"The Rebels" by L. Ron Hubbard
At the end of the fourth Kilkenny Cats story, "The Mutineers," aristocratic naval officer Steve Gailbraith, through skilled (i.e., duplicitous) diplomacy had set the exiles up on a planet of giants. Since then, six months have passed, and things are not going well for the humans living boring and uncomfortable lives among the giants. The working class thugs who comprised labor leader Dave Blacker's battalion during the revolution on Earth and were forced to join him in exile have been engaging in petty crime, and as a result the Brobdingnagian natives have been lynching them. As for Steve, he has become a drunk! Vicky Stalton, love interest and former top propagandist for the revolution, is broken hearted to see Gailbraith, the hero who saved their lives so many times, reduced to such a state, but none of her pleading or cajoling has managed to get him back on track to fulfilling his destiny, which Vicky and we readers assume is to overthrow the communist dictator, Fagar, who exiled Steve, Vicky, Blacker and the rest after the revolution achieved success.
This situation is unsustainable, and Blacker tries to cut the Gordian knot by sending a message to Earth and conniving with the Fagar government--Blacker will launch an uprising against the giants that will facilitate a raid on the planet's wealth by Fagar's space navy; in return, Blacker's people will be pardoned and allowed to return to Earth. As Gailbraith, and we readers, expect, when the Terran government forces arrive they don't just neutralize the remainder of the native defenses, but gather together Blacker and his people and execute them on the spot. Gailbraith, Stanton, and a handful of the middle-class scientists among the exiles witness this mass murder from hiding and we have a front row seat along with them; one of the particular features of this episode of the Kilkenny Cats is the high volume of eye-popping gore, with Hubbard describing how the giants pull humans limb from limb, for example, and lingering over descriptions of the effect ray guns have on people struck by them.
Fagar's Terrans, then, fall into Gailbraith's trap--our boy Steve has been roused from his stupor by Stanton's feminine wiles, she having inspired jealousy in the man she loves by flirting with Blacker. Back on an even keel, as he has so often before, Gailbraith preserves the lives of the aristocratic and bourgeois exiles with his knowledge of space navy operations and a fair bit of trickery. When Fagar's ships take on supplies they unwittingly load water that Steve has spiked with the powerful native alcoholic beverage he has been imbibing--soon the entire fleet is in a comatose state, allowing Steve to seize one of their vessels and disable the rest. As the story ends, Gailbraith, Stanton and the scientists have an operational space battleship again and Steve's quest to overthrow Fagar--along with his and Vicky's love affair--can proceed.
"The Rebels" isn't bad--I like that the Gailbraith-Stalton relationship moves forward and that there is lots of space naval warfare--but I think it is inferior to its predecessors in the Killkenny Cats series. I didn't find all that credible the idea that ruthless veteran labor leader and revolutionary Blacker would think he could trust Fagar to keep his end of a deal, the dictator after all having quite recently sent him into an exile meant to kill him after Blacker had helped Fagar win the throne of Earth. Gailbraith's trick in this one didn't feel as convincing or as fun as some of his earlier plot-resolving schemes, either. Distractingly, the origin story for Stanton in this one seemed to contradict that in the previous KC story, uninteresting new characters of limited utility are introduced for some reason (a huge "Negro" who acts as a sort of servant to Gailbraith and an earnest young cabin boy type) and I even found some of the sentences here in "The Rebels" puzzlingly opaque. I also had sort of expected the last KC story to see Gailbraith taking over the Earth or at least overthrowing Fagar, so I was a little disappointed about that. Maybe Hubbard had planned to continue this series but ran out of steam or was responding to a lack of interest from Campbell or Astounding's readers. Too bad.
Merely acceptable.
"There Shall Be Darkness" by C. L. Moore
Catherine L. Moore’s famous Weird Tales stories of Northwest Smith are all about sexy Terran criminal Smith’s dangerous relationships with sexy alien women, and one of the supporting pillars of Moore’s story here in the February 1942 issue of Astounding is a very similar theme, but alongside that facet of the tale are somewhat more "serious" themes related to the politics of imperialism and the supposed cycles of history. You see, for centuries Earthmen have ruled the solar system, imposing civilization on the natives of the other planets. But today the Terran Empire is crumbling under the pressure of attack from extrasolar barbarians as well as rebellion in the colonies!Captain Jamie Douglas is the commander of the last Terran base on Venus. Douglas is a big wide-shouldered Scotsman, and Moore here in "There Shall Be Darkness" indulges in the romanticizing of Celtic culture and ethnicity we have seen in the work of her husband, Henry Kuttner, as well as the stories of their friend Leigh Brackett, flavoring the story with fragments of Scottish song and intimations that Celts have special powers, that they can gain insight from visions and through dreams and so forth. Moore's choice of ethnicity for her Terran lead may also be a reflection of the idea that Scotsmen were the vanguard of the British Empire; Moore further reminds us of popular images of martial Scotsmen by having her Venusian natives march into battle to the sound of "skirling" "pipes."
