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Captain Future #18
Danger Planet
Retro Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel!
One million years back in the swirling, shrouded past, evil ultra-beings ruled the Planet Roo. Suddenly, unbelievably, they are alive again, threatening the universe with total destruction.
Only one man dares challenge the Evil Ones. He is Captain Future, inter-galactic agent of justice, whose identity is top secret, whose strength is ultimate. He sets out alone to stop the deathless menace creeping ever closer...
[Also published as "Red Sun of Danger".
Brett Sterling and Edmond Hamilton are the same person].
One million years back in the swirling, shrouded past, evil ultra-beings ruled the Planet Roo. Suddenly, unbelievably, they are alive again, threatening the universe with total destruction.
Only one man dares challenge the Evil Ones. He is Captain Future, inter-galactic agent of justice, whose identity is top secret, whose strength is ultimate. He sets out alone to stop the deathless menace creeping ever closer...
[Also published as "Red Sun of Danger".
Brett Sterling and Edmond Hamilton are the same person].
128 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published April 1, 1945
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 16, 2023
Captain Future was a futuristic pulp superhero in the tradition of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, or Kimball Kinnison. He had his own magazine for seventeen quarterly issues from 1940 to 1944, but then the wartime paper shortage caught up to him. Captain Future was Curt Newton, and he had a team of aides and associates to rival Doc Savage's: Professor Simon Wright (a brain in a box, literally), Grag the robot, Otho the android, and they were often joined by Planetary Police agents Marshall Ezra Gurney and the lovely agent Joan Randall. Fifteen of the first novels were written by Edmond Hamilton, but when he joined the Army Joseph Samachson was tapped to fill in. Red Sun of Danger was written by Hamilton but was published in the Spring issue of Startling Stories magazine in 1945 under the house pseudonym Brett Sterling, which had been instituted with the first Samachson story. I really wonder why they didn't go back to using Hamilton's name, which was very well known in the field at that time. It's a good Futureman adventure, set late in his career when the limitation that applied in the first several novels, that of mankind being limited to the Solar System, has been overcome and mankind's apparent manifest destiny is underway. (It was the 1940s, remember!) Curt infiltrates a criminal organization while Joan and Ezra investigate, Simon coordinates, and Grag and Otho get into trouble. It's a fun and captivating story, with a surprisingly dark Lovecraftian twist at the end. Popular Library chose it to lead off their reprints of the Captain Future pulp novels in 1968 and retitled it Danger Planet. They put the legend on the top of the cover: "Introducing Captain Future," which was confusing since it was chronologically one of the last stories. They also kept the Brett Sterling pseudonym on it rather than using Hamilton's name, which is also confusing. On the plus side they used a lovely cover painting from no less a legend than Frank Frazzetta himself, and it's every bit as good as his depictions of Conan or Tarzan. I was delighted to stumble across a copy at a used bookstore last week! It was nominated for a Retro-Hugo award for the best science fiction novel of 1945 but lost out to one of Isaac Asimov's Foundation books. As with all of the original Captain Future stories, it sometimes lacks sophistication and the writing gets a bit hasty (and the two pets, Eek and Oog, are annoying!), but they're still a lot of fun, hopeful, innocent, and positive fare. Hamilton wrote one more novel in the series and several short stories, Manly Wade Wellman wrote one, and much more recently Allen Steele has re-booted the franchise. Curt is the spiritual grandfather of both Jim Kirk and Luke Skywalker, and this is one of his better outings.
December 19, 2015
The better of the '40s pulps I've sampled so far: a straight-laced story of an awesome hero and his loyal band of followers, with the requisite neocolonial attitude I've come to expect. Also, the final ten pages devolve into some Lovecraftian horrorness.
