All the stories in the world can be placed in one of two boxes....

All the stories in the world can be placed in one of two boxes.

Into the first box goes stories which didn’t really happen, but invite us to imagine that they did. 

Into the second box goes stories which don’t pretend to be anything other than artistic creations, made up by a story teller for our entertainment.

What if... stories and tales of Parallel earths go into the first box, along with epistolatory novels and first person narratives and pretend diaries and True Confessions.

Imaginary tales go into the second box along with most jokes and ballads and fairy tales and parables. 

You might expect the first box to contain all the sensible stories about housewives and businessmen and school cricket teams and regency country houses; and the second box to contain all the ridiculous stories about space men and monsters and vampires. But if anything, the opposite is true. It is in the first box where you would find The Lord of the Rings and Tarzan of the Apes and Call of Cthulhu, along with Sherlock Holmes and Robinson Crusoe. It isn't just that Tolkien pretends that he translated Bilbo's memoirs from an ancient Red Book; and that Edgar Rice Borroughs was told the tale of the ape-man from one who had no business to tell it to him. It's that these kinds of stories are only fun if you kind of pretend that there really was a Detective as clever as Holmes and a cast-way as resourceful but obtuse as Crusoe. We aren't actually fooled -- but we have to play along with the game if we are going to enjoy what are (as a matter of fact) rather silly stories. But if you want eminently believable stories about witty ladies trying to find suitable husbands and thwarted young women trying to do good in the world, it's in the second box we have to look for them. Lovers misunderstand each other and old Aunts act snobbishly in many country houses on many days of the week. But Jane Austen would not think of trying to convince us, even playfully, that her novels are true. She isn't creating fake news or fake gossip: she is creating a work of art: making things up. From time to time she points out she has determined or altered the course of events based on her personal sense of morality and decorum. Any work of fiction with an "omniscient" viewpoint wears its fictional status on its sleeve. Watson can't tell you what Holmes is thinking, because he doesn't know. George Eliot can suddenly jump into the head of Rev Casaubon because he's her character and doesn't exist outside the story.

(Boys stories and girls stories? Let's not go there.)

In fact, I am far from sure that two boxes are enough. If we are going to divide all the stories in the world into piles, I think we may need as many as five. You can imagine them placed inside each other like a Russian Onion, if you want. They are very probably made of ticky-tacky.

Box Zero contains the real world: things which happened yesterday; and things which happened eight hundred years ago. The conversation with the nutter you had on the bus goes into Box Zero; so does the Battle of Agincourt. Unfortunately, Box Zero is empty, because no-one can get inside your head and no-one can travel back to St Crispen's day 1415. The only way of talking about real things which happened in the real world is to turn them into stories. 

Box One contains news, and first person testimony, and autobiography -- stories, certainly, but stories which are doing their level best to tell you what really happened and not deceive you or make good art or even necessarily be particularly interesting. That funny story I told you about the nutter who sat next to me on the bus last week goes into Box One; so does the first hand testimony of one of Henry V's herald.

Box Two contains stories. But it only contains true stories: stories that take stuff we found in Box One and dust it down, polish it up, make it interesting and palatable and enjoyable. If I take my funny anecdote about the bus-ride and turn it into a short play for Radio 4, I would have to put it into Box Two -- alongside Shakespeare's Henry V. True stories contain lots of stuff which is made up. We don't know or remember what we said yesterday, or what anyone said eight hundred years ago. But if someone asked "Is Goodbye Christopher Robin a true story? Is Shadowlands? Is Nowhere Boy?" we would reply: yes: A.A Milne and C.S Lewis and John Lennon did roughly those things under roughly those circumstances?

Box One and Two contain True Stories: but Boxes Three and Four contain Stories. Everything in them is fictitious and any resemblance to real persons or events is purely coincidental. Ghost stories and love stories and cowboy stories and superhero stories all go into these boxes. 

But some Fictional Stories pretend very hard to be True, They tell you about battles and bus-rides as if the person telling the story was on the bus or at the battle; even though the battle or the bus-ride never happened. They might even have happened in made-up towns and made-up countries. Those kinds of stories go into Box Three. You might call these stories Lies -- and certainly some Lies would fit nicely into Box Three. But in general, no-one is trying to fool anyone else. We are just pretending. 

This leaves us with Box Four. Box Four  contains all the stories beginning Once Upon a Time and A Funny Thing Happened to Me On The Way To The Theatre and "so this man walks into a bar, right" and "come all you young girls and I'll tell you a tale." But it also contains all the very serious novels in which the novelist doesn't pretend to be anything other than a novelist.

So, in ascending order of fictionallness:

0: What happened

1: Me telling you what really happened

2: Me creating a work of art about what really happened

3: Me making up something which never happened but pretending like it did

4: Me telling you a thing I made up

I don't know why so-many far-fetched, pulpy, genre fictions are to be found in Box Three. Maybe the idea of an invisible crime fighter who learned magic in Tibet is so hard to believe that you can't read it at all without pretending that the stories came from The Shadow's Own Private Files. Maybe the sorts of people who become pulp writers are not quite so clever as the sort of people who become literary writers. Maybe Jane Austen can make us believe in Fanny Price because she describes her so beautifully; maybe Maxwell Grant can only make us believe in the Shadow by swearing blind (in quotation marks) that such a person really exists and appears on the wireless every Thursday evening. 

The most famous and important stories in human history are utterly and irreducibly in Box Four. The only conceivable answer to the question “Why didn’t the Levite help the man who had been set upon by Brigands” is “Because Jesus wanted to make a point about sectarianism and the Temple.” Anyone who tried to infer things about the man’s psychological make up or what he had for breakfast that day would have utterly missed the point of the parable.

Some Christians do utterly miss the point. Some Christians insist that every single word in the Bible comes straightforwardly from Box One. The story of Adam and Eve isn't a metaphor or an allegory: it is there to give you information about who the first Man and Woman were. If someone doubts that they were real, they can be instantly silenced with the killer question "Were you there?" If there is a parable about a certain man who had two sons, then the certain man with two sons must be an historical fact -- you aren't calling Jesus a liar, are you? Some of us think that reading parables as history annihilates them as parables. There are, of course, almost as many Christians who think that every single word in the Bible is a parable -- even the bits which are pretty obviously historical.

I think that my boxes will go quite a long way towards solving literary criticism. When they become well known I expect them to replace Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell as the standard models of narrative 

Consider:

Mary Shelly and Lord Byron really did tell each other ghost stories during a wet summer in Italy (Box 0.) 

The preface to Frankenstien describes the competition as Mary Shelly remembered it. (Box 1). 

The event has been turned into a story in such works as Gothic, Bloody Poetry, The Bride of Frankenstien and The Haunting of Villa Diodati, (Box 2).

(It might be that Mary Shelly's preface has been fictionalised. It night be happier in Box 2 than in Box 1.) 

