Guest Review: "Killdozer!" by Theodore Sturgeon, reviewed by Don Briago

Today, I'm happy to bring you another guest review. This time around, the subject is "Killdozer!", a science fiction horror novella by Theodore Sturgeon. So I hand over to Don Briago to share his thoughts on "Killdozer!":

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“Killdozer!” is a novella by Theodore Sturgeon. It was first published in the November 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found online here.

It has been reprinted many times since. As a kid I came across the story in one of the excellent Spectrum anthologies edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. For this review I read the version that appears in Killdozer!, the third volume of Sturgeon's collected stories, which contains a wonderful general introduction by Robert Silverberg and informative notes on each story by Paul Williams. 

As recounted by Williams, the origin of "Killdozer!" is probably more interesting than "Killdozer!" itself. It was possible - barely - to scrape a living as a pulp writer if you were very prolific, but throughout his career Sturgeon's output was irregular. During the early Forties, he had a pretty good excuse for being distracted, what with a world war breaking out. The army hired him for various gigs, one of which involved operating a bulldozer, a job Sturgeon found not only well-paid but enjoyable. 

The army shipped him here and there. By the time Sturgeon wound up in the Virgin Islands, he hadn't written anything for over four years. (Between lying on the beach or churning out pulp fiction, which would you choose?) Financial desperation - the freelancer’s muse - forced him back to the typewriter, and his creativity erupted. He finished the thirty thousand words of "Killdozer!" in nine days, and mailed the manuscript to John Campbell at Astounding.

The legendary editor loved it. He stopped the presses so he could run "Killdozer!" as Astounding's next cover story. As both Silverberg and Williams note, Campbell paid Sturgeon the princely sum of $542.50, equivalent to ten grand today. Its success led to a (very inferior) bulldozer sequel, a Marvel comic, and a 1974 TV movie that looks so cheesy I'm dying to watch it. It also inspired the formation of a proto-grunge band called Killdozer. Not bad for nine days' work. 

The most successful story Sturgeon wrote was probably also his least characteristic. Sturgeon was widely acclaimed for his casual lyricism and humorous warmth. Neither quality is evident in "Killdozer!" It is pure action, plain and simple. There is no literary innovation here. As Cora recently pointed out, at this time many SFFers were writing stories about malevolent, autonomous machines, though I'm not sure if Sturgeon was aware of the trend during his long fallow period. 

“Killdozer!” starts with a truly awful and unnecessary infodump summarizing the history of a lost civilization that was destroyed in a war against sentient machines. All that's left in its ruins is "neutronium", a field of concentrated energy that could quite possibly wreak havoc. You think, "Oh no, is this going to be a Lovecraft thing where an ancient artifact unleashes eldritch horrors upon the hapless men who disturb its rest?" Yes, it is, but there's no overwrought Lovecraftian atmosphere. Thankfully, the neutronium doesn't really matter, and for the most part Sturgeon retains his light touch.

The hero is a guy named Tom, his foil is a guy named Chub, and there are six other guys who are more or less interchangeable. Their expository dialogue informs the reader that they are a construction crew sent to a deserted Pacific island to pave an airstrip. Which means nobody will be around to rescue them if, for example, they accidentally desecrate an ancient temple housing a nameless evil and it starts disemboweling them. (Campbell no doubtsaw the resemblance to his own seminal story "Who Goes There?" in which a group of isolated men get picked off one by one by a shape-shifting alien.) All of this set-up takes far too long for my taste and suggests Sturgeon's storytelling skills were indeed rusty.

We meet the real star of the show, the bulldozer, and she's a beaut, a D7 model whom the boys on the crew have nicknamed Daisy Etta (a corruption of "De Siete", Spanish for D7.) Then there's a bunch of boring conversation about the crew's past experiences in construction. Sigh. When your readers pick up a story called "Killdozer!" (complete with exclamation mark) they know what's coming once you introduce the bulldozer. You should get on with the anticipated rampage. When I was a kid I thought, "Less talking, more killing!" as I worked my way through the filler, and I felt the same impatience today as a nominal adult. 

