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!

Captain Sensible

I've now got a copy of my favorite Captain Future cover/magazine in my filthy, sweaty hands and I'm thrilled that it has an embarrassing full-page ad for some dubious health product on the back. I'd have been disappointed if it didn't.

I love that it's called "Pyro." I'm pretty sure that means it burns like fuck when you pour it in your mouth, but back in the olden days if a treatment didn't hurt when you used it or burn your eyes when you smelled it that meant it wasn't working. I wouldn't have been surprised if the doctors back then offered to give you a Hurtz Donut when you came to the office.

Remember, if Pyro doesn't save your teeth you get your money back which you can use to buy false teeth by mail from one of the convenient ads inside.

Now, this has always bugged me about pulps, this sloppy cover flapping around. They're always lined up on the top edge but the bottom usually wraps around the pages. I know I'd be trimming the stupid thing when I got it home from the newsstand like way back in 1941 because I'm weird like that. Seems like I've got one some obsessive teenager trimmed up all nice back in the day but I'll be damned if I can find it. Maybe I considered buying it instead of actually buying it.

To recap, this issue is the one where the Futuremen joined the circus and the plot was totally batshit crazy. Curt goes on a lame date with Joan and Otho, the guys think Captain Future is dead and bury somebody else, there's all kinds of goofy disguises, Curt builds a transmitter out of leaves or something, and they go to the Pleasure Planet which disappointingly is only a casino where nobody wins anything. This was one of the few original novels that wasn't reprinted as a paperback in the 60s, though it didn't make any sense to leave out the best one with Ul Quorn and reprint the yawn-enducing Magician of Mars. I haven't read the third Ul Quorn story, The Solar Invasion, yet but the consensus seems to be that Manly Wade Wellman did a mondo sucky job at it.

Anyhow, here's this awesome drawing of circus Curt in a cage full of wild Venusian swamp tigers which, honestly, looks like what happens when I come home from work but it's just the one cat.

Even though nobody asked, Otho's still nekkid.

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

Mmmm, Pulpy

Not only did 1940s pulps try to sell you false teeth, eyeglasses and trusses by mail, they also made you poop. Observe Betty and Sally gleefully discussing bowel movements or lack thereof. Once Betty has an Ex-Lax or three she's so excited to finally take a dump she's inadvertently revealed herself to be a freaking Toon. 

 

Besides that troubling scene, Startling Stories, January 1940 also has Edmond Hamilton's The Three Planeteers, his space opera take on the Three Musketeers, and it has the beginnings of the world he filled out later in the Captain Future novels. I kept wondering why he kept referring to people as "planeteers" thinking maybe it had something to do with pioneers out in the frontier of space but since Captain Future obviously wasn't living on an asteroid in a log cabin plowing his land claim with a robot it didn't make any sense. Musketeers, duh.

  

On to Captain Future, The Comet Kings, whose cover has diddly-squat to do with the plot. I was hoping for some awesome giant bats but I'm disappointed yet again. Joan's creepy eyes show she's right on the verge of revealing that she's a Toon once she's popped a couple Ex-Lax. 

Anyway, someone or something has been snatching ships out of space and nobody can figure out who or why. The Planet Police also doesn't seem to know they should tell everyone not to fly through that part of space so they don't disappear but considering their past incompetence I'm not surprised. Of course Marshal Ezra Gurney and top agent Joan Randall investigate and go missing like everyone else. Because why the fuck not.

It's a wonder the whole solar system hasn't been stolen and sold for scrap.

Because the Planet Police are little more than interplanetary Keystone Kops they're forced to call in Captain Future. He figures out that anyone flying near Halley's Comet disappears so he goes to investigate and is sucked right into the comet. There he finds immortal glowy electrical people, everyone who'd gone missing imprisoned, and some evil race that electrified the Halley's Comet people against their wills for some reason I'm not remembering but isn't at all important for this synopsis. 

Once he finds Joan, who's now an immortal glowy electrical woman he can't touch, Curt gets all grabby and is immediately electrocuted. This should've been comedy fodder but it's played straight with, like, "hungry arms" that can't hold the woman he loves and all. 

Eww. I think I liked them better as a bickering non-couple, frankly.

Joan says there's no way to defeat the glowy electrical people and Curt should get electrified just like she has so they can live there forever which is a way more creative way to trap a guy than getting knocked up. Anyhow, he converts to electricity to fight the bad guys, which would've been hilarious if later they found out Curt was AC and Joan was DC and they were stuck with each other until the end of time, but I'm not writing this so we have to play the cards we're dealt.

