter with Sly Gantlet. It is a hilarious cross-over not to be missed!
And remember that with proof of purchase of Four Bullets for Dillon you'll also get the 10 page illustrated "Dillon And The Escape From Tosegio." Details can be found here.
If you are a fan of the old pulps or are curious about the New Pulps, this is a great book to get you started.
Check out the Pulp Magnet column on Dillon (http://www.newpulpfiction.com/2011/09/dillon.html ) and watch the New Pulp Fiction site for our up-coming interview with Dillon's creator Derrick Ferguson!
The Time Travelers is a movie originally done in 1964. I first saw it in black and white as a kid watching late night monster movies in the Seventies. Perhaps that explains a few things.
Unlike the Irwin Allen classic TV series that came after it, The Time Travelers were only trying to open a window into the past. But like all good vintage SciFi-Bmovies, the lead scientist is an arrogant snot full of hubris and vinegar, just like they still make 'em.
Dr. Erik von Steiner pushes things to the limit like any good German Engineer.
Then he pushes it farther.
Harder.
Until something breaks.
And it does, it does. Something breaks, others things fuse, and a few sparks fly. It's not Irwin Allen-level pyrotechnics, but this is 1964 and they're on a budget.
Ahem.
Their window into time comes into focus. It shows a seemingly endless desert landscape. It was supposed to show the campus grounds.
It does.
The Time Window is looking out on the site of the campus in the year 2071.
After a devastating nuclear war. But not just any nuclear war--this war literally blasted the survivors back into the stone age, complete with tribes of nasty, brutish degenerate mutants. They're probably cannibals, but it isn't really expressly stated. One doubts that they'd still be finding cans of peaches or beans out in the wastelands, but who knows.
But wait a moment, we're getting ahead of things.
Let's take a step back.
The intrepid Herr Doktor Steiner and his associates discover that their Time Window is actually a gaping Time Barnyard Door. Their fly is down and wide open, technologically speaking. The disposable technician-kid discovers that the 'window' is really a door way when he practically falls through it. One wonders if the stodgy guys in white lab coats would have noticed it was a portal until after a mutant came at them through it. Like when a pair of degenerate mutants come after the obligatory blonde left behind when the two scientists go running off after the Technician-kid who ran off before them.
Who knew that fire extinguishers could be so lethal. At least to degenerate mutants.
The scientists, their half-wit Technician-kid and their obligatory blonde (literally a Playboy Playmate) find themselves stranded on the wrong side of the Portal when it collapses.
Then the mutants come running after them--probably attracted by the noise made when the portal collapsed.
The Doktor Steiner, the other scientist and the blonde run away, chased by mutants until they meet-up with the Technician-kid who has gathered a bunch of ammo--throw-able stones. They drive off the mutants by throwing stones at them. Then they run away some more, until they find a cave.
The mutants figure out where they are fairly soon and come running again.
But this time they are stopped by an invisible force field. The same force field that did not stop the player characters Scientists, Technician and Centerfold from entering the cave just moments before.
The force field belongs to a group of survivors who wear cool white outfits, obviously descended from the not so cool white lab coats of the Scientists.
The survivors are totally certain that the Earth can not support life very much longer. But luckily they know how to build a spaceship and plan to cart off all their women-folk to a planet around another star (Alpha Centauri IV). Oh and these survivors also build flesh-tone rubber-covered sex-doll androids that look like mostly naked humans with leather shoulder pieces, numerical tattoos on their chests and weird non-faces. And they use a modification of the Laser Beam Drill that shrinks matter in a gobbledygook sort of handwavium-activated manner that just sounds stupid, but looked cool.
Herr Doktor Varno, the resident Aryan super-scientist kindly explains everything to the Time Travelers. He uses a handy video display to demonstrate the end of the world.
These survivors claim to be the last 'normal' inhabitants of the Earth. They were obviously underground when the nuclear war took place. Deep underground. They are descended from scientists and their families who were deep underground in a secret complex. Hmmm...what sort of secret complex might they have been hiding-out in? Could it be the one that The Time Tunnel was built within? That would explain the presence of spare parts that the Time Travelers could use to rebuild their Time Portal.
Nah. That'd be just plain weird.
The intrepid Herr Doktor Steiner and his crew help the survivors to complete work on their spaceship that they hope to use to escape the mutant-dominated Earth. But then the really advanced people of the future announce that they will not take the Time Travelers along with them to Alpha Centauri IV. So sorry. Too bad. There's a schedule and a deadline to meet. The spaceship will depart on schedule. Even a second of delay would be disastrous--or so it is claimed. The fact that the Time Travelers were not of good Aryan stock isn't directly mentioned, but there is an uneasy implication that kind of hangs over this sequence that carries a very creepy undercurrent.
Anyhow.
The Time Travelers don't have a lot of choice. They keep working on re-building their Time Window/Portal, but they do it sullenly. Resentfully. Maybe they were really looking forward to suspended animation or the new android-servants that were going to be theirs in the New World.
But it was not to be.
