Edmond Hamilton, pioneering pre-Golden Age SF writer, scripter of Superman and Batman comics, husband of Leigh Brackett, and MPorcius fave, has nine short stories listed at isfdb under the date 1931. We've already talked about "Monsters of Mars," "The Horror City," "The Shot from Saturn," "The Man Who Evolved," and "Ten Million Years Ahead." Today let's talk about three more of these 1931 SF tales, two from Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales and one from Harry Bates' Astounding.
Like a lot of these Edmond Hamilton stories this one is about three dudes--narrator dude, his best friend, and the third dude who is smarter and/or wackier than narrator dude and his bosom chum, Often it is the extraordinary third bloke who sets off the plot with his crazy invention or theory and ends up getting captured or even killed, but in "The Earth-Owners" the third man is like a Greek chorus who explains everything that is happening but doesn't do much about it.
"The Earth-Owners" starts out with our narrator Sterling and his best friend Carter hanging around with their eccentric pal Randon in his house on the edge of Boston. They are talking about the latest news, that astronomers have spotted black clouds in space that are approaching Earth. Randon, citing Charles Fort, suggests that these black clouds may be alive and may be the Earth's true owners! Maybe Earth is just a farm or game preserve, and we are like some alien's chickens or goats or deer, bred to be slaughtered for food or hunted for fun! Jinkies!
Sterling, sitting by the door, has a view of Boston's downtown, and suddenly he sees black clouds, no doubt those from space, descend upon Beantown's streets--when they rise they leave behind scores of dead bodies! As the clouds drift from block to block, exterminating all life in Boston, our three protagonists speed out of town in Randon's automobile.
The three head south, along the way passing knots of refugees and town after town full of dead bodies. The black clouds are spreading throughout the country, wiping out the populations of all but the smallest settlements! Randon and his companions learn that the government is setting up the HQ of America's resistance to the space clouds in a little village in the greatest state of the union, New Jersey, and they travel there and volunteer their help. The assembled scientists are impressed by Randon's theory that the Earth is the property of these living black clouds of death.
Earth's scientists have no luck finding any weapons that can harm the clouds, and it looks like we are all doomed, when suddenly from outer space appear some glowing spheres; these spheres attack the black clouds with lighting and have soon eradicated them. Randon thinks that these new aliens are going to devour our life forces just like the black clouds were, but when the glowing globes leave he realizes his mistake--the globes are beneficent owners who feel pity and affection for us! "The Earth-Owners" has a sort of sense of wonder ending in which Radon imagines that the human race, protected by the spheres, will one day grow in wisdom and become the globes' equal, maturing beyond our need for their protection and even travelling the galaxy to become the owners and protectors of races as primitive as we are today, paying forward the good deed done us by the globes.
This story is OK. In general I prefer stories in which the characters' actions mean something, and in this story the characters are merely spectators, and in general I am skeptical of stories that welcome alien paternalism or imperialism, like Robert Crane's Hero's Walk or Kate Wilhelm's The Killer Thing or Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. But "The Earth-Owners" is short, and themes that can grow frustrating in a novel of over 100 pages can be easier to digest in a short story. All the scenes of death and travel I liked, and I found Randon, who is always expounding his wild theories to everybody, to be an (perhaps unintentionally) amusing character, so I enjoyed "The Earth-Owners" and am judging it acceptable.
It is the future! Every corner of the solar system has been explored by humankind--except for the interior of a comet. The coma of a comet, we are told, is "a great globe of glowing gas charged with enough electrical force to blast out of existence any matter that touches it." To date, any rocket that has tried to explore the interior of a comet has come to grief.
Kirk and Madden want to be the first to see the inside of a comet, and in their rocket, which is made of a new alloy that is (they hope) proof against the matter destroying properties of the comet's coma, they blast off for the largest comet in the system. Two weeks later they have reached the comet. They don dark glasses and plunge into the comet's coma, where, after safely passing through a shell of energized gas, they find an inner void, in the center of which is a green planet with air they can breathe!
On this planet Kirk and Madden have an Edgar Rice Burroughs style adventure. The planet is home to two races. There are numerous populous cities of humans just like Earth people, and a single city that is home to a small cadre of men made of organic flexible metal. The humans have an ancient or medieval level of technology--walled cities and metal swords--but the metal men are an old race that is practically immortal and they have much more advanced technology. Their numbers are low and they no longer reproduce, so to work all their machines they require slaves. Humans are too rebellious to make good slaves, so when they capture humans the metal men tear the flesh from their bones and use it as a raw material from which they create obedient amoeba-like organic robots.
