Retro Review: "The Children's Hour" by Lawrence O'Donnell a.k.a. Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore

Astounding had some good covers in 1944. This is not one of them.

"The Children's Hour" is a novelette by Lawrence O'Donnell, one of the many pen names of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore. It was first published in the March 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is finalist for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version may be found online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point!

The protagonist of "The Children's Hour" is a soldier named Sergeant James Lessing. Lessing has a problem, for during a psychological experiment to use hypnosis to desensitize soldiers against pain, hunger and other hardship (Am I the only one who finds this slightly sinister?), Lieutenant Dyke, the psychologist running the program, noticed that three months of Lessing's life were simply missing, hidden behind an impenetrable hypnotic block. Lessing, on the other hand, does have memories of those months, memories of a perfectly mundane civilian life as an advertising executive in New York City.

Nowadays, a soldier with three months of his life missing and a hypnotic block in his mind conjures up sinister scenarios along the lines of The Manchurian Candidate. However, the novel version of The Manchurian Candidate was not published until 1959, fifteen years after "The Children's Hour". And even though "The Children's Hour" was written at the height of World War II, it is the product of a more innocent time not yet affected by Cold War paranoia. And so the novelette goes into a completely different direction.

The story catches up with Lessing as he is about to see Lieutenant Dyke for the decisive session, the one where Dyke will finally break through the barrier in Lessing's mind. Dyke hypnotises Lessing and asks him to go back to the summer of 1941.

At first Dyke sees a shadow and gets the first lines of a poem, "The Children's Hour" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem is not identified in the story itself. Kuttner and Moore obviously assumed that their readers would recognise it. And since the poem was frequently taught in American schools in the first half of the 20^th century, the average Astounding reader of 1944 probably did recognise it. I have to admit that I had to look it up, even though I do own The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and wrote a paper on "Evangeline" at university.

As a matter of fact, the story is full of literary allusions – not just to Wordsworth, but also to Greek mythology, Shakespeare, Alice in Wonderland, James Branch Cabell and H.G. Wells – that make me wonder whether a contemporary reader in 1944 was expected to recognise them all without Google at his disposal. Coincidentally, it also belies complaints from certain quarters that science fiction and fantasy used to be simple, plain good fun, but now everything is so political and literary. Because here we have an SFF story full of literary references in 1944.

But though the literary references enrich the story, "The Children's Hour" also works without them. In fact, I am now reminded of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, another work full of literary references (reading it as an adult after watching the 1985 movie when I was way too young for it, I was stunned how many references there were) that was a genuine mega-bestseller in the 1980s and was read and enjoyed by lots of people who didn't get the references at all, but just read the novel as an exciting historical mystery.

Gradually, Lessing remembers that he met someone at a drinking fountain in the park that summer. At first, he has problems recalling that person, then he gets another line of verse – this time a quote from Romeo and Juliet – and finally remembers.

The person Lessing met in the park was a woman named Clarissa. Clarissa made Lessing see the world anew, as if he were a child again, and Lessing was very much in love with her. However, there was someone standing between them. Shadowy guardians, who had snatched Clarissa away and taken Lessing's memory. Lessing also remembers that Clarissa had an aunt, an aunt who disapproved of him. However, he cannot remember what that aunt looked like or what she said to him on the last day he saw Clarissa. All he remembers is Clarissa and her tears.

Gradually, Dyke and Lessing unearth more buried memories, such as the first time when Lessing noticed something off about Clarissa, when she suddenly vanished in a vortex of pulsating concentric rings, while they were witnessing a car accident near Central Park, only to reappear a moment later.
Strange things keep happening. The next time, it's not Clarissa who vanishes, but a pavilion in Central Park, where they want to take shelter from a sudden rain shower. Due to being caught out in the rain, Clarissa develops a fever and Lessing does not see her for a few weeks. During these few weeks without Clarissa, life become dull and drained of colour to him. But then Clarissa is sufficiently recovered that Lessing can visit her again in her strange windowless apartment that is filled with mirrors.

