THE BLACK STAR PASSES

Boy, science fiction sure was different in1930. 

After reading (and loving)  ASTOUNDING (2018) by Alec Nevala-Lee (see my review elsewhere on this blog), I decided to sample some early science fiction by the legendary John W. Campbell Jr., who started his career as an sf writer before becoming the genre shaping editor of ASTOUNDING/ANALOG.

 THE BLACK STAR PASSES is a collection of three novellas all linked by a recurring cast of characters, a team of scientists so brilliant that it's like having the Fantastic Four comprised entirely of Reeds. These men aren't just smart, they're super-smart, not just the smartest guys in the room but the smartest guys on the whole damn planet (and perhaps in space itself). These men are so smart that they have no need of such things as a personality, or any of the various character traits that make us human and they certainly have no need of women as there are absolutely no female characters (human or alien) in the book. Thinking on a grand enough scale to save the solar system is strictly man's work in these tales. 

The first entry, PIRACY PREFERRED, prefigures the type of scientific menace that Doc Savage would later clash with in his pulp adventures. Here, a master criminal known as The Pirate, is robbing trans-continental airplanes in mid-air using an ingenious mixture of knock-out gas and invisibility. He's not really a bad guy. It turns out that he's simply schizophrenic, a condition which is soon cured (shades of Doc's Crime College!) and once cured, the reformed villain joins his former foes for their next adventure. 

SOLARITE is the name of the spaceship that these four men build in an incredibly short period of time and launch on a voyage to Venus. Once there, they find the planet divided by a civil war between the northern and southern hemispheres. The peaceful northerners are about to be decimated by their vicious (and technologically superior) southern foes but the intrepid earth men step in and save the day, especially after learning that the Kaxorians have picked Earth as their next target. Campbell refers to the natives of Venus as "Venerians" rather than "Venusians" (not that it really matters, I suppose since we all know there's no life by any name on the planet). He also refers to the earth men as "Terrestrians" rather than "Terrans". 

All of this simply sets the stage for the grandiose final entry, the titular BLACK STAR PASSES in which Earth and Venus join forces for an interstellar war against invaders from a dying solar system whose sun has gone black (why it didn't become a black hole is beyond me but I suspect that such a concept might have been unknown in 1930). Our four super scientists take center stage for the first part of the yarn, helping to fend off the first invasion and then exploring the downed alien vessels for a means to victory in round two. 

But all characters, human and alien, disappear for said round as Campbell orchestrates an immense battle in outer space that prefigures George Lucas's STAR WARS by almost fifty years. It's a dazzling, action packed piece of space opera but it's also strangely sterile and uninvolving due to the absence of any characters. It's all super science, with gigantic carrier vessels launching smaller, faster one man fighter vehicles. Some pilots use their fighters as dive bombers, pointing them at the immense alien vessels and then hitting the ejector seat button. They don't wear parachutes because such devices would be useless in the vacuum of space, Instead, the ejected pilots merely float helplessly in space hoping that a larger rescue ship will pick them up before their air tanks run out. Or not. 

Throughout all three stories I kept imagining what this material would have looked like if it had been illustrated by Jack Kirby at the height of his career. Picture any one of the many double page spreads of fantastic machinery that The King excelled at drawing and you have some sense of what the imagery of BLACK STAR is like.

Pure pulp on every page, THE BLACK STAR PASSES is a rock-'em, sock-'em early science fiction adventure that I'm sure was a page-turner of a thriller for the far less sophisticated reading audiences of 1930. Reading it today, it still has the ability to amaze and excite despite its shortcomings.

 Worth reading for genre aficionados or anyone interested in early, pre-Golden Age science fiction.