The Star of Life by Edmond Hamilton

He had risked death and he had died, almost, to win the freedom of the stars for men.  Not if he could help it was anyone going to abridge or limit that freedom.

There was a 50% off sale at Second Story
 Books, so I snagged this beauty for $1.50.

For my recent exercise in Malzbergian studies, the results of which appeared in my last blog post, I wanted copies of Harry Harrison's early 1970s anthologies Nova 1 and Nova 2.  I went to the vast and labyrinthine Second Story Books warehouse store in Rockville, MD to dig through boxes and shelves of SF paperbacks in the search for these two volumes, but came up empty.  This expedition was not a waste, however, as I laid eyes upon a dozen or so beautiful books I'd never seen before, and I even purchased one, the 1959 Crest paperback edition of Edmond Hamilton's The Star of Life.  This edition has a Richard Powers cover that features not only the characteristic Powers abstractions and weird buildings and spaceships, but human faces.  I very much admire Powers' depictions of the human form--check out his illustrations for Robert Heinlein's Number of the Beast and the cover of Fredric Brown's Star Shine  if you are only familiar with his more abstract work.

The Star of Life first appeared in 1947 in Startling Stories; isfdb has two distinct entries for the novel, one for the magazine version that went on to be included in Brian Aldiss's anthology Space Opera and one for the books that appeared in 1959--there was a hardcover as well as my paperback edition.  A quick look at the magazine version does suggest that the texts are substantially different.  My paperback is like 180 pages of text, and the version in Startling takes up like 55 or so pages, while, according to isfdb, only 15 pages of Space Opera is devoted to The Star of Life.  Maybe Aldiss only included an excerpt?  (isfdb clearly indicates that the contribution to Space Opera from Hamilton's wife, Leigh Brackett, is just an excerpt (from the MPorcius-approved The Sword of Rhiannon.))  Whatever the case, The Star of Life appears to have been liked by editors--the novel version was translated into French, German and Italian, and the version in Space Opera would appear in Croatian.

Let's see what one of Ohio's greatest SF writers and a particular fave of the MPorcius staff has in store for us this time.

Kirk Hammond took off from Earth in the middle of the Cold War in a three-stage rocket--he had been chosen to be the first man to see the dark side of the moon!  But the third stage of the rocket fired at the wrong time, and he found himself not about to swing around Luna and then back to Earth, but hurtling past the moon on a one-way trip to deep space!  As our story begins, Hammond makes a terrible decision: rather than wait long agonizing hours for his oxygen supply to run out, he commits suicide by cracking open the hatch and letting the cold of interplanetary space kill him!

But our man Kirk does not kick the bucket!  Instead he is flash frozen and preserved like those peas in your freezer your wife asked you to buy when you went to the store to stock up on Ovaltine!  Hammond wakes up when reentry into Earth's atmosphere heats up his little vessel and defrosts him!  How long has he been flying in a long comet-like orbit before one of his trips brought him within the loving embrace of Mother Terra's gravity?  A little over 10,000 years!

There is a long history of SF stories in which somebody sleeps for hundreds or thousands of years and then wakes up to confront a future world; this is apparently the plot of H. G. Wells's 1910 The Sleeper Awakes, which I have not read.  I have read a number of such stories over the course of this blog's career (immediatly coming to mind are Neil R. Jones's 1930s stories about Professor Jameson and the Zoromes, Hamilton's own "In the World's Dusk," Cordwainer Smith's 1957 "Mark Elf," and Clifford Simak's Cosmic Engineers) and I expect to read still more before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

Hammond lands on Earth, weak as a kitten, and is nursed back to health by a motley crew of weirdos living in an underground complex, hiding from dangerous enemies.  Hammond's new friends teach him their lingo and he learns all about life on Earth in the year 12094.  His rescuers call themselves the Hoomen, and are a multiethnic bunch whose members include people with blue or grey skins as well as people with classic skin colors like yours and mine.  Mankind conquered space and colonized planets that orbit other stars long ago--the blue and grey people are humans whose bodies, over many generations, evolved to suit their extraterrestrial environments.

But all is not well for humanity!  Around the year 10000 some humans exploring the Trifid Nebula discovered a means of attaining immortality and instead of sharing it with all the galaxy kept it to themselves!  For centuries now they have comprised a small elite of super-scientists known as the Vramen, and their long lives have enabled them to develop super weapons that have made them practically invincible.  These jokers control the entire galactic civilization, in particular maintaining a firm grip on all space travel to keep anybody else from going to that Trifid Nebula.  Most Hoomen have grudgingly accepted Vramen domination--though they keep immortality to themselves they have produced much technology that has made life better for everybody--but the group of people Hammond has fallen among are independent-minded types, a band of rebels!  Their leader is Jon Wilson, a man whose look of fanatic dedication to his cause reminds Hammond of pictures he has seen of John Brown!  (Wilson also has a pretty daughter named Iva who quickly develops a crush on our astronaut hero.)  Wilson's band of conspirators are secretly building an illegal star ship that won't have the mandated Vramen surveillance and control apparatus, and you already know where they want to fly that ship, don't you?  To the Trifid Nebula to snag that immortality for themselves and for all mankind!

"It's a suicide attempt, Hammond.  We all know it...But if we should succeed, we will have given all mankind indefinitely long life, freeing them forever from the tyranny of the Vramen and the vastly greater tyranny of time."

Despite the fact that Hammond's last space trip was a total disaster, he volunteers for this dangerous operation, seeing as, all his life, he has believed in human freedom and aspired to give the human race untrammeled access to the stars!  Another thing that sticks in his craw is the Vramen practice of using a ray projector device to control the minds of rebellious mortals--"He had an old-fashioned ingrained notion that a man's mind, and the freedom thereof, was an inviolable right."

Before the rebel star ship is completed there is a skirmish with the Vramen, and the rebels capture one of the arrogant elitists' top brainiacs--a gorgeous blue-eyed blonde named Thayn Marden!  The rebels are thrilled--this chick can guide them through the Trifid Nebula to the planet of immortality, Althar, warning them of any dangers on the way.  "You are children," Marden warns them, "You talk of things you do not know.  If you knew what really lies at Althar...."

The Star of Life includes large helpings of human drama and emotion.  Hamilton does a good job of describing Hammond's despair when he is in the doomed space capsule in the first chapter, the Hooman resentment of the Vramen, and the contempt the centuries-old Thayn Marden has for mortal humans, who are like ignorant children to her.  This is a space opera, but a space opera in which the author tries to get into the heads of people in futuristic and alien situations and portray their motives and feelings for us readers, and I think he succeeds in a way that is entertaining.  I have complained that SF novels I have read recently--Simak's Cosmic Engineers and Arthur Sellings's The Power of X--lacked human feeling, and Hamilton here shows us how much painting characters with believable relationships and emotions can help bring to life an alien milieu (how much respect would you accord a 30-year-old engineer if you had been studying physics and inventing machinery for 200 years? how would you feel if your child or spouse contracted a terminal illness and you knew there was a way to make your loved one immune from disease and a haughty smartypants was keeping it from you?) and make you care about a more or less traditional adventure plot.  The moment Thayn Marden stepped onstage I wanted to learn more about her and see what her relationship with Hammond would be like, and I was eager to find out what the hell was going on in that Trifid Nebula.

The presence of Marden spurs doubts in Hammond about the rebels, largely because the Hoomen conspirators are willing to use a high tech brain reading device to get information out of the Vramen genius, and the device threatens to damage her brain.  Marden, for her part, is eager to talk to Hammond, ostensibly to learn all about the 20th century.  Jealous, Iva Wilson warns Hammond about Marden: "The Vramen are loveless and childless, caring only for knowledge and power.  Don't be deceived by her beauty."  Despite this warning Marden exploits Hammond's attraction to her and tricks him into exposing the conspiracy so all the rebels end up arrested, on trial, and then sentenced to life on a penal planet orbiting Spica!  This mishap sours Hammond's relationship with the rebels, who consider him a traitor, but also gives him (and us readers) a chance to see mainstream Hooman society, its beautiful cities and its legal system and its star ships, and its uneasy relationship with the Vramen, who dominate the galactic society while disdaining to hold any official government positions.

Internment on the single planet of the Spica system marks the mid point of the novel.  Imprisonment there is not harsh--the prisoners all have nice houses and challenging productive work clearing away the native jungle with bulldozers.  Security is light because there's nowhere for the prisoners to go--the whole planet is their prison and they are hemmed in by the deadly jungle.  But it is rough for Hammond because all the other prisoners hate him--at one point they even leave him to die in the clutches of a native jungle monster!  He decides to get back in their good graces (and "make them eat crow") by leading an escape attempt; he has the guards contact Thayn Marden, who comes to Spica in response to Hammond's offer to help the Vramen in their historical researches (the 20th century lies within a gap in their historical knowledge resulting from the destruction of archives in an interplanetary war that broke out soon after man colonized Mars and Venus.)  Hammond catches Marden off-guard by professing love to her (there is a lesson here for all you ladies!) and knocks her out and deactivates the forcefield protecting the spaceport.  So Jon Wilson's crew, along with Hammond and Marden, blast off for the Trifid Nebula.

