#van-pires

“Through the metal throat of its victim crash steel teeth; the blood of its prey-the gasoline, that is-is drained into its stomach, its gas tank.”

I dig pulp and corny old genre fiction of all kinds. During my recent scouring of public domain comics and pulp mags for art resources, I came across these gems, both illustrations by Frank R. Paul, for a story called “The Ideal” by Stanley G. Weinbaum.

The story itself is interesting enough, a sort of larval Twilight Zone concept wherein a rather dingy engineer is introduced to an invention by a self-aggrandizing supergenius.

This invention is not, however, a car-devouring robotic monster of pure toyetic joy.

Rather, the Professor has invented a device that conjures ideal versions of thoughts into images on a mirror-screen. The car-devouring robot is essentially a mock-up sculpture that the professor uses to make a point about individuality being an expression of flaws. The philosophy is shaky at best. The Professor insists that his thought particles can be converted into matter and energy, and visa-versa, so theoretically, these ideals could be manifested as true matter.

The Professor intends to hook the device into the robot with the intention of making it a sort of mechanical Laplace’s Demon, receiving the professor’s thought-particles, supplementing them with converted energy and concentrating them to answer questions with ideal answers. Why a machine-predator designed to hunt and kill automobiles is the chosen host for this device is not addressed, nor is the reason for designing the robot in the first place.

Now, the story may be from 1935, but tropes are tropes. You can guess where its going: the idealizer machine picks up on this “ideal car hunter” concept, the robot becomes fully active and starts hunting poor commuters until the young protagonist and the Prof can reign in the fruits of his hubris. Lots of cars get nommed, there’s chaos, what has science wrought, etc, etc.

Except that’s not what happens. The story is actually a boy-finds-girl-loses-girl tale. I suspect the conceptual ancestor to vaguely-known 90s CGI atrocity Van-Pires there was a case of “the artist came up with this, work it into the story” or “this won’t make a good cover, give us a monster.”

I will admit to having been surprised by the plot direction, something that doesn’t happen much, but it is the rare case where cliche would have been better.