Retro Review: "The Winged Man" by E. Mayne Hull and A.E. van Vogt

"The Winged Man" is a novel by E. Mayne Hull and A.E. van Vogt. It was first serialised in the May and June 1944 issues of Astounding Science Fiction and is finalist for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version may be found online here and here. There is also a paperback version, which has apparently been expanded from the magazine version. However, I don't have the paperback, so this review is based on the magazine version alone.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point!

"The Winged Man" opens in the present day, i.e. 1944, aboard the US Navy submarine Sea Serpent in the Pacific. The Sea Serpent is currently above water and one night, First Officer William Kenlon chances to observe a very large bird flying past. There is only one problem: The Sea Serpent is more than one thousand two hundred miles from the nearest atoll, so where does the bird come from? Furthermore, the bird Kenlon saw is considerably larger than an albatross, the largest bird who could fly more than a thousand miles.

Kenlon discusses this mystery with the Sea Serpent's third officer, one Lieutenant Dan Tedders, who almost never sleeps. However, he is asleep when Kenlon rouses him to annoy him with questions about the exact position of the Sea Serpent (which any officer worth his salt could have determined himself). And since this is a story published in Astounding, that conversation is full of infodumps and clumsy "As you know, Bob…" dialogue about albatrosses and the size of the Pacific.

After the infodump, Kenlon decides to take another look outside. The moon breaks through the clouds and Kenlon chances to see the bird again. Only that it isn't a bird. It's a man with wings.

Shortly thereafter, Tedders shows up to apologise and technobabble some more about what Kenlon might have seen. Lucky for the reader, Kenlon and Tedders are interrupted before they can launch into another infodump, because the winged man has landed aboard the Sea Serpent and is attaching something to its hull. Kenlon and the winged man fight, before the winged man takes off into the night.

Now we're in for another endless round of technobabble and infodumping, while Kenlon attempts to remove the device the winged man has attached to the hull. Alas, the device cannot be removed. Though the radio operator of the Sea Serpent is fairly that it's not a bomb, but some kind of radio device.

Kenlon and submarine commander Jones-Gordon decide to capture the winged man, for otherwise they would never be believed. They succeed, too, but not before the winged man has attached a second device to the hull of the Sea Serpent. The devices cannot be removed and emit a light so bright that the bones of the crewmen aboard the Sea Serpent become visible (I had flashbacks of The Day After at this point, though the device is not a nuclear weapon).

Interrogating the winged man proves to be difficult, for he speaks a language no one aboard can identify, let alone understand. Finally, they begin to communicate via drawings in a notebook.

Meanwhile, the crew of the Sea Serpent suffers various misadventures. One man drowns as Kenlon and several other crewmen fall into the sea. Later, they spot a bleak grey shoreline on the horizon, even though there shouldn't be any land in more than a thousand miles. An attempt to explore the mysterious landmass causes two more crewmen to die, when they sink into quicksand.

Kenlon, who has a knack for languages, tries to learn the winged man's language and teach him English. The effort is successful enough that they can communicate. The winged man, whose name is Nemmo, informs Kenlon that the Sea Serpent has been brought a million years into the future via the strange devices Nemmo attached to the hull. It's amazing that no one aboard the submarine noticed this before Nemmo told them. You'd think they would at least notice that they have lost contact with their command and that no new orders are coming in.

The land is uninhabitable due to "water that fell from space" and created the treacherous quicksand. The winged people were genetically engineered to survive under the new conditions, as were their sworn enemies, a race of amphibious humans, while the regular human died out. The winged people live in a floating metal city in the sky, the amphibian men live in metal citadel under the sea. The two races have been at war for a long time now. Somehow, Nemmo's people managed to bring a WWII submarine into the far future. They want the Sea Serpent to destroy the citadel of their amphibian enemies, then they will return them to their own time.

Commander Jones-Gordon has no intention of helping the winged people. The US Navy will not be drawn into a private war in the far future. And besides, the only hostile act – kidnapping the Sea Serpent and her crew – was committed by the winged people.

The Sea Serpent finally reaches the island city of the winged people. Kenlon spots other craft in the water around the island. He asks Nemmo about this. Nemmo tells him that other winged people have been sent through time to bring back war machines to defeat their amphibian enemies. However, the amphibians have not been idle either and drag Commander Jones-Gordon down into the sea. Thus ends part one.

Part two begins with Kenlon, now senior officer aboard the Sea Serpent, staring at the spot where Jones-Gordon was dragged into the depths. Kenlon initially wants to go after Jones-Gordon and his kidnappers with the submarine, but quickly realises that's futile, because Commander Jones-Gordon is surely dead by now, while the amphibians are headed for their underwater city. Kenlon plans to head there as well, catch up with the kidnappers/murderers of Commander Jones-Gordon and torpedo them. However, Nemmo claims not to know the coordinates of the undersea city. Only the council of the winged people knows the exact location.

