Retro Review: "Garden of Evil" by Margaret St. Clair

Not an illustration of "Garden of Evil", but a white-washed Eric John Stark from Leigh Brackett's "Queen of the Martian Catacombs".

 

"Garden of Evil" by Margaret St. Clair is a planetary romance short story, which appeared in the summer 1949 issue of Planet Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1950 Retro Hugos, should they ever be held. The story may be found online here.

I came across this story when SFFAudio pointed out on Twitter that the entire summer 1949 issue of Planet Stories, including "Garden of Evil" was now public domain. And since I've enjoyed everything I've read by Margaret St. Clair so far, I decided to make it the subject of my next Retro Review.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

The story begins with a man called Ericson – we never learn his first name – waking  up after spending what appears to be several months in a haze. Ericson is not alone. There is a green-skinned woman named Mnathl with him, who gives him something to eat.

We gradually learn that Ericson is on a planet named Fyhon that is not unlike the Venus of the shared pulp science fiction solar system – a place of jungles and seas – except that it has sunshine on occasion. And in fact I suspect that the reason that Margaret St. Clair did not set her story on Venus is because her alien planet needed to have direct sunlight.

Ericson is an ethnographer supposed to study Fyhon and its people. He fell in love with the lush planet and decided to stay. All would have been well, if Ericson hadn't managed to get himself addicted to a drug called byhror, when he got lost in the jungles of Fyhon during a one-man expedition without supplies or food and had to resort to taking the drug to survive.

When we meet Ericson, he has just been through a lengthy and painful withdrawal and is clean for the first time in three years. Mnathl helped him to get clean by taking him to an otherwise deserted island, strapping him down and subjecting him to a combination of injections of human drugs and the healing properties of some local herbs. The treatment is extremely painful and makes Ericson intermittently violent.

The story made me curious whether medical addiction therapy was already a thing in the 1940s, so I did some research. The results, however, were inconclusive. Methadone, the most commonly used substitution drug, had been developed by German chemists in the late 1930s and was introduced to the US market in 1947, after the US had stolen (and yes, that's what it was) German patents and brand names post WWII, so it was already available by 1949. However, methadone was originally marketed as a painkiller and only was used for drug substitution therapy from the 1960s onwards. However, there had been other attempts at medical addiction therapy before, going back to the late 19^th century. To help them get clean, addicts were injected with all sorts of substances such as cocaine, a solution of gold and strychnine in alcohol, bromide, insulin and even heroin with predictably horrible results. Was Margaret St. Clair familiar with such treatments? It's certainly possible.

Once Ericson is clean again, he is eager to get back to the human settlement of Penhairn and find a job. However, Mnathl insists that they instead go to a place called Dridihad in the unknown heart of the south polar continent of Fyhon. Ericson doesn't want to go to Dridihad, but he doesn't have any choice in the matter, for Mnathl injects him with a drug that saps his will. "Mnathl had made other things in her cooking pots besides soup", a resigned Ericson notes.

Mnathl's drug eventually wears off, but by now Ericson is no longer unwilling to go to Dridihad. After all, the ethnographic paper he plans to publish about this adventure will hopefully help to get him his old job back. Mnathl teaches Ericson how to kindle a fire and hunt, but she refuses to answer any questions about why they are going to Dridihad and what they will find there.

After a few days, Ericson and Mnathl come across a giant pyramid in the jungle. Ericson is fascinated, Mnathl less so. When he asks her who built the pyramid, Mnathl replies that her people built it.

More days pass and Ericson is bitten by a venomous snake. Once again, Mnathl saves him by sucking the poison from the wound, risking her own life in the process. If you're thinking by now that Mnathl is a little too good and too self-sacrificing to be true, you're not alone.

After sixty-six days, Ericson and Mnathl finally reach the foot of the plateau upon which the city of Dridihad lies. After a laborious climb up the plateau, the gates of Dridihad finally open for Mnathl and Ericson.

The people of Dridihad treat Ericson like a prince, while Ericson dreams of the fame and fortune his paper will bring him. After all, none of the human scientists on Fyhon even knew that there was such an ancient and populous city in the heart of the supposedly deserted south polar continent. Too bad that no one in Dridihad will give Ericson any writing materials.

When Mnathl reappears, she is dressed in splendid robes like a queen or a priestess. She takes Ericson hunting on the plateau, shows him around the city and takes him to a ritual in the main temple of Dridihad, which involves sacrificing an animal and eating it. Mnathl officiates at the ritual, which confirms Ericson's suspicions that she is a priestess.

Ericson also wonders why such an important personage even bothered to help an alien drug addict like him and comes to the conclusion that Mnathl is in love with him. This is a problem, because Ericson is not remotely attracted to her.

After several more days and more rituals, rituals which seem to be leading up to some kind of climax, Mnathl takes Ericson to the top of the pyramid-shaped temple. Ericson tries to have an awkward, "It's not you, it's me" conversation with her, but Mnathl blows him off and starts to laugh. She definitely does not love him, but instead wants Ericson to be the messenger of her people to the gods. "And then", Mnathl says, "we eat."

Mnathl's people, she tells him, became interested in Ericson when they heard of his ill-fated solo expedition into the interior of the continent. They were particularly fascinated by Ericson's unusual colouring, a combination of near golden tanned skin and blonde hair. And so they decided that he would be an excellent messenger to their gods and sent Mnathl to find him, nurse him back to health and bring him back to Dridihad.

Ericson now knows what his fate will be. Not only has he witnessed several religious rites by now, he also recalls a remark in another ethnographer's paper that the people of Fyhon are definitely not engaging in ritual cannibalism, which strikes him as very ironic.

However, Ericson is also remarkably resigned to his fate. After all, he is free of his drug addiction now and besides, he got the ethnographic experience of a lifetime, even if he never got to write that paper and never got tenure either. And so Ericson smiles, as the temple guards chop off his head. Mercifully, Margaret St. Clair spares us what comes after.

 

Margaret St. Clair in the 1940s

This is a fascinating story, in spite of the downer ending. On the one hand, it's pure pulp science fiction with a human explorer on an alien planet who falls in with an indigenous beauty and comes to a sticky end. And indeed, if you're the protagonist of a pulp science fiction story, it's never a good idea to hang out with alien women, no matter how beautiful, seductive and helpful they seem to be, because they will inevitably want to enslave you, steal your body, kill you or eat you. Just ask Northwest Smith and Eric John Stark, who narrowly escaped such a fate more than once. In fact, Eric John Stark escapes a similar fate in "Queen of the Martian Catacombs", the lead novella of that very same issue of Planet Stories.

However, Ericson is no Eric John Stark or Northwest Smith. He's a nerdy academic and a recovering drug addict besides. And indeed, the fact that the protagonist is a junkie makes "Garden of Evil" feel almost like a New Wave story from the 1960s at times. Not that the drugs never appeared in the science fiction and fantasy of the pulp era – indeed, a lot of SFF of the 1930s and 1940s is absolutely drug-soaked to the point that I'm glad all that stuff went over my head as a teenager. But while descriptions of alien landscapes may be nigh hallucinogenic and alien opium dens abound in golden age science fiction, the protagonists usually do not dabble in mind-altering substances.

In fact, the only other golden age science fiction story with a drug-addicted protagonist I can think of is Leigh Brackett's "The Moon That Vanished" from 1948 (the protagonist of Brackett's 1944 novelette "Terror Out Of Space" is also high as a kite on amphetamines for most of the story, but he's not an addict). Interestingly, "The Moon That Vanished" bears striking similarities to Margaret St. Clair's 1952 story "Island of the Hands", which I reviewed for Galactic Journey last year. In fact, I wonder whether Brackett and St. Clair knew each other, especially since they both lived in California at the same time, published in the same magazines and tackled similar themes.

Both Brackett and St. Clair deal with colonialism in many of their stories from the 1940s. "Garden of Evil" is no exception, because it's a story about indigenous people turning the tables on a western explorer. Even though he's an ethnographer, Ericson assumes a lot about the indigenous people of Fyhon, that they're primitive, but harmless, that they're stoic and unemotional, that Mnathl is in love with him, that her people definitely do not practice ritual cannibalism. Every single one of those assumptions is wrong. And what makes Ericson a target is his blonde hair and golden tanned skin.

Aliens in pulp science fiction are often stand-ins for indigenous people, usually the indigenous people of North America. "Garden of Evil" is an exception here, because the names, the religious practices and the pyramid-like temples are reminiscent of Central America. Furthermore, the drug that Ericson gets himself addicted to is a powerful natural stimulant found in a type of leaves native to Fyhon, which brings to mind cocaine.

