Science fiction existed long before people ever called it that, of course, dating back to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and quite possibly earlier. And there was quite a bit of it published in the pulps before the term came into existence. A couple of examples are the debut novelette by Ray Cummings, “The Girl in the Golden Atom”, originally published in ARGOSY in 1919, and its novel-length sequel, “The People of the Golden Atom”, published a year later, which were combined into the novel THE GIRL IN THE GOLDEN ATOM in 1923. That novel has been reprinted numerous times, often in an abridged version.
I just read the original pulp versions, which are available in various e-book editions. Sometimes these eighty- and ninety-year-old pulp yarns don’t hold up well for today’s readers. What about THE GIRL IN THE GOLDEN ATOM?
The original novelette finds five men sitting around their club (gentlemen used to belong to clubs, you know, where they would sit around and smoke and drink brandy and tell each other about their adventures): The Chemist, The Doctor, The Banker, The Big Business Man, and The Very Young Man. Yes, that’s how Cummings refers to them throughout, although eventually he does reveal their names. It seems that The Chemist has discovered by using a super-high-powered microscope that there are worlds within worlds and habitated universes within the very atoms of everything that makes up our world. He has also developed chemicals that will allow him to shrink and enlarge, so he can visit the universe he has discovered within the atoms of his mother’s golden wedding ring. In other words, Cummings was there first with the idea that sparked the plots for countless comic books and movies later on.
In the first part of the story (the original novelette), The Chemist visits the Golden Atom, falls in love with the beautiful girl he spied on there, and helps out her people in a war with an enemy city-state. He does this by growing to giant size and stomping on the enemy army. (To quote Dave Barry, I am not making this up.) Since he decides not to come back to our world, eventually The Doctor, The Big Business Man, and The Very Young Man use the chemicals he left behind to follow him into the Golden Atom. They find their friend there, but they also find a revolution, excitement, danger, and romance, along with a lot of shrinking to hide from enemies and growing to giant size to stomp them. There’s a lot of stomping, both deliberate and accidental, in this book, which at times provides it with some rather bizarre humor.
The first half of the book is pretty slow, an example of what some people call travelogue SF, where the characters walk around, look at stuff, and talk about the history, geography, and social customs of the world where they find themselves. There’s also a lot of pseudo-scientific discussion about the whole shrinking process. In the second half of the book, though, the revolution gets underway and the whole thing turns into a colorful, violent, fast-paced adventure that fits pretty well into the sword-and-planet subgenre of science fiction.
So, is THE GIRL IN THE GOLDEN ATOM worth reading nearly ninety years later? If you’re interested in the history of science fiction, definitely. If you looking for an entertaining adventure novel, it qualifies there, too, although you have to be patient and the writing style is definitely old-fashioned. Cummings isn’t nearly the storyteller that his contemporary Edgar Rice Burroughs was, and the scientific speculation seems pretty silly now, but back then it was pretty dazzling stuff, I imagine. I enjoyed the book and I think some of you would, too.
(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on July 17, 2009. I haven't read anything else by Ray Cummings since then except some of his Weird Menace stories, which were pretty good.)
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