Those degenerate mutants with the bad breath come storming in and wreck everything. Bastards. If only the survivors had hired Carson (Yul Brynner's character in The Ultimate Warrior), they could have driven off the smelly pseudo-caveman mutants. Heck, Andre the Giant would have been really helpful in that regard, even on his most off day, unless the mutants offered him some irradiated booze. But that's a tangent for another day.
The crew from the Time Window/Doorway rebuild their Temporal Portal using the newfangled technology of the post-apocalyptic Home Depot and a lot of old fashioned baling wire, spit and ingenuity that only a Scientist with a Heidelberg Scar (he keeps it in his wallet, don't ask) can bring to bear. They open the new Portal/Window and manage to escape from the nuked-out wasteland of 2071 with a few new friends, and manage to do so just before the degenerate nuclear mutants burst in and try to eat them.
One of the group tosses something back through the Portal/Window and causes it to collapse. Maybe those mutants will figure it out someday and re-open the Portal/Window. All they need is one smartass Mentally-Enhanced mutant and they're two-thirds of the way there.
Once back in their lab--what luck! Someone was rolling really well that night--the group finds out that they're still sort of screwed anyhow--the GM is a real jerk after all. They are all aging rapidly. The passage through the Time Window/Portal has caused them all to speed up drastically in relation to the rest of the world.
Yeah. It doesn't make a lot of sense. If you were going to balk at something why did you wait until now?
Ahem.
The brilliant Herr Doktor Steiner determines that they have only one option left to them. They must go 100,000 years into the future. He comes to this realization through very, very scientific means. He is a Top Man after all. Good thing he stayed out of archaeology.
They go into the empty black screen of the year 100,000+ and ta-daa! They all fail their save versus bad writing and wind up trapped within an ever-accelerating time loop. They've invented the Groundhog Day from hell years before Bill Murray made it fun.
If all that hasn't turned you off, you can watch this extravaganza, just like I did all those years ago.
It's an interesting movie, more for the assumptions and the early special effects than for the writing or dialogue. A lot of the sets and sound effects really do evoke the classic original Star Trek series. There might well have been some some sort of recycling going on--Dr. Varno/John Hoyt certainly did appear in Star Trek later on.
The mutants in this movie are really shown as having a lot of messed-up genes more than the Gamma World craziness of extra limbs or eye-blast powers, etc. They are lacking fingers, seem to be somewhat impaired in their mental functions, and are really sad, tragic non-survivors, really. One wonders if they are really the left-overs of the war, or just throwbacks and those deemed unfit and thus summarily ejected from the bunker redoubt of the scientifically-oriented survivors and their sex-doll androids and the silver spaceship that is supposed to take them all off to a brave new world...
Gladiator is a pulp novel first published in 1930 by Philip Wylie. Yeah, that Philip Wylie -- the guy who also wrote When Worlds Collide. Gladiator was Wylie's third novel (a drastic revision of his first, Titan, actually) and came out nearly eight years before Siegel & Shuster invented Ubermensch Superman for National/DC. In 1940 Wylie threatened to sue DC & Siegel for infringing/plagiarizing Gladiator, and even though Siegel had reviewed Gladiator in 1932 for his own fanzine, he claimed to not have been influenced or inspired by Wylie's character in developing Superman. Siegel even signed an affidavit to that effect. Whatever the truth of the matter, the case never went anywhere and Wylie seems to have dropped the matter. Speculation is that he did so because both Siegel & Schuster were in the midst of other lawsuits and in financial straits. Maybe that is so. The whole mess faded from public view fairly quickly. Most people forgot all about the brouhaha. But others haven't. Many believe Wylie's novel to have been the original impetus for Siegel & Schuster's very popular (and very litigious) character. This entry over at the Superman Story site is a quick example of someone still carrying the banner of the Gladiator's lost cause forwards into the modern day. They also have a very quick description of Gladiator's Hugo Danner that'll make it fairly obvious that Superman had a predecessor in print eight years his senior. Just saying...
So who is Hugo Danner? Good question. Philip Wylie was quite a bit ahead of the curve in 1930 (or 1926 when he later claimed to have first written the manuscript for Gladiator...). He had Hugo's papa, the not so mad scientist Professor Abednego Danner of Colorado invent a serum that he then injects into his pregnant wife. Really. It's another bit of science fictional spousal abuse just like in The Inmost Light all over again.
The serum doesn't kill the unborn child, nor the wife. Which is probably a darn good thing as it would have led to an investigation and some serious questions regarding Professor Abednego Danner's sanity and highly unethical methods, to say the least. Fortunately for little Hugo Danner, he is born with the proportional strength of an ant and the leaping ability of a grasshopper. Oh and he's bulletproof the way that Achilles was invulnerable to blades, etc., and that's without getting dipped in any smelly old river, and without the whole vulnerable heel thing either.
At first he seems like a lucky, lucky bastard...
...but in truth Hugo Danner is one morose, depressed and frustrated guy. He lacks confidence, has no real direction in life and to be quite frank, he's a real waste of superpowers. But then that was Wylie's intention. He wasn't interested in the colorful tights nor the super competent crime-fighters like The Shadow, Doc Savage, etc. He was looking at things from a more humanistic angle--how possessing such powers would remove a person from the commonplace in a way that might make it difficult for them to adapt, or to find their place in the world.
