Perilous Planets Part 1

Perilous Planets.

Brian W. Aldiss.

INTRODUCTION.

Long before I began compiling this book, I could see what it had to contain. Its t.i.tle and its contents leaped at me while I was working on the first anthology in this series, s.p.a.ce Opera*, three years ago.

For the majority of readers new to science fiction, a landing on another planet - a planet, because unknown, even more perilous than Earth - must be their peak experience of the genre. If they don't get the true sf charge out of touchdown on Procyon v, they will never get any charge at all. The cutting edge of science fiction lies along the interface between the known and the unknown.

So what I wanted for my anthology was that seminal story in which our brave astronauts, or s.p.a.ce-travellers as they used to be called, make the first-ever voyage through s.p.a.ce, see the stars like jewels flung into the sack of night, and touch down on a totally unknown planet. There they jump out to test the atmosphere, find it even better than Earth's, and take a stroll amid the glorious scenery. Whereupon something awful appears and - according to which seminal story you read -attempts to eat them, warps their minds with obscene tele-pathic messages, or captures them and takes them into subter-ranean tunnels.

It was a fantastic story, one you remember for the rest of your life. My trouble was, I had forgotten which story it was. For months, I leafed my way through my library, looking for the seminal story. I found plenty of stories like it, but never that actual story.

Eventually the truth dawned. That seminal story had no actual existence. It was a creation of my memory, compounded from elements common to many similar first- landing stories. It was, you might say, a folk memory of landing on a strange planet.

s.p.a.ce Opera was followed by s.p.a.ce Odysseys, Evil Earths, and Galactic Empires (in two volumes), all from the publishers of this companion volume.

Looking backwards into the mists of receding time, or the receding mists of time, I can see how the legend has gradually become briefer and more sophisticated over the ages since I first began reading, and the sayers of the saga themselves gradually less Neanderthal. Right on the edge of the abyss where memory begins, I am able to recall myself lying in my cot, dummy in mouth, reading an absolutely enchanting Great Progenitor of the story in Wonder Stories.

This is how that Great Progenitor went.

Two professors with German names are arguing about the nature of life. One of them believes that life would be possible even with a silicon-based metabolism, as opposed to the car-bon-based metabolism prevalent on Earth; the other does not so believe. Both put their points of view. Sometimes they grow angry and strike their brows, or scribble equations on a handy blackboard. Every few chapters, in comes the housekeeper and throws more coal on the fire.

So heated grows the argument, that the two professors with German names decide to settle the matter by travelling to Mars, which they suspect is a silicon world.

Going out into the back-yard, they begin to a.s.semble a rockets.h.i.+p, still occasionally striking their brows. Some parts they get from the local hard-ware store, where the owner is amused by their preposterous idea; he often looks over the garden fence to joke with them. But progress is made, little by little, chapter by chapter.

The rocket is completed. The two professors with German names persuade their housekeeper to come along with them as cook; she consents to come as long as she can bring her dog, Fritz. They climb aboard, shovel in the coal, heat up the boiler, and the rocket goes shooting up into s.p.a.ce - to the considerable discomfiture of the hardware store owner.

s.p.a.ce is very interesting and is described in some detail. They can see all the planets in the solar system, etc. They are aiming for Mars but Fritz knocks the compa.s.s over and they land by accident on Jupiter instead. To their surprise, they find Jupiter is rather like Earth, except cloudier. Also the trees are bigger.

The two professors with German names step outside and sniff the air. It is even better than Earth's. They take a stroll.

Whereupon something appears. It is a crowd of Jovians and - bless my soul! - they prove to have a silicon-based meta-bolism. So one of the professors wins his argument. They shake hands and marry the housekeeper, whose carbon-based metabolism has always had a certain appeal.

Doubtless some of my more cynical readers will find this story a little naive, comical even. Let me a.s.sure you that my first impressions were entirely more favourable. At that tender age, I had never heard anyone discussing such a fascinating subject as the nature of life; if taxed I might have claimed off-hand that life had no nature. Nor had the subject of a silicon-based metabolism ever crossed my mind. I believe I am correct in saying that it was this metaphysical aspect of science fiction which interested me as much as the actual s.p.a.ceflight and land-ing on Jupiter.

As the ages pa.s.sed and I left nappies behind, I found that the story of that first landing was developing. The earlier chapters became abridged, even perfunctory.

