Cosmic Engineers by Clifford Simak

"My Lord," said Gary, "think of it!  Imagination saving the people of another universe.  The imagination of a little third-rate race that hasn't even started really using its imagination yet."

"You are right," declared the Engineer, "and in the aeons to come that imagination will make your race the masters of the entire universe."

My copy

Recently I was in South Carolina to visit in-laws and the art museum in Columbia.  I stopped by Ed's Editions and found, way in the back, three cardboard boxes of paperback SF books that had yet to be priced.  There were many I already owned, many I wasn't interested in, and a few I'd red when I borrowed them from libraries.  But I found one with a fun Jack Gaughan cover that I was curious to read and willing to pay two dollars for--a 1964 edition from Paperback Library of Clifford Simak's Cosmic Engineers.  I have been kind of off Simak for a few years, but I recently read a good story by him, 1952's "The Fence," so it seems a good time to read some work by this SF Grandmaster who was important to me in my youth because the local library had a lot of his books.

Cosmic Engineers originally appeared as a serial in Astounding, spread across three issues in 1939.  (It looks like all three issues are available at the internet archive--I will resist the urge to check out the illustrations until I have finished reading this 1964 printing!)  In 1950 Gnome Press put out a hardcover edition (the Wikipedia page on Simak suggests this edition was somewhat expanded from the magazine version), and since then many paperback editions have been produced.  Here is a piece of work which has achieved market success, won a vote of confidence from SF fans who have voted for it with their hard-earned pay.  Let's hope I will enjoy it as much as they did.

It is the future, the year 6948!  Mankind has colonized the solar system!  Travelling from one planet to the next in their little ship, looking for scoops, are journalists Herb Harper and Gary Nelson.  (Remember, Simak worked as a journalist himself in the Midwest for decades.)  En route to Pluto they spot an odd-looking derelict and investigate.  Within the inert vessel lies Caroline Martin, a scientist from a thousand years ago, kept alive in suspended animation.  Gary revives her by following the instructions she left, and she joins the journalists in their ship.

Caroline wasn't asleep while she was in suspended animation--she was awake the entire time, like the hunter in Poul Anderson's 1951 "Duel on Syrtis."  So, she had 1,000 years to train her brain and develop new theories about the physical nature of space.  So, when on Pluto the boffins there tell Herb, Gary and Caroline that they have been receiving undecipherable psychic messages from outside the Milky Way, Caroline is able to decipher them and even respond to them.  Goody-Two-Shoes aliens (these are the Cosmic Engineers of the title) who have taken up the task of defending the universe are sending the messages, requesting help; it seems some threat from beyond the universe, from beyond space and time, has appeared and the C.E.s need help in dealing with it.  They send Caroline plans for a teleporter terminal, and she builds it and our cast of characters (now including some scientists from Pluto) fly their spaceship through a warp tunnel, reappearing almost instantaneously at the city of the Cosmic Engineers on a planet with three suns on the very edge of the universe, a city, we are told, that "would have put a thousand New Yorks to shame."

1950 hardcover

Here the protagonists meet the C.E.s, metal men who have high technology but lack imagination and creativity--they never invented painting and are amazed to discover the concept of painting in the humans' minds, and it is hinted that they are merely the artificial robots built millions of years ago by a now-extinct organic race.  The Cosmic Engineers explain the monumental challenge which has led them to summon the humans, as well as representatives from other alien races from throughout our universe.

Our universe is just one of many universes that floats around within the next level of reality, just like the Milky Way is but one of many galaxies floating around within our universe.  An alien universe is about to collide with ours, a very rare but natural occurrence that will cause a cataclysm--energy generated by the two universes touching will cause both universes to contract until they are reset and begin to expand anew.  The process of contraction will kill every living thing within the universe.  The Engineers need the help of more imaginative beings to figure out what to do about this impending collision that will total two universes and make traffic fatalities of all passengers.

As if this wasn't enough, there is a little complication.  It turns out that our galaxy isn't just home to nice people like you and me!  There is a collectivist and belligerent race in our universe, a society about as high tech and powerful as the C.E.s themselves, but instead of being goody goodies is devoted to taking over the universe.  These creeps, known as "The Hellhounds," have figured out a way for a small elite of their race to survive the cataclysm by shifting outside the universe just before the crash; after our universe has finished contracting they will be able to return to it and direct its new expansion to their specifications, dominating all the new life that develops.  The Hellhounds are more than willing to obstruct any efforts of the C.E.s to save our universe.

"For many millions of years they have been educated with the dream of universal conquest.  They have been so thoroughly propagandized with the philosophy that the state, the civilization, the race is everything...that the individual does not count at all...that there is not a single one of them who would not die to achieve that dream.  They glory in dying, glory in any sort of sacrifice that advances them even the slightest step toward their eventual goal."       

There are a lot of SF stories in which the human race is shown to be inferior to aliens, but in Cosmic Engineers Simak celebrates human heroism and ability and suggests that our people are equal or superior to any people in all the universes!  The C.E.s dismiss the representatives of all those other intelligent species, because only the thought processes of the Earth people are on the C.E. wavelength--only the human race is in a position to foil the Hellhounds and save the universe!

Caroline comes up with a way to create in the region between the universes new miniature universes.  These can, perhaps, be used to absorb and generate and direct energy on a cosmic scale--these miniature universes could perhaps be used to power, move, or destroy entire star systems and civilizations.  To really get this idea up and running, Caroline needs more info, and she needs it fast because the Hellhound space navy has just started its attack and the Cosmic Engineer space navy is hard pressed--it looks like the C.E. city might get destroyed before Caroline can finish building her universe-preserving devices!

The info sweet Caroline requires, the C.E.s suggest, could be found on the Earth of the future, so the metal men set up a warp tunnel through which Gary and Caroline's ship travels to the dying Earth of millions of years in the future.  (I lost track of why the C.E.s needed a terminal at both ends to facilitate travel between present Pluto and the C.E. city but don't need a terminal on future Earth to send our heroes there; maybe one of Caroline's many theories has been applied to improving the warp tunnel system?)

Only one man is left on future Earth, but luckily he has the info Caroline needs.  He also gives a speech about how great mankind has been.  There's always time for a pep talk, even when our universe is about to croak!  Gary and Caroline head back into the warp tunnel, but it has been diverted to a creepy planet and they are forced to land there.  A Hellhound vessel has also been diverted to this planet, and a scenario somewhat like that in Fredric Brown's famous 1944 story "Arena" ensues--a mysterious voice explains that it has contrived to put two humans and two Hellhounds on the same planet and deactivated their ships and weapons so they will fight a duel to the death with their bare hands and their wits!

(A quick look at the issues of Astounding at the internet archive suggests that this interlude was not part of the original 1939 version of Cosmic Engineers, but added in 1950, so if anybody was copying anybody, Simak was inspired by Brown.  This section does nothing to advance the plot and is resolved via deus ex machina, one of the less satisfying literary devices.  I keep discovering reasons to believe the magazine versions of Golden Age SF stories are better than the book versions.)

Gary and Caroline make a bow and arrows from odds and ends and Gary shoots down the two reptilian bipeds that are the first Hellhounds they have ever seen.  (Did the 1939 version not reveal the Hellhounds at all?  Even in this book version the Hellhounds are underdeveloped, with no speaking parts.)  The voice reveals itself to be the millions-of-years-old collective mind of a race which abandoned first machines and then individuality and physicality.  It has god-like power, but acts in a childish way, setting up this little fight for its own amusement and then stranding the winners on its uncomfortable planet.  (Isn't Star Trek full of these kinds of mischievous and mentally unstable deities?)  Luckily, it has a moment of sanity and during that lucid moment restores the humans' equipment and allows Gary and Caroline to escape to the C.E.s' world.

