(Mystery Men Comics 016, 1940)
As our story opens, huge diamonds are raining down on Earth. Upon contact with a human, they expand to engulf and imprison them.
Earth authorities sensibly contact space hero Rex Dexter of Mars who has once again been sidetracked in his seemingly straightforward quest to travel from Earth to his home planet. In a nice change of pace from most Rex Dexter adventures, Rex and his pal Cynde have not stopped due to some mortal peril but for a romantic interlude on the hot and steamy planet Eros.
Setting aside my usual question of just where Eros is that it can be stopped off at between Earth and Mars, I want to get to the real point of this entry: digging into some speculative xenobiology! The native Erosite (nice demonym!) here only gets one panel to shine, but what an impression they make! How does a creature evolve to resemble a twee little Cupid-style bow and arrow? Could they be analogous to Earth insect life, with the "bow" as two whirring wings? Or are they a snakelike species equipped with tiny flying machines? Is the unnatural positioning of the bow relative to the plane of the ground indicative of a partially unseen structure like an air jellyfish, or that the bow is an extrusion into three dimensional space by a higher-dimensional creature? I love it! More outlandish aliens in fiction, please!
Moving on. Here we meet Emro, Lord of Diamonds. Emro is pretty standard as far as mineral-based alien designs go: a faceted crystalline humanoid, though with a really terrific skull face. I do however appreciate the mention of his home planet of Gemro having left the Solar System. As Emro's plan is to annex the Earth so that the Gemrovians (another nice demonym!) can have sun access again it seems as though the planet's departure was fairly recent and not some prehistoric event, this adds weight to the theory that all of the extra planets that Rex and Cynde are visiting are in fact asteroids and not additional planetary bodies that have joined the solar system in the 60-400 years between 1940 and Rex Dexter's time.
But enough forensic future astronomy - this post is about speculative xenobiology! And here we have a real development: though Emro is a crystalline humanoid with a cool skull face, his fellow Gemrovians are revealed to be shaped vaguely like bacteriophages, all big heads tottering around on a couple of spindly legs. This suggests a couple of possibilities: Gemrovians could operate in a eusocial caste system, with the humanoid form being reserved for breeding castes. Or they could have a more mutable form than organic life - Emro might have chosen to be humanoid as part of his scheme of conquest or for some personal reason.
The key to defeating the Gemrovians lies in the fact that Earth paralysis weapons are deadly to them. When tested, this effect applies to the diamonds used in the initial attack on Earth as well, indicating that those were, in fact, Gemrovians. This suggests another possibility: that the Gemrovians have a complex life cycle like that of an insect or amphibian, with several morphologically different stages. Perhaps the person-absorbing diamonds are analagous to eggs or pupae and the absorption behaviour is a passive predation tactic!
Anyway. Emro, Lord of Diamonds, I salute you.
No comments:
Post a Comment