We've already read a story from this issue, John W. Campbell's "Blindness." Campbell not only has two pieces of fiction in the issue, one under a pseudonym, but a letter as well, under a different pseudonym. His letter is part of an incomprehensible argument with another letter writer about orbital velocities (I think) and includes brain-breaking math. It seems like Astounding readers really knew about science and really cared about science! Wilson Tucker has one of his joke letters printed, in which he refers to Robert Lowndes; the letters columns in these 1930s SF magazines make the SF community of the day feel like an intimate, if sometimes contentious, family. When you flip through them you'll sometimes find people saying the letters column is the best part of the magazine and judging an issue almost as much on whether their favorite letter writers are represented as on the quality of the fiction.
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| When I was a kid everybody talked about the 1950s as a time of prudish repression of sexual expression, but woah, check out this Hannes Bok cover! Zowie! I guess nowadays we can use this cover as evidence the 1950s was an era steeped in rape culture! |
The Adastra is a spherical spaceship five thousand feet in diameter, mankind's first interstellar craft. She is propelled by a complex drive that disintegrates things--this disintegration effect must be carefully dampened by supersonic vibrators lest the entire ship, and anything nearby, also be disintegrated. The vessel is on its maiden voyage, a mission of exploration bound for Proxima Centauri, the star system closest to our own. The huge ship was crewed with families, rather than individuals, and Leinster likens the ship to an apartment building. But this is a building that nobody can leave, where nothing changes, and there is very little work to do, and the monotony and boredom of the seven-year trip to Proxima Centauri has proved too much for many of the crew, leading to broken marriages, murder, and mutiny. Just a few years into the voyage the officers disarmed the enlisted men and barricaded themselves in one section of the vessel, and for years the opposing groups have been separated; occasionally the officers have had to force the crew, at gunpoint, to accomplish some work task or other.
As our story begins the Adastra is finally approaching its destination. The captain had signals sent ahead to announce their arrival to any potential modern civilization in the Centauri system, and, sure enough, the Adastra has been receiving replies even less comprehensible than one of John W. Campbell's mathematical formulas. As luck would have it, the best communications operator aboard the Adastra is not from an officer class family, but is the son of two enlisted class parents. Of necessity, this young man, Jack Gary, has been raised to the officer class. Romeo and Juliet-like, he and the captain's daughter, biologist Helen Bradley, are in love--Leinster gives his story that old dramatic standby, the love triangle, by having the ship's second-in-command, Alstair, also in love with Miss Bradley, but this middle-aged guy has no chance.
Jack Gary figures out via technical stuff I won't go into here that the alien signals are no longer coming from a planet but from an approaching spaceship, and that spaceship is trying to conceal its movements, as if it is going to attack the Adastra. Bradley's father, an old geezer, is not up to the task of commanding the ship during this crisis so Alstair takes command. The alien ship, which has greater acceleration and maneuverability than our Earth ship, comes up and sprays the Adastra with deadly radiation--the Earth vessel's hull absorbs the rays, so the humans survive the bombardment, but the Adastra has no heavy weapons with which to retaliate So, the humans play possum, luring aboard an alien boarding party which the Earthers ambush with stun ray guns. Study and interrogation of the captured Centaurians reveals that they are basically mobile plants, and that they treasure animal flesh--like our own!--as a delicacy. Eating animal tissues drives them to ecstasy, and so they have killed almost all animal life in their system, and are thrilled to find in the Adastra a new source of delicious animal protein. They even enjoy eating strands of some guy's wool sweater!
A squadron of alien ships joins the scout and they begin slowly burning away the Adastra's hull with some different kind of rays. By now Gary has figured out how to communicate with the Centaurians, giving the Earthers a chance to surrender. The aliens take over the ship, murdering all the crew members, leaving only the officers. Two officers are selected, along with a bunch of livestock and books and sample devices, to be sent to a fertile but unpopulated planet owned by the monarch of the Centaurians. Jack and Helen are chosen, and shipped to this prison planet on an automatic ship (the king of the Centarians can't trust any of his subjects who might accompany the delicious humans to resist the urge to eat them.) The rest of the humans are killed and eaten, except for Alstair. Alstair has figured out a way to transmit messages to Jack and Helen so that the love birds get to hear him go insane from the horror of seeing his comrades murdered and out of jealous unrequited love for Helen.
