Virgin Planet by Poul Anderson

"You know," answered Davis, "this is the kind of thing I used to daydream about in my teens.  A brand new world, like Earth but more beautiful, and I the only man among a million women.  Well...I've found it now and I want out!"

So many SF novels have covers that I really like produced by artists whom isfdb is unable to identify.  There's the cover of the 1970 Lancer edition of Damon Knight's World Without Children and The Earth Quarter, the cover of Belmont's 1963 Novelets of Science Fiction, Ace's 1975 edition of Leigh Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon, and Dell's 1971 collection of A. E. van Vogt stories, More than Superhuman. Well, we can add Paperback Library's 1970 printing of Poul Anderson's Virgin Planet to the list.  The use of color and metaphor (the women in the book are not giants) gives the cover a very poster-like, "graphic design," feel which I like and which distinguishes it from the many more literal and realistic covers produced for Virgin Planet over the years, while not neglecting the obvious erotic overtones of a book about being the only man on a planet full of women.

Virgin Planet first appeared in book form in 1959, an expansion of a 1957 novella published in the very first issue of Venture with attractive illustrations by Emsh, and has been reprinted frequently.  I just sang the praises of one of Anderson's Dominic Flandry stories; let's see if Virgin Planet provides me a chance to issue further encomiums to the man who built a houseboat with Jack Vance and Frank Herbert.

The Delta Capitas Lupi system of two stars and five planets and many moons has been cut off from the human space federation (the "Union") for as long as anybody can remember by a "trepidation vortex," the kind of thing in other SF you might call a warp storm.  The vortex has largely shifted out of the way, and playboy Davis Bertram (is this a Wodehouse reference?), girl-chasing son of a wealthy businessman, has purchased a one-man space ship with the idea of being the first to explore the system and win some prestige.  When he lands on the Earth-like third moon of the subordinate star's larger planet he discovers it is inhabited by the cloned descendants of a lost all-women colonization vessel that crash landed on the moon 300 years ago; these women have only preindustrial technology and are illiterate and have only dim legends about their ancestors' origins and ordinary human sexual life!

Anderson's narrative begins in medias res, with Corporal Barbara Whitley of the flightless-bird-riding cavalrywomen of Freetoon, one of the competing settlements of clones on planet Atlantis, as they call it. She captures Davis (in the Union, family name comes before personal name) with a lasso and drags him to imprisonment in Freetoon.  After a few flashback chapters which give us insight into Bertram's character, the novel's plot showcases the radical effect Davis's arrival has on Atlantean society.

Women who have been resorting to celibacy or lesbianism all their lives jealously compete for the attention of Davis, while the rulers of the towns see him and his spaceship as the key to absolute hegemony, and war erupts over him.  Barbara Whitley and her genetically identical comrade Valeria free Davis and they escape into the wilderness with him as a coalition army from other towns is storming Freetoon.  Davis insists on bringing along Elinor Dyckman, a voluptuous brunette who makes her way in the world via flattery and sex appeal and for whom the athletic and belligerent red-headed Whitleys have contempt.

The novel is quite readable and entertaining.  Anderson devotes considerable time and energy to setting the scene, describing in detail the sky of Atlantis, for example, with its many heavenly bodies that include the huge planet about which Atlantis orbits, a gas giant which looms 14 times the size of Luna as seen from Earth and  whose amber light alters colors on the Atlantean surface, where the numerous moons often paint a complex multiplicity of shadows.  We learn all about Atlantean society.  The 300-year old ship which brought the very first iteration of Whitley and Dyckman and all the few hundred women who are the prototypes of the hundreds of thousands of people now living on Atlantis is now the base of a sort of papacy.  Women from all the many towns go to Ship City as pilgrims, to be impregnated by the mysterious "Doctors" via a parthogenetic process which splits one of their ovum so they can give birth to a baby genetically identical to themselves.  The Doctors stay out of the endless political disputes between the warlike towns but demand regular tribute and live relatively luxurious lives.

