R. F. Starzl, SF Pioneer

R. F. Starzl (1899-1976) was a promising early writer of Science Fiction for pulps like the Clayton Astounding and Amazing Stories. His career lasted only eight years, starting out writing for Hugo Gernsback before moving onto other publications, but in that time he wrote twenty-five stories. He left SF for a career in newspaper publishing. Gardner F. Fox acknowledged Starzl’s contributions to micro worlds when he named a miniature world “Starzl” in Justice League of America #18 (March 1963).

1. “Out of the Sub-Universe” (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Summer 1928)

2. “Eye of Promethius” (Scientific Detective, January 1930)

3. “Madness of the Dust” (Amazing Stories, May 1930)

4.“Planet of Dread” (Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930)

5. “King of the Black Bowl” (Wonder Stories, September 1930)

6. “Red Germ of Courage” (Argosy, September 13, 1930) reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, January 1940.

Syl Webb is forced through severe taxation into labor and shanghaied into space. There he learns the space mug’s trade, making friends with Splade the cook. The Mugs, lead by Mark Gunning, mutiny and Syl is forced to choose between his new place in the crew and saving a beautiful girl on board.

Starzl spends quite a few paragraphs describing the spaceship, which uses rotation to create a false gravity. He also has merclite, a narcotic or alcoholic chewing gum. The society is described as having three classes, lower class or Mugs, the highly taxed middle class, and the technocractic scientists who run everything. Starzl also mentions the I. F. P. or Interplanetary Flying Police, the police of the spaceways who jettison people out of airlocks for serious crimes. they will show up in other stories such as “The Hornets of Space”.

It seems obvious to me that Starzl was inspired by Jack London’s The Sea Wolf (1904), which has a highbrow critic turned into a sailor, fights his captain, Wolf Larsen, for the girl. Even some of London’s Socialist ideology has inspired Starzl’s world of the future, creating his three-tier society. Starzl doesn’t side with the techno-elite, as you might expect of an SF writer, but with the Middle class to which he belonged. There was much discussion in the fanzines around Technocracy (see Ray Bradbury’s Future Fantasia). Starzl was not a supporter, I guess. Bleiler calls the story “Commercially competent” but misses the finer meaning of this. Sold to Argosy, the story had to appeal to a wider audience than it would have in an SF Pulp magazine, and perhaps, also been better written by commercial standards.