Retro Review: "The Martian and the Milkmaid" by Frances M. Deegan

I keep finding more stories by obscure and forgotten women authors of the golden age, so enjoy this review of  "The Martian and the Milkmaid", a science fiction short story by Frances M. Deegan, that was published in the October 1944 issue of Fantastic Adventures and would have been eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

"The Martian and the Milkmaid" opens with the narrator in his car, complaining about the state of the roads in North Dakota in 1944. We learn that his name is Howard Clement and that he is a geologist chasing meteorites, looking for deposits of diatomaceous earth. Too bad that that meteorites have the diabolical tendency to select the most inaccessible places to land.

Howard's destination is the rundown farm of Bill and Margie Henshaw, where a meteorite came down in 1901. The Henshaws are friendly enough and welcome Howard with breakfast and freshly brewed coffee. Though Bill warns Howard that his scientific equipment will draw the attention of the Gook, a mentally disabled man who lives on the farm and likes tinkering with things. Sometimes, he's remarkably successful – for example, he built an incubator for the Henshaws, allowing them to raise and sell chickens. Oh yes, and the Gook just showed up on the farm at the same time the meteorite came down. Bill Henshaw found him wandering alone in the storm, naked and full of bruises.

As is the habit with friendly midwestern farmers who come across aliens and meteorites in their fields (just remember the origin of Superman), the Henshaws took the Gook in and nursed him back to health. From the bruises on his body, the Henshaws assumed that the Gook had been held captive and escaped. Since the Gook couldn't speak in any language the Henshaws could understand, they also assumed he was mentally disabled, though the story uses far less polite terms. "Gook" was about the only word the stranger could utter, so that became his name.

Howard finally meets the Gook, when he comes into the kitchen and sits down at the table. We learn that the Gook is tall, slender and dark-skinned, that he has pointed ears, wears black glasses, that his dark hair has a purple tint and that his skin has an olive green tinge. When the Gook finally takes his black glasses off, his eyes are yellow. He also takes his coffee with Margie Henshaw's homemade chili sauce.

The Henshaws asks Howard about his mission, so Howard gets to infodump about the benefits and applications of diatomaceous earth. There's even a helpful footnote with further explanations. The science is correct, too – which is more than you can say for some of the stories in Astounding – with two exceptions. Diatomaceous earth is not linked to meteorites and there never was a deposit in North Dakota. Instead, the world's biggest deposits were in the Lüneburg Heath some 130 kilometres from where I live. This also explains why the US would be so eager to located alternative deposits of diatomaceous earth, since the ones in the Lüneburg Heath were inaccessible to them due to World War II.

Later that evening, when Howard is checking his equipment, the Gook comes to his room, watches him and finally asks Howard if he is intelligent. Outraged, Howard replies that he is of course intelligent, but the Gook is not convinced. After all, he muses, nothing is less certain on this haphazard planet than intelligence.

The Gook now tells Howard that he comes from Mars and is more than four hundred years old. He also tells Howard that he will find no fallen meteorite on the farm, because the meteorite was the Gook's ship. As for all the other meteorites Howard was investigating, well, they were Martian spaceships as well. For Mars is dying and the Martian people are nearly sterile. However, Earth is green and abundant and humans have no problems reproducing. The Martians want to find out why and maybe import some earthly germs and seeds to make Mars green again. However, the Gook finds Earth incredibly primitive and backwards, even though he learned English from some old schoolbooks, mail order catalogues and a dictionary the Henshaws had in their house. And since the Gook is extremely long-lived, he's biding his time and waiting for technology to become advanced enough to establish communications with Mars. Oh yes, and his name really is Gook.

Howard tells Gook that it's no surprise that he finds rural North Dakota backwards, but New York City is a completely different matter. Gook decides to take this as an invitation and travels back to New York City with Howard. The Henshaws aren't even sad to see him go; they believe it will do Gook a lot of good to see more of the world than just the farm.

In Chicago, while waiting for the flight back to New York City, Howard gets some suits for Gook, because his farmer's garb won't fly in the big city. He also introduces Gook to whisky, which Gook likes, and tells him that putting ketchup and chili sauce on everything is absolutely not acceptable in polite society. And since Howard can hardly introduce Gook as a stray Martian who followed him home, they instead hash out a convincing backstory for Gook.

There is only one problem. Gook is too dark-skinned to pass as a white man – and that's exactly how Deegan puts it. So Howard decides to pass Gook off as an East Indian man of mixed parentage named George Guk. This George Guk is a highly educated refugee who does not wish to speak about his traumatic past, which also avoids uncomfortable questions. It is very telling that a mixed race Indian refugee was considered more acceptable in the 1940s than an American-born black man.

Howard also announces that he does not intend to support Gook indefinitely, but that Gook will have to get a job to support himself, whereupon Gook informs Howard that the capitalist system is absurd and a symptom of the barbaric confusion of human existence and that humans should just abolish it. Gook also criticises consumerism and declares that WWII is a barbaric waste of resources, but that humans apparently have so many resources they can't help but start wars to destroy them. When Howard points out that most humans wish for peace, Gook counters that humans fight from birth on.

So in short, Gook is a dark-skinned pacifist Socialist from Mars, who criticises American consumerism. He also utterly fails to be impressed by all the technological miracles Howard introduces him to – radio, telephones, electricity, indoor plumbing – because too many devices are faulty.

Back in New York City, Howard pulls some strings and gets Gook forged papers as well as a job with the company where he works. Gook also moves into Howard's apartment. And that's where he meets Hebe, Howard's lover and the titular milkmaid.

According to Howard, Hebe – though she went by a different name back then – won a milking contest at a county fair in Pennsylvania and was sent to the New York World Fair of 1939 to give milking demonstrations dressed up as Hebe, goddess of dairy. Of course, Hebe isn't the goddess of dairy, but the goddess of youth and cupbearer to the gods of antiquity, but apparently 1930s dairy promoters had only a very vague grasp of Greek mythology.

Once in New York, Hebe got the taste for big city life and just stayed on, becoming a Broadway starlet. She also married a past-his-prime boxer and had a string of babies with him, four in five years. Hebe's husband is always on the road, looking for opportunities to make his comeback (even though – as Howard remarks – he never had a career in the first place), so Hebe is alone a lot. That's why she started an extramarital affair with Howard. However, once blonde and well-endowed Hebe sets eyes on Gook, she forgets all about Howard and embarks on an affair with Gook.

But Howard is far more irritated that Gook has been given a job in the company's experimental lab, where he is apparently doing invaluable research on some kind of top secret project. Howard is even more irritated that Gook earns three times what Howard earns, even though Gook has no interest in money and deposits his entire paycheck with Howard.

