Magnetism
Entry updated 29 March 2024. Tagged: Theme.
While Gravity was long understood as a force that attracted people to the ground, it was accepted as a logical consequence of Earth's position at the center of the universe – as explained by Aristotle; but when it was discovered in ancient times that lodestones – naturally occurring magnets – could attract pieces of iron, the phenomenon seemed more mysterious and suggested the possibility of other strange attractive or repellent forces. Thus, magnetism arguably represents one ancestor of all of the various forms of attractive and repellent scientifically created forces found in sf, including the Tractor Beam, Pressor Beam, Force Field, and Antigravity. Humanity's long fascination with magnets is well illustrated by a classic story by Jack Williamson, The Legion of Time (May-July 1938 Astounding; cut 1961), wherein the future of the human race literally hinges upon a magnet: if a young boy picks up a magnet and becomes interested in it, he grows up to become a Scientist whose achievements lead to a Utopia, but if he instead picks up a rock, he never becomes a scientist and the result is a Dystopia. Competing groups from the two alternate futures struggle, using Time Travel, to determine his decision and thus bring their own realities into existence (see also Jonbar Point). And in the real world, it is not unlikely that youthful experiences with magnets – once a common childhood toy – have inspired some people to pursue scientific careers.
There have been occasional sf stories about naturally occurring powerful magnets that prove threatening, including Jules Verne's sequel to Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Le Sphinx des glaces (1 January-15 December 1897 Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation [seconde série] 1897 [published in two volumes]), wherein an enormous magnetic mountain is the final peril encountered by Antarctic explorers. A magnetic mountain also dooms an expedition to the Antarctic in From Pole to Pole; or, Frank Reade Jr.'s Strange Submarine Voyage (1893), attributed to "Noname" (probably Luis Senarens), and a similar mountain disrupts compass readings and enable a European realm to remain a Lost World in Dornford Yates's The Stolen March (August 1925/May 1926 The Windsor Magazine, each episode surtitled "Etchechuria"; coll of linked stories/fixup 1926). A valley surrounded by a magnetic force field is encountered in Ernest G Henham's Bonanza: A Story of the Outside (1901). In "The Magnetic Asteroid" (1955), an episode of the television series Tom Corbett: Space Cadet (1950-1955), an extremely magnetic Asteroid imperils space travellers, while the "magnetic planet of Kybroid" is encountered by the protagonists in the fifth issue of the Australian Comic The Adventures of Captain Havoc and the Phantom Knight. Characters in various incarnations of Star Trek sometimes encountered menacing magnetic fields. An artificial but similar menace is featured in the film The Magnetic Monster (1953), which involves a newly created isotope generating an intense magnetic force that keeps expanding and threatens to force Earth out of its orbit.
Yet magnetism first became prominent in sf during the nineteenth century primarily because research then established that electricity could create a magnetic field, suggesting the possibility of the scientific creation of magnets that were far more powerful than found lodestones. This inevitably led to sf stories about scientists developing magnetic devices for their own purposes – usually Weapons or vehicles (see Transportation).
Stories about weaponizing magnetism include Julius Vogel's Anno Domini 2000, or Woman's Destiny (1889) which involves a female scientist who uses magnetism to paralyze a group of rebels. W W Cook's The Eighth Wonder, or Working for Miracles (November 1906-February 1907 The Argosy; 1925) features an inventor who makes a mountain magnetic in an effort to take control of the world's electricity. In Roy Norton's The Toll of the Sea (March-August 1909 The Popular Magazine as "The Land of the Lost"; 1909; cut vt The Land of the Lost 1925), a Lost Race inhabiting a new continent in the Pacific Ocean employs magnetism to overpower a US Navy ship. Francis Perry Elliott's The Power King (November 1910-March 1911 All-Story) describes people competing to possess a scientist's magnetic weapon. Burton Stevenson's The Destroyer (15 May-15 July 1913 The Popular Magazine; 1913) envisions the Germans developing magnetic weapons to prepare for war, but Hugo Gernsback's "The Magnetic Storm" (August 1918 The Electrical Experimenter [see Science and Invention]) depicts a young inventor who brings about Germany's defeat in World War I by generating a magnetic field that disables all German machinery – a strategy also followed by another scientist seeking to impose world peace in C S Forester's The Peacemaker (1934). In Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars tale The Warlord of Mars (December 1913-March 1914 All-Story; 1919), the villainous yellow Martians employ a powerful electromagnet to make Airships crash and subsequently enslave their occupants (see Slavery). In G K Chesterton's The Sword of Wood (1928 chap), a magnetic sword is employed as a weapon in the seventeenth century.