When Daisy finally makes her first kill, Tom suspects it's due to a technical malfunction, not because she has been possessed by an eldritch horror, so he sabotages her innards and siphons all the gasoline from her tank. That doesn't stop her, of course, and she kills again. The other crew members suspect Tom of the murders. By the time they accept the fact that Daisy has somehow become a sentient serial killer, half of them are dead.

What follows is the heart of the tale, a cat and mouse game between Daisy and the surviving crew, and it's genuinely gripping. I'll pick three nits, namely the depiction of the crew's Puerto Rican wouldn't fly today, Daisy's intelligence conveniently ranges from shrewd to dumb to fit the vagaries of the plot, and the ending is very, very weak. None of this diminishes the sheer visceral appeal, though. The primal “man versus machine” showdown unquestionably delivers. 

What else is there to say? It's a flawed, fun story. It's hard to imagine mystics founding a religion with "Killdozer!" as a sacred text, or scholars plumbing its depths for semiotic analysis. Sturgeon is simply inviting your inner child into his sandbox to play with his toy tractor. It isn't anything more than that, and it doesn't need to be anything more, not even for $542.50. 

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Thank you to Don for this great review of "Killdozer!"

Retro Review: "Iron Mask" by Robert Bloch

This cover by Margaret Brundage is actually an accurate depiction of a scene in the story.

"Iron Mask" is a novelette by Robert Bloch, which was first published in the May 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.

"Iron Mask" starts out at the headquarters of the local Resistance movement in the French town of Dubonne. American Eric Drake, an AP correspondent who got stuck in France after the beginning of WWII, confronts Pierre Charmand, the former mayor of Dubonne and now head of the Resistance. Eric is furious because Charmand has sent his girlfriend, Charmand's daughter Roselle, to the ruined Chateau D'Ivers to retrieve some important papers Charmand has hidden there. For not only is the Chateau supposedly haunted, the local top Nazi Gauleiter Hassman is also heading there with a squad of soldiers, presumably to look for the same papers as Roselle.

Charmand is a lot more sanguine than Eric. He assures Eric that the Chateau is definitely not haunted (famous last words that). As for why he sent Roselle rather than one of the male members of the Resistance, a woman is less likely to arouse suspicion. But when dusk falls and Roselle still hasn't returned, a determined Eric goes after her, Nazi patrols be damned.

Braving patrols and bats, Eric makes his way to the Chateau. Once inside, he hears Roselle scream. He follows the scream and finds Roselle unconscious on the floor, a sinister cloaked figure bending over her, clutching the papers. As Eric approaches, the figure vanishes.

Once Roselle comes to again, she insists that she was attacked by a thing wearing an iron mask. And this thing was not a ghost, but real. Eric agrees that the attacker was real enough, because ghosts don't steal important papers and they don't leave footprints.

Eric tells Roselle to return to her father. Meanwhile, he will go after the attacker and get the papers back. Roselle, on the other hand, doesn't want Eric to go alone. For Roselle shot her attacker in the head, which didn't even slow him down. "He's a monster," she insists. Eric, on the other hand, points out that Roselle's bullet must have hit the iron mask, which is why the attacker was not injured or killed.

So Eric follows the footprints of the attacker deeper into the ruined castle. When they lead to seemingly dead end, Eric finds a secret passage through which the attacker escaped outside. He chases the attacker down a hill, only for both of them to run into a squad of Nazi soldiers coming up the hill. Soon, Eric finds himself fighting side by side with the masked stranger against the Nazis. Eric uses his gun, while the masked stranger hurls rocks at the Nazis with superhuman strength.
Once the fight is over, Eric demands that the masked stranger – whose mask is not made from iron but velvet – hand over the papers. Turns out that the stranger is working for the Resistance as well and also planned to procure the papers, before they could fall into the hands of the Nazis. As for why he wears a mask, the stranger tell Eric that he was a French soldier whose face and hands were burned by flamethrowers. The doctors attempted to save his life, but left him disfigured. So the stranger donned a mask and started his solo crusade against the Nazis.

Eric wants to take the stranger to the Resistance meeting (he is rather trusting – after all, the stranger could be anyone, even a Nazi in disguise), but the stranger doesn't want to come. Eric assures him that his damaged face doesn't matter. "You don't understand," the stranger says, "I have no face." Then he takes off his velvet mask to reveal an iron mask where his face should be. So Roselle had been right after all.

