People Minus X

Dawn of the Demi-Gods #2

by Raymond Z. Gallun

The hero of the novel is Ed Doukas, who is the nephew of the scientist whom everyone blames for the destruction of the Moon (though it's never clear if the scientist is actually guilty); this uncle survived, because he had left the Moon the day before the experiment. Soon, the government learns of the survival of the uncle, and he goes underground. Ed soon finds himself a pariah due to his relation to his uncle. As the story proceeds, there begins to be a debate, then more animosity between people who are natural, and the re-created android personalities, until it begins to resemble McCarthyism, as the naturally-born people believe the androids want to take over the world. Ed learns where his uncle is hiding, and decides to stand with the androids, since the natural-born are so hysterical and are becoming luddites, i.e. they are against all science. Soon, there is a war between the two sides, and that fills up the rest of the story.

Genres: Science Fiction

98 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Aka William Callahan, Arthur Allport.

Raymond Zinke Gallun (March 22, 1911 - April 2, 1994) was an early science fiction writer.

Gallun (rhymes with "balloon") was born in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. He lived a drifter's existence, working a multitude of jobs around the world in the years leading up to World War II. He sold many popular stories to pulp magazines in the 1930s. "Old Faithful" (1934) was his first noted story. "The Gentle Brain" was published in "Science Fiction Quarterly" under the pseudonym Arthur Allport. Another of his pseudonyms was William Callahan.

Reviews

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining listening 🎶🔰

Another will written fantasy Sci-Fi futuristic space opera adventure thriller short story by Raymond Z. Gallun about normal size people being micro sized and travelling through the galaxy. I would recommend this novella to readers of fantasy space adventurers novels 👍🔰. Enjoy the adventure of reading 👓 or listening 🎶 to Alexa as I do because of health issues. 2022 👒🗽🏭☺

[Roddy Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Scientific experiments on the moon and an accidental lunar explosion that seared the earth triggers another tale from the imaginative pen of Raymond Z. Gallun.
The secret of life and the restoring to the living of victims of the holocaust initiate a conflict for Ed Dukas, Gallun’s scientific pioneer of the future. Restoring persons through scientific methods, personality records and the memories of near kin, leaves one fatal flaw. They lack one indefinable quality – a divine spark, perhaps a soul.
Gallon depicts a struggle between the restored people and the natural living. Life on the asteroids, thought machines, a journey to Mars and a star ship expedition to Sirius are woven into the plot.
People Minus X is packed with action, science-fiction style. - Detroit Times'
Blurb from the 1958 D-291 Ace Double paperback edition

The plot is straightforward enough. Ed Dukas' Uncle, Mitch Prell, is a scientist whose creations include Vitaplasm, a synthetic but living flesh which can not only aid with repairing limbs or organs but - once one's body has been screened - can reproduce a copy if the human original is killed.
These bodies are stronger, faster and can absorb light and radiation as fuel for the body. Prell has also developed android bodies for the same purpose. As Ed's father is dead, but wasn't screened, Prell collects as much information as he can with a view to having Ed's father resurrected.

Not long after however, there is an explosion on the moon related to one of Prell's experiments and the Moon disintegrates into a ring of asteroids around the Earth, but only after a large number of them have already hit the Earth causing mass fatalities and chaos. Everyone blames Prell for the disaster and for the fact that victims of this holicaust are returning from the dead, something to which a vocal minority fiercely object.
Ed and his mother are forced to leave and live in the asteroids for a while until she receives a message and tells her son that they have to return.
Ed's father has been resurrected as a Vitaplast human it seems. but is not the same man. Ed decides to accept him though, as do other families whose relatives, killed by some of the moon debris, begin to return to them.
Slowly tensions rise as Human purists begin to campaign against the Vitaplast and android returnees, a campaign which escalates to the point of open warfare.
Prell is believed to be still alive and one day Ed finds the word 'Nipper' - Prell's nickname for his nephew, written in ink on a blank sheet of paper.
From herein on, Ed is on a mission to find his uncle and try and put a stop to the madness that has been unleashed on the Earth. It's a journey that takes him and his girlfriend to Mars where they are given knowledge and power that could halt the war that is about to erupt.
It's a marvelous little buried gem, this; a colourful and thrilling story which - serendipitously- echoes the the rhetoric of the current US Christian Right in their hate-filled pogroms against people whom they believe have no right to exist.
The dialogue is a little strange, even for the Nineteen Fifties. Oddly this seems to imbue the book with its own character. The narrative packs a huge amount into a minimal number of pages and - whether consciously or not - the author manages to make a telling point about how the US deals with the problem of xenophobia within its borders. You push all those 'different people' onto a ship and send them off on a one-way trip to the planets of Sirius.
But hey, that was the Fifties. Sixty years later we are still seeing people doing the same thing in Syria and in Europe. These 'different people' aren't wanted and are being told to move on or go back.
They'd maybe welcome a giant spaceship to Sirius.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Due to the constraints on length in the golden age of pulps, this novel rushes along at breakneck speed by today's standards, cramming multiple larger-than-life concepts into its few pulse pounding pages. Pacing aside, it has aged fairly well, its technology still remote enough not to have become too dated. I wish the genre were still this wide eyed and optimistic today.