Kenlon's interrogation of Nemmo is interrupted by a delegation from one of the other ships the winged people have brought through time. This delegation consists entirely of women, who are escorting a political figure called the Sessa Clen to her wedding. Their ship comes from ten thousand years in the future. Luckily, the commander, a woman named Dorilee, speaks English that Kenlon can understand (though it is very unlikely that the English language will remain even remotely understandable even a thousand years into the future, let alone ten) and also implies that Americans are the only civilised people of the twentieth century. Coincidentally, Dorilee and her squad of Joannas are the only female characters in the story so far and they only appear partway into part two.
Kenlon is quite smitten with Dorilee, while Dorilee infodumps all over him. She explains how her own flying ship works (magnetism), gives him a rundown on the other ships the winged people abducted and also informs Kenlon that Nemmo has been in constant contact with the other winged people. Then Dorilee abruptly decides to take command of the Sea Serpent, because she believes that only a submarine can carry out the winged people's mission. Kenlon pulls his gun on Dorilee who takes him out with some paralysing crystals.

"A woman was about to capture a fully armed, fully manned United States submarine", a desperate and paralysed Kenlon muses, while at least this reader cheered Dorilee on, because she is a lot more interesting than the rather dull and bland Kenlon.

Meanwhile, Kenlon is still standing like a statue in his own control room, while musing about the humiliation he just experienced and how this will disgrace him in the eyes of the crew. He is also furious that Dorilee doesn't even seem to care about the mortal wound she dealt to Kenlon's honour, because women just cannot understand such things. At this point, my eyes rolled so hard that I almost sprained them.

But Van Vogt and his wife E. Mayne Hull are not yet done with the casual sexism. For when Dorilee, who apparently also likes infodumping to people who can't answer, informs Kenlon that they need to return to their own time quickly, for otherwise the Sessa Clen whom they are escorting to her marriage will be replaced by her sister, Kenlon muses that a woman on her way to her wedding is more tigress than human being. At this point, my view of Kenlon changed from "bland nonentity, who unfortunately happens to be the protagonist" to "sexist jerk".

By now, the second and third officer, who were both up on deck, realise what is going on. The second officer tries to retake the control room, only to fall to the paralysing crystals. Third officer Tedders, however, is manning the Sea Serpent's anti-aircraft gun and will not stand down. Dorilee now gives Kenlon a device that neutralises the paralysing effect and tell him to order Tedders to stand down. Kenlon, fearing bloodshed, does so.

Once Dorilee and her Joannas have taken over the Sea Serpent, they are eager to set off and destroy the underwater city. However, the winged people are no more willing to give her the coordinates than they were willing to give them to give them to Kenlon. For it turns out that the council of the winged people is still undecided on the plan to destroy the stronghold of their enemies. This is a problem, because the council is supposed to be omniscient. And so the council demand to see Kenlon first. They do not ask to see Dorilee, at least not now. But then, Van Vogt and Hull have been referring to the winged people as the "winged men" throughout. Apparently, sexism is still a thing one million years in the future.

Kenlon is taken to the city of the winged people and now Van Vogt and Hull finally remember that where there are winged men, there will be winged women as well. None of them get any lines – all we get are some descriptions of Kenlon ogling them, before he decides to ogle the flying city instead.

But before Kenlon gets to meet the council, he first finds his consciousness transferred into the body of a winged being. Kenlon experiences the wonders of flight and joins in with the winged people sunbathing, singing and dancing high above the clouds that now envelop the Earth. But before Kenlon can actually talk to anybody, he suddenly finds himself underwater swimming, his consciousness suddenly transferred into the body of an amphibian person. The amphibians are on a shark hunt with Kenlon along for the ride. And then, once the shark has been captured and killed, Kenlon finds himself taken to the underwater city. He notes that the amphibians are all busily working, whereas the winged people prefer to flit about, while singing and dancing. Kenlon also learns a little about the main problem facing the amphibians – more and more of their number are succumbing to the lure of the sea and deserting the city – and meets an amphibian woman. This one even gets a few lines, mostly to berate the amphibian menfolk for their fascination with the sea and to inform us that women who take to the sea can never return to the city. Whether in the air or under water, sexism is clearly alive and well in the year 999999 A.D.

This positively psychelic cover dates from 1970.

The scenes of Kenlon experiencing the joys of flying and swimming are nigh hallucinatory. In fact, it is striking how many scenes there are in golden age SFF that read like transcripts of drug trips. I always assumed the association of SFF and drugs was mainly a product of the New Wave, but it was already a thing in the 1930s and 1940s.

Just before Kenlon is returned to his own body, he witnesses several amphibians dragging the limp body of Commander Jones-Gordon through an airlock into the underwater city and announcing that he will be easy enough to revive. So Jones-Gordon is alive after all.

