Robots Have No Tails (Henry Kuttner)

I used to wonder if my sleeping self were a completely different creature than the waking me who’s typing this now. My sleeping self, I thought, had his own personality, his own urge to survive, and simple wants: to be left alone so he could survive – which meant, of course, not waking up.

My sleeping self could carry on a short conversation. He might promise to do anything, if it seemed like once he’d made the promise, he’d get to survive (sleep). He even might answer the phone and do those things remotely. Once he picked up the phone and just said “Why are you doing this to me?” before he hung up.

He had a fairly short window in which to make the world go away because after a couple of minutes the waking me would take his place. So he was wily. Often enough I found myself dealing with what he’d done as my day went on.

But the sleeping me was nothing compared to the alternate self of Galloway Gallegher, as we see in this collection of short stories by Henry Kuttner.

Gallegher, says Gallegher, does science by ear. He doesn’t know how. Somehow – in spite of not having a lot of formal training – his subconscious has picked up a lot of knowledge along the way and if his conscious mind just gets out of its way it can do such amazing things that it makes him the most gifted – if unusual – inventor in the world.

Fortunately for his subconscious, this happens when Gallegher is supremely drunk. It’s fortunate because that happens pretty often.

And that’s the setup for each of these stories – because although Gallegher (drunk) can solve just about any problem that’s presented to him he does it "by ear", using whatever materials are at hand – and sometimes, whatever he can have delivered. He doesn’t make notes, and he’s suspicious of any attempt to record what he’s up to. He’ll meet with clients, cobble together some bizarre machine to solve their problems – often more than one at a time – and then pass out, leaving Gallegher (sober) to try to figure out what’s happened. Why, for example, he now has a machine that’s eaten all the dirt in his back yard and does nothing else except to sing "Saint James Infirmary". And, just as often, why everyone seems to be out to get him.

I remember Henry Kuttner mainly for his fantasy stories from the 1940s and 1950s. They were among the many pulp stories reprinted when I was young. Discovering these, though, was a great pleasure – they’re science fiction screwball comedies, and I just wish there were more of them.

Robots Have No Tails (Henry Kuttner)

Four of the five Gallegher stories were written in 1942 (under the name Lewis Padgett), before Kuttner went off to war. The last was published in 1948. The near-future world of these stories is one in which rapid changes in technology have confused matters a bit – especially in the legal system – and that makes us feel right at home there, doesn’t it?

These stories were first gathered together as a book in 1952. This Planet Stories edition has a new cover by Tomasz Jedruszek and some fine interior illustrations by Brian Snoddy, a new introduction by F. Paul Wilson, and the original 1952 introduction by C.L. Moore – Kuttner’s wife, herself the author of Shambleau and the Jirel of Joiry stories.

Highly recommended!

Technorati Tags: science fiction, henry kuttner, robots have no tails, planet stories, paizo publishing, astounding magazine, lewis padgett

Just Imagine - now available at Amazon

This is momentous news, dear reader, and I have no idea when exactly it finally happened – but the world’s first all singing, all dancing science fiction musical is finally available on DVD.

“Just Imagine” was a landmark film, in which the 1920s and 1930s vision of the future was captured for all time – with amazing miniature sets and rockets, the most famous of which rose out of the prop room to become Flash Gordon’s rocket, in the movie serials – and it is simply not to be missed by anyone who loves the retro future.

It is also a profoundly silly film. Don’t let that stop you.

For years, it’s been impossible to find a commercial tape or disc of this movie, though bootlegs showed up often at eBay.

Just Imagine was an early sound picture – it was released in 1930 – and it features both Maureen O’Sullivan and the vaudeville comic El Brendel. The film takes us (and Brendel) to the astonishing world of 1980 – where we all have flying cars and New York is a multilayered city of public and private transportation, with traffic cops on floating platforms

Just Imagine - now available at Amazon

blowing their whistles at us. The sets are fantastic; the rockets are wonderful; and it’s just sort of mind-blowingly naive and silly.

There is (of course!) a trip to Mars, but possibly the best times are to be had here on Earth with its arranged marriages, its food pills, its whiskey pills, and its numerous jokes about Prohibition.

If Metropolis is our serious and socially conscious great-uncle of the retro future, Just Imagine is its jazz age slaphappy cousin.  The one we actually want to hang out with.

