The sixth of Captain W. E. Johns's 'Interplanetary Adventures' is the last one that I read as a child. These first six novels in the series were published by Piccolo in the UK in the early eighties and I'd picked them up gradually on market stalls or at charity shops and read them more than once, but I'd foolishly assumed that they constituted the entire series and, with the war of rays with Ardilla apparently won at the end of it, it seemed like a natural place to end.

Only much later, after I re-read the first one, 'Kings of Space' for my classic children's genre novel project, did I realise there were another four that Piccolo never reprinted. I'll start into those new-to-me books in February, with 'To Worlds Unknown' but for now, I'll catch up with my childhood self by re-reading 'The Death Rays of Ardilla'.

If you recall from 'The Edge of Beyond' last month, Ardilla is one of the most dangerous planets in the universe, because its people have mastered the use of cosmic rays and have been using them against the universe at large. Mostly that's taken the form of persuading potential visitors to not visit, which seems fair enough, but their rays are so powerful and widespread that they're starting to affect interstellar travel and that's a bigger problem that needs to be solved, though it's open as to who might take on the challenge of solving it.

We do get to that problem in this book but, for the longest time, we find ourselves back on a tour of new planetoids. At least there's a reason this time. When Vargo and his friend Multavo visit the Professor in Scotland, ostensibly so the former can stock up on tea, it's really because the Minoans have lost a ship on the planet Petroconda, with a friend of Vargo's on board, named Quantos, and they're going to mount a rescue mission. Do their Earth friends want to come along? Well, take a wild stab in the dark.

Before they leave, there's an odd scene with a kid called Donald McDonald from Altnahoish that I have to see in a new light, now I know that there are four more books. He's walked over the hills to see a flying saucer and he does, because Vargo's ship, the 'Tavona', is there in front of his eyes. As a kid, I probably thought that the Professor successfully diffuses the situation by pointing out that nobody would believe him if he told anybody what he saw, so there's no point opening his mouth. I see it a little differently now, because he also promises the boy that, maybe, just maybe, he'll take him on a trip to the Moon later. Now I want to know if he does, in book seven.

Anyway, off they go to Petroconda, via the usual places. Mars is coming along nicely, though I have to wonder that, given all these highly advanced civilisations the Minoans keep on introducing our heroes to, why nobody chose to solve the Martian problem before he did. Mino is there, I guess, as we arrive and leave again in a single paragraph. However, they spend time on Petroconda, the first of a few new worlds we visit this time out. As always, Johns has fun conjuring up alien landscapes and civilisations that are completely different from each other but somehow easy to compare to our own pale blue dot.

Petroconda is a flat world, covered in grass that remains uniform even when our explorers walk in it. The blades simply return to their original place. There's no wind and nothing ever happens. So, why are there three Minoan corpses, apparently battered to death? Well, they figure it out soon enough when the weather changes. They were killed by hail, of all things, and Quantos lost in the fog that follows it, though he is at least found and rescued without any worries. This must be the quickest rescue in the history of science fiction. It's almost like it isn't the point of the book.

My least favourite part of the series was the rapid tour of the planetoids in our own solar system that happened in 'Now to the Stars' because there were so many stops that Johns couldn't spend much attention on any of them. Here, it's a little more leisurely and there is more of a point than only the Professor's abiding eagerness to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. Yes, this is getting rather episodic. That point is to find Rolto, who apparently sped off towards the area of space most affected by the rays of Ardilla, and he could be on any one of them.

Some of the planets aren't visited, merely talked about, like Dacoona, where the only way to die is accidentally. Also, the people work for eight months, 24/7, and then sleep for four. Some of them are visited but have no names, at least until the Professor decides to invent some. There's a giant ant world, about which you won't be surprised about anything, and a waterworld he calls Aquania that has immense tides. On a third, they're attacked by birds, presumably the dominant species.

The most interesting of them is the one they spend longest on, which is Selinda. Barron tells them all about it in one chapter, then they spend two more exploring it. Civilisation there is extinct now but it left behind art of legendary beauty. I won't spoil everything that our intrepid explorers find there, but the bottom line is a message that Johns can outline simply. The people of Selinda knew art so well that they mastered it, but they knew nothing of science and that was their downfall. It would seem that this is yet another example of Johns highlighting the need for balance.

Most of the planets in this series are how they are because society has found a particular balance. With a few, the balance has tipped to something demonstratively negative, at least from our very human perspective, but there's always a warning floating over the most positive planets as well. Johns wonders what they lost by solving the greatest problems that we still have at our primitive stage of advancement and deem worth keeping regardless?

Eventually we get to the ultimate point of the series, which is spoken by Prof. Brane but clearly as an avatar for the author himself. "One day," he tells Vargo, "when I write a book on my travels, it will shake the people of Earth to know what can happen to them. It should also make them well-satisfied with what they have, and perhaps restrain from killing each other in wars." Well, that's optimistic, to say the least, and I couldn't fail to recall the time when the Professor submitted his findings about the Moon, having actually been there to see it in person, and the scholarly journal rejected him as having written complete nonsense. Maybe Johns should have put "true story" on this series and seen if it ended all war on our planet.

Eventually he gets round to addressing the Ardilla problem, but does so with a ridiculously simple solution that just doesn't ring true, given all the buildup the problem has been given. There are a few of those here, including a section where the Minoans realise that they can just outrun the ray being aimed at them, even though that makes no sense whatsoever. How is Ardilla jeopardising a whole region of the universe, causing much danger to interstellar travel when spaceships can just outrun their rays? I imagine a boat trying to outrun the beam from a lighthouse and thus found a complete lack of acknowledgement of these ridiculous solutions.

But hey, there's fun to be found here in what is mostly a superior retread of 'Now to the Stars' and I'm into entirely new territory next month. See you then so we can travel 'To Worlds Unknown'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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