Lessing is completely in love with Clarissa by now and they begin making marriage plans. But then, Clarissa begins to slip away. Lessing blames her aunt for keeping them apart. Then, one day he tries to visit Clarissa at her apartment, but no one answers the door, even though he can see a shadowy figure – the aunt – moving around inside. Lessing gets angry and breaks down the door, only to find the apartment empty.

And suddenly, Lessing sees Clarissa enveloped by a golden shimmer and begins to fall through a portal of mirrors, until he is suddenly somewhere else. Two men armed with strange weapons threaten him, protecting a group of women, one of whom is Clarissa. The armed men are as surprised to see Lessing as he is surprised to see them. Only Clarissa isn't surprised. She smiles at Lessing and tells him that he doesn't have to bother explaining where he came from, because they would only forget anyway. One of the guards attacks Lessing with a whip and suddenly he is back in the real world, lying flat on his face outside Clarissa's apartment. He chalks the whole episode up to bumping his head, while he tried to break down the door.

However, Lessing's adventure in the mirror world was so vivid that he plans to talk to Clarissa about it, forcing his way past her aunt by any means necessary. He comes to the apartment again, but this time the door is open and the only person at home is Clarissa, who is standing there in a shower of golden stars. Lessing, who is rather erudite, is immediately reminded of the antique myth of Danae, locked away in a tower from all men, only for Zeus to transform himself into a golden rain and impregnate her.

Lessing comes to the conclusion that the strange occurrences surrounding Clarissa must mean that she is being courted by a godlike being just like Zeus once courted Danae. Lessing also muses whether the Greek legends have a basis in experiences like his own with Clarissa. However, he cannot tell Clarissa what is going on, because she does not seem to be aware of what is happening and he has no idea how Clarissa will react, once she learns the truth. However, Lessing plans to open her eyes, before his supernatural rival comes to claim his bride, so that Clarissa can choose freely. Whatever else you think about Lessing, you have to admire his guts, considering he believes that he is about to go up against a god.

The next evening, Lessing takes Clarissa dancing at a seedy nightclub. He is determined not to get drunk, but a mix of alcohol, drugs (marihuana is namechecked) and the intoxication of love make him decide to take Clarissa away from New York City, away the aunt who keeps her imprisoned and his godlike rival. So they get into Lessing's car and drive along the Hudson River.

It's interesting that neither Lessing nor Dyke nor the authors sees anything wrong with Lessing driving, while drunk (and the story makes it very clear that he is at the very least drunk, if not high as well). Considering how strong the taboo against drunk driving and the respective laws are today, I have to admit that I found that scene jarring. Investigations reveal that New Jersey, just across the river from where "The Children's Hour" is set, had a law against drunk driving as early as 1906. The state of New York followed in 1910. So Lessing's drunken ride along the Hudson River was no more legal in 1944 than it would be today.

In the end, Lessing and Clarissa's drunken flight is for naught anyway, because the powers guiding Clarissa's life force them back via traffic jams, road closures and Lessing suddenly realising he is going the wrong way (Uhm, are you certain that's not just because you're drunk?). The golden rain appears again to envelop Clarissa and Lessing suddenly finds himself in a forest, watching a procession of sombre figures in black hooded cloaks. One of them is Clarissa, who is oddly, deliriously happy. Lessing tries to approach her, but before he can, a person in a red hooded cloak embraces her. Lessing cannot see that person's face, just a golden glow, and assumes it's his divine rival. Then the world starts spinning again and he is suddenly back in his car, double-parked (Lessing really is intent on violating traffic laws, is he?) outside Clarissa's apartment. Clarissa bids him good night and tells him to phone her in the morning.

However, it's Clarissa who calls Lessing and asks him to come at once. She seems upset and point blank asks him, if they did something wrong last night, because she had a feeling that they did, only that she cannot remember. Now Lessing tells her everything, all the strange occurrences surrounding her and that he has the feeling that someone is guiding Clarissa towards something.

