"Zora of the Zoromes," "Space War," and "Labyrinth" by Neil R. Jones

A beautiful old building in Galesburg, Illinois that I was told was once an Odd Fellows meeting hall today houses an antique mall.  As followers of my nearly defunct twitter feed may have noticed, the wife and I are on a road trip, and a few days ago we visited this antique mall, where from a shelf of old paperbacks I purchased for one dollar a copy of 1967's Space War, the third collection of Neil R. Jonses's Professor Jameson stories.  I read the second collection, The Sunless World, back in 2015, so you may recall that Professor Jameson is the last living human being and his disembodied brain has been implanted by aliens into a robot body.  Accompanied by the aliens known as the Zoromes whose brains reside within similar robot bodies, Jameson explores the galaxy of millions of years in our future.  Let's join Jameson in three more adventures first printed in Amazing Stories in the mid-1930s.

"Zora of the Zoromes" (1935)

As the book begins Prof. Jameson, called 21MM392 by his benefactors, is on planet Zor, talking to Zora, Princess of the Zoromes, a woman who has not yet had her brain put into a robot body.  After the Prof tells the princess, who, like all Zoromes before they are upgraded with mechanical bodies, is a six-tentacled crustacean, how he preserved his body in orbit around Earth forty million years ago and was then revived by her countrymen, the Princess brings him up to date on current events here on Zor.  A major war is developing between Zor and planet Mumed, whose spider-like people learned from the Zoromes how to transplant their brains into robot bodies and how to build space ships; these ungrateful eight-legged jerks have turned on the Zoromes and begun attacking Zorome-inhabited planets in Zor's star system!

Prof. Jameson tours the Zor system, Jones giving us a long and perhaps unnecessary description of each of its planets, but then we get our action scenes and the violence we crave!  The Princess's boyfriend Bext is on a star ship which is captured by the Mumes, and Prof. Jameson is a member of the commando squad that goes to planet Mumed in two invisible star ships to rescue this guy.  The Zoromes in robot bodies are able to infiltrate the population of planet Mumed because the Mumes use the same model of mechanical bodies as the Zoromes.  Princess Zora stows away aboard one of the invisible ships, determined to help rescue her boyfriend.

The invisible Zorome vessels conduct useful intelligence operations over planet Mumed, but the effort to spring the Princess's six-armed squeeze is no piece of cake.  Many people are killed in the fighting subsequent to the freeing of Bext, which features tentacle-to-tentacle combat as well as aerial bombardment, and among the slain is Bext himself!  Zora is distraught, and grabs the weapons controls of the ship and shoots down many Mume ships and strafes many Mume factories and residences.  Eventually, by capturing a Mume ship, Jameson, Zora and the other Zorome survivors of the fight elude all the forcefields and detection devices and get out of planet Mumed's gravity well.

Back at Zor we get good news.  Bext's body was torn to pieces by the Mumes, but his skull was not damaged, and the other Zor commando ship collected it and brought it back to Zor where the brain was revived and put into a robot body.  Like so many Zoromes, Bext is now a "machine man."  Zora is at first overjoyed, but, no longer connected to a flesh and blood body, Bext feels no passion for her!  Knowing that a life without Bext's love will be miserable, Zora volunteers to have her own brain prematurely put in a robot body, liberating her from her fleshly emotions and unrealizable desires.  (Getting put in a robot body is like being neutered or spayed!)  Then she volunteers to be a gunner in the space navy!

"Zora of the Zoromes" is an entertaining SF adventure tale.  All the technology and fighting is fun, all the various weapons and defenses and strategies and countermeasures Jones comes up with.  There is also human drama and food for thought thanks to Zora and her passion for Bext, and the idea that, disconnected from an organic body, you will lose your emotions and passions.  I think "Zora of the Zoromes" is eligible for the coveted "strong female character" tag, as Zora charts her own course and bucks the demands of the men around her, but seeing as her big decisions revolve around her love of a man I don't see any chance of this story passing the Braunschweiger test.  That contact with the more technologically sophisticated Zoromes has made the Mumes look just like the Zoromes reminds us of the criticism of globalization that you hear sometimes, that it leads to cultural homogeneity, but I doubt Jones in the early 1930s was offering this sort of critique.  More likely Jones is thinking that it is risky to provide high technology to culturally primitive people who are driven by a lust for conquest.

