Science Fiction fans laugh (along with everybody else) when they watch Pinky and the Brain. But SF fans laugh just a little louder. The story of the two lab mice who have escaped their genetics experiments lab and now want to “try and take over the world”, is a couple of old Pulp cliches that the cartoonists have fun with. The first and most obvious is the mad scientist theme that Mary Shelley got started in 1818, but the other is the idea of the “evolved man”. Brain’s huge head and super-intelligence are also an SF cliche with a history.
The Evolved Man of the early Pulps owes everything to legacy writers like H. G. Wells and Olap Stapledon. Wells puts evolution into action in The Time Machine, where the time traveler sees how the human race divides into Eloi (consumed) and Morlock (consumer). Wells was making commentary on social issues like the class struggle. He does so again with the Martians in The War of the Worlds (1898) who have evolved bodies that were mostly head and tentacles. The Martians didn’t even have stomachs, injecting their food (human blood!) directly into their veins. Wells proposes this idea earlier in an essay, “The Man of the Year Million” ( Pall Mall Budget, November 6, 1893) where he describes the large headed man with the weak physical body.
1911 saw The Hampdenshire Wonder by J. D. Beresford, which doesn’t follow evolution rapidly but is more about how normal people will react to those that jump up the evolutionary ladder. In other words: mutants. This theme would be popularized in the Pulps by A. E. van Vogt and his novel Slan (1941), in the comics and movies by The X-Men.
Edgar Rice Burroughs got in on the evolutionary fervor with The Land That Time Forgot (1918), where humans are the last stage of evolution begun as microbes, then fish, then dinosaurs, then apemen, etc. Burroughs got the idea from Haeckel’s law that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. ERB just took it to a larger arena. His final beings are the Wieroos, bald winged men who must steal females from the humans. The Wieroos are cruel, supposedly super-intelligent, though the Englishman, Bradley, has no trouble besting them.
Stapledon outdoes Wells and all the others in Last and First Men (1930), writing an entire book on how men changed over two billion years. The First Men are current humans and the book follows Hegelian cycles of advance and fall up to the Eighteenth Men. These “perfect” artists and philosophers have several genders and a group mind. They are immortal but a supernova kills them all but not before they send a virus out into the cosmos to continue intelligent life.
Pulps writers could hardly NOT be influenced by these giants of Science Fiction. The first and probably the most important to come after them was Edmond Hamilton. Even before Last and First Men, Hamilton wrote “Evolution Island” (Weird Tales, March 1927). His evolved man looks like:
“… And I saw him, saw the shape that was his, the shape and form of all humanity, ages from now. His head had grown very much larger…had grown to almost twice its former size, and had become quite hairless, though the feature seemed much the same. But the body! … there was no body, as we know it. Instead of a human body, the head was attached directly to a mass of flesh, round and squat, which was about half the size of a human trunk. And from this shapeless mass projected four supple, boneless arms of muscle, arms that were really long, powerful tentacles. He could walk on these tentacles, or on part of them, or he could use all to grasp and hold. Four long twisting tentacles, that had once been arms and legs. For I saw in Brilling the changes that future ages will work in the human body.”
Sam Moskowitz wrote in Seekers of Tomorrow (1967): “… Evolution Island, an imaginative tour de force, about a ray that speeds up evolution on an island and its bizarre effects upon all life forms, including the emergence of intelligent, mobile plants…” The plot is well known to Hamilton fans because he would use it again and again in “The Comet Doom” and ten others.
Also written before Stapledon is “The Machine-Man of Ardathia” (Amazing Stories, November 1927) by Francis Flagg. Flagg was a Wellsian writer, more about the concepts than action. Still he gets things going before the story is over. Here a time traveler from the far future mistakenly stops in our time to the local man’s regret.
“Occupying the space where the rocking-chair had stood (though I did not notice its absence at the time) was a cylinder of what appeared to be glass, standing, I should judge, above five feet high. Encased in this cylinder was what seemed to be a caricature of a man—or a child. I say caricature because, while the cylinder was all of five feet in height, the being inside of it was hardly three; and you can imagine my amazement while I stared at this apparition.”
Edmond Hamilton returned with “The Man Who Evolved” (Wonder Stories, April 1931) , a kind of Stapledon novel all-in-one story. This tale can be seen as the one that influenced all those who followed. Unlike “Evolution Island”, “The Man Who Evolved” appeared in an all-Science Fiction magazine, so it was read by more future SF writers. Sadly, Weird Tales, despite its popular SF tales, was disregarded by many of the snobbier readers. It was thought of as a book of ghoulies and ghosties even though Hamilton was writing innovative material there along with Nictzin Dyalhis and J. Schlossel.
Dr. Pollard subjects himself to advancing levels of radiation to push himself up the evolutionary chain. Of course, once he becomes a giant brain monster he wants to take over the world. Further doses reduce the monster back to primordial slime.
“He had become simply a great head! A huge hairless head fully a yard in diameter, supported on tiny legs, the arms having dwindled to mere hands that projected just below the head! The eyes were enormous, saucer-like, but the ears were mere pin-holes at either side of the head, the nose and mouth being similar holes below the eyes!” (“The Man Who Evolved” by Edmond Hamilton)
This is one of the first SF Pulp stories to deal with accelerated evolution, making the classic mistake of evolution of an individual, rather than a species. As Asimov points:
“This is not to say that science fiction stories can be completely trusted as a source of specific knowledge. In the case of “The Man Who Evolved,” Hamilton was on solid ground when he maintained cosmic rays to be a motive force behind evolution. They are, but only in so far as they help create random mutations. It is natural selection that supplies the direction of evolutionary change, and this works, very painfully and slowly, upon large populations, not upon individuals.
