Green Sulfur

original cover art by Earle Bergey

This month is the eighth consecutive August that I have celebrated the life and science fiction stories of Jack Vance. In May, I read all of Vance's stories published in pulp magazines during the year 1951. Here in this blog post, I comment on Vance's 1952 story "Sabotage on Sulfur Planet".

But first... At the beginning of the June 1952 edition of Startling Stories was an editorial trying to refute a reader's claim that dreams of space travel and colonization of distant planets are merely symptoms of a bad case of running away from one's troubles on Earth. The editorial got into a discussion of malnutrition among the people of Earth as an example of Earthly problems and asked if we need to travel to distant planets in search of new sources of food. 

The secret uses of sulfur.

In the middle of the editorial, readers were treated to the suggestion that in cases of a bad diet, you simply have to expect a change in a woman's sexual behavior. In trying to account for higher birth rates among poorly fed populations, it is suggested that deficiency of food in a female's diet is a known factor "which causes her to sustain a higher level of sexual desire".

image source

The editorial mentions research on laboratory rats that had been performed by James R. Slonaker, a physiologist at Stanford University. Slonaker did research on the relationship between the activity of rats and their fluctuating estrogen levels. He also studied how changes in diet influenced body weight and longevity in rats. The leap from this research on laboratory rats to conclusions about the sexual behavior of women that was included in that June 1952 editorial was rather Startling. 

image source

Independent of diet, dramatic drops in birthrates have been observed in many countries simply by providing women with better educations and an opportunity to fully participate in society rather than being forced to only exist as housewives and mothers. "In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime." Now, that birth rate has been cut in half (see the graph to the left) and if the trend continues, world population will start to decline.

interior art by Antonio Schomburg

 Sulfur Planet. Moving beyond fictional science in the editorial, what about the intentional science fiction in Vance's story? Vance set "Sabotage on Sulfur Planet" in an imagined future at a time when humans were 150 years into the process of spreading outwards from Earth to explore the nearby star systems, but those frontiersmen had not yet made contact with any intelligent aliens. 

Suddenly, out in the depths of space near Star Control Field Office #12, there is a drunken spaceman telling tales about the discovery of a new planet that is home to an alien species with intelligent behavior. 

cover art by Leslie Edwards

I find it intriguing to read Vance's old stories from the pulp Sci Fi magazines and see how his story writing skills developed through the years. I suspect that Vance must have had some "educational" experiences when he was working as a seaman in the Merchant Marine. Many old Vance stories such as "Sabotage on Sulfur Planet" capture the "look and feel" of nautical adventure stories that could just as well be set in exotic ports of Earth rather than on some exoplanet.

At the beginning of the story, Robert Smith is a low-ranking, poorly-paid office clerk working for Star Control. Smith wonders why his boss does not replace him with a computerize system that could do his work. The only answer is, it is cheaper to pay Smith to do the job. However, don't blink, because the lowly Smith is soon promoted to the rank of Lieutenant in Star Control's Extraordinary Squad and he heads out on a dangerous mission to make First Contact with the intelligent aliens of Sulfur Planet.

An editorial blub that was inserted right into the text of the story, 3 pages in.

green sulfur

Vance had some university training in geology and geological plot elements often appeared in his science fiction stories. For "Sabotage on Sulfur Planet", Robert Smith travels to the titular Sulfur Planet (identified by Vance as the 4th planet of Rho Ophiuchus) after discovering that a mysterious green "crystal" ("unlike anything seen before") seems to substantiate the drunkard's tales of a newly discovered exoplanet that might be home to an alien civilization.

Each of the alien drones has a green crystal.

Shown to the left is the interior art that was placed right at the start of the story. Sadly, readers don't actually get to Sulfur Planet until 15 pages into the story. 🙁 The atmosphere of the planet is mostly composed of noxious sulfur compounds, so the human visitors have to wear special protective suits that won't dissolve in the planet's corrosive air.

Notice the cubical "castles" in the image shown to the left. These contain a sulfurous liquid that the natives live in. We don't get to meet the castle-building aliens (Vance only provides a brief description of a mysterious alien arm that reaches out of the "boiling" liquid that fills one of the castles). 

star code

Smith discovers that the green "crystals" act as receivers for radio signals that control the movements of the drones, the mobile objects that look like cacti with tentacles in the interior artwork drawn by Schomburg. The drones wander around, plucking up and harvesting small plant-like growths and delivering them to the castles.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. And the first choice in Hollywood. Back in the early 50s, Vance had the opportunity to write scripts for the Captain Video television program. I was in the next generation of kids to watch Sci Fi on TV and I got to watch the absurd fist fights (and sword fights) of Captain Kirk on Star Trek. 

