Retro Review: "Gambler's Asteroid" by Manly Wade Wellman

There are no space walrusses in "Gambler's Asteroid" either, though there are frog aliens.

"Gambler's Asteroid" is a space opera short story by Manly Wade Wellman, that was published in the Spring 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories and would have been eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

The titular gambler's asteroid is 624 Hektor (spelled "Hector" in this story), which in this story's version of the pulp science fiction shared solar system has been encased in a bubble of glassite and had its spin sped up by atomic engines to create artificial gravity (Hector is too small to have much in the way of natural gravity) on the inside of the glassite bubble. So all of the characters in this story are walking around on a glass floor with the stars below them. An enterprising Venusian then turned Hector into a sort of interplanetary Las Vegas or rather Atlantic City, considering that the Las Vegas we know today is largely a postwar phenomenon.

Our protagonist is Patch Merrick, a not very successful gambler, who has just bet his last value-units on a card game named Indemnity. The game is fictional, but Wellman explains how it works in a quick paragraph. Not that it matters much, because Merrick loses in the second round anyway.

Wellman now gives us some backstory about Merrick and his tentacled and telepathic Martian pal Zaarrgon. Turns out that Merrick and Zaarrgon are fugitives on the run. Zaarrgon is another of those social justice warriors that certain quarters still claim did not exist in golden age science fiction. He stole water to help his fellow Martians who were dying of thirst and thus attracted the attention of the Martio-Terrestrial League. I can't help but wonder whether this organisation is a rebrand of Leigh Brackett's Terran Exploitation Company. "Hey, we're still an evil bloodsucking company, but at least out new name is a little less blatant about it."

Zaarrgon ended up in prison, facing execution, and Merrick, who refers to himself as "guilty of sentimentality", broke him out. As a result, Merrick lost his promising career and his fiancée Morgana Conti, daughter of the wealthy Coburn Conti, and was forced to flee with Zaarrgon to the lawless asteroid belt. They stopped on Hector, hoping to win enough money – pardon, value-units – to buy supplies for their space cruiser and continue their escape. However, Martians are banned from gambling on Hector due to being telepathic and Merrick turns out to be really crap at gambling, so they're soon out of money and supplies.

The game that Merrick was playing normally ends with all players, including those who dropped out, comparing their totals. The highest total wins. Merrick had good cards. However, he and Zaarrgon are broke and the stakes are too high for them, so Merrick wagers their space cruiser instead. There is obviously no way this can go wrong.

However this time, Merrick gets lucky and beats not just a fellow human player named Mr. Alabaster, but also the house. Now he and Zaarrgon have more than enough to resupply their ship.

Mr. Alabaster, on the other hand, is not happy at all, because he was on Hector to do a job and the money he just gambled away was expense money. Turns out he is a bounter hunter, albeit a very inept one, who is supposed to hunt down Merrick and Zaarrgon on behalf of Morgana Conti and her father. Zaarrgon is still scheduled for execution. As for Merrick, his fate will be worse, at least according to Alabaster, because Morgana Conti still wants to marry him. As for Alabaster, he wound up with the bounty hunting job, because he's a friend of the Conti family and Morgana hired him. However, she did not consider supplying Alabaster with photos of Merrick and Zaarrgon, which seems like an odd oversight.

Zaarrgon gives the luckless Alabaster his money back and tells him that the fugitives are headed for the moons of Jupiter to throw him off their scent. Not that it helps much, because Zaarrgon and Merrick are arrested anyway by casino security guards who overheard their conversation with Alabaster.

And so Zaarrgon and Merrick end up in prison, while the casino security chief, a froglike Venusian named Lirog, immediately calls Morgana Conti and asks if the prisoners are the fugitives she seeks. Morgana confirms this, doubles the reward and declares that she will pick up the prisoners herself. Alabaster shows up again as well to gloat, because Morgana will pay him a handsome reward as well.

While Merrick and Alabaster are arguing, Zaarrgon uses one of his tentacles to steal a guard's handy rust raygun and uses it to reduce the lock of their cell to rust. Merrick knocks out a guard and the two fugitives are on the run once more.

On their way back to their space cruiser, they steal some of the atomic fuel for the engines which keep Hector spinning. There is some brief technobabble that Hector was once the centre of a planet that broke apart to form the asteroid belt, which is why powerful atomic fuel can be found there. Fuel powerful enough to take Zaarrgon's and Merrick's space cruiser beyond the solar system, though what they plan to do there is anybody's guess.

They reach the docking bay of their cruiser, Merrick knocks out two more guards and Zaarrgon, who's clearly the brains of this outfit, uses the rust ray he borrowed to weaken the frames of the glassite sheets and blow a hole into the bubble that envelops Hector, which will both allow the space cruiser to escape and keep everybody on the asteroid so busy with repairing the breach that they won't have time to follow the fugitives.

The plan works, too. Merrick and Zaarrgon escape and head for another asteroid to purchase supplies, since luckily no one thought to relieve them of their winnings before throwing them into prison.

However, as Merrick and Zaarrgon make their escape aboard their space cruiser, they receive a call from none other than Morgana, who informs them that her plan worked.

When Merrick points out that her plan didn't work, because he and Zaarrgon escaped, Morgana reveals that she wanted them to escape and made sure they would. She sent Alabaster after them, because he is the stupidest man she knows and a compulsive gambler besides. Then she bribed the card dealer to make sure that Alabaster lost all his expense money to Merrick, allowing Morgana to secretly finance Merrick's escape.

However, the card dealer informed Ligon, the casino security chief, who then decided to arrest Merrick and Zaargon to get the reward himself. Merrick once more tries to reassert his independence by telling Morgana that he and Zaargon broke out on their own.

"That's what you think", Morgana says and reveals that she paid Alabaster to smuggle the rust gun into the prison, allowing Merrick and Zaargon to escape. Merrick is dumbfounded and Morgana tells him that he can't come home now anyway, because he's still a wanted man and because there are still many things that Morgana has to fix. And besides, she knows that Merrick isn't ready to settle down just yet, but once he's had enough of adventure, he'll come back to her.