The s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps were still built privately in back yards, but the details of manu-facture, and the argument, were curtailed. The landing, and what happened then, became the thing. After more ages the stories simply skipped the prolegomena and opened with the s.h.i.+p blasting out of s.p.a.ce and the captain jumping out of his s.h.i.+p, sniffing the air and finding it even better than Earth's, and claiming it in the name of - well, it used to be the British Empire, but that changed too.

Nowadays, the formula has tightened still further. Perhaps you will recall a recent story which begins smartly, 'After land-ing on Regulus v, the men of the Yarmolinsky Expedition made camp .. .' (I prefer not to give the name of the story; with any luck, you will find it in the next anthology in this series.) There was a time, during the sixties, when it looked as if the first-landing story was dead, killed by its own cliches. At that period, Harry Harrison and I had started the first of our many collaborations, a little magazine of sf criticism ent.i.tled SF Horizons. An Oxford friend of ours, C. C. Shackleton, wrote some witty send-ups of various aspects of science fiction. One subject he impaled was precisely this matter of first-landings; as one can infer from his remarks he felt the subject had It suffered severely from over-use. I am happy to include his piece, 'How Are They All on Deneb IV?' as a kind of post-script to this Introduction, since it defines the area more wittily than I could ever aspire to do.

So this anthology does not contain that first-landing story you remember. It was just a folk-memory. All parts of the legend are, of course, embedded in H. G. Well's novel, The First Men on the Moon. One never forgets the moment when Cavor and Beford see the sun rise, watch the plants grow, and sniff the air, to find it even better than Earth's.

What this anthology does contain are stories which, while being excellent in their own right, range along the whole spec-trum of interest aroused by that feat which still remains imaginary: standing upon another planet. (The Moon is a satellite, not a planet.) That particular kind of thrill has been conjured in literature since time immemorial; during time memorial, sf is the name of the literature that does it now.

Actual unrestricted travel in s.p.a.ce, if it ever comes, may alter the nature of science fiction, as reality wipes out folk memories. There must be other beings on other planets who dream similar tales. I'm convinced - I know it is controversial to say this - that when we get to Jupiter we shall find it in-habited by creatures with a silicon-based metabolism. For sure, their writers will be writing science fiction, too.

Who knows, maybe it's even better than Earth's...

We have here seventeen stories from nine different magazines; their vintages cover a span of three decades. Some are de-servedly famous, some undeservedly neglected.

As always, in the hope of preserving a whiff of period flavour, I have left the original blurbs intact, or forged them where the originals were not available. Can you tell the fakes? Two hundred and fifteen correct answers to the last anthology so far. An addi-tional puzzle this time: which piece is by me, operating under a pen name?

Brian W. Aldiss Heath House Southmoor October 1976

'HOW ARE THEY ALL.

ON DENEB IV?'.

by C. C. Shackleton

All right, I know, times are changing. It's the great theme of our age. Ever since evolution and all that, the decades have gone hog wild for change; you'd think there was a law about it.

Maybe there is a law about it.

Don't think I'm complaining: I am. Since I was a kid, every-thing has changed, from the taste of bread to the nature of Africa and China. But at least I thought sf would stay the same.

Instead, what has happened? It's all different. They don't write like Heinlein any more - even Heinlein doesn't. In the old days, you knew exactly where you stood in a story. Take the aliens; back in the Golden Age, when the writers had a bit of a sense of wonder and there were blondes on the covers, you knew the aliens would always be there, endlessly mown down, endlessly picturesque, swarming over endless alien worlds. But nowadays - well, let's take actual cases, he said, reaching eagerly for the May 1940 copy of Gruelling Science Stories. The Luftwaffe was plastering London at the time, but thank heavens the American sf writers hadn't got wind of that, and Zago Blinder was still turning out his customary peaceful limpid prose. His May 1940 stint was ent.i.tled, with what I've always thought showed considerable skill in alliteration, 'The Devils of Deneb iv'.

You know how this sort of thing goes right from the start. The pleasure lies in its predictability. Scarcely has the whine (whisper, snarl, thunder) of the landing jets died than the hatch opens and three Earthmen jump (crawl, climb, fall) out and stand looking round Deneb iv. They find the air is breath-able and quickly hoist the flag (Old Glory, U.N. banner, Stars and Stripes).

