7/17/16

Asteroid Blues


"You're not going to let him get away, are you?"
- Spike Spiegel (Cowboy Bebop, Episode 10: Ganymede Elegy) 
David V. Reed was an American author who primarily left his mark on comic books, such as writing for Batman during the 1950s and co-creating the villain Deadshot, but he also tinkered with fiction and his work was published in various popular magazines – which included such publications as Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Astounding Science Fiction and Argosy. He seems to have been fluttering between the pulps and the slicks.

Murder in Space (1944) was one of Reed's experiments in fiction and originally appeared between the covers of Amazing Stories, but this hybrid-tale was doomed to drift to the darkest, deepest regions of literary obscurity. Sadly, I can see how this story failed to make an impact or leave a visible impression on any of the genres Reed attempted to incorporate into his story.

The book attempts to transplant a semi-hardboiled crime story with touches of the legal thriller, courtroom drama and even the Western to the edge of our solar system.

Regrettably, this mish-mash of genres fails to take off and is as poorly handled as the bits of speculative science, which showed asteroids capable of hosting life, but even I know space rocks usually lack the delicate atmosphere of a place like Earth – coming on top of a strange blend of contemporary and futuristic technology. On the one hand, the reader is expected to believe the solar system has been colonized with a vast array of advanced spaceships, but, on the other one, courtroom photographers apparently still use flashbulbs. Anyhow, I'm getting ahead of myself here.

The backdrop for Murder in Space is a settlement on a planetoid, named Mirabello, which is a lush mining community, with "its twin golden suns" blazing "merrily from a sky of flawless blue," and the place has the tendency to be a prosperous, peaceful space colony – extracting all of its prosperity from orium deposits in the surrounding asteroid belt. One of Mirabello's most well-known prospectors is Scotty Purdon: who owns the Silver Spoon Mine, "the famous bonanza," which is a well-kept secret and only Purdon knows its exact location. But, one day, Purdon fails to return from one of his regular mining expeditions and the person who is held responsible is the owner of the Wylie Lode.

Before he came to Mirabello, Buck Wylie served a prison term of six months for "killing a man in a gunfight over a mine in Tyuio," but the old gunslinger settled down to honest life when he found riches in the Wylie Lode. However, when Purdon's spacecraft was found in free space, "empty and drifting," a demolition bomb with a time-fuse was recovered from the vessel, which had a score of identifying marks tracing the explosive back to Buck. The bomb is a good example of the discrepancy between certain bits of technology in this book: the explosive was found on a futuristic spacecraft that could traverse the asteroid belt, but the fuse of the bomb needs to be lighted like a stick of dynamite.

In any case, Buck is hauled in front of a judge to be indicted for murder and the shadow of public suspicion came with a powerful enemy: John Murchison is a personal fiend of Purdon and the publisher of the local newspaper, The Mirabello City Twin-Sun, which he has uses a platform to form public opinion against the accused. So Buck's beautiful sister, Sue Wylie, engages Mr. Terwilliger Ames, Attorney at Law, to defend her brother.

Terwilliger Ames came to the small mining planet from New York, but he soon comes to the realization that colonial space law is differs from regular law. One of them is that they don't "necessarily need the production of a dead body to indict and convict for murder." After all, the act of murder "is a simple crime when millions of miles of free space surrounds one" and a body can be disposed of "in any one of a dozen convenient hiding places in space" – which makes it hard to insist on a corpus delicti in every instance. Unfortunately, this interesting legal problem that space exploration and settlement brings with it is never fully explored and the body is exactly where it is expected to be. And this hidden location is eventually found by examining the fuel use and distance traveled by the spacecraft. I'm afraid that's all of the significant detective work done in this book. It's literary the furthest the plot got from moving beyond the set premise.

There is not much else of interest happening in this book: Ames runs into some snags, get shots at with a ray-gun, gets fired, faces possible legal repercussions and hears of a second murder, but everything slightly promising is dumped by wayside as soon as they're introduced into the story. Well, I guess Ames' excursion and adventure inside the asteroid belt resulted in one or two decent scenes, but was obviously done to give the story a Western flavor and show, once again, the hand of the painfully obvious murderer – who had already been confirmed guilty by the halfway mark.

