The Closed Worlds by Edmond Hamilton

"It was fanatics like you who took away from us the freedom of the stars."  She turned and pointed at the glass grid, where the three men lay unmoving.  "That is the road to infinite freedom, to go anywhere in the universe, to find out anything we wish to know--and you would destroy it."

It's time to read the second Morgan Chane novel, The Closed Worlds, first published by Ace in 1968.  (You'll remember that before we read those stories about fish ladies and killer dust, we read the first of Edmond Hamilton's Chane books, The Weapon From Beyond.)  Since December 2013 I have owned a copy of the '68 edition of The Closed Worlds, which I am glad to have for its Jack Gaughan cover and frontispiece, but, as with The Weapon From Beyond, I will be reading the version of the novel found in my copy of the 1982 omnibus entitled Starwolf, if only because the later printing seems less likely to fall apart in my hands.

As The Closed Worlds begins, John Dilullo, mercenary captain, and his company are on Earth, in what we here at MPorcius Fiction Log consider the greatest city in the galaxy, New York, New York!  But Morgan Chane, who was raised on Varna, the forbidding planet of the superstrong space pirates known as Starwolves, finds N-Y-C to be B-O-R-[pause]-I-N-G.  I guess nobody told him about the Greek vases and American sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art!  Chane, you need a tour guide!  Well, at least Dilullo gets a taste of the real New York when he gets mugged.     

Dilullo is contacted by James Ashton, co-owner and manager of one of the biggest interstellar trading companies, Ashton Trading.  James's brother and owner of the other half of the company, Randall, is more of an academic than a businessman, and five months ago he went to the Allubane system to do some anthropological research (or so he claimed.)  The Allubane system has three inhabited planets, and they are known as the Closed Worlds because the people who govern the system hate visitors and drive away people who come by.  Even the Starwolves of Varna consider Allubane a no-go zone!  Randall Ashton's team has not been heard from since it got there and James wants the mercs to go to the Allubane and rescue his brother or bring back proof of his death.

Hamilton spends some time on Earth (and more time later, during their perilous adventure) fleshing out Dilullo and Chane's characters--Dilullo is middle-aged and wants to build a big house in his native Brindisi and retire there, and Chane's parents were from Wales, and Chane goes there and finds he likes Welsh people.  (No doubt the Royal Tourism Board of Wales was thrilled that Hamilton depicted Welshmen as dudes who love to drink and sucker punch Americans.)  I wouldn't say Hamilton's characterizations in The Closed Worlds are excellent, but they are more than adequate, and add to the story; this is an improvement over the characterizations in Hamilton's pre-Golden Age space operas that appeared in Weird Tales like "The Star-Stealers" and "Crashing Suns;" those capers, while having cool SF devices, aliens, and scenes of terror and violence, were severely lacking in the character department, to the point that it was a noticeable drag on the enterprise.

By the twentieth page or so of this approximately 150-page novel the mercs are back in space, approaching the Allubane system.  After abortive negotiations with the isolationist government of the capital planet of the system, Arkuu, Dilullo leads Chane and other mercs on a commando raid that liberates from prison one member of Randall Ashton's party as well as a beautiful Arkuun woman, Vreya, who is a leader of the rebel faction of Arkuuns who want to open up Allubane to interstellar commerce.  Vreya and her comrades helped Ashton and some of his friends get out of government custody earlier, and currently Ashton and co are searching for the astounding artifact that the Arkuuns have been hiding from the galaxy, rumors of which brought Ashton's team to the Closed Worlds in the first place--a machine called the Far-Faring that can separate your mind from your body so you can explore the universe as a noncorporeal entity.

