FROM SCIENCE TO SCIENCE FICTION
This series, see part 1, part 2, gleans from Martin Kottmeyer’s articles “Varicose Brains, Part 1: Entering a Grey Area,” “Varicose Brains, Part 2: Heading Towards the Future” and “Varicose Brains, Part 3: Headhunt,” Magonia. I will attempt to keep things chronologically. Following I will relate some of the details specifically relevant to the large headed small bodies grey alien archetype in general. These will be from early scientific speculation which lead to early and ongoing science fiction.
Of course, this is not a comprehensive list as, for example, comic books (and many others from fiction to non-fiction) have been saturated with aliens for decades. In that regard, many of the images I collected and posted as the original Fifty Shades of Grey article (see slide show of images at the end of this article).
1920 AD
1922 AD, Martin Kottmeyer describes Edgar Rice Burroughs “The Chessmen of Mars” thusly:
A race called the kaldanes exists that is 90% brain by volume with only the simplest of vital organs forming the remainder…The eyes were hideously inhuman, set far apart, protruding and lidless…A girl abducted by the kaldanes experienced him fastening “his terrible eyes upon her. He did not speak, but his eyes seemed to be boring straight to the centre of her brain…
They seemed but to burn deeper and deeper, gathering up every vestige of control of her entire nervous system”…The nose was “scarce more than two small parallel slits set vertically” above a round mouth. Most had a skin that was bluish-gray.
They also “have no sex,” quoting directly from Burroughs’ book:
Evolution proceeded. The brains became larger and more powerful. In us you see the highest development, but there are those of us who believe that there is yet another step – that some time in the far future our race shall develop into a super-thing — just brain. The incubus of legs and chelae and vital organs will be removed. The future kaldane will be nothing but a great brain. Deaf, dumb, and blind it will be sealed in its buried vault far beneath the surface of Mars…just a great, wonderful, beautiful brain with nothing to distract it from eternal thoughts.
1923 AD, The movie “Radio-Mania” includes, “a dream sequence in which Martians are depicted as having oversize heads.”
1924 AD, John Lionel Tayler book “The Last of My Race” is set in 302,930 AD and has a being with “huge head with tremendous brainpower, big chest, long thin legs, light weight…”
1926 AD, In G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s “The Coming of the Ice” people of “the hundredth century” are “men with huge brains and tiny, shrivelled bodies, atrophied limbs, and slow ponderous movements.”
1927 AD, Donald Wandrei’s “The Red Brain” is set at “the last days of the universe when all that remains are some giant brains with god-like powers.”
1928 AD, Ray Cummings “Beyond the Stars” features, “Small huge-headed beings.”
The same year had a Weird Tales issue which included the story “Evolution Island” relates the fictional “discovery that evolution can be accelerated or reversed by means of an earthly radiation. A mad doctor enters the evolution ray and is transformed into a big-domed superman.”
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