DR HERMES REVIEWS CAPTAIN FUTURE ¶¶¶¶¶

THE SPACE EMPEROR From the Winter 1940 issue of Captain Future's own pulp, this story is corny, melodramatic and scientifically close to impossible– but who cares?! It's just so much fun! I had completely forgotten the sheer exuberance of Space Opera, where imagination has been cranked up full blast and let loose. Captain Future's own magazine ran for four years and he then appeared in STARTLING STORIES up until 1951. Nearly all our hero's exploits were written by the outstanding Edmond Hamilton, although others pitched in a few times (Manly Wade Wellman) among them. Where do we start? Well, it's the VERY near future (2015 to be exact) and all of the other eight planets in the Solar System have been colonized by Earthmen (Yay, Earth! Go, Earth!) despite the fact they were already inhabited by alien beings. The situation is reminiscent of the 19th Century as Great Britain and other European nations* forcibly took over other countries to build their Empires, not without some bitter resentment. The moral questionability of this is hardly touched on in this story, however. Our hero is Curt Newton, a twenty- five-year old scientific genius in a perfect athletic body. He was born in a secret hideout on the Moon and (after his parents were murdered), was raised by the three weird characters who became his team- mates. There is more than a faint resemblance to the Doc Savage concept in all this – Einstein in the body of Hercules, trained and educated since birth to be an adventurer– but it's not really offensive since it's so good natured and cheerful. (As a tip of the hat to Cap's model, we meet an archaeologist named "Kenneth Lester". Readers of the time may not have known that the writer Kenneth Robeson was mostly Lester Dent, but it's a nice way for Hamilton to acknowledge his debt.) Cap's three comrades are not exactly average suburban citizens, either. Simon Wright is a human brain kept alive in a tank of fluid, with eye -sensors and a voice-box; he was an elderly scientist who chose this way of life rather than die of an incurable disease. (DONOVAN'S BRAIN was a big hit at the time in book, movie and radio.) But he's mostly a gruff, no-nonsense senior advisor. Then there's Grag, a seven-foot metal robot who seems, well, a bit dim. He calls Cap 'Master', is slow and patient and pretty dull. Much more interesting is the white-skinned android Otho, a quick-moving and impatient synthetic man. Otho seems more than a little bloodthirsty and reckless, and the contrast between the doglike Grag and the feline Otho is pretty effective. Also, the android is a master of disguise. Not only 1

can he perfectly mimic any voice or gesture, he can use an oily solvent to soften the structure of his face for a few minutes so that it can be reshaped to imitate anyone. Hey! Get me Richard Henry Benson's phone number. Someone swiped the formula for that face-softening chemical he used after his own creepy powers faded. It's worth noting that, unlike Doc and the Avenger, Captain Future and his team have no ethical problem with slaying their enemies. They don't kill lightly, but if it seems necessary, rayguns sizzle and metal hands crush skulls. Every page has a nice creative touch, and Hamilton creates a gorgeous, dangerous Jupiter that our NASA probes did not exactly report, where the Red Spot is a gigantic sea of molten lava, and where the native Jovians are squat green guys with flippers for arms, descendants of an ancient civilization whose advanced technology has now been rediscovered by the heinous villain who calls himself the Space Emperor... My favorite bit is that Captain Future has an invisibility gizmo that works for ten minutes, but since light goes right through his eyes, he's blind while he uses it and has to rely on touch and long training while invisible. It makes for some tricky moments. And did I mention Jupiter's most intriguing wildlife, the tree octopus? I'd love to see a Planetary Geographic Special on that critter! ________________ *And to be fair, the United States dabbled in a bit of imperialism, ourselves.

¶¶¶¶¶ CALLING CAPTAIN FUTURE From the second issue (Spring 1940) of his pulp, this is another over-the-top, physics-disregarding adventure with the whole cast. We have Curt Newton, the athletic supergenius who was raised on the Moon by his three cronies: Simon Wright, the cranky brain in a plastic fish tank, Otho, the hyperactive impolite android, and Grag, the dim but loyal giant robot. Add in Joan Randall, the planetary secret agent with a hopeless crush on that big uncaring lu g, as well as crusty old space Marshall Ezra Gurney, and you have a crew that really stand out no matter where they go. As in most issues, imminent doom threatens the Earth. This time, a massive dark star is zipping along toward a head on collision that will make the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs look like a fender bender in a parking lot. Complicating matters is the mysterious Doctor Zarro*, who claims he alone can divert the dark star... but only if he’s given complete dictatorial powers. This is a tough situation, and the call goes out for Captain Future, who immediately gets to work. So there are chases and rescues, some deductive reasoning, picturesque bug-eyed monsters, the Legion of Doom, a mob of hundreds of escaped convicts who were put in prison by Captain Future himself (whoops), and in general a lot of hectic activity. Although Cap tries to take his enemies alive for trial, he and the other Futuremen have no problem with killing in a fight, if it comes down to that. 2

