Francis Flagg is not a name that falls from the lips when people talk about the early Science Fiction writers like E. E. Smith or Edmond Hamilton. And yet he was a contemporary of these men and has much to offer the fan of early SF. Inspired by H. G. Wells, his work is fascinated with the idea of other planes of existence, other versions of our reality, and all the things we do not know about in the universe. Flagg was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1898. By age 20, he had moved to the United States. Later in life he would live in Arizona, and set many of his stories there.
Flagg’s start was prominent, getting the cover with his first story. “The Machine-Man of Ardathia” (Amazing Stories, November 1927) doesn’t have much of a plot but is a glimpse into future human evolution. A sober, elderly man named Matthews, is startled to find a strange child-sized alien inside a glass case in his apartment. The Machine-Man tells how he is from 30,000 years in the future and how humans evolved over the centuries, sealing themselves in their “envelopes”. The future visitor goes forward five years into the future then returns. He explains that the building they are in will be torn down and Matthews will be in a room filled with other men. When someone comes to the door, Matthews tries to show off the alien but it is gone. He ends up in an insane asylum, the room the alien predicted. His apartment building is being torn down for a roadway. This story would be the beginning of Flagg’s only series, with a sequel in 1932 and was supposed to be a vast future history.
“The Master Ants” (Amazing Stories, May 1928) has a professor and his secretary travel forward in time. Unfortunately, time travel isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, as the machine disintegrates as it ages. The travelers suffer a similar aging, arriving in 2650 as old men. When they arrive they find the world has been taken over by large, intelligent ants. Humans are used as mounts and the females are even milked like cows. The duo escape animal slavery when an airship rescues them and takes them to Science Castle, the last redoubt of humanity in America. The time travelers learn all about the history of how the ants took over and see many wonderful new inventions. The story ends on a downer as the Master Ants attack on the backs of mutant wasps. Flagg’s inspiration is pretty obvious, H. G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” meets “The Empire of the Ants”. He does a great job of envisioning the ant masters. One of his inventions is see-through walls that allow the humans trapped inside Science Castle see the insects slow and persistent attempts to conquer them.
“The Blue Dimension” (Amazing Stories, June 1928) has another older scientist named Doctor Crewe and his assistant, Robert, pierce the veil between our world and that of a higher vibration that they call the Blue Dimension. They are able to observe this parallel world with a new invention, special glasses. Crewe builds a machine that can send things into the other dimension, first mice then himself. The doctor discovers that he is gigantic in this other realm and begins exploring. He encounters weird creatures and a strange ruin. After three days he returns to be retrieved and realizes that he can’t cross back because he doesn’t have a second machine in the Blue Dimension. He requires Robert to send him food. When the glasses are broken, the last link with the temporal explorer is lost. Flagg is once again building off of Wells and his “The Crystal Egg” in which a man can see the happenings on Mars. I got Lovecraftian chills when Flagg described the weird ruin that Crewe is unable to see into. I can see why HPL and Flagg were friends.
“The Chemical Brain” (Weird Tales, January 1929) has a machinist, John Lester, working for two older men, Captain Rowman and Walter Parsons. The two inventors are creating the first mechanical man. Rowan is a theosophist while Parsons is a complete atheist. The two men argue in a friendly way about whether there is life after death. Parsons is secretly having an affair with Rowan’s sister, Genevieve. Lester suspects Rowan knows but holds his tongue. The robot is finally finished when a lumpy mass is placed in the brain pan. At this moment, Rowan has a heart attack and dies. The robot comes to life after a period of time and breaks into the house, attacking and killing Parsons. Lester destroys the machine with a large monkey wrench. The man is certain the spirit of the dead Captain had animated the machine and taken its revenge.
It isn’t surprising this story appeared in Weird Tales, rather than Amazing Stories. The religious question would not have been to Gernsback’s liking. Gernsback’s slowness in paying his writers may have also been a factor. Flagg may have tailored the story to sell it to Farnsworth Wright. What is even more interesting is that Flagg, in one section where Lester is horrified at the implications of the invention, delineates the robot idea fully, including robots that make robots, terrible job loss, and even a war with the robots. All these ideas would be used in future stories, especially those by Jack Williamson, but Flagg outlines them all here in 1929. There can be little doubt he was influenced by Edmond Hamilton’s earlier robot stories in Weird Tales and Amazing Stories.