But the story of Frankenstien is not presented as a spooky story that young Mary is making up. It works very hard to create the illusion that Frankenstien lived in the real world: it is presented as a series of letters and diary entries written by the sailor who finds Frankenstien wandering in the ice; which contain Frankenstien's own first hand account of what happened. Nevertheless, the existence of the ghost story frame reminds us that it is in fact only a story created by Mary Shelly in order to scare us (Box 4.) 

Indientally, Frankenstien is the name of the scientist who created the monster, not the monster itself.

Or, again - to take the most delightful example of all:

 

William Goldman is a real screen writer and director, who really wrote a novel called the Princess Bride and really struggled for decades to get it turned into a film (Box 0). 

The novel "The Princess Bride" consists of an entirely naturalistic and believable frame in which William Goldman tracks down a copy of his favourite childhood novel and is disappointed by it (Box 3). 

This frame is presented so convincingly that many people believe it to be straightforward (Box 2) reportage, although in fact it is entirely made up: Goldman is not married to a child psychologist and didn’t have a ten year old son at the time. 

Goldman really did write Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, (Box 0) but he definitely did not base the cliff-jump sequence on a similar event in The Princess Bride. His convincing account of his childhood infatuation with the book is completely made up (Box 3). 

The bulk of the story is presented as something which an eccentric novelist named Morgenstern created (Box 4); with some embellishments by Goldman himself. He adds material to Morgenstern's story, but makes no suggestion that he is trying to get back to an original historical Box 1 version of Westley and Buttercup: he is just making stuff up to make it a better (Box 4) yarn. The double or triple framing sequence gives us permission to accept and enjoy far fetched events the resurrection pill and the left-handed sword fight -- because it is being presented, not as implausible history, but as an admittedly preposterous story. 

Characters can, of course, sometimes escape from their narrative boxes. There is nothing in the world to stop me from saying: “What if it turned out that Mary Shelly was not making up the story which so terrified Lord Byron: what if in fact Victor Frankenstien was known to her, and she had seen the Monster with her own eyes”. But all I have done in that case is created a new story with Mary Shelly in it. I have certainly not made the monster real! You could say that I have moved the Mary Shelly of the prologue from Box 2 (True Story) to Box 3 (Fiction Pretending To Be Real.) Or perhaps I have moved the monster from Box 4 (Fiction presented as fiction) to Box 3 (Fiction Pretending to Be Real). What I have certainly not done is made Frankenstien's monster real in the primary world! 

I cannot satisfactorily imagine a story in which Fred Savage (the sick boy in the movie version of the Princess Bride) steps through a portal and meets Westley and Buttercup (the fictional hero or heroine) or in which Westley and Buttercup drop by with some grapes to play Commodore 64 sports games with him and his grandpa. I can't even imagine the Boy going to modern day Floren and visiting Westley's grave. The characters in Morgenstern's Princess Bride -- in the story within the story -- don’t exist in another world; they don’t even exist in our world, a long time ago. They are only stories. They don’t exist at all.

I am prepared to defend, to some extent, Walt Disney’s desecration of Winnie-the-Pooh: the American accents, the gopher, the voice of the narrator, the dreadful songs, the misunderstanding of the metaphysical status of heffalumps. What I cannot quite forgive is the way the stuffed-toy-Pooh in Christopher Robin’s bedroom winks at the audience in the final frame. Pooh is a toy; Christopher Robin is a little boy; the Pooh-stories are made-up-stories, in a book, in which the narrator imagines the toy Pooh to be a real bear. The final scenes asks us to think that either Christopher Robin’s live action bedroom is actually part of the cartoon world in the book; or else that something from the cartoon book world has escaped into 1920s England. 

Similarly, in the final frames of Disney's Song of the South the cartoon characters from Uncle Remus’s tales appear in the flesh and start interacting with the live action children, while the old man rubs his eyes in astonishment. Is the message that Bre’er Rabbit was as real as the post Civil War South -- or the the post Civil War South is as fictional as a cartoon about talking bunnies? 

Song of the South has one or two other problems which we don’t need to go into right now.

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting me on Patreon.

If you don't want to commit to monthly payments, please consider making a one-off payment on Ko-FI. 

Lets talk about the multiverse...

"Please, Aslan!" [said Lucy]  "Am I not to know?"
"To know what would have happened, child?" said Aslan. "No. Nobody is ever told that."

Prince Caspian

Let’s talk about the multiverse.

In 1977, Stan Lee’s arch disciple Roy Thomas created a comic book called What If...? Thomas was a smart guy. He'd spotted that Conan and Star Wars were the kinds of things Marvel should be doing when Stan Lee thought they should only be doing superheroes. Star Wars was a big hit and probably saved the company from bankruptcy. Conan was a slow burner, a critical success, sold steadily for decades, and was the main cause of Dave Sim.

When Stan Lee was pitching story-ideas at his stable of artists and co-writers, he used to say things like “What if Doctor Doom stole the Silver Surfer’s power?" "What if Doctor Octopus kidnapped Aunt May?" "What if the Thing quit the Fantastic Four?” Lee thought that being able to think up What If... questions was the very definition of  creativity. He and he alone had the power to say “What If Jonah Jameson hired a robot to catch Spider-Man?” Any old hack could then turn these solid gold ideas into workmanlike comic books. (By a strange coincidence, when he stopped working with Ditko and Kirby, the power to come up with surefire What If...? questions mysteriously deserted him.) 

At any rate, Roy Thomas would have had no difficulty convincing Stan that “What If...?” was a good title for a comic book.

The What If...? comic asked questions about the past, rather than about the future. Instead of taking a blank page and saying “What would happen if...?” it took an existing story and asked “What would have happened if...?” The first What If... took a narrative dead end from the first issue of Spider-Man and asked “What would have happened if Spider-Man had joined the Fantastic Four?” A bit of a tragedy, as it turned out: the Invisible Girl would have left Reed and married Namor, and the remaining members of the Fantastic Five would have been left wondering what would have happened if Spidey had never joined the gang. 

Some of them were based on questions that almost anyone could understand (What would have happened if Peter Parker had stopped that Burglar and Uncle Ben had not been murdered?) Others asked questions you would have had have been quite hard core to understand or care about. (What would have happened if the Avengers had become pawns of Korvac?)

Some of the stories were just plain fun. "What If The Original Marvel Bullpen Had Been The Fantastic Four?" is pretty much just a romp through comic book history, and the last time Kirby’s brush came into contact with those characters. But very often they felt more like commentaries: ways of illuminating what was good and essential about the original story; the reason why things could not have turned out differently. "What If Phoenix Had Lived?" was Chris Claremont’s explanation of why the character had to be written out of the X-Men when she was; Frank Miller’s "What If Elektra Had Lived?" plausibly showed that if his one true love had not been killed off, Daredevil would have quit being a crime fighter and lived happily ever after and there would have been no more stories. 'What If The Fantastic Four Had Never Got Their Powers?" is essentially John Byrne demonstrating how much the original F.F owed to Challengers of the Unknown. 