A few months later, Howard finally learns what Gook has been working on. For Gook has been developing an extremely light and extremely strong plastic, which has immediately been put to use to build an experimental bomber, powered by high octane fuel. And who will be the test pilot of this miraculous plane? No other than Gook himself.

However, the plane disappears during its trial flight, along with Gook. Hebe disappears around the same time during a visit to Hebe's family in Pennsylvania. A mysterious plane was spotted in the area where Hebe was last seen.

Both Hebe and Gook are presumed dead. But Howard is not convinced and wonders whether they took off to Mars together to repopulate the planet.

In the course of the Retro Reviews project, I have unearthed a lot of forgotten gems. "The Martian and the Milkmaid" is not one of them, however. The prose is clunky and there are several strange phrasings and homonym errors, e.g. Margie Henshaw "bides her tongue" at one point. The plot is also predictable and it's always clear where the story is going. The fact that the title basically spoils the story doesn't help either.

Nonetheless, "The Martian and the Milkmaid" is an interesting story, because of what it reveals about the attitudes of the time during which it was written. One thing to note is that the narrator Howard Clement is an idiot and a jerk besides. Now narrators who are idiots and jerks are not exactly rare during the golden age, though I'm often not convinced that the author knows that their narrator is a jerk and an idiot. However, I'm pretty sure that Frances M. Deegan knows only too well that Howard is an idiot and a jerk.

For starters, Howard is wrong about almost everything in this story. He is wrong about the meteorites. He is dismissive of the Henshaws. He mistakes Gook for mentally disabled (to be fair, so do the Henshaws, but they at least have a reason, since they do find him wandering around naked in a storm, unable to speak English) and even once he realises the error of his ways, he does not really grasp that Gook is vastly more intelligent than Howard will ever be, as evidenced by the delightful moment when Gook presents Howard with his paycheck, which is thrice what Howard earns.

But Howard isn't just an idiot, he's also a jerk and unpleasant. Because from the first line on, Howard does nothing but whine. He whines about bumpy roads and meteorite landings in difficult to access locations and that he has to drive through rural North Dakota on what he assumes is a wild goose chase. He also whines about being stuck with Gook and about Gook getting recognition and earning more than Howard. Finally, Howard basically threatens to sue the Henshaws, should they or Gook as much as touch his equipment.

Finally, Howard treats Hebe like a living sex doll and doesn't seem to realise that Hebe has ideas and ambitions of her own. Instead, Howard thinks that Hebe is stupid. At one point, Howard even remarks that Hebe should have stayed on the farm or gone back there to become the wife and mother she was meant to be rather than a Broadway starlet. Howard also takes Hebe for granted and doesn't even realise what is happening when she dumps him for Gook. Instead, he seems to assume that Hebe sleeps with anybody and that she will come back to him.

Talking of Hebe, she doesn't appear on the page and we only see her through Howard's eyes (and Howard is an idiot, as we have established), but nonetheless she is very unusual woman character by 1940s standards. For starters, Hebe is very much a woman who knows what she wants and goes out and gets it. And if that means posing as a milkmaid at the 1939 World Fair, then so be it. Hebe also has an ongoing extramarital affair and eventually runs off with another lover, leaving her husband and children behind, and absolutely no one seems to think that this is anything out of the ordinary, let alone that there is anything wrong with her behaviour. Considering how vilified women who have extramarital affairs and/or who abandon their children are to this day, this is really quite remarkable. Finally, Hebe – who is explicitly described as white, plump and blonde – is engaged in an interracial (and interspecies) relationship and again no one seems to think anything about this, twenty-three years before interracial marriage was legalised in all of the US in the landmark Loving vs. Virginia case.

Talking of Gook, he is not only explicitly described as a man of colour, he is also the smartest person in the story by far. Unlike Hebe's behaviour, Gook's skin colour does become a plot point, when Howard is forced to concoct a backstory for Gook that will be more acceptable in a deeply racist society than a mere, "He's black, deal with it." I also find it interesting that a mixed race refugee of East Indian origin was considered more acceptable than an American born black or mixed race man. And how much do you want to bet that Howard passed off Gook as the son of an Indian maharaja or something?

Though again it's interesting that except for Howard (whom we know to be a jerk), no one seems to bat an eyelash at the fact that Gook is not white. The Henshaws, a farming couple from North Dakota, a state which is still more than eighty percent white today, take him in, George's employer gives him a well paid job working on a top secret project during wartime and Hebe has no issues embarking on a relationship with him. Indeed, the only person for whom Gook's skin colour is an issue is Howard.

Though I do find it strange that Gook was content to just spend forty-three years on the Henshaw farm rather than try to get his hands on more advanced technology. Yes, North Dakota may be remote and rural, but it did have universities in 1901 and even more by 1944. North Dakota also had railroads, so Gook could have left at any time. And since he had access to mail order catalogues and a dictionary and very likely the radio, he must have realised that there is more to Earth than rural North Dakota.

The science in the story is dated, but no worse than what you find in other magazines of the pulp era. Gook's homeworld is the dry and dying Mars of the pulp science fiction shared solar system. The fact that Gook is humanoid and can interbreed with humans is nothing out of the ordinary for the period either. And the infodump about diatomaceous earth is actually correct, which is more than you can say for many of the infodumps in Astounding, several of which were pure nonsense ("Far Centaurus", anyone?).

Another thing I noticed is how many food descriptions there are in "The Martian and the Milkmaid", which is remarkable, considering that food almost never features in golden age speculative fiction. Sometimes, there are cocktails, but otherwise the only food that is mentioned are the ubiquitous food pills. "The Martian and the Milkmaid", on the other hand, offers a rich farm breakfast consisting of coffee, ham and fried potatoes, thick slices of home-made bread and rich, yellow butter. Considering that this story was published in the middle of WWII, when most of these foodstuffs were rationed, it's a luxurious breakfast indeed. Furthermore, there also is Margie Henshaw's homemade chili sauce (which sounds delicious) and ketchup – here spelled "catsup" – which Gook has with everything.

So who was Frances M. Deegan, the author of "The Martian and the Milkmaid"? Frances M. Deegan is another of those enigmatic women writers of the golden age about whom we know next to nothing. She published seventeen SFF stories between 1944 and 1952, all in Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories. Some people believe that Frances M. Deegan was a house name and that the person behind the name was William L. Hamling, editor at Ziff-Davis Publishing, publisher of both Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories. Hamling happened to be married to a fellow writer named Frances Yerxa (widow of SFF writer Leroy Yerxa), whose maiden name may have been Deegan, which would support that theory. Though stories by Frances M. Deegan continued to appear in Ziff-Davis magazines, well after Hamling left the company. And considering the case of Allison V. Harding, I have to wonder why it's inevitably women authors who are believed to be house names, while obscure male authors are nonetheless assumed to be actual people, unless proven otherwise.