“The Dancer in the Crystal” (Weird Tales, December 1929) has something like an EMP wipe out all electricity throughout the world, plunging everyone into darkness, dropping planes from the sky. Years after the event, a writer interviews the only man, Peter Ross, who can explain the pillar of fire seen burning up into the sky from the prairies of Alberta. Ross tells how he and an under-professor of Physics at McGill University, John Cabot, stole three spheres that came to Earth in a meteorite. Each of the smooth glass eggs has a swirling black dot dancing inside it. The two men go to the wilds of Alberta break open one of the spheres. The huge pillar of electrical-sucking energy explodes from the shell. The black dot forms into an evil presence that devours Cabot and wants Ross. Cabot’s voice tells Ross to smash the second sphere in his backpack. When he does this, the two beings join and fire off into space. The second half of the story is reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” that appeared in Amazing Stories two years earlier.
“Land of the Bi-Pos” (Science Wonder, February 1930) has two thieves, the narrator, Pete, and his older accomplice, Red Saunders, breaking into an amateur inventor’s private lab. They step on a mysterious piece of equipment and get knocked out. As punishment, the scientist sends the two men into another dimension where penguin-like creatures raise humans like cattle.Red and Pete flee captivity and discover humans living in underground burrows. They become the leaders of these humans, known as the Murlos. The earthmen even teach them to use fire against the Bi-Po’s version of hunting dogs, the jahlos, blood-sucking tentactular lizards. The Bi-Pos capture the duo quite by accident and use a mind scanner to see that they are not regular Murlos. At this point the scientist recalls them from the dimension only to learn that what was hours on Earth was weeks in the other place. The experience has changed the two men, who only want to return to the Land of Bi-Pos, armed with weapons to free the Murlos.
There are plenty of interesting details to this story. Flagg has a segment where the Bi-Pos hunt the humans, a scene familiar to us today from the film, The Planet of the Apes (1968). Try to imagine it with penguins instead of gorillas! The human cattle idea seems like retread from “The Master Ants” but the plot reminds me more of the works of Edmond Hamilton, who would write this type of story many, many times. The world of Science Fiction in 1930 was small and we can be pretty sure Hamilton and Flagg had some contact. One last bit to point out, Flagg has fun when Red says: “…I read a story once — in one of those science-fiction magazines it was — about a trip to another world. The inhabitants of it were like plants. And H. G. Wells in The War of the Worlds made his Martians something like octopuses. Bunk, I thought it then, but now!” The story about the plants could be his own “The Blue Dimension”. Once again he has paid homage to his master, H. G. Wells.
“An Adventure in Time” (Science Wonder, April 1930) has time travel again, with a Professor Bayers telling how he went into the future. Flagg uses an idea that not many have since, futurians sending a working model back in time so present day people can discover how to build the machine. Once built, he goes to a utopia ruled by women. Flagg falls into the Wells trap of spending much time commenting on politics and presenting inventions and generally boring the crap out of me. (The best of the inventions would be the replacement of written books by “books on tape”. He even makes the observation I myself have found true, that the person reading the story is as important and sometimes even more important than the book. Another is the hover shoes shown on the cover.) Bayers falls in with a group of males, all bred for small size and low numbers, who want to rebel against the women. The rebellion quickly falls apart when Bayers meets Editha. Flagg’s observations about the roles of women in our times as compared to the future are well thought out and lack the venom of other writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs in Pellucidar (1915) with his tribe of brutish women and effeminate men.
Another fault of utopian fiction is the lack of adversaries for conflict so Flagg has his women ruling only part of the world while South America is still run by violent men. The use of a ray that disintegrates iron and lead has the aggressors suing for peace. Eventually, Bayers’ female companion, Editha, is chosen to become one of the Mothers, the highest rank within the patriarch. Once initiated, Editha loses all feeling for her man. Bayers flees back to the past. Those listening to his story demand proof, and in a reveal worthy of H. P. Lovecraft (minus the italics) he shows them the words tattooed on his chest: a number listing him as breeding property of Editha.
Again Flagg mentions Wells and his own story “The Machine Man of Ardathia”, which one character says, “I don’t read cheap, science fiction magazines.” It’s not hard to imagine that the author is quoting some long-dead critic. Flagg also builds upon his story “The Master Ants”. His time traveler equips his machine with a glass shield to protect the rider from the friction that disintegrated the previous device and aged its occupants. This time out Flagg doesn’t want to explore the mechanics of time travel but the war of the sexes.
“The Jelly-Fish” (Weird Tales, October 1930) is a departure for Flagg, a typical ghost story rather than a Science Fiction piece. A man wandering along the shore encounters a man covered in seaweed. He takes him for a lunatic because he tells how his clipper ship sank and he and two others were trapped in the cabin. Jellyfish come to look at them like zoo exhibits before tentacles grab them and pull them to their deaths. The man runs away but months later sees a picture at his aunt’s house of his great-grand uncle who had been mate on that doomed ship. Flagg must have been taking a more commercial approach to writing for this is a potboiler. He would write more horror tales for Weird Tales and Strange Tales.