Clarissa tells Lessing that she never really noticed before how she was being guarded and guided, but that she cannot unsee it now. She also tells him a fairy tale she heard from her aunt, about a princess who grew up among the blind in the woods, never opening her eyes, even though she can see, because the sun would still be too bright for her. Clarissa has no idea how the fairy tale ends, but she knows that she is the princess. She also tells Lessing that the powers have always protected her. Lessing is doubtful about their true intentions, but Clarissa insists that they are benevolent and that of course, the powers will let them get married.

But then, one of the guardians – the unseen aunt – appears and tells Clarissa quite clearly that there will be no marriage and no future with Lessing. Clarissa cries, while Lessing is paralysed as the aunt tears them apart. A voice tells Lessing that he has served his purpose and shall now forget, which he promptly does, until Dyke recovered his missing memories.

However, "The Children's Hour" is still a story published in Astounding and so Dyke now takes over to deliver the solution to the mystery, complete with the requisite technobabble, including equations. Dyke theorises that Clarissa is a young human superior. As adults, human superior are so highly developed that ordinary humans cannot even perceive them, just as Lessing could never truly see Clarissa's aunt. Meanwhile, human superior children are about as developed as ordinary human adults. And that is what Clarissa was, a human superior child come out to play in the world, a four-dimensional being in a three-dimensional world. Once she has become mature enough, she was returned to her own people, while Lessing had his memories wiped.

However, Dyke also has another, more likely theory. After all, both Lessing and Clarissa were caught in the rainstorm in Central Park. Clarissa fell ill, developed a fever and experienced delirium. But maybe Lessing fell ill as well and simply imagined all the strange things that happened afterwards.

Lessing decides to settle the question once and for all. He will go back to the apartment and pay Clarissa a visit. After all, she might be waiting for him. Dyke does not think that this is a good idea, but goes along with it. So Lessing heads for Clarissa's apartment and rings the doorbell.

The door opens and Lessing sees the mirrors, but he can no longer see Clarissa. She is an adult now, to evolved for him to even perceive. Lessing briefly grasps the truth. Clarissa is not just homo superior, but a multi-dimensional being existing in many worlds and places at once. Those were the visions of other Clarissa's in other worlds that Lessing saw. Once all of these different Clarissas have developed, they will combine to form the full, adult Clarissa. This is exactly what happened and not only can Lessing no longer even perceive Clarissa, to her he is merely a child's toy, a plaything to be put away for more adult pursuits.

The story ends with Lessing getting into a taxi (at least, he's not driving drunk or high this time) and asking the driver where to find a good nightclub. He has forgotten everything once more and this time, the memory block is complete, which is probably for the best.

This 1959 anthology credits "The Children's Hour" only to Kuttner, even though Moore likely wrote the bulk of it.

"The Children's Hour" is a very beautiful and very strange story. Not a lot happens, the bulk of this very long (likely close to the novella borderline of 17500 words) novelette consists of two men sitting in a psychologist's office, while we are treated to a long flashback of one of the two's doomed romance with a superior being. And while there is a mystery to solve, there is no huge world-threatening menace involved. Lessing was hypnotised and had part of his memories taken not for some sinister purpose to sabotage the war (and it's very clear that the story is set during WWII, even if the war never impinges on the narrative except via brief mentions of military ranks, barracks and marching soldiers), but to protect him from a truth to great for him to understand.

Even though "The Children's Hour" is a love story between an adult man and what is essentially a child, it manages not to be skeevy. For starters, Lessing has no idea that Clarissa is a child, even if she does seem childlike at times, as Dyke points out. Furthermore, Clarissa appears to Lessing as a woman of his own age. Physically, they are similarly developed, even if Clarissa will evolve and Lessing will not. Finally, there is also no indication that Lessing and Clarissa ever had sex – mostly they just walk hand in hand through the parks of New York City. Of course, there is very little in the way of sex in golden age science fiction in general and in Astounding in particular. However, in C.L. Moore's earlier Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry stories, it's very clear that both Northwest Smith and Jirel have sex at times, even if the scenes are vague and the sex only alluded to. There is nothing along those lines in "The Children's Hour" and I also suspect that if Lessing and Clarissa's romance had ever threatened to go beyond handholding in public parks, Clarissa's unseen guardians would have intervened – just as they did when Lessing attempted to elope with Clarissa.