However, Kenlon doesn't have time to muse about this, before the council of the winged people asks him to decide which of the two humanoid species on this far future Earth – the amphibians or the winged people – should survive. For both species believe that the Earth is not big enough for both of them and are planning to destroy the other. The amphibians have the better chance, because they have powerful tractor beams that are slowly dragging the flying city into the sea. However, the winged people have Kenlon and a submarine.

There is no real reason why this weighty decision should fall to Kenlon other than that he is the protagonist and currently in command (at least in theory) of the lone vessel that can destroy the underwater city. The council of the winged people also make it very clear that they don't want an alliance with Dorilee and her all-women troop of Joannas (who actually are in command of the Sea Serpent), for only Kenlon can resolve their dilemma. Gee, I wonder why.

Once the council of the winged men have said their piece, they return Kenlon to the Sea Serpent where a furious Dorilee is waiting for him. Turns out that Kenlon has been gone for three days, not a few hours as he initially assumed. It also turns out that Dorilee did not get the amazing drug trip of flying with the winged people and swimming with the amphibians, when she was questioned by the council. Instead, she was merely taken to a room with what sounds like a primitive computer.

Dorilee is eager to attack the undersea city, so they can all return to their own times. Kenlon, however, does not want to attack the city, because that would mean killing Commander Jones-Gordon. Of course, Kenlon doesn't even particularly like the man, but he still feels dutybound to rescue him. Furthermore, Kenlon finds that he does not want to exterminate an entire species, even though his commanders are planning to do the same thing to the Japanese.

It is depressing that by the standards of Astounding Science Fiction in 1944, a character realising that genocide is bad is a step forward. After all, in Fredric Brown's "Arena", published in the same year, genocide was the solution to the protagonist's dilemma. It's also disturbing how many science fiction stories published in 1944, mainly in Astounding, but also elsewhere, feature two species so different and hostile to each other that the universe/galaxy/solar system/planet is only big enough for one of them. Yes, I know it was in the middle of World War II, but fanzines from the same era often contain musing about how science fiction can bring about a better and peaceful world for everybody, so why were the prozines so genocidal?

An interesting collage style cover from 1967.

However, Dorilee is still bound on destroying the undersea city and the amphibians. The hatches are closed and the engines start up. However, Dorilee and her Joannas have made a fatal mistake. They use the Diesel engines not the electrical motors. And the Diesel engines require so much oxygen that they quickly exhaust the entire submarine's air supply. One by one, the Joannas pass out. Kenlon, however, was lucky enough to grab an oxygen tank just in time. He disarms the Joannas, strips them nude, because they might have weapons or shields hidden in their underwear (yes, honestly, that's the reason given in the story) and locks them in the torpedo room. However, Kenlon has regained his honour and standing in the eyes of his crew and that clearly matters more than the fact that he just stripped and groped more than forty women.

No sooner has Kenlon regained control of the Sea Serpent that the amphibians return Commander Jones-Gordon. It turns out that Jones-Gordon made a deal with the amphibians. They will return the Sea Serpent to its own time, if Jones-Gordon destroys the city of the winged people, using the warheads from the torpedoes as bombs and the submarine's onboard sea plane to launch them. Kenlon wants nothing to do with this, after all he has just come to the conclusion that genocide is bad.

Luckily, Kenlon speaks the language of the winged people and Jones-Gordon does not. And so he tells the winged people to seize Jones-Gordon and himself. Then he sets course for the undersea city and fires torpedoes into the city's central computer a.k.a. "council" and the tractor beam emitter, while leaving ninety-five percent of the city intact. This way, the amphibians no longer pose a threat to the winged people.

Jones-Gordon forgives Kenlon for his mutiny and the Sea Serpent is returned to 1944 – without Nemmo and the Joannas, of course.

The striking minimalist cover of The Winged Man dates from 1967.

Short fiction rather than novels was the beating heart of the science fiction genre during the golden age. As a result, the novel category at the Retro Hugos is often full of left-field finalist. However, pickings were truly slim in 1944 for The Winged Man to make the Retro Hugo ballot. For the novel is, to put it politely, not very good.

For starters, it's much too long. There is no reason that this story needs to be novel-length. It would have worked just as well as a novella or even novelette. But as it is, The Winged Man feels padded. A large portion of the novel is being taken up by Kenlon musing about his commander, whom he dislikes because Jones-Gordon is too rigid and unimaginative, Kenlon nursing his wounded masculinity, after Dorilee takes over his ship, and Kenlon wondering whether to commit genocide and how to extract himself and his ship from the dilemma in which they find themselves. As a result, we spend an awful lot of time in the head of Kenlon, who's simply not a very likeable character. He's dull, bland and a raging sexist.