After a challenging trip through the Trifid Nebula the rebels land on Althar, where they find that the Vramen inhabit only a small fortified mountain base; the rest of the planet is in the hands of the Vramen-hating natives known as the Third Men.  Despite Marden's warnings about them, Wilson tries to make friends with these tall humanoids, and our cast ends up in their black cubic city of Vonn.  The Third Men, like the Vramen, are immortal--the source of immortality is radiation from Althar's sun.  Althar is odd in another way--it has no metal, which has kept the otherwise scientifically advanced Third Men from building space craft and nuclear reactors.  The ship Wilson's rebels have brought to Althar has been wrecked, but enough material from it has been salvaged to allow the Third Men to build all the nuclear reactors, super weapons and star ships anybody could ever need.  (Once they have a nuclear reactor they can just create metal.)

Wilson commits himself and his friends to full support of the Third Men, but when Hammond learns Wilson has handed over not only all that valuable material but also Thayen Marden to these mysterious characters, he finally admits to himself the thing all of us readers and all the other characters in the book have known since page 52--he is in love with Thayen Marden, the smartest, strongest, most beautiful woman he has ever met!  Hammond rescues Marden, and the two of them flee Vonn for the Vramen fortress.  Despite all the complaints we hear about women in magazines like Startling being ineffectual damsels in distress, it is Marden who does all the brain work involved in this escape and journey: she figures out how to outwit the Third Men's security robots, she pilots a jet aircraft, she thinks up the ruse by which they evade the pursuing Third Men aircraft, etc.  As the two lovers march through a moss forest to the fortress, their stolen aircraft a crumpled hulk sunk in a lake behind them, Marden reveals to Hammond the horrible truth about immortality and the origins of the Vramen, the Third Men, and the still more mysterious Fourth Men!   

As we have seen before, over his entire long career, Hamilton has been interested in radiation, mutation, and evolution.  The Third Men are the children of the Vramen, smarter and stronger still than their parents, thanks to changes to their parents' DNA wrought by the same radiation that made the Vramen immortal.  Unfortunately, the genetic changes to the Vramen also resulted in their children being amoral and ruthless, determined to conquer the universe.  And they won't be kind masters--they consider Hoomen to be nothing more than animals!   The Vramen have kept the Third Men bottled up on Althar--despite their superior abilities, the Third Men have been unable to take the Vramen fortress because they have lacked metal and atomics...the very things Wilson just gave them!  If something isn't done soon, the Third Men will take over the planet and build a space navy that will enslave the galaxy! 

The Third Men's children, the Fourth Men, are even more intelligent than their parents, and you will be relieved to hear that they have no worldly ambitions, and live in a hermit city where they live the life of the mind.  They are also sterile.  In the final pages of the novel Hammond has to go to their hermit city to ask them for help against their parents.  The Fourth Men use their astonishing mental powers to bring the Third Men to heel, but not before they have demolished the Vramen fortress with their super weapons, inflicting many casualties on their parents.  Among the casualties is beautiful genius Thayn Marden--the love of Hammond's life dies in his arms!

The Star of Life is a great space opera, for the reasons I have already enumerated and because Hamilton is a skilled professional writer: the pacing is good; there is a balance of violent or tense action scenes and more chatty scenes; the characters and settings are described enough to produce a memorable image and tone without overburdening the reader with excessive superfluous detail.

An Italian omnibus edition including
The Star of Life as well as two other novels

The novel also includes themes we see in SF all the time.  SF is full of minorities of superior people who are envied and resented by the normies--A. E. van Vogt's Slan are an early example, and the X-Men a more famous one.  Such people are better than the rest of us, so even though they contribute to our society they are subject to suspicion because they are different, envy for their superiority and fear of their power.  SF is also full of elitism, with many stories by the foremost practitioners in the field (Asimov, Heinlein, Sturgeon, etc.) about how the smarter people should manipulate the common man because the common man is too dumb to know what is good for him.  The Star of Life has both of these elements.  Early in the book Hammond is lead to believe that the Vramen are keeping the secret of immortality to themselves out of pure selfishness, but it turns out that these geniuses have been keeping it out of the hands of the masses because if everybody was immortal the human race would be on the road to cultural and biological sterility and finally extinction.  Marden asserts, and Hammond is moved to agree, that just explaining to people the dangers of immortality would not be enough, that the vast majority of people would selfishly seek immortality and say to hell with the future of the human race.

Minor themes of the novel include disappointment and doubt.  I appreciate serious adult themes like these in my adventure stories, and Hamilton deploys them well here.  Immortality is a disappointment, and the Vramen and the Third Men are disappointed in their offspring.  Hammond not only has doubts and changes his mind about the various characters he meets and the justice of the actions of both Wilson's rebels and the arrogant Vramen, but more than once he even doubts, Malzberg style, the wisdom of the space program for which he has devoted and risked his life:

"Was it such a good thing to conquer space?  We thought it would be, back in the Twentieth Century.  But was it?"  

A fun and satisfying space caper--once again I offer kudos to Edmond Hamilton and recommend one of his books to fans of classic SF adventure.  The Star of Life is the real deal.

**********

My copy of The Star of Life has five pages of ads at the back--none of these ads are for SF books.  But they are still kind of interesting.  In the coveted "If you liked this space opera about inter-mutant rivalry you'll want to read our novel about a teenaged girl who gets raped" spot is Lost Summer by Christopher Davis, which was admired by John Wain, whose idiosyncratic biography of Samuel Johnson I found interesting.  Then we have (at last in paperback) James Gould Cozzens's By Love Possessed, a best-selling and award-winning novel about a small town lawyer.  The wikipedia articles about By Love Possessed and Cozzens's relationship with the literati of his day are actually pretty interesting.

Next up is a book of fairy tales endorsed by Woman's Day magazine and introduced by Dr. Joyce Brothers; I was interested to learn that Woman's Day is still alive (and full of articles about the British royal family and Oprah, who I guess, in the absence of any notable female Kennedys, is sort of like America's Queen) but Brothers, who used to pop up on TV all the time in my youth, is dead.  The Bystander is, I think, a novel by a Texas-born Harvard prof about a young Frenchman who chases an older woman.  Finally we have the movie-tie in edition of Alan Le May's The Unforgiven, which I guess is about the relationship between white settlers and native Indians in the Southwest.

I was curious to see the cover of the movie-tie in edition of The Unforgiven, which apparently features a color photo of Burt Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn, but couldn't find one online, just a description.  Images of the sex novels are readily available, however; unfortunately they are not nearly as interesting or even as sexy as Powers's cover for The Star of Life.  Yet again, SF beats the mainstream!

The Comet Kings by Edmond Hamilton

"You can help us willingly with all your knowledge of this universe, and be rewarded by electric immortality.  Or you can refuse.  In that case, we will strip your mind of all knowledge and then destroy you immediately."

In his essentially mainstream novel about a science fiction writer who goes insane, Herovit's World, Barry Malzberg, who has read more SF and thought about SF more than just about anybody, includes a parody of SF of the Lensman/Captain Future type that features heroic scientists and fighting men who explore the universe and battle hostile aliens.  Let's check out an example of the very kind of story Malzberg was satirizing, Edmond Hamilton's The Comet Kings, first published in Captain Future magazine in 1942.  The Comet Kings is the 11th Captain Future Adventure; I am reading the 1969 paperback edition from Popular Library.

(We've read two Captain Future novels by Hamilton already, Quest Beyond the Stars and Outlaw World, and over the course of this blog's life I have read many other novels and stories by Hamilton, who, like his wife Leigh Brackett, is something of a MPorcius fave.)

The government of the Solar System, based in beautiful New York City on Earth, has a big big problem!  Dozens of space ships, both private commercial ships and government war ships, have vanished without a trace in a sector beyond Jupiter.  The Planet Patrol has sent out two of its best agents, old man Ezra Gurney and Joan Randall, a "dark, pretty girl" and "the smartest agent of our secret investigation division" who "knows the spaceways better than most men," to investigate.  These two geniuses also disappear, so the government turns to the Moon for help!  Only four people make their homes on the Moon, scientist Curtis Newton, known as Captain Future, and his three comrades, the Futuremen!  Newton has a crush on Randall, so everybody knows he will take this job seriously!

Who are the Futuremen?  Oldest of the three is Doctor Simon Wright, a genius scientist who was a close colleague of Curtis's father, biologist Roger Newton.  When his body approached death, Newton removed Wright's brain and implanted it alive in a box equipped with cameras, microphones, and projectors that emit "beams of force" that allow him to hover and fly.  Newton and Wright created in their lunar lab the other two Futuremen, Otho, the synthetic man, and Grag, the intelligent robot.  When his parents died, young Curtis was raised by Wright (AKA "The Brain") and Otho and Grag, and became a brilliant scientist himself, as well as "the most renowned fighting planeteer in the System."

