Philip Wylie - The Gladiator (1930)

 

I gather that much has been made of this novel as a precursor to Siegel and Shuster's Superman, or this is at least the reason for my having heard of it. The Gladiator was published in 1930 and features a man who leaps tall buildings with a single bound and can lift rocks of several tons. His skin is impervious to bullets and his hair is described as so black that it seems almost blue. It's hard to miss the parallels with the star of Action Comics, and although the first issue didn't appear until 1938, Siegel and Shuster had been working on the character since at least 1933. Nevertheless, once we're past those parallels already listed, the association becomes tenuous. One early version of Superman had powers bestowed upon him during the experiments of an irresponsible scientist, much like Wylie's Hugo Danner, but the argument remains thin.

Of course, the notion of progress as something which must surely apply to the future of human evolution was very much a hot topic when The Gladiator was written, meaning it taps into a popular theme more than it originates, and those persons then most visibly - or at least memorably - obsessed with such themes included those writing for early science-fiction magazines such as Hugo Gernsback's Astounding Stories.

Strangely, The Gladiator gets off to a thoroughly putrid start very much in the spirit of the misanthropy found in the worst of Astounding. Our amateur scientist is an unappreciated genius married to an unpleasant nag of a wife. Family values are emphasised with the sort of toxic conservatism typical of young male writers who haven't had much life experience but nevertheless presume themselves above the common herd; and Abednego Danner, our crusading scientist, routinely drowns any kittens left over once he's done with his experiments because he's above mere sentiment. His experiments, as you may have guessed, are geared towards the creation of a superhuman. He succeeds, and so his son is born effectively invulnerable with inhuman strength.

Just as I'd begun to wish I'd picked something else to read, the superbaby becomes a child and the novel reveals itself to be something quite different to that which was seemingly promised in the first chapters.

From his earliest day that longing occupied him. He sought to hide his strength. He hated to think that other people were talking about him. The distinction he enjoyed was odious to him because it aroused unpleasant emotions in other people. He could not realise that those emotions sprang from personal and group jealousy, from the hatred of superiority.

Our boy, you see, is afflicted with superhuman ability more than he is blessed, and this theme dominates so much as to dispel any similarity to those sunnier cartoon people who fight crime and right wrongs with a big, big smile. If The Gladiator foreshadowed anything in the world of comic books, it would have been Stan Lee mashing caped books up with romance comics to produce the angst-ridden superheroes of the sixties and beyond, but even there the parallels are superficial, traditional comic book superhero angst serving mainly to add depth and contrast to the three colour antics. Here the angst is probably nothing less than a measure of the gulf which exists between ideology and that to which it is applied, because the dreams of supermen can only ever be a distraction.

His tragedy lay in the lie he had told to his father: great deeds were always imminent and none of them could be accomplished because they involved humanity, humanity protecting its diseases, its pettiness, its miserable convictions and conventions, with the essence of itself—life. Life not misty and fecund for the future, but life clawing at the dollar in the hour, the security of platitudes, the relief of visible facts, the hope in rationalisation, the needs of skin, belly, and womb.

I'm therefore assuming that the wince-inducing Gernsback-isms of the first chapters are deliberate, ultimately serving as a refutation of the mania from which they were born, and it's probably no coincidence that our main character is named Hugo.

Reaching maturity, the aforementioned Hugo does his best to make his way in the world, but his physical superiority sabotages everything he does to the point of leaving him destitute, struggling to make a living at a carnival sideshow. He struggles at college, accidentally kills an opponent during a game of football, before finding himself drawn into the first world war - the ultimate refutation of meaning, ideals, and ideology.

The Gladiator delivers a deliberately contrarian opener before settling into an intense and genuinely gripping philosophical debate with more than just a flavour - as well as the literary flair - of H.G. Wells at his best, savoured with pulpier touches and moods that remind me of John Fante and Céline, of all people. So I'm not saying this is superior to the caped comics which followed, but that it's such a different animal as to render comparisons mostly pointless. It's not much less than a retort to pretty much every lie we told ourselves for the duration of the last century.

August Derleth (editor) - The Other Side of the Moon (1948)

 

This was originally a hardback collection, of which - due to the limitations of bookbinding at the time - it was possible to fit only half the stories in the paperback version, which is what I have here. So I'm missing material from H.G. Wells, Lord Dunsany, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury amongst others, although mostly stuff I've read elsewhere from what I can tell. Those selections which made the cut seem to have been less established names at the time of publication, but Derleth knew what he was doing and there's no particularly weak link in the resulting chain.

That said, this is golden age science-fiction as distinct from any modern variant, so there's not much point getting pissy over the absence of lengthy discussions about the properties of photons. The genre was still evolving, John W. Campbell was just beginning to make a name for himself, and even if everyone was familiar with Wells, Gernsback, and the rest, a lot of what we have here is more or less weird fiction with a few sciencey touches stirred in for flavour, and Donald Wandrei's Something from Above typifies the form as a marginally less purple Lovecraft-style yarn about flying saucers; and where contributions may not quite tick all the recognised weird fiction boxes, they're fucking weird nonetheless.

A.E. van Vogt's Resurrection, for example, teaches us that human beings brought back to life by aliens following the extinction of the human race will have superpowers for no adequately explained reason. The lad was firing on all four cylinders with that one. Elsewhere we find Original Sin in which S. Fowler Wright predicts that philosophy will eventually advance to such a degree as to inspire the entire human race to commit to a surprisingly cheery form of mass suicide, because the purpose of life is the evolution of its own destruction or summink; and Eric Frank Russell's Spiro recruits a shape-shifting alien refugee to the London music hall of the day thus allowing us to imagine what a Tommy Trinder version of Campbell's Who Goes There? might look like.

The rest are mostly cut from the same strange cloth; which you might call dated, but I'd prefer to regard as simply consistent with a particular style and mood associated with the forties, blending deco stylings with post-bomb paranoia and all of our ideas about supermen beginning to look a bit shaky; and, as ever, Derleth brought us the cream of the crop.

The Moon Maid

Edgar Rice Burroughs The Moon Maid (1923)
After the previous three, I had no real intention of dipping any additional toes into Edgar, but this was in a second hand book store in Kenilworth, England, exactly opposite the charity shop from which I'd bought my first Edgar back in 2011; and my brain had somehow already flagged The Moon Maid as worth a look, for some reason.