However, the name Frances M. Deegan also appears around the same time in crime fiction magazines like Detective Story Magazine and Mammoth Detective. The latter was a Ziff-Davis magazine, but Detective Story Magazine was published by Street and Smith. US census records also show that there was a Frances Marie Deegan, who was born 1901 in Iowa and died 1975 in Los Angeles. Interestingly, 1901 is also the year in which Gook crashlands on the Henshaw's farm.

The January 1946 issue of Mammoth Detective, which contains Frances M. Deegan's autobiographical essay.

Eric Leif Davin also dug up a brief autobiographical article that accompanied one of Frances M. Deegan's stories in Mammoth Detective. According to this article, Deegan was born in Iowa and never married, because no one ever asked her. After a stint as an office worker, she went to Chicago in the 1920s to become an actress and nightclub singer and later moved to New York and St. Louis. Note the parallels to her character Hebe, another country girl trying to make it in show business in the big city. Frances M. Deegan hung out with gangsters, was shot at and beaten up and did PR work for an anti-Prohibition organisation. However, Frances M. Deegan always wanted to write and not just anti-Prohibition leaflets either. One day, she met Raymond A. Palmer, editor at Ziff-Davis, and asked him if she might submit something to him. Palmer told her to go ahead and thus began the SFF and crime writing career of Frances M. Deegan. "The Martian and the Milkmaid" seems to have been her first published story.

So there really appears to have been a writer named Frances M. Deegan and the name similarity to William L. Hamling's wife was just a coincidence. If the autobiographical article she wrote for Mammoth Detective is even remotely correct, Frances M. Deegan also seems to have had a fascinating life. Once again, I wish we knew more about her.

"The Martian and the Milkmaid" is never going to be a classic. Instead, it's a typical example of the bread and butter stories (quite literally in this case) that filled the pages of the science fiction pulps of the golden age. But even if the story is no classic, it's nonetheless interesting and far from the worst story I have reviewed for this project.

Retro Review: "The Huddling Place" by Clifford D. Simak

Is it me or were some of the 1944 Astounding covers really ugly?

"The Huddling Place" is a science fiction short story by Clifford D. Simak, which was first published in the July 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version may be found online here. "The Huddling Place" is part of Simak's City cycle and has been widely reprinted.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point!

"The Huddling Place" starts off with the funeral of one Nelson F. Webster. It might be a scene in any contemporary set story, if not for the fact that the pallbearers are robots and that Nelson F. Webster died in 2117, aged eighty-three.

Our narrator is Jerome A. Webster, son of the late Nelson F. Webster, and one of only three Websters still left alive. The other two are Jerome's son Thomas, who will soon be leaving for Mars, and Jerome's mother, who never gets a name. In the course of the funeral, We also get a brief rundown of the Websters (and a Webster father-in-law, William "Gramp" Stevens who is an important character in the first "City" story published earlier the same year)  interred in the family crypt on the Webster estate. Again, only one woman is mentioned, Mary Webster, Jerome's late wife.

For four generations now, the Websters have lived on a spacious estate with whispering pine trees, meadows, a rocky ridge and a stream full of trouts, ever since John J. Webster, great-great-grandfather of Jerome, moved there after humans abandoned cities in the twentieth century in favour of what the characters consider gracious living on huge lots of land, served by a small army of robots.
The story follows Jerome through his day, as he retreats into his study to mourn his father, not even bothering to say good-bye to the priest who conducted the funeral service. Instead, Jerome leaves the Websters' faithful robot butler Jenkins to deal with the priest, just as he leaves him to deal with everything else.

We learn that Jerome never leaves his house, even though he spent several years as a doctor on Mars in his younger days. Nowadays, however, Jerome doesn't see any need to leave his house. After all, modern technology allows him to speak to anybody, virtually visit any place, attend a concert or play, browse a library and conduct any business he might want to conduct, all from the comfort of his home. This short paragraph is probably the most prescient thing published in Astounding in the entire year of 1944, because the Internet allows us to do all of that from the comfort of our own home as well. Though I hope that most of us react to those possibilities a little differently than Jerome.

Jerome's contemplations are interrupted by a virtual visit from an old friend, the Martian philosopher Juwain whom Jerome met during his time as a doctor on Mars. Juwain has come to pay his respects to the late Nelson F. Webster and also to ask why Jerome never physically returned to Mars for a visit, even though the Martians owe him a great debt, because Jerome wrote the book on Martian medicine. For we learn that the Martians never really had doctors before the humans arrived. Instead, they simply accepted illnesses as fatal. Meanwhile, Martians have come up with orderly and logical philosophy that may be applied as a practical tool, rather than the fumbling human attempts at philosophy. And Juwain is about to make a further breakthrough in philosophy, a breakthrough that will help both humans and Martians. A. Williams' interior art depicts Juwain as a being with flimsy tentacle-like limbs and a huge domed head, which certainly suggests a species of philosophers.

This is not the first time in Astounding in the 1940s that different races and species are given different specialisations they are inherently suited for. Something similar can be found in the Jay Score stories by Eric Frank Russell, one of which – "Symbiotica" – was a finalist for the 1944 Retro Hugo. Though it's certainly interesting that the superior Martian philosophy is orderly, logical and practically applicable, i.e. it is a type of philosophy that would have appealed to John W. Campbell. Meanwhile, humanity still gets to be superior, if only because medicine is a much more vital field than philosophy for the survival of any species.

The story picks up again at a spaceport, where Jerome sees his son Thomas off to Mars. Jerome can barely keep himself from begging Thomas to stay on Earth. Once the spaceship carrying Thomas to Mars has lifted off, Jerome suffers the mother of all panic attacks. He barely makes it across the open stretch of concrete back to the terminal building, where he huddles on a chair near the wall, terrified of the noise and the strangers all around him.

Jerome is desperate to return home at once, so he can feel safe again. However, the faithful robot butler Jenkins informs him that they can't leave just yet, because the Websters' private helicopter is in need of repair. Jerome freaks out even more. "I understand, sir," Jenkins says, "Your father had it, too."

Now Jenkins reveals that crippling agoraphobia apparently runs in the Webster family and usually sets in at around fifty. That's the true reason why Jerome as well as all the Websters before him never leave their estate. Because they cannot.

Being a doctor, Jerome conducts an experiment and invites some two-hundred and fifty men (Simak's word choice, not mine) to visit him. Only three of those invited actually show up, which suggests to Jerome that more and more of humanity (well, the male half) is succumbing to the same crippling agoraphobia that has affected him. This is, Jerome assumes, the result of humanity's lifestyle living far away from each other on huge tracts of land, where they feel so comfortable that they simply cannot bear to leave the familiar surroundings, unless they absolutely have to. And maybe not even then.

