If you missed the last one…
This post is brought to you by The Paradigm Trap by Jack Mackenzie. The long conflict between humanity and the Kreoch Empire is over. Humanity has won. The Fleet is victorious. Everything has changed. Kent McLennan commands the Fleet ship Meritorious on a mission to accept the Kreoch surrender. But the Kreoch are not taking defeat so easily. Twenty years ago the greatest hero that the Fleet had ever known, Jack Church, was killed by a misguided assassin. Jack Church’s tactical genius was an integral part of the eventual downfall of the Kreoch. If Jack Church had never existed, how different would the outcome have been? What if his tactical knowledge could be used to serve the enemy? What if the Kreoch found a way to turn their defeat into an ultimate victory? Jack Mackenzie brings his exciting style to good SF Adventure.
Space Opera as a term has changed over time. When Wilson Tucker coined the expression, it was intended to be an insult, pointing at the lowest form of SF adventure fiction. Over the decades, it has become a universal term for all adventure SF, whether good or bad. You can call Star Wars films Space Opera just as you can Buck Rogers comic strips or a classic like Murray Leinster’s “Exploration Team” which won the Hugo. The term no longer carries quite the same bite as Wilson intended.
“Invaders From the Outer Suns” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1937) by Frank Belknap Long may come as surprise to those who know FBL as H. P. Lovecraft’s best friend. Long penned several classic Horror tales for Weird Tales but also Science Fiction. Even before the death of H.P. Lovecraft in 1937, Frank expanded his credits to include F. Orlin Tremaine’s Astounding Stories and more juvenile markets like Thrilling Wonder. This space saga follows Interplanetary Police Patrol Officer James Ross on the trail of Justin Nichols. Ross lands on Saturn to look for his culprit in the seedy entertainment domes. Ross finds his man but a woman entering the bar calls him out as a cop. Ross shoots out the lights then punches his way to freedom. When he gets back to the spaceport, he finds Nichols gone and his comrade, Robert Brooke, nursing a sore jaw. The girl from the bar fled with the criminal.
The policeman pursues the bandit, locating him in space, headed for Hyperion. Brooke asks if they can tractor-beam him rather than go to Hyperion, since it is inhabited by killer plants. Ross does net the other ship but Nichols shoots back with a death ray. This beam kills Brooke, making Ross swear vengeance. But before he can reel in his prey, a giant, spider-like ship rises out of the clouds on Hyperion takes Nichols’ smaller vessel.
Ross lands on Hyperion, then goes in pursuit wearing a breathing apparatus. He finds a circle of dead men and a diary explaining what has happened. The Earthmen were attacked by strange vegetable giants who used telepathy to take over their minds. Rather than submit, the spacemen died. These evil plant creatures are not the local leech-weeds that burrow into bodies, nor the infectious fungi that infects the swamps.
Next Ross finds Nichols. He is dying from leech-weed. The terrible tendril giants, as he calls the weird invaders, have put his sister, Marta, the girl from the bar, asleep. Nichols confesses she was only acting out of concern for her brother. It was Justin who used the death ray and embezzled the cash. Marta is innocent. As Nichols dies, Ross encounters his first tendril giant:
…A tall, wavering shape had emerged from the mist a few yards away and was moving swiftly along the valley toward him. The creature was eight feet in height and covered with a kind of yellowish fuzz. It looked like an immense, shriveled root. Only its head, which was vaguely anthropomorphic in contour, and its little tubular legs hinted at animal kinship. Its heart-shaped face was a flat, wrinkled expanse, expressionless save for the bright glitter of two little slitted eyes, and a writhing, puckered oriface immediately beneath then which appeared to serve as a mouth.
