Infinite Stars Read online

  Just about as popular a purveyor of space opera in the 1930s was Jack Williamson, who made his mark with the classic The Legion of Space in 1934. This novel, serialized in the appropriately named magazine Astounding Stories, involves the adventures of a quartet of heroes whose task it is to protect the guardian of a doomsday weapon known as AKKA and prevent it, and her, from falling into the hands of hostile alien beings, the Medusae, who will use it against us. Williamson’s main man is lean, rangy John Ulnar, later known as John Star, whom we meet as a new member of the Legion of Space, the Solar System’s peacekeeping force. When Aladoree Anthar, the young and beautiful guardian of AKKA, is abducted by the aliens, John Star must travel to far-off Barnard’s Star to rescue her, accompanied by three fellow legionnaires, Jay Kalam, Hal Samdu, and the roguish, Falstaffian Giles Habibula, who is the only character anyone remembers after reading the book. (“‘Dear life—not now!’ gasped Giles Habibula. ‘Not into that wicked thing they call the Belt of Peril!… Sweet life, not yet,’ sobbed Giles Habibula. “Give us time, Jay, for a single sip of wine! You couldn’t be so heartless, Jay—not to a poor old soldier of the Legion…’”)

  These four, after much anguish, fight their way grimly across the nightmarish jungle of the Medusae’s home world, rescue the fair Aladoree and save the world from its alien enemies, but not without leaving room for two sequels. Along the way, John Star falls in love with the delectable Aladoree and marries her. Williamson, who lived on into the 21st century, produced many another space opera, and plenty of more complex science fiction as well, in the course of a distinguished 75-year career that saw him designated a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

  The third of the great pioneering figures of space opera, and the most prolific, was Edmond Hamilton, who was writing epics of the Interstellar Patrol years before Williamson had brought us his Legion of Space and Smith the Galactic Patrol. Hamilton first staked his claim to eminence in the genre with Crashing Suns, serialized in Weird Tales in 1928. Though primarily dedicated to fantasy and tales of the supernatural (it was the primary magazine publisher of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard) it ventured frequently into science fiction also in its earliest years, much of it the work of Hamilton. In Crashing Suns a star is on a collision course with our sun, threatening to create a “titanic holocaust” in which the planets of the Solar System will “perish like flowers in a furnace,” and must be deflected somehow by the gallant men of the Interstellar Patrol. “As the control-levers flashed down under my hands our ship dived down through space with the swiftness of thought,” is how Hamilton begins the first of his many space epics. “The next instant there came a jarring shock, and our craft spun over like a whirling top.” And so it goes as our patrolmen—Hal Kur, Jan Tor, Hurus Hol, and the rest—zoom back and forth across the galaxy at hundreds of times the speed of light until the tentacled aliens who are causing the trouble have been overcome and the sun has been saved.

  Having begun his series with such glorious melodrama, Hamilton had no choice but to keep upping the ante for the Interstellar Patrol in the next few years. The names of his novels tell the tale: The Star Stealers, Within the Nebula, Outside the Universe, The Cosmic Cloud, and, eventually, in the 1930s The Universe Wreckers (misnamed, actually, since it is only our solar system, once again, that is threatened by destruction.) Hamilton never created characters as memorable as E.E. Smith’s four Lensmen or Williamson’s Giles Habibula—it is hard to tell his monosyllabically named Jhul Dins and Dur Nals apart—but his novels go beyond theirs in their picture of the grandeur and color of the distant worlds he invents.

  Some years after his Interstellar Patrol days, it was Hamilton who created the Captain Future series—a kind of comic book in prose that very likely was on Wilson Tucker’s mind when he described space opera as “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn.” Captain Future was the name of a quarterly pulp magazine launched in 1940 that featured in each issue a novel by Hamilton telling of the adventures of the eponymous hero “Captain Future,” Curt Newton, also known as “the Wizard of Science,” who, of course, was supplied with the proper set of comic-book companions—Grag, a giant metal robot, Otho, a synthetic android, and Simon Wright, a disembodied brain housed within a plastic case. This quartet travels from world to world, dealing with crises far and wide in a manner similar to that of the team aboard the starship Enterprise of Star Trek, for which the Captain Future stories may well have served as a prototype. Hamilton, like Jack Williamson, lived on into the modern era of science fiction, and, like him, eventually moved away from the frenetic tropes of early space opera toward a quieter, more mature type of story that nevertheless demonstrated science fiction’s ability to convey the wonder of galactic space that had been the hallmark of his storytelling skill since the days of Crashing Suns.

  Such writers as Smith, Williamson, and Hamilton—and there were dozens of others in the olden days, Homer Eon Flint (The Lord of Death), J.U. Giesy (Palos of the Dog Star Pack), Ralph Milne Farley (The Radio Man), Garrett P. Serviss (A Columbus of Space) and many more, all but forgotten today—provided what we can regard today as guilty pleasures. As Brian W. Aldiss put it in an essay on space opera in 1974, “Its parameters are marked by a few mighty concepts standing like a watchtower along a lonely frontier. What goes on between them is essentially simple—a tale of love or hate, triumph or defeat—because it is the watchtowers that matter. We are already familiar with some of them, the question of reality, the limitations of knowledge, exile, the sheer immensity of the universe, the endlessness of time.”

  All through the 1930s and 1940s science fiction writers, particularly those who specialized in space opera, had been almost exclusively male. But along the way two conspicuous exceptions arose among all those men and between them brought about a revolution in the writing of this kind of science fiction.

  The first was Catherine Lucille Moore, who, concealing herself behind the epicene byline of “C.L. Moore,” gave no indication that she was female and left many readers with quite the opposite belief. Beginning with “Shambleau” for Weird Tales in 1933 and continuing on through the entire decade of the 1930s, she produced a series of stories that made use of the formulas of space opera but embedded them in a supple, elegant prose that pulp-magazine readers had never seen before. They were set on Mars or Venus, mainly. Her chief protagonist was an adventurer called Northwest Smith, who seemed to have wandered into those worlds out of the American West.

  But it was not the Mars and Venus of astronomers where Northwest Smith roamed; they were exotic, mysterious worlds that owed something to the Orient of Somerset Maugham and Joseph Conrad, and much to Moore’s own fervid imagination. (“Northwest Smith leant his head back against the warehouse wall and stared up into the black night sky of Venus. The waterfront street was very quiet tonight, very dangerous. He could hear no sound save the eternal slap-slap of water against the piles, but he knew how much of danger and sudden death dwelt here in the breathing dark, and he may have been a little homesick as he stared up into the clouds that masked a green star hanging lovely on the horizon—Earth and home.”) No one had ever seen science fiction like that in 1934, and there has been little of its kind since. Eventually Moore abandoned Northwest Smith, but her later work, such as the 1943 novel Judgment Night, retained the vivid sensuality of the early stories while moving away from the more formulaic aspects of space-opera technique.

  The year 1940 saw the debut of a second gifted female writer of space stories who, like Moore, made use of a gender-free byline in the pulp magazines whose readership, and authorship as well, had been nearly entirely male. This was Leigh Brackett, whose first story, “Martian Quest,” immediately established her as one who paid as much heed to matters of style and mood and characterization as she did to the romance and exoticism of space opera. Though she spent much of her career in the movie industry (she and William Faulkner worked together on the screenplay for the 1946 Humphrey Bogart film The Big Sleep, and thirty years later she
was one of the writers of the screenplay for the second Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back), she remained loyal to the pulp magazines as well, most notably with a series of stories set on Mars and dealing with the exploits of an adventurer named Eric John Stark, a literary descendant, perhaps, of Moore’s Northwest Smith. (“The ship moved slowly across the Red Sea, through the shrouding veils of mist, her sail barely filled by the languid thrust of the wind. Her hull, of a thin light metal, floated without sound, the surface of the strange ocean parting before her prow in silent rippling streamers of flame. Night deepened toward the ship, a river of indigo flowing out of the west. The man known as Stark stood alone by the afterrail and watched its coming. He was full of impatience and a gathering sense of danger, so that it seemed to him that even the hot wind smelled of it.”) Brackett’s prose, like Moore’s, was sinuous and vivid, richly colored and appealing powerfully to all the senses. She employed it, like Moore also, in the service of the rugged themes that we regard as those of space opera. One of her last stories, written not long before her death in 1978, was a Stark tale written in collaboration with her husband, no less a space-opera titan than Edmond Hamilton, whom she had married in 1946.

  Impelled by writers like Moore and Brackett, and by other newcomers like Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Vogt, James Blish, Jack Vance, Henry Kuttner (who married C.L. Moore in 1940 and collaborated fruitfully with her thereafter), Cordwainer Smith, and Poul Anderson, the space story, like science fiction in general, began to undergo an evolution in the late 1940s and 1950s. The infelicities of style, the scientific impossibilities, the melodramatic confrontations between noble heroism and black villainy, all the hallmarks of the pioneers of the genre, gave way to a subtler, more adult, kind of work. And so “space opera” ceased to be the pejorative term that Wilson Tucker had meant it to be. It was understood now to be something much more than the Captain Future stories: it became simply one subdivision of science fiction, one kind of story, as variable in quality as any other specialized type of story can be. And some years later space opera would move beyond the science fiction magazines into the mainstream of American entertainment, most notably with the television show Star Trek and then with the series of Star Wars motion pictures, both of which were solidly grounded in the concepts and manner of true space opera. And today space opera, with no Tuckeresque negative connotations attached, has become the province of some of the most creative and imaginative of science fiction writers.

