Giant, Undead Brains and Three-Headed Dinosaurs

Auro, Lord of Jupiter, is a rather bizarre character. He first appeared in Planet Comics #41 (March 1946), ruling Jupiter with his consort Dorna. He's murdered by a rival.

About the same time, an American scientist named Chet Edson builds a prototype rocket ship, but a saboteur knocks him out, shoves him into the rocket and launches him into space. He crashes on Jupiter, but he can't survive in the atmosphere there.

So Dorna transfers Chet's mind into Auro's body. After a few adventures, Auro's personality reasserts itself and Chet is able to only subconsciously influence the big dope into taking intelligent action when in danger.

And there's a lot of danger on Jupiter. In Planet Comics #47 (March 1947), scientists are experimenting with the brain of a master criminal named Zago, King of the Underworlders. But Zago's brain is "struggling for freedom"and soon forces one of the scientists to drop him.

Soon, the brain has grown to gigantic proportions and is mind-controlling nearby people and animals. When Auro/Chet and Dorna fly in to investigate, they run into a gauntlet of various dangers.

It looks as if they are going to be overwhelmed, but Chet influences Auro to run from the fight and get to the nearby lab, even though this mean temporarily abandoning Dorna.

Zago rewards his underling for capturing Dorna by killing them, because he's decided that everyone ought to be dead just like he technically is. He doesn't kill Dorna right away, but rather begins tormenting her with the illusion of three-headed dinosaurs. Zago might be evil, but he comes up with some pretty cool illusions.

Fortunately, Chet has influenced Auro into inventing a device that destroys Zago, ending the threat and saving Dorna in the nick of time.

This is the first Auro, Lord of Jupiter story I've read and it is delightfully goofy, jumping wildly from one plot point to another with gleeful abandon. It might arguably have benefited from some more coherent world-building, but--then again--not every work of fiction needs to have strong internal logic. Sometimes, it's nice to just go with the flow and have fun.

You can read this story online HERE.

Next week, I think we'll return to Earth and visit with Swamp Thing.

The Only Thing He Hadn't Hunted was a Martian

The March 1951 cover of Planet Stories is one of the best known, featuring a dynamic image from Leigh Bracket's novella Black Amazon of Mars, which is also one of her best-known stories.

But that isn't the only version of Mars featured in that issue. Poul Anderson sends us to the Red Planet as well--this one a version of the planet that has a thin atmosphere requiring us poor Earthmen to wear helmets, but also includes an intelligent native species.

"Duel on Syrtis" is set long after man has colonized Mars and gone through a phase in which we were enslaving the natives--called by the derogatory term "owlies" because of their owl-like faces.

Times have changed, though. Slavery is outlawed and there's even talk of giving the Martians the right to vote. This annoys a wealthy big-game hunter named Riordan. He's hunted game all over the solar system--"From the firedrakes of Mercury to the ice crawlers of Pluto, he'd bagged them all. Except, of course, a Martian. That particular game was forbidden now."

But Riordan knows that if you throw enough money at a problem, you can usually make it go away. Soon, he has information about a Martian named Kreega, who lives alone in an isolated location. Soon, Riordan is stalking Kreega with a rifle and a couple of Martian animals analogous to a hunting bird and a bloodhound.

Kreega, at least at first, is caught outside without any weapons. Despite this, he knows the land and he has a symbiotic relationship with the flora and fauna of the surrounding desert.

But what advantage can the ability to give commands to a small, harmless sand-mouse give the Martian? Perhaps a tad more than Riordan--or the reader--suspects.

This science fiction variation of "The Most Dangerous Game" is a lot of fun, with Anderson carefully setting up the conditions of the hunt that make the brutally ironic ending appropriate and believable. As I've written before, evil big game hunters are pretty much everywhere, but they rarely meet a happy end.

This story has fallen into the public domain, so you can read it HERE.

Icky mind-controlling octopods!!!

I'm insufferably proud whenever I'm cited as a source in a Wikipedia entry. It doesn't really mean that much, but it helps feed my ego. And my ego is big enough to need a lot of nutrition.

Anyway, the entry on the wonderful pulp magazine Planet Stories cites my book Storytelling in the Pulps, Comics and Radio as a source. (They spell my last name wrong, but what the hey.)

Planet Stories provided a nice balance for science fiction fans of the 1940s. The other great SF pulp was Astounding Stories, edited by John Campbell. Campbell insisted on scientific veracity in the fiction he published, one of several standards he set that helped raise the genre up into the level of true literature.

But Planet Stories went with pure space operas, eschewing a strict scientific realism to tell straightforward adventure stories. Here, the galaxy was full of planets full of inexplicably human barbarians, bizarre monsters and larger-than-life alien threats. Beautiful princesses in need of rescuing were common as dirt and the average astronaut often had to be as skilled in swordsmanship as in stellar navigation in order to survive.

Planet Stories was the child of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars and Venus stories and the grandfather of Star Wars. It was a reminder that not every science fiction story has to be steeped in what might be realistically possible. Sometimes, it's nice to visit a galaxy full of beautiful princesses for a time.

Ray Bradbury and Leigh Brackett (later one of the script writers for The Empire Strikes Back) were the two most important contributors to the magazine. But a lot of other lesser-known writers provided some great stuff. The Winter 1949 issue, for instance, included a short novel by Emmett McDowell titled Sword of Fire.

A space explorer named Jupiter Jones is lost and crash lands his small ship on an unexplored planet. He soon ends up with a small parasite attached to the back of his neck, allowing a race of octopod-like aliens to control his mind. The aliens have been in charge of the planet for thousands of years, enslaving the humans and breeding them into different specialized sub-species (warriors, workers, meat animals, etc.).

Jones just wants to get back to his ship and escape. But the local humans think of him as a savior--the legendary "Wanderer-from-Beyond" who will free them from slavery. Besides, the only source of spaceship fuel Jones can find is a radioactive idol right smack in the middle of the aliens' city. He may have no choice but to become a leader and a hero.

It's a fun, fast-moving adventure story. It gives us a cool alien world with bizarre threats and a hero capable of taking those threats on. It doesn't worry about scientific veracity, nor should it. I love hard science fiction and I'll always enjoy the work of Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson and Larry Niven. But its a good thing to from time to time mix a little bit of fantasy together with science fiction trappings.