Astounding Jan 1941: L R Hubbard, M W Wellman and M G Hugi and E F Russell

Let's twiddle the knobs and tune in the pre-Dianetics L. Ron Hubbard and read the third installment of Hubbard's Kilkenny Cats series in its January 1941 incarnation in an issue of Astounding, the leading science fiction magazine, at that time edited by the towering figure of John W. Campbell, Jr.  Also in this issue is the first part of Robert Heinlein's serialized Sixth Column, a novel I haven't read yet and won't be starting today.  What we will be reading today from the 1/41 Astounding besides Hubbard's contribution is a story by Manly Wade Wellman, author of many weird stories and space operas, and a collaboration between Eric Frank Russell, reportedly Campbell's favorite author, and Maurice G. Hugi, a guy I don't know anything about.  

(Here are links to my blog posts about the first two Kilkenny Cats stories, "The Idealist" and "The Kilkenny Cats.")

"The Traitor" by L. Ron Hubbard

The colony of exiles on Sereon is in trouble.  Not only are the tensions between the small cadre of educated professionals and the large group of laborers erupting into violence again--perhaps even worse, a green plague has started infecting the colonists.  Fortunately, former royalist space naval officer Steve Gailbraith, who turned revolutionary and once the revolution was won and had  turned on him turned reactionary, a man who doesn't really get along well with the eggheads or the working class thugs, is on the scene to patch things up. 

Steve pretends to be a traitor to his fellow exiles, commandeering the colony's communications apparatus by force and transmitting a cock and bull story to the communist government that exiled them about how the colonists have dug up a space worthy warship abandoned on Sereon long ago and are now preparing it to harass government shipping.  This call brings back to Sereon the space battleship that brought the exiles to the planet.  The ship's officers are untrained and uncharismatic incompetents whom the ordinary spacers and marines don't respect, so Gailbraith is able to seize control of the ship through trickery and personal magnetism.

"The Traitor"'s chase scenes and military scenes, involving various ray guns and force fields and people getting gruesomely blasted, are pretty entertaining.  Hubbard also provides the pay off for the scenes in the last installment that showed how unfit for command were the revolutionary officers of the battleship, and advances Gailbraith's relationship with beautiful propaganda officer Frerdericka Stalton.

Pretty good.  Now that Gailbraith has a space ship, I guess we'll see what he does with it in the next installment of the Kilkenny Cats series.

"Lost Rocket" by Manly Wade Wellman

Here we have a murder mystery in space with not only a cast of suspects/potential victims and a bunch of clues for the cast to cogitate over and argue about, but also the space suits, ray guns, and zero-G physics we SF fans crave.  Wellman handles all this material pretty well, so I enjoyed "Lost Rocket." 

It is the spacefaring future; mankind's furthest flung colonies are among the Jovian moons.  Some robber barons are making more money out there under the Great Red Spot than the government on Earth likes, so in the mail on the latest supply ship is a written order to the current colonial governor, whom the Terran officials have deemed too friendly to the robber barons--he is to stand down and make way for his second-in-command.  But the supply ship doesn't make it to Jupiter intact!  The vessel's engines explode, killing some thirty men!  The bow of the vessel and a limited supply of oxygen remains intact, and the five spacemen who were there when the motor went boom survive: the captain, his lieutenant, a squid-like Martian mechanic, and two ordinary spacers, one young and enthusiastic, the other gruff and "beefy."  The five men figure that one of their number must have sabotaged the ship at the behest of the Jovian robber barons, making sure he was in the bow so he would survive the blast and live to get his reward from the Jovian monopolists.  No doubt a ship working for the robber barons will collect them, rescuing the robber barons' agent and killing the other four men.  Do the innocent spacemen have time to figure out who the villain is before they are picked up by the criminals and murdered?  Could they somehow alter the course of their unpowered coasting rump of a ship?  And what will the canny saboteur do to protect his identity and make sure he hooks up with his payday? 

I liked the space walk scene and the fight scenes, but the mystery is pretty good as well.  Thumbs up for "Lost Rocket!"  

Wellman is a pretty well-known and well-liked writer, and I recommend "Lost Rocket," but according to isfdb it has never been reprinted.  The publishing world can be as cruel and inexplicable as the void between the stars!

