Sojarr of Titan by Manly Wade Wellman

"Many would welcome the chance to take me for a mate.  Perhaps you think me ugly."

"No, not ugly.   But you are bitter of tongue and proud of spirit, as women seldom are.  Probably you would make a good leader of warriors, but a bad wife.  Anyway, I am a new leader and I must learn my duties."

Last week I was in Washington D.C., the belly of the beast!  At Second Story Books' Dupont Circle location I spotted a 1949 copy of Manly Wade Wellman's Sojarr of Titan, a sort of digest-sized magazine thing.  This inspired me to read the original version of Sojarr of Titan printed in 1941 in an issue of Startling Stories.  Like me, you can read this issue of Startling at the internet archive free of charge, right there on your computer or smart phone screen.

In brief, Sojarr of Titan starts out as an Edgar Rice Burroughs style story in which a fish-out-of-water guy who is superior to the natives, like John Carter or Lord Greystoke, fights monsters, becomes leader of a native polity, and rescues a brave princess who herself is not averse to fighting.  Then some more Terrans arrive and we get sciency space opera stuff as they investigate the alien milieu and act as competitors to our hero and the princess.  In the end the good natives and good Terrans benefit and the evil natives and evil Terrans are laid low, and Sojarr makes a love connection.

Wellman's style is not too bad, though there are some odd word choices and typos which an editor should caught.  Wellman succeeds in coming  up with some entertaining monsters and societies as well as speculations about future science and technology.  The action and horror scenes are also good.  So, I enjoyed Sojarr of Titan and am giving it a thumbs up.

If you are curious about the details, here comes our little plot summary, which will be followed by comments on this issue of Startling's departments.

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It is the 31st century!  The human race has colonized the inner planets, asteroids, and even Jupiter, but Saturn is still virgin territory.  One of our best space pilots, Pitt Rapidan, sets out for Saturn--inexplicably, he brings his three-year old son Stuart with him!  I guess Child Services of the future is pretty lax.  Rapidan's ship goes out of control, and just before it hits Titan, Dad tells little Stuart to be a brave soldier.  Dad is killed in the wreck, but Stuart, secure in a special shock absorbing hammock, survives.  He grows up alone on Titan, in a valley where there is a clear pool from which to drink and plenty of fruit and small game to eat; remembering his father's last words, he thinks of himself as "Sojarr."  His Terran muscles give him the strength to outfight the local monsters and his victories make him brave and confident.

Outside this valley, most of Titan is covered with dense jungle.  Two intelligent races live on Titan, blonde humans and monstrous aliens with multiple eyes and six limbs, the Truag.  These two people have similar technologies and social structures, living as nomads, riding around in convoys of wagons or trucks powered by steam engines.  (Wellman calls them "cars" and "trains;" while each has its own engine the leader's car generally pulls the lot of them.)  The convoys follow highways that have been cut through the dense jungle and kept clear by regular applications of salt.  The people of Titan have swords and single-shot muzzle-loading pistols and the leaders wear mail, though metal is scarce so most of the fighting men wear leather armor or go without.  They don't have books or apparently any written language.  A typical tribe has about 30 to 60 fighting men, and of course a bunch of women and other noncombatants, kids and old geezers.  The different tribes may barter with each other, but often fight.

A smallish human tribe, led by Birok, in flight from a particularly large Truag tribe led by a particularly ambitious Truag, Hekta, arrives in Sojarr's valley.  Sojarr's great strength and ingenuity impresses the blonde tribe, and Sojarr becomes a valued member of the Birok's band, their best fighter, best hunter, best fisherman, etc.  He also has the sharpest and most durable sword, because he makes it out of a piece of space age metal from his father's crashed space ship.  While he is valued, the native humans are also suspicious of poor Sojarr, as he is brunette and tan while they are blonde and fair; Birok is also wary of Sojarr, because, as in so many adventure stories, the leader of a tribe is selected through single combat, and Birok knows that Sojarr, twice as strong as any Titanian, could beat him if he chose to challenge him.

Birok's small tribe tries to avoid Hekta's large tribe but eventually, in the seventh of Sojarr of Titan's twenty-two chapters, Hekta's tribe catches up to them.  Sojarr's strength and ability as a tactician save the day, and he sends Hekta packing after severing one of the creep's four claws.  (Don't worry, alien sympathizers, Truags regrow lost limbs.)  In Hekta's wagon train they find a human woman clad in mail--she is Vara, daughter of a large human tribe's leader; Hekta captured this babe when she was foolishly off alone hunting.  Vara's father had no sons so he taught his daughter to fight and lead and hunt.  

