First to the Stars by Rex Gordon

I saw instantly that it did not matter how I lived or what I did.  My future was negative.  At the very best, for the rest of my life if I lived for a hundred years, it could only be the avoidance of love, of committal, of further pain.  What did it matter if the "people" around me were green-skinned, insectival, and busy as ants or bees?  Human society would have the same aspect to me: that of people engaged in hopes and aspirations that I could not share.  

Do you remember what you were doing on March 2, 2014?  I don't either, but if you scroll back, back, back far enough through this blog's content you will see that on that date I was complaining about the terrible writing and copy editing that went into Rex Gordon's 1969 novel The Yellow Fraction.

If I had remembered that on June 27 of last year I probably would not have purchased the Ace edition of Gordon's 1959 novel First to the Stars while down in Carolina visiting in-laws.  (Gordon's countrymen over in Great Britain printed this novel in 1961 as The Worlds of Eclos--the cover illustration includes what appears to be some serious plagiarism.  Perfidious Albion!)  But what's done is done; I have made my SF bed and will lie in it.  Maybe this 190-page novel, written 10 years before the one I denounced not only for its unforgivably poor style, but also for its politics and plot, will be better?

The United States government has determined that if you send a man alone out into space he will go insane.  Also, that if you send two men out together into space, they will both go insane.  ("Didn't O'Hara and Gollancz try to murder one another when we tried the experiment with the two of them?")  The taxpayers are not interested in financing a rocket big enough to haul three or four men, so it is decided that, for the three-year mission of mapping and photographing Mars, a crew of one man and one woman will be sent.  The man is our narrator, pilot Major David Spencer, and the woman is biologist Dr. Elvinia Köhl.  Spencer and Köhl immediately take a dislike to each other, but keep their antagonism to a minimum while on the ground because they know there are plenty of other people who would jump at the chance to make this historic voyage.

After blast off our bickering astronauts face many technical problems.  They find themselves so far  off course that ground control doubts they can get to Mars, and orders them back, but Spencer pulls a Nelson and claims he can't read Earth's signals and tries to reach Mars anyway.  After six weeks he realizes that their acceleration has caused Einsteinian effects to kick in much earlier than the government eggheads had predicted--while Spencer and Köhl feel like six weeks have elapsed, for the rest of the universe it has been six months, as evidenced by the fact that the Earth is halfway through its orbit of Sol.  At the terrific (relative to their own life processes) speeds they can achieve, the very stars are in reach, and Spencer decides to abandon the effort to get to Mars and instead explore interstellar space!

Karel Thole contributes a beautiful cover image
 to the 1978 Italian printing of First to the
 Stars--I love the colors, the female figure, the
 contrast between the hard straight lines of
 the ship and the eerie curves of the foliage, etc. 

Out among the stars Köhl proves herself just as insubordinate and ambitious as Spencer.  When Spencer nixes her idea of investigating a planet to see if there is any life there (she is a biologist, after all) she grabs a wrench and threatens to smash the "computor" if she doesn't get her way.  Shortly thereafter, when it looks like they will be unable to slow the vessel sufficiently to maneuver among a swarm of planets and are thus wdoomed to die in a crash, Spencer and Köhl confess their love for each other and spend six weeks having sex.  When these six weeks come to an end they, unexpectedly, survive a crash landing on a very wet planet with a breathable atmosphere.

(The number six, especially in reference to periods of time, comes up again and again in the novel, maybe laziness on the part of the author or maybe some kind of clue or symbol?)

The first quarter of the book covers that astronomical and psychological journey.  The second quarter takes place on the marsh-covered planet, where Spencer and Köhl struggle to survive.  Their space ship irretrievably submerged, Spencer builds a hut and raft with stone tools, and Köhl fishes with a line made from her own hair.  Köhl gives birth to their daughter, Eve, and in a plot twist that surprised me, Köhl dies and Spencer loses the will to live!  Fortunately, on the very same black day upon which Köhl expires, insectoid aliens from yet another oxygen atmosphere planet show up and their biologist quickly figures out how to feed little Eve.

The people at isfdb suspect this German
1963 edition is abridged

The aliens, called the Kara, take Spencer and Eve in their space ship to a modern city of skyscrapers, helicopters and hovercars on their home planet, where they raise Eve and have long scientific discussions with Spencer.  These discussions take up years, but don't accomplish much because the Kara have an entirely different view of the universe than Earth scientists do--they don't believe in electrons, for example.  Another problem is that Spencer is unwilling to reveal anything about Earth's location or technology, for fear of a war breaking out between the two species.  (No matter how friendly and pacific the Kara may be, Spencer assumes that Earthmen are all so racist and imperialistic that contact will inevitably lead to war, a war the Earth would lose to the more technologically advanced Kara.) 