When some costumed schmuck starts prattling on and on about how they'd like to lead a normal life--it's partly Wylie's fault, and more importantly unrealistic bullshit bad writing, but it's what the unwashed masses expect, so the same old slop gets tossed out to them by the bucket-full.
Hugo Danner has a few modest adventures, most of which you see revised and made a bit more colorful and exciting or at least interesting in the early run of Superman.
In the end Hugo goes up on a mountain top and asks God in a weirdly snivelly manner for some advice and gets struck dead by a lightning bolt.
Boom.
Dead.
Wow.
What a harsh bit of feedback indeed.
But Gladiator's Hugo Danner hasn't quite gone quietly into the good night. There is a very good website at the Hugodanner.com domain, devoted to Gladiator essays and seems to be one of the best possible resources for all things Gladiator out there. You can read Wylie's Original Introduction, read Will Murray's thought provoking essay on Gladiator, check out a very cryptic inscription in Wylie's own hand, or view a gallery of Book Covers for Gladiator's various editions. There's an amusing Q&A page as well, but we're not sure if the site is still offering $5 for Gladiator essays. But if you're really interested in doing something along those lines, please do contact them--might as well get a $5 check than not...
You can acquire a free copy of the full text of Gladiator at Many Books or Archive(dot)Org -- it isn't old enough to show up on Gutenberg just yet.
You could pay a lot for the University of Nebraska reprint of the Knopf edition of Gladiator, but since they fail to include anything remarkable in terms of some much needed scholarship regarding the origins and influence and impact of Gladiator on the Pulps, comics, and so forth, why not just get the cheaper version sans academic pretensions?
Perhaps more ignominious than just being ignored, plagiarized paid uncredited homage to, would be having the text converted into a B-grade comedy. This actually happened to Gladiator. They made a comedy out of the Gladiator novel starring Joe E. Brown in 1938. IMDb can give you some more details, if you're interested. You just can't make this stuff up.
In 1976 Roy Thomas adapted Gladiator for Marvel Comics in Marvel Preview #9 as 'Man God.' Then Thomas developed "Iron Munro" for DC as a Retcon-doppleganger for the editorially-erased Golden Age Superman. Iron Munro was one part the classic Street & Smith character and another part Wylie's Gladiator, but went on to become fairly well ignored as his own character. It turns out that Hugo Danner (Wylies' Gladiator) was Iron Munro's estranged father. Which was a very nice little precedent to be setting...
It was also very cool of Roy Thomas to have Iron Munro encounter Georgia Challenger in the course of his efforts to locate and learn what happened to his father, the ill-fated, whiny and supposedly lightning-blasted Gladiator, Hugo Danner. That's right. Arn, Iron Munro, meets a living, breathing, beautiful and butt-kicking grand-daughter of Professor Edward Challenger while investigating a secret government project (like one of those other projects all those scientists might have been working on in the secret underground complex featured in The Time Tunnel perhaps?)
Roy Thomas is so much fun.
Howard Chaykin and Russ Heath teamed-up to revise/adapt Wylie's Gladiator in the Wildstorm comics 4-part miniseries which might still be available at eBay for around $10. There isn't much available on this series, even with Chaykin & Heath having been attached to it. The mini-series just seemed to drain away into obscurity, which is very strange given the major talent involved in its creation.
Hugo Danner, the Gladiator, is a flawed, bungled and botched mess of a guy who just happens to have gained superpowers because his daddy was an unethical prick who injected his mother with an untested, experimental serum while he was still in the womb. The guy is a walking victim and a real sob sack, despite being invulnerable. He joined the French Foreign Legion and didn't really gain much in the way of honors or recognition, despite serving in WWI. You'd think that a guy who is bullet-proof, super strong and able to outrun a train just might have found himself making an impact on the battlefields of Europe in 1917. At least you'd think he might. But not this guy. Nope. He's conflicted, emotionally constipated and totally at a loss for what to do with himself.
It's a good thing that he gets blasted with a lightning bolt at the end of the novel.
But then maybe he survives the thunderbolt and goes off to reinvent himself. He was part of the whole Lost Generation, which really, really begs the question, at least for me, why the hell didn't a guy like Wylie who was one of the founders of The New Yorker write a more Upton Sinclair or F. Scott Fitzgerald sort of novel out of this stuff? Hugo Danner could have been a cross between Odd John and The Great Gatsby--and that would have been infinitely cooler than what we were given...
Maybe someone needs to really go back over this stuff and write a sort of pseudo-Regencypunk revision of Gladiator that merges it with Stapledon and Fitzgerald. That would be very, very cool...with or without flying monkeys...or vampires...
