My rebound copy of The Book League Monthly edition of Gladiator (1930) finally arrived! In the opening paragraph of his introduction, Wylie explains that he created the superhuman character in response to his own failings:
A temperamental consciousness of material force brought Hugo Danner into being. The frustration of my own muscles by things, and the alarming superiority of machinery started the notion of a man who would be invincible. I gave him a name and planned random deeds for him. I let him tear down Brooklyn Bridge and lift a locomotive. Then I began to speculate about his future and it seemed to me that a human being thus equipped would be foredoomed to vulgar fame or to a life of fruitless destruction. He would share the isolation of geniuses and with them would learn the inflexibility of man’s slow evolution. To that extent Hugo became symbolic and Gladiator a satire. The rest was adventure and perhaps more of the book derives from the unliterary excitement of imagining such a life than from a studious juxtaposition of incidents to a theme (Wylie, 1930, iii). [1]
So, Danner was born from a strange coupling of human frailty and automated strength and efficiency. This makes him a sort of cyborg, one capable of lifting tons with ease, jumping over houses, and moving faster than the eye can see.
Several lines in chapter four emphasize this metallic origin:
"When you were little more than a mass of plasm inside your mother, I put a medicine in her blood that I had discovered. I did it with a hypodermic needle. That medicine changed you. It altered the structure of your bones and muscles and nerves and your blood. It made you into a different tissue from the weak fibre of ordinary people (emphasis added). Then—when you were born—you were strong. Did you ever watch an ant carry many times its weight? Or see a grasshopper jump fifty times its length? The insects have better muscles and nerves than we have. And I improved your body till it was relatively that strong. Can you understand that?"
"Sure. I’m like a man made out of iron instead of meat (emphasis added)"
"That’s it, Hugo. And, as you grow up, you’ve got to remember that. You’re not an ordinary human being" (Wylie, 1930, p. 28; 1974, pp. 50-51).
And you can see that his strength is also compared to insects, whose small, yet powerful, armored bodies further recall machines.
The canonical source of Hugo Danner's strength is said to be "alkaline radicals" (Wylie, 1930, p. 7; 1974, p. 7). I know zip about chemistry, so I consulted the dreaded Google AI. It explains that this "is a broad term that typically refers to positively charged ions (cations) associated with bases and alkalis. These include basic radicals derived from alkali and alkaline earth metals" (more on this below). I inquired about the subject on the Biochemistry subreddit. Someone alluded to such an injection being lethal, and a majority suggested that Wylie simply chose the term because it sounded "sciencey." That is no doubt true, but I'm sure there's more to it than that. For example, Fischer (1927), a science book published around the time that Gladiator (then known as "Titan") was being written, associates alkaline radicals with "... potassium, sodium, lithium, magnesium, calcium, strontium, iron, copper, [and] mercury..." (p. 38). Perhaps the author consulted similar media linking alkaline earth metals with biology and thought they could be used to bolster the body to superhuman, machine-like levels.
Interestingly, Wylie also refers to the formula constituents being "a group of ultra-microscopic bodies" (Wylie, 1930, p. 7; 1974, p. 7). This brings to mind nanobots. I know this technology didn't exist during his time, but it's fun to speculate, isn't it? This is, after all, science fiction we're talking about.
Taken together, this info might suggest that our hero is some kind of organic iron robot. This is fascinating because even Danner's father mentions that the abilities cannot be passed on genetically. Any future offspring would have to be injected with the same formula to gain the same powers (Wylie, 1930, p. 148; 1974, p. 288).
1) This introduction only appeared in The Book League Monthly edition and not the standard Alfred A. Knopf printing.
Fischer, M. H. (1927). Colloid Chemistry in Biology and Medicine. In Lectures on the Biologic Aspects of Colloid and Physiologic Chemistry (pp. 29-111). United Kingdom: W. B. Saunders Company.
Wylie, P. (1930, March). Gladiator. The Book League Monthly, 3(5), 5-171.
Wylie, P. (1974). Gladiator. Westport, Connecticut: Hyperion Press, Inc.
