Customer Reviews

Men, Martians, and Machines

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4 star:		(2)
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I still remember how it affected me. My imagination was awakened to visualize the entire book. I am now 47 years old and I never forgot that paperback and how it excited me. I definitely am going to find a used copy and read it again. I enjoyed it and am extremely fond of it.

Eric Frank Russell wrote this book in 1955. It was well ahead of it's time. It consists of four interlinked but separate stories about the Starship Marathon. Sound famililiar! It was said that Gene Roddenberry based Star Trek on this book. All four stories are excellent examples of 50's Sci-Fi space opera. When I first read it in the mid 60's I was enthralled and have recently thanks to Amazon been able to obtain another copy which has already been reread several times.

I got a copy of this book when I was about 9 yrs old and have probably read it so often that I've nearly memorized it over the last 30 yrs. What draws me into the book are the unforgettable characters---Jay Score (was he the inspiration for Mr. Spock?), Capt. McNulty, the chess-fanatic Martians---Kli Yang, Kli Morg, Sug Farn, et al, and the narrator, the sergeant at arms who is never identified by name. The stories are told in the first person and in a way it lets the reader become that character. The only downside of the book is that, as far as I know, Russell never wrote any further stories about the crew of the Marathon.

A couple of years ago I had the luck of finding a hardcover edition, (in pristine condition I might add) to replace my badly worn paperback copy. Our narrator is sergeant at arms aboard the merchant spaceship Upskadaska City, known to seasoned spacers as the 'Upsydaisy', making regular voyages between Earth and Venus until holed by an errant glob of space debris that sends the Upsydaisy hurtling directly into the sun. The ship survives thanks to her captain's navigating, the skill of her rather unusual emergency pilot and the grit displayed by all hands. As a reward captain and crew are given the new interstellar explorer ship 'Marathon' and sent to explore 'strange new worlds' all of which prove somewhat inhospitable to aliens. Our band of brothers is augmented a staff of government experts and a smart mouthed official photographer. And includes a Martian repair crew, goggle eyed ten tentacled beings who frequently complain about thick air, human odor and want to play chess at the most inopportune times. Dispite frequent interspecies bickering and banter when the chips are down Terran and Martian alike know they can depend on each other to the bitter end.

This is an absolutely wonderful book - roughly the SF equivalent of Three Men in a Boat. Just as Jerome K Jerome lyrically sliced and diced genteel British conventions, so Eric Frank Russell deconstructs the conventions of space-travel SF, lovingly reducing high adventure to the lowest common denominator: human nature. No matter where you go, there you are. Or, in Russell's words: "Space-conquerors, bah! Nutty, all of them, just like you and me!"

Like the other reviewers here, I've read and re-read this book countless times - and look forward to doing so many times more. I'll never tire of these vivid characters, and the matter-of-fact way they face outrageous alien situations. Eric Frank Russell wasn't a huge SF innovator, but at his best he was a truly great writer. And this book represents his absolute best work. If only there were more!

It's absolutely criminal that this book should be out of print for even a day, when lesser rubbish never seems to go away. SF fans who haven't read it should do so immediately, if not sooner.

Fortunately, the hardcover edition pictured on this Amazon page shouldn't be too hard to come by. Unfortunately, it suffers from a small but painful flaw. Some editorial bozo (I'm not pointing fingers, but George Zebrowski gets credit as "Series Editor") has replaced all instances of the lovely nautical word "pinnace" with the anachronistically trekian term "shuttlecraft." Apparently, SF readers don't own dictionaries. The original Berkley paperback has it right, but I'd be amazed if any remain that are not on the verge of crumbling to dust. A new edition - preferably leather-bound and printed on acid-free paper - would be an instant must-have.

ADDENDUM: I've discovered that there's yet another version of this book, which I suspect to be the original British one. It includes quite a bit of 'spicy' language - including such nasty English expressions as 'he11's bells' and 'damme' - which I presume were watered down in the Berkley edition so as to spare the tender ears of the North American reader. I've seen this unexpurgated version only in e-book form, but I believe it restores an earthier, more authentic tone to this great work.

This is a book I pull out and reread every couple of years. Russell has written some rather pedestrian science fiction, but he has also written a number of classics--novels, short stories, and novellas: Wasp, Now Inhale, and Men, Martians, and Machines. Many of his works, including MM&M, have a wonderfully humorous touch.

MM&M has one short story (Jay Score): this is the weakest part of the quartet. The other 3 long short stories/novellas involve landings on alien worlds by Men, Martians (part of the crew) and Machine (Jay Score, a robot). These stories are all solid 5-star works, and are about some strange planets indeed. Much of the pleasure in reading these stories lies in Russell's light touch and humor--he gives a lot of entertainment where another writer might be humdrum.

If you have never read Russell, you're in for a treat, provided of course that you stick with his best work. If you have a book of short stories that includes Now Inhale, or Diabologic, start with that--since Russell also wrote not a few undistinguished magazine fillers. For a novel--get Wasp--my oldest copy is dogeared and cost 35 cents when new!

