Who Goes There?

Both Wikipedia and the SF Encyclopedia have little to say about Amelia Reynolds Long. She apparently lived a long but quiet life, born and died in Pennsylvania. She lived her whole adult life in Harrisburg, specifically. She got both her BA and MA from U Penn, and incidentally she earned her MA the same year “Omega” was published. Long was part of that first generation of women to write for the genre magazines, and along with Clare Winger Harris she had her work published under her full name. She wrote short SF somewhat prolifically from the late 1920s through much of the ’30s, but by the ’40s she turned away from SF to focus on writing mystery fiction. ISFDB is very useful for tracking authors’ writings, for the most part, but the folks in charge tend to neglect listing non-genre works, even with there being a non-genre section. Long stopped writing mystery fiction in the early ’50s to focus on writing poetry and editing textbooks. “Omega” is a pulpy but somewhat prescient SF-horror tale, seemingly written in homage to Edgar Allan Poe but with that touch of 1930s super-science that dominated the field until the tail end of the decade. Long challenged herself by telling a story of the last days of mankind without using time travel.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1932 issue of Amazing Stories. It’s been reprinted in Avon Fantasy Reader No. 10 (ed. Donald Wollfheim), Amazing Science Fiction Anthology: The Wonder Years 1926-1935 (ed. Martin H. Greenberg), and Beyond Time: Classic Tales of Time Unwound (ed. Mike Ashley). Sorry, it doesn’t seem to be public domain yet.

Enhancing Image

Professor Michael Claybridge is giving us a testimony of a pretty unusual event, that being an experiment in which a man, under hypnotic suggestion, took on the persona of the last man to live on Earth—tens of thousands of years in the future. This was an experiment conducted by a friend and colleague of Claybridge’s, Professor Mortimer, and the subject was a man named Williams. From hereon I’ll be summarizing the plot in the present tense, but we can gather from Claybridge’s tone and choice of words in the beginning that this experiment was successful—maybe too successful. The session is a way to test what Mortimer calls “mental time,” his theory that there are two ways in which we understand time: materially and mentally. More importantly, he argues that the latter is just as legitimate and has as much bearing on human perception as material time. Mortimer had already tested this on a willing subject who claimed to have experienced life in the time of Napoleon, but Claybridge is understandably skeptical about this. It’s one thing to claim to have lived, for a moment in your mind’s eye, in a different country a century ago, but what about the future? What about the end of the world as we know it?

People who know their classic horror should immediately think of Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” which on top of being horror is also arguably an example of proto-SF. Hugo Gernsback certainly thought so, even printing it in the inaugural issue of Amazing Stories. Both “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and “Omega” are examples of SF having to do with hypnotism, or mesmerism as it’s also called, a topic that doesn’t come up so much nowadays but which can be considered a soft science. Hypnotism tends to be written off these days as pseudo-science rather than soft science, not helped because its most prominent influence on the real world in living memory is its connection with Dianetics and the Church of Scientology. Indeed, what Mortimer’s been testing with “mental time” sounds like a more inoccuous precursor to what L. Ron Hubbard and his followers would be doing just a few decades later. Going back to Poe’s story, that one has to do with the titular Valdemar, an old man, who is put under hypnosis while on his deathbed, with the results being disconcerting, to say the least. Williams, a man who is on the run from the law on account of murder, but who is unable to kill himself despite a guilty conscience since his religion “forbids suicide,” signs up for Mortimer’s experiment.

Mortimer (rightly) suspects the experiment, like in Poe’s story, will go sideways somehow, so he has Williams sign a waver and with a hefty cash reward of $5,000. Where Mortimer got the money from, I’m not sure, especially this supposed to be in 1926 (when the story is set) dollars. You may also be wondering how Claybridge contributes to this experiment: he doesn’t really. Well, on a metatextual level Claybridge is there so that we have a “grounded” and journalistic viewpoint on what sounds like a bunch of quackery. In-story the justification is that despite his better instincts he’s become morbidly curious about what Williams might say while under hypnosis. The scene of the action is a room that’s been cleared out for this purpose, described as follows:

It was windowless, with only a skylight in the ceiling to admit light and air. Aside from the chair in which Williams sat, there was no furniture save an instrument resembling an immense telephone transmitter that a crane arm held about two inches from the hypnotized man’s mouth, and a set of ear phones, such as a telephone operator wears, which were attached to his ears. But strangest of all, the walls, floors, and ceiling of the room were lined with a whitish metal.

Basically we have a white metallic cube with only a skylight for air and light, said skylight figuring into the story’s ending. While under hypnosis Williams is made to recount the last six days (in “Biblical time,” as in Genesis) of life on Earth, from the perspective of man—not any specific man, but sort of the inverse of ancestral memory. In a voice that isn’t his own, Williams gives us the story of the last days of mankind, and a planet that has gone very hot and very wet, before finally the seas dry up and the last lifeforms on Earth wither. For the record, as someone who’s read Genesis a couple days, I’m not really sure what Mortimer means by this way of keeping time. There’s material time and mental time, but then there’s Biblical time. If you’ve read even a few books from the Old Testaments, the unknown authors of these books had some pretty funny ideas about how time works. Anyway, we’re given a tour of life, more than 40,000 years into the future. It’s here that Claybridge as both narrator and character evaporates, to say nothing of Mortimer and Williams, as the story turns away from plot and even character to focus on what I have to think is honest speculation.

There was some dying earth SF prior to “Omega,” albeit not a lot of it. Pretty memorably the hero of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine travels millions of years into the future in the climax of that novella, to find an Earth that’s become all but inhospitable. There was also William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, from 1912, which itself would prove quite influential on science fiction and fantasy about Earth in its twilight years, not least of them being Jack Vance’s own The Dying Earth. Long’s way of getting around having to send her characters forward in time in order to give us a glimpse of Earth in such a state also anticipates John W. Campbell’s “Twilight,” which has been reprinted far more often and is in some ways the less dated story. Campbell’s technique is more fluid and “mature” than Long’s, although it must be said Long’s story doesn’t have the unfortunate bits of anti-black racism that crop up in “Twilight.” This is a nice way of saying “Omega” now reads as stilted and rather basic, although it would not been taken as such in 1932. The dialogue especially can be hard to stomach now, but that part mostly goes out the window once Williams tells his story.

There Be Spoilers Here

Not only does Williams feel psychological agony from the hell of Earth’s distant future, but Mortimer isn’t even able to pull him fully out of his hypnotic state. Much like how poor Valdemar is able to keep talking even after death (sorry for spoilering a story that came out 180 years ago), Williams is unable to break out of this “last man” persona. Things go from bad to worse when on “the sixth day” something totally unexplainable happens: as Williams’s persona dies, the man himself seems to get atomized, with only his charred clothes remaining. The skylight from above killed Williams like how sunlight typically kills a vampire. Well, at least those $5,000 would presumably go to his sister.

A Step Farther Out

By the time “Omega” was published, Amazing Stories was no longer the top dog in the small world of magazine SF. Hell, Astounding was a couple years away still from holding that title. Keeping in mind that we’re reading a story from a magazine that had gone from being a pioneer to second-rate in just a handful of years, “Omega” ain’t half bad. It’s simple, and ultimately isn’t trying to say anything all that meaningful about the future of mankind, but its simplicity and egalitarian attitude are to its credit. I said before that Campbell’s “Twilight” takes a similar premise and executes it perhaps more memorably (readers certainly thought that was the case), but “Omega” doesn’t have that certain awkwardness of Campbell’s story which makes it hard to recommend these days.

See you next time.