Interstellar Package Delivery

Read/Watch 'em In Order #82

A mail run was supposed to be easy. Pick up mail and packages on the planet Xecho, along with some cargo (including a few live animals and some frozen embryos) and deliver then to the planet Twesworld. Xecho is a crossroads planet with a small space port and not much else. Twesworld is sparsely populated planet with an agricultural economy. There's nothing about the job that can cause trouble.

Postmarked the Stars (1969) is the fourth novel about the Solar Queen, an independent merchant ship that plies the stars and got the contract for this simple mail run at the end of a previous adventure. Andre Norton had already given us three exciting and well-plotted Space Opera adventure. With this novel, she's at the top of her game. The story is exciting and complex science fiction, full of mystery, adventure and super-science.

Our point-of-view character is still Dane Thorson, the assistant cargo master on the Queen. Just before the Queen is scheduled to take off from Xecho, he gets word that there's one last package to be picked up. When he hurries into port to pick it up, he's poisoned and left for dead. Someone wearing a Dane mask brings the package aboard.

Dane, though sick as a dog, manages to get back to the ship before it lifts off. The fake Dane turns out to have a heart condition and dies under the stress of lift off. The package he brought aboard is--at first--nowhere to be found.  In fact, it's not found until the strange radiation it's emitting has caused the animals being transported to regress to earlier, extinct versions of themselves.






In one case, to the surprise of everyone, this gives the animal human-level intelligence, meaning it was once an intelligent species in the distant past. The situation is so odd and inexplicable,that the captain decides that the animals and the box emitting the retrogressing radiation be landed in a remote area until he has a chance to explain everything to the authorities.

Dane and two other junior crewmen take the Queen's landing boat down to an uninhabited section to Twesworld. But they are soon facing unexpected dangers themselves, stumbling across several recently murdered men and getting attacked by a prehistoric version of an animal native to yet another planet. Someone has already been transplanting creatures from other planets to Twesworld and regressing them to more dangerous versions.

What follows is both an exciting adventure and a well-constructed science fiction based mystery.

Who are the bad guys? Why did they initiate the complex plan of replacing Dane and smuggling the box aboard? Why are they making an army of prehistoric monsters from different planets? Before those answers can be found, Dane and another Solar Queen crewman (along with a local law enforcement official) will spend time as prisoners, manage a wild escape with the help of one of the now-intelligent animals the Queen had been transporting, witness a battle to the death between two bizarre monsters, and find themselves obligated to launch a make-shift rescue effort to save some settlers besieged by a combined force of outlaws and monsters.

The action is non-stop, but each set piece logically follows the one before it and the information needed to figure out what is going on is gradually and expertly fed to us. As much as I  enjoyed the first three novels, this one has instantly become my favorite.



We see Dane continuing to mature as a competent crewman. This time around, he has opportunities to be much more proactive than in the previous novels, contributing intelligent ideas and coming up with workable plans. His character arc throughout all four Solar Queen books is believable and realistic.

There were three more Solar Queen novels written in the 1990s, but these were mostly written by someone else. I believe I mentioned last time that fan reaction to these was mixed. I believe I will thus end the In Order look at the series here. We still have a couple of Nick Carter films to go, as well as the sequel to Parnassus on Wheels. Then we'll move on to something else.

Voodoo Planet

Read/Watch 'em In Order #79


Andre Norton returned to the crew of the interstellar freighter Solar Queen for the 3rd time in 1959, with the short novel Voodoo Planet.  Though this time, the Queen and most of the crew aren't involved.

While the ship is being refitted for the mail run it was given at the end of the last novel, Captain Jellicoe and Tau, the ship's medic, are invited to the planet Khatka, a planet that was settled by humans of African descent some centuries earlier. The colonists had been fleeing an atomic race war and had stumbled across a planet on which the flora and fauna parallels Africa.

Dane Thorson--our point-of-view character in the series--also comes along. But its Medic Tau who takes the lead in this story. He's an expert in "magic"--the often ceremonial powers wielded by priests and witch-doctors on many planets.

