Doomsday Planet

Every so often a book lands on the review pile that is interesting less for what it is than for the curious circumstances of its existence, and Doomsday Planet is very much one of those. It is, on the face of it, a slim and unassuming piece of 1960s space adventure, the sort of thing that filled the spinner racks for a shilling or two and was read once and forgotten. Dig a little into where it came from, though, and a rather poignant little story emerges, one that colours everything about how the novel reads.

The author's name on the cover is Harl Vincent, which was the pen name of an American mechanical engineer called Harold Vincent Schoepflin. Vincent was, in his day, a genuinely prolific figure in the early pulps. From the late 1920s onward he sold something in the region of seventy or eighty short stories to the great magazines of the period, the likes of Amazing Stories and Astounding, writing the kind of brisk, gadget-minded science fiction that the engineering-trained authors of that era did so well. And then, around the start of the 1940s, he simply stopped. For more than two decades he wrote nothing, and the reasons for his long silence seem to have gone unrecorded. Doomsday Planet, published in 1966, was his return after that quarter-century gap, and it was the only full-length novel he ever produced. He died not long afterward, in 1968. So this is, in a real sense, a last word: an old pulp hand, in his seventies, picking up a pen he had laid down before the war and writing one final book.

Knowing that, it becomes a good deal easier to be generous toward what is, by any honest measure, a slight and old-fashioned novel.

The story itself is pure pulp adventure, and none the worse for being upfront about it. Our hero is Jack Donley, who has signed aboard the ethership Meteoric on a trading run taking the outer route from Earth's lunar station out toward Mars. Donley has a private reason for being there: his fiancée, Mera, was lost in space aboard an earlier ship, the Saturnia, on this very same trajectory, and he is quietly hoping the voyage might tell him something about what became of her. He gets rather more than he bargained for. Out on the edge of known space the Meteoric is caught and dragged off course by an invisible stream of cosmic energy, a force far stronger than the ship can hope to break free of, radiating from a strange rogue world called Ormin. As the ship is pulled inexorably toward the planet, a low, hypnotic, pulsing throb begins to sound through the hull, a steady lub-dub, lub-dub that lulls most of the crew and passengers into a catatonic, sleeping stupor. Donley, along with a level-headed scientist named Randall and a Martian crewmate, proves immune to the effect, and the three of them manage to bring the ship down safely on Ormin. There they discover a domed city and the survivors of an ancient civilisation, and learn that the planet was long ago torn apart by a war between two factions. Ormin, it turns out, is the doomsday planet of the title, a world living under a death sentence, where those who set foot are condemned to a kind of living death.

It is, you will gather, not a story overburdened with subtlety, and the pleasures it offers are the straightforward pleasures of vintage space opera: a mysterious signal, a ship pulled toward a sinister unknown world, a small band of heroes immune to a menace that fells everyone around them, an ancient alien race with a tragic history to explain. Vincent moves it all along competently enough, and there is a certain undeniable charm in the period furniture; the talk of etherships and cosmic ray streams, the optophones and optical scanners, the whole confident, brass-and-rivets vision of space travel that the genre had already begun to leave behind by 1966. The throbbing pulse that creeps through the ship is the book's single best idea, genuinely a touch unsettling, and Vincent is wise to lean on it.

That said, I would be doing you a disservice if I pretended this was anything other than a minor work. It does, to borrow my own phrase, ever so slightly show its age, and rather more than slightly in places. The prose is functional rather than memorable, the characterisation is thin even by the forgiving standards of the form, and the wonder that the great pulp stories could conjure is only intermittently present here. There is a sense throughout of a writer working in an idiom that had already passed its prime, telling a kind of story that the field had been telling, and frankly telling better, thirty years earlier. The young Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke had moved science fiction a long way by the mid-1960s, and Doomsday Planet reads like a transmission from an earlier decade that has arrived a little late.

And yet I find I cannot be hard on it. There is something quietly affecting about an old craftsman returning, after twenty-five years of silence, to the kind of story that made his name, and writing it one last time with evident affection for the form. Read as a polished modern novel, it falls well short. Read as what it actually is, the final flourish of a golden-age pulpster who wanted to fly an ethership through the dark one more time before the end, it is rather lovely.

So who is Doomsday Planet for? Not, I think, the casual reader looking for a strong introduction to the genre, who would be far better served almost anywhere else. It is a book for the enthusiast and the historian, for the reader who enjoys the texture of vintage science fiction for its own sake and who can take pleasure in a competent, old-fashioned adventure without needing it to be more than it is. Approach it in that spirit, with an eye on the man behind the pen name and the story of how it came to be written, and it offers a modest, genuine, faintly melancholy charm. It is a curiosity rather than a classic, but some curiosities are well worth the shelf space.