In Arthur J Burks's "Monsters of Moyen" (April 1930 Astounding), a scientist employs magnetism to destroy American ships, while magnetic weapons are one element in the convoluted plots of John Scott Campbell's Beyond Pluto (Summer 1932 Wonder Stories Quarterly) and John W Campbell, Jr's Islands of Space (Spring 1931 Amazing Stories Quarterly; 1957) and Invaders from the Infinite (Spring 1932 Amazing Stories Quarterly; 1961). Aliens employ magnetism to defend themselves against adversaries in Philip Francis Nowlan's "The Onslaught from Venus" (September 1929 Science Wonder Stories [see Wonder Stories]) and Clinton Constantinescu's "The War of the Universe" (Fall 1931 Amazing Stories Quarterly). Jason Kirby's "The Floating Island of Madness" (January 1933 Astounding) involves a Mad Scientist who uses a magnetic ray to capture a plane flown by three men investigating his shenanigans; similar rays capture opponents of a would-be dictator on Earth in Ed Earl Repp's "The Sky Ruler" (May 1930 Air Wonder Stories) and attract Spaceships so that their possessions can be stolen in Clinton B Kruse's "A Princess of Pallis" (October 1935 Astounding). An alien spaceship employs magnetism to take control of an opponent's vehicle in Harl Vincent's "Explorers of Callisto" (February 1930 Amazing Stories), and magnetism attracts ships which are then looted in Wolfe Herscholt's Magnetic Peril (1949). A villainess similarly uses magnetism to seize spaceships in the first issue of the comic Space Patrol (1952). Lunar rebels use an electromagnetically powered catapult to send rocks to crash on the Earth in Robert A Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966); a similar system is seen in the film La Morte (1967), wherein powerful magnets are employed to hurl asteroids in order to destroy an alien base on Callisto (see Jupiter). In one episode of James P Blaylock's Steampunk extravaganza Lord Kelvin’s Machine (1992), the titular magnetic device is able to drag iron ships to the bottom of the sea. A villain uses a powerful magnet to devastate Earth in the film Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014).
Several Superheroes and Supervillains from comics have been depicted as masters of magnetic powers, which they deploy to achieve their disparate ends, such as two 1940s characters both named Magno from Ace Periodicals and Quality Comics; DC Comics's Cosmic Boy, a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and Magno Lad, a member of its Legion of Super-Villains; Marvel Comics's villain Magnetic Man and the better-known adversary of the X-Men, the Mutant Magneto, who later reformed to become their ally; and America's Best Comics reimagined version of the 1940s superhero the Magnet, who now controls magnetism. The armor worn by Marvel's Iron Man generates a magnetic field to protect his fragile heart; the Robots in the Japanese television series Robot Detective (1973) have magnetic powers; and the Lego Batman Videogames regularly involve players using magnets or "magnet suits" to overcome obstacles. (There is also a real-life "superhero", Alex Benigno [aka Magnet Man], who patrols the streets of Atlanta using magnets to pick up dangerous debris.)
Regarding imagined magnetic improvements in transportation, Jack Wright and His Magnetic Motor; or, The Golden City of the Sierras (The Boys' Star Library, 234 [?] December 1891; Pluck and Luck, 214, 9 [July, 1902]), attributed to "Noname" (probably Senarens), is about the plucky boy inventor perfecting a vehicle propelled by magnetism, also a feature of another book by "Noname", Jack Wright, the Boy Inventor Exploring Central Asia in His Magnetic Hurricane (1892). A similar vehicle figures in Otto Witt's Det magnetiska luftskeppet ["The Magnetic Airship"] (1912). A magnetic method for launching spacecraft is discussed in John Munro's A Trip to Venus (1897). In William Amos Miller's The Sovereign Guide: A Tale of Eden (1898), a magnetic submarine takes the protagonist into a Hollow Earth. Francis Hernaman-Johnson's The Polyphemes: A Story of Strange Adventures among Strange Beings (1906) describes a race of enormous ants who employ "x-magnetism" to propel their airships. Gernsback's Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 (April 1911-March 1912 Modern Electrics; exp as fixup 1925; rev 1950) predicts the construction of an Underground tunnel that propels vehicles from the United States to Europe, powered by magnetism, while Harl Vincent's "Lost City of Mars" (February 1934 Astounding) envisions a magnetic tube that Martians employ to reach their moon Phobos. In Edward E Chappelow's "The Planet's Air Master" (August 1929 Air Wonder Stories), magnetic rays guide planes in flight and bring them in for landings, while magnets are employed to retrieve a spaceship stranded in Earth orbit in Ed Earl Repp's "Beyond Gravity" (August 1929 Air Wonder Stories). Nat Schachner's "The Son of Redmask" (July 1935 Astounding) features a villain based in the North Pole who employs the energy of Earth's magnetic field to power both his weapons and his vehicles. In the 1960s, when Chester Gould shifted his iconic comic strip detective Dick Tracy into sf territory, Gould repeatedly observed that "The nation that controls magnetism will control the universe," purportedly based on secret information he had obtained. The strip then featured among other marvels a "magnetic space coupe" which Tracy used to travel to the Moon and a "magnetic air car" developed by lunar inhabitants and given to Tracy to fly on Earth. Airships powered by magnetism are featured in the Parallel World of the Australian series Spellbinder (1995). Rapidly moving trains elevated by magnetism figure in the film Black Panther (2018) – an idea that has also emerged in the real world in the form of "maglev" trains, though these remain rare today.
