Customer Reviews

The Crimson Capsule

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E.F. Bleiler and Richard Bleiler (1991) note that many of Stanton Coblentz's works are mixtures of the satiric novel and the adventure story-- and that the two strands frequently do not mesh well with one another. _The Crimson Capsule_ (1967) contains a mixture of these two elements, but it may be best read as a straight adventure novel; the satiric aspects are fairly routine and do not take center stage.

The heroes are two chums who fall in love with the same girl. When she marries somebody else, they respond in a normal, red-blooded American manner: They swear off all women, and they volunteer to go into suspended animation in a time capsule. (The reader may wonder why only males were selected to survive the possible rigors of the future. This is never answered, but it may be that women were just too smart to volunteer.)

They awake over 600 years After the Bomb in a post-holocaust world. But Coblentz makes it clear that it was not just atomic war and the collapse of civilization that created this future world. The Greenhouse effect has created massive climate changes, and the overuse of pesticides has led to the extinction of insects (forcing artificial pollination techniques to be used in farming). Bomb shelters proved to be useless as a defense, but their remains are now being used as the foundations for prisons. I found these topical references to the 1960s oddly charming. There was a certain amount of entertainment looking for them in the novel.

Normal humans (atavists) are now fairly rare in the world. Most of the creatures are either ape-men or half-witted mutants who hold the humans in a state of slavery. They quickly capture the heroes. Much of the novel involves the heroes' misadventures in court, in prison, in asylums, and in labor camps in an effort to escape.(In one incredible burst of stupidity, the heroes offer to take their captors to the site of the capsule simply to prove that their story is true. They are saved only by the fact that their captors are more stupid than they.) There is a beautiful heroine named Olga, but she is constantly running about so much that she never has time to talk to either hero for more than a few seconds at a time.

The novel is mildly entertaining. It is amusing in spots, and it has a happy ending for those that like such things. But it is hard to consider this as anything more than a routine piece of writing.

With nuclear war impending, a brilliant inventor creates the Bellingham Capsule, which will save the most precious art, music, and literature of our civilization. A few men in suspended animation will safeguard the capsule for the next thousand years, when it will automatically release them.

But when an earthquake finally breaks the capsule, Philip Lee Talbot and Edward Magnus emerge into a world far stranger than they had bargained for. Has it been a thousand years . . . or much, much longer?

For Mankind no longer rules this Earth . . .

Five centuries after atomic war destroyed most of the Earth, survivors have clawed their way back to civilization . . . And their eyes have turned to the stars. What of the colonists who fled Earth in its last days? Might they still be alive on other planets in our solar system?

Roy Bentley and Chris Hartridge set out to learn the truth. And their first stop is Mercury, the planet next door to the sun . . . for wonders await them as they discover Earth's long lost children!