The same description could also apply to the novel as a whole. For while pulp science fiction can be many things, it rarely is boring. The Winged Man, however, is just dull. For large stretches of the story, very little happens. And even if something happens, it isn't particularly exciting. Even action scenes are dull. What little happens is also quite often confusing. There were several moments where I thought, "Wait a minute, what just happened? Did I miss something?" The pacing of the novel is simply off.

This German cover from 1967 mimics the popular war pulps of the era, but it is an accurate illustration of the story.

Submarines were a popular subject for pulp fiction from the 1930s well into the 1950s and beyond, not just in the US but in Germany as well. As a result, I have read my share of submarine adventures and none of them manage to make life and battle aboard a submarine as dull as The Winged Man. For SFF stories about submarines published in 1944 alone, "Undersea Guardians" by Ray Bradbury is much better than this turkey.

But while part I is merely dull, part II is so suffused with glaring sexism that it's hard to imagine that The Winged Man was co-written by (and in the magazine version, solely credited to) a woman, E. Mayne Hull, A.E. van Vogt's first wife. I forgive Hull and Van Vogt for not including any women in the first part, because there were no women on submarines of any nation during World War II. However, the treatment of Dorilee and her Joannas in part II is unforgivable. Yes, the idea of an all-women military unit was revolutionary in 1944 (and there are still plenty of people in the SFF genre today who have issues with the idea of women soldiers). And to be fair, Dorilee isn't particularly likeable – after all, she does commandeer the Sea Serpent after taking out her crew, though she doesn't want to kill anybody, if she doesn't have to. She is also fully willing to commit genocide, but then so is Commander Jones-Gordon.

However, Kenlon's blatant dismissal of Dorilee's motives grates. Yes, it's only a wedding, but Kenlon himself admits that he has no idea how weddings work and what they mean in the future world from whence Dorilee hails. It's well possible that the failure of the bride to appear at her wedding might mean summary execution for the bride and her retinue. It might mean that the bride's home country is bombed into submission – after all, it's clearly a political wedding. We don't know the consequences of the bride missing her wedding and neither does Kenlon. Nonetheless, he is convinced that the Sessa Clen, the woman Dorilee serves, is merely a bridezilla willing to do whatever it takes to get her perfect wedding.

The fact that Dorilee and her Joannas are defeated by their lack of knowledge about how WWII submarines work grates as well, even though the text makes it clear that the reason for their ignorance is the fact that the technology is so old that any knowledge they have about it is spotty. Nonetheless, there is an unpleasant undertone of "women are just too stupid to understand science" here, especially since oh so superior Kenlon manages to stay conscious, because he knows how his own submarine works.

Not only is the tagline on this 1980 cover wrong, since the Sea Serpent travels one million years into the future rather than thirty thousand, nothing about this cover is accurate. I assume the woman is Dorilee, even though she does not wear a bathing suit in the novel itself. And why are the men dressed like extras from Battlestar Galactica, when they would be wearing Navy uniforms?

But the most annoying thing is being treated to pages upon pages of Kenlon nursing his wounded masculinity and worrying that the crew will no longer respect him, now he has been beaten by a woman (Dude, I'm pretty sure the crew can't stand you anyway, because you're an insufferable prick). And then we get Kenlon whining that Dorilee will never understand how she has humiliated him, because she is just a woman. Never mind that Dorilee is a military commander as well and therefore Kenlon's equal and would probably understand his worries about losing the respect of his subordinates. Most likely, it simply never occurs to her that the fact that she is a woman would be a problem for Kenlon. And don't even get me started on Kenlon personally stripping every single Joanna aboard naked. But he doesn't do it because he enjoys it (yeah, I bet he doesn't), but because the Joannas might have hidden weapons or shields in their underwear. Honestly, the supposed hero of this story gropes and strips more than forty unconscious women. I cannot imagine such a scene flying anywhere in modern SFF.

All of the above could be blamed on the fact that the POV character of the novel just happens to be a sexist jerk. However, the sexism in The Winged Man is not just in Kenlon's head – no, the whole novel is suffused with casual sexism. It begins with the fact that the two species competing for dominance on the Earth of the far future are referred to as the winged men and the fishmen throughout the novel. And while we do meet females of both species, the winged women never get any lines at all and the lone amphibian woman only gets to nag the menfolk for being too enamoured with the sea. Finally, there is the fact that it is Kenlon of all people who is asked to make the final decision about the fate of the winged people and the amphibians. Not Dorilee or Commander Jones-Gordon or the Sessa Clen or any of the people aboard the other ships that have been abducted into the future, but Kenlon, whose only distinguishing qualities are that he is an annoying jerk who happens to be the protagonist.