Back at the edge of the universe Caroline's system of manipulating the power of the region between universes is used to wipe out the Hellhound fleet.  (This reminded me a little of AKKA in Jack Williamson's 1934 The Legion of Space.)  Then her system is used to transport entire civilizations from the other universe to safety within ours (their universe was old and worn out anyway) and to destroy that old universe before it can crash into ours and cause it to contract.  Then we get a ten-page denouement in which the Cosmic Engineers explain their origin and the origin of the human race, as well as the human race's astonishing destiny.

I want to like Cosmic Engineers, but I have to grade it merely acceptable.  The thing lacks personality and emotion, the characters and the action are flat and boring--there is no tension, no fear, no thrills, things just plod forward.  The only character with any personality is Herb, "the dumpy little photographer" who serves only as superfluous and anemic comic relief, making the most feeble jokes possible and contributing zilch to the plot.  There need have been only two human characters, Gary and Caroline, and instead we get five.  Cosmic Engineers feels not like a fun space opera like something by Edmond Hamilton, but something grey and bland, like one of John W. Campbell's space operas in which indistinguishable eggheads build a better machine every few chapters until they build one powerful enough to end the story.  The novel's real "character" is the human race, which Simak presents in a hopeful and optimistic light, painting humanity as bold and adventurous and imaginative, conferring on us the distinctive attitudes of youth--all the alien races are depicted as old and tired, either hopelessly set in their ways or actually insane.

While not terribly entertaining, Cosmic Engineers is interesting for the student of SF.  Not only is it full of elements that we see in other SF works, as I have pointed out, but it contains elements characteristic of Simak's later, more mature work, like an Earth abandoned by the majority of the human race and robots who outlive their creators but maintain a dogged devotion to them.  And here's a list of three other things about Cosmic Engineers that struck me as noteworthy (I've been told that people on the internet love lists):

1. Positive attitude about The Crusades:  Nowadays it is conventional to denounce the Crusades as racist imperialism, but Simak offers up the Crusades as a paradigmatic exemplum of mankind's courage and eagerness to make sacrifices and take risks; he repeatedly compares the efforts of Gary, Caroline and the rest of the human cast to the Crusades.  Simak was not an outlier in his day; for example, Eisenhower's memoir of his service in World War II was titled Crusade in Europe.        
2. Female protagonist:  It is interesting, and counter to the stereotype of women in Golden Age SF being mere damsels in distress, that the lead scientist of the story is a woman, and that she saves not only our universe, but saves the people of another universe and actually creates universes.
3. Pro-individualism/anti-government/anti-collectivist vibe:  Several times in this story we see demonstrated the superiority of the individual over the state or the collective, and witness people standing up to the government or the collective.  Caroline was imprisoned in that derelict because she had disobeyed the government, and she came up with the process of suspended animation all by herself.  The police come to stop our heroes from teleporting from Pluto to the edge of the universe, and Caroline and her friends don't even consider following the law and obeying the fuzz--one of the men actually cries out "No government is going to tell me what I can do and what I can't do."  The villainous Hellhounds, who hold that the individual is nothing and the collective everything, are obviously an allegory or caricature of Soviet Socialism and/or German National Socialism, while the god-like being that sets up the duel is a product of radical collectivism.

Cosmic Engineers is frustrating because if you told me there was a book about a space war in which a genius woman wakes up after a thousand years to prove herself the greatest scientist in the universe, a book that celebrates human achievement, focuses on the good side of the Crusades, and is for the individual and against the collective, I would have said, "That sounds awesome!"  But here it is, and it is lukewarm and bland because Simak fails to write the characters or action scenes with any feeling.  I am 100% on board with the spirit of Cosmic Engineers, but as a literary construction I cannot endorse its component parts nor the way they were put together.  Too bad.

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The last page of my edition of Cosmic Engineers is an ad for four Paperback Library SF titles, four titles that sound pretty good!  There's Eric Frank Russell's 1939 Sinister Barrier, which I would definitely like to read.  (Remember when I read The Best of Eric Frank Russell from cover to cover and learned that Russell was--according to Lester Del Rey, at least--SF icon John W. Campbell's favorite SF writer?)  Next on the list is A. E. van Vogt's The Book of Ptath, under its alternate title Two Hundred Million A.D.-- that was a good one!  Edmond Hamilton's Battle for the Stars I read and enjoyed back in 2012, long before this blog wriggled free from my grey matter to infest the world wide web.  The Roger Elwood anthology Alien Worlds has stories by Simak, Hamilton, Russell, Campbell, Poul Anderson and Robert Bloch that I would definitely read.  This might be the most attractive selection of books I have ever seen in a single ad!   

   

Three Weird Tales winners by Edmond Hamilton

I remember this image well from my youth,
when it appeared on Piers Anthony's
Blue Adept

I recently acquired at an Ohio antiques mall a copy of the 1983 World Fantasy Convention program book, a special focus of which is Weird Tales, that year being the 60th anniversary of the magazine's founding.  This thing is full of cool stuff for the Weird Tales fan.  Editor Robert Weinberg compares cover artist and con Guest of Honor Rowena Morrill to famous Weird Tales cover artist Margaret Brundage, suggesting both are pioneers as women in the speculative fiction illustrator field and that both have been denounced by feminists and prudes for their depictions of naked women in distress.  (Weinberg specifically mentions King Dragon, a copy of which resides in the MPorcius library!)  Robert Bloch reminisces about his experiences as a Weird Tales reader and contributor, and Jack Williamson, in an excerpted chapter of his autobiography, talks about his relationships with such members of what he calls "the Weird Tales clan" as editor Farnsworth Wright himself, E. Hoffman Price, and MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton.

I am very cheap, and I thought a looong time before plunking down ten bucks for this publication.  The thing that pushed me over the edge and made me a buyer was an article in the program by SF historian Sam Moskowitz entitled "The Most Popular Stories in Weird Tales: 1924 to 1940, with Statistics and Analytical Commentary." While serving as editor, Wright read all the letters sent to the Weird Tales offices, and, whenever a story was mentioned in a letter in a positive way, he marked the mention as a "vote" for the story on a notecard listing all the stories in that issue.  This way he was able to judge (scientifically!) which stories were the most popular in each issue.  Years later Moskowitz obtained these notecards and, in this article, he provides us grateful readers a list of the most popular stories in each issue of the magazine for the period of Wright's editorship.  Moskowitz's list indicates the number of votes each winning story received, as well as the number of votes received by some famous stories which were only second or third favorite for an issue, and he also includes a list of the 56 top vote-getting stories for the entire period, and of the eleven writers who most often won the top spot for an issue.

Seabury Quinn, about whom I know nothing and about whom I rarely hear anybody talk, had the top story in the most issues, thirty.  Second and third place are held by speculative fiction icons H. P. Lovecraft (16 issues) and Robert E. Howard (14.)  In fourth place is our man Hamilton--in nine issues of Weird Tales between 1924 and 1940 his story was the most popular.  Hamilton's winning stories include "He That Hath Wings," "The Monster-God of Mamurth," and Part Two of "Crashing Suns," which I have already read.  But most of Hamilton's winners I had not read until this week, when I begin to rectify this gap in my Hamilton knowledge by reading "The Polar Doom," "The Avenger from Atlantis." and "The Six Sleepers."  I read all three online at the internet archive.

Attention doctoral candidates in the humanities!
 A denunciation of this cover will serve as the
extra chapter your dissertation needs!

"The Polar Doom" (1928)

Like "The Monster-God of Mamurth," "The Polar Doom" starts off like one of those lost city stories I associate with H. P. Lovecraft.  From superstitious Eskimos white men hear rumors of a ruined city, "erected by devils long ago," on an island in the northernmost reaches of Canada, among what are now called the Queen Elizabeth Islands but were in the 1920s known as the Parry Archipelago.  A famous anthropologist, Dr. Angus McQuirk of Eastern University, who has the odd theory that the human race originated in the Arctic, organizes an expedition up to this island.  The last thing the civilized world hears of the expedition is a garbled radio message that suggests some unknown disaster has killed all members of the party!

