Space Captain by Murray Leinster

He was filled with remarkable emotions.  Marian was again out of a predicament in which the folly of other men had involved her.  He and he alone had proved capable of action to get her out.  He was succeeding.

It's time to read some Ace Doubles! Way back in early 2016 I read Philip E. High's The Mad Metropolis in its Ace Double 1966 incarnation.  Let's flip M-135 over and start this series of examinations of Ace Doubles with Murray Leinster's Space Captain. We've got a fun astronaut-with-camera-and-rifle cover by Gray Morrow, and on the first page of the text a beautiful drawing (maybe by Jack Gaughan?) of a back lit astronaut in free fall which I absolutely love; unfortunately some sort of printing error mars my copy's reproduction of this illustration.

Alright, on to the text itself.  It is several centuries in the future, and mankind has colonized much of the galaxy.  Space pirates are making trade impossible in the Pleiads star cluster, but the owners of the starship Yarrow hire Captain Trent to skipper the Yarrow on a trading mission to the Pleiads--he and the owners can make some serious mullah if he can pull off this risky operation, and because the Yarrow has been equipped with a secret weapon that can hopefully turn the tables on the rapacious pirates, the owners think Trent has a good chance of success.

The secret weapon may not be all it is cracked up to be, but Trent uses various ruses and improvised weapons and he and his crew, over the course of two naval battles and a climactic commando raid, defeat the pirates and bring peace to the Pleiads.  Trent finds time in this 105-page tale to fall in love with Marian, the daughter of a planetary president.

Leinster seems to have conceived of this story after reading some books about maritime history--the Trent family has been in the captain business for a thousand years or so, and everything that happens in the novel is compared to merchant shipping in the 18th-century or naval warfare during the World Wars:

The report of a reading on the drive detector was equivalent to a bellowed "Sail ho!" from a sailing brig's crosstrees.  Trent's painstaking use of signal-analysis instruments was equal to his ancestor's going aloft to use his telescope on a minute speck at the horizon.

Trent's several-times-great grandfather would have kept his crew chipping paint or tightening or slacking off stays to adjust to differences of humidity from day to day. 

It was possible for him to maneuver in a fashion peculiarly like a submarine--one of those fabulous weapons of the last wars on Earth--submerging to get out of sight.... 

A book about a starship on a dangerous voyage getting involved in battles, inspired by real life tales of the high seas, is a great idea, and particularly appealing to me: over the course of my life I've read numerous books about Drake, Cook, Bligh, and Nelson, and about WWII naval and aerial warfare, as well as a stack of those Patrick O'Brian novels, and, during the life of this blog, two different novels (The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat and H.M.S. Ulysses by Alstair MacLean) about Royal Navy officers serving in the Second World War.  So it is very disappointing to find this book's solid idea and serviceable plot undermined by its very poor style.

I've read four novels by Leinster in the past, and I wasn't really expecting Space Captain to be well written, but I was astonished at how badly written it was--it is like some of the student papers I've had to read in my career on the fringes of academia. Sentences are short but vague instead of direct, and important information is withheld for no narrative reason.  Other pieces of information are provided to us again and again, as if Leinster thinks we might have forgotten what he told us just one page ago. The same words and phrases are used again and again, and the same metaphors crop up repeatedly.  I wondered if an amateur had ghost-written this thing, or if Leinster had had to lengthen an earlier draft (Space Captain first appeared in 1965 as a serial entitled Killer Ship spread across two issues of Amazing, and a note on the publication page of my copy of this Ace edition informs us that the Amazing version was shorter) and did so by just peppering the text with superfluous verbiage.  I also considered the possibility that Leinster, almost 70 when Killer Ship appeared in Amazing, was getting a little senile when he wrote it.

The characters in Space Captain are totally lifeless; they have no personality, their motives barely register, and the stuff they do sometimes makes little sense. Everybody in the novel, excepting Trent, acts like an imbecile.  The crew members of the Yarrow aren't even given names, and the romance between Trent (whose first name we never learn) and Marion is so perfunctory that I don't even know why it was included.  The novel has no human feeling, and the pacing is totally flat; Space Captain reads like a bland newspaper story about colorless people you've never heard of and will never hear about again.

