Title The Fire People Series --- Author Ray Cummings Cover Art --- Publisher --- First Printing 1922 Category Science Fiction Warnings None Main Characters Alan, Miela, Mercer, Anina, Tao Main Elements Aliens Website ---

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The book starts EXACTLY the same as The War of the Worlds, spaceship lands on Earth, starts using death rays, but no tripods and it's in the U.S. Then next thing you know it's Princess of Mars...only it's Mercury, because, "Conditions on Mercury are not fundamentally different from here." *cough*

Ok, so the plot is humans (because aliens on another planet would be EXACTLY like us) from Mercury sent an initial all-male foray to Earth to check things out since things are pretty crowded up there on Mercury so they want to claim some of our real estate. And on a second ship a female has landed, bumps into a male Earth human and there is insta-love (and here I thought that was a YA girl phenomenon, huh), oh, she has giant red wings...but you can hide those with a cloak, no one will notice the GIANT hump on her back. Anyway, she's come to warn us about the invasion (right, she learns to speak English in a couple days), and also ask for our help because women on her planet are repressed, their wings are clipped when they are married so they can no longer fly away from the aggressive males. Because on Earth 1920's women were treated so much better and the men so much more gentle, right.

Anyway, Earth guy marries Mercurian woman and they use her ship to go back to a VERY sparsely populated Mercury (wasn't it like super crowded a moment ago?) How are they not fried? See, Mercury is protected by this really thick atmosphere *cough* Venus *cough* so it's not really that hot except on the side that always faces the sun. In fact people used to live even there until the climate changed and now there are gaps in the clouds that allow the sun to scorch the planet surface, there is some mention of Fire People that might still live there, but are never mentioned again (at which point I wonder at the book title seeing as most of the time is spent on the darker side of the planet...)

Anyhow, they find another earth man was taken by that original ship, but he escapes and hooks up with the other Earth man and his wife. They decide they can't let the bad guy take over since he'll then invade Earth (plus men shouldn't be so mean to women by clipping their wings, but they'll worry about that later). So they gather up all the girls since the king is a useless old man and none of the men want to fight, they build platforms so the girls can ferry the two Earth men about, and the plot meanders about for a good 2-300 hundred pages with them bouncing around various bits and parts of the planet trying to find Tao's supporters and stop them. Oh, that other Earthman? Insta-love with the Mercurian girl's sister, of course.

The bad guy runs to the dark side of Mercury, the Earthmen raise an army and chase them. They run into some of the hovels that people live in on the dark side, you can't grow anything there so they all eat meat, because there are caribou that can be hunted (what the caribou eat is left to the imagination). There's a fight, battle is won, and girls get to keep their wings.

And for a planet that can come up with the technology for light rays and space ships and powered boats...technology was otherwise non-existent and people spent their days tending rice fields by hand. What?

Normally I wouldn't just blurt out the plot in a review, but honestly I kept hoping it would end already. I was reading an omnibus so I had no idea how many pages this particular novel had and it seemed to just keep going forever, like "oh, you beat the bad guys OH NO YOU DID NOT, he escaped! So now you get another 50 pages to trudge though". To be fair it was 1920, we didn't know then what we know now about the planets, and the likelyhood of life evolving on them, (though H.G. Wells from about 30 years before did a much better job reasoning out what his aliens would be like, so maybe Cummings didn't have an excuse after all) so there was a lot more fiction than the science. Basically it is was it is, an adventure romance tale directed towards young males who loved reading pulp magazines. But somehow Edgar Rice Burroughs had plots and characters that I actually enjoyed while this one just didn't make any sense, so the genre can be done a lot better than this.