Comet Madness!

I wasn't going to interrupt my series on Earl Peirce, Jr. I was going to keep writing it straight through to the end, which is still a couple of weeks off at the current rate. But then I saw something yesterday that put me over the edge.

I saw a man driving a Jeep.

Alone.

With the top down.

And the doors off.

With the wind whipping all around him and through his vehicle.

And he was wearing a mask.

It's not just a Jeep Thing. Every day, I see people driving, with their windows up or down, or bicycling, or walking, in the breeze, in the fresh air, in the bright, hot, ultraviolet-y sunshine--and they wear masks. They're alone, and they wear masks. They're with their husbands or wives, with whom they presumably live, sleep, eat, and make love, and they wear masks. They could be astronauts in quarantine after a moon-landing--they could be the scientists in The Andromeda Strain, scrubbed and sterilized to the marrow--they could be the Bubble Boy inside his impervious plastic membrane--and they would still wear masks.

The operative part of coronavirus is virus, a thing--living, non-living, or somewhere in between--that is both discoverable and describable by science. Our superstitious acts--knocking on wood or throwing a pinch of salt over our shoulders--are of no use. They do nothing. To use a science-y kind of word, they are inefficacious. Likewise, the coronavirus does not exist or act in accordance with superstition. It does not go around in clouds, vapors, gases, or waves, like the poisonous tail of a world-ending comet, or a fog of mustard gas creeping over a Belgian battlefield, or a strange mist that engulfs you like the one in The Incredible Shrinking Man, leaving you coated all over the way a kindergartner is after crafting with sparkles and glue. It is a virus, and it is subject to the laws of nature, not the vagaries of superstition. We live in a world full of people who claim an absolute belief in science and an equally absolute disdain for superstition. In actuality, most people feed at a buffet in which both are offered and they take their pick. A little of this, a little of that . . .

A comet is crossing our skies this week. Called NEOWISE, it was discovered on March 27, 2020, the week before coronavirus deaths in the United States jumped from the hundreds into the thousands. Coincidence? I don't think so. Not when you realize that comets have been bringers of doom and disaster for as long as there have been people. It happened in 1832 with Biela's Comet. If you don't know that the world ended then, it's only because all records were wiped out in the disaster. The same comet came back in 1872 and the world ended again. In 1910, the French astronomer and science fiction author Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) predicted that if the Earth should pass through the tail of Halley's Comet, cyanogen gas could impregnate our atmosphere, thereby snuffing out all life here. I don't know which hat Flammarion was wearing when he made that prediction, whether it was his stargazer hat or his fantasist hat. Maybe he made this one himself from tinfoil. In any case, I don't remember that the world came to end in 1910, but then that was way before my time.

By the way, that's the second time Flammarion's name has come up in this blog in the last month. That's pretty good for a guy who has been dead for nearly a century and whom nobody remembers much anymore.

I'm not sure how Flammarion survived all of the cyanogen gas that swept the planet. Maybe he hid in a cave like we're all doing right now and like a "strange sect" in Georgia did on the night of May 18-19, 1910, as the comet made its deadly pass. (1) Those people were pikers, though. They may have had to deal with great clouds of cyanogen gas, but that's nothing compared to coronavirus. I heard that coronavirus can actually dissolve rubber. It happened to a fighter pilot over New Mexico when he flew through a cloud of it. His mask dissolved and he ended up crashing his airplane and dying. That's what I heard.

We don't know how many fatalities there were from Halley's Comet in 1910. We didn't keep good numbers back then. Not like today. Not like in Florida, where a man who was killed in a motorcycle crash the other day is rightly counted as a coronavirus victim because he had the coronavirus when he crashed. That's what Dr. Florida Man told us. I quote: "But you could actually argue that it could have been the COVID-19 that caused him to crash." Too bad Dr. Florida Man wasn't around in 1910 to count the victims. Then we would know. Instead all we have is the case of forty-eight-year-old Jacob Haberlach of Evansville, Indiana, who keeled over from a heart attack while trying to get a look at the comet. (2) The score so far: Coronavirus 10 billion, Halley's Comet 1.

If this is science, I guess we will go on having clouds and mists, vapors and waves, fogs and gasses, cloaking the planet in a deadly miasma but rendered completely harmless by pieces of cloth worn over our faces. Or really just parts of our faces because who ever breathes through their nose? You don't need a mask there.