This is a great day. A tremendous day. It’s good to be here in the future. Now if they’d just release “Madam Satan”. But that’s another story.

Technorati Tags: just imagine, retrofuturism, retro future, futuristic, movie, film, science fiction, musical, sci fi, comedy

Vivian Heller’s The City Beneath Us is a wonderful book from the New York Transit Museum, full of period photographs and information about the construction of the three lines that eventually merged to become the single New York subway system.

I’m especially interested in the appearance of the tunnels during the 20’s and 30’s, as part of the research for a gigantic personal project of mine. Heller’s book doesn’t disappoint there, but I found that I was captivated by the wealth of historic detail about the struggles to create and maintain the system – first opposed by those who thought it was impossible or ill-advised, and later plagued by the political impossibility of raising the nickel fare – which lasted for nearly 45 years – so that the system could be properly maintained and expanded.

I was amazed to learn that the short test run of a pneumatic subway was constructed secretly (and illegally!) before 1870. That’s how desperate the city was to give its immigrant population some means of getting out of the overcrowded tenements of lower Manhattan – one of the prime motivations behind a public transportation system.

The three lines were built using several different techniques, depending on the composition of the land they were cutting through. While tunnels were driven through rocky sections, a “cut and cover” technique was used wherever possible. Utility lines (already a labyrinth beneath the city) had to be rerouted so that trenches could be cut below the streets and then covered over, the streets being restored above the heads of the workers who then completed the work. Where stone was removed from the tunnels it was moved, with carts, cars, and mules, and crushed so that it could become part of the concrete that formed so much of the tunnel lining. This work was largely done at the turn of the twentieth century and the engineers worked brilliantly within the limits of their technology.

The design itself was so good that even after the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 there was little damage to the tunnels except where they passed closest to the World Trade Center. When those tunnels were rebuilt, the modern engineers made only minor modifications to the hundred year old bracing design that had worked so well.

Likewise the construction of the subway lines that passed underwater used techniques that are very similar to those used in the trans-Bosporus tunnel now being built in Istanbul. Whatever else you can say about the turn of the 20th century, those were days in which builders rightly believed that they could accomplish just about anything.

Like any public transit system the New York subway has had its rough times, its encounters with bankruptcy, its intrigues, and its rebirths. It’s where Heller’s book deals with Robert Moses that I just had to smile. Moses is a polarizing figure in New York history and he was no friend to public transportation. When I’ve read about Moses’ role in the creation of the 1939 New York Worlds’ Fair, he’s described as a visionary – but because so much of that vision was based on the automobile and its highways he’s very nearly demonized here. He is always a figure who seems larger than life, either way – though from this 21st century vantage I have to lean toward the Transit Museum’s view of him. New York would have been far better served through the improvement and expansion of its public transit.

The text runs for just 81 of the book’s 245 pages – the rest is given over completely to the vintage photographs that introduce us to the workmen and sites that, street by street and borough by borough, gradually knit themselves together into a functioning network that now carries people rapidly and reliably through all of Manhattan and its outlying areas. And while that complete process took decades it’s still true that its original framework – the IRT line – came together in just the first four years of the 20th century, at a time when the city was growing and changing at an unprecedented rate. Mounting and completing such a major project in the middle of that growth and change was – and remains – a staggering achievement.

The City Beneath Us – Building the New York Subways at Amazon.

Technorati Tags: new york, subway, public transit, public transporation, manhattan, irt, brt, ind, urban planning, 20th century, engineering

It looks like Thanksgiving will be the time to stock up on a few cases of Slurm and kick back in the Robolounger, because Amazon is now taking pre-orders for the (first!) Futurama movie on DVD.

Yep – the evil Fox Empire did indeed axe Futurama several years ago – but they’ve been so pleased by its sales on DVD that they’ve contracted for up to four direct to DVD movies from Matt Groening et al.

Each of the direct to DVD movies will also be sliced up into separate episodes for airing on Comedy Central (and – one assumes – elsewhere, as time goes on). This first movie is scheduled for a November 27th release on DVD.

“Bender’s Big Score” sends the crew of Planet Express on a time traveling adventure that involves nudist alien Internet scammers, Leela’s love life, and Fry’s buttocks. It is not to be missed.

Technorati Tags: futurama, futurama movie, dvd, matt groening, retro future, animation, comedy, bender’s big score