A God With Nothing to Do
Edmond Hall tries three things in this book, in this order: knowledge, power, pleasure. Each one collapses under him within a chapter, and the collapse is the plot. On a bluff over Lake Michigan he sketches, idly, the means to seize the planet — financial control, a weapon, a religion — and abandons all three before he's finished sketching them, because he watches a hill of ants scatter under his boot and thinks, "As well call myself emperor of these." Then he lies back and lets his own perspective shift until the moon becomes "a hurtling sphere" and the earth a spinning atom in a chaos of colliding spheres, and he has to dig his heels into the grass to stop the vertigo. Weinbaum stages the whole crisis of superiority as a problem of scale, not morality. Edmond isn't tempted to conquer humanity and then convinced it's wrong. He's never tempted at all, because conquest requires an opponent worth the trouble, and there isn't one.
The mutant-genius story was a crowded shelf by 1939 — Wylie's *Gladiator*, Stapledon's *Odd John*, van Vogt's *Slan* two years off — and all of them run the same experiment: take a man out past the species and see what's left. Weinbaum's answer is bleaker than the others' because it isn't tragic, just administrative. Edmond doesn't fail to connect with humanity through some flaw in his design. He succeeds at everything he tries and finds each success worthless on delivery. The book was published four years after its author's death, which means Weinbaum never watched the actual 1930s superman rhetoric metastasize into the thing it became by 1945. He couldn't have known how ugly "biologically superior" would sound within a decade of writing it. He also, in a scene where Edmond withholds an idea for atomic energy from a physicist friend and speculates about "an atomic bomb that keeps on exploding for several weeks," landed closer to Trinity and to the long half-life of fallout than anyone writing in 1939 had business landing. Both facts sit in the same book without resolving each other. That's worth noting without smoothing it over.
What the genre usually gets wrong, and what this one gets uncomfortably right, is where the loneliness actually bites. It isn't that people fear Edmond, though they do — a dog attacks him on the street, a woman calls him "queer," his own wife eventually can't stand the way he looks at her. It's that he has run out of games. "The path of Power ends in a blank wall, and is so short and straight that I see to its futile end from whatever point I stand, without the need of treading it." A man who can see the end of every road before he starts walking it doesn't get corrupted by power. He gets bored by it, the way a chess grandmaster gets bored playing a child, except there is no rest of the world capable of being anything but a child to him. The book's real subject is not superiority but the specific misery of having no opponent left who can lose interestingly.
The last quarter turns pleasure into an experiment too, and Edmond runs it with the same cold thoroughness he brought to power, which is where the book earns its ending. Dying by his own hand, poisoned, he arranges his death to look like a murder that never happened — an empty cartridge in another man's gun, a bequest written with a Satanic little smile, a final command planted in his rival's mind so the man will walk away believing he got away with something. Even extinguishing himself, Edmond can't stop directing the scene. It's not cruelty. It's the same reflex that made him abandon the atom-bomb hint and the political coup: an aesthete's insistence on curating the only story he has left to tell, right down to who gets to believe what about how it ended.
Later entries in this same lineage — Butler's Oankali, Tchaikovsky's uplifted spiders — solved the loneliness problem by making transcendence collective, a species event rather than a single unlucky mutation. Weinbaum's superman gets no such company; he is alone by definition, the whole point of the experiment. It leaves the book stranded a little oddly in its own genealogy, an ancestor whose solution nobody downstream chose to keep. What would Edmond have done with a second superman in the room — an equal, someone whose next move he couldn't already see?