Spencer only sees his daughter once a week or so, and she grows up with more in common, culturally at least, with the Kara than with humanity.  When she is thirteen, Eve, at the urging of the aliens, starts pressuring Spencer to tell the Kara where Earth is.  This is bad enough, but Eve also suggests that he have sex with her--the insect people don't want to go without human specimens, and no doubt Eve will want some human companions after her father dies!  Spencer is disgusted and torn--of course incest sickens him, but at the same time, does he want to leave his daughter the only human on a planet of bug-people whom he detests?  "What I knew was that I was going to hate myself whatever I did or did not do...."     

In the event, all these decisions are taken out of Spencer's hands--the Kara dig up his lost space ship on the marsh world and don't need his help after all to figure out where Earth is.  In the last quarter or so of the novel Spencer and Eve take on the role of diplomats trying to forge a peaceful relationship between the Kara and Earth.  A Kara ship takes them to our solar system, where negotiations are conducted via radio; when these negotiations break down, the Kara leave Spencer and Eve on barren Neptune and flee the system.

Back cover of my copy

The defining characteristic of First to the Stars, to my mind at least, is its existential angst.  The whole book is about a guy who is lonely and alienated from those around him, who looks at the future and sees only misery or catastrophe.  The novel is full of lines like "There was nowhere I could go and be welcome on that ship, where nerves were tense and where we were inevitably regarded as aliens..." and "Her remark cast me into a black depression."  When the pioneering astronauts land on the marsh planet, Köhl doubts that life is worth living.  When Köhl dies, Spencer doubts that life is worth living.  Among the insectoids, Spencer is obsessed with a fear that the aliens won't treat him and his daughter like people, but like animals to be put in a zoo, and that Earthmen won't see the Kara as people but monsters to be destroyed.

Despite this we get a more or less happy ending.  Because of those relativistic effects, by the time Spencer is back in the solar system some 200 years have elapsed on Earth, and he finds that the human race is grown rich from exploring and exploiting the solar system and has a level of technology that matches that of the Kara.  An Earth ship rescues him and Eve from Neptune, and he finds that his astronaut pay in the bank has been accumulating interest and so he is rich.  Eve, now among Earthlings, assimilates to human culture and develops a normal, healthy relationship with her father.  A Cold War develops between humanity and the Kara, but each empire colonizes different parts of the galaxy, and a shooting war is avoided.

As well as being a story about alienation, depression and pessimism, First to the Stars is also a traditional SF story in which a guy and his companions use their wits to solve problems and which exposes us readers to lots of astronomical, relativistic, biological, sociological and psychological speculations that probably don't stand up to scrutiny.

First to the Stars is not particularly well written, but the style is acceptable.  The plot is OK, and I like the fact that the novel focuses on Spencer's difficult relationships (with authority, with women, with society and with the universe) and his correlating psychological problems.  I can really get behind a protagonist who is unable to get along with others and thinks life is meaningless, and I can ignore the happy ending just like I always skip the inexplicably and discordantly happy song at the end of The Kinks' Give the People What They Want, an album otherwise about disappointment, perversion, violence and evil.  I'm giving First to the Stars a marginal to moderate recommendation.

**********

First to the Stars, Ace D-405, has two fun pages of ads in the back.

Click or squint to learn about the books Ace was pushing in 1959

"David Grinnell" is a pseudonym of Donald A. Wollheim, one of SF's most important editors and an interesting and somewhat controversial character.

Of the works advertised, I think I have only read A. E. van Vogt's 1946 novella "Siege of the Unseen."  If you are curious about "Siege of the Unseen," stay tuned to this station, as it is scheduled to be discussed in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.  Or, read it yourself under its original title in scans of Astounding at the internet archive! 

The Yellow Fraction by Rex Gordon

Here we have the last science fiction novel written by British author Stanley Bennett Hough, under his manly pseudonym Rex Gordon.  I am sure there are ordinary people all over world with the name "Rex Gordon," but to my susceptible mind "Rex Gordon" sounds like the name of a guy who punches first and asks questions later, a guy who writes those mens' adventure books like The Destructinator: Peril in Patagonia or The Exculpationer: Massacre in Madrid.  On the other hand, the cover painting by Kelly Freas seems to be illustrating the story of a man who lives on the dole and sits in the park all day and at 5:00 sadly watches the business people file out of their office building.