Planet Stories is often dismissed as a purveyor of cliched space opera adventures and indeed, there are many of those to be found in its pages. However, even at its most cliched, the fiction in Planet Stories is always entertaining. Furthermore, the magazine also offered a home to stories, which did not fit the rather narrow editorial standards of the more upscale science fiction mags like Astounding or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which had only just started in 1949, or Galaxy, which would start up the following year and would never publish "that pulp stuff". Or can you imagine John W. Campbell publishing a story like "Garden of Evil", where the protagonist is a down and out drug addict (even if he also is a scientist), who does not triumph due to his human ingenuity, but instead loses his head at the end?

Margaret St. Clair is one of the neglected woman authors of the golden age (though her careers spans both the silver age and the New Wave as well and she kept writing into the early 1980s). I have no idea why she isn't better known, since Margaret St. Clair can easily stand alongside Leigh Brackett, C.L. Moore and Andre Norton with regard to quality of her fiction. She was also very versatile – more versatile than any of the others except maybe C.L. Moore with her work spanning science fiction, fantasy and horror and ranging from screwballs comedies like "The Sacred Martian Pig" (which I should really review for Retro Reviews sometime, since it's such a delightful story) to downers like "Garden of Evil".

Yet when her name comes up at all these days, it's usually in connection with Appendix N, the one page list of inspirational science fiction and fantasy authors and novels for further reading to be found in the back of the first Dungeon & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide. Even though the Dungeon Masters Guide was published more than forty years ago, there has been a renewed interested in works listed in Appendix N in the past few years. And whenever Appendix N is discussed, Margaret St. Clair is often mentioned as the most obscure author on the list (here is a recent example), though personally I find several others (John Bellairs, Sterling Lanier, Andrew J. Offutt) more obscure.

Like many of Margaret St. Clair's stories, "Garden of Evil" has never been reprinted, which is a pity because it's a fascinating story which combines the adventure of pulp science fiction with the sensibilities of the New Wave. Highly recommended.

Retro Review: "The Golden Apples of the Sun" by Ray Bradbury

"The Golden Apples of the Sun" is a science fiction short story by Ray Bradbury, which appeared in the November 1953 issue of Planet Stories. It would have been eligible for the 1954 Retro Hugos, awarded in 2004, but neither made the ballot nor the longlist. The magazine version may be found here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

The narrator of the story is the unnamed captain of a spaceship called the Copa de Oro a.k.a. Prometheus a.k.a. Icarus, whose mission it is to fly to the sun and retrieve some of its fire or rather fusion power in a giant cup held by a giant remote-controlled hand. What could possibly go wrong with this plan, particularly given the name(s) of the spaceship?

In order to survive the trip to the sun, the Copa de Oro/Prometheus/Icarus is cooled down to a temperature of one thousand degrees below zero. Her crew can only survive by wearing protective suits. The first disaster to befall the mission happens when the protective suit of the first mate, a man named Bretton, fails and Bretton freezes instantly to death.

But more danger awaits, for the ice on the ceiling of the control room suddenly starts to melt, when an auxiliary cooling agent pump breaks down at precisely the worst moment. The captain and the crew frantically scramble to fix it before they are burned to cinders.

One of the crew members asks the captain whether to pull out or stay, but the captain orders to stay the course, because the mission has almost reached its climax. And so the captain operates the cup via what would eventually be called a "waldo", while the rest of the crew still frantically tries to fix the broken pump.

The pump is repaired at just the right moment, the captain pulls the cup with the solar fire into the spaceship and the Copa de Oro/Prometheus/Icarus turns around for the long journey back to Earth, her mission a success.

I came across this story, while checking early 1950s issues of Planet Stories for women authors not named Leigh Brackett. I read it a long time ago and remember liking it, so I decided to reread it.

"The Golden Apples of the Sun" is very short, only four pages in magazine format. There is only one named character – who only gets a name when he dies – and the plot is very slight. There is a dangerous mission, there are some complications, everything is resolved at the last minute and the mission is a resounding success.

In the hands of any other author, this story would have been a forgettable filler. And indeed I shudder to imagine what this story would have looked like, if it had been published in Astounding, full of infodumps and clunky technobabble and nonsense science.

However, "The Golden Apples of the Sun" is a Ray Bradbury story. And so what makes it special is not the slight plot, but Bradbury's poetic language, filtered through the POV of the nameless captain.

Like most Ray Bradbury characters, the nameless captain shares Bradbury's idealised midwestern small town childhood (which at least according to this article by Colleen Abel likely never happened that way). And so we get lots of imagery of seasons changing. The heat of the sun is compared to the "sweltering dog-mad days of August", the interior of the ship is compared to "all the coldest hours of February". When the pump fails and the ice begins to melt, the captain likens it first to the last icicle of winter finally melting in April and then to a warm summer rain. There is also a striking description of the ship and its crew burning up in the heat of the sun, "popped like strawberries in a furnace".

The story is also full of allusions of mythology and literature. The triple name of the ship refers to Prometheus who stole the fire from the gods, Icarus who flew to close to the sun, so that his wings melted, and Cup of Gold, John Steinbeck's 1929 debut novel, which was probably better remembered in 1953 than it is now, since it's a historical novel about the life of Henry Morgan and rather atypical of Steinbeck's work. The title of the story is a reference to the last line of the poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus" by William Butler Yeats. "Fear no more the heat of the sun" is a reference to Cymbeline by William Shakespeare. There is also a reference to the 1912 mythological novel The Crock of Gold by James Stephens, an author who must have been a lot more popular in the mid 20^th century than he is now, since C.L. Moore also referred to his novella Deirdre in "No Woman Born".

Indeed, one thing I find fascinating about golden age speculative fiction is how many literary references there are, including some so obscure these days that they require googling. Meanwhile, contemporary speculative fiction is far more likely to refer to other SFF works or various media properties than non-genre literature. Unless it's Star Trek, which is full of references to Shakespeare with some Dickens and Sherlock Holmes thrown in.

Those who don't care for Ray Bradbury's writing tend to claim that he was not a "real"™ science fiction writer, because his stories focus more on atmosphere and mood and less on hard science. And indeed, Bradbury was not particularly interested in technobabble and infodumps, which is probably why he didn't get along with John W. Campbell of Astounding and found his market elsewhere. However, while Bradbury does not focus on the science, what science there is in his stories is actually pretty sound by the standards of the time.

Of course, the mission of the Copa de Oro/Prometheus/Icarus is impossible. Even if it were possible for a spaceship to get close enough to the sun to grab some solar plasma (I assume that's what they want to grab, but then Bradbury only vaguely speaks of fire), it would certainly yield fascinating scientific results, but not limitless fusion energy. Nor would constantly cooling the spaceship down protect it from incineration. The ESA Solar Orbiter and NASA's Parker Solar Probe, the closest real world equivalents to the Copa de Oro/Prometheus/Icarus, are protected by heat shields and reflective aluminium rather than cooling circuits. They are also unmanned.

However, Bradbury's description of the cooling system of the ship – even it wouldn't actually do what it's supposed to do – is pretty sound and I'm totally stealing the "ribbed boa constrictor coils" through which the cooling agent flows for a translation sometime. The "waldo" like grab mechanism to retrieve a sample of solar plasma also isn't unlike the robotic arms used aboard the late space shuttle and the International Space Station.

I first read the story in this 1970 UK paperback edition of "The Golden Apples of the Sun", which I found in the university used bookstore.

I also liked the paragraph where the captain muses about the motive for their perilous mission, starting out with all sorts of reasonable ideas about unlimited fusion energy and unlocking the secrets of the sun, including the line "the atomic bomb is pitiful and small", which must have been shocking indeed barely a year after the first hydrogen bomb test. But after all the very reasonable scientific motivations, the captain finally comes to the true reason: Because we can and because it's fun. Somehow, I can't imagine a line like that in Campbell's Astounding.

Even though it's fairly slight, "The Golden Apples of the Sun" is a popular and beloved story that has been reprinted umpteen times and gave its title to the eponymous collection. In fact, I'm surprised that it did not make the ballot nor the longlist for the 1954 Retro Hugos, considering how well known the story is. But then the competition was extremely strong that year – the winner in the short story category was "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke. And besides, Ray Bradbury got to take home (literally, since he was still alive at the time) a Retro Hugo for Best Novel for Fahrenheit 451, so I strongly suspect that he didn't mind not getting a nomination for "The Golden Apples of the Sun".

Not much in the way of plot and character, but beautifully written and a very typical example of Ray Bradbury's writing in the 1950s.