Though there are no explicit sex scenes, Anderson plays up sex angle--one of the first things Davis witnesses in captivity is Barbara Whitley stripping and bathing in a trough, and on their harrowing journey over the mountains and through the woods to a different region of Atlantis, Davis repeatedly gets within seconds of getting into the quite willing Elinor Dyckman's pants, only to be interrupted each time by a jealous Whitley or a monster attack.  Anderson also talks about genetics and sex differences that maybe we aren't supposed to talk about nowadays?  For example, how women's muscles are weaker than men's, which results in Atlantean close combat yielding relatively few fatalities rates-- the women are not strong enough to easily penetrate each other's armor with their axes and spears.  Because an individual's personality, inclinations and abilities are determined by her genetic identity, each class of clones becomes a caste and fits the same niche in each town near Davis's landing spot--every settlement is ruled by mannish Udalls, and wherever you go all the aggressive Whitleys are members of the warrior class while the selfish Dyckmans (a Dickensian joke name?) are lovers and advisers to Udalls and mercilessly manipulate everybody at court.    

In the region of Atlantis beyond that mountain range the party of Freetoon refugees encounters a town in which all the women are the same type of clone, Burkes.  The Burkes have a republican society with a council and social equality, everybody taking turns at menial tasks, a contrast to the  the Udall monarchy and rigid castes--among them a class of helots--found at Freetoon and neighboring settlements.  The Burkes take Davis captive, hoping to breed with him and thus throw off their reliance on the Doctors and generate a more diverse, vital and physically strong nation which will be able to take over the entire planet.  Our heroes escape to an island where resides a settlement inhabited by a small variety of different genotypes, all creative and artistic people, a sort of decadent artists' commune.  These sensitive types are also eager to mate with Davis, for less utilitarian reasons, but the jealous Whitleys yet again interfere.  Then a representative of the Doctors shows up.  Uninterested in having their exalted position disrupted, the Doctors want Davis killed at once, hiding their fears behind the allegation that he is no man, but an alien monster.

The last third or so of the 150-page novel covers Davis's cobbling together of a military alliance of women disaffected from the Doctors and their conquest of Ship City. Anderson keeps this realistic rather than John-Carteresque--like you would expect of an actual political leader, especially in a society like the galactic Union which has abandoned war, Davis is far in the rear with the generals, watching the assault and not even issuing orders but letting an old native, a veteran ship captain, command the operation, until his special expertise is required when it is discovered that the Doctors have his ion blast pistol.  In the end Davis and Barbara and Valeria are able to neutralize the Doctors and make peace among the Atlanteans.  Davis leaves the planet with his lady love (one of the Whitleys, though Anderson keeps it a mystery which) to open up Atlantis to the Union--soon the women of Atlantis will all know the joys of heterosexual sex and sexual reproduction!

After the novel proper Anderson provides a seven-page explanation of all the science in the story, telling us he is emulating Hal Clement's well-respected and very science-based Mission of Gravity.  

A quite good example of the traditional SF story--an adventure with violence and danger that portrays a paradigm shift, expresses skepticism of religion and slings a lot of science--in this case astronomy, biology, sociology and political science--at you in an entertaining and thought-provoking way.  Anderson also succeeds in presenting characters who all have motivations, personalities and relationships that make sense, and who evolve as the novel proceeds.  Thumbs up for Virgin Planet.

Lancer's Science Fiction line in 1972

In our last episode we read the edition of David Mason's Kavin's World published by Lancer in 1972, which they billed as a "science fantasy" in the "immortal tradition of Conan."  I guess Conan was a big money maker for Lancer; at the end of the book are three pages of advertising, and the first of them is for Lancer's line of Conan paperbacks.  We are told our local retailer may very well have a special Conan display!

I think people nowadays look down on these editions of Conan because they include pastiches and posthumous collaborations with Howard by people like Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp.  I think my brother and I had some of these as teenagers, but as an adult I bought and read those oversized paperbacks put out by Ballantine-Del Rey that have more authentic texts.