After making a lot of crazy guesses about The Yellow Fraction based on the author's pen name and the cover illustration, I decided that the best way to find out what it was all about was to actually read the 160 page 1969 novel.  A decision I perhaps took too lightly.

Five hundred years ago an Earth colonization ship arrived at the planet Arcon, where plants grow blue instead of green.  Sick of space, most of the colonists wanted to put down roots on Arcon.  Some, dubbed the Greens, hoped to terraform the planet so that it resembled Earth.  Another faction, the Blues, thought humanity should learn to adapt to Arcon's environment.  A tiny minority, eventually labelled the Yellows, feared Arcon was too unhealthy to colonize.  The Yellows were not only outvoted, but became pariahs and scapegoats on whom all problems, for centuries, were blamed.

The Yellows were, of course, right; Arcon is poison, and after the starship is irretrievably dismantled it becomes clear that human life expectancy on Arcon is a mere 40 years!  Lacking any means to escape the planet, the government conspires to keep people in ignorance of the facts.

I took an almost immediate dislike to this book.  On the second page of text, page 6, Rex gives us this sentence: "He laughed in a voice that gave Len a considerable lack of pleasure."  To my mind this is poor writing.  You don't give somebody a lack.  The phrase should be something like "gave Len considerable displeasure" or "failed to give Len any pleasure."

On page 9 we get a typo, "staying" for "saying."  On page 32 we get this atrocious paragraph:

The man and the voice were known, but not the sense the things the voice said.  The cell was ten feet by six, with toilet and white tiles, which made it look quite clean.  The way it looked so uninviting could be the pain.

How do you know a sense?  Does the sentence mean the things the voice said made no sense?  Does it mean the words were unrecognizable?  Does it mean the tone was different than before?  And the last sentence... should "way" be replaced with "reason?"  There are distracting problems like this all through the novel.

Rex, I don't buy these books so I can relive my experiences copy editing students' papers!

So much for the style.  As for the plot, the first half of The Yellow Fraction is a weak political satire full of anemic jokes.  (The Army's administration building is called "The Hexagon," and the head of the military is J. Adolf Koln.)  The protagonist is Len (I guess short for Lenin) Thomas (perhaps his middle name is "Doubting.")  Len is a college student.  After being inspired by Yellow-sympathizing college professor Berkeley (a nod to Bishop Berkeley?) he gets thrown out of school for his Yellow beliefs, and so decides he wants to launch a revolution.  He is immediately hauled in by the government, and quickly discovers that Berkeley is a high-level member of the secret police!  (Doesn't this happen in 1984?)  The reader soon realizes that the Yellows are not only oppressed by the government--they have infiltrated the government!  (Doesn't this happen in Slan?)

Rex turns out to be an ambitious writer willing to experiment.  Besides the third person narration of Len's adventures, he provides us with J. Adolf Koln's and Berkeley's diaries, the minutes of political party conferences, memos, extracts from the history books of the future, and even a woman's shopping lists.  Rex inadvertently reminds us that not every experiments is a success.  Way way too much of this book consists of uninteresting people sitting around talking.  Are the competition between the Army and the secret police for public funds and Yellow debates about the possibility of constructing a starship without alerting the public supposed to thrill the reader?

The book shows some signs of life in its second half, when Len and 11 other 20-somethings with science or engineering training, an elite carefully chosen by the Yellows, are drafted into crewing a space ship that has been built secretly in the desert.  The Army and the intelligence services have conflicting views on what the ship's mission will be, which creates some suspense, and the dozen crew members, half male and half female, are expected to pair off sexually, generating a little human interest.  Unfortunately, Rex's main focus is on people on the Arcon surface: a philosophical discussion between two Yellows (Rex seems to think that the lies of religious and communist leaders are justified and can lead to improvements in society) and J. Adolf Koln's conspiracy to outwit the intelligence service and take over the government.  Boring.  The whole plot is resolved when Len in space and the Yellows in the intelligence service promulgate the spurious claim that Arcon is under attack from space aliens.  This lie galvanizes the populace and leads to a revolution that somehow solves all of Arcon's problems.

With its mediocre plot, irritatingly bad style, and elitist "vanguard of the revolution" politics, The Yellow Fraction is to be avoided even more assiduously than the poisonous blue planet of Arcon itself.