Retro Review: "And the Gods Laughed" by Fredric Brown

Now that the finalists for the 1945 Retro Hugos have announced, it's time to get back to Retro Reviews and cover those finalists I missed the first time around. I'll start off with "And the Gods Laughed", a science fiction short story by Fredric Brown that was published in the Spring 1944 issue of Planet Stories and is a finalist for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

"And the Gods Laughed" starts off with the line "You know how it is when you're with a work crew on one of the asteroids." It's an opening that pulls you right in. For not only is the reader tempted to reply, "No, actually I don't", but they also want to find out exactly what it is like to be part of a work crew on an asteroid. Furthermore, Brown also uses this first line to establish the setting of the story, namely a mining crew on an asteroid.

Over the next page or so, the first person narrator – we later learn that his name is Hank – tells us that asteroid mining mainly means being stuck in a very confined space with four other people and nothing in the way of entertainment. Because space is at a premium both on the mining outpost and aboard the spaceship that takes the crew there, so it's not possible to take along any books, magazines or other distractions. Nor is there radio reception except for a once-per-day newscast. And since a shift is only four hours long due to the technical limitations of space suits and airlocks as well as due to union regulations, this means that the five man work crews (and they are all men, of course) have a lot of time to fill.

As golden age science fiction goes, "And the Gods Laughed" offers a more realistic image of what space travel is really like than many other stories. Because conditions aboard spacecraft and space stations are often cramped – though the ISS does have a selection of books, DVDs, games, etc… available – and people are stuck together in a confined space for a long time. Interestingly, Brown also mentions at one point that Jupiter has several previously unknown satellites – "almost an asteroid belt", as Hank explains – which endanger spaceships trying to land on its moons. Voyager 1 and 2 as well as later missions to Jupiter would prove this prediction right. In 1944, when "And the Gods Laughed" was published, Jupiter had eleven known satellites. By 2020, it has 79. It also has rings.

Brown's asteroid miners spend their copious amounts of free time by spinning yarns and telling stories. Again, this is not entirely unrealistic – there are reports that storytelling is an ability prized in prison. Other activities that might occur between five men trapped together on an asteroid (or in a prison) for months on end are only hinted at.

The narrator Hank makes it very clear in his introduction that most of the stories the miners tell each other are tall tales and must not be taken too seriously. Then we are plunged right into the tail end of such a tall tale, when one of the miners, a man called Charlie Dean, recalls the time he spent fighting a hostile Martian race called the bolies, who look like alligators on stilts. And just in case we don't get whom the bolies are supposed to represent, the narrator helpfully informs us that the bolies think and fight a lot like Native Americans during the Indian wars of the 19^th century. Not that Hank knows much about that – in fact, he muses whether the Native Americans used crossbows or longbows to fight the white settlers.

In his story, Charlie mentions using zircon earrings to impress the bolies (more historical parallels), which causes Hank to launch into a story of his own about the first expedition to Ganymede, where the natives go naked wearing nothing but earrings. Only that, so Hank explains, the natives don't wear earrings, but the earrings wear them. Now Hank has the others hooked, he launches into his story.

We learn that eight months before, Hank was a crewmen on the first successful mission to Ganymede. The members of the expedition team were Dick Carney, the skipper, Art Willis, a fellow crewman, and three scientists, a biologist and linguist named Lecky, a geologist and mineralogist named Haynes and a botanist named Hilda Race. Yes, there is an actual woman scientist in this story, though she fills the traditional position of botanist (women on mixed gender spaceship crews in older science fiction are almost inevitably biologists, botanists or medical doctors). Hank's scant remarks about Hilda are also quite sexist – at one point he calls her "a hippopotamus acting kittenish".

Once the ship lands on Ganymede, the crew quickly encounters the native people and notice that they all wear an earring in one ear only. Biologist/linguist Lecky is sent to make contact with Hank and Art Willis acting as guards. They briefly leave Lecky alone in the native village to survey the surroundings and encounter another alien who is of the same species as the others, but does not wear an earring. He is also a lot more hostile.

When Hank and Art pick up Lecky, they notice that he is wearing one of the native's earrings. Lecky explains that the earring was a gift and that he gave the Ganymedeans a slide-rule in exchange. Hank and Art wonder why Lecky would give the aliens a slide-rule rather than the usual trinkets reserved for such encounters. Lecky explains that the aliens were fascinated by the slide-rule and quickly figured out how to use it. Lecky also explains that even though the Ganymedeans seem primitive, they have an advanced understanding of mathematics, science and philosophy. Finally, Lecky is curiously protective of the earring, which makes him an honourary member of the Ganymedean tribe, and won't take it off.

Further trips to the village consist of two scientists and one crewman as a guard. The first team consists of Lecky, Hilda Race and Art Willis. Upon her return to the ship, Hilda is wearing an earring as well and won't take it off either. The next day, Hank accompanies Lecky and Haynes to the village. Haynes declares that while he wants one of the earrings to analyse, he certainly won't stoop to wearing it.

While the two scientists are in the village, Hank takes off to explore the surroundings. By now we get the impression that Hank is not very good at his job, considering he leaves the people he is supposed to be guarding alone twice. He hears Haynes scream and comes running, only to find Haynes on the ground with what looks like blood on his shirt. Haynes seems dazed and insists that nothing is wrong, that he simply stumbled and spilled some wine. Oh yes, and he is also wearing an earring, even though he insisted earlier that he wouldn't.

Hank slips away again and watches two Ganymedeans trying to cross a stream, when one of them is attacked by an unseen creature and has their legs bitten off. Their companion drags them ashore. The Ganymedean is remarkably unbothered by having their legs bitten off. The injured Ganymedean tries to get up and notices that they cannot stand or walk because they no longer have any legs. So the injured Ganymedean nods to his companions, who removes their earring, whereupon the legless Ganymedean collapses – quite dead. Almost as if the earring was animating the alien.

Hank is understandably disturbed by this. He makes an even more disturbing discovery when he returns to the ship with Lecky and Haynes and notices that Haynes' shirt is not just bloody, it's also torn and has matching holes in the front and back. Holes that look as if someone had stabbed a spear through Haynes' chest.

Back at the ship, Hank notices that Lecky, Hilda and Haynes are all acting strangely. Plus, Art Willis is now sporting an earring as well. Furthermore, they seem to forget to talk at times and just stare at each other, before they suddenly resume talking in mid sentence.

Hank bides his time and waits until he can catch Dick Carney alone to share his suspicions. He corners Dick and tells him point blank that the other four are no longer the same people they were at the start of the journey. Whereupon, Dick sighs and says, "Well, it didn't work. We need more practice then." Hank realises too late that Dick is wearing an earring as well, though he is wearing it as a bracelet hidden under the sleeve of his uniform.

Dick threatens Hank with a gun and promises to tell him everything, which Lecky – the leader – then proceeds to do. Hank and the reader learn that the earring creatures have no name for either their race or its individual members. Instead, they refer to themselves by numbers. They are telepathic and parasites, which means they can only live when they take over another lifeform. It doesn't matter if that lifeform is alive or dead – after all, Haynes was killed before the earring creatures took him over.

Hank also learns that the earring creatures – or earring gods, as the Ganymedeans call them, hence the title – come from outside the solar system and arrived on Ganymede with alien visitors a very long time ago. Ever since then, they've been stuck there, because the Ganymedeans don't have space travel and the earring creatures cannot do anything without accessing their hosts' knowledge and memories. However, now that Earthpeople have landed on Ganymede the earring creatures finally have a way to get off the moon as well as a whole new planet and solar system to conquer.

Hank was the only crewmember not taken over, because the earring creatures wanted to use him as a guinea pig to see if he'd notice anything off. But now that the earring creatures know that they need to be more careful, Hank is no longer of any use and will be taken over as well. And so Lecky hands him an earring and tells him to put it on, otherwise he'll be shot. The earring creatures prefer to take over undamaged and living bodies, but they'll also take a dead one, if necessary.

Hank, however, launches himself at Lecky and manages to grab hold of the gun. He shoots his fellow crewmembers, but the shots don't even slow them down, let alone hurt them. So Hank flees out into the Ganymedean night. The earring creatures don't even bother to pursue him, cause they know he won't survive for long out in the cold and with insufficient oxygen.

Hank's tale stops at this point. Charlie asks what happened next and how he managed to escape, Hank says that he didn't. He just passed out from lack of oxygen and awoke the next morning aboard the ship.

