"The Man from the Atom"
“The Man from Atom,” by G. Peyton Wertenbaker and published in Amazing Stories in April 1926, tells the story of a man who willingly tries out a device invented by a reclusive genius that causes growth or shrinkage, only to grow so large he floats into a nebula and then into another world altogether. The narrative follows the tester, who in hopes of seeing the stars, decides to expand himself enormously, but after “a sudden impulse” of fear and a desire to return to earth, he tries to stop the expansion, but cannot. As his growth accelerates, celestial bodies become smaller, and he finds himself encapsulated in a nebula, where in a strange, debatable climax the tester experiences a sort of rebirth.
It’s not hard to imagine this setting as embryonic fluid composed of stars within the nucleus of an iridescent nebula, or the narrator as a fetus. His growth does not stop even here, however, and his momentum propels him in dramatic fashion through clouds, and then water, only to land in an alien world. At this point, his desire to return becomes even more intense, becoming a sense of traumatic separation from “Mother Earth” (66). Like a child, he feels himself defenseless and motherless. With no humans to communicate with, he finds himself disintegrated, abandoned, and helplessly neurotic.
“The Man from the Atom” is as a story littered with binaries: big and small, up and down, known and unknown. The physical split from Mother Earth suggests a Freudian interpretation, while the passage from the known to the unknown world as a royal road to the Unconscious, where the man comes face to face with the alien. “The Man from the Atom” is also structured as a version of the Icarus myth, in which the narrator’s innocent intrepidness to see “what lay beyond…the stars” (64), ultimately causes his catastrophe. The genius inventor, Martyn, here plays the Daedalus role, allowing the protagonist to venture out and reach, a little too far, beyond the stars, giving him the ability to see beyond others but at the expense of his isolation and exile. There isn’t any real flight from Minos, however. And the plummet is not physically lethal. Instead, Martyn, the inventor is left to mourn, like Daedalus, for the eternal separation from his volunteer, while the narrator is left in an underworld where he describes himself as, “as an ignorant African…in an incomprehensible London” (66).
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Entry by Michael Reyes, Spring 2016