I took these images of Curt Newton's comrades from the scan of the Winter 1943 issue of
Captain Future available at the Internet Archive

Apprised of the disappearance of Randall and hundreds of other people, Newton and the Futuremen fly off to the orbit of Jupiter to investigate.  It is not long before they suspect that Halley's comet is somehow connected to the disappearances, and, when they approach the comet to have a look-see,  their ship is seized by a magnetic force and pulled towards the mysterious body.  They discover, within the glowing energy field that is the outer shell of the comet, a small forested planet with an alabaster city on its surface.  Here lie all the lost space ships, and here our heroes are taken prisoner by the pirates who live on the comet, men and women whose very bodies pulse and glow with electricity!  These electric people do not need to eat or drink, and are practically immortal!

There are no three-eyed aliens in this story

The world inside Halley's Comet is full of surprises.  Our heroes learn that the people of the Comet (the Cometae) only recently became electrified and immortal, when their tyrannical rulers, King Thoryx, Queen Lulain, and the weird old adviser, Querdel, exposed them to the power of the Allus, creatures from another cosmos summoned to our universe by Querdel's science.  The majority of Cometae don't even want to be electrified, as they feel it has stripped them of their humanity--they are sterile and thus denied the joys of parenthood as well as the age-old natural cycle of birth, maturity, and death.  Another surprise: when he is brought to the royal court, Newton finds that his crush Joan Randall has been electrified herself!

Randall of course is only pretending to have joined the Cometae in order to learn more about them and the Allus--she is an intelligence agent, after all.  When Newton and the Brain promise the leaders of the anti-Allus majority population of the comet world that they will try to reverse the electrification of their bodies, the commoners launch an uprising against the royals, and Newton and the Futuremen are right in the thick of the fighting!  Unfortunately, when the rebels are on the cusp of victory, Querdel contacts the extradimensional Allus via his ten-foot-wide ebon orb and a wave of energy from another universe hypnotizes all the rebels into immobility, save the not-quite human Grag and Otho, who escape to the forest outside the alabaster city.

Querdel, in his six-wheeled car, drives the unconscious Newton from the white city to the black citadel of the Allus.  Luckily, Grag and Otho, hiding in the woods, see the car go by and march to the 1000-foot tool black tower.  Within the tower Curt learns the true nature of the Allus and their mission in our universe.  (The scenes in which Newton sees the true forms of the Allus for the first time, and when he looks through the Allus' portal into their universe of four dimensions, seemed to me to owe some inspiration to H. P. Lovecraft, Hamilton's fellow Weird Tales scribe.)  Newton, the Futuremen and Joan Randall work together to shut the portal from the other universe, dending the Allus menace, and then Newton, The Brain, and a Martian scientist figure out how to turn all the immortal electric people back into short-lived normal people who can have children and die.  (Hooray, I guess?)

There are no giant bats in this story

This is a fun, fast-paced, and brief (128 pages here) story, a good example of old-fashioned adventure SF.  The Comet Kings is full of speculative science about things like a comet's make up and why living things age and die, though I'm guessing these theories are today totally exploded, and our heroes overcome obstacles again and again by using their knowledge and via trickery--while there is some hand-to-hand combat and bloodshed, the story fetishizes not strength or martial prowess, but science and quick-thinking.

As part of my project of defending Golden Age SF from misharacterizing attacks, I will point out that while Malzberg's parody in Herovit's World suggests that SF scientist/soldiers are xenophobic, shooting first and asking questions later, and making servants or slaves of alien races, this Captain Future novel is practically a paean to diversity.  It is true that nobody gives a boring or self-righteous speech about the evils of racism and sexism--Hamilton instead depicts the people of the future matter-of-factly taking diversity and equality as a given, portraying Earthlings, Martians and Venusians working side by side, both men and women exhibiting intelligence and bravery, and all of them accepting such strange characters as Grag, The Brain and Otho as comrades.  The masses of the people of the comet are good and quick to aid the strangers from outside--it is only their aristocratic leaders who are evil, and they courageously oppose when given a chance (Hamilton perhaps exhibiting a very American attitude about hereditary rule.)

An entertaining, optimistic and wholesome space opera, perhaps an interesting contrast to the somewhat gritty, pessimistic and noirish Hamilton space opera we read a little while ago, "The Starcombers."

**********

The last page of my 1969 paperback is an ad, but not for SF books.  Rather, it promotes the history of the Plantagenets by Canadian-born writer Thomas B. Costain.  It looks like people still read these--the first volume, The Conquering Family, published in 1949, has 25 reviews on Amazon.  I like to think that there are thriving classic SF and pulp fiction communities online, but The Comet Kings only has two Amazon reviews and the third volume of The Collected Captain Future put out by Stephen Haffner (which contains The Comet Kings and three other Captain Future novels) has only 11 reviews--I guess this Costain guy is a big wheel!

1956 Adventures from Edmond Hamilton, Harlan Ellison, and Randall Garrett & Robert Silverberg

My last eleven blog posts have been about anthologized science fiction short stories, and I have had my fill of joke stories and stories denouncing American mass culture for a while.  Remember when you were a kid and you saw the 1977 Star Wars movie for the first time, and it was just two hours of guys shooting monsters and space Nazis, like a child's amalgam of King Kong, the raid on St. Nazaire and The Battle of Britain, a confection composed of a maximum proportion of violence, a helping of horror and a minimum of jokes and preachiness?  Remember how awesome that was?  Where might we look if we wanted to recreate that experience?

Well, I own a copy of the first issue of Science Fiction Adventures, a magazine which endured from late 1956 to 1958 and produced twelve issues, and that seems like a decent place to start.  The cover depicts a uniformed alien shooting down a woman, and is emblazoned with the words "3 Complete New Action Novels."  The first "action novel" is by Edmond Hamilton, husband of Leigh Brackett and an MPorcius fave about whose work I have written many times.  The other two action novels are the work of Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg, presented under pseudonyms.  When we open to the contents page we see that a "Bonus Short Story" by Harlan Ellison has also been included.  Today I am reading this baby cover to cover--you can read it yourself for free at the internet archive.

"The Starcombers" by Edmond Hamilton

It made him wonder why they fought to live at all.  It made him wonder why anybody did.

A flotilla of four starships are searching the planets of a burned-out black star for salvage.  They discover the ancient foundations of a long-decayed city, and begin to dismantle them so they can bring the alien metal and plastic back to human space to sell.  But things on this planet ain't quite that simple!

The surface of this planet may be airless and dead, but deep down in a seventy-mile-wide cleft eerily lit by volcanic activity, some atmosphere lingers, and so do some native inhabitants: short humanoids, the last members of a dying race, and the giant monsters against which they must struggle!  The natives have fine vacuum suits, and powerful energy hand guns and energy artillery, but are very short on food, and the humans hope to trade with the natives, food supplies for technology.  But when one of the four human vessels goes down in the cleft to make the trade, during an attack by the ravenous dinosaur-sized monsters, the natives double cross the humans, killing some and capturing others.  Only one of the men remains free, Sam Fletcher, and he has to decide if he will try to flee to the surface or try to rescue his fellows from the ancient half-ruined fortified city in which they are being held.

Hamilton generates a grim and tense atmosphere in this story.  First of all, Hamilton presents the whole idea of searching the galaxy for ruins to salvage as sordid, like jackals and vultures picking the bones of superior creatures, and even the practice of trade as little more than swindlers trying to take advantage of each other.  While a guy in a Poul Anderson story might look out into space and think of all the opportunities for interstellar trade and how interstellar relations can make people's lives better, Sam looks at the stars and wonders "why men had ever bothered to struggle their way out to the stars...this was all the struggle came to in the end, sordid money-making...."

Adding to this story's air of cynicism and pessimism is that fact that all the characters are pretty sketchy--it's like reading about a criminal gang!  The leader of the four-ship squadron is greedy corner-cutting Harry Axe, who is accompanied by his second wife, Lucy, an ill-tempered wench who flirts with all the men in the company and bitterly insults any who resist her charms.  The aforementioned Sam Fletcher, a drunk who pilots the company's scout ship, is one of those who rejects Lucy's advances; Fletcher is also under Harry's thumb because he (Sam) lacks a license to work as a spaceman and would be an unemployed wretch were it not for Harry and his rule-bending ways.

A woman scorned, Lucy has been spreading the rumor that Sam has a thing for her, has been trying to steal her from Harry.  So, when Axe has been captured by the natives, Sam can't just jump in his ship and fly back to the surface where Lucy and the rest of the flotilla wait--people will assume Sam has murdered Harry and probably prosecute some lynch mob justice on Sam!  Instead he has to venture into the ruined city in search of his fellows.  While he is sneaking around among the ruins some natives from a rival city state, having learned that the locals have found a new source of precious food, launch an attack and a ray cannon artillery duel erupts. 

