We just read four stories from the December 1936 issue of Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales, stories about a werewolf, a guy who achieves vengeance from the afterlife, and Americans who make friends with foreigners and then get embroiled in deadly fights and encounters with monsters. But we still haven't read the story in that issue by that African-born historian of America's Old South, Manly Wade Wellman. Let's tackle that story today, plus two other Wellman tales published in 1936, one from F. Orlin Tremaine's Astounding and one from Argosy, a magazine founded in 1882 and which, according to wikipedia at least, became the first pulp magazine in 1896 when its publishers switched to cheap paper and devoted its entire contents to fiction targeting a male audience.
"Outlaws on Callisto"
"Outlaws on Callisto" is a traditional pirate story with science fiction trappings. It is the 28th century, and having colonized the inner planets, the human race is starting to colonize the moons of Jupiter. Wellman suggests that, in the same way the discovery and colonization of the New World led to piracy and revolutionary wars, the development of settlements on Ganymede has led to space piracy and political unrest.
Our hero is Captain Tarrant. The freighter he is commanding is boarded by the ruthless crew of a pirate ship; in the fight all members of the freighter's crew are killed save Tarrant, who is knocked out in the fight; the freighter's sole passenger, a woman in a concealing cloak, is spared so the pirates can gang rape her. When Tarrant comes to, the pirates ask him to join their crew, and he agrees, demanding that the woman be his sole property. The pirate captain thinks the pirates should share the woman, and he and Tarrant fight a duel with their "ray sabers" to decide the issue. After Tarrant, an expert fencer, kills the pirate captain, the woman throws off her cloak and reveals herself to be the leader of the entire pirate fleet, daughter of the man who founded the pirate community and set up the secret pirate base on Callisto. Her name is Jahree but the pirates all call her "Herself" as a sign of respect. She is happy to have a skilled fighter, pilot, and good-looking gentleman like Tarrant as part of her pirate empire, and Tarrant goes along with the gag.
The sciency stuff in "Outlaws on Callisto" involves how a tiny bit of atmosphere is to be found on barren Callisto, deep underground in a cavern accessible through a narrow gorge; Jahree's Dad found this unexpected supply of breathable air and the failure of government scientists to theorize its existence has meant the authorities have never looked for the pirate base on Callisto, nor discovered that Callisto has a native population of seven-foot-tall shaggy people. At the base, Tarrant meets the various pirate captains, most of them human, save a Martian scientist, a skinny guy with toad-like features who has hypnotic powers, synthesizes all the supplies the pirates need from raw materials mined from the moon, conducts experiments on the native Callistans to increase their intelligence, and has developed an invisibility device.
All this stuff is sort of interesting, and the story has tension (at least for me) because I wondered if Tarrant was going to figure out a way to alert the authorities of the location of the buccaneers' base and end the pirate menace or if he would refrain from doing so because he has the hots for Jahree or for some other reason. But then the narrative hits a boring spot as Wellman spends multiple pages explaining and depicting card playing, including not only poker but a game of the future presumably of Wellman's own devise. Tarrant beats the Martian in a hand of poker and wins a slave from the scientist, a native Callistan who can read, write and understand the spoken word but not speak. Tarrant frees the giant hairy alien, who stays on as a sort of servant.
(I probably don't have to say it, but in the same way the ray sabers reminded me of the traditional weapon of the Jedi, this shaggy guy reminded me of Chewbacca.)
The Martian scientist is tired of living on the barren moon, and tries to make friends with Tarrant in hopes they can team up to rebel against Jahree and the pirates. At the same time, Jahree is sick of being leader of a murderous criminal operation and wants Tarrant, the closest thing to a decent man she has met in ages, to take over the pirate fleet and be her boyfriend.
“I’m sick of being chieftainess. I’ve held the job because it was the only way to keep louts like Fetcho and Sam and the others at their distance. Now you’re here. You can stand up for me — I can be just a woman.”There follows a series of tricks and double crosses as Tarrant, with the indispensable help of his huge hairy servant, outwits and outfights the Martian scientist and the human pirate officers and takes control of the pirate fleet, which he then hands over to the government. As for Jahree, she is in love with Tarrant, and he is in love with her, but circumstances are such that a relationship is impossible--Tarrant pulls the trigger on the missile launcher that shoots down her ship over Ganymede and after Tarrant digs her out of the wreckage she dies in his arms.
Though it has never been reprinted, "Outlaws on Callisto" is actually a good adventure story with interesting fights, somewhat edgy sexual content, characters that are memorably distinct from each other in personality and background and who each pursue their goals in a rational fashion, and various entertaining scientific elements. The story also has an ideology we might call conservative--Tarrant's priority is to fulfill his duty to others, to society, whatever the cost, while Jahree demonstrates the belief that what women really want is a relationship with a take-charge kind of guy who has just the kind of code of honor that Tarrant has. I like that Wellman doesn't romanticize the pirates as rebels against an unjust society or whatever, and that Tarrant and Jahree don't get a cheap happy ending together--Tarrant has to pay a price for doing the right thing and Jahree is punished for her horrible crimes.
"Space Station No. 1"
I'm reading "Space Station No. 1" in a scan of a paperback edition of My Best Science Fiction Story, where it appears with a foreword by Wellman.
