Three early 1930s stories by Edmond Hamilton from The Horror on the Asteroid

One of the first hardcover SF books, a volume printed before the Campbellian revolution and the publication of the first SF stories by Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and A. E. van Vogt in 1939, was the 1936 Edmond Hamilton collection The Horror on the Asteroid.  The Horror on the Asteroid contains six stories first published in Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, and Astounding.  I have already read three of them, "The Monster God of Mamurth" (which I blogged about in 2017), "The Man Who Evolved," and "The Accursed Galaxy" (which I wrote about in 2013), and today we'll read the remaining three: the title story, one called "The Earth-Brain" and one entitled "The Man Who Saw Everything" that originally appeared as "The Man With X-Ray Eyes."  I don't have a copy of The Horror on the Asteroid, but all three stories are readily available at the internet archive in scans of the magazines in which they first appeared. 

"The Earth-Brain" (1932)

Our initial narrator for this tale is Morris, who by chance meets his friend Clark Landon on the streets of beautiful Manhattan during an earthquake.  Landon, a brave explorer, was in an earthquake up near the North Pole two years ago--that quake killed Landon's two best friends, fellow explorers David Travis and Herbert Skeel.  There have been earthquakes all over Europe and North Africa ever since that big one up north, and Landon reveals that he has been at the epicenter of each quake--he claims that the quakes have been following him, trying without success to kill him and inadvertently slaying thousands of innocent people!  Of course Morris thinks this is balderdash.

Landon sits down with Morris in a hotel room and takes over the narrative, relating his story of weird polar horror to his friend and to us.   

Two years ago the three white men, Landon, Travis and Skeel, along with two Eskimos, traveled north via ship and then dog sled towards the Pole.  When they came upon a mountain Landon and his two buds were eager to climb and explore it, even though the Eskimos warned them that, according to their lore, this mountain must hold the Earth's brain, and as such was forbidden.  The white men scoffed at the natives' idea that the planet Earth was a living being with its brain in a polar mountain, and started climbing the mountain, doing their best to ignore the increasingly violent tremors that the Eskimos told them were a warning that must be heeded.  Halfway up the peak they found a smooth-walled tunnel that led them into the hollow core of the mountain, a huge cavern in which rested a hundred-foot high glowing thing shaped like an egg--this spheroid of coruscating light is the brain of our planet!

Landon and his pals were snatched up by tentacles of light, and their minds invaded by the consciousness of the Earth-Brain!  The Earth-Brain had never paid much attention to humans before--we are like microbes to it--and now it studied the three men.  When the tentacles tore Skeel apart to examine his insides an enraged Landon drew his automatic and shot the brain.  The brain's resulting paroxysms of fury killed Travis, and the Eskimos outside, but Landon, by luck, managed to escape and make his way to civilization.  Everywhere he went the vengeful Earth rocked in an effort to kill him, but Landon knew to stay in open spaces, away from buildings and mountains that might fall on him.

After telling his story to Morris, Landon leaves New York and heads south.  Morris tells us about newspaper reports of further quakes, each farther south than the last.  The last quake took place in Guatemala; according to the papers during the quake an American jumped into a crevice--the crack closed up on him and the quake immediately ended.

2014 edition

"The Earth-Brain" is too long and repetitious; we know the essentials of the plot from the third page--including who dies at the Pole--and then Hamilton spends page after page elaborating and embroidering them.  The plot and idea are good, but the structure and style of the story do not make the best possible use of them.  If I was Hamilton's co-writer or editor I would get rid of the Morris character and the NYC frame story and present the story as Landon's journal.  The first part of the journal would set up the friendship between Landon and Skeel--Skeel was there for Landon when Landon's fiance cheated on him or Skeel saved Landon's life in the war or something--so when the Earth-Brain rips Skeel in half it is really heartrending.  Skeel's death would not be foreshadowed, at least not blatantly, so it would come as a surprise.  The later parts of the journal would be full of Landon's feelings of guilt over Skeel and Travis's deaths and the deaths of innocent people in other earthquakes aimed at him, as well as his ruminations on suicide.  Appended to the journal would be a newspaper clipping about Landon's suicide during the Guatemala quake.

Barely acceptable.

"The Earth-Brain" would be reprinted in Robert Price's 2001 anthology Acolytes of Cthulhu.

"The Horror on the Asteroid" (1933)

"The Horror on the Asteroid" was first published in an issue of Weird Tales with a pupil-dilating S&M cover by pioneering woman artist Margaret Brundage that illustrates the Conan story now known as "Xuthal of the Dusk" but then called "The Slithering Shadow."  (We read "Xuthal of the Dusk," a lost city story featuring a sexy queen and a man-eating god monster, last year.)

Space liner Vulcan is travelling to Jupiter from Earth when it is struck by meteors and its hull breached--over half the people on board are killed!  Hamilton really dwells on the grief and terror of the survivors, and how tough a time the surviving officers have keeping the spacemen and passengers under control and shepherding them into the life boats and to a nearby asteroid.  This asteroid, 100 miles in diameter, has a breathable atmosphere and is covered in jungle.

The space castaways, about a hundred people, become very insubordinate and fractious, and many fights ensue among them.  They spot some hairy ape-like creatures, and some large crocodillians, and find some wrecked space ships which crashed on the asteroid in the past.

I figured out the central gag of the asteroid early because I recalled Hamilton stories about evolution gone haywire like "Devolution" and his wife Leigh Brackett's 1948 story "The Beast-Jewel of Mars," in which bitter Martians use rays to devolve Earth colonists into cave men and even further back down the evolutionary ladder.  In "The Horror on the Asteroid" it is elements in the asteroid's atmosphere which cause humans to devolve.  The lead character, the Vulcan's radio operator, figures this out by reading the log from one of the earlier crashed ships.  He tries to convince everybody to get back in the life boats and flee the asteroid, but it is too late--they are too ape-like to even understand what he is talking about!  Luckily just then a rescue ship arrives.

The start of "The Horror on the Asteroid," all the stuff in the stricken space ship and the life boats, is good.  But the stuff on the asteroid is a bit weak.  First of all, there is the deus ex machina ending--the characters don't do anything to solve the problem presented by the asteroid's atmosphere, they are just fortunate that a rescue ship appeared before they were hairy ape men.  Secondly, in the first half or so of the story Hamilton sets up relationships--there is a mutinous spaceman as well as a self-important businessman who aren't interested in taking orders from the officers--that are just abandoned, which is frustrating.  When a story has troublemakers in its first half we expect them in its second half to get punished, or to reform, or, in a twist, to turn out to be smarter than the main character and inspire a change in the protagonist.  When they simply disappear from view it is disappointing and we feel like our time has been wasted.

Acceptable.

It doesn't look like "The Horror on the Asteroid" has appeared outside of Weird Tales and the collection which bears its name.

"The Man With X-Ray Eyes" (1933)

Back in 2017 we read Edmond Hamilton's 1934 story "The Man Who Returned," the tragic tale of a guy who was buried alive, escaped his tomb, and then realized life was not worth living when he eavesdropped on people and realized how they really felt about him.  "The Man With X-Ray Eyes" is a similar piece of work.

David Winn is a young reporter in New York City who wants to marry his girlfriend Marta Ray, but feels he does not have enough cash to do so.  When he hears that some scientist has developed a way to alter animals' eyes so they can see through inorganic matter, Winn realizes that if he could see through the stone and metal walls of homes and offices he could become the world's best reporter, with one scoop after another, and very quickly the world's best paid reporter!