The confusion of the battle allows Sam to liberate one of his captured comrades, from whom he learns that Harry Axe, that greedy jerk, is now in league with the desperately ruthless aliens!  Axe heads for the landed ship with six of the little aliens, but Sam and his comrade beat them there and ambush them, wiping out the six natives in a barrage of energy gun fire and taking their traitorous leader into custody.  The story ends with a not very convincing change of attitude on the part of Sam--the natives of this nameless planet of a dead star remained on their dying world only to face inevitable decline and extinction, presenting an object lesson that proves that the human race's course of exploring the universe, no matter how risky or sordid it is, is the wiser course.

This is an entertaining, exciting adventure story, even if I can't endorse its skepticism of exploration and trade.  It includes ray guns, space suits, space ships, hostile aliens, monsters, disastrous sexual relationships, existential despair, so many of my favorite things.  There isn't a hell of a lot of science, and it is essentially a lost race story, so maybe "The Starcombers" will appeal most to fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Howard; I am myself a fan of ERB and Howard, and I am giving this one a big thumbs up.

"The Starcombers" would reappear in 1958 in the British edition of Science Fiction Adventures with a different illustration of a redheaded woman dressed in white getting shot (or having a seizure or something.)  In the 1960s the story was included in multiple editions of a paperback anthology entitled Great Science Fiction Adventures.

Editor's Space by Larry T. Shaw

Page 50 of the magazine is devoted to a message from the editor of Science Fiction Adventures, Larry T. Shaw.  Shaw complains that SF isn't as fun as it used to be, that too many stories are "long-winded and one-sided arguments about psychology, sociology and culture" and tells us that Science Fiction Adventures is here to feed our need for entertaining SF.  This sounds like a complaint about the New Wave but it came seven years before Michael Moorcock took over New Worlds! 

"Secret of the Green Invaders" by Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg (as by Robert Randall)

In his intro to this story, Shaw just comes right out and says the authors are Silverberg and Garrett.  I don't think I've ever read anything by Garrett before, though I recognize the name.

As I read "Secret of the Green Invaders" I wondered if I was supposed to be reminded of Palestine, which has been ruled by a succession of foreign empires--the Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans, and the British among many others--over many centuries.  As the story begins it is the year 3035 and Earth has been ruled by the furry green Khoomish for seven years.  The leader of the small human resistance movement, Orvid Kemron, has been captured and is dragged before the Khoomish officer in charge of Earth.  Then we get a flashback in which we learn that in the 21st century there was a nuclear war which left Earth in shambles and an easy conquest by the reptilian Sslesor.  The Sslesor were benevolent rulers who managed our affairs for a thousand or so years.  But some men were more interested in freedom and independence than bland good government!  In 3027 these rebels, led by Joslyn Carter, planted a nuclear bomb in the Sslesor headquarters, but just before they detonated it the Sslesor announced they were leaving the Earth!

The Sslesor had been defeated in a war by the Vrenk, and as part of the peace treaty they were surrendering Earth to the Vrenk.  When representatives of the Vrenk arrived they announced a hands-off policy and immediately departed, leaving the people of the Earth to their own devices.  Carter tried to set up an Earth government, but nobody respected his authority and the world collapsed into hundreds of tiny antagonistic fiefdoms.

The climax of this story is when it is revealed to Orvid Kemron that the Khoomish are not aliens at all but Carter and his comrades in disguise.  Carter realized that a thousand years of alien rule had left humans conditioned to regard rule by aliens as natural.  When the "Khoomish" appeared, over 99% of humans welcomed them and started behaving again.  As the story ends we know that Carter and Kemron will be collaborating on a thirty-year plan of conditioning the human race to accept human rule by playacting out a fake tyranny and a fake rebellion that will inspire a human desire for independence and confer legitimacy on Kemron.

"The Secret of the Green Invaders" is solidly within the SF tradition of a guy using his noggin instead of his brawn or weapons to resolve the plot, and the SF tradition of smart committed elites manipulating the ignorant masses.  The idea of getting humanity to unite by tricking them into thinking an alien invasion is underway is another recurring idea in SF.

This story is also kind of boring.  In contrast to Hamilton's compelling "The Starcombers," there is no human feeling here, no excitement, no vivid images; "The Secret of the Green Invaders" is dry and feels gimmicky.  Hamilton, like a craftsman, worked assiduously to create a setting and a cast of characters and a plot that generated an atmosphere, a mood, while Silverberg and Garrett just came up with a basic idea and then rudely hammered together a utilitarian skeletal framework to support it.  By no stretch can you call this an "adventure" or "action novel."  Thumbs down.   

"Secret of the Green Invaders" was reprinted in the U.K. edition of Science Fiction Adventures but seems to have been neglected since.

"Battle for the Thousand Suns" by Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg (as by Calvin Knox and David Gordon)

After the plodding "The Secret of the Green Invaders" I embark on this story with low expectations.  Even though Shaw was upfront about the true authors of "Secret of the Green Invaders," in his little intro here he pretends that Calvin Knox and David Gordon are real people, apologizing to Gordon because his name was accidentally left off the cover.

Fifteen years ago Dane Regan fled the isolated Empire of the Hundred Kings, a star cluster of ten thousand stars and a thousand habitable planets, in fear for his life from King Gwyll of Jillane, most powerful of the hundred kings and the murderer of Regan's family.  For most of those fifteen years Regan has been training to become an expert fighting man in the Milky Way galaxy so he can get his revenge, and the time for revenge approaches as Regan returns to Jillane!

The societies of the Hundred Kings are feudal in nature, with a nobility, a merchant class and then the peasants.  This feudal structure is the result of a rare mutation.  A small number of people out in this cluster are born with psychic powers that can kill or stun non-psykers in an instant.  Those psykers who can kill are members of the royalty, those who can only stun, the lower members of the aristocracy.  Our hero Regan is the rightful King of Jillane and at the start of the story it is hinted that he has extra special psychic powers.

Travelling incognito as a passenger on a merchant ship from the Milky Way, Regan's plan is to join the Jillane military and work his way up the ranks until he is close enough to the reclusive hunchback King Gwyll to work his vengeance.  The first thing Regan does on Jillane is mug a merchant and steal his clothes so he won't be treated like a peasant.  (In general, writers look down on business people and, besides often portraying business as some kind of sin, they also enjoy depicting business people being abused.)  The second thing is buy a sword.  The third thing is go to the recruiting center and get in a brawl with non-commissioned officers and then a sword duel with a commissioned officer in order to prove how good a fighter he is.  He is commissioned a lieutenant.

Over the course of a year Regan becomes a hero by leading the Jillane space fleet to victory in a space naval battle (the various Kings are always fighting each other, something Regan's father hoped to be able to stop) and engages in another duel, killing his man.  The rise of Regan, who is ostensibly an outsider from the Milky Way, makes many native Jillanians jealous, and Regan is warned he will eventually be assassinated.  So he uses his psychic powers (hypnosis and illusion) to fake his own death and then leaves the planet.

Two years later the Emperor of the Hundred Kings dies; this is an elective lifetime office for which the hundred kings are the electors, and Gwyll is expected to win the election to the Imperial throne.  A week before the election Regan returns to Jillane, disguised as a prince from a bogus empire he claims is on the other side of the Milky Way.  He spends time with Gwyll's daughter, winning her affection.  Gwyll is duly elected, and at the coronation Regan exposes the fact that Gwyll isn't really a royal-class psyker--his hunchback is not a real malady, but a cover for a machine he wears behind his shoulders that artificially strengthens his psychic ability so he appears to be of the royal class.  Regan kills Gwyll and is immediately crowned king of Jillane.  We are lead to assume that the kings who just elected Gwyll emperor a few days ago will soon be electing the guy who just killed Gwyll to replace Gwyll.

"Battle for the Thousand Suns" is actually an adventure story and an "action novel" full of violence and death.  Unfortunately it is also a clunky piece of work, with no interesting characters (Gwyll gets almost zero screen time) and a somewhat frustrating plot--we watch Regan pursue his Plan A for many pages until he just abandons it to activate Plan B, which works after a few pages.  (The authors try to pass off the structure of their plot as a sort of demonstration that bold plans can be preferable to methodical plans.)  Many scenes just seem to be thrown in there to fill up pages, like the seduction of Gwyll's daughter.  Also, Regan kind of acts like a jerk--kicking an innocent waiter is one thing that comes to mind.

"Battle for the Thousand Suns" feels like something thrown together at the last minute to round out the magazine, unlike Hamilton's contribution, which feels like something that was created with care.  I have to give this thing a marginal thumbs down; it feels like filler.  The curious thing about it is that it faintly reminds me in its most surface elements of Jack Vance's Demon Princes novels, and, somewhat more strongly, of Silverberg's lucrative but mind-numbingly lame Lord Valentine's Castle, in which a boring dude goes on a boring journey of several hundred pages in order to retake his throne.

I believe this is the only appearance of "Battle for the Thousand Suns."

