Manly Wade Wellman continually surprises me. “When Planets Clashed,” his writing debut back in Wonder Stories Quarterly Spring 1931 is no exception. I expected a juvenile effort, technically poor, but showing the spark that would flower in years to come, such as Robert E Howard’s “Spear and Fang” in Weird Tales. Instead of some filler piece, “When Planets Clashed” is an interplanetary war tale with a difference. Yes, it has the elements Hugo Gernsback would expect in a story about Earth and Mars waging a war across space. But as Gernsback says in the story’s intro:
Stories of Interplanetary warfare usually presuppose earthlings who are all heroes and enemies across space who are all villains. The supposition is also made that earth is fighting to defend its honor or its people from a predatory race from another world.
Read the rest:
https://www.michaelmay.online/2017/05/when-planets-clashed-war-in-space-guest.html