It's not a book in and of itself, but it is a story that you'll find in several old books that collect and anthologize Machen's stories. Maybe you've already read or have heard of this story. Arthur Machen doesn't get anywhere the respect that say H. P. Lovecraft has gotten, nor that Edgar Allen Poe has regained from his sordid trashing by people who should have known better. Instead, Machen remains fairly obscure outside of the usual horror enthusiasts and Mythos-fans. Yes, you can quibble about this author's literary merits or his overall grammatical or structural strengths and/or weaknesses, but who really cares? In an age when the worst grammar and least editorial input seems to be the order of the day for popular best-sellers, arguing about that seems like dusty virgins having a pillow fight in a crumbling Victorian brothel that's on fire, while collapsing into a deep, dark lake. Pointless. In truth, much as The Rock would say: "It doesn't really matter."
What matters about Machen, and most of his contemporaries are their stories. Like Shakespeare said: "The play's the thing." In this case the tales and the ideas and the legacy of their wit, their words, and their writing -- and the weird worlds that they opened up a path for us to go explore after them.
Arthur Machen has many stories well worth examining, and we'll get to a few more before we're through, but for now, we're taking a look at Just One Story in order to see what it holds for us, where it leads onwards, and what hidden things await us within these mostly overlooked and obscure words from very different time...
You can download your own copy of The Inmost Light at Horrormasters, Project Gutenberg (as part of the collection House of Souls), Arthur's Classic Novels, Neotake, Feedbooks, and if you need more options just Google it. You'll find The Inmost Light in several collections. You can also find some music inspired by the story here, if you're in the mood for some sort of accompanying soundtrack.
A Description of the Jewel illuminated by The Inmost Light...
"He hailed the first hansom he could see and drove home, and when he had lit his hanging lamp, and laid his parcel on the table, he paused for a moment, wondering on what strange thing the lamplight would soon shine. He locked his door, and cut the strings, and unfolded the paper layer after layer, and came at last to a small wooden box, simply but solidly made. There was no lock, and Dyson had simply to raise the lid, and as he did so he drew a long breath and started back. The lamp seemed to glimmer feebly like a single candle, but the whole room blazed with light--and not with light alone, but with a thousand colours, with all the glories of some painted window; and upon the walls of his room and on the familiar furniture, the glow flamed back and seemed to flow again to its source, the little wooden box. For there upon a bed of soft wool lay the most splendid jewel, a jewel such as Dyson had never dreamed of, and within it shone the blue of far skies, and the green of the sea by the shore, and the red of the ruby, and deep violet rays, and in the middle of all it seemed aflame as if a fountain of fire rose up, and fell, and rose again with sparks like stars for drops. Dyson gave a long deep sigh, and dropped into his chair, and put his hands over his eyes to think. The jewel was like an opal, but from a long experience of the shop-windows he knew there was no such thing as an opal one-quarter or one-eighth of its size. He looked at the stone again, with a feeling that was almost awe, and placed it gently on the table under the lamp, and watched the wonderful flame that shone and sparkled in its centre, and then turned to the box, curious to know whether it might contain other marvels."
Of course in the story...
"He lifted the bed of wool on which the opal had reclined, and saw beneath, no more jewels, but a little old pocket-book, worn and shabby with use. Dyson opened it at the first leaf, and dropped the book again appalled. He had read the name of the owner, neatly written in blue ink..."
It seems that in these sorts of stories, someone is always finding handy diaries, journals, scrawled notes--that approach is so very common in these sorts of stories that it becomes a parody of itself in The Diary of Alonso Typer where the narrator actually transcribes their screams into the diary in a moment of Monty Python surreality. Thankfully Machen keeps things a bit more sound and reasonable--the journal in question is being offered as a sort of sordid confession, sort of a brutal challenge. Not a spurious, cliched trope that even Monty Python couldn't take seriously any longer...
(We'll be coming back to Alonso Typer another day, and not just to mock his diary...)
Back to Machen and The Inmost Light. The Journal and the Jewel were both contents of a mysterious parcel recovered through a bit of smooth, even bald-faced serendipity that few modern authors would dare to attempt. As the narrator examines the shabby old pocket note-book it reveals some lurid details surrounding the work of its author. Troublesome Things indeed...
"In that work, from which even I doubted to escape with life, life itself must enter; from some human being there must be drawn that essence which men call the soul, and in its place (for in the scheme of the world there is no vacant chamber)--in its place would enter in what the lips can hardly utter, what the mind cannot conceive without a horror more awful than the horror of death itself."
This madman is meddling with the very essence of human souls. He's literally extracting the soul-essence from living human beings and has discovered -- surprise -- that something more awful than the horror of death itself enters the vacated body in its place.
Yeah. Didn't see that one coming. Right. Something about vacuums and abhorrence and nature. Duh.
But hey, this explorer of the arcane secrets of life and death, who works diligently, obsessively and even arduously in his cobbled-together 'laboratory' or work-space is a man of science, not some hare-brained alchymist or some half-literate mumbo-jumbo artist with pretensions of being a sorcerer. He's not even an inbred congenital wizard like one of those Whateleys from America. Nope. He's conducting experiments into the nature and chemical composition of the soul, extracting it, weighing it, analyzing it and seeing how it can be stored within a stable vessel outside the human body. But it's not black magic. It's independent scientific inquiry.