Eric nonetheless takes the stranger and the papers to Charmand, who also accepts him a lot more readily than I would in his position. Only Roselle remains sceptical. Charmand also tells the stranger that there is an important Resistance meeting taking place at midnight (when else?), where the Resistance will plan their campaign against Gauleiter Hassman's attempt to conscript French men as forced labourers. However, Charmand is still missing an important report, because two of his men have not returned yet. The masked stranger offers to procure the report, though he won't say how he plans to do that with only an hour left until midnight. "I have developed a certain – technique – in such matters," he declares.

Indeed, the stranger returns with the report just in time for the Resistance meeting. But almost as soon as he has handed it over, the Nazis storm the Resistance headquarters, led by Gauleiter Hassman himself. By this point, this reader at least became even more suspicious, because the Nazis' timing is mightily convenient.

In the ensuing battle, Charmand is killed. Eric escapes with Roselle, the papers and the masked stranger who is seemingly impervious to bullets. Not knowing where else to go, they retreat to the Chateau, where Eric demands to know just how the stranger could survive being hit by at least fifty bullets. Now, the stranger finally admits that he is no flamethrower burned French soldier. Instead, he is the legendary Man in the Iron Mask. Oh yes, and he is immortal, too.

Iron Mask tells his story. He is the grandson of Nostradamus and was supposed to continue the family trade of alchemy and prophecy in Paris, advising the aristocracy. Over time, the future Man in the Iron Mask became extremely influential, until he was the de facto ruler of France. Alas, King Louis XIV suspected him of having an affair with his secret wife Madame de Maintenon and therefore ordered him arrested, imprisoned and locked into an iron mask for the rest of his days. However, neither the King nor the Man in the Iron Mask realised how long this life sentence would last. For just before he embarked for Paris, Iron Mask had been given a potion by his alchemist father that grants eternal life.

After thirty-four years of imprisonment, the Man in the Iron Mask finally managed to escape by passing off the body of a recently deceased prisoner in the Bastille for his own. The entries in the prison records of the Bastille containing his true identity vanished at around the same time. But even though Iron Mask was immortal, his face still aged, so he continued to hide it beneath his mask. Ever since then, he has reappeared to aid France in her hour of need. And so he joined the Resistance.

Alas, the Resistance in Dubonne has been all but wiped out – only Eric, Roselle and the Man in the Iron Mask are left. Their headquarters has been discovered as well. Luckily, Iron Mask knows of an alternative: The sewers under the old townhall, now the Gauleiter's headquarters and the last place where the Nazis would think to look.

So the three of them retreat to the sewers, where Eric informs the others that he has an important meeting with a representative of the Paris Resistance. He plans to hand over the papers they rescued to this representative and receive his instructions what to do, when the Allies land in France (it's notable that the Normandy landings did not take place until June 1944, i.e. a month after this story was published). However, the Nazis are on the warpath and have patrols everywhere, so Eric has little chance of reaching the representative. Luckily, he has a plan.

He sends out Roselle to check if the Resistance representative is at the meeting point. Meanwhile, Iron Mask will keep the Nazi patrols busy and draw them away. Since he is immortal, their bullets can't hurt him. Once Roselle gives the all clear, Eric will head to the meeting. However, as soon as Roselle and Iron Mask have left, Eric opens the cask with the papers, finds one that is of interest and sneaks into the Nazi headquarters instead.

Roselle and Iron Mask return just in time to see Eric returning from his spying expedition, the Nazis hot on his heels. The three escape through the sewers, the Nazis in pursuit. During the ensuing fight, a pipe bursts and drowns the Nazis. Once again, only Eric, Roselle and Iron Mask escape.

Iron Mask demands that Eric turn over the papers to him and he's not asking nicely. Eric, however, wants to give them to the Resistance representative. He draws his gun and when that doesn't stop the Man in the Iron Mask – well, he is immortal, after all – Eric fires.

The bullet does not hurt Iron Mask, but it tears a hole into his cloak, revealing metal underneath. The stranger isn't just wearing an iron mask, his entire body is made from iron. He's a robot and a rampaging one, too.

