Space Operas You Might Have Missed I

We often think of Space Opera as a clunky old-fashioned style of space adventure from “Before the Golden Age”, so the 1930s. Its roots can actually be found before 1930 in the work writers like Edmond Hamilton in Weird Tales. The 1930s saw the sub-genre flourish with writers like E. E. “Doc” Smith and Jack Williamson. It was one of the forms of tales along with gadget stories, monster invasions and “thought variant” yarns. But Space Opera did not disappear in the 1940s with the coming of John W. Campbell and Astounding Science-Fiction. Captain Future started January1940, delivering a space hero in his own Pulp magazine. Ray A. Palmer had Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories pumping out an adolescent version of SF each month with space battles being fought everywhere.

The 1950s was a time of great variety, with more SF magazines than at any other time in history. Many of these used adventure SF. Planet Stories, a Pulp dedicated to space adventure, saw its last days along with all the other Pulps. The SF digest came along and we got Fantasy & Science Fiction, Galaxy, IF and other smaller-sized magazines.

We often don’t recall the Space Opera of the 1960s. Campbell’s renamed Analog gave us Frank Herbert’s Dune, for instance. Writers like Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson wrote about war in space, while Jack Vance created strange worlds to explore. Writers like Murray Leinster continued to craft better and better tales despite being around since before “Science Fiction” got its name. There is much to enjoy in this decade that is better known for its “New Wave’.

This series of posts will look at adventure-oriented SF that may have been forgotten by the historians. Perhaps by the fans as well. We’ll start in the 1960s. The gold is lying in wait for the treasure-hunter. Let’s start digging…

Castaways’ World

Castaways’ World (1963) by John Brunner is part of a series of three books about the spaceship crews fleeing Zarathrusta’s sun going supernova. Two ships crash land on an earth-life planet inhabited by deadly plants and animals. The two crews have different experiences of the long winter they arrive during. The ship that crashed on the plateau is subjected to worse cold and death, making those survivors lean and nasty. The other ship is where the main characters are, with Brunner doing a lot of psychological digging into the different personalities. The two most important are Delia, a woman of supposedly loose morals and our hero, Lex, a genetically altered man training to become a Polymath. These are super-trained and altered humans who are placed in charge of new worlds. Lex has many of the features, such as being able to see in the dark, but his training is incomplete.

The first half of the story is Lex determining if either spaceship can be fixed and if not, what then? He finally, with Delvia’s help, decides to tell his crew he is a quasi-Polymath and their best hope of a future is to forget about the broken spaceships. Having arrived at that, the water in the river dries. The people on the plateau have built a dam to generate electricity for their ship repair. Lex takes a team of seven through the killer jungle to the plateau. They are captured and told they will become slaves like the rest of the survivors. The ruler on the plateau is the former captain, a man named Gomes. The lowlanders escape, losing their only two rifles in the process.

Gomes and a team of men armed with rifles come for the lowlanders. When he arrives, Lex plays a dangerous psychological game with him and his goons, making sure they see how well off the others have been. The captain takes the polymath and plans to return to the plateau, after telling the lowlanders they can have a berth on his repaired ship if they agree to be slaves. Lex, in a style I recognize from several Doc Savage novels, kills all of Gomes’ goons and destroys the dam, then squares off with Gomes for a final fight. Lex’s plan comes to fruition, bringing the plateau dwellers into the fold and removing the bad guys. The humans will survive on the castaways’ world.

A band of humans against the elements is a basic plot engine but one I love. I wrote about a couple others with a similar set up here including Syd Logsdon’s Jandrax (1975) and Tom Godwin’s Space Prison (1960). The fact that these are Man vs. The Environment plots does nothing to lessen their fun.They can be as sophisticated as a writer wants them to be. For example, Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom’s The Jesus Incident (1979) is another fav, with its super-deadly fauna like the Hooded Dashers, dog-like aliens with weird sack-like mouths. Brunner offers some equally nasty critters in Castaways’ World. All these harken back to Stanley G. Weinbaum and Arthur K. Barnes.

Oddly enough, Brunner would go on to become one of those New Wave writers with books like Stand on Zanzibar (1968), The Sheep Look Up (1972) and Shockwave Rider (1975). You can feel him chomping at the bit with the many psychological profiles of his characters in this story, as if he wanted to break out of writing Space Operas. I guess he eventually did.