“The Lizard-Men of Buh-Lo” (Wonder Stories, October 1930) almost reads like a sequel to “The Machine-man of Ardathia”. A scientist named William Swiff reads Flagg’s story and wants to replicate the Ardathia’s envelope to slow down aging. This leads to an experiment in suspended animation and then another in speeding up a wheel to the point its vibration sends it into another dimension, an idea used in “The Blue Dimension”. It is only Swiff’s experiments in suspended animation that make it possible to survive the great speeds and enter this other world. Swiff finds a world of fairy-like creatures (which he dubs the Hummingbird People) and the lizard-men of the title. Coincidence has it that the lizard-men worship a god called Tee-a-tola, who looks like a white human. Swiff uses this chance to rescue one of the hummingbird people named Aeola.
He goes to the temple to demand her back, but the priests aren’t fooled and tied him up. he is thrust into a pit with killer plants but escapes by luck and wanders down a tunnel. he is attacked by two different monsters. Once out of the tunnel he stumles on one of the priests, fights him and kills him. The priest was inside a giant statue of Tee-a-tola, making the false god move. He sees Aeloa is about to be sacrificed. Swiff throws two smoke grenades into the crowd, knocks out the priest. Free to act again he takes Aeola back to the forest and returns home. What seemed like a few days adventure was ten years in our world. Swiff and a friend, Powell, rearm and go back to the other dimension to set themselves up as gods. They promise to send a message but none ever comes back.
Two things strike me about this story. First, Flagg is re-writing “The Blue Dimension”, as if he felt he should have explored more, in particular the ruins of that place. Second, Flagg has more action that is usual for his fiction up to this point. I detect an influence from Edgar Rice Burroughs (The Mastermind of Mars in particular, with its fake god statue scenes, that appeared in Amazing Stories Annual 1927.) The reliance on coincidence is certainly Burroughsesque.
“The Picture” (Weird Tales, February-March 1931) is a deal-with-the-devil story. Jim James, a bum, studies arcane books until he can conjure a demon, Liam Maroo. In exchange for the woman he loves (not his soul), he is given immense wealth and power. Rather predictably, we see him rise to greatness meet the woman of his dreams, only to be confronted by Liam Maroo to pay up. James chooses to lose everything, including her love, to save her life. The opening scene with the strange book and weird rites smacks of H. P. Lovecraft but ultimately Flagg doesn’t want to horrify but to look at the character of James.
“The Synthetic Monster” (Wonder Stories, March 1931) is a weak entry, with the typical Flagg plot, a younger man goes to work for a scientist, this time a chemist working for a Doctor Jacobs. Jacobs has secluded himself away from the scientific community that ridicules his experiment to create living cells. Strange things happen in the house, including vast quantities of food going into the lab and night time encounters with a strange amorphous thing. In the end, the doctor’s ectoplasmic monster attacks Mrs. Reynolds, the widow who keeps the house and love interest of the narrator. The doctor attempts to quell the creature but is partially devoured by it. It is a familiar mad scientist theme that goes back to Mary Shelley. This story has the strongest romantic interest in it of all the Flagg stories.
“The Heads of Apex” (Astounding, October 1931) has two soldiers of fortune being hired by a strange looking cripple named Solino. He takes them in a submarine to fight in a war undersea. The sub crashes, killing Solino and revealing his wheelchair to be a robot cart and the dead man only a head. They leave the sub for a creepy cavern. There they find a shining pyramid that sends them to another dimension. Arriving in this other phase of our dimension they are attacked by tall, green warriors. They are rescued by more head-men riding on wheeled devices. The Head Men of Apex are the survivors of Atlantis, from 300, 000 years ago, and are scientists who have given up their bodies for eternal machine life. The Head Men were worshipped as gods by the regular human survivors of Atlantis but when the scientists allowed a man named Spiro to join them, he rebelled and drives the people to abandon their gods.
Once again, Flagg uses all his favorite props: phase dimensions, immortal machine-men. He has abandoned the Wellsian plot of scientist making a new discovery for a more Edgar Rice Burroughs style adventure with his heroes being soldiers. Their arrival in the other dimension is familiar to those who have read Burroughs’ The Gods of Mars (1913).
“The Superman of Dr. Jukes” (Wonder Stories, November 1931) once again features a criminal rather than a scientist as protagonist. “Killer Mike” is a hitman for the mob who ends up on the wrong side of his boss “The Big Shot”. He flees into the world of hobos, where he subsists until Dr. Jukes offers him work on an experiment. For money and lodgings, “Killer” is injected with serum occasionally until several weeks pass. The experiment over, Jukes leaves the killing of the specimen to an underling. Fortunately for “Killer” he had snuck into the lab the night before and accidentally mixed up the bottles. Instead of a lethal injection, he is given more serum, making him super-fast and super-strong.