Eric and the robot fight. Eric finally gets lucky and hits the robot with the butt of his gun, splitting its iron skull. And that's the end of Iron Mask.

Eric now reveals that he had his suspicions about Iron Mask from the beginning. If he had really been a burned soldier, there was no way bullets wouldn't have hurt him, iron mask or not. And while Iron Mask was clearly immortal, he was no saviour and protector of France, but instead her mortal enemy.

Iron Mask was created in the thirteenth century by Roger Bacon, when Bacon was imprisoned in the Bastille. Indeed, Iron Mask was the fortune-telling Brazen Head that legend attributes to Bacon. And because Bacon was furious at the French for imprisoning him, he programmed his immortal robot to take revenge and destroy France, which the robot proceeded to do in the centuries that followed.

Iron Mask was an adviser to kings, true, but he inevitably gave bad advice. He whispered the policies that would eventually lead to the French revolution into the ears of the respective monarchs, he set Napoleon Bonaparte on his way to become a tyrant, he advised Bismarck in the Franco-Prussian War (maybe that is the reason Otto von Bismarck was known as the Iron Chancellor) and he made a deal with Hitler, allowing the Nazis to conquer France. In fact, Gauleiter Hassman was taking orders from the robot, while Iron Mask set about to destroy the Resistance. As for why he was so keen to get his hands on those papers, among the papers were the vanished prison records of the Bastille which would have revealed Iron Mask's secret, so the robot had to procure and destroy them. Conveniently, those papers also revealed that Bacon had built a weakness into the robot, a weakness Eric exploited to destroy Iron Mask.

I'm not sure what I had expected when I decided to read and review "Iron Mask", but it certainly wasn't a gonzo WWII spy adventure cum Tim Powers-esque secret history starring a malevolent medieval robot with a pathological hatred of French people. Because honestly, there is no way you could expect a story like that. As a matter of fact, "Iron Mask" is an excellent example of how very strange the pulps could be at times. With a few tweaks, this story could be one of the more offbeat adventures of Captain America, Peggy Carter and/or the Howling Commandos.

"Iron Mask" is an action-packed tale and follows the pulp school of plotting with frequent twists, turns and reveals. In fact, I am pretty sure that the major reveals map onto Lester Dent's pulp fiction master plot, even though "Iron Mask" is a long novelette rather than a six thousand word short story. But unlike with e.g. A.E. Van Vogt, whose random plot twists often don't make sense, the plot twists and reveals in "Iron Mask" all fit naturally into the story.

"Iron Mask" is very well written. The action scenes – and there are many of them – are  thrilling and visceral. The descriptive moments, whether it's Eric disturbing some bats in the ruined chateau or a fire fight with Nazi soldiers in the cellar of a disused brewery, are suitably atmospheric. Bloch was only twenty-seven, when "Iron Mask" was published, but then he was something of a prodigy and had been writing professionally for more than ten years at this point. Bloch's first story "Lilies" appeared in Marvel Tales in 1934.

Nowadays, Robert Bloch is mostly remembered for Psycho and his contributions to the original Star Trek, but his range was much greater. He wrote Cthulhu mythos stories, while still in his teens, he was responsible for the mid-century Jack the Ripper renaissance (via the 1944 Retro Hugo finalist "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper") and also for our modern obsession with serial killers in general. And at least based on "Iron Mask", I'd also say that Robert Bloch originated the secret history subgenre, eight years before Tim Powers, the SFF author most associated with secret history fiction, was even born.

Because "Iron Mask" is certainly a secret history. Bloch uses historical facts – the legend of the mysterious man in the iron mask, the fact that records regarding the man's identity went missing from the Bastille (they were eventually recovered in 2015 and didn't reveal the identity of the man in the iron mask, though they did reveal that his jailer was a greedy jerk), Roger Bacon's stay in Paris (though he was never incarcerated in the Bastille, because it was built almost a century after Bacon was in Paris), the rumours that Bacon had a metal head which could foretell the future, the various points in French history where things went disastrously wrong – to create a wholly fictional narrative of a villainous robot manipulating French history through the centuries. The secret history subgenre sits on the borderline between SFF and thriller and "Iron Mask" is no exception. There even if a classic MacGuffin in the form of the secret papers that the Nazis, the Resistance and Iron Mask are after. The story certainly is thrilling stuff, even though I find it a little hard to swallow that kings, generals and political leaders all took the (highly questionable) advice of a masked man with a metal head. I mean, I could almost see Hitler making a deal with a malevolent robot, but Bismarck? Sorry, but the old Iron Chancellor strikes me as way too practical for that.