(Grag apparently has neve r agreed with Asimov`s Three Laws of Robotics, and I sort of suspect Otho ENJOYS killing, not a cheering though.) I was surprised to learn that Pluto has a climate much like that of Greenland (those darn NASA probes get everything wrong!), and a fur suit is sufficient protection to wander around its surface. And although I always thought Pluto’s moon Charon was discovered in 1978, apparently Edmond Hamilton knew about it almost forty years earlier. I only wish the rest of our Solar System was more like the colorful, life- filled planets in these stories. Early on in the story, Curt and his gal Joan are escaping the evil types in a desperate attempt that lands them in the Sargasso Sea of Space. Now, most long running heroes in the 1930s and 1940s had at least one adventure in the mythical version of the Sargasso Sea, usually finding immortal survivors or descendants of Vikings and Romans still living in their trapped ships. This is a variation on that theme, sort of a very mild form of black hole where currents in the "ether" (remember the ether?) have helplessly tangled spacecraft from all planets and time periods. It’s an eerie scene that would be very creepy in a movie. Cap and Joan explore the derelict ships, still filled with the cadavers of their crews (perfectly preserved in the vacuum of space) and the fact that our heroes are trapped in the same predicament that killed all these people is a bit nerve wracking. What’s really intriguing is that Cap and Joan find the wreck of the spaceship PIONEER III, along with its legendary pilot Mark Carew "the man who first visited Saturn and Uranus and Neptune", second only to the first great space explorer, Gorham Johnson. Captain Future reads the log written by Carew in his last minutes of life and, choked with emotion, salutes the body of the space pioneer. It would take a more learned authority of Golden Age science fiction than I am to explain this sequence, but it seems likely that Edmond Hamilton is referring back to one of his own early stories. Hamilton did this in a few other Captain Future stories, and it’s tantalizing to wonder if he wrote the exploits of Carew in some long forgotten short story that would still be fresh in fans` minds back in 1940. Maybe some expert can help out here? Simon Wright actually gets tortured in this adventure, as a villain cuts off his supply of nutrient serum, effectively suffocating him. Torturing a helpless BRAIN in a box... that’s low! Come to think of it, why didn’t Curt build the Brain a little robot body to house him, one which responded to voice commands? It wouldn’t even have to be a full humanlike body, just a powered cart with a few mechanical tongs or grabbing devices would have been better than having to ask Otho or Grag to carry him around. Oh, well, maybe Cap thought Simon was bossy enough the way he was. For a bodiless brain in a tank of fluid, he sure barks out orders to his team-mates. It's is worth noting for researchers in psychic phenomena that the metal robot Grag can send telepathic messages to his little moonpup pet. I think THE FORTEAN TIMES needs to be informed of this. ____________ *Two or three times, this mastermind is referred to as "Doctor Doom", apparently his original name before editorial edict. But then Dr Zarro also reminds one of Dr Zarkov and of Zorro, so it’s not much improvement. So hard to find a sinister name that hasn’t been taken....

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THE MAGICIAN OF MARS From the Summer 1941 issue of CAPTAIN FUTURE magazine, this is another headlong, slam-bang juvenile adventure that has a wonderfully imaginative sequence on a world where invisibility is taken to a new extreme. Once again, the Solar System is in dire straits as the master criminal Ul Quorn escapes from an inescapable space prison, taking a vicious criminal from each planet to form his new gang and setting out to conquer the nine planets. Quorn, the Magician of Mars, has a special place in Cap's rogues gallery– his father was the lowlife who killed Curt Newton's parents, and since Quorn's father was then immediately killed by Newton's cronies, the two groups have a real implacable grudge going on. Just to make things STILL worse, the interplanetary hoods in the new gang were caught and imprisoned by Captain Future himself, so you can tell there's not much chance of negotiations going on here. Cap and Quorn have one of those grudging relationships where, despite the fact that they're in a fight to the death, hero and villain seem to have, well, almost a crush on each other. ("I'm almost sorry to see you die, you're the one man I considered to be my equal.") The far-fetched science in these stories is really not much more implausible than what goes on in the Star Wars and Star Trek books and movies. There are a little bit too much convenient solutions to crises ("luckily I have my veeblefetzer in my belt to neutralize that death ray"), but the important thing is momentum and urgency as the two groups chase each other back and forth. Books like these are best read as quickly as possibly and in a single sitting if possible. A lot of the charm of ear ly science- fiction is the convention of each of the Solar System's planets being habitable (Neptune is always a watercovered world, Mars is red desert, Uranus is all huge mountains), each with different red or green or blue humanoids. Star Wars-type stories essentially do the same thing on fictional planets, but some of the mystique of the place names is lost. Hoth may be more believable than Pluto as a setting, but it doesn't have the charisma. Nearly all of THE MAGICIAN OF MARS is straightforward pursuit and fights, but there are a few interesting little digressions. For no reason as far as the plot goes, the android Otho goes into a bar in disguise (showing off how fast he can metabolize alcohol) gets roaring drunk and has to be corralled back to the adventure. By this time, Otho and the more traditional robot Grag have each acquired a pet, neither one liking the others' animal. I can only surmise that Captain Future has somehow managed to unearth a two-hundred year old stack of Doc Savage paperbacks and his creations think Monk and Ham are just too cool. I wonder if possibly this novel is based on an earlier story which Edmond Hamilton wrote. The villain has discovered a means of warping in and out of the fourth dimensional universe, based on notes left forty years earlier by a scientist named Harris Haines. It sure feels as if Haines appeared in a short story of his own, set in the present day perhaps, and Hamilton is having fun by using those elements in these new books. Readers of THE MAGICIAN OF MARS may have gotten a little kick and thought, "O h, that Haines guy again." The most imaginative sequence has our heroes trying to land on a world where a strange gizmo has made not only the planet itself, but the visitors completely invisible –even to themselves! All they can see is stars and space, and Curt has to take the glass off the instruments so he can land his space ship by FEELING where the needles on the dials and gauges are indicating. What a guy! 4

