THE DEEP ONES: "The Third Interne" by Idwal Jones

"The Third Interne" by Idwal Jones

Discussion begins May 8, 2024.

Published in the January 1938 issue of Weird Tales.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?87144

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

None

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v31n01_1938-01_sas/page/n107/mode/2up

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wuYYeQJZIk

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idwal_Jones_(novelist)
https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf0x0nb168/entire_text/
https://tinyurl.com/4eahawz6

Here's an interesting bit I found on some of the scientific and cultural background of the story: "Off With Your Heads: Isolated Organs in Early Soviet Science and Fiction" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2743238/).

I wonder if I'd read this story the same way if I'd encountered it in a way not predisposing me to interpreting it as "Weird"? As it was, I was genuinely surprised that the decapitated yet living heads were mere figments of the intern's deranged imagination. Would I have been more skeptical of his story if I'd encountered this in, say, a collection of general fiction?

The intern's story in itself though, irrespective of its truth value within the framing story, is pretty undeniably Weird.

At least as far as English language weird and science fiction goes, Jones' might have claimed to have done something novel if he hadn't rationalized the matter of the severed heads.

I'm not sure where Jones would have come across it, but he was clearly influenced, in the matter of experiments on severed heads and the Soviet setting, in the work mentioned in the link I put up and, specifically, Alexandr Beliaev’s Golova Professor Douelja (Professor Dowell’s Head) from 1926.

Now I wonder if this was an inspiration for the severed heads in That Hideous Strength.

The 20th century Russian High North is incidentally an unexpected place for a bubonic plague epidemic, and that three out of a group of four of medically educated people should die of it quite unlikely - treatment is better, and the disease itself less deadly than in the 14th century.

Maybe because of its ending, this story felt more mainstream than "weird", despite appearing in Weird Tales itself. I can imgine it as a 30's or 40's radio drama.

The background in >2 RandyStafford: was fascinating. Is this where the long tradition of severed but living heads in science fiction stems from, then? It was a theme Curt Siodmak used and returned to, I seem to remember.

And when was the last non-ironic use of the severed head idea? Dennis Potter's Cold Lazarus, maybe? - that's already over a quarter of a century ago.

>6 housefulofpaper: You can check out the "Brain in a Box" entry on the online Science Fiction Encyclopedia for the development of this notion.