This is a science fiction novel, not a fantasy, so its made clear that Magic is the term given for things that are done through a combination of cultural conditioning and mass hypnosis. On Khatka, one of the leaders (Chief Ranger Asaki) is concerned that the witch doctor Lumbrilo has dramatically increased his ability to perform magic and might have plans to stage a coup.


Soon after arriving, though, the three merchants, along with Asaki and another Ranger, are in an air ship accident that leaves them stranded in the jungle without a working radio. Now they must face both the natural dangers of the jungle and the so-real-they-can-kill illusions of Lumbrilo in order to get back to safety. Along the way, they run into an off-world gang of poachers, making their journey even more interesting.

Voodoo Planet is essentially a traditional jungle adventure given a science fiction slant, which is fine with me because it is a really fun jungle adventure, full of dangerous treks through deadly swamps, unique monsters to fight and a criminal conspiracy to unravel.

It feels a little bit like a "time-out" from the rest of the series, since the action takes place away from the Solar Queen and doesn't involve their usual business as traders and merchants. But that's okay to, not just because it is a fun adventure and because it gives Dane yet more experience in dealing with odd situations. In fact, though Tau gets to do the awesome hero stuff, Dane handles himself well and this is the first of the Solar Queen adventures where he doesn't make a serious mistake because of inexperience. That is significant.

These first three Queen novels were the ones easily available as ebooks. The fourth one--the last written entirely by Andre Norton--is winging its way to me in the form of a used paperback, so we will revisit the crew at least one more time.  The remaining three in the series were co-written by other authors and my understanding is that Norton's input was limited. Fan reactions to these later novels were mixed. I'm enjoying the series enough to where I will read these as well, but I will wait until I do to decide whether to include them in the "In Order" series or move on to something else after the next one.

Plague Ship

Read/Watch 'em in Order #78

Gee whiz, I don't know why I never read the Solar Queen novels before. They are more fun than a barrel of space monkeys.

In Sargasso of Space, the crew of the independent merchant ship Solar Queen was instrumental in helping clean up a band of space pirates, so they have claimed trading rights on a remote planet as a reward. It's the sort of contract that the big merchant companies usually leave to the independents because profit margins are thin. 

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But the planet has proven to be the source of a valuable jewel, so a ship from one of the big companies (Inter-Solar) shows up and tries to muscle in on the trade, despite the overt illegality of this. And trading with the natives on this planet is already a tricky and sometimes dangerous thing. For instance, several of the Queen's crew must help the natives fight an amphibious race of reptilian frog-crab things at one point. Later, the Inter-Solar men use the traditions of the natives to rope the Queen's captain into a duel. Interstellar trade is literally a cut-throat business.

The world-building here, by the way, is really fascinating. The native culture on the planet is believable while still being very, very alien.

Our point-of-view character is still Dane Thorson, the Apprentice Cargo-Handler and still the youngest guy on the crew. As in the first novel, we see that Dane is still learning. In fact, early on, he makes a serious mistake which only the dumbest of luck turns to the ship's advantage. But Dane is intelligent and willing to learn from his mistakes.

Another parallel to the first novel is that Dane is not the automatic hero--he's a capable member of the crew, but only one member of that crew. Other crewmen contribute to the Queen's success according to their own capabilities and specialties. This continues to be a strength in these stories, creating a sense that the Solar Queen is a real ship that operates in a realistic manner.

At the same time, Dane is given several moments to shine even more so than in the first novel. It's obvious that Andre Norton is still setting him up to one day become a leader of men, taking him through a tough and dangerous learning process in order to get him there.





The crew staves off the efforts of Inter-Solar to muscle in on the trade, but ends up in a situation where they have to carry a cargo to Earth and return within a relatively short period of time. This would have been doable, but soon after they lift off, members of the crew start to get sick and drop like flies.

This is the premise for the bulk of the story. The sickness aboard the ship soon leaves only Dane and three other of the youngest, least experienced crew still on their feet. Whey are they apparently immune? What is the source of the sickness? If it's a plague, they might be banned from landing on any inhabited planet or even forced to fly into a sun.

