Nine books into his 'Interplanetary Adventures' featuring Prof. Brane, Tiger Clinton and his son Rex and their friend Toby, it's abundantly clear that Capt. W. E. Johns was trawling out a sort of greatest hits package because it's all he had left. Here, he's like a band from the sixties who hit the charts with a vengeance back then but haven't done anything since and so find themselves performing on cruise liners to aging fans who think everything made after the Beatles went to India and grew their hair long sucks royally. I'm starting to realise why Armada chose to reprint only the first six books in the series in paperback.

So, let's see if we can find something new here that we haven't read in one of these books thus far.

Chapter one starts out at Glensalich Castle in the Highlands of Scotland, which is precisely how most of these books start. It's the home of Prof. Lucius Brane, the eccentric genius who built a spacecraft and flew it too, exploring a number of planets before it fell apart in the atmosphere after one adventure. He's an inveterate explorer, consumed by curiosity but highly pessimistic about the future of mankind should it continue down the road of warfare. I wonder if he might be pontificating to a captive audience about just that subject in the library? Why, yes he is! I'm not remotely shocked.

As he's now reliant on his Minoan friends to take him and his friends into space, it's likely that it happens to be a night with a full moon, so Vargo Lentos will arrive to inform them of another imminent adventure they can't resist taking. This time it's the planet Krona, because the folk who live there don't age. We've encountered this before, with the people of Dacoona, who are apparently immortal, only ever dying through accidents, but we never reached resolution with that strand of plot.

If memory serves, they have a sort of gland-created secretion that does the job but nobody has quite figured out how it works or how to make it available to the rest of us who would love to be immortal even if it means something icky with a gland-created secretion. Therefore, Johns, not apparently interested in revisiting Dacoona, revisits immortality instead in a more explainable way. The people of Krona don't age because they eat a native bean, also called krona. The only catch is that they have to keep eating Krona because if they come off it, they rapidly wither and die. In other words, they're immortal but their diet is inherently limited.

Before our heroes travel to Krona to investigate, we're run through some other old chestnuts.

Rolto is still around and, guess what, he's still getting into trouble, now suggesting that Mino's technology should be put to use in focusing the sun's heat on the polar icecaps of Earth so that everyone who doesn't die in the ensuing floods will be far too busy to mess around with nuclear technology and risk blowing up the Earth, thus negatively affecting everyone else who inhabits our solar system.

Morino is still around too, in her frustratingly limited role of Rex's alien girlfriend who he visits once in a full moon. In fact, her character is even more problematic here than usual, because as much as Johns talks up how backward our civilisation is compared to older and more advanced ones elsewhere in the universe, he can't grasp a future in which women actually do things.

For instance, Morino would love to visit Earth to see how her boyfriend lives in person, but she isn't allowed to fly in a spacecraft because she doesn't have a penis. Only men can fly in space! Here, her role is degraded further to the wartime girlfriend who's left behind weeping during the first reel as she worries whether her love will ever come back to her. Now, Rex is exploring space, not fighting the Jerries in the trenches, but there's danger and so Morino turns into an emotional wreck, weeping in fear at Rex's departure. It's acutely embarrassing to see such old fashioned misogyny depicted as inevitable even in an advanced civilisation.

Then again, assumptions abound here that are rooted in Johns's understanding of his present, which was just over sixty years ago, in 1962. Once the 'Tavona' arrives on Krona, our explorers are quickly able to distinguish the women from the men as the former have "hair down to their waists". Apparently, Johns was happy to have the Minoan men wear kilts because that's manly but only women can have long hair. That's pretty selective trawling from history. They find that aliens have been visiting Krona in spaceships, which means only one thing to Tiger: they need a slave labour force. After all, "men who can build space ships could hardly be cannibals". Oh, and the ships they use to carry off a slave labour force can only be crewed by "seven or eight men".

If we make it past a barrage of assumptions fuelled by what seems to our highly advanced 21st century civilisation to be archaic, then we can get down to business. The Kronians aren't having a great time of it. Not only are they being raided by aliens but threatened by dragons, wingless ones but still. They need their krona beans to stay alive but the raiders are destroying the crop and they can't get past the dragons to obtain more from a neighbouring village. So our heroes acknowledge they're in 'Seven Samurai' territory and take action. They go home for bombs, tiny ones because they're advanced, to wipe out the dragons, and train the locals to shoot bows and arrows at the raiders when they return.

In case this wasn't enough for an interplanetary adventure, they're diverted to another planet for another rescue. This time, it's called Barida and a couple of Minoan ships haven't returned from there, prompting the investigation. You will, no doubt, be shocked to find that the bombs they picked up for Krona turn out to save the day on Barida too. However, just as the professor created new problems when he tackled the mosquito problem on Mars, they also create a new problem on each of Krona and Barida. And, of course, we don't see how that pans out because the book's done.

I should also mention that we don't go back to Lila, so that plot strand is presumably dead, not having been explored much at all, even by explorers like Prof. Brane with insatiable curiosity. I therefore doubt we'll ever see how Krona and Barida end up, given that there's only one book left in the series. At this point, I'm OK with that, but I do want to see resolution to more overt plot strands. How does Mars end up? How do Rex and Morino move forward? Do we get a more public first contact between Earth and Mino? Inquiring minds want to know. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Captain W.E. Johns click here