Procrastination!

Currently fighting with a chase scene and a pathetic excuse for a gun battle, then "The Unmentionable Unknown" can be uploaded, or at least that's the huge fib I'm telling myself. I also think I have to shoehorn in a tiny bit more porn but I could probably be very wrong about that. These characters should put probably their damn pants back on and go home.

And now for a word from our sponsor! I haven't quite seen the hell of having a stuffy nose portrayed so accurately in an ad before. Startling Stories, January 1940.

On to yet another Captain Future, Planets in Peril. When I first saw this one I thought that was Joan on the cover and she'd been mistakenly portrayed as a blond or maybe she wanted to change her look but that's actually Shiri, a scientist who's come through dimensions from a dying universe with her brother asking for help. Everybody on their world is apparently platinum blond so they make a big deal out of redheaded Captain Future and decide he's got to come back with them to save their world. Joan, of course doesn't want him to go without her. "Do you think I'd let you go off without me to a universe where all the women are platinum blondes?" Nice try. Curt says it's too dangerous and leaves her behind anyway, even after actually showing some sort of half-assed affection for her at the beginning. Sadly, this only involves tossing her up in the air and no making out.

Anyway, the platinum peoples' last big-deal scientist Kaffir was also a redhead and they think their citizens will be stupid enough to believe he's come back from being in suspended animation for like a million years if they drag Future back with them. Because science. See, if they don't get help the Cold Ones will sterilize the population so their race dies out and since it's 1942 we can't have a whole planet of lily-white honkies going extinct. Who are the Cold Ones? They're a mutant race that looks like living skeletons.

A nice return to skull-crushing in this novel, with exposed brains that look like cartilage when their skulls get stomped on.

Mmmm, pulped cartilage brain. Decent story, especially in comparison to the next novel which is a total Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

I'm just going to say up front that I hate this cover. The ship is sinking into lava, people are barely escaping with their lives, Joan is screaming like she's being carried away by Leatherface, and Captain Future is totally all Ridiculously Photogenic Guy. He also looks about 15 years older than he should. WTF Curt? Saving the Solar System wearing you out?

I'm sorry to say the cover isn't the only thing wonky about The Face of the Deep. The plot will make you wish you'd never heard of Captain Future and it's not even an amusingly convoluted stupid-fun plot like The Seven Space Stones. Oh god the plot. I didn't think I'd be begging for a space monopoly.

The Planet Police have a cruise ship that's been converted to transfer prisoners to the big prison on Pluto's moon Cerebus. This is the same prison moon where a bunch of prisoners Captain Future put away escaped from like it was nothing in one of the first books, maybe Captain Future and the Space Emperor, and in The Magician of Mars where Ul Quorn and his band of white-collar felons somehow smuggled weapons in and massacred all the guards. 

Instead of putting these dangerous prisoners into suspended animation or having more guards or a better locking system on this ship they're only using a handful of guards and they've called in Joan Randall as a guard since there's some sort of problem somewhere else in the system that uses up all the competent officers. Captain Future gets all het up about it and demands that she stay home because it's dangerous and she's his woman and all and she tells him off since doing cop stuff (no matter how incompetently) is her job. Grag offers to drag her off and hold her until the ship leaves and this inexplicable line turns up:

Treat women rough? Was Grag offering to spank her? He hasn't mentioned spanking Curt in a while so perhaps he's itching to put his metal hands on some bare human bottom.

Whatever. Curt and the Futuremen decide to go along on the prison ship because he has a bad feeling something's going to happen, which it does otherwise we'd only have a lame travelogue of all the prisons they pick up bad guys from and three pages later they'd reach Cerebus. The rest of the magazine would be false teeth by mail ads.

OK, the bad guys escape, kill the ship's captain and a bunch of guards, lock up everybody they didn't kill and they head out of the Solar System to Alpha Centauri but they hit an unknown planet on the way and wind up in a lava bed which melts the ship leaving no way to get back home.

Whatayado, Captain? You build a new ship big enough for like a hundred escaped convicts. Really, they build a new ship. From scratch. They mine ore, build an atomic smelter and smelt shit, and build a new fucking space ship from dirt and rocks. There's really no way I can envision this without picturing some sort of Gilligan's Island kinda contraption. I would've believed building a transmitter but not a whole fucking space ship. Oh yeah, they also have to make tools first so they can mine the ore and build the fucking smelter and whatever.

Eventually one of the convicts realizes there's only one woman on the whole entire planet (for some reason there are no lady convicts) and he offers to give her something to hang her towels on. Curt doesn't like this and beats the guy up a couple times. I think he also offers to beat up the engineer who evacuates from the ship with a case of prunes instead of tools. This guy is so prune obsessed I swear he must be based on some guy whose miserable prune-filled guts Edmond Hamilton hated worse than life itself.

Blah blah blah something keeps eating the convicts during the night, cubic caterpillars help them mine ore, they make steel, build a ship and fly away, oh god you just have to read it for yourself. The best part are the letters in a later Captain Future magazine where readers are practically having a stroke over the plot, and Sgt. Saturn, the drunken crank who answers the letters column in Captain Future and Startling Stories, amuses himself by abusing anyone who writes in.

Here's one where the reader seems to be happy with The Face of the Deep except for the apparent existence of Joan Randall so Sgt. Saturn decides to take a potshot at Captain Future instead. "...there isn't enough love interest in Curt Newton's life to excite Mahatma Gandhi..." Wow, somebody call the burn unit. This is from the guy's own magazine for crap's sake.

One thing the readers forgot to shriek about is where is Curt's atomic-powered ring? This is the first magazine where it isn't mentioned. He uses it to identify himself in the early novels since in the future apparently nobody has photos of anyone nor can anyone remember what their big hero looks like, he can hypnotize people with it, and occasionally he takes it apart and makes some atomic-powered doodad out of it. In The Face of the Deep he certainly could've used an atomic-powered doodad at the end instead of dismantling Simon's brain case.

I think I might've preferred reading a hundred pages of false teeth ads.