While he was telling his story, Hank grabbed Chekhov's Gun (Anton, the Russian playwright, not Pavel, the Enterprise crewmember) from the wall and started to clean it. Conveniently, he finishes cleaning the gun just as he finishes his story. However, Hank's fellow asteroid miners Charlie Dean and Blake Powers are not as easily tricked as Hank himself. And so Charlie launches himself at Hank, grabs hold of the gun and points it at Hank.

Blake, who is the captain, still half believes that Hank was just spinning some spaceman's yarn. But just to be on the safe side, he order Charlie to keep the gun and Hank to roll up his sleeves and trouser legs. When this does not reveal any mysterious jewellery, Blake orders Hank to take off his clothes. Only when Hank is buck naked (no, there is nothing odd at all about two guys who haven't seen a woman in months forcing a third at gunpoint to strip) and there is still no sign of any malevolent jewellery anywhere on his body, Charlie and Blake are satisfied that Hank was really just telling a tall tale. They laugh, while Hank heads for the shower.

So all is well that ends well. Or does it? After all, this is a golden age science fiction story and we all know how much the golden age liked twist endings. And so the story ends with a one paragraph excerpt of a telepathic report from one number 67843 in the asteroid belt to one number 5463 on Earth. Number 67843 reports that the plan to test the credulity of the humans by telling them the truth about what happened on Ganymede was a success. The humans were fully willing to believe the story, but the absence of any visible earrings or bracelets persuaded them that it was just a hoax. Therefore, the process of surgically implanting the earring device into every human taken over must continue to avoid arousing suspicions. Number 67843, otherwise known as Hank, will make sure that the remaining four asteroid miners are all implanted with devices before they return to earth.

I have to admit that I haven't read much by Fredric Brown and what I have read was mixed. There is the haunting 1948 flash fiction story "Knock", which stayed with me for a long time after I first read it, even though I initially had no idea who the author was. On the other hand, Brown's 1943 Retro Hugo finalist "The Star Mouse" was just too silly for me and his other 1943 Retro Hugo finalist "Etaoin Shrdlu" – another possessed machine story – was okay, but nothing special.

As for "And the Gods Laughed", I'm not sure what to think about it. On the one hand, it is an effective and well written story. Brown skilfully combines two popular storytelling devices of the era, the "tale within a tale", a story told around the dinner table, fireplace or aboard an asteroid mining station, and the twist ending. Even Chekhov's Gun gets an outing – quite literally in this case.

Of course, anybody with any science fiction experience can see the twist ending coming from a mile away. However, the by now well-worn concept of alien parasites who take over humans to invade Earth was still a very new idea in 1944. The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein, probably the most famous early take on the trope, did not come out until 1951, six years after "And the Gods Laughed". And while A.E. van Vogt's "Discord in Scarlet" predates "And the Gods Laughed" by five years, the parasitic aliens in van Vogt's story are closer to the xenomorph from Alien (probably because both were inspired by the same real life creature, the emerald cockroach wasp) than to the parasitic invaders of The Puppet Masters. Furthermore, most alien parasites that take over humans are described as slug-like or starfish-like creatures, so malevolent parasitic jewellery is certainly a different idea as well as a fine example of the wonderful weirdness of the golden age.

Nonetheless, I had issues with the story. One is the fact that "And the Gods Laughed" is narrated in the first person by Hank, which is quite common for "tale within a tale" stories. However, as we learn in the last paragraph, "Hank" is not really Hank, but malevolent parasitic earring number 67843. So why is malevolent parasitic earring number 67843 telling the story as if they were Hank who had a spooky experience and got away? Is malevolent parasitic earring number 67843 trying to fool us just like they fooled Charlie and Blake?

Of course, "the narrator did it" was not a new idea even back in 1944 – after all, Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd came out in 1926, eighteen years before. However, revealing that the narrator is the villain without the narrator's voice hinting at that fact at any point before is not exactly playing fair with the reader. And considering Fredric Brown was also a (very good) mystery writer, he should therefore know a thing or two about mysteries playing fair. Honestly, I feel the story would have worked better, if Charlie or Blake had been the first person narrator (and in most examples of the "tale within a tale" trope, the first person narrator is not the same person as the one who tells the story within a story) instead of "Hank".

Another issue I had with the story is one that probably wouldn't have bothered 1940s audiences, but is really glaring today, namely the unquestioning acceptance of colonialism and imperialism. Of course, we know that the races who inhabit the various planets and moons in golden age science fiction are often stand-ins for Native Americans or other indigenous people, but Brown isn't just content to imply these parallels, no, he flat out has his narrator tell us. And just like European colonisers, the human explorers bribe/trick the various indigenous people with all sorts of worthless trinkets. For example, there is an anecdote about an alien race from the Martian moon Phobos who had never seen elastic before and were willing to trade a bucket full of gemstones for the suspenders of a spaceship crewman. This was probably considered light-hearted back in 1944, but it really hit me the wrong way.

On the other hand, the aliens also use worthless trinkets, the earrings, to trick and take over the human explorers and eventually the Earth. So was Brown interrogating and reversing that hoary old trope by placing the human colonisers on the receiving end of a truly bad deal?

Another thing that struck me is that a single earring worn in one ear (the right, apparently) used to code a man as gay. And here we have a story where single earrings are used to literally take over the almost all male crew of a spaceship. So is the story a metaphor for gay men supposedly turning heterosexual men gay? Or is this a complete coincidence? Though it is notable that the interior art depicts a man wearing a single earring in his right ear. And let's not forget that the story also contains a scene where two men force another man at gunpoint to strip naked, so they can examine his body jewellery or lack thereof? And where exactly did Charlie and Blake expect Hank to be wearing the earring that he needs to strip naked? Or am I seeing things here which aren't there?

Fredric Brown is clearly popular with Retro Hugo nominators, considering he had two nominations for 1943 and also had two for 1945. Nonetheless, I was a bit surprised to see "And the Gods Laughed" on the ballot, because it is not a particularly well known story. It has been reprinted a few times over the years, but it is not nearly as well known as "Arena", Brown's other 1945 Retro Hugo finalist. Nor does it show up in Isaac Asimov's and Martin H. Greenberg's The Great Science Fiction Stories anthology for 1944. And lesser known stories that make the Retro Hugo ballot can often be found in the Asimov/Greenberg anthologies such as Edmond Hamilton's "Exile" from last year.

Whatever the reason, quite a few people clearly liked "And the Gods Laughed" enough to nominate it. And to be fair, it is a good story, though it also has its share of flaws. But considering the competition this year, I don't really see it winning.

Retro Review: "Citadel of Lost Ships" by Leigh Brackett

The finalists for the 1945 Retro Hugos will be announced tomorrow. But for now, I'll continue to take a look at some of the finalists for previous years of Retro Hugos. And today, I'll continue with a story that was not the best story on the ballot, neither in its respective category nor by the respective author, but that I nonetheless found extremely interesting and that I found myself thinking about a lot more than about many of the other Retro Hugo finalists of that year.

The story in question is "Citadel of Lost Ships", a space opera novelette by Leigh Brackett that was the cover story of the March 1943 issue of Planet Stories and was a finalist for the 1944 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

Roy Campbell, the protagonist of "Citadel of Lost Ships", is a typical example of the outlaw heroes Leigh Brackett was so fond of. He is also explicitly described as dark-skinned, even if cover artist Jerome Rozen portrays the character as white and blonde and a deadringer for Doc Savage as portrayed by Walter Baumhofer.

At the beginning of the story, Roy has narrowly escaped the Spaceguard and found refuge with the Kraylens, a tribe of native Venusians who have taken him in before. But there is trouble brewing in this peaceful Venusian paradise, for the exhausted and injured Roy is woken by war drums in the middle of the night.

Roy finally gets the story of what is going on from his Kraylen foster father. It turns out that oil, coal and other minerals have been discovered in the Venusian swamps near the Kraylens' home. And now the Terran-Venusian Coalition government is planning to take possession of the Kraylens' land to drain the swamps, drill for oil and mine the coal and other minerals (we wonder if the appropriately named Terran Exploitations Company is involved). The Kraylens will be resettled into reservations, where tourists can gawk at their primitive lifestyle. Understandably, the Kraylens are not fans of this plan. "We will die first," Roy's foster father says.

Roy wants to help the Kraylens. After all, they gave him a home when he needed one and hid him from the authorities several times thereafter. But Roy also sympathises with the Kraylens' plight in more ways than one, for we learn that he comes from a family of farmers who had been working the same plot of land for more than three hundred years, until they were displaced by a hydroelectric dam, victims of the same idea of progress and expansion that will now claim the Kraylens and their way of life.