THE LOST WORLD OF TIME From the Fall 1941 issue of CAPTAIN FUTURE, this is a real trip. Edmond Hamilton keeps throwing bigger challenges at our heroes, one right after the other and each more mind-blowing than the one before. I love this stuff. It’s set in a colorful carnival of a universe where every planet is habitable, heroes and villains are larger than life, and you never know when the sky is going to fall in. Hamilton tells his story with clarity and energy, giving just enough detail for us to visualize the scenes. Actually, in a way this would have worked great as the first Captain Future story, since it would provide a neat explanation for his title. (I mean, the time he lives in is his present, not his future, after all... it’s only the future to us.) In this story, a desperate recorded message sent forward from a hundred million years ago pleads for help from the hopefully advanced people of that future time. The distress call comes to the attention of none other than Curtis Newton, the athletic genius who was raised on the Moon by a brain in a jar, a robot and an android (wait, it gets much wilder than this.) So, there he is... the "Captain Future" they were hoping to find. Not only is he innately noble and helpful, but Curt is also restless and looking for a challenge, having become blasé about the boring ol’ Solar System. So he promptly loads his family of quasihumans in his ship the COMET and uses high-powered doubletalk to blast backward in time. (Normally, I don’t find time travel stories all that appealing, but this one avoids getting bogged down in pretzel logic and doesn’t stop to debate paradoxes.) The Futuremen are thundering backwards in time to rescue the people of Katain, the beautiful golden world which was once the Solar System’s tenth planet. It was the break-up of Katain into fragments which created the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. And don’t give me that newfangled astronomy stuff that says otherwise, either. Curt Newton was there and he saw it. With witnesses. For that matter, I think the international scientific community needs to be informed that the Red Spot of Jupiter is actually an immense pool of lava released when a huge chunk of Katain broke that giant planet’s crust. It was another fragment of the tenth planet that formed Saturn’s rings. (I’ve already written to Stephen Hawking about this.) Be that as it may, Captain Future and his crew find themselves up to their ears in desperate melodrama of the classic kind. The majority of the Katains are hoping to escape the disaster by turning their moon Yugra into a spaceship and heading for Sirius (sounds good), but there is another faction led by a putz named Zikal, and he’s determined to invade Mars, slaughter the inhabitants and take over as dictator. (This was back when invading a people who hadn’t attacked you was considered wrong.) Cap gets involved, and before it’s all over, we’ve gone way back to literally witness the creation of the Solar System, learned why all the planets have similar humanoid denizens and why they all regard the star Deneb as sacred, noticed that Earth originally had a second moon back then (good news for werewolves), tangled with dinosaurs, done conjuring tricks for a king, fought daring battles and suffered loss of innocent lives, and rushed hysterically to evacuate a planet as the ground was breaking up underfoot. Whew! If you were a typically imaginative twelve year old science fiction fan back in 1941, just reading this book would have you hyperventilating. 5

The book also has the sideplot of the android Otho seeming to start a romance with an Ea rthgirl. Now, I think Otho is a suspicious sort to begin with, what with his quick temper and mercurial personality. I’ve never quite trusted the guy and the way he constantly harasses the rather dim metal robot Grag doesn’t make him endearing. Yet, the white android has a vaguely tragic side to him; he’s intelligent enough to feel alienated from mankind, and when the luscious cavegirl from Earth eagerly tags along wherever he goes, it’s hard to blame him for enjoying her admiration and company. (It’s too bad, of course, that she practically has a sign taped to her back saying SACRIFICIAL LAMB in a target design.) After all this, what with travelling billions of years to be there at Creation, watching planets explode and suns collide, you might think Curt Newton has just about had the biggest adventure of his career and everything after that will have to be a letdown. Not so. The fact that the Katainians emigrated to Sirius has him looking up thoughtfully at the stars and making plans...