This last Terran base is in a prosperous "Terrestrialanized" city, and living on the base with Douglas is our Venusian lead, his slender beauty of a girlfriend, Quanna; Quanna is perhaps the true main character of "There Shall Be Darkness." Little does Douglas know that Quanna is in close contact with her brother, Vastari, the ambitious leader of one of Venus’s disparate warring tribes, a man whose ambition is to kick out the Terrans and unite the planet under his own royal rule. In fact, Quanna has been charged by Vastari with the sacred duty of murdering Douglas with a special ceremonial dagger--Douglas’s name is actually written upon its blade!
In contrast to manly man Douglas, who represents the best of (a now decadent) Earth, the natives of Venus are characterized as effeminate; they are manipulative, inscrutable, sneaky, selfish, and obsessed with fine points of etiquette and ignorant of big abstract ideas--the men are even slender and wear long hair. At the same time, Venusian society is terribly sexist--among the natives women are second class citizens, generally consigned to harems. (At times I think Moore is trying to evoke readers' impressions of British soldiers and administrators in Afghanistan or among Arabs--besides the reference to harems there is an ambush in hill country, for example.) The plot of "There Shall Be Darkness" revolves around Quanna’s clever and underhanded machinations and manipulations, which involve lots of lying, drugging, backstabbing, and passing through secret doors, as she engineers events to achieve her goals, which at times are somewhat mysterious to us readers: is Quanna trying to help the strapping Earthman she apparently loves, or her own wild and beautiful planet and people, or is she just acting out of radical selfishness, putting at risk everything and everybody in her pursuit of her own desires? The backdrop and foundation for all this action is the theme of cycles of history that reminds us of Robert E. Howard (whom Moore famously admired) and Poul Anderson, the theory that the vigor and expansion of young civilizations is succeeded by decadence and collapse into barbarism. Terra has lost Mars and its other colonies and as our story begins the rulers of Earth are summoning Douglas and his soldiers back from Venus to help protect Earth from those extrasolar invaders.
Quanna’s elaborate schemes to convince Douglas to take her with him to Earth don’t quite work out, and it is deus ex machina developments—the arrival on Venus of a bunch of those extrasolar barbarian reavers and the manipulations of an alien almost as mysterious and deceptive as Quanna (but more responsible), a Martian merchant resident on Venus—that resolve the plot and offer Quanna and Douglas the opportunity to try and build some kind of life together as well as some kind of enduring civilization on Venus that we might see as a hybrid of Terra and Venus' cultures (perhaps this is Moore telling us that society needs both male and female aspects to prosper.)
"There Shall Be Darkness" is a pretty good story, with numerous strengths as well as elements that will perhaps make it interesting to 21st-century readers. Moore offers plenty of romantic descriptions of Venus scenery (e. g., mangrove swamps and mountains plagued by rockslides ) and depictions of exotic wildlife (Quanna is a master of flying snakes, Venusian horses and venomous arachnids and employs her knowledge of these creatures in her complex plots.) In the past I've complained that Moore overdoes all the surreal and romantic description in some of her Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry stories, but the descriptions here in this 1942 tale contribute to the story without overwhelming it.
There are a lot of feminist/gender studies angles to "There Shall Be Darkness," what with the fact that Moore is herself a woman, the person who drives the story’s plot is a woman who uses stereotypical feminine methods to pursue her stereotypical feminine goals, and that the Venusians are coded female while Douglas the Terran is hypermasculine. And there are timeless political issues: When is law and order in fact tyranny, and when is freedom merely anarchy? Should the colonized welcome peace and elevated standards of living if it costs them autonomy?
A solid piece of work, especially if you are interested in depictions of imperialism, gender stereotypes, and ethnicity in SF. Martin Greenberg included "There Shall Be Darkness" in the 1951 anthology Journey to Infinity (reprinted in German in 1964 as 8 Science Fiction Stories) and in our own century Frederick Krome selected it for inclusion in his anthology Fighting the Future War: An Anthology of Science Fiction War Stories, 1914-1945, which I guess was marketed to colleges as a text book or something--how many SF anthologies cost $64.95 in paperback?
"The Sorcerer of Rhiannon" by Leigh Brackett
This story, the title of which is so similar to that of the book version of Brackett's 1949 Thrilling Wonder piece "Sea-Kings of Mars," appears in two 21st-century collections I own, Haffner Press's Martian Quest: The Early Brackett and Gollancz's Sea-Kings of Mars, but I don't think I've read it before. Brackett's "Sea-Kings of Mars" AKA The Sword of Rhiannon involves a Terran archaeologist on tired old Mars who gets a glimpse via esoteric means of the young and vibrant Mars of a million years ago, and endures the experience of having some other intelligence impinge upon his own mind and try to take over his body. Here in "The Sorcerer of Rhiannon" Brackett presents similar themes. Max Brandon is a tomb raider guy who illegally uncovers ancient artifacts on the desert planet of Mars to sell to collectors and scientists on the black market; this adventurous behavior apparently wins him lots of girls, but he mostly does it for neither money nor love, but because of his fascination with the mysterious and glorious past of Mars, ancient home of lost races which, apparently, had more advanced technology than today's spacefaring Earth imperialists.
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