It starts well, at least reminding us that Burroughs knew how to pull a sentence together, but before we've even come to the foot of the first page, we're told that the war which has been waging since 1914 is at last over, and that the Anglo-Saxon races have won - which has obviously come as a massive relief to everyone, even the losers who apparently always knew themselves to be a bad lot. To be fair to Edgar, I'm fairly certain he's referring to the Anglo-Saxon as something distinct from the forces of Communism - then making quite a commotion in the east at the time of writing - rather than specifically distinct from other racial groups. Nevertheless, it strikes an unfortunately ambiguous note.

Next we realise we're reading a variation on that narrative device, so popular at the time, where our man strikes up a cigar-based friendship with a mysterious explorer at the gentleman's club, and the mysterious explorer is naturally busting to spill the beans on his recent most diverting escapade in the celestial planet of Neptune, or similar. For reasons best known to himself, Edgar goes one better in The Moon Maid, and our guy strikes up a cigar-based friendship with a mysterious adventurer who just so happens to be channeling his own future self, or possibly his son from a few decades down the line, and the son has been to the moon. My friend Neil once had an idea for a movie comprising just a continuous car chase, but which incorporated flashbacks to previous car chases throughout, and the flashbacks would also feature flashbacks to earlier car chases. I'm not sure if Neil ever read The Moon Maid.

Anyway, whichever narrator we eventually end up with, he goes to the moon in the company of his most hated enemy, who also happens to be a technical genius - so that makes perfect sense. They crash inside the moon, because it's hollow with numerous rudimentary civilisations dwelling therein, the first encountered being the Kalkars, a race of cannibalistic centaurs resembling the bastard offspring of Jason King and Germaine Greer if the cover of this edition is any indication. As usual, these creatures are more or less American Indians so there are spears aplenty, various incidents of failing to recognise the inherent superiority of whitey, and so on and so forth. Our guy's most hated enemy runs off to teach the Kalkars how to make guns because he's a wrong 'un through and through, and bringing him to the moon was a huge mistake. The Kalkars were commies in an earlier version of the book, for what that may be worth. Our guy teams up with the noble underdogs, as usual, having fallen in love with a right tasty moon lady of normal human physiognomy, which is handy. You can probably guess the rest.

The great shame is that Burroughs had a genuinely wonderful way with words, an elegant prose at least equal to that of Wells, which keeps you reading no matter how fucking stupid the story gets; and he wasted these not inconsiderable talents on this barely coherent garbage resembling the much older lunar satire of Cyrano de Bergerac and others, but rendered in wax crayon without the satire.

This was definitely the last one for me.

Rocket Ship Galileo

Robert Heinlein Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)
I loathed Stranger in a Strange Land with such force as to inspire the promise that I would never read another Heinlein, but Alec Nevala-Lee's history of Astounding has given me cause to lift this embargo, because I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed those I read before I came to the aforementioned four-hundred pages of egocentric shite. So here we are again.

Rocket Ship Galileo may be among the squarest tales ever told - pipe-smoking scientist helps three rocket crazy young lads to build a spacecraft by which they fly to the moon, with all the science done right, equations and calculations described in detail, and no agricultural language or references to beastly habits. It's almost a variation on the lunar expeditions of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells as they would have been serialised for fifties America by the guy who wrote Biggles, but - as I now remember why the man had such a reputation - Heinlein not only makes it work, but it's positively gripping. He ticks every last box on the John W. Campbell checklist - five page lectures about sub-atomic particles, plot elements hung upon obscure features of trigonometry, lengthy discussions of structural integrity whilst our three smart young lads address everyone as sir and behave unlike teenagers have ever behaved in the real world - and yet Rocket Ship Galileo dazzles, page after page, somehow swanning around like a jaunty insurance salesman with pipe clenched firmly in its wry grin without a predictable sentence or narrative twist in sight.

I still don't know how he came to write Stranger, and there's no way I'm touching anything written later, but I'm glad I got over the hump. I'm already looking forward to the other two I picked up at the same time as this one.

Nerves

Lester Del Rey Nerves (1942)
This is the novelisation - updated and expanded in 1975 - of a shorter story first published in 1942, but Lester insists it's essentially the same thing so that's what I'm going with. With the passage of time having overtaken the science-fiction element, Nerves was left beached as, I suppose, a medical thriller - not really my sort of thing, but scooped up regardless for reasons described nearly a year ago. It's set in a nuclear power plant, and the title refers to the tension which tends to mount when a nuclear power plant explodes, but also to the synaptic connections of Jorgensen, the man who knows how to stop the nuclear power plant exploding if only they can get him to wake up after the core went meltdown with himself inside.

Having been written in 1942, Nerves imagines those nuclear power plants of the future in the same way that Gernsback imagined us eventually sucking baby food from feed tubes so as to dispense with the grinding hardship of chewing. The power plant of Nerves not only supplies power to a massive community of erm… atomjacks and their families, but also manufactures super-heavy stable isotopes for use in whatever sciencey stuff we'll be doing in the future; and these super-heavy isotopes found somewhere on the periodic table way past plutonium and the others are stable, as I say, so they aren't really radioactive; but even if they were it wouldn't matter because if you're exposed to radiation there are all sorts of treatments available and in certain cases you just have a bit of a rest and you're usually fine. I suppose I should just be happy that no-one develops mysterious super powers.

Science-fiction has generally had a lousy track record in predictive terms, and Nerves is an example of science-fiction getting it really wrong. Science-fiction getting it really wrong can often be massively entertaining, but Nerves focusses on the tension, which doesn't work quite so well as it probably did in 1942, before even the immediate effects of exposure to radiation were fully understood, never mind what happens when one of the fucking things blows up. Furthermore, it attempts to weave tension from too large a cast of fairly generic characters, at least a couple of whom spend time talking about how they'll be able to pipe the waste into the local river and get rid of it that way - and these are good guys saving the day, not Mr. Burns and Smithers.

I assume Nerves was pulled out and given a fresh coat of paint partially in response to just how much the public loved their disaster movies during the seventies, but given how faithful it seemingly remains to the magazine version of 1942, it seems a little like reprinting First Men in the Moon as a Star Wars cash-in.

When the Sleeper Wakes

H.G. Wells When the Sleeper Wakes (1903)
This was written as a serial and published in the Graphic, whatever that was, between 1898 and 1903. I assume it's therefore different to Herbert's 1910 revision as the novel, The Sleeper Awakes, which I haven't read. I gather Wells was dissatisfied with the serial version and took the opportunity to iron out a few of the creases, which I understand because I too am dissatisfied with the serial version.