Luckily, Roy has an idea. The travelling space station Romany, the titular "Citadel of Lost Ships" since it has been assembled from abandoned spaceships, has been offering refuge to those displaced by the imperialist expansion of the Terran-Venusian Coalition for a long time now. And Romany just happens to be in orbit around Venus, so maybe they can be persuaded to take in the Kraylens. It is worth a try at any rate.

So Roy sets off for Romany, narrowly evading yet another patrol ship on his way there. When he reaches the space station, he isn't exactly given a warm welcome. The communications officer, a young black man from Mercury called Zard, treats him coolly and his boss, an Earthman called Tredrick, blows him off and tells Roy that Romany cannot help the Kraylens and that he shall leave. However, shortly after Tredrick has broken contact, Roy receives a message from Zard telling him to dock at one of the ships that make up Romany. Because, so the young man tells him, there are some who still consider Romany a refuge.

Roy docks as instructed and is promptly knocked out by a one-armed Martian named Marah, who mistakes him for a spy for Tredrick. Once that misunderstanding has been cleared up, Roy learns from Marah and a human telepath named Stella Moore what is going on aboard Romany.

It turns out that Romany is on the edge of a civil war between those like Stella, Marah and Zard who want to continue living according to their own code and help those in need, even if it pisses off the Coalition government, and a group led by Tredrick and the station council who want to stop interfering with the Coalition's plans in exchange for better trading rights and constant orbits. Tredrick's fraction is about to move against the rebels when Roy blunders in.

Stella promises Roy that the rebels will rescue the Kraylens. In exchange, Roy promises that he'll stick around and help the rebels – for the Kraylens' sake and because Roy sympathises with the rebels and their cause.

Romany is a fascinating setting, an assembly of spaceships whose interior not only houses members of many different races, but also mimics their natural environment, i.e. the Venusian quarter has swamp vegetation, while the Titanian quarter has ice caves. Sadly, Leigh Brackett never revisited Romany, though it's spiritual descendants still abound in science fiction, ranging from Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine to Alpha, the City of a Thousand Planets, from the Valérian and Laureline comics and the recent film adaptation by Luc Besson.

The rebels are planning to take a ship and rescue the Kraylens, but before they can get there, they find their way blocked by Tredrick and his men. Tredrick informs everybody that Romany cannot help the Kraylens, not anymore, because the Kraylens have already been imprisoned for harbouring the dangerous criminal Roy Campbell. And even though Roy used a false name, when contacting Romany, Tredrick knows that he is aboard the station and warns everybody who helps him of dire consequences.

The rebels pretend to comply with Tredrick's orders, while Stella and Marah help Roy escape. Roy manages to make his getaway just before the Spaceguard arrives, which leads to yet another chase, as the Guard ships pursue Roy and his ship. Roy's ship is fatally damaged in the resulting firefight. Roy himself is badly wounded, but nonetheless he gets into a spacesuit and steps out of the airlock. He hides among the debris of his damaged and dying ship – a manoeuvre that Roy's spiritual descendant Han Solo would use again some thirty-seven years later in The Empire Strikes Back, the original screenplay of which was also penned by Leigh Brackett – and then uses the jetpack of his spacesuit to descend to Venus. Of course, Roy would have gotten burned up upon entering the atmosphere, but pulp space operas don't care about such inconvenient scientific facts.

Back on Venus, Roy meets up with Marah, Stella and their motley crew of alien rebels, who took a ship from Romany to rescue the Kraylens. Together, they head for the Venusian city of Lhi, where the Kraylens have been imprisoned.

However, Tredrick pre-empted their move and has put the Kraylens under heavy guard. But one of the rebels, a man from the Jovian moon Callisto, uses his magical harp to put the guards to sleep. But when Roy and his friends free the Kraylens, Tredrick himself shows up with more guards. A firefight erupts and Roy and Stella find themselves face to face with Tredrick himself.

Now we briefly get Tredrick's motivation for turning on his own people. Tredrick explains that even though he was born on Romany, he was never happy there and didn't care for the freedom Romany offered, since that freedom also meant poverty. So Tredrick decided to rise through the ranks, take over Romany and make a deal with the Coalition government to ensure prosperity for all. Roy and the Kraylens as well as Stella, Marah and the rebels stand in his way, so Tredrick decided to use the Coalition forces to get rid of them.

Roy launches himself at Tredrick and the two men engage in a furious fight. But Roy is weakened from his injuries and therefore he is losing. Just as Tredrick is about to kill Roy, Stella intervenes and uses her telepathic abilities to kill Tredrick.

Roy tells Stella to lead the others to safety. He will stay behind and take the blame for the death of Tredrick and the escape of the Kraylens. Because, so Roy tells Stella, the Coalition government needs a scapegoat for what happened on Venus. And if they cannot use Roy as a scapegoat, they will go after Romany. And Romany has no chance against the combined might of the Terran-Venusian Coalition. But if Roy sacrifices himself, Romany gets to remain free.

"You're wonderful," a tearful Stella tells Roy, "I didn't realize how wonderful."

Roy promises Stella that he won't be in prison for long and that he'll escape. He also says that he hopes Romany will remember him and maybe erect a statue in his honour, because he will be back. Then he waits to be arrested, while Stella flees with the Kraylens.

"Citadel of Lost Ships" is exactly the kind of glorious and thrilling pulp space opera that Leigh Brackett excelled at. However, the story also has a strong undercurrent of social criticism. Now a lot of Leigh Brackett's early stories were critical of imperialism and capitalism and often featured marginalised protagonists. "Citadel of Lost Ships", however, features Leigh Brackett in full social justice warrior mode.

Stylistically, "Citadel of Lost Ships" is very much a story of its time. It's set in the pulp science fiction shared solar system and its full of the usual anachronisms such as finned rocket ships, people smoking in space and Roy Campbell surviving re-entry in a spacesuit. On the other hand, "Citadel of Lost Ships" is exactly the opposite of the prevalent stereotype of golden age science fiction. "Citadel of Lost Ships" couldn’t be further from the ideals of Campbellian science fiction (and John W. Campbell did not publish it – Malcom Reiss of Planet Stories did). Furthermore, the themes Leigh Brackett tackles – the impact of imperialism, colonialism and capitalism, the treatment of indigenous people, the sacrificing of people in the name of progress – are all themes that science fiction is still grappling with today.

The humans of the Terran-Venusian Coalition are clearly the bad guys jere and the story is very concerned with the treatment of what Roy Campbell calls “the little people”, many of whom are aliens who – in a genre tradition that would last well into modern times – stand in for various marginalised groups in the real world. The plight of the Kraylen is clearly intended to criticise the treatment of Native Americans – and let’s not forget that the Wounded Knee Massacre took place only twenty-five years before Leigh Brackett was born, while the last conflicts between Native Americans and representatives of the (white) authorities happened within Brackett’s lifetime, i.e. those events were still very much within living memory, when “Citadel of Lost Ships” was published. Romany, the name of the space station, refers to the Romani people and indeed, Stella explains at one point that the station and its inhabitants are welcomed as traders but otherwise “hated, just as gypsies [Brackett’s word choice, not mine] always are.” This is not the only time that the Romani people feature in Leigh Brackett's stories of the golden age either. "The Jewel of Bas", published a year later, also features a heroic Romani protagonist.

Roy Campbell's father losing the family farm to a hydroelectric dam project, an event which psychologically scarred Roy and set him on the path towards crime, also echoes actual events of the time the story was written. Because the 1930s and 1940s were the age of the great hydroelectric dam projects in the US like the Hoover Dam (then still known as the Boulder Dam) or the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933. These hydroelectric dams displaced (and were still displacing when the story was written) farmers, families and sometimes whole towns in the name of progress. It’s very difficult to find critical voices about the Tennessee Valley Authority Act or the Boulder/Hoover Dam even today (the displaced farmers and flooded towns are usually just a footnote), so to find one in 1943 is quite remarkable.

Furthermore, people are still facing displacement due to hydroelectric dams and strip mining operations today, whether it's the historic Turkish town of Hasankeyf about to be flooded by the waters of the river Tigris due to the Ilisu Dam or the people of the Garzweiler and the Lausitz regions in Germany who have lost or are still about to lose their homes to lignite coal strip mining, even though lignite coal is extremely harmful to the environment and will be phased out in the next ten to twenty years anyway. So the issues addressed by "The Citadel of Lost Ships" are not in the distant past – they're still current today.