Kirk and Madden learn all this background after rescuing a party of captive humans from a pair of metal men and their squad of flesh robots; with no guns of their own, the metal villains are easy prey for K & M's "rocket-pistols." During the fight one native human is brave enough to help them--it turns out she is the fiancé of the chief of her home city! This princess-to-be leads them to her city, where K & M hang around a while and then help repel an assault on the city by a legion of flesh blobs. During the fight they run out of "rocket-bullets," and Kirk is actually carried off by the flesh robots; the city chief tries to save Kirk, and he is also captured! ("City chief" sounds silly, so I'd call this dude "the mayor," but can you imagine a big-city mayor risking his life during a hand-to-hand fight to do anything except maybe smoke crack? I can't either!)
This is an entertaining enough story. One thing that distinguishes it from some of Hamilton's other stories is that he tries to develop a relationship between Kirk and Madden, having them joke around a lot, referring to past exploits, etc. This adds a dimension to the tale, but all the joking I think does diminish the atmosphere of horror a little.
Both "The Earth-Owners" and "Creatures of the Comet" would had to await the 21st Century to see republication; like "The Sargasso of Space" they appear in the 2013 volume Reign of the Robots: The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume Four.
Here's a story that was reprinted in the 20th century. "The Sargasso of Space," which was gifted with an awesome fight-for-your-life-with-improvised-weapons-in-the-cold-vacuum-of-space cover when it made its debut in Astounding, reappeared in 1990 in Astounding Stories: The 60th Anniversary Collection from Easton Press. Easton Press makes those leatherbound books with gold decorations on them, I guess mostly for use as gifts. I think these books look ridiculous, like a child's idea of what a fancy book looks like, but Easton Press is still in business, so I guess there is a market for these.
It is the future! Hundreds of space ships travel between all points in the solar system, carrying goods and passengers. But don't suppose that life for the sailors of space is easy! The space freighter Pallas is travelling from Jupiter to Neptune when a fuel leak is discovered--due to a shortage of fuel the ship drifts into a "dead-area" where "the ordinary gravitational attractions of the solar system are dead....because in that region the pulls of the sun and the outer planets exactly balance each other." Inside the dead zone the Pallas joins a huge mass of thousands of lost spaceships (the "wreck pack") held together by their own small gravitational pulls; unless they can find some old fuel among the wrecks the crew of the Pallas will expire in a few months when their rations or oxygen run out.
Immediately upon becoming part of what we WH40K kids call a "space hulk," the Pallas receives unexpected visitors--another disabled ship, the passenger ship Martian Queen, recently drifted into the dead zone and the survivors of that disaster float over to the Pallas.
The Martian Queen, according to the "swarthy" leader of the survivors, Krell, ended up in the dead zone when its rocket tubes exploded; in the explosion all the officers and passengers, save a female passenger, were killed. Kent and a party from the Pallas go over to take a look at the Martian Queen and, despite all of Krell's dissembling, spot clues that suggest mutiny! Kent slips the female survivor, Marta Mallen, a communicator ("suit-phone") and when he gets back to the Pallas he and Marta have a secret convo. It turns out there really was an accidental tube explosion (these rockets aren't very reliable, are they?--I'll be sticking on Earth, thanks) but few people were killed--Krell decided that the way to conserve oxygen and rations and thus prolong his own life in the dead zone was to kill all the officers and passengers. To make this prolonged life in the dead zone a little more bearable he spared Mallen for the obvious reasons.
A tense drama follows as the crews of the two ships have no reason to trust each other but need each other's help--the mutineers of the Martian Queen need a ship with working rockets while the crew of the Pallas need help navigating the maze of the space hulk in their search for fuel. There are double crosses, people getting killed when somebody opens a valve and all the air in the compartment they are in is released into space, and the final zero gee hand-to-hand combat with iron bars (for whatever reason, neither the Pallas nor the Martian Queen had any firearms on board.) Putting the lie to the idea that SF of the past was totally sexist and the women depicted therein were all ineffectual damsels in distress, Marta Mallen repeatedly puts herself at risk to save men's bacon and to slay mutineers.
A solid entertaining thriller, full of science (not that much of it is tenable today if it ever was) and danger and violence. I love stories in which people have to deal with space suits and airlocks and all that, and "The Sargasso of Space" is a good one. Thumbs up!
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Three entertaining SF adventures full of gruesome deaths and crazy theories. What more could the classic pulp reader ask for?
Edmond Hamilton was one of my favorite writers back in the 1960s. He had a number of stories as part of the ACE Doubles series. I have THE BEST OF EDMOND HAMILTON around here somewhere...
ReplyDeleteBack in 2017 we here at MPorcius Fiction Log read and blogged about The Best of Edmond Hamilton edited by Leigh Brackett and The Best of Leigh Brackett edited by Edmond Hamilton. Good times, good times!
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