Wardrobe Change

For anyone that cares, I was digging around on eBay recently and found a Bergey cover I knew I had but it looked odd so I went to my collection to see why.

The one on the left was a magazine I'd had for a while, Fantastic Story summer 1950, the right was the recent eBay find, Thrilling Wonder Stories winter 1946. This means the story the cover is illustrating is in the older mag so I can find out if the guy is yanking the wires apart or jamming them together.

Note also the smaller size of the paper-rationed 1940s issue as compared to the newer publication. My wartime and post-war Startling Stories pulps have the same size change as well as lower page counts. They compensated by using smaller print so the amount of stuff in each issue wasn't much changed but there were fewer issues per year.

Startling Stories would start out as a bi-monthly magazine (1939-42), switch to quarterly from 1943-45, go back to a bi-monthly (1946-51), before attempting to go to a monthly starting in 1952. They had switched to a digest-sized magazine in mid-1952. By the end of 1953 (pulps were dropping like flies) they switched back to a quarterly before ceasing publication in the winter of 1955.

Random fact: According to Edmond Hamilton, the only reason Captain Future magazine was missing the Fall 1944 issue wasn't because of wartime paper shortages. He'd gone to Mexico for a few months and wrote Magic Moon and the "Worlds of Tomorrow" story about one of the handful of planets the plot took place in and when he tried to go through customs they confiscated all his manuscripts and sent them to Washington, all because there was a map of where the novel took place. Apparently they really needed to get cracking on that Nazi base on Neptune. Since it would be months before he got his manuscript back and he didn't have time to write another novel they just skipped that one and printed Magic Moon in the Winter 1944 issue.

Anyway, I had no idea Earle Bergey recycled his covers, but since he'd done literally hundreds of covers in his career there's no way I could ever see all of them. Maybe the brass bras and miniskirts of the 1940s were completely out of fashion by the 1950s and no self-respecting space woman would be caught dead in an asteroid storm wearing a getup like this. Really, her outfit is the only thing changed on the entire cover.

Note to self: In scienfornication stories without characters in Space Brigade uniforms I need to put somebody in a damn brass bra. What the hell's wrong with me?

Bergey died in late 1952 so Startling's covers went from fun and goofy with brass bras, thrusting nipples and plenty of BEMs (Bug Eyed Monsters), to staid and realistic. Sort of like what was being published in SF at the time.

Kind of like this. Startling Stories, May 1953. I totally bought this one for the cover. In the future they appear to have solved the impracticality of strapless bras in spacesuits but not guys sneaking a look while they ostensibly "help" you in or out of your unwieldy gear. I'm pretty sure he signed up for astronaut school because of what happens to boobs in low gravity.

Here's the response to a reader who complained the cover of Startling Stories January 1950 had nothing to do with the story "The Return of Captain Future." It did, sort of. Grag holds Joan back for all of one sentence. Anyhow, it mentions both brass bras and BEMs in one crap verse.

No, I haven't got this issue and unless I look for dealers who don't sell on eBay I most likely will only be able to afford it if it has no cover and half the pages have been eaten by beetles. I didn't even think this was Joan Randall since her hair is the wrong color. I was all ready to say she was some dangerously nipply space queen. You also have to remember Grag is supposed to be seven feet tall and the cover shows Joan to be a stilt-legged Amazon who'd probably tower over him by a good three feet.

Yeah, anyway, I've got two more Capt. Future stories to ruin before I get to this one so I'll leave it hanging like a damp, abandoned wino's overcoat on a park bench.

Brass bras just naturally segue into the cover of the next Captain Future novel, Outlaw World, Startling Stories winter 1946. Another Bergey brass-bra and miniskirt cover. If you're wondering, yes, her bra is attached to her helmet which means there was always the chance of Captain Future getting an eyeful when Joan ditches that oddly-positioned bubble helmet so she can actually face forward. This cover scene does take place in the novel. They escape from bad guy Ru Ghur's space ship and rocket away using hand-held impellers.

Ru Ghur is an evil scientist who has invented a "lethe ray" that people use to have hyper-realistic dreams they become addicted to and Curt discovers his base on the planet Vulcan.

Remember Vulcan, it'll become important in the story "Children of the Sun." It's an unexplored planet closest to the Sun that nobody bothers with since you need a ship with special shielding to get anywhere near it and everyone thinks it's covered in molten lava. Vulcan is hollow, Curt finds the way in and blah blah blah discovers the natives speak the same root language most of the primitive natives he's encountered do, since they all had the same origins mentioned in earlier stories and that he goes looking for in "The Return of Captain Future."

I'll leave the rest of the story but here's an amusing passage early on when Curt is captured by Ru Ghur and connected up to the lethe ray. His dream involves that house with the garden he half-assedly promised Joan, like, years ago and it all goes depressingly pear-shaped, at least for poor Joan, when we find out he's also brought along the Futuremen to live with them. So Joan's finally alone with the man of her dreams but he's brought along his entire family. Sorry, Joan. 

Unfortunately we don't get to see what Joan dreams when she's connected to this machine but I'm guessing whatever it was it wasn't cluttered up by a pack of Futuremen.

To make things so much worse, Otho disguises himself as Joan while she's still drugged by the lethe ray and Curt doesn't realize it isn't her. It isn't spelled out that Otho is wearing her clothes but just wearing a brown wig isn't going to do it. Otho and Curt both have a habit of knocking someone out, changing their appearance with makeup, then swiping the unconscious person's clothes to complete the disguise. Curt has also taken a dead guy's clothes, ew. So Otho seems to have gotten further with Joan than Curt has. Damn.

Nearly forgot, for some reason Hamilton keeps pushing "ten years ago" in this story. Ten years ago Curt invented the vibration-drive that he used in Quest Beyond the Stars (Winter 1942), ten years ago he did blabbity blah blah. It was mentioned enough times that I believe he wanted to age the character a bit, since he'd become less the two-dimensional swashbuckling douche from the first novel who comes bounding in through President Carthew's window like some obnoxious hennaed Errol Flynn, punching bad guys in the name of science. 

Science! 

Hey, another edit: I also forgot to mention Outlaw World recycled the asteroid belt pirates from The Three Planeteers, though I liked them better in the earlier novel but I can't really recall why. Brigands of the Moon sucked away much of the memory of this Cap Future before I could properly write about it. Dammit.

There would be only one more novel before Captain Future was put on hiatus for a couple of years. After that, the stories got a little depressing. Those are short, like 20 pages each so it'll be easier just to do them all in one big chunk, as though they're part of a disjointed novel.

Next time: The worst Captain Future novel ever!