John Wyndham’s Planet Plane (The Passing Show, May 2-June 20, 1936) and its sequel “The Sleepers of Mars” (Tales of Wonder #2, March 1938) form a narrative that explores a journey to Mars and back. This book is part of the Pulp phase of Wyndham’s career, now writing as John Beynon. Earlier, he had written for the American Pulps as John Beynon Harris. We are a decade and a half before he would emerge as John Wyndham, the author of The Day of the Triffids (1951). Planet Plane, or Stowaway to Mars as it is also called, was John’s second novel after 1935’s The Secret People.
Planet Plane
The plot begins with a spy lose in the shipyard of Dale Curtance’s Gloria Mundi, a spacecraft worthy of a trip to Mars. The spy kills the night watchman and then is killed himself. There are no identity clues on his body. Curtance realizes he can no longer keep his project secret from the public. This is 1980, where flying cars called gyrocurts exist beside a world of cinema news reels. Wyndham is very predictive about rockets taking off while still stuck in 1936 in other ways.
Dale is famous the world over as a flyer of speed rockets, but the terrestrial kind. He and his wife disagree over the value of machines. Even as she is giving birth to their son, Dale and his crew fly off in the Gloria Mundi for the red planet. His crew numbers five: along with Dale are Geoffrey Dugan, assistant pilot and navigator, James Burns, engineer, Doctor Grayson, medic, and Froud, the newspaperman and reporter for the mission.
Stowaway To Mars
After take off the men notice that they have used too much fuel. The reason becomes obvious when they discover Joan, the stowaway. She is quite secretive at first, but Froud eventually recognizes her. She is Joan Shirning, daughter of the ridiculed scientist, John Shirning F. R. S. Her father claimed to have found a machine from another planet, a self-aware robot that destroys itself before he can show it to the world. The newspapers lampoon him into isolation. She has snuck on board to go to Mars and return with a robot to prove her father was telling the truth and clear her family name. (Wyndham seems to be cannibalizing his own older story, “The Lost Machine” (Amazing Stories, April 1932) with this tale within the tale.
Wyndham has a little Science Fiction lesson in this portion of the book, referring to past Moon and Mars literature including Jules Verne and H. G. Wells as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Jacob Astor IV’s A Journey in Other Worlds. In this way Wyndham introduces all the preconceived ideas that Martian travel stories have used, including the nature of the canals. The journey to Mars is long and the crew begin to suffer from cabin fever. Dale makes a pass at Joan but she rejects him. Later Burns goes a step farther and tries to rape her. Dugan stops him, and from then on the man is an outsider, loathing his fellow mates.
Martian Arrival
The Gloria Mundi finally arrives on Mars, falling over in its rough landing. The crew, now accepting Joan as one of them, goes for a look around. All they see are dry, lifeless plants. These bushes grow along the canals, which they also see. These waterways are clearly man-made (well, Martian made). It is then that Burns snaps. He takes Joan at gun point and heads back to the ship to have his way with her. Only he never makes it. When the other men come looking they find a blood-stained smear. Something has killed Burns and taken Joan. What could have done this?
The men don’t have long to wait, though they have a limited supply of oxygen for their masks. An army of weird robots shows up. The rifles of the Earthmen hold them back. They watch as the survivors drag away the fallen, then cannibalize their parts. The Martian machines hold them at bay until dark. They get back to their ship and lock themselves in. Again, John Wyndham seems to be borrowing from his earlier work. “The Moon Devils” (Wonder Stories, April 1934) resembles the siege portion of this tale. In this tale the coffins have Lunarians in them. In the novel, the coffins are coffin-shaped robots.
