Title Briggands of the Moon Author Ray Cummings Cover Art --- Publisher --- First Printing 1930
	Title Wandl the Invader Author Ray Cummings Cover Art --- Publisher --- First Printing 1932
	Category Science Fiction Warnings None Main Characters Gregg Haljan, Snap, Anita, Venza Main Elements Space Opera, Aliens Website ---

Briggands of the Moon

Wandl the Invader

Brigands of the Moon was my first Cummings story. I'm doing a year of SF and wanted to be sure I got in some of the old stuff, from those pulp magazines, and I found this pair duology for free (there's a lot more on Project Gutenberg). It starts off ok, with Haljan and his friend Snap doing a routine luxury liner trip to Mars. But they are hijacked by a group of Martian brigands, the passengers dropped off on a passing asteroid (that had trees and water and breathable air...*cough*), and then brought to the moon to steal a valuable mineral discovery.

Wandl the Invader was the fifth story in the omnibus. By then I knew what to expect so when the story starts with another a planet smaller than our moon but maneuverable as a starship that then sent out gravitational beams to try to pull Earth, Mars and Venus and take them out of the solar system (I must have missed why, because away from our sun those planets won't be habitable...the fact that Mars and Venus is habitable in this tale is already a stretch). The planet, Wandl, is populated with giant brains that have eyes and legs, and a kind of insectoid humanoid that serves the brains to replace their atrophied bodies. And this world smaller than our moon has air, and rivers, and well...stuff that the gravity of the planet shouldn't be able to handle. I did like the idea though that if you were able to have an atmosphere in such a place, a storm would be able to blow boulders and redirect rivers because the gravity is so low the rocks would weigh very little. Brisk breeze would blow all the people around!

After reading the five stories I came to the conclusion that being scientifically accurate was only useful when it supported your story (e.g. allowing your characters to take 50 foot leaps) but ignored when inconvenient (need to dump some people somewhere, just pick a random hospitable asteroid). The plots are silly too (let's steal planets from the solar system and drag them who knows where). The stories can go on and on, I mean they are meant to be novels and they are short in that regard, but they read as short stories that are way too long. The women at least weren't portrayed as helpless. Sure the guys were constantly trying to protect them, but that's the guys. The women often saved their butts and did fairly well on their own, even if you wouldn't consider them heroines, at least they didn't faint all the time...in fact I think Snap did most of the fainting but then he was usually shot or asphyxiated.

But I suppose you turn off your brain a bit, and pretend that you are back in the 30's, long before you could read things like Dune, Ender's Game, Asimov, Clarke, Le Guin and Dick, you had pulp magazines were boys could let their imaginations run wild amongst the stars battling aliens, then yeah, they are action packed adventure stories. Also kind of liked the idea that ship propulsion was based on pushing against, or pulling towards the gravitation of the bodies of the solar system, hence the navigators like Haljan have to be really skilled at plotting the course.

But I'd recommend Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars stories instead, I actually ended up liking those. By the time I was halfway through the Cummings omnibus I was wondering if it would ever end, but for what its worth, the Gregg Haljan stories were actually better than some of the others (The Fire People was interminable...and didn't actually have any Fire People!)