While we're on the subject of history, I have some minor nitpicks regarding the accuracy of the story. And yes, I know it's strange to say that about a story starring an immortal francophobic robot collaborating with the Nazis. That said, Gauleiters were a kind of provincial governor during the Nazi era in Germany, Austria, occupied Czechia and occupied Poland, i.e. what the Nazis considered their Reich. However, there were no Gauleiters in occupied France with the exception of Alsace, which was (and still is in part) largely German speaking, was part of Germany from 1871 to 1918 and was still considered part of Germany by the Nazis. From 1940 on, it was part of the Gau Baden-Alsace, ruled over by a particularly nasty piece of work named Robert Wagner. However, Dubonne is clearly not in Alsace, because the naming pattern is wrong for the region (speaking as someone with Alsatian ancestry) and therefore wouldn't have had a Gauleiter. Furthermore, Gauleiter resided in major cities, not provincial small towns. So Bloch used the wrong title for his Nazi official, but then internal Nazi hierarchy is rather opaque. Also, the various Nazi patrols wouldn't have been Gestapo men, but regular Wehrmacht soldiers. Not that any of this matters much, because Gauleiter Hassman's role is mainly "generic evil Nazi" in this story. And I have to applaud Robert Bloch for giving his evil Nazi official the name Hassman, which literally means "hate man" in German. But then, Bloch was the son of German Jewish immigrants, so it's likely that he spoke at least a little German.

Compared to the positively lurid villain (Iron Mask, not the mistitled Gauleiter Hassman), protagonist Eric Drake remains a tad bland. He's your typical two-fisted pulp hero, quick with his gun, his wits and his fists, dedicated and heroic, but with few characteristics that set him apart from a dozen other pulp heroes. Before the war, Eric was a foreign correspondent for Associated Press, making him the third reporter hero I came across in the course of the Retro Reviews project. But then, journalist and reporter was a popular occupation for heroic characters in the first half of the twentieth century. Note how many superheroes work as journalists in their civilian identity and how many superheroes have journalists as their significant other. The heroic journalist, once such a common figure in popular culture, has sadly almost died out and journalist protagonists are thin on the ground in the twenty-first century, reflecting increased distrust of and disenchantment with the news media.

Roselle Charmand, female Resistance fighter, theoretically sounds like an awesome character, but in practice she remains bland as well and is given little to do aside from screaming and running. Though I did like the fact that Bloch casually mentions that many of the Resistance members are female, including seemingly harmless and pious looking housewives.

In spite of the stunningly gothic (and accurate for once) cover art, courtesy of Margaret Brundage (who is eligible for the Retro Hugo for Best Professional Artist again this year and who I really hope will win one day), "Iron Mask" is another contemporary tale, albeit one with gothic trappings. In fact, all of the Weird Tales stories I have reviewed for this project so far were contemporary tales. "Iron Mask" is also one of only two stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project that directly mentions World War II (the other is "Undersea Guardians" by Ray Bradbury), though several other stories address the war indirectly.

"Iron Mask" is also one of several robot stories I have reviewed for this project. Robots were certainly having a pop cultural moment in the 1940s, just as they are having a pop cultural moment now. And as Isaac Asimov said in the introduction to The Complete Robot, robots came in three flavours during the golden age, robot as menace "Iron Mask", "The Jewel of Bas" by Leigh Brackett), robot as pathos ("No Woman Born" by C.L. Moore, even though Deirdre is theoretically a cyborg, and Jenkins from the "City" stories by Clifford D. Simak) and robot as a machine ("Catch That Rabbit" and pretty much any golden age robot story by Isaac Asimov). Bloch also reminds us that robot-like figures have been appearing in myth, legend and popular culture for centuries, even though the term "robot" only goes back to Karel Capek's 1921 play R.U.R.