The final portion of the book is an overlong, drawn-out courtroom scene, in which Ames, once again, goes over all the known facts in the case and lays a (simplistic) trap for the murderer based on a futuristic detection-device – which will provide the reader with a final groan. You'll know why when you read this one for yourself.

If I would put it nicely, I would say Murder in Space under performed in every possible way imaginable, but, to put it bluntly, the story is atrociously bad and poorly imagined. The plot is painfully obvious and drawn-out. Its vision of the future is poverty stricken and never went beyond the basics of rocket ships and ray-guns. Not a single reason is given to care about any of the characters. Honestly, the single genuine accomplishment of Murder in Space is that it can be mentioned in the same breath as Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet (1942) and John Russell Fearn's The Master Must Die (1953) and The Lonely Astronomer (1954) as precursors to Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957). That and the fact that the book has made me want to revisit Cowboy Bebop. So that's positive, I guess.

Well, let's end this review on a semi-positive note by pointing out two recent reviews: the reason for lifting Murder in Space from my TBR-pile was a recent review by John Norris of The Bloody Moonlight (1949) by Fredric Brown – a much beloved writer of both detective stories and science-fiction. Secondly, I previously reviewed The Mystery of the Shrinking House (1972), which I enjoyed vastly more than the subject of this blog-post.

Finally, I hope to uncover something better for the next review. So stay tuned.

17 comments:

  1. If you read this in the Armchair Fiction version, I would beware. I was very happy when Armchair started publishing, but then I noticed that the publisher was severely abridging the books without notice to the readers. I don't know the extent of the problem because I stopped buying their books. I doubt if this affected the quality of the story in this case if it was done, but it still is not proper. If you are going to abridge a book, you have to inform the reader of that fact.

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    1. Thanks for the heads up, Anon. I completely agree that readers should be told whether they're reading the full, untouched text from the original or an abridged version. Sadly, I also have to agree that an abridgement would probably not greatly affect (positive or negative) the overall quality of this particular novel.

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  2. Please do an updated top 100 list of favourite murder mystery books.


    Your friend from the past,

    Origami

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    1. Well, that list is definitely due a thorough revision and update. Not sure when I'll get around to it, but I will keep in mind for the near future.

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  3. Looks like you beat me to this! I'd only be able to talk about Asimov and Fearn just as you did. There is a smidgen of sf in THE SHADE OF TIME by David Duncan, but I dislike that book intensely for the author's ignorance in not knowing the difference between a gay man and a transvestite.

    "but, on the other one, courtroom photographers apparently still use flashbulbs."

    This is a huge problem I have with early science fiction stories -- the inability for the writer to completely envision a future unlike the time in which he is living. In the new mummy anthology edited by Jonathan Lewis (son of Steve Lewis of Mystery*File fame) there is an excerpt from a mid 19th century SF/mystery novel. In it two archeologists travel from the 21st century back to the Victorian era...via balloon! The exploration of the pyramid and the mummy is done with all sorts of Victorian implements. The only thing "futuristic" about it is the reviving of the mummy with an ill-described electrical device. The author was a 17 year old girl at the time; I don't think she had a thing published afterward. Clearly she had read lots of Jules Verne and probably Frankenstein a couple of times.

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    1. The excerpt you described sounds more like a pale imitation of Edgar Allan Poe's "Some Words With a Mummy," but with a time-slip angle chugged into the mix and apparently Poe had a better explanation for his living mummy. It was explained by the mummy himself that mummification was part of a lost technology/knowledge used in the ancient world to literally preserve the dead. Of course, this is pure fantasy, but better than the bad science-fiction of an ill-explained electronic device.

      Anyway, have you read Devil's Planet by Manly Wade Wellman? I would love to read your take on that one. It has some of that old-fashioned technology in a futuristic setting, but, as a detective story, it is not too bad and has a very decent locked room problem.