Perhaps more interesting than the Conan page are the last two pages of my copy of Kavin's World, which advertise Lancer's general SF line.  "Have you missed any of these recent LANCER SCIENCE FICTION best sellers?" we are asked.  Looking over the list I see I have actually read, and even written about, some of these!

Michael Moorcock: The Jewel in the Skull.  This is the first of the Runestaff/Hawkmoon books.  I was a Michael Moorcock fanatic in my teens and early twenties, and read all of the Hawkmoon books, though not in Lancer editions.  (I think I read the 1990 Ace edition of The Jewel in the Skull.)  Of the various Eternal Champion series, I thought these were below average, with less interesting characters and more tedious wars than in the Elric and Corum books, though I loved the idea that all the bad guys wore elaborate masks.  A theme that recurs in Moorcock's work is a portrayal of Great Britain as the villain, and with the exception of the Oswald Bastable books I think that theme is most blatant in the Hawkmoon series.  According to wikipedia the Runestaff books are full of weird in-jokes about the Beatles, British politicians and SF writers, jokes which I did not pick up on when I read them.

Michael Moorcock: The City of the Beast, The Lord of the Spiders and The Masters of the Pit.  These are the three Warriors of Mars books, which I liked least of Moorcock's adventure stories.  They felt totally uninspired, and I have heard they were written in a feverish rush due to a need for money to finance other projects.  I think my brother back in New Jersey still has my copies of these, the early '90s Ace editions, which have Dorian Vallejo covers.

Hal Clement: Needle: I own the 1967 Avon edition of this and read it in 2013 and thought it wasn't bad.  The way the alien communicates with the human protagonist was pretty ingenious.

Ted White: The Sorceress of Qar.  I own the Lancer 1966 edition of this, but have not read it yet.  I liked White's Spawn of the Death Machine, so will probably check it out after I get a hold of and read Phoenix Prime, which precedes it in the Qanar series.

Edmond Hamilton: Return to the Stars.  I own the Magnum edition of this, which looks almost exactly the same as the Lancer printing.  Was Magnum a division of Lancer, or a company which bought Lancer properties or what?  Mysterious!  The cover is by Steranko.  I read my copy quite a long time ago, I guess during my New York days.  I don't remember much specific about Return to the Stars--a guy's consciousness is flung into the far future into the body of an important personage involved in a space war--but I am pretty sure I enjoyed it.  Return to the Stars is a sequel to The Star Kings, a copy of which I own (1967, Paperback Library) but have not read.  Hamilton and his famous wife Leigh Brackett wrote another story involving the Star Kings, Stark and the Star Kings, which was supposed to appear in Harlan Ellison's abortive third Dangerous Visions anthology.  Fortunately in the 21st century Haffner Press and Baen made the story (which I have yet to read) available to Hamilton and Brackett's fans.

Poul Anderson: Satan's World.  I own the Berkley 1977 edition of this, and read it in April of last year.  I wrote a positive review of it at this here blog; it is a good space adventure story, full of hard science and libertarian politics, just the thing to cheer up you laissez faire types in this decidedly unlibertarian political season.

John Lymington: Ten Million Years to Friday.  I read this baby in September of 2011 and reviewed it on Amazon.  This is one of those stories in which Christians, businesspeople, and humanity in general are shown up by a superior alien.  As in way too many movies, the evil humans try to exploit the alien and the main character protects it.  I sold my copy of the Lancer edition in 2013.

Frank Belknap Long: Survival World.  The mysterious Magnum Books strikes again! I own the Magnum edition of this title, which looks almost exactly like the Lancer edition.  This is one of the worst books I have ever read; I suffered through it in late 2011.  As of today there are three Amazon customer reviews of Survival World, and all three award the book a single star; one of these reviews is mine, and you can read it here.

Robert Hoskins (ed): Infinity Two.  I own this anthology, and in 2015 read a few stories from it, including tales by William F. Nolan, Edward Bryant, and Barry Malzberg.  I should probably read more from this thing; there is a collaboration between Poul Anderson and his wife Karen, and stories by writers like J. F. Bone, Anthon Warden, and Russell L. Bates, about whom I currently know very little.