¶¶¶¶¶ THE FACE OF THE DEEP From the Winter 1943 issue of CAPTAIN FUTURE, this is classic space opera. Hardly a page doesn't have a moment where your scientific-error alarm won't go off: 'but that couldn't work because...', 'evolution doesn't happen that way', 'wait a minute, they use copper to start a nuclear reaction?', 'an asteroid one hundred miles across (from beyond the solar system, no less) just happens to have an atmosphere humans can breathe? And animals and plants we can digest?' But don't worry about it! None of that matters, just let yourself go back to being twelve years old again and full of more eager enthusiasm than critical acuity. Read in that frame of mind, and this is a wild ride wit more than enough suspense, mystery and plot twists to make you stay up late on a school night to finish it. Even if today you have a few grey hairs here and there, and a few aches and pains when it's going to rain, that twelve year old is still inside you... and not so far down, either. This is "Captain Future's greatest adventure." Actually, it seems like EVERY issue is Captain Future's greatest adventure. I'm impressed how Edmond Hamilton kept topping himself over and over, constantly upping the scale and increasing the odds without getting lost in a completely hopeless mess of adjectives. Hamilton also shows a craftsmanship that would be greatly welcome today. He deftly juggles a dozen plot elements as he moves the story quickly forward, never letting any one thread fade from sight long enough to be forgotten. It's formula plotting, but it works well. Okay, here's the problem this time for Curt Newton and his travelling menagerie of Futuremen (a metal robot who's dense in more ways than one, a rubbery android with a mean streak, a pickled human brain in a fish tank, an crus ty old space marshall and Joan, his Planet Patrol girlfriend). Four billion miles outside the Solar System, they find themselves stranded on a tiny unexplored planetoid. They have totalled their spaceship (sunk into lava and completely lost), all they have salvaged is what they are wearing, and they are surrounded by the men who were prisoners on that ship, "more than a hundred of the most dangerous criminals of the nine worlds, every one of which cherished a bitter enmity toward him [Cap]." Oh yeah, and also the planetoid (which Joan dubs Astarfall, how cute) is shuddering with earthquakes and volcanic activity which indicate it will blow up in a few weeks. (It 6

seems that in this case Roche's Limit includes the mass of the Solar System as a whole, not just the nearest planet; astronomers, please write that down in your notebooks.) Personally, I get depressed and discouraged when my car won't start in the morning, but luckily Captain Future is tougher and up to just about any challenge. He promptly announces that they will build a space ship from scratch in a few weeks. With no tools or supplies! And he means it. Let me pick the book up off the floor where I dropped it just now. Sure enough, Curt gets the hundred convicts working on the project which is the only chance any of them have of surviving. First, they need to fashion a stockade and huts, and hunt for food; then build a crude forge and make an anvil and hammer and after that start fashioning some tools... They are literally re-enacting the slow process of thousands of years of technological progress, working under the strong incentive of having imminent doom underfoot. Now, actually the castaways have a few extra advantages. Their leader of course is an amazing super-genius, raised from infancy to be the greatest scientific mind of his era. But it also helps that one of his teammates is Grag, a big robot strong enough to crack rocks open with his hands and carry huge weights back and forth tirelessly; another aide is Simon Wright, a living brain in a me tal tank full of nutrient serum, and he has the ability to flit all over like a hummingbird and search with telescopic lenses for necessary supplies. So they're not exactly struggling barehanded under strict caveman conditions. Also, they are functioning in the space opera universe, where you can construct a working cyclotron (actually, it sounds more like a small nuclear power plant) by hand, making the necessary smelting and forging much easier. But even this is not enough to provide a worthy challenge to our hero. Never mind that he has to keep a gang of murderous cut-throats under discipline and laboring on the escape ship (since he captured many of them and sent them to jail himself, they understandably have some hard feelings toward him). Never mind that his beautiful gal Joan (a Planet Patrol officer herself) is the only woman in a crowd of a hundred sleazy thugs and naturally her presence is going to stir things up even more. No, there has to be one more awful obstacle to overcome and so it seems there are some hostile intelligent lifeforms on the planet. Despite all their precautions, the castaways begin to disappear in ones and twos overnight as their sleeping minds are taken over by the telepathic summons of the Dwellers (whatever they are) and disappear, never to be seen again. To give Hamilton the credit he deserves, he plants proper clues as to the nature of the Dwellers and the true story of the bizarre colony-type life form called Cubics (little cubes of flesh with beady eyes and hooked feet which combine into different formations as needed), and these clues are as fair as any mystery fan would require. You get that wonderfully smug sense of being clever when you realize the solution to these puzzles before the characters do, even if you are being steered by the author to get a nudge at the right moment. There is even a sense of tragedy and loss as the life forms on the doomed planetoid realize their fate but cannot escape it. The characterization in these stories is the usual shorthand for pulp adventures, just enough for us to tell the characters apart and predict what they might or might not do. Edmond Hamilton handles it well enough; the dialogue is corny and usually overstated, but it's just right for this kind of story. Detailed, subtle portrayals would take up too much room, shift focus off the action and actually detract from the effectiveness of the story (although an occasional flash of insight or neat little speech is always welcome.) Kim Ivan, a burly Martian pirate, is the kind of semi- honorable villain who keeps his word and grudgingly becomes Curt's ally. When we meet a stuttering crewman who is "the butt of constant jokes because of his inordinate fondness for prunes", you can immediately visualize the big target painted right over his head and be reasonably sure he will meet a touching death, probably dying heroically to save others. 7