Roy Campbell is one of my favourite Leigh Brackett characters. In many ways, Roy Campbell feels like a prototype for Eric John Stark, who would come along six years later. Like Stark, Campbell is a man of colour, like Stark he does not fit into regular human society, like Stark he found a home with an indigenous tribe, only to lose it again, when those indigenous people were displaced and slaughtered in the name of progress. But while Eric John Stark is generally a good man, Roy Campbell is probably the noblest character Leigh Brackett ever created, even though Roy sees himself as anything but a hero. I also doubt it's an accident that this noble outlaw and hero of colour shares a surname with the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, a man who would become infamous for his reactionary views regarding race, gender and politics. Was this Leigh Brackett's way of giving John W. Campbell the finger?

In many ways, it's a pity that Brackett never revisited Roy Campbell. Did he manage to escape from the prison mines of Phobos (in the pulp science fiction shared solar system, moons are inevitably prisons)? Did he even go to prison in the first place or did the Coalition authorities just shoot him, because the whole affair was too embarrassing? Did Roy get that statue and did he ever get to see Stella again? We'll never know.

Roy Campbell also sums up the point of the story on the final page, when he says:

“They’re building, Stella. When they’re finished they’ll have a big, strong, prosperous empire extending all across the System, and the people who belong to that empire will be happy.
“But before you can build you have to grade and level, destroy the things that get in your way. We’re the things – the tree-stumps and the rocks that grew in the way and can’t be changed.
“They’re building; they’re growing. You can’t stop that. In the end it’ll be a good thing, I suppose. But right now, for us…”

So much for the claim that the golden age was unpolitical and all about fun science fiction and/or that the science fiction of the time promoted the unquestioning belief in science and progress and the unquestioning acceptance of colonialism. Cause here we have a story from 1943 that is very much about social justice warriors in the most literal sense of the word fighting against human imperialism.

But don't let my analysis of the political background of the story scare you off. Because "The Citadel of Lost Ships" is a cracking good pulp space opera, whether you agree with its politics or not.

The novelette category of the 1944 Retro Hugos was uncommonly strong and so "The Citadel of Lost Ships" lost out to the excellent, if very different "Mimsy Were the Borogroves" by Lewis Padgett a.k.a. Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore. And much as I enjoyed this story, it was not in first place on my ballot either, if only because I love Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser even more and "Thieves' House" is the best of the early Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories published in Unknown. And indeed, reviewing the early Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories is a project to tackle, once I've dealt with the 1945 Retro Hugo finalists I missed.

"The Citadel of Lost Ships" is one of the lesser known Leigh Brackett stories of this era. It has been reprinted a few times, but not nearly as frequently as many of her other stories. This is a pity, because "The Citadel of Lost Ships" is a great story that deserves to be better known.

Retro Review: "Highwayman of the Void" by Dirk Wylie a.k.a. Frederik Pohl

"Highwayman of the Void" by Dirk Wylie is a space opera novelette, which appeared in the fall 1944 issue of Planet Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found here.

Regarding the author, Dirk Wylie was the name adopted by Joseph Harold "Harry" Dockweiler, a member of the Futurians and frequent collaborator with Frederik Pohl in the 1940s. However, Frederik Pohl subsequently stated that he wrote "Highwayman of the Void" alone and submitted under Wylie's name. So I will refer only to Pohl as the author from this point.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

"Highwayman of the Void" has an absolute killer of a first paragraph:

Steve Nolan was three years dead, pyro-burned in the black space off Luna when a prison break failed. But Nolan had a job to do. Nolan came back.

After this promising start, we follow the undead Steve Nolan across the icy surface of Pluto towards a domed city called Port Avalon. Gradually, we learn that Nolan was once a reporter for the Interplanetary Telenews Company. Now, he' s looking for revenge on his sworn enemy Alan Woller, his former boss and the man who framed him for treason for supposedly collaborating with a terrorist group called the Junta. Woller's lies got Nolan a life sentence on Luna. Nolan managed to escape and nearly died. And because he was presumed dead, he decided not to correct the error. But as a result he can never return to the inner worlds. And now Woller is on Pluto, heading a shipping company. Nolan will make sure that he pays for his crimes.

Nolan still has fifteen miles to trudge across Pluto, when he gets lucky and a skid breaks down right in front of him. Nolan forces his way into the skid and persuades the pilot, a young woman, to give him a lift to Port Avalon. In return, he'll fix the broken skid. The young woman agrees, not that Nolan gives her much of a choice. After an encounter with some local fauna – a giant crab-like critter – Nolan and the young woman reach the city. The young woman – neither we nor Nolan learn her name at this point, with good reason – is quite taken with Nolan and offers to buy him dinner, which is remarkably progressive by 1940s standards. However, Nolan rebuffs her. He has other things on his mind.

He heads to a disreputable bar (are there any other bars in space opera?) named The Golden Ray, where he meets with an old acquaintance, a gambler named Petersen who rescued Nolan after his nigh-fatal prison break and is the only one who knows Nolan's true identity. Petersen warns Nolan not to go after Woller, because Woller is even more influential than he used to be. But Nolan is determined. He will see Woller dead.

So Nolan sneaks into Woller's hotel, into what he believes is Woller's bedroom, only to get the surprise of his life, when he finds not Woller, but the young woman who'd given him a lift, in the bed. "Where is Woller?" Nolan demands, but the young woman refuses to answer. The encounter ends with Nolan retreating, because he can't bring himself to shoot an innocent woman, even if she is Woller's mistress, whereupon the woman raises the alarm and the guards come running.

Nolan braces himself for a shoot-out. But suddenly, alarms go off all over Port Avalon. The dome that protects the city against the harsh environment of Pluto has cracked and is rapidly losing air. Soon, everybody in Port Avalon will be dead.

Nolan knows that he should use the chaos to escape, but instead he goes back into the hotel room and tells the young woman to put on a spacesuit (though Pohl calls them heatsuits). Then he flees, desperate to find a spacesuit for himself. But just outside the hotel, he is intercepted by Petersen, who triggered the dome breach alarm to give Nolan to chance to escape the guards. Petersen also informs Nolan that Woller was called away to Mars in a hurry and that his ship will be leaving in the morning.
Nolan tries to bribe his way aboard Woller's ship. When that doesn't work, he just forces his way aboard and hijacks the ship. But when Nolan finally comes face to face with Woller, he doesn't kill his sworn enemy. Instead, he wants Woller to confess and clear Nolan's name. But before it come to that, the captain – who is a black man, by the way – and the crew overpower Nolan and lock him up.
When the ship lands, Nolan causes an explosion and escapes in the confusion. He also realises that the ship never travelled to Mars at all. Instead, it just landed in another part of Pluto. Nolan is quickly recaptured – there are a lot of escapes and recaptures in this story. Woller, who was wounded in the explosion Nolan caused, very much wants to kill him. However, first he has other business to attend to and so, in the manner of careless villains everywhere, exposes his grand plan.

Turns out that Woller is the one who is collaborating with the Junta to build a fleet of warships in a secluded part of Pluto. When intrepid reporter Nolan accidentally stumbled upon Woller's schemes, Woller framed him to get rid of him. Nolan also learns that Woller is not actually the head of the Junta. A man in a mirrored helmet everybody only calls Chief is.

The Chief is not at all pleased to see Nolan and orders one of the others to give him a gun. But once he has it, the Chief aims his gun at his co-conspirators and tells Nolan to disarm them. For the man behind the Chief's mirrored helmet is not the man the Junta were expecting. But that's a risk that all villains who hide their identity behind a mask run and in fact I am surprised that it doesn't happen more often. The fake Chief tells Nolan to put on a spacesuit and blows a hole into the side of Woller's hideout. The explosion and the loss of air kill many of the conspirators. Nolan and the false Chief flee through the hole and commandeer a skid.

Once aboard the skid, the fake Chief finally takes off his mirrored helmet and reveals none other than Nolan's good friend Petersen underneath. Petersen finally comes clean and admits that he is no gambler at all, but an agent of the interplanetary police force known as Tri-planet Law. Tri-planet Law knew about Woller's treachery all along and they also knew that Nolan was being framed. Nolan was never supposed to go to prison, instead he would have been questioned and given a new identity or taken into protective custody. But Nolan messed up that plan with his escape attempt. So Nolan was officially declared dead. Petersen was sent to rescue and befriend him to find out what Nolan knew.

When Nolan couldn't be deterred from going after Woller, Petersen did his best to protect him, including disguising himself as the Chief to infiltrate the meeting of the Junta leaders.

Nolan insists that since the Junta leaders are all at Woller's hideout, they must do something about it. Petersen says that's already being taken care of. Together, he and Nolan watch as Tri-planet Law bombs Woller's hideout, killing everybody inside and putting an end to the Junta.