The story follows a man called Graham who sleeps for a couple of centuries, wakes to a futuristic society which has come to regard him as a near God-like figure for no immediately credible reason, and who then comes to take a dim view of the aforementioned futuristic society. It's a dystopia and is thus ancestral to more or less an entire genre, although Wells' version of the future foreshadows that of Aldous Huxley more than it does Orwell's 1984, particularly with the babble machines feeding the populace a steady diet of complete bollocks in a spirit we have come to associate with Fox News. Science-fiction has a generally poor track record for predicting the future which, to be fair, isn't always the intent so much as passing comment on emergent trends of the time in which it was written - which is the point that poor old Hugo Gernsback seemed to miss. Sleeper, unfortunately, doesn't even seem to say a whole lot about the nineteenth century aside from its characteristic obsession with aviation. Also the race thing is a little uncomfortable, with an imported black police force here serving for the brutal nightstick of the state. Nevertheless, the term savage is used just once so far as I noticed and it would be unfair to castigate Wells for having grown up in colonial Victorian society. Certainly his attitudes seem mild in comparison to Edgar Rice Burroughs dog-whistling the Klan or Lovecraft inserting the phrase let's go, Brandon into every other tale.

Wells wrote some astonishing books, but I've found the ground tough going once you're past the hits. In the Days of the Comet is mostly decent, but I found The War in the Air pretty thin and The Food of the Gods borderline unreadable; and Sleeper probably isn't as good as even The Food of the Gods which at least had jokes, or tried to crack jokes. It's not terrible, but it's a bit of a chore because there's not much to be said once we're done with how the times have changed. I ended up skimming the last thirty or so pages just in case anything happened, and nothing did apart from Graham crashing his plane. Wells just about communicates his loosely socialist views along with a well founded suspicion of anything calling itself a revolution, but it's all bogged down in the humourless drone of Graham's protracted sighing about the state of the world and how everything used to be better, albeit with some justification.

I suppose I may one day take a shot at the revised version should I happen upon a copy, but I'm not in a hurry to seek it out.

Amazing Stories July 1961

Cele Goldsmith (editor) Amazing Stories July 1961 (1961)
Whenever I pick up one of these old digests - and usually because Murray Leinster is promised by the cover - the story within nearly always turns out to be something I've already read, and usually one of his series featuring Doctor Calhoun, a sort of spacefaring version of the district nurse. Pariah Planet is thankfully not one of the Calhoun stories with which I'm familiar, although it's fairly typical of the series, meaning it may as well have been written by Hank Hill and comprises a sequence of Asimov style narrative puzzle boxes which the reader is invited to see if he, or she - but probably he, can solve before our man gets there. So it's pretty dry and this one isn't helped by a ton of speculation as to what Calhoun might find before he's actually found it, which tends to diminish the potential for surprise and threatens to muddy the distinction between what's happening and what may yet happen; but on the other hand, Leinster is rarely, if ever, a chore, and this episode borders on being a western with planets as frontier towns and our man Calhoun solving medical mysteries on a world overrun with cattle, so I'm not complaining. Also, Virgil Finlay's line illustrations are gorgeous.

Elsewhere, we're very much reminded of the space race transpiring right outside the reader's window with an article on escape capsules of the future, and Gordon Dickson's efficient but underwhelming account of lunar heroism. Thankfully we also have Dan Morgan's implausible but satisfyingly disgusting Father, and The Coming of the Ice by G. Peyton Wertenbaker.

I hadn't heard of the guy, and The Coming of the Ice is significant as having been the first original story to be commissioned and printed in Amazing back in 1926, everything before that having been reprints of Wells and the like; and it turns out he lived in San Antonio, so that's interesting - at least to me. The Coming of the Ice isn't life changing, but it's snappy, well written, and deliciously suggestive of that short window in publishing history during which no-one was quite sure what science-fiction was supposed to be, and the notion of an idea being too wild was yet to take hold. It concerns a man who is made immortal by scientific means, describing his experiences over the millions of years to come as humanity evolves around him even as he himself remains essentially unchanged. The influence of Wells is obvious, but it's got enough of a spark to get me on the hunt for more Wertenbaker, and more than justifies what little I paid for this magazine.

Words Are My Matter

Ursula K. LeGuin Words Are My Matter (2016)
Ever since I first read LeGuin's review of Jeanette Winterson's Stone Gods in the Gaurdani, I knew she was one of the good ones, someone who understood in a world of complete fucking idiots. She found a lot to like about The Stone Gods but spent a couple of massively enjoyable paragraphs rolling her eyes and sighing over Winterson's refusal to acknowledge that a novel in which someone colonises an alien planet can be termed science-fiction - on the grounds that science-fiction is such a boy thing or some such bollocks amounting to the usual snobbery one tends to experience with proper authors. The review is reprinted in this collection, along with a few similarly righteous and massively satisfying truths fired off in the general direction of Margaret Atwood; so I couldn't not buy the thing.

I'm not usually too stoked at the prospect of a writer writing about writing, but LeGuin's essays are packed with insights of the kind which I'd assumed were just me and probably no-one else in the universe. She dissects the relationship between proper writing and that which has come to be termed genre, bursting a multitude of self-important bubbles along the way, and even tackles the myth about whether people really are reading less these days and which people we're talking about when we make such generalisations. For what it may be worth, she doesn't believe that we are reading less, which is encouraging.

LeGuin proves similarly fascinating when discussing the work of other writers - both as reviews and dedicated essays harvested from various literary mags. Here she sheds fresh light on H.G. Wells, J.G. Ballard and others with such clarity and enthusiasm as to have inspired my purchase of a novel by at least one of the names I hadn't heard of - and naturally there are a few. She brings a refreshing feminist perspective to her subject while remaining even-handed and generous throughout, preferring to focus on positives even when dealing with books she clearly didn't enjoy and so eschewing the didactic tendencies of Atwood and Winterson.

Finally, we end with a diary written while at a writers' retreat on some island, with pleasing emphasis on the wild bunnies she encounters. It's not often I find myself wanting to hang out with an author as a result of having read their work, but Ursula really does come across as having been a genuinely wonderful person. We could do with a few more like her, generally speaking.

