Astounding July 1940: L R Hubbard, R A Heinlein, L del Rey and R M Williams

After four weird fiction blog posts in a row featuring ghosts, witches, voodoo and demons, let's shift gears and read stories from a magazine in whose pages we expect to see stories about science that speculate on what life will be like in the future, John W. Campbell Jr.'s Astounding.  The July 1940 issue prints the first story in L. Ron Hubbard's Kilkenny Cats series, and we'll take a gander at that, as well as stories by Robert A. Heinlein, Lester del Rey and Robert Moore Williams.  Nota bene: I am reading these stories in a scan of the World War II-era magazine, so my comments will not reflect any revisions to be found in later reprints.

"The Idealist" by L. Ron Hubbard

"The Idealist," which appears under the pen name Kurt von Rachen, begins with a long epigraph, an historical essay about the fall of Earth's aristocratic government in 2893 to a workers' revolution and the character of the succeeding government.  This epigraph, and the story that follows, illustrates the wisdom you will find in conservative magazines, that government is generally terrible but violently overthrowing the government will cause tremendous hardship and probably just open the door to an even worse government.  

The first third or so of the story proper, which is like twelve pages of text in total, is set in a crowded courtroom scarred by gunfire, where the judges of the new Communist government are passing sentence on their former allies in the workers' revolution, now their defeated rivals, the leaders of the different components of the Anarchist party.  The obese cigar-smoking head judge banters with the captive anarchists, physicist Jean Mauchard, labor leader Dave Blacker, and soldier Colonel Steve Gailbraith, Hubbard demonstrating how the commies are bloodthirsty monsters and the anarchists are brave idealists who made the error of underestimating the evil of their socialist allies and the gullibility of the masses.  These heroes of the revolution are too popular to execute out of hand, so the commies who have control of the government decide to exile them to planet Sereon in the Sirius system; they can sell this punishment to the mob as assigning them the noble task of colonizing another solar system.

The rest of "The Idealist" takes place on the star ship that is taking the captive anarchists to Sirius.  Our main character is Colonel Steve, and we get flashbacks to his military career before and after he joined the revolution.  He meets the beautiful Fredericka Stalton, a former communist propaganda minister who has also been sentenced to the Sereon expedition.  Heartbroken over the failure of the revolution to usher in a better world, Steve has lost his will to live, but Fredericka, who is one tough cookie with a passionate determination to survive this new ordeal, tries to snap him out of his funk. 

Fredericka alerts Steve to the fact that Dave Blacker and his working class followers have a plan to seize the ship from the commies and then murder the Anarchist Party's bourgeois and aristocratic elements, among whom are numbered Steve, Mauchard and herself.  Just as Blacker is about to commit his foul deed of murder, Steve uses his knowledge (gleaned from his service in the space navy before the revolution) of how the ship works to foil the mutiny and save himself and his fellow middle- and upper-class anarchists.  The story ends with a little speech from Steve about his regret at having supported the revolution that destroyed the good as well as bad elements of the old regime and his realization that the common people are incapable of self-rule and need strong government.  There is also the implication that Steve is going to take up the task of overthrowing the communist government and presumably become himself the strong ruler that he feels the common people need; maybe we'll see Steve perform this feat in the later Kilkenny Cats stories.

Acceptable.  We saw Hubbard pursue the argument that people need a strong leader when, nine years ago, we read his novel Final Blackout, which debuted in Astounding in early 1940.  I'm curious to see where Hubbard goes with this theme and these characters, so plan to read more of the Kilkenny Cats stories soon.

"The Idealist" doesn't seem to have been widely reprinted.  According to isfdb, the first book to reprint the Kilkenny Cats series as a whole was an Italian volume in 1980, I rebelli dell'universo; this was followed in 1992 by a small-run special edition from Author Services, Inc., a publisher associated with the Scientology organization. In 2019 "The Idealist" appeared independently of the other Kilkenny Cats tales in the 35th volume of the anthology series L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future.

"Coventry" by Robert A. Heinlein

"Coventry," one of the stories that make up Heinlein's Future History, collected in the thick 1967 volume The Past Through Tomorrow, bears some similarities to Hubbard's story in its structure and concerns.  "Coventry" begins in a court room in a future post-revolution world, where the hero, Dave MacKinnon, faces sentencing from a judge.  But the revolution is far in the past, and the future United States depicted in the story is a technocratic authoritarian utopia with synthetic food, scientific control of the weather where there is practically no poverty or crime--order is maintained by using advanced psychological techniques to alter the personalities of anybody who gets out of line.  Dave is just such a person, a literature professor (he's an expert on Zane Grey) who punched a guy in the face for insulting him.  Having been convicted of this trespass, Dave is given a choice--psychological adjustment, or, exile to the "reservation known as Coventry," which lies within the borders of the United States behind a forcefield.  Denouncing the utopian USA as a bore lacking any risk or excitement and inhabited by "weaklings with water in their veins," Dave chooses Coventry.

