Island of the Conquerors
Island of Conquerors is a collection of science fiction short stories and short stories by the American writer Nelson Bond , published in 1954 by the American comic and paperback publisher Avon Publishers under the title No Time like the Future . The collection was published in 1964 under the title Insel der Eroberer in the German translation by Susi-Maria Roediger with the subtitle The best Science-Fiction Stories by Nelson Bond by Wilhelm-Heyne-Verlag .
The collection contains the works Insel der Eroberer (English original title: Conqueror's Isle ), Jona und das U-Boot (English: Uncommon Castaway ), The Beasts of Kios (English: The Cunning of the Beast ), Outpost Venus (English .: The Last Outpost ), The Bird of the Stars ( And lo! The Bird ) and Just a Handful of Ashes ( The World of William Gresham ).
Plot of the narratives
Island of the Conquerors
The American Lieutenant Joseph Travers Brady, who has a doctorate, reports to his doctor, Corvette Captain Dr. Gorham, about the depressing experiences he went through as an aviator in the Pacific during World War II . While harassing the Japanese in the South China Sea, he and his people get caught in a typhoon in the best weather. It stops just as suddenly as it broke in. Brady has lost his orientation and makes an emergency landing with the Ardent Alice because of lack of fuel on the beach of an island overgrown by rainforest. After a few minutes, unarmed white men step out from under the trees and greet the soldiers helpfully in English.
However, the radio failed when the island was sighted, and Dr. Grove, the leader of the islanders, evades Brady's request to tell his comrades where he is. Grove insists that you get on an elevator that leads from a well-camouflaged concrete shelter into the ground. The American weapons no longer work; Grove paralyzes them with the help of a delicate tube in a cone of rays that appears to the senses only as a silvery glow and Brady looks like a sea of moonbeams or cobwebs. The Americans' ability to perceive is not impaired.
They are carried underground and through a network of seemingly sterile corridors into slowly darkening chambers, in which they fall asleep. Brady is amazed at the unexpected conditions in his environment, which knows no shadows and echoes, and in which, suddenly, through the thick metal wall, Dr. Grove rejoins him. Grove tells his prisoner that he belongs to a group of biologically mutated people whose first found themselves special from an early age. He and his fellow sufferers recognize each other over great distances thanks to a telepathic faculty that is unique to them . They cut themselves off from the rest of mankind on the island a long time ago, multiply there and attract those who are like them from all over the world. In the underground metal cells they hold back over two hundred ordinary people who have been stranded on the island, including several famous missing people, as humanly as they can. In their dexterity and their spiritual strength they have completely ascended to a higher level; their natures are gentleness and kindness. They are preparing to take power, and a small number of them have therefore left the island and taken up important positions as politicians and the like.
Brady only manages to escape from the island because Dr. Grove was particularly innocent by nature. He begs Dr. Gorham to believe him so that the island of the conquerors could be destroyed by an atomic bomb.
The doctor listens to Brady's report attentively and keeps interrupting his questions whenever something particularly improbable comes up. He said goodbye to Brady in a friendly manner, but told his colleagues that Brady would have to stay in the clinic for a long time, perhaps until his death, because of the obvious paranoia. And since he is in a hurry, when nobody is watching him, the psychiatrist steps calmly through the wall onto the street where he parked his car.
Jonah and the submarine
The submarine Grampus (i.e. murder whale , a kind of dolphin) of the American radio operator Jakob Levine sinks under German fire off the port of Alexandria during World War II and suffers a malfunction of its electrical system, which seems puzzling to the engineers on board. But it succeeds in repairing the damage. You reappear, look for friendly vehicles and discover a shipwrecked man. He notices the boat strangely late. It scares him, so you see him as an enemy and take him prisoner. To the amazement of the crew, the new passenger speaks Hebrew. He behaves like a confused fanatic and claims to come from the merchant ship Kriegskönig , which was traveling from the city of Japho with a load of salt, wine and linen goods . The captain of the Grampus couldn't find anything else and was just a little surprised at the stranger's claim that his ship came from Tarsis , because he couldn't associate this name with a seaport. The stranger is baptized following his long and complicated name, Johnny, and he is treated as harmless.
With his completely overhauled devices, Levine only receives atmospheric disturbances, but no broadcasts and can therefore not inquire about the war king in Larnaca, the port of destination of the Grampus in Cyprus .
With Johnny, all kinds of difficulties catch up with the Grampus . Two people injure themselves near him. The sextant seems to be defective: you don't find yourself in Cyprus, as expected, in the naval port of Larnaca, but in a deserted bay with a few dilapidated fishermen's huts. The electrical line and the generators break again, the ship leaks and is also hit by a myriad of other minor breakdowns. You explain the name of the ship to Johnny, show him the gun, to his horror and confusion, and confirm that you are fighting the bad guys.
When you finally reach the Lebanese mainland, there is only an inconspicuous settlement between the tearing clouds. Johnny is put ashore in a rubber dinghy and told that he mustn't tell anything about his observations.
A flash of lightning transforms the oil that was used to smooth the surface of the water for Johnny into a sea of flames. An unreal play of the senses paralyzes Levine's breathing and motor skills for a short time. Suddenly the port of Beirut , which one was hoping to reach, appears in the periscope .
The old man , as the crew calls the captain, already indicated during what was happening that something unusual could happen in the area of the blurring of certain physical phenomena. He only lets the radio operator Levine into his theory. It is possible that one has not only experienced errors and mirages; the electricity could have been somehow related to time and the Grampus and their crew could have been transplanted back into the past for three days. He quotes from Jonah 1: 3 how the prophet set out from Japho to Tarsis and calamity followed him wherever he turned.
The beasts of kios
The inhabitants of the planet Kios surround themselves with metal housings that take over all physical functions for them. That protects them rather inadequately from the caustic downpours that can come down on them. One night Nesro , a friend of the reporter and Doctor Yawa Eloem , dies in the rain with his newly renovated housing. Yawa Eloem then decides to use the air breathers , the animals of the Kiosan forests, to create a subservient being that adapts to nature more supple. He creates a park with a diverse fauna in one of the rooms of his property and exposes it to a manipulated air breather that is adapted to the shape of the well-known metal housing and that walks on two legs. The creature feels lonely and expresses its longing for a companion. The Grand Council is cautiously open to Eloem's efforts, but doubts that a soul can reside in a creature body . The doctor has since broken off attempts with a first companion who was too similar to his creation and only played with her. He has created a second companion a little smaller and more delicate than the male creature . This new daughter of his art laughs at her predecessor, is deeply involved in her animal instincts and drives her boyfriend to work. With him she disregards the prohibition against interfering with the doctor's scientific activity. The two blow up two private buildings and that of the Grand Council. For interrogation by Eloem, they appear in metal housings that they have built themselves. The male creature blames the female, who admits to having guided her friend in his forbidden activities. The council must not kill ensouled beings. But he sees the rebellion as evidence of a soul. He therefore puts Eloem's creatures in a spaceship with which they should look for a planet as far away as possible as their new home. The narrator defends Doctor Eloem against accusations of treason; he had only taken on forces too great for him when he tried to fathom the mystery of the creation of life.
Venus outpost
A forward first-person narrator bears the real author's name, Nelson Bond , and receives a visit from Dr. Westcott . The renowned psychiatrist shows Bond a manuscript by Francis J. Grayson and begs the writer to turn the papers into a science fiction story. The fate of mankind could depend on him doing this. Grayson, a traumatized Air Force aviator, made the notes under hypnosis in automatic writing . The handwriting, style, and grammar have notable weaknesses and do not correspond to Grayson, but to the soldier Kerry McLeod , who colonized Venus with other pioneers in the future of the 1980s. Westcott points out to Bond gaps in the flow of the narrative that coincide with the intermediate times of non-hypnotic consciousness in Grayson. As he parted, he expressed his hope that Bond would also assess the manuscript as meaningful, and postulated that its future creator urgently needed a very specific reference.
McLeod shows how in 1985, when Halley's Comet returned, the pseudo-religious movement of the Diarists binds more and more people and rises up against a worldwide federation of states that has meanwhile taken power on earth. General Harkrader assigns McLeod to gather information on Professor Douglas Frisbee , who has his own location between the fronts.
The other texts inspired by McLeod tell of how the Diarists achieved decisive military successes. McLeod finally gives Harkrader the idea to go to Frisbee, as he seems to have significant knowledge. Frisbee shows the two of them and their gyrocopter pilot, Corporal Babacz , his spaceship Phönix , which he secretly had built underwater. When the Diarists start bombing Frisbee's property, the professor manages to start to Venus with his guests, his daughter Dana and a few other young people. McLeod marries Dana on the way.
The colony of New Eden is established on Venus in the overgrown jungle . When the last weak contact with the earth is broken, Frisbee reveals to his people that the comet, as he foresaw it, touched the earth and that its inhabitants were put to sleep for several years. The professor is not sure if people on earth can survive this. In addition, the radiation from outer space made the Venus colonists sterile. In a fire, the spaceship is destroyed and Frisbee is critically injured. On the death bed, he tells people that pure vitamin A appears to regenerate the damaged germ cells. But the fire has also eaten up the library; one has laboratories, but no longer knows the formula of the vitamin. Before the fire, Babacz stole some science fiction novels, including one by Bond. Lastly, McLeod describes how, in a hopeless mood, he has already rummaged through a large part of these works according to the formula. Bond now forces himself to put the formula as a schematic diagram at the end of the story, but admits that it might make himself look ridiculous.
