THE TWO-TIMERS:

RAY CUMMINGS AND MALCOLM JAMESON

Ray Cummings

“Time,” said George, “why I can give you a definition of time. It’s what keeps everything from happening at once.”

That’s one of the most famous sentences in all of science fiction, and it has achieved considerable currency outside of the field. It’s been attributed to many wits, but as far as I’ve been able to determine, it was first used by Raymond King Cummings (1887-1957) as the opening paragraph of The Man Who Mastered Time, one of the most famous works of this almost unbelievably prolific writers. And one who is been largely—and unjustly—forgotten by a generation who regrettably think that science fiction was invented by George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry or at the earliest by John W. Campbell.

Ray Cummings was writing science fiction before Campbell took the helm of Astounding Stories in 1938, before Hugo Gernsback inaugurated Amazing Stories in 1926, before Weird Tales made its debut in 1923. To the best if my knowledge there’s no definitive bibliography of Cummings’ work, but he is known to have penned somewhere in the vicinity of 750 pieces of fiction, ranging from short stories to novels.

He wrote vast amounts of science fiction, as well as mystery stories, jungle tales, and an array of other works. He was immensely popular in his heyday, and if his stories tend to creak a little in this, the Twenty-first Century, we can still enjoy them as mind-stimulating and pulse-pounding adventure tales.

The Man who Mastered Time is one of his best. It was the second in a series of science fiction novels exploring, in Cummings’ words, “time, space, and matter.” The series was framed as a sequence of meetings by a Gentlemen’s Scientific Association. While this concept may seem quaint today, an attempt was made to revive it as the Interplanetary Exploration Society in the late 1950s by the widely admired John W. Campbell. Further, even today there are organizations such as the Mars Society, the High Frontier, the Planetary Society and others dedicated to the promotion of scientific research.

The first in Cummings’ series was The Girl in the Golden Atom, an early exploration of the notion that each atom is in effect a miniature solar system. Cumming was not the first writer to utilize this theme; that was almost certainly the Irish-American writer Fitz-James O’Brien, in a short story called “The Diamond Lens” (1858). Still, Cummings’ use of the notion was far more extensive and influential than O’Brien’s, and led to a great many pulp and comic book stories.

Cummings’ debt to H.G. Wells was immense, and Cummings’ use of Wells’ works as a matrix for his own was overt. Wells’ first use of the “club” format was in his own first novel, The Time Machine (1895). Wells’ narrator, the Time Traveler, details his adventures in an extended monolog. The other members of the “club” are identified as the Medical Man, the Psychologist, the Mayor, the Very Young Man, and the Rector.

In Cummings’ tales the assembled group include the Chemist, the Doctor, the Very Young Man, the Banker, and the Big Business Man.

Like Wells’ Time Traveler, Cummings’ narrator first explains his theories of time and his attempts (in association with his father) to build a time machine. This machine, utilizing a “Proton Drive,” looks like a cross between a World War One Fokker triplane and a Jules Verne dirigible. Cummings’ narrator travels to a neo-primitive world tens of thousands of years in the future, sees a young woman held in bondage, returns to the present, and sets out on a second time-voyage to rescue her.

In Wells’ novel the future humans have divided into the gentle, peaceful Eloi and the brutish, muscular Morlocks. In Cummings’ novel, the future humans have divided into the gentle, peaceful Aran and the brutish, muscular Bas. There is even a significant character named Mogruud.

Cummings predicts particle-beam weapons, heat-seeking missiles, and aerial drones remotely piloted via TV viewers and radio devices.

Tempting though it might be, I will not divulge more. The Man who Mastered Time is a remarkable novel, an exercise in both prediction and speculation as well as a stirring adventure story. Early in his career and in fact for several decades Ray Cummings was regarded as a pioneering creator of science fiction. As time passed, however, critics and fans alike came to regard him as stodgy and outmoded. In the years after his death, save for occasional revivals of interest, he seemed to become one of the many pulp writers destined to be forgotten by all save antiquarians, scholars, literary historians, and collectors.

There may well have been some validity to this critique, but if Ray Cummings was very much a man of his time, modern readers should be able to read his works with real enjoyment as well as a sense of nostalgic innocence.

Malcolm Jameson

Planning to pursue a career as an officer in the United States Navy, Malcolm Jameson (1891-1945) found himself forced to take an early medical retirement. He turned to writing science fiction, both as a source of income and as an outlet for his immense creative talents.

His first short stories were published in1938, when he was nearing fifty years of age. He produced short stories, novels, and essays at a prolific rate until his death in 1945. His novels included The Giant Atom (later retitled Atomic Bomb) and Tarnished Utopia. He is best remembered for his story cycle Bullard of the Space Patrol. All of these have been reissued by Surinam Turtle Press.

His short stories have been gathered by my friend and colleague John Pelan in two volumes issued by Dancing Tuatara Press, Chariots of San Fernando and Other Stories, and Alien Envoy and Other Stories. Further collections are promised.

The Jameson stories in the present volume, most notably his short novel The Time Column, are very much the product of their era. The Second World War was raging, the threat of Nazi domination not merely of Europe but of the world, was frighteningly real.

One can well imagine Malcolm Jameson, forced out of the United States Navy by a medical diagnosis, itching to get back into action and, as the phrase of the era had it, “to do his bit.” If he couldn’t don his officer’s uniform and board a warship, he could at least promote the war effort by writing these stories about heroism and sacrifice.

He died on April 16, 1945, as the war was drawing to its close.

Richard A. Lupoff

Berkeley CA