But there is one more revelation to come. For Petersen also tells Nolan that the young woman he met in Woller's hotel room is not Woller's mistress but his stepdaughter Ailse. Ailse found out what her stepfather was up to and was planning to confront him. Before Petersen could intervene, she vanished. Petersen fears she may have been at Woller's hideout, when it was bombed.

Nolan is devastated, until he remembers a coffin-like box he saw aboard Woller's ship, a so-called sleep box wherein human beings can be kept in suspended animation. And that same sleep box is now in the cargo hold of the skid Petersen and Nolan commandeered. So Nolan rushes to the hold to kiss Snow White – pardon, Ailse – awake.

"Highwayman of the Void" is a cracking good, action-packed space adventure, even if the title is misleading, because there is no highwayman anywhere in the story, unless Nolan sort of hijacking Ailse's skid makes him a highwayman.

Action-packed space adventure is not really something I associate with Frederik Pohl. Nonetheless, his two pseudonymous stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project are just that. And in fact, Pohl's pseudonymous contributions to Planet Stories feel very much as if Frederik Pohl was trying to channel Leigh Brackett.

The opening scenes of "Highwayman of the Void" with Nolan trecking across the icy wastes of Pluto and later walking the mean streets of Port Avalon sound very much like Brackett in her noir mode. And in fact, I wouldn't have been surprised if "Highwayman of the Void" had turned out to be a forgotten golden age Leigh Brackett story. Though I suspect that Leigh Brackett would have given Ailse a more active role than spending the bulk of the story as Snow White in a sleep box.

The most notable difference between Leigh Brackett's and Frederik Pohl's takes on noir space opera is that in Pohl's stories, representatives of the authorities are portrayed mostly positively. Petersen, the Tri-planet lawman posing as a gambler, is a good example. Meanwhile, Leigh Brackett has much less faith in the system. In her stories, interplanetary police officers mainly exist as a foil for the outlaw heroes, Lundy from "Terror Out of Space" and Simon Ashton from "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" and the Skaith trilogy being notable exceptions.

And even though Steve Nolan is a convict on the run with revenge on his mind, he is not a typical outlaw protagonist like the ones Leigh Brackett favoured. Instead, Nolan is the heroic journalist, a common character type in popular fiction during the 1930s and 1940s, who took on the wrong corrupt capitalist and was framed for a crime he did not commit. There are several crime movies of the 1930s with this very plot. One example that comes to mind is the 1939 prison drama Each Dawn I Die starring James Cagney. There were others as well. Indeed, it is often forgotten that golden age science fiction drew on influences from beyond the SFF genre spectrum, influences which are more difficult to detect today, because the tropes in question have often vanished.

"Highwayman of the Void" suffers a bit from what I call Van Vogt plotting, i.e. there is a random plot twist every 800 words or so. Though attributed to A.E. van Vogt, the frequent plot twists were a common technique in the pulp era. Lester Dent's famous pulp fiction master plot, requires a plot twist every 1500 words, though Dent was better at pulp plotting than van Vogt (but then pretty much everybody was) and his plot twists usually make sense.

"Highwayman of the Void" has plenty of plot twists and several of them seem rather random at first glance. Our hero is trapped by the goons of the villain with no way out. Oh look, a handy dome breach alarm, quell coincidence. No wait, there is no dome breach – the hero's pal has triggered the alarm to give our hero a chance to escape. And then our hero has been captured by the villains – again – and is only seconds from execution, when he is rescued by an unknown saviour wearing the mirrored helmet of the conspirators' leader. What a coincidence – again. And then the unknown saviour is revealed to be the hero's best pal – again. Hmm, that guy sure gets around and also knows a whole lot for a guy who gambles for a living in dingy spaceport bars. Oh, he's really an undercover policeman – that explains a lot.

Pohl is already a skilled enough writer at this point of his career to come up with logical explanations for his seemingly random plot twists, though he isn't yet skilled enough to avoid the pulp school of plotting with its random plot twists altogether. There also are some loose ends, for example the true identity of the Chief in the mirrored helmet is never revealed. That said, it is notable that Frederik Pohl was a better writer at this point of his career than his friend and near contemporary Isaac Asimov, though not yet as good as his other contemporary Ray Bradbury. Pohl is mostly remembered for his fandom activities during the 1940s, but he was already a good writer and editor at this time. Even if "Highwayman of the Void" and his other stories from this period have been reprinted only once in a collection fittingly entitled The Early Pohl.

Another problem with "Highwayman of the Void" is that there is too much plot for a novelette length story. Usually, golden age science fiction stories are exactly the right length for what the idea and plot will support. Occasionally, they are too long, padded out with technobabble and random plot twists. "Highwayman of the Void" is the rare example of a story from this era that I wish would have been longer. Because a novella or even novel-length story would have given Pohl the chance to flesh out the plot and the characters more.

After reading a lot of golden age science fiction stories in a row, including several from the more lurid end of the market such as Planet Stories, Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, I've noticed that many of those stories are set in the same consensus version of the solar system. In this pulp science fiction shared universe, Earth is the dominant force and the tri-planet configuration of Earth, Mars and Venus is the centre of civilisation. Sometimes, Mars and Venus have native humanoid populations, sometimes their populations are the human descendants of early colonists (see "Double-Cross", also by Frederik Pohl). But whichever is the case, Martians and Venusians are usually considered primitive and not on the same level as Earth people. Mercury is inhabited, but a hell world. The rest of the solar system all the way to Pluto (which was still a planet) is inhabited as well, though anything beyond Mars is the wild frontier. Space cops patrol the space lanes.

Earth's Moon serves a prison in this universe (and would still be portrayed as a prison world all the way to Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in 1966 and beyond – e.g. the Second Species Trilogy by Jane O'Neill features a prison on the Moon in a 21^st century series) from which the protagonists either escape or try to prevent being sent there. I've never actually read a golden age story set in the prison on the moon (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress doesn't count, since it’s a 1960s story), but the place sounds about as cheery as a Soviet gulag of the same period.

Science made this pulp science fiction shared universe obsolete in the 1960s, when space probes reached Mars, Venus, the Moon and later on the other planets of the solar system. But nonetheless, we can still see the influence of this pulp science fiction shared universe in contemporary science fiction. The Expanse is set in an updated version of the pulp science fiction shared universe. Earth and Mars are the human core worlds (and perpetually at loggerheads), though science has taken Venus and Mercury out of the game. Meanwhile, the belt and the moons of Jupiter are the wild frontier, populated by marginalised and exploited people and beset by space pirates, murderous capitalists, local revolutionaries and terrorists, space Mormons and fedora-wearing detectives who walk the mean streets of Ceres.

A far more common approach is just transposing the pulp science fiction shared universe to another solar system with more habitable worlds than our own or just the entire galaxy. How many space opera universes feature core of wealthy, high technology worlds (which we rarely visit, because the protagonists usually can't show their faces there) and a galactic rim of much more primitive frontier worlds, which are often oppressed by the core worlds? It's an extremely common set-up in space opera, used by Star Wars and Firefly among others. Even my In Love and War universe features a similar set-up. This trope is so common that we have almost forgotten where it came from.

"Highwayman of the Void" is a good example of a story set in the pulp science fiction shared universe of the golden age.  A fine noir space adventure that deserves more recognition than it got.

Retro Review: "Double-Cross" by James MacCreigh a.k.a. Fredrik Pohl

"Double-Cross" by James MacCreigh is a science fiction short story, which appeared in the winter 1944 issue of Planet Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version may be found here.

And in case you're wondering about the author, James MacCreigh was a pen name Frederik Pohl used several times in the 1940s for his solo stories.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

"Double-Cross" takes us once more to the fog-shrouded. swampy and permanently cloudy Venus that never was that is a familiar setting in pulp science fiction published in Planet Stories, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and similar magazines.

The story starts with some exposition heavy dialogue between Lowrey, Officer of the Deck aboard an Earth spaceship, and the Executive Officer who never gets a name. Lowrey remarks that everything is quiet and that he cannot even note anything in his logbook, because nothing is happening.

The Executive Officer is more sceptical, because he doesn't trust the "natives". When Lowrey points out that those "natives" are human just like them, descendants of the crew of the first starship to Venus, the Executive Officer declares that they might have been human once, four or five generations ago, but that Venus has changed them into something else. And so the Venusians have pallid white skin due to lack of sunshine and they have no hair either. That's not how evolution works, at least not that quickly, but then the Executive Officer is something of a bigot.