Thumbs down, I'm afraid.

Another Ace Double in our next episode!  (Let's hope something better!)

Four stories from 1955's Operation Future: Sturgeon, Leinster, Bixby, and Kuttner & Moore

Last week I purchased Operation Future, a 1955 anthology edited by Groff Conklin and put out by Permabooks, with the last pennies remaining on the Half-Price Books gift card I got as a Christmas gift.  Having just read a bunch of deliberately innovative stories from the 1970s, let's check out some stories from the late '40s and early '50s by Theodore Sturgeon, Murray Leinster, Jerome Bixby and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore; perhaps these are the sorts of stories that laid the foundations for that 1970s work, or the sort of stories those "Me Decade" writers were rebelling against.

"The Education of Drusilla Strange" by Theodore Sturgeon (1954)

Editor Groff Conklin's introduction to this novella (it's like 36 pages here) made me laugh; in my last blog post we witnessed Barry Malzberg make the case that after ten years or so a SF writer should retire because he is out of ideas.  But Conklin here, comparing "The Education of Drusilla Strange" with Sturgeon's 1940 "Derm Fool," tells us that Sturgeon has "matured in the short space of 14 years, both in writing ability and in richness of conceptual grasp."  I suppose these assessments are not mutually exclusive (a guy could write the same basic story again and again for 15 years and get better at it with practice), but Conklin and Malzberg certainly seem to have contrasting attitudes about whether an enduring career leads to growth or degeneration.

A spaceship drops a beautiful naked woman off on the seashore--she is an alien with psychic powers and sophisticated science and engineering knowledge, exiled to our pathetic and disgusting planet of Earth for the crime of murder!  Not only does she have to live among us ignorant schlubs, but alien torture satellites beam down into her mind the beautiful music and art of her sophisticated homeworld, a painful reminder of all she has lost!

"The Education of Drusilla Strange" first
appeared in Galaxy 

"The Education of Drusilla Strange" is a quite good story that takes the adage "behind every great man is a great woman" and runs with it.  The plot is solid, and full of surprises; Sturgeon gets you to believe one thing about the alien exile or her homeworld or some other character, and then later pulls the rug right out from under you, telling you that the opposite is true. He does this in such a way that it doesn't feel like a cheap trick, but comes as a pleasant surprise that feels quite natural.

The alien, who takes the name of Drusilla Strange, thanks to her superior brain, ultra keen senses and mind reading abilities, has no trouble fitting into Earth society and making a decent living.  She takes up with a musician, Chandler Behringer, and, by designing a superior guitar and amplification system and even doing clandestine surgery on his arm to give him greater dexterity, succeeds in making him the world's finest guitarist!  She has an ulterior motive in doing this that reflects how miserable she is on Earth--she manipulates Chandler into projecting her own alien-style music back up at the torture satellites in hopes this act of insubordination will trigger a bombardment from the satellite which will put her out of her misery!

Fortunately for everybody, another exiled alien, Luellen Mullings, whom Drusilla initially thought was a vacuous trophy wife, saves the day.  Luellen, who is married to a novelist whom she has been shepherding to greatness, reveals the truth to Drusilla about their homeworld (it is decadent and corrupt and in terminal decline) and the Earth (it is young and vital, the "hope of the Galaxy") and how she can enjoy her life on Earth, and contribute to Earth's rise to greatness.  It turns out that Earth's history is full of alien exile women who have been inspiring human men to heroic deeds! A hopeful and happy ending, though I presume one which will not meet today's standards for thinking about gender roles.

All the little scenes and elements are good (Drusilla's reactions to Earth technology and customs are engaging), and the story as a whole is well-paced and constructed.  I really enjoyed ol' Ted's work here--this may now be my favorite thing by Sturgeon! (Feel free to check out the many ups and downs in my relationship with Sturgeon over the course of this blog's life!)