RED SUN OF DANGER From the Spring 1946 issue of STARTLING STORIES, RED SUN OF DANGER (re-titled DANGER PLANET for the paperback reprinting) was written by Edmond Hamilton under house name Brett Sterling. So we have a story with two titles by an author under two names. The cover to the paperback reprint was by Frank Frazetta, and it’s one of his more evocative works. I especially like the delicate tracery on the surface of the moon looming enormously behind our hero. For most of the book, DANGER PLANET is pretty drab, a straightforward plot of agents from the government working undercover. It could very easily have been a story of British spies sent to an African colony to see why the natives were restless, or a Western tale about a US Marshall on the frontier, trying to figure out why the Sioux were giving the settlers a rough time. It’s that familiar. But expectedly, at the very end, DANGER PLANET abruptly shakes itself awake and finishes with a strong, imaginative scene that has a heavy H.P.Lovecraft flavor to it. Basically, we’re concerned here with a distant planet named Roo, where a valuable crop Vitron is grown (this is the source for a super vitamin which gives our descendants of 2060 a lifespan of one hundred vigorous years). Lately the native Roons have been attacking the Earth settlements, claiming they have seen apocalyptic omens, and the settlers are ready to massacre the redskinned, parrot-beaked Roons. The supply of Vitron is threatened, and so Captain Future and his bizarre crew are dispatched to resolve things. Part of the problem with these stories when read today is that they show humans from Earth as having colonized every planet in the Solar System, and now starting on distant planets, simply displacing the native of those worlds and taking over. It’s realistic, of course, because history shows that’s the way nations work and just about every large country has at some point trampled upon another state. But it’s a bit disappointing that our heroes never once express any sympathy or concern for the Roons, or try to see the natives’ side. The Roons are just in the way. You might expect a noble figure like Captain Future to rise above this sort of thing, but no. (In stories published at the same time but set one hundred years earlier, Doc Savage invariably stood up for undiscovered societies and tried to protect them from exploitation. Curt Newton doesn’t seem to have that enlightenment.) Until the very end, there is little imagination or creative gadgets. The spaceships might as well be sailing vessels, the atom pistol regular Colt 45s and so on. It would have taken only light editing to have made a typical Old West story into this book. In an earlier Captain Future story, we were slapped with the wonderful idea of an invisibility field so strong that not only the planet but the people’s own bodies seemed invisible... so you felt like a disembodied intelligence in outer space, although you could feel the ground under your feet or hear your own breathing. Not much of that sort of thing in this story. Although the other Futuremen –Grag, Otho, Simon Wright, even Joan and ol’ Ezra– are exactly the same as they were on the first page they appeared, Curtis Newton himself seems to have aged a bit. He seems tired, disillusioned, without that bubbly enthusiasm he once had. The years of adventuring have worn him down a bit.

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Even though this is by no means Edmond Hamilton's best or most characteristic work, he still tells a competent, crafsmanlike story. He throws in an ambivalent character who may or my not redeem himself at a crucial moment, and each of the Futuremen gets a fair share of the spotlight. And just when it seems the narrative will reach an uninspired, predictable conclusion, Hamilton cranks up the dial on his sense of wonder. In the Captain Future mythology, all humanoid races (including Earth’s) are descended from the Denebians, who colonized the galaxy millions of years ago. Having been to Deneb and learned their secret history and language, Newton is one of the few who can understand what is stirring on the dark moon over Roo. For the Denebians long ago had to war against their most powerful enemies, the dreadful Kangas. Long thought extinct, the surviving Kangas are waiting their chance to escape from their crypt on the dark moon and rise up again to slaughter every living thing. They are even called The Old Ones (a nod to Lovecraft?), and the sight of them freezes even the daring Captain Future with terror. Huge, black, shapeless shoggoth-like monsters, their hateful telepathic brains reach out to overwhelm Curt Newton and there is only one tiny hope that he can fight them. ("He was in the power of the mighty beings whose race had died out ten thousand centuries before, the ancient kings of the universe who had reigned before ever man was, the Old Ones!") Yeah! That’s more like it!

¶¶¶¶¶ MAGIC MOON From the Winter 1944 issue of CAPTAIN FUTURE we find Edmond Hamilton rousting Curt Newton and his unlikely little family of robot, android and pickled brain to tackle another ominous threat to the Solar System. This time out, it’s a plot to enslave the natives of Styx, one of the moons of Pluto. Yes, Styx... we have all heard of Charon but evidently our space probes missed this moon so far. So, Come Sail Away with our heroes to a near future where all nine planets are habitable, scientific wonders lie so thick on the ground you trip over them, bizarre yet somehow plausible alien life forms fill every niche, and there’s plenty of action and excitement for everyone... truly the Best of Times. One nice touch is that after four years of grudgingly putting up with her interfering in his adventures, Cap has finally shown a romantic interest in Joan Randall of the Planet Patrol. This is fine, as he deserves a Lady in his life and she is quite the Babe. Joan is brave, resourceful and independent, a fine pulp heroine. Grizzled old space ranger Ezra Gurney is along for the fun, too, and the Gabby Hayes of the Void is always welcome. By now, though, I’ve come to really dread the verbal sniping between the android Otho and the metallic Grag; the Monk and Ham- inspired insults waste time and simply aren’t funny; I would like to see the snarky android leave Mr Roboto in peace for one mission. The most amusing aspect of the story is that the villain’s scheme requires he produces a "telepicture" titled THE ACE OF SPACE about the heroic exploits of Captain Future. Knowing this flick is really just a cover story for the planned exploitation of Styx, Curt arranges to audition for the 9

