Science Fiction Book Review: Assignment Luther by Lan Wright

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I've just finished reading another of these vintage science fiction books that I get in job lots. A bit of a quick read, it's by an author who I don't recall encountering before - Lan Wright. A bit of online research reveals that he was a British writer who was active from the early 50s to the early 60s, before giving up writing to pursue his main career. Published as a novel in the early 60s, this book started life as a series of four short stories that were first published in the 50s. In this edition, the four stories have been edited together to form a continuous narrative, although it's still very episodic. The story is set in some unspecified time in the future, when humans and a variety of alien races are competing with each other to colonise the Galaxy. There's a Galactic Central Council (something like the United Nations), which is supposed to enforce interstellar law and oversee relations between the various races, but it doesn't seem very effective. The general political background more closely resembles the 19th Century imperial system, with the more advance races (including humanity) taking over the homeworlds of alien races who are at a lower technological levels, and competing with each other to increase the size of their empires. The hero of the story is Johnny Dawson, freshly graduated from university. On his last day in university, he is introduced to an unpleasant character called Hendrix. Hendrix represents a government agency wtih the gimicky name of the Spatial Projects and Colonial Exploitation Commission - the SPACE Commission for short, or simply just the Commission. The SPACE Commission is a secretive group with wide-ranging powers to represent Terran interests and resolve any crisis that may arise, using whatever means they deem necessary. Hendrix wants to recruit Dawson into the Commission, but Dawson isn't interested - so Hendrix coerces him into joining by framing him for drug possession and then offering to make the charges disappear if Dawson signs a five year contract. That's the sort of organisation that the Commission is - they believe that the end justifies the means. So Dawson is recruited and trained to be an agent for the Commission. The rest of the story consists of four adventures that feature Dawson interacting with an alien race called the Lutherians, who are direct rivals to the Terrans in the empire-building game. The first story concerns the Lutherians reviving an old dispute about the ownership of a planet that both races have partially colonised - humans live in one hemisphere and Lutherians live in the other. The Lutherians claim to be the rightful owners of the whole planet, which has valuable deposits of a metal that's very useful for spaceflight. If they don't get their way, they're threatening to cut off the supply of a type of plant they export to the Terran empire, which is an ingredient in a vital drug. It's in this adventure that Dawson first meets Arvan, the governor of the Lutherian half of the planet, and who is a recurring antagonist/ally through the rest of the book. At first, Dawson sees no way to resolve the dispute, and in despair he goes off on drinking spree that last for days - he's a very flawed character. He does come up with a cunning solution in the end, which resolves the problem in Earth's favour - but the exact means involves pulling a con on the Lutherians that does them serious economic damage and further sours the relationship between Luther and Earth. Dawson's unscrupulous bosses are impressed, but Dawson hates himself for it. Dawson's second assignment is to a primitive planet where the local population have somehow discovered matter transmission - despite the fact that these people still only have Stone Age technology. Any race that acquires matter transmission technology would have a massive advantage over the others. The Lutherians already have a group there trying to figure out how it works, and Dawson is put in charge of an expedition to beat them to it. The resolution to this problem involves another con, which further degrades relations between the two empires. In the third adventure, Luther is assailed by a pandemic which is putting large numbers of Lutherians in hospital and crippling the economy. The Lutherians have no treatment for the disease, which is new to them, and Dawson is sent to their homeworld to co-ordinate relief efforts and take charge of a team of doctors trying to find effective treatments. Dawson is suspicious of his own bosses in this case, since the Commission delivering charitable aid to alien races seems out of character, and his suspicion is deepened when he finds that the group that he's taken charge of has been told to wait for his arrival before they start doing any real work. Dawson is able to organise food relief, and get the doctors working on a cure, but naturally it turns out that any real relief that the Commission is willing to supply will come with strings attached. This time Dawson has to outsmart his own bosses. The fourth and final story has Dawson sent to liase with the Lutherians when they come under military attack from another alien race. His instructions are to observe and report back, but not to interfere, which conflicts with his basic nature. The aliens who are attacking the Lutherians are winning every battle, although they don't have any obvious advantage. Dawson has to persuade the honourable Lutherians to use illegal methods to extract information from enemy prisoners in order to discover what's behind this success before the Lutherians are overrun. In the end, it takes a devious mind to overcome this problem. Overall, this is an entertaining enough read, but not a classic. Although the author was British, he Americanised the text - for instance, Dawson is said to have attended college, where a Brit would say university, and he goes on vacation instead of holiday. Some of his dialogue almost sounds like a B movie detective. I assume the author did this to make the original short stories easier to sell to American science fiction magazines, but I found it slightly annoying. The hero himself is an odd character, a sort of junior James Bond who drinks heavily and sleeps around. But he does at least have some depth - he's got what you could call a criminal mind, he's really good at conning people, but he also hates using unethical methods. In the end, this is the story of a basically decent person who is constantly forced to engage in realpolitic and dirty tricks in a futuristic cold war. A fun read once, but I don't think I'll bother to read it again. One to put in the pile for resale. 6/10