Reminding us readers of the themes of Heinlein's 1955 novel Tunnel in the Sky, Dave brings a lot of high-tech equipment and supplies with him beyond the forcefield but his fancy kit avails him little and is quickly lost to thieves so Dave has to rely on help from other people to survive and thrive in Coventry.

Dave had expected to find in Coventry an anarchistic utopia of rugged individualists living on independent homesteads, but instead Coventry consists of cities with even more tyrannical rulers than the USA he just left.  One of the two principal polities in Coventry is New America, a democratic republic with a corrupt and overweening government that levies crushing taxes and ruthlessly conscripts the menfolk into its periodic wars with the other major polity in Coventry, a monstrously totalitarian revolutionary surveillance state known as the Free State that is devoted to conquering New America, breaking out of Coventry and then conquering the world.  I guess these are like satiric versions of the USA and the Soviet Union.

Dave arrives in New America and has all his stuff seized by the government and then is thrown in jail.  He and a man who is apparently a career criminal, Fader Magee, break out of jail and Dave is welcomed into the criminal underground of New America.  When news filters down to the underworld that New America and the Free State may be aligning to bust through the forcefield and conquer the outer world (somebody in Coventry having apparently developed a new superweapon), Magee tries to sneak through the forcefield to warn the world, but is severely injured in the attempt.  Dave saves Magee's life by getting him to the best doctor in Coventry.  Doc has a well-read and attractive 15-year-old daughter, and it is suggested that Dave falls in love with her and it is his love for her that inspires him to sneak out of Coventry himself to warn the USA of the threat from Coventry.

In the end, we realize that Magee is a spy for the United States government and the whole super weapon-New America/Free State alliance threat is no big deal.  The "real" plot of "Coventry" isn't the adventure narrative in which Dave risks his life to save the world and impress a girl--though Heinlein does a good job presenting entertaining chase scenes and descriptions of perilous journeys--but Dave's psychological growth, as he builds human relationships, joins a community, and realizes that the technocratic and psychologically intrusive government of the USA is maybe not so bad as the alternatives and that life under it may actually provide opportunities to face challenges and experience risk, at least for special people like Magee and, it turns out, himself.

This is a pretty good story with effective adventure elements as well as speculative/satiric elements that are somewhat more subtle than we often see.  Heinlein presents both the pros and cons of the awesomely powerful government and of being a rebel, and unlike so many SF stories about rebel undergrounds in authoritarian states "Coventry" presents a paradigm shift that takes place not on the scale of nations or planets but on the scale of one man's mind.  I was also surprised by how much psychology was in the story; for example, Dave's psychological issues are blamed on his rigid father.  Heinlein often writes about liberty and authority and the tension between them, and it was interesting to see him depicting not just governmental and religious institutions as the locus of this tension, but the family, something I would be more likely to expect of his friend Theodore Sturgeon.

Besides in the many editions of The Past Through Tomorrow, you can find "Coventry" in the shorter Heinlein collection Revolt in 2100 and anthologies edited by Damon Knight--Beyond Tomorrow--and Groff Conklin--6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction, which has an uncharacteristically triumphant (rather than moody or creepy) Richard Powers cover.

"Dark Mission" by Lester del Rey

In 2014 I read Del Rey's famous story about a runaway atomic reactor, "Nerves;" I recall finding the story to be a drag, but looking at my blogpost about it, I see I was sort of generous.  A few months later I read del Rey's violent time travel story "I Am Tomorrow" and liked it better.  Better still was the del Rey piece I read in 2017, "Day is Done," the tragic tale of a Neanderthal victimized by gentrification.  In 2021 I read Del Rey's "Natural Advantage;" I don't actually remember anything about "Natural Advantage," but the documentary evidence indicates I found it "acceptable" and was reminded by it of Edmond Hamilton's space operas.

Let's see if "Dark Mission" can dethrone "Day is Done" and become my favorite del Rey story.  "Dark Mission" has been anthologized quite a lot, so there is reason to hope it is a good one.

