Magazine Review: Planet Stories Summer 1949 edited by Paul L. Payne
As previously discussed on this blog, Planet Stories was a science fiction pulp magazine published from 1939-1955. It was heavy on the space opera and planetary romance, and usually had a curvy and/or scantily-clad woman on the cover. This Adventure House reprint is of a key issue.
Even before the stories, there’s the readers’ letters column, “The Vizigraph.” It leads off with a letter asking for more acknowledgement of sex, not, mind you, on page depictions of it, just that stories acknowledge that sex is a thing that happens. Even extramaritally or in non-monogamous relationships. Another calls out the habit of having the pulp hero be a white American man, preferably of Anglo-Saxon origin, while the villains are of other ethnicities and races, or alien masks over same. “Already STF writers with no better ideas are beginning to discover on the outer planets races of savage bearded androids who maintain communist systems complete with iron curtains.” Oh, and a letter calling into question the very concept of letter columns as a useful feature.
“Queen of the Martian Catacombs” by Leigh Brackett is the cover story, and the reason this issue was chosen for reprint. It’s the first appearance by her character Eric John Stark, a.k.a. N’Chaka, the Tribeless One. In Stark’s backstory, he was orphaned early in life and adopted by a tribe of Mercurians, who raised him as one of their own. Then in his early teens, that tribe was massacred by Earth miners who wanted their land and N’Chaka was caged for…purposes. The lad was rescued by the Earth Police Control officer Simon Ashton, who raised him for the rest of his youth and gave him an education.
This story opens with Eric John Stark being pursued for gun-running to oppressed natives of Venus, whence he has fled to the deserts of Mars. His pursuer turns out to be Ashton, who is sympathetic and offers a deal. A man named Delgaun in the dry city of Valkis has made an alliance with a tribal leader named Kynon, and hired a selection of the nastiest criminals in the planetary system to create a nomadic uprising. This is all too likely to result in the deaths of many nomads and “civilized” Martians to no gain except to the leaders lining their pockets. The EPC needs an inside man to gather information, and if possible stymie the war plans. If Stark can do this, Ashton can get him off the hook on the gunrunning.
The deal has an extra hook. One of Delgaun’s other hires is Luhar the Venusian, Stark’s partner in gunrunning who’d betrayed him. Delgaun might not realize how bad the blood is between them, considering he’s already sent a job offer to Stark. Stark agrees to take on the mission, despite the obvious dangers.
Eventually Stark arrives at Valkis, and learns that his job will be training the nomads under Kynon in military tactics along with Luhar, the two men being ordered not to kill each other until after the job is complete. Kynon himself turns out to be running a scam where he claims to have access to the immortality secret of the vanished Ramas cult, which involves mind-swapping technology. Stark easily sees through the “demonstration” but isn’t quite ready to share that with the troops yet.
Kynon, his troops, and the mercenaries head off to their own home base, along with Delgaun’s “woman” Berild, a haughty and gorgeous redhead who seems to be more interested in Eric John Stark than might be proper, and her maidservant Fianna, a slightly less spectacular woman who has an unnerving habit of popping up exactly when needed.
Soon, there is treachery afoot, and a series of other strange twists that bring danger to Eric John Stark and those around him.
Stark was Leigh Brackett’s riff on Tarzan, raised in a harsh environment and an expert at combat and survival, but also highly intelligent and knowledgeable about civilization. Thus he tended to sympathize with the “uncivilized” natives of various worlds rather than their colonialist exploiters. It’s repeatedly mentioned that his skin has been permanently “burned black” by the intensity of the Sun on Mercury, and other people in the stories bring this up a lot. This was as close to having a black protagonist as Brackett could get into a pulp SF magazine in the 1940s.
Also of note is that Leigh Brackett generally wrote better female characters than was common for SF pulps of the time. Berild and Fianna are both complex characters with their own agency, much as Stark might rue the day he met them. And there’s also Kala, a minor character who runs a Shanga parlor, where addicts subject themselves to lamps that cause their minds to become animalistic (roughly treated like an opium den in story.) She’s a piece of work.
Overall, this story is an exciting adventure with an unusual protagonist for the time period.
“The Madcap Metalloids” by W.V. Athanas concerns two space explorers that crash on an asteroid. A radioactive asteroid that despite its small size has 3.4 gravities! That can’t be good. The engines don’t have enough thrust left to take off from that heavy of a start, and the life support isn’t going to keep that radiation out for long. On the other hand, this tiny world is inhabited by metalloid spheres with shapeshifting abilities and the ability to read human minds. Could they be of help?
Mildly amusing, goes heavy on the “friendly banter” that used to be considered a mark of comradeship.