"Iron Mask" is a highly entertaining spy thriller cum secret history that will keep you on the edge of your seat. It's also a fine example of how strange the pulps could occasionally be and how little they cared about genre boundaries.

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

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

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retro Review: "Terror Out of Space" by Leigh Brackett

This scene does not actually appear in the story.

"Terror Out of Space" by Leigh Brackett is a science fiction novelette, which appeared in the summer 1944 issue of Planet Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. You can find the story online here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

The story starts with the protagonist, an officer of the Tri-Worlds Police, Special Branch called Lundy (no first name given), in a fistful of trouble. He's flying solo through the clouds of Venus, desperate to deliver his cargo to a destination he will never reach.

Gradually, we learn that a mysterious alien lifeform has crash-landed on Venus and caused a wave of madness. For this mysterious alien lifeform is telepathic and appears to every heterosexual male as the most desirable woman ever. However, no one has ever looked into her eyes and lived to tell the tale. Apparently, the alien has zero interest in heterosexual women or gay people of any gender. Lundy and his partner Jackie Smith have been tasked with capturing one of those alien lifeforms and delivering it to a group of scientists for analysis. They got lucky and managed to apprehend both the creature as well as its latest victim, a man named Farrell.

At the beginning of the story, the creature is locked in a safe aboard Lundy's ship. Lundy also drugged and strapped down its victim, though not before Farrell managed to knock out Jackie Smith. And so Lundy is flying solo, while Smith is unconscious and Farrell is screaming his lungs out in the hold.

When Farrell falls suspiciously silent, Lundy goes to check on him and finds that the man has torn himself loose from his restraints, the straps cutting his flesh to the bone. The gravely injured Farrell demands that Lundy let the creature out of the strongbox, because "she" is afraid of the dark. Lundy refuses only to find himself looking into the barrel of Jackie Smith's gun, for Smith has also fallen under the creature's spell.

The resulting fight causes the craft to crash into the Venusian ocean. Only Lundy survives – Farrell succumbs to his injuries and Smith drowns, an expression of horror frozen on his face. The safe is open, the creature gone.

So Lundy puts on a pressure suit, grabs some meds and oxygen tanks and decides to walk across the Venusian ocean floor to the destination he was trying to reach. This trek across the ocean floor is a highlight of the story. Atmospheric descriptions of alien worlds are one of Leigh Brackett's great strengths as a writer and she employs it to the fullest here, offering up vivid and nigh psychedelic depictions of the Venusian ocean floor, complete with ruined underwater cities and flesh-eating monster flowers. On the way to one the former, Lundy nearly succumbs to the latter, but just as the flowers are about to devour him, he is rescued by a group of telepathic Venusian kelp people.

The friendly kelp people tell Lundy that they live in a nearby ruined city. The kelp people are all female, because the males abandoned their partners to follow a mysterious women who passed through. Lundy recognises the creature's handiwork at once. The kelp women ask Lundy for help to rescue their menfolk, because the kelp people are periodically besieged by creatures they call the Others who prey on them. The women know how to keep themselves and their seedlings safe, but the men are so besotted by "her" that they are sitting ducks.

Lundy, being a heroic type, at once promises to help the kelp people. Besides, he sees a chance to finally apprehend the creature, which has caused so much pain and misery. However – and this is something you would never find in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction – Lundy also has doubts whether he is up to the task, whether he will be able to resist the creature, when Jackie Smith, Farrell and the kelp men all succumbed to "her". Just as Lundy is scared much of the time during his trek across the ocean floor and his pursuit of 'her". Nonetheless, he is going to bring "her" in or die trying.

Things come to a head, when Lundy tracks the kelp men and the creature to the heart of the ruined city. He manages to catch the creature inside a net and promptly finds himself assaulted by the kelp men who are desperate to free "her". But lacking human hands, they cannot. At the same time, the Others – also kelp beings, but vicious, cannibalistic ones – attack. Leigh Brackett is not the first author who comes to mind when thinking of aliens who are truly alien – she was simply more interested in humans than aliens. The kelp people, the creature and the Others are some of the more interesting alien beings in Brackett's fiction.