What If... has no morphed into an animated TV series, asking questions about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (We live in a strange post-fannish world where there is a thing called the Marvel Cinematic Universe you can ask What If... questions about.) But it is much more interested in creating fun, one-off versions of the movies than with asking clever questions about them. "What If Peggy Carter Had Been The First Avenger?" is an excuse to give us a lady Captain America with a Union Jack on her shield (and to put Steve in a very primitive Iron Man suit); "What If The Black Panther Had Become Star Lord?" is essentially a new Guardians of the Galaxy heist, with a not-evil Thanos sitting in bars talking about his plan to solve the population crisis.

Our friend C.S Lewis, who had probably not read many Marvel Comics, said that asking what would have happened was only ever a vivid rhetorical device for talking about what, in fact, did happen. 

DC also had a nice line in counterfactuals, which they called Imaginary Tales. Imaginary Tales tended to be utterly preposterous events which, if not marked “Imaginary” would destroy a character or change them beyond recognition. An Avengers comic in which a female Captain England was defrosted by Nick Fury in the twenty first century would only be a little different from the Avengers comic we know and love. A Superman comic in which Kal-El stays at home in an apron and changes the diapers of a pair of super-babies would no longer be a Superman comic in any recognisable sense. The formula was not “What would happen...?” or “What would have happened....?” it was “What might happen...” Imaginary tales were about possibilities, albeit very remote ones.

DC had a propensity to produce parallel earths by the sack-load: but they were part of the main storyline. There really was another universe where the Flash wore a funny tin-hat and the Green Lantern had a strange raised collar and cape. You could get from Earth-1 to Earth-2 if you ran fast enough. But Imaginary Tales were a different thing. There was no Earth-17 where Superman became President; or married Lois; or watched Lois marry Batman; or where he married Lois and Lana and Lori consecutively; got old; turned evil; turned into a gorilla; split into two distinct individuals... They were imaginary stories. The Batman versions were occasionally said to be works of fiction that Alfred was creating in his spare time!

Spider-Man 121 has a front page caption: "Not a trick! Not an imaginary tale! But the most startling unexpected turning point in the webslinger's entire life! How can Spider-Man go on after this almost unbelievable death!" Marvel wanted us to believe that imaginary stories were cheating: that, at any rate, a non-imaginary story was more dramatic and important than an imaginary one? 

But why? If they are all stories anyway, shouldn't the tale be judged on its own merits? 

One is tempted to misquote Oscar Wilde: "There is no such thing as an imaginary or a non-imaginary comic book. Comic books are well written, or badly written, and that is all."

The answer is that a canonical story affects all subsequent stories. In Superman 149 Superman dies. There is no let-out clause, no unexpected happy ending: Superman is really dead. But because The Death of Superman is only an imaginary story, there is no expectation that he will remain dead in issue 150, 151, or 152. But once [SPOILER ALERT] Gwen Stacy is dead in Spider-Man 121, we take it for granted that she will remain dead in issue 122, and 123, and 124: and that we will see Peter Parker dealing with his grief, finding a new lover, agonising about his guilt. Gwen may be cloned; she may turn out to have a twin sister; she may even be raised from the dead. In comic books, no-one dies for ever, except Bucky. But the tragic murder on the bridge can never un-happen. 

The canonical story allows a writer to exert power over all subsequent writers. If Alan Moore says that the Joker shoots Barbara Gordon in the spine, then all subsequent writers have to depict her as a wheel-chair user (or give her bionic legs, or introduce a brilliant surgeon who can cure her.) 

The canonical story is one component of a bigger story. An imaginary story or a What If... in which Aunt May died would not be particularly interesting: she is very old and very poorly and was bound to pass away sooner or later. But it would be a very interesting development in the on-going Spider-Man soap opera -- because we would want to know what happens next month, and the month after, and in five years time. How will Peter Parker cope in the absence of his only relative and mother-figure? Does he now have any particularly good reason to keep his identity a secret? Will Marvel's most realistic hero sign a pact with Satan to bring her back from the dead? 

The distinction between canon and non-canon is therefore a litmus test of our fannishness. If you read Spider-Man as a soap opera, than stories which fall outside that narrative stream are a waste of time, albeit a diverting one. If you think that individual stories are merely bricks which make up a vast edifice called The Marvel Universe then an imaginary story is at best a piece of childish trivia and at worst a dishonest scam. But if you just read comic books, then the story is the thing. Comics are fun or boring, and that is all. A hard-core fan approaches the forthcoming Batman movie by asking "How will it interact with the Snyderverse?". The more casual fan and the normal movie goer is more likely to ask "Will it be any good?" 

"It's called ther Batman", said Christopher Robin. "Don't you know what ther means?"

Alan Moore’s 1986 story Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? is an elegiac tribute to Silver Age Superman comics; a celebration of everything Moore loved about them, and a vicious deconstruction of everything he found silly in them. It was the last time that the old 1950s world of super-pets and rainbow kryptonite would appear in a mainline Superman comic. Moore famously introduced it with the simultaneously wistful and cynical comment : “This is an imaginary story...but then aren’t they all?”

 

The previous 30 years of Superman stories were about to be "decanonized" in the Crisis reboot, so it was in one sense true that every single comic he remembered from his childhood was about to become, by editorial fiat, an Imaginary Tale. But at a deeper level, this story, like every other Superman story, and indeed every other story, was Imaginary -- a product of the human imagination. 

It was a good line. But we shouldn’t press it too hard. If a fan asks “Is Batman: ther Dark Knight Returns an imaginary tale?” it is unkind and unhelpful to smile smugly and say "Yes, but aren't they all?" Marvel and DC comics have spent decades building up the illusion that their stories take place in their own, self-consistent universes -- imaginary, of course, in the sense of not-really-existing, but with a continuity and a history in which events have narrative consequences. Some things "really happened" in that great story-made-of-stories; some things emphatically did not. It is not childish or contemptible to want to know on what side of the line a particular graphic novel falls. 

The future of a character is as much a part of that character as his past: as Alan Moore said, it is an important part of the Norse Thor that he will fall at Ragnorak; it is an important component of the yarns of David Crockett that he was killed defending the Alamo. I can read Dark Knight Returns thinking "this is how the story will end". I can reading it thinking "Frank is just taking the toys out of the boxes, fooling around with them, and putting them away again". Most of us take a little from column A and a little from column B. But it is simply wrong to say that it makes no difference. It makes a difference, not only to your reading of Frank Miller, but to your reading of every subsequent Batman story. 

