The Hidden Testament.

"He lived with regret at his own table– for his own sake have mercy upon him."

---Tolstoyish

The universe surrounds us with its laws and notions, and in many cases it takes a clever and discerning mind to tease Nature's ways out into the light where they can be clearly seen.

Perhaps there exists in potentia the Greatest Book, the Ultimate Bible, the Definitive Word the way that the fabulous kingdom of Amber hides within its endless reflected and distorted images.

Hidden deep within the enormous library of possible books, then could be the ur-Book. What can not be found by logic might be stumbled upon by oracles, and as such, the algorithmic  genii may as yet prove fruitful.

"The book had produced. Night was disturbed by the words to avert the latter, and hope, I not suppose, the pathless seas, and from my solitary isle like abhorred."

--Schmipsum

Of course, this is just a expansion of my favorite hobby. Considering the Doc Savage Canon as if it is reflections of real events is walking the thin edge of paranoia and conspiracy. I always feel the classic example of this is the Holy Blood/Holy Grail madness, crowned by Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum*  Its a hobby that is given an extra thrill by the possibility that at some point  I will become convinced by my own research that Clark Savage was real, and at that point will become irretrievably mad.

The Insane Gods of Chaos are sprung, like all Gods, from our foreheads, after all. Using software Markov Generators and Completion Anticipators ups the game, improves the  mirror we gesticulate in front of.

 Now its time to start running these programs upon the Canon, and see if we can shake out new adventures from the echos of the Ultimate Book.

"I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock."

 --Edgar Allen Poe

*Proving yet again that a intelligent academic can exceed any madman's excesses.

The Ten Ton Snakes of Tlön

One of the less entertaining Savage adventures is the Ten Ton Snakes. Its a struggle over a quantity of material, believed to be a meteorite, that has enormous density. At hundreds of pounds a cubic centimeter its not neutronium, but definitely not from here on earth. Some prospectors found it in the jungles of Brazil, and were forced by the force of narrative inevitability to become crazed gangsters. Unlike a lot of these cases the peculiar property - the density -  of the material wasn't even exploited as a weapon.*

I wouldn't be bringing this up if I hadn't found something interesting. I was reading Jorge Luis Borges classic Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius when I noticed a reference to an object found in Brazil:
"...along with a cone of bright metal, the size of a die...A man was scarcely able to raise it from the ground...I remember that its weight was intolerable..."

In passing he remarks "These small, very heavy cones(made from a metal not of this world) are images of the divinity in certain regions of Tlön."

Borges account hails from the 1940's, and I have tentatively placed the Ten Ton Snakes as being in 1945-1946 period. TTS  has a weak ending that seems to state that Savage et al. hung around the jungle for a few days until they were rescued, and that Renwick toyed with the ultradense material a little, but didn't seem much use in it.  It would have been a much more interesting story if the material was linked to an intrusion of the parasitical plane of existence Tlön,  and the time spent until their 'rescue' pushing it back.


While it seems odd in retrospect that Savage never fought metaphysical  threats (With the the exception of the Thing in the cave at Quoddy Bay), I always figured this was due to the fact that any adventure that didn't involve two-fisted action would not have been very interesting to the audience of the day. Its not clear how Tlön's grim plan of reality replacement could be interfered with, but certainly there would have been nothing that could have been punched or blown up. But if a metaphysical scalpel was needed to slice Tlön's  infection free from this world, I daresay there would have been few people better qualified to wield it than our favorite Action Scientist slash Surgeon.

I would certainly read ' Doc Savage vs Tlön '!

*Although if it was collapsium, then I imagine it would have some weird electronics properties. Would collapsing a atom's electron shell around its nucleus make it a perfect insulator? Or would it have a disastrous breakdown voltage where it un-collapsed at around the speed of light, vaporizing the material and a good chunk of the nearby landscape?

Unexpected DNA Corroboration of a Doc Savage Adventure!!