The War in the Air

H.G. Wells The War in the Air (1908)
The general consensus seems divided as to the quality of Wells' later work, or at least his less well-remembered work. My take is that, based on what I've read, you're probably better off sticking with War of the Worlds, First Men in the Moon, and the ones you've already heard of because they're mostly at least as amazing as their respective legends would have it. In the Days of the Comet is decent, but probably not so astonishing as earlier novels, and The Food of the Gods is massively underwhelming - an interesting story struggling to free itself from beneath a duvet of creaking gags and supposedly comic characters. The War in the Air struggles with similar whimsy but mostly keeps the balance to just the right side of readable. Of course, history itself has somewhat overtaken this novel and readers may need to remind themselves of what a wonder powered flight must once have seemed. Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men foresaw the aircraft as such a radical invention as to inspire what would become a new religion, and in the art world there were the Italian Aeropainters - about whom no-one really likes to say too much these days - but the miracle of aviation has since been lost somewhere within the general thrust of technological progress.

Once again, Wells tends to fall flat as an author of predictive science fiction, his flapping flying machines belonging to the same oubliette as the feeding tubes which Hugo Gernsback had believed would put an end to the misery of mastication. Although this isn't to suggest that this novel lacks purpose or fails to say anything of interest, and certainly it predicted the change in the zeitgeist brought about by the first world war, if not necessarily the means by which it was fought. Our main character is one Bert Smallways of Bromley, Kent. Smallways - who probably would have worked just as well without his speech rendered in phonetic south London - is one of Wells' working class types who thankfully manages to stay just the right side of turning into Will Hay or George Formby, and who finds his parochial existence cast rudely upon the wider world stage through a faintly improbable encounter with an inventor. Manned flight is developed and swiftly spreads, and the entire world is suddenly at war. Combatants are no longer obliged to fight along a limited earthbound front and are now able to attack the enemy from above, far behind the traditional lines. Finding himself aboard a German airship as it bombs New York, Smallways accordingly comes to a realisation.

Hitherto he had rather liked the idea of war as being a jolly, smashing, exciting affair, something like a Bank Holiday rag on a large scale, and on the whole agreeable and exhilarating. Now he knew it a little better.

Technological progress has forever changed the dynamic of war, as did, it could be argued, the first world war a few years later.

Nowhere in the world any more was there a place left where a Smallways might lift his head proudly and vote for war and spirited foreign policy, and go secure from such horrible things.

Wells takes a typically pessimistic view, and so The War in the Air effectively bombs the human race back into the stone age, the message being at least as much to do with human nature as the technological progress which allows us to express its worst aspects.

The development of science had altered the scale of human affairs. By means of rapid mechanical traction it had brought men nearer together, so much nearer socially, economically, physically, that the old separations into nations and kingdoms were no longer possible, a newer, wider synthesis was not only needed but imperatively demanded.

Wells' view is that such a synthesis is vital but unlikely because we as a species tend to take for granted the universal nobility of our own intentions, so the argument is, as ever, not whether we can do something, but whether we should. The above principal applies just as well now as it did in 1908 and might be considered with regard to the sort of cultural homogeneity and amplification of stupidity which the internet has brought about.

The War in the Air is far from Wells' greatest but its only real failing is, arguably, that it would have worked as well with about half the page count. Otherwise, it's respectable, and only truly suffers through War of the Worlds and others having been such tough acts to follow.

Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds

Manly W. Wellman & Wade Wellman
Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds (1975)
I suppose someone had to do it, and given the corpulent central cell of this particular Venn diagram, I'm surprised there haven't been more - although Andrew Hickey's The Book of the Enemy is substantially different, should anyone be about to mention it. Ordinarily I might shy away from such crowd pleasing schlock, particularly given that recent developments among certain self-identified fan groups suggest that we can no longer tell the difference between inspiration and quotation; and, of course, I've already found some Goodreads pillock describing this book as steampunk.

The premise is what Conan Doyle's characters were doing during Wells' War of the Worlds - characters in the plural because the authors team Holmes up with Professor Challenger from The Lost World and somehow it actually sort of works. The authors additionally draw on Wells' The Crystal Egg, establishing an association that even Herbert himself left somewhat unresolved; so it embellishes and underscores War of the Worlds, fleshing out certain details even when attempting to contradict them, and as such makes for a surprisingly satisfying read, possibly because it's a Challenger novel more than anything. I hated the character in The Lost World, suspecting Challenger to be a genuine and unrestrained expression of Conan Doyle's misanthropic regard of his contemporaries as intellectual pygmies. The Wellmans, however, allow the character his alleged scientific genius while clearly having fun with his endless declarations of the same; and so we essentially get a version of the Wells novel told from the perspective of those living off the side of the page, and told very well too. I'm sure Holmes obsessives might have something to say about this, not least the detail of Sherlock getting busy with Mrs. Hudson - whom I still picture as played by the significantly older Mary Gordon in the Basil Rathbone movies, so that was odd - but who gives a shit, really? Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds is nothing life changing but it's a lot of fun and at least held my attention for a couple of hundred pages.

Amazing Stories (February 1946)

Raymond A. Palmer (editor) - Amazing Stories February 1946 (1946)
I found this in a comic book store. It was falling apart, missing the final three pages and back cover - although I don't get the impression they featured anything vital - and flakes of yellowing paper came away each time I read it; but it was three dollars and the cover promising material by both Richard Shaver and Robert Moore Williams made it an essential purchase.

Palmer is credited only as managing editor - Bernard George Davis being listed as the actual editor - but his influence seems overpowering, this influence being expressed as a carnival barker's huckster enthusiasm for scientifiction and the idea that if we are able to imagine it, then one day it will happen - a position I recall having been taken by Bez of Happy Mondays during some television interview wherein he described what he liked about Star Trek. Palmer's editorial accordingly suggests that the contents of the magazine should be read as prediction as much as fiction, giving as an example the notion that readers of Amazing would not have been too surprised by the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, having encountered such weaponry in the magazine many years earlier. Palmer, in true pseudoscientific spirit, actually seems to have regarded Einstein as merely a fellow visionary, and suggests that many of his theories were obviously wrong, as demonstrated by tales published in previous issues because if you can imagine faster than light travel, then one day it will happen.

The divide between imagination and reality was clearly an issue with Richard S. Shaver, arguably the star of the magazine at this point. Shaver's I Remember Lemuria had already been rapturously received and Palmer was quite happy to capitalise on its success. The protagonist of the story tells of his being kidnapped by a race of degenerate subterranean beings called the Dero, whereupon he learns how the Dero have influenced human history by use of special rays which cause people to act with evil intent. It's a paranoid fantasy which seems fairly typical of certain types of schizophrenia, and Shaver seems to have related what he believes to have been actual events as fiction, so as not to cause panic as the legend has it.