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  4. As far as the ability of a science fiction author to envision the future, it depends on the author. H. G. Wells envisioned mass destruction via atomic bombs in The World Set Free (1914). Manning and Pratt's "The City of the Living Dead" (1930) describe the technology and effects of virtual reality in some detail. Murray Leinster's story "A Logic Named Joe" (1946) was dead on as to the consequences of the invention of the personal computer. David H. Keller understood very well the social consequences of science in many of his stories. For instance, in 1929 he wrote a story called "The Threat of the Robot." This story was probably the first use of the term "robot" for a mechanical simulacrum of a man, instead of the organic androids discussed by Capek. In the story, mechanical robots replace human sportsmen in games like football. Keller also projects that sports events would be televised to a mass audience. Mack Reynolds described the modern computerized world in great and accurate detail more than 40 years ago in such stories as The Five Way Secret Agent (1969). John Brunner's projection for the world of 2010 in his book Stand on Zanzibar (1968)was amazingly accurate, as was his take on computerized societies in The Shockwave Rider (1975).

    If you actually review the early pulp science fiction authors from the period 1926 to 1945, it appears to me that on a piecemeal basis they have described our present and many potential futures in great detail. If they doled out one new idea per story, rather than envisioning an entire future in 10 pages, I would say we got our money's worth. The things they got wrong just lend a period charm to the stories. The best cure for future shock I know is to read science fiction up to the 1980s; after that idea exhaustion occurred, much as in the detective fiction genre.

    I think, in short, that they should be given great credit for thinking in terms of the future (at a penny a word) at a time when no one else could be bothered. The impact of early science fiction on our mass popular culture cannot be calculated. Things like Star Wars and Star Trek are merely primitive space operas compared to what even E.E. Smith was producing in the 1930s. A good deal of the way we imagine the future, including the terminology, comes right out of these early stories.

    I have read Duncan's The Shade of Time and his science fiction works and liked them very much, especially Beyond Eden. It is a shame he wrote so little sf.

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    1. Thanks for the many recommendations, Anon. Before I began to blog, my reading diet used to be a bit more varied than it's today and, for years now, I wanted to return to that.

      No idea when I will actually act on that intention, but I will keep your post in mind when I do. They certainly sound more interesting than the handful of science-fiction novels I have read, which did not get much further than Douglas Adams, H.G. Wells' The War of Worlds, Fredric Brown's Martians, Go Home and the SeaQuest DSV novels.

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  5. Stories are a product of their times. When a science fiction author envisions the future, he can only do so from the standpoint of his present. Indeed, science fiction stories tell us more about the times in which they were written than about the future they project. But that should not detract from their value because the same thing happens with detective stories, but in the reverse direction. It is like condemning a Sherlock Holmes story because the characters did not pull out a smart phone or fly in jet planes in crucial parts of the story. I am sure that everyone in this neck of the woods understands how to put stories in historical context. A good story is always a good story even if the technology or social attitudes change.

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    1. Well, The Caves of Steel by Asimov was written in the early 1950s, but was, as a detective story, so far ahead of its own time that it refuted certain arguments against traditional mysteries decades before they were actually made.

      As a first-rate mystery novel with a futuristic setting, it showed that the march of scientific progress does not necessarily have to mean the death of clever plotting. There was even room for a couple of clever, but false, solutions.

      So, if an original, fair-play mystery works when it is set in far-flung world, it should work in a contemporary setting with such modern "gadgets" as DNA testing. Something that was proven in a modern crime novel entitled The Devotion of Suspect X.

      So, yes, stories are often a product of their time, but some of them become immortal classics because they are either timeless (Sherlock Holmes) or ahead of its time (The Caves of Steel).

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  6. The point was made that early science fiction authors only partially realized the future in their stories. The Caves of Steel is a perfect example of that. It takes place 3,000 years in the future. But if your vision is bad, your choices are still only glasses or contact lenses. If you want shoes, you go to a shoe store with display windows. Women still carry handbags. You meet your future wife at the office Christmas party over the punch bowl. They read from "book films" and work on paper. I see no trace of personal computers. The office has a primitive computer where data is stored on mercury. I see no evidence of a computer network. Police squad cars are driven by hand and have sirens. In short, the set-up of The Caves of Steel is the set-up of the 1950s plus robots. The robot stuff is highly developed but Asimov does not waste any time on social developments. No one cares, it is still a good story, but Asimov does not even trouble himself to bring mechanization of his society even to the level of the first such story, Paradise and Iron by Miles Breuer (1930).