Thumbs up for "Zora of the Zoromes."  Like all three of the pieces in Space War, this tragic saga of the passion of an alien princess was translated and included in a German collection of Professor Jameson tales published in 1985. 

"Space War" (1935)

Prof. Jameson is captain of a small ship probing the defenses of Mumed.  After a space naval battle that features boarding actions, the enemy ship the professor has transferred to crashes on an uninhabited planet of the Mumes' star system.  Almost everyone on the ship is killed in the crash.  Through the quick thinking of one Zorome, who dies in the performance of his act of subterfuge, the Mumes are led to believe Prof. Jameson is a Mume.  Thus his brain is put into a new mechanical body, and he is given a job on the crew operating the super weapon that guards planet Mumed.  The Mumes plan to draw the Zor fleet within range of this powerful energy projector the way the Jerries might trick British tanks into range of a battery of 8.8cm Flak guns, but when the main Zorome fleet arrives Professor Jameson is able to sabotage the Mume defense, winning the war for Zor.

As the capital Mume city is being blasted to oblivion, Jameson and another Zorome in a robot body escape in a small space ship.  The dictator of Mumed also escapes in such a ship, and the Prof and his comrade follow the tyrant to planet Ablen.  The primitive natives of Ablen hate the Mumes, who oppress and enslave them, and they kill the dictator, and, not knowing the Prof and his friend are Zoromes, try to kill them also, but they escape.  Unfortunately, the Ablenox have disabled both space ships, so our heroes are stuck on Ablen!  (I expected the next Professor Jameson story to be about escaping this planet, but Jones doesn't take this tack, instead at the start of "Labyrinth" just telling us Jameson was rescued by a passing ship.)

This fun and straightforward war and espionage story, full of aliens and energy weapons and defenses, would reappear in 1972 in the reprint magazine Science Fiction Adventure Classics.

"Labyrinth" (1936)   

When "Labyrinth" first appeared as an Amazing cover story in 1936 its title was printed inside quotation marks, like David Bowie's "'Heroes'" (though maybe Bowie called them "inverted commas.")  This is always confusing, and we can see that the quote marks were forgotten on the cover of the magazine, and when the story was reprinted in Amazing in 1968 they remembered this punctuation on the story title page but not in the table of contents.  The quote marks appear nowhere in the 1967 book printing I am reading.

Of the three stories in Space War, this is the most bland and least entertaining, though I still judge it acceptable.  The war with the Mumes being over, Jameson and two dozen other people in machine bodies have set out to continue their explorations of the galaxy.  They land on a planet to investigate the ruins of an extinct race.  Inhabiting the ruined city are some barbarians, people of low intelligence with four legs, four eyes, and many tentacles.  The Zoromes make friends with these primitives, and accompany them on a hunt in a sterile desert where no plants grow.  The traditional prey of the barbarians are slugs that are like 2 or 3 feet long.  These slugs, it turns out, eat metal, and normally subsist on veins of ore on the desert surface and in tunnels they themselves slowly dig with a corrosive they secrete.  This acid has no effect on organic matter.  The Zoromes, who are of course made of refined metals, represent a delicious meal for the slugs, and soon the mechanical men are surrounded by ravenous hordes of the slugs!  There are so many slugs their ray guns will run out of juice before they can exterminate them all, so the Zoromes flee into a cave and get lost in a maze of twisting tunnels and yawning caverns.  Eventually they find their way out.

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These are diverting little capers with plenty of danger and death, and in "Zora of the Zoromes" Jones manages to include some engaging human drama.  "Space War" also has some emotional content with its heroic Zorome and its vengeful Ablenox, but "Labyrinth" unfortunately has little human feeling and instead repetitive descriptions of wandering around in tunnels and being surrounded by slugs.

Maybe someday I'll read the fourth of these Ace Professor Jameson volumes, which I believe resides on one of my bookshelves a thousand or so miles east.