While Shaver's tales weren't the revelation claimed by Palmer and others in mythology-building articles featured elsewhere in this issue, and nor did they necessarily constitute classic material, neither were they quite the incomprehensible pulp turds recalled by more stringent critics. The worlds and beings described are patently those of a man with mental health issues, and the plot of Invasion of the Micro-Men in this issue is as prone to absent-minded swerves as any of Shaver's fiction, but there's nevertheless something fascinating and compelling here - plus I suppose it could be argued that he foresaw nanotechnology ahead of the curve. This issue transposes the author's usual concerns to outer space with the Dero replaced by their interplanetary equivalent, the Jotun, degenerate inhabitants of abandoned caverns on a myriad of worlds, but tolerated by the utopian Nortan race, who are elevated and therefore almost certainly white. As with the Dero, the Jotun aren't so much evil as simply irresponsible and prone to mischief. Naturally they have a tendency to kidnap Nortan women for their wives, transforming them - so it is primly hinted - into freaks, which I take to mean that they give them comically massive tits by means of special enlargement rays. Even as we read, we can sort of sense Shaver wrestling with thoughts he doubtless regarded as dirty and therefore part of whatever was wrong with his head, itself expressed as the dominant theme of malevolent, invisible influence - whether it's those special rays or tiny men in the bloodstream.

Robert Moore Williams' The Huntress of Akkan is, roughly speaking, Abraham Merritt's The Face in the Abyss but with its team of plucky, hard-boiled adventurers mysteriously transported to another world. It's pleasant enough, and although it hints at some of the strangeness of Williams' later efforts, it lacks their ponderous and peculiar allegorical quality.

The rest of the magazine is competent but about what you would expect of its kind - pulpy and sort of predictable but not actually offensive; and Final Victim by Ray Bradbury and Henry Hasse isn't anything special. The pseudo-factual articles are more speculative than scientific, pretty much Charles Fort with a few grudging nods towards Einstein and the like; and there's The Bearded White Prophet by L. Taylor Hansen which suggests that Quetzalcoatl was almost certainly Caucasian, which is pure bollocks. If anyone familiar with this idea should still, in 2019, be wondering why it's all bollocks, it's because 1) the native records from which this legend derives were all written half a century after the conquest and represent an after the fact attempt to rationalise it, and b) some indigenous Mexicans actually could grow beards.

So it's underwhelming, but fascinating as an historical document, dating from before science-fiction was really a thing in the same way as it is now, even before the advent of the science-fiction paperback. Amazing Stories inhabited a world in which its genre was H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, a few other bits and pieces here and there, and then these generally frowned upon magazines with their lurid covers and arguably more in common with the trashier end of Hollywood than all that fancy book learnin'. Yet, there's worth here, even imagination, and if it amounts to compost in literary terms, then we should keep in mind that things grow very well in compost.

Master of the World

Jules Verne Master of the World (1904)
There's this place high up in the mountains, so high up that no-one can get to it. There's something going on up there, flames - lightning maybe, and everyone is worried that it might be a volcano. John Strock tries to climb up to have a look but it's too high, and then he gets a mysteriously anonymous letter suggesting that he should mind his own business. Next come strange reports of a very, very fast car, and later there are reports of a very, very fast boat. John investigates and encounters the boat, but it flies away with him inside. It's piloted by the Master of the World, a man who doesn't say very much and who doesn't seem very friendly, but he crashes the amazing car-plane-boat thing he's invented, and so that's the end of that.

All of this is padded out with speculation, page upon page of it. One might surmise that this thing which has been described is actually one and the same as the other thing described earlier. Could it then be that this thing which has been described is actually one and the same as the other thing described earlier? Let us examine the reasons why this thing which has been described might actually be one and the same as the other thing described earlier; then eventually it dawns on us, the truth is revealed - this thing which has been described is actually one and the same as the other thing described earlier!

I vaguely recall a movie adaptation of this novel which I saw as a kid, and one which sort of worked because the cinematic Master of the World had invented a superweapon, a huge dirigible with propellers from which he presumably menaced the rest of us. Unfortunately in the book he just has this car-plane-boat thing which now sounds a bit ludicrous, and his alleged mastery of the world is seemingly because he's the fastest. Verne's Master doesn't seem particularly interested even in maintaining a small circle of pals, never mind ruling over anyone, and so the plot mostly resembles the mumbled invention of a four-year old kid whose attention is divided between playing with his Lego and making up a story which, on close inspection, actually turns out to be Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea but with wheels.

I've had this problem with Verne before, and doubtless someone will tell me that I've read a lousy translation. Unfortunately, I actually enjoyed Master of the World in so much as that I found it highly readable, even engrossing, in spite of its fucking stupid story; and whilst I recognise Verne as having been very much an ideas man, the gulf between those ideas and his seemingly elegant prose is a complete pillock flouncing about in a cape, pulling scary faces and expecting you to be surprised at revelations of the bleeding obvious. So I'm not saying he was a bad writer, only that they weren't all stone cold classics, and that he had some sauce saying whatever it was he said about the work of H.G. Wells.

Weapon X

Barry Windsor-Smith Weapon X (1991)
I missed this one first time around, having given up on Marvel a few months earlier from what I can recall - probably a good thing as Weapon X, had I seen it, might have sucked me right back in, it being the absolute opposite of all that Liefeld inspired crap which was dragging the medium down into a grimacing slurry of katana swords and improbably massive tits. Weapon X is exactly the sort of thing which first got me hooked on all those caped books.

For those who've been living in a monastery since 1974, Wolverine is a character rather than a superhero, a violent feral mutant with the ability to recover from almost any injury no matter how disgusting. It's surprisingly difficult to trace his lineage back to Superman or any of his sunny pals, and Wikipedia points out that Wolverine is one of a certain superhero archetype which seems to have emerged in the wake of the Vietnam war. Since he first appeared in an issue of the Incredible Hulk, Marvel had kept the origin of the character vague and mysterious, occasionally hinting at his being the reluctant fruit of some dubious military experiment, and for a while there was a lot of mileage in all of this muttering and whispering. Of course, what with Marvel being Marvel and the whole deal with how you won't believe your fucking eyes as we finally reveal the pulse pounding secret origin of whoever inherited amazing powers from an ancient sorcerer this week, the mystery wasn't to last; and by now, had I been paying attention, I probably would have known what brand of underpants Wolverine was wearing when they squirrelled him off to that secret laboratory. Anyway, back to 1991 when we still didn't really know…

Barry Windsor-Smith, writes, draws, and doesn't give a whole lot away, telling this story in generally impressionistic style with hints requiring the reader to join the dots - snatches of dialogue combined with images from other parts of the story as a sort of narrative collage, no thinky bubbles, no one explaining what they're doing for the sake of an easy ride. Weapon X is disorientating, brutal, and beautiful, one of the most elegant looking comic books I've seen and at least of a standard equivalent to the work of Jean Giraud. The disorientation serves the atmosphere of the tale rather than obscuring the sequence of its events, which are in any case loosely familiar from Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and even Jurassic Park, I suppose. The end result makes even the more commonly praised examples of the medium seem clunky and childish, and yes, even Watchmen and its like.

