More of the Same

Here we go again. I've been too lazy to post these synopses when I'm done reading so I'm throwing them out there in a huge pile. It also means I've forgotten a lot of plot, planned punchlines and sad jokes. Dammit.

Captain Future, Worlds to Come, Spring 1943. This is the first one not written by Edmond Hamilton. He was afraid he was going to be drafted and contracted Joseph Samachson who wrote this one under the house name Brett Sterling. Later Hamilton would write a couple under that name though I'm not recalling why exactly, though it might've been because he wasn't being taken seriously when he was writing space opera which was rapidly becoming outdated and considered juvenile. Really, all he needed to do was to porn it up a little. Sheesh.

We haven't had Curt and Joan on a lame date in a while, at least not since they got stuck on a dying planet together for two months with like a hundred convicts and I'm pretty certain they didn't have soap or toothpaste. You'd think they'd be sick of each other after that since it'd sort of be like seeing someone you like with the flu or food poisoning. Imagine them all scroungy and smelly after digging up ore for two months building a fucking spaceship.

Anyhow, Curt invites Joan and Ezra Gurney to visit him on the Moon and what does he do? He leaves his girlfriend inside with her boss and a cranky old man's brain in a box while he and Otho and Grag are outside on the Moon's surface being jackasses to each other. They have a Plutonian slug-horse, something they've never mentioned having ever, and they're daring each other to ride it and when somebody winds up face-planting in the Moon dust they all laugh like jackass guys do when their friends get hurt.

Curt hasn't learned that the best (meaning worst) way to impress a girl is to let her watch you do stupid shit with your stupid friends so really, he should've told her to put on her spacesuit and come up to the surface to watch the injuries pile up.

Simon whips up a mind-meld crystal deus ex machina thingy out of nowhere so Joan and Curt can communicate by thought waves which is seriously creepy. No way do I want some guy knowing what I'm thinking, though it would save a lot of arguments in the end if I could think you suck so much ass you stupid motherfucker at them really hard. This doodad becomes totally mega-important for the last half of the book, then it's never mentioned again.

Back to Jackasses on the Moon. Now if this slug-horse comes from Pluto, which in Hamilton's space opera universe has a breathable atmosphere, how is it breathing on the Moon which Hamilton has only given a limited underground atmosphere for the Moon Men? Does it just not need to breathe, like Moon wolves? When the Jackass Trio is done with the slug-horse do they just leave it on the Moon's surface to suffocate? Do they pour a couple hundred pounds of salt on it? Like the mind-meld crystal it's never mentioned again.

Anyhow, after Grag sits on the slug-horse and flattens it (Otho thinks this is hysterical but he's a jerkass) Ezra tells them there's a Planet Police emergency where a ship is hurtling towards the Sun and of course they can't do anything about it. I'm not sure why anyone bothers to call the Planet Police unless it's to ask them if their refrigerator is running. So the guys head out in the Comet, leaving the now forgotten slug-horse to be eaten by Moon wolves I guess (really I think I'm the only one who cares about the foul thing at this point), and they manage to stop the ship before it crashes into the Sun.

The three guys on board have come through dimensions looking for Captain Future since their own government can't solve their own problems, much like the Solar System's President, so they put the dimensional drive doodad from the scuttled ship onto the Comet and away they go. Partway there they break a rocket tube and Curt goes outside the ship to switch it out like he's changing a goddamn tire and his magnetic boots fail and he falls off and they leave him. When they finally realize he's gone they turn around but can't find him and so they assume he's dead for, like, maybe the third or fourth time in this series and continue on to the system that needs their help.

Anyone else would've written this as a jackass guy practical joke gone wrong. You know, they leave him floating in space and forget to come back for him or something.

So Curt floats in space and by using his proton pistol he creates some momentum to get to a planet where he plans to build another fucking spaceship from scratch but instead of a hundred convicts to dig up ore for him he only has a handful of primitive people who he can't even teach how to use a shovel. After few days of (hopefully) screaming and cursing at smelly grunting cave people Curt finally realizes he has the mind-meld crystal thingy and contacts Joan through dimensions or something and he tells her how to use a machine in his Moon lab to switch bodies with one of the smelly grunting cave people so he can build this fucking spaceship.

I don't recall if this was a mind-switch machine recently invented by Curt and Simon or if it's the mind-switch machine from that earlier novel where a bad guy uses a Neptunian mind-switch machine to swap Curt's mind with a Neptunian fish-man, whatever story that was. It made total sense in context but sounds like something stupid I just now made up.

