BLOOD AND IRON (4)
By:
December 3, 2023
“Blood and Iron: A Play in One Act,” A Radium Age proto-sf ancestor of The Six Million Dollar Man and RoboCop, was first published in the December 1917 issue of The Strand. (Note that the play predates Karel Čapek’s “R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots” by four years.) HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize it here for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8.
241: Noth—ing.
SCIENTIST (Smiles knowingly at Emperor. Turns card over.): Ah, very good. (SCIENTIST holds card up again.) Once more.
241 (After a moment of staring he reads deliberately.): A — nation’s — will — should — be — the — will — to power!
EMPEROR (Takes card from SCIENTIST and glances at it.): Correct!
SCIENTIST (Crossing to centre and returning card to portfolio, then addressing EMPEROR.): This is my greatest achievement. Never has science
done so much for the human animal. From a shattered, bleeding wreck of no value to his country I have made him into an efficient man — hands of steel, leg of bronze, arm of nickel and aluminum, telescopic eye, an ear that — (241 bends his ear of stage left.)
EMPEROR (Startled.): You hear something? What do you hear?
241: A — bugle — call — sounding the assembly!
EMPEROR: Impossible! Open the door!
(SCIENTIST opens door and distant bugle-call is faintly heard of stage.)
EMPEROR (In astonishment.): God in heaven! Miraculous! (as SCIENTIST gently closes door aglow with triumph). What have you accomplished?
SCIENTIST (With fervour.): A resurrection!
EMPEROR: Complete!
SCIENTIST: A triumph over matter. The fragment of a soldier reconstructed under the magic touch of Science, without which he would to-day be rotting on the field — a source of pestilence — a worthless thing. Science set him on his feet, gave him a leg, an arm, hands, a telephonic ear, a telescopic eye!
EMPEROR (Leans back and deliberately inspects 241.): How long have you been in my service?
(241 hesitates and salutes.)
SCIENTIST: You may speak.
241: Eighteen — years — Majesty.
EMPEROR: Married?
241: Yes, Majesty.
EMPEROR: Children?
241: Seven — Majesty.
SCIENTIST: Five sons!
241 (Bitterly.): One dead — three at — the front — my youngest follows —
EMPEROR: His age?
241 (Swallowing.): Sixteen!
EMPEROR (Coldly to SCIENTIST, referring to 241.): When does his furlough end?
SCIENTIST: Noon, to-morrow. By nightfall he will again be in the trenches.
EMPEROR (Reflectively.): And if he returns I will award him the Triple Cross. (More brightly.) This will stimulate the military ardour of the Crown Prince. It will delight him to see this reassembled soldier.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague | Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”) | Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt | H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook | Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins | William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land | J.D. Beresford’s Goslings | E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man | Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage | Muriel Jaeger’s The Man With Six Senses | Jack London’s “The Red One” | Philip Francis Nowlan’s Armageddon 2419 A.D. | Homer Eon Flint’s The Devolutionist | W.E.B. DuBois’s “The Comet” | Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Moon Men | Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland | Sax Rohmer’s “The Zayat Kiss” | Eimar O’Duffy’s King Goshawk and the Birds | Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Lost Prince | Morley Roberts’s The Fugitives | Helen MacInnes’s The Unconquerable | Geoffrey Household’s Watcher in the Shadows | William Haggard’s The High Wire | Hammond Innes’s Air Bridge | James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen | John Buchan’s “No Man’s Land” | John Russell’s “The Fourth Man” | E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” | John Buchan’s Huntingtower | Arthur Conan Doyle’s When the World Screamed | Victor Bridges’ A Rogue By Compulsion | Jack London’s The Iron Heel | H. De Vere Stacpoole’s The Man Who Lost Himself | P.G. Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmith | Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” | Houdini and Lovecraft’s “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” | Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Sussex Vampire” | Francis Stevens’s “Friend Island” | George C. Wallis’s “The Last Days of Earth” | Frank L. Pollock’s “Finis” | A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool | E. Nesbit’s “The Third Drug” | George Allan England’s “The Thing from — ‘Outside'” | Booth Tarkington’s “The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis” | H.G. Wells’s “The Land Ironclads” | J.D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder | Valery Bryusov’s “The Republic of the Southern Cross” | Algernon Blackwood’s “A Victim of Higher Space” | A. Merritt’s “The People of the Pit” | Max Brand’s The Untamed | Julian Huxley’s “The Tissue-Culture King” | Clare Winger Harris’s “A Runaway World” | Francis Stevens’s “Thomas Dunbar” | George Gurdjieff’s “Beelzebub’s Tales” | Robert W. Chambers’s “The Harbor-Master” | Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “The Hall Bedroom” | Clare Winger Harris’s “The Fifth Dimension” | Francis Stevens’s “Behind the Curtain” | more to come.