"Cure for a Ylith" by Murray Leinster (1949)

It looks like it has been over three years since I have read anything by Leinster.  "Cure for a Ylith" is one of those traditional SF stories in which a scientist uses high technology and trickery to resolve the plot and achieve his goals and trigger a paradigm shift in his society, and it is pretty good.

"Cure for a Ylith" first saw print in
Startling Stories; behold the Chrysler Building!

Planet Loren has suffered under the tyranny of the monarchy for centuries.  Garr, a medical researcher, is one of the tiny handful of Lorenian subjects permitted to travel to another planet via the interstellar teleporter system.  He returns to Garr after two years on Yorath, bringing with him a new device.  The device, he tells people, is able to pick up transmissions of such low power that they have never been detected before.  When people test out the device (by putting on a headset) they report that they have had conversations with deceased relatives--the device apparently allows communication with the immortal souls of the dead!  Good people who use the machine receive comfort and advice from their relations in the afterlife, while people who have misbehaved receive dire warnings of punishment!

Garr finds himself in the royal court after being called upon to help treat one of the King's pet monsters (the "Ylith" of the title.)  He makes sure that the King learns of the Yorathian device and tests it out himself.  This results in catastrophic internecine warfare among the palace guard and aristocracy--among the two million dead are the King and almost all his flunkies.  The monarchy collapses, hopefully to be replaced by a more responsible government.

As Garr explains in the final scene of the story, the Yorathian machine doesn't really communicate with the dead--it brings to vivid life the user's superego, personified as a trusted deceased relative.  (This sounds kind of dumb as I type it, but I felt like it worked as I read the story.)  The King's warped superego warned him of traitors among the elite, inspiring an attempted purge that set off the fighting.

Leinster does a good job of quickly sketching out his setting and characters, economically bringing it all to life.  I also like the plot.  "Cure for a Ylith" is a solid piece of work; can it be time for me to explore the unread Leinster books I have on my shelf: Quarantine World, Space Captain and The Greks Bring Gifts?  

"The Holes Around Mars" by Jerome Bixby (1954)

"The Holes Around Mars" first appeared in
Galaxy

Bixby's is a pretty prominent name in SF, but I am not very familiar with his work.  He of course wrote the immortal classic "It's a Good Life;" I also enjoyed "Vengeance on Mars" a few years ago, as well as some of the films he contributed to, so I welcome a chance to become better acquainted with him.

"The Holes Around Mars" follows the investigation of strange geological phenomena on the Martian surface by the first Earth expedition to the red planet.  I'm afraid readers will figure out the answer to the mystery long before the scientists and astronauts do.  I'd judge this story a little slight and kind of silly (a main theme of the tale is the puns made by the expedition's leader, and there is even a "he was so scared he shit his pants" joke) but it is a pleasant entertainment and I'm giving it a passing grade.

"Project" by "Lewis Padgett" (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore) (1947)

"Project" is the main reason I bought Operation Future; I am keen on Kuttner and Moore, and a quick look at isfdb on my battered iphone while at the store indicated that this story has appeared in no other book.

It is the 21st century, and the world is ruled by an autocratic "Global Unit;" only a tyrannical one-world government, it is believed, can keep a lid on nuclear power and prevent the rise of dangerously powerful mutants (homo superior), the product of limited atomic wars.  The Global Unit, however, is not truly in charge--it accepts without question the advice of the scientists of the secretive Council at Mar Vista General.

The people, and some Senators of the Global Unit, are sick of the lack of transparency into the doings of the eggheads who truly rule the world from Mar Vista; no outsider has ever been allowed inside the facility since the foundation of the current governmental system.  So the most pugnacious of the Senators, Mitchell, insists on being allowed to investigate the secretive campus, and his findings will be broadcast to the world instantly from his little hand transmitter!

"Project" first saw publication in an issue of
Astounding with a typo on its cover (or is this issue
perhaps an artifact from a slightly different
alternate universe where Canadian SF writers
have subtly different pen names?)

