In honor of our new space adventure novel, The Gear Crew by Jack Mackenzie, here is some classic space opera to get you in the mood.
Get off My Planet! is the title of a 1966 paperback collection by Murray Leinster. This isn’t Buck Rogers space opera but well thought-out space adventure that I would have guessed came from Astounding Science Fiction. As it turns out, this not the case. The three novellas appeared in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories. I did a little digging and Leinster didn’t sell anything to John W. Campbell between “The Strange Case of John Kingman” (Astounding Science Fiction, May 1948) and “Historical Note” (Astounding Science Fiction, February 1951).
This may have been coincidence since Leinster sold to many publications including Argosy, Galaxy, and even The Saturday Evening Post and Woman’s Day during this time. Will F. Jenkins (Murray’s real name) was selling to magazines while John Campbell was still in grade school. His first SF story appeared in 1920. Also looking at Astounding during this time, Campbell is publishing space stuff by Jack Williamson, L. Sprague de Camp, Poul Anderson and others. There is no reason to not assume that Campbell saw and rejected them all before they went on to other markets.
During this time period Leinster wrote plenty of space adventure, perhaps more than Campbell wanted. He appeared in Sam Merwin’s Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories more often that Astounding. It should be no surprise that Leinster appeared there as well as Ejler Jakobsson’s Super Science Stories and Robert W. Lowndes’s Future Combined with Science Fiction Stories. Several of these are not high-paying or prestige magazines. They were someplace to publish but little more. Despite that fact, each of these stories has the Campbell stamp of logical and scientific knowledge behind them. As Campbell once bragged, he improved the standard of Science Fiction everywhere.
The collection begins with “Second Landing” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Winter 1954) perhaps because the idea of the book’s title is so strong here. The second expedition to the twin worlds of Thalassia and Aspasia is dropped off on the surface for a six month dig. The crew are all archaeologists including our hero, Brett Carstairs, a paleo-technician, or one who divines the purpose of ancient machines. The party is threatened by a booby-trapped nuke that begins their desperate race to survive a party of Aspasians intent on killing them.
To make matters stranger, Brett finds a locket with a picture of an Aspasian woman in it. He later meets her on an island on the other side of the planet, which is all water except for one continent and a few islands. When she sees him, her reaction is horror. Brett flees home but has his archaeological site nuked again. He and the others flee before the Aspasians douse the area with radioactive sea water.
The Earthmen run to the mountains where they find another booby-trapped dead city. When a dirigible comes in search of them, Brett figures out how to denotate one of the nukes to knock the ship out of the air. The pilot of the craft is the beautiful woman from his locket. She ties to detonate another nuke to kill everyone but Brett shoots it with his homemade bazooka. The bomb is ruined and he manages to capture her and an injured man. The Aspasians are filled with wonder when they find the Earthmen have five rather than six fingers and real beards. They are not Thalassians and now the two worlds can begin in friendship. We don’t get to see that since the story ends with the woman learning to say Brett’s name.
Leinster does something in this tale that makes the whole thing work for me: mystery and adventure. The Aspasians are shadowy for a long time, as Brett and Halliday, the team leader, rationalize what the Aspasians are like based on evidence. They figure out that they live on a desert world, have a 20th Century level technology (nukes, spacecraft but not hyperdrive). The constant threat and attack keeps the plot moving. There are no four page lectures on nuclear power as you might get in Astounding.
“White Spot” (Startling Stories, Summer 1955) begins with the Danae, a spaceship in dire circumstance. The engines are failing so the four person crew must deal with a falling ship. To make matters worse, the giant white spot on the surface turns out to be an energy weapon. It blasts the ship twice, sending it to the surface which is almost all sand. The ship lands near the polar ice cap where some plant life exists.
The crew of the Danae are a married couple, Dee and Ellen Borden. There is a younger man, Jerry, and an evil criminal, Sattell. Sattell tried to push himself on Ellen earlier in the trip and has said he would murder Borden if he had the chance. He is a problem since he can’t be trusted. Borden wishes he had killed him when he had a chance. Sattell can’t beallowed weapons and the ship’s lock is disabled so he can’t lock them out.
The green zone of the planet has lifeforms, a strange furry creature that likes to have its belly rubbed. (Happily, Emsh drew them for us in the second illo.) The weird creatures will not go near Sattell, innately feeling his hatred. Jerry goes off with a group of them while Sattell steals the log book and star charts, effectively stranding the travelers on the planet.
Jerry returns with a ground car that bears the skeletons of the race that created it. They resemble humans for the most part. There are also energy weapons inside the car. Dee figures the furry creatures were once domesticated pets. Jerry has learned how to talk to them using a sock filled with clay. The trio go to where Jerry found the car, a mud bog where forty more vehicles lay. They discover Sattell has taken one but since Jerry took all the weapons, he doesn’t have one of the golden ray guns.