Jerome's theory is tested when he gets a call from a man called Clayborne, an old acquaintance from Mars. Clayborne works for the Martian Medical Commission and has contacted Jerome with an urgent request. After all, Jerome is the leading expert on the Martian brain and Clayborne has a patient who urgently needs a brain operation, an operation only Jerome can carry out. And that patient is none other than Jerome's good friend Juwain who has been asking for Jerome.

"You'll bring him here?" Jerome asks, only to be informed that Juwain cannot be moved. Jerome will have to go to Mars to operate him, otherwise Juwain will die.

"But I cannot come," Jerome tells the increasingly (and understandably) irritated Clayborne. Surely he isn't really needed, surely someone else can carry out the operation. Clayborne, however, won't have none of that. He's sending a spaceship straight to the Webster estate.

Soon thereafter, Jerome receives another call, this time from one Henderson, president of the World Committee, which appears to be the global government in Simak's future. Henderson also insists that Jerome must go to Mars to save Juwain. Because if Juwain dies, the philosophical breakthrough he was about to achieve, a breakthrough which will advance humanity and Martians by a hundred thousand years, dies with him.

To be fair, Jerome is determined to at last try to go to Mars, even though he is utterly terrified. He also realises that even though humanity may have left the cities behind, they have still psychologically chained themselves to their homes. Finally, he realises that he has to break those chains and leave his comfortable home behind, just as humans left the cities behind some two hundred years before. So Jerome forces himself to pack a bag and promptly suffers yet another panic attack.

His panic attack is interrupted by Jenkins who arrives to tell him about a most extraordinary occurrence. A ship landed at the estate and wanted to take Jerome to Mars.

"They are here?" Jerome asks, "Why didn't you call me?"

Jenkins declares that he did not want to bother Jerome, because the whole thing was just too preposterous. So Jenkins personally told the men to leave and when they refused, he threw out by force.

Poor Juwain is doomed and humanity will never learn the philosophical revelations he had in store for them. And all because of an overzealous robot butler.

I enjoyed "Desertion", the other Clifford D. Simak story I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project, a whole lot and it's definitely going on my Retro Hugo ballot. I did not like "The Huddling Place" nearly as much. What is more, the story reminded me of what always irritated me about Simak's stories, when I first read them as a teenager, namely the anti-urbanism.

Now I'm very much a city person and I was even more of a city person, when I was younger. My teenaged self wanted to live in some major international metropolis – London, New York or Paris were my top choices – and literally could not understand that there were people who actually enjoyed living in the countryside or in suburbs or small towns. I always assumed they were forced to live there due to jobs, money issues or families who had the idiotic idea that children should grow up in the countryside. Realising at age fifteen that American suburbs like the ones you always see in horror films were a real thing where real people lived utterly baffled me, because who would choose to live in a horror movie setting?

When I read about city world of Trantor, capital of the Galactic Empire from Isaac Asimov's stories, I thought Trantor was the coolest place ever and immediately would have moved there, if that had been at all possible. And when I first encountered the City cycle by Clifford D. Simak at around the same time, I thought it was a horrible dystopia where human had abandoned the cities to live on country estates where nothing ever happens and no one ever goes anywhere, because there is nowhere to go. Worse, I strongly suspected that Simak was not aware that he was writing about what to me was a horrible dystopia.

My adult self has a more differentiated view of the City stories. Yes, Clifford D. Simak was clearly not a city person and obviously preferred the countryside. Just as he was obviously a dog person. Indeed, I was stunned that there is no dog anywhere in sight in "The Huddling Place", because dogs are so prominent in Simak's fiction, including the City stories.

However, even as early as "The Huddling Place" it is very clear that Simak does not view the cityless world he has created as an unalloyed good (and civilisation does eventually break down in the City cycle and humans die out, while dogs and ants take over the world). After all, Jerome A. Webster is a pitiful person, chained to his home and unable to leave even to save the life of his friend. Furthermore, Jerome is utterly dependent on Jenkins and the other robots. It isn't Jerome himself who makes the fatal final decision, Jenkins makes it for him.

I vaguely remembered that the way the humans treated their robots as slaves to run their oversized estates was one of the things that annoyed me about the City cycle. However, upon rereading the story, I realised that it's not so much the humans who are enslaving the robots. Instead, it's the humans who are slaves to their robots. Furthermore, I also remembered Jenkins as wholly positive figure fully in the "robot as pathos" range, to quote Asimov's classification of science fictional robots. But upon rereading, I found Jenkins an almost sinister figure. Does he truly have the best interests of Jerome and the other Websters at heart or is he slyly making Jerome even more reliant on him? After all, if not for Jenkins, it's quite possible that Jerome might have managed to overcome his fears and gone to Mars after all.

Agoraphobia is another theme that keeps popping up during the golden age, particularly among writers in the orbit of John W. Campbell and Astounding Science Fiction. Isaac Asimov, who suffered from agoraphobia himself, addressed the issue several times, most notably in the Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw novels. Asimov's 1953 science fiction murder mystery The Caves of Steel is set on a future Earth that is pretty much the opposite of the world from Simak's City stories. Here, humanity has retreated to huge domed cities and is terrified of any open space. The 1956 sequel The Naked Sun, meanwhile, is set on a world of suburban sprawl that is even more extreme than that of "The Huddling Place". Here, too, humans live on huge estates tended by robots. But in The Naked Sun, the Solarians not only refuse to leave their palatial homes, they also cannot bear to be in the physical presence of other humans, even members of their own families. Indeed, the similarities between "The Huddling Place" and The Naked Sun are so pronounced that I wonder whether both stories aren't the result of one of John W. Campbell's infamous writing prompts.

It's also interesting to view both "The Huddling Place" and The Naked Sun in the light of the trend towards suburbification after World War II. Because in the 1950s and 1960s, people all over the western world really did turn their back on cities in favour of suburbs built on what had been fields and meadows only a decade before. Of course, those people were far more likely to end up in a Levittown shoebox or a "garden city" housing estate than on a huge multigenerational estate like the Webster home. On the other hand, the McMansions that were popular in the US from the 1980s into the early 2000s do seem to show a trend towards a scaled down version of the Webster home. And while humans post WWII did not actually succumb crippling agoraphobia, people did stop going to cinemas, theatres, restaurants, bars, etc… for a while, preferring to stay at home and watch TV and have dinner parties in the privacy of their own homes. Suburbification is mainly associated with the postwar era, but now I wonder whether those trends were already noticeable in the 1930s and early 1940s and whether stories like "The Huddling Place" and The Naked Sun were a type of "If this goes on…" speculation.

