A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Three Worlds to Conquer - Poul Anderson

While I’ve never considered Poul Anderson one of my absolute favorite science fiction authors, I realized the other day that I’ve been reading his books off and on for more than forty years, starting with his Flandry series back in the mid-Sixties. I don’t recall ever reading a book of his that I didn’t like, either.

THREE WORLDS TO CONQUER is a non-series novel from 1964 that I’d never read before. It’s set in the Jovian system, on Jupiter itself and on the moon Ganymede, where there’s a mining colony from Earth. Humanity doesn’t have interstellar space travel yet, but there are colonies scattered throughout the solar system. Somewhat to the surprise of the colonists, they’ve made radio contact with a fairly primitive, centaur-like species native to Jupiter’s surface. One of these beings is smart enough to have mastered the radio on one of the scientific instruments sent down to the planet’s surface from Ganymede, and a friendship has sprung up between him and one of the scientists at the mining colony on the moon.

Then things go to hell for both of them. Civil war breaks out back on Earth, and a warship with a captain that’s still loyal to the losing side shows up on Ganymede, where most of the colonists backed the winners. The spaceship captain takes over the moon and plans to use it as a base to launch a counter-revolution. Down on Jupiter, a horde of barbarians have invaded the country of the native being who’s in contact with the mining colony. It’s no surprise that these two storylines intersect, and the two friends from different species wind up helping each other out.

Anderson makes it believable that sentient beings could live on Jupiter’s surface, and those chapters of the book are my favorites because they read almost like a sword-and-planet yarn, what with all the barbarians and fighting with swords and axes and such. Anderson handles all that very well. The political intrigue in the scenes set on Ganymede aren’t as compelling, but at least Anderson keeps the pace moving along swiftly and the reader can’t help but wonder how he’s going to tie everything together . . . which he does, quite neatly.

THREE WORLDS TO CONQUER is a prime example of the sort of adventure science fiction I grew up reading. If you haven’t tried Poul Anderson’s work before, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start. If you’ve read and enjoyed Anderson’s novels but not this one, it’s worth seeking out. Plus it has a decent Jack Gaughan cover.

(Since this post originally appeared on January 8, 2010, I've found out that THREE WORLDS TO CONQUER was serialized in 1964 in the science fiction digest magazine IF. I saw issues of GALAXY now and then, but IF didn't get any distribution around where I lived, so I never would have come across that version.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, January 1952

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat tattered copy in the scan. You don’t hear much about ADVENTURE from this era. The magazine was far past its glory days of the Teens, Twenties, and Thirties, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t still entertaining. We'll find out. The cover on this issue is by Murray Hirsch, an artist I’m not familiar with. The editor at this point is veteran pulpster Ejler Jakobsson.

The issue leads off with “Son of the Sword”, a historical adventure novelette by Poul Anderson. This may well be the first thing I’ve read by Anderson that wasn’t science fiction or fantasy, but I know he did a number of historical adventure novels and stories. In this one, set in ancient Egypt, a pirate from Crete is hired to get King Tut’s beautiful young widow out of Thebes before political enemies of hers who have seized power have her killed. The opening of this story reminded me a little of Robert E. Howard’s “The People of the Black Circle”. Thoas the pirate has some definite similarities to Conan, as well. However, the story’s plot is very much a straight line, without any of the twists and double-crosses that Howard would have included, and the action scenes, while good, don’t rise to REH levels. That said, I don’t want to criticize this story for what it isn’t, since it’s well-written, does a great job with the setting, and races right along at a nice pace. It’s a very good story that I enjoyed quite a bit. It certainly made me want to read more of Anderson’s historical fiction.

Charles J. Boyle was a baseball journalist who wrote seven stories for ADVENTURE, ARGOSY, and THE SATURDAY EVENING POST in the late Forties and early Fifties. I don’t think I’d ever encountered his work until I read his story in this issue, “Blood Sky”. It’s about McGafferty, a troubleshooter who specializes in disasters such as avalanches, mine cave-ins, floods, and forest fires. In this one, it’s a forest fire that’s threatening a small town. Boyle uses a couple of flashbacks to give this story a bit of an epic feel and to flesh out the romance between McGafferty and a beautiful female reporter who’s written some unsympathetic stories about him. This is a great yarn. There’s enough material here for a full-length novel, and it would have made a wonderful movie directed by Howard Hawks, starring John Wayne and Barbara Stanwyck, with a screenplay by Jules Furthman. I need to see if I can find some more stories by Charles J. Boyle.

