Science Fiction Book Review: Ace Double F-117: The Door Through Space by Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Rendezvous on a Lost World by A Bertram Chandler

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I'm still going through my large collection of Ace Doubles, the long-running series of science fiction paperbacks that was published from the early 50s to the early 70s. Each volume consisted of two books printed back to back – double the fun! Sometimes it helps me to appreciate a story if I know something about the author. But just occasionally, knowing something about the author can get in the way. The Door Through Space by Marion Zimmer Bradley This is a writer with whom I'm not very familiar – I may have read one of her books when I was a teenager, but I'm not completely sure. I do know that she was very popular during her lifetime, but since she died a few years ago, some allegations have been made about her which have seriously crippled her reputation. I won't go into specifics here, but I'll just say that after she died, her children went public to say that she had done some really bad stuff. I mean really bad. So it was with some trepidation that I started reading this story, wondering if I could set aside what I'd heard about the writer and just appreciate the story on its own merits. The action in this story takes place on the planet Wolf, which is a colony of the Terran Empire. Wolf is a slowly dying planet, with dried up seas, orbiting a red star. It's an impoverished, technologically backward world, inhabited by a mixture of humans, half-humans and non-humans. The Empire has had outposts on Wolf for a long time, but but doesn't have a lot of direct power outside the trading settlements that it has established. The political landscape of Wolf mostly seems to consist of isolated city states, known as “dry-towns”, run by what appears to be an inbred and decadent native aristocracy. The protagonist is Race Cargill, a Terran intelligence officer. He's lived on Wolf for all his adult life, and is steeped in the peculiar local culture, which has an extremely rigid code of honour and manners, where addressing someone the wrong way can potentially get you killed, and where blood feud takes precedence over everything. Cargill had been a secret agent, with the ability to blend in and pass for a native, but six years before the beginning of the story his secret agent career was violently terminated when a fight with a colleague left both of them heavily scarred. Cargill's colleague, Rakhal Sensar had fallen out of sympathy with the Terran Empire and disappeared following the fight, becoming part of Wolf society and taking Cargill's sister, Juli, with him. For six years, Cargill has been doing a desk job and is about to leave Wolf to seek new opportunities. But then his sister Juli reappears. It seems that Rakhal has left Juli, taking their young daughter with him. Juli needs Cargill to track down Rakhal and get Juli's daughter back, but she doesn't want Cargill to kill him. There's also a possibility that Rakhal is on the trail of the secret of matter transportation, which the Empire would pay a lot for. Cargill agrees to go after Rakhal and the girl, and agrees to try to bring him back alive – despite the fact that the two of them are in a state of blood feud. Cargill disguises himself as a native and goes in search of Rakhal, using his secret agent skills for the first time in six years. The trail takes him from one town to another, brings him into contact with an aristocratic family who are involved in plotting against the Terran Empire, brings him into violent contact with some of the natives and even gets him tortured at one point. Rakhal may or may not be involved with a religious cult that's involved in both drugs and subversive activities. And the trail to Rakhal brings Cargill face to face with a mysterious and threatening alien nicknamed the Toymaker. This short novel was published in 1961, and I understand it was Bradley's first published novel. In some ways it's a call back to the science fantasy of an earlier time, things like the John Carter and Flash Gordon stories. It's a competently written adventure mystery, with a hero who you're not necessarily supposed to find particularly likeable and a set of flawed supporting characters. The mixture of intelligent races living on Wolf wasn't adequately explained as far as I'm concerned, and I did find some aspects of Wolf society unsettling – most notably the fact that women routinely go around wearing manacles. Although the women aren't necessarily portrayed as always being weak or submissive. I found it a moderately entertaining read, but I don't think I'll go out of my way to seek out this author again. Call it 5/10. I'm not sorry I read it, but it's doubtful that I'll ever re-read it. Rendezvous on a Lost World by A Bertram Chandler For me, this was definitely the better story out of the two. Chandler is an author who I've started getting into over the last few years, and so far I've enjoyed everything of his that I've read. A Bertram Chandler was born British, but eventually moved to Australia and became a citizen of that country. He was a fairly prolific science fiction writer, but writing was his secondary profession. He was a merchant seaman by trade and eventually worked his way up to being the captain of a coastal steamer in Australia. Knowing a bit about the author's background helps me to appreciate his stories, because his characters tend to be the Space Age equivalent of today's sailors – crewmen on board spaceships that are organised on naval lines, whether civilian or military. This story is no exception. The story is set centuries in the future, and forms part of