Colossus: The collected science fiction of Donald Wandrei

by Donald Wandrei

Book by Wandrei, Donald

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Horror, Short Stories

421 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Donald Albert Wandrei was an American science fiction, fantasy and weird fiction writer, poet and editor. He was the older brother of science fiction writer and artist Howard Wandrei. He died in St. Paul in 1987.
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/w/d...
Along with August Derleth, he was co-founder of Arkham House publishers.

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was working through the "W" section of my "to read" list of horror/supernatural short fiction and hit Donald Wandrei. Most of the works I needed to read could be found in Don't Dream: The Collected Horror and Fantasy Fiction of Donald Wandrei (the review of which is where I'll talk a bit more about Wandrei) but a few of the pulpy SF stories appeared here, so thanks to Inter Library Loan I was able to read some stories from this collection.

Now, SF isn't really my thing, and certainly not in its pulp manifestation. So if I seem overly negative in my notations, I'm admitting up front that basically I have a bias against this type of stuff. Two of the stories did nothing for me: "On The Threshold Of Eternity" (which is kind of a sequel, or more like a "continuation/cut ending" to the superior "The Red Brain" - see later) has the "Great Brain" (from that preceding story - one presumes that the "Red Brain" has killed itself after committing genocide), the last living thing in the universe, dying at the end of time as the universe ends, reflecting on the past (and passing) of all existence. Not really a story, just a thin reason for spinning out vast cosmic verbosity again. Meanwhile, "The Whisperers" is a history report on a mysterious plague in the 20th Century, which originated after a strange object fell from the sky in Russia and caused a virulently communicable, fatal fever (along with a curious low muttering sound emanating from the infected's body). The plague nearly destroys the world until two scientists (working on a way to examine things of submicroscopic size) discover the secret. Eh, more "inventive" sci-fi ideas rigged to an easy plot. Similar is "Black Fog" - not really a "story" so much as just a recitation of an idea taken to a pulpy SF conclusion - mankind suffers 11 minutes of "absolute darkness" (no propagation of light - not darkness, but absolute blackness) and the expected terror and accidents occur. Then, things revert to normal. Scientist postulate we passed through some kind of object/space/event in hyperspace. But then, it is discovered that everyone and everything on earth is now sterile and can no longer reproduce. Populations dwindle and food production drops. There's even a momentary respite as a wrecked alien spacecraft brings vegetation that CAN reproduce, but by that time mankind is on its way out and strange cross-species hybrids have begin to take over. All this is told in a dry, matter-of-fact, non-story way (no characters, etc.) It's like J.G. Ballard with no ability or interest in writing fiction.

Slightly better, but still pretty weak, were:
"A Race Through Time" - Two scientists (a nice guy and a cad) both desire the same female scientist as their wife, and both have, independently, invented one-way "time travel" approaches (the good guy through "faster than light" travel, powered by atomic explosions, which he hopes to use to explore the universe and then return to the earth in a few millennia - the bad guy with drugs that retard aging and biological processes - hoping to remain in suspended animation for millennia). They both want the woman to come along, but she rejects them both, at which point the cad kidnaps her and injects her along with himself (sealed in a dome of metal & crystal) - so now it's a race through time with the goal being the mysterious Earth of 1 million years in the future! This is a fun, goofy, pulpy sci-fi yarn, enjoyable as a trifle but not really my kind of thing, even less so for the lack of a cliched "good triumphs" ending and instead substituting a lame and unsatisfying twist.

"Colossus" - as apocalyptic atomic world war breaks out, a man leaves Earth in a new, experimental spaceship (that gains its power source from background radiation, and which can travel far, far faster than the speed of light) hoping to reach the ends of the known universe. Passing beyond all celestial bodies and into complete darkness, he eventually bursts through space itself and the ultimate limit, to find himself in a new universe (of which our universe comprised only one atom), where he has to make a deal with alien scientists. Again, while not really my thing - hyperactive, hyperdramatic, hyperverbose pulp sf writing - this is enjoyable in a goofy way with big concepts and stunted characterizations (one can see how Comic Books eventually replaced the pulps as a source for a "sensawunda" for kids, by also having illustrations), and "the universe is but an atom in a larger universe - and how far can that go?" is fun, but it's also trite and silly. Tries to include some concepts from Einstein (the ship deforms as it accelerates) while ignoring others (decelerating an infinite mass never comes into it).