August 8, 2017
I am somewhere over 40% done reading all the Hugo Best Novel winners and nominees. I hadn't quite realized that the list I had grabbed from the internet all those years ago included the Retro Hugos that had been handed out by that point, until I finished this book and went looking for the year Danger Planet had been nominated. I kind of like picking up the Retro Hugos in this list, but knowing that this award was handed out in 1996 makes it a little bit more baffling that Danger Planet made the cut. Perhaps there weren't that many novel-length SF books to pick from.
Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook
Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook
September 21, 2016
What the space is going on here?
Okay, so this is some 40s sci-fi adventure pulp stuff full of rocketships, rayguns, alien races, and robots. Captain Future is built up as a well-known interplanetary hero who hangs out with The Futuremen and sometimes his girlfriend. He's famous for doing Buck Rogers / Flash Gordon type space heroics and he's brave and brilliant like Doc Savage. His team consists of a giant robot, a person-sized android, and a floating brain in a metal box.
In this particular adventure (#5 in a series, but this is the first one I read) Captain Future must pose as an outlaw to infiltrate a gang that's conspiring to cause revolt on a distant planet in order to hold monopoly on a longevity drug.
It all runs smoothly enough, I suppose, but here are a few amusing/distracting points: the heroes are looking for a villain named Lu Suur (Loser?) on a planet called Roo which was once ruled by an ancient evil race called the Kanga (Winnie the Pooh, much?). Captain Future spends nearly the entire story in disguise makeup and actually doesn't do a whole lot of Captain-Future-ing. The book is 3rd person and divides its time evenly between a large group of good-guys as they each play their little part in the adventure. Sometimes the order of events is slightly switched up in order to explain someone arriving in the nick of time (like in “Flash Gordon”), however the whole story is generally pretty light on actual action or heroics (unlike in “Flash Gordon”).
The robot “Futuremen” contribute largely to comic relief and some of them have space-pets who do more of the same. There are humanoid races with minor variations from planets like Mars and Mercury and Jupiter, which is always a nice touch.
Really, the whole thing was pretty light, enjoyable enough but not especially memorable. It might be that I just chose the wrong book to start in with.
Okay, so this is some 40s sci-fi adventure pulp stuff full of rocketships, rayguns, alien races, and robots. Captain Future is built up as a well-known interplanetary hero who hangs out with The Futuremen and sometimes his girlfriend. He's famous for doing Buck Rogers / Flash Gordon type space heroics and he's brave and brilliant like Doc Savage. His team consists of a giant robot, a person-sized android, and a floating brain in a metal box.
In this particular adventure (#5 in a series, but this is the first one I read) Captain Future must pose as an outlaw to infiltrate a gang that's conspiring to cause revolt on a distant planet in order to hold monopoly on a longevity drug.
It all runs smoothly enough, I suppose, but here are a few amusing/distracting points: the heroes are looking for a villain named Lu Suur (Loser?) on a planet called Roo which was once ruled by an ancient evil race called the Kanga (Winnie the Pooh, much?). Captain Future spends nearly the entire story in disguise makeup and actually doesn't do a whole lot of Captain-Future-ing. The book is 3rd person and divides its time evenly between a large group of good-guys as they each play their little part in the adventure. Sometimes the order of events is slightly switched up in order to explain someone arriving in the nick of time (like in “Flash Gordon”), however the whole story is generally pretty light on actual action or heroics (unlike in “Flash Gordon”).
The robot “Futuremen” contribute largely to comic relief and some of them have space-pets who do more of the same. There are humanoid races with minor variations from planets like Mars and Mercury and Jupiter, which is always a nice touch.
Really, the whole thing was pretty light, enjoyable enough but not especially memorable. It might be that I just chose the wrong book to start in with.