A long pursuit down the arrow straight roads of the planet begins. The road leads to the white spot. The heroes manage to get in front of Sattell and decide they must deal with the unknown terror before Sattell can join forces with it. Along the way they find millions of bones, each disconnected from the other. From this, Dee surmises the white spot is an amoeba-like alien.
Once they arrive at the white spot this is confirmed. The thing that shot the bolts of energy at them pursues. Jerry and Dee devise a way to use their one walkie talkie and the car’s power to broadcast voices at the thing. The random nature of speech drives the thing away. In the end, they kill it and discover the water-rich oasis-city lying under the spot. Victoriously, they head back to find Sattell. He shows up in his car. Dee and Jerry shoot out his treads and roll the vehicle. Sattell stumbles out with a weapon but kills himself either by accident or intentionally. The stolen star charts are reclaimed. A weak ending for a villain smart enough to leave twenty booby traps in the ship.
No longer in danger, the trio return to their ship, repair it, grow food and safely return to space. Dee admits he might like to return to the planet and live in the ancient city. Ellen agrees. Even Jerry admits, if a certain girl would come with him, he too would come back. The ending is a happy one, one that required a technological solution. Not my favorite kind of solution after too many Star Trek episodes solved in the last five minutes with a gadget.
Once again Leinster starts with a hostile alien race expressing their wish that strangers stay away from their planet. He also uses mystery too, making you wonder what the white spot of the title is and the true nature of the furry creatures. Sattell is an utterly ruthless and unlikable character, not much different from the obvious cardboard bad guys of an Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure. He is no Dr. Smith of Lost in Space fame.
“Planet of Sand” (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, February 1948) has two men rivaling for the affections of the beautiful Esther. Stan Huckley is in jail because his superior officer, Rob Torren has framed him. Stan wants nothing more than to strangle Torren. He is surprised when Rob shows up and offers to break him out. He wants to duel Stan to the death so that Esther will accept his offer of marriage. Huckley agrees. Torren sneaks him out then puts him in a spacesuit and gives his a space sled. When the ship passes Khor Alpha’s white dwarf sun, Stan pushes himself away from the ship and past the hyperdrive field. The prison ship is millions of miles away a second later.
Stan travels through space to find Khor Alpha. His sled hits a ship moving through hyperspace and loses most of its power. He lands on the planet to find it is all sand except for small ice caps. He discovers a strange structure hundred of miles long with flaps that collect sand then drop it, generating power. When Stan gets a distress call from Esther (who has been following the prison ship) he uses the structure’s power to fuel the sled. He rescues her from her ship and takes her to the ice cap, where the terrible daytime storms are not a hazard. There they find the tracks a gigantic centipede-like machine.
The duo return to the energy grid but flee when the inhabitants of the world notice them, trying to fry out the sky sled’s battery. They run back to the pole but machines are there stomping their planted seeds into dust. They go back to Esther’s ship, the Erebus. Stan uses the sled to uncover the door so they can get into the vessel buried under tons of sand. Next he uses two jets of the ship, one facing up and the other down, to raise the ship to the surface and rid it of sand.
About this time the locals show up in their centipede machines. Stan uses the meteor deflector from the ship as a weapon, blowing sand so fast at the enemy that their machines are torn apart. Stan does a daring run out to the enemy machines to gather the graphite rods he needs to fix the Erebus‘s hyper drive. Esther blasts some attackers, allowing Stan to get back inside. About then Torren shows up. Unwisely he admits all his wrong-doing to Esther before he tries to blow them up from space. (“Nuke’em from space — it’s the only way to be sure.”) Stan hasn’t fixed the drive yet, but his taunting Torren gives the locals time to fire at his ship. With more time, Stan fixes the hyper drive and the Erebus blasts off into space. With Esther’s testimony, Stan can now clear his name and they can get married. Stan plans to return with an interplanetary envoy to make peace with the local inhabitants.
This one is a good adventure, though Leinster spends too much time at the energy generator (explaining). We never really get a good look at the local aliens, just their machines. This piece feels older, which it is, being the eldest story here, and Esther, like Ellen Borden in the last story, is far too timid and “female” for a modern audience. If Princess Leia had been there, she’d have given them a slap and said, “Man up!”
Conclusion
Murray Leinster produced something here that Edmond Hamilton also did in his later novellas: well-conceived but fun Science Fiction that has plot, character and action. There is room in a novella to expand on an idea or delve into character that the five thousand word short story simply can not do and a full-blown novel may bury in more wordage or ideas. I love this story length, whether the “novels” of the Pulps or the ones used later by Donald Wollheim for the ACE doubles. This collection was quite enjoyable for me, wanting some of that old “thrilling wonder” but enough modern Science to keep it from becoming Fantasy. Leinster is an old hand at it and deserves his moniker as “The Dean of Science Fiction”.
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