Winn visits the inventor of the eye altering process and volunteers to be his first human test subject.  The experiment is a success, and after a stop at his paper for his assignment (talk to a bunch of politicians and prominent businessmen about a recent corruption case) Winn sets to work getting scoops.  Winn can read lips, so he hangs out in waiting rooms and, by looking through the wall, can "listen in" on the meetings of all these pols and magnates, and they all turn out to be totally corrupt, unabashedly so among their equally venal subordinates and colleagues!  This is a little more depressing than Winn expected it to be.  Then Winn heads over to Marta's.  On the way he passes through a slum, and past a prison and a hospital--able to see through walls and doors and floors, he witnesses every form of human evil and misfortune and misery!  He can't go on living if every moment he will be exposed to the hellish reality of human life, and the egghead told him that the surgery was irreversible!  Winn decides that after he marries Marta they will move to the country and become hermits!  But then comes the ultimate blow--through the wall as he approaches Winn can see Marta and her mother talking about him, and by reading their lips learns they both think he is a loser and that Marta is only marrying him because she expects she can't do any better.  "I have to marry someone, don't I?"

Winn proceeds to drown himself in the river.  (Winn is one impulsive dude.)

This is a pretty good story, even if Hamilton forgets that rubber and petroleum products are organic and erroneously has Winn unable to see automobiles--he should be able to see the tires, hoses, fuel and lubricants.  I can be much more enthusiastic about this one than the other two. 

"The Man With X-Ray Eyes" was reprinted in Startling Stories in 1946, where it was heralded as a "Hall of Fame Classic."  That same issue of Startling includes Henry Kuttner's The Dark World, which I didn't think was very good when I read it years ago.

Over in the British Isles, in 1945, "The Man With X-Ray Eyes" was included with Robert Bloch's "The Red Swimmer" and H. O. Dickinson's "The Sex Serum" in an odd little publication whose main selling point was apparently its cover photo of a topless woman.  The Science Fiction Encyclopedia has an article about the series of reprints of US fiction of which "The Sex Serum" was Number 9.

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More stories from a Weird Tales habitue in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

World of the Starwolves by Edmond Hamilton

"Were there guards in there?" Dilullo asked.

"There were," said Chane.  "Two of them.  And to answer your next question, I didn't kill them.  I was a good little Earthman like you said, and only stunned them."

Today is the day we bid our farewells to exiled space pirate Morgan Chane and space mercenary captain John Dilullo, the principals of Edmond Hamilton's Starwolf trilogy, three paperback space operas from Ace printed in 1967 and '68 with Jack Gaughan covers.  I am reading the third and final volume, World of the Starwolves, in the 1982 omnibus edition I bought in Iowa in 2015.  If you need a refresher course on Chane and Dilullo, check out my blog posts on Starwolf #1, The Weapon from Beyond and Starwolf #2, The Closed Worlds.

The Starwolves of planet Varna have committed another crime against galactic civilization!  Varna is a planet with high gravity, so the strain of humans who live there are super strong, so they can accelerate their spaceships faster than other humans--this makes them almost unstoppable space pirates.  Their latest exploit is stealing a famous work of art, a mobile of forty large one-of-a-kind synthetic jewels; each jewel represents one of the biggest stars in the Milky Way and each produces its own distinct musical tone, the forty tones adding up to a beautiful symphony.  (It is fun when SF writers try to conceive of "the art of the future"--remember Robert Silverberg's The Second Trip?)

Morgan Chane's parents were Earthborn, but he was raised on Varna and has super strength himself, and before a spat led to his exile, he lived the life of an interstellar bandito alongside the hairy Varnans.  Thus when he says the Starwolves couldn't care less about art and will tear the mobile apart and sell the forty jewels separately, you can believe him.  He also knows to whom they will sell them.  You see, planet Varna is in the Argo Spur, where there are a bunch of particularly corrupt and anarchic star systems.  The Starwolves don't raid these systems, but instead sell them the stuff they steal from further afield.  In return, the worlds of the Argo Spur have let it be known that if the decent systems of the galaxy were ever to band together and muster an allied fleet to nuke Varna and solve the Starwolf problem once and for all, the Argo Spur worlds would quickly throw together their own fleet to defend Varna's sovereignty.

The rightful owners of the mobile are willing to pay a lot of moolah to get the masterpiece back, and with his intimate knowledge of Starwolf operations and the Argo Spur, Chane thinks he can guide a team of mercenaries to the jewels and retrieve them so they can get that sweet reward.  In the first chapter of World of the Starwolves, Chane convinces John Dilullo, who retired from the mercenary captaining business a few months ago, to get back in the merc game, and by Chapter II they and a crew of mercs are in a spacecraft, infiltrating the Spur.

While in the Argo Spur the mercs will try to pass as asteroid miners, so they stop in an asteroid field to gather some ore to make their cover more believable.  The swarm of asteroids Chane chooses is one used by an ancient alien race as a sort of cemetery or memorial--many of the asteroids are carved into cyclopean statues of cthuloid monsters.  (This reminded me a little of Gene Wolfe's 2007 story "Memorare.")

Chane and Dilullo do detective work and get into fights on a few Spur worlds and eventually discover that the Starwolves sold the forty jewels to five or six different parties, but then a mysterious race of aesthetes, the Qajar, living on a planet few know about, Chalann, acquired all forty and reassembled the mobile for exhibition in their gallery of galactic art treasures.  When the mercs try to sneak onto Chalann to get the mobile they are repelled and barely escape with their lives.  They are even imprisoned by a crime boss who helped finance their attack on Chalann.  Doh!

Things are looking pretty bleak--the crime boss may even hand the mercs over to the Qajar, who are expert torturers!  Chane then hits on a radical solution--enlisting the Starwolves to help him attack Chalann!

He had tried to be a good Earthman with the Mercs.  But he was not a good Earthman.

He was a Starwolf and he was going home.

Chane, by himself, escapes captivity and goes to Varna, and we readers learn more about the people of Varna and Chane's youth among them.

Anybody with access to an internet connection knows that the world is full of people who love cats. Well, the members of the SF community are not immune to this predilection, and so SF is full of cat people.  Flash Gordon meets Lion Men, Larry Niven and Poul Anderson have cat people in their extensive future histories, there are lots of cat people in that cartoon about the long-suffering undead wizard Mumm-ra, and on and on.  I tell you this, of course, as a preamble to telling you that the people of Varna, while human, evolved in a different direction from Earth humans, and are covered in down and have slanty eyes that glow and so are, essentially, even if Hamilton doesn't come right out and say it, cat people.  The most obvious hints are when Chane meets up with the flirty and promiscuous woman he, before his exile, had a sort of thing with: we are told she looks "like a beautiful panther" and that being kissed by her "is like being kissed by a tigress."

As for the plot, while many people on Varna like Chane and are happy to see him back, and many others are indifferent, one clan of Starwolves wants to kill Chane because on the last of the many pirate raids he participated in he killed (in self-defense) a native Varnan who was trying to take from Chane some of Chane's legitimate share of the loot.  So, when Chane turns up, this clan challenges Chane to a sort of formalized feud, what you might call a judicial fight to the death or trial by combat.  Science fiction is full of people fighting in the arena, and I fully expected Hamilton to give us one or more scenes of Chane battling a feline pirate before a crowd of cheering onlookers.  But Chane manages to convince the Varnan elders to authorize a major raid on Chalann by a large fleet, and they postpone the resolution of the feud until after the raid.

There are some Starwolf losses, but the raid is a success.  Chane not only guides the Starwolves to victory, he escapes from the clutches of the clan that hates him and snatches the mobile and makes his way to the crime boss's planet to free the mercs.  Chane leaves the world of his birth behind him, along with the dangerous feud and the panther-like wench, and embraces a life among the stars with his mentor John Dilullo and other men who share his Earth blood and can teach him Earth mores.

World of the Starwolves is an entertaining space opera.  The heist caper plot and all the attendant chases, escapes, fights and detective stuff are fun, as are the strange planets and alien creatures and all the gadget and space scenes.  The character stuff also works; for example, Dilullo and Chane don't just head to the Spur because they desire money, but for psychological reasons related to their feelings about home--while Chane is homesick for the Spur, and, ultimately, Varna, Dilullo doesn't feel comfortable in his native Brindisi because those he loved when he lived there are no longer alive.  Chane and Dilulo are both men who have lost a home but found a friend with whom to share a life of adventure in space.

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I have read many space operas by Edmond Hamilton over the course of this blog's life.  And many more lie in the future of MPorcius Fiction Log!  Edmond Hamilton was a professional writer who churned out speculative fiction adventures like one-man sword and ray pistol factory!  But first we'll check out some 1970s stories billed as "works of horror, supernatural horror, the macabre, and the generally weird."

The Closed Worlds by Edmond Hamilton

"It was fanatics like you who took away from us the freedom of the stars."  She turned and pointed at the glass grid, where the three men lay unmoving.  "That is the road to infinite freedom, to go anywhere in the universe, to find out anything we wish to know--and you would destroy it."

It's time to read the second Morgan Chane novel, The Closed Worlds, first published by Ace in 1968.  (You'll remember that before we read those stories about fish ladies and killer dust, we read the first of Edmond Hamilton's Chane books, The Weapon From Beyond.)  Since December 2013 I have owned a copy of the '68 edition of The Closed Worlds, which I am glad to have for its Jack Gaughan cover and frontispiece, but, as with The Weapon From Beyond, I will be reading the version of the novel found in my copy of the 1982 omnibus entitled Starwolf, if only because the later printing seems less likely to fall apart in my hands.

As The Closed Worlds begins, John Dilullo, mercenary captain, and his company are on Earth, in what we here at MPorcius Fiction Log consider the greatest city in the galaxy, New York, New York!  But Morgan Chane, who was raised on Varna, the forbidding planet of the superstrong space pirates known as Starwolves, finds N-Y-C to be B-O-R-[pause]-I-N-G.  I guess nobody told him about the Greek vases and American sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art!  Chane, you need a tour guide!  Well, at least Dilullo gets a taste of the real New York when he gets mugged.     

Dilullo is contacted by James Ashton, co-owner and manager of one of the biggest interstellar trading companies, Ashton Trading.  James's brother and owner of the other half of the company, Randall, is more of an academic than a businessman, and five months ago he went to the Allubane system to do some anthropological research (or so he claimed.)  The Allubane system has three inhabited planets, and they are known as the Closed Worlds because the people who govern the system hate visitors and drive away people who come by.  Even the Starwolves of Varna consider Allubane a no-go zone!  Randall Ashton's team has not been heard from since it got there and James wants the mercs to go to the Allubane and rescue his brother or bring back proof of his death.

Hamilton spends some time on Earth (and more time later, during their perilous adventure) fleshing out Dilullo and Chane's characters--Dilullo is middle-aged and wants to build a big house in his native Brindisi and retire there, and Chane's parents were from Wales, and Chane goes there and finds he likes Welsh people.  (No doubt the Royal Tourism Board of Wales was thrilled that Hamilton depicted Welshmen as dudes who love to drink and sucker punch Americans.)  I wouldn't say Hamilton's characterizations in The Closed Worlds are excellent, but they are more than adequate, and add to the story; this is an improvement over the characterizations in Hamilton's pre-Golden Age space operas that appeared in Weird Tales like "The Star-Stealers" and "Crashing Suns;" those capers, while having cool SF devices, aliens, and scenes of terror and violence, were severely lacking in the character department, to the point that it was a noticeable drag on the enterprise.

By the twentieth page or so of this approximately 150-page novel the mercs are back in space, approaching the Allubane system.  After abortive negotiations with the isolationist government of the capital planet of the system, Arkuu, Dilullo leads Chane and other mercs on a commando raid that liberates from prison one member of Randall Ashton's party as well as a beautiful Arkuun woman, Vreya, who is a leader of the rebel faction of Arkuuns who want to open up Allubane to interstellar commerce.  Vreya and her comrades helped Ashton and some of his friends get out of government custody earlier, and currently Ashton and co are searching for the astounding artifact that the Arkuuns have been hiding from the galaxy, rumors of which brought Ashton's team to the Closed Worlds in the first place--a machine called the Far-Faring that can separate your mind from your body so you can explore the universe as a noncorporeal entity.

The merc rescue team and Vreya hide in the dense jungles of Arkuu, where reside dangerous monsters and the ruins of the superior civilization which once held sway over the planet.  That was a starfaring civilization, and people like Vreya want the Arkuuns to regain the freedom of the stars--she thinks the ruling party's isolationism is sheer superstition.  Vreya leads Dilullo, Chane and the rest to the mountainous part of the jungle where she thinks Ashton must be looking for the Far-Faring--while Vreya turns out to be a good sex partner for Chane, she isn't the most reliable guide, because she figures the longer Randall Ashton is away from Earth, the more likely the Earth government or some other entity is to send a battle force to Allubane which will overthrow the conservative isolationist government she detests.

The chases and fights involving the native monsters (these creatures, knwon as "Nanes", are the renegade descendants of artificial life created by Arkuu's fallen high tech civilization) and the current Arkuun government on the way to the Far-Faring are entertaining.  When everybody ends up at the Far-Faring inside a mountain the leader of the conservative government calls a ceasefire and explains his policy, the policy of centuries of governments before his.  The reason Arkuu is covered in ruins of high tech cities is that the Arkuuns of the distant past became addicted to the Far-Farings; while they were all busy exploring the universe they neglected all the big and little responsibilities of maintaining a modern society and Arkuun civilization almost entirely collapsed.  A small number of hard asses destroyed all the Far-Farings they could find, but they knew some had escaped their notice, so they initiated the isolationist policy to make sure nobody from off world would find out about the Far-Farings and swamp Arkuu with tourists and put all galactic civilization at risk of addiction.

The mercs drag an unwilling Randall Ashton away from the Far-Faring; Vreya gives the thing a try and accidentally pulls Chane in with her.  The worst pages of the book are Hamilton giving us a sort of psychedelic description of what it is like to be dissociated from your body and floating around the universe, though the kind of SF reader who loves science may appreciate how Hamilton uses the phrase "Brownian Movement" without explaining it.  Chane is a man's man, of course, and realizes that a life apart from your physical form is a bad idea, and he and Vreya successfully overcome the urge to abandon their bodies forever.

In the final fight many people (including the head of the Arkuun government and all his agents) are killed, and all their vehicles are knocked out, so the survivors among the mercs, the Arkuun rebels, and the Ashton party have to walk through mountains and jungle for weeks to rendezvous with the ship.  When the mercs and the Ashton team blast off for Earth they leave Vreya behind to, apparently, take over the planet and open up the Free-Faring to all comers.