I recognize the Ray Harryhausen space suit
from Earth vs the Flying Saucers,
Robbie from Forbidden Planet, and the
female robot from Metropolis, but what is the
second figure from the left?  [UPDATE: 
April 20, 2019: In the comments below
Dennis identifies the mystery robot!]

"Hadj" by Harlan Ellison

"Hadj" has appeared in the Ellison collection sometimes titled Ellison Wonderland and sometimes titled Earthman, Go Home!, and in collections of short-shorts.  It is only four pages here.

It is the future Earth of world government!  Super powerful aliens--the "Masters of the Universe"--send a message to Earth to request that a single representative be sent to their homeworld; the message includes instructions on how to build the hyperspace ship necessary.  Earth computers choose an old retired businessman--the businessman is of course some kind of evil schemer who will be looking for ways that Earth can outwit the current masters and make the human race the new Masters of the Universe.  A Muslim pilots the ship that takes the businessman to the Masters' homeworld; when the Muslim compares the trip to the pilgrimage to Mecca the businessman tells him that this not a pilgrimage, that Earthmen are just as good, if not better, than these aliens.

The Earthers' ship enters the atmosphere of the alien planet, and they request directions from the local air traffic control.  The last lines of the story are the directions: "Please go around to the service entrance."  This is a disposable joke story that doesn't even make sense--the aliens ask for a representative, then, when he comes, treat him like a delivery boy, even though they didn't ask him to deliver anything?  Did they just ask us for a representative and give us the secret of hyperdrive so they could insult us?  Did Ellison write this one in fifteen minutes and then neglect to revise it?

**********

After Ellison's forgettable gag story there is a full page ad for a subscription to Science Fiction Adventures that tells you $3.50 for 12 issues is a bargain because the 36 novels you will get are sure to be published as expensive hardcovers--10 cents for such a novel will be a steal.  This is a little amusing and a little sad because, as we have seen, of today's three novels, two never saw book publication and the lead story has only ever appeared in paperback.

The final two pages of the magazine are a sort of bulletin board meant to facilitate interaction between SF fans.  The first item is about Stan and Ellen Crouch, who want to meet people interested in their innovative system of spelling, "Representative Spelling."  The second item promotes the Science & Fiction Critics Club, of Boston, and includes an aside about propeller beanies.  The third item promotes Stellar, a fanzine put out by Larry Stark and our friend Ted White, that included fiction about SF fans.

**********

Hamilton's "The Starcombers" is alone worth the price I paid for this magazine (I think I got it in a lot of 18 magazines for which I paid $45.00), the rest of the stories are just mediocre filler at best.

We'll be hunting for more adventures in the pages of SF publications from the mid-20th century in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.
     

A Brand New World by Ray Cummings

When father first arrived, they had respected him and listened to his advice.  But gradually the power of Graff's oratory, his sweeping personality, his incessant propaganda, had its effect.  As this evil genius rose in power, father and his influence waned.

Let's continue our examination of the work of Ray Cummings, recently heralded by Bill Christensen as a "giant of Golden Age scientificiation."  Today's subject: A Brand New World, a novel first serialized in the fall of 1928 in Argosy.  I own two paperback editions of A Brand New World, an Ace copy printed in 1976 as part of Ace's "Science Fiction from the Great Years" line, which I bought some time ago, and an Ace 1964 printing which I received from internet SF maven Joachim Boaz.  The cover on F-313 is embarrassingly amateurish--the composition makes no sense, the people's faces and bodies are lifeless and rudimentary, and the colors are uninspired.  Even the beautiful skyline of Manhattan, the center of the universe and the tomb of my decayed dreams, looks bad on this cover!  Did Donald Wollheim's barber do this?  Did Ace accidentally print Jack Gaughan's initial color sketch?  I don't get it!

The 1976 printing has a solid Vincent DiFate cover featuring an attractive woman with insect wings and rays coming out of her palms who seems to be standing on a pile of my old gaming computers.  This cover is not bad, but I have to say that the fact that neither of these covers includes a gun or a sword has my spider senses tingling.  If A Brand New World turns out to be a mind-numbing utopia I am going to be irritated.  I can take some comfort from the fact that A Brand New World seems to have been popular with editors and readers--not only did Ace publish it twice in paperback, but in 1942 it appeared a second time in magazine form, in Famous Fantastic Mysteries.  How bad can it be if they kept printing it?

Zetta doesn't actually have wings, nor does
she shoot rays from her many-jointed
fingers

Well, let's hit the text and see what this thing is all about.  I have chosen to read the 1976 edition, because the print is bigger (it's 205 pages versus the '64 edition's 158) and my eyes are old.  (This was perhaps a mistake, as the 1976 edition, it turns out, is full of typos.)

Our narrator for A Brand New World is Peter Vanderstufyt, a journalist in the future world of 1966.  (The narrator of the two Tama books we just read was also a journalist--the kind of journalist who engages in zero gravity hand-to-hand combat with aliens!)  He's had to leave New York City for the Middle West (I know your feels, Petey!) to cover a murder trial in Indiana.  While Petey's out there, his father, a famous astronomer, is observing the new planet which is hurtling towards our solar system.  (Remember how in all those Edmond Hamilton stories a star hurtling into our solar system presaged a tremendous space war?)  This new planet, dubbed Xenephrene, takes up an orbit between the Earth and Venus.  Its presence there is going to make a mess of the Earth's climate and weather--this big blue marble's axis shifts so that soon the northern and southern hemispheres will take turns enduring scorching days six months long followed by frigid six-month nights!

The world's governments and the international clerisy of eggheads keep the news of this catastrophe a secret from the masses, but lift their censorship the day Petey gets back to the East Coast (this way Petey can be the broadcaster who breaks the story!)  In one of those strange coincidences we just have to accept if our hobby is going to be reading fiction instead of something logical like gardening or hang gliding, the very same time the news of this world-altering cataclysm is being revealed, down in Puerto Rico, Petey's sister Hulda meets an emissary from Xenephrene, a young woman with white hair who has arrived in a silver sphere and whose name is "Zetta."

I think I played Vanilla Angband on
the one on the left, and Doom with my
brother on the one on the right

The authorities keep Zetta a secret--a leitmotif of this book is elites keeping the masses in the dark.  The US government sends Petey's Dad down to PR to study Zetta and try to communicate with her.  While Dad is spending time with the space girl, the world's governments and populations are making a beeline towards the equator--the American government is moved to Miami, the British and French governments to North Africa, etc.  London, Paris and New York are abandoned wastelands buried in snow.

Larger silver spheres land in New York and in Venezuela, where the multitudes of Latin America have been congregating.  These aliens are apparently hostile, and prove impervious to attack from Earth weapons (their defenses are quite like military equipment that appears in Cummings's Tama, Princess of Mercury--Cummings is a master recycler!)  Just as Petey's Dad is about to share with the government what he has learned from Zetta, the alien ships in New York and Venezuela fly away, and Dad, Zetta, and Hulda are carried off along with them when Zetta's little sphere is hijacked!

   
Four years pass without intercourse between Earth and its new neighbor, Xenephrene.  Petey misses his father and his sister, and he also misses Zetta, whom he fell in love with after meeting her for a few minutes right before her disappearance.  (Love is blind--Zetta's extra finger joints don't put him off!)  Then in 1970 a cylinder lands on Earth with a message from Dad!  (Both "Aerita of the Light Country" and Tama of the Light Country feature message cylinders landing on Earth, sent by Earthlings on Mercury.)  The message includes instructions on how to build a space ship so Petey and some minor characters can fly to Xenephrene.  This ship is powered by "Reet," "a force something like electricity...it was also the growing, life-giving essence of all vegetable and animal organisms."

The construction of the ship (done in secret, of course!) and its flight to Xenephrene, like 25 pages in the middle of the novel, is one of the better parts of the book, to my mind, at least.  Once on Xenephrene, Petey and we readers get a lecture on Xenephrene history and society from Dad.  The people of the mysterious wandering planet are ruled by a secretive guild of scientists (naturally, they recognize a comrade in Petey's Dad and so he is privy to their secrets.)  Thousands of years ago, the people of Xenephrene had a high tech civilization, but then the majority decided that the simple life was best, and they abandoned modernity to live in tree houses like god- damned Ewoks.  A small minority wanted to keep their high tech stuff, but a law was passed making it illegal to "preach modernity," and these rebels were exiled to another part of the planet, called Braun (the mainstream society is located in Garla) and over the centuries the two societies have developed separately.  Dad considers Garla to be a paradise, but this utopia of tree house living is threatened because the powers-that-be have been slacking in enforcing their speech codes!

Here we see Zetta, a minor character Hulda is dating,
and Hulda herself

You see, today, Braun, which Dad calls "despotic," is ruled by Graff, a brilliant scientist and orator who wants to conquer the Earth.  Braun and Garla conduct trade, and Graff has spent time in Garla, where he has managed to sway some Garlands into considering the reintroduction of technology and the conquest of Earth.  Graff has also fallen in love with the apparently irresistible Zetta; for her part, Zetta is willing to marry Graff (after all, Dad says Graff has "a magnificent physique") if the tyrant agrees to abandon his plans to conquer the Earth.

