Laurence Manning's World of the Mist

Laurence Manning (1899-1972) was a Canadian writer of science fiction. He wrote stories for pulp magazines from 1928 to 1935 after which he devoted himself to his nursery business although he produced one or two later stories. His short novel World of the Mist, published in two parts by Wonder Stories in 1935, was one of his last science fiction stories.

You have to bear in mind the historical background to this novel. In 1935 people were just starting to get excited by the latest advances in physics. People still didn’t know what to make of quantum mechanics but Einstein’s theories had captured the public imagination. People were starting to get the idea that the universe might be a very strange place indeed. And they’d started on all sorts of speculations on the implications of Einstein’s theories. Some of these speculations were totally and completely nuts but they were often highly entertaining as the basis for science fiction stories.

There was also a growing obsession with the idea of other dimensions - the fourth dimension, the fifth dimension, maybe lots of dimensions. Maybe whole alternative realities. World of the Mist taps into these growing obsessions in a really major way.

Three guys are discussing the possibilities of other dimensions. They reason that humans can only exist in three dimensions, but maybe we exist in the first, second and third dimensions and perhaps humans could exist in the fourth, fifth and sixth dimensions. They come up with the idea that the only way to access such dimensions would be by using gravity. But what you’d need would be something nice and compact in size but with the enormous mass necessary to generate an incredibly powerful gravitational field.

They figure that the right material would be debris from an exploded star. They further speculate that there are thousands of meteorites orbiting Earth and some of those meteorites might be composed of exploded star stuff. Of course you’d have to get into orbit to find those meteorites so you’d need a spaceship. By a stroke of good fortune two of the guys, Wadsley and Cogger, have the necessary know-how. And the third guy, Trench (the narrator of the story), has the money. He has pots of money.

They build their spaceship and they find a meteorite that looks really promising. They decide to investigate it up close.

And that’s where the story starts to get seriously weird. I’m not going to spoil things by telling you anything about the weirdness other than the fact that what they find is even stranger than their wild theories.

This is definitely an attempt to do what would later be called hard science fiction (even if the science it’s based on is wildly and outrageously speculative and crazy). But the emphasis is on the scientific stuff. This is not space opera. You won’t find any space battles or ray guns in this story.

There is however plenty of danger and excitement. And while our spacefarers have discovered a whole new universe they face one big problem - how are they ever going to get back to our reality?

Manning really does come up with some intriguingly mind-bending off-the-wall stuff. This is wildly imaginative writing.

There’s also just a trace of philosophical and maybe even religious or quasi-religious speculation. Wadsley is a bit obsessed by ghosts and the afterlife.

Structurally the book follows a pattern that was very popular at the time. It’s a story told by someone to someone else. The narrator of what might be called the framing story is a lighthouse keeper named Jellicoe who has picked up some strange radio messages which he has transcribed. The bulk of the book is the story as set down by Jellicoe, a story narrated by Trench.

Finding a workable ending for the story would have been a challenge but Manning manages it rather well.

World of the Mist is thoroughly enjoyable science fiction that attempts to probe the fringes of human knowledge of how the universe works, as that knowledge stood in 1935. Highly recommended.