Ten days later mysterious aircraft that look like flying domes or "gigantic chocolate-drops" hover over Winnipeg and we are in "World Wrecker" Hamilton / War of the Worlds territory as they wipe the city out with "compression rays."  Hamilton explains that "any matter, any object, is composed of vast numbers of tiny molecules in ceaseless motion, molecules spaced as far from each other proportionately as are the planets of our universe;" these sorts of theories were apparently beloved of the SF writers of the '20s and '30s--for example, we saw them prominently featured in some Donald Wandrei stories from the early 1930s we read recently.  Anyway, the compression ray causes the molecules of the target to move much closer together, killing people and causing buildings to collapse by shrinking and distorting them in whole or in part.  (Like the graviton gun I've been using in Deathwatch, this seems like an unnecessarily fancy way to kill people when you can just set them on fire or blast holes in them.)

Next on the domes' hit list are Montreal, Quebec, and Boston, all demolished.  This series of misfortunes is followed by a genuine tragedy as the flying domes topple skyscrapers and destroy bridges in beautiful New York City!

While the mysterious flying domes are destroying the metropolises of North America, a lone Canadian pilot, unaware of the holocaust to the south, flies north to look for the lost McQuirk expedition, and crash lands on the island to find David McQuirk, the anthropologist's brother, is still alive.  David then takes up the narrative in a long flashback describing how the expedition found a frozen dome and defrosted it, only to awaken an ancient race of toad people!  You and I know that there is no creature more charming on God's green Earth than a toad, but these toad people go the extra mile to force us to reassess our toad love!  They murdered most of the expedition out of hand, and took the anthropologist and his brother captive.  Angus, impressed by the high technology and advanced scientific knowledge of the toad people, became what people twelve years later would be calling a quisling!  (These damn anthropologists are always going native and betraying the human race!)  He quickly learned the toads' language and history (they can't stand the cold and have been waiting out the ice age in suspended animation since the days when the North Pole was warm) and even helped them set up their heating system, a beam they shoot into space to collect heat from the rays of the sun:

that mechanism was to be a great heat-magnet, a magnet which would be able to bend and attract heat-vibrations as Einstein has shown that light-vibrations are bent and attracted by the bodies they pass in space.    

With this heat magnet the toad people plan to defrost their entire city of thousands of domes (which fly through the use of "propulsion ray apparatus") and conquer the world!  Angus even told them all about our civilization so they'd know what to attack first!

Anyway, after the attack domes have returned from their trip to Manhattan, the Canadian airman gives David a pistol, and the two of them sneak up to the heat magnet while the toad men are distracted.  David has to shoot down his own brother, but they deactivate the heat magnet and all the toad men freeze to death.

Much of "The Polar Doom" reads like a newspaper article or a brief history, and there is little attempt at producing characters or achieving any kind of literary style.  When talking about Hamilton's success as a Weird Tales author in "The Most Popular Stories in Weird Tales: 1924 to 1940," Moskowitz suggests "It should be remembered that, up until John Campbell's takeover of Astounding Science-Fiction, novelty of the idea took precedence over literary style as a criteria [sic] of the popularity of a given piece of science fiction, which was then regarded as a literature of ideas."  Hamilton certainly serves out the scientific ideas in "The Polar Doom," invoking Einstein on the effect of gravity on light and "French biologist Berthelot" (does he mean Sabin? Marcellin? I don't know) when talking about suspended animation.  But he also includes the sort of striking images of horror I think most of us look for in Weird Tales, and which were memorable elements of the stories collected in Crashing Suns.  My favorite in "The Polar Doom:" a ray slices through the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges, sending thousands of fleeing Manhattanites, a veritable waterfall of screaming figures, plunging to their doom in the East River.

Entertaining.  "The Polar Doom" would only be reprinted a single time, in the 2009 volume of early Hamilton stories from Haffner Press, The Metal Giants and Others: The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume One.

I guess Brundage is going for a
metaphorical thing here

"The Avenger from Atlantis" (1935)

Here's a story which it seems has never been reprinted (though maybe the Haffner folks will get to it in the future?)  Written somewhat later in Hamilton's long career, it is much more character-oriented than "The Polar Doom," but if you are "woke," these characters may well have you scurrying for your safe space!

Ulios, our narrator, is the greatest scientist in the island city of white towers and porticoes known as Atlantis!  Among his duties is holding the position of Guardian of the Force, the Force being the apparatus that manages the volcano that is this advanced civilization's power source.  Ulios is married to a beautiful woman, Etian, a half-breed--she is half Atlantean, and half barbarian!  When Etian finds out that Ulios has perfected a means of transferring brains between people, she wants him to promise to transfer her brain to a young body when she gets "wrinkled and flabby and old.  Old!  A horrible fate that I dread above all others."  Of course, Ulios, greatest scientist in Atlantis, tells her this would be "black unholiness" and to "banish such thoughts as these from your mind."

He may be a great scientist, but Ulios is a lousy director of human resources.  His assistant, Karnath, is the only other guy in Atlantis who has the key to the Force, and the only other guy who knows how to transfer brains.  So Ulios may be surprised when his servant Sthan wakes him up one night to tell him Etian has just flown off in Karnath's flying machine, but the reader isn't.  We also aren't surprised to learn Karnath has sabotaged the Force and that the whole Atlantean civilization is exploding and sinking beneath the waves while Ulios, Sthan at the helm, is flying after his faithless wife and colleague, but our narrator is!

I swear by all the gods that I had no suspicion of anything else!  Earth tremors were common enough in Atlantis, and had I dreamed that this was anything more I would have forsaken my pursuit.

Crushed by "black guilt" for committing the sin of abandoning the Force to pursue his own vengeance, thus allowing his entire civilization to be annihilated, Ulios vows to atone for his crime, but only after punishing Etian and Karnath for theirs!  The flying machines of pursued and pursuer run out of juice over North Africa, and Ulios and Sthan continue following the traitors on foot.  For years they chase them, overcoming deserts, mountains, barbaric tribes, monstrous beasts.  Karnath teaches Etian how to transfer brains, so when they get old they just kidnap local savages and move their brains into their young bodies!  When Ulios realizes this, he teaches Sthan the secrets of the operation, so he and his servant can also waylay innocent people and take their bodies as replacements!  The chase goes on for generations, for centuries, as the four last Atlanteans keep switching bodies so that they never die and need never give up flight and pursuit.

Babylon, the Rome of Tiberius, the Paris of the French Revolution, London under the bombs of the zeppelins--Ulios and Sthan chase the destroyers of Atlantis through them all!  Finally, in a Manhattan skyscraper, that monument to modern ingenuity, ambition, sophistication and beauty, where Karnath's brain resides in the body of the world's richest man and Etian's in that of his gorgeous mistress, we get a final showdown and a twist ending that revolves around Etian's womanly vanity!

This story features so many of my favorite things--mad scientists transferring brains, disastrous sexual relationships, a quest for vengeance--and Hamilton fills it with so many melodramatic speeches and wild cliffhangers, as well as a protagonist who legitimately acts like he is insane or from an alien culture, that I love it.  It is easy to see why the readers of Weird Tales embraced it--"The Avenger from Atlantis" is a classic of the weird!

I assume that's Lenya, but Brundage
decided to leave out Hath's human face!

"The Six Sleepers" (1935)

Weird Tales cover boy Hamilton struck again just months after "The Avenger from Atlantis" with the "startling thrill-tale" "The Six Sleepers."  Like the tragic tale of Ulios, this baby has yet to be reprinted.

[UPDATE: July 29, 2019: The Science Fiction Encyclopedia suggests that "The Six Sleepers" was retitled "Tiger Girl" and printed in Great Britain in a strange little magazine or pamphlet with a photo of a topless woman on the cover.  Click the links for details (and the topless photo, you horndogs!)]