The notion that a concentration of cosmic rays would cause an individual human being to evolve, personally, in the direction inevitably to be taken by the entire species is, of course, quite wrong. Concentrated radiation would merely kill.” (Before the Golden Age by Isaac Asimov)
Hamilton was so into evolutionary ideas he wrote eight distinct stories and novels with evolutionary themes. He inspired others to do likewise, including his wife, Leigh Brackett who wrote of devolution in “The Beast Jewel of Mars” and Manly Wade Wellman in “Devil’s Asteroid”. The cliche of the devolved man is actually a separate but related subject that dates back to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885).
“Time’s Mausoleum” by Neil R. Jones (Amazing Stories, December 1933) offers of two different evolutions.
“At a later period of a few hundred thousand years, Professor Jameson found marked changes in humanity. Man had reached an advanced stage of evolution, where one of his ancestors of five million years ago would have disowned him as an incredible monstrosity. His legs were jointed to move in either of two given directions. Four arms terminated in eight digits. The body was comparatively small. This…was due to disappearance of the digestive tract. Science of that era…had supplanted the comparatively short existence of the gastric organs with a more practical means of existance. Man’s radioactive blood was kept charged with energy from huge broadcasting units located over the Earth and on the spaceships in which he traveled. Oxygen was superfluous, too. A lifetime of ten thousand years was common. Man’s head had become devoid of both mouth and nostrils. Like the appendix of man, the unused mouth had finally disappeared. Food no longer was a necessity, and articulate speech had long since yielded to mental telepathy, like that of the Zoromes. Instead of hair, there arose from the head fully two dozen antennae, serving a double purpose of picking up thought waves and the reception of the broadcasted energy for their bodies. Two black, lidless eyes peered intently from the face. Humanity had done away with sleep. The energy broadcasters kept the body charged constantly.” (“Time’s Mausoleum” by Neil R. Jones)
The last version of the human being, five million years from our time, is not a very attractive specimen without a mouth, nostrils and having two dozen antennae. He communicates by telepathy and receives nutrients from something like cell phone towers. The race eventually leaves the Solar System for far Sirius. Jones tries to follow the logical changes of the human race. (I’m not sure why we should develop four arms and eight digits though.) Jones shows an interest in evolution as an idea throughout the series. He once uses the term “evolutionized” instead of “evolved” which shows how uncommon the terminology was in the 1930s.
John W Campbell Jr.’s “The Last Evolution” (Amazing Stories, August 1932) suggest that humans will not evolve but our machines will. Again a topic for a piece on robots but Jones uses it in “Time’s Mausolium” as well.
“One of the strangest cases ever brought to the professor’s eyes had happened less than six hundred years following his death. A mastery of super-scientific surgery had been performed. A human being killed in a space wreck among the asteroids had been brought back to life. With mangled limbs, a fractured skull and punctured heart, Nex Hulan had been given mechanical arms and legs, an aluminum brain pan, radiophone ears, a rubber heart and had been restored to life, a human robot.” (“Time’s Mausoleum” by Neil R. Jones)
The Zoromes take a special interest in Nex Hulan, a man who has parts of his body replaced with metal parts. The human race could have become a machine race as well except Hulan’s operations stimulate his brain cells and twist his mind. He becomes a notorious space pirate. Not much of a poster-child for mechanical surgery.
This character is intriguing for he is a counter-point to the Zoromes’ mechanical natures. Jones makes sure the experiment fails for he doesn’t want too many machine men cluttering up his series.
“The Adaptive Ultimate” (Astounding Stories, November 1935) takes a similar idea, again closer to “Slan” than anything, a human mutant that can adapt to any condition. Weinbaum makes this creature a beautiful woman, of course:
“So what’s happened to Kyra Zelas, by some mad twist I don’t understand, is that her adaptive powers have been increased to an extreme. She adapts instantly to her environment; when sun strikes her, she tans at once, and in shade she fades immediately. In sunlight her hair and eyes are those of a tropical race; in shadow, those of a Northerner. And—good Lord, I see it now —when she was faced with danger there in the courtroom, faced by a jury and judge who were men, she adapted to that! She met that danger, not only by changed appearance, but by a beauty so great, that she couldn’t have been convicted!” (The Adaptive Ultimate” by Stanley G. Weinbaum as John Jessel)
It is the only option of the less superior men to hunt her down and kill her before she takes over the world. (Feminists feel free to comment.)
Science Fiction in the pulps would produce many classics over the decades, including The Man Who Woke (1933) by Laurence Manning, in which a man goes into suspended animation, awakes to see how humanity is doing, then back under to try again in another few hundred years. This book never really looks at physical change so much as cultural changes. Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human (1953), which is again in The Hampdenshire Wonder mode, following a group of odd folks as they move towards the next step in evolution and how others react. Childhood’s End (1950) by Arthur C. Clarke takes a religious angle that even the author distances himself from. There are many, many more but these stand out as the most interesting.