The story ends with Merrick moping and Zaarrgon babbling about asteroids and the creation of the asteroid belt and wondering why Merrick is moping. I take it back. Zaarrgon is not the brains of the outfit, he and Merrick are both idiots in their own way. Morgana, on the other hand, is awesome.

I have to admit, I only read this story, because I flipped forward through the Spring 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories after reading "Unsung Hero" by Ruth Washburn and came across this story – after two pages of "incredible but true Scientifacts". The interior art – showing an anthropomorphic frog and a man in a cage ogling an attractive woman – looked intriguing enough and besides, I like Manly Wade Wellman's writing, so I decided to read it. I'm glad that I did, because this is a fun space opera adventure that manages to pack a lot of plot into only six pages.

If I have one complaint about "Gambler's Asteroid" it's that it's too short. With the amount of plot and backstory there is, this could easily have been a novella, if not a novel. The glassite encased asteroid Hector is a fascinating setting, which I would have loved to explore more. I also would have loved to see Merrick break Zaarrgon out of prison and learn more about Merrick's relationship with Morgana and her father and just what his life and promising career were like, before he decided to free Zaarrgon. And of course, I would have loved to see more of Morgana than two brief videocalls, because Morgana is awesome.

Intergalactic gambling dens are a space opera staple these days, whether it's Canto Bight and Bespin of Star Wars fame (okay, we never actually see any gambling on Bespin, but you know it's going on somewhere, considering who runs the place), Stardust City in a recent Star Trek: Picard episode as well as a lots of other intergalactic gambling dens in pretty much every Star Trek series to date, the casino planet Carillon in the original Battlestar Galactica or The Scuttling Cockroach, where Mikhail and Anjali rescue Pietro Garibaldi and get themselves into trouble in my own Freedom's Horizon. However, Hector is the granddaddy of all of those intergalactic gambling dens. I'm not sure if this is the first intergalactic gambling den to ever feature in science fiction – most likely it's not. But it's definitely a very early example.

These days, Manly Wade Wellman is mainly remembered for his (very good) occult detective and folk horror stories – indeed, I reviewed one of them. But like most authors of the pulp era, Wellman was a man(ly) of any talents, who also wrote science fiction, mystery and crime fiction, comic books (a Spirit comic he wrote was nominated for the Retro Hugo this year) and historical non-fiction and who was even nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Award over William Faulkner. However, Wellman's science fiction stories, particularly his space opera tales from the 1930s and 1940s, are less well known than his fantasy and horror stories. At least based on "Gambler's Asteroid", I think that's a pity.

Wellman's skills as a writer are clearly evident in this very short story. In a few lines and paragraphs, he manages to sketch a fascinating setting by sprinkling in details like "Venusian chirp-water music", a "Martian joy-lamp shedding stimulus rays overhead" or the popular Martian genre of "formalised comi-tragedy", all of which are attractions on offer on the glassite floors of Hector. Wellman also had a dry humour that sets his work apart from other pulpy space opera tales of the era.

Like too many of the stories I have reviewed here at Retro Reviews, "Gambler's Asteroid" has never been reprinted. I sincerely wonder why, because there is a lot to like about this fun space opera caper.

Retro Review: "Unsung Hero" by Ruth Washburn

Lester Brant encounters neither murderous space walrusses nor women in brass bikinis in this story.

"Unsung Hero" is a humorous science fiction short story by Ruth Washburn, that was published in the Spring 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories and would have been eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

When I embarked on the Retro Review project, one of my goals was to spotlight the works of the forgotten women SFF authors of the golden age. And so I reviewed not just stories by the big name female authors of the era such as Leigh Brackett and C.L. Moore, but also by lesser known and largely forgotten women such as Allison V. Harding, Dorothy Quick, Alice-Mary Schnirring and E. Mayne Hull. However, there was one woman publishing science fiction in 1944 who is so obscure that even I, who was explicitly looking for women authors of the time, overlooked her, namely Ruth Washburn.

During the early forties, Thrilling Wonder Stories ran an amateur story contest and published the winning story in their magazine. Ruth Washburn was the winner of the story contest for the Spring 1944 issue. Almost nothing is known about Ruth Washburn except what she herself wrote in the short biographical blurb that ran alongside her story (and the child psychologist Ruth Wendell Washburn who comes up on Google is definitely not the same person as the author of "Unsung Hero").

According to the brief biography she provided, Ruth Washburn was born between 1901 and 1909, i.e. during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, in Vermilion, South Dakota. She seems to have been a rebellious youngster who repeatedly ran away from home and amassed a remarkable resume of odd jobs ranging from farmworker, factory worker and cook to cosmetics saleswoman and carnival worker. By the time she wrote "Unsung Hero", Ruth Washburn was living in Chicago with her husband and working as a dressmaker, even though she always dreamed of being a writer.

I really wish we knew more about Ruth Washburn, since she seems to have had a fascinating life. "Unsung Hero" is her only published science fiction story, at least under that name. I did come across a 1932 cookbook for Old-fashioned Molasses Goodies by one Ruth Washburn Jordan who may have been the same person. At any rate, our Ruth Washburn worked in the food industry and molasses are briefly mentioned in the story.

"Unsung Hero" opens in a newspaper office Washburn's hometown Chicago during WWII. In addition to "war on a dozen fronts", as a journalist character puts it, Chicago is experiencing a homegrown crisis, for an invisible barrier is blocking the Chicago River and impeding the war effort.

The news also reaches a would-be inventor named Lester Brant in his private basement laboratory. Lester is trapped in an unhappy marriage with Matilda who places no trust in his abilities as an inventor and would rather that Lester keep earning money as a lensmaker. I wonder whether this is a gender reversed commentary on Washburn's own position as a woman who wanted to write, but had to work as a dressmaker to support the family. Was Ruth Washburn's husband as unsupportive of her writerly ambitions as Matilda is of Lester's inventor spirit?

Lester theorises that the unseen barrier is due to a parallel world colliding with ours. And so he grabs one of his apparatuses, which allows him to look into other dimensions – at least in theory. But before he can take off for the Chicago River to test his theory, Lester is interrupted by Matilda banging on the door of his lab. Determined not to let Matilda stop him now, Lester switches on his device and promptly sinks through the floor in front of the eyes of a stunned Matilda.