By coincidence (like an actor who refuses to rehearse because he wants his performance to be spontaneous, I never plan out these blog posts) all three of these Edmond Hamilton stories are about people who live thousands of years and must face strange new versions of Earth.  In "The Six Sleepers" we have American prospector Garry Winton who gets chased into a cave in Morocco by Berbers.  The cave is full of a natural gas which induces a state of suspended animation.  Already in the cave are five other people who have been chased into the cave by hostile Africans over the centuries: a Roman legionary, an English crusader, a 15th-century Italian condottiere, a 16th-century pirate, and an aristocratic emigre from Revolutionary France.  (For some reason no African hunters or farmers ever end up in this Moroccan cave, just European professional fighting men.)

Garry and the five European sword swingers wake up thousands of years in the future, when an earthquake causes the cave's roof to collapse and the gas to escape.  If Garry was the kind of (self-)conscious consumer who only buys products emblazoned with "NO GMO" labels he is SOL (the kids still say that, right?) because this future is chockablock (I know the kids still say that!) with genetically modified organisms.  The adventurers are attacked by huge rats with human faces, and then make friends with a young woman, Lenya, who is accompanied by Hath, her loyal retainer, a bipedal wolf with a human head!  Lenya tells Garry that the civilization after his, that of the super high-tech "Masters," developed all kinds of new breeds of people, like the rat-men to serve as miners and fish-men to explore the oceans.  The Masters are long gone after a fratricidal war and their technology defunct (Lenya carries a spear around instead of a plasma rifle) but, left to their own devices, the rat-men and other freaks have flourished.  And by flourish I mean they have multiplied and mercilessly prey upon the few true humans left, people like Lenya, descendants of the tiny number of Masters to survive the cataclysmic final war.

Anyway, Lenya's brother and two of the swordsmen are captured by rat-men and the rest of the cast have to rescue them before they are sacrificed to the rat-men's god. Hamilton tries to build up suspense by not telling us what the god is until the last moment--I stupidly was predicting a robot or computer or nuclear reactor.  The god turns out to be a huge snake with a human-like face.  (I wonder if Hamilton got the idea for this story from witnessing somebody feed rodents to his pet snake.)  After the crusader decapitates the snake-man there is a chase through a ruined city and a final desperate fight, which Garry resolves by getting one of the Masters' old atomic power projectors operating and using it to incinerate the rat-men.

This story isn't actually bad, but the plot (rescuing somebody from being sacrificed by creepo cultists) is pedestrian and Hamilton's innovations don't really spice it up. Innovation #1, that the protagonist is joined by warriors from five eras, feels contrived (their swords didn't rust over a thousand years?) and is just used to make obvious jokes (the legionary can't believe the Roman Empire is no more, and the crusader thinks everybody is a witch or a demon), and Innovation #2, all the crazy human-animal hybrids, is just window dressing--the hybrids simply play the same role in the story that expendable enemy soldiers play in fiction all the time.  Disappointing after all the science and striking images in "The Polar Doom" and the perfect little mad scientist masterpiece "The Avenger from Atlantis."

**********

A fun exercise; I will be letting Moskowitz's article guide my reading in the future.      

Four stories by Edmond Hamilton from the 1920s and '30s

In the past I've mentioned Del Rey's cool Best of series of paperback collections of stories by classic SF authors; in fact, back in early 2016, I read 1978's The Best of Eric Frank Russell, which has an introduction by Alan Dean Foster, cover to cover.  In 1977 Del Rey put out a volume dedicated to MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton, edited by Hamilton's wife, Leigh Brackett, as well as a book of Brackett stories edited by Hamilton.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we'll be reading both of these collections of classic adventure SF.  First up, four stories from The Best of Edmond Hamilton that first appeared in genre magazines in the 1920s and early 1930s.

"The Monster-God of Mamurth" (1926)

On its second appearance in Weird 
Tales, "Monster-God" didn't get
a cover mention; I hope Hamilton 
didn't feel like he'd got demoted!

This is Hamilton's first published story, and it is actually mentioned on the cover of the issue of Weird Tales in which it appeared, which must have been very exciting for a writer early in his career.  The Best of Edmond Hamilton is actually dedicated to the editor who bought the story, Farnsworth Wright, who edited Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940. "The Monster-God of Mamurth" has seen quite a few reprintings, including a second Weird Tales appearance in 1935.

"The Monster-God of Mamurth" is a solid Lovecraftian-type story, complete with lost city, alien and/or prehistoric god, and invisible monster.  (Though I label these elements "Lovecraftian," they were not invented by Lovecraft, and Hamilton didn't necessarily get them from Lovecraft stories; in fact, I think Lovecraft's big lost city and invisible monster stories, like "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Dunwich Horror" and "At The Mountains of Madness" were published after "Monster-God of Mamurth."  Lovecraft's "The Nameless City" was published in an amateur periodical in 1921, but was not widely available until the 1930s.)  Hamilton includes a (mercifully brief) frame story--our narrator is a white trader in the North African desert, and one night an American archaeologist who is near death crawls into his camp.  The archaeologist luckily has the strength to take up the narration for fourteen of the story's sixteen pages, telling us how he stumbled on written evidence (an inscription on stone in Phoenician) of a previously unrecorded ancient city, and went there by himself, even though the people who wrote the inscription and all the Arabs he talked to strongly advised him to stay away.  At the ruined city he explored an invisible temple and had to fight for his life against an invisible monster, much like a spider the size of a horse, presumably the god worshiped by the city's long dead citizens.

Hamilton paces the story well, and the descriptions of dealing with an invisible building and an invisible enemy are good.  More action-oriented and less extravagantly written than your typical Lovecraft story; maybe we should call this one "Howard-like"--after all, the archaeologist escapes the multi-limbed god, and it is via an adrenaline-powered feat of desperate strength, not by using his noggin or some dusty old book!

"The Man Who Evolved" (1931)

I've already written about the second story in The Best of Edmond Hamilton, "The Man Who Evolved," so I'll be skipping it here.  I read it in Isaac Asimov's fun and interesting 1974 anthology Before the Golden Age.

"A Conquest of Two Worlds" (1932)

First appearing in Wonder Stories, "A Conquest of Two Worlds" would be reprinted 16 years later by Startling Stories, whose editors heralded it as a "Hall of Fame Classic"!  Then Donald Wollheim, the hero behind DAW books and so many other laudable (and a few questionable) SF projects, selected it in 1951 for his Every Boy's Book of Science Fiction.  Sounds like a must read!

"A Conquest of Two Worlds" is a sort of "future history" in 32 pages of Earth's expansion into the rest of the solar system, a history which, as Brackett tells us in her spoiler-rich introduction to the volume, is surprisingly "downbeat" and "realistic."  This story, Brackett relates, is a response to SF stories in which the Earthman is portrayed as having the right to take over other planets, which are universally inhabited by evil monsters.  In this story the people of Earth are portrayed as driven largely by emotionalism and greed, while the aliens are largely sympathetic.

The plot: Some egghead invents an atomic power source--atomic propulsion systems and energy weapons soon follow. The boffin takes a single trip to scout out the inner planets and Jupiter, then dies in a crash upon landing on Earth.  The people of Earth quickly form a sort of world government, build a fleet of atomic rockets, and send out expeditions to exploit the vast natural resources of Mars and Jupiter; in a series of episodes that recall events in the history of British exploration and imperialism in North America, Africa and elsewhere, the Earthmen trigger and prosecute tremendous wars against the stone-age Martian and Jovian natives!  Like American Indians, the Martian and Jovian populations are seriously diminished and the survivors end up on reservations!

Besides depicting Earth settlement of Mars and Jupiter as resulting in immoral wars, Hamilton keeps reminding us how dangerous space travel and exploration are with many mentions of rocket ship crashes and illness due to cosmic rays and extraterrestrial environmental conditions.  This is a story drenched in pessimism, and unrelieved by the idea that challenges excite humanity to noble deeds of heroism, and in this it reminds me of Hamilton's 1952 story "What's It Like Out There?", which I read four or five years ago, during the Iowa period of my life, having borrowed from a university library via interlibrary loan a number of books of Hamilton stories.  "What's It Like Out There?" appears in The Best of Edmond Hamilton and I will be rereading it as part of this series of posts on Hamilton and Brackett.    

