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!

Pulpity-Pulp-Pulp

Took a break from Captain Future and read Hamilton's The Three Planeteers, Startling Stories, Jan. 1940. Pretty entertaining, as far as lightweight space opera pulp stuff goes. It takes place a couple hundred years after men first went into space and all the planets are populated not by old civilizations like in the Captain Future stories (which take place only a generation after spaceflight was developed) but by Earthmen who have evolved to cope with that planet's conditions. A high gravity makes the people short and squatty, minerals in the atmosphere makes skin yellow, etc. Not as much stupid, goofy fun as when the populations are non-Earth humanoids with civilizations older than Earth's, but still worth a read.

The Three Planeteers are Earthman John Thorn, Venusian Sual Av and Mercurian Gunner Welk, who are wanted for the thefts of stuff all over the system, but not really. They're actually undercover spies--robbing ships and such gets them access to all sorts of information they couldn't have gotten otherwise. The only person who knows what they're really up to is the Chairman of the Earth Government who's been sending them out to spy on the League of Cold Worlds (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus) since they're plotting to take over the Inner Alliance (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars). Apparently nobody wants Pluto.

"You take it!" 
"No, you take it!"
Rejected Pluto makes sadface.

The Inner Alliance has a honking big secret weapon to use against the League's invading ships, since the Alliance couldn't be bothered to build up their defenses even though they knew full well something was brewing, and decided to throw everything into this fancy weapon they haven't even tested. Whatever. It also uses a shit-ton of radite (an isotope of radium, old-timey SF's favorite thing) and they can only get huge quantities of the stuff on Erebus, the tenth planet, so the Planeteers volunteer to go. 

The problem with Erebus is that only one explorer has come back from there and nobody knows why. Martin Cain has been dead for years and never told anyone but his daughter Lana how he escaped. She's now the leader of a community of pirates called the Companions of Space who use the asteroid belt as their hideout and base of operations. Hamilton will recycle these pirates and how they're able to hide and navigate in the asteroids in the fairly juvenile Captain Future novel Outlaw World.

Since this one is actually worth reading, if only for Erebus and what happened to the disappeared explorers, I'll stop here and ruin another story later.

On to the last Captain Future magazine put out before the magazine went under without warning due to wartime paper shortages. I thought there'd be a mention in the Startling Stories that picked up the novel meant for the Summer 1944 issue but I've flipped through my ratty Spring 1945 copy and haven't seen anything. Balls. Of course it's in an earlier 1944 Startling Stories I don't have.

Yeah, whatever. After a couple of "ehh" entries we have a pretty good one, Days of Creation, Spring 1944, a story full of the kind of goofy stuff you'd find in Outlaws of the Moon or in half of The Seven Space Stones, so no plot spoilers for this one. No major ones anyway.

The Solar System is overpopulated like all of a sudden and so Captain Future proposes they build a whole new planet (completely ignoring all those countless asteroids in the system with atmospheres people could go live on) using that fancy matter-creating doodad from Quest Beyond the Stars. Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy, right?

This plan is opposed by sleazy Hartley Brooks, who has the--wait for it--monopoly on all the slum towers on all the planets in the system and he'd rather not have his slumlord empire ruined by some damn-fool science dink. Not like he couldn't get the contract to throw together some slum towers for this new planet or anything.

Anyhow, he decides to have Future and the guys killed when they're off putzing around on an archaeological expedition but only manages to bury the Futuremen and give Curt amnesia. Another random criminal guy steals Curt's atomic-powered ring and the Comet and thinks it'd be awesome to hire some Futuremen impersonators and pretend to be their assistant so he could whoosh around space in this whiz-bang hotrod spaceship.

Don't worry, pirates pick up amnesiac Curt and a random prospector finds the Futuremen when they dig themselves out of the dirt like a month later. You were worried, right? No?

Joan also gets to make out with three guys in this story but two of them are Captain Future. One is scraggly grabby pirate Curt with amnesia, one is normal boring Curt after the brain surgery shown on the cover, and the third guy is an actor paid to impersonate Captain Future but he's kind of stupid and also a lush so everyone says it's a shame he hit his head in that explosion. Good times.

You really want to read it now, right? Especially the grabby pirate bit? No? Not even the part at the end where Curt gets his memory back and Joan tells him she liked things about scraggly Curt but won't say what but we all know it's the grabby pirate stuff?

As expected neither the Plutonian slug-horse nor the mind-meld crystal deus ex machina thingy from Worlds to Come are mentioned. Maybe Joan said the hell with Curt being able to read her mind so the crystal is in whatever passes for a junk drawer in the future and the slug-horse is just dead.

This is a Planet Police uniform, by the way. You can tell that room is really cold because of Joan's pointy . . . gloves.

Now for the first Startling Stories Captain Future, Red Sun of Danger, Spring 1945, by Edmond Hamilton writing as Brett Sterling. Not one of my favorites, mostly because there's a planet called Roo and an ancient people called Kangas. Damned distracting if you ask me. Despite that it's not a bad story even though it has yet another monopoly for Captain Future to break up, this time it's a chemical called vitron which combats the poisons that cause the human body to age.

Vitron is only grown on the planet Roo way out in another star system. The human colonists are worried about the native Roons going wacko and killing colonists, and meanwhile somebody's stirring up the Roons so they go wacko and kill colonists. They believe if the colonists don't leave Roo then the Old Ones (Kangas) will destroy the universe. Meanwhile, the colonists don't believe there really are Old Ones, especially the guy who's stirring up the Roons so he can have the vitron production all to himself.

Captain Future sneaks to Roo by pretending to be a criminal who shoots Future who's really Otho in disguise, instead of just dressing up like somebody else like he always does, then the rest of the Futuremen turn up in disguise, as do Joan and Marshal Gurney. Really, they all should've taken the same spaceship and saved some space bucks.

It turns out there really are Old Ones, vaguely Lovecraftian black blobby things that had been defeated by the ancient Denebians with a psycho-amplifier that amplifies brain waves so they've been sleeping for thousands of years until somebody disturbs them--like that guy who wants the vitiron monopoly, so he stirs up the natives by blowing up the Kangas' resting place. Nice.

That deely-bobber psycho-amplifier's a great look, Curt. You should make that a permanent part of your Captain Future outfit. You should also pay way more attention to your half-dressed girlfriend. Her pointy . . . boots . . . tell me it's a little cold there on Roo.

Cover Close-Up

This is one of my favorite covers, one that I bought specifically because of the amusing rocket crash. You can't really tell what exactly is going on because of the low-quality cover printing but with a little digital image enhancement we can now see the fine details of the rocket and its cargo. What was in it?

Turtles.