Retro Review: "The Golden Apples of the Sun" by Ray Bradbury

"The Golden Apples of the Sun" is a science fiction short story by Ray Bradbury, which appeared in the November 1953 issue of Planet Stories. It would have been eligible for the 1954 Retro Hugos, awarded in 2004, but neither made the ballot nor the longlist. The magazine version may be found here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

The narrator of the story is the unnamed captain of a spaceship called the Copa de Oro a.k.a. Prometheus a.k.a. Icarus, whose mission it is to fly to the sun and retrieve some of its fire or rather fusion power in a giant cup held by a giant remote-controlled hand. What could possibly go wrong with this plan, particularly given the name(s) of the spaceship?

In order to survive the trip to the sun, the Copa de Oro/Prometheus/Icarus is cooled down to a temperature of one thousand degrees below zero. Her crew can only survive by wearing protective suits. The first disaster to befall the mission happens when the protective suit of the first mate, a man named Bretton, fails and Bretton freezes instantly to death.

But more danger awaits, for the ice on the ceiling of the control room suddenly starts to melt, when an auxiliary cooling agent pump breaks down at precisely the worst moment. The captain and the crew frantically scramble to fix it before they are burned to cinders.

One of the crew members asks the captain whether to pull out or stay, but the captain orders to stay the course, because the mission has almost reached its climax. And so the captain operates the cup via what would eventually be called a "waldo", while the rest of the crew still frantically tries to fix the broken pump.

The pump is repaired at just the right moment, the captain pulls the cup with the solar fire into the spaceship and the Copa de Oro/Prometheus/Icarus turns around for the long journey back to Earth, her mission a success.

I came across this story, while checking early 1950s issues of Planet Stories for women authors not named Leigh Brackett. I read it a long time ago and remember liking it, so I decided to reread it.

"The Golden Apples of the Sun" is very short, only four pages in magazine format. There is only one named character – who only gets a name when he dies – and the plot is very slight. There is a dangerous mission, there are some complications, everything is resolved at the last minute and the mission is a resounding success.

In the hands of any other author, this story would have been a forgettable filler. And indeed I shudder to imagine what this story would have looked like, if it had been published in Astounding, full of infodumps and clunky technobabble and nonsense science.

However, "The Golden Apples of the Sun" is a Ray Bradbury story. And so what makes it special is not the slight plot, but Bradbury's poetic language, filtered through the POV of the nameless captain.

Like most Ray Bradbury characters, the nameless captain shares Bradbury's idealised midwestern small town childhood (which at least according to this article by Colleen Abel likely never happened that way). And so we get lots of imagery of seasons changing. The heat of the sun is compared to the "sweltering dog-mad days of August", the interior of the ship is compared to "all the coldest hours of February". When the pump fails and the ice begins to melt, the captain likens it first to the last icicle of winter finally melting in April and then to a warm summer rain. There is also a striking description of the ship and its crew burning up in the heat of the sun, "popped like strawberries in a furnace".

The story is also full of allusions of mythology and literature. The triple name of the ship refers to Prometheus who stole the fire from the gods, Icarus who flew to close to the sun, so that his wings melted, and Cup of Gold, John Steinbeck's 1929 debut novel, which was probably better remembered in 1953 than it is now, since it's a historical novel about the life of Henry Morgan and rather atypical of Steinbeck's work. The title of the story is a reference to the last line of the poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus" by William Butler Yeats. "Fear no more the heat of the sun" is a reference to Cymbeline by William Shakespeare. There is also a reference to the 1912 mythological novel The Crock of Gold by James Stephens, an author who must have been a lot more popular in the mid 20^th century than he is now, since C.L. Moore also referred to his novella Deirdre in "No Woman Born".

Indeed, one thing I find fascinating about golden age speculative fiction is how many literary references there are, including some so obscure these days that they require googling. Meanwhile, contemporary speculative fiction is far more likely to refer to other SFF works or various media properties than non-genre literature. Unless it's Star Trek, which is full of references to Shakespeare with some Dickens and Sherlock Holmes thrown in.

Those who don't care for Ray Bradbury's writing tend to claim that he was not a "real"™ science fiction writer, because his stories focus more on atmosphere and mood and less on hard science. And indeed, Bradbury was not particularly interested in technobabble and infodumps, which is probably why he didn't get along with John W. Campbell of Astounding and found his market elsewhere. However, while Bradbury does not focus on the science, what science there is in his stories is actually pretty sound by the standards of the time.

Of course, the mission of the Copa de Oro/Prometheus/Icarus is impossible. Even if it were possible for a spaceship to get close enough to the sun to grab some solar plasma (I assume that's what they want to grab, but then Bradbury only vaguely speaks of fire), it would certainly yield fascinating scientific results, but not limitless fusion energy. Nor would constantly cooling the spaceship down protect it from incineration. The ESA Solar Orbiter and NASA's Parker Solar Probe, the closest real world equivalents to the Copa de Oro/Prometheus/Icarus, are protected by heat shields and reflective aluminium rather than cooling circuits. They are also unmanned.

However, Bradbury's description of the cooling system of the ship – even it wouldn't actually do what it's supposed to do – is pretty sound and I'm totally stealing the "ribbed boa constrictor coils" through which the cooling agent flows for a translation sometime. The "waldo" like grab mechanism to retrieve a sample of solar plasma also isn't unlike the robotic arms used aboard the late space shuttle and the International Space Station.

I first read the story in this 1970 UK paperback edition of "The Golden Apples of the Sun", which I found in the university used bookstore.

I also liked the paragraph where the captain muses about the motive for their perilous mission, starting out with all sorts of reasonable ideas about unlimited fusion energy and unlocking the secrets of the sun, including the line "the atomic bomb is pitiful and small", which must have been shocking indeed barely a year after the first hydrogen bomb test. But after all the very reasonable scientific motivations, the captain finally comes to the true reason: Because we can and because it's fun. Somehow, I can't imagine a line like that in Campbell's Astounding.

Even though it's fairly slight, "The Golden Apples of the Sun" is a popular and beloved story that has been reprinted umpteen times and gave its title to the eponymous collection. In fact, I'm surprised that it did not make the ballot nor the longlist for the 1954 Retro Hugos, considering how well known the story is. But then the competition was extremely strong that year – the winner in the short story category was "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke. And besides, Ray Bradbury got to take home (literally, since he was still alive at the time) a Retro Hugo for Best Novel for Fahrenheit 451, so I strongly suspect that he didn't mind not getting a nomination for "The Golden Apples of the Sun".

Not much in the way of plot and character, but beautifully written and a very typical example of Ray Bradbury's writing in the 1950s.

Retro Review: "Citadel of Lost Ships" by Leigh Brackett

The finalists for the 1945 Retro Hugos will be announced tomorrow. But for now, I'll continue to take a look at some of the finalists for previous years of Retro Hugos. And today, I'll continue with a story that was not the best story on the ballot, neither in its respective category nor by the respective author, but that I nonetheless found extremely interesting and that I found myself thinking about a lot more than about many of the other Retro Hugo finalists of that year.

The story in question is "Citadel of Lost Ships", a space opera novelette by Leigh Brackett that was the cover story of the March 1943 issue of Planet Stories and was a finalist for the 1944 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

Roy Campbell, the protagonist of "Citadel of Lost Ships", is a typical example of the outlaw heroes Leigh Brackett was so fond of. He is also explicitly described as dark-skinned, even if cover artist Jerome Rozen portrays the character as white and blonde and a deadringer for Doc Savage as portrayed by Walter Baumhofer.

At the beginning of the story, Roy has narrowly escaped the Spaceguard and found refuge with the Kraylens, a tribe of native Venusians who have taken him in before. But there is trouble brewing in this peaceful Venusian paradise, for the exhausted and injured Roy is woken by war drums in the middle of the night.

Roy finally gets the story of what is going on from his Kraylen foster father. It turns out that oil, coal and other minerals have been discovered in the Venusian swamps near the Kraylens' home. And now the Terran-Venusian Coalition government is planning to take possession of the Kraylens' land to drain the swamps, drill for oil and mine the coal and other minerals (we wonder if the appropriately named Terran Exploitations Company is involved). The Kraylens will be resettled into reservations, where tourists can gawk at their primitive lifestyle. Understandably, the Kraylens are not fans of this plan. "We will die first," Roy's foster father says.

Roy wants to help the Kraylens. After all, they gave him a home when he needed one and hid him from the authorities several times thereafter. But Roy also sympathises with the Kraylens' plight in more ways than one, for we learn that he comes from a family of farmers who had been working the same plot of land for more than three hundred years, until they were displaced by a hydroelectric dam, victims of the same idea of progress and expansion that will now claim the Kraylens and their way of life.

Luckily, Roy has an idea. The travelling space station Romany, the titular "Citadel of Lost Ships" since it has been assembled from abandoned spaceships, has been offering refuge to those displaced by the imperialist expansion of the Terran-Venusian Coalition for a long time now. And Romany just happens to be in orbit around Venus, so maybe they can be persuaded to take in the Kraylens. It is worth a try at any rate.

So Roy sets off for Romany, narrowly evading yet another patrol ship on his way there. When he reaches the space station, he isn't exactly given a warm welcome. The communications officer, a young black man from Mercury called Zard, treats him coolly and his boss, an Earthman called Tredrick, blows him off and tells Roy that Romany cannot help the Kraylens and that he shall leave. However, shortly after Tredrick has broken contact, Roy receives a message from Zard telling him to dock at one of the ships that make up Romany. Because, so the young man tells him, there are some who still consider Romany a refuge.

Roy docks as instructed and is promptly knocked out by a one-armed Martian named Marah, who mistakes him for a spy for Tredrick. Once that misunderstanding has been cleared up, Roy learns from Marah and a human telepath named Stella Moore what is going on aboard Romany.

It turns out that Romany is on the edge of a civil war between those like Stella, Marah and Zard who want to continue living according to their own code and help those in need, even if it pisses off the Coalition government, and a group led by Tredrick and the station council who want to stop interfering with the Coalition's plans in exchange for better trading rights and constant orbits. Tredrick's fraction is about to move against the rebels when Roy blunders in.

Stella promises Roy that the rebels will rescue the Kraylens. In exchange, Roy promises that he'll stick around and help the rebels – for the Kraylens' sake and because Roy sympathises with the rebels and their cause.

Romany is a fascinating setting, an assembly of spaceships whose interior not only houses members of many different races, but also mimics their natural environment, i.e. the Venusian quarter has swamp vegetation, while the Titanian quarter has ice caves. Sadly, Leigh Brackett never revisited Romany, though it's spiritual descendants still abound in science fiction, ranging from Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine to Alpha, the City of a Thousand Planets, from the Valérian and Laureline comics and the recent film adaptation by Luc Besson.

The rebels are planning to take a ship and rescue the Kraylens, but before they can get there, they find their way blocked by Tredrick and his men. Tredrick informs everybody that Romany cannot help the Kraylens, not anymore, because the Kraylens have already been imprisoned for harbouring the dangerous criminal Roy Campbell. And even though Roy used a false name, when contacting Romany, Tredrick knows that he is aboard the station and warns everybody who helps him of dire consequences.

The rebels pretend to comply with Tredrick's orders, while Stella and Marah help Roy escape. Roy manages to make his getaway just before the Spaceguard arrives, which leads to yet another chase, as the Guard ships pursue Roy and his ship. Roy's ship is fatally damaged in the resulting firefight. Roy himself is badly wounded, but nonetheless he gets into a spacesuit and steps out of the airlock. He hides among the debris of his damaged and dying ship – a manoeuvre that Roy's spiritual descendant Han Solo would use again some thirty-seven years later in The Empire Strikes Back, the original screenplay of which was also penned by Leigh Brackett – and then uses the jetpack of his spacesuit to descend to Venus. Of course, Roy would have gotten burned up upon entering the atmosphere, but pulp space operas don't care about such inconvenient scientific facts.

Back on Venus, Roy meets up with Marah, Stella and their motley crew of alien rebels, who took a ship from Romany to rescue the Kraylens. Together, they head for the Venusian city of Lhi, where the Kraylens have been imprisoned.

However, Tredrick pre-empted their move and has put the Kraylens under heavy guard. But one of the rebels, a man from the Jovian moon Callisto, uses his magical harp to put the guards to sleep. But when Roy and his friends free the Kraylens, Tredrick himself shows up with more guards. A firefight erupts and Roy and Stella find themselves face to face with Tredrick himself.

Now we briefly get Tredrick's motivation for turning on his own people. Tredrick explains that even though he was born on Romany, he was never happy there and didn't care for the freedom Romany offered, since that freedom also meant poverty. So Tredrick decided to rise through the ranks, take over Romany and make a deal with the Coalition government to ensure prosperity for all. Roy and the Kraylens as well as Stella, Marah and the rebels stand in his way, so Tredrick decided to use the Coalition forces to get rid of them.

Roy launches himself at Tredrick and the two men engage in a furious fight. But Roy is weakened from his injuries and therefore he is losing. Just as Tredrick is about to kill Roy, Stella intervenes and uses her telepathic abilities to kill Tredrick.

Roy tells Stella to lead the others to safety. He will stay behind and take the blame for the death of Tredrick and the escape of the Kraylens. Because, so Roy tells Stella, the Coalition government needs a scapegoat for what happened on Venus. And if they cannot use Roy as a scapegoat, they will go after Romany. And Romany has no chance against the combined might of the Terran-Venusian Coalition. But if Roy sacrifices himself, Romany gets to remain free.

"You're wonderful," a tearful Stella tells Roy, "I didn't realize how wonderful."

Roy promises Stella that he won't be in prison for long and that he'll escape. He also says that he hopes Romany will remember him and maybe erect a statue in his honour, because he will be back. Then he waits to be arrested, while Stella flees with the Kraylens.

"Citadel of Lost Ships" is exactly the kind of glorious and thrilling pulp space opera that Leigh Brackett excelled at. However, the story also has a strong undercurrent of social criticism. Now a lot of Leigh Brackett's early stories were critical of imperialism and capitalism and often featured marginalised protagonists. "Citadel of Lost Ships", however, features Leigh Brackett in full social justice warrior mode.

Stylistically, "Citadel of Lost Ships" is very much a story of its time. It's set in the pulp science fiction shared solar system and its full of the usual anachronisms such as finned rocket ships, people smoking in space and Roy Campbell surviving re-entry in a spacesuit. On the other hand, "Citadel of Lost Ships" is exactly the opposite of the prevalent stereotype of golden age science fiction. "Citadel of Lost Ships" couldn’t be further from the ideals of Campbellian science fiction (and John W. Campbell did not publish it – Malcom Reiss of Planet Stories did). Furthermore, the themes Leigh Brackett tackles – the impact of imperialism, colonialism and capitalism, the treatment of indigenous people, the sacrificing of people in the name of progress – are all themes that science fiction is still grappling with today.

The humans of the Terran-Venusian Coalition are clearly the bad guys jere and the story is very concerned with the treatment of what Roy Campbell calls “the little people”, many of whom are aliens who – in a genre tradition that would last well into modern times – stand in for various marginalised groups in the real world. The plight of the Kraylen is clearly intended to criticise the treatment of Native Americans – and let’s not forget that the Wounded Knee Massacre took place only twenty-five years before Leigh Brackett was born, while the last conflicts between Native Americans and representatives of the (white) authorities happened within Brackett’s lifetime, i.e. those events were still very much within living memory, when “Citadel of Lost Ships” was published. Romany, the name of the space station, refers to the Romani people and indeed, Stella explains at one point that the station and its inhabitants are welcomed as traders but otherwise “hated, just as gypsies [Brackett’s word choice, not mine] always are.” This is not the only time that the Romani people feature in Leigh Brackett's stories of the golden age either. "The Jewel of Bas", published a year later, also features a heroic Romani protagonist.

Roy Campbell's father losing the family farm to a hydroelectric dam project, an event which psychologically scarred Roy and set him on the path towards crime, also echoes actual events of the time the story was written. Because the 1930s and 1940s were the age of the great hydroelectric dam projects in the US like the Hoover Dam (then still known as the Boulder Dam) or the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933. These hydroelectric dams displaced (and were still displacing when the story was written) farmers, families and sometimes whole towns in the name of progress. It’s very difficult to find critical voices about the Tennessee Valley Authority Act or the Boulder/Hoover Dam even today (the displaced farmers and flooded towns are usually just a footnote), so to find one in 1943 is quite remarkable.

Furthermore, people are still facing displacement due to hydroelectric dams and strip mining operations today, whether it's the historic Turkish town of Hasankeyf about to be flooded by the waters of the river Tigris due to the Ilisu Dam or the people of the Garzweiler and the Lausitz regions in Germany who have lost or are still about to lose their homes to lignite coal strip mining, even though lignite coal is extremely harmful to the environment and will be phased out in the next ten to twenty years anyway. So the issues addressed by "The Citadel of Lost Ships" are not in the distant past – they're still current today.

Roy Campbell is one of my favourite Leigh Brackett characters. In many ways, Roy Campbell feels like a prototype for Eric John Stark, who would come along six years later. Like Stark, Campbell is a man of colour, like Stark he does not fit into regular human society, like Stark he found a home with an indigenous tribe, only to lose it again, when those indigenous people were displaced and slaughtered in the name of progress. But while Eric John Stark is generally a good man, Roy Campbell is probably the noblest character Leigh Brackett ever created, even though Roy sees himself as anything but a hero. I also doubt it's an accident that this noble outlaw and hero of colour shares a surname with the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, a man who would become infamous for his reactionary views regarding race, gender and politics. Was this Leigh Brackett's way of giving John W. Campbell the finger?

In many ways, it's a pity that Brackett never revisited Roy Campbell. Did he manage to escape from the prison mines of Phobos (in the pulp science fiction shared solar system, moons are inevitably prisons)? Did he even go to prison in the first place or did the Coalition authorities just shoot him, because the whole affair was too embarrassing? Did Roy get that statue and did he ever get to see Stella again? We'll never know.

Roy Campbell also sums up the point of the story on the final page, when he says:

“They’re building, Stella. When they’re finished they’ll have a big, strong, prosperous empire extending all across the System, and the people who belong to that empire will be happy.
“But before you can build you have to grade and level, destroy the things that get in your way. We’re the things – the tree-stumps and the rocks that grew in the way and can’t be changed.
“They’re building; they’re growing. You can’t stop that. In the end it’ll be a good thing, I suppose. But right now, for us…”

So much for the claim that the golden age was unpolitical and all about fun science fiction and/or that the science fiction of the time promoted the unquestioning belief in science and progress and the unquestioning acceptance of colonialism. Cause here we have a story from 1943 that is very much about social justice warriors in the most literal sense of the word fighting against human imperialism.