I have no idea what is going on on the cover of this French Kuttner/Moore anthology. It looks like Kuttner and Moore in bed with a buddhe statue, stunned that a naked black woman has just appeared on the floor of their appartment

A lot of people have claimed that with Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore's collaborations, it's difficult to tell who was responsible for which parts. And reprint anthologies and collections have frequently attributed their collaborative stories to Kuttner alone. However, I have never had any problems telling Kuttner's and Moore's contributions apart, because their solo writing styles are quite different. And the dreamlike quality that suffuses the entire story, particularly the flashback scenes of Lessing and Clarissa, is highly reminiscent of C.L. Moore's Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry stories of the 1930s. After all, both Jirel and Northwest Smith spent more time exploring strange worlds and having nigh psychedelic experiences than swinging swords and firing blasters, something which regularly exasperates those who prefer their SFF with a large dose of fighting action. But fighting action is not something that C.L. Moore delivers. However, she could create otherworldly landscapes and moods like few other writers of the era. At times, the story feels almost psychedelic, like a drug-fuelled dream. Steve J. Wright calls it a 1940s fairy tale in his review.

Because the rest of the story is so dreamlike, the infodump towards the end, complete with equations, sticks out like a sore thumb. I strongly suspect that Kuttner wrote that part, if only because Moore's infodumps sound very different as can be seen in "No Woman Born". I also don't think the story really needs the infodump and that it would have worked just as well, if the mystery of Clarissa's true nature had remained vague. But Astounding editor John W. Campbell liked his infodumps and since he paid well and upon acceptance, his writers obliged him.

Another anthology, which contains "The Children's Hour", even though there are no aliens in the story, nor did it appear in Analog.

Talking of which, "The Children's Hour" is yet another highly atypical Astounding story. In his review, Paul Fraser says that while he was reading "The Children's Hour", he kept wondering what this story was doing in a 1940s issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Frankly, I had the same reaction. Because while the other atypical Astounding stories I have reviewed for the Retro Reviews project such as e.g. the City stories by Clifford D. Simak are still very much golden age science fiction stories, "The Children's Hour" doesn't feel like a story of the 1940s at all and certainly not like a science fiction story, technobabble infodump complete with equations notwithstanding.

I know that I say this a lot, but I'm very surprised that Campbell bought and published this novelette, because it is so very much not the sort of thing you'd expect to find in Astounding, even if the character who cracks the mystery is a psychologist who uncovers hidden memories, a subject Campbell had a keen interest in. However, "The Children's Hour" is very much the anti-Astounding story, if there is such a thing. Once again, the mood is bittersweet and melancholic, which is remarkably common for Astounding in the 1940s (see also the City stories or Moore's own "No Woman Born"). There is a mystery to solve here, but science and technology do not help to solve it, even if Dyke throws around some equations towards the end. Never mind that Dyke's efforts have been for naught, because Lessing has his memories wiped again at the end and most likely that pesky meddler Dyke will receive a visit from a shadowy presence as well. Nor are the humans triumphant or superior in this story. To superior multi-dimensional beings like Clarissa's "aunt", humans are little more than children, to be used to socialise and educate their own young. And yes, Dyke and Lessing refer to the adults of Clarissa's species as homo superior, a popular concept in Astounding during the golden age, which eventually found its way into the Marvel comics of the 1960s and beyond. But we have no way of knowing if they really are human, since Lessing cannot even perceive the adults of the species. And while the adult beings are not malevolent, unlike Alexander, the homo superior baby and psychopath in training from Kuttner and Moore's "When the Bough Breaks", they are simply so far above humanity that they barely show any interest in us at all, except as playthings for their kids.

