Ray Cummings, a forgotten ‘founding father’ of SF

Ray Cummings (1887-1957) is one of the “founding fathers” of pulp science fiction who unfortunately never got out of the “pulp getto.” During his career he wrote some 750 works, most for the pulps, and mostly science fiction. I was surprised to learn he had written quite a bit outside of sf.

His most well-known work is Girl in the Golden Atom. This was his first original professional sale as the short story “Girl in the Golden Atom” in All-Story Weekly in 1919, which was followed by the novel “The People in the Golden Atom” serialized in All-Story Weekly in 1920, and later the two were combined into a novel in 1922 as The Girl in the Golden Atom. Probably the best current edition of this is the combined edition from Steeger Books, which reprints both pulp works with their illustrations. Later on when he was writing comicbooks, he used this as the basis for a two-part Captain America story at Timely.  And I’ve heard it said that many of his later stories were just variations on the same theme.

In this story, the hero of the tale takes a drug that causes him to shrink to subatomic size, finding a whole universe contained within an atom. There he has adventures, meets a girl, and returns to normal size.

The story is also the first in a loose series called the “Scientific Club.” The only connection of this stories is the “club story” setting of them, where the protagonist is telling his tale to a group of fellow members of the Scientific Club. Steeger Books has also published the only complete collection of these stories, which also includes the two Golden Atom tales.

Next, we have Cummings’ loose “Matter, Space, and Time” sequence of stories. The two Golden Atom stories comprised “Matter.” For “Space,” there is The Fire People and The Princess of the Atom. And for “Time” there is The Man Who Mastered Time, The Shadow Girl, and The Exile of Time. I found that some of these have been reprinted by Armchair Fiction, which has been reprinting several Cummings works, about nine so far. I wonder if they’ll do the others?

Cummings also did a short space-opera sequence, referred to as the Greg Haljan sequence of Brigands of the Moon and Wandl, the Invader. The first is about space pirates, the second is about a wandering planet with alien monsters. Both have been reprinted by Armchair Fiction and Wildside Press.

Cummings also wrote detective stories, including nine stories in the “Crimes of the Year 2000” sequence in Detective Fiction Weekly (1935-37). Pulpville Press has put out two books with overlapping contents reprinting detective tales from Thrilling Detective, as well as some other Cummings works.

I hope to read some of these tales and will post further reviews of these works. Maybe more of his works will come back into print. At present a good deal is available from Armchair Fiction, Pulpville, and Wildside.