Shoot at the Moon - William F Temple

 A sci-fi semi-classic from the Sixties by a pioneer of the postwar British genre.   William F Temple was never as famous as Arthur C Clarke or as idiosyncratic as Brian Aldiss, but he knew them both and had his own literary characteristics.   I have already reviewed The Four-Sided Triangle, Battle on Venus and (the best title) Fleshpots of Sansato on this blog.   Shoot at the Moon is every bit as good.   As an extra bonus it took me back to the mid-Sixites when the debate among schoolboys was Is it even possible to land on the moon?

Well obviously it was, and Temple, being of a scientific bent, never seems to have doubted it.   He follows Clarke in his advocacy of atomic engines being the best and least damaging way to do it, and they may well have been right.   He then works in Charles Eric Maine's debut trick of murder in space.   Indeed, he doubles down on the device with two murders.   But the Endeavour only has a crew of five to begin with: the proto Musk, Colonel Marley, who has funded the expedition, his schizophrenic daughter Lou, who happens to be a leading scientist, her ex-husband Thompson, the celebrated Johan, Pettigue, who has a reputation of being the only survivor of several expeditions, and our narrator, the jobbing space pilot Franz Brunel.   Well, it can't be him, we assume - that would be taking the unreliable narrator too far.   And it can't really be either of the two victims, certainly not the first.   Temple hints that there are other crews elsewhere on the Moon, so it may be them, especially since the Endeavour is on a literal gold hunt on a forbidden patch of the Dark Side.

I'm not going to reveal the killer.   Just to say, it's a good one when it comes and provides an excellent chase to finish with.   The characters all have their strengths and weaknesses, their motives and guilty secrets.   Shoot at the Moon is Temple on top form.   If retro British sci-fi is your thing, you'll love it.

The Fleshpots of Sansato - William F Temple

 Great title - but a novelette only likely to interest the literary acheaologists amongst us.  Temple was a pioneer of British sci fi from the war period until the Seventies.   He mixed with the best but never really rose above the level of supporting player.   His best-known novel was Four-Sided Triangle, which I reveiwed earlier on this blog.

To me, Temple is interesting purely because he is a bystander, observer of what the better-known were up to.   Fleshpots is basically a take on Psychedelic sci fi of, most notably, Michael Moorcock.   Temple has ingenuity but a distinctly prosaic imagination, so the result is basically pulp detective noir in space.   Ray Garner of the Sidereal Intelligence Service is ordered to the distant planet of Montefore to find SIS source Dr Lowry who has disappeared into the titular fleshpots.

A classic example of period sci fi - the galaxy has intergalactic travel but still uses telephone landlines.   Interestingly, Temple's take on the travel element is that it has been made available to earthlings by the otensibly friendly Dorians of a far distant planet.   Temple is a bureaucracy man and, typically, the Dorians retain a measure of control: earth travellers can only go one way on the instant relocator; the other half of a round trip has to be by conventional spaceship.   Dr Lowry, a prominent scientist, was sent into space to try and figure out how the quick version works.

Despite mixing with aliens (and doing more exotic things to alien females in Sansato) human intelligence agents still favour racial stereotypes.   Thus Garner's contact on Montefore is the very Italian Arnoldo (Arnie) Monicelli, who drinks Italian wine and favours long lunches.   Garner is American and therefore a whisky man.

So Garner plunges into the fleshpots and meets the Satos, the Montefore version of geishas.   Their sexual specialities are various: one is invisible, another is literally electric, a third a humanoid cat complete with claws.   The one who leads Garner to the truth is Vygynia, an autistic waif whom both Lowry and Monicelli have taken under their wing, the Italian in a paternalistic, protective way, the not-so-good doctor probably not.

It's all good fun with plenty of betrayals and red herrings.   I've no idea why this NEL edition is 'specially abridged' but having done my research on Four-Sided Triangle I'm betting there is another, very different version out there somewhere.

Battle on Venus - William F Temple

 Intrigued by his Four-Sided Triangle, I decided to explore more of William F Temple's work and found several of his lesser output in an online bookshop in Liverpool.   This one is actually a double bonus - an Ace Double from 1963 - two Temple short novellas or long short stories for the price of one.

Like many in the second rank of Fifties sci fi writers Temple began in traditional book format and was reduced to pulp publications to keep going.   Battle on Venus is typical.   The first Earth mission crashlands  on Venus to find the air breathable and the planet at war with itself.   Tanks and aircraft and torpedos and giant cutting wheels battle around them.   While the crew try to repair the spaceship explorer George Starkey sets off to find whoever is in charge of the machines.   But first he finds a Venusian girl with a gift for thieving.  She leads him to the immortal being who has created the war to allieviate the boredom of immortality and who has thus wiped out 99% of the planet's population by remote control.

As ever it is the ideas which intrigue - the window they open on the scienctific consensus of the time.   In 1963 we knew that Venus is shrouded by poisonous clouds but had no idea at all what lay beneath.   Actually, nowadays many scientists wonder if Venus was Earth's twin, a lost paradise, which leads some to wonder if life began there and migrated here.   In 1963 I suspect that idea was confined to outliers like C S Lewis and William F Temple.   Automated warfare is another idea which has come to fruition.   I liked the concept of Teleos, caps with electronics which enable Starkey and the Venusians to communicate by thought.

Battle on Venus is fun and interesting.   By this time Temple had developed more of a gift for character than in Four-Sided Triangle.   The 'Jonah', Captain Freiberg, is amusing, as is the petulant immortal Senilde.   Mara, the thief girl, is more interesting than our hero.

Four-Sided Triangle - William F Temple

 Another of the British Library's wonderful reprints of mid 20th century UK sci fi.  Four-Sided Triangle was originally a short story in the US magazine Amazing Stories (November, 1939).   Temple then expanded it into a novel during his wartime service - as Mike Ashley recounts in his useful introduction, Temple had to do so three times, having twice lost the manuscript in battle action.

The end result is a peculiar animal.  The padding is obvious and in expanding a very short story into a 300 page novel is going to take some significant new material (a subject I hope to expand upon myself in a forthcoming monograph).  But the question arises, what if anything could be cut?   And I can't answer that one.   The story certainly takes a while to get going but I could argue the delay is necessary to establish the credentials of reckless inventor Bill.   Perhaps moving the key development into a prologue to hook us in would be the answer.

However what Temple has really done in adding material is develop characters we are intrigued by, something so often lacking in science fiction of the period.   The story of their relationship is as old as the hills - two friends love the same enigmatic girl, but only one can have her.   The twist, the sci fi maguffin, is to make a duplicate so they can both have one.   Again Temple cleverly develops this through his narrator, a bachelor doctor too old to be interested in young girls but who happens to be Bill's foster parent.   He sees what the youngsters cannot, he is a practitioner of other people's science, not an innovator.

It's slow but it is engrossing.   Nothing else Temple wrote came anywhere near, apparently, though the British Library has also reprinted his Shoot at the Moon, which I will certainly try.   I am also intrigued to find that Four-Sided Triangle became an early Hammer film, directed by Terence Fisher and available on DVD.   That might be on my list of acquisitions too.