Vaygan the Martian
Joan, meanwhile, goes for a high speed journey to a distant Martian city, where she sees thousands of robots. It is here she meets Vaygan, an actual Martian. She allows him to do basically a mind-meld (to use a Star Trek-ism) so he can speak with her. Joan learns all about the Martian race, which is dying, living inside their cities, sealed off from the thin air. All the work is done by robots. Slowly she learns that the Martians don’t have the same relationship with their machines that Earthlings do. They see the robots as their children, who will carry on after the fleshly Martians have all died out. The robots who attacked the rocket are crazy machines that the Martians put up with.
Using a kind of television device, Vaygan shows Joan what is going on at the Gloria Mundi. Only it isn’t the GM, but another rocket. The Russians have arrived. They walk over to the British ship, act rudely, knocking over the Brits flag of conquest. The Russians won’t conquer the Martians but make them see the righteousness of Communism. (Wyndham’s portrayal of the Russians is quite 1950s era but two decades earlier.) The visitors leave, a little gun-play follows, and the Englishmen don’t warn them about the killer robots outside the ship. Later, another rocket shows up and crashes and explodes in the canal. This is an American craft.
Love and Disease
Joan and Vaygan become quite close, spending a night together. Joan wants to meet the other Martians, but first tests must be made on her body for disease. The results aren’t good. Martians and humans can’t be together. They would infect each other with foreign ailments. Joan will have to go back to the ship, which the Martians will send back immediately. They do not want contact with Earth. They want to be left alone to die out in peace.
The Russians are in trouble with the mad machines. A giant tank-like machine shows up and disperses them by sending waves out that mix-up their brains. The machines crash into each other until destroyed. Some of the Russians return to their ship. Joan shows up and the Gloria Mundi returns to Earth. The reception at home is glorious at first, but later changes to hatred. Especially for Joan. She dies in isolation, giving birth to Vaygan’s baby. (Wyndham says what happened to the child is another story…) Dale and his wife reunite though Mrs. Curtance decides she must not hold Dale back from his love of machines.
Conclusion I
Planet Plane has both some wonderful ideas and long dull passages, marring its over-all effect. Wyndham would get better at finding ways to make the ideas play out in action rather than in discussion. He doesn’t info-dump so much as set up long Socrates dialogues where ideas can be looked at, played with, and finally seen to be true or false. His main question: what is the true relationship between humans and machines is worthy of a good novel. He tries to show how we currently regard technology and how we might if we were like the Martians. Both choices have their price. If we continue to have a master-slave relationship with our tech, then there will always be people like Mrs. Curtance who fear and hate machines. If we allow machinery to become our children, our evolutionary extension, then we will lose vitality and fade away like the Martians. As with any good discussion, Wyndham leaves it all for you to decide.
The Sleepers of Mars
Wyndham leaves questions unanswered because he wanted to write a sequel to Planet Plane. It took the form of a novella and concerns the Russians who do not return when the British astronauts do. “The Sleepers of Mars” appeared in Walter Gillings’ SF magazine Tales of Wonder.
After a recap of Planet Plane, the story picks up with the Russian Captain leading his men into the blades and tentacles of the mad machines. Captain Karaminiff, Vassiloff and Steinoi are killed during the moment when the Martians use their ray on the wild machines. As the devices destroy each other the three men are mangled. Vinski, the Ukrainian, jumps clear (John Carter style) and makes it back to ship. There he finds Doctor Platavinov, the Kirghizian, Zhatkin and Gordonov, a Brit named Gordon who joined the Russians. The man the Brits shot has died.
Soantin the Martian
The Martians machines raise the Tovaritch up just as they did with the Gloria Mundi. The cosmonauts watch the machines outside. Through drawings the Martians convey the idea that the rocket must leave the planet. The British take off first. The Russians attempt it but their ship is too damaged. (They were lucky they didn’t explode in the attempt.)
Stuck with the visitors, a television-like box is sent in. A Martian named Soantin hypnotizes the doctor so he can understand the Martian speech. The Martians refuse to be near the humans because of disease. (We learn Vaygan is dying from germs he got from Joan.) The Martians will fix the rocket so the Russians can leave.
