Last time out, in 'To Worlds Unknown', our intrepid space explorers visited a planet called Lila that I found particularly fascinating. After all, it seems to have been populated by human beings back in Biblical times to escape the Great Flood. It was a neat way for Johns to explain away a lost tribe of Israel and set up quite a mission of discovery for our heroes. They've already learned plenty that a large number of people would love to hear about. They've made first contact with aliens, travelled the solar system, stopped at numerous planets and planetoids within it, even explored the further reaches of space, three more regions of it as numbered by the Minoans. Here, they could fill us in an aspect of our own history. It carried serious promise!

However, they promptly left again, which seemed like an odd decision at the time, but I was hoping they'd return in the next volume, this one, which is the eighth in the series. Well, no such luck. The only mention of Lila in this entire book is to note that Rolto, a perpetual thorn in the sides of our protagonists, which is why he sent them there to begin with, has been stripped of his command. It seems that the Minoans now know what trouble he got up to on Lila and that's it for his exploring for a while. There are only two books left in the series. Maybe he's done for good.

Instead of returning to Lila, this one puts a better structure around Prof. Brane's habit of visiting countless worlds in quick succession than his tour of the asteroids in 'Now to the Stars'. It all stems from more philosophy. In all his explorations, he hasn't yet found another planet that we could use as a backup should everything go completely pear shaped on Earth. In fact, he's rather depressed about that conclusion. But hey, there's a full moon, so Vargo is due and off we go to look for one to satisfy his curiosity.

And, of course, we don't find one, even though we'd already found one in Lila. What better choice for a backup planet for Earth than one that's already been used as a backup planet for Earth? It's not rocket science, as they say, but Lila appears to be off the agenda, so they try a bunch of others including some all the way into the Fifth Region. How many regions are there in the Minoan's list? With two books left, maybe that means a Sixth and Seventh Region, which must be so far from us that it would take serious hibernation to get there. Maybe they're still on their way back from the Eighth Region to report in for an eleventh book, but I don't know they'll tell given that Captain W. E. Johns died in 1968.

Some of are quite fun in a pulp sci-fi vein. There's a cave of marble on X 1001, a planet populated by snakes, where these explorers discover natural batteries in serial that shock them. It's the sort of place that teachers in the dim and distant future when travel is instantaneous might take the kids in their class for a science lesson. Grab that V shaped growth over there, Timothy. Now, class, why did Timothy just get hurled across the cave? There's another planet populated by troglodytes and elephants with many trunks. That's cool. There's even a planet whose trees exude nitrous oxide, a substance better known as laughing gas. That's cool and weirdly dangerous!

The planet they spend most time on is the one that comes closest to satisfying Prof. Brane's wish list. It doesn't have a name, because that's a thing in this book for some reason, even though they had a habit of naming everything in the seven that preceded it. However, it's a lush and enticing world, a world of giants. Everything is massive: the plants, the animals, even the people. And everything's also peaceful, blissfully happy and utterly worry free. The catch, of course, is that it wouldn't stay that way if Prof. Brane evacuated any sizeable chunk of humanity there, should the need arise. He simply wouldn't do that to the native population.

Eventually, they reach a planet that has a name, which is Flentos, easiest described as a planet of the apes, sans Statue of Liberty. By that point, the quest has ceased to be particularly interesting and I found it more useful to note some of the bizarre attitudes that date the book considerably. I have to note that it was released in 1961, the year that Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to travel into outer space, other than Prof. Brane, Tiger Clinton, his son Rex and his friend Toby, of course, who had been doing that since 'Kings of Space' in 1954. That means that it's only sixty-four years old, which isn't ancient, and that makes it younger than many of the kids genre classics I've been reading of late.

One problem has to do with food, something you might expect a spacefaring civilisation like Mino to have solved long ago, even ignoring their interaction with even more advanced planets such as Terramagna. Of course, they concentrate their food so it doesn't take up a huge amount of room on a potentially very long spaceflight. However, it has no flavour and it can't be heated up, given that, get this, you can't cook on a spaceship. Now, I can understand why Gagarin couldn't cook on Vostok 1 but there was a forced air convection oven on the Space Shuttle and they retired that in 2011, almost fifteen years ago. The Minoans couldn't get that far?

Another problem has to do with sexism. I find it frankly hilarious that Johns can throw out planets like confetti to use as the means to highlight some sort of parallel back on Earth and perhaps set up some social commentary, but those advanced Minoans have a rule forbidding women to make interplanetary trips? Rex's interplanetary girlfriend Morino would love to make a trip to Earth to see what it's like, but nah, that's not allowed without a special waiver. This hearkens back to the times when folk honestly believed women shouldn't ride on steam trains because their uteruses would fly out of their bodies if they reached a speed of fifty miles per hour.

The only problem somewhat explainable is that there's no mention of the Goldilocks Zone here in a book that's screaming out for it. If you aren't aware, the Goldilocks Zone is a range of distances from a star in which a planet could maintain water, a requirement for humans to survive. In other words, it's not too close and not too far but just right. Now, I didn't expect to see the term used in 1961 because it wasn't coined until the seventies, but the concept was floated as early as 1913 and the term "habitable zone" had been popularised in 1959 by American astrophysicist Su-Shu Huang. That would have been maybe a year before Johns wrote this book and, given his obvious interest in the concept, I find it strange that he didn't pick up on it during his research.

Focusing on the negatives doesn't exactly recommend this book, but it's enjoyable enough. I'd call it a better take on 'Now to the Stars' in most ways, but that doesn't nudge it even close to the best books in the series. I honestly think he was writing about a subject that interested him but maybe got away from him over seven books (or maybe four or five) and he'd run out of substantial things to say. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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