The amusing part is that he's agreed to become an electrical glowy thing like her but he works his ass off to figure out how to undo it in a couple of days. He also makes an empty promise to Joan at the end that there's an asteroid with a garden they can live on...one day. Like, when he's defeated all the criminals and broken up all the monopolies in the solar system. So, never. Sorry Joan.

  

I like the Worlds of Tomorrow articles in this magazine which a lot of the pdf downloads don't bother with even though they add a lot to the world building in this series. This particular issue has a map of the Earth after 2027 when volcanic activity went nutso, new mountain ranges formed and earthquakes abounded. Looking at this map I'd advise everyone to sell that waterfront property in Florida right now. I also see digging the Chunnel was a complete waste of time since you'll be able to just walk over to France once the ground stops heaving.

  

The Captain Future pdf downloads also leave out the articles on the Futuremen from that issue, which is a shame because they have a lot of backstory on the characters and some are short adventures, mostly involving young Curt Newton making an ass of himself. This particular one has him turning 18 and leaving the moon for the first time, trying to break up a monopoly on Pluto and getting his clock cleaned. The guy should've visited a Jovian whorehouse instead and gotten his clock cleaned in a completely different way.

  

A couple days ago I found a zip file on the Capitaine Flam site that has all the Futuremen articles so you can read the whole thing without me having to photograph magazine pages. I'd somehow managed to miss it in all the non-English files.

I'll end this post with the tasty back cover of The Comet Kings whose horrific case of athlete's foot seems to have spread to the paper itself.

There She Goes Again

Bored, bored, bored. Bored enough to make more inane derogatory comments about everyone's favorite artificial jerkass Futureman Otho.

Here he is, nekkid as the day he came out of a test tube and already he's blasting a hole in somebody. But sometimes he wears clothes.

...except when he doesn't. Everyone should be thankful he's carrying Brain Guy in front of him. The Brain is somehow looking completely horrified even though he doesn't have a face to speak of.

He can occasionally be seen scampering around in a skintight leotard, which is only barely less awful than being nekkid. The odd choice of loafers over say, knee-high space boots leaves something to be desired.

This attractive ensemble from The Comet Kings is reminiscent of that weird neighbor whose yard the police just dug up with a backhoe looking for human remains.

Still no explanation of what purpose the strange antenna array serves. It was mentioned in the first two or three novels but nothing since. The first few magazines in the series had biographies of each of the characters but I'm missing the one with Otho's bio so I'm sure there's some backstory there that was never brought up in the novels. That leaves me no choice but to make stupid shit up. Really, I'm forced to do this.

Let's see, maybe Otho uses his antenna doohickey to suck energy out of the air to survive and occasionally uses it to dry underpants on. We're not certain exactly whose underpants they are, just rest assured that they are in fact underpants.

Happy? I'm not.

I just recently polished off two more Captain Future stories, Magician of Mars and The Lost World of Time, both of which were severely disappointing. Here I was looking forward to more Ul Quorn if only because if Captain Future didn't have an arch enemy he'd have to go back to breaking up space monopolies and we really don't want to have to read any more of that.

If you want to read just one Capt. Future I'd go for The Seven Space Stones just for the sheer amount of wacko plot crammed into one little 95-or-so-page novel. In order to capture bad guy Ul Quorn, Curt Newton and his Futuremen put on disguises, join the circus and follow him around trying to catch him committing a crime; the guys think Curt's dead and bury an impostor then plot sweet, sweet revenge; Curt builds a transmitter out of I dunno dirt and leaves or something; Curt and Ul Quorn cheat at atomic space roulette on the Pleasure Planet so they can win one of the Space Stones, etc. etc. etc. It's cheesy as fuck but it's a good kind of cheesy, like nacho cheese Doritos with Velveeta melted on top and a side order of that cheese dip you bought at the 7-11 at 2 am when you had the munchies but completely forgot about once you got home.

On the other hand, Ul Quorn's return in Magician of Mars was the most anticlimactic sleeping pill I've ever had the misfortune to swallow. Cheesy? Hell no. It was about as un-cheesy as something without cheese on it, like a fireplace log or a Siamese cat. There was none of the chin-stroking, "Well played, Captain Future," like arch enemies are supposed to quip when they'd really rather not be bothered killing or capturing one another. It's as though the editor handed author Hamilton the plot and he just started banging his head on the typewriter and said that was good enough.