"The Mechanical Mice" by Maurice G. Hugi and Eric Frank Russell

Anthologists may have given "The Traitor" and "Lost Rocket" the cold shoulder, but not "The Mechanical Mice," which appears in multiple US and European anthologies.  The story was printed under Hugi's name here in Astounding and in the 1957 edition of Healy and McComas' Adventures in Time and Space I consulted at isfdb; Terry Carr, however, in his 1978 anthology Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age, credits it to Russell, and explains in his intro to the tale.  It seems that Russell wrote the story based on the germ of an idea that was included in a story Hugi wrote but which was rejected by editors some twenty times; Carr tells us Hugi was a good friend of Russell's, but "a dreadful writer."

(Carr's intro is pretty colorful, describing Russell typing the story in Liverpool during a Luftwaffe raid and letting Hugi take credit for it as a favor to a sick friend close to death who would be cheered up by seeing his name in Astounding.  Like a real scholar, Carr provides a long citation list of his sources for his intro, which also touches on the history of SF in Britain in the early 20th century, so if Russell or British SF generally is one of your interests, check it out.)

"The Mechanical Mice" is a pretty good SF horror story, with gore and some sense of wonder elements that perhaps inch into cosmic horror territory.  One of my complaints about "The Mechanical Mice" is that while Russell employs first-person narration, he also includes long passages describing in detail events to which the narrator was not a witness; Russell should have just composed the entire thing in the third person.  

The narrator is a writer, and he has a friend who is an inventor.  Friend some years ago invented a super efficient battery.  In the beginning of this story the narrator learns how his pal came up with that impressive invention.  You see, this brainiac also has, secretly, invented the "psychophone," a thing you attach to your noggin that allows you to look into the future!  What you witness is largely random, but the inventor was lucky enough to peer through the mists of time and watch a person of the future manufacturing a battery; he was then able to reproduce that process in his own 20th-century lab and thus made a mint marketing to consumers the superior technology of the far future.

(As in so many time travel stories, in "The Mechanical Mice" Russell addresses time paradoxes and the possibility of changing history; Russell asserts that you cannot change history.)

The narrator dons the apparatus and takes a crack at observing the future and witnesses scenes of violence and grue in a totalitarian dystopia in which people are controlled via headsets they are obligated to wear.  The tone of "The Mechanical Mice" is that of a weird horror tale, and the futures it depicts are strange and disturbing.

The inventor has another mind-blowing revelation for the narrator.  For years now, based on his glimpses of the future, he has been building a machine, but he doesn't actually know what the machine does.  It appears that the inventor, gazing into the future, laid eyes upon an advanced machine, a robot, that was capable of detecting the inventor's prying eyes and even look back, implanting into his mind blueprints and hypnotizing him into making a replica of itself in the 20th century.  The inventor shows the resulting mystery machine to his friend; it is is a sort of refrigerator-sized box on casters adorned with camera eyes as well as antennae that remind the narrator of a devil's horns.  In keeping with the story's horror tone, the narrator repeatedly describes the machine as being the size and shape of a coffin, and both our main characters uneasily recognize a sinister "air" about it.

The second half of "The Mechanical Mice"'s 18 pages concern how this future machine proves to be a terrible menace and our heroes and some minor characters fight it.  Russell uses animal analogies to explain how the machine operates.  The machine, it turns out, is like a queen bee that gives birth to swarms of smaller robots; these robots are likened to rodents, being mouse- or rat-sized, and capable of scurrying along with terrific dexterity at astonishing speed.  So like rodents are they that cats who see them instantly attack them, but these little droids are armed with wickedly sharp blades, and over the course of the story many felines are killed, Russell describing in some detail their bloody wounds.  The mechanical mice steal watches and clocks and bring them back to the mother robot, and anybody who tries to stop them gets cut.

Our two guys wreck the mother robot, and we have a sort of climax and denouement in which the inventor muses on the robot-dominated future of Earth (offering a crumb of optimism by raising the possibility that the robots only take over the world because mankind has graduated from an Earthbound existence and emigrated to the stars.)  But then for some reason the story keeps going, with another mother robot discovered (built by mice from the first one) and the mechanical mice's reign of terror continuing.  So our heroes have to find and destroy this one as well.  This final part has some good gore scenes and a fun idea on how to defeat the robots, but Russell should have somehow integrated that material into the struggle with the first robot queen--two climaxes is one too many; after the defeat of the first robot queen I couldn't muster up sufficient interest in a second queen to make lengthening the story in this way worthwhile.

As I have suggested, I have some gripes about the construction of this story, but the plot and themes are good and individual sections are all well-written.  So, thumbs up.

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Three entertaining stories that make good use of so many beloved standard-issue SF components: inventors, space warships, forcefields, space suits, ray guns, malevolent robots, and time travel.  A solid issue of Astounding.

More Astounding and L. Ron Hubbard next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.