Talking of which, I also find it extremely unlikely that a WWII submarine, even a particularly advanced one, is the mightiest weapon to be found in one million years. That's like claiming the Wilhelm Bauer, the most advanced submarine of its time (which - though still powered by both diesel engines and electrical motors - was a lot less likely to accidentally suffocate its crew than the Sea Serpent) built in the last days of WWII, was the mightiest weapon in all of creation. Yes, if you want to destroy an underwater city, a submarine is a good bet. And while the military usefulness of submarines will eventually decline – though I suspect that the aircraft carriers the Americans love so much will be gone before submarines – grabbing a nuclear submarine with nuclear warheads from a couple of decades later would have been much more effective. And yes, Van Vogt and Hull had no way of knowing this. But claiming that a WWII submarine is the most mightiest weapon of all time is extreme even for John W. Campbell's well known superiority complex.

This 1977 cover shows both the Sea Serpent and the citadel of the winged people.

So far, I have been very harsh on The Winged Man and frankly, the novel deserves it, because it really is not very good. However, there were some aspects about the story that I liked, so let's focus upon them: For starters, I like the fact that genocide is not the answer in this novel. Yes, I know that "Genocide is bad" is a low bar to clear, but there are 1944 SFF stories (as well as many later ones) which fail to clear even that low bar ("Arena", cough). I also like that Commander Jones-Gordon is initially unwilling to get involved in the conflict between the winged people and the amphibians, because it's not the US Navy's job to get involved in other people's wars. Of course, Jones-Gordon still goes fully genocidal at the end and the US would get involved in other people's wars plenty of times over the next seven decades, but by 1944 standards "Genocide is bad" and "We keep out of other people's conflicts that we neither understand nor do they have anything to do with us" are remarkably progressive statements.

Another thing I liked about The Winged Man is that the plot largely makes sense and is free of the random plot twists every 800 words or so that Van Vogt was so fond of. I suspect that this is the influence of E. Mayne Hull.

Of the many covers "The Winged Man" has had over the years, this Dutch cover from 1974 is probably my favourite.

I also liked some of the worldbuilding details such as the fact that the winged people's numbering system has a base of nine rather than ten. The descriptions of the citadels of the winged people and the amphibians respectively are suitably alien and yet make perfect sense for the beings that inhabit them. Van Vogt and Hull also at least considered the biological implications of the humanoid beings they introduce, e.g. the winged men have hollow bones to allow them to fly and the amphibians are bigger than regular humans and have gills.

However, the few good aspects don't make up for the fact that The Winged Man is a slog and simply not a good novel. If not for the fact that there are still many fans who like Van Vogt's work, I doubt it would have made the Retro Hugo ballot. Cause it's just not Hugo-worthy in my opinion (unlike Van Vogt's much better "Far Centaurus"). If it wins, I shall be very cross, especially since both Shadow Over Mars and Sirius are much better.

Retro Review: "Far Centaurus" by A.E. van Vogt

I'm continuing my reviews of the 1945 Retro Hugo finalists with "Far Centaurus", a science fiction short story by A.E. van Vogt that was published in the January 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is a finalist for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

"Far Centaurus" starts with the first person narrator – we later learn that his name is Bill Endicott – awakening from suspended animation. Over the next page or so, we learn that he is a crewmember aboard a sublight spaceship bound for Alpha Centauri and that he has been asleep for fifty-three years, seven months and two days. Our narrator muses that everybody he knew back on Earth, including his old classmates and the girl he kissed at a party just before take-off, are all old or dead now, while he is unchanged due to a handwavium medication called "the Eternity drug".

While Bill eats some soup, we learn that the four crewmembers – all men, of course, and all college friends – are woken up approximately every fifty years for brief periods to look after the ship, before taking another dose of the drug and going back to sleep. Altogether, the trip to Alpha Centauri will take five hundred years.

However, the Eternity drug has a certain failure rate, as our narrator finds out to his shock, when he finds one of his fellow crewmembers – Pelham, inventor of the Eternity drug – dead in his quarters. There is a grisly moment, as Bill tries to prepare Pelham's body for a space burial, only that the body is so badly decayed that pieces keep falling off. Then Bill radios his report to Earth, where it will be received in five months. He also enters Pelham's death as well as a note for the next crewmember to be woken, engineer Jimmy Renfrew, into the ship's log. Then he goes back to sleep, this time for one hundred and fifty years.

There is a jump ahead in time and our narrator Bill wakes up again. This time, two hundred and one years have passed since take-off. Bill immediately heads for the log book to see what his fellow crewmembers have written. Jimmy Renfrew, the next to wake, has only logged instrument and made no personal comments at all. His entry reads like a robot's, Bill muses. Even the death of Pelham, who was a close friend of Renfrew's, doesn't seem to bother him. This worries Bill, because Jimmy Renfrew was always a sensitive soul.