If you're in the mood for a wild ride, twisting and gyrating through and around every obstacle but the kitchen sink, incorporating science fiction tropes that would become more commonplace decades later, including immortality, androids, cyborgs, cloning, star travel, a kind of proto-nanotechnology before it was called that, and even miniaturization a la Fantastic Voyage, yet somehow still holding together as a unified story, this is a fun read.

I had no idea this is the second part of a series until seeing it described as such here on Goodreads. No matter. It is completely self contained.

3.5 stars if I could give them, knocking off a half star for the pacing.

[Tania Rook · Rating 1 out of 5]

So here's the thing. I read The Secret People by John Wyndham and it was really boring. So I thought I would treat myself to a little Raymond Gallun, get a change of pace before I dove into the next Wyndham book (Foul Play Suspected).

But Gallum is even worse than Wyndham, while also being quite a bit the same.

There is a genre of science fiction that says each exciting chapter should be like a serialised adventure played at the local movie theatre, only with words rather than moving pictures. So you get all this incredibly low stakes drama and no real plot or progression. People Minus X essentially ends in the Garden of Eden at the beginning of creation - I hardly call that forward momentum. And all the ideas expressed are simply thrown at the wall. They're not meaningful in any way. Not sure who the intended audience for this form of sci fi is, but it isn't me.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you want to write a successful science fiction novel it's certainly a good idea to top load the first chapter with all manor of events and inventions creating a different world than the one we all currently know.

Gallun really goes for broke in People Minus X.

Everyone chills out on the 'sensipsych,' a super-immersive virtual reality device; death and decay have been effectively rendered obsolete via rejuvenation vats; anyone from the past can be resurrected from a single cell and the addition of memory implants; space colonisation is possible and an ancient, extinct Martian race has been discovered; a group of experimental scientists accidentally blowup the moon...

And then an invisible presence writes the word 'Nipper' on Ed Dukas's letter paper.

That"s quite an array of interesting ideas, the author has more than piqued my interest. Of course it also helps if you learn to write beforehand.

Gallun forgot that part.

His prose was a curious mixture of the plodding, the inane and the randomly melodramatic. Then the plot became increasingly addled as 'vitaplasm' (think of it as super silicon) was thrown into the mix and a miniaturised uncle turned up.

Soon the hero and his obedient girlfriend are giving the shrinking game a go. It doesn't sound like the best way to save the day, they soon find themselves 'stranded here in a microcosmos for as long as they could survive, helpless to move even a pebble.' Surely the world is doomed?

Not quite. They prove to surprisingly durable and tenacious as miniature androids the size of dust particles. Our hero can still shake his tiny fist in anger at the bad guy called Carter Loman - surely fiction's first android bigot - and he and his wife can still share a quick smooch ('Perhaps it was odd that dust-mote beings still could do that?')

If this novel were turned into a screenplay and pitched to a movie producer the tagline would be I, Robot meets Fantastic Voyage as shown at the Mystery Science Theater 3000.

I'd probably go and see it.

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel was written as though for a teenage reader. It ranges all over the place, is light in characterization and has fantastic elements with no possible science behind it (for example, shrinking in size to the near molecular level and riding from Mars to Earth on a neutrino beam without benefit of space suit). Its theme seems to be that androids can be people, have feelings and higher thought processes, and so should be shown regard. Also, anyone who dies, like many do when the moon gets blown up, can be brought back to artificial life.

I hope I've written enough so that you can see the juvenile silliness for yourself here. In addition, there were about five or six typographic errors in the original Ace paperback edition that I noticed. Pretty amateur production.