He Owned the World by Charles Eric Maine

"What do you imagine will happen to me?"

She shook her head slowly.  "Even if I knew, I would not be permitted to say.  In time you will know everything, so do not be impatient.  Remember you are immortal, too." 

I have to admit that when I started reading Englishman Charles Eric Maine's 1960 novel He Owned the World I had what the kids call a WTF moment.  We just read the 1959 version of Edmond Hamilton's The Star of Life (the first version appeared in Startling Stories in 1947) in which a 20th-century astronaut on a mission to be the first to orbit the moon suffers a mishap so that he is lost in space for thousands of years and then wakes up from suspended animation and gets involved with the politics of the far future.  Well, Maine's book is also about a 20th-century astronaut who is on his way to becoming the first man to orbit the moon when his vessel suffers a malfunction and he is lost in space for thousands of years, only to wake up and find himself involved in future politics.  It is certainly an odd coincidence, but let's just shrug our shoulders, admit that there are lots of SF stories about people falling asleep and waking up in a strange future world, and move on with our lives.  (And by "lives" I mean our mission to read, digest, and assess all these old SF books and magazines!)

I purchased my torn and worn copy of the 1960 Avon paperback edition of He Owned the World in 2015 on a road trip through the Middle West.  It looks like I bought 10 novels, one anthology, and a magazine on this trip, and that I have now read about half of that material.*  Evidence that I am making progress in my life's work!  He Owned the World was printed in hardcover as well as paperback here in America in 1960, and saw multiple editions in Britain, Italy and Germany, so I guess we can call it a success.

Our hero in He Owned the World is British astronaut Robert Carson.  Like the guy in The Star of Life, when it is evident that he is lost in space, he commits suicide rather than wait for his supplies to run out.  Carson dies, but wakes up 8000 years later, revived by the medical science of the future.  Despite what I said about moving on with our lives, it is hard not to compare the similar plot elements of the first chapters of Maine's novel and Hamilton's.  Compared to Maine, Hamilton's The Star of Life is fast paced and gets to the point quickly; Maine includes lots of technical info about the damaged space ship and a metaphorical, surrealistic passage about the experience of waking up, alive, after centuries of being dead: "A purple glow trembled like aurora, then changed color, moving tranquilly through the rainbow of the spectrum....there were tentative sensations of feeling: tiny pinpricks of physical awareness like the impact of cosmic rays on exposed nerves...."

After a long convalescence, during most of which he is unconscious, a rehabilitated Carson learns where he is and what is going on.  Thousands of years ago there was an atomic war on Earth, and our home planet still hasn't quite recovered.  Before that cataclysmic war, Mars had been colonized by scientists, and, because the war didn't directly affect Mars, the red planet is now the leading polity in the solar system.  Among other technological advances, the Martians have achieved immortality--Carson himself is now immortal.  In turn, the Martians have abandoned sexual reproduction, but as a compensation, people's genitals (including the revived Carson's) are artificially enhanced to increase the pleasure of the sex act!

Carson is a very important man on Mars, and is assigned the best doctors and teachers to get him healthy and to acclimatize him to life in this future world.  He is even assigned as a house mate and bed partner the smartest and sexiest woman on Mars, Competence Cayne!  (These centuries-old Martians all have first names that reflect their professions or attributes; this woman's name I also suspect is some kind of Cain and Abel joke.)  It may sound like Carson has died and gone to heaven, but his relationship with Cayne causes some disturbance for our 20th-century astronaut.  The people of Mars in the 100th century are cold and intellectual, they feel no love and have contempt for emotions, and while Carson becomes emotionally attached to Cayne, she tells him "Love is an obsessive form of compulsion neurosis" and warns him, "There are surgical techniques in psychoneurology for curing conditions of emotional distortion."  Yikes!  When they part at the end of Cayne's three-week tour of duty as Carson intimate companion, our hero is a little depressed and lovesick.

There's still more bad news for those of us with 20th-century values and a little Earth patriotism when Carson begins to learn just what it is that makes him so important to these cold-blooded Martian brainiacs.  The red planet lacks many of the natural resources the Martians need, so they trade with Earth.  Two thousand years ago the war-ravaged Earth demanded prices the Martians didn't want to pay, so the Martians figured the logical way out of this impasse was to use their superior technology to build a space navy and conquer Earth!  Three interplanetary wars, decades of strife in space and on the Earth's surface, followed, and each conflict ended in stalemate, with the Earthlings unable to strike back at Mars, but Mars unable to overwhelm the tenacious Terran defense.  Earth and Mars have been in a Cold War for the dozen centuries since, only conducting that vital trade via intermediaries on Luna.

When Carson died back in the 20th century he was hailed as a hero and rich people set up a charitable institution to commemorate him and search for his lost rocket and his corpse.  Over the thousands of years of nuclear war, interplanetary war, and uneasy peace, the Carson Trust invested its funds wisely, so wisely that it became the most powerful institution on Earth.  The Trust not only came to own a majority of the property in the world, but all of Earth's governments became reliant upon its financing.  Now that Carson is back to life, because he is the beneficiary of the Trust, the Martian authorities believe that, legally, Carson "owns" the entire planet Earth.  I didn't find all this very convincing, but there it is.  While Maine strives to make so many of the little things in He Owned the World realistic, the outlandishness of this central plot element makes me suspect the novel is as much a satire of technocratic government, arrogant and unfeeling scientists, and general human shortcomings as it is a "thriller" (as it is called on the cover of the British 1961 hardcover edition.) 