"Space Station No. 1" has a lot in common thematically with "Outlaws on Callisto." We've got space pirates with a secret weapon, a woman who wants the love of a man above all, and a guy who is dedicated to his duty above all and who succeeds in his time of desperate need because of the actions of a dependable and courageous non-human who has been augmented by high technology.
The scene of the action is a space station in the same orbital path as Mars, but on the exact opposite point of that orbit from the red planet, with the sun lying between them. As this story tells it, the distance between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter is so great that space ships can only travel between the red planet and the colonies on the Jovian moons when the two planets are at their closest proximity ("conjunction") which only happens every two Earth years. The space station permits such trips to occur twice as often.
Service on this space station is considered so onerous (by humans, at least) that the two men there now are a Martian who likes being there and our protagonist Everitt, an ordinary schlub who has been exiled to the station because he had the temerity to date the daughter of the "director-general" of the corporation that owns the space station and manages the space merchant marine, a young woman named Fortuna.
The station is approaching conjunction with Jupiter when a space ship arrives from the direction of Earth earlier than expected. It is not one of the expected freighters, but a new fangled vessel, a warship faster and with better ray weapons than any ship Everitt has ever seen. In command of the ship, to Ev's amazement, is his hot girlfriend Fortuna! Fortuna has sprung some patients from an insane asylum who had space experience and stole this prototype super-ship so she could liberate Everitt from exile; her plan is that she and Ev hide in Brazil or Africa and live out their lives together in anonymity and peace in the Third World where her rich powerful father can never find them.
Forunta has some bad news coming--Ev is a gentleman, and refuses to abandon his post and put the colonies orbiting Jupiter at risk and the entire economy of the solar system in disarray. Even worse, the men Fortuna released from the loony bin and armed with all different kinds of slug-throwing and ray-projecting small arms--as well as the solar system's top warship--don't want to go to Africa or Brazil (and who can blame them?) but instead plan to rape Fortuna and then make themselves dictators of the Jovian colonies.
Ev's Martian buddy joins up with the mental cases but it is a sham--the Martian neutralizes the rank-and-file space pirates and saves Fortuna from becoming a sex toy for mental patients and sets things up so Ev can have a final conclusive fight with the pirates' leader. The Martian even tells the government that Fortuna didn't lead the space pirates' effort to hijack the prototype warship but was rather kidnapped by them, and he gives Everitt all the credit for slaying the pirates and recovering the lost ship so that the director-general gives his blessing to the marriage of Everitt and Fortuna. What a guy that Martian is!
This is a fun space adventure. The science stuff is interesting, including the Martian, who is a kind of genetically engineered cyborg, a Martian uplifted so he can live among humans and is in fact deracinated, alienated from his own people--if you are in grad school you could compare him to a "house n*****" or to an Uncle Tom or a "Magic Negro" or something like that, in an American context, or, in a broader imperial context, to an Indian or African serving the British or French colonizers, a man who embraces the materially superior culture of the outsiders and abandons his own native culture and people. The action scenes--the various ways Ev and the Martians kill the pirates--are exciting; for example, Everitt and the pirate leader fight in zero gee in the vacuum of space, struggling not only to kill each other but to avoid drifting so far from the station that they are doomed. Feminists might not like that Fortuna's actions are all driven by her desire to be with a man, and that her scheme is mind bogglingly stupid (giving the space navy's most advanced weapons to inmates from a madhouse?) but at least she is brave and resourceful.
Thumbs up for "Space Station No. 1."
"The Theater Upstairs"
Jan Luther is a good-looking guy, a Hollywood actor. Years ago, he abandoned his girlfriend, successful actress Georgia Wattell, and she killed herself. Today Luther and our narrator are wandering around Lower Manhattan, and in a district full of shops run by immigrants, they find a tiny cinema showing one of Wattell's films. They go into the theater and watch the film, one neither of them recognizes. We readers quickly realize that this is no ordinary film--the actors on the screen are ghosts, and they conspire to wreak a deadly vengeance on Luther, the man who broke Wattell's heart.
Short and to the point, well-written and effective. Thumbs up!
Three good stories--my respect for Wellman is really growing. It is also interesting that all three of today's stories have plots largely set into motion by women's extravagant behavior in search of love, and all feature men animated by animalistic lust. Wasn't one of the complaints of the New Wavers that "old" science fiction didn't include sex? (See Harlan Ellison's review of Barry Malzberg's Herovit's World in a 1974 issue of F&SF.) Like the Pre-Raphaelites, who produced great work but whose criticisms of the Renaissance painters and the 18th-century painters against whom they performatively rebelled could be pretty dumb, I suspect the New Wavers, much of whose work is good, have presented people with a caricatured view of the SF writers who preceded them. Secondary sources are not to be trusted, even those produced by intelligent and well-read people like Ellison and Malzberg--to learn about SF before the New Wave or before the atomic bomb or whatever dividing line you choose, you have to actually read those old magazines and anthologies, and thanks to the internet archive, luminist.org and annas-archive.org, today you can easily do so, something many people in 1974 could not easily do. And if your taste is at all like mine, you will find many of those old stories are very fun, like today's three tales by Manly Wade Wellman.
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