The scientists are afraid that the truth of their work will cause a revolution and they will all be lynched by the ignorant masses. And what is this truth?  Well, not only did they engineer that whole limited atomic war business to increase their own power, but they have kept one of the dangerous homo superior mutants alive, in a sort of suspended animation which prevents it from maturing; they have been picking its brain, passing off its brilliant ideas as their own, while keeping it from reaching its full, world-shattering potential.  Luckily, they are mere hours from activating a super weapon which will give them total power; if they can just distract and delay Mitchell for a few hours they will have absolute control and be able to ignore any attack that may come from the Global Unit's military apparatus, much less a lynch mob.

Just after Mitchell, being held at gunpoint by one of the boffins, learns how much the Mar Vista scientists have been manipulating the rest of the world for decades, the ostensibly retarded homo superior reveals that he in turn has been manipulating the scientists!  He has only been pretending to be retarded, and has in fact achieved his full potential!  This superman will now take over the world, controlling the aforementioned super weapon and infiltrating its homo superior offspring among the homo sapiens populace until homo sapiens is extinct.

This story is disappointing; no wonder "Project" doesn't appear in any later anthologies!  It has no human feeling; it takes no ideological stand for or against human liberty or for or against the rise of homo superior; all the characters are bland and uninteresting.  The whole thing comes off as a boring history lecture about a complicated series of events you can't bring yourself to care about.  Too bad!

**********

Both the Sturgeon and the Kuttner and Moore stories include shocking revelations that flip what we thought was going on 180 degrees, but Sturgeon's twists feel natural and are closely tied to believable and touching characters, while the twists in "Project" had me asking, "Who cares?"

Sturgeon's "The Education of Drusilla Strange" is the stand out here, while the Leinster and Bixby are fun entertainments.  The Kuttner and Moore is worse than filler, it is a waste of time.  Sad, but true.

There are 15 more pieces in Operation Future, and we'll read some of them before the book goes back on the shelf.

Two early 1950s short stories by C. M. Kornbluth: "The Altar at Midnight" and "The Adventurer"

On March 12 of this year I explained why I avoid Cyril Kornbluth's work and panned his famous and influential story "The Marching Morons."  But I try to keep an open mind at this here blog, so today I read two more Kornbluth stories, both available for free to all us cheapskates at gutenberg.org.  The gutenberg versions are the original magazine versions, and include the original art by Freas and Ashman.

"The Altar at Midnight" (1952)  

This is sort of a hard-boiled story set in the Skid Row of some Earth town.  The narrator meets a spaceship crew member in a strip bar and takes him to a different bar, one inhabited by crippled drunks who enjoy telling the stories of how they were crippled working for the railroad.  The spacer explains how the regular changes in air pressure and the hard radiation in space have damaged his body, how being a spacer is risky, gets you involved in trouble with women, damages relationships with your family, weakens your religious faith, coarsens your morals, etc.  It turns out that the narrator is the scientist who made space travel possible.  He feels guilty about his accomplishment, because of how rough space travel is on people and (it is hinted) because Earth's Cold War tensions have spread to the moon (where there is some kind of missile base) and maybe Mars and Venus.  

The story is short and to the point, which I appreciated.  Its pessimism about space travel reminded me of Murray Leinster's Other Side of Nowhere (1964) and Edmond Hamilton's "What's it Like Out There?", also published in 1952.  Then there is the story's bleak view of the railroad.  It is remarkable how many science fiction writers and stories express ambiguous or even hostile attitudes towards technological advances - in just the last few days I read L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout (1940), in which he blamed modern war on "machinery," and of course there are many more examples, even before talk about pollution and ecology and the environment became de rigueur around 1970.  

"The Altar at Midnight" is an effective story, even if you aren't some kind of Luddite who thinks that the locomotive and rocket ship were a mistake.  It is economical, the tone is consistent, and the style is not bad.  It is no great masterpiece, but it is worth reading.