Dr. Jukes returns from meeting with a supposed War Department agent, who is actually working for the mob boss, Frazzini, “The Big Shot”. Jukes gives a long, dull explanation of how glands work to his purchaser (and the reader). “Killer Mike” kills the doctor and his assistant, when they realize he has not been terminated, then wanders out into the country. He stops a car traveling at twenty miles an hour cold, with just his hand.
The car turns out to be a cab housing The Big Shot’s Number Two, the man who had posed as a War Department agent. “Killer Mike” recognizes him and kills him with ease, even dodging a bullet from a gun. With his new senses, “Killer Mike” can virtually read minds and track by smell. He quickly finds Number Two’s hotel room and the futuristic Television-Radio. With this he calls The Big Shot, who is in the middle of arguing with his wife, Gloria.
Frazzini, with all his connections, has a five thousand dollar reward placed on “Killer Mike’s” head. The gunmen are helpless to stop the superman from coming into the big Shot’s own lair and take him. Mike and his victim are chased by mobs of thugs and police wanting the reward. Killer Mike takes them out into the desert, for the superman continues to change under the power of the serum, now seven feet tall and burning hot. Frazzini’s mind is an open book, and Mike tells him to quiet his mind. The vibrations increase and he can see another dimension, filled with beautiful places and people. But Mike has reached his climax and now begins to cool down. The magical other realm disappears and he wanders the desert out of his mind.
When the cops find Frazzini they find him a blank-minded idiot. Only Killer Mike can return his sanity to him but he is gone, crazy himself. No one ever finds Killer Mike, though we hear of an old Mexican woman who finds a naked man on the grave of her dead son. She takes him in, believing him to be her boy, returned from heaven. He will live out his life herding goats and dreaming of the other realm he saw for but a moment.
This story is amazing when looked at in perspective of its time. The character Superman, created Siegel and Shuster, was still seven years away. The Nazi busters like Captain America are a decade away. The idea of the super-strength man who is created by mad scientists, enemy of gangsters and crime, and even actual comic books have not been invented in 1931. The first comics appeared in 1933, reprinting material from newspaper comic strips. It would take Superman to change this format to new, original comics. Gernsback cites H. G. Wells’s “The New Accelerator” as the obvious inspiration for Flagg, and the way Killer Mike heats up would prove this. Another likely source is Philip Wylie’s 1930 novel, Gladiator, that was one of Jerome Siegel’s influences along with the Doc Savage pulps. Flagg uses the express “Man-plus” once in the story and it may be the first time it is used – long before Fredrick Pohl’s novel (1976) of that name. The idea of a superman being evil in nature, rather than the well-mannered fellow he is often portrayed as, begins with H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897), where the inventor is also a madman and plans to use his new power to rule the world. In this way Wells may have even been partly responsible for chain reaction of storytelling that created the comic book super villain.
“The Seeds of the Toc-Toc Birds” (Astounding, January 1932) has Flagg writing about Arizona again. This time a man named Talbot is doing geological work on an old mine when his Mexican helper, Manuel, draws his attention to a strange looking bird with metallic feathers. Later he hears strange noises coming from the old mine, but urgent business takes him away before he can explore them.
Later the town of Oracle, near the mine, is overtaken by strange jungle plants that spring up almost immediately. These plants are seeded by strange black globes that drop the seeds. After oracle, the weird invasion moves on to Tucson. Eventually the army is called in to deal with the strange plants and the odd-looking birds and globes.
The cause of the invading birds and seeds becomes known when Milton Baxter, a student of Professor Reubens, comes forward to explain to Congress what he knows. Reubens had witnessed the professor’s invention of a machine that could look into matter, into the multiverse of worlds that exist inside a single grain of sand. There he discovers the race of the Toc-Toc Birds and their advanced mechanical society. The professor works with the birds to bridge the two worlds. The Professor has since disappeared.
The military want to bomb the birds but Talbot shows up again, back from his urgent business, and tells of the mine. He has a plan for two men to sneak into the mine through an adjacent opening and blow the birds up. To do this the military give him a new explosive gas, which Talbot places with success. His curiosity gets the better of him, wanting to see the bird machines, and gets captures. He is knocked unconscious and wakes up in the sub-universe with Professor Ruebens, both prisoners. They escape and return to our world in time to avoid being blown up.