In the real world, the trend towards suburbification and people retreating into the privacy of their homes eventually reversed, as younger people moved back into the cities, once derelict city neighbourhoods became extremely desirable places to live, while some suburbs withered and became places for old people, families and those who can't afford to live in the city. Just as people started going out again and cinemas, theatres, restaurants, etc… rebounded. Furthermore, the postwar trend towards suburbification was a purely western phenomenon anyway. Beyond the western world, people continue to flock to the cities, because that's where the jobs, the opportunities and the facilities are.

Indeed, the world Simak describes in "The Huddling Place" and the other City stories is pretty much unsustainable. It's simply not possible for people to take up so much space, unless the world population has been drastically reduced. And in fact, I always assumed that only a minority of people, mainly in the US, lived like the Websters, while life and cities go on as normal in the rest of the world. And considering how very few women there are in the City stories, I also wonder whether women didn't continue as normal, maybe even happy that the men had walled themselves in.

In many ways, "The Huddling Place" is a very American story. Now many of the stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project feel very American, but "The Huddling Place" is an extreme example, since the story's idea of gracious country living is very American phenomenon. "The Huddling Place" is an early example of what Joanna Russ would eventually call galactic suburbia science fiction and one of the comparatively few that was written by a male author.

Since "The Huddling Place" is a Clifford D. Simak story, it is beautifully written. The nature descriptions do their best to make the reader understand just why Jerome loves his plot of land so much. The panic attack scenes are visceral and will bring back unpleasant memories to anybody who ever suffered a panic attack.

In fact, "The Huddling Place" feels more like a work of mid-century literary fiction than like the sort of hard science fiction normally found in the pages of Astounding. Maybe that is why John W. Campbell felt the need to add a blurb announcing that this story is an important extrapolation of social trends. In fact, if Jenkins and the other robots had been replaced by human servants, the spaceport with an airport or train station and if the dying Juwain had resided in a different country rather than on Mars, "The Huddling Place" wouldn't have felt out of place in a 1940s issue of the Saturday Evening Post or the New Yorker.

A tale about crippling agoraphobia and the dangers of suburbification with rather sinister undertones for such a quiet story.

Retro Review: "Shadow Over Mars" a.k.a. "The Nemesis from Terra" by Leigh Brackett

Mayo wears a sensible coverall for most of the novel, but the cover artist had to give her a brass bikini

Shadow Over Mars by Leigh Brackett is a planetary romance novel, which appeared in the fall 1944 issue of Startling Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version of the novel may be found here.

Many people will probably also know this novel under its alternate title The Nemesis from Terra, under which it was reprinted as one half of an Ace Double (the other half was Collision Course by Robert Silverberg) in 1961 and a few times since. Though unlike the Ace Double reprints of two Eric John Stark stories, which I reviewed for Galactic Journey last year, the only difference between Shadow Over Mars and The Nemesis from Terra seems to be the title. The text is otherwise unchanged, including a persistent misspelling of the Mars moon Deimos as "Diemos".

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

Shadow Over Mars starts off in the ancient Martian city of Ruh, a location that I at least don't remember from any other of Leigh Brackett's Martian adventures. Protagonist Rick Gunn Urquart is on the run, trying to avoid the press gangs of the charmingly named Terran Exploitations Company (well, at least they're honest and there's something to be said for truth in advertising) who are hunting slaves for the mines they operate on Mars. Anybody who doesn't run fast enough is fair game, because evil capitalists need cheap labour.

Rick is a typical Leigh Brackett outlaw protagonist, someone who ekes out a living on the margins of his society. Rick is a drifter, born in space, "in the hull of a tramp freighter…" he proudly declares at one point, "…and never left it since." To the native Martians, Rick is an Earthman (and the titular nemesis from Terra), but that's not how he views himself. And indeed it's interesting that even though most of Leigh Brackett's protagonists are nominally Earthpeople, they have little connection or loyalty to Earth and usually view themselves as something else.

Rick ended up stranded on Mars, when he was fired from his latest job on a spaceship crew after slugging a mate (we're certain he deserved it). He's dead broke, because he left what little money he had in the brothels of Mars. And so he is fair game for the press gangs of the Terran Exploitations Company, press gangs that consist of apelike Martian beings called anthropoids.

Rick easily kills the first batch of anthropoids with his trusty blaster, but the shots draw others and Rick has gotten trapped in a dead end in the maze-like streets of Ruh. Lucky for him, he spots the crack of light of an open door and forces his way inside.

The house is inhabited by an old Martian woman and her grandson. Rick tells them that he means them no harm, but that he will hide out until the press gangs have gone. The old woman offers to read his fortune. Rick doesn't really believe in such things, but he humours the old woman anyway. Her pronouncements regarding his origin turn out to be surprisingly accurate. Then she tells Rick that he is the titular shadow that will fall upon Mars and suddenly attacks him with a knife. Ricks shoots her in self-defence and flees, only to promptly run into the arms of a press gang and end up in the very slave mines he tried so hard to avoid.

In the next few chapters, we encounter the rest of the players and the fractions that are fighting for control of Mars. For starters, there is the Terran Exploitations Company with its director Ed Fallon. Fallon's righthand man is Jaffa Storm, a human telepath from Mercury who is described as tall and dark-skinned. So we have another main character of colour in this novel. But unlike Eric John Stark, Leigh Brackett's other tell and dark-skinned Earthman from Mercury, Jaffa Storm is an unambiguous villain and a particularly nasty one, too.

On the Martian side, we have the boy king Haral and his general Beudach who are plotting to start a rebellion and kick the Earthpeople off Mars. The grandson of the old woman Rick killed immediately runs to Haral and Beudach to inform them about the prophecy and to demand the head of Rick Gunn Urquart as vengeance for his grandmother. Haral, Beudach and their supporters are only too happy to oblige, because they don't want any Earthpeople ruling Mars, whether it's the Terran Exploitations Company or Rick Urquart whose shadow will fall upon Mars. And so the hunt is on for Rick.

The third fraction is the Union Party (I'm sure it's purely coincidental that the name of the party is reminiscent of the term "trade union), a group headed by Earthman Hugh St. John and Martian Eran Mak. They want to unite Earthpeople and Martians and establish a better society on Mars for everybody. However, that requires getting rid of Ed Fallon and his Terran Exploitations Company first. And so Fallon tries to bribe St. John with large sums of money, which St. John gratefully pockets while trying to find proof that Fallon is using slave labour in his mines, so he can report him to the authorities, because even the imperialist Terran Empire of Leigh Brackett's stories frowns upon slavery. You'd figure that the press gangs roaming the streets of Martian cities and snatching people would be proof enough, but apparently not. And so St. John has sent a spy into Fallon's lair, a young Earthwoman named Mayo McCall.