Most of "A Conquest of Two Worlds" reads like an encyclopedia entry about a military campaign, but there are dimly realized characters whose careers are pegged to the campaigns to conquer Mars and Jupiter.  In the last dozen pages of the story one of these characters, 60 years before Kevin Costner would do it, 70 years before Tom Cruise would do it, and almost 80 years before whoever the hell is in Avatar would do it, turns against his modern and imperialistic people and culture to join the primitive Jovians and aid them in their doomed struggle against the Earth!

While it is interesting as a pioneering example of a revisionist anti-Western-imperialism story, "A Conquest of Two Worlds," because it is dry and the characters are flat, is not very entertaining, so I'm awarding it merely a passing grade of "Acceptable."

A PDF scan of the issue of Wonder Stories in which "A Conquest of Two Worlds" appeared is viewable at the internet archive.  There you can see the included illustration by Frank Paul (depicting a major spoiler), a portrait of Hamilton, and an editorial introduction that tells you the story is about the crimes of the white race and greedy businessmen (everywhere I look I'm finding spoilers for this story.)  But that's not all!  The owner of the magazine hand wrote one-line reviews on each story's first page, and while he or she gushes about Jack Williamson's "The Moon Era" (and check out Williamson's slick hairdo and cool spectacles!), "A Conquest of Two Worlds" gets panned as "timeworn" and "hackneyed."  Ouch!

"The Island of Unreason" (1933)

Another piece that appeared in Wonder Stories and was accorded "Hall of Fame" status by the people at Startling, who only waited twelve years to reprint this baby.  As I learned at isfdb, "The Island of Unreason" also appeared in a mysterious 1946 publication along with another Hamilton story, "Murder in the Clinic."  This odd little book, published in Ireland by London outfit Utopian Publications, was part of a British series of books and magazines of short fiction by American authors whose covers were adorned with drawings or photos of naked women.  While many of the stories are by legitimately popular and important SF authors like Robert Bloch, Jack Williamson, Clark Ashton Smith and Ray Bradbury, it is hard not to suspect that the real selling point of the books was their covers, most of which you can see at isfdb, should you be curious.

"The Island of Unreason" takes place in a socialistic technocratic future that fetishizes "reason," efficiency and cooperation, and condemns emotion and individuality.  When Allan Mann, Serial Number 2473R6, an engineer in City 72 (the future name of New York City--what kind of media bias is this?--NYC should be Number 1!) questions handing over the atomic motor plans he has been working on for two years to another engineer because he wants to finish the designs himself, he is charged with a breach of reason.  The authorities exile him for an undisclosed period to the Island of Unreason, where there is no government.  Now, I know all you Kmele Foster fans out there are thinking an island without government would be a paradise ("please don't throw me in that brier patch!"), but the inhabitants of this technocratic society, including Mann see a place without government as some kind of living hell!  The director of City 72 thinks by exposing Mann to life outside the paternal state will teach him how essential government really is ("cure" him of "unreasonable tendencies.")

Mann is dropped off on the island and, while initially horrified, quickly learns to cope without all-powerful government with the help of the "unreasonables" already there, who have a primitive village and a rough and ready sort of social order.  When his sentence is up and the government agents arrive to bring him back to City 72, he decides he'd rather stay on the island.

This is a better story than "A Conquest of Two Worlds" not just because I like anti-big government stories, but because it focuses more strongly on individual characters and presents more vivid pictures of societies.  It is actually amusing to watch Mann, a member of "the world's fiftieth generation of vegetarians" who is used to eating the "mushy pre-digested foods" rationed out by the government, sleeping in a government dormitory and having sex with women whom the "Eugenics Board" orders him to impregnate, respond and adapt to a world in which he has to eat fresh meat, sleep on the ground, and compete for sex partners because people get to choose who they have sex with based on their own far-from-logical preferences.

While I am contrasting them from a literary and entertainment point of view, I think we can see strong thematic similarities between "The Island of Unreason" and "A Conquest of Two Worlds."  Both feature a character deeply embedded in his society, an elite member of that society, in fact, who changes his mind about that society after being exposed to a different, less technologically advanced, society.  Both also evince a level of skepticism about modernity and progress and make an argument that a concern for material well-being can lead a society to abandon traditional morality and compromise people's freedom to an atrocious degree.

Good.

"Thundering Worlds" (1934)

Back in March we read the story from this issue
attributed to Heald, a collaboration with
H. P. Lovecraft

Over the course of this blog's life we've seen a range of types of stories from Edmond Hamilton: mad scientist stories, stories about evolution, today a weird lost city story and two nakedly political stories expressing views about Western imperialism and the role of the state in our lives.  But Hamilton is perhaps most famous for his epics about interstellar warfare conceived on the grandest possible scale with the highest possible stakes, wars in which civilizations maneuver the very planets and stars like so many aircraft carriers and battering rams as they seek to avert or inflict genocide. "Thundering Worlds," first seen in Weird Tales, is just such a story.  I read "Thundering Worlds" during the same period in which I read "What's It Like Out There?", but I have no compunctions about reading it again.

It is the far future, and the human race has colonized all nine planets, and the system is ruled by a council consisting of the leaders of each of the nine worlds.  Our narrator is the top official of Mercury, and as the story begins he describes how mankind is under a terrible threat--Sol is cooling off and the nine planets will soon be uninhabitable! The solution to this crisis is to construct atomic thrusters of mind-boggling size on each of the nine planets and then drive them like huge ships across the black void of interstellar space to a new sun!

The Mercurian's narrative relates how the nine planets go from one star to another, looking for a home.  One star produces radiation that is deadly to human life (radiation looms large in Hamilton's oeuvre), while another star system is inhabited by hostile aliens, and a terrible space naval battle between swarms of human and alien craft results.  By some terrible coincidence, these aliens (amoeba people) live in a star system whose sun is about to go nova, so they have the idea of hijacking the solar planets to escape certain doom.  When the Solar space navy repels their invasion, the amoeba people construct their own colossal atomic engines and the nine solar planets are soon pursued by four amoeba planets!

When the human migrants finally find a suitable star to orbit their worlds around, a showdown with the amoeba people is inevitable.  The narrator decides that Mercury will make the ultimate sacrifice--all the Mercurians evacuate their little world and then the narrator rams it into the lead amoeba planet, causing a five-planet pileup that wipes out the amoeba race and leaves us humans masters of all we survey!  Go Earth!

This is a fun story.  The first-person narration and a sort of rivalry between the narrator and the rulers of Pluto and Jupiter means it doesn't fall into the trap of sounding like a dry encyclopedia article that "A Conquest of Two Worlds" does.  I'm a little surprised "Thundering Worlds" hasn't been reprinted more often; maybe its lack of social or political commentary made it less attractive to editors.

**********

All worthwhile reads by World Wrecker Hamilton, and pleasantly diverse in their subject matter and tone.  In our next episode we start The Best of Leigh Brackett with three of her stories from the 1940s.

1955 stories from Arthur C. Clarke, Jack Williamson and Chad Oliver

Front cover of my copy of
the 1962 edition

Let's read three more stories from Fred Pohl's 1955 anthology of brand new (to Americans) stories, Star Science Fiction Stories No. 3. This time we'll be tackling stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Jack Williamson, and Chad Oliver (!?)

"The Deep Range" by Arthur C. Clarke

Scientist and diving enthusiast Clarke gives us a very hard piece of hard SF, all about technology and biology. This is also one of the many SF stories that gushes sentimentally over how smart and beautiful dolphins are.