One of the minor themes of Sojarr of Titan is inter-species breeding and mutations, and Hekta had the idea of having children with Vera to father a super race!  (Birok and Sojarr's other detractors have been alleging dark and tall Sojarr must be the product of such a union.)  Fortunately for Vera, she isn't in a Tanith Lee or Jack Vance story, and Hekta hadn't had a chance to put his scheme into operation before she was liberated.  But she's not out of the woods yet!  Birok declares that Vara is his prize; Sojarr demurs and he and Birok fight.  Sojarr wins, of course, but he spares Birok.  According to local tradition, Sojarr should be acclaimed leader of the tribe, but some people object because he is an outsider.  Luckily, just then a monster attacks and Sojarr demonstrates his fighting prowess and his inventive ability (it is a flying gas bag kind of monster and in the course of the fight Sojarr employs a parachute he invented out of huge flower petals) and after that everybody drops any vocal objection to Sojarr's assumption of the role of chief.

Three years pass, during which time Sojarr expands his authority to four more tribes whose warriors he arms with superior weapons and armor made from the hull of his father's space ship.  In Chapter IX the story changes gears, as another Terran space ship lands on Titan, that of John Kaiser, whom we immediately suspect is a villain because he is "plump" (if his name hadn't been enough of a clue.)  Kaiser's ship is crewed by men facing debts and criminal charges back in civilization.  Kaiser himself is a brilliant engineer and scientist, but he loves money, and has come to Titan in order to win a prize offered by the Goddard Foundation to the first person to successfully travel to Saturn.  One reason he wants money is so he can offer to his niece Ursula, the only person in the Solar System he has any fond feelings for, a life of luxury.  Ursula is headstrong and brave, and to Kaiser's dismay has sneaked away from school to stow away on his ship and and thus accompanies her uncle and his band of scoundrels to Titan.

Ursula is a beautiful redhead and the plot of Sojarr of Titan now focuses on not only Kaiser's efforts to make sure he secures the reward which is rightfully Sojarr's, but a Vara-Sojarr-Ursula love triangle.  Vara and Ursula may be strong-willed women who are always ignoring what men tell them to do and jumping at the opportunity to chop somebody with a sword or burn a company of aliens to ashes with a ray gun, but I guess they aren't truly feminist figures because both of them fall in love with hunkalicious Sojarr within moments of laying eyes (blue for Vara, green for Ursula) on him.   

As soon as the doorway of her cabin was closed upon her, she was quite ready to die herself, or to kill others, for the pure purpose of defiant escape.  The sight of the ray thrower--a sovereign oxidizer and cutter of the toughest metal--was all she needed.

Besides the action stuff, Wellman throws us some science and technology content.  Kaiser and Sojarr's groups fight, Soajrr's forces routed by Terran high technology, and Ursula figures out the surprising origin of life and culture on Titan (Titan was colonized by Atlantis--the human Titanians are descendants of Atlanteans) and Kaiser and his fellow disreputable scientists work on exploiting an element unique to Titan that can foster the production of superior weapons and space craft.   

Hekta captures Ursula, and the Titanian and Terran humans make a truce.  Sojarr and Vara rescue Ursula and kill Hekta, and then the Terran debtors and criminals realize Kaiser is plotting to murder them so he can get all the money from the scientific discoveries on Titan.  In the final showdown Kaiser is slain, and Sojarr has to choose between the two beauties.

A fun pulp adventure.

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The March 1941 issue of Startling includes a "Scientific Crossword Puzzle" with clues like "Bacteria that require free oxygen for the maintenance of their vitality" and "Cryptogamous plant growing on the ground, decaying wood, rocks, etc."  In the letters column, known as "The Ether Vibrates," Harry Jenkins, Jerry Datlow and Arthur J. Burks praise Edmond Hamilton's A Yank at Valhalla (I blogged about it back in 2017.)  Datlow also liked Henry Kuttner's A Million Years to Conquer, as did Lee O'Connell, who tells us he is thirteen and has been reading SF since he was eight.  (I also blogged about A Million Years to Conquer AKA The Creature from Beyond Infinity back in 2017.)