(I probably don't have to tell you that "graf" is the German equivalent of "count" or "earl" and that Braun is a common German name.  Is A Brand New World an early indictment of Nazism, or evidence of lingering resentment over German aggression in World War I?)

So, finally, after 140 pages, we have our war and love triangle plot set up, a plot very similar to those we saw in Cummings's Mercury books.  There is even a Braun woman, Brea, in love with Graff who wants to kill Zetta, the way Muta wanted to kill Rowena in Tama, Princess of Mercury and Zara wanted to kill Aerita in "Aerita of the Light Country."

There are some elements in A Brand New World that don't show up in the Mercury stories, like Reet.  More prominent than Reet is Cummings's notion of "the infrared world."  This (I think) is a parallel dimension inhabited by demons that may be the source of human evil.  Xenephrene is somehow connected to the infrared world so that the demons are always faintly evident as sinister red shapes that float around and murmuring, snickering voices.  Dad tells Petey that he'll get used to them!    Radiation from the small purple star that orbits Xenephrene like a moon* has kept the crimson demons in check for time immemorial, but when Xenephrene entered our solar system the demons became more pervasive and powerful, apparently strengthened by the radiation of our sun.  The Garland scientists have been dealing with this by manipulating two spheres kept in their secret lair, "the control globes," one red and one purple, keeping the infrared and ultraviolet forces in balance.

*I was amazed that Cummings waited until page 114 to mention this remarkable astronomical phenomenon.

Anyway, the day before Graff launches his invasion of Earth he and his Brauns steal the two spheres--with the red one Graff can drive everyone on Earth insane by unleashing the crimson demons, while with the purple one he keeps his own people safe.  Of course, if the control globes are removed from Xenephrene everybody on that planet will go insane.  The Brauns also seize our narrator Petey and his lady love Zetta, and these two are aboard Graff's flagship when the Braun fleet flies to Earth.

From Graff's beachhead in Brazil Petey witnesses the war on Earth.  (The war is one of the better parts of the book; it is perhaps noteworthy that Cummings here refrains from the sort of descriptions of horrific gore with which he spiced up the Mercury stories.)  Graff is on the verge of driving everyone on Earth outside his HQ insane when Brea helps Zetta and Petey escape--with Zetta gone she figures Graff will pay her more attention.  But Z & P don't just book it on out of there; they break the red control globe and steal the purple one--it is easy for Petey to kill all the guards because Brea gave him a suit of ray-proof armor and Xenephrene people are much weaker than Earthers (just like the Tama books' Mercurians are much weaker than Earthers.)

Dad and some minor characters arrive from Xenephrene with Xenephere weapons and equipment, so now Graff, lacking his control globes, is no match for Earth's much more numerous military forces.  The Xenephrene invaders are wiped out (including that dope Brea!), the purple control globe is returned to Xenephrene so the Garlands won't go infrared insane, and then Xenephrene unexpectedly breaks out of its new orbit and heads out of our system.  Zetta stays on Earth to bear Pete's half Earthling, half Xenephrene children; one wonders how many joints their digits will have and of they will be so physically weak that all the Earth kids will casually bully them. 

A theme of my blog post here has been that Cummings would reuse plot elements and ideas that appeared in A Brand New World in his later Mercury stories.  Those 1930, 1931 and 1941 Mercury stories were shorter, more focused on sex and violence, and more fun than 1928's A Brand New World, which is a little more thoughtful and tries to put across some arguments about politics and societal evolution, arguments that we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are not prepared to endorse.

A Brand New World exhibits the belief that is de rigeur in SF that ordinary people are mindless dolts and that their "betters," here primarily scientists but also journalists and to some extent even(!) politicians, have an obligation to lead the masses by the nose.  Cummings argues that a big part of the role of the elite is to control the flow of information, and I have pointed out numerous examples in the text of Earth and Garland elites withholding information from the people, allegedly for their own good.  But Cummings doesn't stop there--he suggests that the common people's judgement is so suspect that the rulers of society should keep from the hoi polloi's ears dangerous beliefs by silencing dissenters and making it illegal to express certain ideas.  Remember how at the start of the novel Petey was covering a murder in the Middle West?  A woman had massacred her husband and children, and, instead of being condemned by the public, this murderess hosts a radio talk show and becomes a celebrity:

She was a handsome woman, and a good talker.  She was taking full advantage of the new law regarding free speech, and every night from the jail she was broadcasting little talks to the public.

This murderess, of course, is a parallel to Graff, another good-looking smooth talker who should have been silenced by the establishment.  According to Cummings, some people shouldn't be permitted a platform to speak, and the voicing of some ideas must be legally forbidden; this is an attitude I personally find despicable.

We shouldn't be surprised, I suppose, that Cummings, a professional writer who also worked with Thomas Edison, should feel that scientists and writers should run the world and have a monopoly on information and power, but it is still hard to take.  More mature and interesting is the related attitude displayed by Cummings in the horror story "Corpses from Canvas," which foregrounds the reality that publishers and creative people are not selfless saints who should be given power and privileges but rather corruptible individuals out to make a buck like everybody else, and even hints that Cummings felt a little guilty about some of his more exploitative work.  (I say "related" because both attitudes show contempt for the credulous masses, portraying them as sheep who lack agency and don't know what is good for them.)

The episode of the Indiana murderess also lays the groundwork for Cummings's theme of societal change.  The common people fail to condemn the murderess, and the government fails to convict her--I think Cummings is using this crime story to signal to us that Earth society is decadent.  In the same vein, Petey later moans that Earth is not ready to face the threat posed by Graff because of "the apathy of the people."  But over the course of the book Earth society, guided by the eggheads and politicians, improves (at least in Petey's opinion) in response to adversity.  On page 80 our narrator talks about the worldwide response to the changes in climate:

The important word here, I believe, is "rational," a word which implies planning from above by scientists--the eggheads will be the fathers of the "one big family" that is the world, telling us children what to do.  Cummings (and/or Petey) reiterate this on the last page of the novel:

The Great Change brought all the nations, all the people of every race into a keen realization of values, an enforced community of interest.  Like brothers in a family sorely pressed, they fought united.... 

The final sentence of A Brand New World is "This Earth has become a good place on which to live."

I don't know about you, but I don't want to be treated as a child, forced into a community and told what my interests are.  And I am certainly not crazy about the government, especially a government of unelected "experts," deciding who gets to speak and what things we are allowed to say.

Alright, so am I giving A Brand New World the thumbs up or the thumbs down?  I suppose it is interesting that a guy would write a science fiction novel that argues against freedom of speech, but it is also distasteful.  Some of the space travel and war content here is good, but that stuff makes up but a small proportion of the text.  Cummings's innovative and weird science ideas, like the Reet life force (which of course reminds a 2018 reader of Star Wars) and the infrared dimension of demons (which reminded me a little of Lovecraft stories like "From Beyond" and "the warp" in Warhammer 40,000) are convoluted and poorly integrated into the rest of the material--'The Force" in Star Wars and the warp in WH40K are foundational to what goes on in those universes, while Reet and the infrared dimension feel tacked on to this novel.

A Brand New World is an important piece of the "Who is Ray Cummings and what is he all about?" puzzle, so I'm glad I read it--I am curious about the half-forgotten heroes of SF's early history and the controversial fringe members of the SF community (I think MPorcius Fiction Log faves A. E. van Vogt, Edmond Hamilton, and Barry Malzberg all fit into one or both of these somewhat arbitrary categories, and that Cummings does as well), but I can't quite recommend this novel on its own merits.         

Four tales of Mars by Leigh Brackett

Let's explore yet another of my Fifty Cent Second Story Books finds, my copy of Ace's 1970s edition of The Coming of the Terrans by Leigh Brackett.  There is some mystery over exactly when this edition was published and who produced its cover illustration, but we know that the first edition of The Coming of the Terrans was published in 1967 and had a cover by Gray Morrow.  The collection includes five stories, and we've already read one, "The Last Days of Shandakor," as it also appears in The Best of Leigh Brackett, which we read in its entirety in the summer of last year.  Today we'll tackle the remaining four stories it contains by the celebrated writer of SF adventures, detective stories, and screenplays.

"The Beast-Jewel of Mars" (1948)

"The Beast-Jewel of Mars" was the cover story of the Winter 1948 edition of Planet Stories, where it is advertised as a story of "lost worlds" where beautiful women try to bewitch tall men (how different is that, really, from our own world?)  I like the cover illustration--the principal figures wear suitably and convincingly desperate expressions and the female lead sports a charming little blue number--and the inside pages boast not only the Brackett tale but contributions from two other beloved writers on the fantastical end of the SF spectrum, Ray Bradbury and Frank Belknap Long. 