role of Captain Future himself. Posing as a Blue Collar Man named Chan Carson, our hero lands the role and then has to act timid and awkward as he plays a role as a clerk playing himself... errr, playing Captain Future*. It’s a cute sequence. As you might expect, the other Futuremen quickly join the cast in the roles of themselves. Grag and Simon Wright suffer the indignity of impersonating props! (Although I’m sure we can all name plenty of Hollywood stars today who would be well suited for that.) Simon has to burglarize an office at one point, which is asking a lot from a brain simmering in a tank but he does his best. Even Joan insists on going along on the filming party (she wants to protect the way the Futuremen are portrayed, although I don’t see what say she would have in the matter.) Plotting to seize the newly discovered diamonds on Styx is Renegade financier Jon Valdane, with his ruthless hired assassins on one hand and a succulent blonde starlet on the other, he has every tool needed to give Captain Future a real struggle. Our boy has his hands full, as he has to keep up his masquerade as a meek clerk, even when Joan is in danger or when the lava sea of Jupiter (back in our era, it was called the Red Spot) is about to erupt and spew all over the crew. Neptune has its own speed bumps, what with the giant monsters in its global ocean. Then there are the mysterious furry Stygians themselves, with their ominous mutterings about awakening an Ancient Power to rid them of these heathen intruders. These pacifists have the ability to cast convincing images into the minds of others, using the Grand Illusion as a disorienting weapon. Styx isn’t called "Magic Moon" without good reason and, although Valdane has a carefully worked out evil scheme, Nothing Ever Goes As Planned. I like the way Curt always responds to the most depressing setbacks; stranded on Styx with every piece of metal on the moon literally disintegrated, he immediately gathers what few bits of plastic and glass are available and starts improvising. One of his ancestors must have been McGyver. It’s easy enough to be heroic when everything is going well, but Cap is most impressive when he takes one disaster after another in stride. As usual with these stories, Hamilton provides us with a few happy hours romping through a gorgeous universe which has variant humans living on every planet in our Solar System, where a guy can pilot his own spaceship from Mars to Pluto and back the way you’d take the Thruway from Manhattan to Albany in a few hours. It’s noticeable that already we seem to have a lot of technology Captain Future’s era has somehow lost. Personal computers are conspicuously absent, there’s no digital video effects (you can’t make an actor look taller, for example) and it’s interesting that Curt makes his ship accelerate between planets by slamming the pedal down to the floor. (Peel out, Cap!) But this is not to criticize Edmond Hamilton, whose job was basically to write entraining adventure yarns with a few imaginative props and some colorful backgrounds. He did not have a Crystal Ball after all to show him what would develop sixty years later (it’s alarming that Captain Future’s stories are set only about ten years ahead of our present date... we’d better get cracking on colonizing those other planets). __________________ *You have to smile at the critic’s remarks about the finished movie, saying that this Chan Carson is a dud. "Let’s hope that the next time Jeff Lewis makes a film like this, he gets somebody for it who can really look and act like Captain Future." Sure, it’s corny but I love it. 10

THE SOLAR INVASION From the Fall 1946 issue of STARTLING STORIES, this was the last full- length novel of Captain Future and his heroic menagerie (four years later, our heroes would return for seven further short stories). It’s a lively enough space opera, packed with an invasion by the denizens of Dimension X, full scale space battles with ships blasting away, even the return of two of Cap’s most significant archenemies. THE SOLAR INVASION is pretty good for its genre. It’s a fun way to spend a few hours away from the cares of the world and recharge your batteries. The problem is, I had unreasonably high expectations for this story, because it was a fill- in job by Manly Wade Wellman. I have always enjoyed Wellman’s stuff; at his lowest ebb, he’s still a more skilled wordsmith than most pulp writers at their best. So, perhaps unfairly, I picked up this story thinking it would be just unbearably wonderful. Nope. Wellman did a fine job, certainly, although (in my opinion) he doesn’t quite handle Captain Future and the bizarre crew of rubbery android, cloddish robot and pickled brain quite as deftly as Edmond Hamilton did. One of the joys of the Captain Future series was that it kept escalating. From creating a new tenth planet to going back in time to witness the creation of the Solar System to heading off to the other end of the Galaxy, the stories kept getting wilder. This time, our universe is threatened by an invasion force from another dimension altogether... one so dire, it’s not the Fourth or Sixth Dimension, but the much more sinister-sounding Dimension X! This alternate universe is much older than ours, with the stars all getting dim and cooling off. ("Dimension X... had a greyness like an old blanket in a dingy, unlighted room. There were stars, but not bright stars. They hung and glowed dully, sometimes waxing or waning a trifle, like half-dead sparks on the blanket.") The inhabitants of their ´Earth´ have adapted to the dimming light of their Sun by becoming pale, stunted little gnomes with huge dark eyes. As if being attacked by these trolls wasn’t bad enough, they have been joined by two renegades from our own dimension. These are none other than Ul Quorn, the Magician of Mars himself who has clashed with the Futuremen twice before. If Curt Newton has a greatest single foe, it would likely be Ul Quorn. This interplanetary mongrel’s father was the one who murdered Cap’s own mother and father on the Moon, only to be promptly executed by the trio of Simon Wright, Otho and Grag (who then raised little Curt on the Moon without benefit of normal human companionship). So there’s not much chance Ul and Cap will ever decide to forgive and forget; they’re wellmotivated enemies. Along with Ul Quorn but working on her own sneaky agenda is the succulent but amoral N’Rala. These two promptly sign up with the Xers to pillage their own native dimension (talk about no loyalty... betraying your ow n dimension, really!) As we have come to expect (and enjoy) this book is absolutely crammed with as much action and suspense as the pages will hold. Captures and escapes, dogfights between fleets of spaceships, bizarre alien life forms slithering up all over the place, all the stuff you would hate to experience but which sounds great from the safety of your couch. There is even an immense warship the size of a moon, bristling with weapons, which reminds me of some Death Star thing I saw in an obscure science fiction movie back in the 1970s. There are two interesting details Wellman throws in. First, he introduces yet another man-eating giant plant. In 1948, he wrote a short story about a Gardiner called "Come Into My Parlor", and he later had his classic character Silver John encounter one of the darn