The bird from the stars
At the observatory of a university, the astronomer Dr. Abramson on the silhouette of a gigantic bird approaching the center of the solar system from beyond the limits of the solar system. The journalist Flaherty reports how he and his editor-in-chief Smitty initially only brought a joking report about it. However, other sky explorers confirm Abramson's discovery. Against all kinds of exotic attempts at explanation, the realization soon prevails that a bird that is larger than Jupiter and that beats its wings rhythmically in an unknown ether is really flying towards the earth at great speed. Abramson refers Flaherty to numerous legends that seem to have vague information about a corresponding bird, and also mentions the planet Vulcano , which was sighted between Mercury and the sun in the 18th century, but is now definitely no longer there. He reminds Flaherty of the astronomers' ignorance of how the solar system was formed. In its geological conditions, the earth appears like a gigantic egg . The bird seeks its brood. The only way to protect yourself is to kill the chick that lives inside the earth.
The bird flies past the earth, orbits for two days searching for the innermost companion of the sun and then pauses over it. People on the street watch how the monster helps a clumsy boy to blast off Mercury like a shell and in the warmth of the sun to dry his little wings from a mysterious liquid that oozes from the planet.
Engineers from all over the world try from the American desert to kill life inside their homeland. The bird goes to Venus and deals there for a long time with things about which people can only guess. Flaherty fears, along with the others, that the young bird among them might wake up ahead of time. He says he only writes his report to distract himself from this fear - because in the morning the earth had already started knocking.
Just a handful of ashes
The psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Preston reports on one of his patients, PhD physicist Dr. William Gresham , who caught his eye with his unusual indifference. Preston reproduces excerpts from Gresham's diary, which he looked into after the patient's death and in which the latter describes in detail the outbreak and course of a world war. According to Gresham, the President of the United States of America has announced that there will be "immediate defense, even with the heaviest and deadliest weapons", against an attack by the Soviet Union on United Nations bases in the Far East. From Harbin in (Soviet) Manchuria a disaster is now spreading over the earth, which had heralded itself by a tremor of unique strength, could not be explored with the help of airplanes and could only be perceived through the successive mass exodus and troop movements that trigger it. Very soon Gresham concludes that this could only have been the new wonder weapon that he and his colleagues recently completed. He believes he knows exactly which radio stations are reporting on the slow circular spread of the destruction, and assures Preston that he and the other physicists suspected the danger of the bomb, but far underestimated it. In his diary, he followed in an agitated manner how people move to the areas that are furthest away from the growing "[pulsating] surface with a deadly, all-destructive charisma". Finally, with fiery determination, he bid farewell to Preston, who he now believes is a hospital inmate in disguise. The following night screams are heard in the vicinity of his sickroom. On the chair in front of his desk you can find the remains of his naked body charred to a small amount of ash, while the diary ends with how he sees the boiling mass approaching and tries to process this in writing until the last moment, remembering his complicity. The hospital staff are thinking of a particularly severe case of obsession. A colleague of Gresham directs them to the fact that the physicist thought it possible to go beyond the normal limits of time and that he should have experimented a lot with such things.
Fabric and shape
Outpost Venus is reworked from Bond's short story The Ultimate Salient (in: Planet , Fall 1940). Jonah and the submarine is recognized as a modification of the biblical story of Jonah in the belly of the whale. The Beasts of Kios is considered a prime example of Bond's mastery of plot construction. Gerald W. Page regards Island of Conquerors and The Bird of the Stars as examples of how close Bond's worlds are to those of a Saki and those of John Collier, respectively.
The collection as a whole is an example of how after the Second World War one could no longer fascinate in the same way as before, by merely describing the astonishing, but as a science fiction writer was already compelled on a level of more mature thinking and artistic feeling. Bond still saw the future as good and blessed.
It is the sovereign work of an old master of science fiction ( Phantastik-Couch.de ), who lively and with humor turns the temporal interplay of events in his hands and transforms it back to the original basis. There is no sign of the fact that the author had to bow in any way to the difficulties in terms of content that would have arisen for a less experienced person due to the tricky nature of the logical, the technical and the scientific in general.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Peter Ruber: Nelson Bond, A Bibliography in Progress ( en ). Archived from the original on July 9, 2011. Retrieved January 9, 2016.
- ↑ Erik Schreiber : Nelson Slade Bond. In: Fictionfantasy.de. Retrieved May 1, 2010 .
- ↑ Nelson Bond : Island of Conquerors . In: Island of Conquerors. Nelson Bond's best science fiction stories. German first publication. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag , Munich 1964, pp. 7-24
- ↑ Bond 1964, pp. 25-46
- ↑ Bond 1964, pp. 46-68
- ↑ Bond 1964, pp. 69-123
- ↑ Bond 1964, pp. 124-139
- ↑ Bond 1964, p. 142
- ↑ Bond 1964, p. 151
- ↑ Bond 1964, pp. 140-160
- ↑ a b Gerald W. Page: Bond, Nelson S (lade) . In: Jay P. Pederson (Ed.): St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers . 4th edition. St. James Press , New York et al. a. 1996, pp. 86-87; P. 87
- ↑ a b Island of the Conquerors by Nelson Bond . Phantastik-Couch.de , accessed on June 18, 2011