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: "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: "I, Rocket" by Ray Bradbury

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

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Retro Review: "Catch That Rabbit" by Isaac Asimov

"Catch That Rabbit" is a short story by Isaac Asimov, which was first published in the February 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version may be found online here. "Catch That Rabbit" has also been widely reprinted in I, Robot, The Complete Robot and other Asimov robot collections.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point!

"Catch That Rabbit" is one of five stories Asimov wrote about Mike Donovan and Gregory Powell, a pair of troubleshooters in the employ of United States Robots and Mechanical Men Inc. "Catch That Rabbit" is also the last of the Powell and Donovan stories except for "First Law", a 1956 "tale told in a bar" story that Asimov himself has called a spoof and the 1945 short story "Escape", wherein Powell and Donovan work with and are upstaged by Dr. Susan Calvin.

In "Catch That Rabbit", Powell and Donovan are tasked with field-testing DV-5, a robot of US Robots' brand-new line of mining robots. What makes DV-5 – or "Dave", as Powell and Donovan call him – special is that he controls six smaller robots via his positronic field. What's a positronic field? Don't ask, cause Powell and Donovan have no idea and neither does Asimov. However, the smaller robots are not independent, instead Powell and Donovan liken them to the fingers of a human body.

Dave passed all factory tests with flying colours. But when he is deployed on an asteroid for field tests, along with Gregory Powell and a grumbling Mike Donovan, Dave and his "fingers" sometimes fail to mine any ore at all. Worse, Dave can't or won't explain what the problem is. Instead, he claims he can't remember what happened.

In my review of "The Big and the Little", I said that many of Asimov's early stories – both robot and Foundation stories – are structured like mysteries. But instead of figuring out whodunnit, the investigators are tasked with figuring out why a robot malfunctioned. "Catch That Rabbit" is an excellent example, because it is essentially a science fiction mystery with Powell and Donovan trying to figure out what the blazes is wrong with Dave.

Gradually, the clues pile up. For starters, Dave only malfunctions, when neither Powell nor Donovan are around. This, of course, makes it difficult to figure out what is wrong. Tests reveal no problem with Dave's positronic brain. Questioning Dave doesn't help either, because Dave claims amnesia, though Donovan at least is sceptical about the veracity of his claims. But then, Donovan is given to panic and wild speculations, whereas Powell is much more practical.

Gregory Powell comes up with the idea to install a kind of viewscreen, called "visiplate" in the story, so they can remotely watch what Dave and his subordinates are doing. And so one day while they are bickering (and Powell and Donovan bicker a lot), they spot Dave making his subordinates march up and down the mine tunnels in a military formation. Donovan worries that this might be a prelude to the robot revolution, but Powell assures him that this is impossible and uses the opportunity to remind Donovan and the reader of the Three Laws of Robotics.

When our dynamic duo heads out to the mining site, the robots promptly return to normal, once they detect the presence of Powell and Donovan. Worse, Dave once more claims to have no idea what happened. Since the robots only malfunction when no humans are present, Powell suspects that the reason for the problems may lie in Dave's personal initiative circuit. Dave's decision making facilities are overloaded, because there are no humans supervisors around to defer to.

Powell and Donovan finally decide to interview one of Dave's subsidiaries. Unlike Dave, the subsidiary remembers what happened and reports that during difficult or potentially dangerous situations, he would receive an order from Dave, which would be immediately superceded by another, nonsensical order. However, the subsidiary has no idea what the original order was.

So our dynamic duo decides to figure out which specific order causes Dave to malfunction. There is only one problem. They cannot observe Dave and his subsidiaries directly, because Dave only malfunctions when there are no humans around. And because Dave communicates with his subsidiaries via a positronic field, they cannot intercept his orders either. Therefore, Powell and Donovan agree to take turns watching Dave and his subsidiaries via the visiplate.

For the next eight days, Powell and Donovan keep the robots under continuous supervision. But while there are malfunctions, neither of them can tell what causes them. For the image on the visiplate is too small and too blurry to make out clearly what Dave and his subsidiaries are doing. Our dynamic duo needs to take a closer look at the robots, preferably at the exact moment a malfunction occurs. Luckily, Donovan has a plan for causing Dave to malfunction deliberately.

For by now Donovan has figured out what at least this reader had already figured out a few pages ago, namely that Dave only malfunctions in particularly difficult or potentially dangerous situations such as when the robots are laying explosives or there is a cave-in. Donovan now suggests deliberately provoking a dangerous situation and causing Dave to malfunction.

So our dynamic duo put on their spacesuits and head out into the mine to cause a small cave-in. However, they miscalculate and manage bring down the roof upon themselves rather than upon an empty section of mine tunnel. Now Powell and Donovan are trapped, their oxygen is limited and the only help – Dave and his subsidiaries – have malfunctioned once again and are performing a bizarre ballet in the mine. If you're thinking at this point that Powell and Donovan are idiots, you're not alone.