Lester finds himself in an alien world, where he meets beings with large saucer-like eyes, which look like cartoon ghosts and can project random tentacles from their bodies. The beings, called Tnn and Mmmm, are telepathic and Lester begins to communicate with them. However, he has problems making Tnn and Mmmm understand his plight, while the two aliens are incredibly fascinated by Lester's clothes and proceed to strip him to his underwear.

Eventually, Tnn and Mmmm teleport Lester to see their leader, one Ool. Ool, it turns out, is having problems, for he is trying to create a force dome by combining the mental powers of a large group of aliens. However, the alien minds generate too much power and so the force dome won't close, but the power just projects outwards, eventually piercing the dimensional barrier and blocking off the Chicago River.

Lester decides to test his theory by turning his device off and promptly materialises – in striped boxers – on a bridge across the Chicago River near the barrier. Lester's suddenly appearance startles the onlookers and attracts the attention of a young female news photographer in a scene which is also charmingly illustrated in the interior artwork by M. Marchioni.

Lester quickly turns his device on again and returns to Tnn and Mmmm, who are in the process of dissecting (quite literally) Lester's clothes. Lester gets angry, accidentally telepathically blasts Tnn and Mmmm's house and then returns to Ool to explain that he must switch off the force wall, because it is causing problems and impeding the war effort in Lester's home dimension. Ool certainly has sympathy for Lester's problem, but points out that his people need the wall to shield themselves from stray thoughts in order to solve complicated problems.

The situation is unknowingly resolved by Tnn, who is trying on Lester's hat and finds that it blocks out all stray telepathic thoughts. This gives Lester an idea. If felt and leather, unknown to Tnn's people, can block out stray thoughts, then there is a solution to Ool's problem that doesn't involve invisible force walls blocking off the Chicago River.

Lester asks Ool how many people there are in his colony and then returns to his own dimension, only to promptly be arrested, because men in underwear suddenly appearing out of thin air is frowned upon in Chicago. And as if getting arrested for disturbing the peace wasn't bad enough, Matilda also appears waving a newspaper with Lester's portrait – in striped boxers – on the front page.

Lester and Matilda are taken to the police station, where Lester tries to make everybody understand that he alone knows how to solve the problem of the invisible barrier blocking the Chicago River. But of course no one believes him. And so Lester is about to be thrown into jail with bail set at fifty dollars, which must have been a significant sum indeed in 1944.

Matilda has no intention to bail him out, but Lester, who has finally found his courage, threatens her with divorce and tells her to hand over the money, since he knows that she has quietly embezzled money from him. Grudgingly, Matilda does so.

Lester once more tries to explain that his device allows him to travel to other dimensions and once more no one believes him. The police sergeant wants to try out the device. Lester lets him and the police sergeant promptly vanishes, only to reappear a few seconds later, now convinced that Lester is telling the truth.

All of a sudden, the police are a lot more helpful. They escort Lester to a sporting goods store, where he buys football helmets for all the beings in Ool's colony. Lester returns to Ool's dimension to drop off the football helmets, whereupon Ool switches off the force field and the Chicago River is free again.

Lester is now the hero of the hour and even Matilda grudgingly promises to make him pork chops, when Lester threatens that next time he'll disappear for good. So Lester gets his happy ending. Not only is Matilda a lot nicer to him, he also has a limitless number of strange worlds to explore.

Okay, so it's not SFF and it may not even be the same author, but it is a cute cover and the recipes apparently are good as well.

This is a charming little story reminiscent of Henry Kuttner's humour pieces such as "A God Named Kroo" and the Gallegher stories. In many way, "Unsung Hero" is a science fiction screwball comedy.

The henpecked husband and overbearing wife dynamic between Lester and Matilda grates a little, because it's very much a cliché by now. Not to mention that I wonder why the threat of leaving or divorcing her works on Matilda. She clearly has no respect for Lester, so why would it bother her, if he left her? It's briefly mentioned that Matilda primarily views Lester as a meal ticket, but I don't think a woman would have had problems finding a job in Chicago in 1944. For that matter, why doesn't Lester leave Matilda? Surely, he could find someone to make him pork chops who doesn't steal from him and is a lot easier to get along with.

Honestly, the gender dynamics in this story are not great, especially for a story written by a woman. Though it is notable that the random news photographer who gets a snapshot of Lester in his underwear is a woman.

Even though this was Ruth Washburn's first and only published story, she clearly had talent. It doesn't feel like a debut story and I have certainly read far worse SFF stories published in 1944.

Stylistically, "Unsung Hero" is closer to what was published in Astounding Science Fiction than the grab bag of adventure focussed pulp science fiction that was found in the likes of Thrilling Wonder Stories and its sister magazine Startling Stories. Did Washburn originally submit this story to John W. Campbell at Astounding, only to have it rejected? Or was she a reader of Astounding and unconsciously mimicked the style of the stories therein, but it never occurred to her to try to submit to Campbell?

At any rate, I wonder how Ruth Washburn's writing career would have gone, if she had sold "Unsung Hero" to Campbell at Astounding rather than to Oscar J. Friend at Thrilling Wonder Stories. After all, we know that Campbell for all his flaws did nurture the careers of new writers, including some women.

But unlike Lester Brant, we cannot peer into the alternate universe where Ruth Washburn became a popular science fiction author of the golden and silver age with a lengthy career. And in our universe, this is the only story of hers that we have. I for one find that a pity, because based on "Unsung Hero", I wouldn't have minded reading more of Ruth Washburn's work.

Retro Review: "A God Named Kroo" by Henry Kuttner

This cover does not illustrate "A God Named Kroo", but Venusian Nightmare" by Ford Smith

"A God Named Kroo" is a novella by Henry Kuttner, this time writing under his own name. It was first published in the Winter 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories and is finalist for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version may be found online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point!

"A God Named Kroo" begins with Kroo, a minor village god in the Himalayas. Kroo has a problem, for his last worshipper died fifty years before. Ever since then, Kroo's temple has lain abandoned, avoided by the villagers. Now the only follower that Kroo has is a yak, which wandered onto the temple grounds one day in search of food and now belongs to Kroo according to ancient tradition.