Vance never out-grew his predilection to include flying fists and flashing swords in his stories. In "Sabotage on Sulfur Planet" we are subjected to the antics of the bellicose Captain Plum who is endlessly getting into fist fights and disciplining his crew members with a quick blow (or two or three) to the subordinate's face.

Stephen Byerley

I have to confess, that even the gentler Isaac Asimov could not always avoid a well-timed punch in his stories. He turned his psychohistory hero, professor of mathematics, Hari Seldon into a trained hand-to-hand fighter and I'm waiting with pent-up horror to see what Apple TV does with that character feature. Probably the most famous punch ever thrown by one of Asimov's characters is illustrated in the image to the left. That's one robot punching another robot, so in the end, this simulated violence is only a trick used to make people believe that politician Stephen Byerley is not a robot.

In "Sabotage on Sulfur Planet" the protagonist Smith must deal with the notorious Captain Plum and the lowly crew of spaceship Messararia who are a rag-tag assortment of men with dark backgrounds. The action all takes place on the frontier of newly explored star systems and don't expect a significant role for any female characters, just a seemingly endless series of fist fights. 

arrack

Readers almost get a glimpse of the secretary who works for Noland Bannister. The secretary is a minor character who we can only guess is a woman, but "she" remains hidden from view, on the other side of Bannister's office door. Later, in this Hi Tek™ computerized future of the space age, another secretary must rummage through filing cabinets in search of information about the Messararia. She is "the girl" who works at the spaceship Bureau of Registry, but Vance does not waste any ink describing her. This inattention to the two women in the story is in contrast to the intricate detail we get about male characters, including multiple lines in the story that elaborate on the features of Captain Plum's nose hair.

The one member of the Messararia's crew with a shred of conscience and loose drunken lips is Don Lowell, who is described as the supercargo. We must wonder what Lowell's real job is, because the Messararia does not seem to be a normal cargo ship. Captain Plum's business seems to be looting frontier worlds.

light-years

Noland Bannister is Superintendent of Field Office #12 and he's unwilling to dismiss Lowell's drunken ramblings as fabrication. Bannister insists that even a drunkard's stories of a planet with intelligent alien life must be investigated by Star Control.

A Real Spoiler. Having been castigated by Bannister for failing to properly investigate the rumor of a newly discovered alien intelligence, Smith seeks out Lowell and finds him in a bar near the spaceport. Lowell provides a coded description of how to find the Sulfur Planet. In Lowell's code, which might seem like more drunken rambling, "red arrack" stands for right ascension. "Dubonnet" was code for "declination" and the "lys" on a torn "fluer de lys" liqueur bottle was Lowell's code for "light-years". 

Lost World. The entire plot of "Sabotage on Sulfur Planet" is contrived and hard to swallow, but it seems like the embryonic origins of a better story that Vance published 12 years later. Vance invented a poem that included a coded description of how to find the "lost" planet Thamber. That poem was used in The Killing Machine to guide the hero (Kirth Gersen) to Thamber where he could complete his dire mission.

Smith's new partner?

 Last word. I often like to imagine that in an alternate Reality the stories written by Jack Vance or his analogue, Joan Vance, might have been somewhat different. I wish we had learned more about the aliens of Sulfur Planet in "Sabotage on Sulfur Planet". I also wonder if Vance might have planned to turn Robert Smith into a recurring character who could appear in a series of short stories like Magnus Ridolph. Maybe Robert Smith was related to Joe Smith, the main character in Vance's 1951 story "Son of the Tree".

At the end of "Sabotage on Sulfur Planet", Bannister tells Smith to take a vacation and then he will have a new mission as a roving agent of Star Control. 

a sequel in the Ekcolir Reality?

I like to imagine that in an alternate Reality there might have been somewhat different versions of stories like "Sabotage on Sulfur Planet". Maybe in a sequel story Smith could return to the planet and team up with a red-haired biologist who wants to study the aliens creatures of Sulfur Planet.

Image Credits. The imaginary book cover shown to the left was made using "eqsu9equs9o fractal gimp stock" by SwordTiger8888 and also see "Plo Koon head and hand freebie" by dazinbane.

Also: The adventures of John Smith.

Related Reading: redhead Alice Wroke

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