"The Adventurer" (1953)

In the future the United States (called "the Republic") is a tyrannical hereditary monarchy, wracked by coup attempts and fights among the elite over succession, perhaps reminiscent of the struggles for succession we see in the Roman Empire.  The United States is still locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union; this conflict has extended out into the solar system, including on Io, which is half Soviet and half Republican.  The story follows events in Washington among the politicians and on Io, where a shooting war breaks out and a charismatic young officer becomes a hero.  Like Caesar or Napoleon, the young man turns on the Republic and makes himself ruler.  It is revealed that his rise was engineered by patriotic conspirators who wanted to end the current political system, but instead of embracing the conspirators, the young officer, who declares himself a god, has them all executed.

This story seems pointless.  The satirical elements, the adventure elements, and the trick ending elements are all weak.  Was Kornbluth just projecting a silly romantic theory of history (that on occasion great men rise up to take over and revive moribund empires) onto the future in order to ridicule it?      

Embedded in the story is an interesting idea, a future art form whose main focus is not line or form or color or composition (as in a painting or sculpture) but texture; one doesn't appreciate these art objects primarily by looking at them but instead by touching them.  I guess this is maybe a joke, perhaps an ironic reference to money (the art objects are called "fingering pieces") but I found it the most memorable part of a weak story.

***************

So, one average story and one poor story.  There is a third Kornbluth piece available at gutenberg, The Syndic, but it is a full length novel and I'm not feeling up to it after the almost useless "The Adventurer."  The Syndic in 1986 received a Prometheus Award for being a "Classic Libertarian SF novel," which is intriguing, so I will probably read it someday, but not today.   

The Devil Is Dead by R. A. Lafferty

This is an unusual piece of work that makes no effort to be realistic (critics often describe Lafferty’s writing as being like “a tall tale”) and at times is self-consciously difficult. The introduction, which is titled “Promantia,” even ends with the lines, “Is that not an odd introduction? I don’t understand it at all.”

The plot of the first half of The Devil is Dead consists of the voyage of the ship Brunhilde, among whose passengers are numbered: the Devil; Anastasia, a Greek woman who claims to be a mermaid; Marie, a murdereress and some kind of leftist scold (she considers “being a lady” and “happily-ever-after” to be “bourgeois conceits,” and thinks good and evil are merely superstitions); and the main character, Finnegan, a “bugle-nosed dago with an Irish moniker,” who is not only a talented painter and draughtsman but has clairvoyant powers (Finnegan reads a letter through a sealed envelope, and has lots of hunches and premonitions.)

The novel starts with Finnegan coming to his senses, but not knowing where he is, what time of year it is, his own name or that of his companion, Saxon X. Seaworthy, millionaire ship owner. I didn’t know if Finnegan was an angel, a demon, a drunk, or a metaphor for a human soul just about to set out on life’s journey. Several times throughout the novel characters claim that Finnegan is not one of the “regular people” but one of “the other people.” Finnegan tells Seaworthy that he has “an upper life and a lower life,” and Seaworthy responds “Who hasn’t! All of our sort indulge in amnesia….” Late in the book Finnegan implies that if he, and his kind, don’t like people, they set them on fire (page 139). Does this mean Finnegan is a (fallen?) angel? On page 27 the third person narrator declares that there are two sorts of people in the world, those who belong with “such as Finnegan and Anastasia... with all good people everywhere…” and the “wrong sort” who “belong in Hell.”

Soon Seaworthy’s vessel, the Brunhilde, is under weigh (or perhaps underway.) Finnegan and his companions sail around the world, following the coast from Texas south along Latin America then across the Atlantic to Africa and north to Europe. The ship stops at every port, and in each port the Devil does his work – Finnegan, reading the newspapers, realizes that each town they visit is stricken, a few days later, by mass murder, riots, or similar large scale mayhem. The crew and passengers of the Brunhilde split into hostile factions and become embroiled in a sneaky back-stabbing fight against each other which culminates in a tremendous firefight in Greece with WWII rifles and machine guns. Anastasia and the Devil are among the dead, while Seaworthy, apparently the leader of the victorious faction, and Finnegan, who sat the fight out, survive.

