Back in 2016 we read the first three stories of Edmond Hamilton's Interstellar Patrol series in a 1965 collection, and the year before that we read a 1964 book publication of the fourth IP story. Those four stories appeared in Weird Tales at the tail end of the 1920s, and in the year 1930 Hamilton published three more stories of the Interstellar Patrol in the unique magazine. We at MPorcius Fiction Log just received notice that we have been recalled to service in those ships that sail the void between the stars--join us and we'll see what those diabolical aliens who are always plotting to annihilate our civilization have cooked up this time and maybe we'll be able to throw a space spanner in the works of their monstrous plans!
"The Comet-Drivers"
It is many thousands of years in the future, and the human race is allied with many alien races
under a unified galactic government, the Federation of Suns. And today that Federation is in trouble! Approaching the Milky Way is a comet bigger than any star. (I think all the stuff Hamilton says about comets in this story is untrue, but maybe he was reflecting the current theories of the time in which he penned the tale.) A comet, we are told, is a relatively small nucleus of matter surrounded by a huge cloud of electrical energy. The electrical energy put out by this comet, the mother of all comets, is so powerful that, if it enters our galaxy--and it is only a few weeks away--our galaxy will be completely destroyed.
Our narrator, who explains all this to us and his comrades, is the Chief of the entire Interstellar Patrol, Khel Ken. He is at the head of a fleet of one thousand ships, and hopes to lead them inside the comet to use force beams on the nucleus to push the comet onto a different course. Directly subordinate to him are three Sub-Chiefs, each from a different Federation system: insect man Najus Nar, fish-like Jurt Tul, and Gor Han, a being like a headless ape with four legs and four arms; his eyes and mouth are in his chest.
When the fleet approaches the comet, which is many millions of miles wide, they realize it is escorted by an alien space fleet of one hundred cube-shaped vessels. A battle ensues, which the IP wins, though they are knocked down to like 800 ships. The six surviving cubes flee, and the IP cruisers pursue them into the comet through a concealed gap in the deadly electric energy cloud.
Within the hollow shell of the electrical cloud is a vast empty space, at the center of which is the comet's nucleus, its nucleus, a cluster of planets that are not spheres but disks. From the central disk arises a much larger fleet of cube ships, and these defeat the IP in the next phase of the battle; almost all the Federation ships are destroyed, but a few crash land on one or another of the disk worlds, or seek refuge in chasms on their surfaces.
On the disk worlds the IP officers discover that the comet-dwelling aliens, people made of liquid who can act as individuals when they wish but also like to join together into larger pools or blobs to commune more closely (for example, when it is time for beddy-bye these weirdos gather together by the thousands in huge pits, forming a single pool with thousands of eyes), have lived in the comet for ages, travelling through intergalactic space. Periodically the comet starts losing power, so they just steer it towards a galaxy; when they pass through the galaxy the comet sucks all the energy out of that galaxy's suns to recharge itself. They have done this many times over the eons, and this time it is our beautiful Milky Way galaxy that is on the menu!
Khel Ken reunites with his friends, the eight-limbed Gor Han and the amphibious Jurt Tul, and learns that his third buddy, the insect-man Najus Nar, has joined forces with the extragalactic aliens! Treachery! The three amigos try to get to the controls that will turn the comet away from our galaxy, but they are spotted and must flee. Just as the cube ships are about to wipe out the last remaining IP ships, five thousand more IP cruisers burst into the comet and another huge naval battle erupts. The comet people play their ace card--a cube ship even bigger than the others, that generates a light vibration that makes all the cube ships invisible! To neutralize this high tech camouflage twenty IP cruisers make the ultimate sacrifice, ramming the super-sized cube and destroying it and themselves.
The Interstellar Patrol is full of these kamikaze types. The true character of Najus Nar, who had been written off as a traitor, becomes clear as, under cover of the confusion of the battle, he sabotages the comet's controls, starting an irreversible process that shortly leads to the implosion of the comet and the extermination of the liquid people. Najus Nar is is shot down, another martyr to the Federation, but a few IP ships make it out of the collapsing comet so they can tell the people of the Milky Way of his heroism.
The premise of "The Comet-Drivers" is not unlike that of the first two Interstellar Patrol stories, "Crashing Suns" and "The Star Stealers," in both of which a renegade star is going to enter our solar system and destroy it. A bigger problem than the fact that Hamilton is reusing the same plot yet again is the pacing. Some passages are repetitive and longwinded, even when, as they are describing tense activity that is taking place at breakneck speed, they should be just the opposite. For some reason Hamilton thinks the way to emphasize his points, about the size of the comet, for example, or the light the comet casts, is to remind us of these things again and again, using the same words over and over. Hamilton also fails to give his characters any personality, so his efforts to generate human drama, such as when Ken is worried about his friends being captured or dismayed that one of them may be a traitor, achieve little.
The only really good elements of "The Comet-Drivers" are the images--the many non-human people, the worlds within the comet and their cities, the hundreds of crashing and exploding space warships--these would make great paintings. Maybe "The Comet-Drivers" would work better as a comic book or a movie than it does as a piece of text.