***********

Readers who have read any of the books from Lancer's late '60s/early '70s line, who think I'm all wrong about Michael Moorcock's Hawkmoon and Mars books, or who actually saw the special Lancer Conan display way back when, are invited to comment!

Orbit 4 stories by Harlan Ellison, R. A. Lafferty, and Vernor Vinge

On Labor Day I stopped in at Half Price Books to take advantage of the 20% off sale, and one of my finds was a copy of 1968's Orbit 4, edited by Damon Knight.  I like the cool green cover, with its resonant hints of alien planets, electricity, electronics, and the ocean deep.

There's no actual intro to the book as a whole, though on the first page there is a blurb from Publishers' Weekly that, without saying "new wave," comes across as celebrating that vaguely-defined phenomenon and Orbit's role in it: "Most of the stories typify the emerging new domain of science fiction, with its emphasis less on the 'out-there' than on the 'right-here, right-now.''  In the next sentence they give their prime example, the included Harlan Ellison story.

"Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" by Harlan Ellison

My man tarbandu has made mention of this story a few times at The PorPor Books Blog, and I was glad to have a chance to read it myself.  "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" has appeared in numerous other venues, including The Illustrated Harlan Ellison, where William Stout (I love Stout's dinosaur illustrations!) gave it the comic book treatment.

Rudy, a recently discharged soldier, comes to a decrepit gothic house looking for his former fiance, Kris, whom he still loves and wants to marry, even though he hasn't seen her in eight months.  The house is full of hippies, and Kris, like the rest of them, spends most of her time out of her mind on drugs.  Rudy moves in, and helps to support the hippies by running errands, bringing in money, and serving as a presentable public face for the hippie colony, things which none of these perennially stoned goofballs can really do.  Significantly, because "love" is so much a part of the hippy "brand," Ellison shows that the druggies have lost the ability to love or care for each other--their sexual needs are like those of animals,

Ellison describes the house the way you would describe a haunted house, all weird noises and shadows, and goes beyond showing that drug use has turned the hippies into useless, filthy decadents: in an oft-foreshadowed final dream sequence/metaphor, the hippies appear as vampires, werewolves and other monsters.  Drug addiction has turned them into parasites, cannibals, who infect others with their evil: Rudy eventually succumbs and starts taking drugs himself, leaving behind his productive life (before his time in the service he had a job as a mechanic) and his sincere and human love for Kris.

This story is pretty good; it is certainly vividly and economically written, with each sentence serving the story's purpose and being worth reading with care.  As an attack on the drug culture and a warning to stay off drugs, I suppose many people would dismiss it as a sort of SF version of Reefer Madness.  Though I am sympathetic to Ellison's message here (I'm as square as they come and never drink or use drugs), and Ellison's writing is far better, "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" did remind me a little of that over-the-top anti-gun story by Davis Grubb, "The Baby-Sitter." Both stories employ horror fiction conventions to issue a heavy-handed condemnation of what their authors consider a social evil, in the process exaggerating the seductive power of the vice that has inspired their ire, and diminishing the agency of individuals.

Mild to moderate recommendation.

"One At a Time" by R. A. Lafferty

It has been a while since I read any R. A. Lafferty, so I eagerly took this chance to do so.  Lafferty is sui generis.  When you read a SF story in which a guy is swinging a sword at some other guys, it is easy to say "this story is an attempt to emulate Burroughs" or Howard, or Tolkein, and to assess the story's success by comparing it to those beloved classics.  But what can you compare a Lafferty story to?  Damon Knight, in his intro to the story, suggests "One At a Time" is like an "ethnic" tale, Irish most probably, but also argues that Lafferty's stories are probably best described as "tales unlike other tales."

Sour John, a rowdy hard-drinking type who hangs around in bars in port cities, "collects odd ones."  So when he hears an "odd one" is hanging around Barnaby's Barn, he hurries over to the tavern to meet him.  The odd one is McSkee, who eats tremendous quantities of food and drinks vast volumes of booze--he's breaking all the local records!  Sour John spends the evening with McSkee, wandering the city, fighting and whoring, living it up--for Sour John and McSkee it is such hearty, simple pleasures that make life worth living, and McSkee can handle more of such pleasures than any man alive.  Sour John tries to figure out McSkee's secret, and McSkee is quite open about it: he has learned how to put himself into a kind of hibernation, to slow down his body and literally die, and then wake up again, years or decades later. McSkee has lived for ages, but only one day at a time, each day separated by many years.

