This post is brought to you by Ships of Steel edited by G. W. Thomas. This anthology of Space Opera and SF Adventure tales features four novellas, each with its own illustration by M. D. Jackson. If you enjoy your Science Fiction with more action this is the book for you. Manhunts across a giant spaceship, a quest for stolen space pirate treasure with killer androids, a lost child that is the key to a mystery and a planet with a deadly secret that will cause a galactic war. These are stories that move but will also move you.
Murray Leinster coined a common SF trope with the story “First Contact” (Astounding Science Fiction, May 1945). Since that tale, all stories about humans meeting aliens for the first time are considered “First Contact” stories. (Leinster’s estate sued Paramount for using the term in a Star Trek film, but lost. The Court decided the term had become generic.) The plot of this classic involves two spaceships meeting then facing a standoff because to return home could lead invaders back to your planet. The stalemate is broken with the decision to trade vessels (removed of all identifying information). The trade-off would give each planet new innovations as well as a chance to get to know each other for future encounters. It was a typical Campbellian puzzle story that left questions for the author.
Those questions were answered in two stories, the Rod Cantrell adventures that appeared in a different magazine, Startling Stories. The first and shorter of the two was “The Story of Rod Cantrell” (Startling Stories, January 1949). This initial piece doesn’t really involve space travel except to explain the mechanism for the following tale. Rod Cantrell is a famous space explorer but he has to deal with a war at home first. The Total State are upstarts with scientific discoveries that threaten the World Government. Cantrell is taken by the baddies then using his superior scientific knowledge learns the secrets behind their force field and the terrible weapon that allows them to destroy entire cities. This proves to be a system of beams that place a target (like Washington DC) into a hyperspace, which Leinster calls Other-Space. Rod defeats the evil scientist-in-charge, Jugg, and discovers hyperspace travel at the same time.
The second was the “novel” The Black Galaxy (Startling Stories, March 1949). Rod is back along with his fiancee, Kit. The Chairman of World Government wants to sideline Rod. The push is for exploration of other worlds. Rod has been to other planets and has discovered strange black pyramids that are traps for intelligent life. Rod wants to build armaments to protect Earth before dashing off into more space. The decision is left moot because Rod and Kit and a handful of others are trapped on the unfinished spaceship Stellaris. Thus begins a long journey for Rod and the others.
The Stellaris, using other-space, encounters strange pyramid-shaped ships that Rod suspects are his hostiles. The crew flee an attack then come to a planet that has recently been euthanized by the pyramid-builders. Every living being has been rendered to ash. The pyramid-builders prove to be thugs, feeding off the destroyed planet. They are not a super-intelligent race but a gang of thieves who often possess less sophisticated tech than Earth. They are bent on killing off any space-faring race who might threaten their robber-baron civilization. (Here Rod and gang discover television, which dates this book from 1949. TV came to the public notice the year before but most readers would not have any real knowledge of it. Leinster gives a good idea of an iPad in 1949 though he has to find a way to use tubes since the micro-processor hasn’t come along yet. It’s weirdly old-fashioned and yet far-seeing at the same time. The author did the same thing for the Internet five years earlier.)
The rest of the novel is a series of fights with the baddies, as Rod learns more and more about other-space and the beam technology. One of his resources is a colony of the dead race from the first planet. This small group joins the fifteen humans and helps them to capture a pyramid ship’s navigation charts. Using these and a chunk of other-space matter, the crew (after much debate and changing of minds) sends the missile into the heart of the bad guys’ sun, destroying their solar system and the power system for their ships. In an instant, they kill the evil race. The humans return to Earth and explain everything with the help of the good aliens.