Up to now, we readers have been carried along breathlessly (restlessly, hesitantly, mindlessly) on the flood of the author's prose, full of admiration for the way in which he has so eco-nomically created a situation so distinct from our own hum-drum world. More, the old-timers among us are full of grat.i.tude for his dropping the first three (four, six, twelve) chapters describing the construction of the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p in some-one's back yard and its long eventful journey to Deneb which were once considered compulsory in this sort of exercise.

Now, however, comes an awkward pause. We have been brought painlessly through what the textbooks call Building Up Atmosphere, Establis.h.i.+ng Environment, Creating Charac-ter, and so on. The idyllic mood must be shattered. It is time to Introduce the Action.

'Look!' gasps (coughs, barks, yells) the captain, pointing with trembling (rigid, scarred, nicotine-stained) finger at the nearby hill (jungle, ocean, ruined temple).

His crewmen follow the line of his fingertip, and there approaching them they see an angry group (ugly bunch, slavering horde, s...o...b..r-ing herd) of Denebians who are plainly out for blood as they gallop (surge, slime, esp) towards the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p.

You must admit this is value for money, particularly if you only borrowed the magazine. In no time, the three intrepid explorers are back in their s.h.i.+p and the vile Denebians are try-ing to scratch their way in through the cargo hatch.

What more could you ask for? Personally, I asked for nothing more; I had had enough by the time I came across this situation for the fiftieth time. It was not boredom so much as bravery. The Denebians weren't what they used to be.

How-ever mindless and merciless they got, I was no longer scared. I developed immunity. Yet, for all that, I liked things the way they were. The more unsociably those aliens behaved, the more I realized how superior we Earthmen were.

Then things became less straightforward. I was rifling through Microscopic s.e.x Wonder during the boom year of 1951 when I realized that Deneb was no longer the same. They'd dared to alter the plot!

This time, the aliens didn't appear when the flag was hoisted. Everything was peaceful - too peaceful. Our three chums wandered among beautiful trees, or they found charming people like themselves but nicer, with sweet old mums sitting knitting on the porch, and Pa sucking a corn cob and spittin' to avoid bunches of rosy-cheeked kids, or else they found nothing there at all except the waving gra.s.s.

You remember what happened, don't you? Those beautiful trees, that grand old granny, those cheeky kids, that expanse of nothing, that sneaky gra.s.s, was really our old Denebians in dis-guise. Yes, sir! Freud had hit sf by this date, and the old slob-bering hordes were back in full force only nastier, because they could thought- wrap themselves as grannies or gra.s.s and get into the s.h.i.+p and cause chaos. That was a terrible era, and I don't know how I survived it. Story after story, I had to face utter mind-wrenching terror.

I grew to love it.

Then they went and changed the plot again! I knew just how things were going and was all set to relax when the editors or whoever it is that insists on these things - for sure it's not the writers - altered the orthodoxy.

I can pinpoint the date exactly when I realized something had gone wrong. I had bought the Jannish - sorry, the January issue of The Monthly of Whimsey and Wharnmo-Science, 1960, and was leafing through this story by Piledriver Jones ent.i.tled 'On Deneb Deep My Pleasure Stalks'. Funny, I thought, the t.i.tle doesn't sound right, they've started mucking around with the t.i.tles now, is nothing sacred?

But since I wanted to find out if a pleasure stalk was what I thought it was (it wasn't), I forced myself to read on.

You can't fail to recall the story, not only because it has since been anthologized fifty-two times and won a Hank, but because it started a new trend. This is the one where they arrive on Deneb iv all right, in this funny s.h.i.+p that rides solar winds, but some sort of bug gets them and they all grow extra limbs; the captain alone grows twelve big toes, fourteen left arms, a spare pair of b.u.t.tocks, two girl's knees, and a horse's head. And then they sit around and talk philosophy, not mind-ing at all, until in the end it turns out that back on Earth things are even worse because people are terribly short of horse's heads and b.u.t.tocks and knee caps and things.

Let's have no false modesty - I can adjust to anything. But it needs about twenty years to adjust to that sort of plot. And what happened? Already, already, they've altered the line again. That's what I mean about change running hog wild.

Just this year the new orthodoxy has set in. Look at this month's crop of magazines - it's not a very big crop these days, because people won't read unless they know what to expect -look at Monolog, look at Off, look at Odious Fantasy and Lewd Worlds and Gallimaufry, and what do you find? Not a darned one of them has a story set on Deneb IV!