The Closed Worlds is a good adventure story; better than its predecessor, The Weapon From Beyond.  The action scenes and all gadgets and monsters are good, the characters are fine, and the ideas Hamilton makes use of--isolation vs integration with a larger civilization, the risk that freedom and high technology can lead to decadence and social collapse--are interesting.  There is also some of that skepticism of intellectualism that we see in the work of Hamilton's fellow Weird Tales scribbler Robert E. Howard:

The very fact of the existence of the Nanes was nightmarish.  They were a by-product of that same science that had produced the Free-Faring, and Chane thought that that science had been a curse to this world, creating a horde of almost immortal horrors to prey upon all life.

Hamilton seems skeptical of the Far-Faring, and I thought maybe he was presenting it as an allegory of drugs or TV, but his book is ambiguous; after all, the people who would destroy or keep concealed the Far-Faring are all killed and Vreya, whom it is clear we are expected to admire, comes out on top.  Similarly, instead of going hardcore pro-business or anti-business, Hamilton presents contrasting specimens of businesspeople--there's James Ashton, who loves his brother, treats the mercs decently and wins Dilullo's respect, and the businessman who, as part of a money-making scheme, told Randall Ashton about the Far-Faring and thus put everybody at risk, a guy who earns Dilullo's derision.  (I think Hamilton means Dilullo to be the moral center of the Morgan Chane books--the mercenary leader acts as a mentor of sorts to Chane, who, though a great fighter and resourceful adventurer, has the twisted values of a criminal and needs help learning how to fit in to mainstream human civilization.) 

Thumbs up for this late-1960s space opera from one of the pioneers of the genre.  I hope to enjoy the final Starwolf book, World of the Starwolves, as much as I did this one.

The Weapon From Beyond by Edmond Hamilton

"I can't go back to Varna now.  'Damn Earthspawn!' Ssander called me.  Me, as Varnan as he was in everything but blood.  But I can't go back."

It's adventure time!

On a road trip across America's great Middle West in August of 2015 I purchased a copy of the 1982 omnibus edition of Edmond Hamilton's Starwolf trilogy at The Book Rack in Davenport, Iowa.  The three Starwolf novels were originally published in the late 1960s; today let's experience Starwolf #1, 1967's The Weapon From Beyond.  Like A. E. van Vogt and Barry Malzberg, over the course of this blog's life Edmond Hamilton has become one of those writers I am perennially interested in, any specimen of whose work I will read with attention out of curiosity, but, as always, I will strive to give a fair assessment of The Weapon From Beyond's merits, judging the novel without fear or favor!*

*If for some morbid reason you want to hear me slag some Hamilton stories, check out what I said about "Child of the Winds" and "Alien Earth."  "Alien Earth" was praised by SF icons Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg, so you know I was going against the establishment in expressing my antipathy towards it!

Morgan Chane is a dangerous criminal, one of the space pirates known as Starwolves who blast off from planet Varna in their needle-shaped ships to plunder peaceful inhabited planets throughout the galaxy.  "...to come down in a surprise swoop on the fat little planet with the fat little people who squeaked and panicked when he and his comrades hit their rich towns...."  Whoa, these Starwolves aren't just murderers and thieves, they also commit hate speech against people of size!

As The Weapon From Beyond begins, Chane's life has taken a dramatic turn.  There was a dispute over how to divide some loot and shots were fired (who would have thought you couldn't trust a bunch of pirates to settle their differences amicably?), and now Chane is all alone in a small ship, on the run from his erstwhile comrades.  Taking refuge in a cloud of dust, the power generator of Chane's ship is wrecked by a meteoroid, and he has to go out into space, propelling himself with hand held "impellers," just like Jack Gaughan depicted on the cover of the first edition of the novel and some Swede did on the 1970 Swedish translation.

Most Starwolves are native Varnans, and Chane is a pure-blooded Earthman (though he has never seen Earth, one of the poorest inhabited planets), but the captain of the ship that picks him up out of space is not fooled--one look at his superb muscles and John Dilullo, mercenary commander, knows Clane has been spending lots of time on high-gravity planet Varna!  Instead of handing Chane over to his crew for summary execution for crimes against galactic civilization, Dilullo blackmails Chane into joining the mercs, promising to not expose the pirate if he follows orders and contributes to the success of the merc's current mission.

That mission concerns a war between two planets in the same star system.  The blue-skinned humans of Kharal are arrogant and wealthy thanks to the valuable gems and minerals their planet's mines produce, and the white-skinned and white-haired Vhollan of planet Vhol are trying to take over Kharal.  The Kharali repelled a conventional Vhollan space fleet, but have intelligence suggesting the Vhollan are hiding a super weapon of some kind in the nearby nebula.  The Kharali have hired Dilullo and his team of Earthling mercenaries (Earth, being poor and having a history of warfare, produces some of the most courageous, resourceful and desperate men in the galaxy) to find and destroy this super weapon.  The first half or so of The Weapon From Beyond's 150 pages consists of Dilullo's team, most prominently Chane, talking to people and sneaking around behind their backs on Kharal and Vhol, looking for clues as to the nature and location of the super weapon, with people breaking and entering and getting captured and escaping, like in so many adventure stories.  In the second half of the novel Chane and compatriots fly into the nebula, and we get space chases and space battles involving both Vhollan and Spacewolf ships.  The "super weapon" turns out to be the wreck of an extra-galactic starship of tremendous size, the product of a mysterious civilization which crashed on a barren planet ages ago.

The mercs capture the Vhollan scientists studying the mile-long artifact, who tell them the extra-galactic aliens, whom they call the Krii, were pacific scientists with no weapons who were studying our galaxy.  (As he did back in 1929 in Outside the Universe, Hamilton blurs the distinction between "galaxy" and "universe," suggesting that maybe in other galaxies the laws of physics are different; the Krii, as one character puts it, "don't even have the same atomic table.")  In the kind of coincidence that happens all the time in fiction, right during a gun battle between the mercs and Vhollan soldiers, after thousands of years, a Krii rescue ship finally arrives to revive the crew of the crashed vessel, who were in suspended animation.  The Krii pacifists employ a field that causes all merc and Vhollan equipment and weapons to cease functioning, but otherwise they ignore the violent Milky Way natives.  The Krii take everything of scientific value out of the wreck, then disintegrate it and leave.  Dilullo has the disintegration filmed so he can tell the Kharali that the Vohllan secret weapon has been eliminated and collect the mercs' fee.

As the story ends Chane agrees to stick around with Dilullo's mercenary company for the time being.
       
There is nothing particularly new or special about The Weapon From Beyond, but it is competently written, the characters all have their little conflicts and quirks, and there are plenty of cool alien creatures and cool high tech devices, scanners and detectors and weapons and things.  The danger-in-space scenes and action scenes all work.

A sort of theme of The Weapon From Beyond is race and ethnicity and relations between different intelligent life forms and branches of humanity.  Like a lot of SF settings, Hamilton's Milky Way galaxy in the Starwolf books posits that many planets in the ancient past were seeded with human life, so that scores or hundreds of planets have human populations.  These populations have had over a million years to evolve separately, so on Varna people are super strong and covered in hair and on Kharal they are tall and blue and on Vhol white as a sheet of paper.  These different strains of humanity have different politics and cultures and personalities and express dim views of each other--as perhaps is fitting for an action adventure series, Hamilton seems to focus more on interethnic conflict than cooperation.