Okay, the exclamations points are unnecessary,but they really felt needed. As a poet, I feel free to (ab)use language to suit myself. After all ,it worked for the hot-sheets*.
In the Secret of the Su , an adventure I have tentatively dated as occurring in April 1942, Clark Savage and his gang of Merry Men encounter a remnant of the long-lost Mayan civilization...living in the Everglades.
They speak a language which Doc can partially understand and identifys as 'Yucatan Basic...pre-Mayan.'.
Of course, this is complicated by the fact that Doc himself speaks two forms of 'Mayan': a formal version used by the priesthood of the Lost Valley, and a common version. While the Lost Valley language is usually referred to as 'Mayan' (ignoring the 'Incan' from 'Incan in Gray') , we have to be mindful that these labels were assigned nearly a century ago, and may not accurately conform to the real tongues spoke by the Mayans or the 'pre-Mayan Yucatan people'.

So where am I going with this?
Well, the report of Purepecha DNA found in Georgia / North Carolina!
The Purepacha were one the of the major pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica, a high-technology people with copper smelting and stepped pyramids. Their language Tarascan is spoken today by about a quarter-million people (according to Wikipedia) and is part of the Chibchan family of languages...and yes, the Chibchan languages seem to have pre-dated the Mayan.

Of course, there is a lot of 'Mayan' variants, which makes the 'High 'and "Low" versions spoken by Doc difficult to pin down without any examples. If we could just identify Hidalgo...

Now to add to the fun, its been argued for a while that the rock terraces found at Brasstown Bald in Georgia is the ruins of the fabled city of Yupaha. People are willing to argue that the ruins date from around 1000 AD, which would put them at the end of the Mayan civilizations peak. Problem is, nothing has been dug up that looks definitively Mayan; or for that matter, Purepacha.
But its hard to argue with the DNA.

The deportation/genocide that befell the Creek Confederation could certainly have provided the impetus for  Purepacha descendants to flee deep into the 'impassable' Everglades. Their home is described as being dug into a natural coral mound, within hiking distance of the town of Everglades.

Everglades (now 'Everglades City') is on the coast, up against the edge of the Big Cypress National Preserve, and the Everglades National Park. Its billed as the tourist entrance to the Ten Thousand Islands. Population of 479 people in 2010, and the jungle is still tangled and secluded enough to be a major drug smuggling hub through the 1970's and 1980's.

Secluded enough that the Su may still live in their tunneled homes, keeping themselves hidden away from the Global Village.



*Weekly World News. Thank you, MiB.

Those Who Cannot Remember Doc Savage...

Jess Nevins has a interesting overview of what he describes as a historical backlash against the
ideals of physical development that spawned Clark Savage Jr., and his varied companions of the pulps.
"Those Who Cannot Remember Doc Savage Are Condemned To Repeat Him: The 20th Century Backlash Against Posthuman Bodybuilders,"
While this provides some realworld relevance to the slow decline of Doc's capabilities over the years - especially post WWII - this paper suggested something much more sinister to me.
The question of where Savage went can also be asked about Kent Allard (Lamont Cranston - the Shadow),Richard Wentworth (the Spider), Carson Napier, or Anthony Quinn(the Black Bat).
Were they hunted down and destroyed?
Philip Jose Farmer has suggested that Savage disappeared during a expedition through the 'Gate of Hell' cave system near Quoddy Bay, but its pretty clear that the Russians got him:  Terror Wears No Shoes ends on a uncharacteristically down note:

" Doc Savage had replaced the virus charged money packets in the suitcase, and was inspecting them carefully with a magnifying glass.

He turned his head, said, "You'd better tell them to quarantine this suite and all the prisoners. Have them shut off the air conditioning so air from this place won't be circulated through the ship."

Canta,shocked by how pale his face was, asked, "Do you think any of the packets broke open?" "I don't think so. But we'll take no chances."

"You mean we have to remain in here for the rest of the voyage?"

"That's right. And then we'll have to be segregated for several weeks afterward. That won't be so bad--we'll be in the mountains somewhere, at a laboratory that we'll set up to find out what this virus is and dig up a vaccine or treatment."

"Can that be done?"

"It can be tried," he said. "Go on, tell them to keep everyone out of here, and keep the prisoners in the suite."