Lundy knows that the kelp men are so focussed on freeing the creature from the net that they are easy prey for the Others. So Lundy does the very thing he'd been terrified to do, he telepathically communicates with the creature, telling her that he is the only one who can free her, but that he won't, unless she lets the kelp men go.

The creature obeys and just in time, too, for the Others are almost upon them. The kelp men escape. Lundy tries to hold off the Others with his blaster and finally hides in one of the ruined houses. He finds himself trapped in a Venusian execution chamber together with the creature, while the Others are swarming outside. Worse, Lundy's oxygen supply is getting low.

The creature tries to persuade Lundy to let her go, but he lets her know in no uncertain terms that he will never let her go after what she has done to Jackie Smith and Farrell and so many others. Now Lundy – and the reader – finally gets to see "her" in the form of a small, naked and angelically perfect woman. Her eyes, however, remain hidden for now. In many ways, "she" reminded me of the alien angel from Edgar Pangborn's debut story "Angel's Egg", which appeared seven years after "Terror Out of Space".

Though exhausted and high on stimulants, Lundy still manages to resist "her" and asks the creature at one point why precisely she drives men crazy and eventually kills them. The creature does not understand. The men worship her and it's nice to be worshipped. Nor does she understand the meaning of death, because in deep space, where her species lives, there is no such thing as death. On Venus, however, the creature is not immortal, because she cannot withstand the gravity. Sooner or later, it is going to crush her.

Once Lundy understands the creature's motivations, he makes a deal with "her". Lundy will make sure that everybody knows her story and that she will be remembered and yes, worshipped, as a hero, if she leads the Others away from Lundy and the kelp people into a convenient nearby undersea volcano. The creature agrees because dying while being worshipped and remembered is better than dying in a net and forgotten.

So Lundy lets her go free and she goes off to fulfil her part of the deal. However, Lundy makes one fatal mistake. He asks her to let him look into her eyes. And once he does, he finally understands why Jackie Smith died with an expression of pure horror frozen on his face. Because behind her eyes, there is nothing.

I encountered "Terror Out of Space" in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks collection "Sea Kings of Mars and Other Stories".

"Terror Out of Space" is a fairly uncommon Leigh Brackett story. Her talent at writing action scenes and evocative descriptions of alien landscapes is evident here, but both protagonist and plot are quite unlike Brackett's usual work. For starters, Leigh Brackett's protagonists tend to be outsiders and even outlaws, people living on the margins of the future society she depicts. Lundy, on the other hand, is an officer of the Tri-Worlds Police, Special Branch. Interplanetary police officers occasionally show up in Brackett's stories, but mostly they are faceless antagonists who pursue her outlaw heroes. Lundy is one of only two sympathetic representatives of the official authorities of the solar system I have ever encountered in Leigh Brackett's fiction. The other is Eric John Stark's mentor and surrogate father Simon Ashton, who appears briefly at the beginning of "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" in 1948 and less briefly in the Skaith trilogy of the 1970s.

Regarding the plot, "Terror Out of Space" is very much a hunt for an alien monster tale, which is not a type of science fiction story that Leigh Brackett wrote very often. There is something almost Lovecraftian about the idea of a mysterious creature that drives men (and only men) mad. But whereas the creature would have remained unknowable in a Lovecraft story, while the protagonist succumbs to madness, Lundy remains sane long enough to negotiate with the creature and learn about her real motives. "Terror Out of Space" certainly has its share of moments of horror – Farrell, who cuts himself to the bone trying to escape and bleeds to death, the dead Jackie Smith with an expression of nameless horror frozen on his face, the alien plantlife trying to devour Lundy and of course the beautiful woman with nothing where her eyes should be. Nonetheless, "Terror Out of Space" is not a science fiction horror story like John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" or H.P. Lovecraft's "Color Out of Space".

It is also unusual for a Golden Age story that the alien creature is not so much evil, but misunderstood and has no idea about the damage she is causing. Just try to imagine what this story would have been like, if it had been published in John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction. For starters, Lundy would never have been allowed to have doubts and fear, even though this sets him apart from the stereotypical square-jawed heroes of the Golden Age. And the creature would have been unambiguously villainous, only to be outsmarted by superior human intelligence. But then, Leigh Brackett had stopped publishing in Astounding by this point, having found a more sympathetic audience for her brand of science fiction in Planet Stories.