The merc rescue team and Vreya hide in the dense jungles of Arkuu, where reside dangerous monsters and the ruins of the superior civilization which once held sway over the planet.  That was a starfaring civilization, and people like Vreya want the Arkuuns to regain the freedom of the stars--she thinks the ruling party's isolationism is sheer superstition.  Vreya leads Dilullo, Chane and the rest to the mountainous part of the jungle where she thinks Ashton must be looking for the Far-Faring--while Vreya turns out to be a good sex partner for Chane, she isn't the most reliable guide, because she figures the longer Randall Ashton is away from Earth, the more likely the Earth government or some other entity is to send a battle force to Allubane which will overthrow the conservative isolationist government she detests.

The chases and fights involving the native monsters (these creatures, knwon as "Nanes", are the renegade descendants of artificial life created by Arkuu's fallen high tech civilization) and the current Arkuun government on the way to the Far-Faring are entertaining.  When everybody ends up at the Far-Faring inside a mountain the leader of the conservative government calls a ceasefire and explains his policy, the policy of centuries of governments before his.  The reason Arkuu is covered in ruins of high tech cities is that the Arkuuns of the distant past became addicted to the Far-Farings; while they were all busy exploring the universe they neglected all the big and little responsibilities of maintaining a modern society and Arkuun civilization almost entirely collapsed.  A small number of hard asses destroyed all the Far-Farings they could find, but they knew some had escaped their notice, so they initiated the isolationist policy to make sure nobody from off world would find out about the Far-Farings and swamp Arkuu with tourists and put all galactic civilization at risk of addiction.

The mercs drag an unwilling Randall Ashton away from the Far-Faring; Vreya gives the thing a try and accidentally pulls Chane in with her.  The worst pages of the book are Hamilton giving us a sort of psychedelic description of what it is like to be dissociated from your body and floating around the universe, though the kind of SF reader who loves science may appreciate how Hamilton uses the phrase "Brownian Movement" without explaining it.  Chane is a man's man, of course, and realizes that a life apart from your physical form is a bad idea, and he and Vreya successfully overcome the urge to abandon their bodies forever.

In the final fight many people (including the head of the Arkuun government and all his agents) are killed, and all their vehicles are knocked out, so the survivors among the mercs, the Arkuun rebels, and the Ashton party have to walk through mountains and jungle for weeks to rendezvous with the ship.  When the mercs and the Ashton team blast off for Earth they leave Vreya behind to, apparently, take over the planet and open up the Free-Faring to all comers.

The Closed Worlds is a good adventure story; better than its predecessor, The Weapon From Beyond.  The action scenes and all gadgets and monsters are good, the characters are fine, and the ideas Hamilton makes use of--isolation vs integration with a larger civilization, the risk that freedom and high technology can lead to decadence and social collapse--are interesting.  There is also some of that skepticism of intellectualism that we see in the work of Hamilton's fellow Weird Tales scribbler Robert E. Howard:

The very fact of the existence of the Nanes was nightmarish.  They were a by-product of that same science that had produced the Free-Faring, and Chane thought that that science had been a curse to this world, creating a horde of almost immortal horrors to prey upon all life.

Hamilton seems skeptical of the Far-Faring, and I thought maybe he was presenting it as an allegory of drugs or TV, but his book is ambiguous; after all, the people who would destroy or keep concealed the Far-Faring are all killed and Vreya, whom it is clear we are expected to admire, comes out on top.  Similarly, instead of going hardcore pro-business or anti-business, Hamilton presents contrasting specimens of businesspeople--there's James Ashton, who loves his brother, treats the mercs decently and wins Dilullo's respect, and the businessman who, as part of a money-making scheme, told Randall Ashton about the Far-Faring and thus put everybody at risk, a guy who earns Dilullo's derision.  (I think Hamilton means Dilullo to be the moral center of the Morgan Chane books--the mercenary leader acts as a mentor of sorts to Chane, who, though a great fighter and resourceful adventurer, has the twisted values of a criminal and needs help learning how to fit in to mainstream human civilization.) 

Thumbs up for this late-1960s space opera from one of the pioneers of the genre.  I hope to enjoy the final Starwolf book, World of the Starwolves, as much as I did this one.