Time Bomb

The Joseph Ross run of Amazing Stories hit a new low point for SF magazines. Mostly reprints, the editor did offer one new lead with all the old stuff. His first issue included a novella by Keith Laumer, creator of Retief and Bolo, that was probably purchased by the previous editor, Cele G. Lalli. Laumer had sold her several tales back in 1964. No matter who bought it, “Time Bomb” (Amazing Stories, August 1965) by Keith Laumer is a good tale and about as far from New Wave’s Jerry Cornelius as you can get.

Yondor is a young warrior in a tribe on the harsh planet known only as World. His people believe in magic and spirits. Their religion is based on the log of a spaceship that crashed generations ago. For decades their village has been protected by an ice wall but that has melted and strange goblin creatures are appearing. Yonder and six others, including his father who bears the title Captain, go to unlock the sacred shrine that lies beyond the pass.

We learn that the underground base was built by the spacemen who crashed on the planet. We also learn that the humans had been in a war with an alien race called the Tewks. The aliens appear on a screen and the tribesmen learn that the Tewks and humans now live in peace. They will send a party to rescue them. The Tewks appear and capture everyone except Yonder who escapes into the base. Exploring with little knowledge, the young man enters a matter transporter and begins visiting several different human planets, all under the Tewk alliance. Yonder quickly learns that humans have been sold out and are being gradually enslaved and devoured.

Eventually he returns to World, having to figure out where it is by examining the constellations in his familiar night sky. He returns with a pulse rifle in hand to find his party still tied up under the Tewks. Desperately, he takes on five aliens and wins out because his father distracts the last one, sacrificing his life. After freeing his fellows, he witnesses the leader of the Tewks ranting on the viewscreen, telling how he will torture those that defy him and how the Tewks will eventually devour the entire human race. This tirade is witnessed by the admiral of the mothballed human fleet. The tribesmen will be rescued from World, and those like Yonder want only to fight the Tewks. Their last act will be to denotate the bomb within the base that will blow up the planet that lies in Tewk territory.

This one is a natural for me. I love the primitive human versus the aliens trope. I loved it in “Tumithak of the Corridors” (Amazing Stories, January 1932) by Charles Tanner. I loved it when Manly Wade Wellman did it in “The Day of the Conquerers” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, January 1940).  Even William Tenn’s Of Men and Monsters (1968) does the same in a different way. I suppose it is a descendant of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) where humans are so inferior to the Martians. But in these later stories, the humans win the day, not bacteria.

Brian Aldiss

In his tongue-in-cheek anthology Space Opera (1974) Brian W. Aldiss says “Science Fiction is for real. Space Opera is for Fun. Generally.” Now I’m not going to say that he’s wrong, though I felt that his introduction is at times unkind. He also made this analogy:

Science Fiction is a big muscular horny creature, with a mass of bristling antennae and proprioceptors on its skull. It has a small sister, a gentle creature with red lips and a dash of Stardust in her hair. Her name is Space Opera. This volume is dedicated to her.

Now lets remember this is 1974. We haven’t seen the resurgence of Space Opera that came with writers like Orson Scott Card’s Ender series, Peter Hamilton, Adrian Tchaikovsky and James S. A. Corey’s The Expanse. 1974 is three years before Star Wars opened in theaters. At ACE Books most everything was reprints along with Ursula K. Leguin’s Hainish novels and Frank Herbert’s Dune reprints. Reprints and more reprints. Fans still wanted to buy them but not too many writers were penning new ones. At most other publishers, even less.

Probably the best thing to happen to adventure SF in the early 1970s was DAW Books opening its doors. Donald A. Wollheim published plenty of Space Opera. And Sword & Sorcery. And why shouldn’t he? He was the editor of the ACE Doubles that printed Castaways’ World back in 1963. To go back to Aldiss just once more he said:

Nowadays—rather like grand opera—it [Space Opera] is considered to be in decline, and is in the hands of imitators, or else has evolved into sword-and-sorcery.

At first I thought that comment unfair but then I thought about it. Aldiss is actually referring to “imitators” like Lin Carter who did write plenty of imitation Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett. And he is also referring to Sword & Planet, like Gardner F. Fox’s Llarn books. So not wrong, but perhaps one-sided. Are these things so bad? If what you want is fun, rather than stodgy slow Science-dominated fiction, I will take that glitter-haired beauty with the bright red lips any day.