The Monstrefact: Aliens of the Planet of Doubt

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses a fictional denizen of the planet Uranus, as brought to life in Stanley G. Weinbaum’s 1935 short story “The Planet of Doubt.” 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the
Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, focusing in no mythical creatures, ideas and monsters
in time. I'd like to offer this episode as an
imaginative side show to our core episodes on the moons

(00:30):
of Uranus. As we discuss in those episodes, it's not
beyond the realm of possibility that one of the icy
Uranian moons contains or may have once contained life. But
the planet itself is a cold, dead world, and its temperatures, pressures,
and materials simply don't correspond to life as we know it. However,

(00:51):
if we venture back far enough in science fiction, we
can find some interesting dreams regarding what life on the
seventh planet might con sist of American author Stanley G.
Weinebombs nineteen thirty five story The Planet of Doubt is
just such a dream. The story, which you can find
in various collections today, is very old fashion in many respects.

(01:15):
It takes place in an action packed Solar system where
humans have encountered various alien life forms on the inner
planets and moons and continue to discover new wonders on
the outer planets. Where the story excels, however, is in
its imaginative description of strange creatures lurking in the planetary fog.

(01:36):
Of this imagined take on Urinus, a planet the author
describes as quote a wild, alien, mystery choked planet with
only icy Neptune and Pluto between it and the interstellar void.
Our human adventurers encounter two dissimilar life forms on the planet.
The first encountered organism resembles some sort of vague dark

(02:00):
gargoyle in the fog, but the second is a truly
inspired creation quote. The thing was featureless, just a dull
black circle and a tubular body that stretched off into
the fog. Or not quite featureless. Now they could perceive
an organ that projected from the center of the circle,
a loose, quivering member like a large pancake on a

(02:24):
finger thick stem, whose edges quivered and cupped toward them
as if to catch sounds or scent. The creature was blind.
The adventures in the story are quick to fire their
automatics and their flame pistols, but quickly realize they're facing
not one creature composed of multiple segments, but multiple individuals

(02:44):
joined together in a lengthy chain quote. Suddenly the thing
was roaring past them, black and huge as a railroad train.
It was a segmented being. It was composed of dozens
of eight foot links, like a train of miniature cars.
Theres three pairs of legs to a section. The adventures
in the story quickly learn that if you blast the

(03:05):
front or leader segment, the next section behind takes over
as leader. Blast a middle segment, and now you have
two alien trains to contend with. The biologist on the
team in the story, Patricia quickly draws parallels to a
real life terrestrial organism processionary caterpillars, the larval form of

(03:26):
some Domatopina moths that move in columns in search of food.
Only the segment aliens on this fictional uranus actually physically
connect their nervous systems in a way that allows them
to share sensations and, perhaps pat speculates, even memories. While
not mentioned in the story, shrews are known to engage

(03:48):
in a similar procession, with a mother's young following behind her,
each holding onto the tail of the shrew in front
of it with its mouth on this fictional version of Urinus. However,
the semented aliens prove aggressive and Pat is separated from
the party in the fog. But she takes inspiration from
actual experiments with processionary caterpillars by French naturalist Jean Henri Fabre,

(04:13):
who lived eighteen twenty three through nineteen fifteen, who found
that you could manipulate these caterpillars into forming a loop,
an unbroken circle that we continue around, say a potted plant,
until one of the individuals in the circle in this
unbroken segment dies, forcing them to break off in a
new leader to emerge, Pat dodges the front of the

(04:36):
alien procession as it's coming at her, then doubles back
toward the rear segments, tricking this alien train into forming
an unbroken, roaring alien freight train circle in the fog.
Her crewmates rescue her from the center of the circle
with ropes, and they leave the Planet of Doubt, but
not before they saw the riddle of the gargoyle like
shadow creatures in the fog as well. These strange forms,

(05:00):
they realize, are the shadows cast in the fog by
the flying adult forms of the lauval creatures. They've encountered
on the ground. It's a fun tale, and one that
nicely uses the weirdness of the natural world to populate
imagined worlds. Stanley G. Weinbaum only lived nineteen oh two
through nineteen thirty five, but pen to number of sci

(05:22):
fi tales, including A Martian Odyssey, which has headlined a
number of anthologies of his work over the years, including
some that are commercially available today. A handful of his
stories were adapted for film or television in the nineteen fifties,
including nineteen fifty seven's She Devil. Tune in for additional
episodes of The Monster Fact each week. As always. You

(05:44):
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.