Now what raises this space adventure above most Space Opera fare is the inherent questions Leinster asks. These go back to “First Contact”. One of these questions is: if we encounter aliens, will they be a threat? How do we deal with them? H. G. Wells introduced the idea in 1898 with The War of the Worlds but Leinster has evened the playing field with the humans being close to the invaders in technology. In “First Contact” both sides are intelligent and largely benign. They will eventually become friends if their love of dirty jokes is any indication. In Black Galaxy, we get both hostile and friendly aliens. Leinster feels any normal, intelligent and empathic race would side with peace. The pyramid-builders are a lower race that has somehow gained superior technology that they use for profit. Once set on this pirate lifestyle, they can never be forgiven so they must destroy any who can call them to account. He feels this explains why an intelligent race might do such evil. (Rather naively, he feels humankind would not fall into this trap. Late-stage capitalism suggests we might be those very bad’ens. He has forgotten his own rotters from Total State.)
There is a moment in the finale when Rod is planning to kill off the entire pyramid-builder civilization when he must confer with the other aliens, the ones they call ‘the round ones’ because of their physique. These folks have a much greater cause for revenge but at first they quail from it. They want to find a planet and forget about the attackers. They change their minds when the ship discovers another race, technologically low, with horse carts and thick stone walls, that has been killed off. The pyramid-builders have been spooked by Rod and his attacks and now are killing any intelligent races regardless of whether they have space travel. At this point, the round ones join in the final assault on the bad guys. No one will be safe until they have been eliminated.
All this makes The Black Galaxy a philosophical book as well as an adventure. The only other time I have come across such an argument so well placed was in the TV show Doctor Who, Terry Nation’s “The Genesis of the Daleks” when the Doctor has the chance to destroy the Daleks and erase them from history. Tom Baker was the Doctor for that series. He pulls off what could have been a very hard switch from all the silliness, saying should he do it?
‘…Doctor, we’re talking about the Daleks. The most evil creatures ever created. Complete your mission and destroy them. You must!’
The Doctor stared at the gleaming wires as though mesmerised. ‘I simply have to touch this to this and generations of people might live without fear, never even hearing the word “Dalek.”‘
‘Then do it,’ urged Sarah. ‘Suppose it was a question of wiping out the bacteria that caused some terrible disease. You wouldn’t hesitate then, would you?’ The Doctor looked at her solemnly. ‘But if I wipe out a whole intelligent life form, I’ll be no better than the Daleks myself.’ In an agony of indecision, the Doctor repeated his question. ‘I could destroy the Daleks, here and now. But do I have the right?’ (Novelization by Terence Dicks)
The Doctor is saved from having to make that decision. The plot pulls him away and the question remains unanswered. Leinster doesn’t have that luxury. Rod Cantrell must do something to save humanity and all the other peaceful space races. The old Space Opera tales of Edmond Hamilton of the 1920s never even pause for a second to consider such a question. Slam-bang-pow, we are off to fight alien ships. Leinster is writing only four years after the end of World War II and his answer is for readers of the Cold War of the 1950s.
Conclusion
I had to finish this post with one quick question: why didn’t John W. Campbell publish either story? Well, “The Story of Rod Cantrell” reads like a much earlier kind of Pulp SF tale. No surprise there. The Black Galaxy is different. It has plenty of pseudo-scientific goobly-gook to please JWC. I kept think: this reads like Astounding, not Startling. (later it was republished as a Galaxy novel. It doesn’t read like Galaxy either.) I can only assume that Leinster felt that since Startling published the first one , it should get the second.
Or, that John W. Campbell rejected The Black Galaxy because it was too spaceship oriented. 1949 was before the Dianetics silliness would ruin Astounding, but even as early as 1949, Campbell was shifting away from space adventure for stories set on earth or similar planets. All the spaceship fights were too old-fashioned perhaps. (At times I did feel like I was reading some new Edmond Hamilton.) Whatever the reason, Startling Stories had a minor coup with this novel. Murray Leinster would return to this theme with books like The Greks Bring Gifts (1964), though the flying saucer craze was now in full swing so alien ships filled with invaders was about to become much less interesting. The bigger philosophical questions will be sidelined for sensationalism.
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