Lowrey, on the other hand, thinks that the natives are friendly enough. Some of them are hostile, worried that now humans know that Venus is habitable, the planet will be overrun with immigrants from Earth who will displace the original settlers. There is an underground movement as well, which Lowrey dismisses as paltry and unimportant. Though he is not bothered that settlers from Earth will displace the Venusians. After all, survival of the fittest is the basic law of evolution. We suspect that Lowrey doesn't know how evolution works either. Lowrey's musings are interrupted, when the sensors detect that a spy ray is aimed at the Earth ship.

If there was a ranking of "As you know, Bob…" scenes in golden age science fiction, Frederik Pohl's version in "Double-Cross" would rank higher than Isaac Asimov's various attempts, if only because Pohl's dialogue is less clumsy than Asimov's. On the other hand, Asimov gets points for cleverly using an "As you know, Bob…" scene as a vital clue in a mystery in "The Big and the Little" and just making fun of the convention in "Catch That Rabbit".

It's also interesting that Pohl's "As you know, Bob…" scene takes the form of a conversation between two ship officers. Idle conversations about the plot between random guards, soldiers, crewmembers, etc…, who often will never appear in the story again, are a common convention in space opera and military science fiction (and elsewhere) that predates the pulp era by centuries (you can find variations of this scene in Shakespeare plays) and one that still persists to this day. A recent example, played for laughs, was the scene with the two idiotic Stormtroopers who punched Baby Yoda (Boo, hiss) in The Mandalorian.

At any rate, the scene between Lowrey and the Executive Officer does its job of setting up the central conflict between the original settlers of Venus and the newcomers from Earth neatly enough. Any parallels to historical events are entirely coincidental, I'm sure.

The scene then switches to what is going on at the other end of the spy ray, where the Venusian underground has been listening in on the two Earth officers and are now convinced that the worries about immigrants from Earth displacing the Venusians are justified. We meet Svan, leader of the underground, and also learn that the underground has the support of the Venusian council.

Svan is a militant and wants to make sure that the spaceship never returns to Earth. And in order to ensure that the Earth ship never makes it home, Svan has a handy Atomite bomb. He also has a plan how to plant it aboard the ship. Svan and his co-conspirators will go to see the Earth ship like the rest of the town. On the way back, they will feign a car accident to draw away the ship guards, giving one of the conspirators the chance to get close enough to the ship to plant the bomb.

Svan's followers are a lot less militant than he is. An old man named Toller has issues with the fact that planting a bomb aboard the Earth vessel is essentially murder. And a young woman named Ingra remarks that their ancestors came from Earth, too, and therefore Venusians and Earthpeople are of one blood. Svan rightly points out that according to the Executive Officer aboard the Earth ship, the Venusians aren't even human anymore.

Because none of Svan's followers are volunteering to plant the bomb, Svan has them draw lots. Svan draws a blank, but when he looks around, none of his followers announce that they have drawn the lot that makes them the bomber. Therefore, Svan assumes that one of his followers is a coward or worse, a traitor. But if he accuses his followers of treason an cowardice, the traitor will be warned. So Svan quickly marks his own piece of paper, while the others aren't watching, and announces that he will plant the bomb. Why Svan didn't volunteer in the first place, especially since it was his plan and he is the most militant of the bunch anyway, remains a mystery.

Svan's plan hits a not entirely unexpected snag, when he and his party are stopped by a Venusian guard who announces that no one is allowed near the Earth ship anymore, because Svan's spy ray warned the Earthpeople that there was something afoot. Svan signals to the guard that he is on Council business. But the guard refuses to budge and is not a fan of the Council (which we learn is not an official administrative body, but the name of Svan's underground group) either, so Svan attacks and kills the man to the shock of his co-conspirators.

The conspirators go forth with their plan. They drop off Svan at some distance from the ship and drive onwards, unaware that Svan has planted a second bomb in the car. Since he can't trust his followers anymore, he has decided to blow them up, because an explosion will make a much better diversion than a car accident. He does briefly waver, when Ingra kisses him good-bye and wishes him good luck. But then Svan decides that even if she isn't a traitor, Ingra is weak, so she must die for the cause with the others. This confirms that Svan is a murderous arsehole, in case there was any doubt.

Svan makes his way to the ship and waits for the explosion to draw the guards away, while fingering the lot he has drawn and wondering once again who the traitor might be. As terrorists go, Svan is certainly unlucky. For once more, his grand plan goes awry, when the car unexpectedly returns, driven by the loyal Ingra. Ingra tells Svan to jump into the car, because the dead Venusian guard has been found and both Earthpeople and Venusians are now after them. Svan just screams, "Go away!", at Ingra and the car and tries to leg it, because he knows that the bomb is about to go off. But he never makes it.

After the explosion, Lowrey and the ship surgeon find the dying Svan. They also find the second bomb and realise that the Venusians were trying to bomb them.

"Poetic justice if I ever saw it," Lowrey says. Then he notices the piece of paper that Svan is still clutching in death and frowns.

The surgeon asks him what's the matter, whereupon Svan shows him the piece of paper and notes that it is marked with a cross on both sides. So there never was a traitor – Svan was just too stupid to turn over the paper.

"Double-Cross" is a neat science fiction thriller with a surprising, if somewhat contrived conclusion. The title (a good title, which I have used a for science fiction story myself) is also doubly relevant, both the in metaphorical (Svan double-crossing his own followers) and literal (there are two crosses on the piece of paper) sense. It also a good example of the twist ending stories that were so popular during the golden age.

Not a lot of stories surprise me these days – I can usually tell where they're going in a few pages. "Double-Cross", however, did surprise me. Initially, I was expecting something along the lines of a Leigh Brackett story about a revolt of native people against the invading Earth capitalists similar to the 1944 Retro Hugo finalist "Citadel of Lost Ships" or the later Eric John Stark stories. Never mind that forty years of Star Wars and its imitators have primed us to inevitably assume that the plucky rebels fighting against overwhelming forces are the good guys. But sometimes, the plucky rebels are just terrorists. And sometimes, those terrorists become paranoid and turn on their own.

Though Lowrey and the unnamed other members of the spaceship crew don't come across all that well either. And indeed, various remarks made by Lowrey and the unnamed Executive Officer suggest that the Venusians were right to worry about the influx of Earthpeople. "Double-Cross" is a story, where there are no good guys, which shows again that morality was not always black and white during the golden age and that there were shades of grey. Furthermore, "Double-Cross" also belies claims from certain quarters that golden age science fiction was just apolitical fun.

Of the named characters in the story, Svan is the only one who has a personality, though it's not a very pleasant one. He is domineering, militant and paranoid to boot. Even if the cause of the Venusian underground is justified (and Pohl hints that it might be), Svan's zeal goes beyond any reasonable boundaries. Svan only lives for the cause and is willing to sacrifice anything and anybody to achieve his aims, whether it's the innocent crew of the Earth spaceship (and while Lowrey and company might not be the most pleasant people, they haven't harmed any Venusians), the Venusians guard who gets in his way or his own followers. In short, Svan is a murderous arsehole. His character also rings true, because revolutionary movements tend to attract people who just want to cause mayhem and will turn on their own comrades at the slightest provocation. In many ways, Svan is an interplanetary Andreas Baader (de facto leader of the West German terrorist group Red Army Fraction) or Charles Manson, even though Baader was only one year old and Manson ten, when "Double-Cross" was published.

Frederik Pohl's left political leanings are well known and he was a member and even chapter president of the Young Communist League for a few years in the 1930s. I wonder whether Pohl encountered types like Svan during his time with the League, especially since Communist groups during the Stalin era were often riddled with paranoia.

The solution with the piece of paper marked on both sides may seem a bit contrived, though it's not entirely unrealistic, because thankfully, quite a lot of terrorists are stupid and tend to blow up themselves rather than their targets. The ideological bent doesn't matter, stupid terrorists come in all political and ideological flavours. Here is an article listing some exceptionally stupid Al Qaeda terrorists and here is one about their equivalents in the IRA.

"Double-Cross is short, only six pages long, including an illustration that takes up three quarters of a page. Most of those six pages are dialogue. We get little in the way of description, unlike what you'd find in a Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, Clifford D. Simak or C.L. Moore story. But if you've read enough golden age science fiction, you know what Venus looked like during the golden age and don't really need it. And while Pohl may not have been a particularly poetic writer, his prose is less clunky than Asimov's.

Like several of the stories I have reviewed for the Retro Reviews project, particularly those originally published in Planet Stories, "Double-Cross" has only been reprinted once, in a 1976 collection entitled fittingly enough The Early Pohl. It consistently surprises me how many of the stories that have rarely or never been reprinted are pretty good, sometimes better than the stuff that was reprinted.
A short and punchy science fiction thriller, that offers no heroes to root for, but some genuine surprises.