“Hark, Africa!”, a reprint from the September 1937 issue of ADVENTURE, is a novelette by veteran adventure, mystery, and aviation pulpster Joel Townsley Rogers. I think it’s about the clash between a French colonial official and the German who ran the colony before World War I over a native dancer. I say I think because I read five or six pages of this one and gave up on it. Long-winded, very repetitive, and just not to my taste at all. I’ve read other stories by Rogers that I enjoyed, but this isn’t one of them.

“No Man’s Passage” is a short story by an author I’m not familiar with, Steve Hail. That’s a good name for a pulp writer, and evidently his own. He wrote more than sixty adventure, Western, and sports stories for a variety of pulps and slicks between the mid-Forties and the late Fifties. I learned something from this story, which seems to be set in the Pacific Northwest. There were lightships, like floating lighthouses, that protected shipping from rough coastlines. This story is set on one and uses the old plot about the clash between a crusty old captain and a by-the-book young officer. Naturally, there’s a bad storm and a looming disaster as well. It’s an okay yarn, the kind of thing I like, but the writing never really grabbed me. I finished it with no problem, though, unlike the Rogers story.

I’ve seen Verne Athanas’s name on plenty of pulp TOCs. He wrote dozens of stories for various markets between the late Forties and the early Sixties, as well as a handful of Western novels. There’s even a collection of his pulp Western yarns, PURSUIT, still available on Amazon. I don’t recall ever reading anything by him before, though. His story “Killer’s Dark” rounds out this issue. It’s a Western about a bank-robbing outlaw on the run from a lawman with a personal score to settle with him. It’s well-written and moved along nicely, but then the ending made me say, “That’s it?” Not a bad story, but it definitely left me feeling it was a little lacking.

There are also poems by C. Wiles Hallock and John Bunker. I’m not a poetry guy, but I read them and they’re okay.

Which is a good overall rating for this issue, I think: just okay. A very good story by Poul Anderson, a great one by Charles J. Boyle, and then the rest of the contents pretty forgettable. I worry sometimes that I’m too inclined to like pulp stories just because they’re, well, pulp, and that I’m too inclined to dislike current fiction because it doesn’t match up to the old days. But then a pulp issue like this makes me think that might not be the case. Either way, all I can do is try to be objective and move on.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Planet Stories, May 1952

Another excellent Allen Anderson cover on this issue of PLANET STORIES. Why the War-Maid of Mars' raygun looks like an old-fashioned Western six-shooter at first glance, I don't know, but it's eye-catching, as are other, ah, attributes. Maybe Anderson adapted this from an unused painting he did for LARIAT STORY. Anyway, speaking of the War-Maid, I wouldn't mind reading that story by Poul Anderson. I'll have to check and see if it's ever been reprinted anywhere. The only other familiar names in the Table of Contents are Bryce Walton, Robert Moore Williams, and J.T. McIntosh.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Planet Stories, January 1952

Gotta love those Allen Anderson PLANET STORIES covers, along with titles like "Sargasso of Lost Spaceships", the Poul Anderson (no relation) yarn in this issue. There are also stories by John Jakes (long before he was a bestselling writer of historical sagas), Margaret St. Clair, Bryce Walton, and others. Personally, I really enjoy this sort of adventure science fiction, but I've never been noted for my highbrow tastes.

Forgotten Books: The War of Two Worlds - Poul Anderson

Here's another Ace Science Fiction Double by an always reliable author.  This short novel was originally published in 1953 under the title "Silent Victory" in the pulp TWO COMPLETE SCIENCE-ADVENTURE NOVELS, and then later was reprinted as THE WAR OF TWO WORLDS as half of Ace Double D-335, which is where I read it. Poul Anderson has never been one of my favorite authors, but he could be counted on for consistently entertaining work, and that's the case here.


THE WAR OF TWO WORLDS takes us back to the Solar System as it was originally portrayed in SF, with life on other planets -- or at least one other planet, in this case Mars. This novel begins where some would end, as a long, bloody war between the Terrans and the Martians finally grinds to a halt with the Martians emerging victorious. The narrator and hero, a spacer with the United Nations forces, returns to a defeated Earth under Martian occupation. But all is not as it seems, and before you know it, we're off on a cross-country adventure that at times reads more like hardboiled crime fiction than SF.


The short length and pulp origins means that the story is almost all action without much characterization, but there are some nice plot twists along the way and the pace seldom lets up for very long. Not a great book, but I found it pretty enjoyable and think that it's well worth reading.