Mayo McCall is a spunky heroine and an all around awesome character. When Jaffa Storm forces a kiss on her, she kicks him in the balls. Nor does she take shit from anybody else. She's probably my favourite female Leigh Brackett character. Mayo works as a technician for the Terran Exploitations Company and absolutely no one finds anything unusual about a woman working as a testing technician for a mining company. Of course, when Shadow Over Mars was written, plenty of women in the real world were working in factories, building airplanes and tanks, testing military equipment, etc… But in the speculative fiction of the golden age, spaceship crews, lab technicians, miners, etc… are all male and women only appear in a few stereotyped roles such as wife, mother, daughter, girlfriend/love interest, housewife, actress, nurse, etc… In this environment, Mayo McCall is a breath of fresh air.

Mayo just happens to be at work, when Rick stages a slave mutiny, because he's not going to let himself be worked to death by the Terran Exploitations Company. At first, Rick's revolt seems to be successful, until Jaffa Storm brings in a Banning Shocker, a weapon that also appears in "Queen of the Martian Catacombs", the first Eric John Stark story. Eric John Stark is only threatened with the Banning Shocker, but in Shadow Over Mars we see it in action. And so Rick's fellow mutineers are either killed or surrender one by one. Rick refuses to surrender and is about to be killed by Jaffa Storm and his men, when Mayo intervenes and tries to get Storm and Fallon to confess that they're using slave labour. Unfortunately, Mayo is unmasked as a spy instead. In the resulting shoot-out, Rick and Mayo flee into the mine tunnels and eventually escape into a maze of fossilised bore tunnels left behind by the long extinct mud-worms of Mars.

If the huge Martian mud-worms seem a tad familiar to you, you're not alone. Because those mud-worms are very clearly the ancestors of the sandworms from Frank Herbert's classic novel Dune. And indeed, there is quite a bit of Brackett influence detectable in Dune. I guess Frank Herbert was a fan.

Rick and Mayo eventually escape the tunnels and find themselves in the Martian dessert, where they encounter a group of tiny winged people, a native Martian race that also appears elsewhere in Leigh Brackett's work such as her 1949 novel Sea-Kings of Mars a.k.a. The Sword of Rhiannon. The winged people are allied with Haral and therefore immediately recognise Rick as the man all Mars is looking for. So he and Mayo are taken prisoner.

The winged people are planning to hand Rick over to Haral, Beudach and the grandson of the prophetess. Only a young woman named Kyra takes a liking to Rick, because he is so alive and she believes he could bring that life to dying Mars. Mayo agrees and thinks that Rick might be an asset to the Union Party. Rick himself isn't sure what he believes except that he wouldn't mind ruling Mars with Mayo by his side. Mayo points out that that's not what she meant. She also tells Rick that she loves him, even though she isn't sure if he is able to love anybody except himself.

Now I'm a big fan of Leigh Brackett, but one thing that often bothers me about her stories is that her characters tend to fall in love with each other a little too quickly. The most glaring example is Eric John Stark falling in love with the titular character of "Black Amazon of Mars" as soon as he realises that the masked Martian warlord he has been fighting is really an attractive woman, completely forgetting that she had him whipped nearly to death only two days before. The romance between Rick and Mayo does not come quite so out of nowhere – after all, they did survive the ordeal in the worm tunnels together. And to be fair, Rick isn't entirely sure at this point whether he loves Mayo. He just knows that there is a connection between them and wants to see where it goes.

Nor are Rick and Mayo the only characters affected by insta-love. Kyra also falls in love with Rick at first sight, even though she knows that he doesn't feel the same. Hugh St. John quietly pines for Mayo and Jaffa Storm also wants to possess her, even though Mayo kicked him in the balls at their first meeting. Maybe, humans from Mercury have a touch of masochism in Leigh Brackett's version of the solar system.

What is more, believable romantic relationships are fairly rare in golden age science fiction. Leigh Brackett may tend towards insta-love, but at least her characters do get to have feeling at all, which is more than you can say for many other stories of the period. Of all the stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project, the most affecting love story not written by Leigh Brackett was that between a man and his spaceship. And I liked Rick and Mayo very much. They definitely have chemistry and I could easily imagine them being played by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in a movie. Nonetheless, I would have preferred it if the relationship between Rick and Mayo had developed a little more slowly.

Though Rick and Mayo haven't got much time, before their captors take them to Haral and his court. Rick won't beg for his own life, but asks the Martians to let Mayo go. The Martians, however, have no intention of letting anybody go. And so Rick is crucified against the nearest wall, while the Martian chiefs continue to plot the overthrow of the Terran Exploitations Company.

The Martian war council is interrupted by Jaffa Storm and his troops, who kill the Martians, kidnap Mayo and leave Rick for dead. However, Rick is not dead, not yet. Nor is he the only survivor of the massacre. Haral's general Beudach and the winged girl Kyra survived as well. Together, they free Rick. Beudach, who has been quite impressed by Rick's courage and strength, clamps the collar of Ruh, symbol of the rulership over Mars, around Rick's neck before succumbing to his injuries.

Now Rick has the collar and the prophecy to back him up, he and Kyra gather the troops. They persuade Martians and Earthpeople living on Mars to work together to bring down the Terran Exploitations Company. Rick also enlists the help of Hugh St. John and Eran Mak and their Union Party.

The cover of the 1951 edition

Meanwhile, Jaffa Storm hasn't been idle. He killed his boss Ed Fallon to take his place and is using his telepathic abilities to learn of his enemies' plans before they can put them into action. To counter Storm's abilities, Rick decides to do something completely unpredictable and crashes a spaceship into the headquarters of the Terran Exploitations Company. The element of surprise gives Rick the edge and the combined army of Martians and Earthpeople manage to overcome Storm's forces. However, Storm has fled and taken Mayo with him.

Rick is determined to go after them, but first he has to deal with treachery from his own allies, when Hugh St. John and Eran Mak double-cross him. They knock Rick out, steal the collar of Ruh and tell Earthpeople and Martians that he betrayed them both. Then they put Rick on a spaceship bound for Earth with fifty thousand credits to make him go away. But Rick isn't someone you can get rid of that easily. He uses the fifty thousand credits to bribe his way off the ship.

He finds Kyra who was mortally wounded in the attack on the Terran Exploitations Company. She dies in Rick's arms, but not before telling him where Storm has fled with Mayo. I have to admit that I was disappointed that poor Kyra was fridged like that. Yes, obviously there was no future for Rick and her, but couldn't Brackett have found someone else for her? Or have Kyra remain happily single and working to build a better Mars?