Chane's own character reflects this conflict.  Like Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan and Leigh Brackett's Erik John Stark (Brackett was Hamilton's wife and Burroughs was Brackett's hero and inspiration), Morgan Chane is a cross-cultural figure, raised by people of a different race in a harsh alien environment, and this gives him special abilities.  But before the start of this novel Chane has been rejected by the people who raised him, the Varnans, and now they hunt him.  The third book in the Starwolf series is titled World of the Starwolves and I wonder if Clane returns to Varna to mend fences and rejoin the amoral supermen who reared him and taught him all he knows, or to cement his relationship with mainstream galactic civilization by wiping out the pirates.

I enjoyed The Weapon From Beyond, and it was apparently a big success for Hamilton; the novel was published in at least six foreign languages, giving artists from around the globe the opportunity to draw men in space suits and space ships, though Karel Thole for the Italian publication chose to present a striking and surreal image that I am having trouble linking to any specific scene in the novel.  (Maybe Thole was illustrating the short story accompanying The Weapon From Beyond in Urania 481, Miriam Allen de Ford's "The Colony.")

We'll read the second Starwolf novel, The Closed Worlds, soon, but first, some horror tales from famous and important horror writers in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.

1947 Weird Tales by Edmond Hamilton, Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury

Let's thumb through the January 1947 issue of Weird Tales and read stories by MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton and winners of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury.

"The King of Shadows" by Edmond Hamilton

John Fallon and his best friend Rick Carnaby served together in World War II, flying supplies from India to China.  During the war, Rick crashed in the mountains, and, now that the war is over, John has come looking for his buddy, dead or alive!  John's native guides are afraid to enter the part of the mountains where he believes Rick crashed because they know it is inhabited by Erlik, the evil god of death!  John scoffs at these superstitious goofballs until he is kidnapped by a beautiful translucent flying woman and taken to a lost city for an audience with Erlik himself!

Of course, Erlik isn't a god and the throngs of dark translucent people inhabiting the lost city aren't ghosts--that would be silly!  The logical explanation is that Erlik is an alien, one of the leaders of the human race which originated elsewhere thousands of years ago and colonized the entire galaxy, tens of thousands of planets, of which Earth was only one.  When extragalactic aliens, collective creatures not of matter but of energy who were immune to human weapons, invaded the galaxy they enslaved one planetary population after another until only Earth was left!  Erlik, a genius scientist, figured out how to turn humans into immortal beings of pure energy who could fight the invaders on their own terms.  For centuries, Erlik and people he has turned into shadows have been flying out into space to wage war on the invaders, protecting Earth and building up their strength so they can liberate the rest of the galaxy.

Rick Carnaby, we learn, was fatally injured in his crash but Erlik saved his consciousness by transforming John's buddy into one of those shadow beings consisting of energy.  Now Rick regularly flies into space with the others to fight the hive mind invaders, and Erlik decrees that John must also be transformed into a space-war-fighting shadow man!

John isn't crazy about losing his material form, and Rick and Valain, the beautiful woman who first captured John (and who is falling in love with John), sympathize with him, and help John in an escape attempt.  Hamilton gives us a sort of lame deus ex machina ending--Erlik is able to thwart John's escape attempt, but then decides to let John go anyway, because the war for the galaxy is almost won and new recruits are not needed.  When the space war is over Erlik will figure out a way to turn Valain back into a mortal flesh creature so she can be John's wife.

This story is mediocre.  The Earth is saved and John gets the girl without having to take any risks or perform any impressive deeds; John is basically a spectator, and "The King of Shadows" is thus more like a description of an idea and a setting than an actual story with character development and a plot that generates tension and leads to a climax.  Too bad.

Hamilton scholars will recognize similarities between "The King of Shadows" and other Hamilton works.  The Valley of Creation, for example, which was published in 1948, takes place in the same part of world, and also stars a war veteran who discovers the alien origin of the human race.  In "King of Shadows" a guy figures out the truth behind some Turkic mythology, and in A Yank in Valhalla a guy figures out the scientific truth behind Norse mythology.   Outside the Universe, which was in Weird Tales in the '20s, is all about intergalactic war, and "Child of the Winds," in Weird Tales in the '30s, features superstitious Near Eastern natives and immaterial people and our hero falling in love with some weird woman he meets far from civilization.

"The King of Shadows" was reprinted only once in English, in the 1974 collection What's It Like Out There? and Other Stories.  (I wrote about the highly regarded title story of that collection back in 2017.)

"Cellmate" by Theodore Sturgeon

One of my favorite Sturgeon stories is "The Other Celia," which I read years ago in the 1978 DAW collection A Touch of Strange and reread today after reading "Cellmate."  Both stories are about people who have limited respect for the law encountering beings who are even more alienated from society, and both are well-written, smooth, vivid and absorbing, and just the right length.  I think "The Other Celia" is better, the protagonist more interesting and the weirdo he encounters more bizarre and original, but "Cellmate" is quite good.

A low level criminal, a strong and violent man accustomed to brief stretches in jail or prison, narrates "Cellmate."  He is doing a 60-day stretch when an odd man joins him in his cell.  This character, named Crawley, has a huge barrel chest but skinny limbs, and appears quite weak and lazy.  As the story proceeds, the narrator slowly learns what this freak is all about.  Crawley is, in fact, a pair of conjoined twins, the somewhat dimwitted man whom the world sees and, inside a sort of cavity in his chest with a hinged cover, his tiny genius brother!  The miniature brother has psychic powers that enable him to give orders that other people must obey, and our narrator is soon doing Crawley's bidding, in things small, like cleaning Crawley's meal tin and spending his precious cigarette money appeasing Crawley's sweet tooth, and large, like helping Crawley break out of the joint!

I remember complaining about how, in his famous story in John W. Campbell's Astounding, "Killdozer," Sturgeon wasted my time by describing all the little details of operating construction equipment.  In "The Other Celia" Sturgeon describes little details of being a snoop in a crappy boarding house and in "Cellmate" we get little details of being in a prison, but in these two stories all the details build up to create a mood and a memorable picture of a strange milieu, ol' Ted calibrating just right how much to tell us.

"Cellmate" was included in the 1953 collection E Pluribus Unicorn and in 1959 was reprinted in the magazine Satellite, in what they called their "Department of Lost Stories."

"The Handler" by Ray Bradbury

A British edition of Dark Carnival.

Also in Satellite's "Department of Lost Stories" we find Ray Bradbury's "The Handler."  This story was first printed in book form in Dark Carnival, a collection of Bradbury stories, and would also be included by Groff Conklin in BR-R-R-!, an anthology of horror tales, and scads of other collections and anthologies.  (Like "King of Shadows" and "Cellmate," I read "The Handler" in the internet archives's scan of the January 1947 issue of Weird Tales.)

Mr. Benedict owns the mortuary and cemetery in a small town.  Physically ugly, and shy and submissive by nature, Mr. Benedict has never been successful with women and has never been good at making friends.  He's one of those incels we keep hearing about!  Everyday the people in the town make little snide remarks to him, make little jokes about him, or just ignore him, like he is beneath them.  And every night, at work in his mortuary, he gets his revenge by mutilating the corpses brought to him!