She frowned at him. He seemed detached, absorbed in the matter of solving the virus that lay ahead. There was no visible elation about him, and certainly no noticeable interest in her as a woman, and a very pretty one.

Canta felt an odd, helpless sort of rage.

She turned and went out and stood by the suite door, listening to the Captain of the Crosby Square tell expert lies to his curious passengers.

THE END "

Italics mine. 

'shocked by how pale his face was ' Savage pale with terror was a new development. I'm going to have to re-read this book to see if anything can be adduced to suggest that the Commie-spy-spreads-plague plot was actually a plot to catch the Man of Bronze. After all, everything else had failed over the years: poison and bullets, monsters and beautiful assassins.  

I've often wondered how Savage never encountered the eponymous villain Dr. Fu Manchu, although the strange entity answering to the name of Jonas Sown might well have been the Master himself.

Could Dr. Fu Manchu, (most certainly not his real name) been the surreiptious destroyer of the early twenty-century's crop of posthumans? Being apparently immortal, he could undertake schemes that would span decades, centuries even. Being subtle, he could have turned the concept of superhumanity or posthumanity into a laughable comic book idea of capes, tights and Krypton.

And now, behind a spiderweb of international banks, world-ruling corporations, and a global-marketplace of confusion and  incomprehensible wealth, does the Master rule?

Its easy to argue that the superheros destroyed the supervillians before they faded away, but no one can explain what happened to the singular greatest of the villains; tall, lean, with strange green eyes and commanding unknown sciences, the One known as Doctor Fu Manchu (known to be a pseudonym) or Kathulos or Dr. Nikola and possibly before that simply as the Creature, must still walk amongst us.

 

"... That artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to say is significant, others hear and are affected.” — Edmund Carpenter.

Which makes me think of Lester Dent.
Now if I mention Doc Savage, my friends get a certain look in their eyes. Because they really can't see why I enjoy the books, and they suspect that if I talk about them long enough, they too, may become infected and zombie-like.

 Lester Dent wrote around 4.5 million words on the subject of Doc Savage. All were written at speed, all were written to sell to an audience of limited scope, and for a throw-away, disposable medium. Here today, gone tomorrow. But mixed into that output is some interesting art, and it is that thin vein of gold that fascinates me.

I could live without the obvious plot twists, the femme fatales, Monk's head injuries -- in fact I usually ignore them. The bigger story about a Renaissance man who's life is changed by his father's murder, is explored behind the maze of mysterious deaths and dashing gangsters.
Its a familiar concept to us now -- thank you Bruce Wayne -- but unlike Batman's psychotic reaction, Savage's PTSD manifests itself differently. In solving mysteries, he tries to rationalize the universe, and by extension his own life. The surgeon he might have become, fades. Early, groundbreaking work in nuclear physics are ignored by the world at large. A genius originally feted and consulted is gradually marginalized by a larger world of politics and progress.

 Dent does not emphasis these ideas. He was writing for a market, and getting thousands of words down every day was the important part.
But he does talk to himself, and the words are there, and the astute reader can maybe string them together, and so much more interesting plot surfaces.

'According To The Plan Of A One Eyed Mystic' and 'Bequest of Evil' contain intreasting similarities.
In both cases there is a plan to sell secret weapons, there is a base by the seashore - in one case, on 'Death Island' somewhere north of Labrador, in the other in Labrador.
The head honcho in one is a short man referred to as 'Lucky Napolean'. He is supposedly a a european gangster. In the other book, his name isn't known, but he uses the alibi 'Mister Mystic' - he is a short man, with brown skin, and apparantly missing an eye.
'Bequest of Evil' is confused to the point of incoherency. An attempt is made to kidnap Doc. It fails. Monk is told he has inherited the Canadian estates of the Earl of Mayfair, along with five million dollars. He goes to the estate, where he is captured.
Its explained they wanted him because they thought he was an electronics expert! The famous Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, Chemist Extraordinare!
Then it turns out that the Earl of Mayfair isn't dead after all, and he looks just like Monk - like enough to impersonate Monk with ease. Oh, and did I mention that Earl Mayfair is actually a British Secret Agent?