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things in a brief vignette. Wellman evidently had issues regarding giant carnivorous plants; they do make for some creepy moments. The other innovation which Wellman introduces is that he makes Otho into a sort of Plastic Man. The whiteskinned android has always been described as rubbery, able to assume convincing disguises by molding his facial features after rubbing in an acidic oil. Under Wellman, though, the android is able to stretch his body and limbs considerably, wiggle out of tight wire bindings and throw punches further than his arms should be capable of reaching. ("...Yet at the moment of diving, he elongated and shrank his elastic tissues... he writhed like a serpent, slenderized his waist and legs, and kicked clear on the outside.") It’s a cool effect, and it helps distinguish him from the immensely strong Grag (who, let us face it, is not likely to finish the SUNDAY TIMES crossword puzzle by himself). This pliability also reinforces how inhuman Otho really is, and it would have been neat if he had possessed this trait from the first. Crusty old Space Marshal Ezra Gurney is still helping out, as is Joan Randall. Poor Joan never gets the rewards she deserves. One of the "best secret service agents in the Planet Patrol", she is not only right there when the Futuremen need her, she insists on showing up even when they discourage her presence. This time out, she’s invaluable because she’s immune to N’Rala’s potent sex appeal; Joan tells her to save the femin ine trickery because it won’t work on her and she’d just as soon burn a few protons through the vixen’s torso as look at her. Despite the way Joan just about throws herself right on top of Curt Newton, and despite the hints that he has feelings for her too, nothing seems likely to take its natural course. Being raised from infancy on the Moon by three weird characters has left Captain Future with some emotional underdevelopment.

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THE RETURN OF CAPTAIN FUTURE From the January 1950 issue of STARTLING STORIES, this is pretty tense, suspenseful stuff. Over the ten years the stories ran, the Captain Future saga not only covered every premise from interdimensional invasion to personally witnessing the origin of the solar system, Edmond Hamilton developed rapidly as a writer. As the stories went by, you could see him becoming smoother and more subtle at his craft. Even though the Captain Future concept was essentially juvenile space opera (nothing wrong with that!), Hamilton managed to work in some depth and subtlety among the grand spectacles. The final seven stories were only about a dozen pages long, and what they couldn’t undertake in epic scale, they made up for with human drama and intensity. (It’s too bad there weren’t a few more of these short codas.) It has been three years since the last adventure of Curt Newton and his heroic space menagerie back in the Fall 1946 issue. As "The Return of Captain Future" opens, the Futuremen have literally been missing for the same amount of time.

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We learn that they had launched a bold expedition to the Andromeda Galaxy, and not heard from since. (Actually, the previous book had been THE SOLAR INVASION by guest writer Manly Wade Wellman, which had ended with our heroes safely returning to Earth from Dimension X.) The authorities have reluctantly decided Curt and his team aren’t coming back and it’s time to confiscate the Futuremen’s moon base. Like Doc Savage ’s Fortress of Solitude, Cap’s laboratory has amazingly advanced scientific gadgets and (more alarmingly) all the apocalyptic forbidden weapons our hero has taken from the villains he’s defeated over the years. Not saying we can’t TRUST the government to wisely use the fiendish instruments of destruction stashed on the moon base, but well, look at their record. So, Joan Randall and Ezra Gurney blast off in their own little ship to hustle to the moon before the government men in black can show up. Longtime partners and friends of Cap, Planet Patrol officer Joan and crusty old Marshall Ezra are almost members of the Futuremen themselves. They know the secret entrance to Cap’s moon base and get past the lethal booby traps to find all four of the Futuremen not only alive and home, but up to their necks in even more desperate goings-on. One of the most enjoyable things about this series is that Hamilton developed a detailed mythology for Cap’s universe, a backstory that was consistent and imaginative. It turns out that a million years ago, the human race had developed advanced technology and had founded the Old Empire, "...the great human civilization that had ruled the stars a million years ago". By the time our present industrial society worked itself up, the Old Empire has been long forgotten except for bits and pieces surviving in folklore and legends. (Hey! Is this the same ancient star empire C.L. Moore kept mentioning in her Northwest Smith stories? You know, "Shambleau"?) Captain Future has already managed to learn that our Solar System was seeded with humanoid life forms by colonizers from Deneb as soon as the planets were habitable (so that’s why there are humanoids on every single planet*!) His expedition to Andromeda not only has given him much more of the puzzle to brood over, he’s come back with something immensely old and so dangerous even he is apprehensive. A Linid. This is not so much an alien life form as it is a focus of dark energy. It looks like a shifting bundle of dark cowls and veils and cloaks, it has immense telepathic force and an urge to possess a physical body like a step- in. This Linid has no affection for humans either, considering we were the very life form that defeated and exterminated them in the distant reaches of the past. (There are sometimes hints of Lovecraft in Captain Future, all these enigmatic prehuman beings who ruled the cosmos before men.) The Linid not only badmouths the human race with some vigor, he has a plan. Although the Futuremen have shielded their minds against the Linid`s mental assault, there is one detail they overlooked.... It’s interesting how much Curt Newton has changed from the brash, confident young dude who swaggered on stage in THE SPACE EMPEROR. Ten years of desperate crimefighting and close calls involving the imminent deaths of billions have worn him down. ("In the harsh light from the ceiling dome, his face s howed lined and tired. It had hardened somehow, and changed.") Cap’s bizarre childhood (he was raised on the Moon with only an android, a robot and a brain in a fish tank for company) made him a determined overachiever with little gift for social skills. He’s like one of those kids driven to be Olympic gymnasts or chess players by compulsive parents, only much worse. 13

