Customer Reviews

The Forgotten Planet / Contraband Rocket (Classic Ace Double, D-146)

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Here is a pair of old Ace Double Novels that is something of a collector's item. The covers are appropriately dramatic. One shows a body wrapped completely in a brownish covering behing tossed in space out the airlock of a rocket with the name _Absyrtis_ emblazoned on its tailfin. The other shows a man dressed in a blue loincloth holding a pointed weapon in his hand facing a giant wasp on the attack.

Let us start with _Contraband Rocket_ (1956) by Lee Correy. "Lee Correy" was the pseudonym of the rocket engineer G. Harry Stine. Stine wrote fiction under his pseudonym and nonfiction (usually science) under his real name. (A similar case was the astronomer Robert S. Richardson who wrote fiction under the pseudonym "Philip Latham.")

I had read _Contraband Rocket_ a couple of times when I was in elementary school and enjoyed it. But that was mumbledy-mumble years ago. I felt obligated to reread the novel as a check against my youthful judgement. I found, to my surprise and pleasure, that it held up fairly well. It is certainly not great art. The characters are cardboard, and the style is plain; but there is a real enthusiasm for rockets and rocketry that carries the day.

Correy envisions a rather conformist society of the near future in which it is possible to be brainwashed. In spite of this risk, a group of social misfits get caught up in the dream of outfitting a rocket of their own and flying it to the Moon. Professional passenger spaceflight is a routine reality, but amateur flights are unknown. Correy has a good feel for the technology needed to do the job, how the husk of a ship would be stripped and rebuilt, what spare parts would be needed from rocket junk yards, how a rocket society can become an unlikely revolutionary group, how money would be raised, and what courtroom procedures and legal shenanigans the group would have to use.

There were some small details that I missed when I read the novel the first couple of times. Divorce is no longer a matter of separation. It usually ends with one person being declared "maladjusted" and then brainwashed to conform to the wishes and desires of the other spouse. And the old spaceman Luna Luis is the past recipiant of "the R.A. Heinlein Award for establishing the terra-luna schedules" (78). Few readers would have caught that joke in 1956, but a great many would understand it today.

The story is technically still in our future. It could happen yet, or at least something like it. Correy makes it clear that in the conflict between the professional and the amateur, he is firmly on the side of the amateurs-- the ones who still know how to dream. I give it a three star rating.

I am giving less attention to Murray Leinster's _The Forgotten Planet_ (1954), because I have reviewed it in more detail on another site. It is a mixture of stories from the 1920s and the 1950s. The style is in many ways rough and awkward. And yet the story has a curious kind of mythical drive. It features the leader of a primitive tribe on a planet of giant insects who becomes a kind of Prometheus figure as he discovers fire, weapons, and the other basic needs for civilization. By using the known behavior of insects, Leinster manages to create a convincing setting. I give it a four star rating.

All in all, a book worth your attention if you don't mind a couple of well-told but old-fashioned tales.