Not a darned one of them has a story set on any alien planet! They're all Earth stories, everyone, though Monolog has this nine-part serial set in England at the time of the Norman Con-quest, with William the Conqueror finding cases of telepathy among the peasants. Otherwise, nothing! Russians, psi powers, medicine, psychology, sociology, politics, traffic problems, robots, nuclear wars, funny little tales about fellows meeting aliens and not realizing it, oh yes, no shortage of all that sort of stuff, and, of course, plenty of drowned, crystallized rainless, bug-ridden, childless, adultless, metal-less, doodless, witless worlds, all of them Earth. But not a single story set on another planet.

I'd chuck in my hand. I would. I'd give up. I'd never bother to try and read another sf story in another magazine in my life. There just happens to be one small thing that gives me grounds for hope.

Lewd Worlds has a little cameo, not more than a thousand words long, about this chap who seduces this girl and then creeps into his back yard and builds his own rocket s.h.i.+p. He has this secret perverted desire to reach the stars, see?

It's only a matter of sweating it out a few more years, boys. We'll get back to Deneb one day. The times they are a-changing.

Section I

Uninhabited Planets

'.. . Because they're There"

Mouth of h.e.l.l by David I. Ma.s.son Brightside Crossing by Alan E, Nourse The Sack by William Morrison

It's an adaptation of what Sir Edmund Hillary replied when asked why he wanted to climb Everest. 'Because it's there,' he said. This remark has become part of the currency of con-versation of our time. For the same reason, we want to visit other planets. Because they're there. (The unspoken remainder of the sentence goes, and because we are human beings.) That's straightforward enough. As to why we want to visit planets in fiction - that's less simple. But there are valid reasons for our interest in unvisited or unvisitable planets; this anthology sets out to explore some of them.

In this opening section, the action unfolds on uninhabited worlds. Even within this setting, there are different categories of uninhabited worlds. Ma.s.son's story is set on a purely imaginary planet. Nourse's story is set on a purely imaginary Mercury.

Morrison's story is set on an imaginary planetoid, or asteroid. Each choice of location has its due effect on the kind of story which is told.

'The Sack' is an excellent story. I do not know why it has not been anthologized more often; nor do I understand why the name of its author, William Morrison (the pseudonym of Joseph Samachson), is not more widely known. There is no mistaking 'The Sack' for anything but an sf story; yet we can see that it is also a fairy story, with all the traditional virtues of that genre: a grain of unpalatable wisdom incorporated within the fantastic, the medicine within the spoonful of jam.

The wisdom comes in the form of a fairly standard, but continually necessary, precept concerning the rightful use of knowledge and power. 'The Sack' was first published in the USA in 1950, one of those awful years that have trudged by, when Senator Joe McCarthy was just beginning his inquisi-tion of anyone suspected of being a Communist; Morrison's senator is less interested in the truth than in his own career. The story itself takes the form of an inquisition. Now that McCarthy has long since disappeared from the scene, 'The Sack' reveals more universal aspects of its fable.

'The truth will make you free' is an adage from a safer era.

Morrison offers a revised version - 'The truth may enslave you.'

Several of the other tales in this collection also represent quests for the ultimate in one form or another. The lure of ultimate answers to everything is embodied in 'The Sack'. Alan Nourse's 'Brightside Crossing' embodies the solar system ulti-mate in adventure, a crossing of Mercury's bright side during perihelion.

'Brightside Crossing' is a fine story. It is included here be-cause it is also absolutely out-of-date.

At the start of the sixties, Alan Nourse published a highly successful book ent.i.tled Nine Planets, with colour ill.u.s.trations by Mel Hunter, which embodied all the knowledge then cur-rent about the nine planets of our solar system. In the chapter on Mercury, Nourse has this to say: The planet turns completely around on its axis in exactly the same time it requires to complete one revolution around the Sun. This means that on Mercury a 'year'

and a 'day' are equal in length, and that the same face of the planet is therefore always turned toward the Sun . . . Mercury has a bright side and a dark side; the bright side is perpetually hot, exceedingly hot, while the dark side remains bitterly cold.

Well, so the astronomers all thought, before the astonis.h.i.+ng successes of nasa's Mariner fly-bys of the sun's nearest planet. We know now (is this the ultimate answer to the question?) that Mercury does in fact have a slow axial revolution, so that its days do not equal its years.

