Pulp Spotlight: "Man of Two Worlds" by Bryce Walton
A sci-fi classic from the early 1950's
AI’s interpretation of the story.
I’ve been recently reading the excellent Planetary Adventures by DMR Books, a collection of Golden Age science fiction gems. Among them is Bryce Walton’s Man of Two Worlds. What a wild story. It was originally published in the pages of Space Stories in October 1952.
The magazine didn’t have a long and illustrious life: it only lasted five issues. The publisher, Standard Magazine, is today perhaps best known for characters like Captain Future, the Black Bat, and the Phantom Detective–thanks largely to high-quality reprint collections.
The story opens with Lee Thorsten returning from a mysterious black pyramid, dazed and confused. What happened to him? Turns out that beneath the pyramid lies a portal to the past–one that Lee discovered with the help of the racial memory of his lover, Lori Saunlon.
Pursued by the murderous Martian government, the time-crossed lovers have no choice but to flee through the portal. Cue some fourth-dimension shenanigans, and Lee and Lori find themselves in the bodies of Theseus and Princess Ariadne, respectively.
Walton takes his time describing the nature of traveling consciousness. It’s all well and good, but the choppy way he writes creates a strange effect. I had to double check whether this story had been serialized, which would’ve explained the repeated, well, repetitions. But no, it was published as a single piece. This means Walton was either aiming to meet a specific word count or really wanted to hammer his points home.
Walton does a great job of filling in people who are not that knowledgeable about the original myth, as its divergence from the way 'it really happened' is a significant part of the story's appeal. We encounter familiar faces like Medusa and Talos, but with a sci-fi twist.
It’s one of the many stories that owes its existence to Edgar Rice Burroughs' pivotal John Carter of Mars series.
Bizarrely, Walton also brings Conan the Barbarian into the mix. How he managed this without copyright issues is anyone’s guess—probably he just ran with it, permissions be damned. Several of his letters were published in Weird Tales, which suggests that he was a fan of Robert E. Howard’s work.
Conan definitely wasn’t a household name at the time. Perhaps this was just Walton’s way of paying homage to the great character, considering the popular Lancer Books reprints of Conan didn’t come out until about a decade later. The Cimmerian’s appearance isn’t a long one, but it certainly is consequential.
Yes, the prose is clunky at times, and yes, Walton loved repetition, but this one still gets a thumbs-up from me. It’s one of the many stories that owes its existence to Edgar Rice Burroughs' pivotal John Carter of Mars series.