It will take some time, so the humans are taken to the abandoned city of Ailiko. They have complete run of the empty towers. All their needs are met: food, shelter, spacesuits with oxygen. The men find the empty city depressing. They struggle with the futility of existence. If beings as technologically superior as the Martians could not defy entropy, what chance do humans have?
A Secret Revealed
To distract themselves from the fatalistic thoughts, the men explore. The doctor finds a hospital with fascinating machine. He also finds a vault under the clinic filled with thousands of preserved bodies. When he opens one of them, the woman inside gasps out her life and dies. The bodies are the sleepers of the title. With help, Platavinov takes another one, a man back to their apartment. They successfully revive the man who is called Yauadin. From him they learn that millennia ago, before the canals, volunteers placed themselves in suspended animation to await the new, plant-rich planet. Obviously, when this failed, the Martians who were not sleeping refused to revive the others. Yauadin is coldly angered by this news.
That night, while the Martian sleeps, Zhatkin suggests that they should kill Yauadin. He is a dangerous man. Sadly, none of them can bring themselves to do the deed. When they go to look for him, they find he has gone off hours ago. When they go to the clinic, they find all the doors locked. Inside, Yauadin is releasing an army of angry Martians. One of these men arrives at the apartment. The Earthmen realize that the sleepers want to take over the planet, build spaceships and colonize Venus and Earth.
Desperate and Dangerous
The ship is almost ready to go back to Earth. The men agree they must tell Soantin about the sleepers. The doctor talks to him but Zhatkin realizes that Platavinov did not tell him. The Russian plans to nip off in the rocket, leaving the mess behind. They are ready to leave when Yauadin and others break in. The Martian and Platavinov struggle, with the doctor getting a laser bolt through the head. Yauadin also dies in the struggle, the word “Karlet” on his lips. This is the name of the woman that Platavinov killed by accident when he opened the first coffin.
Zhatkin fatalistically sits down on the couch. In the tele-viewer he can see Vinksi and Gordonov rush back to the ship. Sleepers have gotten inside ahead of them. When they try to climb of the rope to the door, it is cut. One of the men smashes his helmet in the fall and suffocates. The other burns up in the rocket’s jets as the ship takes off for who knows where. Zhatkin, finding the weapon that killed Platavinov, presses the barrel to his head and pulls the trigger.
Conclusion II
Now we know why the Russian expedition never returned to Earth as hinted at the end of Planet Plane. Wyndham leaves plenty of loose threads. Do the Martians get to Earth? What of Joan and Vaygan’s child? He answers none of these stories directly. His later novels will look at similar subjects: The Midwich Cuckoos and Chocky feature alien children. The Troons series will follow human history in space.
Unlike Planet Plane, Wyndham isn’t focused on the machine question this time. “The Sleepers of Mars” takes its inspiration from the end of H. G. Wells’s “The Time Machine”. In the last act the time traveler escapes the Morlocks to see the end of the world. (Wyndham mentions the crab-like creatures found there in the earlier novel.) What is it all for? Why does humanity go on when ultimately there is no point? The Russians face this question directly in the story but have no answers. They want to return home, to survive, despite this sad realization. The sleepers of Mars want it, too.
New Directions
With the completion of Planet Plane and “The Sleepers of Mars”, John Wyndham enters a new chapter of his career. He has shed the worst of the Pulp legacy for a new approach that is more idea-driven, more philosophical. His lengthy digressions to pursue an idea are part of this new desire to write about important questions. The classic novels, beginning with The Day of the Triffids, are still ten years away, but John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris is on a path that will see a string of new short stories published under the John Beynon name. Stories that will be collected in books like The Seeds of Time, The Infinite Moment and Consider Her Ways and Other Stories. The old days of Wonder Stories and Amazing Stories, are behind him now. Future stories will not have that “sense of wonder” that the old Pulps did, but the writer of ideas is here to stay.
