The Winds of Gath (1967, UK) is the first book of Tubb’s Dumarest series, which reached 31 books before DAW pulled the plug in 1985. A French small press later persuaded Tubb to write a book to end the series, and this was translated into English and published by a US small press in 1997. A UK small press magazine then published a short story following on from the “final” book, and it was later expanded to book length as Dumarest #33, Child of Earth (2008, UK). Unfortunately, Tubb died soon after — he was ninety-one.
The Winds of Gath was originally published as one half of an Ace double with Juanita Coulson. In fact, the first seven books in the series were published as one half of Ace doubles, the seventh as a novel entire, and the series was only picked up by DAW with Mayenne (1973, UK), the ninth novel.
The Winds of Gath lays out the series’ story arc right from the beginning: Dumarest was born on Earth, stowed away on a ship at age ten, and now wanders from planet to planet (he is in his thirties), hunting for the way home to a world that most consider mythical. The series’ main institutions are also set up in the first book — the Cyclan; the Brotherhood; High, Middle and Low passage… As is the plot template every book followed: Dumarest stranded on a new world, needs to earn money to buy Low passage to the next world, fights someone to better his situation, inadvertently foils the nefarious plot of someone or other…
Oh, and there’s usually a love interest. Who rarely survives the book.
Gath is a world notable for the “music of the spheres”, generated when storms hit a mountain range of crystal, on a tide-locked planet which has a narrow habitable band between inhospitably hot and lethally cold. Tourists from all walks of life visit Gath to experience this music, which apparently has supernatural properties, but there are no permanent facilities for the visitors. And Low travellers who arrive there find it difficult to earn enough to ship out.
Which is why Dumarest is annoyed when he finds himself on Gath.
He fights and kills a trained killer in a prize fight, earning the enmity of a rich and powerful and psychotic prince, but gains the notice of the Matriarch of Kund. When the various parties travel to the mountains to witness the famous “music of the spheres”, Dumarest narrowly survives several attempts on his life. But there is more at stake than just the succession of the Matriarchy of Kund, or the depredations of the Prince of Emmend…
Earl Dumarest first appeared in 1967, from a British writer, and it’s tempting to think he came from a long tradition of English heroes — well, yes, James Bond is Scottish, but he’s presented in Fleming’s novels as more English than the actual English. But neither does he map onto Bulldog Drummond… Yet there’s a long tradition of US science fiction also at play here. While Dumarest is physically fit and has above average reaction speeds, he is not competent, he doesn’t have a trade at which he excels. He’s not an engineer, he doesn’t even own a slide rule. He’s not something which came out of 1950s US science fiction, he’s not something from the English heroic tradition.
I suspect Dumarest owes most to a British refactoring of a US template than he does any English popular hero. His lack of trade is interesting and, I think, peculiarly British. He was not alone, however. Other contemporaneous British writers, such as Stableford and Bayley and Lee, also published by DAW, wrote books with heroes who didn’t fit the mould of US science fiction heroes.
For all that they were rigidly formulaic, the Dumarest series books were influential in terms of science fiction universe-building. I suspect that also includes the character of Dumarest himself. He was a wanderer, unskilled but psychologically smart, and that may well have triggered a raft of similar US protagonists, who had no trade against which to measure their worth. Such as Paul Atriedes, a messiah-in-waiting with special powers (which is not to say special powers had not been present in earlier US sf, from James Blish to Alice Eleanor Jones), but competent heroes do not have special powers, they have only that which they have learned and improved.
There were many other ideas in the Dumarest series which were picked up and recycled by numerous other works. Low passage is a pretty common trope these days, in both written and media sf. The novels were also well-written — but then DAW in the 1960s and 1970s published a lot of short novels, often in series, by UK writers, and most of them were a good deal better than their US contemporaries. There’s an interesting re-fertilising of the field at play there — pulp sf shipped to the UK as ballast during the war years, which inspired a host of UK writers, who were published widely in the US by paperback imprints a couple of decades later, and so helped change the genre.
It doesn’t mean their books are necessarily good books, acceptable to present-day sensitivities, or, in many cases, even worth reading. The Winds of Gath was published in 1967. It’s a product of its time, but its sensibilities are not so far removed from those of 2022. Yes, there is male gaze, but there is also female agency — one of the characters is the ruler of a matriarchy, for a start, and Tubb knows what that means. There’s even a discussion on consent, framed as a woman in position of power accusing a man of rape. Tubb’s argument plays differently in 2022, but he wasn’t that far from the right answer.
I’ve a feeling the formula began to wear a little thin somewhere around the ten or twelve book mark, but it’s a long time since I last read them. Certainly, I remember Tubb’s consistency as impressive. He did once say he was happy to churn them out as long as Donald A Wollheim was willing to buy them. It was only Wollheim’s retirement which brought the series to an abortive end, although I imagine by then they had over-stayed their time. The books were published in the UK by Arrow throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but the last four books, #28 Melome (1982, UK) and #29 Angado (1984, UK), and #30 Symbol of Terra (1984, UK) and #31 Temple of Truth (1985, UK), were published by Legend as two novels in one paperback each. I suspect the series was not hugely popular in its heyday, although it had, and still has, many fans, but by the mid-1980s interest had clearly faded.
In hindsight, this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Had they continued to be published, Tubb would likely have continued with the formula, and we may never have seen the end. We’ve all seen that happen with other genre series.
Sometimes, you can have too much of a good thing, it seems.