And so Kroo would eventually have faded away for lack of attention and worshippers, if American archaeologist and ethnologist Dr. Horace Danton hadn't come along in dire need of a yak, for two of his have died and the rest are exhausted. The villagers are reluctant to sell Danton the yak, for it belongs it Kroo, but eventually the almighty dollar wins out. Danton now has a yak and Kroo has a new acolyte.

The point of view shifts to Danton now. We learn that he has been travelling the Himalayas for two years, cut off from all news. Idly, he wonders how the European war (what we would call World War II) is doing, unaware that the war is purely European no longer (and frankly never was in the first place, though Danton views the war between Japan and China as a separate conflict).

Kroo first makes his presence felt, when his sacred yak falls into a ravine and Kroo levitates it to safety. He also follows Danton and his native guide Jieng in the form of a thundercloud. When Danton mentions the mystery of the floating yak to Jieng, Jieng points out that he initially assumed the yak was a magician or a god in disguise, but when he questioned the yak, the yak did not answer. Jieng also noticed the thundercloud long before Danton did (but then Danton is your typical absent-minded professor type rather than Indiana Jones) and suggests that Danton may have become a living buddha. When Jieng mentions the goddess Kali whom he worships (Kuttner does not explain why a man with a vaguely Chinese name worships a Hindu goddess), there is a sound of thunder, which Jieng takes for a sign that another god is present. Danton, being a sceptical westerner, will have none of this.

Before the debate can go any further, Danton and Jieng are interrupted by a native attack. However, Kroo will not lose his newfound acolyte and so he picks off the attackers with well-aimed lightning bolts. And as if all this were not yet strange enough, Danton and the yak are suddenly lifted into the air and briefly find themselves sitting upon the thundercloud. And once Kroo sets them down again, he suddenly begins speaking through the very confused Danton, demanding the Jieng and the rest of the expedition worship Kroo or suffer the consequences.

Kroo also declares Danton his high priest. A conversation between Kroo and his new high priest follows, even though Danton is basically talking to himself. Danton understandably thinks that he is having a mental breakdown and also drinks a lot of whiskey, while Kroo tries to convince Danton that he is real. But only when Kroo levitates Danton into the air again and threatens to fly him halfway to the Moon does Danton relent. Kroo now demands that his high priest provide him with a temple. Danton meanwhile tells Kroo that he doesn't want to be his high priest, because he has no idea what to do. All he wants is to go home to the States. Kroo asks where the States are and Danton says eastwards, ever eastwards. He is clearly confused by the experience, because New York, where Danton wants to go, is west of Tibet. Nonetheless, Kroo obliges and flies Danton and the yak eastwards.

However, Kroo is weakened and so he only gets as far as Burma (nowadays, we would call it Myamar) to a town called Myapur (likely fictional, at any rate no town by that name exists in modern day Myamar), where he decides to find a temple, evict the resident god, if necessary, and rest awhile. However, the "temple" upon which Kroo decides is really a power station and it is guarded by Japanese soldiers who have taken over the formerly British colony of Burma. Kroo dumps off Danton and yak inside the power station and goes in search of the resident god to challenge him to a duel.

Danton, meanwhile, finds himself confronted by some very angry Japanese soldiers. But though Danton speaks Japanese, he has no idea that the US are at war with Japan now. The Japanese soldiers assume that Danton is a spy, arrest him and take him to their commander, one Captain Yakuni. There he also meets another western prisoner, a young woman named Deborah Hadley, who came to Burma as a singer in a travelling show. Deborah is no wilting wallflower. She smokes, wears pants, curses (in Gaelic, so not to upset the censors), knows how to fly a plane and banters with Yakuni and Danton (whom she calls Dan, because she dislikes the name Horace). At one point, she tells Yakuni to have the hapless Danton shot, because he obviously doesn't have the brains to be a spy. Imagine Katherine Hepburn or Lauren Bacall playing her in a movie and you've got the idea.

When Yakuni qustions Danton, Danton manages to put himself perilously close to the wrong side of a firing squad. He politely asks Yakuni for transport, because he urgently needs to get his specimens and data back to the US, which goes down about as well as you'd expect. Yakuni also wants to know how Danton got from Tibet to Burma. Danton obviously cannot tell the truth, so he claims he was hypnotised and only came to in the power station.

Yakuni decides not to shoot Danton for now and instead asks Deborah to show him around. Deborah takes Danton to a bar and catches him up on recent events. She also tells Danton that Yakuni needs the power station, because he is manufacturing bombs from a special, electrolytically created superexplosive. Deborah wants to either get word to the Allied forces or destroy the power station herself and enlists Danton's help. Danton also tells Deborah about Kroo, but naturally she doesn't believe him.

Kroo picks just that moment to return and work another miracle. He levitates Danton and the yak into the air and has Danton order Burmese and Japanese (and Deborah) alike to worship him. The Burmese comply, the Japanese try to shoot down Danton and get fried by lightning bolts for their trouble. Deborah procures a dead goat as an offering to Kroo, which pacifies him for now.

Yakuni, on the other hand, is not at all pacified. He has Danton arrested again and demands to know what exactly is going on. Danton of course can't explain and then Kroo starts speaking through him again, demanding that Yakuni worship him. And when Yakuni refuses, Kroo starts to curse him using Danton's voice. As a result, Kroo almost gets his high priest shot by the furious Yakuni, but luckily he decides that discretion is the better part of valour and teleports Danton and Deborah to his "temple", before Yakuni can pull the trigger.

At the "temple", really the power station, Kroo makes Deborah his priestess, informs Danton that he has gotten rid of the men who defiled the temple (Japanese soldiers who were supposed to repair a broken dynamo, before Kroo reduced them to piles of ashes) and demands that they prepare the temple for a sacrifice. Kroo departs and Deborah and Danton discuss what to do now. They both realise that the Japanese will shoot them, should they find them in the power station. Deborah suggests wrecking the power station and Danton grabs a sledge hammer that is conveniently lying around and proceeds to smash the dynamos. This brings Kroo back, who considers the dynamos his altars and will not have them touched. Deborah persuades Kroo that this was all part of the ritual. Kroo relents and demands that Danton go outside the temple to bring Kroo's commandments to the people.