Maybe "The Children's Hour" was left over from Unknown Worlds, Astounding's fantasy-focussed sister magazine, which fell victim to WWII paper rationing the year before. This might also explain why the technobabble infodump feels so tacked on, because it was retrofitted to turn into a science fiction story for Astounding.

However, if I had read "The Children's Hour" blind, I would have assumed it was either a fantasy story from an early 1930s issue of Weird Tales (and of course, Kuttner and Moore both got their start writing for the unique magazine) or a New Wave story from the 1960s. The fact that "The Children's Hour" is either fifteen years behind its time or twenty to twenty-five years ahead of it may also be the reason why the story is not particularly well known. Adventures Fantastic points out in their review that it has only been reprinted a handful of times over the past seventy-five years. It does not show up in either Moore's or Kuttner's Best of collection. Nor was it included in Isaac Asimov's and Martin H. Greenberg's anthology The Great SF Stories Vol. 6 – 1944, probably because they already included "When the Bough Breaks" and "No Woman Born" and felt that "The Children's Hour" would be one Kuttner/Moore story too many. Even though I vastly prefer "The Children's Hour" to "When the Bough Breaks" and will have a hard time deciding whether to rank "No Woman Born" or "The Children's Hour" in first place on my Retro Hugo ballot, because they're both very good, if very different stories. That said, 1944 readers seem to have liked the story, even it is highly atypical, and voted it in first place of Astounding's reader poll for the March issue.

"The Children's Hour" is a beautiful, almost dreamlike fantasy romance. I'm not sure if Retro Hugo voters will go for this story over the better known "No Woman Born", "City" or "The Big and the Little", but do I hope that it will do well, because it is story that deserves more recognition.

Retro Review: "The Free-Lance of Space" by Edmond Hamilton

"The Free-Lance of Space" by Edmond Hamilton is a space opera 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!

Like so many space operas and noir stories, "The Free-Lance of Space" starts out in a disreputable bar cum cosmic opium den near the Uranus spaceport. In a private room, two men are meeting, the Saturnian agent Brun Abo and the Earthman Rake Allan, the notorious Free-Lance, a broker and fixer who owes no allegiance to Earth or any other world, after he was kicked out of the Earth diplomatic corps, disgraced and outlawed.

Brun Abo has a job for Rake Allan. For it turns out that a Martian biologist named Doctor Su has discovered a drug that can revive people who have died of "spaceshock", i.e. the sudden exposure to the vacuum of space. Such a drug is invaluable to any power who possesses it and therefore Brun Abo wants to acquire the formula for the Saturnian space navy, because it would give them the edge in case of an interplanetary war. The Saturnians aren't the only ones interested in the formula, other worlds have made Su an offer as well. However, Doctor Su refused all of them and intends to return to Mars that very night. Abo now offers Rake Allan half a million Earth dollars, if he procures the formula for the Saturnians.

Allan listens to Abo's story with interest, but he has no intention of selling the formula to the Saturnians. Instead, he'll sell it to the highest bidder, whoever that might be. And so he overpowers Abo and leaves him in the intergalactic opium parlour, drugged out of his mind. Then Allan heads for the spaceport to catch the Draco, the spaceship that will take Doctor Su back to Mars. He gets lucky, too, for the Draco has been delayed, because half her crew got drunk on Uranus and had to be replaced.

Allan boards the Draco under an assumed name and secures a cabin for himself. Unfortunately, the cabin right next to Doctor Su's is already taken by a young Earthwoman, so Allan has to improvise. He tries to sneak into the woman's cabin and when he finds it already occupied, he sprays narcotic gas through the keyhole to knock the woman out.

However, Allan is in for a surprise, because the young woman in the cabin next to Doctor Su's is also onboard under an assumed name. In truth she is Jean King of the Earth diplomatic service, Allan's former co-worker and ex-lover. And she's aboard the Draco for the same reason as Allan.

When Jean comes to again, she tells Allan that she isn't looking to secure Doctor Su's formula for Earth. Instead, she wants to keep the agents of other planets from stealing the formula, because Doctor Su is a true humanitarian (Martianitarian?) and wants to give the formula to the entire solar system rather than any one power.

