Podcast #89 — New Year’s Eve Edition
Curator’s Note:
As this episode goes live, The Rocketeer has just crossed 100 subscribers on Substack. I’m noting this here not as a celebration in the usual sense, but as a quiet archival marker. It tells me there is an audience willing to spend time with long-form, historically grounded discussions of vintage sci-fi and fantasy, pulp literature, and the ideas surrounding them. For an independent project built on depth rather than volume, that matters. Thank you to everyone who has chosen to read, listen, and stay. :)
In this episode of The Rocketeer, I look at “Ogden’s Strange Story” (1934) by Edison Marshall, a lesser known vintage fantasy that unexpectedly brushes up against ideas debated in science today.
Marshall, best known for adventure fiction, was a lifelong hunter whose deep familiarity with wilderness landscapes shaped his writing. In Ogden’s Strange Story, he imagines a modern intellectual who survives a plane crash in the Yukon wilderness—and, following a traumatic head injury, appears to regress into an ancestral human state: Og, the Dawn Man.
Though the story relies on now-familiar pulp tropes—most notably the “caveman” and “noble savage” archetypes—it is handled with surprising care and psychological depth. Beneath its fantasy surface, the narrative raises questions about atavism, phenotypic plasticity, genetic memory, and the limits of civilization.
Points I mention in this episode include:
What atavism actually means in modern biology
How phenotypic plasticity and epigenetics really work
Why Marshall’s premise remains scientifically implausible—yet strangely resonant
Where fantasy anticipates real scientific questions, and where it clearly departs from them
Set in 1926 and framed as a story that “may be true—at least in its larger sense,” Ogden’s Strange Story becomes a window into how early 20th-century writers grappled with human origins, instinct, and survival.
In the podcast I mention that I had already done a Rocketeer segment about Marshall’s novel, “Dian of the Lost Land”. This is incorrect, I have not. I will get to it. However, I have done a podcast about one of Marshall’s other works, “Who is Charles Avison?” Listen to it here:
Happy New Year to all!