The Disney What If... cartoon series begins with a speech by the Watcher:

"Time. Space. Reality. It's more than a linear path. It's a prism. Of Endless possibility. Where a single choice can branch out into infinite realities, creating alternative worlds from the ones you know... I am the Watcher. I am your guide through these infinite realities. Follow me. And ponder the question. What if..."

If you ask "Where is an imaginary story happening?" the answer is (by definition) in the imagination of the reader, the writer, or in some cases, the Butler. But a What If... story takes place in the Marvel Universe itself -- a different time line, but one as "real" as the one our own Peter Parker or Tony Stark inhabits. That's why we need The Watcher: there has to be a viewpoint. A What If... story has to command what our friend Mr Tolkien would have called Secondary Belief. 

This may have been one of the reasons Stan Lee was initially so reluctant to take on licensed properties. If everything Marvel published had to have Secondary Reality then everything which Marvel published had to link up into one vast Secondary World. If all Marvel Comics made up one big story, then the very act of publishing a comic about a real world stuntman called The Human Fly made The Human Fly a character in the same story as Peter Parker and Howard the Duck. So the first question to ask about a Star War or a Doctor Who comic was "“How will it fit into the Marvel Universe? Will Darth Vader meet Doctor Doom?” And you couldn't say "No, of course not: Star Wars is just a story" in case the reader thought "But then, aren't they all?" So Godzilla has to fight SHIELD agents, and Peter Parker has to meet Count Dracula. There was even a rather desperate attempt to send Spider-Man through time to meet Conan the Barbarian. (I seem to think that Mary Jane briefly becomes Red Sonja, although wild wildebeests wouldn’t make me re-read Marvel Team Up at this point.) 

Tolkien said that when children ask if a story is true, all they are really asking is whether or not it was contemporary. They understand that the story in the newspaper about the Orrible Murder is True -- that’s why they mustn’t wander off and talk to strangers. They understand that the equally terrifying story in the fairy tale books is Not True -- there is no danger of them actually encountering a child-eating witch with a candy cottage. But hearing a story about Hitler or Sherlock Holmes or Francis Drake for the first time, they don’t immediately know which box to put it in. The correct answer to “Is it true?” he said, was “Well, there are certainly no dragons in England today.”

We never thought that Spider-Man stories are true in that sense -- although when we were very small we pretended we did. But we wanted and needed to think that Spider-Man was true somewhere -- in some secondary world. The stories didn't really happen: but they really happened to Peter Parker. And this is a very specific way of reading. No-one asked why Charlie Brown didn't advance in age from 8 to 58 during the half century of Peanuts existence: but the fact that Peter Parker spent three decades stuck at the age of 17 is a genuine impediment to our faith.

It’s ironic that it was Marvel Comics where this approach took root. Stan Lee literally presents his seminal texts as imaginary stories -- as tales that he and his collaborators are making up; observing; commenting on; and presenting to the audience for their delectation. He is the puppeteer and he wants us to see the strings. Lee’s acolytes never saw the joke. As soon as the torch was passed, the Roy Thomas’s and Mark Gruenwald’s started talking about Marvel Time and Omniverses and writing pedantic stories which connected the Golden Age Captain America to the Modern One. “What If The Avengers Stayed Together After World War II” pointedly omitted the word “had” from the title. It remained canon for decades...

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting me on Patreon.

If you don't want to commit to monthly payments, please consider making a one-off payment on Ko-FI. 

Something To Do With Space

 What is the Golden Age of Science Fiction?

About nine.

Blast Off At Woomera

The Domes of Pico

Operation Columbus

Moonbase One

Expedition: Venus

Destination: Mars

Terror By Satellite

Journey to Jupiter

Mission to Mercury

Spaceship to Saturn

The Mohill Mystery

Nineteen Sixty One A.D

Moonbase One is the last Hugh Walters book that I propose writing about. For the time being, at any rate. It kind of winds up an opening quartet. The first four books have all been about The Moon, and specifically about the mysterious alien artefacts on The Moon. The fifth one, Expedition Venus will be a soft reboot, repositioning the series as being about planetary exploration. All plot threads from the Moon sequence will be left dangling;  the Space Beings and their Domes are never properly explained.  Walter’s doesn’t so much conclude the Pico story as lose interest in it.

If Operation Columbus was about liberal theology, then Moonbase One is about English education and the phasing out of the Eleven Plus. 

Up until the 1940s, barring scholarships or rich parents, most children left school at 14 and got a job or an apprenticeship. Between about 1944 and 1965, children were put into a magic sorting hat which divided them into Academics (who went to Grammar School); Skilled Workers (who went to Technical School) and Workers (who went to Secondary Modern). Unfortunately, there weren’t actually any Technical Schools for them to go to, so the system turned into a straight competition in which the winners earned places at Grammar Schools and the losers were condemned to Secondary Moderns. The two kinds of school were supposed to have “parity of esteem” but in practice people who "failed" the Eleven Plus were widely regarded as having failed at life. In the 1960s, Harold Wilson swept the whole elitist system away, and replaced it with a more egalitarian model in which everyone was educated equally badly in vast mixed ability jungles. In the 1980s, this Comprehensive system was itself abolished and replaced with -- whatever the hell it is we have now. Hugh Walters would have been educated in the 1920s: he presumably either won a scholarship or had parents who could afford to pay for his secondary education. Chris Godfrey was born in 1940 and attends Wolverton Grammar presumably on the basis of having passed the Eleven Plus in 1951. (His Auntie runs a little shop and could never have afforded to educate him privately.) Schooldays over, he sails into Cambridge University: we never find out which college or indeed precisely what he studied. 

The initial set up, all those years ago, was an unashamed wish fulfilment fantasy, with Chris as the barely concealed Mary-Sue. A famous scientist just happened to be passing his school and just happened to realise that he just happened to be the ideal person to be Britain’s first astronaut. If it could happen to him, it could happen to you. Like Stan Lee, Hugh Walters has the sense to make the hero pay for his big dreams with an awful lot of grief. If you become a superhero, everyone will hate you and those you love will die. If you become an astronaut, you’ll have to do a lot of extra P.E with some particularly unpleasant P.E masters. And you will very probably die. 

But time has moved on, and Chris has become an idealised figure -- famous, brave, self-sacrificing, pious. He’s twenty-two now with a degree in -- something or other -- and feels that going to the moon is the apex of his life’s work. He is a shoo-in to be the leader of the latest mission. (Walters keeps referring to him as the Young Leader, making the US/Commonwealth moon programme sound a bit like the Boy Scouts.) Jolly stirring stuff, of course, but with a hero to whom it is increasingly hard to relate.

So, in this fourth volume,  Walters revisits the Schoolboy In Space motif.  And I have to say that he comes up with a distinctly clever plot device to justify it.