The adventure feel of this story shows how Flagg was able to please Harry Bates’ agenda at Astounding as easily as Gernsback’s invention-oriented feel at Amazing Stories. The worlds-within-worlds idea is not new. Ray Cummings had been using it in All-Story Weekly since The Girl in the Golden Atom (1920), though it is new for Flagg, who tended to take his scientists into other dimension through vibration. The invasion theme isn’t new either, coming long after H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898). What is interesting is how similar Flagg’s use of the idea reads like an Edmond Hamilton tale.
“The Smell” (Strange Tales, January 1932) has a young doctor of Psychology who dabbles in the occult take on the case of Lemuel Mason. The boarder has taken a cheap room in a rooming house but believes it is haunted. The previous night, after falling asleep, he did not see but could smell, then feel, something evil.
The doctor convinces him that it is not occult and to return with sleeping pills. That night Mason again experiences the female and serpentine evil, hearing it speak as well. The doctor insists on joining him for the third night. Taking another sleeping pill, Mason sleeps but rises up in an weird dance with the spirit. The doctor drags him from the room but not in time. Mason has seen the terror and dies of heart failure. The landlady says his face looks just like the young woman who died in the room two years previously.
This story is interesting in that Flagg sets it is the town of his birth, Halifax, Nova Scotia. The doctor begs the landlady to board up the room and never rent it again. He tells us the house was destroyed in the great explosion of 1917. For those not familiar with Canadian history, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions happened in Halifax harbor on December 6, 1917 when two ships filled with military explosives collided. This story also features a vaguely Lovecraftian tome, filled with evil passages and diagrams like The Necronomicon.
“The Cities of Ardatha” (Amazing Stories, March 1932) is a history lesson in the class struggle. Wealthy Purples have all the money and power and ignore and vilify the Unlings. The Equalizers are revolutionaries who dare to ask the Purples to change their ways. When they refuse, Jan, an Equalizer sympathizer kidnaps Thora, daughter of the Lord of Steel. His plan is not to kill or hurt her but to force her to live like an Unling so she will understand the terrible life the underpeople suffer with no food, bad air and robots replacing them in their jobs.
The Equalizers strike up a plan that involves a new mechanical brain. This super-computer can override any mechanical device that has had a fob attached to it. One of the plotters is actually a spy and tells the overlords about everything. The Purples turn the computer’s inventor, Ventar, to their cause with threats and promises of an even better laboratory. The Purple will have Ventor command the machines to do their bidding.
Meanwhile Thora experiences life in the Industrial city of Ferno. She wears rough clothes, eats rough food and gets rough treatment from the local police. She works ten hour days in the mills. She sees her father making an inspection but is beaten when she tries to talk to him. The baby of the couple who house her dies and she flees. Later the policeman Bolan, who is a Pink or privileged servant of the Purples, kidnaps her and takes her to a Pink fortress. There Jan is working espionage and rescues Thora. She is returned to her father an hour before the great revolt.
The moment of uprising comes but Ventar has betrayed the Equalizers and Jan and his boss, Elan, the head of the Equalizers are captured. They expect death but Thora comes. She has convinced her father to save Jan’s life. The two are in love and will marry. Elan accepts his fate, knowing that Thora will now change things for the Unlings, and with Jan at her side he can remind her if she forgets.
This outcome is quite contrary to the usual Gernsback or Amazing Stories formula. In such stories the revolt would have won. And to show Flagg’s true talent the story doesn’t end there. Ventar brings in a an age of new machines and eventually the people, the Unlings included, become technical marvels but fall to worshipping the machine. The story ends with Jan forseeing future humans throwing off the yoke and becoming masters again. (This would be the time of “The Machine-Man of Ardathia” I suppose.) Jan knows he will not live long enough to see it.
Though a quaint class struggle tale, “The Cities of Ardathia” still hits present day readers with certain themes. The tale of the ruling one percent does have relevance in today’s world as does job lose to mechanization. The mechanical brain and the failed attempt to “hack” the system are quite familiar to modern computer users.
“By the Hands of the Dead” (Strange Tales, March 1932) has two newspapermen investigating a Mr. Peter Strong, a scientist who explores Spiritualism. Set in Flagg’s Tucson, the reporters meet Strong at a séance. Later they go to his home, a creepy mansion where they see a mysterious woman. The servant, Michael, seems very nervous as the men discuss how Strong is working on a machine, that looks like a radio, that can draw the dead back to life by producing “units” that will form the body.
The reporters are invited back when the machine is finished. Strong wants skeptics, not believers present. The machine is turned on. It produced noise and sparks. The spark form into the body of a woman, that charges Strong and strangles him to death, before dying herself. Michael explains to the newspapermen that the form is Miriam, Strong’s dead wife. A terrible woman in life, she has killed her husband in death.
