AHEAD OF TIME is a Henry Kuttner short story collection drawing on his 1940s and early 1950s work; “Ghost,” for example, has a computer but as the word isn’t coined yet (the word still meant a human who computed numbers) it’s a “thinking machine.” Other stories involve celebrity head-hunters, alien peacemakers, suicidal robots and the immortal Hogben mutants of the Appalachians (heavy on the hillbilly stereotypes but still funny). I particularly liked “Camouflage” which feels like it’s in conversation with his wife CL Moore’s “No Woman Born” as the cyborg protagonist proves he’s as human as the gang of pirates he’s fighting (“I told you Tom, you’d forget our friendship before I did.”). Good stuff
Kuttner’s The Dark World has always felt to me like he’s knocking off A. Merritt’s Dwellers in the Mirage. THE VALLEY OF THE FLAME (cover by Ed Emshwiller) is also very Merrittesque, but more in style than a direct steal. For no discernible reason, this 1945 novel is set in the 1985 Amazon jungle, where the protagonist discovers a mystery that leads him to the lost land of Paititi. There an evolution meteor that landed 30 years ago has turned jaguars into cat people, speeding up existence in the lost land so that they’re civilization has (from their perspective) lasted for centuries. Now, though, the meteor is dying, which may devolve them into monsters; however a mad jaguar scientist’s plan to restimulate it may prove equally disastrous. The weirdly speeded-up life in Paititi is eerie and entertaining though I question Kuttner’s assumption that feline-evolved humanoids must be culturally different from us monkey people.
I could have sworn I reviewed SLAYING THE DRAGON: A Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons by Ben Riggs, a year and a half ago when I read it but nope. A very good job looking at the birth of the game in the 1970s and how it struggled despite being one of the coolest entertainment options out there (obviously my definition of “cool” is not universal). Under co-creator Gary Gygax’ tenure as company boss, it suffered from “we’re rich, let’s blow lots of money” syndrome. It gained, however, from the religious right denouncing it as Satan’s tool for initiating kids into black magic — that made an innocuous game experience as wild and rebellious as listening to death metal!
After Lorraine Williams bought a majority share in the company it faced other problems: complicated, unsound financing arrangements, bad decisions (favoring bookstores for distribution and ignoring gaming/hobby stores) and poor treatment of its creative personnel. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance books launched a long line of D&D tie-in books but they wound up leaving the company and having even bigger success writing their own stuff. Despite which, of course, D&D endures and still has devoted players; I’m no longer one of them but I’m glad lots of people are.
Werwile of the Crystal Crypt was a pulp short story by comics legend Gardner Fox that I read simply from curiosity what a werwile is. It turns out it’s just the title of the Satan figure who destroyed the galaxy’s first civilization; can Nuala, a beautiful super-genius preserved in suspended animation, defeat him with the help of a “present-day” space adventurer? This is familiar pulp stuff, fun but not up to the level of Fox’s later comics SF stories (e.g., “The Invisible Dinosaur” with the Murphy Anderson cover). And the ending is horrifically sexist: Nuala gets mind-wiped in the final battle, losing her memories and her intelligence which delights the hero — now she’ll be happy to marry him and become a perfect little homemaker!
One of pulp hero Doc Savage’s best-known gadgets was his invention of mercy bullets that tranquilize their target rather than killing or injuring. I never much thought about that as a tween fan of the series — tranquilizer darts were familiar from lots of TV shows — but while working on Savage Adventures I began wondering what the state of the tech was in the 1930s. On the Trail of the Mercy Bullet: Pain, Scientific Showmanship and the early history of animal tranquilizing, c. 1912-1932 by Mia Uys answered my question. Uys looks at one Captain Barnett who developed a prototype tranquilizer dart and coined the “mercy bullet” term.
Barnett wasn’t the first; a 1912 inventor hit on the idea of putting grooves in bullets and morphia particles in the grooves, though nothing came of it. Barnett’s concept involved bullets that were miniature hypodermics; despite dubious effectiveness in animal capture he was still promoting it in radio and in-person lectures in the early 1930s. Presumably he inspired Dent to create Doc’s armaments, though firing them from a machine gun, it’s hard to see how they wouldn’t do serious injury or give the target too much of a dose if they were hit by multiple drafts.
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