Bill is not the only one worried about Renfrew. For the other crewmember, Ned Blake, has left a letter for Bill in the log book, instructing him to tear out and destroy the sheet when he has read it. In this letter, Blake confesses his worries about Renfrew's mental state. Back on Earth, Renfrew was rich, charming, a brilliant engineer and a ladies man (we learn that he has three ex-wives who are not so ex, at least according to Blake). Both Blake and Bill were already worried about Renfrew's reaction upon awakening from his drug-induced sleep only to realise that everybody he'd ever loved, including the three ex-wives, was dead. They assumed that Pelham would act as psychological support for Renfrew, only that Pelham is dead, too. Blake closes the letter by urging Bill to think what to do about the unstable Renfrew, since they will have to live with him, once the ship reaches Alpha Centauri.

Bill destroys the letter as instructed, does his routine work and checks on Blake and Renfrew who are asleep and still alive. He still has no idea what to do about Renfrew, but there still is time, so our narrator goes to sleep for the third time.

When Bill wakes for the third time, the ship's alarm is ringing. Once he makes it to the cockpit, he sees a great ball of fire on the viewscreen, which set off the proximity alarm. Bill initially thinks that the ball of fire is an unknown star, but he eventually realises that it is a giant spaceship on fire. He assumes that the spaceship hails from Alpha or Proxima Centauri, which must have inhabited planets. Thrilled that they won't be all alone when they reach Alpha Centauri, but that they will encounter an alien civilisation there, Bill goes back to sleep.

The next time Bill wakes up, he is not alone. The ship is about to reach its destination and Ned Blake is already up and walking about with a grim look on his face. He feeds Bill, who's still dizzy from his long sleep, soup and informs him that Renfrew has gone mad and had to be restrained. Bill is shocked, for while Renfrew was prone to depression, he didn't expect that the knowledge that everybody he ever knew and loved was dead would drive him to insanity.

"It isn't only that," Blake says and tells Bill to prepare for the greatest shock he ever had. For when Blake awoke and saw Bill's report about the strange spaceship, he checked if he could receive some radio signals from Alpha Centauri. He found hundreds of radio stations, all broadcasting with perfect clarity. Renfrew couldn't take the news and promptly went mad. Blake also informs Bill that a ship is coming from Alpha Centauri to meet them. Blake still hasn't told Bill what precisely the problem is, but Bill – and at least this reader – can already guess what's up.

Spoiler alert: In the five hundred years it took Bill, Blake and Renfrew to get to Alpha Centauri, humans developed lightspeed and got there before them. The Alpha Centauri system is settled and has been for a long time. Though the Centauri were kind enough to name four planets orbiting Alpha Centauri A and B as well as Proxima Centauri after the four brave explorers who were late to arrive.
Not long after this revelation, Bill and Blake are met by a giant spaceship and instructed to land in its onboard hangar. This ship, they learn, can make the trip from Alpha Centauri to Earth – a trip which took Bill, Blake and Renfrew five hundred years – in three hours.

Aboard this ship they are ushered into a luxurious parlour, where they meet a heavily perfumed man called Casellahat, who informs them that he has studied the language and customs of the mid American period since early childhood solely for the purpose of welcoming the visitors from the past. Because not only has technology advanced in five hundred years, language has changed, too. The visitors from the past are honoured guests on Alpha Centauri and will be given a luxurious penthouse and well as five million credits. However, Casellahat keeps wrinkling his nose and finally tells Blake and Bill that they should not interact with the Centauri population directly, because they stink. Which is really mean. After all, Blake and Bill haven't had a shower in five hundred years, so of course they smell.

The Centauri have been able to restore Renfrew's mind to sanity. Bill and Blake hug him, overjoyed to see their friend finally well again. In fact, Renfrew is well enough to ask Casellahat science questions, which leads to roughly two pages of the technobabble that John W. Campbell so loved and most others skip (Leigh Brackett said so in 1944). There is something about bachelor suns that don't tolerate anything in orbit around them and their tenuous connection to the universe. We also get a crash course in the development of the interstellar drive and the history of the settlement of Alpha Centauri. Oh yes, and the burning spaceship that Bill saw upon his third awakening was a tragic accident, but one that advanced spaceship technology a lot, so they shouldn't feel bad about accidentally having caused the explosion.

Bill and Blake are feeling morose, because they still have a good fifty years or so left to live in a world where other people, including women, find them disgusting and where they cannot even figure out how the simplest machines work. They are torn out of their ruminations by Renfrew who announces that he has purchased a spaceship and that all three of them will go on a trip.

Bill and Blake go along with the plan, but even the wonders of cruising through space cannot shake the melancholy the two of them feel. Only Renfrew is permanently cheerful, but then Renfrew was mentally unstable to begin with.

One day, Renfrew enters Bill's cabin with a gun in his hand. He ties up Bill and Blake, so they won't interfere with his plan. Now Bill – and the reader – finally learns that the Centauri psychologists managed to cure Renfrew by telling him that Bill and Blake had gone insane because of the shock. The sense of responsibility for his friends shocked Renfrew back into sanity and now he has found an ingenious solution to their dilemma. He is going to pilot the spaceship into one of the bachelor suns that Renfrew and Casellahat technobabbled about earlier.

