Giants of Science Fiction can mean either the greats who wrote SF, or as in this case, the giants that appear in Science Fiction tales. Like giant robots, B. E. M.s, killer space ships and weird-looking aliens, the giant is a pretty common feature on covers. And why not? Something huge is always menacing and attention-getting.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Re-reading “John Carter and the Giant of Mars” (Amazing Stories, January 1941) got me thinking of all the giant humans in Science Fiction. Edgar Rice Burroughs was working in a long tradition when he wrote this story about Joog.
Joog was created by the Synthetic Man, Pew Mogel. Joog is made from 10,000 red men and white apes. His body has been infused with a serum that regenerates his body quickly. He is virtually indestructible. As John Carter says at the end of the story, Joog is not evil, just simple-minded.
“John Carter found himself looking into a monstrous face. From top of shaggy head to bottom of its hairy chin, the head measured fully fifteen feet…the creature must have been fully a hundred and thirty feet tall!… He was dressed in a ill-fitting, baggy tunic that came down in loose folds over his hips but which allowed his arms and legs to be free.” (“John Carter and the Giant of Mars”)
Burroughs’ readers would have been familiar with the idea of a giant from many other sources. (This of course ignores the actual science.)
Folklore
Readers are first introduced to giants in the fairy tales and folklore of childhood. Jack the Giant Killer, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Valiant Little Tailor as well as in mythology with Polyphemus, Atlas, Skrymir, Gog and Magog, etc. In these stories the hero is always small (appealing to children and underdogs everywhere). The giants are cruel bullies but not usually that clever. Some have multiple heads or other weird deformities. The classic struggle between weak and strong is played out (David and Goliath style), telling the listener that brains or more important than brawn.
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift took the folklore of giants and flipped it both ways for his classic satire, Gulliver’s Travels (1726). In the first portion of the book, Lemuel Gulliver is the giant in the land of Lilliput. There he suffers capture by the tiny Lilliputans, puts out a castle fire by peeing on it, then captures an entire fleet of ships while swimming. In the second part, Lemuel is the tiny one, in the land of the Brobdingnagians. That word has become a synonym for gigantic. “When compared to the relatively small red man and his breed of thoats they assume Brobdingnagian proportions that are truly appalling. (The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs) Swift uses Gulliver’s small size to put an physical barrier between the Queen and himself. The remainder of Swift’s novel is not as popular as his first two voyages. When adapted into film, these later parts are often shortened or left out.
H. G. Wells
The next writer to use giants significantly in Science Fiction is H. G. Wells. His middle novel The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (Pearson’s, December 1903- February 1904) features a substance that can make any living thing grow to monstrous size. Centipedes, rats, a chicken and finally a baby get transformed. It is this last one that inspired such films as The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958). It was applied to apes earlier in King Kong (1933) but that wasn’t really H. G. Wells. Films like Dr. Cyclops (1940) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) went the other way, making humans small. the two idea seem linked ever since Swift.
The Pulps
The Science Fiction Pulps were quick to add giants to their covers as well as their fiction. Ray Cummings wrote “Explorers Into Infinity” (April-June 1927) and “The Giant World” (January-March 1928) for Weird Tales. Thrilling Wonder Stories and other pulps featured giants on their covers, menacing skyscrapers or capturing airplanes.
To go back to Edgar Rice Burroughs (clearly part of the Pulp tradition), “The Giant of Mars” seems to have three obvious inspirations: Frankenstein, Gulliver’s Travels and King Kong. Burroughs has fun with the difference in size (ala Swift) plus the villain is fond of grabbing people through windows like the giant hand from Kong. This wasn’t his first time using Swift either. Tarzan and the Ant Men (1924) has Tarzan attacked Lilliput style, then shrunk down to join the ant men in overthrowing their dictator.
The comics weren’t far behind. Superman to The Avengers, giant villains and monsters abound. Jack Kirby got his start doing strip after strip about another giant monster. (That’s where Groot came from originally.) Giants of Science Fiction of another kind, writers like Edmond Hamilton, Otto Binder and Gardner F. Fox brought much of the Pulps to comics in the 1940s, expanding the fantastic nature of the bad guys. The Tick satirized the entire motif with the VLM, or Very Large Man.