Donovan points out that if they can get close enough to Dave that he detects them, the robot will function normally again and can dig them out. And luckily, Dave and his chorus line of subsidiaries move right into the direction of our dynamic duo, only to turn around right before they get close enough to detect the two men. Donovan hollers to attract Dave's attention, only to be reminded by Powell that he's wearing a spacesuit and they're on an airless asteroid, so how the hell should Dave hear him? Okay, so Mike Donovan really is an idiot.

However, Gregory Powell has an idea that might just save them. He draws his blaster, aims through a convenient hole in the rubble and shoots one of Dave's subsidiaries. And guess what? Dave immediately snaps back to normal and proceeds to rescue the dynamic duo.

Donovan begs his partner to explain what just happened and Powell – being a protagonist in a hard science fiction story published in Astounding – is of course only too willing to oblige. After all, they already knew that the problem lies with Dave's personal initiative circuit and that the malfunctions only occurs in difficult or dangerous situation, which require Dave to use a lot of personal initiative. Powell now deduced that Dave's decision making facilities were overloaded with controlling six subsidiaries. He could manage the six subsidiaries in ordinary situations, when some of them were engaged in routine tasks which require little to no supervision. But in emergencies, when Dave must make decisions for and give orders to all six subsidiaries, he freezes up and malfunctions. Powell shooting one of the subsidiaries lightened the decision load on Dave and turned him back to normal.

"But why…" Donovan wants to know, "…did Dave make his subsidiaries perform those marches and dances?" "Well, that's obvious", Powell replies. After all, the subsidiaries are Dave's fingers and when unsure what to do, Dave simply twiddled his fingers.

As a solution to a science fiction mystery, Powell's explanation is weak. Of course, it makes sense that Dave's malfunctions are caused by the cognitive demands of controlling his subsidiaries and in fact, I suspected that the subsidiaries were the cause of the malfunctions long before Powell and Donovan did. But how could Powell possibly know that the correct number of subsidiaries was five rather than three or four (beyond the fact that human hands usually have five fingers)? And how will US Robots – whose motto is "No employee makes the same mistake twice – he's [Asimov's pronoun choice, not mine] fired the first time" – react to react to Powell shooting what is presumably a very expensive prototype robot? Especially since keeping one subsidiary behind at the base and checking if the malfunctions still occur would have been a much more cost effective and less risky way to test the hypothesis. Okay, so getting trapped by the cave-in forced Powell's hand, but the only reason Powell and Donovan got trapped by the cave-in in the first place is because they're idiots. So is this the true reason why appearances of Powell and Donovan became scarce after this story? Because US Robots and Mechanical Men Inc. finally fired those two idiots?

Isaac Asimov would eventually go on to become a fine mystery author and he was clearly already interested in the mystery form at this early point in his career. But – as I also pointed out in my review of "The Big and the Little" – he wasn't yet very good at writing mysteries. Unlike in "The Big and the Little", Asimov does at least give the reader all the information they need to solve the mystery and indeed, I solved it before Powell and Donovan did. Even the groanworthy "finger" pun at the end was set up from the beginning, as the subsidiary robots are referred to as "fingers" throughout the story. Indeed, the main problem with "Catch That Rabbit" is not that the clues are set up badly, but that the investigators are too stupid to interpret those clues.

As a teenager, I read my way through pretty much Asimov's entire science fiction oeuvre. The stories and novels impressed me deeply and I find that I often have pretty clear memories of these stories even thirty years later. However, when rereading Asimov's stories for the Retro Hugos and for Retro Reviews, I find that I have comparatively few memories of the Powell and Donovan stories. Maybe that's because Powell and Donovan simply aren't very memorable compared to Susan Calvin or Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw.

That said, the two troubleshooters do have distinct personalities. Mike Donovan complains a lot, is given to outbursts of temper (at one point, he even smashes the visiplate) and blind panic. Gregory Powell is calmer and the more rational of the two. As always with Isaac Asimov, we are only given very sparse descriptions of our two protagonists, though Donovan is repeatedly described as red-haired. Red hair and a volatile temper are of course common stereotypes about the Irish, something which went completely over my head, when I first read this story as a teen.

As for Gregory Powell, the only physical descriptions we ever get of him is that he is older than Donovan and has a moustache which he fingers a lot (and one point tries to finger, only to realise that he is wearing a spacesuit). However, my teen self was absolutely convinced that Gregory Powell was a black man. Even now, when rereading the story, I still picture Powell as black, though his skin colour is not mentioned either in this nor in any other story featuring Powell and Donovan and the interior artist portrays both men as white (but then pulp artists routinely portrayed even unambiguous characters of colour like Eric John Stark as white). I have no idea why I imagined Powell as black, though I suspect that when I first read the stories, I mainly associated the name Gregory with actor and singer Gregory Hines, who was indeed black and had a moustache. So sorry, no diversity points for Asimov, because Gregory Powell is only black in my mind, not on the page.