But somehow, after reading tons of books and poring over scribbled manuscripts from the children's section of the local library, and after blowing wads of cash on glassware, exotic herbs, more peculiar books (all collectible First Editions to preserve their scientific potency no doubt), the dabbler with things best left untampered with decides he's missing one essential thing in order to really, really go on with his ultra important and incredibly scientific work.
He needs a volunteer from the audience, ahem, a human victim accomplice experimental test subject.
So, like any good Victorian man of his station, he brow-beats his wife into obliging him in participating in his 'experiments' as though he were demanding some variation in their sex life.
She breaks down in the obligatory 'weak and overly emotional female' sort of tears and eventual resolution to do what she must for her husband, no matter how half-baked, crack-pot or dangerously demented his 'work' really and truly appears to be.
He removes her soul.
He places it into a synthetic Jewel--the very one that the narrator is fondling even as he reads the shabby journal.
The Inmost Light is the idiotic pseudo-Faust's own wife's soul trapped in a Jewel.
Eeeewwwww.
But of course you saw it coming, didn't you.
Sure you did. Or maybe you thought he was some sort of perv? Well, he pretty much was, when you think about it. Extracting your wife's soul? Putting it into a box Jewel. Just to see if you can do it. And then finding out that something else has entered into her body. Talk about an anti-feminist reverse-Galatea. Wow. That is perverse, in a chilling pre-Stepford kind of way.
To make a short story shorter, something unnatural and weird comes into the wife's body. We don't actually see much of that though, as it mostly takes place off-stage. If you've read Machen's The Great God Pan, then you have a pretty good idea of what was going on. The wife's body and its new occupant take to the streets and start doing all sorts of unspeakably horrific things like holding opinions of their own, speaking bluntly and openly, eschewing the trembling school-girl routine, and generally getting all uppity and difficult and powerful. What a terrifying thing that turned out to be for the wonderful, sensitive husband who only wanted to extract his wife's soul in the name of science.
Like most such stories, it sort of works out in the end. The Jewel gets crushed and the world is made safe from the unspeakable feminist threat once again. But that's the least interesting part of it all.
What would you do with a Jewel containing the extracted essence of another human being? What could you do with such a thing?
...being a short compilation of resources associated with Mars/Barsoom and how it has evolved into a shared world within the Public Domain and beyond...
Last Updated: April 20, 2011
Postmodern Barsoom, by Den Valdron
A good introductory article that opens the way to Mr. Valdron's more detailed and far more engaging two-parter on all things fictionally martian--
Another rather fine article by Mr. Valdron that further investigates the ongoing admixture and adulteration of Barsoom with Wellsian bits, or is it Well's Mars with Burroughsian pieces? Either way it's a lot of fun and now an established literary tradition, so why not muck about with it a bit yourself?
Apochryphal Barsooms, Part 1, by Den Valdron Apochryphal Barsooms, Part 2, by Den Valdron
Den Valdron essentially states up front that he considers Barsoom to be a shared world. He backs this premise up with a two-part article that will give you a lot to mull over. He opens some intriguing doors and makes a lot of interesting connections concerning the various fictional approaches to Mars. Very useful stuff if you're at all interested in the roots of the Sword & Planet genre, and would like an expanded palette of literary references with which to experiment and work with on your own Sword & Planet projects.
What We Know of Mars, by Edward S. Holden
This article at ERB-zine has newspaper clippings, picks a fight with Tesla and gives us some nice old fashioned maps of Mars. Well worth taking a look.
Invasive Techniques: An Analysis of the Sarmaks and Other 'Martian Invaders' by Dennis Power and Dr. Peter Coogan.
This is a very wide-ranging article that veers wildly across a wide array of literary universes in its effort to nail down just who, what and where the Martian Invaders from Wells' novel came from--and how they fit into Burrough's Barsoom and other fictional versions of Mars. It's quite a tour de force.
Prisoner of Mars/ War of the Vampires by Gustave Le Rouge Erloors=bat-winged vampires from Mars who serve a Great Brain. The hero builds a psychic-powered rocket-ship with the help of a friendly Hindu who might or might not have been Captain Nemo in disguise. This is one of those bizarre books that combines science, mysticism, and pulp adventure in equal proportions. A quick review of the combined edition is available at Vintage Pop Fictions, and Black Coat Press has brought out a very nice edition that combines both The Prisoner of Mars and The Vampires of Mars as translated by Brian Stableford. It's $15. Come on.
The Red Star, by Alexander Bogdanov Introduces the 'etheroneph', a nuclear photonic rocket. Yep. Socialists on Mars, nuclear rockets, murder in space, extreme apathy, and androgynous doctors to help you sleep better on the rocket to Mars. How'd this never set the literary world on fire? This one might have to wait a while. Even advanced insomnia has it's limits...
