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

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

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

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

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cover of the 1951 edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retro Review: "The Man Who Wouldn't Hang" by Stanton A. Coblentz

"The Man Who Wouldn't Hang" is a short story by Stanton A. Coblentz, which was first published in the July 1944 issue of Weird Tales and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found online here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following.

This story takes the form of a tale told around the fireplace. One night, man called Carrigan, who's worked as a state executioner for thirty years, is hanging out with friends and telling stories about his work. The fact that Carrigan is so open about what he does for a living is remarkable, considering that most real life executioners rarely talk about their work (executioners also have a high rate of depression and suicide), though there are exceptions who like to give interviews or write memoirs. And considering that executioners were historically shunned and often had to live outside the city gate, it's also remarkable that Carrigan even has friends, even if those friends mainly seem to be interested in the macabre stories Carrigan has to tell.

Carrigan is quite unapologetic about his line of work. And so when one of his friends, the first person narrator of this story, asks him if there was ever a prisoner who got away, Carrigan tells the story of a convicted bank robber and murderer he calls Scar-Face because the man had a distinctive scar on his face.

Throughout his trial, Scar-Face insists that he is innocent and did not fire the shot that killed a bank clerk, but it is to no avail. He is sentenced to death anyway. On death row, Scar-Face is remarkably cool and sanguine, even as his execution date draws near.

On the way to the gallows, Scar-Face is polite and cheery and even helps his executioners to blindfold him. Meanwhile, Carrigan is overcome by a spooky feeling. And though Carrigan has zero moral qualms about executing people and even brags that he has already hanged fifty men, he is uncommonly reluctant to pull the lever. When Carrigan finally pulls the lever after all, what happens is… nothing. The trap door does not open and Scar-Face does not hang.

Carrigan pulls the lever again and again, but the trap door just won't open. So Carrigan and his assistants check the gallows and everything seems to be in order. Even the trap door opens as intended, when Scar-Face is not standing on it. But as soon as they return the condemned to the gallows, the trap door once more refuses to open. At one point, Carrigan even has his assistants try the gallows on himself, with the rope tied around his waist rather than his neck. The trap door opens. So Scar-Face is brought back to the gallows and once again nothing happens.

Eventually, Carrigan and his assistants give up. Scar-Face is returned to his cell and Carrigan has to explain to the state governor why the execution could not be carried out. The governor is furious and threatens to fire Carrigan, but eventually relents, since there are plenty of witnesses to confirm that the failed execution wasn't Carrigan's fault.

And so a new execution date is set and a new gallows is built. The governor even shows up in person to witness the execution. Scar-Face is taken to the gallows and once more nothing happens. The trap door refuses to open and a thorough examination of the gallows finds no technical fault. Exasperated, the governor finally gives up and commutes Scar-Face's sentence to life imprisonment. Of course, this would never have happened in reality, at least not in the US, where executioners try again and again, if the first execution attempt fails. And yes, there are several examples.

Carrigan concludes his tale by reporting that a few years later, a member of Scar-Face's old gang made a death bed confession and admitted that he shot the bank clerk. So Scar-Face was innocent after all and is promptly freed. When his friends ask Carrigan about his theories why Scar-Face couldn't be hanged, Carrigan admits that during the final execution attempt, he saw a strange mist in the gallows chamber, a mist which coalesced into a pair of hands that held the trap door shut.

I have to admit that I chose this story at random, while (virtually) flipping through the July 1944 issue of Weird Tales. What attracted me was the title and the evocative interior art by A.R. Tilburne. Besides, the story is very short – only four pages long – and so I decided to read it.

I wrote in my review of "Guard in the Dark" by Allison V. Harding that her stories were often dismissed as forgettable fillers in later years. I felt that was too harsh a verdict for "Guard in the Dark". "The Man Who Wouldn't Hang", on the other hand, really is a filler. The story is well written – the general writing quality in Weird Tales seems higher under Dorothy McIlwraith than during Farnworth Wright's tenure – and effective, but it is also very slight. There isn't any deeper meaning nor does the story offer any opinion on the death penalty one way or another. "The Man Who Wouldn't Hang" is merely a spooky anecdote. There also is very little supernatural content in this story apart from the mysterious misty hands. "The Man Who Wouldn't Hang" could have been published just as well in the likes of Black Mask or Dime Mystery or any other crime pulp.

The fact that the story is well written is no surprise, as author Stanton A Coblentz was a veteran pulp writer who had started publishing in the 1920s and kept writing well into the 1960s. He was a frequent contributor to Amazing Stories and the other Hugo Gernsback magazines. "The Man Who Wouldn't Hang" is somewhat atypical for Coblentz, since most of his work seems to have been science fiction, quite a lot of it satirical. In addition to writing speculative fiction, Coblentz also was a poet and literary critic.

"The Man Who Wouldn't Hang" is very likely based on a real case, that of John "Babbacombe" Lee, who was sentenced to death for the murder of his employer in England in 1885 and survived three attempts to hang him, when the trap door would not open. As in "The Man Who Wouldn't Hang", the gallows functioned perfectly fine, when tested. Like the fictional Scar-Face, John "Babbacombe" Lee had his sentence first commuted to life imprisonment and was eventually freed. Though John "Babbacombe" Lee was not saved by supernatural intervention. Instead, the most likely explanation for the failure to hang him is that the gallows had been disassembled and set up in a different part of the prison prior to Lee's execution. In the process, the trap door mechanism had become misaligned and the trap door refused to open. An alternate explanation is that a prisoner tasked with setting up the gallows in its new location had deliberately sabotaged the mechanism. But whatever the reason, John "Babbacombe" Lee survived his execution by sixty years.

The case of John "Babbacombe" Lee is fairly well known and was also described in detail in the memoirs of James Berry, the executioner who was supposed to hang him. Coblentz likely stumbled over this story at some point and fictionalised it.

A neat spooky anecdote, lots of atmosphere, but little substance.