Weapon X was originally serialised in Marvel Comics Presents, a biweekly anthology which I vaguely recall as having been otherwise somewhat ropey; which is indicative of what I loved about Marvel at the end of the eighties, specifically the sheer variety of ideas and quality without anyone feeling the need to slap a warning on the cover reading grown-ups only, no kids allowed! As the comic book became a teenager, wearing long trousers, listening to Gentle Giant albums and trying really hard to enjoy them, Marvel - at least for a while - was just getting on with doing what it had always done to the best of its abilities. Too bad it all went tits up.

The Valley of Spiders

H.G. Wells The Valley of Spiders (1905)
I didn't do very well with my last collection of Herbie's short stories, finding them generally patchy and of uneven quality amounting to things which might seem nice ideas as the mind wanders while doing the dishes, but which don't quite add up to a tale. It's hard to miss that a couple of these follow certain narrative conventions favoured by my fifteen-year old stepson, specifically that by which he came up with the saga of the raccoons with rainsticks.

He was back from a weekend at the ranch, and there had been rattlesnakes under the house. 'I called them raccoons with rainsticks,' he informed me, barely able to contain the pleasure taken in his own wit.

'Tell him how you came up with that,' my wife prompted.

'Well,' he began, figuratively taking a thoughtful puff on an imaginary cigar, 'we were in the bedroom and we could hear rattlesnakes under the house, and Courtlandt asked what it was, and I said it was raccoons with rainsticks!'

'What a great story,' I dutifully exclaimed.

Anyway, Wells employs more or less the same composition technique with tales centred upon the appearance of a weird and unusual thing, entailing the discovery of a thing which seems both weird and unusual, with the weird and unusual thing additionally named in the title of the story - The Moth or The Inexperienced Ghost being two examples. Despite being the father - or perhaps uncle - of modern science-fiction, there's not actually a whole lot of science here; although significantly, there's nothing traditionally supernatural, and that which falls outside the realm of anything sciencey should probably be termed either unexplained or just plain weird. These tales have the rhythm and mood of Poe - or what I vaguely remember of Poe - without quite invoking dark forces as anything much beyond a product of human imagination. I suppose therefore that this was supernatural horror catching up with the enlightenment, the death of God, and the industrial revolution.

Yet for whatever reason, I enjoyed this a whole lot more than the collection based around The Time Machine - or Poe for that matter. The stories were written between 1894 and 1905, roughly the decade from which Wells' better novels came, and so most of these are reasonably tight without too much of the whimsy or jabbering which characterised his less successful efforts. The Red Room succeeds as a ghost story in a universe which doesn't really allow for the existence of ghosts; Pollock and the Porroh Man achieves the same but with a more visceral mood which almost foreshadows Lovecraft; and The Crystal Egg serves as an intriguing pendant to War of the Worlds. As seems to be generally true of Wells' short stories, there's nothing here to match the likes of the hits, but it's nevertheless a decent collection in its own right.

Children of the Void

William Dexter Children of the Void (1955)
With Children of the Void, I think I've finally identified a previously unrecognised science-fiction subgenre. I'm tentatively naming it Theosophic science-fiction, in reference to its scrambling towards some image of a cosmos subject to the secretive or otherwise hidden influence of a Godlike figure or figures. Characteristic of the genre - and which arguably excludes Philip K. Dick, although he's clearly related - are novels of occasionally allegorical persuasion utilising science-fiction tropes as support for what otherwise reads like mythology, and making frequent use of telepathy, subterranean realms, idealised or angelic alien visitors, mind control exerted by unknown forces, and other conditions commonly associated with certain forms of schizophrenia. So far I have William Dexter, Richard S. Shaver, and Robert Moore Williams on the list, and George Adamski's accounts of trips aboard flying saucers tick most of the same boxes - keeping in mind here that Shaver similarly claims the events described in his fiction to have actually happened to him. It's been a while since I read Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race but I've a feeling it may also count.

Without getting bogged down in what some other fucker is welcome to write up for Wikipedia if they care that much, I'm not proposing that Theosophic science-fiction should be considered an actual school so much as that it's a distinct type just as Menippean satire is a distinct type, the essence of which can be distilled to A.E. van Vogt rewriting Madam Blavatsky, or thereabouts; so it's arguably cranky, and may count as outsider art in so far as that it's never going to achieve the relative respectability of Asimov or Clarke - although 2001 might have made the list had Arthur thought to include an underground race of mole-people.

I resent the term outsider art, but we're generally talking about novels which may eschew certain literary or grammatic conventions to tell stories with a peculiar dream-like quality not unlike those of the aforementioned van Vogt. It is this quality, often dismissed as a basic inability to tell a coherent tale, which has marginalised the authors under consideration, possibly meaning that I'm the first to attempt to define this thing as an actual literary tradition, and I suggest that it's worth defining as a literary tradition - albeit a vague one - for the sake of discussion. These books have elements in common, not least that they make for very weird reading. I like it very much when a novel surprises me, and Shaver, Dexter, and Williams score very high in this respect.

Anyway, this one came to my attention when someone took the piss out of its admittedly ludicrous cover art on Tumblr, or one of those things - as you will see if you scroll to the foot of the page. It made me laugh but I felt sorry for the book, and a little research revealed it to have formerly been Children of the Void by one William Dexter, rather than Zorgo the Red's Come Be My Friend. Sadly, it seems Dexter's publishers weren't significantly more respectful of his art than whoever mocked up Come Be My Friend. The bat-winged creatures of the planet Varang-Varang are eight rather than hundreds of feet tall, and both front and back cover blurb refer to Earth torn from its orbit and sent hurtling through space. Not only does this not happen in the novel, but it's not even referenced as anything likely, so they were probably thinking of the aforementioned Varang-Varang, upon which our heroes spend some time, and which has enjoyed an unpredictable orbit.