But don't let my analysis of the political background of the story scare you off. Because "The Citadel of Lost Ships" is a cracking good pulp space opera, whether you agree with its politics or not.

The novelette category of the 1944 Retro Hugos was uncommonly strong and so "The Citadel of Lost Ships" lost out to the excellent, if very different "Mimsy Were the Borogroves" by Lewis Padgett a.k.a. Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore. And much as I enjoyed this story, it was not in first place on my ballot either, if only because I love Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser even more and "Thieves' House" is the best of the early Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories published in Unknown. And indeed, reviewing the early Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories is a project to tackle, once I've dealt with the 1945 Retro Hugo finalists I missed.

"The Citadel of Lost Ships" is one of the lesser known Leigh Brackett stories of this era. It has been reprinted a few times, but not nearly as frequently as many of her other stories. This is a pity, because "The Citadel of Lost Ships" is a great story that deserves to be better known.

Guest Review: "The Delicate Ape" by Dorothy B. Hughes, reviewed by Don Briago

Today, I'm happy to bring you another guest review. This time around, the subject is a potential left-field finalist, the near future novel The Delicate Ape by Dorothy B. Hughes. So I hand over to Don Briago to share his thoughts on The Delicate Ape.

***

If the Retro Reviews have taught us one thing, it's that the pulp pioneers of the Forties didn't give a hoot about what we now call "genre boundaries." They promiscuously jumbled mad scientists, wizards, hard-boiled detectives, robots, vampires, astronauts and cowboys, and stirred them all together into one glorious pop-culture stew. So when a celebrated crime writer like Dorothy B.Hughes decides to add her fiction to the melting pot, the SFF community should welcome her, not denounce her as an interloper. However, we still need to ask, is The Delicate Ape science fiction?

It is a novel published in 1944 that is set in 1957 (or thereabouts - Hughes never tells us the date, only that the story takes place twelve years after the end of the war. By 1944, after the Battle of Stalingrad, most Americans felt that the Nazis were toast but feared that the war with Japan would drag on for years. Presumably Hughes didn't want to jinx the outcome by naming a specific day of surrender.) Technically it's about "the future", but otherwise it's a purely mainstream, naturalistic thriller with none of the pulp trappings of vintage SF. Hughes has no interest in delving into possible technological  or sociological changes. There are no jet packs. (Seriously, where are our jet packs? It's 2020!) There are no other futuristic gadgets (such as TV sets, which were already a reality) or any dystopian tropes. 

So is it SF or not? My head says "Yes" because Ape is set in an imaginary future. My heart says "No" because Ape doesn't feel like SF... And my head wins, because it enjoys writing posts for Retro Reviews. Case closed. 

Having delivered that totally disinterested and non-arbitrary verdict, we can now ask if Ape is any good. It won’t be easy, but I’m going to resist the temptation to point out the many ways Ape’s 1957 differs from our consensus-reality 1957, and laugh at all the things Hughes got wrong. A work of fiction can never be "wrong." As I decreed, Ape is inarguably SF, so I’ll treat it as if it were an example of the alternative history subgenre. 

In this alternate 1957, there is no Cold War. The Soviets aren't even mentioned, and the defeated Germany is not split into Communist East and Capitalist West. Instead it's occupied by a benign if implausible new branch of the American government called the Peace Department. For twelve years since the German surrender the Peace Department has monitored the Germans to prevent them from stockpiling arms and developing an air force as they did between the world wars. Since the Germans have been behaving themselves lately, why don't the occupiers withdraw and let the Germans self-rule?

No way, says Secretary of Peace Samuel Anstruther, the Germans cannot be trusted yet. He compiles a dossier on German crimes and writes a short speech of such stunning, superhuman eloquence that any diplomat who listens to it will instantly be converted to the anti-German crusade. (When we finally hear it in the last chapter, it's an unintentionally hilarious dud.) Unfortunately Anstruther is bumped off on an airplane (too bad he didn't have a jet pack) before he can deliver the papers at the Peace Conclave in New York City, Hughes's forerunner to the UN. Piers Hunt, his deputy and the hero of the novel, keeps Anstruther’s death secret while planning to foil those uppity Germans. 

Hughes is clearly in her element when Piers walks the New York streets, and Hughes evokes the urban atmosphere. The rest of the novel comes across as a laborious effort by the author to make a Grand Statement while stretching herself and failing miserably. It's dull and predictable, from the routine double-crosses, to the three cartoon German villains (Brecklein, Schern, and von Eyna), to the obseqious portrait of the U.S. President. I just can't bring myself to summarize the rest of the idiotic plot and forgettable characters. 