Acceptable.
"The Comet-Drivers" is included in the 1965 Ace collection of IP stories Crashing Suns, which I own but which I am currently unable to access, so I read the Weird Tales version at the internet archive, which will be my practice for all three of these 1930 space operas.
"The Sun People"
For some reason, the sixth IP story, "The Sun People," which debuted in the May 1930 issue of
Weird Tales, was not included in
Crashing Suns. It can be found in Haffner Press's 2009
The Star Stealers: The Complete Adventures of the Interstellar Patrol.
The narrator of "The Comet-Drivers" was the commander of the entire galactic space navy, and in "The Sun People" we move further still up the chain of command--our narrator for this baby is the executive who has authority over the entire Federation, "Nort Norus, Chairman of the Council of Suns!" The story begins with Norus giving a science-heavy speech about the latest peril menacing the Milky Way. Somebody somewhere is broadcasting vibratory waves throughout the galaxy that are neutralizing the gravitational effect of the stars, causing the galaxy to break up, each star drifting on its own away from the galactic center, the Canopus system, where the federal government sits. (The gravity of planets is on a different wavelength and frequency than that of stars, so planets' gravitational pull is still in effect, so the planets are accompanying the stars they orbit out of the galaxy and if you knock that priceless Ming vase off its pedestal it will still fall to the floor and shatter.) Being president of the galaxy (or universe--Hamilton in these Interstellar Patrol stories often uses "universe" as a synonym for "galaxy"), Norus doesn't herald this event as an opportunity for every star system to strike out on its own and achieve a welcome sense of independence, but rather as a catastrophe.
I found this to be a pretty disappointing threat, after so many Interstellar Patrol stories featuring menaces that would literally kill every living thing in a system or the whole Federation. When you have space ships that can move at a speed hundreds of times greater than that of light, the planets of your space empire being a little further apart doesn't seem like that big a deal. But maybe my 20th-century brain is missing some of the nuances of life in the 2000th century, or whenever this story takes place.
Anyway, Norus informs the Council that the scientists have figured out that the gravity-countering waves are coming from right here in the vicinity of the Federation legislature, from inside Canopus, the biggest star in the Milky Way. These scientists have prepared a cruiser capable of withstanding the heat of the interior of a sun so some rave souls can
go inside Canopus to destroy whatever inexplicable phenomenon is emitting those vibrations. Norus himself is one of those selfless risk takers; he will command the cruiser himself, and in the cockpit with him will be the current head of the Interstellar Patrol, the bird-man J'han Jal, and the top government scientist, Mirk En, a nine-armed octopus person.
One of my minor gripes with these IP stories is that Hamilton doesn't include the kind of details that somebody with a little knowledge of military history expects to see that give these sorts of stories a little additional verisimilitude. In "The Comet-Drivers" the characters never say "We lost the 12th Squadron!" or "We are expecting Admiral Ignatz Mowz with the Red Fleet from Betelgeuse" like real naval officers might but "We lost twenty ships!" and "We are expecting 5000 ships" like the ships and their crews are a mere commodity with no personality or emotional value. Similarly, the ship Norus captains into Canopus doesn't even have a name. In real life a guy writing a memoir about commanding a ship on an important mission would tell you the name of the ship, even develop some kind of psychological relationship with the ship.
Anyway, the nameless ship flies into the star, and we get overly long and repetitive scenes of struggling to fly through sunspots and avoiding prominences and that kind of thing, with the ship being temporarily thrown off course and Norus, Jal and En being tossed about the cockpit by the turbulence. On one page Hamilton writes "we could see vast prominences leaping, titanic uprushing jets of incandescent gas capable each of licking up hundreds of worlds," which I think is pretty good adventure story writing, but then on the next page we are told a sunspot is "a whirlpool of flaming gasses that extended far beneath the surface, we knew, and that could have engulfed countless worlds," which is so similar as to distract the reader. Hamilton also uses the word "maelstrom" like a dozen times in the story, including multiple times in one paragraph, so that the use of the word is distracting, like a tic.
Just like the comet in "The Comet-Drivers," Canopus, our heroes discover, is hollow and in its empty interior are a bunch of planets. The IP ship approaches one planet and sees that it is inhabited by people who are white cubes about the height of a human with a limb protruding from each of their eight corners. These cube people build cube buildings and fly square aircraft and spacecraft, which I guess are like huge open sleds--the people who crew them must wear space suits. There is a running fight between the IP cruiser and the square ships, and then a boarding action in which the space suited combatants fight hand to hand, wrestling and grappling (the ships all have energy projector artillery, but nobody on either side thought to bring any small arms or the swords and axes we are used to seeing in E. E. Smith space operas and Warhammer 40,000.) Our Federation boys get the better of the fight at the cost of 50% casualties; the cube-man boarding party is wiped out, save for one captive who is interrogated via a telepathy machine.