As with World in Eclipse, to which this is the sequel, here we have a fairly straightforward morality tale about how it's good to not blow ourselves up with atomic bombs, in this case expanding the idea to suggest that despite our differences, we're all brothers, that we're all - quite literally - children of the void. This understanding is achieved through a series of scrapes and encounters experienced by Denis Grafton, our narrator, as he travels between worlds in a flying saucer piloted by creatures called the Nagani. They become lost in the tunnels beneath the surface of the near dead world Varang-Varang, then escape to an Earth depopulated by the events of the previous novel - specifically to Crystal Palace and south-east London, which was nice for me seeing as that's my old manor. The Anerley Road even gets a mention.

I would guess that Dexter was inspired by either Wells or Wyndham, as his prose has some of the same qualities, sober or even stately whilst retaining a conversational tone. The story is narrated very much in the style of a travelogue, even incorporating peculiar references to the typewriter our man has on board the Nagani saucer; and as with van Vogt, there's a sense of constant motion combined with a disorientating absence of focus. We're never quite sure where the story is going, or what anyone is trying to achieve, but the pace is such that this never becomes a problem. Children of the Void is one of the weirder things I've read this year, and it came as an immense pleasure after the turgid and surprisingly predictable plod through Alan Moore's Jerusalem.

The Space Merchants

Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth The Space Merchants (1952)
It has been impressed upon me for the last couple of years, or at least since I read New Maps of Hell, that this was the Kornbluth collaboration I really needed to read. I therefore kept looking, despite A Mile Beyond the Moon and others; and at last, here we are.

I thought it would be funnier, and I'm not sure it entirely lives up to expectations - although my expectations were fairly nebulous - but otherwise, yes - I can see that the hype is at least partially justified. Written in the fifties, The Space Merchants predicts a future which has turned out unfortunately like the present and, oddly, foreshadows Philip K. Dick's projections of where capitalism was headed - could be either the influence of this book or great minds thinking alike. Where Dick would incorporate the occasional scene of advertising drones attaching themselves to the hood of one's flying car and attempting to sell you toothpaste while you're trying to concentrate on driving, here the emphasis is much heavier, darker, arguably more sarcastic - maybe like a more overtly dystopian take on Mad Men.

The writing is lively and literate without ever quite crossing over into the jabbering of which Kornbluth was occasionally guilty, and it has the feel of one of those science-fiction novels you can usually smuggle in under the radar of those who might ordinarily wrinkle noses unless it's Wells or Wyndham. Our tale relates the story of an advertising executive who falls from grace and ends up fighting for survival at the bottom end of the economic totem pole, a victim of those forces he once helped perpetuate. Inevitably, his fall from grace brings an awakening, although I have to admit I found the last quarter - from chapter fourteen onwards - a little bewildering and hence unsatisfying in comparison with that which went before, although not enough so as to diminish the whole.

As an aside, the suffering underclass here depicted as justifiably disgruntled bordering on heroic suggests that Kornbluth's supposed sympathy for eugenics - as implied by The Marching Morons and The Little Black Bag - is far from being so cut and dried an argument as his critics have alleged. For my taste The Space Merchants could have used a bit more atmosphere, but it's otherwise decent.

The City of Gold and Lead

John Christopher The City of Gold and Lead (1967)
As you will almost certainly be aware, The City of Gold and Lead is the second of John Christopher's trilogy of children's books set upon an Earth dominated by the alien Tripods. Where The White Mountains seemed more obviously like something extrapolated from The War of the Worlds, this one represents the point at which the tale heads off into new territory. The White Mountains kept its Tripods as a mysterious but remote menace whilst focussing on more familiar human concerns with authority, and how we act when it spins out of control.

This time we go right into the Tripod city to live amongst them as they exist beyond the safety and anonymity of their walking machines. It could have gone horribly wrong in reducing something distant and fairly scary to a known, even potentially comic entity as the creatures from within the machines are revealed to be three legged, tentacled cones of alien flesh with hopes and desires of their own, and apparently based on George Melly - if the one who enslaves Will, our main protagonist, is any indication. Christopher nevertheless pulls it off with ease, crafting a horror story which comes close to hinting at the excesses of the Nazis despite that these Nazis appear to resemble the sort of rubber monsters we bought for five pence a throw and stuck on our pencil tops when I were a lad. It may even be the peculiarity of the Masters - essentially more personable variations on Lovecraft's Great Race - which maintains the fine balance of the narrative by keeping the Tripods at a slight remove from their operators, therefore preserving the menace established in the first book.

Beyond the obvious matters of facing up to tyranny, helping your pals, and generally selfless acts, The City of Gold and Lead doesn't seem quite so philosophically weighty as The White Mountains, although there's also the possibility that I may simply have been overthinking that one; but then it doesn't need to be, because it does what it does to the point of perfection, and is as such one of the best things I've read in a while. As with its predecessor, I really, really wish I'd read this back when I was of the age group for whom it was written.

Who?

Algis Budrys Who? (1958)
This was written a year before The Falling Torch, the only other one I've read by Algis Budrys, and is informed by many of the same cold war preoccupations. I'm not sure if this is due to the era or just Budrys working out some of the baggage of his eastern European origin, hailing from a country occupied by the Nazis and then the Soviet Union. I seem to remember enjoying The Falling Torch, even if it was a bit single-minded in its focus, and Who? is mostly the same deal. I'm not really convinced that he was ever the best science-fiction author since H.G. Wells, as Kingsley Amis put it.

The story is faithful to Asimov's edict of good science-fiction only ever containing one element of the fantastic or implausible - an edict which I'd say is proven demonstrably and unnecessarily Cromwellian by A.E. van Vogt - and here the element is Lucas Martino, our main man. He's the scientist behind some important but poorly defined breakthrough, and so he's been taken prisoner by those weasely Soviets. We don't know if he revealed his secrets, but now they've given him back, except he was a bit poorly so they fixed him by giving him a metal head; and this means we can't actually be sure it's Martino. It may even be some guy the reds have sent to steal the secret of whatever Martino was working on, and so on and so forth.

