CLUBHOUSE: Review: RALPH I24C4I+ by Hugo Gernsback

OBIR: Occasional Biased and Ignorant Reviews reflecting this reader’s opinion.

Ralph I24C4I+ – by Hugo Gernsback

Publisher: Armchair Fiction, Medford, Oregon, USA, 2013.

Cover art by unknown. Not stated.

Premise: 

The most popular man in the world explains everything to a woman who pretends to know nothing about anything.

Review:

For example:

“Alice, while rolling along one of the elevated streets of the city with Ralph, inquired how the present monetary system had been evolved: ‘You know,’ she confided, “I know very little of economics.’”

“Well,’ said Ralph…” and he’s off and running for a good 6 pages of explanation as to how checks (or “cheques” as we say in Canada) replaced money as an invincible form of credit immune to bank runs or financial collapse. Not far off, if you consider the role of modern credit cards, albeit burst bubbles and financial disasters are still with us as a threat-in-being. However, it seems good-hearted Hugo was convinced that as soon as the majority of people realized that the worth of any monetary unit was merely an agreed-upon convenience, they’d all see the logic of that and have perfect confidence in the credit supply. After all, every check would eventually return to the bank which issued it, so how could the bank possibly lose the monetary value it controlled?

Personally, I attribute this to Hugo’s sense of humour. Of that, more later.

Getting back to Alice 212B 423, she was evidently brought up to be a demure, not to say simpering, damsel in distress. Bear in mind this novel was first serialized in MODERN ELECTRICS, one of Gernsback’s numerous tech mags, in 1911. This is one year before A PRINCESS OF MARS by Edgar Rice Burroughs was first serialized in ALL-STORY MAGAZINE under the title UNDER THE MOONS OF MARS by “Norman Bean.” Fair to say Dejah Thoris as a rounded character is light years ahead of Alice in complexity and sophistication. (There’s a sentence you don’t see too often.)

To be fair, Alice serves but two purposes. First, as a trigger for yet another long-winded lecture by Ralph, and second, as an excuse for yet another demonstration of Ralph’s quick inventiveness when it comes to using science to foil the dastardly plots of the two beings threatening Alice’s virtue.

First is Fernand 600 10, who possessed “a handsome face, though, to a close observer, the eyes were set just a trifle too near each other, and the mouth betrayed cunning and had a touch of viciousness.” He’s a stalker, harassing Alice on the street, but she demurs, not wanting to cause a scene, leaving Ralph, who is acting as her chaperone, boiling with rage at not being allowed to strike the cad down.

Then there’s Llysanorh’ CK 1618, a Martian seven feet tall with “great black horse eyes in the long, melancholy face” and “elongated, slightly pointed ears” who, as Fernand remarks, “these Martians are so self-controlled it is hard to tell anything about them.” Hmm. Can you think of a 1960s SF television figure similarly enigmatic in nature? I wonder if the latter’s creation was inspired by Llysanorh’?

Be that as it may, Alice accepts Llysanorh’ as a personal friend and confidante. Oh, she’s aware of his great passion for her, but she knows she can rely on his self-discipline and sense of logic to never disobey the interplanetary laws forbidding sexual relations between the human species and the Martian species. Alas, she is unaware there’s no legislation forbidding him from ruining her love interest in someone else.

Ralph first meets Alice when his Teleservice Telephot accidently misconnects him to a “vivacious beautiful girl” in Switzerland. Never having given a thought to the opposite sex before, he’s entranced. She, in turn, is happy to meet a man with “a physique much larger than that of the average man of his times and approaching that of the huge Martians.” Even better, “His physical superiority, however, was as nothing compared to his gigantic mind. He was Ralph I24C4I+, one of the greatest living scientists and one of the ten men on the whole planet Earth permitted to use the plus sign after his name.” No wonder she falls for him.

Wouldn’t you know it, in the course of their conversation an avalanche begins higher up the Swiss mountain from the cabin where Alice is staying. Not entirely ignorant, she tells Ralph it will take 15 minutes for the avalanche to reach her cabin. Thinking quickly, he instructs her to “run to the roof and attach the Communico mast piece to the very base of the power mast, and point the former toward the avalanche. Then move the directoscope exactly to West-by-South, and point the antennae of the power mast East-by-North. Now run—I’ll do the rest!”

She rushes off to do his bidding, no doubt grabbing an unmentioned tool kit along the way. Meanwhile Ralph activates some gizmos in his laboratory and fires an enormous outpouring of energy to her power mast, utilizing the omnipresent ether as a medium of transmission just as the sound waves of a bell require the medium of air in order to be heard.

As luck and clever planning has it, the energy is transmitted via the Communico mast piece in the form of enormous flames which immediately began melting the tumbling ice and snow of the avalanche as it advanced. “A torrent of hot water rushing down the mountain was all that remained of the avalanche; and while the water did some damage, it was insignificant.”

Frankly, I don’t think converting a massive avalanche into a massive flood is a good example of converting a threat into a problem solved but, for purposes of presenting Ralph as a quick-thinking know-it-all, it serves nicely.