Allan, however, is much more sceptical about the alleged noble motives of Jean and the Earth diplomatic corps. After all, the corps disowned him and left him to rot in a Venusian prison for two years, after a mission went south. Jean begs Allan to reconsider his decision, but he's not listening. Instead, he gags Jean and continues with his mission.

He drugs Doctor Su with the same narcotic gas he used on Jean earlier and breaks into his cabin. He quickly find a sample of the elixir, but he can't find the formula. So Allan has to wait for Doctor Su to wake up. He threatens Su with his blaster, even though the Free-Lance does not kill, and tricks him into revealing the whereabouts of the formula. Su begs Allan not to take the formula, because he can never reproduce it from memory. And besides, he really wants to give it to the whole solar system.

"Why didn't you already publish it already then?" Allan asks, "Why wait?"

Su declares that he doesn't want to publish the formula until it has been tested on a human being. That's why he is returning to Mars, because he wants to test the formula. And Su's chosen test subject is none other than his own son who died in a spaceship accident two years before and whose body being kept refrigerated on  Mars. Su also begs Allan to leave him as much of the elixir as Su needs to revive his son and take the rest, if he must.

Su's plight touches what remains of Allan's conscience where Jean's could not. He releases Jean and Su. "You win," he tells them and advises Su to publish the formula as soon as he has tested it, because there will be other agents after it.

And indeed one of those other agents, a Jovian named Stakan Awl, attacks as soon as Allan has made his decision. Turns out that the Jovian secret service got the crew of the Draco drunk on Uranus to replace them with their own agents. Once safely in space, those agents take over the ship and proceed to procure the formula. However, Stakan Awl wants to test the formula first. And the test subject he picks is none other than Rake Allan.

As Allan is on his way to the nearest airlock (though Hamilton calls them "space-doors"), he manages to trick his guards and escape. He makes his way to the bridge and barricades himself in, intending to turn the Draco around and alert the Uranian space patrol. However, Stakan Awl has disabled the engines. Worse, the Jovians are about to cut their way onto the bridge. Allan cannot deal with them all. And if he is recaptured, the Jovians will kill not only him, but everybody aboard the Draco, because Jovians never leave witnesses.

So Allan decides on a risky gamble. The controls for the airlocks and life support system are on the bridge. So are spacesuits for emergencies. Allan put on one of those spacesuits and opens the airlocks all over the ship, just as the Jovians break down the door. Within seconds, Allan is the only person left alive aboard the Draco.

He closes the airlocks and starts up the life support system again. Then he races back to Doctor Su's cabin to retrieve the elixir. He revives first Jean and then Doctor Su. Allan informs the stunned Doctor that his elixir works and has been tested on humans and that there are plenty more people to revive, the passengers and non-treacherous crew of the Draco and the Jovian agents, too, once they have been bound and disarmed.

So Doctor Su takes off to revive the rest of the passengers and crew, while Jean and Allan enjoy their reunion and revival some more. Jean asks Allan to return to Earth with her, for surely the diplomatic corps will forgive all his past transgressions after the great service he did to Earth and the entire solar system. Rake Allan confesses that he never forgot Jean and asks her to marry him. Jean accepts and Rake muses that they will probably get wedding presents from police forces of all nine planets now that the Free-Lance is settling down.

"The Free-Lance of Space" is a neat action-packed spy thriller from one of the pioneers of the space opera subgenre as we know it. I've never warmed to E.E. Smith, even though his works are hugely important to the development of the science fiction genre. However, I've always liked the works of Edmond Hamilton who started writing space opera only a few years after Smith and whose Interstellar Patrol series is one of the founding texts of the space opera subgenre. But Edmond Hamilton's work is also important to me personally, because the 1979 anime series based on Hamilton's Captain Future series (which is eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugo for Best Series – hint, hint) was one of works which made me fall in love with science fiction, along with Star Wars, the original Star Trek, Time Tunnel and Raumpatrouille Orion.

