Jay Score at chess with Martian crewmate Kli Yang We had ramped the vessel and were waiting for the blow-brothers-blow siren, due in forty minutes, when Jay Score arrived. There were eight passengers, all emigrating agriculturalists planning on making hay thirty million miles nearer the Sun. We were lying in the Colorado Rocket Basin, north of Denver, with a fair load aboard, mostly watch-making machinery, agricultural equipment, aeronautical jigs and tools for Upskadaska, as well as a case of radium needles for the Venusian Cancer Research Institute. Needless to say she was known among hardened spacemen as the Upsydaisy.
Our ship was the Upskadaska City, a brand new freighter with limited passenger accommodation, registered in the Venusian spaceport from which she took her name.
the casual approach to spaceshipsĭestiny placed me at the top of the gangway the first time he appeared. A visit to a post-disaster Earth by a poet from Mars : Dear Devil. Ĭonspiracies concerning alleged influence by men from Mars : Dreadful Sanctuary. Invisible energy beings oppressing Earth : Sinister Barrier. Psychological warfare on Earth: With A Strange Device. A plot by a politician from Venus : Sentinels from Space. settingsĪ ship holed by a meteor in interplanetary space: Jay Score. Only his first novel, Sinister Barrier, seems to me less engaging than his usual style (though, ironically, it may be his most original work, as far as clever ideas are concerned). Be that as it may: any story you see by Russell - grab it and enjoy. Much of his output was set in interstellar regions, and is thus beyond the scope of this website. But a lot of the time he is just having fun, playing with various themes and writing tales that scintillate, the scintillation arising not from any super-clever idea but just from the way he tells 'em. He uses the props of science fiction to make simple, healthy points about the deadening effects of bureaucracy and militarism, for instance.
Russell's ideas are fairly straightforward. Some writers are particularly pleasing in their style, so much so that they can turn hackneyed plots into pure literary gold - tales that one reads and re-reads and from which one derives pleasure that lasts a lifetime.
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