In the future, the oceans are filled with electric fences, and "cowboys" in one-man submarines, with the help of dolphin "sheep dogs," shepherd herds of whales whose meat will end up on dinner tables the world over. Our hero is one such cowboy. When a forty-foot shark breaks through a weak spot of fence he uses sonar and the abilities of his two dolphin buddies to track down the predator; then he shoots it with a wire-guided poison dart torpedo, saving the whales for somebody's fridge.

This is a quite good realistic, straightforward, day-at-the-office-of-a-man-in-the-future story; Clarke paints a clear and sharp picture of what is going on in his speculative future. The story doesn't try to engage your emotions or achieve anything on the literary level, though it prompted me to read the wikipedia page about the Greenland shark, which can live to be 500 years old, something I hadn't known before. (Yes, the shark that gets killed in this story was probably swimming the seas when Samuel Johnson was compiling his famous dictionary and Napoleon Bonaparte was murdering people by the thousands--that shark was a witness to history but that didn't protect him from mammal privilege!) isfdb is telling me "The Deep Range" first appeared in the April 1954 issue of the British magazine Argosy; it would be expanded a few years later into a full-length novel in which we presumably witness still more endotherm on ectotherm macroaggressions.

"Guinevere for Everybody" by Jack Williamson

I have fond memories of Williamson's Legion of Space and some other of his books. But they can't all be winners!

It is the future, the period just after the management of large corporations has been turned over to computers! One of the biggest firms, Solar Chemistics (makers of delicious chemburgers), under the leadership of its managerial computer, Athena Sue, has begun marketing clones of a beauty contest winner. This doesn't sit well with the public--some object to what amounts to selling sex slaves, others feel threatened because the clones are apparently superior to us natural born humans. After a series of riots at the retail stores selling the clones and at Solar Chemistic's HQ, the board of directors shuts down the computer and puts a human being back in charge of the company; manufacture of clones is ceased. But why did Athena Sue pull such a blunder? A computer expert from General Cybernetics examines Athena Sue's workings and discovers she was sabotaged by the former general manager whom she was replacing! He also discovers that the beautiful and flirtatious clones were designed with planned obsolescence in mind--when you buy one it is a model of nubility, but overnight it ages into extreme senescence.

"Guinevere for Everybody," which is told in a light-hearted manner that undermines consideration of the various serious issues that are involved (what makes us human? how does our society and how do individuals respond to changes in the economy brought about by mechanization and computerization?) and whose jokes would probably be considered sexist today, feels like filler. Merely acceptable.

"Any More at Home Like You?" by Chad Oliver

If you are a regular reader of MPorcius Fiction Log, you may be saying to yourself, "Isn't Chad Oliver that guy MPorcius is always complaining writes the same dumb space-anthropologist-goes- native-among-primitives-who-live-in-harmony-with-the-environment story again and again? Why is he reading this?" The fact is, I am burning with curiosity: is there any chance that this is yet another story about a space anthropologist who finds low-tech aliens who are exactly like Earth humans, except that they live as one with nature, and so he decides to abandon his people and live out his life with the primitives in their mud huts or wigwams or whatever? How many times could he pawn off this same material on the SF community?

...and back.

When people talk today I all too often find myself unable to understand them, or simply recoiling at their vocabulary. I don't know what "gaslighting" means. I don't know the difference between a "big mess" and a "hot mess." When I am driving in the car I might say "I'm 200 miles from New York," or "I'm two hours away from Chicago," but I'd never say "I'm two hours out." ("Out?") I still say "Where are you?" instead of "Where are you at?"

One of the irritating neologisms I have just started noticing people saying is "nothingburger." This seems to be used primarily to describe accusations of a crime which you want to ignore, but "nothingburger" was the word that kept popping into my mind when I read "Any More at Home Like You?;" this is a story about as thrilling as an account of walking to the corner to borrow a book from the library.

A spaceship crashes near Los Angeles. An alien, who looks exactly like an Earth human, emerges. He claims to represent a vast galactic civilization and is taken to see the president and to speak before the UN about building peaceful relations with the rest of the galaxy. Then he sneaks away to talk to a college professor, a linguist. It turns out the alien is not a representative of a galactic civilization--he is a lowly grad student "studying the vowel-shift from Old English to the present" who wanted to sneak around the Earth undetected but fouled it up. The alien governments don't give Earth a second thought; the last alien to visit Earth, also an academic, was here a thousand years ago! The college prof gives him a crate of books that will make his research easy and the alien is picked up by his friends in a second spaceship. The End.

(This guy is going to base his dissertation entirely on secondary sources? Tsk, tsk!)

Oliver is going meta on us here, making a joke about how SF stories about alien landings usually feature an alien bent on conquering us or peacefully integrating us into a larger, more sophisticated, polity. But the reason those themes are common is because they are fun and interesting; a linguist coming to clandestinely research esoterica is boring. Oliver also includes what felt like a self-referential joke directed at critics of his work like me: before the alien has revealed his true mission, the Earth professor asks him if he is an anthropologist!

Like Williamson's story, this one feels like filler--while not offensively bad, it is merely acceptable.

**********

Clarke's story is kind of modest in its ambition, but is a perfect example of the type of SF it represents; a world reliant on herds of whales for food is an exciting and memorable vision, and Clarke makes it feel real. Williamson and Oliver try to be funny and clever, but leave us with something limp and forgettable. 

Three Worlds to Conquer by Poul Anderson

"As always, he found engineer thoughts soothing.  Forces and matrices were so much easier to deal with than people." 

My (and Bill Meeker's) copy of the novel

Jesse at Speculiction recently reviewed The High Crusade, one of Poul Anderson's more famous novels. I read High Crusade soon after the start of my exile (it was in the local library here on the prairie), like four years ago, and I have to agree with Jesse that the novel is just too incredible. The idea that medieval English fighting men might have admirable qualities that are lacking in modern technological societies, like physical courage or a willingness to take risks or whatever, is an interesting insight and is typical of Anderson's work, but it is too difficult to accept them conquering societies with the wealth and organization required to achieve interstellar travel.

(On the other hand, I recall High Crusade being more readable and memorable than some of Anderson's later work, like For Love and Glory, which I read and have completely forgotten, and Harvest of Stars, which I read and remember being tedious.)

I may not be Poul Anderson's biggest fan, but I enjoyed Brain Wave and The Enemy Stars, and on this blog I have praised several Anderson stories and collections. I am quite sympathetic to Anderson's point of view, so, despite periodic bumps in the road, I keep going back to him.  This week I read a novel published four years after 1960's High Crusade, Three Worlds to Conquer, which was first serialized in If in the first months of 1964. I have the Pyramid paperback, X-1875, printed in 1968.  This copy, for which I paid $1.50 in Minnesota, was originally owned by a Bill Meeker.  

Fellow SF fan Bill Meeker,
we salute you!

Three Worlds to Conquer is a traditional science fiction story about science and wars.  Our hero is Mark Fraser, an engineer on the Ganymede colony of 5,000 people.  He's a skilled pilot of space craft and also the human most adept in the lingua franca that has developed between humans and the natives of Jupiter known as the Nyarr.  Because Jupiter is so inhospitable to human life, humans and Jovians have never met in the flesh, but for over a decade the two civilizations have corresponded via a neutrino-based transmitter system.  As the novel begins Fraser's counterpart on Jupiter, Theor, is asking for Fraser's help because another Jovian society, the Ulunt-Khazul, have launched an aggressive war on the Nyarr.  But Fraser has his own problems--the civil war taking place on Earth has just spread to Ganymede, and the crew of a space battleship (a huge sphere bristling with gun turrets--awesome!) is arresting all the technical personnel on the colony!

The narrative alternates between Theor and his war on the Jovian surface and Fraser's struggle on Ganymede; Theor and Fraser conduct their relationship entirely through electronic communication.  Three Worlds to Conquer thus reminded me of those hard SF classics A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge (1999) and Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement (1954), which also centered on long distance human-alien relationships.