The aliens make Alstair land the Adastra on their planet. The Centaurians' rocket drives make their ships faster and more maneuverable than the Adastra over short distances, but to get all the way to Earth, which they are eager to conquer because to them the whole planet looks like the meat department at Wegmans, they need to learn how to make the kind of disintegration drive the Adastra has, and they want Alstair to show them. Alstair activates the engine without switching on the supersonic vibration dampeners, disintegrating not only Earth's first interstellar craft, but the entire planet and the entire Centaurian race. Jack and Helen can see the flash from their prison planet as Alstair saves humanity from becoming the plant people's main course. Take that, veggies! Jack and Helen are sitting pretty, all alone on this prison planet until the arrival of humanity's second interstellar ship, which is due in four years.
"Proxima Centauri" is an entertaining enough spacecraft and spacesuit adventure, with plenty of science (e.g., detailed descriptions of the effects of rays and heat on the ship's hull) and engineering (e.g., Gary goes on a spacewalk to install new improved antennas and modifies machines to create a translation device) as well as lots of melodramatic horror elements--murder, torture, insanity, suicide, etc. The story could have stood some editing for length and repetition, as a bunch of technical descriptions at the beginning get repeated redundantly, and the style is mediocre, but I judge it acceptable.
It is interesting to see another story about how space travel is going to drive people insane, but I'm afraid all that business about the ship being populated with families who get involved in a class war after going bonkers from boredom is sort of superfluous. Once the main thrust of the story, the struggle with the man-eating plant men of Proxima Centauri, gets going all that stuff about families and class war is forgotten, and all the named characters are officers. I suppose Leinster introduced the class distinctions jazz as a way to give his love-triangle subplot more oomph, but Bradley and Alstair only ever mention Gary's class origins in the very start of the story, so it doesn't add much of anything. The fact that the people on the Adastra had psychological problems also casts a shadow on the happy ending of the story--Jack Gary and Helen Bradley are expecting the second Earth interstellar ship to arrive in four years, but if that ship's crew suffers the same psychological issues the Adastra crew did, then maybe they won't make it! Even if they do make it, the fact that they might be miserable diminishes the relief the story's ending is supposed to give the reader after all the horror business with the planet people.
I enjoyed "Proxima Centauri," and judge it to be a borderline case between acceptable and mildly good.
"No Medals" by H. L. Gold
Maybe some day I'll sit down and look through a bunch of issues of Galaxy and try to figure out why exactly Pohl and Malzberg think that 1950-1955 Galaxy is the bee's knees. But today I'm just going to read this early story by Gold, which has been reprinted once, in 2011's Fighting the Future War: An Anthology of Science Fiction War Stories, 1914-1945.
Pohl, of course, was a leftist who wrote plenty of anti-capitalism satires, and "No Medals" provides us reason to suspect why he and Gold got along like two peas in a pod: the story's mad scientist, Patrick Finch, is a genius at making medical devices "but never could understand the workings of a business deal" and is driven to fits of nerves at the thought of "commercial bickering and haggling, the possibility of being cheated;" this poor bastard is forced by poverty to live on bread and milk! He has sunk every penny into his masterwork, a project he has toiled at for 23 years! But today is the day, today his project is complete and he day dreams about being hailed by his countrymen as a national hero!
That masterwork is the invention of a technique of turning dead bodies into remote-controlled drone infantrymen by stuffing them full of electronics! Before him stands just such a remote controlled zombie, and it works! Gold spends a considerable portion of this brief piece describing the science of electricity in the body and then how Finch has replaced some of a dead body's nerves with wires. And then we get an extended fantasy of the mad scientist, his vision of an irresistible assault carried out by the flesh robots, who, having no fear and feeling no pain, will triumph even though they receive no medals. But the scientist's day dreams get the best of him--as he is imagining all the accolades he will receive for his invention he gets so excited he accidentally moves a lever on the remote control that causes his prototype drone to stab him to death with a bayonet (as depicted in the super spoily illustration to "No Medals.") Finch won't be getting any medals, either!