While on the subject of diversity, once again there are no female characters in this story at all. Even the robot is referred to by a male name and masculine pronouns. And indeed, in the three science fiction stories Asimov published in 1944, there are only two female characters, one of which has neither a name nor any lines, while the other is a strictly secondary character. The stereotype that golden age stories are all about white male characters doing heroic things in space is not necessarily true, not even if you look only at Asimov's oeuvre – after all, Asimov also created Susan Calvin, Bayta and Arkady Darell, Jessie Baley and Gladia Delmarre during this period. But it is absolutely true for his 1944 output. Though the lack of female characters in "Catch That Rabbit" grates less than in "The Wedge" or "The Big and the Little", because "Catch That Rabbit" only has two human characters.

In my review of "The Big and the Little", I noted that the story contained some homoerotic vibes that went completely over my head, when I first read it as a teenager. Considering that the protagonists of "Catch That Rabbit" are a two-man team of troubleshooters, are there similar vibes between Powell and Donovan? Well, I didn't notice any, but then Powell and Donovan are way too busy to take turns watching Dave to get down to more interesting business such as nude sunbathing and cigar smoking. However, when I checked out the other Powell and Donovan stories, I didn't notice any overt homoerotic vibes there either. The closest any of the stories comes is when Powell suggests to Donovan that they go to bed – no mention of how many beds there are. However, I'm pretty sure that if you want to read about Powell and Donovan doing more exciting things than spouting technobabble, AO3 has you covered.

Considering that "Catch That Rabbit" is comparatively long – I suspect it lies at the upper edge of the short story range – there isn't a whole lot of plot. Nor is there a whole lot of action. Clues are doled out, there are two interviews – one with Dave and one with one of his subsidiaries – and there is the climactic cave-in. But most of the story's nineteen pages (in the magazine version) are taken up by Powell and Donovan talking and bickering. Now Asimov was never much of a stylist and the dialogue he gives his two protagonists sounds like nothing anybody ever said either in 1944 nor in the future where the story is set (which should be around 2020, come to think of it). But even though the dialogue in "Catch That Rabbit" feels about as natural as the dialogue in a Silver Age Marvel comic, i.e. not very, it is nonetheless snappy and zips along. I had fun reading this story, even if not much actually happens and the protagonists are idiots besides.

Isaac Asimov is not normally a writer associated with humorous science fiction. Nonetheless, at least at this early point in his career, Asimov did write funny stories. And while "Catch That Rabbit" is not nearly as funny as "Victory Unintentional" and "Robot AL-76 Goes Astray" – both of which sadly failed to make the 1943 Retro Hugo ballot, even though they were better than the Asimov story which did make the ballot – it is nevertheless an example of the lighter side of Asimov's work. Even the title – a reference to the saying "If you want to make rabbit stew, you must first catch a rabbit" – would have brought Bugs Bunny to mind more than anything else in 1944, for Bugs thwarted four would-be makers of rabbit stew that year alone.

Most of the humour comes from our heroes bickering, though we also get moments such as Donovan enjoying "a non-too-nutritious diet of fingernail" or an anecdote about Powell jumping out of the window of a burning house with nothing but a pair of shorts and the Handbook of Robotics – and if necessary, he would have foregone the shorts (sadly, Asimov never wrote that particular story). And yes, Powell is certainly aware that Donovan is an idiot and I'm pretty sure that Asimov is aware that both his protagonists are idiots.

Asimov is also poking fun at the conventions of what passed for hard science fiction in the 1940s in general and at the sort of stories published by John W. Campbell in Astounding Science Fiction with their endless infodumps (see Steve J. Wright's review of Cleve Cartmill's "Deadline" for a prime example) and "As you know, Bob…" dialogue in particular. For example, Asimov unmasks the "positronic field" via which Dave controls his subsidiaries as the technobabble it is by having Powell state that there isn't a roboticist at US Robots who knows what a positronic field is or how it works and neither do Powel and Donovan. All that matters is that it does work. As for the competent men that Campbell wanted as protagonists for the stories he published, Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan are many things, but competent is not one of them.

At this early point in his career, Asimov wasn't yet skilled enough to avoid "As You Know, Bob…" dialogue altogether, but he at least tried to use it in interesting ways. And so a painfully clumsy "As you know, Bob – pardon, Jain…" conversation on Seldon crises in "The Big and the Little" actually turns out to be an important clue to the central mystery, because it reveals that a character is not who he claims to be or he wouldn't have needed a primer on what a Seldon crisis is. And in "Catch That Rabbit", Asimov points out how ridiculous characters telling each other things they should both already know really is by having Donovan interrupt Powell's "As you know, Mike…" monologue with "I know that", whereupon Powell shushes him with, "Shut up! I know that you know that, but I'm just describing the hell of it".

I will always have a soft spot for Isaac Asimov, because his work was pretty much the first serious adult science fiction I discovered – all earlier science fiction reads were YA, Star Wars novelisations and some Anne McCaffrey. However, rereading some of those old Asimov stories for the Retro Hugos, I also realise that they hold up better for me than many other books I read around the same time.

"Catch That Rabbit" is not a particularly good story. It's not even the best Asimov story of 1944, for "The Wedge" is better. However, "Catch That Rabbit" is the story I enjoyed reading the most and the one that has suffered the least from a visit by the suck fairy, maybe because even my teenaged self realised that Powell and Donovan were bumblers and idiots and pretty much the science fiction equivalent of Laurel and Hardy.