Benedict's abuse of the cadavers takes the form of what he considers poetic justice.  For example, a racist white man's corpse is pumped full of ink so its skin color resembles that of the African-Americans he detested in life.  A woman who ate too many sweets has her brain removed and whipped cream put in its place.  A man with a handsome body who seduced many women is decapitated, to be buried without that chick magnet bod.  And so on and so on (Bradbury gives us plenty of examples.)

An old geezer subject to "spells and comas" is brought to the mortuary.  He wakes up, not being dead after all, and discovers the sorts of violations Benedict has been subjecting the townspeople's deceased loved ones to all these years.  Benedict murders him by pumping full of poison with a hypodermic needle, but before he expires this old coot cries out to the dead in the surrounding graveyard, begging them to exact revenge on Benedict and liberate the town from his abuses.  His cri de coeur is heard, and an army of corpses in various states of disrepair rise from their graves and tear Benedict to pieces and bury each part in a separate grave.

This story is just OK; it is a little silly and a little obvious.  I guess the interesting thing about it is that it is so misanthropic and cynical.  Obviously Benedict is a bad person--besides mutilating all these corpses, it is hinted that he murdered his own mother in an attempt to create a new life for himself way back when he was starting his career.  But most of the ordinary people in the town are also depicted as deplorables--snobs, racists, gossips, womanizers, bullies, etc.  Emotionally and ethically, the story is a little confusing--we can't really sympathize with Benedict, who is so wicked, but we can't really sympathize with the townspeople, either, they being a bunch of jerks.

The story's "social politics" might prove interesting grist for some feminist grad student's mill.  Bradbury is on the right side of the woke divide when Benedict harshly condemns the guy who "hated Jews and Negroes."  But Benedict (and, we may speculate, perhaps Bradbury) also levels at the fair sex many of the traditional criticisms of women, for example, that they are sluts easily seduced by a good looking guy, that they gossip all the time, and that they have a weakness for sweets.  The most shocking part of the story is probably how one "old maid" is buried along with body parts severed from an old man--it is implied that Benedict put a dead penis in her dead vagina.

Not Bradbury's best work.  A much better Bradbury story you might accuse of misogyny is "The Silent Towns," one of the stories included in The Martian Chronicles.  And "The October Game," which I was gushing about in our last episode as a perfect non-supernatural horror story, is a far superior tale about a frustrated nut playing around with dead body parts. 

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More Weird Tales in our next installment, if you can stand it!

Stories from the 25th Anniversary issue of Weird Tales: Hamilton, Bradbury, Bloch and Smith

In our last episode, in which I read Ted Sturgeon's "The Professor's Teddy Bear," I marveled at all the big names in the March 1948, 25th Anniversary, issue of Weird Tales, so I decided today to read stories by four of those big names, Edmond Hamilton, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch and Clark Ashton Smith.  (I read all of these stories in the scan of the issue at the internet archive.)

"The Might-Have-Been" by Edmond Hamilton

Manhattanite scientist Graham is depressed.  The skyscrapers and crowds of the big city depress him.  His expectation that another cataclysmic war could break out at any minute depresses him.  The fact that his wife died eight years ago and he is all alone depresses him.  So when he invents a machine which can project a ray that throws your mind out of this universe and into an alternate time line, maybe one where your wife is still alive and the world doesn't seem to be on the brink of war over Berlin, he jumps at the chance to visit those other possible worlds.

"The mind, you know, isn't material.  It's a web of electric force, an electric pattern that inhabits the brain but that can be torn away from the brain by the right force." 

Graham activates the machine and his consciousness is hurled from one time line to another; in each he rides as a passenger inside the brain of alternate versions of himself residing in alternate 1948 New Yorks.  In one the Renaissance never occurred and in 1948 there is still feudalism and people still wear mail and fight with swords.  In another Europeans and Asians never developed civilization, and the effete Mayans and the totalitarian militarist Aztecs are the highest cultures.  In a third, dinosaurs evolved into an intelligent species and reptile men who have built a high tech civilization have made primitive humans their slaves.  All three of these alternate Earths groan under  tyranny and are wracked by war, and every alternate Graham is on the losing side of these conflicts!

Back in our Earth in his own body Graham sees the light: life isn't easy for anybody and you have to learn to take the bad with the good and do the best you can in the circumstances in which you find yourself.

Anybody who has followed my blog here knows I am a big fan of Hamilton's, but I have to classify "The Might-Have-Been" as a weaker effort, even though I agree with the Stoic wisdom it is trying to sell Weird Tales readers.  Instead of a single strong horror or adventure narrative we get three mediocre little tales of action and terror that individually fail to generate tension (our Graham is just a spectator in these capers) or present a cathartic resolution (the alternate Grahams are not very successful in their aims.)  The Graham of our world does grow and change, and the best part of the story is the angsty beginning in which Graham broods about "the gaunt skyscrapers that seemed to huddle together under the somber winter night" and "the hordes of weary, pathetic, eager faces hurrying homeward in the cold and windy dusk..." but those parts of the story are a minority of the page count. 

Merely acceptable.  My opinion, that this is lesser Hamilton, seems to be the consensus one, as "The Might-Have-Been" has not been reprinted anyplace.

One of the many volumes in which "The October
Game" appears; I actually own one of these,
having paid 10¢ for it at a library sale

"The October Game" by Ray Bradbury

Bradbury has written more than his share of sappy and sentimental stories, and wholesome stories which tell you to be nice to immigrants and don't be a racist, and fantasy stories with likable Adams family weirdos.  But "The October Game" is a masterpiece of hardcore, no-holds-barred, realistic psychological and gore horror.  I read it years ago in some book or other and reread it in the scan of the March 1948 issue of Weird Tales for this blog post, and both times was thrilled by its macabre perfection--the broken-marriage-as-seen-from-the-inside beginning of the story is compelling, and the gruesome ending is mesmerizing and disturbing, even heartrending.

It is Halloween!  Mich Wilder has been unhappy for years.  During the springs and summers he can escape his misery for a little while, taking long walks, but the bitterly cold winters are so horrible he cannot take another.  Why is Mich so miserable?  He had wanted a son with his own dark looks, and forced his wife Louise, who was afraid of getting pregnant, scared of the risk of death associated with childbirth, into producing a child.  Instead of a dark boy, Louise gave birth to a girl as blonde and fair as Louise herself is!  That was eight years ago, eight long years of a loveless marriage.  Today Mich is going to end it.  Abandoning his wife and her blonde brat will not inflict enough pain on Louise.  Shooting Louise down with a pistol will not inflict enough pain on Louise.  To achieve his revenge, to inflict maximum pain on Louise, Mich comes up with a scheme so creative, so cruel, it shocked me the first time I read it and still managed to make me shiver in anticipation and groan at the terrible revelation this time out.

Excellent--five out of five dismembered children!

The first book to feature "Catnip"

"Catnip" by Robert Bloch

In November, December and January, I read a bunch of 1950s and 1960s stories by Robert Bloch; let's check in with Bloch and see what he contributed to this 25th anniversary issue of Weird Tales.  "Catnip" was included in 1977's The Best of Robert Bloch and 2000's The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy, so it must be good, right?

Ronnie Shires is a 14-year-old bully who smokes cigarettes and wants to be class president.  We witness him physically abuse a nerd and treat with utter contempt a girl who has a crush on him--that negging strategy we hear about must work because this chick does Ronnie's homework for him and canvasses for him among the other girls in his class--it looks like he will win election tomorrow!