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    1. In that case, I really have to re-read The Caves of Steel, because I remember being impressed with the "worldbuilding" elements of the story and the old-world technologies seemed to be less prevalent than in other science-fiction mysteries I've read. I also remember the follow up novel were getting stronger on the social commentary and the influence of advanced technology on the societies of the settler planets.

      But then again, my reading in this genre has been very shallow and therefore it was probably more impressive to me than to well-read science-fiction fans. I'm only an irregular visitor to that genre.

      By the way, does SeaQuest DSV count as (proper) science-fiction?

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    2. I don't watch much television, so I was not familiar with SeaQuest DSV. However, upon reading its Wikipedia page, I would surmise it is rather primitive science fiction in the Star Trek mode; in other words it is an action-adventure show which happens to be set on a submarine. Real science fiction would attempt to explore a realistic projection of future underwater development, in the manner of Arthur C. Clarke's The Deep Range. Star Trek is science fiction, it is just not very good science fiction. It is more in the nature of routine space opera. As I define it, in good science fiction a new scientific idea is the central focus of the story and the characters are peripheral to it; the idea is the center point of interest and the story involves how the characters react to it. The idea is the hero. This was the central discovery of Jules Verne. He was the first person to write this way, so I think his designation as the father of science fiction is well-founded. If we look at Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, for instance, I think it has been pointed out that the submarine is the actual hero of the story and gets the most attention; of the human characters, Prof. Aronnax is just a cipher, and Capt. Nemo is an enigma. In Star Trek, it appears to me that the characters, cardboard though they are, are really the central focus, and scientific ideas are peripheral and rudimentary. So it is science fiction, but not very good. SeaQuest DSV sounds like a show in the same mould.

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    3. Primitive science-fiction, huh? I always assumed it was a good and clever science-fiction series, because a real scientist explained the science behind all of the science-fiction bits during the end credits.

      During the first season anyway. All of that was gutted in the second season and that got the series canned halfway through the third season.

      Anyway, thanks for your lengthy, insightful comments that convinced me I should try some real, hard science-fiction in the future.

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    4. As I stated, I never saw the show, and my comments were mainly related to Star Trek as an example of TV sf. However, the list of story themes on the Wikipedia page and other sources all sounded pretty routine and old-fashioned to me, i.e., mad scientists, monsters of the week, underwater colonies, time travel, ancient underwater alien spacecraft and the like.

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  7. On the other hand, Star Trek sometimes shows what it can do as good science fiction in this regard. If we look at "The City on the Edge of Forever," for instance, it seems to me that this is good science fiction as I define it. In other words, the idea is central and the characters are peripheral. By this I mean that there is no story at all except for the scientific time travel element. If you take away the time travel element then there is no story at all. So the rest of the story is how the human characters react to their predicament. I think the character part was done amazingly. In fact, the character part is what makes it a story instead of a scientific treatise. The original Trek actors could act up a storm when given the right material.

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  8. Theodore Sturgeon defined science fiction as "a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content." That seems to me to be a pretty good definition, except that the scientific content is generally speculative in nature, i.e., we don't have what they are talking about yet.

    I would go a step further, and state that that is also a good definition of mystery fiction; I would just substitute "criminous or investigative idea" for "scientific idea." And that, I think is the link between detective fiction and science fiction; both of them are essentially literatures bounded by particular types of ideas and the literary structures pertinent to those ideas.

    I would also state that I think that both the detective genre and the science fiction genre fell into terminal decline about the same time in the 1970's and for the same reason: a refusal by the authors in attempting to exploit new ideas in their fields; it was a failure of creativity. I guess that should not be surprising; that has been a failure in this civilization across the board.

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