The thing has tendrils that puts Ross to sleep. He awakes to find himself with Marta, going to the aliens’ ship to serve their glory. Marta breaks the spell over Ross by declaring her love. The Earthman snaps out of it long enough to steal the ship from the aliens and fly for Earth. A man and humankind saved by a woman’s love. The emotionality of the ending is classic Long, for his SF often centers on human feelings as well as monsters. Long’s plot and characters are nothing unusual but his prose stands out as something different. Where most Space Opera is told with a dry prose worthy of any Western, Long’s is rich and bedazzling, worthy of a Clark Ashton Smith or A. Merritt.
“The Foxholes of Mars” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1952) by Fritz Leiber is the exception that proves the rule. The story is basically an anti-war rant with very little plot. It is about a nameless soldier from the galactic wars, his bitter thoughts as he slides towards death. The tale is brilliant as anything except Space Opera, which it still is, appearing in the back pages of Thrilling Wonder. What did Samuel Mines think of this little political firecracker? Too good to pass on but not really what Space Pulp readers were expecting. Leiber was a conscientious objector during WWII, though he later worked in a munitions factory as part of the War Effort. Amidst the Korean War (when this story appeared), he has lost none of his feelings about armed conflict.
I’ve written about other Murray Leinster before, like Get Off of My World, and each story is a delight to me. Will F. Jenkins, to use his real name, had all the right skills to write great Space Opera. He had the technical knowledge in Science, being an inventor and could ply on the nerdy stuff for John W. Campbell when required (not my fav). But he also had a great range as a writer, having started in the Pulps before the SF mags, writing in many genres. He has as many classics in the Mystery genre (like “Side Bet”) as he does in SF circles. I think his biggest strength is he knows what a story is, which sounds odd but so many of the poorer Pulp tales I come across have a gimmick or a style but are short on good storytelling.
“The Aliens” is the lead novella from John W. Campbell’s Astounding that features a familiar Leinster theme, First Contact. Murray coined the term with “First Contact” (Astounding Science Fiction, May 1945). He addressed it at greater length in The Black Galaxy (Startling Stories, March 1949). And has returned to the question again ten years later. How will human explorers behave when they encounter the first aliens? Leinster often does this from a military angle, and this story is no different. Open arms or loaded arms?
“The Aliens” has an Earth ship on the lookout for a “Plumie” vessel. These mysterious aliens are named that because relics found from a few sites bear a plumed crest. As with “First Contact”, the ship’s captain has to balance intelligent contact with military might. One of the crew is a military officer named Taine (a nod to SF writer John Taine?), an unstable xenophobe. The Earth ship Niccolet comes across a Plumie vessel and tries to shoot it with their torpedoes. The aliens turn their weapons back at them then crash into them. The two ships become fused. The Plumies come out to meet with their attackers. Short with tall helmets, they appear largely human at first.
A Plumie visits the human ship then Baird, the communications officer visits the Plumie ship and sees the aliens have large feather plumes on the top of their heads. Both ships are slowly falling into the local sun. The Plumies give the Terrans a substitute power plant while the xenophobe Taine tries to blow them up. Baird stops him, then helps to free the Plumie ship. The metal technology is different between the two ships, with the Earth’s iron and magnetic forces causing hell with the Plumie tech. Freed the aliens tow the Earthmen to an oxygen planet to repair the Niccolet. Baird figures out that both races will be great friends because they have different atmospheres and can trade metals from separate environments. Like “First Contact” (and not The Black Galaxy), peace and cooperation proves the right answer.
Conclusion
I don’t know if these stories were thought of as “Space Opera” when they appear (maybe the Long piece). “The Aliens” is a puzzle story in the Astounding/Campbell tradition. Fritz Leiber’s Foxholes is an anomaly in the era before the late 1960s. The Hippies of fifteen years later would certainly have approved. What did Bob Silverberg and the other fan boys of the 1950s think? None that I could see but the letters in general were fairly sophisticated and Leiber’s tale might not have stood out as much as I thought. Whatever readers thought then, people today are going to think Space Opera when they read these Pulps today. The type of tale told before the New Wave is almost always seen that way. The label doesn’t really matter if the ideas and storytelling are fun.
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