One definitely feels that as this fourth volume opens, a formula is being established. The main characters have all been thoroughly Flanderized. Or, to put it more kindly:  Walters has generated a plot machine that works, and sees no particular reason to modify it. Sir George is wise, avuncular, loves Chris just a little bit too much, but is largely absent. Sir Leo is ruthless and inhuman but gets the job done. Whiskers is nice and funny and calls people "fella-me-lad" and "young whipper-snapper". Chris is brave and noble and pious and modest and shy. Morrey is American and open-hearted; Serge is Russian and reserved. But Serge and Morrey are, truthfully, little more than names in this volume. The human interaction, such as it is, is almost all about Chris and Tony. Since Tony is in the same position that Chris was in the first book, this is rather nice, although it is a shame that Walters never makes the point directly.

There is going to be another trip to the moon; this time, three bold astronauts are going to construct a simple, pressurised dome on the surface and remain there for days or weeks, finding out all they can about the Space Beings and their increasingly repetitive Domes. There is never any question about Chris being one of the crew and (since it is an international mission) Yank Morrey and Russkie Serge, from the last volume, get to go along for the ride. Chris, Morrey, and Serge will become the protagonists of the remaining sixteen books in the series; and anyone with a background in comics may feel that Moonbase One is wrapping up an Origin Story. Nice Whiskers, the comedy RAF Wing Commander, compares them with the Three Musketeers, and at moments of peril, Chris makes the team shout “all for one and one for all” which must puzzle Serge. I suppose it could have been “to the toppermost of the poppermost.”

The Fourth Musketeer is Tony.  Tony is an alien. Well, almost as bad as being an alien. He’s from the North. And he’s distinctly common: Chris has to translate his broad Brummie accent into English for the benefit of the rest of the cast. And he didn’t pay attention at school, and he hardly ever goes to church. He’s moody. And he takes more than his fair share of chocolate. And he’s distinctly young even by the standard of agencies who routinely send sixth formers into space: he's only fifteen.

In Domes of Pico; a very bad thing happened: the nasty round monoliths bombarded the earth with nasty radiation, making all the nuclear power stations break down. In the ensuing years, a large number of younger people have come down with some sort of mysterious but always fatal blood cancer. But -- and this is actually quite clever, as blatant plot devices go -- the very small number of people who already had the cancer have equally mysteriously got better. The radiation kills healthy people but it cures sick people. (The slightly cleverer explanation is that perfectly ordinary cosmic radiation is what causes and cures the illness, and the nasty Dome rays made a temporary change to the earth’s atmosphere which let the radiation through.) Either way, the boffins want to send a sick child into space, let him absorb cosmic rays and, see if he gets better. If he does, then they can set to work making a synthetic cosmic ray generating device and save thousands of lives. 

Tony is tragically almost certain to die, and pathetically put on the space ship in a poignant attempt to save his life. Given all the tragedy, pathos and poignancy, it will come as no surprise to the reader to find out that he is ginger, freckled, happy-go-lucky, snub-nosed and endearingly naughty. He even teaches the Russian and the American to play marbles. One wanders why Walters didn’t simply name him Jimmy Olsen.

So the plot of Moonbase One partially retreads that of Domes of Pico. Chris knows that Tony is terminally ill, but isn’t allowed to tell anyone else, Tony least of all. (“Gosh! It would be awful to live with a chap you knew was dying!”) Death is regarded as mildly indecent and unmentionable. Tony’s Mum doesn’t want her dying son to come home from the hospital “Oh I don’t think I could bear it!” she says “I don’t think I could face him knowing he’s going to die.”

Sir Leo is distinctly dis-chuffed with Tony being added to his delicately prepared mission, and tells Chris to gas him, or failing that, knock him out if he causes any problem. (This line was removed from the American edition. English Grammar schools were notoriously fond of corporal punishment, but clubbing boys over the head was already considered a faux pas even in the 1950s.) Chris, however, is determined to treat Tony as a member of the crew. There is a moment of actual characterisation in which his and Sir Leo’s attitudes are contrasted:

“Very well, then. And what about the subject of the other experiment—I forget the boy’s name?” demanded the scientist.

“You’ve forgotten his name? It’s unusual for you to forget anything, isn’t it, sir?” Chris couldn’t resist the thrust at Sir Leo, and was rewarded with an angry glint in the scientist’s eyes.

“His name is unimportant. I regard him merely as an instrument. Have you any comments on his behaviour pattern to date?”

“Tony Hale—that’s his name, Sir Leo—has turned out to be a very likeable boy. “

In Blast Off At Woomera, we were told that the authorities went to some effort to provide a cover story for Chris -- no-one found out that the government was sending a teenager into space until the last possible moment. In Moonbase One, everyone kind of accepts that sticking a fifteen year old kid in a capsule with three fairly experienced astronauts is a perfectly sensible thing to do. If I had been writing the story, I might have decided that everyone in the whole world knew about Tony’s illness apart from Tony himself. He would have to be sequestered, like a jury, and there could be all sorts of tension when some damn fool brings a newspaper or a transistor radio set into the air-base. Or I might have suggested that the space agency ran a competition in which one lucky English schoolboy would win the chance to go into space, and faked the result so Tony wins the golden ticket.

So: we repeat the action of the first few books quite satisfactorily. The presence of Tony makes all the centrifuges and space-suit fittings almost as exciting as they were first time around, because they are new to Tony, and Tony is excited by them. (He is very excited indeed. He “dances round the spacesuits” in excitement when he first sees then; he “literally dances” when he first goes on an aircraft and he “babbles excitedly” when he sees the airfield.)  Although he gyrates his way through the endurance training, he sits out the serious mission briefings and science stuff. In a wry twist, he hangs around with the techies, watching them build stuff, and finds it all rather interesting. It occurs to him that if only he’d paid more attention at school, he could have been a technician as well.

Perhaps after he got back to Birmingham he’d get himself a job in a car factory. Not as an apprentice, of course, for you have to have exam certificates before you get taken on, he thought bitterly.

And so they go to the moon. Or, as Hughes, with his gift for understatement puts it: “Audacious man, in the persons of three young men and a boy, establish a foothold on earth’s satellite!” They start to do their research, having forays out onto the moon's surface and trying to learn more facts about the Domes. The Domes are still really functioning as Plot Devices, I am afraid, with no particular information about who they are and what they want. They send out a terrifying black smoke which gets everyone lost, and there is a moderately scary sequence in which our heroes have to get back from the bomb site to the moon-base despite not being able to see each other through the alien fog.