Ahh, Captain Future's Challenge, Summer 1940.

Back to Worlds to Come, when Joan and the smelly cave woman switch bodies Curt tries to kiss her then suddenly decides he'd rather not, even though technically it's Joan, but I guess the real Joan knows what toothpaste and soap are. He doesn't say Cave!Joan is smelly, just that she doesn't look right. That's the blue woman wearing the leopard skin on the cover. You'd think he'd be all over that but this is Captain Future who sadly isn't all over anything. Sorry, Joan.

Anyhow, blah blah blah they don't have to build a spaceship since the bad guys invading the planet of those three guys from the beginning I'd forgotten about have landed nearby and Curt and Joan stow away on it. Blah blah blah, they defeat the bad guys and everybody's happy. The End.

This installment is by Edmond Hamilton writing as Brett Sterling. The Star of Dread, Captain Future Summer 1943. The only Captain Future magazine cover that doesn't even have Captain Future on it has Joan Randall being menaced by the Cosmo Kramerbird. "Yo yo ma," it shrieks. "Yo yo ma!"

This one has some what-the-fuckery going on but not in the plotting. There are some mutant creatures called man-horses, man-dogs, man-birds and man-tigers which are all regular animals but with human faces. Eww. Reminds me too much of that brief scene in the 1970s Invasion of the Body Snatchers where that freaky-ass dog with the human face runs up to the camera. I don't wanna be anywhere near these things.

shivers

On my world a man-beaver is called a mangina.

These man-beasts were mutants made by the evil scientists as slaves on one of the first worlds. A running storyline in Hamilton's novels is that an ancient race has seeded the universe with various human species mutated to survive on whatever planet they've been dumped onto. This is the quick and dirty explanation for why all the different humanoid species in the Solar System can interbreed with one another, and towards the end of the series Captain Future sort of abandons his raison d'être of fighting bad people who use science for bad shit and goes hunting for the birthplace of all humanity.

There's also an interesting bit that didn't get used often enough in this series where bad guys kidnap Joan and instead of torturing her to make her tell where the fancy science doodad is hidden they tell her they'll kill Curt instead. This might've been a nice excuse for them to keep whatever sad non-relationship they have a secret which would make it way more exciting and they might actually kiss more than once every six months, but that would've been way too icky for the kiddies.

Here's another one whose cover I like but I don't yet own an original copy. Captain Future, Magic Moon, Winter 1944. Curt and Joan are menaced by a Swallower, which is a huge flat swimming thing with a big mouth that lives in the oceans of Neptune. In the story only Captain Future is attacked by one but I guess Earle Bergey thought the cover needed a screaming braless girl in shorts.

I love how Captain Future's gloves never match his space suit. Teal blue and red with brown leather? It's like he's colorblind or something.

This is another Edmond Hamilton as Brett Sterling novel and it's one of those fun WTF ones that's worth reading so I won't ruin the plot. A rich financier wants, hey whadayaknow, the diamond mining monopoly of Pluto's moon Styx so his movie company sets out to make a movie about some of Captain Future's adventures called The Ace of Space. Total crapshit name but whatever. It'll be filmed completely on location on whatever planet Future did whatever he did and the financier's plan is to take over Styx when they start filming there using some movie asshattery to defeat the natives.

They put out a call for tall redhaired guys to be in this movie instead of hiring real actors and putting makeup on them. Yeah, awesome! So Curt disguises himself slightly and pretends to be a drygoods clerk. Drygoods. They'll still have those in the future? Is this some kinda futuristic curly-mustached hipster kinda shit? I couldn't tell you when was the last time I went into a drygoods store that wasn't in some sort of gold mining Bug Tussle theme park kind of a place. I don't know why they couldn't have made him something vaguely futuristic like a spacesuit salesman or a vacuum tube polisher or a food-cube clerk. 

He acts like a total space-sick wuss, whines a lot, screws up his lines and drops his prop pistol constantly, coming across as such a loser that Joan doesn't even recognize him. She's been a pain in the ass following this film crew all over the System just to make sure they get the details of Future's heroic shit right and she thinks this Chan Carson dweeb isn't worthy of cleaning up the dessicated remains of Captain Future's squashed Plutonian slug-horse. You'd think she would've memorized every detail of the guy's face, every pore, even that weird eyebrow hair that always grows the wrong way. You know, from all those years of being a creepy fangirl. But you'd be totally wrong.

Poor Curt. If he was to suddenly stop being a big hero Joan would dump his ass in a heartbeat.

sad trombone