Flagg gives away his inspiration in an off-hand comment that Thomas Edison had been working on such a machine before his death. The scenario is Flagg’s version of what might have happened if Edison had succeeded. J. N. Williamson would use the idea at novel length in Horror House (1981), a book marketed as “More Chilling Than The Amityville Horror”.
“The Resistant Ray” (Amazing Stories, July 1932) has another scientist duped by foreign powers, this time Mars. Brown, a writer of sporting magazine stories, is resting out in the hills of Arizona and comes across Doctor Bush, who is working on a new military weapon, a ray that can resist bullets. Doctor Bush, who has the inevitable beautiful daughter, turns out to be the famous scientist, Lasser. Brown isn’t what he seems either, but a government secret agent named Ragnat. When the Martians snag the invention and the Lassers, Brown takes off after them.
The agent hijacks a mail plane and has the pilot jump out with a parachute. He puts on a parachute of his own and finds the Martian spaceship, Taurag at sea, looking for Martian transport. Ragnar planes to shoot up the Taurag with the mail-plane’s heavy guns but the resistance ray is used against him. The plane is stopped in mid-air and the captive slides down on air to the waiting Martians.
The leader of the Martians is Franz Josef (a German sounding Martian if there ever was one!). Josef tells Ragnar of his plans to conquer the Earth with some extra time spent molesting Lasser’s beautiful daughter, Helen. To kill Ragnar, Josef places him between a steel wall and the encroaching resistance ray’s force field. Ragnar will be squished like a bug! The Martians leave because the sight will be too awful. This gives Ragnar enough time to figure how high the force field wall is. It doesn’t go all the way to the ceiling, so he simply crawls over it and kills the Martian operating the machine. Ragnar doesn’t even stop long enough to turn the machine off.
He creeps about the ship until he finds Josef about to take Helen, while her father is locked up in the room next door. Ragnar and Josef begin an epic slugfest, which the Martian wins because he was once a great athlete. Before he can dispatch the American, Helen picks up a chair and knocks him out. The duo rescue the professor just as the ship begins to crack apart. The resistance ray has ruined the ship and the three earthlings jump, using Ragnar’s chute to bring them to safety.
This story shows Flagg losing steam. Written for T. O’Connor Sloane at Amazing Stories, it has none of the exotic deep ideas of Flagg’s work for Gernsback. There are no other dimensions, just an adventure plot with one invention. This type of story was common and there were plenty of hacks to write them.
“After Armageddon” (Wonder Stories, September 1932) is a post-apocalyptic tale narrated by a man who remembers the old days to his young apprentice, Bilembo. The French invade America with a weapon of mass destruction that looks like explosive and poisonous fog. The fogballs as they are known don’t dissipate but last for decades, rolling about destroying life and property. The narrator is a rich man with servants and multiple homes in L. A. and the country. When the killer fogs come he flees with his family and the help in a flying car. Slowly technology fails and the survivors revert to more savage ways. The narrator’s butler Williams changes from servant to master as he leads their small band through dangers. He solves their first crisis, the lack of women, by instituting polygamy. Williams takes the band back to the Pacific coast before dying, where the narrator assumes his role as head priest. The closest precursor to “After Armageddon” is not Wells for once. Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912) tells a similar tale though at much greater length.
“Cosmos” (Chapter 5: Tyrants of Saturn) (Science Fiction Digest, October 1933) is a real departure for Flagg. Usually a Wellsian writer, he abandons his dimensions and time travel for a pure Space Opera tale. Cosmos was a massive writer’s jam written by seventeen different writers, so Flagg inherited certain elements from the previous four chapters. he picks up after bob Olsen’s chapter. The plot follows Fo-Peta, a revolutionary who wages war on the Pross lord, Mer-Mere. To do this he flees to Hade for relief but the three lords of Hade are even more corrupt. Using fifth dimensional technology, the Hadians conquer the Pross lords and arrest Fo-Peta.
The remainder of the story has Zeera, an attractive female who the first ruler of the Hadians desires, using her new power to free Fo-Peta (whom she has fallen for), Pross Mere-mer and Kama-Loo, an astronomer, and getting them to the fifth dimensional craft so they can flee to Awn. The segment end there ans the story will be continued by John W. Campbell himself.
Flagg’s style here is bejeweled and filled with mysterious words that the reader must navigate: “…The walls and ceiling of this hall were of beaten turquay inlaid with tonlin and the floor was of spun prack.” The characters are largely inhuman with gills and tentacles and brain cases. The only real Flaggian element is the introduction of the fifth dimension, which he explored earlier in stories like “The Blue Dimension”.
