Lab Rats No More: "Rebirth of Man"
The ROCKETEER is focusing on pulp-era aliens for the next several weeks in honor of the Chehalis Flying Saucer Party.
For the last entry in the series I’ve chosen “Rebirth of Man” (1940) by Basil Wells. Not only is it a powerful story but it touches on something else I believe is important. Science fiction and speculative authors have sometimes been referred to as “profits of the future.” Although these “prophets” are wrong more than they are right, the thought persists. Why? I believe that in a state of creative expression a person can reach a generalized and timeless wave of thought, called the collective unconscious. Unconsciously they pick up things, perhaps glimpses of the future, or the past. That wave or field is a standing record, variable but present. It’s also timeless. If you reach it with conscious intent you can “look” for something specific, a frequency match to something else. But information received may not make contextual sense to the receiver. Undoubtedly, you will interpret the information through the filter of your own knowing. As an example, a writer from the 1920’s might pick up on the idea of a cell phone, and indeed we do see sci-fi imagery of this in the 1920’s, but they do not look like our cell phones. The people of the past were filtering their ideas of what phones looked like to them. The other part of this wave of information is that even non-sensitives can pick up on big, century-spanning ideas. One of these seems to be that aliens have visited Earth and experimented on humans in dramatic and perhaps terrible ways. Some people even believe, according to ancient texts, that humans were genetically modified by aliens long ago. There is so much data about this that it is quite simple to research. Whether you believe it is hogwash or not is up to you.
For the moment though, let’s make two assumptions: 1. that this is correct and humans were once genetically modified by aliens. 2. that this has left one hell of a scar on the psyche of humanity. I believe that Basil Wells was picking up on such ideas when he wrote “Rebirth of Man.” The plot is not unique to him, nor is it unique to pulp-era stories. But Wells is a compelling writer with good ideas and his version is effective. As with most pulp-era stories humanity wins in the end. However, in this case, it’s a little bit hard to call the GMO’d hero really human. You’ll see why in a minute.
In the story massive giant aliens come to Earth during the mid-twentieth century and very quickly obliterate almost all humans. They preserve a small group to be used as lab rats for their experiments. Their rulers have given them an assignment to perfect an immortality serum and send them to our far-flung planet as a secret laboratory. The alien scientists know that they can’t return home until they succeed.
The poor dregs of humanity are penned in a ten acre habitat within the scientists’ laboratory area. Seeing “animal experiments” from the perspective of the animals (in this case human beings) is terribly cruel. The experiments are not sadistic, they are simply cold science. But the casual disregard shown to the human “lab rats” is chilling. Relatively quickly, the human population relapses into primitive tribalism worshiping the “Great Ones” whose heads brush the sky. The aliens do not know that humans are intelligent, despite recognizing they'd once had winged ships and wheeled vehicles. They note that now that they are “domesticated,” they seem to have lost those abilities.
Healthy “specimens” are routinely experimented upon and then die. Often tossed into a lab furnace to be disposed of. This goes on for about five hundred years before anything changes. Meanwhile, the centuries-old aliens are continuing to improve their serum. Eventually, one of their test subjects lives a full two years after being injected. They hope the changes in him will breed true. The injected man dies an extremely painful death and his wife/mate chances an escape from their village/pen. Through luck and courage she finds an old sewer system and gets out. She travels hundreds of miles on foot before feeling safe from the aliens. There she gives birth. Her son is named Harg and she raises him not to fear the aliens but to hate them.
True to stories of this time, Harg becomes a noble savage—able to hunt and fish and swim with athletic prowess. After his mother dies in an accident he’s lonely as there are no other humans left, except for those in the aliens’ pen. He travels and explores the barren world. Eventually, he stumbles upon an old underground bunker which is intact and filled with technology. It is also filled with information and through tapes he learns the history of the world, learns to read, learns much else. After several years he’s well educated (and well armed) but is still stymied by being alone. His plans call for many hands and he doesn’t have them. He decides to steal children from the penned humans and raise them in knowledge. He begins with four kids, two boys and two girls. They grow up unafraid and also educated. Over time, more children are taken from the superstitious and stupid “lab-rat” humans. After two-hundred years of good planning, a new human society has been built in secret. But Harg has not aged. The serum that killed his father has succeeded with him. But he knows nothing of that, only of his plans to take out the aliens for good. I hesitate to give away the details of his “David and Goliath” strategy but suffice to say that it works and humanity regains control of Earth.
As I’d mentioned, this type of post-apocalyptic story is not unusual for the pulp-era. But showing humans as lab rats is. While it is true I can think of several stories were people are shrunk down to tiny size, the deed is done by human scientists. The villains in those stories are well aware they’re tinkering with their own species so their acts are cruel, perhaps psychopathic, but not exactly unhuman. In this case, we can see the other side of the alien abductions and experimentations. Cold, alien science. We are nothing but powerless animals lacking sentience to them.
Motto: Do not underestimate humanity, even before sizeable odds.
If you’d like to read “Rebirth of Man,” you can read here it for free.
This is the Rocketeer signing off for today.