"You can help us willingly with all your knowledge of this universe, and be rewarded by electric immortality. Or you can refuse. In that case, we will strip your mind of all knowledge and then destroy you immediately."In his essentially mainstream novel about a science fiction writer who goes insane, Herovit's World, Barry Malzberg, who has read more SF and thought about SF more than just about anybody, includes a parody of SF of the Lensman/Captain Future type that features heroic scientists and fighting men who explore the universe and battle hostile aliens. Let's check out an example of the very kind of story Malzberg was satirizing, Edmond Hamilton's The Comet Kings, first published in Captain Future magazine in 1942. The Comet Kings is the 11th Captain Future Adventure; I am reading the 1969 paperback edition from Popular Library.
(We've read two Captain Future novels by Hamilton already, Quest Beyond the Stars and Outlaw World, and over the course of this blog's life I have read many other novels and stories by Hamilton, who, like his wife Leigh Brackett, is something of a MPorcius fave.)
The government of the Solar System, based in beautiful New York City on Earth, has a big big problem! Dozens of space ships, both private commercial ships and government war ships, have vanished without a trace in a sector beyond Jupiter. The Planet Patrol has sent out two of its best agents, old man Ezra Gurney and Joan Randall, a "dark, pretty girl" and "the smartest agent of our secret investigation division" who "knows the spaceways better than most men," to investigate. These two geniuses also disappear, so the government turns to the Moon for help! Only four people make their homes on the Moon, scientist Curtis Newton, known as Captain Future, and his three comrades, the Futuremen! Newton has a crush on Randall, so everybody knows he will take this job seriously!
Who are the Futuremen? Oldest of the three is Doctor Simon Wright, a genius scientist who was a close colleague of Curtis's father, biologist Roger Newton. When his body approached death, Newton removed Wright's brain and implanted it alive in a box equipped with cameras, microphones, and projectors that emit "beams of force" that allow him to hover and fly. Newton and Wright created in their lunar lab the other two Futuremen, Otho, the synthetic man, and Grag, the intelligent robot. When his parents died, young Curtis was raised by Wright (AKA "The Brain") and Otho and Grag, and became a brilliant scientist himself, as well as "the most renowned fighting planeteer in the System."
I took these images of Curt Newton's comrades from the scan of the Winter 1943 issue of Captain Future available at the Internet Archive |
There are no three-eyed aliens in this story |
Randall of course is only pretending to have joined the Cometae in order to learn more about them and the Allus--she is an intelligence agent, after all. When Newton and the Brain promise the leaders of the anti-Allus majority population of the comet world that they will try to reverse the electrification of their bodies, the commoners launch an uprising against the royals, and Newton and the Futuremen are right in the thick of the fighting! Unfortunately, when the rebels are on the cusp of victory, Querdel contacts the extradimensional Allus via his ten-foot-wide ebon orb and a wave of energy from another universe hypnotizes all the rebels into immobility, save the not-quite human Grag and Otho, who escape to the forest outside the alabaster city.
Querdel, in his six-wheeled car, drives the unconscious Newton from the white city to the black citadel of the Allus. Luckily, Grag and Otho, hiding in the woods, see the car go by and march to the 1000-foot tool black tower. Within the tower Curt learns the true nature of the Allus and their mission in our universe. (The scenes in which Newton sees the true forms of the Allus for the first time, and when he looks through the Allus' portal into their universe of four dimensions, seemed to me to owe some inspiration to H. P. Lovecraft, Hamilton's fellow Weird Tales scribe.) Newton, the Futuremen and Joan Randall work together to shut the portal from the other universe, dending the Allus menace, and then Newton, The Brain, and a Martian scientist figure out how to turn all the immortal electric people back into short-lived normal people who can have children and die. (Hooray, I guess?)
There are no giant bats in this story |
As part of my project of defending Golden Age SF from misharacterizing attacks, I will point out that while Malzberg's parody in Herovit's World suggests that SF scientist/soldiers are xenophobic, shooting first and asking questions later, and making servants or slaves of alien races, this Captain Future novel is practically a paean to diversity. It is true that nobody gives a boring or self-righteous speech about the evils of racism and sexism--Hamilton instead depicts the people of the future matter-of-factly taking diversity and equality as a given, portraying Earthlings, Martians and Venusians working side by side, both men and women exhibiting intelligence and bravery, and all of them accepting such strange characters as Grag, The Brain and Otho as comrades. The masses of the people of the comet are good and quick to aid the strangers from outside--it is only their aristocratic leaders who are evil, and they courageously oppose when given a chance (Hamilton perhaps exhibiting a very American attitude about hereditary rule.)
An entertaining, optimistic and wholesome space opera, perhaps an interesting contrast to the somewhat gritty, pessimistic and noirish Hamilton space opera we read a little while ago, "The Starcombers."
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The last page of my 1969 paperback is an ad, but not for SF books. Rather, it promotes the history of the Plantagenets by Canadian-born writer Thomas B. Costain. It looks like people still read these--the first volume, The Conquering Family, published in 1949, has 25 reviews on Amazon. I like to think that there are thriving classic SF and pulp fiction communities online, but The Comet Kings only has two Amazon reviews and the third volume of The Collected Captain Future put out by Stephen Haffner (which contains The Comet Kings and three other Captain Future novels) has only 11 reviews--I guess this Costain guy is a big wheel!
I love your comments on the ads in paperbacks as much as I love your reviews! Yes, Thomas B. Costain wrote commercial historical novels. I still find them in thrift stores from time to time. Haffner Press is reprinting the Captain Future series which I've been buying.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I find these old paperbacks fascinating, adverts included! And they fit into the lean MPorcius budget, which the quite fine Haffner Press books, sadly, really do not. I do own two Haffner volumes, Thunder in the Void, Kuttner space operas, which I splurged on, and a tattered withdrawn Des Moines library copy of the Leigh Brackett collection Martian Quest.
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I'm a big fan of the Haffner Press books. I wish they would publish more classic SF. I tend to vote with my money so Haffner, Subterranean, Stark House, Armchair Fiction, and Altus Press get most of my dollars.
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