To show how tough he is to some other boys, Ronnie bothers the black cat that lives with the reclusive old woman whom kids think is a witch.  Things escalate after the old bag yells at him and one evening he contemptuously throws a cigarette at her ramshackle old house and accidentally burns it to the ground while she is inside, killing her.  But the cat survives the conflagration, and, on the day of the class election, the feline chases Ronnie around town, keeping him from attending school so he can't be there for the election.  The story ends with a Bloch pun that has been foreshadowed multiple times throughout the story when the cat (apparently now inhabited by the witch's soul) jumps on Ronnie's face and tears out his tongue.

This story is just OK.  For one thing, puns undermine the tension I really want to see in a horror story.  And then there is the issue of our revolting protagonist.  When I wrote about Anthony Boucher's "They Bite," I noted that many horror stories have an unlikable protagonist, a bad person whose misdeeds lead them into contact with an even worse person or entity who destroys them.  This literary strategy turns what is ostensibly a horror story into a sort of morality tale in which, instead of (or in addition to) being horrified at the fate of the protagonist, we feel that justice has been served, that, in mysterious ways, the balance of the universe has been set to rights.  The man in "They Bite" was threatening our society's liberal institutions, and so when a mummy kills him, we are not so much horrified as relieved that the status quo has been preserved, even if by some outre means.  Similarly, readers of "Catnip" want to see Ronnie, who is a real piece of shit, lose the class election and suffer some sort of punishment for his cheating and bullying, his trespassing and manslaughter, and the witch's black cat foils Ronnie's electoral ambitions and metes out the punishment.

"They Bite" and "Catnip," while they have horror elements, are wish fulfillment fantasies in which supernatural agents help solve our problems for us.  They assure us that the universe is a sensible place where the evil are punished and their plans thwarted.  This is in contrast to Lovecraft stories in which the universe is shown to be totally inexplicable and absolutely callous, or Bradbury's "The October Game" in which an evil and/or insane person succeeds in murdering and torturing many innocent people.  To me, those are real horror stories, stories which, allegorically or realistically, explore the horror of our lives.

"The Master of the Crabs" by Clark Ashton Smith

The Abominations of Yondo (1960) was the
first book to include "The Master of the Crabs"

Back in my New York days I bought and read the 2002 Smith collection The Emperor of Dreams; where it is now, I am not sure, hopefully my brother has it back home in New Jersey, the greatest state in the union.  (In related news, I am kind of regretting not buying those cool Smith paperbacks I saw in a New Jersey antique mall back in August.)  Anyway, I like Smith, even if it has been years since I read anything by him.  The Emperor of Dreams includes over forty stories, but "The Master of the Crabs" is not one of them, so I believe this will be my first reading of this tale of Zothique, the fantasy land conceived by Smith.

The wizard Sarcand, whose father was a sorcerer and whose mother was a black cannibal, has discovered the fabled chart of Omvor the pirate!  This will guide him to the hiding place of the unique spellbooks and magical devices looted by Omvor hundreds of years ago!  But another wizard, Mior Lumivox, was able to look at the chart over Sarcand's shoulder by casting his ka out of his body by means of drinking the juice of the purple dedaim!  So when Sarcand sets out for the location of the treasure, the Island of Crabs, Mior Lumivox is right behind him!

Our narrator for this sword and sorcery caper is Mior Lumivox's apprentice, Manthar.  Mior Lumivox and Manthar sail after Sarcand, and on the island find him already in possession of the treasure.  Who will live and who will suffer a horrendous death as these two wizards battle for the invaluable artifacts secreted on the Island of Crabs?

This is a fun tale about ruthless amoral wizards with plenty of cool magic and gruesome bloodshed.  However, seeing as the villain is a biracial cannibal with his teeth filed into points, I wouldn't advise you recommend it to anybody who has influence over your employment status.  "The Master of the Crabs" just ain't woke!

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I'm still enjoying these old horror pieces--more 1940s Weird Tales in our next episode!

He Owned the World by Charles Eric Maine

"What do you imagine will happen to me?"

She shook her head slowly.  "Even if I knew, I would not be permitted to say.  In time you will know everything, so do not be impatient.  Remember you are immortal, too." 

I have to admit that when I started reading Englishman Charles Eric Maine's 1960 novel He Owned the World I had what the kids call a WTF moment.  We just read the 1959 version of Edmond Hamilton's The Star of Life (the first version appeared in Startling Stories in 1947) in which a 20th-century astronaut on a mission to be the first to orbit the moon suffers a mishap so that he is lost in space for thousands of years and then wakes up from suspended animation and gets involved with the politics of the far future.  Well, Maine's book is also about a 20th-century astronaut who is on his way to becoming the first man to orbit the moon when his vessel suffers a malfunction and he is lost in space for thousands of years, only to wake up and find himself involved in future politics.  It is certainly an odd coincidence, but let's just shrug our shoulders, admit that there are lots of SF stories about people falling asleep and waking up in a strange future world, and move on with our lives.  (And by "lives" I mean our mission to read, digest, and assess all these old SF books and magazines!)

I purchased my torn and worn copy of the 1960 Avon paperback edition of He Owned the World in 2015 on a road trip through the Middle West.  It looks like I bought 10 novels, one anthology, and a magazine on this trip, and that I have now read about half of that material.*  Evidence that I am making progress in my life's work!  He Owned the World was printed in hardcover as well as paperback here in America in 1960, and saw multiple editions in Britain, Italy and Germany, so I guess we can call it a success.

Our hero in He Owned the World is British astronaut Robert Carson.  Like the guy in The Star of Life, when it is evident that he is lost in space, he commits suicide rather than wait for his supplies to run out.  Carson dies, but wakes up 8000 years later, revived by the medical science of the future.  Despite what I said about moving on with our lives, it is hard not to compare the similar plot elements of the first chapters of Maine's novel and Hamilton's.  Compared to Maine, Hamilton's The Star of Life is fast paced and gets to the point quickly; Maine includes lots of technical info about the damaged space ship and a metaphorical, surrealistic passage about the experience of waking up, alive, after centuries of being dead: "A purple glow trembled like aurora, then changed color, moving tranquilly through the rainbow of the spectrum....there were tentative sensations of feeling: tiny pinpricks of physical awareness like the impact of cosmic rays on exposed nerves...."

After a long convalescence, during most of which he is unconscious, a rehabilitated Carson learns where he is and what is going on.  Thousands of years ago there was an atomic war on Earth, and our home planet still hasn't quite recovered.  Before that cataclysmic war, Mars had been colonized by scientists, and, because the war didn't directly affect Mars, the red planet is now the leading polity in the solar system.  Among other technological advances, the Martians have achieved immortality--Carson himself is now immortal.  In turn, the Martians have abandoned sexual reproduction, but as a compensation, people's genitals (including the revived Carson's) are artificially enhanced to increase the pleasure of the sex act!

Carson is a very important man on Mars, and is assigned the best doctors and teachers to get him healthy and to acclimatize him to life in this future world.  He is even assigned as a house mate and bed partner the smartest and sexiest woman on Mars, Competence Cayne!  (These centuries-old Martians all have first names that reflect their professions or attributes; this woman's name I also suspect is some kind of Cain and Abel joke.)  It may sound like Carson has died and gone to heaven, but his relationship with Cayne causes some disturbance for our 20th-century astronaut.  The people of Mars in the 100th century are cold and intellectual, they feel no love and have contempt for emotions, and while Carson becomes emotionally attached to Cayne, she tells him "Love is an obsessive form of compulsion neurosis" and warns him, "There are surgical techniques in psychoneurology for curing conditions of emotional distortion."  Yikes!  When they part at the end of Cayne's three-week tour of duty as Carson intimate companion, our hero is a little depressed and lovesick.