"I'll tell the Japanese what you want", Danton tells Kroo, "But they won't listen. They'll just shoot me."

Kroo confidently replies that he will protect his priest. So Danton goes out and promptly finds himself starring into the barrels of dozens of Japanese rifles. Yakuni orders his soldiers to shoot Danton, but Kroo intervenes and freezes them. He then declares a holiday in his honour and demands that his worshippers celebrate. A Burmese man points out that they don't have any food, because the Japanese took it all, so Kroo promptly raids the Japanese stores and teleports that food into the street, much to the delight of the Burmese and the chagrin of Captain Yakuni.

Kroo finally unfreezes the Japanese soldiers and demand that they join in the celebration. And just to make a point, he incinerates several Japanese soldiers who advance upon the power station. So Yakuni and his soldiers pretend to go along and join the festivities to honour Kroo. Several soldiers try to seize and shoot Danton, but once more Kroo intervenes, incinerates the soldiers and then erupts into a thunderstorm. He also lifts Yakuni up into the air and has Danton order him to worship Kroo or be incinerated. Then Kroo orders a tournament to be held to determine the chieftain of his tribe, which Kroo personally will oversee while inhabiting the body of the yak.

Left alone at the power station, Danton and Deborah decide to steal some of Yakuni's bombs and blow up the power station, even if that will infuriate Kroo. However, they find that Kroo's taboo is too strong. Nor can they radio for help, because Yakuni has disabled the radio. Danton is also certain that Yakuni has not truly given in, even though he is pretending to go along with Kroo for now.

Over the next few days, Danton proceeds to manipulate Kroo. First, he persuades Kroo to make Danton and Deborah invulnerable. Kroo does grant them invulnerability, but only if they remain near the sacred yak. Next, Danton persuades Kroo to have the people build a floating temple, which conveniently doubles as a raft. Finally, Danton persuades Kroo that in order to become a better and more legendary god, he needs to symbolically die and be reborn.

So Kroo goes into hibernation. Danton and Deborah take the chance to board the floating temple together with the yak, claiming to make a sacrifice to Kroo in a secret place. They also tell the Burmese that if they do not return within two days, the town of Myapur is a taboo place in order to protect the Burmese from a possible Allied bombing as well as the enraged Kroo.

Danton and Deborah get away from the village without incident and travel down the river on their raft. However, they fail to find an Allied base. Worse, Kroo awakens from hibernation to find Myapur deserted, his high priest, priestess and worshippers gone and his "temple" desecrated, since the Japanese took the dynamos with them, when they left. So Kroo seeks out his faithless priest and priestess, fully determined to kill them for the sacrilege. However, Deborah and Danton manage to persuade Kroo that it was the Japanese who desecrated the "temple" and that Deborah and Danton were just trying to get help. This satisfies Kroo for now, though he demands that Danton get his "shining altars" – the dynamos – back.

Danton deduces that Yakuni must have transported the dynamos downriver and that he must have set them up near a waterfall to utilise water power. So he asks Kroo to fly them down the river to search for Yakuni and the missing dynamos. They finally find Yakuni's new power station, which is fully operationally. The dynamos are up and running and Yakuni is manufacturing bombs again.

Confused, Kroo asks what happened to his temple and his altars. Danton tells him that an evil god has taken up residence in the temple, an evil god worshipped by the Japanese, and that Kroo should challenge this god in battle. Kroo promptly flies off to do that and succeeds in blowing up the dynamos, the Japanese and himself. The yak drops dead the moment Kroo does. Danton and Deborah are finally free. They mourn Kroo, who may have been a barbarian god, but wasn't a bad sort overall. An Allied plane comes to investigate the explosion and Danton and Deborah are rescued at last.

The point of view now switches to Kroo again, who finds himself on the rainbow bridge to Asgard – pardon, Godheim, the afterlife for deceased gods. Kroo is confused, because Godheim is for great gods and Kroo was just a Tibetan village god who never had the chance to grow to greatness. However, the other gods inform him that Kroo was brave enough to go up against a mighty deity whom none of them have ever dared to face. And even though he was slain in that battle, this more than qualifies Kroo for a place in Godheim. Is the point here that science and technology are more powerful than any of the gods of old? Or am I reading too much into this?

I have no idea which story this cover illustrates, but it's not "A God Named Kroo"

"A God Named Kroo" is a charming and highly entertaining adventure story. The plot moves at a brisk pace and so the story feels shorter than it actually is. Occasionally, SFF novellas from the golden age can feel padded and overly long – the authors were paid by the word, after all. I never had this feeling with "A God Named Kroo".

Thrilling Wonder Stories was mainly a science fiction magazine, but "A God Named Kroo" is pure fantasy without even a hint of science fiction. I could easily imagine it in John W. Campbell's Unknown – the science versus religion angle would have appealed to Campbell and Unknown published a lot of contemporary fantasy and also published lighter and more humorous stories than Weird Tales – and maybe that's what the story was intended for. Alas, Unknown fell victim to World War II paper rationing the year before and so "A God Named Kroo" wound up in Thrilling Wonder Stories instead.

Danton, Deborah, Kroo, Yakuni and even the yak are all fully developed characters with their own goals and motivations. I liked the fact that Danton – though brave and intelligent – is also something of a bumbler. Nor is he technically proficient – he is an archaeologist and ethnologist, after all, not an engineer. Deborah is a great example of a 1940s take on a strong female character, written by a man no less. I bet she'd get along just wonderfully with Mayo McCall from Leigh Brackett's Shadow Over Mars. Even Kroo, village god with an inferiority complex, is a remarkably sympathetic character – especially considering he is a barbarian god with a taste for blood sacrifices and the tendency to incinerate recalcitrant worshippers.