After suffering military defeats at the hands of their enemies, Fraser and Theor use their engineering ability, rhetorical skill, and willingness to incinerate people with rocket exhaust, to win the day.  

There is a lot of science in Three Worlds to Conquer; we hear all about neutrinos, the solar wind, the atmosphere and geology of Jupiter, and what kind of orbits space ships have to take to efficiently travel about the solar system.  I think Anderson spends two entire pages of Chapter 2 describing the neutrino communications device to us readers.  For the most part this stuff is convincing and interesting.  More fun, perhaps, is the strange ecosystem Anderson comes up with for Jupiter, particularly the plants, animals and people that fly/swim in the thick Jovian atmosphere.  He also makes a creditable effort to figure out what kind of technology the Nyarr and other people living on Jupiter's surface, under tremendous pressure and in terrible cold, would have.

Anderson has a tragic sense of life, and, besides all the people who get massacred in these wars, this is expressed in Fraser's relationships.  A skinny 40-year-old who complains about getting old, he has a wife and children, but his marriage has obviously grown stale.  When Fraser returns from a week-long mission to Io, he goes to the neutrino transmitter to talk to Theor before he goes to see his family.  ("Bros before hos," I guess, even if your bro is an alien you've never seen.)   Fraser and Lorraine Vlasek (mmm, pickles), a woman whose loyalties seem to vacillate between the two different sides in the Earth civil war, have a sad unconsummated love affair.  Fraser also deals with the stress of his work on Ganymede by smoking a pipe and taking "happypills," and frets when tobacco and "psych medicine" are in short supply.  Anderson doesn't imply any moral judgments about Fraser's attitude towards his family or his reliance on stimulants to get through a Ganymedean day.

Characters and style aren't the strong point of this short (143 page) novel; it's a story about plot and ideas.  There aren't any libertarian speeches like the one at the end of the Van Rijn collection Trader to the Stars, but Anderson's politics are in evidence; Fraser carps about government censors and bureaucrats, and Theor gets out of a predicament by trading with primitive natives he encounters.  Anderson portrays war as preferable to living under tyranny or surrendering what is yours, but many minor characters are willing to give up and/or collaborate and have to be convinced by people like Fraser and Theor to do the right thing and stand up for what is right.  And while wars will happen, at the center of the novel is the idea that different cultures will most profit through trade and friendship.

Not spectacular, but solidly entertaining; Three Worlds to Conquer has all the classic hard SF elements, and doesn't outlast its welcome, as new things keep popping up to maintain the reader's interest.

*********

Some four years ago Joachim Boaz reviewed Three Worlds to Conquer; you'll have to take my word for it that I read his review after drafting mine. 

If we have any substantial disagreements about the novel, it is about Fraser's wife, Eve.  Joachim seems to think her lack of "screen time" is a careless flaw, perhaps a sign of sexism.  I, as I have suggested above, think this is a conscious artistic choice by Anderson, an effort to depict a stale marriage.  The very last line of the book is actually about Eve, and Fraser's strained relationship with her, suggesting Anderson thought the Fraser marriage an important element of his novel.

Joachim also suggests the aliens in the novel are silly-looking, but I thought them better than the cat people, teddy bear people, and girls with blue or green skin we so often get in SF.

***********

The last page of my edition of Three Worlds to Conquer is an ad for the "Latest Science Fiction!" published by Pyramid.  Of the seven books advertised, I've only read the two included Jack Williamson Legion of Space novels, first written in the 1930s ("latest" indeed.)  I remember enjoying The Cometeers (yay, space war!), but being disappointed in One Against the Legion (instead of interstellar naval warfare we get a detective story in a space casino.)  Joachim read the Sturgeon collection A Way Home last year, and gave it a mixed review.

Feel free to let the world know via the comments why we should seek out The Butterfly Kid, Venus Equilateral, Against the Fall of Night, and The Synthetic Man, or why we should avoid them like we'd avoid the ammonia seas of Jupiter.

Outlaw World by Edmond Hamilton

Front and back of my copy

In 1939, Mort Weinsberger concocted the character of Captain Future, and over the next twelve years 27 stories about Captain Future appeared in science fiction magazines.  Most of these stories were written by Edmond Hamilton, prolific SF author and husband of Leigh Brackett.  The Captain Future stories were reprinted in paperback in the 1960s and 1970s, and I recently purchased a few of these.  This week I read Outlaw World, choosing it essentially at random; it is the 19th Captain Future adventure.

My 1969 printing of this 1945 tale has a cool Frazetta cover (albino King Kongs chasing people up a cliff!) and, on its last page, an advertisement for a book on astrology aimed at women. All the women who paid 60 cents for a paperback about an evil scientist who is stealing radium are enjoined to spend ten bucks for a hard cover book ("truly a collector's item") that will tell them when to make "major purchases."  Hopefully someone was there to warn these ladies that the best time to make the major purchase of a ten dollar book of nonsense is never.

The universe of Captain Future is one in which the planets of the solar system, and some of the moons and asteroids, have atmospheres and ecosystems that can support human life. All the planets, or most of them, seem to be home to humanoid civilizations (late in the book it is suggested that thousands of years ago people from Deneb colonized the planets of the solar system, and we are their descendents.) The interplanetary trade in radium is critical to the livelihood of the system’s populace, and a mysterious band of space pirates has been severely disrupting this trade. The government’s space navy (the Planet Patrol, HQ in New York) has no luck deterring or catching the pirates, so Captain Future (Curt Newton, HQ on Luna) takes up the case!

Curt Newton is a genius scientist, but in this book he spends most of his time acting like a naval officer or a CIA operative.  Which is just as well; I don't want to read a book about a guy sitting at a desk taking notes and attending boring conferences.  Newton travels incognito on a radium hauling merchant ship, looking for clues, and gets captured by the leader of the space pirates, an obese Uranian scientist who uses his genius for evil!  (There are three genius scientists in this novel.)  There are gun fights with energy pistols, space naval battles, encounters with monsters, tense moments in a pirate stronghold.  Newton does take some time out from piloting space ships and shooting people to prove his science bona fides by building a detection device in his lab.

Starring a guy with a name like "Captain Future," I was afraid that this short novel (126 pages) would be annoyingly silly and childish; fortunately, it didn't sink to that low a level, though it is quite simple.  There is essentially no style other than a fast pace, and Captain Future and his milieu are not particularly memorable, unlike, say, the protagonist and setting of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom books or Tarzan of the Apes.  Hamilton doesn't seem to be trying to convey any ideology or ethic (unlike, say, Leigh Brackett with her anti-government theme in Alpha Centauri or Die! or M. John Harrison with the anti-business and anti-industry attitude he gives Pastel City).  Outlaw World is nearly all action and cliffhangers, but, Hamilton succeeded in keeping my interest as Newton and friends journeyed from one planet, asteroid or space ship to another, overcoming some challenge at each one.

There are lots of characters, and each has only one or two personality traits--Simon the Brain is a genius scientist who consists of a disembodied brain in a hovering robotic box, Grag is a hulking robot who loves his alien pet, Bork King is a loyal and brave Martian.  These aren't deep characters, but they are likable.  All the good characters have an opportunity to display their positive qualities and contribute to the victory over the evil Uranian scientist.  There are also comic relief moments--in order to sneak among 18-foot tall white apes Grag, who is like seven feet tall, is painted white, and his disguise is such a success that he is adopted by a female ape who thinks he is an ape baby.

Outlaw World is a simple trifle, but it is pleasant and inoffensive.  It is not ambitious, but it seems to accomplish its aims, and I was never bored or irritated.  Fans of old-fashioned space opera like "Doc" Smith's Lensmen books or Jack Williamson's Legion of Space stories may like it.

The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by Brian Ash

Tarbandu at the PorPorBooks blog recently has featured the cover of Brian Ash's Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction on his site, and blogged about the similar Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by Robert Holdstock. Drake University has a copy of the Ash volume (sadly, the spine is quite broken and the pages threaten to achieve their liberty at any moment) and I spent some time looking through it.

