The Ultimate Weapon (1936) is a very short novel, originally from Amazing Stories Magazine. I don’t think it makes 40,000 words. I read most of it on the way into work this morning.

At the time that this was written, writers like Doc Smith, Fletcher Pratt and John W. Campbell, jr. were trying to break Science Fiction out of gadget fiction and make it something more. SF for a long time was included in amateur science and electronics magazines as an extra entertaining feature and was written to appeal to the readers of those magazines. They were fiction about gadgets and not fiction about people. Hugo Gernsback made his living bring SF to a new audience, but in 1936, Amazing Stories still specialized in gadget fiction. Either that was what people read, what Gernsback liked, or the only thing that writers then were writing.

The Ultimate Weapon, however, is just a gadget story. A young, handsome, incredibly rich, genius slacker manages to survive an attack by aliens and in a matter of weeks single handedly invents the ultimate power source, the ultimate weapon, and the ultimate space ship. At least a quarter of the text is technical jargon. He beats the aliens by simply doing what any super genius American would do. End of story.

Campbell wrote this kind of story all through the 1930s. They are short, easy to read and mildly enjoyable. I find his sentence level style annoying. It is full of all kinds of structures that force me to read them twice to get the meaning. There are no women and no three dimensional characters. It’s all technology. There are never any real problems to overcome, just the defeat of the aliens. I find myself feeling sorry for the aliens. The deck is heavily stacked against them.