Scary Books, Kiddies!
The Mad Gasser of Mattoon: Dispelling the Hysteria. By Scott Maruna. Swamp Gas Publishing Company, 2003. Cover art by Michael Schwab.
Yes, friends, my parents’ hometown was the site of an intrusion of the outré into WWII middle America.
The Mad
Gasser incidents stirred up a fuss all over the country, but the actual
so-called attacks happened in two brief months in the fall of 1944.
Believe me,
Mattoon, Illinois is not a big town.
It’s the anchor of a hundred square miles of farmland. Nowadays it has a few hotels along the
interstate, and some chain restaurants.
But in 1944 it was not that big.
It had a population just over 15,000 in the 1940 US census. In 1944, Ralph Smith became Mattoon’s first
black mailman. Mattoon’s first radio
station was WLBH (1170 AM), signing on in November 1946. During the Mad Gasser days of August-September
1944, radio signals streamed in from Chicago, but otherwise the Mattoon Journal-Gazette
was the prime local “official” source of information.
Maruna does
a good job of describing the incidents and their surrounding hysteria. Something happened and made a few
people turn dizzy. Then public panic and hysteria popped up. What? Why? Who?
Well,
Maruna has a theory, involving a town pharmacist and his son. Is this likely what happened? I don’t know.
What do you think? (By the way, if you want to sound like an authentic Mattooner, you refer to the local paper as the “Gaze-at-it.”)
01 - St John's Night on a Bare Mountain (Original Version) - Mussorgsky - Ukraine NSO - 1867 (12:48)
02 - Night on Bald Mountain (Full Metal Cover) - Mussorgsky - arr John Parrish - 2016 (10:35)
03 - Walpurgis Night Allegretto - Gounod - 1859 (1:26)
04 - Night on Bald Mountain - Mussorgsky - Mint Julep Jazz Band - 2015 (4:08)
05 - Dorothy's Rescue (Extended Version) - Mussorgsky - arr Herbert Stothart - 1939 (3:10)
06 - Die erste Walpurgisnacht - Overture (edit) - Mendelssohn - 1831 (6:34)
07 - Walpurgis Night - The Coffinshakers - 2007 (3:27)
08 - Night on Bald Mountain (Piano Solo) - Mussorgsky - arr Andrew Ray - 2012 (8:11)
09 - Walpurgis - François Rabbath - 1963 (3:19)
10 - La nuit de Walpurgis - Overture - Charles-Marie Widor - 1887 (10:13)
11 - From the Bohemian Forest - Walpurgis Night - Dvořák - 1883 (3:58)
12 - A Night on Bare Mountain - Mussorgsky - arr Leibowitz - 1962 (10:36)
SoonerCon 2009’s theme was “Slideways in Time,” and here are some of the text pieces I wrote for its Program Book.
“—All
You Zombies—” is a science-fiction short story by Robert A Heinlein. He dashed it off in a single day, July 11,
1958. It was first published in the
March 1959 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine. In this story, the first-person narrator is
his own father, mother, and child.
Timescape is a 1980 novel by science-fiction writer Gregory
Benford. In it, doomed scientists from a
dying Earth (in 1998) try to send a warning message to the past, in 1962. The interesting thing about the message is
that it doesn’t involve travel as such. The
scientists shoot a tachyon beam to the astronomical position of the Earth in
1962 with their message.
In
the 1986 comics maxi-series Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
describe an alternate Earth, deviated for the worse by the presence of “real”
superheroics. If superheroes were real,
they’d really screw the world up, Moore said.
The Star
Trek episode “The Naked Time” ends with a cold-fusion restart of the Enterprise’s
warp engines, which accidentally sends the ship and crew three days backward in
time. Fan rumor has it that “The Naked
Time” was originally a two-part story and script, with the time-travel ending
of “Time” leading into the Enterprise’s accidental arrival in
1969 for the beginning of “Tomorrow Is Yesterday.” The beginning of the aired version of “Yesterday”
blames the Enterprise’s time travel on the slingshot effect of a
black hole’s gravitational field.