The Martians are ready to launch their fourth war on Earth, and this time they will have an edge because Carson is going to be the figurehead leader of the invasion and of the rational and scientific colonial government they will set up once resistance is crushed.  The Martians figure many Earthlings will welcome the rule of their hero and the legal owner of the planet.  Carson is far from keen on playing this role, but it doesn't matter to the Martians whether Carson wants to participate in this scheme or not--beneath its utopian veneer of immortality and no-strings-attached sex, technocratic Mars is an authoritarian society.  Here is the theory of society of Mr. Mentor Jaff, head of the Martian Department of Co-ordination:

"This is the hundredth century, Mr. Carson, and not the twentieth.  The State is an entity in itself, and the government is the co-ordinating brain of the State, and individuals are merely the cells of a corporate body."     

Via a device implanted in Carson's ear (one many Martians, apparently, are issued), Jaff listens in on all of Carson's conversations and transmits to him "advice."  If Carson elects to ignore this "advice," Jaff, at the flick of a finger, can deliver to him a painful ultrasonic blast--this is the stick that complements the carrots the Mars government has been providing Carson, like his luxury apartment furnished with four nubile women. 

It is typical in SF for immortality to turn out to be a curse, rendering life boring or causing people to lose their humanity.  Here in He Owned the World the immortals treat mortals like children at best, and at worst as a natural resource to be manipulated and exploited or discarded as necessary.  The immortals claim that they are responsible stewards of the solar system, that the fact that they will live essentially forever means they have an incentive to make a better future; in contrast, they say, the mortals of Earth, who live less than a century, act irresponsibly and selfishly because they know they will not live long enough to suffer the long term consequences of their actions on the economy and the environment.  Thus it is just for them to run Earth without taking Earthmen's wishes into account and even kill millions of Earthlings if it facilitates Martian rule.

The second half of the 144-page book begins with Maine's description of the Martian conquest of the Moon and the attack on Earth--Carson spends these months on Mars, following the war's progress on TV.  When it appears (deceptively, as it turns out) the Martians have Earth under control, Carson and Jaff go down to the ruins of London for a propaganda ceremony, but the Earthlings launch a surprise attack and after an interlude among the mutants who live on the Earth's radioactive surface, Carson finds himself in the custody of the genetically normal Earthers who live in vast underground cities.  Carson's captors deactivate the transmitter in his ear so he is no longer subject to the control of Jaff, who managed to make it back to the Martian forces.

The Earth government spends a lot of time and energy trying to figure out if Carson is the real resurrected Robert Carson or some kind of Martian impostor, maybe an ordinary Martian man given all kinds of plastic surgery and hypnotism so he looks and even thinks how the real 20th-century Carson must have.  When they are satisfied he is the real deal they want him to act as a negotiator between the Earth and Mars, to end the war and get the invaders to leave.  The Earth people, who are not immortal, have values and attitudes closer to Carson's own (for example, while the pitiless Martian scientists want to exterminate the mutants because they are a genetic dead end, the subterranean Earthers provide the mutants what food and medical care they are able to spare) and he enthusiastically throws in his lot with them.  He negotiates a cease fire, but the amoral Martians use the cease fire as an opportunity to launch a sneak attack, massacring an entire subterranean Earth city's population and once again getting their mitts on Carson.

The final pages of the novel throw everything into doubt for Carson and for us readers.  Competence Cayne reappears, ostensibly to offer herself to Carson as a permanent companion, a bribe so he will do the bidding of the Martians.  But sotto voce she also claims to be part of an underground movement of Martians who want a less tyrannical government, and that Jaff himself is part of this movement.  When Jaff was saying all that stuff about the meaninglessness of the individual he was just playing a part, she claims, because he is monitored himself by those above him!  As the novel ends and Carson commits suicide a second time we cannot be certain about Carson's true identity or Jaff's or Cayne's true motives, and we have no idea what will happen to any of the hundredth century characters and societies; all we know is that Carson's resurrection (or creation) achieved nothing.       

He Owned the World is well-written and I enjoyed it (the surreal passage at the beginning is not representative of the text as a whole.)  While I am often unhappy with conspiracy stories and stories in which the main character is a puppet, Maine's novel also includes some of my favorite themes, like immortality, warfare, unhealthy sexual relationships, and skepticism of the State.  It is also interesting to see a SF book that is so hostile to scientists.  If you don't mind a book that argues that life is meaningless, that we can never attain reliable knowledge of anything, and that people with talent and experience use those assets to dominate and exploit their inferiors, I would certainly recommend He Owned the World to you.

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*  Imagination Science Fiction, April 1956: It includes a story by Edmond Hamilton which I liked and some politically incorrect cartoons

Genius Unlimited by John T. Phillifent: I declared it "pretty bad"

The 7th Annual Year's Best S-F edited by Judith Merril: I have read numerous stories from this, including a terrific story by Cordwainer Smith

Across Time by Donald Wollheim, writing as David Grinnell: I called it a "disappointment" and gave it a marginal negative review

Worlds of the Wall by C. C. MacApp: I said this was "acceptable" but today I remember nothing about it.  According to my blog post it features a giant otter and duck people.  Something for you fetishists?

The Diamond Contessa by Kenneth Bulmer: This thing is bizarre and self-indulgent, though I was feeling charitable when I blogged about it and didn't outright condemn it

Who Goes Here? by Bob Shaw: I somewhat grudgingly gave this joke story a positive review