'According to The Plan of a One Eyed Mystic' is almost as confused. Here a scheme to make people think that their minds have been swapped into other people's bodies is being perpetuated as part of a plan involving the
Sterling Instrument Company, which is making something for the war that is so secret that even Doc cannot gain any information when he calls the plant - an occurance he considers surprising. Something to do with the A-Bomb, perhaps?

Reading the two books together really gives me the idea that there was a Mad Scientists Lair somewhere along the Labrador coast, that it was run by a one-eyed man, and that he had developed several intreasting weapons and had made a deal to sell them to the Nazis. Or rather, to sucker the Nazi's into showing up with a submarine stuffed with money, and then murdering them all and taking everything. The kidnapping of scientists must have attracted Doc's attention, and he was already investigating when Monk is captured. Following Monk gives him the leads needed to storm the hidden base, after provoking a fight between the henchmen and the Nazis.
The tale - no doubt a complex one - is heavily garbled, and furnishs material for two seperate books.

So is Monk an Aristocrat?
Considering that he hates being referred to by his given names, and makes a point of dressing and acting like some sort of sideshow buffoon makes me think its just an act. A clumsy clown like show, at odds with his brains and his upbringing, I suspect.

Another treat, this one from Mad Eyes:
' Doc had whipped out a strange-looking pair of binoculars. These were superlensed. They showed all objects in four dimensions at any distance. ' *

In Four Dimensions ??

It gets better. The villains use enormous suction machines to draw lighting down from the sky into special conduits and storing it in immense copper spheres.
The henchmen use paralysis rods, that have thin wires attached to them, but its never explained what the other end of the wire is attached to. Men are driven mad with visions of amoeba and paramecium projected onto their retinas by super-magnifying 'metallic' contact lens.

Ooo. How is this for an explanation? '"These cars are a type of Super-Diesel, which draws nearly all of its energy from the stratosphere. "'
Say....whaaaat?
This isn't even pseudo science. Its nonsense.
Much of the action takes place in a quarry beneath a sanitarium named 'Cragsrock'. Which is all blown up by the bad guys during the final scenes.
Tres gothic, tres dramatique...

On the other hand, theres a plot to discredit Savage via impersonation by Andrus Davidson, a 'unsuccessful actor', and the whole scheme to take over the world is masterminded by his 'plump' sister Jane Davidson. Savage is supporting research into projection microscopy and Professor Spargrove's discovery of bacteriovores.

*Are they talking about the Sagan-Tesla conjectured fourth cardinal direction 'Zorth' ?

Continuing in the same strain, we present stinker number two:

The Devils Playground

Where do we start? The setting is before World War Two.
Its somewhere in Northren Ontario (Canada).
As an opener, we discover that the Ojibway Indians are still using stone tomahawks. This is referred to repeatedly, despite the fact that by 1900, it would be unlikely you could find an Ojibway that even knew how to make a stone 'tomahawk', let alone had one. They also use message drums, which I was given to understand were only to be found in Africa.

Savage has his associates stake out a mysterious iron mine; Littlejohn has actually joined the miners, while Monk and Ham pilot a birchbark canoe up and down the nearby watercourses, pretending to be some sort of sports fishermen. Sports fishermen accompanied by a weird pig and a weirder ape. Definately inconspicious.

Its important to note that while it seems to be a birchbark canoe, its actually a submarine with two different modes of operation. In one mode, a cover is drawn over the canoe made of fine metal mesh that somehow repels the water and extracts oxygen. The hydrogen is left to bubble to the surface. In its second mode, a 'glassite' cover is unfolded from a compartment and drawn over the top of the canoe, replacing the mesh. This plastic material is clear and rubbery, yet immensely strong.
In either mode, the canoe has ballast pumps, and a form of chemical rocket propulsion. The propulsion sounds like the machinery used in Savage's glass sub of Haunted Ocean, so I would geuss this farce is supposed to have subsequently occured. (Grammer terrible is. Muppet I am.)
The canoe also has extensive lockers, containing a complete chemical laboratory.
Lockers on a birchbark canoe.
Oh, and did I mention that the canoe slash submarine can be submerged and then recalled via a jolt from an induction coil? Convenient for those moments when the baddies might find your birchbark canoe with many useful additions and decide that something is amiss.

