Ray Cummings (1887-1957)

"Time is what keeps everything from happening at once." ~Ray Cummings

Raymond King Cummings was born in New York on 30 Aug 1887. He died in Mount Vernon, NY on 23 Jan 1957. An American author of science fiction, Cummings was rated one of the "founding fathers of the science fiction pulp genre".  Educated at Princeton University, he served as an assistant to Thomas Edison for five years, before embarking on a career in writing.

His debut novelette, “The Girl in the Golden Atom”, was originally published in Argosy in 1919. His first novel, "The Shadow Girl" appeared in 1921. In 1923, they were combined into the novel “The Girl in the Golden Atom” which has been reprinted numerous times, often in an abridged version.

The Girl in the Golden Atom

Hear it HERE

The original novelette finds five men at their club: The Chemist, The Doctor, The Banker, The Big Business Man and The Very Young Man (this is how Cummings refers to them throughout, though he eventually does reveal their names). By sing a super-high-powered microscope, The Chemist has discovered that there are worlds within worlds and habitated universes within the very atoms of everything that makes up our world. He has also developed chemicals that will allow him to shrink and enlarge, so he can visit the universe he has discovered within the atoms of his mother’s golden wedding ring. In other words, Cummings was there first with the idea that sparked the plots for countless comic books and movies later on.

In the first part of the original novelette, The Chemist visits the Golden Atom, falls in love with the beautiful girl he spied on there and assists her people in a war with an enemy city-state. He does this by growing to giant size and stomping on the enemy army. Since The Chemist decides not to return to his world, The Doctor, The Big Business Man and The Very Young Man eventually use the chemicals he left behind to follow him into the Golden Atom. There they find The Chemist, a revolution, excitement, danger and romance, along with a lot of shrinking to hide from enemies and growing to giant size to stomp them. (There’s a lot of stomping, both deliberate and accidental, which at times provides some rather bizarre humor.)

The first half of the book is pretty slow, where the characters walk around, look at things and talk about the history, geography and social customs of the world in which they’ve found themselves. There’s also a lot of pseudo-scientific discussion about the whole shrinking process. In the second half of the book, the revolution gets underway and the whole thing turns into a colorful, violent, fast-paced adventure that fits pretty well into the sword-and-planet sub-genre of science fiction.

As a writer of primarily science-fiction, Cummings produced some 750 novels and short stories using the pen names Ray King, Gabrielle Cummings and Gabriel Wilson. Most of his stories appeared in the pulp science-fiction magazines such as Amazing Stories and Astonishing Stories during the 1930s and 1940s. He is perhaps best remembered for his novel "The Girl in the Golden Atom" (1922), which has become a science-fiction classic. His other works include "The Man Who Mastered Time" (1924), "Explorers Into Infinity" (1927), "Beyond the Stars" (1928), "The Snow Girl" (1929), "The Sea Girl" (1930), "The Exile of Time" (1931) and "The Insect Invasion" (1932).

During the 1940s, with his fiction career in eclipse, Cummings anonymously scripted comic book stories for Timely Comics, the predecessor to Marvel Comics. He recycled the plot of "The Girl in the Golden Atom" for a two-part Captain America tale, "Princess of the Atom." (Captain America #25 & 26). He also contributed to the "Human Torch" and "Sub-Mariner," which his daughter Betty Cummings also wrote.