I don't know how we're ever going to get through all of this.

Notes

(1) "Georgia Sect in Cave Awaiting End of World," York Daily (York, Pennsylvania), May 19, 1910, p. 1.

(2) "Comet Causes Heart Disease," York Daily (York, Pennsylvania), May 19, 1910, p. 1. Yes, they're from the same source.

Comet Madness!

"But wonders and wild fancies had been, of late days, strangely rife among mankind [. . . ]."

--Edgar Allan Poe

In its issue of December 1839, Burton's Gentleman's Magazine printed Edgar Allan Poe's tale "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion." The tale is brief. It takes the form of a dramatic dialogue between the two title characters, one newly arrived in the afterlife, the other a veteran. The newcomer Eiros explains how he got to this place: Earth came in contact with a comet that--tenuous as it was known to be--nonetheless took away all of our planet's nitrogen, leaving everything to "burst at once into a species of intense flame, for whose surpassing brilliancy and all-fervid heat even the angels in the high Heaven of pure knowledge have no name. Thus ended all." Was this the first comet story in fantasy and science fiction? I don't know. Was it the first tale of comet madness? I don't know that either. Let's just call it an introduction and draw from it the epigraph above, which is as true now--or truer--as it was in Poe's day. The illustration by the way is by the Italian artist Alberto Martini (1876-1954).

Clouds, gases, and waves, engulfing us, sweeping over us, carrying us away--these have been the promises, predictions, prognostications, and panics that have come again and again throughout history, especially since science and mass culture were invented in the modern period. "One of the Terrors of Halley's Comet Which Is Not at All Likely to Be Realized," reads the caption of this illustration from the New York Tribune, May 8, 1910. Thanks for letting us know that this probably maybe won't really happen. The copywriter left off a subtitle: "But We're Going to Show It to You Anyway, Just to Put a Scare into You!" We have the same thing now with predictions of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dead from the coronavirus. Anyway, this picture has it all: the comet and its tail in the background, an ominous black cloud in the middle ground, and a huge, devastating wave washing over the village in the foreground. We don't have any comet panic this week that I know of, but there has been talk of waves and second waves for months now in regards to the coronavirus. Don't Get Caught In the Wave! Wear Your Mask!

If you thought that passing through a tail of cyanogenic gas was bad, just think of what would happen if the comet were actually to crash into Earth! It would look like a cordial cherry when you squeeze it too hard, as in this illustration from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 15, 1910. There are clouds again and jets of gas, too.

This one's even better. There is actual pain, suffering, and destruction going on, though most of the people don't appear to be too worked up over things. One woman is even holding onto her hat as if to lose it would be the greatest of disasters. Taken from the Chicago Tribune, August 9, 1903, this illustration has a now-classic composition with people running around in the foreground while all kinds of terrible things are going on in the background. ("It's a cookbook! It's cookbook!") Basil Wolverton drew a picture almost exactly like it for a story called--appropriately enough--"The End of the World." To see it and others like it, click here.

So Halley's Comet passed and nobody died except Jacob Haberlach. Nelson Harding (1879-1942) of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle observed that happy event--the passing of the comet, not the passing of Haberlach--with this cartoon captioned "That Was Easy," dated May 19, 1910. Easy? Maybe. Old Planet Earth still has a little bit of sweat on his brow, though. But look how brave he is: no mask.

In World War I, on the battlefields of Europe, deadly clouds of gas became real, and men wore masks to protect themselves from it. "Learn to Adjust Your Respirator Correct and Quick" enjoined the caption on this poster by Lieut. W.G. Thayer (William Gordon Thayer, 1893-1921) of the U.S. Army. In 1918, when this picture was made, wearing a mask might mean the difference between a little more life and a horrifying death. Again, the threat was real and the need for the mask was real. Those two things don't always go together.

These are British soldiers "Fighting Foul Fumes and Fiends." They're wearing masks like the ones we're wearing now. The difference is that they faced horrors, many of them almost certain death. What do we face exactly?

The date--May 15, 1915--is significant: less than a month before, on April 22, 1915, the Germans used poison gas for the first time as they launched what became known as the Second Battle of Ypres. Note the blurb above the main title, "The Allies' Wonderful Advance on Turkey." It refers, I assume, to the landing at Gallipoli, April 25, 1915. That "advance" turned out to be not so wonderful after all.