March 26, 2020
Storyline: 2/5
Characters: 1/5
Writing Style: 2/5
World: 2/5
Classic pulp. 1996 Hugo voters decided to nominate this 18th in the series for the Retro Hugo Award. Whatever may have come in those first seventeen volumes, it was not necessary for understanding the events in Red Sun of Danger. This is another interstellar cops and robbers story where the hero can learn and do anything but is most acclaimed for how fast he can draw a weapon from a holster. This was remarkably similar to E.E. Doc Smith’s Lensman stories, the first of which would have appeared in magazine form nearly a decade before Sterling’s version. There does not appear to be much maturity in the genre at this time. Humanity not having been to the moon yet and before much of the advances in astronomy, the writer has to be forgiven for making the planets in the solar system habitable and with their own humanoid denizens. Sterling does have a neat idea or two in here, at least one of them being picked up by later science fiction. There is no doubt, however, that this is a 1940s adventure story from a “Scientifiction” magazine that was on the lookout for opportunities to use exclamation points!
Characters: 1/5
Writing Style: 2/5
World: 2/5
Classic pulp. 1996 Hugo voters decided to nominate this 18th in the series for the Retro Hugo Award. Whatever may have come in those first seventeen volumes, it was not necessary for understanding the events in Red Sun of Danger. This is another interstellar cops and robbers story where the hero can learn and do anything but is most acclaimed for how fast he can draw a weapon from a holster. This was remarkably similar to E.E. Doc Smith’s Lensman stories, the first of which would have appeared in magazine form nearly a decade before Sterling’s version. There does not appear to be much maturity in the genre at this time. Humanity not having been to the moon yet and before much of the advances in astronomy, the writer has to be forgiven for making the planets in the solar system habitable and with their own humanoid denizens. Sterling does have a neat idea or two in here, at least one of them being picked up by later science fiction. There is no doubt, however, that this is a 1940s adventure story from a “Scientifiction” magazine that was on the lookout for opportunities to use exclamation points!
February 18, 2011
borrowed this from a friend [thx Grayson] and powered through it [as much as I power through any book]. good pulpy sci-fi kitsch, with lots of exclamation points. it's got me interested in reading more pre-60s Sci-Fi, when space was something we as a people hadn't actually touched yet.
November 18, 2017
Despite being written an almost a dialect of the era, I found it fun and inventive. I did skim a bit ( or is that speed reading ?) but had no trouble following what was going on. A lot happens in this modest book. A steady barrage of action, twists and turns and invention kept me reading. I enjoyed that some effort was put into the alien planet ( which doesn’t always happen) in it’s culture, alien inhabitants, environments and lifeforms. If I’m reading pulp SF and adventuring on a new world I want me some Alien World dammit ! I wasn’t as enamoured with the ‘tough guy’ underworld capture and release events, but those scenes were the backbone of the story and were the plot points. A fun and interesting look at mid century/post pulp SF.
March 17, 2018
I'm a fan of the hero pulps, and I'd heard of Captain Future, so I was excited when I found this in a local used bookstore.
It was great! Full of pulp action goodness! I didn't know anything about the Futuremen, but what great characters!
I really want to find more Captain Future tales!
It was great! Full of pulp action goodness! I didn't know anything about the Futuremen, but what great characters!
I really want to find more Captain Future tales!
September 21, 2020
Written by Edmond Hamilton. The solar system relies on vitron, a drug which keeps people young and healthy into what should be old age. But evil men want a monopoly on it and Captain Future (in disguise) and the Futuremen travel to the stars, to the planet Roo where it is now grown. The villains upset the native Roons so they will expel the Earthmen from their planet. They plan on using the myth of the dreaded Old Ones to scare the natives into open rebellion, not knowing that their stunt will free them, the Kangas, horrible mind monsters who have been sleeping for a million years on the Black Moon. Only the super science of ancient Deneb can save mankind if the dreaded Kangas wake again. Space Opera at its best.
January 25, 2016
The pulp era SiFi hero, Captain Future is a more scientific version of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. He and his band of Futuremen are special criminal investigators for the Earth government and are similar to Doc Savage and his band of helpers. Great reads, recommended
December 26, 2007
read 04.04.85
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews