<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Ray Cummings (August 30, 1887 – January 23, 1957, New York) first began writing for the pulp magazines in the early 20th Century and produced several hundred stories and novels before his death. Most of them involved speculation about technology and the nature of the universe, and much of the science was suspect even at the time. Probably his most famous single story is the novel The Girl in the Golden Atom (1919), which sometimes appears in book form combined with its sequel People of the Golden Atom (1920). When a scientist spots a beautiful girl while examining a sample under a microscope, he invents a method by which he can shrink down and meet her in person.

The concept of worlds within worlds apparently fascinated Cummings, because he returned to it several times. The microscopic people decide to enlarge and invade our world in A Princess of the Atom (1929), and a similar conspiracy including kidnapping and imprisonment of people from our universe in the subatomic worlds takes place in Beyond the Vanishing Point (1931). The Insect Invasion (1932) only reduces its protagonists to the size of common insects. In Beyond the Stars (1928) and Explorers into Infinity (1928), the situation is reversed. Scientists from our world decide that stars and planets are actually the atomic components of matter in a large reality and set out to enlarge themselves.

The most readable of Cummings' novels are Brigands of the Moon (1931) and its sequel, Wandl the Invader (1932), both of which follow the adventures of Gregg Haljan. Martian pirates seize interplanetary cargoes and nearly precipitate an interplanetary war in the first, and a rogue planet inhabited by belligerent aliens enters the solar system in the latter. The Tama novels,Tama of the Light Country (1931) and Tama, Princess of Mercury (1932), are reminiscent of the interplanetary romances of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but without Burroughs's narrative gift. The Shadow Girl (1929) is one of his better efforts. A mysterious tower appears in the middle of a city, actually a time machine carrying a troubled girl from the future. Two other novels of time travel, The Man Who Mastered Time (1929) and The Exile of Time (1931) are less interesting.

Cummings was by no stretch of the imagination a skillful writer, but at his best he told rousing, engrossing adventure stories, and his imaginative flair helped to evoke a sense of awe and wonder about the universe. "Fragments of Diamond Quartz" (1949) is probably the best of his short stories, most of which are now impossible to find.

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