This is a fun story, and you have to suspect Lafferty is somehow referring to such central elements of Christian thought as Jesus of Nazareth's death and resurrection and the immortality of the human soul, as well as exhorting all of us to live every day to its fullest.  The story perhaps contains hidden depths.

"One At a Time" would later appear in the 1970 collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers, which I own, but which is currently in storage along with most of my books.

"Grimm's Story" by Vernor Vinge

In a time that feels long ago, I guess early 2003, when I either had money or was behaving as if I had money, the wife (then my girlfriend) and I took a trip to Western Europe, staying in a hotel in London, with a friend of hers in Denmark, and with a friend of mine in Portugal.  On planes and trains I read Vernor Vinge's Deepness in the Sky.  It was the first science fiction novel I had read in a long time, and I rather liked it.  With its interest in human freedom and technological and social change, it reminded me of SF I had read in my youth.  Some time later I read The Peace War, but thought it was just OK; I remember thinking it addressed the same issues and had the same tone as a bunch of other SF work, including Deepness in the Sky, and being disappointed because I had been hoping for something new.

It had been approximately a decade since I'd read any Vinge when I bought Orbit 4, so I decided to check out the longish (over 50 pages) Vinge contribution, "Grimm's Story."  Isfdb told me that "Grimm's Story" is a component of a fix up novel called Grimm's World, which was later retitled Tatja Grimm's World.  If the cover illustrations of this novel were any guide, the story was about a sexy girl who has a battleship--that part of MPorcius's mind which is still 13 years old thought that sounded pretty good.

"Grimm's Story" is a traditional type of hard SF story.  In this category of story, which presumably has a name that I don't know, the author imagines a planet or planet-like environment which has some physical difference(s) from the Earth--the gravity or temperature or chemical composition or whatever are significantly different.  The author speculates on how civilization and/or the ecosystem would evolve and adapt in such an environment.  This alien world is then used as a setting for an adventure story in which the protagonists must journey from point A to point B and accomplish some mission; this journey provides the author opportunity to describe different facets of the world he has designed.  Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity is sort of the archetype for this type of story, but I think Poul Anderson's Three Worlds to Conquer and Larry Niven's Ringworld and Integral Trees books, and even Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, John Varley's Titan and Bob Shaw's Orbitsville qualify.

The planet in this story is a vast ocean with lots of little islands, inhabited by humans who are descended from Earth colonists who lost their high technology ages ago.  The planet is severely lacking in metal deposits; iron and aluminum are very rare, and as a result technological development has been slow.

Hard science fiction stories often glamorize scientists, engineers and merchants, and show contempt for religion and government, and Vinge delivers on these expectations.  Our heroes are an astronomer and the crew of a publishing enterprise that makes money by putting out girlie magazines and a journal of science articles and science fiction stories.  (Remember how, in his alternate world in Ada or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov called science fiction "physics fiction?"  In "Grimm's Story" the people call science fiction "contrivance fiction" or "c.f.")  These businesspeople make their own paper and print the magazines on a huge ship that travels around the planet, delivering the periodicals.  Vinge describes the chemical and mechanical processes by which this is done, which will no doubt thrill some readers and bore others.

The astronomer, Svir Hedrigs (I just realized that when you say it out loud in the German or Scandinavian accent it seems to demand it sounds like "severe headaches") is sitting in a bar with his little pet monster that has psychic powers (hard SF is ostensibly based on real science, and yet somehow often includes characters with psychic powers, just like extravagant action-based space fantasies like Star Wars and Warhammer 40,000) when the tall and beautiful woman who runs the publishing ship, Tatja Grimm, appears and seduces him.  Grimm uses her womanly charms to persuade Hedrigs to join the publishing company on a perilous secret mission.  This mission is to infiltrate the impenetrable fortress in the capitol of the most powerful nation in the world, which is ruled by a murderous tyrant.  This dictator has the world's only complete collection of the aforementioned science fiction magazine, and he is planning to sacrifice this literary treasure to the gods!  This crime against humanity must be stopped!  The only way to rescue the magazines from the fortress is to use Hedrigs's little psionic monster to fool the guards.