Considering how many American works of the WWII era portray the Japanese as grossly racist caricatures (e.g. last year's Retro Hugo winning Wonder Woman comic or the Retro Hugo nominated Batman serial), it is a pleasant surprise that Yakuni, though the antagonist, is still very much a human being. Nor is Yakuni portrayed as pointlessly cruel, which is even more of a rarity. Yes, he plans to shoot Danton, but that's actually understandable given the situation. He also does not sexually harass Deborah, though one of his subordinates does. But then, Earth's Last Citadel, a 1944 Best Novel Retro Hugo finalist by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, has two main characters who are Nazi spies and only contains one offensive scene. Kuttner and Moore do not dehumanise their antagonists, which makes me like their fiction even more.

That's not to say that there aren't several moments in "A God Named Kroo" that will make a modern reader roll their eyes or grit their teeth. Because there's quite a bit of casual racism in the story. Jieng, Danton's guide, is described as monkeylike. The Burmese and Tibetan people are described as superstitious and backwards, even though they are generally sympathetic characters. The Japanese are repeatedly described as "yellow-skinned" (Has Kuttner ever seen a Japanese person? Or any Asian person, for that matter?) and referred to as "Japs" or "Nips" in the dialogue throughout.

Furthermore, Kuttner also seem to be an adherent to the Lester Dent method of writing adventure stories in foreign settings. Foreign words are scattered throughout the text to evoke a sense of authenticity, whether the terms make any sense in that setting or not. Jieng is described as Hindu, even though he appears to be Chinese or Tibetan and would therefore most likely be Buddhist. Finally, Kroo manifesting as a thundercloud and striking down his enemies and insufficiently worshipful followers with lightning bolts is based on a very western and Christianised idea of religion. For manifesting their anger as thunder and striking down enemies with lightning is something western deities do.

But in spite of these criticisms, "A God Named Kroo" is highly enjoyable story. I could easily imagine this as a movie, a sort of cross between Indiana Jones, African Queen and Bringing Up Baby.

Talking of Indiana Jones, his inspirations are not as well documented as those for Star Wars, though in general Indiana Jones is believed to have been inspired by the movie serials of the 1930s and 1940s with maybe a dash of Doc Savage thrown in. However, I have also come across several science fiction and fantasy stories from the golden age which were more than a little reminiscent of Indiana Jones. "A God Named Kroo" could actually be an Indiana Jones movie – down to the protagonist and his female partner being saved and the antagonists being destroyed by divine intervention. For though Indy is more of an action hero than Horace Danton, he nonetheless is saved by divine intervention in his first three movie and by alien intervention in the fourth that we shall not talk about. I don't know if George Lucas ever read "A God Named Kroo". However, we know that he was an avid reader of pulp science fiction, so I wonder if there isn't a little bit of Horace Danton or Leigh Brackett's various archaeologist protagonists in Indiana Jones.

The fact that "A God Named Kroo" is such a delightful and entertaining story makes it even more of a surprise that the story is relatively obscure. It is probably my favourite of the Kuttner solo stories I've read so far. At any rate, I enjoyed "A God Named Kroo" more than the better known Gallegher stories from the same period. Nonetheless, "A God Named Kroo" has only been reprinted once in seventy-five years – in 1954.

This very obscurity may well count against "A God Named Kroo" in the Retro Hugos, which tend to reward stories and authors with name recognition – which is why substandard early stories by future stars get nominated and occasionally win Retro Hugos over better, but lesser known stories. And though the novella category for the 1945 Retro Hugos is a tad weak, "A God Named Kroo" is up against the well-known and very good "Killdozer" by Theodore Sturgeon as well as also very good "The Jewel of Bas" by Leigh Brackett and "The Changeling" by A.E. Van Vogt, who still has a lot of fans. Furthermore, Henry Kuttner has somewhat fallen into obscurity, probably because he died much too young. "A God Named Kroo" would certainly be a worthy winner, but I suspect it's too obscure to win.

Retro Review: "The Veil of Astellar" by Leigh Brackett

"The Veil of Astellar" by Leigh Brackett is a space opera novelette, which appeared in the spring 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version may be found here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

Uncommon for Leigh Brackett, "The Veil of Astellar" begins with a framing story about a manuscript found inside a message rocket sent to the Interworld Space Authority headquarters on Mars. This manuscript offers an explanation of the space phenomenon called "the Veil" which comes out of nowhere and swallows spaceships in the asteroid belt. The space police officers are initially sceptical about the account, but eventually manage to determine that it is authentic. Furthermore, the much feared Veil has vanished and the message inside the rocket explains why.

Once the framing story is out of the way, Leigh Brackett takes us to one of her favourite locales, the low-canal town of Jekkara on Mars, a wretched hive of scum and villainy to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi. Here we meet the first person narrator – unnamed for now, though we will eventually learn that his name is Steve Vance – stumbling over a corpse that has been thrown out of a Martian brothel. The corpse clearly bothers the narrator, though he did not kill the man, and so he closes the dead man's eyes.

Once he's done, he meets a young couple – Virgie, a redhead who reminds the narrator of his dead wife Missy, and her husband Brad. Brad and Virgie are passengers aboard a space liner called the Queen of Jupiter, which is carrying immigrants to the Jovian colonies. Vance serves aboard the same ship – quell coincidence. We also learn that Vance is telepathic, that he has a glowing aura, which responds to his emotions, as well as white hair, even though he does not look old.

Virgie is troubled by the dead body in the street and also by Vance, who she claims looks familiar. Vance says that they probably met aboard the Queen of Jupiter and tells Brad and Virgie to return to the ship where it's safe. Then, after a tastefully described pit stop at a Martian brothel, he heads back to the ship himself and has another encounter, this time with a man called Gallery, a fellow crewmember aboard the Queen of Jupiter. Gallery is yet another of the Irish stereotypes I've encountered several times before in the course of the Retro Reviews project. And so Gallery is a big quick-tempered brawler who smells of whiskey. Though unlike the redheads Mike Donovan from Isaac Asimov's "Catch That Rabbit" and Steve "Irish" Marnagan from Ray Bradbury's "The Monster Maker", Gallery has black hair, which must count for something. I already knew before I embarked on the Retro Reviews project that Irish stereotypes were a thing during the pulp era and well beyond (Star Trek: The Next Generation featured several in the late 1980s/early 1990s), but it was still a surprise to encounter three of them in such a short span of time.