It is, as has been stated before, funny how the mind works. If I was nine or ten when I read this book, Tony was unimaginably older than me: a little bit younger than the heroes, sure, but still essentially a grown up who had been right through Big School. In my head-cannon, he is a slightly whiney and troublesome adult. Reading the actual text, he is in all respects a naughty and irritating child; and treated as such by the other characters. The scene in which he steals some chocolate rations sticks in my mind from my first reading. Chris is incredibly patronising about it, but I think I was largely on board with Tony when he said that he’d simply eaten some of his own share in advance. (Chris’s objection, that the others would be far too nice to eat chocolate while Tony goes without, didn’t really make sense to me then, and even now reads a little like moral blackmail.) By the end of the adventure, he is sulking and refusing to work with the other heroes; Chris doesn’t actually thump him across the head as Sir Leo proposed, but he does ground him in the Moonbase while the others work on the space capsule and on the surface of the moon.

But then, of course disaster strikes. A supply rocket, bringing food and fuel and even some treats, crashes. It damages the main cable connecting the three Beacons together. Without three functioning Beacons there is no way of taking off and returning safely to earth.

The whole take-off operation was dependent upon the radio beams from the beacons, for the initial guidance of Pegasus. Just as the great rocket had been carefully nursed on to its outward course by signals from Control, so its homeward journey would depend on all three radio beacons. If either of them failed to function correctly the odds were that the projectile would speed off its course and be lost in the depths of space.

So: there is no way of getting home, and everyone is, once again, quite definitely going to die. They are all very noble and brave and talk about whether a million to one chance is better than no chance at all and if it would be better to blow themselves up trying a manual launch or just suffocate slowly when the oxygen runs out.  And just when all seems to be completely hopeless....Tony agrees to come down from his room and play nicely. And he reveals a surprising twist: while he was mooching around with the techies, he learned some basic skills. He knows how to solder cables together! And although they don’t actually have a soldering iron, Tony has apparently read Lord of the Flies. Out here on the moon with no atmosphere in the way, they can use glass from a space helmet to focus the suns rays and generate enough heat to melt wire. If Tony the common working class lad hadn’t been there, the mission would have ended in disaster and everyone really would have died.

(In 1970, when the real life Apollo 13 was in similarly dire straits, the technicians at mission control gave the astronauts very detailed instructions about how to fix their stricken vessel. I can’t help thinking that if mending the cable was that easy, someone on Earth could have talked Chris or Serge or Morrey through the procedure, rather than leaving it to a stroppy chocolate pinching teen to save the day. But I am quite prepared to let this one go, because it’s a nice dramatic neat plot tie-off.)

When they get back to earth, Chris explains the moral for all to hear. Last time, we learned that evil freedom hating commie scum and normal English people would do better if they learned to work happily together. This time, we learned that workers by hand and workers by brain have an equal role to play. Again, Walters is completely explicit about this:

“Neither Serge, nor Morrey, nor I, though we are hoping to become scientists, had the knowledge or skill to make the repair. Only Tony here...had the ability to do the job. Without him, we should not be standing here now....So you see....in space travel a good mechanic is as valuable as a good scientist. Just as we can’t all work with our heads, so we can’t all work with our hands. I think that, whatever we work with, if we do a job well we should all respect each other’s skills....”

And there you have it. In the future, Grammar Schools and Secondary Moderns really will have Parity of Esteem. 

Tony is cured of his fatal illness, of course, but we've all forgotten that subplot by this point. 

And there we leave it (for now). Chris, Morrey, Serge and Tony are a team, all set up to accompany me through the closing years of Junior School and the first few years of Big School, right up until the frabjous day when Luke and Han will burst into my life. The books are badly written; the emotionalism sometimes makes me a little queasy; the characterisation struggles to make one dimension; and the piety makes one’s jaw drop a little. But they were space books, and they were in the school library, and they did what they said on the space tin. 

I wish I could return to Stan Lee's original Marvel Universe and A.A Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood, and to some extent I sometimes do. But I can’t re-enter the world of centrifuges and space-suits and chaps laying down their lives for each other without a second thought. But I did enjoy pressing my nose against the glass and looking into that world; I can see why I was happy living there for a while.  

A long time ago, in the space age.

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting me on Patreon.

If you don't want to commit to monthly payments, please consider making a one-off payment on Ko-FI. 

Space: 1960

Operation Columbus by Hugh Walters is a very subtle refutation of J.A.T Robinson's Honest To God.

After the first manned space flight, the Soviet propaganda machine made up a quote for Yuri Gargarin: “I have been into space (the heavens) and I have not found God there.” 

Liberal Bishops responded with earnest books patiently explaining that Christians did not think that God was literally "up there" -- or even "out there". He was really, as Captain Kirk said "in here" -- in the human heart. Robinson’s proposed new theology in which “God” meant “whatever we most fully and deeply believe in” -- was, for most people, indistinguishable from atheism, which inadvertently proved Gargarin's or at any rate Kruschev's point. C.S Lewis noted that it wasn't very alarming to most Christians that the Russians hadn’t found “God” floating eight kilometers above the surface of the earth. “The really disquieting thing would be if they had.”

The burden of this difficult third album in the Chris Godfrey icosology is that you aren't any closer to God (or any further away from him) on the Moon as you would be anywhere else.  Although Chris utters a lot of silent prayers, we never see him reading the Bible; but one imagines he was familiar with Psalm 139. 

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? 

or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: 

if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

Operation Columbus was published in 1959: two years before Vostock I and four years before the Bishop of Woolwich's book. So my theory may not entirely hold water. But people really were thinking about space travel in religious terms.  

Blast Off At Woomera, established the formula: boy goes up in rocket, boy comes down again. Domes of Pico, the second book, was a little bit louder and a little bit worse: boy goes all the way to moon; boy comes back to earth. This third volume takes things to their logical conclusion: boy lands on moon; boy comes home.

But this time, Walters struggles to make me care. I praised Blast Off At Woomera because Walters seemed to have thought through the logical consequences of his -- admittedly far-fetched -- premise. In Operation Columbus he seems to be pulling plot developments out of his space-hat in a desperate attempt to keep us interested. And then he beats us over the head with a moral even less subtle than the first two books. Even at the age of nine, the denouement made me say “Ooo....that’s a bit of a stretch”.

A year has passed since the last book; Chris is still at college. (That makes him 20, and the year 1960, if anyone is keeping track. The book was published in 1959, so we are gradually slipping into the future.) As the book opens, he is visiting nice old Sir Leo Frayling, who is recuperating from the terrible injuries he took saving Chris’s life in the last thrilling instalment. Walters has repositioned Frayling as a standard issue tough-but-fair housemaster: kind and avuncular when off duty, but an absolute bastard once the mission starts. He would like to get back to work: and it just so happens that there is a new space-mission in the offing.

The first two books began with a crisis: in each case there was a jolly good reason for sending a small boy to the moon right now. This one feels less urgent: the boffins have decided that it would probably be a good thing to go back to the moon and pick up a sample of the demolished Domes just in case the extraterrestrials -- referred to from now on as the Space Beings -- ever decide that they want to wipe out civilisation again. 

