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The Black Heart
This is a book of strange tales about strange people and sometimes stranger places. It includes Weinbaum's novel The Dark Other, in which Nicholas Devine and his girlfriend Pat are deeply in love, but before they can fulfil their dreams they must exorcise a demonic presence that threatens both their future together and their lives. Also included is another love story that takes place in a tranquil world of beauty and innocence that can only be seen through the lenses of "Pygmalion's Spectacles", and several other surprising tales.
248 pages, Paperback
First published April 19, 2006
About the author
Stanley G. Weinbaum
368 books73 followersFull name: Stanley Grauman Weinbaum.
"In his short career, Stanley G. Weinbaum revolutionized science fiction. We are still exploring the themes he gave us." —Poul Anderson
"Stanley G. Weinbaum's name deserves to rank with those of Wells and Heinlein—and no more than a handful of others—as among the great shapers of modern science fiction." —Frederik Pohl
"In his short career, Stanley G. Weinbaum revolutionized science fiction. We are still exploring the themes he gave us." —Poul Anderson
"Stanley G. Weinbaum's name deserves to rank with those of Wells and Heinlein—and no more than a handful of others—as among the great shapers of modern science fiction." —Frederik Pohl
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July 7, 2022
So you're a young lady who's met the perfect guy. He's handsome, smart, caring, has interesting things to say, he checks all the boxes . . . he's quite the catch! Maybe you're already imagining what your name sounds like with his last name, maybe you're picturing what your kids might look like. Love is great!
Except the boy's got one problem. He claims to be demonically possessed and sometimes proceeds to act like it. Not cool! The wide swings in personality are unnerving and even he's telling you to cut your losses and find another boy. Frankly, its advice that makes perfect sense.
So what you do, as that young lady? Why, just love him even harder, of course.
This is the dilemma that Pat has when she meets adorable Nicholas Devine and falls hard for him. He's deep and brooding and sensitive, but keeps hinting he has conflicted and tortured feelings, that sometimes he's just not himself. Then during one romantic evening he really stops being himself, changing into a guy who could use an entire bottle of Visine per eye, speaking into a more grating voice like he's joined a terrible goth band and being a bit more . . . forceful in his advances, bordering on (and probably crossing into) assault. Needless to say, it seems like the writers of Tenth Doctor episode "The Satan Pit" were taking some notes.
In real life this story would probably end tragically or in five pages when Pat calls the police and they toss Nick in jail. In the world of fiction that this actually inhabits it’s the leadoff story in the last volume of Stanley Weinbaum stories. It appears to have an interesting history (none of which is hinted at in the book itself, as part of my ongoing complaint about the lack of contextual material in these volumes) having apparently started life in the Twenties as "The Mad Brain" before Forrest J Ackerman did some revision around 1950 with the permission of Weinbaum's widow, removing some of the more dated references. That presumably is the version we get here, although whether "The Mad Brain" still exists in primordial form the series doesn't say (its certainly nowhere in sight).
This is definitely one of those tales where the presentation is going to make or break this story for you because for modern audiences the bare bones of this aren't going to cut it. Look, there's no nice way to put this: possessed or split personality or whatever the reason is the truth is Nick acts in utterly appalling ways toward Pat seemingly at random (or when he's . . . aroused by emotion?) and a number of those incidences turn disturbingly physical. It's meant to heighten the stakes and add a sense of horror but over the course of a hundred and seventy pages Weinbaum has to keep upping the ante to maintain a sense of tension but it gets to the point where Pat greeting the aftermath of every assault with "B-but I love him, and he's nice when he's not attempting to tear my clothes off!" starts to make you seriously question her judgment. Especially since it seems like he's some dude she's literally only known for a short period of time. I'm sure you can find some other pretentious guy who quotes Poe at you!
It’s a shame how implausible some of the book is because for the most part Weinbaum does a good job making Pat seem like someone with an actual brain. Not content to just shrink back and scream while her boyfriend decides if its Menace O'Clock yet she does play an active role in trying to figure out how to save dear Nicholas from whatever is happening to him, scrambling back and forth to figure out a solution that doesn't involve calling a priest or her taking a baseball bat to his groin and not stopping until he stops moving. It adds a note of welcome compassion in a story that could have indulged too often in the "young woman in peril" cliche . . . beyond one ally, Pat is basically on her own (Nick generally opts for the mopey "Please, leave me and forget you met me because my very existence is torment" approach, which of course only makes him sexier . . . but it means he's not much help).
Fortunately for Pat her main ally is an actual grown up. In one of the more interesting pairings in fiction Pat teams up with neighbor and family friend Dr Carl Horker, who happens to be a psychologist. Their relationship is somewhat complex . . . with Pat's mother backgrounded for much of the story and her father not in the picture Dr Carl winds up being a father figure of sorts, worried about Pat the way one fusses over a favorite niece but also increasingly willing to help her out as it becomes clear how much this all means to her. But they become partners in crime in a sense, actively plotting how to solve a problem like Nicholas Devine even as his aggressiveness starts to escalate alarmingly and you start to wonder if this is going to finish up inside a pentagram drawn on the floor. Some of the more interesting scenes are when the two of them are bouncing off each other and bantering, you get more of a sense of history between them that the rest of the novel can't quite manage (for one, it really struggles to explain how Pat, who it seems has her pick of boys, falls so hard for Nick . . . maybe its his mediocre poetry).
The novel does try to turn this into a battle between science and sorcery, with Dr Carl insisting that Nicholas is just a few ants short of a picnic while Pat thinks he's got an evil twin inside him that wants to show her the glory of evil. But honestly, once he's dragged her to a bar, gotten her drunk and tried to have his way with her, does the ultimate cause really matter at that point? Its something that the book can't effectively navigate at times without seeming like its falling too much on the "he's totally possessed" side of things . . . because if he's not then we're just reading a story about an abusive relationship, one that gets weirdly psychosexual after a while. Just to hedge its bets even further, the novel seems to give Nick quasi-mystical powers of domination at times, although perhaps its just his animal magnetism (though if you follow that theory it means that Dr Horker also finds him irresistible as well). I mean, every date should end with explicit calls to shed blood and experience pain. Just another night on the singles circuit!
Of course the story ultimately tries to have it both ways, giving us some borderline racy bits (Nick's demon self may be into some kinky stuff but his tendency to narrate in bombastic pronouncements sort of kills the mood, frankly, like making love to Dr Doom) while in the end insisting that maybe possibly maybe there could be a rational scientific explanation for all this, which doesn't quite absolve for me everything that happened but seems to be good enough for most of the cast.
Its definitely an interesting story and probably somewhat intense for the 20s (though the pulps were no stranger to lurid stuff, at least this is well written) . . . in the more conformist Fifties it must have felt weirdly transgressive in some moments. But let's not pretend this is "Revolutionary Road". I do wonder if Weinbaum had halved the length if it would have had more of an impact, though.
"The Dark Other" isn't the only headliner in the bunch here, though. "The Adaptive Ultimate" was published under a pen name about a month before Weinbaum died and then proceeded to spend the next twenty years or so being adapted for radio or television periodically (and filmed as "She Devil" in 1957, in case you're wondering what was the main takeaway from this story). Its a pretty classic "Twilight Zone" "medical experiments gone wild" (or more bluntly, "screw around and find out") . . . two doctors want to run an experiment where they assume that any disease can be cured through adaptation. To do so, a serum is made from fruit flies (and no, nobody is going to turn into icky Jeff Goldblum) and injected into a willing but dying patient, you know, just to see what happens (it also doesn't hurt that she's ugly). What happens is that she gets better but as you'd expect from any clinical trial done with non-blinded and without a control groups things get out of hand quickly. Because it turns out that good ol' Kyra is a) super-adaptable to nearly anything and b) a sociopath and before too long its "laws? Where we're going we don't need laws" and the poor scientists are wondering if they need to drop something heavy on her.
You can see why people wanted to dramatize this story, its got a neat premise that isn't too body-horrorish gruesome (she mostly changes hair or eye color, though also manages to become super-hot in the process) . . . it also neatly presents the problem, escalates it to an alarming degree, hints at catastrophic consequences without actually going there and then forces our heroes, having gotten themselves into this predicament, to figure out some clever solution that doesn't involve burying her in a deep hole or using a variety of sharp objects. Its got a reassuring but freeze-framesque ending and doesn't overstay its welcome at all. If nothing else it gets points for being both clever and efficient.
The other two remaining stories are . . . decent and also somewhat indicative of early SF's tendency to use weird events as an excuse to get a man a beautiful life-partner. "Proteus Island" dumps a zoologist on a strange Polynesian island where he quickly realizes that a past experiment has caused the island to generate strange animals nearly non-stop (as if "The Island of Dr Moreau" was essentially a respawning site). In the midst of all this appears to be a primitive girl, who of course needs a civilized man to watch over and take care of her. It goes almost exactly as you'd expect, throwing a series of perils at our protagonists before wrapping up somewhat neatly with an explanation and a resolution, as well as the promise of continued romance. This was one that could used a bit more of the oddness Weinbaum demonstrated in his solar system centered tales.
And lastly we have "Pygmalion's Spectacles" . . . curious Dan goes along with Professor Ludvig, who claims to have basically invented a clunkier version of VR, or at least a movie that only one person can watch at a time, but is really immersive. Dan discovers just how much when we enters a weird fantasy world and interacts with the requisite hot girl and her overbearing father, fitting in with what seems to be a bizarre hallucination. That extended dream sequence is the highlight of the story and does once again showcase how much better Weinbaum was technically than most of his contemporaries . . . in a short space he manages to convey a strange land and its customs while also never losing touch with how unreal it all seems. The conclusion is cute enough but sort of undermines the rest of the story, as if Weinbaum was somehow afraid to totally commit to the strangeness.
And that wraps up seemingly everything Stanley Weinbaum ever wrote. With the vast majority of his work published almost ninety years ago and with even the really good stuff unable to shake the "of its time" vibe, he's probably mostly forgotten today except by people who are interested in the history of the genre and the might-have-beens. Weinbaum was definitely an innovator, except he was never able to capitalize and build on those skills, dying too young before he could improve further. Its fortunate that he was as good as he was in these stories or he'd be even less than a footnote today, relegated to the dim and dusty memories of people who found this as kids in a parents' attic, hiding inside moldering magazines. He's essentially a necessary building block to what SF would eventually become as it evolved out of its pulpier roots . . . and if he didn’t come along then someone else would have, even if they wouldn't have had his sureness and imagination. To today's audiences he's probably more interesting as a missing link, and for most people a good SF oriented "Best Of" will probably suffice to give you an idea of what all the fuss was about. But even with all the dated and outdated elements of his stories the core of them are still enough to impress and make you wonder . . . maybe he would have faded into deserved obscurity, never progressing beyond his earlier promise, or maybe he would have stayed at the forefront for another decade or two. It’s the question and the tragedy of any decent who dies before his time . . . we have four volumes of stories here, but what if we had four more? What would they have been like? Where would he have taken us next?
Except the boy's got one problem. He claims to be demonically possessed and sometimes proceeds to act like it. Not cool! The wide swings in personality are unnerving and even he's telling you to cut your losses and find another boy. Frankly, its advice that makes perfect sense.
So what you do, as that young lady? Why, just love him even harder, of course.
This is the dilemma that Pat has when she meets adorable Nicholas Devine and falls hard for him. He's deep and brooding and sensitive, but keeps hinting he has conflicted and tortured feelings, that sometimes he's just not himself. Then during one romantic evening he really stops being himself, changing into a guy who could use an entire bottle of Visine per eye, speaking into a more grating voice like he's joined a terrible goth band and being a bit more . . . forceful in his advances, bordering on (and probably crossing into) assault. Needless to say, it seems like the writers of Tenth Doctor episode "The Satan Pit" were taking some notes.
In real life this story would probably end tragically or in five pages when Pat calls the police and they toss Nick in jail. In the world of fiction that this actually inhabits it’s the leadoff story in the last volume of Stanley Weinbaum stories. It appears to have an interesting history (none of which is hinted at in the book itself, as part of my ongoing complaint about the lack of contextual material in these volumes) having apparently started life in the Twenties as "The Mad Brain" before Forrest J Ackerman did some revision around 1950 with the permission of Weinbaum's widow, removing some of the more dated references. That presumably is the version we get here, although whether "The Mad Brain" still exists in primordial form the series doesn't say (its certainly nowhere in sight).
This is definitely one of those tales where the presentation is going to make or break this story for you because for modern audiences the bare bones of this aren't going to cut it. Look, there's no nice way to put this: possessed or split personality or whatever the reason is the truth is Nick acts in utterly appalling ways toward Pat seemingly at random (or when he's . . . aroused by emotion?) and a number of those incidences turn disturbingly physical. It's meant to heighten the stakes and add a sense of horror but over the course of a hundred and seventy pages Weinbaum has to keep upping the ante to maintain a sense of tension but it gets to the point where Pat greeting the aftermath of every assault with "B-but I love him, and he's nice when he's not attempting to tear my clothes off!" starts to make you seriously question her judgment. Especially since it seems like he's some dude she's literally only known for a short period of time. I'm sure you can find some other pretentious guy who quotes Poe at you!
It’s a shame how implausible some of the book is because for the most part Weinbaum does a good job making Pat seem like someone with an actual brain. Not content to just shrink back and scream while her boyfriend decides if its Menace O'Clock yet she does play an active role in trying to figure out how to save dear Nicholas from whatever is happening to him, scrambling back and forth to figure out a solution that doesn't involve calling a priest or her taking a baseball bat to his groin and not stopping until he stops moving. It adds a note of welcome compassion in a story that could have indulged too often in the "young woman in peril" cliche . . . beyond one ally, Pat is basically on her own (Nick generally opts for the mopey "Please, leave me and forget you met me because my very existence is torment" approach, which of course only makes him sexier . . . but it means he's not much help).
Fortunately for Pat her main ally is an actual grown up. In one of the more interesting pairings in fiction Pat teams up with neighbor and family friend Dr Carl Horker, who happens to be a psychologist. Their relationship is somewhat complex . . . with Pat's mother backgrounded for much of the story and her father not in the picture Dr Carl winds up being a father figure of sorts, worried about Pat the way one fusses over a favorite niece but also increasingly willing to help her out as it becomes clear how much this all means to her. But they become partners in crime in a sense, actively plotting how to solve a problem like Nicholas Devine even as his aggressiveness starts to escalate alarmingly and you start to wonder if this is going to finish up inside a pentagram drawn on the floor. Some of the more interesting scenes are when the two of them are bouncing off each other and bantering, you get more of a sense of history between them that the rest of the novel can't quite manage (for one, it really struggles to explain how Pat, who it seems has her pick of boys, falls so hard for Nick . . . maybe its his mediocre poetry).
The novel does try to turn this into a battle between science and sorcery, with Dr Carl insisting that Nicholas is just a few ants short of a picnic while Pat thinks he's got an evil twin inside him that wants to show her the glory of evil. But honestly, once he's dragged her to a bar, gotten her drunk and tried to have his way with her, does the ultimate cause really matter at that point? Its something that the book can't effectively navigate at times without seeming like its falling too much on the "he's totally possessed" side of things . . . because if he's not then we're just reading a story about an abusive relationship, one that gets weirdly psychosexual after a while. Just to hedge its bets even further, the novel seems to give Nick quasi-mystical powers of domination at times, although perhaps its just his animal magnetism (though if you follow that theory it means that Dr Horker also finds him irresistible as well). I mean, every date should end with explicit calls to shed blood and experience pain. Just another night on the singles circuit!
Of course the story ultimately tries to have it both ways, giving us some borderline racy bits (Nick's demon self may be into some kinky stuff but his tendency to narrate in bombastic pronouncements sort of kills the mood, frankly, like making love to Dr Doom) while in the end insisting that maybe possibly maybe there could be a rational scientific explanation for all this, which doesn't quite absolve for me everything that happened but seems to be good enough for most of the cast.
Its definitely an interesting story and probably somewhat intense for the 20s (though the pulps were no stranger to lurid stuff, at least this is well written) . . . in the more conformist Fifties it must have felt weirdly transgressive in some moments. But let's not pretend this is "Revolutionary Road". I do wonder if Weinbaum had halved the length if it would have had more of an impact, though.
"The Dark Other" isn't the only headliner in the bunch here, though. "The Adaptive Ultimate" was published under a pen name about a month before Weinbaum died and then proceeded to spend the next twenty years or so being adapted for radio or television periodically (and filmed as "She Devil" in 1957, in case you're wondering what was the main takeaway from this story). Its a pretty classic "Twilight Zone" "medical experiments gone wild" (or more bluntly, "screw around and find out") . . . two doctors want to run an experiment where they assume that any disease can be cured through adaptation. To do so, a serum is made from fruit flies (and no, nobody is going to turn into icky Jeff Goldblum) and injected into a willing but dying patient, you know, just to see what happens (it also doesn't hurt that she's ugly). What happens is that she gets better but as you'd expect from any clinical trial done with non-blinded and without a control groups things get out of hand quickly. Because it turns out that good ol' Kyra is a) super-adaptable to nearly anything and b) a sociopath and before too long its "laws? Where we're going we don't need laws" and the poor scientists are wondering if they need to drop something heavy on her.
You can see why people wanted to dramatize this story, its got a neat premise that isn't too body-horrorish gruesome (she mostly changes hair or eye color, though also manages to become super-hot in the process) . . . it also neatly presents the problem, escalates it to an alarming degree, hints at catastrophic consequences without actually going there and then forces our heroes, having gotten themselves into this predicament, to figure out some clever solution that doesn't involve burying her in a deep hole or using a variety of sharp objects. Its got a reassuring but freeze-framesque ending and doesn't overstay its welcome at all. If nothing else it gets points for being both clever and efficient.
The other two remaining stories are . . . decent and also somewhat indicative of early SF's tendency to use weird events as an excuse to get a man a beautiful life-partner. "Proteus Island" dumps a zoologist on a strange Polynesian island where he quickly realizes that a past experiment has caused the island to generate strange animals nearly non-stop (as if "The Island of Dr Moreau" was essentially a respawning site). In the midst of all this appears to be a primitive girl, who of course needs a civilized man to watch over and take care of her. It goes almost exactly as you'd expect, throwing a series of perils at our protagonists before wrapping up somewhat neatly with an explanation and a resolution, as well as the promise of continued romance. This was one that could used a bit more of the oddness Weinbaum demonstrated in his solar system centered tales.
And lastly we have "Pygmalion's Spectacles" . . . curious Dan goes along with Professor Ludvig, who claims to have basically invented a clunkier version of VR, or at least a movie that only one person can watch at a time, but is really immersive. Dan discovers just how much when we enters a weird fantasy world and interacts with the requisite hot girl and her overbearing father, fitting in with what seems to be a bizarre hallucination. That extended dream sequence is the highlight of the story and does once again showcase how much better Weinbaum was technically than most of his contemporaries . . . in a short space he manages to convey a strange land and its customs while also never losing touch with how unreal it all seems. The conclusion is cute enough but sort of undermines the rest of the story, as if Weinbaum was somehow afraid to totally commit to the strangeness.
And that wraps up seemingly everything Stanley Weinbaum ever wrote. With the vast majority of his work published almost ninety years ago and with even the really good stuff unable to shake the "of its time" vibe, he's probably mostly forgotten today except by people who are interested in the history of the genre and the might-have-beens. Weinbaum was definitely an innovator, except he was never able to capitalize and build on those skills, dying too young before he could improve further. Its fortunate that he was as good as he was in these stories or he'd be even less than a footnote today, relegated to the dim and dusty memories of people who found this as kids in a parents' attic, hiding inside moldering magazines. He's essentially a necessary building block to what SF would eventually become as it evolved out of its pulpier roots . . . and if he didn’t come along then someone else would have, even if they wouldn't have had his sureness and imagination. To today's audiences he's probably more interesting as a missing link, and for most people a good SF oriented "Best Of" will probably suffice to give you an idea of what all the fuss was about. But even with all the dated and outdated elements of his stories the core of them are still enough to impress and make you wonder . . . maybe he would have faded into deserved obscurity, never progressing beyond his earlier promise, or maybe he would have stayed at the forefront for another decade or two. It’s the question and the tragedy of any decent who dies before his time . . . we have four volumes of stories here, but what if we had four more? What would they have been like? Where would he have taken us next?
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