Having worked through all ten books in Captain W. E. Johns's 'Interplanetary Adventures', the first six of which I read in paperback as a kid, I thought I'd dive into a contemporary series, this one by an American author, Isaac Asimov.

In fact, this first book slightly predates 'Kings of Space', having seen release in 1952, under the title of 'David Starr, Space Ranger' and the pseudonym of Paul French. Like the Johns books, I read all six books in paperback as a kid, but that was the entire series this time, because New English Library published the lot. Of course, I was reading them a few decades late, as the two series ran in parallel, the Asimovs from 1952 to 1958 and the Johns from 1954-1963. Given that I hadn't returned to either since maybe the mid-eighties, I was expecting them to be similar but the similarities vanish pretty quickly.

Certainly, both series kick off within our solar system, with the early focus of both being Mars. Asimov stayed there throughout, safe in his choice to set the series five thousand years in the future, but Johns, who had unwisely stayed contemporary, soon realised that he had to expand far to avoid being quickly proved wrong on everything. Certainly both series make a fair effort to stay scientifically accurate but, of course both fail miserably to hindsight. My NEL edition of 'Space Ranger' was published in 1973, only a couple of decades in, but Asimov felt the need to add an introduction almost apologising for getting it so horribly wrong.

Oddly, I didn't have a problem with him putting an ancient race of Martians under the surface of their planet, having transformed into telepathic creatures of pure mind and energy. No, I'm pretty sure there aren't any of those actually on Mars but this is fiction. I don't care. Much of his tech still seems believable too, the name and function of his force-blades prompting me to wonder how often George Lucas read this series in his youth. Domed cities on Mars don't seem inappropriate, given that we built them. I absolutely adore the ladder tech that our hero uses to climb down into a two-mile-deep crevasse. The forcefield table tops are cool too. I want one.

Personally, I didn't feel that any of those choices dated this novel. Asimov trumps Johns every day of the week on that front and twice on Sunday. What dated it were cultural asides that are thoroughly unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but stand out because they're already so far from our cultural norm. While David Starr is enjoying his futuristic food on his futuristic table in a futuristic restaurant, we notice that leaders of bands still have batons. That one was close to being dated when this book first hit print. Dr. Augustus Henree, senior member of the Council of Science, smokes a pipe. That was almost de rigeur in the fifties, if the movies are anything to go by, but not for long afterwards.

The one detail that Asimov probably ought to have been ashamed of is his suggestion that our ever-expanding population would get so out of control as to reach five billion by this point five thousand years in the future. We got to that point in 1987 and we're now three billion beyond it. What's more, to cater to this insane number of people, Asimov shifts farming over to Mars, farm syndicates under domes providing the majority of Earth's food because our agriculture is simply unable to cope. In reality, we're producing more food than we can eat, merely doing an awful job of distributing it. And half of our eight billions are in a pretty small circle in Asia if we plot population onto a map. There's a lot of room left on the planet for farming.

Anyway, behind all this, there's a story, and it all centres around young David Starr, who's only just becoming a member of the Council of Science as we start out. While this is science fiction, his character plays out rather like a superhero. He's an orphan like Batman, his parents killed during a pirate attack when he was only four-years-old. Knowing they were about to die, they set him adrift in space in a lifeboat rather like Superman. Dr. Henree and Hector Conroy, now Chief Counselor of the Council of Science, brought him up with one thought in mind, to make him what his father would have been, reminding us of Doc Savage.

However, like Savage, his powers are entirely natural, one early hint about radiation aside, as he drifted a little closer to the sun in that thin-hulled lifeboat than he should have done. What seem even more like superpowers come much later in the book, as he encounters the Martians and they give him an ephemeral mask that, when put on, applies a personal force shield, which is far beyond the technical capability of mankind even five-thousand years in the future. I hear that this was intended to serve as a science fiction version of 'The Lone Ranger' and that rings pretty true. It's easy to read this as a science fiction western and the mask looks very similar.

However, even if it's a science fiction western, it's fundamentally phrased as a mystery. In that futuristic restaurant in chapter one, Starr sees a man die at another table and proves unable to help. It's poison and it might be the marplums that are to blame. As we metaphorically pull back to see the bigger picture, we learn that there have been two-hundred dead over the past four months, the common factor being Mars produce. So, Starr travels to Mars to investigate, taking a menial job as farm boy on a Martian farm outside Wingrad City, under the fake name of Williams. He'll be a seeder, for the princely sum of fifty bucks a year. Damn!

Eventually he figures it out and the finalé is conducted mostly traditionally in Agatha Christie style, with all the suspects assembled in a room for the hero to talk it through and expose the villain. The only difference is that it doesn't seem to be David Starr leading this scene, it's the Space Ranger; that mask disguising his appearance and his voice. When John "Bigman" Jones, the nickname ironic because he's only five-foot-two, figures out that the two are the same, he promptly becomes his official sidekick, taking on the Tonto role. He's sharp.

The mystery is fair but the setting is evocative. The best scenes for me are the ones under the surface in the caverns the Martians carved out of the rock a million years ago, though they're also the ones that might lose a lot of readers. The action of the story is reminiscent of Robert Heinlein's earlier juveniles, especially during the checkup, when farmers leave their domes in sand-cars but Starr's is sabotaged, missing its weight-rods, prompting a fight that turns out to be to the death. However, this section is pure Asimov, unfolding almost entirely in dialogue, as Starr and the Martians politely swap information.

I remember Heinlein's juveniles pretty well from my youth, when they were amongst the first science fiction books I read. I've gone back to them too, much more recently, and will dive into them afresh for this project at some point. This series, on the other hand, clearly didn't stick well in my memory, perhaps exacerbated by my never having gone back to it. It doesn't feel as substantial and the superhero angles cheapen it further, but it's stronger than I expected it to be and I enjoyed it. I'll happily work through the rest of the series too, but, like Johns's series, it'll likely be my last time doing that. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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