Bill and Blake manage to free themselves and try to stop him – after all, Renfrew is  insane and even if they wasted their lives on a futile dream, they don't want to die just yet. But try as they might, they cannot get the ship into orbit around the bachelor sun, because bachelor suns don't like anything orbiting them. Meanwhile, Renfrew babbles something about how contact with the bachelor and its tenuous hold upon the universe will throw them all back in time by four hundred and ninety years and seven months.

Bill finally realises just what Renfrew is planning. He's taking them all back to their own time, one and a half years after they left. "But what about the ship?" he asks. Wouldn't bringing back a hyper-advanced starship from the future change the course of history?

Renfrew says that won't be a problem, because no one can understand how the future technology works anyway. They'll keep the ship for their own use to jaunt around the universe and otherwise let history take its course.

Bill is still unsure, but Renfrew tells him that the girl he kissed at the good-bye party just before the launch, the girl Bill has been pining for every time he woke up again, that girl will be sitting right next to him, when Bill's first radio message from space finally reaches Earth some fifty years from now.

The story ends with the line, "That's exactly what happened"

Now I have to admit that I'm not a huge A.E. van Vogt fan. I know that he was one of the most popular authors of the golden age, but his stories just don't work for me. And I certainly tried. I tried Slan and The Worlds of Null-A and The Weapon Shop/The Weapon Makers and didn't care for any of them. As a result, my reaction whenever A.E. van Vogt puts in an appearance on the Retro Hugo ballot is, "Oh no, I have to wade through another one of those." I have much the same reaction to C.S. Lewis' appearances on the Retro Hugo ballot, by the way.

Coincidentally, I was stunned that A.E. van Vogt, who would have celebrated his 108^th birthday on April 26, lived until 2000, until the ripe old age of 88. For van Vogt is so associated with the 1940s and 1950s that I assumed he died much earlier. According to ISFDB, his publication frequency drops drastically from the mid 1950s on, but he still published stories and novels well into the 1980s.

There are three A.E. van Vogt works on the 1945 Retro Hugo ballot, one of them co-written with his wife E. Mayne Hull. I decided to start with "Far Centaurus", because it is the shortest. To my surprise, I found that I liked the story. It's probably the best story by van Vogt I have read so far. True, the story does suffer from van Vogt's well-known weaknesses such as inconsistent or rather non-existent plotting and random plot twists every eight hundred words or so. But by some miracle, van Vogt's random plotting technique works this time around and results in a satisfying story.

As Paul Fraser points out in his review, the best part of the story by far is the first half with Bill waking up every couple of decades aboard the starship. Van Vogt's prose tends towards the purple, but he does manage to convey the sheer scale of the journey that our three explorers are undertaking very well. He also manages to convey the sense of loneliness and isolation that Bill feels as he thinks about the people he's known who are now old and later dead and of the girl he kissed the night before and fell in love with. This girl is the only female character in the entire story, by the way, and she never even gets a name.

The clock announcing how much time has passed and Alpha Centauri growing brighter and bigger, as our sun grows dimmer in the viewport are nice touches, as are the notes that Bill and Blake leave for each other. The death of Pelham is a genuine shock and for a moment I assumed we were in for a murder mystery in space a la 2018 Hugo finalist Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty, especially since one of our three explorers is supposedly mentally ill. However, Six Wakes is a story that could only happen after stories about century long space journey at sublight speeds had become an old enough hat that a sublight ship could serve as a backdrop for a completely different story.

However, in 1944 a journey through space lasting five hundred years was still a brand-new idea and must have teased that good old sense of wonder hard. After all, golden age science fiction rarely ventured beyond the boundaries of the solar system. With so much excitement and adventure to be found on Venus, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and elsewhere, Alpha Centauri is indeed far out. And indeed, several people who first read the story when they were young report how it blew their minds. I imagine it would have blown mine as well, if I had first read it at fifteen.

Talking of which, I was surprised that it was already known in 1944 that Alpha Centauri is a triple star system consisting of Alpha Centauri A and B as well as Proxima Centauri, since I thought this was a later observation. However, it turns out that the binary nature of Alpha Centauri was discovered as early as 1689 by Jean Richaud. Proxima Centauri was discovered in 1915 by Robert T.A. Innes. So that part of the story was based on known science. Even the fact that the triple star system has habitable planets is not that far out, since a potentially habitable exo-planet was discovered in orbit around Proxima Centauri in 2016.

Most authors would probably have ended the story with the revelation that later generations of humans had beaten our three brave explorers to Alpha Centauri and that the system had long since been colonised – a revelation that likely was a lot more shocking in 1944 than today.