In fact, the ruthless and manipulative Tatja Grimm has even bigger fish to fry than preserving old issues of her world's analogue of Analog.  She ends up using Hedrigs and his little hypnotic pet to overthrow the tyrant and make herself Queen of that powerful country.  As it turns out, Grimm isn't just the sexiest woman on the planet, but the smartest human being.  She thinks that, at the head of the world's strongest economy, she can advance technology to the point that people can fly to a neighboring planet!  And why does she want to fly to that planet?  Because she is lonely and hopes that on that other planet is a man smart enough for her to love!  On the last page of the story Grimm says:

"...I am going to turn this world upside down, and regain the ancient arts that mythology said we once had.  For somewhere in this universe there must be what I need most...a man."    

Was that sound I heard feminists' heads exploding?

I thought this story was pretty good.  I love the idea of a huge centuries-old ship, and thought the idea that they were on a quest to save old SF magazines pretty adorable. And I thought Vinge did a decent job with Tatja Grimm, a sort of anti-hero with mysterious motivations about whom we learn more and more as the story progresses. Now I want to find that fix-up novel and see what happens to Grimm and her quest for love!

************

I'm quite happy with this edition of Orbit--all three of these stories are entertaining and interesting.  (I read the included Silverberg story, "Passengers," some years ago and liked it, as well.)  I'll be reading more of the anthology in the future to see what else Knight served up the SF readers of 1968.

Three Worlds to Conquer by Poul Anderson

"As always, he found engineer thoughts soothing.  Forces and matrices were so much easier to deal with than people." 

My (and Bill Meeker's) copy of the novel

Jesse at Speculiction recently reviewed The High Crusade, one of Poul Anderson's more famous novels. I read High Crusade soon after the start of my exile (it was in the local library here on the prairie), like four years ago, and I have to agree with Jesse that the novel is just too incredible. The idea that medieval English fighting men might have admirable qualities that are lacking in modern technological societies, like physical courage or a willingness to take risks or whatever, is an interesting insight and is typical of Anderson's work, but it is too difficult to accept them conquering societies with the wealth and organization required to achieve interstellar travel.

(On the other hand, I recall High Crusade being more readable and memorable than some of Anderson's later work, like For Love and Glory, which I read and have completely forgotten, and Harvest of Stars, which I read and remember being tedious.)

I may not be Poul Anderson's biggest fan, but I enjoyed Brain Wave and The Enemy Stars, and on this blog I have praised several Anderson stories and collections. I am quite sympathetic to Anderson's point of view, so, despite periodic bumps in the road, I keep going back to him.  This week I read a novel published four years after 1960's High Crusade, Three Worlds to Conquer, which was first serialized in If in the first months of 1964. I have the Pyramid paperback, X-1875, printed in 1968.  This copy, for which I paid $1.50 in Minnesota, was originally owned by a Bill Meeker.  

Fellow SF fan Bill Meeker,
we salute you!

Three Worlds to Conquer is a traditional science fiction story about science and wars.  Our hero is Mark Fraser, an engineer on the Ganymede colony of 5,000 people.  He's a skilled pilot of space craft and also the human most adept in the lingua franca that has developed between humans and the natives of Jupiter known as the Nyarr.  Because Jupiter is so inhospitable to human life, humans and Jovians have never met in the flesh, but for over a decade the two civilizations have corresponded via a neutrino-based transmitter system.  As the novel begins Fraser's counterpart on Jupiter, Theor, is asking for Fraser's help because another Jovian society, the Ulunt-Khazul, have launched an aggressive war on the Nyarr.  But Fraser has his own problems--the civil war taking place on Earth has just spread to Ganymede, and the crew of a space battleship (a huge sphere bristling with gun turrets--awesome!) is arresting all the technical personnel on the colony!