Of course, Leigh Brackett, whose penchant for femme fatales is well known, could not resist turning even her very alien antagonist into a femme fatale. And not just any old femme fatale either, but the ultimate femme fatale who literally drives men of any species mad with a single look into her eyes.
When reading "Terror out of Space", there is never any doubt that this is vintage science fiction. Whether it's the vivid description of an ocean covered Venus that never was or Lundy's old-fashioned rocketship, complete with an autopilot named Iron Mike who is a literal robot or the aggressive heterosexuality of the creature, it is always very obvious that we are reading a story that's seventy-five years old. However, "Terror Out of Space" is also dated in other less obvious ways. For example, the medication Lundy takes along on his long trek across the Venusian ocean floor is a drug called Benzedrine, which left me puzzled, thinking, "But isn't that the trade name of an allergy medication?"

It turns out that I got the names mixed up (I was thinking of Benadryl, which is indeed an allergy medication) and that Benzedrine was an early amphetamine, which actually was used as a nasal decongestant, before people figured out that it also was a very effective stimulant. In the 1930s to 1950s, Benzedrine was widely used, both by soldiers in WWII as well as by scientists, mathematicians, writers and artists who used it to focus, stay awake and be more productive. And considering the conditions under which pulp fiction writers worked, sometimes cranking out one or two short novels per month, it's obvious why a stimulant like Benzedrine would be popular. And indeed, Wikipedia has a long list of references to Benzedrine in pop culture.

So a science fiction reader in 1944 would have known what Benzedrine was and what its effects were at once, whereas I – reading the story seventy-five years later – had to look it up. Leigh Brackett also namedrops another drug, Avertin, which Lundy uses to sedate the raging Farrell. I initially assumed Avertin was a made up name, but when I googled it, I found that Avertin is the trade name for an anaesthetic called tribromoethanol, which is still used in veterinary medicine today and which was used for humans in the first half of the twentieth century, before safer substances were developed. So again, a reader in 1944 would likely have known what it was.

The story provides enough context that it is obvious what these drugs do, even if – like me – you have never heard of them. Nonetheless, the takeway here is that a science fiction writer should never assume that something ubiquitous in your day will still be recognised by latter day readers, let alone in whatever future you depict. And indeed, when mentioning medication (which occasionally comes up in the In Love and War stories in particular), I never use real brand names, but either make up a name or just describe what it does.

I'm also very glad that the many references to drug use you can find in science fiction from the Golden Age all the way through the New Wave and beyond went completely over my head, when I read these stories as a teenager (not "Terror Out of Space", but other stories by Leigh Brackett). Because I wouldn't have been able to enjoy those stories, if I had realised how drug-soaked many of them were. For back when I read them in the late 1980s, it was a serious topic of debate among my friends whether it was morally acceptable to consume art that had been produced under the influence of drugs. I resolved the issue for myself by declaring that none of my favourites would ever as much as look at drugs – after all, they were science fiction writers and should know better (Yes, I know. I was very naïve) – so the question was moot. When I saw a documentary about Hollywood on TV and some fellow held up a bag of what he claimed was cocaine and said every movie or TV series produced in Hollywood was made by mediocre people under the influence of cocaine, I was utterly crestfallen and depressed, because it that were true, it would mean no more US movies or TV shows ever. In the end, after an avid discussion with friends, we decided that the man in the documentary must have referred to dull Hollywood movies, Wall Street, Fatal Attraction, Terms of Endearment, Basic Instinct and the like, that nobody liked anyway.

Among Leigh Brackett's extensive oeuvre, "Terror Out of Space" is one of the more obscure stories. It hasn't been reprinted very often – once in 1959 in an anthology of Venus stories edited by Donald A. Wollheim and then not again until 2005 in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks edition Sea Kings of Mars and Other Stories, which is also where I encountered it. But while "Terror Out of Space" is fairly obscure and also atypical for Leigh Brackett, it is nonetheless a fine and entertaining story, featuring some of the more interesting alien creatures of the Golden Age.