By the way, American soldiers were gassed during the war, too, among them Robert Jere Black, Jr. (1892-1953), a teller of weird tales.

There were other veterans of the Great War who contributed to Weird Tales, most notably the editor, Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940), and the co-founder Jacob Clark Henneberger (1890-1969). The war was a seminal event in the creation of the magazine. It's hard to imagine that Weird Tales would otherwise have come about or that it would have had the subject matter from which to draw so many of its stories. There was (and is) a general atmosphere of doom or fate in weird fiction (that's actually close to the meaning of the word weird), also a feeling that we are helpless--or nearly so--in our encounters with the indifferent or even malevolent forces afoot in the universe. In the depths of mass warfare, men might only feel the same things.

In December 1939, just three months after World War II began, Weird Tales had its first war cover. The artist was a young Hannes Bok (1914-1964). The cover story is "Lords of the Ice" by David H. Keller (1880-1966). The plot is fanciful (it concerns a nameless dictator's plot to seize the natural resources of Antarctica), but the imagery would have been firm in the memory of its viewers: the man in the doorway could easily have stepped out of a trench in Flanders or France, circa 1915. He's even wearing a mask.

(We can safely add Keller's story to the Polar Fiction Database. We might also speculate that the idea of the secret Nazi base in Antarctica was in weird fiction and science fiction before it became a conspiracy theory in what some people think is the real world. But then that's usually the case, not just with conspiracy theories but with all kinds of wacky ideas.)

The 1930s were a time of anxiety as people sensed that real disaster was once again stalking Europe. On November 19, 1932, the Illustrated London News printed this shocking and sensationalistic image on its cover. The artist's signature is partially cropped out, as is any caption or subtitle. (I didn't do the cropping but I'll apologize for it anyway.) It doesn't take the reading of a caption to understand the subject matter: it can only be a gas attack, perhaps on London, certainly on a city of Western Europe. The timing would not appear random, for in November 1932, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party were wrangling for power in the German government. Two months later, he and they would have it.

And when it came time to stand up to the Nazis, the world didn't flinch. People didn't put on masks and hide in a corner of their houses. They showed courage, and they fought.

As I have already said and as everybody should already know, the coronavirus does not travel around the world in a cloud. You will not encounter it in any such way. Not on foot. Not in your car. Not on your bicycle. And especially not on a boat on the lake. (Unless you're in Michigan. But then only on a motorboat. Being in a canoe protects you from clouds of coronavirus.) What we're living through is not the coming of a comet or a World War I gas attack, and it's certainly not like this scene from The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957).*

This is actually the first image that came to me as I began seeing people driving around in their cars while wearing masks. This is what I picture must be going on in their imaginations: the approaching cloud of coronavirus . . .

The Incredible Shrinking Man was written by Richard Matheson (1926-2013), who also wrote for Weird Tales. His second and last story, entitled "Slaughter House," appeared in the magazine sixty-seven years ago this month, July 1953. Matheson went on to write I Am Legend (1954), the story of a terrible disease that ravages the world and probably the same story that started us off on the road to zombie hordes roaming over the Earth.

*Which was released, it so happens, in the month that the Asian Flu pandemic began, February 1957.

Original text and captions copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein

The woke but godless, the arrogant but ignorant, the violent but physically unimpressive, the degreed but poorly educated, the broke but acquisitive, the ambitious but stalled--these are history's ingredients of riot and revolution.

--from "The Fragility of the Woke" by Victor Davis Hanson, July 9, 2020

Last night I finished reading Robert A. Heinlein's novel Beyond This Horizon (1942). By chance, it touches on some of the things I have written about lately. What I mean when I say "by chance" is that I didn't know what the book is about before I read it, and I don't have a program of reading in search of Cozy Dystopia. I just found this book at the secondhand store and read it at my first opportunity.

I wouldn't call Beyond This Horizon a cozy dystopia or really a dystopia of any kind. Although it seems to have been written as a kind of positive fantasy on the part of its author, I don't think Heinlein's book is really utopian, either. It simply describes a future society that's different from our own, one that maybe Heinlein would have enjoyed but no one else. (There's a lot of gun-slinging in it.)

