Disposable Lit Reviews

Ace Books, 1928/1962
190 pp.
No ISBN
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I feel bad that I can’t give this novel a good review, because it’s kind of like looking at your grandparents’ wedding pictures and discovering that your grandmother wasm’t that great a catch, even when she was young and energetic.¹ This book started out as two separate long stories in Amazing Stories in 1928, and was apparently well-received — so much so that a comics syndicate bigwig approached Phil Nowlan about adapting the storyline to a daily comic strip. Except that protagonist’s name has got to go. “Anthony Rogers” — it just doesn’t sing. How about “Buck”? And so Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was born, and through its various permutations it was one of the formative influences on the public perception of science fiction (probably right behind Flash Gordon).

But damn, Grandma was pretty damned ugly.

Anthony Rogers is a twenty-eight year-old American whose job involves exploring for “radioactive gases” in rural America. One fateful day, he stumbles into a cave in Pennsylvania right before a tremor closes off the mouth of the cave, and the mysterious gases knock him out — and keep him in suspended animation.

Five hundred years later, thanks to another tremor, he is released and wanders out to find that America is less settled than it was in his day. In fact, it’s practically wild, inhabited by a furtive race of Americans who live under forest cover to hide from the new rulers of the continent, the Han Empire.

See, in Nowlan’s version of post-Great War history, the next war was indeed a world one — but it was all of Europe ganging up on America. With that battle waging for several decades and weakening America’s resources, they were easy pickings when the Soviets and the Chinese merged into one political force and swept over the continent. The Hans, as you can imagine, are everything that a 1920’s American would imagine of the Yellow Menace: shifty, sneaky, cruel, heartless, indolent, and spiteful. The Hans have confined themselves to massive cities of luxury and socialism, venturing out on occasion just to give yet another beating to the regional “gangs” of Americans who survive in scattered and camouflaged pockets.

But even though these Yanks have been on the run and underfoot for four centuries, they’ve still managed to stay organized, educated, and even technologically viable. No Yangs and Coms here, friend. In fact, in their perfectly equitable and democratic societies, the Americans have managed to discover two new substances which the atrophied Hans haven’t put their fingers on: ultron and intertron, both constructed of coalesced sub-sub-electronic particles. The one, once formed, is just about indestructible, not even yielding to the Han disintegrator rays; the other is completely non-reactive to gravity, and the Americans use it to fashion jumper belts, balancing them to leave the wearer only a few ounces of effective weight, and giving them a way to move about speedily without machines or a transportation superstructure. That’s right, the people of the future are a bunch of grasshoppers (and the fact that they wear green for camouflage only increases the resemblance).

It’s into this unlikely world that Rogers stumbles; in fact, he just happens to rescue young and beautiful Wilma Deering from an attack by rival gang members, and is immediately accepted into her gang.

From there, Rogers becomes the instigator of the new retaliaion against the Hans living in Nu-Yok (figure it out yourself), when he a) discovers a weakness in the “repulsors” used on the Han airships which could easily have been found and exploited hundreds of years ago without his help, thank you; and b) introduces the Americans to that forgotten tactic of WWI warfare, the barrage. Armed with these advantages, Rogers leads the Americans to free their country from Han domination.

Now, you may think that, from this summary, it shouldn’t have been such a bad read. Pulpy and naive, certainly, but fun nonetheless, wrong?

Oh, how I wish it were so. But here’s the real problem: Nowlan is a fantastically bad writer. And not bad in the flashy, breathless, shallow fashion that you’d find in a standard pulp story of the era, no. Bad in the worst summarizing, distancing, tell-don’t-show fashion.

Whole chunks of the story — important chunks — are summarized in leaden prose. The narrative is first-person by Rogers, told from several years after the events related, and all immediacy is gone. At one point, the narrative stops cold in the middle of a battle so that we can have an entire chapter explaining the technology behind the Han repulsor rays — and it’s not like this technical familiarity is necessary to understand the plot. Nowlan just seemed inordinately impressed with the level of background technobabble he’d concocted.

The personal story is lost as well. I’m sure you can imagine that Anthony and Wilma provide the obligatory love story, and “imagine” is about all you do. After scenes of summarized battles, their romance and courtship is referred to in passing, with no real relationship to the plot. Their eventual marriage is only mentioned weeks after it happened; it was an afterthought.

The most hilarious instance of this summarizing approach occurs when Rogers rallies the troops for an attack — and in what should have been his “St. Crispin’s Day” speech, he instead records, “Finally I began to speak. I do not remember to this day just what I said…” That’s right, folks, even here we’re denied immediacy. (And all I could think of was any one of Rimmer’s reminisces on Red Dwarf.)

It’s tempting to say that perhaps a modern ghostwriter could take these pages as an outline and expand them, perhaps into a big thick trilogy, which would actually breathe some life into it as a kind of “retro-SF.” But that’s probably not going to be, simply because of the antiquated racial tension which drives so much of the plot. Instead of going all Indian, the Americans manage to maintain an equitable society with organized sciences and arts, simply because of the inherent virtue of “the American race.” One can see this attitude as analogous to that informing the premise of the original Tarzan of the Apes (and missing more and more from each successive adaptation, thanks to the sanitizing influence of political correctness), that the congenital nobility of the white man is such that, even if raised by apes, he still becomes more a man than the native tribes. These Americans are not affected by their long woodland exile; they’re still reasonable rational people, with nothing that a 1920’s American would consider an unreasonable prejudice. Sure, they hate the Hans without stinting, but that’s understandable, and scarcely shameful — after all, they’re only Orientals, right?

Given the premise, it would be very unlikely to find anything of an accurately “prophetic” nature here, so it was with double the pleasure that I read the following, describing the despicably lazy lifestyle in the Han cities:

There is no denying that the economic system of the Hans was marvellous. A suit of clothes, for instance, might be delivered in a man’s apartment without a human hand having ever touched it.

Having decided that he wished a suit of a given general style, he would simply tune in a visual broadcast of the display of various selections, and when he had made his choice, dial the number of the item and press the order button. Simultaneously the charge would be automatically made against his account number, and credited as a sale on the automatic records of that particular factory in the acount house. And his account plate, hidden behind a little wall door, would register his new credit balance. An automatically packaged suit that had been made to style and size-standard by automatic machinery fromn synthetically produced material, would slip into the delivery chute, magnetically addressed, and in anywhere from thirty seconds to thirty minutes or so,according to the volume of business in the chutes, drop into the delivery basket in his room.

Aside from the delivery time, that’s got “Amazon.com” written all over it.

All told, it was a long, tough read, despite only being 190 pages, and it still astounds me that anyone would read this, told as undramatically as a science fiction adventure can be, and immediately think that it would be the great basis of a daily comic strip.

But then, if I told you how my father’s parents met, you’d probably be astounded that I exist, either.

Nathan Shumate

1. A hypothetical example. My own grandmother was quite the looker. [back]