In Domes of Pico, Chris was quite cross about being asked to volunteer to fly to the moon, because he would much rather have been practicing amateur boxing at Coll. This time he is absolutely determined to be the first man on the moon. Chris persuades Sir George to reinstate Sir Leo as head of the new moon-shot, on condition that Sir Leo choose him to be the astronaut who makes the landing. When we first met him, Chris was an everyman figure who ended up at the sharp end of a rocket due to circumstance. But now he’s a very British Buzz Lightyear who feels that a chap has to do what a chap has to do. Walters reassures us that it isn’t mere “romantic ambition”, he doesn’t particularly want to “make a heroic sacrifice for science” and it certainly isn’t about “notoriety”. But “if he failed to offer himself for this final crowning achievement he would know peace no more”. I strongly suspect that there was a breathless hush in the close when he makes his decision. 

So: off we go again; training, trip to the moon, terrible dangers, return to earth. The first wrinkle is this. Operation Columbus is going to be a joint British/American moonshot but (naturally) there is only room in the capsule for one astronaut. The Yanks send their top candidate to go through the training alongside Chris at Farnborough, but Sir Leo will then decide which of them takes the trip. Once again, astronaut training is mainly about strength and endurance. The centrifuges and isolation tanks are there to “test and torture the human frame”; Whiskers the comedy wing-commander says that he expects “all these tortures to scare the Yank” and when the American arrives he and Chris are put through “the whole gamut of tests and tortures” that the air-base has available. The lad who takes his punishment most manfully gets the place on the space-ship.

The second twist is this. On the other side of the world, Bad Guys are engaged in an even nastier game of Endurance. In Blast Off At Woomera, Chris’s heroism had inspired Russia and the West to pool their resources and meet the threat of the Domes as a unified humanity. The Domes having been thoroughly nuked, Russia is now striking out on its own and is determined to get its guy to the moon first. Even by the standards of the 1950s, the characterisation of the Russians is pretty broad. A nasty Comissar threatens to redeploy a scientist to the New Regions near the arctic circle; the same fate meets anyone who “deviates from the communist party line” or “begins to have ideas and thoughts of their own”. We hear the cosmonaut thinking that a landing on the moon would be...

“A great day for the Soviet Union. A great day for him, Serge Smyslov. His name would be recorded in the history books of future generations along with those of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Kruschev. Nothing, nothing, must be allowed to rob him, or his great country, of this glorious honour!”

We don’t hear Chris monologging that he should go to the moon in the name of the British Empire or hoping that his name will go down along with Churchill, Nelson and Henry the Fifth. The British rocket is named after Christopher Columbus but the Russian one is named after Lenin. 

One assumes that Sir Leo will use Science! to decide who goes to the Moon, but the Ruskies cut right to the chase. They put all their candidates in isolation chambers and tell them that the one who sticks it out longest gets to go. I remember finding this section quite compelling when I read it as a kid: the young Russian (“Serge”) stuck in the fake capsule, looking for ways to pass the time, counting seconds, taking gulps of glucose and hoping to sleep as much as possible seemed quite compelling when I first read them: the idea of being in solitary confinement, being free to come out by pushing a button, but trying to delay doing so as long as possible was quite scary. In the end he sticks it out for “twelve days, two hours, fifty-six minutes” and wins the golden ticket. The need for catheters and diapers has still not occurred to anyone.

Despite being his bitter rival, Chris’s American counterpart, Morrison (“Morrey”) naturally turns out to be a jolly decent chap, and the two of them form a close friendship. We rather have to take Walters' word for this: we don’t see enough of the training to get much of a sense of their relationship. I could imagine a story in which two people are trying very hard to beat each other in a competition while becoming close friends off the pitch, but this is not that story. Chris continues to talk like an English schoolboy, but Walters works very hard to capture the nuances of Morrey’s U.S dialect. (“Say - you’ve been up in a rocket, haven’t you...Gee, thats swell.”)

Morrison wins the torture show and is sent to Australia for the Moon shot, while Chris is put on the first train back to Cambridge feeling distinctly sorry for himself. (He feels better after he's said his prayers.) However, within two paragraphs of his arrival at Woomera, Morrey very sensibly decides to go horseback riding with Betty, the Australian girl with whom Chris has the barest homeopathic suggestion of a romantic relationship. Naturally, he falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and Chris gets to go to the Moon after all. 

One of the few things which sticks distinctly in mind from when I read the book in the school library is Chris being all tongue tied and apologetic to Morrey and Morrey being very American and open about it.

“Sorry about your leg, Morrey,” he burst out at last, “though it would be silly to deny I’m pleased it means I can go on the rocket trip. Still, I wish it had been something else.—Er. I mean—that is, I don’t mean I wish you’d broken something else, but–––” 

“That’s all right,” the American laughed. “I know what you mean, Chris. You’re glad to be going, but you’re sorry it’s had to be my accident that’s let you in.”

This side of the story feels distinctly pointless, except to show what good sports everyone is. Chris is turned down, and Morrey breaks his leg in the space of one chapter: there is no time for us to feel that it matters very much. Books feel longer when you are eight, and I created a great deal of fan fiction in my head. Chris looked, and still looks, exactly like John from the Tomorrow People.

Walters envisages the top section of Chris's rocket landing on the moon, with retractable legs: the idea of a separate lunar module doesn't occur to him. Chris is able to leave the capsule and walk on the Moon's surface in a pressurised space-suit. The Russians have the arguably more sensible idea of providing Serge with a small, battery powered caterpillar tracked vehicle; so he can explore the moon without actually setting foot on it. Hughes is not great at describing landscapes: the moment when Chris steps on the Moon is, if anything, rather an anticlimax. The Moon is dusty and marked with craters, but not particularly  strange or alien.

Undulations and more craters seemed to be the general pattern. Some distance away he could see a change in the colour of the ground from brown to a bluey-grey.  This, he decided, must be the lunar dust, and to discover as much about it as possible was one of his tasks....

I think C.S Lewis would have complained that the books are insufficiently focussed on the idea of space-travel: the Moon is difficult to get to (like a mountain) and very hazardous to explore (like a desert) but Walters is not interested in evoking the Mooniness of the Moon. But he is good at imagining how things would present themselves to his human hero's senses: there is a lot of entertaining stuff about Chris figuring out how to move around in low gravity.

In his childhood he’d read fairy stories about seven league boots and he remembered how badly he’d wanted a pair. Now he found that with little effort he could sail forward four or five yards at each stride. It was great fun and he covered the ground.

The Commies haven’t officially sent Serge to the Moon to murder Chris: but they have used their dirty brain-washing techniques to make sure that he will decide to kill him all by himself. Chapter 8 has one of Walters’ killer closing lines:

If they both made a safe landing and came face to face on the Moon, there was no doubt in Smyslov’s mind as to what he would do. His eyes fell on the firing trigger of the rocket gun carried by his little tank.

