George B. Beattie was an English writer of Science Fiction. He produced only four stories for Hugo Gernsback. We know very little about GBB, though Gernsback hyped him as “one of England’s foremost writers” despite having no CV to back that up. From his portrait we can see he is not a young man like so many of Gernsback’s stable.
“The Martian Nemesis” (Wonder Story Quarterly, Winter 1931) has a love triangle play out during an expedition to Mars. The dry planet becomes a garden of man-eating plants when the polar ice caps melt, watering the seeds. Thus explains where the Martians went. Beattie is good at describing the planet Mars and its deadly flora but the human story is filled with cliches. Love a good plant monster. This is what drew me to Beattie.
“The Murders on the Moon-Ship” (Wonder Stories, February 1931) has a traditional murder mystery play out in space. The story was originally written for Amazing Detective Tales but that was cancelled. Edmond Hamilton would write a similar story in “Space-Rocket Murders” (Amazing Stories, October 1932). Isaac Asimov, in the 1950s, would complain that early SF mysteries did not “play fair”. Without revealing the solution, this story falls into that category.
“The Man Who Shrank” (Wonder Stories, April 1932) gives us the Asian detective Li Phou Lee in pursuit of the criminal Zela. The villain can be recognized by his missing digits. On a remote island, Lee finds an old university acquaintance, Lombard, a mad scientist. The man has regrown Zela’s missing toes by transplanting lobster glands into the man. Lee leaves but returns with the cavalry and finds Lombard dead. They find a dwarf who has been shrank even smaller. Lombard had been creating freaks for circuses. Lee figures out how to reversed the process. Again, very Edmond Hamilton in plot.
“The ‘Plantinum Planets'” (Wonder Stories, August 1932) is a complex tale of successive men who try to possess a series of cursed items. A bizarre sculptor creates a series “platinum planets” that draw men to their doom. E. F. Bleiler in Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years (1998) wonders what Jack Vance could have done with the idea.
And with that George B. Beattie is gone. Plenty of potential to produce better works, he left us before that promise could be developed. Like so many other early SF writers, we know so little about him, why he wrote what he did and where he ended up.