In Mark Twain’s novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the laconic Hank Morgan arrives in Camelot by simply waking up there. At the end of the story, a jealous Merlin puts Morgan into a magical sleep until his own 19th-century time.
In Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man, an agnostic named Karl Glogauer travels from the year 1970 in a time machine to 28 A.D., where he hopes to meet the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Eventually Grogauer becomes the Jesus of history, with his words on the cross—“It’s a lie, it’s a lie”—misinterpreted by as “Telestai,” which is Aramaic for “It is finished,” or “It is paid.”
The Terminator films and TV series posit a future where machines have become sentient and systematically begin to eliminate humanity. Who’ll change their oil? I wonder.
In Ray Bradbury’s classic 1952 tale “A Sound of Thunder,” the killing of a butterfly on a Time Travel Safari to kill a Tyrannosaur changes history, a presidential election, and the spelling rules of the English language.
When Harlan Ellison turned in his original script for Star Trek’s “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the Enterprise crewman who escaped to the planet was a drug dealer on the run from a Security team. While in the past, Jim Kirk made the decision to live in the past with Edith Keeler (the future be damned). It is Spock who prevents somebody else (not Kirk or McCoy) from saving Edith’s life.
In a March 1986 episode of The New Twilight Zone, a story called “Profile in Silver” tells of a history professor from 2172, a distant descendant of JFK, who returns to Dallas 1963 as part of a time-travel research project. But things go awry when Professor Joseph Fitzgerald prevents the assassination and is taken into custody himself. He produces a silver 1964 half dollar and then time starts to fall apart. The professor realizes that unless JFK dies, nuclear war will end life on Earth now, in 1963.
In Superboy 85, cover-dated December 1960, a very young and inexperienced Superboy decides to change history by time-traveling to prevent the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. However, in Washington DC he first encounters an adult time-traveling Lex Luthor, who whips out a piece of Red Kryptonite that paralyzes the super youth. Only after a commotion in the street draws Luthor’s attention does the villain realize that Lincoln has been killed, and comes to the horrible conclusion that Superboy wasn’t time-traveling to apprehend Luthor but to rescue Lincoln. Luthor has, in effect, murdered our 16th President.
Marvel Comics had several runs of a comic series What If? in which parallel-history stories wondered about what might happen if one or another piece of Marvel mythos were changed. Topics wondered, “What if Spider-Man joined the Fantastic Four?” or “What if Captain America Became President?”
The 2004 film The Butterfly Effect focused on the idea that subjectively tiny incidents might portend large deviations in time. Ashton Kutcher starred as a fellow enabled to time-travel along his own life. Each “correction” he attempts leads to a disastrous conclusion.
Philip K Dick’s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle is considered the fountainhead of alternate histories. It matter-of-factly describes a North America carved up by the Japanese and Nazi Germany after the Axis Powers won World War II.
Several episodes of Babylon 5 featured the concepts of time travel or alternate outcomes, such as “War Without End” and “Babylon Squared.”
Dr Who’s TARDIS can travel anywhere and anywhen in time and/or space, depending on the skill of its pilot (and its maintenance schedule). Don’t forget that TARDIS is an acronym for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space.
The perennial Christmas feel-good movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, is at its heart an alternative-history story. What if George Bailey hadn’t been born? How would Bedford Falls and its citizens be different?
In 1966-1967, ABC provided a sci-fi show called The Time Tunnel, where two scientists became detached in time after the malfunction of the US government’s Project Tic-Toc. Every week, while attempting to make their way home, they would end up in another crisis of times future or past.
Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death is a post-modern anti-war science-fiction novel dealing with soldier Billy Pilgrim’s experiences during World War II and his journeys with time travel. Somehow becoming “unstuck” in time, he wanders up and down his life’s timeline, living out Vonnegut’s deterministic and anti-free-will viewpoint.