After many more ordeals, Rick finally tracks down Jaffa Storm in the polar cities of Mars, where an ancient non-human race lies in stasis and dreams, while their marvellous technology still lies around, ripe for the taking. Rick has no weapons, but nonetheless he manages to outwit Storm by using his telepathy against him. For while Storm can sense which move Rick is going to make next, he is unaware that Rick is lefthanded and therefore miscalculates his countermoves.

Rick kills Storm and rescues Mayo. Together, they head back to confront the treacherous Hugh St. John and Eran Mak. Rick tells them in no unclear terms that he will not be bought off with fifty thousand credits. After all, Rick tells them, he was the one who suffered, was crucified and almost killed on more than one occasion, while St. John and Mak sat around in their office twiddling their thumbs. Also, Rick knows the secrets of the polar cities with their fantastic weapons and he will use them if he has to.

Luckily, Rick has no interest in ruling Mars. St. John and Mak can have that job, thank you very much. Rick would much rather have Mayo – as well as a spaceship and a crew to explore the asteroid belt and Jupiter plus trading privileges. After all, he was born in space and that's where he will return.

The cover of the 1961 Acve Double edition shows Rick in chains.

No one wrote better planetary adventures than Leigh Brackett and Shadow Over Mars perfectly showcases her skills. There are thrills and action aplenty as well as twists and turns and the nigh psychedelic descriptions of alien landscapes that Brackett excelled at.

Shadow Over Mars was Brackett's first science fiction novel (she also penned a hardboiled crime novel entitled No Good From a Corpse in the same year). In many ways it feels like a prototype for her later work, particularly the Eric John Stark stories as well as her 1949 novel Sea-Kings of Mars a.k.a. The Sword of Rhiannon. A lot of elements from this novel – the prophecy, the slave rebellion, the Banning Shocker, the polar cities of Mars with their mysterious non-human inhabitants, the winged people of Mars and the dark-skinned humans of Mercury – would all show up again in future stories.

But while Eric John Stark may be physically closer to Jaffa Storm, there are also many similarities between his character and Rick Urquart. Both are drifters without a home or a loyalty to any particular planet. Erik John Stark was an orphan raised by a Mercurian natives and refers to himself as N'chaka, the man without a tribe. Meanwhile, Rick was born in space and doesn't belong on any planet.

Now most of Leigh Brackett's protagonists are drifters and outlaws, but Rick Urquart is a little more cynical than most of them. Eric John Stark's involvement with various uprisings against villainous capitalists and colonialists are inevitably motivated by idealism, even if he calls himself a mercenary. Rick, on the other hand, is mainly out for himself. His love for Mayo softens him somewhat, but he still has no qualms about blackmailing St. John and Mak to get what he wants. Though to be fair, St. John and Mak have it coming.
 
I can't even blame them for not wanting Rick in charge of Mars, because Rick really isn't the sort of person you'd want to put in charge of anything larger than a spaceship. Never mind that history has shown again and again that the people who lead the revolution are usually not the ones who end up ruling the country afterwards. Nonetheless, Rick is right. St. John and Mak did let him fight and suffer and bleed for their cause and then promptly turned on him. And even if Rick is plainly unsuited to ruling Mars, I can't help but wonder how well Mars will do under the control of the backstabbing St. John and Mak. They are marginally better than Fallon and Storm, if only because they don't enslave anybody (yet). But I can't really imagine them being good rulers. Most likely, they will become the villainous government that the next outlaw hero has to take down in ten or twenty years' time. Leigh Brackett obviously had a strong dislike of politicians and government and it often shows through in her fiction.

The cover of the edition I own has nothing whatsoever to do with the story.

The Sad and Rabid Puppies generally seem to like Leigh Brackett, probably because of the 1970s Skaith trilogy with its evil space hippies and evil space socialists bleeding a beleaguered population dry. However, Leigh Brackett's stories from the 1940s and early 1950s are extremely critical of colonialism, imperialism and capitalism and her heroes are often literal social justice warriors, fighting to liberate a downtrodden native population. These tendencies can be seen in the Eric John Stark stories as well as in the 1944 Retro Hugo finalist "The Citadel of Lost Ships". Shadow Over Mars is another example of Leigh Brackett in social justice warrior mode. And the Terran Exploitations Company are the most blatantly evil capitalists I've ever come across in any Brackett story.

Rick and the kidnapped men slaving away in the mines of the Terran Exploitations Company wear chains and manacles and Rick is often depicted in chains on several of the covers this novel had over the years. Those chains bring to mind not only slavery in the antebellum South – abolished for not quite eighty years when this novel was published and therefore as far removed for 1940s audience as WWII and the Great Depression are for us – but also the chain gangs of convicts that still toiled in fields and built roads in the US South at the time Shadow Over Mars was published. Leigh Brackett often tackled contemporary social issues in her stories, which is why I'm so surprised that those who believe that good science fiction should be apolitical tend to embrace her work. But then, Leigh Brackett also wrote cracking good action, so maybe that makes it easier to overlook the blatantly political messages in her stories.

Like pretty much all stories of the golden age, Shadow Over Mars is dated in places. The apelike anthropoids the Terran Exploitations Company uses as disposable muscle are referred to as "black boys" by those on the receiving end of their fists, which is not a word choice anybody would make today. The smoking, always present in golden age speculative fiction, is also really notable here. Rick, Jaffa Storm and pretty much every other male character smokes. At one point, his trusty pack of cigarettes even save Rick from a pit full of flesh-eating psychedelic killer flowers.

But in spite of the dated aspects, Shadow Over Mars is another great and glorious adventure from the queen of space opera. It would make a great addition to the 1945 Retro Hugo ballot, especially since 1944 wasn't a strong year for SFF novels.

Retro Review: "I, Rocket" by Ray Bradbury

"I, Rocket" by Ray Bradbury is a military science fiction short story, which appeared in the May 1944 issue of Amazing Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

As the title implies, "I, Rocket" is a story written from the POV of a spaceship. This isn't all that unusual in the modern era, see the Imperial Radch trilogy by Ann Leckie or "Damage" by David D. Levine. But while the science fiction and fantasy of the golden age are full of sentient machines, often possessed or otherwise malevolent, I don't know any other story of this period which has a machine, in this case a spaceship, as a POV character.

Pronouns are always tricky with non-human characters. And since neither the rocket nor Ray Bradbury have expressed a pronoun preference, I have decided to go with "she", since seagoing ships and spaceships are traditionally referred to by feminine pronouns. Besides, the crew also refers to the rocket as "she".

At the beginning of the story, the rocket is lying ruined on a barren pebbled plateau with twisted jets and bashed fore-plates. It will, the rocket calculates, take a few hundred years for rust and corrosion to break her down. And since the rocket has a lot of time on its hands, she decides to share her story.