I never expected such earnest, lifeless propaganda from Hughes. It's not just that she writes as if she's never met a diplomat or a German, it's as if she's never met a human being. Whenever the story builds up a little momentum, Piers interrupts to remind us how preferable peace is to war, and how noble the American cause is. The lurid prose often set my teeth on edge, and the scenes with the femme fatale Morgen are cheesy beyond belief. In a nutshell, Ape is a dumb political thriller that's transformed into a total slog by windy rhetoric about War and Peace and Brotherhood. 

Hughes received a fair amount of acclaim during her lifetime, and some now regard her crime novels as among the best ever written. I haven't read enough crime fiction to judge. Sarah Weinman, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre, has named Hughes her favorite crime writer. Yet even Weinman doesn't care for Ape, which she considers a disappointing regression from the qualityof Hughes's previous novels. As with many artists at the time, the war made Hughes temporarily lose her mind, along with her talent. 

I'd love to disagree with Weinman and say that Ape is an overlooked science-fictional gem, but it's only a mildly interesting curiosity about the near future by someone who was understandably anxious about the brave new world being formed during a global cataclysm. It was probably something that Hughes had to get out of her system before she could roll up her sleeves and get to work on masterpieces like In a Lonely Place and Dread Journey. Ape is too overtly didactic to be convincing or entertaining as fiction. History buffs could perhaps use The Delicate Ape as a springboard for a discussion about contemporary attitudes towards post-war politics. That's something, but it’s not enough to deserve a Retro Hugo.

***

Thank you, Don, for this great review of The Delicate Ape, even if the novel itself was diappointing.

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: "No Woman Born" by C.L. Moore

"No Woman Born" is a novelette by C.L. Moore, which was first published in the December 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version may be found online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point!

"No Woman Born" opens with a man called John Harris on the way to a vital meeting. Harris was once the manager of an actress named Deirdre, a woman of unparalleled beauty and also a global television star. But then tragedy struck and Deirdre was killed in a theatre fire. But Deirdre isn't dead – or at least not all of her is. For Deirdre's brain has survived the fire and was transplanted into a robot body in an experimental procedure. What can possibly go wrong?

Harris is on his way to meet Deirdre in her new robot body, which has been created by a scientist called Maltzer. Maltzer tells Harris that the procedure was a success and that Deirdre is confident, happy and eager to see him. Furthermore, Deirdre even plans to return to television. Maltzer, however, worries how Harris and the public will react, because Deirdre is no longer the woman she was.

The new Deirdre is a slender golden robot. Instead of a face, she has blank features and a crescent shaped mask of blue glass where her eyes would otherwise be. After an initial shock, Harris quickly accepts that the robot is Deirdre, because the voice sounds like Deirdre's and the robot moves just like Deirdre used to move. Deirdre explains that her brain is controlling her movements and voice and her brain is still the same, even if her body is not. Deirdre also tells him that she is not immortal, even though her robot body theoretically is. But her brain will grow out and eventually die and then her body will just be inanimate metal.

Deirdre is keen to return to the stage and the screen, but Harris is worried. True, to him the robot is Deirdre, because he knew her so very well. And to Maltzer, the robot is Deirdre, because he never knew her before the fire. But how will the public react? Deirdre is confident that they will accept her and even begins to imagine wholly new dance techniques that her new robot body makes possible. Harris is more sceptical.

Deirdre, however, brushes off his doubts. She tells Harris that she has already arranged a performance for that very night, a surprise performance in a variety show. Deirdre wants audiences to see her as she is now without any preconceived notions about her handicaps, because she has none. Deirdre also makes it quite clear that neither Maltzer nor Harris have any say in her decision. For even though Maltzer may have built her new body, Deirdre doesn't belong to him or Harris. Instead, she is her own person.

Maltzer, meanwhile, is vehemently opposed to Deirdre returning to the screen. She has no sex, no sense of taste, smell and touch, Maltzer declares, and those stimuli played an important role in making Deirdre who was. She is no longer human, Maltzer argues. Sooner or later what humanity Deirdre has left will drain out of her. "I wish I'd let her die," Maltzer declares.

Deirdre's first dancing and singing performance after the fire is a huge success and the audience won't stop applauding once they realise who they're watching.

Harris is relieved that everything went so well, but Maltzer is more furious than ever. He insists that the audience may have been surprised now, but once the novelty wears off, they will only laugh at Deirdre. Maltzer also declares that he has to come to know Deirdre better than she knows herself in the year he has been working on her body. Therefore, Maltzer can sense that Deirdre is worried, even if Deirdre herself cannot. He has to put a stop to Deidre's return to TV, Maltzer insists. "I don't think you can stop her," Harris counters. Maltzer insists that he can and throws Harris out.

