If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.

I finished my re-read of Curt Siodmak’s classic novel Hauser’s Memory a few days ago but this is the first chance I’ve had to write about it. I know I originally read the book some decades ago but remembered very little. I also watched the 1970 made-for-TV movie starring David McCallum and Susan Strasberg, but remember just a little more.

This book wasn’t part of my local public library system so I had to buy a used hardback. The copyright says 1968 so I imagine it could be a first edition, especially since the page stock is so wonderfully thick. I really love old books.

What strikes me about this novel more than anything else is the writing. Normally, when I review a piece of science fiction, I’m assessing (among other things) the quality of the science fiction writing. In Siodmak’s case, his writing is that of a wonderful author and storyteller regardless of genre. Taking out the SciFi aspects, his knowledge of humanity is wonderful. I could read his descriptions of even the most mundane aspects of the lives of his characters and still be fascinated.

Of course, most of his characters are pretty messed up, which makes them all the more disturbing. On the inside dustjacket’s description of Siodmak, it says:

The New York Times has said of Mr. Siodmak: “Mr. Siodmak’s aim is to give his readers cold chills, and he does.”

Unlike the TV movie, one of the main protagonists in the book is Dr. Patrick Cory, who was also the protagonist in Siodmak’s earlier classic novel Donovan’s Brain (1942).

This is a cold war thriller which mostly but not quite demonizes the Soviet Union while lionizing the United States. Although Siodmak does depict 1960s era Communists (and the Nazis who survived the war) in a particularly bad light, he also casts the U.S. CIA agents as not much better. I agreed with Siodmak’s assessment of Communist Europe as a giant prison camp that one can only want to escape.

Soviet defector Karl Hauser, a German scientist during World War Two, had been taken to the west by U.S. Agents. Suddenly he becomes uncooperative and must be forced on a plane going to America. Before that happens, he is shot and falls into a coma. But depending on who you talk to, either the east or the west shot him.

Hauser’s work is in electromagnetism and he has the secret to controlling nuclear reactions, primarily for weapons purposes. He will never regain consciousness, but before he dies, the CIA in the form of attorney Joseph Slaughter, contacts Dr. Cory, an expert on RNA and chemical memory transfer (in animals) to transfer Hauser’s Memory into a “volunteer.” The volunteer turns out to be a death row prisoner who would do this in exchange for his sentence being commuted, but Cory refuses.

In the early stages of this story, Siodmak describes Cory’s relationship with his assistant, Hillel Mondoro and his wife Karen. Hillel is an Orthodox Jew as well as a brilliant chemist. His wife, although Jewish, is less observant and her comments on her husband and the world around her are delightful. She seems to be the most approachable and least serious character in the book.

Once I accessed Siodmak’s biography, the book made total sense.

Siodmak was born in Dresden, Germany in 1902 and was in his native land when Hitler rose to power. A Jew and a mathematician (he was degreed before he turned to writing), he left Germany for England in the 1930s after hearing an anti-Semitic tirade by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. He made his way to the United States in 1937 becoming a screenwriter.

I had no idea he had written or co-written some of my favorite old Universal Studios horror films, such as “The Wolf Man” (1941), “Son of Dracula” (1943), and “House of Frankenstein” (1945).

I say all this to add context to my review of this book.

Siodmak’s descriptions of Denmark, East and West Berlin, and Prague are startlingly detailed. This is a man who knew of Nazi and Communist darkness very well. He also didn’t trust the American counterparts, and depicted Slaughter as possibly anti-Semitic because of his mention of Christianity.

The novel was published in 1968 and even for that era, it was strange to have Slaughter (illustrated by Siodmak as cultured but unsavory) saying, “You with your prying into the mysteries of nature. You’re searching for a (N-word) in a tunnel. He might have a club in his hand.”

The “N-word” was fully spelled out, and while a tad shocking in the 2020s, it’s one of those reasons I oppose publishers “updating classic works for modern audiences” and support collecting older editions. Let me decide what I do and don’t want to read. Books, as they were written in the past, are as much history as the periods they describe.