“The Mentanicals” (Amazing Stories, April 1934) builds on H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. A scientist creates a time machine and an impulsive friend named Bronson takes it into the future. There he discovers a world of ruinous tall buildings inhabited by weird cylinder robots (rendered like killer hot water tanks by Leo Morey) and men reduced to savagery. Like Wells’s time traveler, Bronson loses the machine and can’t get back. He tries to communicate with the beast-men but to no avail. He explores finding strange museums filled with tools. He eventually discovers a collection of magazines and books that explain the history after modern times. A scientist named Bane Borgson invents a mechanical brain-cell that leads to the invention of the Mentanicals. These floating robots take over all the labor of humanity, eventually growing beyond their servant role and become the masters. One of their evolutionary steps is a form of whispering speech.
Bronson becomes frustrated and shoots his revolver at the robots though it doesn’t hurt them. The noise does attract another human voice. Bronson finds a small side room in which is a very old man attached to a life-giving machine. It is Bane Borgson, a thousand and five hundred years old. The Mentanicals originally preserved him as a God figure but have abandoned him to an eternity of waiting. It is only after this discover that Bronson is told his time machine is in the same room. Borgson asks him to return to his own time and never return or the Mentanicals will get time travel. He also ask to be killed. Bronson leaps onto the machine at the same time he shoots Borgson’s life-support. He returns home to tell everyone what he has discovered to his friends. They all work to never allow robots to be created or take over.
Flagg borrows heavily from Wells for the structure of this story. At times it is too close to The Time Machine, though Flagg’s concepts are about the evolution of robots not humans. The ideas he uses are not new in 1934 but have yet to be perfected by Jack Williamson in The Humanoids in 1947.
“The Distortion Out of Space” (Weird Tales, August 1934) is Flagg’s Lovecraftian piece. Borrowing ideas from Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”, Flagg creates a similar set-up. Two campers in Arizona see a meteorite fall on Bear Mountain and go to investigate. On the way they stop off at the cabin of Henry Simpson. The roof of the shack shows damage from the fallen stone but inside something even stranger has occurred. In the bedroom of Henry and Lydia Simpson is a vast distortion, an abyss of dimensional space that does not follow normal physics. One man goes into the distortion to find Henry’s wife while the narrator hangs back at the door to lead him out. Eventually he takes a rope and follows his friend in. Lost and desperate he fires his revolver. The shot accidentally kills the alien who is creating the distortion. The three humans find themselves back in a normal room. The narrator, who shared his thoughts with the alien, knows of its great loneliness and pain. He weeps.
A letter in Wonder Stories, July 1934 called “Flagg’s Defense” addresses a claim by Donald A. Wolheim in a previous letter that the idea for “The Distortion Out of Space” came from Wolheim’s “The Man From Ariel” (Wonder Stories, January 1934). Flagg gives an interesting account of the story’s history. The original unsold version had been shopped around by Flagg’s agent, Charles Roy Cox, in 1932. When Flagg approached Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales personally, Wright told Flagg that “the end scarcely justified” the story. Flagg rounded out the tale and sold it to Weird Tales, though Wright hung onto it for a year before publishing it. Thus Flagg proved his story had not been inspired by DAW, which Hugo Gernsback supports in an addendum.
Flagg spent most of his last years writing only small pieces for the fanzines such as “Cigarette Characterization #1” (Fantasy Magazine, August 1934), “Moon Voyager’s Speech” (poem) (Fantasy Magazine, September 1934) and “My Personal Evolution” (poem) (Fantasy Magazine, September 1935) and “Flower of War” (Leaves, Winter 1938).
Of these “Why I Use a Pen Name” is probably the most important. Flagg explained his pseudonym in Fantasy Magazine, February-March 1935. In a dreamy voice he explains the story of his younger brother, Francis Flagg Weiss, a shorter, stronger, handsome man who fought in the army in World War I, returned to marry his sweetheart and work as a ship-builder. The economic depression of 1920 saw his fortunes fall, so that he worked at shoveling coal at night for small money. His wife, who was with child, was poorly but there was no money for an x-ray and she died. The child died with her, and ultimately, taking his own life, so did Francis. Flagg explains “…I have raised a monument to him in stories, poor tho (sic) that monument may be, and have inscribed on it his name. And in some indefinable way, I have linked his life with mine. It gives me an actual satisfaction to know that Francis Flagg is not forgotten, that thousands see that name, read it, that his monument may last my life-time, if not beyond it.” This heart-felt explanation may be the most touching thing ever written for a fanzine.
“Earth’s Lucky Day” (with Forrest J. Ackermann) (Wonder Stories, March-April 1936)(Reprinted in Fantastic Story Quarterly, April 1951) is an over-written piece that tells of two scientists that ascend in a newly invented sphere that mysteriously disappear. Then a Russian who has invented a new speed-train also disappears. And finally a death ray about to be used in war also vanishes.