Neither Harris nor the reader are party to what happens between Deirdre and Maltzer. But when Deirdre calls Harris the next morning, she tells him that she will retire to her house in the country for two weeks to let Maltzer cool down and keep the audiences in suspense.

Once the two weeks are up, Harris meets with Maltzer and Deirdre. Maltzer has completely deteriorated in those two weeks. "I can't stop her," he tells Harris, "There is only one way out."

Harris and the reader quickly learns what that way is, when Maltzer starts rambling about Frankenstein and his creature and how those who bring life into the world unlawfully must pay for it by withdrawing their own. At this point, it's very clear that Maltzer intends to commit suicide by jumping from a window in the highrise where the meeting takes place. But before he goes he begs Deirdre to tell him that she understands him and that she knows that she is not fully human.

Deirdre counters that she knows she has handicaps, but that the audience need never know. She could play Juliet, Deirdre insists, and the audience would accept it. And she's not Frankenstein's monster, thank you very much, she's human. Maltzer did not create Deirdre, he just preserved her life. To prove her point, Deirdre even lights a cigarette and smokes and suddenly seems very human indeed. And then she crosses the room with inhuman speed to rescue Harris from his fatal plunge.

Now Deirdre finally admits that Maltzer does have a point. She is not happy, for she is drifting further and further apart from humanity. But not because Deirdre is less than human, but because she's more than human. The true reason why Deirdre wants to return to the stage is because she wants to remain in contact with humanity. Because by the time her brain dies, she will have explored so many possibilities of her robot body and will have changed so much that she probably truly will no longer be human. She could probably put a stop to this development now, but her human brain is too curious and simply has to explore all the possibilities. Finally, Deirdre is lonely. She knows that her creation was a fluke, a one in a zillion chance. There will never be another like her.

"No Woman Born" is an excellent updating of the Frankenstein story and probably the best story published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1944, though "Desertion" by Clifford D. Simak is excellent as well. Interestingly, both stories tackle the same question. What makes a person human and what happens when a human mind resides in a body that is no longer human and more than human?

The title is a reference to Deirdre, a 1923 novel by Irish writer James Stephens, based on an Irish legend about a woman who was so beautiful that men would fight, go to war, die and go into exile for her. In fact, quotes from the novel are scattered throughout the story. The legendary Deirdre was a tragic heroine, by the way, who saw her husband murdered by a king who wants her for himself and then discards her, when she does not respond as he had hoped. She eventually commits suicide. C.L. Moore's Deirdre makes the opposite choice – she chooses to live and fully explore her more than human life. Though like the Deirdre of Irish legend, Moore's Deirdre is treated like property by the two men in her life. Deirdre repeatedly expresses what she wants, but neither Maltzer nor Harris are listening.

There are other references to literature and legend peppered throughout the story as well. In addition to James Stephens' version of Deirdre, there are also references to Frankenstein, Mary Stuart, whose fate was dramatized in a play by Friedrich Schiller and to the medieval tale of Abelard and Heloise, which ends with Abelard being castrated by Heloise's uncle. Indeed, between "No Woman Born" and the Kuttner/Moore story "The Children's Hour", which is also full of literary references, I can't help but notice that C.L. Moore's stories (and this seems to have been Moore's rather than Kuttner's doing, based on their respective solo stories) assume quite a lot of literary knowledge from their readers.

"No Woman Born" is written in C.L. Moore's typical richly descriptive style. As a result, a scene such as Deirdre's television comeback, which would have taken up a few paragraphs with another writer is three pages long. And since this is an Astounding story, there is of course the requisite infodump, a load of gobbledygook about how Deirdre controls her robotic body via electromagnetism and brainwaves. But since this is a C.L. Moore story, the infodump is much better written than usual.

It's telling that even though Deirdre is the protagonist of the story – which makes "No Woman Born" the fourth story with a female protagonist I have reviewed for the Retro Reviews project* – we only ever see her through the eyes of Harris and to a lesser degree Maltzer. Harris is the sole POV character and throughout the story he oscillates between seeing Deirdre as a human being and the woman he knew and viewing her as a machine and something non-human. Maltzer, meanwhile, makes it very clear that Deirdre is no longer human as far as he is concerned. Deirdre, on the other hand, is not entirely sure if she is still human or not and what she will become in time, but she knows – and repeatedly states – that she is still Deirdre.

The reader, finally, is left to decide for themselves if Deirdre is still human or not and if it even matters. Personally, I quickly found myself siding with Deirdre against the overbearing men Harris and Maltzer who want to make decisions for her and hoped that Deirdre would ditch them and go on to have a splendid career as the world's first robotic TV star. And I for one wouldn't have blamed Deirdre, if she had let that jerk Maltzer jump to his death. But Deirdre saves him, which proves that she is not only human, but probably a better person than I would be in her situation.