Of course, Alice falls in love with him. Might as well, the whole world already loves and adores him. Puts me in mind of a famous illo, I think by Robert Crumb, showing bodyguards shoving people off the sidewalk while a weedy man surrounded by adoring groupies strolls along. I think the caption has the guards shouting something like “Get out of the way, scum! Make way for a comics artist!” As if such artists have more prestige than all other professions.

Well, I think Hugo is having fun portraying the level of Ralph’s prestige. He is so valued as an inventor he isn’t allowed to perform dangerous experiments. Instead, condemned prisoners are trained to follow his instructions. If they die, no loss. If they survive, their death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment, so a win for them.

Still, Ralph sometimes feels it’s cowardly to avoid taking risks. Now and then he phones up the Planet Governor, ruler of 15 billion people, to plead his case. So valuable is Ralph to the interests of the human race that the Planet Governor is willing to spend hours talking him into a better frame of mind. Often he suggests Ralph revisit the enormous dome in his laboratory lined with thousands of telephots depicting live connections with his fans shouting accolades and praise. Good antidote for the imposter syndrome.

I do believe Hugo’s sense of humour is at play here. Although he produced many useful patented electronic inventions, some of his concepts were rather bizarre and thus he was sometimes derided as a crank. I think portraying an inventor as the crème de la crème of society and the most respected and popular person on the planet was in part wish-fulfillment and in part a parody of normal, rather inadequate, views of the general public in his day. But then, the whole book is a plea for the way things should be, a utopia of the future, why not realize it now?

As for the stilted, repressed love affair with Alice, it’s very similar to the melodramas of the era as manifest in theatre, popular dime novels, and early silent movies. I think Hugo was deliberately being formulaic here in order to appeal to the popular taste of the period. What made it personal for him, I believe, was the concept of portraying sheer intellect as the sexiest of attractions for curvaceous women. Every nerd’s dream, even before the concept of nerd was invented. Yep, definitely a novel advocating the way things should be, at least from his point of view.

Sometimes his humour falls flat. While investigating the kidnapping of Alice, Ralph meets an eyewitness, a shopkeeper, who saw everything. On questioning, the witness declares the kidnapper was black. Well, the book takes place in 2660, but it was published in 1911. The accusation of a white woman being kidnapped by a black man was the source of many a lynching then and for decades after. A red flag waved in front of the bull to many readers. Certainly, an easy way for a writer to manipulate the emotions of the reader, to stir things up.

The witness keeps insisting the criminal was black. He seems to be the type who enjoys prolonging a story as long as possible. Everyone, Ralph and the police, grow increasing annoyed. They demand more details. Finally, the witness explains that the man was not black but was seen to be wearing black clothing covering him from head to foot. Sighs of relief all around. Not a black man after all. Probably the dastardly Fernand whose worst fault was that he was French. A lesser insult to the laws of God and nature, in other words.

I’m pretty sure Hugo chuckled writing that scene, along the lines of “Hah! Hah! Fooled you!” By today’s standards, it’s lame, yes, but kind of terrifying the more I think about it. On the other hand, apart from the treatment of Martians, this is the only overtly racist intrusion, and a fairly subtle one at that.

Given that just about everybody inhabiting this utopia appears to be a WASP, New York city appearing to lack ethnics of any kind, I think Hugo’s vision automatically associated progress and the advancement of civilization with a kind of homogenization of the human race that left petty tribalism behind. A Jewish immigrant himself, undoubtedly a victim of racist insult or innuendo from time to time, I suspect he figured the best way to portray a utopia was to leave out the social problems which tend to hinder progress and just concentrate on scientific solutions to the problems he believed could be “solved” by the correct application of science. He was, after all, a crusader for science. It makes sense he would avoid any problem where science offered no solution.

Hugo was nothing if not a man of many devices and theories. Let us explore some of the nifty and/or peculiar ideas he puts forward in this novel.

The ocean of ether pervading outer space, for instance. He appears to regard it as an undetectable aspect of the electromagnetic spectrum. Further, it passes right through solid matter, like our planet, as if matter is no hindrance to its presence or movement. He imagines it has all sorts of properties influencing energy and matter as we know it. He believes radium decays because of the influence of ether. What a dummy, right?

It occurs to me that the ubiquitous neutrinos in their gazillions zipping through the earth, a kind of ocean of energy spreading through the universe without regard to the matter it contains, are perhaps the modern equivalent of the 19^th century view of the hypothetical all-pervasive ether. The theoreticians of old got it wrong, but not entirely, they were on to something after all.

And take anti-gravity. H.G. Wells proposed Cavorite as a material that would cancel the influence of gravity in his 1901 novel FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, purely as a fictional device to enable his travellers to fly to the Moon. Hugo envisions gravitation as an electromagnetic manifestation of the ether which can be blocked by high frequency electrical waves. “I finally found that only the densest material known, thoro-iridium, would completely stop the gravitational waves, providing that the metal screen was uninterruptedly bombarded with alpha rays which are continually emitted by radium.” Well, sure, why not?

So, Ralph takes Alice to a gravitational circus. The first act is simply a horse and rider rising into the air and coping with zero gravity by pushing off the walls and roof of the circus to perform manoeuvres in mid-air. The people sitting in the stands are not part of the anti-gravity act. Good thing too.

But then things get interesting. Jugglers appear. They carry pitchers of coloured water. By suddenly jerking them away, “the liquid, due to its own lag or inertia, stayed behind. Due to the surface tension of liquids, it did not retain the shape of the pitcher but formed itself immediately into a globe. The jugglers emptied a number of pitchers all in a row, leaving behind the globular liquid balls, formed of water and fruit juices. The jugglers approached the balls and began to drink, simply by placing their lips against them. They then demonstrated the mobility of the water balls by pushing their fingers into them and cutting the balls in two, the halves immediately becoming newer and smaller balls.”

Son of a gun. We’ve all seen footage of precisely this sort of thing taking place aboard the International Space Station. Hugo was dead on the mark depicting how liquids would behave in zero gravity. Spot on. Kudos to him.

It gets better. “The final act was where a huge water ball, about twenty-five feet in diameter, was pushed to the centre of the arena, while a number of pretty girls entered the liquid itself and swam within the ball. The ball was lit up by strong searchlights, and the entire arena darkened, as the girls swam within the clear crystal water ball. When the swimmers needed air, all they had to do was to push their heads out of the sphere, breathe, and then resume ‘swimming,’ or jerking themselves around within the weightless water.”

As far as I am aware, this is the first description of a zero-gravity swimming pool in SF literature. Granted, I suspect the actions of the girls within the pool would eventually disperse it in myriad droplets expanding in a cloud of such, but I don’t actually know. Just how strong is the surface tension of water in zero gravity anyway? I seem to recall modern thought experiments envision swimmers being asphyxiated because the atmosphere within the “room” would quickly transform into a dense mist that would be fatal to inhale, but again, I haven’t got a clue.

But kudos to Hugo for introducing a dramatic visual concept that would not be out of place in a modern movie employing CGI effects. Perhaps there already exists such? I’m no longer a completist when it comes to watching contemporary motion pictures. Too many of them. Can’t afford it. So, excuse my ignorance. Point is, I bet Hugo’s readers were mightily impressed by this scene back in 1911.

Not all of Hugo’s “scientific” ideas are plausible. He imagined that space travel would become quite common, but not by rockets or any other “sensible” means. He figured that if you put together a sealed container holding a large number of gyroscopes set in perpetual motion by electrical current, they could counteract each other to the point of defeating inertia and heading off in a chosen direction regardless of gravity, at speeds up to 100,000 miles an hour, dependent on the maximum rotational speed of the gyroscopes. I have my doubts.

He also stated “As long as a space flyer was not too distant from the sun (within the orbit of Mars, at least), little artificial heat was needed. The sun heated one-half of the flyer’s shell to a fierce heat, but the side turned away from the sun was exposed to the terrible stellar cold (absolute zero) and a fairly comfortable temperature was the result.” Again, I have my doubts.

The book is full of such ideas, some half-baked, some fully baked, and some just a pile of ingredients not properly thought through into a coherent recipe. All part of its charm.

As for the plot… well, ultimately Alice needs rescuing from both Fernand and Llysanorh’. Hasn’t been much plot, to tell the truth. Mostly the reader has ploughed through a seemingly endless string of lectures about the wonders of the future, all of which I found fascinating. But I’ve got to say, Hugo has a lot of guts as a writer. The fakery Ralph employs to trick the Martian is on a cosmic scale that would make Olaf Stapledon gasp. I was deeply impressed. What a feat of imagination! And when Ralph rescues Alice, he goes all out, doing her a good service no pulp hero ever matched, at least to my knowledge. In that sense, all the pulp fiction of the 1920s and ’30s was anti-climactic in comparison.

CONCLUSION:

Hugo Gernsback has the reputation of being the worst SF novelist ever. I think that’s unfair. He accomplished what he set out to do. He wrote a simplistic melodrama reflecting the abysmal popular taste of the day, formulaic in the extreme, and therefore comfortably familiar to his target readership, only to overwhelm them with a kaleidoscopic cornucopia of futurist concepts which must have struck them as bold and exciting, not to say mind-blowing.

Sure, the majority of it is dated and, in hindsight, totally wrong, but some of it was surprisingly prescient. Above all, it is the product of a logical mind seriously working out potential solutions, albeit sometimes taking human imprecision into account to humorous effect. I believe he had his tongue firmly in cheek exploring the ramifications of certain of his ideas. I like to think he chuckled to himself while composing them. Others, I think he was dead serious about what he was promoting.

I’m convinced he deliberately mixed the serious and the unserious in an effort to lend a lively impetus to his prose, in an effort to be both informative and entertaining. Not only that, I’m convinced he succeeded, at least in my case. I genuinely enjoyed reading this book. I found it a lot of fun. Considering its reputation, its actual nature came as a pleasant surprise.

Granted, it’s not a literary classic. But for what it was, it was bold and interesting, never boring. A pure concept-driven novel if there ever was one. I like it.

Find it at:  < Ralph 124C41+ by Hugo Gernsback >