Why is the ship's cat suddenly terrified of certain sections of the ship? That bit of weirdness is, in fact, one of several clues that help the young crewmen figure out what is going on. (A useful cat? Well, this is a work of fantastic fiction.)

But figuring out the reason for the illness isn't enough. The Solar Queen has been declared a Plague Ship AND (because the Queen grabbed supplies from an Inter-Solar emergency station) a pirate ship. In order to work everything out, the young crew is going to have to hide out in the radioactive ruins left over from an atomic war; kidnap a Medic to treat the sick crew; and commit what could be considered an act of terrorism in order to get their side of the story out to the public.

It's a wild plan worthy of Captain Kirk that leads up to a truly exciting action set-piece.

We're not yet done with the Solar Queen--I'll be reviewing at least one more book in the series eventually.

Apprentice Cargo-Handler.... IN SPACE!

Read/Watch 'em In Order #77

According to science fiction, there are essentially two kinds of merchants plying the space lanes between the stars. You have the Han Solo-types, who take jobs without worrying too much about legalities as long as there's a likely profit.

Then you have the legitimate merchants, who obey the laws has they conduct legitimate trade.

It's not surprising that writers most often turn to the "half-witted, scruffy-looking nerfherders" as the character-type most likely to have real adventures. Heck, writing that last sentence makes me want to watch The Empire Strikes Back for the umpteenth time.

But in 1955, the prolific Andre Norton wrote the first in a series of novels that would clearly show that those staid, organized & law-abiding merchants can have some pretty thrilling adventures of their own.

The main character in Sargasso of Space is Apprentice Cargo-Master Dane Thorson, who has just finished his training and is waiting for his first assignment on an interstellar merchants. Most of his classmates hope for a berth on one of the ships owned by a big company--they travel the safest but most profitable established routes. Dane wouldn't have minded such a berth either, but he is sent to The Solar Queen, a small independent merchant.

When he boards the ship, though, he's not at all unhappy. The Solar Queen is a little beat-up looking on the outside, but it's clean and in good repair. It is soon apparent to Dane that the experienced crewmen are good at their jobs.

Which is a good thing. The Queen's captain wins the rights to a newly discovered planet in an auction. The planet, though, turns out to be a "burn-out," a planet destroyed millennia ago in a war that destroyed a pre-human galactic civilization referred to as the Forerunners.

But there are some areas on the planet that can still support life. So the crew of the Queen, after dropping off a group of scientists who want to explore some ruins that might have been part of the Forerunner civilization, take a look around.

But events do not unfold smoothly. There are reasons to believe the scientists are not scientists, there are wrecked spaceships--some of them centuries or even millennia old--all over the place, and a mysterious force prevents the Queen from taking off again. A crewman goes missing and a band of armed men surround the Queen and demand its surrender.

What the bad guys don't realize is that a few of the Queen's crew are not on the ship. This includes Dane. They soon realize that the bad guys have found some sort of Forerunner technology and are using it for nefarious purposes. This means Dane and his fellow merchants will have to play commando, avoid capture, find a hidden Forerunner installation, and figure out how to put a stop to those nefarious purposes.

Andre Norton was a wonderful storyteller. In Sargasso of Space, she gives us an exciting and well-constructed Space Opera tale, built around a mystery to which she eventually provides a satisfying answer.

Dane is our point-of-view character. He makes a few rookie mistakes, but performs intelligently and contributes to the eventual good-guy victory. But he's still the newest and least experienced member of the crew and Norton makes no effort to artificially thrust him into "the hero who saves the day" mode. He's one part of a team.

This is exactly the right decision on Norton's part to make Dane work as a character and for the novel to work as an adventure story. It allows us to believe that the Solar Queen is a real ship that functions successfully because the entire crew is competent.  It makes for a great start to a series of books that will eventually bring Dane into the captain's seat.

We'll look at at least the next two books in the series--frankly because these are the two that have fallen into the public domain and are easily available. There are four more books after that, so whether I continue to review the series depends pretty much on whether I can dig up inexpensive copies or get them via interlibrary loan.