Friday, June 29, 2018

Interplanetary Adventures! ~ A Review of The Best of Planet Stories


I realize I've been talking a lot about pulp recently, and it's for very good reason. The pulp revolution is in full swing, traditional publishing is capsizing, and the wild west of indie publishing is beginning to organize itself into a brand new ecosystem. But one thing not always covered is short stories and their place in this new world. That is partially because they have been made irrelevant by gatekeepers and taste-makers since the middle of the 20th century, and because the markets which traditionally housed them, magazines, had died by the 1950s and were rotting corpses by the end of the century.

But the stories aren't dead themselves.

Planet Stories is a magazine with an interesting history that stands out even more in a post-pulp revolution world. Coming in at the exact moment the short fiction market had swung away from the majority of readers, 1939, and ending exactly when the market had been put in its grave, 1955, Planet Stories offers a good view as to what the pulp market looked like . . . prior to 1940.

You see, pulp stories were once written to entertain and enliven the reader. In the Golden Age of pulps (1919-1939) you had larger than life heroes and villains, big ideas, epic scope, danger, romance, awe, and incredible sights. By 1940, a perfect storm had blown in and ended up hobbling the market. This sent it on a downward trend that ended with the market collapse in the mid-1950s. Planet Stories (along with a few others like Startling Stories) existed almost outside of this purely manufactured change, living in the Silver Age of pulps (1940-1956) but acting as if the older era had never died. As you can imagine, this led to some controversy among the respectable types that thought the perfect pristine future was only one step away.

One of the writers that defined the era, and who is considered one of the greatest in the field, Leigh Brackett, cobbled together an anthology for Ballantine Books in 1974, nearly two decades since Planet Stories ceased operating, signalling the end of pulp. This was to be the first in a series but alas no more were made after the initial outing. And that is a true shame.

In her introduction, she states exactly what most of us had figured out from learning about the era.

"It was fashionable for awhile, among certain segments of the science fiction fandom, to hate Planet Stories. They hated the magazine because it was not Astounding Stories, a view which I found ridiculous at the time, and still do."

For context, at the end of 1937, John Campbell succeeded Orlin Tremaine as editor at Astounding Stories, one of the more popular pulp magazines. By 1940 he had changed the magazine's name, flushed fantasy from its pages, and began focusing on the small scope Big Men with Screwdrivers trope. This didn't happen overnight, but it was still noticeable. By 1940, everything the magazine was had been changed and subverted, the old style effectively flushed out. And these newer fans of this Campbell style didn't like that a magazine existed to remind them of their roots.

She continues:

"Of course Planet wasn't Astounding; it never pretended to be Astounding, and that was a mercy for a lot of us who would have starved to death if John W. Campbell Jr. had been the sole and only market for our wares. Apart from everything else, there wasn't room for all of us in that one magazine. And we who wrote for Planet tended to be more interested in wonders than we were in differential calculus, or the theory and practice of the hydraulic ram, even if we knew about such things."

This introduction is invaluable for anyone interested in pulp, and were I to write more I would transcribe the entire thing. Nonetheless, the sum of it is that adventure fiction is the lifeblood of the soul. No matter how much the bow-tied elite or snarky nihilists try, they cannot squelch that love of the unknown an wondrous from the human race. We exist for more and we hunger for tastes beyond the thin gruel of the literary types.

Even now, years after Cambellian science fiction has faded from relevance to the common reader, the most popular stories in the world remain those of tall tales, miracles, the unexplained, and impossible events. Planet Stories was not behind the times, or ahead of them, it was exactly where it needed to be to supply the audience with those base needs. One of the few, at the time.

This introductory tone sets the stage for the rest of the anthology to follow. Seven stories, all picked from the decade and a half of Planet's existence follow in a simple 200 page paperback. They aren't all what you might expect, either! Now why don't we just dive into this?