So: while Chris is checking out the site of the now-vaporised cones and even collecting a sample, the  Russian tank is trundling over to his spaceship and firing a gun at it. Serge blasts a hole in the ship, so Chris has no way of getting home, but the recoil turns the Tank over leaving him trapped as well.

Gosh, as they used to say in Superman comics. How ironic!

So: we have an Englishman on the Moon with not enough oxygen and no way of getting home; and a Russian with plenty of oxygen and a working spaceship, stuck in an overturned landing vehicle. The solution they eventually come to is, wait for it, mutual cooperation. Chris helps Serge get the lander right side up, and they both fly back to earth in the Russian space ship and live happily ever after.

Chris and Serge have a good old British try at making friends; even trying to teach each other a few words of their respective languages. But things gradually get tense. Serge has been brought up to think that Chris is a dirty capitalist imperialist and Chris presumably thinks Serge is a godless freedom hating commie.  And Serge did recently try to murder Chris; and they’ve been forced to spend 72 hours in a very small room with no toilet. You could forgive them if their nerves got a little frayed. But Walters has a better explanation on hand: being in free-fall for long periods has a strange and barely understood effect on the human mind. It does not go well.

....Benson’s voice came back full of relief. “Only just in time. What’s been happening up there?”

Chris felt himself flush with shame. “I—I don’t quite know,” he stammered. "I think we’ve been scrapping.” 

“I should jolly well think you have,” Sir George called back. “Do you know you’ve smashed everything up and we can’t do a thing from here?” 

“Yes, it looks like it,” the young man answered ruefully.

I’m afraid I just found this silly. Serge trying to shoot Chris for the greater glory of the Soviet Union, maybe. Chris trashing the ship because he’s failing to get on with his new companion, not so much.

Although the rocket is substantially controlled from Earth, it is necessary for the human occupant to manually fire the retro rockets at exactly the right moment. With both humans thrashing each other, things look bleak. Fortunately, Walters has a full-on deus ex machina up his sleeve. Chris is, if anything, even more pious in this volume than he was in the first two. He is the sort of chap who leaps up in the middle of the night if he has forgotten to say his prayers. Before going up into space, he sends for the Padre to take Holy Communion. Just before setting foot on the Moon, he becomes involved in a full-on Sunday School sermon illustration:

Just as he was about to jump an awful thought struck him. He hadn’t yet thanked God for his safety so far. How easy it is, he thought remorsefully, to ask for Divine protection and then, when you get it, to take it for granted. He offered up a silent prayer and asked for help in the task ahead.

And all this praying pays off. During the mad fight with Serge, Chris happens to fall against the correct switch at the correct moment and put the ship back on course. Once again, God has stepped in and saved the day. Hugh Walters is absolutely clear that this is what has happened:

One switch had so far escaped miraculously. It was that which would ignite the retro-rocket in the event of failure to function by the impulse from control. Now—call it Chance or Divine Providence, as you will—the tangled bodies fell against the switch at just the moment control would have chosen. The circuit was completed and the retro-rocket roared into life.

Oh dear.

People feel got at by the Narnia books because the leader of the goodies is quite a lot like Jesus. If anything the complaint is that Lewis’s propaganda isn’t blatant enough: Lion-Jesus somehow slips in under the radar. But I have never heard anyone complain that Walters was writing Christian propaganda. (The very helpful Unexa.Org website does find the later volumes in the series, in which humans encounter increasingly angelic aliens, are a little hard to take.) A bit old fashioned and obsessed with the stiff-upper lip, yes. But all this stuff seems to have whizzed directly over our heads. When I read the book as a child (good Sunday School boy though I was) I didn’t think that the author could be serious about divine intervention as a solution to the crisis. My main reaction was that the character just happening to fall onto the crucial button at the crucial moment was a bit of a cop-out that I wouldn’t have got away with in one of my composition essays.

It’s still not over. They are now hit by a meteor, even though “it had always been reckoned that the chance of a space vehicle being struck by a meteor the size of a marble was only once in several thousand years.” I’m not quite sure why God gets to take the credit for the retro-rockets but the meteor is blamed on “the cruellest of luck”. Wouldn’t it have been more fun if it had been Satan's fault, or the Ghost of Karl Marx, or something? There is some good information about meteors and micro-meteors and shooting stars: I assume it is broadly correct. The dust on the moon seems to jump about because it is being perpetually hit by tiny particles of space sand which would burn up if there was any atmosphere, which was a good guess for the time, I think. What we perceive as shooting stars are tiny dust-sized micro-meteors, and the Moon is covered in craters because there is no atmosphere to burn up the large ones.

So now Lenin is full of holes and I can’t help imagining Arthur Dent’s voice saying that this time they are quite definitely going to die. But Chris has the idea of acting like the little boy in the dyke, and Serge, who probably doesn’t read Dutch folk lore, follows suit. They each cover a hole with their hand, and the spaceship gets back home in one piece. Hurrah! (Or rather “utter a silent prayer of thanks”.)

The final scene finds Chris and Serge in a Russian hospital. The stigmata on their respective hands are bandaged up. “Uncle George” is on hand to explain the very cryptic moral of the story while the theme tune plays in the background:

“But the most important lesson we’ve learnt from your expedition is not a scientific one. It’s something we ought to have known all along. Only by co-operation and the comradeship of all men can Mankind hope to venture into other worlds, and it is only in friendship that we can go forward together.”

Thanks, George. And just in case we miss the point

“As if to give tangible expression to this truth the two young men looked at each other.  Their two good hands stretched out and they clasped each other in a grip that seemed symbolic.”

Thank you, Hugh. But I think we were able to spot the symbolism by ourselves. Chris and Serge, raised to hate each other, but not that different inside. Symbolic. Russian aggression ends up rebounding on the Russians themselves. Symbolic. Russian lad trapped inside his lunar lander, British lad outside it, separated by a steel wall, unable to communicate, while their masters on earth wrangle and argue and an international incident threatens to break out. Symbolic. The British and the Russian, in a space ship, their lives in mortal danger, who fight each other rather than pull together to save the day. The final divine act which forces them together. Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten.

If the Russians are as monstrous and evil as they have been represented, then surely making peace with them is the last thing we ought to be doing. We ought to be building up our nuclear missile collection and militarising the moon. Chris can still be friends with Serge, of course, provided Serge has seen how horrible Russia is and defected to the West and become a Christian. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t tell us a story in which the Russians are pure evil and then tell us that we should all live together in peace and harmony.

So: a bit of a disappointment, this one: but I will have a look at the next one, which completes the initial quartet. Will we finally find out who made the domes? Will Chris stop being quite so pious and develop some flaws? And which two supporting characters from volume 3 are going to become regular team members in volume four? Stay, as they used to say, tuned. 

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting me on Patreon.

If you don't want to commit to monthly payments, please consider making a one-off payment on Ko-FI.