Beyond This Horizon is not the most compelling of Heinlein's novels. It takes awhile to take off and you start to think that it's trying to be too many things at once and not any one thing all together. It's a kind of journey through an alternative society, and in that ways it has similarities to a utopian story. The society it describes, however, is not perfect and is not meant to sound like it's perfect. (At least I don't think it is.) The society in Beyond This Horizon actually sounds kind of disorderly--despite the emphasis on codes of honor and etiquette--and unpleasant--despite the comforts it offers its citizens. In other words, the society described in Beyond This Horizon is kind of like every other society throughout history.

There are innovations, or at least semi-innovations, in Beyond This Horizon. These include waterbeds, sperm banks, voice ringtones, telephonic fax machines, a programmable autopilot, escalators, and welfare payments made directly to citizens by their government. I call them semi-innovations because, although they may have been invented or conceived before Heinlein wrote, they seem to have made pretty early appearances in his novel. In fact, some could have appeared at that time only in a science fiction story.

A long time ago, before it was called science fiction, or scientifiction, or even scientific romance, our favorite genre was sometimes called pseudo-scientific adventure, or fiction, or, if the reviewer was feeling appreciative, literature. The term came along about when you imagine it would have, that is, in the nineteenth century, after there was such a thing as science, and because of that development, various pseudosciences. The earliest use I have found of the term pseudo-science in reference to what we call science fiction is from 1885 in--of all unlikely places--the Vicksburg, Mississippi Evening Post ("Vital Statistics," Sept. 7, 1885, p. 2). The Post's use of the term makes it clear that readers would already have had an inkling of what pseudo-scientific adventure is all about. I suspect the term had been in use for some time, possibly in reference to the works of Jules Verne. In any case, the terms pseudo-science and pseudo-scientific in reference to science fiction were used more often as the turn of the century approached. Curiously, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction treats just one definition of the term pseudo-science, and it's the one we think of now when we see the word. You know, all of that crackpot stuff about eugenics, mental telepathy, space aliens, and reincarnation.

One of the problems with Beyond This Horizon is that there's a lot of that crackpot stuff about eugenics, mental telepathy, space aliens, and reincarnation. In fact, these things form the basic theme of the book, once it gets around to its basic theme. (And thank God it finally makes its point in its final three pages. That's how close Heinlein came to writing a pretty pointless novel. But then maybe he knew what he was doing all along.)

Beyond This Horizon takes place in the far future, maybe somewhere around the twenty-fourth-and-a-half century. (As in Buck Rogers, a man who went to sleep in the 1920s is awakened into this new world.) And although many of the names and much of the culture of past centuries has been lost (this is a post-apocalyptic world), some also remains, including knowledge of Arrhenius and his panspermic hypothesis (perhaps only a semi-pseudoscientific idea in our day) (p. 125), and Flammarion's (pseudoscientific) research into reincarnation (p. 143). (Flammarion also wrote science fiction by the way.) There's another idea from the past--a really hateful idea, in fact--that has survived in Heinlein's future society. More on that at the end.

Although he touched on other pseudoscientific and semi-pseudoscientific ideas, the heart of Heinlein's story concerns eugenics, and from eugenics it goes into mental telepathy and (spoiler alert) reincarnation, all of which are treated as scientific subjects. Eugenics, that dream program of early twentieth-century Progressivism, has thankfully been discredited since Heinlein wrote. (1) But in 1942, when Beyond This Horizon was first published, there were still those in the West who held to it, despite its growing association with the monstrous and often pseudoscientific ideas of Nazi Germany. Again, in the society described in Beyond This Horizon, eugenics is central: the whole point is to breed the superior man. And the whole point of breeding the superior man turns into the goal of developing telepathic abilities in that man, which are used in turn to confirm (in those last three pages) that the soul survives the death of the body and that therefore life has meaning.

I would call that a strange and ambitious subject for a science fiction novel.

As I read Beyond This Horizon, it occurred to me that the eugenics/superior man/mental telepathy program outlined therein seems also to have been the program of the whole of Astounding Science-Fiction under the editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr. Heinlein's novel, serialized in the April and May 1942 issues of the magazine, had been preceded by A.E. van Vogt's Slan (Sept.-Dec. 1940), which treated similar ideas. By 1940 or '42, Campbell had already become interested in psychic phenomena. But who in this world can exercise his psychic abilities? Perhaps only the mutated man, the advanced man, the superior man. So that's the man about whom Campbell's writers wrote. He is in Slan and in Beyond This Horizon. He is also the end goal of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, which first saw the light of day in the May 1950 issue of Astounding, evolving soon after into Scientology.

