Black Gate

Andre Norton’s The Last Planet may have been the first Ace Double I ever saw.

Memory is a tricky thing, so I can’t really be sure. It may have been Daybreak — 2250, which sat enticingly in the spinner racks of the St. Francis Junior High School library in Halifax, Nova Scotia. But The Last Planet was almost certainly the first Ace Double I laid eyes on which I was aware was an Ace Double, with a sister book on the flip side and everything (in this case, Alan E. Nourse’s futuristic thriller A Man Obsessed.)

By then, I had begun to build my own collection of SF paperbacks and this fascinating relic of early SF adventure helped pull me towards the entire Ace Double line, like a shipwrecked sailor drawn towards a desert island. A big, lush desert island with a gorgeous library.

It’s Harry Barton’s classic cover for the 1955 paperback that really did it for me. I’ve never read The Last Planet — it took me years just to track down a copy — but nonetheless it has loomed large in my imagination for decades. Three stalwart space explorers, walking through the ruins of an alien city as their crashed spacecraft cools in the foothills behind them, about to stumble upon a metal robot, hiding in the rubble and clutching a rudimentary weapon.

How could it not? For me, at least, it’s one of the signature works of 20th Century SF artwork.

In the years that I searched for a copy, I imagined the story of those three explorers. Would they shoot the robot? Was it friendly? Could be friendly, with those big google-eyes and curious gaze. Those red-shirted explorers looked awfully trigger happy though, with their steely gazes and twitchy hands on their futuristic sidearms. Lords knows, you can’t blame a redshirt for being trigger-happy on an away mission.

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I love dollar bins. If you’ve ever been in the Dealer’s Room at a convention, or any decent bookstore, you know what I’m talking about. The jumbled box at the foot of the booth, virtually ignored, with a hand-scrawled note on the lid: “All books — $1.”

I was at Capricon 34 this weekend here in Chicago and dropped by Greg Ketter’s booth in the Dealer’s Room. Greg is a great guy, owner of DreamHaven Books in Minneapolis, one of the last great science fiction bookstores. I’m pretty sure I was in the middle of a conversation with someone when I saw three boxes peeking under from under his booth with a hand-written “$1” sign. Next thing I know, I’m sitting on the floor, surrounded by neat little stacks of books on the carpet.

There’s nothing like finding a book you’ve always wanted in a dollar bin. Except maybe finding a treasure you didn’t even know existed. And that’s what happened when I pulled out a pristine copy of Laurence Manning’s 1975 paperback The Man Who Awoke from the bottom of the box.

The Man Who Awoke is a collection of five novelettes originally published in Wonder Stories in 1933. It follows the adventures of Norman Winters, a scientist who finds a way to put himself into suspended animation and wake up every 5,000 years. He encounters vastly changed human civilizations at every stop, until he awakens one last time in the year 25,000 A.D.

I read the first story in the pages of that pinnacle of Western Modern Literature, Isaac Asimov’s pulp anthology Before the Golden Age, and really enjoyed it. Winters awakens in 5,000 A.D. to find the city of New York gone, and in its place a thick forest — and humanity struggling to survive.

It was a rip-snortin’ slice of pulp escapism… or was it?

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A few months ago I wrote about The Best of Jack Williamson, a fun refresher course for me in one of the great science fiction writers of the pulp era. It also reminded me that I wanted to read his Legion of Space novels, one of the most popular pre-Campbell space operas.

Time is running out, too. Isaac Asimov, a huge fan of The Legion of Space when he first read it in Astounding Stories in 1934, sadly found it virtually unreadable when he returned to it as an adult. It’s not unusual for these early pulp novels to be a tough read as you get a little older — if you want to really enjoy them, you pretty much have to experience them first in your youth. And since I turn 50 this year, I figured I better get cracking.

The story goes that Jack Williamson was in a Great Books course when he heard that Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Nobel Prize-winning writer of Quo Vadis, had written at least one of his novels by mashing The Three Musketeers with Shakespeare’s John Falstaff. Recognizing a brilliant idea when he heard it, the young Williamson took Falstaff and the Musketeers and shot them into space, and went looking for a market for his new masterpiece.

Williamson’s Legion, the military and police arm of the newly-liberated Solar System, was led by Jay Kalam and the brilliant warrior Hal Samdu. The part of Falstaff is played by Giles Habibula (frequently described on the jacket copy as “the incomparable Giles Habibula!”, with an exclamation mark). The setting is the 30th Century, where the solar system is colonized but mankind dares venture no further, since the first team of interstellar explorers to Barnard’s Star returned as barely-alive madmen, babbling about a massive planet filled with deadly aliens — and a city inhabited by evil “Medusae,” floating jellyfish with terrible powers.

Astounding turned out to be the right market at the right time. Editor F. Orlin Tremaine published The Legion of Space as a five-part serial, beginning in April 1934. It was a success and Williamson followed with The Cometeers, a four-part serial in Astounding starting  in May 1936, and then One Against the Legion, a three-parter starting in April 1939. All three were collected in 1980 as Three from the Legion; one of the first books I ever purchased from the Science Fiction Book Club. Williamson re-visited the Legion a final time, nearly 50 years after he penned their first adventure, with The Queen of the Legion, an epic set after the disbanding of the Legion. It was published in 1983.

I’ve been reading a lot of pulp fiction recently, and mostly enjoying it — especially the short work of Clark Ashton Smith (“The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis“), Murray Leinster (“Proxima Centauri“), and the fanzines that cover the pulps, like Fantasy Review. I have high hopes that The Legion of Space will add to that list.