Opening this collection is the famous Lorelai of the Red Mist by Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury, the one and only collaboration between these two famous authors. This is very much a Burroughs-style adventure, and one for the books. A man dies and finds himself transferred to a new body, a different man on Venus who has apparently gone insane. Now he must quickly understand this war he's been thrown into or die a second, more permanent death. Here you get action, action, and more action. The only strange part of this tale is the usage of the names "Conan" and "Crom" though not in the way you might think. Even the author admits they are distracting and would change them if she could. Otherwise this is an action packed adventure that is by far the longest story here and the perfect opener.

We then come to The Star-Mouse by Frederic Brown, a unique a comical story about a small lab mouse named Mitkey Mouse who is trapped on an asteroid with tiny aliens after being sent there by an insane scientist who talks to mice. It's very difficult to do comedy in genre fiction these days that isn't subversive fourth wall breaking, but this story works because the situation is treated dead seriously despite how lighthearted it is. It got a few laughs out of me. Unfortunately, it also isn't very exciting and ends before anything major happens. A decent story, but not one of the best. Nonetheless, it does show the range in stories Planet could have.

Following on from that is Return of a Legend by Raymond Z. Gallun a story about wilderness exploration... on Mars! A boy and his father disappear and a few members of the Earth outpost go to find him. It is otherwise typical of the exploration story type. There's a bit here about what it means to be a martian, but it's mainly an adventure story about exploring a world that is more or less dead. Not my favorite included here, but a solid read.

Quest of Thig by Basil Wells is the fourth story in this collection. Thig is an alien come to Earth to find a human to capture and study to prepare to take over the planet. He succeeds and becomes a man named Terry. He soon learns what it means to be human. If I said this came across as a 1934 story with that premise and less like a 1942 (the year it came out) story then it should tell you the type of theme the tale has and what it builds towards. Nonetheless, it might have been my second favorite in this collection.

Then we come to the most popular story in the collection, and one of my favorites, The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears by Keith Bennett. A pre-Starship Troopers Military SF story. Only this is far more exciting than anything Heinlein wrote. A group of Rocketeers become stranded in the jungle of Venus and have to make their way back to base while dodging the alien environment and mysterious animals and beasts waiting in the wings to devour them whole. he entire group faces odds like they've never seen with only their discipline to hold them in check. This story is fast-paced, action-packed, and teeters on the knife's edge of hope and despair throughout. For a slight spoiler, the ending is probably not one you would see nowadays-- or probably at the time.

I always wondered why Ross Rocklynne wasn't a bigger name. Most of his material has never been re-released, and his story in this collection is no different. The Diversifal is a fascinating story filled with action, mystery, and a bit of horror. This one wouldn't have been out of place in Weird Tales, and it's hard to imagine why I've never heard anyone mention it before. A being from the future visits the protagonist and warns him of a dire future for the human race unless he can ruin his own life. This gets rather dark, but never cloyingly so. But it is fascinating. Needless to say, after this unique tale I'm going to be eagerly picking up anything of his I can find. This is my favorite story in the collection.

The last tale here is by the ever-fascinating Poul Anderson with one of his classic entries in Planet Stories called Duel on Syrtis. On Mars, a hunter goes after his prey: a martian! This is a back and forth action story between a hunter and his quarry which ends with quite a surprise. Both characters are fleshed out with obvious motivations and drives, and it tough to say who will win until the final page. Poul Anderson is known for his incredible variety and growth as an author over his long career, but his Planet Stories work were pure pulp from back to front. It's easy to see why this was chosen to end the anthology. To say why might actually spoil the ending, though.

Seven stories, all with very different styles and takes on action tales, and writers that have become almost completely forgotten today. Even this anthology is almost forgotten!

Nonetheless, if you are looking for more pulp to read and just can't decide on a book to pick up, this is what you are looking for. And maybe it'll convince you to look up more from these authors, or the magazine in question.

You could do a lot worse, especially for material from the time period. Planet Stories was an interesting experiment, and I'm glad we had it.

Highly recommended.


My own pulp work is available on amazon. It's a bit too long to have run in Planet Stories, but I'd like to think it would slide in just fine among many of the tales in its pages. It's really more of Weird Tales book, though.

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