After like 60 pages of timeline (called "Program"), listing major events in SF in from 1805 to 1976, the book is organized by themes (or as the book calls them, "Thematics") such as "Robots and Androids," "Mutants and Symbiotes," and "Warfare and Weaponry." This is the heart of the book, in which numerous stories and books are described. Then we get essays on topics like "Science Fiction as Literature," and "The Value of Science Fiction" in the "Deep Probes" section, and finally discussion of "Fandom and Media." Many of the sections of the book are written or introduced by recognizable SF authors and editors, including such important figures as Asimov, Anderson, and Pohl. This being a British book, British authors are well represented, including not only big names like Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard, but some I feel like I don't hear much about, such as Ken Bulmer and Edmund Cooper.

All 19 of the "Thematics" are introduced by "name" SF writers.  A. E. Van Vogt's contribution is characteristically bizarre; my man Van barely addresses the issue he was asked to talk about, espouses some of his weird theories, and actually calls out the people who produced the book he is writing for, saying "I observe that my current work is not appreciated by British critics of the genre; but it sells well...." Zing! Philip Jose Farmer writes about his religious beliefs, asserting that if we are not immortal, life has no meaning. Ouch! Ken Bulmer's contribution is all over the place; he decries technology as evil, complains that in SF "artefact" is usually spelled "artifact," and takes time out from his pessimism party to praise SF artists for their "honourable labour." The photo of Bulmer reminded me that I need to shave and get a haircut.

(I'll list all the Thematics and their introducers below the fold, as newspaper people say.  All you fashionistas will find Ken Bulmer's photo down there, too.  Get your clippers ready. )

I don't really like the design of The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.  The font is tiny and ugly and the pages feel crowded and cramped (every single page has a horizontal heading at the top of the page and most have a vertical heading on the outside margin.) There are many illustrations, mostly book covers and magazine illustrations, which of course is great, but I thought many of them mediocre.  I also don't understand why some particularly weak illustrations, like a panel from a Barbarella comic, are allowed to take up an entire page.  On the plus side, any illustration you haven't seen before has some kind of information value, and this book is full of illos I have never before encountered. There are many photos of author's faces, and, adding to the cramped feel of the book, many of them are cropped very close, the writer's chin and forehead beyond the borders of the image.

As with the illustrations, the text, even when I don't think the style is good, is full of interesting information about books, stories, and authors I have never heard of.  And the 19 Thematics intros provide some kind of insight into the character of writers with whom we may be familiar primarily through their fiction.  The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is definitely worth a look for classic SF fans, even if I don't grok some of its artistic and design decisions and I think some of the Thematics intros are wacky.     

Three tales from The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories: Wells, Kipling, and Williamson

Cover of the edition I borrowed

I wanted to read “Problems of Creativeness,” an earlier version of “The Death of Socrates,” the first chapter of Thomas M. Disch’s fixup 334, and so checked out a copy of 1992’s The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories. The collection, edited by Tom Shippey, seemed to have a number of interesting stories in it, so I put off Disch for a space and read several of them, today stories by H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and Jack Williamson.

“The Land Ironclads” by H. G. Wells

Published in 1903, in this story an unnamed hardy frontier nation of hunters, cowpunchers and “negro-whackers” (Shippey in his intro compares them to the Boers or the Australians) has been invaded by the army of a similarly anonymous urban, sophisticated nation of clerks and factory hands, presumably Europeans.  The skinny city boys easily defeat the rugged country boys by using what we would today call tanks, as well as bicycles.  Wells thinks bicycles are more suited to warfare than horses.

There isn't much by way of character or plot in this one, though the descriptions of the fighting are good.  Wells spends quite a bit of time describing the complex mechanisms of the land ironclads, and those that make their rifles so accurate; there are compensators that take into account the movement of the vehicle, for example, and a device that measures range to target and raises or lowers the gun barrel accordingly.  While Wells condemns war, he celebrates the triumph of science and the brain over spunk and brawn--the city boys in the tanks are described as doing their fighting in a rational, methodical, business-like way, which Wells heartily approves, and they share Wells's contempt for emotionalism, including patriotism.

"Land Ironclads" is more effective as an essay than as a piece of fiction; while competently written, there is no feeling beyond a facile "Gee Whiz!" response to the technological stuff and a smug confidence in the superiority of the educated elite.

“As Easy as ABC” by Rudyard Kipling

In the future (2065) there is what amounts to a world government, the Aerial Board of Control.  With a fleet of highly maneuverable aircraft armed with nonlethal weapons (blinding lights and deafening sound projectors), the ABC's multinational staff is an irresistible force able to maintain order anywhere in the world. 

(The ABC reminded me of the Space Patrol in Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet, which prevents international war by being ready at any moment to nuke aggressors.)

Kipling describes a post-democratic world in which the average person finds a crowd a disgusting source of physical and mental disease and voting to be an absurdity.  People lack any curiosity and are obsessed with privacy; there are no newspapers and everybody plants around their homes dense stands of quick grow trees to block line of sight.

A bunch of democracy activists has amassed in Chicago, however, and are demonstrating.  The local authorities are shocked at the sight of people standing so close that they brush against each other.  These demonstrations have inspired angry counter-demonstrations, and the ABC has to rush air ships to Illinois before the democracy activists are murdered by the anti-democracy crowd.  The members of the democrat crowd (and their families and friends who aren't even there!) are whisked away without any sort of trial to London, where their bizarre antics of taking votes and gathering in crowds will amuse the theater-going public.  Meanwhile the people of Chicago beg the ABC to take direct control of the town.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this story.  Is Kipling so worried about mob violence and so hostile to meddlesome elected politicians that he is advocating rule by an invincible and unaccountable elite that can carry you off without any kind of due process?  Or is he satirizing such fears?  Maybe he is just speculating that, if those of us in democratic countries don't show restraint and exercise responsibility when enjoying such freedoms as freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, and when voting for our representatives, that some kind of tyranny or other will arise.

All the clues point to Kipling believing that ABC rule is benevolent, however, that this story is a utopian attack on democracy and popular government.  The crew of the lead airship (an Englishman, an Italian, a Japanese, and a Russian) are depicted in a positive way, and it is suggested that all people in the world are rich because the population is low.  Maybe the ABC airship using force to keep the two Chicago crowds from fighting is analogous to a 19th century British imperial force taking up the white man's burden and maintaining order in some unruly Indian or African village.
            
On the "Gee Whiz!" front Kipling is as good as Wells.  Besides the aircraft and the fast growing trees, Kipling has automatic maps that act like a GPS computer, electric paralysis rays, and advanced medicine (people normally live to be 100.)  

An interesting, challenging story.

“The Metal Man” by Jack Williamson

It is perhaps not fair to compare Jack Williamson to major literary and cultural figures like H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling, but where "The Land Ironclads" and "Easy as ABC" try to make some point about society and human nature, "The Metal Man," published in 1928, is just a conventional piece of entertainment.

A scientist is searching the South American wilderness for radium.  For some reason he doesn't have any local guides or grad students with him.  He finds a ten mile wide crater full of a weird green heavier-than-air gas.  He blunders into the crater, and discovers that the gas in the crater turns organic matter into metal.  He finds lots of dead metal birds and even a metal prehistoric reptile.  He encounters a bizarre life form, intelligent crystals that have the power to defy gravity.  The crystals help him get out of the crater, but he is doomed to turn to metal.  He writes a letter to his best friend, and pays a guy to deliver his dead metal body to his friend with the letter.  When the friend accepts delivery he puts the metallic corpse in the museum of the college where the scientist taught.  The End.

A barely acceptable trifle.

********

These three stories were more interesting than fun.  I have read more entertaining work by each of these writers in the past: Wells - Kipling - Williamson.  Still, the Wells and Kipling perhaps provide some kind of insight into the thinking of two important British writers. 

This weekend I will read some more tales from The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories.