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.

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.