There were, I felt, three solidly Good stories here (of what I read, which was not much):
"The Crystal Bullet" is a short, succinct tale of a rural farmer who witnesses a meteor fall, but finds at the impact point a strange, crystalline object that radiates cold and green light. He carries it home, intending to sell it, but eventually comes to understand it is far more dangerous than he first thought. Not bad, it benefits from its brevity and clarity, and is kind of a less verbose, less morbid version of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Colour Out Of Space." I enjoyed it.

In "The Blinding Shadows", set in the future looking back, a ten-mile area of New York City is now a "dead ground", barred from access with walls and barbed wire since the "Blinding Shadows" event of 1970. We then hear about a scientist (Mathematician, optician and Philosopher) who, in attempting to visualize the fourth dimension, combines knowledge gained from ancient writings and newly created elements to create prisms and a mirror from which issue three-dimensional, stationary shadows, blinding to look at, although their source remains invisible. These shadows then attack, absorbing tens of thousands of people as the city is evacuated (the 10 mile circle relates to the area where the fourth dimensional world overlaps with our own, limiting them). Again, not bad as a sci-fi apocalypse scenario, with the conception of an abandoned, deserted NYC still haunted by the shadow creatures a nicely eerie one.

Finally, there is "The Red Brain", set in a far, far, future (long after the death of Earth, and our entire solar system) of interstellar dustiness where only the giant star Antares remains, inhabited by the last race left in the universe, who calmly observe as dust blots out everything. These beings are vast, blob-like amoeboid brains who have tried every solution for stemming the Cosmic Dust of obliteration - vast plans involving huge energies, appeals to the greatest minds of the past, the creation of Super Brains who in turn created monsters, etc. etc. Nothing worked. And now a Council of Brains has been called for one final tribunal (although the end of everything seems certain) where The Red Brain (a specially grown super brain) - announces it has a plan... Here, one can see Clark Ashton Smith influenced "eon-spanning" vistas that read almost like a prose form of Jack Kirby's cosmic comic book art and stories: planet obliterating engines of destruction, enormous reaches of time and space, etc. I dug this - it's visionary, fun, not too long and has a marvelously ripe last line!

[Henrik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometime in the Summer 2008: I've read "The Red Brain" so far. What an amazing story! I now understand why Lovecraft found it to be one of the best cosmic stories ever. Mindblowing!

SEPTEMBER 17:

"Something From Above": Nice story, with great images. Not as powerful as "The Red Brain", though, and reminds me too much of Lovecraft's much more atmospheric and powerful "The Colour Out of Space".

SEPTEMBER 19:

"The Crystal Bullet": Another "Colour Out of Space"-themed story. The permeating melancholic note in the text, however, brought a surprisingly strong--and human--vibe to the story.

More later...

[Melissa dixon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have had this book on my shelf for many years, an inheritance from Roger Dard, who loved 1950's pulp fiction. My fave stories were the red brain, as many valued by today's society are the "red brain". I also enjoyed Farewell to Earth, although the romance is a bit wierd. The black and white scifi artwork scattered through the book is terrific as is the 1950's formal no nonsense, pithy writing style. I didn't finish the last few stories as was finding it all a bit repetitive and too geeky or celebral for my liking.

[Sol]

"The Red Brain"

[Harris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like Don’t Dream, published later, Colossus is a collection of vintage weird tales, here consisting of the science fiction stories of Minnesota writer Donald Wandrei, interesting mainly in his role as a correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft and, with August Derleth, founder of the publishing house that preserved much of Lovecraft’s work. Of course, with Wandrei a long time citizen of St. Paul, living in a home not far from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Summit Hill neighborhood, a few blocks from where I currently live, there is the local interest for me as well.

