Raider of the Spaceways - Henry Kuttner

“Raider of the Spaceways” is a novelette by Henry Kuttner that appeared originally in the July 1937 issue of WEIRD TALES, which published the occasional straight-up science fiction yarn along with horror fiction and sword and sorcery. It’s a fairly early story by Kuttner, in that he’d only been publishing fiction for about a year and a half when it came out, but by that time he had published 20 stories, so he wasn’t exactly a neophyte, either. The prose is already as smoothly polished as you’d expect from Kuttner.

The protagonist is Dal Kenworth, a young man who’s growing a crop of elysia plants on Venus, a plant that’s the source of a very powerful and valuable drug. Kuttner kind of throws in the fact that Kenworth is the son of the President of the Americas back on earth. He clashes with a notorious space pirate known as the Raider, and he and a beautiful girl from a neighboring elysia farm have to flee to Venus’s Night Side, the side of the planet that never faces the sun, which is unexplored and full of unknown dangers. What they encounter there is pretty horrible, enough so that the story does sort of fit in WEIRD TALES despite being pure SF.

Whenever I read science fiction from this era, the good stories always make me feel like I’m back in high school, sitting in a lawn chair on my parents’ front porch on a summer morning, getting some reading done before the heat builds up and I have to retreat into the air conditioning. “Raider of the Spaceways” is definitely a front porch yarn. Space pirates! Ray guns! A monster and a beautiful girl! This is my meat, let me tell you. And Kuttner puts the whole thing together with great skill, including a twist ending that I should have seen coming but didn’t.

I suspect most modern readers wouldn’t be so fond of this story (well, some of you reading this probably would be), but I loved it and had a great time reading it. In addition to its original appearance in WEIRD TALES, it was reprinted in the beautiful Haffner Press collection THUNDER IN THE VOID. It’s also available as a stand-alone e-book, and if you’d rather read it in the original, that issue of WEIRD TALES can be found on-line here and here. If you’re a fan of old-fashioned adventure science fiction like me, I give it a high recommendation.