The narrative alternates between Theor and his war on the Jovian surface and Fraser's struggle on Ganymede; Theor and Fraser conduct their relationship entirely through electronic communication.  Three Worlds to Conquer thus reminded me of those hard SF classics A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge (1999) and Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement (1954), which also centered on long distance human-alien relationships.

After suffering military defeats at the hands of their enemies, Fraser and Theor use their engineering ability, rhetorical skill, and willingness to incinerate people with rocket exhaust, to win the day.  

There is a lot of science in Three Worlds to Conquer; we hear all about neutrinos, the solar wind, the atmosphere and geology of Jupiter, and what kind of orbits space ships have to take to efficiently travel about the solar system.  I think Anderson spends two entire pages of Chapter 2 describing the neutrino communications device to us readers.  For the most part this stuff is convincing and interesting.  More fun, perhaps, is the strange ecosystem Anderson comes up with for Jupiter, particularly the plants, animals and people that fly/swim in the thick Jovian atmosphere.  He also makes a creditable effort to figure out what kind of technology the Nyarr and other people living on Jupiter's surface, under tremendous pressure and in terrible cold, would have.

Anderson has a tragic sense of life, and, besides all the people who get massacred in these wars, this is expressed in Fraser's relationships.  A skinny 40-year-old who complains about getting old, he has a wife and children, but his marriage has obviously grown stale.  When Fraser returns from a week-long mission to Io, he goes to the neutrino transmitter to talk to Theor before he goes to see his family.  ("Bros before hos," I guess, even if your bro is an alien you've never seen.)   Fraser and Lorraine Vlasek (mmm, pickles), a woman whose loyalties seem to vacillate between the two different sides in the Earth civil war, have a sad unconsummated love affair.  Fraser also deals with the stress of his work on Ganymede by smoking a pipe and taking "happypills," and frets when tobacco and "psych medicine" are in short supply.  Anderson doesn't imply any moral judgments about Fraser's attitude towards his family or his reliance on stimulants to get through a Ganymedean day.

Characters and style aren't the strong point of this short (143 page) novel; it's a story about plot and ideas.  There aren't any libertarian speeches like the one at the end of the Van Rijn collection Trader to the Stars, but Anderson's politics are in evidence; Fraser carps about government censors and bureaucrats, and Theor gets out of a predicament by trading with primitive natives he encounters.  Anderson portrays war as preferable to living under tyranny or surrendering what is yours, but many minor characters are willing to give up and/or collaborate and have to be convinced by people like Fraser and Theor to do the right thing and stand up for what is right.  And while wars will happen, at the center of the novel is the idea that different cultures will most profit through trade and friendship.

Not spectacular, but solidly entertaining; Three Worlds to Conquer has all the classic hard SF elements, and doesn't outlast its welcome, as new things keep popping up to maintain the reader's interest.

*********

Some four years ago Joachim Boaz reviewed Three Worlds to Conquer; you'll have to take my word for it that I read his review after drafting mine. 

If we have any substantial disagreements about the novel, it is about Fraser's wife, Eve.  Joachim seems to think her lack of "screen time" is a careless flaw, perhaps a sign of sexism.  I, as I have suggested above, think this is a conscious artistic choice by Anderson, an effort to depict a stale marriage.  The very last line of the book is actually about Eve, and Fraser's strained relationship with her, suggesting Anderson thought the Fraser marriage an important element of his novel.

Joachim also suggests the aliens in the novel are silly-looking, but I thought them better than the cat people, teddy bear people, and girls with blue or green skin we so often get in SF.

***********

The last page of my edition of Three Worlds to Conquer is an ad for the "Latest Science Fiction!" published by Pyramid.  Of the seven books advertised, I've only read the two included Jack Williamson Legion of Space novels, first written in the 1930s ("latest" indeed.)  I remember enjoying The Cometeers (yay, space war!), but being disappointed in One Against the Legion (instead of interstellar naval warfare we get a detective story in a space casino.)  Joachim read the Sturgeon collection A Way Home last year, and gave it a mixed review.