As in Don’t Dream, the most interesting part is the biographical information in the introduction, here provided by another genre writer, Richard L. Tierney. Wandrei seemed to have been quite the character, though in some ways a little tragic, never really satisfied with his work. Tierney quotes Wandrei as writing of his own work, “they were all more or less routine pot-boilers without any particular distinction,” which is, sadly, an apt description of the material here.

For the most part, the stories collected in Colossus, published originally in various pulp magazines between the late 1920s and the 1960s, with the bulk coming out of the ‘30s, don’t really offer much to modern readers. The writing is, in general, pretty uninspiring and, in spite of a cool idea here and there, mostly dragged, making it difficult to maintain interest. For those interested in the “Cthulhu Mythos,” it must be noted that none of Wandrei’s stories here really draw from the style and in fact, are quite distinct from that of Lovecraft in terms of attitudes and themes.

Oftentimes, Wandrei’s stories mostly follow a few prominent motifs he returns to again and again. Along with a penchant for creepy love triangles (including one in which a time traveller lost in the far, post apocalyptic future falls in love with the mutated descendant of his crush and his villainous rival for her affections after generations of incestuous “repopulating the Earth”), Wandrei is particularly drawn to scenarios in which ill advised physics experiments involving the nature of time and space lead to the death of the researchers, all of humanity, the Earth itself, or the entire universe. I can only imagine Wandrei wouldn’t be a fan of the Large Hadron Collider. I do feel that Wandrei might have had some pretty innovative ideas for the time, ideas that later became more ingrained standards in science fiction. In one story, for instance, he posits a fourth dimensional object casting a third dimensional shadow, an idea used to great effect in, of all things, an episode of Adventure Time. For the most part, though, I think I preferred the stories in Don’t Dream, his “horror and fantasy” collection, though there is plenty of horror here and plenty of “sci-fi” concepts in Don’t Dream as well.

[Vultural · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wandrei, Donald - Colossus

“… The average air temperature was rising.
Smog and pollution had created a thermal blanket around the globe. As the climate warmed, the forest line retreated farther and farther northwards throughout Canada and Siberia, where new brushlands developed, then forests, and birds and animals never before observed in those regions. The icecap of Greenland shrank more every year. Entire ledges and shelves broke off the crumbling fringes of the Antarctic.
Perceptibly and inexorably, the ocean level rose, initially by mere fractions of an inch, but eventually by inches per year. And the pace of this ecological disaster became accelerated by several related events …”

from “Requiem For Mankind” © 1971

A hefty collection of over twenty stories from the visionary Wandrei.
Most are 1930’s science fiction, pulp style, emphasizing pseudo science, where an enthusiastic Dr. Hans Zarkov would feel at home.
A few stories are overweighted with gobbledygook and techno-babble. Descriptions of lab equipment, voltages, metallurgy, stretched hypotheses regarding unexpected results.
Better stories, such as “A Race Through Time” and “Farewell To Earth” deal with time on an epic scale. Wandrei works in blocks of 100,000 years or more.
Two of this best known works, “Colossus” and “Colossus Eternal,” embrace epochs of time and distance. Masters here are towering beings, the Titans, who have the ability to foresee the future – for good, for ill.
“The Blinding Shadows,” “Life Current,” and “Earth Minus” are cautionary tales. Miscalculations that lead to cataclysm.
These are not Tom Swift yarns, crafted to stimulate and thrill young boys. There is a dark streak in Wandrei, perhaps caused by the Depression, the approach of World War II, or the filthy aftermath.

Colossus remains Fedogan & Bremer’s flagship title, and they have done Wandrei proud.
There are illustrations. Richard Tierney provides an excellent introduction, sketching Wandrei’s life, elaborating on the stories, with observations of the publishing business.
The back of the book contains photos, a glimpse of the author’s young days and his later years.
Worth a place in your shelves if you have a fondness for pulp, or if you are curious about what the future used to be.