Ul Quorn inexplicably gathers up a group of the most pathetic henchmen I've ever seen this side of a Donald Duck comic. They're all criminals who had been put in prison by Captain Future so they're all pretty pissed off, but rather than being murderers and dope smugglers Quorn's got a mine owner from whatever novel that was about the mining monopoly, and the evil rocket manufacturer from Star Trail to Glory which was about a rocket manufacturer destroying his competition and creating a monopoly. It's as though Ul Quorn only broke white-collar felons out of prison and wound up with the future equivalent of Bernie Madoff and the guys who ran Enron.

These low-rent henchmen also die like flies. Hell, even Scrappy-Doo, I mean Johnny Kirk kills one.

Really, the only thing worth mentioning in Magician of Mars is Captain Future finally kisses Joan Randall and it's an indifferent kiss, the sort a nephew would give the elderly aunt who controls his inheritance. "He lightly kissed her." Wow, get a room guys. He was stranded on a strange planet (again) like a million miles from the solar system and in another dimension when Ul Quorn leaves him floating in space. You'd think he'd be way more excited than a "light kiss" when the Futuremen find him. He also doesn't bother to say goodbye to her when he takes off for the moon again, the big jackass.

You'd think this lust-filled scene never happened by the way he behaves in The Lost World of Time. Curt's on the moon, bored, and does he even think about going to Earth to hang out with this woman he finally kissed even if it was pretty lame? Nope. He plays rocketball with his friends then goes off on some random adventure a guy he's never seen before tells him about. He does think about her for one sentence, but that was only to say he was glad she was home safe and I guess not in the Comet getting in the way of guys doing guy stuff.

Anyhow, the Futuremen go back in time a million years to save an ancient civilization nobody's ever heard of and while Curt's there he...dun-dun-dun...kisses some other girl. It's like he just now figured out what to do with women and he's gone all horndog with it. Joan isn't mentioned again, not even as a guilty feeling or his being glad that this other chick is a million years in the past so the two women would never accidentally meet or whatever it is buttheaded guys think.

Oh, and jerkass Otho is less of a jerkass than usual and meets a girl who gets killed saving his life because nobody wants to read about artificial jerky guys getting it on with primitive dinosaur-herding alien women. You know this will mean wall-to-wall jerkassedness in the next novel, right? Hopefully Otho's brand of morose jerkassedness doesn't involve emo crap like poetry.

New Story Now Live

The fifth in the Spicy Science Stories series (try saying that three times fast) Too Much to Handle is now live on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Looking at the cover I see again I totally failed to put "scienfornication" anywhere on it or in the text like I'd planned. The bottom banner should read "A Thrilling New Scienfornication Story" instead of the lackluster "A Thrilling Story of Science Gone Wrong." So, meh. I also inexplicably left out the "Buy Dirty Books For Victory" banner I wasted a whole ten minutes making. I haven't decided whether to fix the first problem yet, or more correctly, I've decided to fix it but I can't be bothered to pull up Gimp and re-upload the cover image.

Anyhow, this entry finishes up the Landica Station arc, though I doubt it's actually an arc if you only have two stories so let's just say it's a straight line between two fixed points instead. Furthermore, isn't "Landica" a pretty name?  Name something fancy after it, like a country club or a golf course or your new baby, then Google it. Heh.

Because I continue to be a terrible person I'm giving you something else to snigger at, this cover which could double as the sales catalog for an interstellar marital aid store, probably called something like The Pleasure Planet.

Coincidentally, the Pleasure Planet is the next stop in Captain Future and the Seven Space Stones, though it's only a huge casino on an asteroid that's been pushed out beyond the jurisdiction of the Planet Police by means of giant rockets, rather than an intergalactic whorehouse which sounds more like a half-remembered episode of Lexx.

 

The Pleasure Planet looks like the kind of place where a guy could stare all day at a table-mounted disco ball while stuffing himself at the all-you-can-eat Junior Mints bar.

Ahh, I see Dr. Yueh comes clear across the galaxy just for the Pleasure Planet's Junior Mints.

Because I amuse easily, here's a bit more on Otho, the jerkass artificial rubbery guy. If you look at the covers he's featured on you'll notice he's always behind something. Why? Because he's NEKKID. He's usually described as wearing only a belt, which holds his proton pistol so he can kill people. Lots and lots of people.

