John Wyndham’s Planet Plane (The Passing Show, May 2-June 20, 1936) and its sequel “The Sleepers of Mars” (Tales of Wonder #2, March 1938) form a narrative that explores a journey to Mars and back. This book is part of the Pulp phase of Wyndham’s career, now writing as John Beynon. Earlier, he had written for the American Pulps as John Beynon Harris. We are a decade and a half before he would emerge as John Wyndham, the author of The Day of the Triffids (1951). Planet Plane, or Stowaway to Mars as it is also called, was John’s second novel after 1935’s The Secret People.
Planet Plane
The plot begins with a spy lose in the shipyard of Dale Curtance’s Gloria Mundi, a spacecraft worthy of a trip to Mars. The spy kills the night watchman and then is killed himself. There are no identity clues on his body. Curtance realizes he can no longer keep his project secret from the public. This is 1980, where flying cars called gyrocurts exist beside a world of cinema news reels. Wyndham is very predictive about rockets taking off while still stuck in 1936 in other ways.
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