A.E. van Vogt, however, just keeps on writing and takes a story into a completely new, if not entirely unexpected direction, as our three explorers finally reach their destination and find that they don't fit into the brave new world of Alpha Centauri at all. Not only does everybody around them think they smell horrible, they also cannot understand the local language, let alone the most basic principles of science. Of course, you cannot blame them for the latter, since the science of bachelor stars and adeledicnander stardrives is complete and utter gobbledegook.

Once the three got on the starship towards the end, I expected the story to go for a downer ending with a triple suicide in the flaming heart of the bachelor star. But maybe I shouldn't have skimmed over the page of technobabble earlier in the story, because that's not what happens at all. Instead, Jimmy Renfrew – who clearly is the most brilliant of the three explorers and probably never was mentally ill at all – has found a way to take them all back to a time they understand.

And so the story comes to a neat and surprisingly satisfying ending. Steve J. Wright points out in his review that given van Vogt's plotting or lack thereof, the fact that the story comes to a satisfying ending is most likely an accident. Nonetheless, it works.

Everybody gets home, Casellahat is probably very relieved to be rid of those smelly ancient humans and Bill gets the girl he's been pining after for five hundred years. Of course, it's amazing that the girl waited for him for one and a half years, especially since she thought that Bill was gone forever on a five hundred year trip to Alpha Centauri. Not to mention that she said, "A kiss for the ugly one, too" just before she kissed Bill, which doesn't exactly sound like the prelude to a great, time- and space-spanning romance. On the other hand, Bill did pine for her for five hundred years and flew straight into a star to get back to her, which should soften even the hardest of hearts. And indeed, Adventures Fantastic notes in his review that the last two paragraphs stuck with him for a long time.

As so often with science fiction stories of the golden age, particularly those published in Astounding, the characters are largely cyphers. We learn next to nothing about our narrator Bill except that he ended up on the expedition team, because he was friends with the other three explorers in college, and that he pines after a girl he kissed at a party the night before take-off. We don't even know what he looks like, except that he's apparently less attractive than his friends. Ned Blake is even more thinly sketched and basically serves only as a sounding board for Bill. Jimmy Renfrew gets a bit more characterisation and we even learn what he looks like. However, we only ever see Jimmy through the eyes of Bill and Ned Blake who to equal parts admire Jimmy and are jealous of him, because he is rich, brilliant, handsome and gets all the girls. It's not even clear if Jimmy Renfrew truly was mentally ill or whether Bill and Blake just think that he is.

In many ways, the idea of four friends, two of whom just happen to be brilliant scientists, building a spaceship together to explore the cosmos (like you do) is a throwback to the very early days of science fiction, when scientists/explorers like Richard Seaton or Hans Zarkov built spaceships in their backyard to explore the universe. By 1944, it would have been obvious that space travel would not be achieved by enthusiasts tinkering in their garages. Though the trope of brilliant scientists building spaceships and taking their friends for a ride into space without waiting for official authorisation did last well into the era of actual space exploration. After all, this is the origin story of the Fantastic Four in 1960 (and we know that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were heavily drawing on pulp science fiction). In fact, I now imagine Bill looking like Ben Grimm pre-transformation. After all, he is "the ugly one".

This is probably the most stereotypically Campbellian story on the 1945 Retro Hugo ballot. We have a trio of competent men, even if one them may be mentally ill (and let's not forget that Campbell was very interested in psychology and hoped to turn it into a more exact science, so the cure narrative would have appealed to him). We have humans triumphing over adversity as well as a positive view of human progress – after all, what our explorers find on Far Centaurus are not aliens, but advanced humans. We have neat central idea, which is grounded in the actual science of the day, and a lot of technobabble, which is not connected to any actual science at all.

On the other hand, the prevailing mood of the story is not one of boundless optimism and marvel at human ingenuity – no, it's melancholy. Melancholy at having left everybody and everything they knew behind, melancholy at no longer fitting into the world of the far future (compare this e.g. to Buck Rogers who becomes a hero within days of waking up in the future). Come to think of it, melancholy was the prevailing mood in several of the stories from Astounding that I read for the Retro Reviews project ("No Woman Born", "The Children's Hour", "Desertion", "The Huddling Place", even the Galactic Empire section of "The Big and the Little"), which is certainly interesting. Finally, the story ends not in the far future on Alpha Centauri, but in the much nearer future with an elderly couple looking up at the stars.

In fact, I have come to suspect by now that our idea of what Campbellian science fiction was like is very much a myth. Because so far, pretty much every story that was published in Astounding Science Fiction that I read for the Retro Reviews project was atypical in some way.

"Far Centaurus" is a surprisingly good story from an author whose work I normally don't much care for. It has been reprinted several times over the years and Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg also selected it for the 1944 volume of their Great Science Fiction Stories anthology series. "Far Centaurus" certainly a worthy Retro Hugo finalist. Let's hope that the other two van Vogt stories on the ballot are as good as this one.