Though Gallery adds a new item to the list of pulp era stereotypes about the Irish, for he also happens to have extra-sensory perception, which – so Vance informs us – you occasionally find, particularly among humans of Celtic and Romani origin. Yeah, more stereotypes, but at least Brackett uses the term "Romani" rather than the more common slur. Gallery's touch of ESP is a problem for Vance, because Gallery has perceived that something is off about him. "You ain't human," Gallery confronts Vance who replies, "No, not anymore. Not for a very long time."

Gallery is planning to kill Vance. To make sure, he has even brought two silver crucifixes, one for each hand. Vance informs Gallery that the crucifixes won't help, because he's not that kind of vampire, but Gallery is undeterred. So Vance kills him by telepathically stopping his heart. He hides the corpse in a ruined tower (there are a lot of those on Leigh Brackett's dying Mars) and returns to the Queen of Jupiter.

Now anybody who knows anything at all about astronomy knows that in order to get from Mars to Jupiter, you must first pass through the asteroid belt. And from the framing story, we know that spaceships have been vanishing in the asteroid belt. So we don't really need a chapter title like "Voyage of Doom" to know where the story is going.

And indeed, as the Queen of Jupiter hits the asteroid belt, Vance is on watch, while the passengers crowd around the portholes. Rumours are traded about the Veil and how it snatches ships and how it's all absolutely true, because one passenger's brother saw it from a distance once, while it took the spaceship upon which the son of another was serving.

Virgie and Brad reappear as well and Vance is mesmerised not just by Virgie's resemblance to his dead wife, but also by her locket. Noticing his interest, Virgie opens the locket which contains an photo of a man who looks uncannily like Vance. The locket is more than three hundred years old, Virgie tells him, a family heirloom and was a present by an ancestor of hers, a crewman aboard the first spaceship to Jupiter, to his wife Missy. Unbeknownst to her husband, Missy was pregnant, when he left for Jupiter, never to return. The locket has been in the family ever since.

Vance is stunned, for not only does he wear an identical locket under his uniform, he is also Virgie's long lost ancestor, who vanished during that first flight to Jupiter. But before Vance can say anything, the feared Veil appears and everybody aboard the Queen of Jupiter falls unconscious. That is, everybody except for Vance.

The Queen of Jupiter finally reaches her destination, a world called Astellar that looks outwardly like just another asteroid, is half the size of Vesta and can travel not just through space, but between dimensions as well, all powered by telepathy and something called X-crystals. In fact, Astellar and its people were expelled from their home dimension for reasons which will soon become apparent.

On Astellar, the passengers and crew of the Queen of Jupiter disembark as if in a trance, drawn by a telepathic signal. Vance disembarks as well and meets first Flak, a man of colour who also was a crewman aboard a snatched spaceship, and then his alien lover Shirina.

Gradually, we learn what happened to Vance. His ship was taken by the Veil and brought to Astellar. Shirina and her people normally drain the lifeforce out of the crew and passengers of the ships they snatch to rejuvenate themselves – which is why they were expelled from their home dimension, because no one likes space vampires. However, they decided to keep Vance, Flak and three other humans alive and changed them into beings like themselves, immortal as long as they regularly rejuvenate themselves with the stolen lifeforce of others. Then Shirina and her people used Vance, Flak and the others to lure more spaceships to Astellar and more humans to the slaughter. And Vance and the others went along with it.

Vance has clearly been feeling guilty of what he's been doing for Shirina and her people for a long time now, but he is too afraid of dying because of the many sins he committed and the many deaths he caused in his long life. But something is different now. Now Vance knows that he had a daughter, a family, and that Virgie is his descendant. And even though Shirina assures him that Virgie's death will be painless, that they will all die painlessly, Vance cannot take it anymore. He takes off, determined to save his several times great-granddaughter and the other humans.

Flak and the other altered humans block his way, but Vance kills all of them. He reprograms the X-crystals to send the hypnotised humans back aboard the Queen of Jupiter. Then he kills Shirina and destroys the crystals, which causes Astellar to break apart. Vance manoeuvres the Queen of Jupiter out of the docking bay, before the asteroid is completely destroyed. Finally, he activates the autopilot, sets a course for Jupiter, boards a lifeboat and leaves. At last, he sends the message mentioned in the framing story, a message which ends with Vance cursing himself for betraying both humanity as well as Shirina's people and causing the deaths of his friends and his lover. And he's not even sure if humanity is worth saving or if it was worth killing the people of Astellar for.

"Why did I give Missy that locket?" he writes, "Why did I have to meet Virgie, with her red hair? Why did I remember? Why did I care? Why did I do what I did? Why was I ever born?" Neither we nor Vance ever get answers to those questions, unless an ad for Star Razorblades counts as an answer. If so, it's a depressing one.

During her lifetime, Leigh Brackett was known as the Queen of Space Opera, even though most of what she wrote was actually planetary romance. "The Veil of Astellar", however, is pure space opera. It's also a fine example of the noir side of Brackett's work and the guilt-ridden and self-loathing Steve Vance is a classic noir protagonist, even if he is a vampire. Even the first person narration, uncommon for Brackett, recalls the hardboiled crime novels of the era. In his review of this story, Adventures Fantastic says that Leigh Brackett's husband Edmond Hamilton believed that Humphrey Bogart was the inspiration for Steve Vance. And indeed, there is something Bogartesque about the voice Brackett gives Vance.

Steve Vance is another outlaw protagonist with a kernel of goodness buried somewhere deep inside his hard shell. This was a character type Brackett obviously liked and frequently wrote about, both in her science fiction and her filmic work. But while Leigh Brackett's other outlaw protagonists are thieves, small-time criminals, mercenaries or revolutionaries, Vance is a literal space vampire. With his guilt, world-weariness and self-loathing, Vance is also a protagonist who would never have found a home in John W. Campbell's Astounding, even if his residual humanity is what allows him to triumph over the alien space vampires in the end.