  That transformation was well illustrated by several modern collections, such as The New Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois, published in 2007 and including work by such modern notables of the field as Nancy Kress, Stephen Baxter, Peter F. Hamilton, and Alastair Reynolds. And in 2006, when David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer produced a massive anthology called The Space Opera Renaissance that covered the entire span of the literature from its beginnings under Edmond Hamilton and Jack Williamson to such modern practitioners as Samuel R. Delany, Gregory Benford, and Ursula K. Le Guin, the editors were able to offer this redefinition, which stands as well as any as a summation of what the term “space opera” has meant and what it signifies today:

  “Many readers and writers and nearly all academics and media fans who entered SF after 1975 have never understood the origin of ‘space opera’ as a pejorative and some may be surprised to learn of it. Thus the term ‘space opera’ reentered the serious discourse on contemporary SF in the 1980s with a completely altered meaning. Henceforth, ‘space opera’ meant, and still generally means, colorful, dramatic, large-scale adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action… and usually set in the relatively distant future and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone.”

  The days of E.E. Smith and Edmond Hamilton are far behind us. But space opera lives on, however evolved and transformed it may now be, continuing to call forth the efforts of the best of our writers and to hold the attention of a multitude of readers who seek that wonder-laden view of the farthest galaxies and of the centuries to come that science fiction, and only science fiction, is capable of providing.

  In 1977, Orson Scott Card burst onto the science fiction field with a novella in Analog Science Fiction and Fact that would launch an empire. “Ender’s Game” later expanded into a novel which spawned a whole series of sequels, won the 1985 Nebula Award and 1986 Hugo Award for “Best Novel.” It has been recommended reading by the US Marine Corp for soldiers at many ranks, and it was made into a film starring Harrison Ford in 2013. The latest spinoff series, Fleet School, debuts in 2017, and this story is the first appearance in print of its protagonist, Dabeet Ochoa. It also stars Ender and Valentine Wiggin, and is a bit of a murder mystery in colonial space written just for this book. Our adventure begins with…

  RENEGAT

  ORSON SCOTT CARD

  Dabeet Ochoa was surprised that the speaker for the dead came so soon, but apparently he had already been en route to Catalunya, for reasons that were apparently none of Dabeet’s business. Yet Dabeet was proconsul of Starways Congress here—in effect, governor—so everything on Catalunya was supposed to be his business.

  He made the decision to meet the speaker at the shuttleport before he was aware that he was considering such a gesture of respect. He knew himself well enough to know that part of his motive had to be a bit of bureaucratic resentment and dread that there would now be, in this colony, a person who had secrets, a person who had protection from Congress or the Fleet that trumped his own. Dabeet put those feelings in the compartment of his mind where he kept his painful self-knowledge. He would be constantly aware of those feelings, so he could guard himself against acting upon them.

  There were other reasons that did not need to be hidden from others, however. The obvious one was that it was Dabeet Ochoa himself who had summoned a speaker—a speaker, not this one, but that’s how speaking for the dead worked. You called, and the nearest one came. No choosing. No doubt this speaker would not even realize what a mark of honor it was for him to come and greet a visitor in person.

  Dabeet decided to come without an open bodyguard. No need to advertise the precariousness of lawful government in the colony of Tarragona. He would tell this speaker soon enough about the seething unrest that the speaker’s coming was meant to help allay. Meanwhile, Dabeet had two I.F. marines in plain clothes hovering within ten meters, in case some kind of emergency arose.

  At first, Dabeet did not realize that the unprepossessing young man with only one bag was the speaker—especially because he was accompanied by a woman of about the same age—maybe twenty-five?—who had not been mentioned in the dispatches Dabeet had received by ansible. A wife? It was hard for itinerant speakers to marry and raise a family; Dabeet had read up on this semi-monastic order before he called for a speaker to come to the planet Catalunya, and he knew that most speakers who married did so when they took themselves off the circuit and settled near a large urban area on a long-civilized world, where they would have plenty of work to do and yet their children could grow up in the same neighborhood through their entire education.

  Once he realized that no one else could possibly be the speaker for the dead, Dabeet strode toward him, lifting his hand in the single-fist salute of the Exploratory Service. The young man saw him, smiled slightly, and nodded in recognition. He did not raise his own fist—showing that he understood the protocol. Speakers were, by definition, not part of the I.F. or the E.S. or MinCol or any other organization. No saluting, no bowing, no accommodation to local custom, unless it happened to coincide with their own personal custom. Which, in this case, appeared to be a handshake, since the speaker’s hand came forward as Dabeet came near.

  It was not until they were grasping hands that, with a dizzy rush of understanding, Dabeet realized that he actually knew this young man—though he had no business being so young.

  “I know you,” said Dabeet, not yet daring to say the name t
hat had come into his mind, though he did not doubt his own memory—he had never had to doubt his own memory.

  “Do you?” asked the speaker.

  “We had a conversation by ansible once,” said Dabeet.

  “How remarkable. It must have been before you came to Catalunya, Governor Ochoa, because your request for a speaker was the first communication I had ever received from this planet.”

  Dabeet stored this information: The speaker had been coming to Catalunya, and yet he had never received any communication from here. Why, then, was he coming?

  The young woman joined the conversation, also with a handshake. “My name is Valentine,” she said. “I’m his older sister and, from time to time, his conscience.”