We recently discovered a rather detailed and wonderfully well-done bit of speculative engineering analysis concerning the technology of the Martians featured in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. You can find it here. We highly recommend it. Unfortunately, this seems to be an archived fragment of something a bit larger in scope. If anyone knows any further details about this seemingly orphaned project, please contact us: netherwerks (at) gmail (dot) com. We'd very much like to find out more about this rather nicely done investigation into the technical aspects behind Mr. Wells' Martians and their technologies. The handwavium-esque 'Viridigen' powersource itself is a touch of genius.
Viridigen not withstanding, there are a few other aspects of Martian Technology that seem to have been lost, forgotten or overlooked in the rush to the Tripods, Cylinders and Heat-Rays.
Of a night, all over there, Hampstead way, the sky is alive with their lights. It's like a great city, and in the glare you can just see them moving. By daylight you can't. But nearer--I haven't seen them—' (he counted on his fingers) ‘five days. Then I saw a couple across Hammersmith way carrying something big. And the night before last’--he stopped and spoke impressively—‘it was just a matter of lights, but it was something up in the air. I believe they've built a flying-machine, and are learning to fly.’I stopped, on hands and knees, for we had come to the bushes.‘Fly!’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘fly.’
It wasn't just something that George Pal dreamed up in his classic 1953 movie. The Martian Flying Machine is in the book. But it only gets mentioned in passing and never really seems to do much more than spread some Black Smoke before the war is over. In fact, the Flying Machine only gets mentioned after the War in an issue of the Daily Mail. And in the version of the story that ran in Pearson's Magazine, it is conjectured that the Martians might not have flown more than 50 miles from London. It is supposed that perhaps the Martians were not able to adapt their Flying Machines to Earth's gravity, air pressure, atmosphere or something like that. It is also possible that the Invaders were caught-up in the throes of an on-going scientific-industrial revolution and only invented the Flying Machines en route to Earth. That opens the door to some wonderful What If? lines of conjecture, such as what else might they have come up with, given more time to fiddle with their slide-rules, erector-sets and lens assemblies?
The Black Smoke
The Black Smoke was delivered by explosive rockets. It is an almost viscous, ink-like vapor that supposedly bonds with Argon in the atmosphere to produce a horribly toxic gas that is almost instantly fatal to all forms of terrestrial life that come into contact with it. The gas is extremely dense, almost fluid-like in its characteristics, and is definitely much heavier than air. One can sometimes escape it by climbing upwards, out of the way of its billowing mass. It forms a nasty black scabrous-scum whenever it comes into contact with water and the Martians were able to clear it away with jets of compressed steam, which reduce it to a soggy gelatinous mass that dries-out into a granular black powder.
We only have Mr. Wells' theory to go on that the Black Smoke actually binds with Argon, but the evidence is grimly clear that the Black Smoke most definitely causes a terrible chemical reaction within its victims that is extremely lethal. This is a terrifying form of chemical weapon that kills on contact, not by inhalation. The primary component of the Black Smoke is unmistakably some heretofore unidentified element that terrestrial science has yet to successfully identify, let alone synthesize. Though there are those making great efforts in this area in numerous locations.
It is possible that some of the 'black tubes' used to launch the rockets carrying the Black Smoke could be recovered from a Cylinder Crash-Site by an intrepid group of adventurers who perhaps were lucky enough to discover a Cylinder that landed poorly, killing its crew. It is also conceivable that a group of freedom fighters might topple a Tripod and be able to strip away some of its armament, such as the black tube rocket launchers (plus the rockets themselves...) or the heat ray mechanisms (parabolic mirror, focusing crystal, power source...), but doing so poses a number of secondary problems such as jury-rigging some means to actually operate the weapons without the intrinsic control mechanisms within a Tripod. But such engineering problems are the meat and drink of stalwart Scientists and Adventurers in the mold of Professor Challenger, Sherlock Holmes, Doc Savage or even a Moriarty or Fu Manchu...
The Red Weeds
An often overlooked component to the Martian Invasion is the Red Weed, a biological weapon that was derived from the ultra-dense red weed that grew abundantly on Mars as seen in The Crystal Egg. This fast-growing red plant spreads like super-kudzu, reproducing almost explosively on contact with water and quickly clogging-up rivers, lakes and streams. The Red Weed practically engulfs those areas it is able to take root within, and tends to choke-out the native vegetation. It glows a soft purple at night and can be eaten, but has a metallic taste that tends to discourage most potential grazers or any but the absolutely most desperate diners.
The Red Weed effectively blocked shipping and all waterborne transport. It also could very easily have infiltrated reservoirs and municipal water supplies, cutting off any form of resistance from their supply of water. That makes it a very effective weapon, and more of a threat than even the Black Smoke. Without water, there is no resistance. Perhaps the Martians had some way of extracting the water from the Red Weed, or they had no need for water in the same way that terrestrial biology does, as they tend to be of more sanguinary tastes or proclivities...