In the second half of the book Finnegan seeks revenge on Seaworthy, whom he blames for the death of Anastasia, but when Seaworthy survives Finnegan’s attack, Finnegan flees across the United States, a squad of murderers on his tail. The page count of this part of the book largely consists of strange and amusing stories not directly connected to the Brunhilde/Finnegan/Seaworthy plot at all, stories about and told by the various characters Finnegan meets while on the run.

The identities of the characters in The Devil is Dead, and their statuses, are always in flux. People in the novel often die, are buried, and then reappear, so much so that on page 118 (of a 224 page book) Finnegan declares, “I become a little impatient with people who are supposed to be dead and who keep reappearing. It loses its humor after a while.” Characters have multiple names, characters who look alike impersonate each other, characters change appearance, different characters share names. I was often wondering if a character was a human, or an angel, or a devil, or The Devil. There is even a hint that Finnegan, Seaworthy, and some other characters are members or descendents of a Lovecraftian “old race” which ruled the Earth before mankind and is still pulling the strings behind the scenes. (Even though much of Lafferty’s references and themes seem to be Christian, by mentioning A. E. Van Vogt and Murray Leinster on page 164 he seems to invite the reader to think in SF categories.)

A large part of the appeal of The Devil is Dead comes from the fact that Lafferty fills the novel with odd jokes, jokes which hover between the “bad” and “bad enough that they are good” categories. There are also cryptic references and what appear to be parodies of epigrammatic wisdom. Two examples:

A description of Anastasia’s grandmother:

She was vital and pretty, she had been prettier than Anastasia Granddaughter, though fairly destitute. She would have been able to feed a small family of visiting mice, but that was all. She wouldn’t have been able to feed a large family of visiting mice.

A description of a Greek mountaintop at night:

The moon lacked a week of being full, but the night was very bright. Here on top was nothing but rocks and gnarled old branches and stump trees. That is the way the top of the world always looks. But by Greek moon it was even stranger. Moonlight is different in Greece. As you know, it was the Greeks who invented the moon.

I read the 1971 Avon paperback (V2406) with the black Bosch-style cover. The history of the book seems almost as crazy as the story it tells. According to Wikipedia two portions of the book are missing from this edition, including the final chapter, which the publisher didn’t receive in time. I get the idea this is a relatively rare paperback; I paid almost ten times the cover price for it at Half Price Books; luckily the cover price is 75 cents.

I enjoyed The Devil is Dead and recommend it. It is unconventional, but once I fell into step with Lafferty’s style it felt comfortable, I laughed at many of the jokes, and even the Promantia was explicable when I reread it after finishing the novel. Readers interested in literary SF, Roman Catholic SF, or books you have to “figure out” should definitely give it a whirl.

Three Murray Leinster novels

Besides The Other Side of Nowhere, which I finished today, I have read three Leinster novels.  All are worth reading for fun or to learn about SF history, though none are without flaws and none made a lasting impression on me. 

Operation: Outer Space

I read Operation: Outer Space in early 2012, and posted the Amazon review below on February 2 of that year. I obviously enjoyed reading the book, but today I can’t remember anything about it.

Operation: Outer Space is a fun sf novel, published in 1954. Through a strange concatenation of events, a TV producer comes to organize man's first trip to another planet. Leinster, with admirable economy, creates an interesting future Earth, likable characters, and sends them on an interesting journey, from Earth, to a space station, to a small moon colony, and then out of the solar system. There is quite a bit of material about TV programming, psychology, and biology that may be outdated, but this does not detract from the book's charm.

I read Signet Q5300, with the very cool astronauts on the cover.

The Forgotten Planet

In September 2011 I read The Forgotten Planet, and posted this review on Amazon on September 13. Whereas I praised the economy of Operation: Outer Space, in my review of Forgotten Planet I rap poor Murray on the knuckles for writing a book that is too long and repetitive. That said, I do remember several scenes from Forgotten Planet, while I remember none from Operation: Outer Space.