“S.O.S. Aphrodite!” by Stanley Mullen has loose cannon ISP officer Steve Coran assigned to go undercover aboard the title emigration ship to Venus to try to a) stop space pirates from stealing the plutonium secretly in the cargo, and b) find and assassinate a man in illegal possession of documents that could embarrass the government.
Steve is less than thrilled that his two-fisted, shoot first ways are no longer considered appropriate for the rapidly civilizing frontier worlds, and political assassin is not a role he relishes. So after this mission, he’s resigning. Next problem, as an emigration ship, they won’t let a single man aboard as a passenger, and there are no available female officers to be his beard. Steve’s first thought is to hire a prostitute from the spaceport brothel to fake-marry him, but then he meets Gerda Mors.
Gerda Mors needs to get to Venus ASAP, and it has to be on the Aphrodite, but she doesn’t have a partner either. Even though the couple take an instant dislike to each other, they figure they can be “married” just long enough to take that spaceship.
It’s not going to be that easy, especially when Steve tries to check up on the ship’s captain, only to find the man murdered and him being framed. It turns out that Gerda has more to her than being a spoiled rich girl, and by the end of the story that fake marriage may be turning real… The romance angle feels forced.
“The Starbusters” by Alfred Coppel, Jr. has the aging battleship Tellurian Rocket Ship Cleopatra being called up for retrofitting a new experimental warp drive. Notably, the starships already have faster than light travel through what’s referred to as “second order flight” but this, if feasible, will be even faster through using “hyperspace.” However, just as she’s being finished with the new engine, Old Aphrodisiac is ordered into the fray against the invading Eridans.
The leathery-tentacled Eridans are a hive mind, so even though the Terrans are much better at space combat, there’s no escaping their immense numbers. Lover-Girl better hope that this warp drive has some way of turning the tide!
Good: The Cleopatra is a gender-integrated ship without it being made a plot point of. There just are men and women working professionally together in a military shipboard atmosphere.
Less Good: Our main characters are rather casual about wiping out an entire intelligent species.
“Peril Orbit” by C.J. Wedlake takes place in a decaying orbit around Sol as a spaceship pilot who was attempting to use a slingshot maneuver wound up getting waylaid by a gravitational anomaly. Content note: At one point the pilot is contemplating suicide, and this is the moment the illustrator chose to draw. This is a more realistic “physics puzzle” story than the usual Planet fare. Not particularly good, but nice to have as a contrast.
“Garden of Evil” by Margaret St. Clair stars Ericson, an ethnographer on the planet Fyhon. He has become addicted to a local plant that’s a natural stimulant, and a derelict. The native woman Mnathl picks him out of the gutter and gets him detoxified and back on his feet. She needs him to come with her to her remote hidden city. You might be able to figure out the twist before it’s revealed on the last page.
“Stalemate in Space” by Charles W. Harness finishes out the issue. It’s a doozy. Evelyn Kane is woken from suspended animation when the Scythians win their decade-long battle between their world-ship, The Invader, and the Earth’s world-ship, The Defender. Back when the two battlespheres first rammed each other, her father had anticipated the outcome, so Evelyn volunteered for a last-ditch suicidal revenge.
Except that during her long sleep, the automated system she was supposed to use to ensure the destruction of both ships was wrecked. Evelyn is forced to infiltrate the Scythian forces posing as one of their secretarial women (thankfully the aliens look just like humans) to find another way to activate the doomsday device. The first part goes pretty smoothly, and she is soon the favored woman of Perat, Viscount of Tharn and the Sector Commander of the Scythians.
After that, it gets trickier. It turns out the elites of both sides are telepathic, and Evelyn must attempt to use her mind powers to gain access to the equipment she needs without triggering Perat’s mind-reading suspicions. Plus, for some reason his father recently sent him a picture of a woman on their home planet who looks exactly like Evelyn down to the curious scar on her forehead.
That scar is where some of her brain tissue was removed and replaced to allow her to control a doll version of herself. She needs to conceal the true purpose of the toy. Also, as Evelyn and Perat spend time dancing together, they are growing closer.
Then comes the big twist at the end where a previously unmentioned (but foreshadowed) bit of technology comes into play, and we learn that “dancing” was at least partially a euphemism because there’s now proof that the two main characters were having extramarital sex. And this stops the war.
Interesting, but maybe tries to pack too many cool ideas into a short story.
Overall, a decent and fairly typical set of stories for this magazine. The Brackett is the one that most people will be reading it for, but I think most of the others are at least worth looking at. Consider it for the pulp scientifiction fan in your life.