This is one of those stories that is just an idea with a scaffolding of mediocre plot and character constructed around it to hold it up, but the idea is good and the scaffolding is adequate. This is also one of those stories you could analyze to death. It is an anti-war story, of course--there is no suggestion that the war Patrick Finch's unnamed country is embroiled in is a just one, or that Finch's motives are patriotic instead of selfish. We might also see the story as being about how new technologies can destroy their creators, how science and/or the modern state have abandoned any belief in the soul or respect for the dignity of human life and thus recognize no limits, how governments treat their citizens like expendable cogs, how soldiers are (or are thought to be) zombies, etc.
Acceptable.
"Telepathic Piracy" by Raymond Z. Gallun
This story comes to us as a document written in 1959, describing an event that took place in 1949, taking as one of its primary sources the diary of an inventor, Roland Voss; the story includes many excerpts from Voss's diary.
One day a neighbor brings Voss a meteorite, in which is embedded a square, apparently manufactured, piece of metal with a jewel mounted upon it. When Voss holds this alien artifact to his head to listen to it, in case it is ticking like a watch or something, it gives him the power to read people's--and animals!--minds!
I liked how Gallun described the experience of being able to read minds--Voss can see through others' eyes, hear through their ears, etc., as well as know what they are thinking. Gallun also does a good job of narrating the evolution of Voss's character as he experiments with and begins exploiting the possibilities of the device he calls "the telepathon." The device has a quite long range--he can read the minds of people all over the Earth. As a scientist and engineer he is interested in reading the minds of other science brainiacs, but he also ends up reading the minds of people living in poverty and misery. Feeling their agony galvanizes him--he will use the telepathon to help them! But we know where that road which is paved with good intentions leads!
First, Voss "just" steals ideas from other inventors and makes oodles of money marketing "his" inventions and uses the money to give stuff to the poor. Of course, this doesn't actually eliminate poverty, so Voss figures what the world needs is a dictator who will run the global economy and solve all our problems for us, and hey, who would be a better dictator than one Roland Voss? To become dictator Voss figures all he needs is a super weapon, something atomic, with which to threaten everybody into submitting to his will. Now, in real life, by 1949, plenty of people knew the principles behind the making of nuclear weapons and reactors, but in this story nobody has cracked the atomic code yet, so Voss can't just steal that know-how from somebody's noggin. Or can he? Voss realizes that, within the moon, there lives a high tech subterranean (er, sublunar) civilization! And these loonies have all kinds of nuclear power!
By picking the brains of the moon people, Voss is able to design and then build a nuclear-powered rocket plane armed with powerful ray projectors. Via radio he broadcasts his demand that the governments of the world surrender to him, and when they are reluctant to do so, he starts shooting his rays from above, devastating sparsely populated areas, to demonstrate his power. When he is attacked by military aircraft he effortlessly shoots them down, and to show he really means business he sinks a battleship. His attacks fill the people of the world with rage, and when Voss puts the telepathon to his head to research public opinion the power of all that rage kills him! When his nuclear-powered aircraft is recovered it provides the key to revolutionary technological development and economic growth--progress which does not require a dictator.
I like Gallun's optimism, his confidence that ordinary people want freedom and wouldn't sell their liberty to the government in exchange for handouts, and his confidence that technological development leads to a better society. Unfortunately, the resolution of the plot is weak--Gallun described the workings of the telepathon in some detail and never offered any clue that people's anger or hate could harm the user through it. He should have come up with some other way to neutralize Voss.
Despite the weak ending, "Telepathic Piracy" is the best of the three stories I'm reading from this issue of Astounding. It is better written than Leinster's story, and there is more meat--more plot and character--than there is in Gold's story. I think it rises above the broad realm of the acceptable and into the "good" band.
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These stories all have their virtues and all accomplish what I take to be their authors' goals and are all worth reading. And it is nice that they are so diverse--this issue of Astounding offers up some doom and gloom about human nature and psychology and the effects of technology, and some hopefulness and optimism as well. As the crew of the Adastra can tell you, monotony is unhealthy, so bravo to editor F. Orlin Tremaine for offering us some variety.
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