The rocket was created as a warship to serve in the war between Earth and Mars. Her first captain was a man called Lamb, a man who is described as wrinkled brown leather with diamond eyes and uneven white teeth. Does this man that Captain Lamb is a man of colour or merely that he wears brown leather? It's not entirely clear at this point, though Captain Lamb's face is described as brown and wrinkled throughout, so I assume that he is indeed a man of colour.

The rocket experiences her first launch and notes that this is the first time she's outside the hangar and the base to see the world. She is surprised to find that it is round. There are more surprises in store for our rocket. Momentum, zero gravity, the gravitational forces of other celestial bodies and the indescribable tides of space.

During the rocket's first trip, we learn more about her crew. We learn that Captain Lamb is in love with a Martian dancer whom he hopes to take back to Earth with him after the war. The cook, meanwhile, is eager for revenge, because his parents died in a Martian attack. Two other crewmen, Conrad and Hillary, are in love with the same woman. The young navigator Ayres is experiencing a religious awakening, something which is apparently common among spaceship crews.

And then there are Anton Larion and Leigh Belloc, two crewmen who are planning to sabotage the rocket. The rocket is aware of their plot, but has no way of warning Captain Lamb and the rest of the crew. However, the rocket is resourceful. She deals with the saboteur Belloc and takes him out via a bursting oil pipe. During the confusion that follows, the second saboteur Larion blurts out a confession and tries to escape in a lifeboat. However, our rocket causes the airlock to malfunction, shooting Larion out into space. She likens this to an immune system reaction.

The rocket experiences her first battle and then many others. She also loses two crewmembers to the war. And when the war is finally over, our rocket is converted into a cargo vessel and given a new captain and crew. She transports freight from Venus and Mars to Earth for five years, until she crashes on a asteroid and her crew is killed.

The rocket lies wrecked on the pebbled plateau for four months, until a one-man patrol ship finds her. And the captain of that ship is none other than Captain Lamb, now patrolman, who misses his old ship just as much as she misses him and therefore set out to search for her when she was lost.

Captain Lamb confesses to the rocket that she was the only thing he ever truly loved. Apparently, things didn't work out with the Martian dancer. It also turns out that Captain Lamb is no happier in peacetime than the rocket. However, the Captain tells the rocket, there is another war brewing, this time with Venus, and good rockets are always needed. And therefore, Captain Lamb will be back with a salvage and repair crew to make the rocket flight ready again and return her to Earth. "I'll be captain of you again," he says.

And so the rocket waits in anticipation for her captain to return.

"I, Rocket" is a beautiful story about the love between a captain and his ship and the difficulties of old soldiers – whether human or metal – to function in peacetime. Ray Bradbury really was on fire in 1944 and I could fill the entire short story category on my Retro Hugo ballot solely with Bradbury stories.

Stories about sentient machinery were a thing during the golden age. "Ride the El to Doom" by Allison V. Harding features a sentient elevated train, "Killdozer!" by Theodore Sturgeon features a murderous bulldozer, "The Twonky" by C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner features an overbearing radio-phonograph console. However, of all these stories "I, Rocket" is not just the only story actually narrated from the POV of a sentient machine, it's also the only one where the sentient machine is unambiguously heroic.

Above, I compared "I, Rocket" to modern science fiction stories with spaceship protagonists. However, "I, Rocket" isn't just a spiritual predecessor to the likes of Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie or "Damage" by David D. Levine. It is a direct ancestor, because like "I, Rocket" both later stories very much hinge on the love between ships and their captains. And yes, "I, Rocket" is a love story, albeit a rather unconventional one.

Apart from Captain Lamb, the rest of the rocket's crew are roughly sketched and yet these characters come alive in their brief interactions with the captain and each other, all observed by the rocket. When two of them die, we feel their loss as keenly as the rocket.

Of the conversations aboard the rocket, the one between Captain Lamb and the young pink-faced navigator Ayres, one of the two crewmembers who will die during the war, is interesting, because it suggests that most spacemen board their ships as staunch atheists, but find religion along the way, inspired by the grandeur of the cosmos. Religion is not a theme that frequently shows up in golden age science fiction – in fact, the only other story I reviewed where religion plays a role is "The Veil of Astellar" by Leigh Brackett – and if religion appears at all, it is usually portrayed negatively. Hence, the conversation between Lamb and Ayres and the implication that all spaceship crews are religious is so unusual.

In my review of "Highwayman of the Void" by Dirk Wylie a.k.a. Frederik Pohl, I noted that a lot of golden age science fiction seems to take place in the same consensus version of the solar system. "I, Rocket" is another story that is clearly set in the pulp science fiction shared universe. And so Martian dancers wear silver bells and Venusian spider-silk is a popular export good, just as in Leigh Brackett's stories of the same period. But then, Ray Bradbury and Leigh Brackett were lifelong friends and critique partners (and even collaborated on one story), so Bradbury probably deliberately inserted those little Easter eggs referring to Brackett's stories.

Ray Bradbury undoubtedly was one of the best stylists of the golden age and "I, Rocket" once again shows off his writing skills. Bradbury attempts to describe what the world and the universe would look like from the POV of a spaceship and likens the rocket's mechanical components and processes going on inside her to the functions of the human body. I particularly liked a passage where the rocket lands on a planet for the first time and likens the mass and the gravity well to the libido and sex drive. But then, rockets are very phallic. Though it is depressing that the most erotic scene in all of the stories I reviewed for this project is that of a rocket landing on Mars.

Of the five Ray Bradbury stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project, one is directly about World War II and three others are stories about war, albeit war in space rather than on Earth. Bradbury never served in the army; he was declared medically unfit due to his bad eyesight. Yet he wrote a lot about wartime experiences, more than most other SFF writers active during World War II. It's also notable that the protagonists of Ray Bradbury's war stories are not soldiers, but a medic retrieving corpses from the battlefield ("Morgue Ship"), a wartime nurse turned murderous mermaid ("Undersea Guardians"), a newsreel photographer ("The Monster Maker") and a war rocket respectively. Bradbury really seems to have wanted to make the point that civilian personnel and other non-combatants (and military vehicles like our rocket) can be as important and heroic as soldiers.

Unlike some of the other 1944 Ray Bradbury stories I reviewed, "I, Rocket" has been reprinted a couple of times. What is more, in 1961 Cele Goldsmith selected it as one of the seven best stories ever published in Amazing for the 35^th anniversary issue alongside such classics as "I, Robot" by Eando Binder  or "Armageddon 2419 A.D." by Philip Francis Nolan, the story which introduced Buck Rogers to the world.

Another winner by Ray Bradbury in what was a very strong year for him.