Feel free to let the world know via the comments why we should seek out The Butterfly Kid, Venus Equilateral, Against the Fall of Night, and The Synthetic Man, or why we should avoid them like we'd avoid the ammonia seas of Jupiter.

Hard Science Fiction Flashback: Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity and Gregory Benford's In the Ocean of Night

My copy looked like this.  I sold it.

There's a fun review of Hal Clement's 1953 Hard SF classic Mission of Gravity at the science fiction and fantasy book review blog From Couch to Moon.  Check it out!

I read Mission of Gravity in 2007, and while I can't disagree with any of the criticisms the reviewer at From Couch to Moon levels at the book, I think I enjoyed it more than she did.   On August 30 of 2007 I posted the following review (in which I fall into the its or it's trap) at amazon.com:

I read a 1950s hard cover of this Hal Clement novel, a sort of hard SF archetype well worth reading.

"Mission of Gravity" is suffused with what some might call a naive optimism about science and technology-- its like a love letter to physics and mechanical engineering. Lacking any literary pretensions, it is a straightforward account of how explorers deal with a series of technical challenges on a planet with a very unusual environment. Clement's fascination with science is infectious, and the book charmingly succeeds in accomplishing exactly what it set out to do; unlike some later hard SF novels which get loaded down with incompetent character development or boring philosophical digressions, Clement keeps his book lean and focused, and never tries to do something he isn't good at. A classic.

Someone who liked Mission of Gravity much more than I did is Thomas Disch.  I have been reading bits and pieces of Disch's 1998 book Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of over the last few weeks.  Much to my surprise, in the middle of this book, a book which seems to have been devised to offend every possible type of SF fan, I find Disch praising Mission of Gravity to the skies.  "When I first read Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, which ran as an Astounding serial in 1953, I thought it the best account of alien life on another planet that I'd ever read.  Forty-three years later my opinion has not changed."  Wow! Disch is full of surprises.       

************

I think mine looked like this.  Also sold.

Hal Clement set out to write a SF book about science, and did just that, and I praised him for it.  I wrote my positive review of Mission of Gravity still smarting from my encounter with Gregory Benford's 1977 In the Ocean of Night.  I had read In the Ocean of Night in February of 2007, and in my opinion Benford's effort to include a lot of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll in his hard SF tale was a total disaster.  I bitterly assaulted the book on February 18, 2007, on amazon.com thusly:

Entombed in this 420 page novel is a decent hard sf short story about Earth's first contact with robotic aliens. Unfortunately, Benford takes on the ambitious task of marrying his traditional space alien story with a literary story about human relationships and the meaning of life, a worthy project he is not equipped to bring to a successful conclusion. So, the interesting alien encounter plot is buried under hundreds of pages of tedious domestic drama (the main character, a British-born astronaut, has a menage a trois marriage, and one of the women is terminally ill) and political infighting (the astronaut is a Bob Dylan- and John Lennon-loving rebel who refuses to play the dishonest games of the warmongering bureaucrats and religious fanatics in the U.S. government.) Benford gets an "A" for effort as he unleashes literary allusions, unconventional prose techniques, and scads of metaphors and similies, and piles on chapter after chapter about the sex lives, religious beliefs, cocktail parties, drug use, day trips to the beach and vacations of the astronaut and his circle, but the characters are uninteresting and the only parts of the book that really work are those two or three dozen pages in which a character is in the cockpit of a space ship or Lunar craft. Too bad.

Gregory Benford was, from a literary point of view, more ambitious than Clement, but it seemed to me all the sex and other soap opera stuff just got in the way, and I was disappointed.

(For those scoring at home, my hostile review of Benford has netted 26 helpful votes out of 31 total votes, while my kind review of the Clement got 4 "helpfuls" out of 6 votes.)

***************

It was fun to think about these books again - thanks to From Couch to Moon for inspiring this little space trip down memory lane.