Chandler's popular “Rim Worlds” series. The background is that faster than light space travel has been achieved and the human race has spread through a significant part of the galaxy and established colonies, most of which are under the authority of the Federation, a political entity that centres around Earth. The Rim Worlds are a region of the Federation out towards the edge of the galaxy, more recently settled than the worlds closer to the Earth and not as economically developed. Things also tend to be organised less formally in the Rim Worlds, and the area tends to attract two types of people – fortune seekers and people who are running away from something. It's a fairly typical frontier situation - people drift out to the Rim Worlds to make new lives for themselves. Four such drifters are Alan Kemp and his friends and colleagues Jim Larsen, Dudley Hill and George (the narrator of the story, no family name given). They're all officers on board a commercial starship that operates on a regular route among the Rim Worlds. They're all immigrants to the Rim Worlds and moved out there for reasons of their own, having previously worked as space crewmen for the better-funded shipping lines further towards the core. In Alan's case he moved to the Rim Worlds for the love of a woman – his wife Veronica who moved out to the Rim to escape a bad romantic situation. Veronica never appears in the story, but it's Alan's love for her that drives the action along. Temporarily stranded on a planet that their ship has made a delivery to, due to a dockworkers' strike, the crew are spending their free time drinking, and Alan is getting increasingly depressed about the enforced separation from his wife. He's not too happy about his job as First Officer either, and dreams of buying his own ship. Impulsively he buys a lottery ticket and is shocked when he wins a large amount of money. A further stroke of apparent luck comes when a ship of an obsolete type known as a gaussjammer comes on to the market. With his lottery winnings, Alan is just about able to buy the ship and refit it, and recruits his friends to join him as the crew. His idea is to set up as an independent freight operator and install his wife on the ship as catering officer so they never have to be separated again. A further stroke of apparent luck is that Jim, the crew's engineer, has experience working on gaussjammers, in spite of the fact that they've been out of service for a long time. It's implied that Jim is a lot older than he claims to be – the shipping companies on the Rim are usually short of experienced officers and don't ask too many questions of the people who work for them. With Dudley as First Mate and George as Purser, they take off on the “Lucky Lady” with a cargo bound for Alan and Veronica's home world. And that's as far as their luck lasts. One reason gaussjammers became obsolete is that they're vulnerable to a natural phenomenon called “magnetic storms”. Magnetic storms are supposed to become rarer out towards the Rim, but they run into one almost immediately after takeoff. The storm leaves the nuclear pile at the heart of the ship's main drive crippled, and the ship itself stranded in an unknown region of space, lost with no navigation references. Limping along on emergency power, they eventually find a habitable planet with signs of industry, but no sign of people. The crew find themselves in the hands of an artificial intelligence that calls itself “Central Control”, which had fled to this unknown system during a conflict between humans and machines on a colony planet centuries earlier. It's built a self-sufficient machine civilisation around itself, but it still sees its main purpose in life as being to serve humans – and Alan and his crew are the first humans it's seen in centuries. Central Control has no malicious intent, but it's not willing to help the crew repair the ship and return to their own part of the galaxy. Instead, it sets them up in quarters resembling a luxurious hotel, with a quartet of very attractive female androids to serve them – in every way. Despite being machines, the androids are both self-aware and very feminine, and the crew start to become very attached to them – except for Alan, who resents the fact that one of the androids is built to resemble his wife, and who is still very keen to get home. The “girls” turn out to be instrumental in their eventual escape though, and the crew take off in a newly-repaired ship, but still with no clue where they are. Finding their way to another habitable planet, the crew find a feudal society run by the descendants of pirates who fled there ahead of Federation justice generations before. The local feudal lord still has his grandfather's star charts, which can help Alan and his friends find their way home – but what will Alan have to trade for them? Alan makes a decision which drives a wedge between him and the rest of the crew – can they survive, get back home and still function as a crew after what they've been through? The story is told in a simple way, almost episodic, but moves fast and maintains the reader's interest. What I really liked is that the characters feel like real people – they're well-described and have the normal range of strengths and weaknesses. They're basically decent guys, but sometimes morally ambiguous and prone to make bad decisions when they're in the grip of strong emotion – as we all are. This is only the second Rim Worlds story that I've read, but the author gives enough detail so I could understand the environment that these people live in, and he's good at hinting at enough past history so that it feels like a real, lived-in world. Very enjoyable, and there's a fair chance that I'll read it again sometime. 8/10.