Captain Burk Winters is a broken man!  He chain smokes Venusian cigarettes!  His hands shake so severely he drops coins all over the place when he pays a cabbie.  What happened to this dude, who was once one of our best space pilots?  He lost his girl to alien drug pushers, that's what!

Jill Leland was a wealthy member of the thrill-seeking classes who spend their leisure time in the solar system's Trade Cities, where the decadent rich of Earth gamble and indulge in elaborate vices!  Such pastimes are sought to relieve the pressure of life in the go go future--here are the kinds of people one sees in the Trade Cities:

Their faces were pallid and effeminate, scored with the marks of life lived under the driving tension of a super-modern age.

Leland's particular vice was the Martian "Shanga."  The Martians are the heirs of the wreckage of an heroic high-tech civilization that collapsed many centuries ago due to nuclear war; even though they can't reproduce much of that old time technology, the Martians can still operate some of the artifacts, and the Shanga crystals are among such artifacts.  In the Shanga parlors in the Trade Cities, Earth people can expose themselves to the Shanga rays, and temporarily feel physically and mentally younger, and live carefree for a few hours.

Brackett explicitly compares the treatment to drug use, and depicts exposure to the rays as a direct stimulant to the human brain's pleasure centers and as quite addictive.  Hard core addicts like Leland soon hear rumors that the Shanga treatment in the Trade Cities is mere kid's stuff compared to the real deal, the Shanga rays available in the desert in the crumbling half-deserted cities of Mars's heyday.  Winters tried to get the Shanga monkey off Jill's back, but to no avail; she disappeared in the Martian desert without a trace, presumed dead!

We learn all this stuff I just told you over the course of the 60-page story, which is structured sort of like a hard-boiled mystery.  The plot of "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" follows Winters as he goes to the Trade City on Mars, Kahora, and then out into the desert in search of his junkie girlfriend.  Winters is a manly man who isn't really interested in Shanga or any of the twisted allures of the Trade Cities, but to pursue his lost love he patronizes their evil trade, posing as a hopeless Shanga addict.  The Martian pushers take him out to the desert, to a lost city on the shore of a dry ocean basin, where they hold him captive and Winters learns the terrible truth.

The Shanga rays, at full power, after repeated doses, don't just roll your biological clock back to childhood, but back down the evolutionary ladder!  One strong dose of the rays turns Winters into a brutish cave man!  Winters recovers from this treatment, but he sees other Earthlings who have received many doses and been turned back to Neanderthals, to "missing links," even to god-damned reptiles and amphibians!  Winters worries that, if he doesn't escape, he'll eventually get turned into an amoeba!

The Martians, who see themselves as a superior race of great wisdom who were building skyscrapers when humans were still living in caves, resent human control of their ancient red planet.  The tribe of Martians in this story, those who run the Shanga parlors, turn Earthers into these evolutionary throwbacks in order to put them into an old amphitheater to torment them and laugh at them, a way of getting a little of their own back and assuaging their humiliation at the hands of us humies.

Our French friends included "Beast-Jewel of
Mars" in this 1975 anthology of stories from
Planet Stories.

Winters finds Jill Leland reduced to the condition of a cave woman--she can't even talk any more!  At night he escapes captivity and sneaks into the room of the leader of this tribe of vengeful Martians, a beautiful woman named Fand who has catlike grace and walks around with her high breasts bare.  (Brackett generally writes stories in which aliens are so biologically similar to Earth people that they are sexually compatible.)  Winters treats Fand the way a New York state prosecutor might treat one of his girlfriends, knocking her unconscious while she sleeps by bashing her in the head and then tying her up and carrying her back to the amphitheater.  When the Martians turn on the Shanga rays as they do every day, Fand gets exposed just like the Earth-creatures, and, because the Martians are an old race with tired genes, she gets devolved way way back, becoming into a disgusting vermiculate monster.  When her tribe realizes what has happened to Fand, chaos ensues, with the Martians fighting hand-to-hand with the Earth creatures in the arena, and Winters escapes with his mute and illiterate girlfriend to alert the human authorities about the menace of the Shanga parlors.       

(The crazy evolution stuff in "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" reminded me of the numerous stories by Brackett's husband, Edmond Hamilton, that feature wild speculations about evolution, and of course the whole plot and theme of the story reminds you of Chinese opium dens and Chinese resentment of Western imperialism.)

When we read two Poul Anderson novels recently we saw they were full of signs of his libertarian attitude--celebrations of private trade, the individual, and rational reason, and denunciations of big government and mysticism.  In "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" we see signs of an old-fashioned conservatism on the part of Brackett.  Modern life, we are told, is too fast and too complicated and drives people batty, and we see that modern wealth and leisure just leave hands idle to do the devil's work.  Interstellar trade hasn't made the life of Terran or Martian better, but corrupted and demeaned them both, giving rise to bitter hatreds as each race abuses or exploits the other at every opportunity.   Brackett also evinces a traditional skepticism of the city and city life:

Winters hated the Trade Cities.  He was used to the elemental honesty of space.  Here the speech, the dress, even the air one breathed, were artificial.

As you might guess, the Trade City on Earth is New York, a famous target for criticism from country folk and conservatives (and not always without reason.)

Not Brackett's best work, but entertaining and interesting.

Scanned from my copy, a brief introductory essay by Brackett and a list of "othe" Ace books
by her, including Alpha Centauri or Die! and Sword of Rhiannon, which I own and have read,
  and Big Jump, another publisher's edition of which I own and have read.

"Mars Minus Bisha" (1954)

Another cover for Brackett, and another Planet Stories in which Brackett shares an issue with Ray Bradbury; this time Bradbury is represented by one of the all-time most famous dinosaur stories and stories about time travel, "A Sound of Thunder."  In "Mars Minus Bisha" Brackett again invites comparisons between the people of Mars and East Asians, this time very directly:

She sat up, a dark and shaggy-haired young person, with eyes the color of topaz, and the customary look of premature age and wisdom that the children of Mars share with the children of the Earthly East.

This is the kind of thing you'd probably think twice about committing to paper today.

Fraser is a scientist living alone in a Quonset hut in the Martian desert, studying Martian diseases.  A woman from a tribe of reptile-riding nomads brings her daughter to him and flees--the shamans of her tribe had declared the seven-year old girl, Bisha, to be cursed, scapegoating her for a plague, and sentenced her to death.  Fraser examines her and finds Bisha to be perfectly healthy, and she moves in with him; soon the little girl is the light of his life, and he plans on bringing her home with him to Earth when his project is complete in a few months.

But it is not to be--this story is a tragedy!  From an ancient race of Martians with tremendous psychic powers Bisha has inherited a recessive genetic trait, an ability to drain the life force of those around her over which she has no control!  If they continue to live alone together, Bisha's autonomic vampiric powers will eventually kill Fraser, but if Fraser lets any Martians see her they will recognize her condition and destroy her.  Fraser's life force is fading--can he get to a human settlement three hundred miles away before he expires and before any natives spot Bisha?  And if not, who will live and who will die?

An effective story, more economical (just 30 pages) and better structured than "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" and with more human feeling, including a sad ending like something out of Somerset Maugham which took me by surprise.

"Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon" (1964)

Brackett's name sits at the top of the list on the cover of the 15th Anniversary "All Star" issue of F&SF, right above her husband's.  (We read Hamilton's contribution to this issue, "The Pro," back in June of last year.)  Preceding "Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon" is a page long bio of Brackett and a description of this story's genesis--it seems that Anthony Boucher, writing about Brackett in F&SF in 1955, made up the slightly goofy name od this story as a sort of parody of the titles of the type of planetary romances she excelled at writing, but some readers didn't realize it was a joke and began asking Brackett where they could find the story.  So, when the opportunity presented itself almost ten years later, Brackett wrote a story to match the title, making real this once fabulous component of her oeuvre.

Harvey Selden (!) has always wanted to go to Mars.  As he looks at the red planet from the observation dome of the starship as it comes in for a landing, Third Officer Bentham, an alcoholic whose career has been stunted by his love for the bottle, invites Selden to have dinner with him on the surface with some Martian friends of his.

Selden is staying at the Kahora Hilton.  Kahora has changed since the days when Jill Leland and Burk Winters frequented the Shanga parlor there; now that "the bad old days of laissez-faire," as Selden calls them, are over, Kahora and the other Trade Cities are under strict government control and all those sinful amusements are just a memory.  Kahora now has seven domes--Bentham takes Selden to the original dome, now a residential district, to meet his friends, including a Martian called Firsa Mak, Firsa Mak's sister and her human husband Altman, and a gorgeous Martian girl who walks around topless and serves the drinks, Lella.

Though this is his first trip to Mars, Selden is an academic expert on Martian culture and history; he came to Mars to take up a position at the Bureau of Interworld Cultural Relations.  He is also one of those liberals who identifies more with the colonized Martians than with his own people, the colonizers, and denigrates the actions of the first human explorers of the red planet, calling them "piratical exploiters."   