Another beautiful piece of vintage Eric Frank Russell. I first read it as a ten year old in 1958, and three of the four stories were quite old (first published 1940-42) even then. Yet they have aged surprisingly well. The technical purist in me winces a little at the thought of a spaceship keeping its rockets burning all the way to Venus (where on/off earth do they keep all the fuel?) and falling into the Sun if they break down, but that was about par for 1940 sf. And Russell surely makes up for it in having a negro as his Ship's Surgeon, even if he does feel obliged to offer a biological justification for this. I don't know if Sam Hignett was the first Black sf character, but there can't have been many before him. This is great for the period.

MM&M is a sort of halfway house between a short story collection and a novel. We keep the same set of characters throughout, but the four sections can be read separately, as indeed the first three were published separately for magazines. The first and shortest, "Jay Score" , is a simple disaster in space yarn, though with a lovely twist at the end which I have no intention of revealing, and serves mainly to introduce us to the cast. The rest of the book is divided between three voyages of exploration, to the planets Mechanistria, Symbiotica and Mesmerica. The titles hint at the nature of the problems encountered by our intrepid heroes, as they meet malevolent aliens who attack them by methods mechanical, biological and psychological respectively

But by no means all the aliens shown are malevolent. The Martians of the title are both friendly and resourceful, and in two of the stories, the human characters might well have perished without them. Again, a very advanced attitude to "race relations" for the time of publication.

All in all, a great read. My only gripe about MM&M (as about Russell's later book, "The Great Explosion") is that there simply isn't enough of it. I should have loved to follow the "Marathon" on a dozen voyages into the unknown, rather than three. Still, I shall be forever grateful for what there is. Enjoy

Outstanding blend of humor and serious space opera. Four linked long stories involving the crew of the exploration ship Marathon. One story, SYMBIOTICA, inspired my earliest interests in ecology, and eventually my novel MIDWORLD.

Long before the voyages of the Starship _Enterprise_, there were the voyages of the Starship _Marathon_. Like the _Enterprise_, the _Marathon_ also had a mixed crew that traveled to distant planets. Some of those adventures are recounted in Eric Frank Russell's lively little book, _Men, Martians and Machines_ (1955). The original stories are: "Jay Score" (_Astounding_, 1941), "Mechanistria" (_Astounding_, 1942), "Symbiatica" (_Astounding_, 1943), and "Mesmerica" (an original book publication).

The first story, like the Jimmy Dean song, is about "a mighty big man". But Jay Score comes to a better end than Big Bad John. The next three tales all involve oddball alien worlds where manic Alice-in-Wonderland misadventures occur. One is a planet of demented and telepathic machines, one is a world that is populated with deadly plants of various kinds, and one (to put it mildly) is a world where things are not as they seem. There are a few details that are a bit out of date. Communication is by radio rather than television, photography is done with photographic plates, and the crew of the _Marathon_ is all male. But these are all qualities that are not unusual for stories of the forties.

So far, I have given an adequate introduction to the book. But _Men, Martians and Machines_ is a curiously _likeable_ book. (Russell is in fact a likeable author.) Perhaps it might be worthwhile to ask what it is about Russell's writing that makes the book so appealing.

One factor, I think, is Russell's relaxed, informal, colloquial style. Here are his spacemen after they have been captured by an army of robots:

Finally we enlarged the gap in the floor and had almost made it big enough for our purpose when something huge and heavy churned along the road, hit our machine with a gentle bump. Came a loud metallic click and the next instant we moved forward, slowly, then faster. A breakdown dingus had come on the job. (47)

And here is a spaceman who is being rescued from the clutches of a very sticky and poisonous tree:

The needler's beam lanced forth at full strength. The leaf dropped off and the tree went mad. Jepson fell twenty-five feet at the incredible rate of two vulgar adjectives per foot. The leaf still fastened to his back, he landed in the undergrowth with a wild yelp and a flood of lurid afterthoughts. While we all lay flat and frantically tried to bury ourselves deeper, the tree thrashed violently around, its gum-laden spatulates thirsting for vengeance. (93)

As a rule, I would not recommend using a colloquial style of writing for long stories. But Russell gets away with it. The reason is his first-person point-of-view character, the sergeant-at-arms aboard the _Marathon_. This style is exactly the way that an old spacedog would relate the adventures of the crew, possibly at a spaceport bar.

But more than style, the appeal of the book lies in the characters. Russell has a genuine fondness for the crew of the _Marathon_, and he creates a sense of brotherhood among them. The cautious Captain McNulty, the Negro surgeon (Russell explains why _all_ space surgeons are Negro), the tentacled, chess playing Martians, the robots, the upstart ship's photographer, the spaceman with the vertical eyebrows... It is, in an odd kind of way, a sense of humanism. And we respond to it. Yes, there are often hardships aboard the spaceship. But we know that we would like to travel with them aboard that ship. Yes, we would.

Classic sci-fi. Read this book when I was young and thought it was out of print forever. What a delight to find it again. Just as good the second time around.