The ape continues to demonstrate his 'knot'ical prowness, able to untie Ham on command. Also able to tie the pig to a stake. This ape is making considerable progress. Next he'll be picking up rifles (Like that scene in Jurassic Park where the velociraptor picks up the man's rifle, and all I can think is Raptors with Rifles!! {The movie refused to become that cool.}.).

Monk and Ham engage in direct telepathy in order to exchange insults while underwater.

Its not just iron being mined, there is also nickel, which is being smuggled to Russia by six bearded dwarves, plus their ringleader Igor. They have a 'perfect defence' in the form of an enormous magnet which holds our heros helpless until they can take their shoes off and empty their pockets.

They are killing their enemies by terrorizing them with Indian drums and warwhoops played from hidden loudspeakers, and when the victim is sufficently demoralized, he's bundled into a Iron Maiden conveniently disguised as a tree, a stump or a boulder.

Savage is in the Fortress of Solitude and broadcasting instructions to his aides. His enemy use radio triangulation to find his poistion and dispatch a pair of twin engine attack bombers (Apparantly pulling them out of their ass, to use the vernacular). Luckily, the planes don't find the fortress, they find one of Savage's planes droning along through the sky.. They attack it, it fights back and finally is destroyed. Luckily, its a robotic plane, with a dummy at the stick. Savage is flying some distance away, and explains to the chorus that he expected radio triagulation and flew five hundred miles from the Fortress to transmit. He then hung around, apparantly to see what would happen. A pair of bomb-loaded twin engine bombers is what happened. Amazing, you never know what might fall out of the sky at you, over the cold Canadian North.

Now at one point he does use a gas that "[...] instantly effective, slowed up all motor processes of those who breathed it. He and Monk had held theirbreath. "It will only be effective for a few moments," Doc advised."

Its referred to as a 'new gas' and I suspect its an early version of Savage's amazingly effective tranquilizer gas.

I suspect from Chemistry's knot abilities that this is written by the same person as Land Of Fear.

Oh, and did I mention that the ringleader kept wearing a 'waxy mask' in public? That was so Renny could tell he was the bad guy, I suppose.

"Tall palms reached up into the sky like tentacles of death."

I knew long before I reached that line that any hope of finding sense in this book was gone.
I've been going through my Doc Savage collection, taking some notes on the unusual inventions. Not the stuff like his early development of television, or the autogyros and airship designs, or the ingenious burglar alarms. I'm interested in things like the mineral REPEL, or the barricade field out of the Spook of Grandpa Eben.
I wanted to get an idea of what unusual devices would be stored in the Fortress of Solitude, and a seventy year old design for two way television merely has curiosity value.
Then I made the mistake of reading The Land Of Fear.
Amung the more bizarre entrys are object compasses a la Skylark, using a new mineral from South America called 'Radiatite'. The villain wishes to steal the formula for crossbreeding rubber trees and cacti - a fantastic combination that Savage instantly names 'Rubberkak' .
The villain, of course is not helpless; he has examined a strange South African plant that can absorb moisture from the plants around it. Sort of a vegetative hydro-vampire. Using this knowledge, he constructs a funnel like device that can convert a human being to a skeleton in moments, merely by sucking all the water from his body. And without making physical contact. The water is stored in tubing wound around the villains body.
There is a house with insanely elaborate death-traps.
Chemistry the Ape is trained to tie knots and coil lines onboard a ship, so that he can work as a furry deckhand.
Savage falls victim to a trap that would serve only to hold a Road Runner: 4 inches of wet concrete with a thin layer of sand scattered on top to disguise it. As soon as Savage and his associates step on it, they are trapped helplessly.
...And to think that's all it would take!
Savage uses inflatable decoys to add verisimilitude to his ventriloquismic efforts.
He has powerful magnets and steel filings arranged to trap gangsters feet when they attempt to flee.
Et cetera, ad nauseum...
Now don't get me wrong. As any of my (non existent) readers can attest, I am a fan of Clark Savage Jr.
But I really think this one needs to be quietly swept under the carpet and forgotten.