Two Worlds of Poul Anderson

TWO WORLDS OF POUL ANDERSON is a recent chapbook published by World Science Fiction Classics. It reprints a novella, “Industrial Revolution” from the September 1963 issue of ANALOG, and the short story “Duel on Syrtis” from the March 1951 issue of the great pulp PLANET STORIES. I hadn’t read either of these stories before.

“Industrial Revolution” is in many ways a typical ANALOG story from the Sixties. The heroes are engineers and entrepreneurs who have set up a mining operation in the Asteroid Belt, only to run afoul of political tensions back on Earth that affect them even as far out in space as they are. The situation on Earth is actually rather prescient, given events of the past few years, but it’s basically just a backdrop for a scientific problem story. Nothing wrong with that, of course. I like scientific problem yarns of the sort that ANALOG has been publishing for the past seventy or eighty years. (Of course, it was still a pulp called ASTOUNDING for some of those years.) “Industrial Revolution” maybe doesn’t rise to the level of a classic, but it’s pretty entertaining.

“Duel on Syrtis”, though, is a real gem. It’s a tough, hardboiled, and very suspenseful story about a rich guy from Earth hunting a Martian “owlie”, a member of the sentient Martian race that resembles a humanoid version of a Terran owl. That’s not a particularly ground-breaking plot, but in Anderson’s hands the story really draws the reader in. It didn’t take me long to realize that this is a Western transplanted to Mars, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. We have a Terran stalking a Martian instead of, say, a lone cavalry scout trying to track down an Apache renegade, but the tension and grittiness are very similar. Of course, since this is an SF story, science does play a part in the very effective final twist. Anderson paints both characters in shades of gray, rather than black and white, and there’s a lot of poignancy on both sides. This is really good stuff, and if the publisher wants to call it a classic story, well, I won’t argue.

Overall, TWO WORLDS OF POUL ANDERSON is well worth reading if you’re a science fiction fan, and it won’t set you back much. Highly recommended.

Astounding, December 1948

Here's the cover mentioned in one of the comments on yesterday's Forgotten Books post about Poul Anderson's THREE WORLDS TO CONQUER. Fine artwork by Paul Orban. (Although the comment was probably about the Anderson story in that issue, not the cover itself. But hey, a good cover is a good cover, and I love those old ASTOUNDINGs.)

Forgotten Books: Three Worlds to Conquer - Poul Anderson

While I’ve never considered Poul Anderson one of my absolute favorite science fiction authors, I realized the other day that I’ve been reading his books off and on for more than forty years, starting with his Flandry series back in the mid-Sixties. I don’t recall ever reading a book of his that I didn’t like, either.

THREE WORLDS TO CONQUER is a non-series novel from 1964 that I’d never read before. It’s set in the Jovian system, on Jupiter itself and on the moon Ganymede, where there’s a mining colony from Earth. Humanity doesn’t have interstellar space travel yet, but there are colonies scattered throughout the solar system. Somewhat to the surprise of the colonists, they’ve made radio contact with a fairly primitive, centaur-like species native to Jupiter’s surface. One of these beings is smart enough to have mastered the radio on one of the scientific instruments sent down to the planet’s surface from Ganymede, and a friendship has sprung up between him and one of the scientists at the mining colony on the moon.

Then things go to hell for both of them. Civil war breaks out back on Earth, and a warship with a captain that’s still loyal to the losing side shows up on Ganymede, where most of the colonists backed the winners. The spaceship captain takes over the moon and plans to use it as a base to launch a counter-revolution. Down on Jupiter, a horde of barbarians have invaded the country of the native being who’s in contact with the mining colony. It’s no surprise that these two storylines intersect, and the two friends from different species wind up helping each other out.

Anderson makes it believable that sentient beings could live on Jupiter’s surface, and those chapters of the book are my favorites because they read almost like a sword-and-planet yarn, what with all the barbarians and fighting with swords and axes and such. Anderson handles all that very well. The political intrigue in the scenes set on Ganymede aren’t as compelling, but at least Anderson keeps the pace moving along swiftly and the reader can’t help but wonder how he’s going to tie everything together . . . which he does, quite neatly.

THREE WORLDS TO CONQUER is a prime example of the sort of adventure science fiction I grew up reading. If you haven’t tried Poul Anderson’s work before, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start. If you’ve read and enjoyed Anderson’s novels but not this one, it’s worth seeking out. Plus it has a decent Jack Gaughan cover.