Twenty-five years pass when a gigantic cylinder is found that contains all three inventions, the dead men who were taken with them as well as giant steel plates with English writing on them. The transcript of the plates tells how giants from another world had come to Earth but thought all its life dead, had taken the inventions but then left to return in fifty millions years, with the hope of finding new intelligent life. The aliens lived at such a pace they could not perceive terrestrial life nor communicate with its inhabitants. The overly long story does have an interesting idea at its core.
In a letter to Weird Tales (September 1937), Francis Flagg said farewell to his correspondent and friend, H. P. Lovecraft. Flagg mentions all the ideologies the two men discussed and bemoans that Fantasy has lost one of its finest writers. Flagg mentions that Lovecraft’s materialist point-of-view was one of the things that made his horror fiction work so well. Flagg would get to say good-by one more time, this time in a poetic fashion with “To Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (Weird Tales, March 1938). The poem speaks to the vastness of time and space and Lovecraft’s short, brilliant time amongst us. It ends: “The genius that no death can ever take/Crowns him immortal, though a man has died.”
“The Dreamer in the Desert” (poem) (Weird Tales, May 1942) is a longer poem that looks at a barren desert, remembers the Empire of Arnor but wonders at how time has erased it all. In essence, Flagg has re-written Shelley’s “Ozymandias”.
“The Snake” (poem) (Weird Tales, November 1943) is a short poem to serpents and their history. What can you expect from a poet who lives in Arizona?
“An Experiment With Time” (with Forrest J. Ackermann) (Fantasy Magazine, January 1934) was an early version of “Time Twister” (with Forrest J. Ackermann) (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1947) is a short short that is meant to be funny but falls short. Professor Olsen and his farmhand, Hank Weston, escape the professor’s shrewish sister, Barbara, by jumping into a time machine. After a whirlwind explosion the two men find themselves in a future where the farm has been wiped out and African animals wander freely. When a lion chases them into a hole, they find Barbara. She had been looking for them to warn them of a coming tornado. The animals must have come a local circus. The time machine never worked.
The Night People (1947) is an obscure novella published as a book just before the author’s death. The plot revolves around a Joseph Smith, a condemned prisoner, who is sent into another realm of existence. Stanton, the doctor in charge of the condemned prisoners, gives Smith a strange drink. In the new reality, Smith is captured by an intelligent ant-like race called the Kolans. He befriends the ant people and even fights in a battle for them against rivals. Gigantic, Smith’s advantage is reminiscent of both Gulliver’s Travels and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ own Gulliver homage, Tarzan and the Ant-Men.
Winning the battle, Smith feels ill and then suddenly grows in size, to look into the eyes of a girl. Flagg begins his next episode without explanation, throwing Smith into a life and death struggle with Bara, a man who has come to claim the diminutive beauty, Dwana (or Dawna, as the text varies inconsistently). Smith kills him, takes his clothes and the duo steal a skryro, or helicopter.
Bara’s pirates follow them in their own skyships and force them to parachute while disguising their route with a chemical fog. They land in a wilderness where they are attacked by an orkru, a cross between a boar and a kangaroo. Smith fights it with an ax but Dwana kills it using a ray gun.
The duo set up camp on a hilltop where Dwana tells him that they are five hundred miles from Dwana’s home city of Mex-Can. The wilderness between them is inhabited by the Erlongs, the Night People. It isn’t very long before they are attacked by the Erlongs, being driven to the highest point of their eyrie. Armed with a catapult, the Night People are close to victory. As the Erlongs attack, a helicopter from Mex-Can shows up. In the desperate escape, Smith falls to his death.
He doesn’t die, of course, but reappears in the hospital, a prisoner. Doctor Stanton explains that Smith has been growing to immense size and arriving on different planes of existence. The Kolans exist on a smaller level than the Night People. The doctor wants to see these other realms too. He has developed a way to stay in a new plane even if the drug wears off. They don’t have to return if they don’t want to. Smith can find Dwana and stay with her forever. Before his execution, both Smith and Stanton disappear, never to be seen again.
The ideas Flagg uses were not new (even for him), having been used in different ways by previous authors, most famously, Jack London, in The Star Rover (1915) and Tom Curry used body transfer to accomplish the same in “The Soul Snatcher” (Astounding, April 1930). The different levels of atomic worlds began with Ray Cummings’ The Girl in the Golden Atom. This tired collection of episodes strike me as being akin to early Flagg stories, and probably would have not been publishable in 1947. The only way it could have seen even a limited audience was in a private edition such as this one.
And with this last, strange tale, Francis Flagg was no more. The author who wanted everyone to remember his brother died but his work remains for us to appreciate now.