The Big Gun on Olympus Mons
The Martian Cylinders have no propulsion units, only a few maneuvering jets at best. They are a one-way delivery vehicle. Each Cylinder is fired out of a massive giga-cannon erected atop Olympus Mons. In certain respects this huge gun resembles the Railway Guns of WWI, only ridiculously more massive and powerful. Later sources have taken to designating the Big Gun as a form of mass driver, but that just doesn't fit with the rest of the technology--it's probably a gigantic cannon. The idea of a gigantic Space Gun isn't just something limited to old science fiction--this is something that very real military money has been spent on and Top Men have investigated on behalf of the United States. But that's getting into the whole black projects end of the conspiracy-nutjob pond and we'll come back to that another day.
Once the Invasion succeeded, the Martians would most likely have built another such mega-cannon on Earth and used it to invade the Moon and possibly Venus, as well as go back to Mars. It would be most unfortunate if the Martians were to discover Cavorite in the course of their depredations and inhuman activities on the Earth. One also has to wonder how they would manage the invasion of the Moon and the attempted subjugation of the Selenites...
The Cylinders
The Thing itself lay almost entirely buried in sand, amidst the scattered splinters of a fir tree it had shivered to frag- ments in its descent. The uncovered part had the appearance of a huge cylinder, caked over and its outline softened by a thick scaly dun-coloured incrustation. It had a diameter of about thirty yards. He approached the mass, surprised at the size and more so at the shape, since most meteorites are rounded more or less completely. It was, however, still so hot from its flight through the air as to forbid his near approach. A stirring noise within its cylinder he ascribed to the unequal cooling of its surface; for at that time it had not occurred to him that it might be hollow.
...And then he perceived that, very slowly, the circular top of the cylinder was rotating on its body. It was such a gradual movement that he discovered it only through noticing that a black mark that had been near him five minutes ago was now at the other side of the circumference. Even then he scarcely understood what this indicated, until he heard a muffled grating sound and saw the black mark jerk forward an inch or so. Then the thing came upon him in a flash. The cylinder was artificial--hollow--with an end that screwed out! Something within the cylinder was unscrewing the top!
H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
Big, thermally-insulated bullets approximately 90 feet in diameter, the Cylinders were fired out of a big Space Gun on Olympus Mons and they came to a very abrupt, hard landing just like interplanetary artillery-shells.
It is still a matter of wonder how the Martians are able to slay men so swiftly and so silently. Many think that in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light. But no one has absolutely proved these details. However it is done, it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of visible, light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam.
Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which gripped a young pine-tree) swinging and rattling about its strange body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal like a gigantic fisherman's basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted out from the joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me. And in an instant it was gone.
Some of the very first Mecha or Land Ironclads/Dreadnoughts in fiction, the hundred-foot-tall Tripods from Wells' novel are iconic harbingers of interplanetary malevolence. Every adaptation and movie has revised and re-imagined the Tripods until now there are dozens of competing, conflicting and sometimes complimentary versions floating about all over the place. Wells describes them as having a brazen hood over the top and they tend to move along at a very speedy clip, out-pacing flocks of birds, for example.
As a bonus--click HERE to go get the plans for building your own paper-miniature version of a Land Ironclad based off of H. G. Wells' story The Land Ironclads.
Besides the Tripod-Fighting Machines, the Sarmak/Mucoid/Martian invaders also employed five-legged 'Handling Machines' that are alternately described as being "spider-like," or "crab-like," with many jointed levers and tentacles with which to move things, manipulate things and build the other machines such as the Tripods. They have the uncanny appearance of being almost alive, possibly they are some form of symbiotic or cybernetically-enslaved lower life form domesticated/enslaved and employed by the invaders for brute labor, and as the hands that they lack. If some enterprising group of adventurers were to hijack acquire one of these machines from their masters, it could quite possibly reveal a great number of things about the Sarmak/Mucoids/Martians...
A gigantic machine used to excavate the pits around the Cylinders and to form earthworks for the Martian invaders. These machine may have been automatons as they are explicitly described as having no pilot or drivers. These machines were often abandoned when the Tripods moved on, though a few were re-directed to work on various secondary projects. They are not described in any real detail within the original novel. Subsequent interpretations seem to favor the form of massive centipede-things, but there is no reason that they couldn't be more along the lines of one of Jules Verne's drill-like machines from Journey to the Center of the Earth. In fact, it might make a very interesting scenario where the Sarmak/Mucoid/Martians are actually trying to invade the Hollow Earth and the surface-world is just something that they need to pass through to get where they are going.
An interesting book by an even more interesting author. The Lost World takes you from London's more fashionably scientifically-oriented drawing rooms and smoke-filled Explorer's Clubs packed with hunting trophies and testosterone, and drops you right in the midst of the Amazon on a plateau (notLeng...though one does wonder...) where the dinosaurs still roam and not a discouraging word is allowed as all must maintain a suitable stiff upper lip. And a loaded high-powered hunting rifle.
When you first look for Sir Arthur's novel, should you ever decide to go do such a thing, you'll find that there are quite a few other entries for Lost World out there. The Lost World page at Wikipedia is rather useful for a jumping-off point to go hare-ing about looking into all the various other forms and versions of the Lost World concept/trope. In fact the Lost World theme is an entire genre unto itself. And it's a very fun one to go exploring as a reader and literarily-excavating as an exercise in data-mining and research as an author/game master/game designer as well. There is also a list of Non-Fictional Lost Worlds at Wikipedia, which we only discovered by chance. That might come in handy down the road...