The cube people are trying to break up the Milky Way, the captive reveals, because the gravitational pull of all those other stars is slowly pulling the worlds inside Canopus's hollow core outwards, and soon they will touch the fire of the star and be destroyed. Neutralizing the gravity of all the other stars seemed their only hope.
Maybe in real life Norus would try to cut a deal with the cube people. Plot elements of the story, however, place time constraints on both the Federation peeps and the cubies that make negotiations impossible--the gravity dampener need only be left on one more hour for the Milly Way to be irrevocably dispersed, and if the gravity dampener is turned off for like 15 minutes the worlds inside Canopus will all drift into the star and be destroyed. No middle ground is possible and the winner will be determined in the next 60 minutes!
Norus and crew use the captured cube-people's square craft to sneak up on the planet where rests the control mechanism for the gravity neutralizer. Norus and Mirk En, octopus-man, storm the control center, wreck the controls, and save the galaxy from drifting apart. As our heroes escape, the cube-people's planets drift into the fires of Canopus and the cubies are exterminated.
The last scene of the story has Norus giving a speech to the Council in which he says that if the disparate races of the Federation continue to stick together, they can handle any problem. Among other things, these Interstellar Patrol stories are celebrations of diversity, with dozens of different species of intelligent life working together to achieve goals, and none of them being relegated to some kind of lower caste--the chief of the IP is a human in one of today's stories, but a non-human in the other two, for example.
I think "The Sun People," which is very similar to "The Comet-Drivers," may be slightly superior because the boarding action in the former is a little more engaging than the naval battle in the latter, though I did like the liquid aliens better than the cube aliens.
"The Cosmic Cloud"
Near the center of the Milky Way is a cloud of blackness, a region where, for reasons unknown, "light vibrations are simply non-existent." For thousands of years the innumerable starships that move the tremendous volume of the Federation's interstellar commerce have been routed around this mysterious cloud, because those that enter it, by accident or, like a scientific expedition a few years ago, by design, never return. But in the last few days, thousands of transports have been sucked into the black cloud by some irresistible force! The economy of the Federation will suffer if commerce is compelled to follow longer routes--something must be done!
The narrator of Outside the Universe, the fourth Interstellar Patrol story, Dur Nal, is back to narrate this tale. Nal, human space captain, and his lieutenants, the metal man Korus Kan and the crustacean man Jhul Din, are summoned by the head of the IP, a plant man, and asked to venture into the black cloud to investigate.
Their nameless ship, while taking sensor readings on the edge of the black cloud, is sucked into the darkness by a powerful magnetic field. Inside they are almost helpless, as no light can exist within the cloud. Their ship is captured and taken to a planet where they are herded off into captivity by aliens who can, apparently, hear so well they can move around almost as well as people who can see. Dur Nal, by good fortune, escapes and stumbles around a city in which he can see nothing, and--more good luck--blunders upon another Federation citizen--the leader of the research team that was lost inside the black cloud a few years ago, Zat Zanat, one of a race of people with bat wings.
Zat Zanat has invented lenses that allow one to see inside the black cloud, and he loans Dur Nal a pair. He also tells him that the thousands of ships the cloud people have captured are going to be used in a few hours to attack the Federation. Even though their fleet is smaller than that of the IP, the eyeless cloud people have invented a device that neutralizes light-vibrations so they can make the entire galaxy as dark as it is within the cloud--they thus have a war-winning advantage over the IP. Zanat is the only survivor of his expedition, the others having been murdered out of hand, like almost every person the cloud people capture. He escaped today in hopes of stealing a ship and getting out of the cloud to warn the Federation of the coming attack.
Dur Nal and Zat Zanat, by being as quiet as possible, get to the ruling palace of the eyeless people to liberate Korus Kan and Jhul Din, who were deemed important enough to keep alive. Then, when the people of darkness take off in all those hijacked ships, Zat Zanat seizes control of the magnetic device that captured the ships in the first place and makes the thousands of ships to crash, annihilating the blind race of cloud people and saving the Federation.
"The Cosmic Cloud" is the best written of the three Interstellar Patrol stories we've read today; it moves at a brisker pace than "The Comet-Drivers" and "The Sun People," avoiding all those problems I was moaning about regarding repetition and long-windedness. The idea of sneaking around among enemies who are blind but have good hearing is not a bad one (wasn't there just a post-apocalyptic movie based on this premise?)
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These stories are not bad, but they are not great, and "The Comet-Drivers" and "The Sun People" in particular would really benefit from some copy-editing and some slimming down. Hamilton, however, was probably facing financial pressures that did not incentivize spending more time on his stories and making them shorter.
More Weird Tales from the 1930s in our next episode.
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Damn, some of the ads in Weird Tales (these are from the May 1930 issue) can be kind of depressing. "Wives, mothers, sisters, it is you that the man who drinks Whiskey, Wine or Beer to excess must depend upon to help save him from a ruined life and a drunkard's grave." "Are you always bashful and confused when you meet people for the first time or when you are in company of the opposite sex?" These ads remind us that life is rough even if liquid aliens aren't trying to recharge their batteries by destroying your home galaxy!
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