A Story of Interplanetary Exploration

Hodder and Stoughton, 1954, 181 p, plus 6 p colour illustrations, 1 p Contents, 1 p List of Illustrations (by Stead) and 6 p Foreword.

The author was, of course, the creator of Biggles, Great War fighter pilot and thereafter general man of action. In the 1950s he took to writing science fiction for younger readers and it was in the children’s section housed in the basement of Dumbarton Library where, after I had consumed all their Biggles books, I started on those. It is due to Johns, then – along with the similarly aimed books written by Patrick Moore – that I developed an abiding interest in science fiction as a genre.

The foreword here sets out Johns’s purpose in writing such books, to inspire young people with the sense of adventure, while also pre-empting possible criticism of inaccuracies by emphasizing there was much not known about even the Solar System those 70 years ago. (He specifically mentions Jupiter’s eleven moons. At last count there are 115 of those.)

Now to the story.

Retired Group Captain Timothy Clinton and his son Rex have been stalking deer on a Highland mountain when the mist comes down towards the end of the day. Eventually they spot five red lights in the form of a cross and stumble across a house whose door contains an immobiliser. This is where a Professor Brane stays along with his butler (and factotum) Judkins.

The Professor is partial to coffee and caramels (which he took up since smoking represented too great a danger among the flammable materials he was surrounded by in his lab) and accepts flying saucers are real. He has also invented a spaceship he calls the Spacemaster, which is powered by cosmic rays. The red cross is a navigational aid to finding his way back home. Naturally he invites Clinton and Timothy to join him – and Judkins – on exploratory expeditions beyond Earth.

Various trips see them have a close encounter with a flying saucer, find life on the Moon, dinosaurs on Venus – a planet on which the Professor wants to take the opportunity to empty Spacemaster’s rubbish bins! – a Mars with no mountains but signs of humans; the last of whom are entombed on Phobos, before returning to Earth where they get the better of some foreign spies alerted to the possible existence of a spaceship by newspaper reports of strange apparitions in the Highland skies.

The whole thing is firmly of its time and ineluctably male but for what was back then called a juvenile (nowadays YA) spends very little time focusing on Rex.

Pedant’s corner:- “the stars would be overheard again long before they could reach their lodge” (overhead again,) “before a rough, overgrown track, guided them” (doesn’t need that second comma,) the word ‘professor’ appears within sentences both capitalised and uncapitalised seemingly randomly, “poor Judkins’ great anxiety” (Judkins’s,) “‘water, which is a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen’” (Er, no. A mixture of hydrogen and oxygen would simply be that, a mixture of two gases. Water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. Compounds have totally different properties from the elements needed to make them,) “the rudder, insert vertically in the exhaust thrust just below the nozzles” (inserted,) diaphram (diaphragm,) “level with he top of the gorge ” (with the top,) “everywhere there where little flecks” (everywhere there were little flecks.) “The affect of this on the human body” (The effect of this,)  “for the most part outlines were spoiled” (for the most part its outlines were spoiled,) the Professor says stray particles of hydrogen might have been caused to ignite by the ship’s velocity (for hydrogen to burn oxygen is also required,) gasses (gases – which appeared later,) the Professor says petroleum is a mixture of carbon and hydrogen (see above for water. Petroleum is a mixture, yes, but of differing compounds of carbon and hydrogen,) acclerated (accelerated,) “the same state of nuclear fission as the Sun” (nuclear fusion that would be,) a missing quotation mark at the end of a piece of direct speech.

So sad to hear the news of the death of Patrick Moore.

I watched the latest episode of The Sky At Night only a week or so ago and he did look frail. It has been obvious for many years now that Chris Lintott was being lined up to take over the presentation duties but Patrick will be sorely missed.

He was one of Britsh TV’s glorious eccentrics – who else in the modern world wore a monocle? – and as well as his scientific credentials he could play a mean xylophone.

His long and productive life was overshadowed by sadness as his fiancée was killed during WW2 by a German bomb and he didn’t wish to settle for what he would have considered “second best.”

As a child I may have been aware of him as a late-night TV presenter (his record for continuously hosting a show will surely never be surpassed) but I certainly remember reading his Science Fiction – from that Children’s Section at Dumbarton Library accessed down the external stairs – where, along with the SF of Captain W E Johns (yes, the author of Biggles; whose WW1 adventures led me to other books coming from the same hands) I gained my introduction to the genre. Blame the pair of them.

Patrick must almost single-handedly have contributed to several generations of British astronomers taking up their trade and won a new set of admirers when he appeared on GamesMaster which is where my own sons came to know him well.

I have a particular debt to him myself as I drew on one of his astronomy books, which contained a reasonably detailed map of Mars that I found fascinating and invaluable, for the background of my first published story, The Face of the Waters.

Sir Patrick Alfred Caldwell-Moore, CBE, FRS, FRAS: 4/3/1923-9/12/2012. So it goes.