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Kings of Space
Timothy "Tiger" Clinton #1
by Captain W. E. Johns
Macmillian, 176pp
Published: January 1954

William Earl Johns has probably never been particularly well known in the United States, but there was certainly a time when every schoolboy in the United Kingdom knew his name, albeit as Captain W. E. Johns, prolific author. After Enid Blyton, he's been fairly called "the most prolific and popular children's writer of his time", turning out over a hundred books about his principal character alone, James Bigglesworth, commonly known as Biggles.

'Kings of Space' isn't one of those as it begins an entirely different science fiction series, featuring the interplanetary adventures of a memorable quartet. The ostensible lead is a retired RAF Group Captain called Timothy Clinton, whom everyone calls Tiger, but the true architect of everything we read about is Prof. Lucius Brane, a reclusive scientist who has invented and built a spaceship of his own. Joining them on their many adventures are Tiger's plucky young son Rex and Brane's butler, Judkins, who's as useful and unflappable as you'd expect a British butler to be.

I devoured the first six books as a child, once I'd stumbled on science fiction at the age of ten via the BBC's 1981 mini-series adaptation of John Wyndham's 'The Day of the Triffids'. Given how far they explore in the hundred and fifty pages of this initial volume, I'm eager to dive back into the others, which I probably haven't read in almost forty years. What I was blissfully unaware of back then was that there are four further books, bringing the series to ten, so I'll need to track those down first.

I should highlight what years these books spanned. 'Kings of Space' was published in 1954, so three years ahead of Sputnik 1. In terms of space exploration, that's the dark ages and this has as much in common with Burroughs as it does Heinlein. That allows Johns to spend the first four chapters in an overtly talky science teacher mode, as Prof. Brane explains what's possible. In its way, the science is well-thought-out and admirably multi-disciplinarian, but it's also very much of its time. It's trivial to poke holes in it given what we've learned since then.

However, the final book, 'The Man Who Vanished into Space', saw print in 1963, so not merely after Sputnik 1 took us beyond the atmosphere but after the Russians had sent dogs and, later, humans into space and the Americans followed suit. That was two years after President Kennedy had called on the country to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. While kids went space mad, the reality was that this sort of interplanetary adventure was already in danger of becoming rendered very much obsolete. We were about to learn how ludicrous much of it was.

For a start, the sheer number of people involved in getting a single human being into space was an impressively large one, but here it's all down to one man, Prof. Brane, who's built his Spacemaster in isolation at his remote Scottish hideaway. It doesn't use rockets, because of the fuel problem, so he's figured out a way to harness cosmic rays, so rendering his ship a domestic flying saucer, but its hull is also welded into place and yet can simply shrug off particles moving through space. Outside of a couple of suspicious interlopers who show up late in the book, only four people even know that this ship exists. On Earth, that is.

And they soon find their way off it. The massive progress that the early space race generated may have seemed impressive at the time, but after the Clintons stumble upon Brane's space operation in chapter one, conveniently as he's doing his final unmanned test flight, they progress way faster. They escape the atmosphere in chapter five and fly round the moon only two chapters later. With a growing confidence, they land on the moon in chapter nine, skip over to Venus in chapter ten, then tackle Phobos in chapter twelve before a landing on Mars in chapter thirteen. That's pretty quick work, I think!

As palpably out of date as it already was when I read this for the first time in the early eighties, it's also a heck of a lot of fun. Returning to it many decades later, I see things I didn't back then, such as how Prof. Brane is clearly neurodivergent, a word that wasn't even coined until 1998. I'm sure that I identified with Rex Clinton when I was a kid, maybe imagining myself growing up to be Tiger. Now, I would happily identify with Prof. Brane instead, at least on that neurodivergent front. I adore that he's quintessentially untidy and yet still knows where everything is.

The elder me also can't fail to notice Prof. Brane's anti-war sentiment that's clearly rooted in then relatively new fears about atomic energy and the growing intensity of the Cold War. He's clearly a genius and has a huge amount of optimism in how he operates, which would truly scare anyone who works in risk assessment or workplace safety. However, he's pessimistic about the inevitability that every scientific advancement will be co-opted by the military and turned into a weapon. He has no intention of that happening with the Spacemaster, so he's willing to destroy it rather than let it fall into someone else's hands.

The other detail that's very much of its time is the fact that UFOs seem to be visiting us and there's surely a reason for that. Johns doesn't quite answer that question in this book, but he sets us up to believe what it is and then explores it in future volumes of the series. Suffice it to say that what life exists on the moon isn't human—it's giant worms, dragonflies, spiders and, well, dinosaurs. There's quite the population of glyptodons on the dark side, it seems. Venus is populated too, but it's more likely that the flying saucers are coming from Mars, which is struggling. They find only death when they land on Phobos and the people of Mars aren't far away from that fate.

As you might imagine, while this works well as a series opener, it's not just open for a sequel, there must have been no doubt at the time that there would be a follow up. Nobody would have had any shock when Johns published 'Return to Mars', not at its existence, its title or any other detail. Now I've revisited the series, I need to follow up with that one next month, which gives me five more to track down the final four volumes, perhaps only ever published in hardback. Wish me luck! ~~ Hal C F Astell

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

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