Although not a bio-chemist, he knew enough to give a credible explanation for now RNA memory transfer worked and its effects. His metaphors in depicting process to laypeople were particularly clear. He also described a dystopian use for the technology.

Siodmak (or Cory) imagined specific memories and behavior patterns for docility, obedience, compliance to authority being distilled out of RNA into a virus-like powder or liquid. It could be sprayed like insecticide over entire population centers, invading the brains of the citizenry without them ever knowing about it.

What could stop a government from disseminating gaseous RNA containing selected ideas? It could not be fought by another virus, since it would occupy healthy cells. What defense could be found against such artificial contamination of the human mind?

In spite of Cory’s musings, the events in the novel never take that turn. That said, in real life, news and social media seem to have done the same job on us, especially among younger people. Along with public education, they’ve eliminated the ability for critical thinking and rationality. More’s the pity.

We follow Hillel (who is followed every step of the way by American and Soviet agents) on a journey that Hauser’s memory takes him. While Hillel does mentally continue the scientific work that was on Hauser’s mind, he is primarily driven by his personal passions.

Hauser loved his wife very much. He was hiding in Denmark and had amassed some money to give her her and this small son during the war. He gave this money to a trusted friend who then betrayed him to the Nazis. A Nazi general ordered Hauser tortured and castrated. Then when Germany fell, he was captured by the Soviets and forced to work for them.

Within Hillel, Hauser finds and forces his “friend” to surrender the money so Hauser can give it to his wife Anna, who is still living in West Berlin. The friend dies of a heart attack, which is convenient. When Hillel tries to give the money to Anna, he discovers she still is a Nazi and detests Hillel for being a Jew. She refuses the money as she hated her husband, believing he willingly worked for the Communists.

Hauser wants to visit his son, now a young adult, in East Berlin. Communist agents make this easy by kidnapping Hillel and Cory, forcing them across the Berlin Wall. Slaughter tries to stop them, but is easily swept aside (sadly, he survives).

Hauser’s son hates both his parents because they were Nazis (even though as a youngster, he loved his father) and also refuses the funds. Hauser, within Hillel, discovers that anything good he thought he had in the world had died years before. All he has now is revenge.

In a series of ploys, counter-ploys, and plot twists, Cory and Hillel find themselves in Switzerland. This apparently is where Hauser wanted to go because the last piece of his puzzle lives there, the General who had him tortured. He is now a landed citizen, the Cuban son of Germans who had lived there. He uses stolen Nazi funds to help war criminals escape the continent.

Now rejecting Hillel’s life and even his pregnant wife Karen, Hauser and his last enemy kill each other. It’s a tragedy for Karen who explodes at Cory for only loving his experiments and making Hillel his lab rat (this, in spite of Hillel having deliberately taking the RNA injection to prevent Cory from being the test subject). Cory, divorced, estranged from his own children, is forced to agree.

I disliked Cory not only for this, but for being such a wooden character. While he did express emotion and even passion to the point of violence, he always reverted to the reclusive scientist trope. Perhaps one of the weaknesses of the book.

The other problem was the last two pages. It should have ended with Hillel’s death and maybe some small follow up by Cory and Karen, but Siodmak continued to drag out the character of Cory and his worldview beyond its utility.

This is a story about prisons, whether they are political, personal, social, or religious. Hillel was imprisoned by Hauser’s memory and his desire for love and revenge. He was also a prisoner of the value of Hauser’s memory to both sides of a geopolitical conflict. The Soviets, who considered themselves having “owned” Hauser’s work, ask why the Americans thought they had the right to kill a man in a coma, slice up his brain, and implant the memories of that work into another American.

Their motives are tainted but the ethical question is a good one. Hauser wanted to defect, not to give his work to the Americans, but to do what, in the end, he made Hillel do. He was prevented in that by either American or Soviet agents (we never find out who actually shot him). Hauser had no intention of working for anyone. He was paranoid, reclusive, and violent. Unfortunately, the final life he destroyed was Hillel’s leaving his wife a widow of an experiment that went all too wrong.

This is an old school thinking person’s novel. Curt Siodmak knew the best and the worst sides of humanity exquisitely. A fine story. I highly recommend it.