The Plateau within the Amazon where the Lost World takes place might have been inspired by Mount Roraima, or the tepui or table-top mountains found in South America. It is interesting, and potentially useful to a worldbuilder to take a look at the page on Table (landforms) at Wikipedia in order to get a feel for all the options that are available for developing these sorts of terrains and geographies in a fictional or game-oriented setting. There are such things as tuyas, mesas, potreros, buttes, plateaus, and Fluvial Terraces to consider, many of which we've been adapting for use on Riskail. Plateaus have a lot to offer in terms of creating isolated communities, pockets of lost civilizations or lost races, providing niche ecologies of monstrous survivals from primordial epochs, etc. They're well worth considering in your setting. Look at Blair's excellent Iridium Plateau at Planet Algol for an example.
Professor Challenger, the star of the show in the novel The Lost World is one of those daring, dashing, intrepid two-fisted Man Of Science who also happen to be very handy with a rifle. Claude Rains played Prof. Challenger in the 1960 movie (directed by Irwin Allen and including a lot of his infamously over-recycled footage from his various TV productions), John Rhys Davies took up the role in the 1992 adaptation, and Bob Hoskins took over in the 2001 version. The character is right up there with Alan Quartermain, Carnacki, Sherlock Holmes and Lord Greystoke.
Here is how Professor Challenger was described initially in The Lost World:
His appearance made me gasp. I was prepared for something strange, but not for so overpowering a personality as this. It was his size, which took one's breath away-his size and his imposing presence. His head was enormous, the largest I have ever seen upon a human being. I am sure that his top hat, had I ventured to don it, would have slipped over me entirely and rested on my shoulders. He had the face and beard, which I associate with an Assyrian bull; the former florid, the latter so black as almost to have a suspicion of blue, spade-shaped and rippling down over his chest. The hair was peculiar, plastered down in front in a long, curving wisp over his massive forehead. The eyes were blue-grey under great black tufts, very clear, very critical, and very masterful. A huge spread of shoulders and a chest like a barrel were the other parts of him which appeared above the table, save for two enormous hands covered with long black hair. This and a bellowing, roaring, rumbling voice made up my first impression of the notorious Professor Challenger.
Now that's one heck of an initial impression. They don't build them quite like that anymore. Perhaps they ought to. Haven't we suffered through enough morally ambiguous whiny weaklings? Where's the great grand-daughter of Professor Challenger? What's she up to these days? Is anyone writing about her adventures? They ought to be. We'd read them. In a heart-beat. Hey, whatever happened to Section Zero--there was a female descendant of Professor Challenger in that super-group...too bad Gorilla Comics folded...maybe we should further develop a few other descendants of the good Professor, possibly as special or Displaced NPCs for various nefarious gaming purposes...the idea does have a lurid sort of Wold Newton allure to it.
The handy Wikipedia page on Professor Challenger also has a lengthy list of Other Author's uses and abuses of Sir Arthur's bombastic master of the direct application of scientifically correct brute force that you can examine and use to rationalize your own use of the guy--or his offspring--in your own stories or game scenarios. He is in the Public Domain, so the issue of canonical depictions and authorized interpretations are not only moot, they're spurious and silly. Anything past Doyle is open to question and completely disposable and eminently dis-regardable. None of it is necessary nor required to be adhered to, nor adopted. It's all subject to your personal veto or emendation, or adaptation depending on how you want to deal with other people's potentially copyrighted sub-creations and spin-offs. Personally, we tend to opt to ignore everything past the original source materials and forge ahead along our own lines, in our own direction. You decide what works best for you.
The Lost World is an amazingly fun romp through the jungle-like backwash of discredited scientific theories that were once taken seriously by very, very earnest authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is a great example of how to further elaborate and expand upon out-moded and exploded, spurious or superceded scientific theoriessuch as the perennial Bierce-Machen-Lovecraft crowd-pleaser about primordial survivals, Preformationism, Aristotelian Physics, Luminiferous Aether, or the Hollow Earth, amongst a plethora of other debunked and discarded theories left lying broken and abandoned along the minefields of scientific orthodoxy and its rigorous enforcement of conformity, compliance and circumspection.
Crack-pottery and pseudoscience can be a writer's and a game designer's and a game master's best friend. All you need is a good guide like Professor Challenger or his grand-niece to lead you through the dense undergrowth to some of the Lost Worlds that have been just waiting to be re-discovered and explored. Just be sure to pack plenty of extra ammo and don't forget your tooth-brush.
There are a lot of other Old Books out there worth taking a look at--and we've just gotten started...
It's a graphic novel based on Edgar Rice Burrough's mostly forgotten/overlooked classic The Outlaw of Torn. Dark Horse is bringing it out, it's $12.99 soft cover & $49.99 limited edition hardcover. We love the Burroughs-ouvre and this sounds cool, but we'll wait until we can see it before we plunk down any money.
Has anyone already seen this thing? What'd you think?