Say what you will about him, but at least Robert Heinlein was smart enough to see through Hubbard and his crackpot schemes. But Campbell and van Vogt? Not so much. Nonetheless, Heinlein seems to have had a favorable view of eugenics and its program of generating the superior man. I have a feeling that he thought of himself as one of them, already on Earth in the here and now. He seems also to have given some credence to mental telepathy as a scientifically explainable phenomenon. Time to move on.

* * *

One of the side plots of Beyond This Horizon is an attempted coup against the government. The government is already pretty lousy. Like human reproduction, the economy is planned and the people have become more or less serfs. (2) But the plotters against the government are worse still. We recognize them today, for they are still with us. Their ideas are the same, though older, more tired, and more worn out than they were in 1942, if that's even possible. They are the ideas of the Progressive, the Socialist (species national or international, it doesn't matter), the Collectivist ("The Whole is greater than the parts!" is their slogan in Heinlein's book), the Leftist of whatever stripe: Society must be destroyed and then rebuilt upon a foundation of Science and Reason.

I started this ever-expanding essay with an illustrative quote. Here are some others, from Beyond This Horizon (Signet, n.d.):

Had he [Monroe-Alpha, one of the plotters] been as skilled in psychologics as he was in mathematics he might possibly have recognized his own pattern for what it was--religious enthusiasm, the desire to be part of a greater whole and to surrender one's own little worries to the keeping of an over-being. He had been told, no doubt, in his early instruction, that revolutionary political movements and crusading religions were the same type-form process, differing only in verbal tags and creeds, but he had never experienced either one before. In consequence, he failed to recognize what had happened to him. Religious frenzy? What nonsense--he believed himself to be an extremely hard-headed agnostic. (Emphasis in the original.) (p. 92)

* * * 

Mordan [one of the government's men, who speaks after the coup has been put down] considered how to reply [. . .]. "Perhaps," he said, "it would be simplest to state that they [the plotters] never did have what it takes. The leaders were, in most cases, genetically poor types, (3) with conceit far exceeding their abilities. I doubt if any one of them had sufficient imagination to conceive logically the complexities of running a society, even the cut-to-measure society they dreamed of. [. . .] What it boils down to is lack of imagination and overwhelming conceit." (Emphasis added.) (p. 104)

* * * 

"I venture to predict [Mordan continues] that, when we get around to reviewing their records, we will find that the rebels were almost all--all, perhaps--men who had never been outstandingly successful at anything. Their only prominence was among themselves."

     Hamilton thought this over to himself. He had noticed something of the sort. They had seemed like thwarted men. [. . .] they were swollen with self-importance, planning this, deciding that, talking about what they would do when they "took over." Pipsqueaks, the lot of 'em. (Emphasis added again.) (p. 104)

Here is where I'll send you back to the quote from Victor Davis Hanson and where I'll just restate that we have seen the likes of these people before, the people about whom Dr. Hanson writes today and about whom Heinlein wrote before him. Heinlein described them as having "conceit far exceeding their abilities"; Dr. Hanson calls them "the arrogant but ignorant." "Pipsqueaks," Heinlein wrote; Dr. Hanson calls them "physically unimpressive." Heinlein understood that plotters are "thwarted men [. . .] swollen with self-importance"; Dr. Hanson calls them "ambitious but stalled." I'll refer you to Eric Hoffer, too. He understood, as Heinlein did, that the radical political impulse is religious in its aims and intensity. Instead of "thwarted," Hoffer referred to these men as having "spoiled lives," "spoiled" not as in materially comfortable, but degraded or ruined. They are bored and unhappy, self-loathing and alienated. They seek happiness, excitement, fulfillment, and a chance to lose themselves in mass movements of visionary and religious intensity ("wild, uncontrolled daydreams," Heinlein calls them). They are the same people today who are destroying and burning, tearing down and looting, beating and killing. They have never created anything, never accomplished anything; they are small, weak, and ignorant, and so they seek, out of infantile fury and rabid envy, to destroy the things that others have created, to bring down their accomplishments and scatter them in the mud and rubble of the hated, ruined, and soon-to-be-overthrown past. Children. Infants. "Pipsqueaks, the lot of 'em."