Even Joan gets to reflect on her hopeless romance with this guy. Curt Newton is handsome, wealthy, intelligent, the most famous hero in the So lar System... and yet, he’s inaccessible. "For loneliness had been Curt’s heritage, had stamped him with a subtle something that set him apart from other men..." and " ´I wonder!´ she said with a sudden burst of anger at the whole vast cruelty of fate that had made her love such a man. ´I wonder if he’d care at all whether I cried or not!´ " The struggle with the demonic Linid is not resolved by whipping up a double-barrelled framistat or reversing the charge on the gamma terwilliker at that last second. Curt has to offer himself as a sacrifice and undergo gruesome suffering as the only solution. The story ends not with an exciting barrage of action but with a melancholy discussion and a haunting final image of the humans (and quasi- humans) looking up. ("They stood, the six of them, too full of thought for any speech, watching. Dark unto dark. And presently the vault of space was empty.") ___________ *Ezra quite reasonably mentions there is some evidence that humans evolved from primates right here on Earth, but the Linid has a scathing explanation. Humans inevitably degenerate into mere apes when left unattended by higher life forms and have to painfully work their way back up again. So there!

THE HARPERS OF TITAN From the September 1950 issue of STARTLING STORIES, this is a very short (30 page) tale that spotlights Simon Wright in his most difficult moments. Captain Future, Otho and Grag all appear, but this is Simon’s story. We never meet Simon Wright in his original body in the Captain Future series. Before Curt Newton was even born, his father Roger operated on the aged, terminally ill Simon and placed his brain in the serum filled tank which kept it alive and functioning indefinitely. This is the Brain as we know him, speaking with a harsh mechanical voice, staring with flexible optical sensors. In the earliest books, Simon has to be carried around like a suitcase by one of his friends but after a bit, he is fitted with tractor beams that enable him to hover and manipulate objects to an extent. In "The Harpers of Titan", for a short time, Simon Wright is again incarnated in a flesh and blood body, and this experience is more interesting and compelling than the allegedly main thrust of the story, the rebellion of the inhabitants of Saturn’s moon Titan. These Monebites are planning to use a forbidden weapon, the Harpers of the title, to drive out the Earth colonists and only one man can hopefully keep the peace. Keogh has married a Moneb woman and is the only outworlder ever allowed on the ruling council, but (right in front of the Futuremen), he’s killed by a dart that destroys his brain. Bloodshed and mass rebellion seem inevitable, until Simon gets the desperate idea that Keogh`s body is still alive... and if it had his brain in it... Curtis Newton reluctantly performs the operation and Simon (in Keogh’s body) sets out to stop the rebels from unleashing the Harpers. It’s an emotionally difficult task for Simon. Not only does he have to deal with being flesh and blood again after decades of living as a disembodied entity, he also has to cope with the deception he must pull on those who knew and loved the man whose body he’s

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animating. When he meets Keogh’s son, that’s hard enough. When the boy meets his sad fate, it’s a poignant moment even in a fantasy story. Edmond Hamilton had developed as a writer over the years since the first Captain Future story, and he was allowed to delve a little deeper than roaring monsters and blazing rayguns by this point. Simon’s reflections as he regains the sense of touch, the feeling of breath coming into lungs, of taste and smell, all are described straightforwardly, without going overboard into poetic rhapsody. Most interesting is that Simon sees many advantages to being the Brain in the tank. Without "the chemical confusions of the flesh", free of hormonal influences and adrenalin surges, Simon could think more clearly and dispassionately than before. The fact that he had been an old, dying man before becoming the Brain certainly helped him make his initial choice, but now he oddly enough is not sure he would want to be flesh and blood again. There is also a haunting image when Simon harshly gives an order to the man he had raised as a boy."...long ago when Curt Newton was a small redheaded boy playing in the lonely corridors of the laboratory hidden under Tycho, with no companions but the robot, the android, and Simon, himself." What a childhood. At least Doc Savage got to travel the world as a boy and interact with dozens of interesting instructors. Captain Future’s upbringing is more like a cruel punishment than a great gift.

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