"No Woman Born" is also a story about disability. For Deirdre is considered disabled by the two men – indeed her lost senses are repeatedly referred to as handicaps and particularly Maltzer only views her in terms of her limitations. Worse, Maltzer fully believes that Deirdre would be better off dead than disabled. Deirdre, on the other hand, does not consider herself disabled. She's different than she was before, true, but not lesser. She will find ways to compensate for what she lost and may indeed be better than before in some respects. In this, "No Woman Born" also reflects contemporary debates whether disabled athletes have an unfair advantage due to their artificial limbs, when competing against non-disabled athletes. Particularly in its treatment of disability, "No Woman Born" feels remarkably modern and wouldn't feel out of place in one of Uncanny's "Disabled People Destroy SFF" special issues. I could also see it turned into a movie or an episode of Black Mirror with Beyoncé or Janelle Monáe as Deirdre.

In other respects, however, "No Woman Born" is clearly dated. The references to smoking are an obvious example and indeed it is fascinating how completely the SFF authors of the golden age failed to predict that smoking would fall from grace and become viewed as a highly unpleasant and unhealthy habit. Furthermore, the depiction of the entertainment industry in the story is also much closer to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century than to whatever future the story is set in.

For starters, Deirdre loses her original body in a theatre fire. Now theatre fires were to the nineteenth and early twentieth century what nightclub fires are to the second half of the twentieth century, disasters that were both extremely deadly and sadly common, until safety measures improved. The Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago on December 30, 1903, is the best known and still the deadliest building fire in US history, but there were many more deadly theatre and cinema fires throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic. The fires were often caused by stage lights setting flammable decorations and backdrops alight and the victims were often female performers in flammable costumes. Indeed, in the mid nineteenth century so many female ballet dancers died when their gauzy costume caught fire from unprotected gas lights on or behind the stage that contemporary commentators wrote about a "holocaust of ballerinas". And even though most of those fires happened before C.L. Moore was born, they nonetheless still lingered in the public consciousness, so a theatre fire would have seemed like a likely cause of death or injury for an actress and dancer to readers in 1944.

Even though Deirdre is a television star – and it is interesting that Moore expected that television would produce more global stars than film and theatre, even though television was intensely local until the 1990s and it is only in the past ten years or so that people around the world can actually watch the same show at the same time – her performances are closer to what could be seen in Broadway theatres in the early twentieth century.

The lead-in to Deirdre's comeback performance is a teleplay version of Mary Queen of Scots, which – given the current boom for Tudor historicals – would not feel out of place on HBO or Netflix. Though it is interesting that C.L. Moore notes that the costumes are far from historical and instead reflect contemporary fashions and that the actresses playing Mary Stuart are inevitably young, even though the historical Mary was middle-aged when she was executed. This description certainly matches the two Mary Stuart movies, which came out a few years before, the 1936 Hollywood movie Mary of Scotland starring the then 29-year-old Katharine Hepburn and the 1940 German movie Das Herz der Königin (The Heart of the Queen) starring the then 33-year-old Zarah Leander. It's unlikely that C.L. Moore saw the latter film, though the description of the gown worn by the TV actress during the execution scene brings to mind Zarah Leander's stunning pearl-studded gown in The Heart of a Queen, where the executioner neatly rips off the high collar to reveal a perfect ballgown neckline. Katharine Hepburn, meanwhile, goes to the scaffold in a Walter Plunkett designed gown with a collar so high it will surely mess up the executioner's aim.

Meanwhile, Deirdre makes her robotic debut in a vaudeville show, even though vaudeville was already in deep decline by the 1940s. However, it would experience a revival of sorts in the form of variety shows on the radio and later television. The description of the dance numbers – both Deirdre's and those of a troupe of nameless dancers – is pure Busby Berkeley, while Deirdre's robot body is very Art Deco.

The entertainment world in which Deirdre became a star may have very little to do with what television looks like in the twenty-first century, but the mix of classical plays and variety shows, both performed in front of a live audience, is remarkably close to what early television looked like, even though television would only become widespread a few years after "No Woman Born" was written.

But even if the depictions of the entertainment world are dated, the questions raised by "No Woman Born" about what it means to be human are timeless. Next to "Shambleau" and "Black God's Kiss", this is probably C.L. Moore's most famous and most reprinted story and with good reason, too. "No Woman Born" is a great story and would make a highly deserving Retro Hugo finalist.


*The other stories with female protagonists are "Undersea Guardians" by Ray Bradbury, "The Gothic Window" by Dorothy Quick and "Hoofs" by Manly Wade Wellman.

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

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

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

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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