You know, we had a nice Solar System once. Then those grubby space probes and lunar landers wrecked some prime literary real estate.

That was back in the days when Frederik Pohl was first writing, hiding behind a bunch of pen names that shielded him and his sometime collaborators. Nice bit of plausible deniability that. You can hide the newbie work if it it’s crap and take credit for the good stuff later. One of those handles was James MacCreigh. The big honcho in sf at the time was John W. Campbell. That guy thought writers needed American type names and, being a Campbell, he naturally thought the Scots-American sort was the best. Not that it did this Pohl guy any good. Campbell never sprang for any of Pohl’s solo work no matter what John Hancock he put on the manuscript.

This Pohl guy comes clean about all this in his “Introduction”. He just flat out tells you this was work from his first fifteen years being a writer, stuff he got published after the war. He’s not going to tell you any of these three stories are great stuff. You make that call. He just tells you they’re “space opera”, “action science fiction”. He polished them and sent them out into the world. Best he could do at the time.

Yeah, these are action adventures. We got heroes. They get beautiful women (or something close enough) at the end.

He’s got these notes before each story. And that kind of takes the air out of the first one, “Figurehead”. Well, that and the title itself.

That Campbell guy suggested the idea for this one. Our hero and his two buddies lose their boat in the Gulf of Mexico and get picked up by some aliens. Not real nice aliens either. There’s the ugly one, looks like a leprechaun crossed with a toad. The three guys call him the Boss, and that’s what he likes to do. Even speaks good English. Those guys are pretty interested in the luscious woman they see on ship. Except she’s got pink hair and doesn’t talk. She sings in some language nobody knows.

After about a year, the ship lands on Ganymede. And the guys are not happy about being put through some lab test and shoved towards some pool of deadly liquid by some little pink critters. Seems like everybody’s got these ugly dog-like things too. So the guys bust up that party and go on the lam. Seems the Ganymedeans had a little racial self-improvement project going on a million years back and made a big mess of things. Now they’re taking “specimens” from other worlds for more lab work.

Maybe I like “Red Moon of Danger” ‘cause it’s got a detective, and I’d been reading those Continental Op stories lately. This Templin guy ain’t a detective, per se. Just a guy with a good head on his shoulders, a guy likes to explore all those inner planets, seeing if maybe he can put a colony on Venus. He’s boiling mad his employer, Terralune Projects, called him all the way back from Mercury to come back to Luna, and for a problem in the company’s local uranium mine. But he’s still on the payroll, and the company’s founder was real nice to him when they were both on the first mission to the Moon. The old man’s dead now, so Templin agrees to help out his beautiful daughter whose running things now.

Ok, so maybe you don’t need to be a private dick yourself, once you hear there are ruins on the Moon from a local bunch of aliens that seemed to get a little too happy with the radioactives, to see what’s coming up. Still, I liked this one with its corrupt billionaire, and Templin handling himself real well with knives and guns though maybe Pohl could have stretched himself a bit to make that violent wrap up a bit less perfunctory.

And that Pohl guy got even better when he gave us “Donovan Had a Dream”. Even got himself a cover illo out of it.

That old Venus was a fine place, and Valentine and his buddy Hadley and the dancer Darl, Valentine’s maybe squeeze, aren’t too bad off. Hadley and Valentine make money smuggling flowers for the local bootleggers.

Things would be a lot better if those bitches, the Hags, weren’t running things, acting like some kind of nuns. They ain’t stupid though. Seems they started out about a 150 years back as a bunch of brilliant women scientists who thought “men had made a mess of things”. Then maybe they started not just complaining about men but doing something about them. Experimenting on them. That got them kicked out of Earth, but they weaseled their way into running Venus after promising the locals they could have democracy if they kicked the Earth government out. Worked great except the democracy part afterward.

They got things in hand, though, with their giant, remote-controlled police robots, and the ladies seem to have something new planned with some tiny robots.

Then a beautiful dame shows up from Earth Space Fleet. Seems Earth’s running out of radioactives, and Venus’ got a bunch. Seems the Hags don’t want to do business, so maybe Valentine knows someone who does. Maybe someone who could get rid of the Hags.

Thing is trusting somebody from Earth doesn’t come easy to Valentine.

Pohl’s kind of clever in this one. He plays the plot twists close to hand, so we’re not sure which cards he’s going to play. I’d have liked some more on the Hags and the little projects their running, but I think we can make some guesses.

This James MacCreigh guy delivers on some fun, keeps you entertained. Not really like that bigshot Pohl and his stuff, but not bad. ( )

Indeholder "Introduction", "Figurehead", "Red Moon of Danger", "Donovan Had a Dream".

"Introduction" handler om ???
"Figurehead" handler om ???
"Red Moon of Danger" handler om ???
"Donovan Had a Dream" handler om ??? ( )

These are among Pohl's first published stories and they are pure golden age scifi, with all that entails: beautiful women who may think they're strong, but who need a good man around for protection when push comes to shove, protagonists who don't hesitate to beat up the bad guys when expedient, and aliens who are either bug-eyed monsters or more-or-less human clones. Which is not to deny that reading stories of this ilk can be a fun, guilty pleasure if they catch you in the right mood. The third story, "Donovan Had a Dream," about Earth's attempts to interfere in a low speed guerrila war between factions on Venus, was the best of the three. ( )