In my review of Leigh Brackett's "Terror Out of Space" I wrote that it was a comparatively rare example of the horror side of Leigh Brackett's work. However, "The Veil of Astellar", which was published in the same year, is another science fiction horror story by Leigh Brackett. But while "Terror Out of Space" was clearly inspired by Lovecraft, "The Veil of Astellar" is a classic vampire story transposed into outer space.

As far as I know, "The Veil of Astellar" is the first space vampire story, published thirty-two years before Colin Wilson's novel The Space Vampires and forty-one years before its film adaptation Lifeforce. And indeed, "The Veil of Astellar" bears certain similarities to The Space Vampires. In both stories, the space vampires lurk in the asteroid belt, where a hapless spaceship stumbles upon them, both vampire races have been expelled from their original homes, both Wilson's and Brackett's space vampires drain the lifeforce rather than the blood of their victims and both are eventually defeated by a human who has learned their powers. I don't know if Colin Wilson ever read "The Veil of Astellar", but the parallels are certainly striking. Though Wilson has admitted that The Space Vampires was strongly influenced by the works of H.P, Lovecraft, who was of course also an influence on Leigh Brackett.

There also are some similarities to another Leigh Brackett story from the same year that I reviewed, "The Jewel of Bas". Both stories feature world-weary and depressed immortals who eventually turn on their own comrades, though Steve Vance is the protagonist of "The Veil of Astrellar", while Bas from "The Jewel of Bas" is merely a supporting character. Furthermore, both stories contain a tense scene of hypnotised humans going unknowingly to their doom and in both, the protagonist tries to save a woman he cares for. Though Ciaran tries to save his newlywed wife Mouse, while Steve Vance tries to save his descendant Virgie who looks uncannily like his dead wife.

"The Veil of Astellar" also contains something else one rarely finds in the US pulp science fiction of the golden age, namely explicit references to Christianity, whether it's Gallery and his two crucifixes or Vance introducing himself as J. Goat – J for Judas – or Vance fearing God's wrath and hoping that someone somewhere will pray for him.

Contrary to what certain Sad and Rabid Puppy offshoots claim, there is very little religion, let alone Christian religion, to be found in the American pulp science fiction of the golden age, probably because many of the writers were secular Jews or equally secular Christians. Explicitly Christian works of the era, such as the Space trilogy by C.S. Lewis, come from outside the pulp science fiction scene. But in American science fiction magazines of the golden age, religion – if it is mentioned at all – is either a) a sham, b) for aliens or c) both and you are far more likely to find a reference to Cthulhu than to the Judeo-Christian God.

And so, religion usually plays no role in Leigh Brackett's science fiction of the 1940s (religion does play a role in her 1955 post-apocalyptic novel The Long Tomorrow, though not a positive one). There are the occasional ancient Martian and Venusian cults, which sometimes turn out to be a sham and sometimes not, but Brackett's protagonists are normally not religious. However, Christianity is baked into the western vampire mythos on which Leigh Brackett is drawing for this story and so religion does figure into "The Veil of Astellar".

Like any story by Leigh Brackett, "The Veil of Astellar" is well written and dripping with atmosphere. The scenes in Jekkara and aboard the spaceship carry a heavy noir vibe, while the descriptions of the interior of Astellar are positively psychedelic, even though the story was written before the term "psychedelic" was even coined.

Leigh Brackett is undoubtedly one of the finest authors of the golden age and was also highly influential on anything from Star Wars (and not just because she wrote an early draft of the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back either) via Indiana Jones (there are several Leigh Brackett stories from the 1940s, which are basically Indiana Jones in space) to Guardians of the Galaxy. In fact, Shirina from "The Veil of Astellar" is pretty much a femme fatale version of Mantis from Guardians of the Galaxy down to the antennae.

Nonetheless, Leigh Brackett is not always as appreciated as she should be, maybe because she fits in nobody's pigeon hole. She did publish a few stories in Astounding, but she never wrote Campbellian science fiction. Instead, Leigh Brackett's stories are unabashed pulp science fiction, filled with adventure, intrigue and morally grey outlaw protagonists who are a lot more interesting than the competent cardboard cut-outs of Astounding.

Leigh Brackett is also one of the two female SFF writers of the golden age (the other is C.L. Moore) who are always held up as an example that women were always part of the genre, even as other women writers of the period such as Allison V. Harding, Clare Winger-Harris, Leslie F. Stone or Dorothy Quick are forgotten. But while Leigh Brackett is one of the poster girls for women writing SFF during the golden age, there is nothing particularly feminine about her stories. Her heroes were usually macho types, who often engage in hate-love relationships with sword, axe or whip-wielding women who want to kill them. And while there always are notable female characters in her stories, a lot of them are femme fatales. Besides, very few of Leigh Brackett's stories pass the Bechdel test.

Politically, she's all over the map as well. The Sad and Rabid Puppies, particularly the Pulp Revolution offshoot thereof, have tried to claim her for their own, but a lot of Brackett's stories from the 1940s are highly critical of capitalism and colonialism and occasionally read like the very social justice warrior fiction they Puppies claim to dislike. On the other hand, her late period Skaith trilogy features evil hippy and evil space socialists trying to keep honest, hardworking barbarians from escaping their doomed planet.

But even though Leigh Brackett doesn't really fit into anybody's pigeon hole, one thing you can always be sure of is when reading one of her stories is that you'll be having a good time. There are Leigh Brackett stories I like more than others, but I've never yet read a Leigh Brackett story I didn't like. And while Leigh Brackett is mainly associated with her Martian adventures and Eric John Stark these days, the breadth and scope of what she wrote is much bigger. In 1944 alone, we have Lovecraftian space horror (Terror Out of Space), lyrical planetary romance ("The Jewel of Bas"), noirish gothic horror space opera ("The Veil of Astellar") and social justice warriors of Mars ("Shadow Over Mars" a.k.a. "Nemesis from Terra", which will be the subject of an upcoming review).

"The Veil of Astellar" feels very much as if Weird Tales and Black Mask (home of many classic noir and hardboiled tales) had a baby and decided to foster it at Thrilling Wonder Stories. It's also a fine example of how the speculative fiction of the golden age was so much more varied, weirder and stranger than just the competent engineers of Astounding. Highly recommended.