It works fine if we assume Martino's fingerprints were never taken and that they were yet to develop DNA testing, but I found it difficult to really appreciate the weight of a story so grounded in cold war politics, given that we now know it was all bluff and bullshit. There are other problems too, notably the contrast between whatever advanced technology might furnish a guy with a metal head, and the rest of the world inhabited by these people. For example, released back into society, Martino goes to a pharmacy and asks to use their telephone, all the while trailed by government agents waiting to see what he'll do, whether he'll give himself away as an imposter. Once Martino has made his call and left, our agents take the phone books from the pharmacy so as to inspect them and hopefully deduce just who it was that Martino could have called by looking for the tell tale signs of pressure left by a finger running up and down a single page in search of a particular number. They obtain the directories by ingeniously sending a guy into the pharmacy under the pretence of using the phone, a guy with a suitcase containing identical phone books which he substitutes for those to which Martino referred. The whole operation is laboured, bewildering, and doesn't do much for one's suspension of disbelief. Why? might have been a better title.

So the espionage is all unfortunately fairly dull.

On the other hand, Budrys alternates espionage with glimpses of Martino's youth, back before he had a metal head. The detail is lovely, haunting, and beautifully written, and I would assume it was such passages which inspired Kingsley Amis to draw the comparison with Wells. Who? is a decent novel, but for reasons other than those which seemed most crucial to whoever wrote the blurb on the back cover, and it probably would have made for a better short story.

In the Days of the Comet

H.G. Wells In the Days of the Comet (1906)
I've tended to avoid what I regard as later Wells, generally meaning anything written since The First Men in the Moon. Whilst the quality of his prose may well have remained high, I have the impression he simply ran out of decent ideas, or was at least floundering to some extent; but admittedly this is only a very vague impression based on The Food of the Gods being largely crap and finding myself massively underwhelmed by most of the later short stories that I read, or at least forced myself to finish for the sake of disliking them with authority. I only picked this up because it's so unusual to come across a copy of a novel other than one of the big five, and against all expectations it's not the pile of crap I expected it to be.

That said, it falls off a little in the second half, never quite attaining the escape velocity necessary to achieve the potential promised by the first hundred or so pages, but by that point I didn't even mind, my initial expectations having been set so low. The story is a fairly simple one entailing a passing comet saturating the Earth's atmosphere with a gas which stops everyone acting like wankers. John Brunner pretty much recycled the idea in The Stone That Never Came Down without either the comet or anything you might reasonably describe as an improvement. For Wells' take we experience everything that was wrong with English society at the turn of the century through the eyes of a working-class lad in a coal mining community. His girlfriend has just run off with the son of the landowning lord of the manor, and he's not fucking happy.

In that time of muddle and obscurity people were overtaken by needs and toil and hot passions before they had the chance of even a year or so of clear thinking; they settled down to an intense and strenuous application of some partial but immediate duty, and the growth of thought ceased in them. They set and hardened into narrow ways.

Wells talks about class, privilege, capitalism, industrialisation of labour, and the use of media by which a population is taught to embrace its own servitude and demonise anything which threatens the status quo. But for period details, at times it reads as though it could have been written just months ago, invoking unfortunate parallels which bring serious weight to Wells' argument. It's been a long time since I read any Thomas Hardy, but the first half of the book strongly suggests what little I recall of his passion for social reform.

The comet passes, assuaging the fears of any person suspecting they may have been conned into reading something other than science-fiction, and a green gas envelops the globe, and everyone wakes up with a new awareness of the error of their ways. Unfortunately, as often tends to be the case with utopian novels, it's not very interesting after that - mostly characters having recriminations about how they could ever have been so foolish as to vote for the Annoying Orange, arguments which were better put in the first half of the book for having been expressed in a spirit of anger rather than one of amiable bewilderment. So it ends on a positive note - but for the suggestion that it will take the passing of a narcotic comet to stop us voting Adolf Hitler back into power, over and over, never learning a single fucking thing - but a positive note that just kind of trails off into nothing. This might be a problem but for the sheer power of the first half of the book - not Wells' greatest novel, but his greatest first half of a novel, I'd say.

Stowaway to Mars

John Wyndham Stowaway to Mars (1935)
Here's an oddity - written by John Wyndham prior to his adopting John Wyndham as pen name and having a massive hit with Day of the Triffids: the forgotten, pulpy stuff from before he learned how to write, you might think; and you'd be so wrong that it hurts. See that Wrongy McWrongface from the wrong side of Wrongtown?

That's you.

Unfortunate first impressions can probably be forgiven considering the vintage and a back cover blurb promising that not only are the chaps utterly miffed to discover that they have a bally stowaway on their flight to the red planet, but dash it all, Ginger - the stowaway is a woman!

Born from the golden age of rocketry, Stowaway to Mars kicks off as a seemingly typical tale of scientifically inclined gentlemen hoping to bag the prize money in a race to be the first to make it to Mars, and our main dude has a mousey wife who doesn't want him to go, and is more interested in babies, and believes he needs to grow up and so on. Nevertheless, they all set sail only to discover that there's a woman on board - the plucky daughter of a disgraced scientist who will almost certainly boss them around, complain about the ironing, and wipe their faces with a piece of kitchen roll covered in saliva.

The science is a bit loose and floppy if you look too close, but as for the mechanics of space flight, life beyond gravity, and extraterrestrial ecosystems - you can at least tell that Wyndham gave it more thought than many had done by that point; and the occasional reminders of Flash Gordon are diffused by how seriously he takes his story. Our stowaway is on board following an encounter with some sort of machine creature - and keeping in mind here that robots were a relatively new idea in 1935 - compelling her to trace its ancestry back to Mars, as she later does. What elevates all of this above the bare bones of its plot is the dialogue which bears less comparison to Asimov having his characters tell us about protons, and more to Plato and his pals stood around discussing morality, reality, and all that other good stuff. Here the gang even go so far as to approach an acknowledgement of the genre they inhabit with references to Frankenstein and - of more direct relevance - H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and J. J. Astor's A Journey in Other Worlds, with this as preamble to discourse on machine intelligence, what is meant by the term machine, transhumanism, evolution, and the folly of faith placed in the emergence of a race of supermen. So there are thrills and spills and plenty food for thought.

Not only is it a great pleasure to read science-fiction of this vintage and general stripe with a philosophical dimension, but it's a great pleasure to read science-fiction of this vintage with a philosophical dimension which isn't pitched in the direction of subjects demanding we bite our twenty-first century lips and mumble well, he was of his time. Stowaway to Mars is a far more satisfying read than the title suggests, and it might even be Wyndham's greatest novel.