...Firsa Mak said with honest curiosity, "Why is it that all you young Earthmen are so ready to cry down the things your own people have done?"

Selden dismisses as nonsense the stories told by those first Earthmen to visit Mars about Martian cults who worshiped evil gods and practiced human sacrifice, but he's in for a surprise, because Bentham the drunk has just delivered him into the hands of people who know how very true those stories are!  Lella has served him a drugged drink and when he wakes up he's bound and gagged in the cold wilderness beyond the domed cities.  Brackett presents starkly the contrast between bookish know-it-all Selden, who in the wilderness proves weak and ineffectual, and adventurous manly men Firsa Mak and Altman, who are perfectly comfortable in harsh conditions and dangerous situations.

This German collection of
Brackett stories includes
"Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon"

Firsa Mak and Altman disguise Selden and drag him to a ritual where cultists pay obeisance to a slumbering Godzilla-sized monster.  The experience is so horrifying that Selden faints.  When he wakes up, Firsa Mak and Altman try to convince Selden to alert the Terran authorities about this cult which sacrifices people twice a year and its dangerous monster, which, they fear, if roused could destroy an entire city.  The government does not believe scruffy adventurers like them, but maybe they will believe a trained academic and member of the establishment like Selden?   

Selden, however, begins to doubt his own senses--Lella drugged him, after all--and worries that spreading rumors about Martian cults and Brobdingnagian monsters will wreck his career.  Instead of reporting the menace to the authorities he abandons his new job with the Bureau and flees to Earth where he undergoes psychotherapy and is relieved to be told he hallucinated the ritual and the monster, the result of drugs working on his unresolved feelings about his mother and his repressed homosexuality.  (We see evidence of Bracket's adherence to traditional ideas about gender roles and sexual mores here as well as in the quote I extracted from "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" above and in her novel Alpha-Centauri or Die!)

"Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon" is well-written and I liked it, but at the same time I have to admit I thought the end was a little disappointing, anti-climactic.  A traditional adventure or horror story with a plot like this would end with the protagonist killing the monster and/or the priestess or making a narrow escape.  Instead, this story is a satire of inept intellectual types who look down on the brave men who defend and expand society, and so the main character is a kind of spectator lead around by the nose and kept from danger by the manly adventurer characters.  He is never in real danger and because he is incompetent outside a classroom he never makes any real decisions of consequence, just takes the path of least resistance.  I'm all for goofing on effete liberals and psychoanalytic quacks, but to achieve its full potential I think a story that follows the kind of adventure/horror template that this one follows needs real tension and a real climax--as "Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon" stands, it is unsatisfying.  (I was hoping all along that Selden himself was going to be sacrificed--this would accomplish the goal of ridiculing the willfully-blind academic types who dismiss the reports of men in the field while at the same time providing a satisfying horror story conclusion.  Of course, then Brackett couldn't work the psychoanalytic angle.)

Another problem I have with the story is the equivocal role of Lella.  We have every reason to believe that the masked woman who leads the ritual, the Purple Priestess, is Lella herself, but at the same time Lella seems to be allied with Firsa Mak and Altman, who are trying to get the government to do away with the cult.  A nagging mystery.

"The Road to Sinharat" (1963)

"The Road to Sinharat" was an Amazing cover story.  isfdb lists it as part of the Eric John Stark series, but Brackett's famous hero does not appear in the tale.  Maybe it is considered part of the Stark series because the city of Sinharat also appears in a Stark story "Queen of the Martian Catacombs," later expanded into the novel The Secret of Sinharat? 

Long ago Mars was a world of oceans and forests; today it is an arid desert.  The men of Earth think they have the technology to restore part of the red planet to its former verdant glory, but the Martians resist the renewal project; they have made peace with their old and tired planet, and don't want to see their canals messed with and their settlements moved.  In fact, the renewal effort is leading to unrest among the natives and even violence against Earthmen.

In 1932 Edmond Hamilton published the short story "Conquest of Two Worlds," a story about Earth imperialism and an Earthman who joined with the natives of Jupiter to oppose Earth oppression.  Brackett considered this one of her husband's best stories--at least she chose it for The Best of Edmond Hamilton, a volume she edited.  I bring this up because "The Road to Sinharat" also features a Terran, Dr. Matthew Carey, who goes against his superiors and risks his life to stand against Earth interference with aliens.

Carey is an archaeologist currently working with the organization planning the renewal project--because the natives oppose the project, so does Carey.  Carey has lived so long among Martians, exploring tombs and even participating in barbarian raids, that he can pass for a Martian desert dweller and capably wield Martian weapons (by which I mean things like axes and daggers--I guess automatic rifles and heat ray pistols aren't among the ancient Martian technologies which have survived.)  He ditches his job to help the natives, and the plot of "The Road to Sinharat" follows Carey and some Martians--the trader Derech, an old friend who accompanied him on his archaeological expeditions years ago, and Arrin, a sexy Martian girl--as they travel via canal barge and then on reptile-back to the forbidden city of Sinharat, to look for some ancient documents which may convince the Terran authorities to abandon their renewal scheme.  They face various obstacles, among them pursuit by a Terran police detective, Howard Wales, and his Martian cops, who is tasked with bringing in the renegade archaeologist on suspicion of fomenting native violence.

Eventually Carey and his friends and Wales and his cops end up trapped together inside Sinharat, under siege by some barbarians who are reluctant to enter the ancient city, which is taboo because it was once the HQ of a tribe of Martian scientists who achieved longevity by kidnapping young people and shifting their consciousnesses into the youth's bodies.  Just as an aircraft comes to rescue the besieged humans and their Martian comrades, Carey finds the records he needs.  They show that the body snatchers of Sinharat, ages ago, launched their own renewal effort, and the memory of its eventual failure lingers in the Martians' cultural consciousness, rendering all such efforts anathema.  These records convince the authorities to abandon their plans.

"The Road to Sinharat" was among the
stories from Amazing and Fantastic
included in this 1968 reprint magazine.

Like "The Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon," "The Road to Sinharat" contrasts academic experts who think they know it all with the men of action in the field who actually do know what's going on, and like "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" doles out some harsh conservative medicine--change is bad, progress is a scam, history is a tragedy, and you shouldn't interfere in other people's business, even if you have the best of intentions.  "The Road to Sinharat" is also reminiscent of Brackett's "Citadel of Lost Ships;" both feature government projects that relocate towns and tinker with water sources, allegedly for the greater good.  (Public policies that destroyed American communities to create reservoirs and dams, like those chronicled here, seem to have struck a chord with Brackett.)

While not bad, this story is another disappointment.  Brackett overstuffs "The Road to Sinharat" with lots of cool material, but because it is confined to a paltry 50 pages the story feels rushed and cramped, almost like a condensed version of a longer piece of work.  All Brackett's ideas and all the many relationships she sets up are dealt with in cursory fashion--she has no room to explore any of them with any depth, so they lack dramatic power.  Derech, Arrin, Wales, and Alan Woodthorpe, head of the renewal project, all have potentially fun and interesting relationships with Carey, in particular Wales and Woodthorpe, because all three of the Earthmen have a strong sense of duty and a determination to do the right thing for the people of Mars, but Carey's thinking is at odds with those of his fellow Earthers, and over the course of the story Carey wins them to see his side.  Unfortunately, Brackett doesn't have room to develop these relationships and chart their evolution in a compelling way.  Arrin is also a lost opportunity--she could have been a sexual interest for Carey, part of a love triangle with Carey and Derech, or given voice to one of the numerous Martian factions (Brackett's Martians are not monolithic, but split into distinct and often competing cultural and political groups who react to the colonizers differently, just like colonized peoples in real life) or all three, but as the story appears, she does very little.

(I often moan that a piece of fiction is too long, but here we have the rare case in which I think a story would have been better at two or even three times the length.)

Another problem with "The Road to Sinharat" is that it lacks the thrilling danger and cathartic (and sexualized) violence of many of Brackett's stories--often in Brackett stories men kill each other with their bare hands and women get beaten or killed (when Fand in "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" got transformed into a 100 lb. slug her lieutenant euthanized her with a sword.)  I don't think anybody gets killed in "The Road to Sinharat"--when the barbarians charge Wales and his men they repel the charge with stun guns.  To be satisfying, an adventure story has to have believable physical or psychological dangers, and "The Road to Sinharat" comes up short in this department. 

**********

"Mars Minus Bisha" is a quite good story of human feeling, while the other pieces we've looked at today are just marginally good or merely acceptable.  "Beast-Jewel of Mars" has some of the violence and passion that bring to life Brackett's best work, like Sword of Rhiannon or "Enchantress of Venus," but lacks their strong characterizations and relationships, while "The Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon" and "The Road to Sinharat" follow an adventure template but lack the danger and violence of a good adventure story and the latter feels underdeveloped.  Fortunately, there are still Brackett stories out there I haven't read, and I can live in the hope that there is another Brackett masterpiece awaiting me.