So on Captain Future's first date with Joan Randall he brings along a jerkass artificial rubbery nekkid guy. Even Miss Manners would say you should wait until at least the second date before suggesting a threesome.

I'll see myself out.

Captain Future Does Stuff

I'm currently reading this particular pulp series, though I'm not quite halfway through Captain Future and the Seven Space Stones, Winter 1941. The eponymous Space Stones in this story each hold part of a secret technology formulated by an ancient Martian scientist whose name I can't be arsed to look up and one man, the amusingly named Ul Quorn, wants that secret so he can take over the solar system.

Thankfully author Edmond Hamilton dropped his usual formula of having the bad guy wear some sort of alien-looking disguise forcing Captain Future to have to pick from four suspects, and yes it's been exactly four suspects in all the previous issues, and usually the bad guy kills a couple of the others saving Future the effort of muddling through a lot of deduction. Oh, did I mention Curt Newton, alias Capt. Future, is a Wizard of Science? Not much real science in these things and what he usually does is MacGyver himself out of whatever jam he's in using the non-scientific stuff I have in my closet right now even though he has a space ship laboratory full of all kinds of science gadgets and doodads.

Future's love interest is a fairly soppy fangirl named Joan Randall, an alleged crack Planet Police agent who's usually captured in every issue more than once. Really, she's the worst agent there is. She also gushes over Future a lot, much like nice girls in 1940s sci-fi do, and he broods about her for all of one sentence and then completely fails to say goodbye to her at the end of the story with a big, sloppy snog. 

Future, you're such a shlemiel.

This issue they actually go on what might be considered a date if you're dead inside. They go to a carnival and he brings along one of the Futuremen, the really jerkass one, thus ensuring absolutely nothing romantic will happen. Did I mention he was raised by a robot, a jerkass artificial rubbery man and a cranky old scientist's brain in a case after his parents were killed by evil scientists? Well, I think none of the three bothered to tell young Curt what grownups do when they like each other.

Hamilton's plot in this issue is a familiar one that gives Future an arch enemy, the half-Martian Ul Quorn who's just as much a scientific genius as Future though he does way cooler stuff with it, like robbing and killing and plotting to take over the solar system. They do a lot of "I know you're up to something" and "I know you know I'm up to something" and "I know you know I know" but neither stops the other. This guy is also in issue #7 The Magician of Mars so he'll be Future's dime store Ming the Merciless for a while which sounds way better than some rich guy screaming, "Somebody blew up my stuff!" and having three other guys say they didn't because anyway the first guy did it to create a monopoly of whatever it is he's producing or mining.

This is also the first issue with an amusingly evil female character, or any female character who isn't soppy Joan Randall. N'rala is a Martian femme fatale, claims to have killed men and seems to be screwing Ul Quorn so long as he's going to take over the solar system, though she'd drop him like a hot rock once somebody more powerful comes along. You can tell she's a bad girl because she hides her proton gun in her bodice, probably between her boobs, and her skirt has a slit in it. 

Partway through the story N'rala sees through Captain Future's crap disguise as easily as if he bought it at the last minute from a drugstore Halloween sale rack. They scuffle and there's some stilted insinuation that this is vaguely sexy, with "the subtle, alien perfume of her midnight hair" though Future turns her down leading to this hilarious exchange.

"You're cold as the robots who reared you!" Ohhh, snap! You want some ointment on that burn, Captain?

I shouldn't have been surprised because the heroes in these things always wind up with the soppy girl who'll gladly stay home on his secret moon base cranking out his babies, darning his space suit and cooking dinners that'll sit in the atomic oven drying out because he's late coming home from saving the solar system again. 

Meanwhile N'rala would've boinked his brains out and left claw marks on his back, broken all the dishes throwing them at his head during an argument, then as a parting shot when they break up for the nth time she'll stand out in the street screaming at the top of her lungs that he really sucked in bed. The neighbors love that. He'll brood about it for all of one sentence before he buys her something expensive and begs for her to come back and they have really loud make-up sex. Neighbors also love that.

Any writer worth his salt would be setting this up for a jealous girlfight later in the story but I'm not expecting anything that exciting. I'm also not holding my breath for Joan to finally give Curt a lukewarm grandma kiss on the cheek before he flies back to the moon.