I read an e-book version of Murray Leinster's The Forgotten Planet, appearing in Planets of Adventure, edited by Eric Flint and Guy Gordon. I believe it is the same text as the 1954 edition published by Gnome Press, but I can't vouch for that.

Looking around the internet for a few minutes leads me to believe that Forgotten Planet is a beloved classic that generally receives glowing reviews, but I am going to have to play dissenter here. The style is acceptable, the plot not bad, but the book is two or three times longer than necessary, and gets very repetitive. Most of the book consists of the protagonist, an illiterate savage, fighting against or fleeing from giant arthropods. There must be 30 or 40 fights with ants, spiders, mantises, crayfish, wasps, etc. An even dozen would have been sufficient. Leinster breaks up the narrative a bit by relating some biological facts about insects and doing some theorizing about the psychology and sociology of primitive people and their rise to civilization.

Space Tug

I read the free Gutenberg version of Leinster's 1953 novel Space Tug, I think over three years ago. This was the book I had in mind when I tweeted that Leinster was “pleasant but forgettable,” and I don’t recall much about it.  A search through my archives has not turned up any notes, so I don’t have much to say. I believe there are Cold War elements, with the Soviet Union trying to blockade or destroy the world’s first space station, and that one of the heroes of the novel is a Native American astronaut (called "Chief" by his friends, as you might expect), so SF scholars interested in Cold War issues and race/ethnicity issues might want to peruse it.

 

The Other Side of Nowhere by Murray Leinster

Recently I had a brief twitter exchange with other SF fans about Murray Leinster in which it was suggested that Leinster’s work is pleasant but forgettable.  I had an unread Leinster, The Other Side of Nowhere (Berkley 1964, F918), on my shelf, so I dug it out and over the last two days have read and enjoyed its 142 pages.

Interestingly, Leinster in this novel portrays interstellar travel in the far future as a dreadful experience.  Space ship crew members are crude brutes who never ship out on the same vessel twice because they routinely grow to hate each other over the course of a single voyage.  It is against the law to bring weapons on a space ship, but most crew members and officers carry a blaster or a knife to defend themselves from each other.  Leinster repeatedly describes conditions in a space ship as being like a prison, and the design of a space ship as not streamlined, but bulbous and ungraceful.  During an interstellar voyage the officers and crew have little to do because the ship basically flies itself, and spacemen do not love a space ship the way sailors traditionally love their boats and ships, perhaps Leinster’s commentary on the psychological cost of our automated, mechanized society.

The ship on which the story takes place is the largest ever built, and is on a dangerous mission, carrying the heaviest cargo in galactic history and planning to land on an uncivilized planet not via the usual foolproof force field, but on old-fashioned rockets.  The captain is grossly obese, and the crew, five thugs, tries to beat up the main character, who is signing up to be the ship’s second in command, on the second page of the book.  Luckily the main character is better at fighting than the crew, because he is from a high-gravity planet.  Just hours after he signs on somebody burgles his blaster from his quarters, so he starts a brawl and outfights all the crew members (the second time in one day!) and steals all their blasters.

 

The ship has passengers, who are also trouble: the passengers on a space ship are supposed to remain in their quarters the entire voyage, but these passengers consist of movie stars and a film crew who want the run of the ship to do shooting in its corridors. 

     

This bizarre and cynical milieu, in which mutiny is the norm and everybody hates each other and is ready to argue or fist fight on any pretext, only gets more crazy as the book proceeds.  The various people on the doomed ship all have their own agendas, and take irresponsible risks to further them, leading to tense struggles in which the officers, crew and passengers pit their wits and ray guns against each other.

Leinster’s plot and characters are not complicated, but they are engaging, as is the book’s hard-boiled tone.  Where Leinster lets the reader down is in his writing style.  The sentences are often clumsy, and I kept rewriting them in my head, like when I am copy-editing a student’s paper, which was distracting.  Still, The Other Side of Nowhere was a fun read; the best Murray Leinster I have read.