"The Free-Lance of Space" is a fairly obscure Edmond Hamilton story and has been reprinted only once in 1974. Nonetheless, it has all the elements that make for a cracking good space adventure. The science is complete nonsense, of course. For starters, it makes no sense that Allan never even considers using the Draco's communication system to call for help. And opening the airlocks would have sucked everybody aboard the Draco into space. Furthermore, knowledge of how the vacuum of space works and how it affects the human body was purely theoretical at the time this story was written, though over in Nazi Germany Dr. Hubertus Strughold was putting those theories into practice via experiments carried out on concentration camp inmates, which did not stop NASA from recruiting him for the US space program.

In my review of "Highwayman of the Void" by Dirk Wylie a.k.a. Frederik Pohl, I noted that many science fiction stories of the golden age seem to be set in the same consensus version of the solar system, a solar system that has very little to do with the one we actually live in, but still influences science fiction to this day. "The Free-Lance of Space" is another story that is set in this pulp science fiction shared universe. However, "The Free-Lance of Space" is more than that. It very much feels like Edmond Hamilton was trying to write a Leigh Brackett story. And no, Brackett did not write this one and publish it under Hamilton's name – the writing style is different.

Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton would marry two and a half years after this story was published. Unlike the other science fiction power couple of the golden age Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, Brackett and Hamilton collaborated only once on "Stark and the Star Kings", a story intended for Harlan Ellison's The Last Dangerous Visions. But even though Brackett and Hamilton may not have collaborated very much, they did influence each other.

I first noticed this last year when I reviewed the 1949 Eric John Stark novella "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" a.k.a. The Secret of Sinharat shortly after I had reviewed Edmond Hamilton's 1948 novel The Valley of Creation for Galactic Journey and realised that even though the settings of both stories were completely different, Himalaya in the late 1940s versus Mars in the far future, there were certain similarities with regard to characters, plot and theme. Reading "The Free-Lance of Space" shortly after reviewing several Leigh Brackett stories from the same year reveals yet more similarities.

Like so many Leigh Brackett protagonists, Rake Allan is an outlaw, a man alienated from his homeworld and embittered because Earth betrayed him. Like Leigh Brackett's outlaw heroes, Rake Allan does have a personal code. "The Free-Lance does not kill," he says at one point, ironically while threatening Doctor Su with a gun. And though some of the Jovian agents die in a shootout, Allan later insists that Su revive the Jovians killed when Allan opened the airlocks. Allan is also quickly overcome by his conscience, once he learns why Su developed the elixir. And like Rick Urquart from Leigh Brackett's Shadow Over Mars and many other Leigh Brackett heroes over the years, Rake Allan realises at the end that love is more important than money and power.

We don't get many physical descriptions of Rake Allan. We mainly learn that he is tall and rangy, another thing he shares with many Brackett heroes. Another thing we learn about Rake Allan is that he has brown skin. So we have another potential protagonist of colour. And this time around, he even looks dark-skinned in the interior art by Julian S. Krupa. Meanwhile, Jean King is clearly described as blonde, blue-eyed and white, so we likely have an interracial relationship as well.

Edmond Hamilton generally wrote strong female characters and Jean King, diplomat and secret agent, is no exception. In practice, she doesn't get a whole lot to do and spends most of the story either tied up or frozen to death, but she has potential. The relationship between Rake Allan and Jean King also feels less rushed than some of Leigh Brackett's romantic couples, but then Hamilton circumvents the insta-love problem by giving Rake and Jean a past romantic history.

Meanwhile, the spaceship with everybody aboard except for the protagonist unconscious and seemingly dead is reminiscent of Leigh Brackett's novelette "The Veil of Astellar" where the protagonist finds himself in a similar situation, though for a very different reason.

"The Free-Lance of Space" is a highly enjoyable spy thriller in space. It's a minor Hamilton, but nonetheless a story that deserves to be remembered more than it is.

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

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

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

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

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cover of the 1951 edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retro Review: "I, Rocket" by Ray Bradbury

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

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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