otterno11's review
2.0
Like Don’t Dream, published later, Colossus is a collection of vintage weird tales, here consisting of the science fiction stories of Minnesota writer Donald Wandrei, interesting mainly in his role as a correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft and, with August Derleth, founder of the publishing house that preserved much of Lovecraft’s work. Of course, with Wandrei a long time citizen of St. Paul, living in a home not far from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Summit Hill neighborhood, a few blocks from where I currently live, there is the local interest for me as well.
As in Don’t Dream, the most interesting part is the biographical information in the introduction, here provided by another genre writer, Richard L. Tierney. Wandrei seemed to have been quite the character, though in some ways a little tragic, never really satisfied with his work. Tierney quotes Wandrei as writing of his own work, “they were all more or less routine pot-boilers without any particular distinction,” which is, sadly, an apt description of the material here.
For the most part, the stories collected in Colossus, published originally in various pulp magazines between the late 1920s and the 1960s, with the bulk coming out of the ‘30s, don’t really offer much to modern readers. The writing is, in general, pretty uninspiring and, in spite of a cool idea here and there, mostly dragged, making it difficult to maintain interest. For those interested in the “Cthulhu Mythos,” it must be noted that none of Wandrei’s stories here really draw from the style and in fact, are quite distinct from that of Lovecraft in terms of attitudes and themes.
Oftentimes, Wandrei’s stories mostly follow a few prominent motifs he returns to again and again. Along with a penchant for creepy love triangles (including one in which a time traveller lost in the far, post apocalyptic future falls in love with the mutated descendant of his crush and his villainous rival for her affections after generations of incestuous “repopulating the Earth”), Wandrei is particularly drawn to scenarios in which ill advised physics experiments involving the nature of time and space lead to the death of the researchers, all of humanity, the Earth itself, or the entire universe. I can only imagine Wandrei wouldn’t be a fan of the Large Hadron Collider. I do feel that Wandrei might have had some pretty innovative ideas for the time, ideas that later became more ingrained standards in science fiction. In one story, for instance, he posits a fourth dimensional object casting a third dimensional shadow, an idea used to great effect in, of all things, an episode of Adventure Time. For the most part, though, I think I preferred the stories in Don’t Dream, his “horror and fantasy” collection, though there is plenty of horror here and plenty of “sci-fi” concepts in Don’t Dream as well.
As in Don’t Dream, the most interesting part is the biographical information in the introduction, here provided by another genre writer, Richard L. Tierney. Wandrei seemed to have been quite the character, though in some ways a little tragic, never really satisfied with his work. Tierney quotes Wandrei as writing of his own work, “they were all more or less routine pot-boilers without any particular distinction,” which is, sadly, an apt description of the material here.
For the most part, the stories collected in Colossus, published originally in various pulp magazines between the late 1920s and the 1960s, with the bulk coming out of the ‘30s, don’t really offer much to modern readers. The writing is, in general, pretty uninspiring and, in spite of a cool idea here and there, mostly dragged, making it difficult to maintain interest. For those interested in the “Cthulhu Mythos,” it must be noted that none of Wandrei’s stories here really draw from the style and in fact, are quite distinct from that of Lovecraft in terms of attitudes and themes.
Oftentimes, Wandrei’s stories mostly follow a few prominent motifs he returns to again and again. Along with a penchant for creepy love triangles (including one in which a time traveller lost in the far, post apocalyptic future falls in love with the mutated descendant of his crush and his villainous rival for her affections after generations of incestuous “repopulating the Earth”), Wandrei is particularly drawn to scenarios in which ill advised physics experiments involving the nature of time and space lead to the death of the researchers, all of humanity, the Earth itself, or the entire universe. I can only imagine Wandrei wouldn’t be a fan of the Large Hadron Collider. I do feel that Wandrei might have had some pretty innovative ideas for the time, ideas that later became more ingrained standards in science fiction. In one story, for instance, he posits a fourth dimensional object casting a third dimensional shadow, an idea used to great effect in, of all things, an episode of Adventure Time. For the most part, though, I think I preferred the stories in Don’t Dream, his “horror and fantasy” collection, though there is plenty of horror here and plenty of “sci-fi” concepts in Don’t Dream as well.
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