There's still more bad news for those of us with 20th-century values and a little Earth patriotism when Carson begins to learn just what it is that makes him so important to these cold-blooded Martian brainiacs.  The red planet lacks many of the natural resources the Martians need, so they trade with Earth.  Two thousand years ago the war-ravaged Earth demanded prices the Martians didn't want to pay, so the Martians figured the logical way out of this impasse was to use their superior technology to build a space navy and conquer Earth!  Three interplanetary wars, decades of strife in space and on the Earth's surface, followed, and each conflict ended in stalemate, with the Earthlings unable to strike back at Mars, but Mars unable to overwhelm the tenacious Terran defense.  Earth and Mars have been in a Cold War for the dozen centuries since, only conducting that vital trade via intermediaries on Luna.

When Carson died back in the 20th century he was hailed as a hero and rich people set up a charitable institution to commemorate him and search for his lost rocket and his corpse.  Over the thousands of years of nuclear war, interplanetary war, and uneasy peace, the Carson Trust invested its funds wisely, so wisely that it became the most powerful institution on Earth.  The Trust not only came to own a majority of the property in the world, but all of Earth's governments became reliant upon its financing.  Now that Carson is back to life, because he is the beneficiary of the Trust, the Martian authorities believe that, legally, Carson "owns" the entire planet Earth.  I didn't find all this very convincing, but there it is.  While Maine strives to make so many of the little things in He Owned the World realistic, the outlandishness of this central plot element makes me suspect the novel is as much a satire of technocratic government, arrogant and unfeeling scientists, and general human shortcomings as it is a "thriller" (as it is called on the cover of the British 1961 hardcover edition.) 

The Martians are ready to launch their fourth war on Earth, and this time they will have an edge because Carson is going to be the figurehead leader of the invasion and of the rational and scientific colonial government they will set up once resistance is crushed.  The Martians figure many Earthlings will welcome the rule of their hero and the legal owner of the planet.  Carson is far from keen on playing this role, but it doesn't matter to the Martians whether Carson wants to participate in this scheme or not--beneath its utopian veneer of immortality and no-strings-attached sex, technocratic Mars is an authoritarian society.  Here is the theory of society of Mr. Mentor Jaff, head of the Martian Department of Co-ordination:

"This is the hundredth century, Mr. Carson, and not the twentieth.  The State is an entity in itself, and the government is the co-ordinating brain of the State, and individuals are merely the cells of a corporate body."     

Via a device implanted in Carson's ear (one many Martians, apparently, are issued), Jaff listens in on all of Carson's conversations and transmits to him "advice."  If Carson elects to ignore this "advice," Jaff, at the flick of a finger, can deliver to him a painful ultrasonic blast--this is the stick that complements the carrots the Mars government has been providing Carson, like his luxury apartment furnished with four nubile women. 

It is typical in SF for immortality to turn out to be a curse, rendering life boring or causing people to lose their humanity.  Here in He Owned the World the immortals treat mortals like children at best, and at worst as a natural resource to be manipulated and exploited or discarded as necessary.  The immortals claim that they are responsible stewards of the solar system, that the fact that they will live essentially forever means they have an incentive to make a better future; in contrast, they say, the mortals of Earth, who live less than a century, act irresponsibly and selfishly because they know they will not live long enough to suffer the long term consequences of their actions on the economy and the environment.  Thus it is just for them to run Earth without taking Earthmen's wishes into account and even kill millions of Earthlings if it facilitates Martian rule.

The second half of the 144-page book begins with Maine's description of the Martian conquest of the Moon and the attack on Earth--Carson spends these months on Mars, following the war's progress on TV.  When it appears (deceptively, as it turns out) the Martians have Earth under control, Carson and Jaff go down to the ruins of London for a propaganda ceremony, but the Earthlings launch a surprise attack and after an interlude among the mutants who live on the Earth's radioactive surface, Carson finds himself in the custody of the genetically normal Earthers who live in vast underground cities.  Carson's captors deactivate the transmitter in his ear so he is no longer subject to the control of Jaff, who managed to make it back to the Martian forces.

The Earth government spends a lot of time and energy trying to figure out if Carson is the real resurrected Robert Carson or some kind of Martian impostor, maybe an ordinary Martian man given all kinds of plastic surgery and hypnotism so he looks and even thinks how the real 20th-century Carson must have.  When they are satisfied he is the real deal they want him to act as a negotiator between the Earth and Mars, to end the war and get the invaders to leave.  The Earth people, who are not immortal, have values and attitudes closer to Carson's own (for example, while the pitiless Martian scientists want to exterminate the mutants because they are a genetic dead end, the subterranean Earthers provide the mutants what food and medical care they are able to spare) and he enthusiastically throws in his lot with them.  He negotiates a cease fire, but the amoral Martians use the cease fire as an opportunity to launch a sneak attack, massacring an entire subterranean Earth city's population and once again getting their mitts on Carson.

The final pages of the novel throw everything into doubt for Carson and for us readers.  Competence Cayne reappears, ostensibly to offer herself to Carson as a permanent companion, a bribe so he will do the bidding of the Martians.  But sotto voce she also claims to be part of an underground movement of Martians who want a less tyrannical government, and that Jaff himself is part of this movement.  When Jaff was saying all that stuff about the meaninglessness of the individual he was just playing a part, she claims, because he is monitored himself by those above him!  As the novel ends and Carson commits suicide a second time we cannot be certain about Carson's true identity or Jaff's or Cayne's true motives, and we have no idea what will happen to any of the hundredth century characters and societies; all we know is that Carson's resurrection (or creation) achieved nothing.       

He Owned the World is well-written and I enjoyed it (the surreal passage at the beginning is not representative of the text as a whole.)  While I am often unhappy with conspiracy stories and stories in which the main character is a puppet, Maine's novel also includes some of my favorite themes, like immortality, warfare, unhealthy sexual relationships, and skepticism of the State.  It is also interesting to see a SF book that is so hostile to scientists.  If you don't mind a book that argues that life is meaningless, that we can never attain reliable knowledge of anything, and that people with talent and experience use those assets to dominate and exploit their inferiors, I would certainly recommend He Owned the World to you.

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*  Imagination Science Fiction, April 1956: It includes a story by Edmond Hamilton which I liked and some politically incorrect cartoons

Genius Unlimited by John T. Phillifent: I declared it "pretty bad"

The 7th Annual Year's Best S-F edited by Judith Merril: I have read numerous stories from this, including a terrific story by Cordwainer Smith

Across Time by Donald Wollheim, writing as David Grinnell: I called it a "disappointment" and gave it a marginal negative review

Worlds of the Wall by C. C. MacApp: I said this was "acceptable" but today I remember nothing about it.  According to my blog post it features a giant otter and duck people.  Something for you fetishists?

The Diamond Contessa by Kenneth Bulmer: This thing is bizarre and self-indulgent, though I was feeling charitable when I blogged about it and didn't outright condemn it

Who Goes Here? by Bob Shaw: I somewhat grudgingly gave this joke story a positive review