"Dark Mission" is one of those stories in which the protagonist is suffering amnesia and doesn't know who he is so a major component of the plot is his quest to learn his own identity.  Our hero wakes up with a head injury in the woods near a dead body and a wrecked house, among the wreckage of which is a crashed rocket.  Was he in the rocket when it crashed?  Or was he in the house when the rocket hit it?  And who is the dead guy?  He can't remember anything! 

Our guy travels around, driven to do various things by obscure, but powerful, subconscious urges; he is able to accomplish these tasks thanks to some remarkable powers--when in proximity to other people his mind can absorb information from their brains, and they are none the wiser!  It becomes clear that he is an alien, a Martian, who has come to Earth to sabotage the human race's efforts to send a rocket to Mars, which are being spearheaded by a private man of means.  As the story ends we find that his mission is one of noble self-sacrifice--the people of Mars are being wiped out by an incurable plague, and he has come to Earth to prevent the human race from being infected by this disease and exterminated in turn.  Dying of plague himself, the hero not only has a limited amount of time in which to stop Earth's first space rocket from lifting off, but at the same time must take care not to infect any of the people he meets.

An entertaining story--it may actually be my favorite del Rey production!

"The Red Death of Mars" by Robert Moore Williams

In February of last year I read three of Robert Moore Williams' adventure novels, Jongor of Lost Land, The Return of Jongor, and Zanthar at Trip's End, and told my readers that two were bad and one was acceptable. I did, however, like his short stories "The Counterfeiter," and "Robots Return," so there's no need to write off this story before we read it.

"The Red Death of Mars" is a conventional adventure story, told with competence; I am judging it merely acceptable.

Eleven years ago Earthers first landed on Mars and discovered ancient cities bearing signs they were abandoned by the natives in desperate haste.  Just recently, an expedition led by the foremost of Earth's astronauts, Avery, left for an as yet unexplored Martian metropolis; HQ has lost contact with the Avery expedition and has sent a rescue ship to search for it, among the crew of which is Avery's son.

The rescuers discover that this city is different than the others--while also abandoned, it seems to be in good order, as if its inhabitants left with deliberation and expected to return.  Also, scattered all over the place are fragile red crystals that look like fist-sized rubies but shatter if roughly handled.

The astronauts find the men they have been sent to rescue--dead, with not a mark on their bodies.  Even more mysteriously, the nuclear reactor of their ship is not working, though it has suffered no visible damage.  After additional searching, the Earthers discover an underground chamber full of Martians, each of them in a pod in a state of suspended animation.

"The Red Death of Mars" has five chapters, and in chapter III it becomes obvious that the red crystals are the dormant cocoon-like form of monsters whose active form is as a cloud of gas.  These monsters feed on radioactivity, and killed the astronauts of the first expedition and crippled their vessel's nuclear reactor by sucking the radioactivity out of them.  (It is explained, not terribly convincingly, that the human heart requires radioactive potassium to beat and eliminating this radioactivity killed the men.)  The rest of the story describes the monsters' attack on the second expedition; the captain is incapacitated in the fighting and promotes the young Avery to command, who risks his life to revive a Martian who can offer advice on how to fight off the monsters.  

Though not actually bad, "The Red Death of Mars" is pretty pedestrian in plot and style.  A truly skilled writer, like Tanith Lee or Clark Ashton Smith or Jack Vance or Gene Wolfe, could have taken the obvious monster and horror material and made it legitimately disturbing, and Lee or Wolfe could also probably move you emotionally with all the business about young Avery's relationship with his hero father and his efforts to emulate dear old Dad when responsibility is thrust upon him, but Williams' treatment here is no more than adequate.  

Martin Greenberg (a different guy than the more famous anthologist Martin H. Greenberg) included "The Red Death of Mars" in his anthology Men Against the Stars, Donald Wollheim reprinted it in More Adventures on Other Planets, and it also appears in the anthology The Year After Tomorrow, edited by Lester del Rey, Cecile Matschat, and Carl Carmer.  Matschat and Carmer were successful mainstream writers with little other intercourse with the SF world, Matschat a geographer and botanist and Carmer a folklorist; both Carmer and Matschat wrote volumes of the Rivers of America series, which wikipedia is telling me was a big deal.

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The Heinlein and del Rey stories are actually good, the Hubbard is sort of interesting and the Williams is an acceptable bit of filler, so, a respectable batch of Golden Age SF about guys on dangerous journeys that throws some political theory and speculative science at you.

More Astounding next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.