Mercury remains a mysterious planet, its pocked face re-sembling to an odd degree that of our familiar Moon. And yet - the Bright Side, the Dark Side, and that thrilling area, the Twilight Zone, have all been abolished at the click of a com-puterized shutter. They provide settings for many sf stories, harbours for many imaginations. We then regarded them as 'fact'; they have been proved one hundred per cent fict.i.tious, like the forests and swamps of Venus, or the ca.n.a.ls and dead cities of Mars.

When lecturing on science fiction, I am often asked, 'What will science fiction do now that science has caught up with it?' My answer is to say, in effect, that every new advance opens up new doors for speculation. I believe this to be so. But I see '

the point of the question. Year by year, old ports of call of the imagination have been closed until further notice. This book celebrates a type of fiction which belongs to the past.

The will to believe in life everywhere is very strong, and not simply in science fiction writers. The recent Viking landing on Mars was designed to check for signs of life. It is hardly to be wondered at that we live on an over-populated globe, when mankind continually populates the deserts, the deeps, the in-terior of the Earth, and the Heavens, with a riotous a.s.sembly of imaginary beings. Life is supported by conjuring life. Con-ception is all.

So how can 'Brightside Crossing' be out-of-date, and yet retain its attraction for us? Because it speaks of human en-deavour and the will to venture where no man has ever set foot. Nourse's adventure remains as up-to-date as ever; the point of the story does not rest on whether the world conjured up for us is real or imaginary.

s.p.a.ce flight has not changed human nature, only human knowledge.

'Mouth of h.e.l.l' takes place upon an entirely imaginary planet. The author does not inform the reader of the name of the planet, or in what star system it is located. This is deliber-ate. David Ma.s.son is one of the most remarkable authors of sf thrown up in the sixties. His stories were printed in Michael Moorc.o.c.k's New Worlds - less than a dozen of them, and then he ceased to publish. His most famous piece is probably Traveller's Rest, a remarkable time-travel tale.

Like the rest of his slender oeuvre, Ma.s.son's Mouth of h.e.l.l shows admirable control of material that, in the vital tradition of sf, has enormous implications.

While it is undoubtedly about an uninhabited planet, and may appear to have no inter-est in anything but describing as remarkable a physical feature as could be found on any imaginary planet, it has much to say about the nature of the human animal. Not only is it about the marvellous, like the Nourse story; it is also about the domestic-ation of the marvellous.

Time has had its little ironies with 'Mouth of h.e.l.l' as with 'Brightside Crossing'.

When Ma.s.son imagined his enormous sloping plateau and its attendant features, it lay almost at the limits of the unimaginable. Whereas Mariner fly-bys of Mercury have outdated Nourse's (and similar stories) premises without invalidating its imaginative power, similar fly-bys of Mars have confirmed Ma.s.son's premises.

There are monstrous features on the Red Planet at which we can but wonder: the great equatorial rift valley, which is 6 km deep, 75 km across, and hundreds of kilometres long, the gigantic Olympus, a volcano some 29 km high - features which considering that the radius of Mars is only half Earth's, are almost unbelievable. In all the sensational stories of Mars written over the past century, not one author dared imagine such monstrosities for fear of being laughed at. Olympus and the rift valley make 'Mouth of h.e.l.l' more, rather than less, credible (whether to its advantage or disadvantage is up to an individual reader to decide).

This is a 'what if story, the account of a discovery.

What does humanity make of it? What does a robin make of a wheelbarrow? What was it Blake said about the sun: 'You see a Disk in shape somewhat like a Guinea ...'?

MOUTH OF h.e.l.l.

By David I. Ma.s.son When the expedition reached the plateau, driving by short stages from the northern foothills, they found it devoid of human life, a silent plain variegated by little flowers and garish patches of moss and lichen. Ketta.s.s, the leader, called a halt, and surveyed the landscape while the tractors were over-hauled. The sun shone brightly out of a clear sky, not far to the south for the quasi-arctic ecology was one of height, not lati-tude. Mosquitoes hovered low down over tussocks below wind-level, beetles and flies crawled over the flowers. Beyond a quarter-metre above the ground, however, a bitter wind from the north flowed steadily. The distance was clear but it was difficult to interpret what one saw, and the treeless waste held no clues to size.