* * *

I have just two more things. There are anachronisms in Beyond This Horizon. That's for sure. Part of it is in the way people talk, a 1940s kind of snappy banter. That's common in Heinlein's writing. When it's good, it peps up a story. When it's not good, well . . . . Another is that some of the characters have old-fashioned names: Felix, Martha, Phyllis. The effect is to make Beyond This Horizon pretty badly dated. (Sorry to all people named Felix, Martha, and Phyllis.) As a cartoonist, I noticed another: the protagonist Felix is referred to once as a "Cheerful Cherub," which was the name of a newspaper comic panel from the 1920s by Rebecca McCann and which could hardly have survived into the far future (p. 149).

There's still one more that is far more troubling.

The man from 1926 comes out of his slumber-stasis and interacts with the superman Felix a couple of times. (This is another of the tangents in Heinlein's novel.) There is a misunderstanding. The man from the past is challenged to a duel. Felix advises him to apologize to the offended party so as to avoid being killed. The man's pride is hurt. And then he uses the n-word (p. 145).

And Felix, who knows only a little of the distant past, its customs, and its lingo, replies, "I don't understand what you mean. What has your color to do with it?" (p. 145).

So we are expected to believe that not only the word--that shocking and disgusting word--is still in use in the far future and that a man of that future knows what it means, but also that the perception and status of the people to whom it is applied have remained unchanged despite the passage of centuries. That is inconceivable to me, and it shows--despite everything else there is in this book--a terrible and inexcusable failure of the author's imagination. I'm not the first to make note of this. Thankfully others have noticed and objected before me. But in 2018, the World Science Fiction Convention awarded Beyond This Horizon a Retro-Hugo Award for best novel. I find Heinlein's use of the word a terrible flaw in an already flawed book. Was there any consideration of this flaw on the part of WorldCon? Couldn't it have found something else out of the year 1942 upon which to bestow its award? (4) And could such a thing happen now, just two years later? Not likely. Not in this climate. I'm not one for cancellation, bowdlerization, or censorship, but Robert Heinlein should have known better. It was 1942 for God's sake. He should have known better. Why should we award his ignorance and failed imagination now?

* * *

I'll close with another quote, this one from a commenter called WP on the website of the National Review. After someone else referred to our times as "stupid," WP wrote:

"Calling our current times 'stupid' is an insult to the dignity and majesty of stupid."

Give that guy (or woman) an award.

Notes
(1) Kind of. Founded by Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood is still in the business of correcting what she called "the most urgent problem today [which] is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective." See her original article "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda," from October 1921.
(2) Did Heinlein really look with favor upon a planned economy? Maybe so. A lot of people did in those days. The man from the twentieth century who emerges into Heinlein's present studied another one of Progressivism's isms, Taylorism, also called scientific management. Taylorism is often a feature of planned and controlled economies. After hating it, V.I. Lenin came to like it and adopted it in his new slave state of the Soviet Republic.
(3) Keep in mind that genetic superiority and inferiority is the unit of measure in Heinlein's imagined society. Feel free to insert your own unit of measure: it all comes out the same in the end. Put another way, there are just two types among the haters and destroyers: the evil and exceptional (like Lenin) and the stupid and thoroughly unexceptional (everybody who follows the evil and exceptional). The second type is waaay more common. This is the type that is currently running through our streets.
(4) How about Rocket to the Morgue by Anthony Boucher? It's not science fiction exactly, but it's about science fiction. Call it honorary science fiction and give Boucher the award.

Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein was first published as a serial in the April and May 1942 issues of Astounding Science-Fiction. Astounding used Heinlein's pseudonym Anson MacDonald as its byline. The MacDonald part was no doubt for Heinlein's wife at the time, Leslyn MacDonald (1904-1981), who was also a teller of weird tales.

The cover illustration by Hubert Rogers depicts one of the most interesting and well-written sequences in Heinlein's novel. That sequence takes place in redwood country in California during the attempted coup.

A. E. van Vogt's story "Asylum" appeared in the following month's issue, displacing Heinlein's on the cover. Rogers was again the cover artist. His green-glowing, fusiform craft is practically the same as the month before. Like Heinlein, van Vogt was a believer, I think, in the superior man. Unlike Heinlein, he went down the rabbit hole of L. Ron Hubbard's scam/belief system.

Revised slightly on July 11, 2020.
Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley