his essential, gap-filling collection from publisher Sean Wallace and crew at Cosmos Books—a division of the print-on-demand publisher Wildside Press—has been assembled with intelligence and devotion by editor Philip Harbottle, who provides two introductory essays which are both historically informative and critically acute. Fearn (1908-1960) began as a short-story writer, but his later abundance of paperback originals has occluded his origins, here revealed through 17 stories published between 1934 and 1960 and spanning over 300 pages across twin volumes.
A simple invention intended to help humanity—a machine that will abolish airborne particulates—instead nearly destroys civilization in "The Man Who Stopped the Dust." "Mathematica" and its sequel, "Mathematica Plus," illustrate a pilgrimage across ontological levels of reality, down to the mathematical basement of the space-time continuum. Tampering by a far-future explorer results in our own era becoming a "Deserted Universe." An atypical supernatural-detective outing, "Experiment in Murder" marked a rare appearance by the author in Weird Tales.
"Wings Across the Cosmos," involving a chunk of white-dwarf matter that lands on Earth, prefigures the powers of DC Comics' Silver Age character, the Atom. A buried alien spaceship provides Terry Marsden with the secret of bringing his dead girlfriend back to life. The final 500 humans of Earth meet their doom on a hostile Venus in "Thoughts That Kill."
Volume Two opens with "Outcasts of Eternity," wherein Nancy Dawlish, jabbed by a strange Martian plant, finds herself unwelcomely immortal. Under attack by invincible aliens in "The Devouring Tide," mankind's brightest scientist realizes in despair that the globe's only hope lies in literally recreating the universe. Cast adrift in the timestream, Blake Carson finds himself enacting a frutiless vengeance in "Wanderer of Time." A motley assortment of strangers have their fates linked by an odd ray in "The Ultimate Analysis." By scientifically integrating all his past lives, the scientist Drath Gofal transcends his species in "The Unbroken Chain."
"Black Saturday" plunges our world into a cosmic blind spot where light fails to penetrate. An experiment gone awry creates a tiny pocket universe in "Brief Gods," trapping several people in a domain where they find their natural capabilities curiously expanding. Nanoscales of existence are explored in "Alice, Where Art Thou?" Finally, an ancestral curse catches up to Enid Cleggy in "Judgment Bell."
Raw energy crackling with ideas
Thornton Ayre, Polton Cross, Volstead Gridban, Astron del Martia and, most notoriously, Vargo Statten. Today, John Russell Fearn is better known by his many pseudonyms than for his birthname. And that reputation is not good. Following World War II, Fearn moved eagerly from the pulps that had nourished him as both reader and writer into the new realm of paperback originals. Producing too many hasty books, he provided tons of wacky, illogical, over-the-top prose for later generations to parody and smirk over. A sad fate for a writer who, upon discovering Amazing Stories circa 1931, instantly fell in love with the vast possibilities of the genre.
But these two Cosmos tomes should go a long way toward rehabilitating Fearn's name. For what they reveal is an author with an authentic voice and some crackling concepts. Nor was Fearn actually a clumsy writer: his stories zip along at light speed, incorporating tons of action and ideas without wasted words or extraneous detours. His dialogue is old-fashioned by today's standards, but quite peppy by earlier measures. His characters are all cut from a limited set of templates, but are recognizably humans motivated by fear, greed, lust, altruism and love.
Where Fearn goes off the rails into semi-incoherence, the reason is always that he's trying to put the ineffable into words. Sure, he places too much unscientific faith in the unlikely miracles that "radiation" and "mathematics" can produce. But as the young Lester del Rey commented at the time: "Fearn tricks the reader into kidding himself that he is following great ideas and is in touch with something out of the ordinary ... [but] he does a good job of it, and I enjoy his tricks thoroughly." Overall, Fearn reads no more absurdly today than, say, Donald Wandrei, a contemporary with a much higher status within the field.
Falling under the guiding hand of editor F. Orlin Tremaine, who demanded that his writers produce "thought variants ... stories containing new and unexplored ideas," Fearn built each of his tales around some mind-boggling concept. Amazingly, many of these nuggets foreshadow work seen as cutting-edge in the 21st century. The "Mathematica" stories, with their insistence that the basis of the universe is equational, could be pure Greg Egan. And in "The Devouring Tide," when we meet aliens who are described as "crystallized thought," we invariably think of Rudy Rucker's recent Realware (2000). "Brief Gods" explores the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle quite well. Fearn's reach may have exceeded his grasp, but what else is SF for? Also, in a quiet, restrained piece like "Black Saturday," with its emotional depiction of two people trapped by a global blindness, Fearn approached his compatriot John Wyndham in subtleness.