Magnetism can be employed to make objects hover, like the throne of the dictator of an subterranean civilization in A R McKenzie's "Luvium" (November 1931 Amazing Stories) and the floating chair given to the Atom when he joined the Justice League of America to enable the diminutive superhero to participate in group discussions around a table. Tom Swift and His Giant Magnet, or Bringing Up the Lost Submarine (1932), by Howard R Garis writing as Victor Appleton, describes in its title Tom Swift's reasons for deploying an enormous magnet. Magnetism is also responsible for the floating islands in James Cameron's film Avatar (2009).
Other uses of magnetism predicted in sf include replacing or simulating Gravity in the weightlessness of outer space; in A Rowley Hilliard's "The Space Coffin" (August 1932 Wonder Stories) the effect is achieving by means of a suit containing iron, but magnetic boots worn to walk on the hulls of spaceships, used in the film Destination Moon (1950) and elsewhere, were more common. Antigravity is powered by magnetism in Ed Earl Repp's "Flight of the Eastern Star" (December 1929 Air Wonder Stories) and Al H Martin's "The Jovian Horde" (Summer 1932 Wonder Stories Quarterly). In S P Meek's "Into Space" (February 1930 Astounding), the discovery that magnetism and gravity are results of the same force leads to the flight of a spaceship; the same idea resurfaces in James Blish's "Bridge" (February 1952 Astounding) as the conceptual heart of the Spindizzy space drive. The aliens who buried the monolith on the Moon in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) provided it with an intense magnetic field to enable sufficiently advanced beings to discover it.
The real-world medical procedure Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), used to treat depression and other issues, has been extrapolated in sf to less benign effects. Ultra-powerful magnetic fields in an alien installation cause at least one of the human intruders to develop weird Psychological problems in Peter Watts's Blindsight (2006), whose appendix cites relevant research papers; R Scott Bakker's uncomfortable thriller Neuropath (2008) features cruel neurological assaults via TMS on human Identity.
To move on to predictions of less probable properties of magnetism, it is extravagantly envisioned as a way to attract the Moon into Earth's atmosphere for easy access in André Laurie's Les exiles de la Terre (1887; trans as The Conquest of the Moon 1889). In Frank K Kelly's "The Light Bender" (June 1931 Wonder Stories), magnetism is used to bend light rays and achieve Invisibility. Beings made of electromagnetism bedevil humans in Fredric Brown's "The Waveries" (January 1945 Astounding). Speculations about magnetic monopoles – isolated north or south poles, analogous to positive and negative electric charges – remain in the realm of Imaginary Science but have been incorporated into some sf: for example, Larry Niven's Protector (1973) mentions mining monopoles from the rings of Saturn (see Outer Planets). "Safe uranium" in Walter Tevis's The Steps of the Sun (1983) is mysteriously stable and non-radioactive until magnetized. Still less plausibly, magnetism is employed to shrink people (see Miniaturization) in Michael Crichton and Richard Preston's Micro (2011).
Finally, many sf stories not mentioned here briefly cite magnetism or the use of an electromagnetic field as a way to explain various technological marvels, again suggesting that the venerable force today retains the same sort of mystical power to inspire wonder that led Jack Williamson's child to enter the world of science. [GW]
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