This is the fifth book in Captain W. E. Johns's 'Interplanetary Adventures' starring Prof. Brane, Rex and Tiger Clinton and the rest and he seems to realise that he's been painted into a corner. 'Kings of Space' came out in 1954 and the series progressed at the rate of a book a year, so it's now 1958 and a lot had changed in the fields of astronomy and space science in that short span. What Johns was setting up in our solar system, on Venus, Mars and the planetoids beyond them, was starting to seem rather old-fashioned, so it was clearly time to travel a lot further, where science wasn't as likely to render his stories obsolete.

He started that in 'To Outer Space', but that was mostly to wrap up some plot strands from 'Now to the Stars'. He truly embraced the idea in 'The Edge of Beyond', having the gang stop briefly at the usual places, like Mars, Mino and Arcadia so we can catch up with long-running subplots there, but quickly move far beyond them. He introduces entire regions of space, numbered by the Minoans, that are so far away that travel to them takes a long time, even in a Remote Survey Fleet ship that can move at incredible speed.

In fact, it takes so long that Minoans tend to go into a sort of self-induced hypersleep in order to pass the time. Rex finds himself reading, talking and sleeping, as the only three options available to him. That boggled my mind. Sure, this is 1958 but did he not take a game with him? Even a pack of cards and a copy of Hoyle's Rules of Games would have kept him busy for the whole series. And no writing? Prof. Brane actually delays this trip so he can finish writing up his notes. He could have done that in all the downtime on these long voyages. It would have been a godsend for him!

Talking of Rex, he's almost becoming the lead of the series. Initially, it was Prof. Brane's, because he's the one who built a spaceship in rural Scotland and set out to investigate the solar system. In short shrift, it became Tiger's, because he's the natural action hero of the bunch. Now, if we could consider leads in stories that are far more about ideas than people, it's Rex, because he's the one thinking about stuff. This time out, he's become a stranger in his own strange land, having done so much and gone so far that the Earth seems like little more than home base now.

Really though, it's the ideas that are taking over. Like 'Now to the Stars', this mostly exists so that Johns has a platform to extrapolate society and guess at what might work and what might not. It's mostly focused this time, so rather than visiting a dozen planetoids, each with its own marvels and dangers, there are primarily two planets in scope, one negative and one positive. I'd choose words like dystopian and utopian, because it certainly feels like that, but it's not strictly true for reasons I'll get to. In many ways, this is Johns looking at a utopia and finding flaws in it.

The negative planet is Ardilla, located in the Second Region, which Prof. Brane unwisely insists on visiting even though the trip was originally suggested by Rolto, so must be a trap, and every other Minoan tries to change his mind. "You are the most inquisitive man I know," suggests Vargo, with a sigh because he knows he'll go along with him anyway. He thinks that Ardilla is one of the most dangerous places in the universe, talking up its dangers beyond imagination, especially a mastery of rays.

Given that book six is called 'The Death Rays of Ardilla', we can be relatively sure that we will find out more about them then but, for now, they can't even get close. Ardilla uses rays as protection, with weird effects. Even at a serious distance from the planet, these invisible rays make them all as one and not themselves. If it wasn't for the preparation of the Minoans, coating themselves in a sort of anti-ray sunblock, they'd all be lost and the series would be over right there. So they get away but clearly will be back for more next time out.

After that disaster, they shift to the positive planet, which is Terramagna, in the Third Region, the most advanced civilisation that the Minoans are currently aware of. A friend of Vargo's, Multavo, lives there, having gone there to be cured of a mental sickness. He liked it so much that he chose to stay, get married and become an engineer-doctor. And it's easy to see why, given how happy the place is. Not only have they conquered pesky things like illness and gravity, they've found a way to remove "evil influences" from the brains of their people. It's all entirely voluntary and it's got rid of crime.

What was notable to me was how the danger of writing this sort of fiction became very clear. Just as Johns sets planets like Terramagna up as being so advanced that we can't imagine them at our current state of evolution, he then takes us there so we can see what being that advanced means. And, while these people have apparently solved all the common ailments of our world, none of it's remotely unimaginable. It's all exactly the same as our world but with things fixed. Nothing seems at all alien, as if they've moved beyond us.

I'm in my second half century, so I grew up before mobile phones, the internet and public smoking bans. My grandparents were the first to have televisions and movies with sound. Their parents saw the introduction of home electricity and the rise of international aviation. Technology has a habit of changing everything. I don't know what my grandkids's grandkids will be doing, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be anything I recognise. Sure, a bunch of things that suck now are going to be a lot better then (maybe) but what counts for normal behaviour is going to be very different.

Yet here, on Terramagna, which has seen a million years of advancement, everything looks much like our world, just cleaner and better and without the problems we have. There are still markets, for a start, and housewives still go shopping. They get there in cars too, even if they don't have to drive them because they're autonomous. Those cars even travel on roads, even if they can do so at great speed. What that boils down to is that Johns seems to think that we've reached a pinnacle of design for society and all improvement is merely incremental from here. And, of course, that's the definition of dated.

I'm still enjoying the series, but less as the set of adventures I liked as a kid and more as a glimpse into the mindset of someone tackling science fiction a few decades before I was born. To me, this is all about the fears of someone who fought in World War II and is living through the atomic age, a combination of optimism that we can get past it and a pessimism that maybe we won't, along with the limits that the society of the time imposed on what he could imagine. After all, Johns wasn't a science fiction writer. He was known for his war stories starring Biggles and others, with this series an anomaly in his output. He was merely dabbling in a genre that intrigued him and the results of that are fascinating to me. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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