The Man Who Evolved

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Pulpophile
Pulpophile
on Jan 19, 2009 at 03:57

Augh! We're all going to be giant brains on the floor! Make it stop! Can't anyone make evolution stop!?!

No. But Edmond Hamilton can make it accelerate to a rate of fifty million evolutionary years for every fifteen minutes under the ill-conceived cosmic-ray lens. I've read a handful of Mr. Hamilton's stories, and I love their rough-cut disconnection from reality, especially the, uh, "science" part of reality. It seems that Hamilton did not let his tenuous grasp of any field of inquiry stand between him and a good yarn. I read this story when I was a kid (in Isaac Asimov's anthology The Golden Years, I think), and it made a big impression. I still think it's a lot of fun, with a few Gothic elements, including the complete destruction of the unholy site of the events and a survivor who ends up giggling mad in a sanitarium.