I’m probably not really old enough to have an opinion about Eric Frank Russell. He was popular in his day, but that day ended decades before I was born. Wasp (1958, UK) appears on many best of sf novels list, and is in the SF Masterworks series (the later yellow-themed unnumbered series, which is still going), but most of his others works have been forgotten. Three to Conquer (1956, UK) was nominated for the Hugo Award in 1956, but lost out to Robert A Heinlein’s Double Star (1956, USA). It was originally serialised in Astounding in 1955 under the title ‘Call Me Dead’.
Reading Three to Conquer now, the only remarkable thing about it is its British author’s facility with US pulp fiction prose styles. The story is set in the US, the protagonist is American, and the novel makes such a good fist of its time and place it could have been written by a US author. Unfortunately, that time and place is 1950s USA, not the future USA in which the story is set.
A telepathic man, the only one in the US to his knowledge, remotely witnesses the murder of a state trooper. He stays to help the police, which later sees him pegged as prime suspect since he apparently knows so much about the crime. He goes on the run, in an attempt to work his way up the chain of command to find someone who will believe him when he explains his ability and what he has discovered.
Which he does. Apparently, there was a secret mission to Venus. The murderers have been identified as its three astronauts, but no one knew they were back. And it seems they’ve been taken over by Venusian mind parasites. Who plan to conquer Earth.
The telepath, with the help of the forces of law and order, sets himself up as bait. And when the Venusians turn up — there are more of them by this point — he identifies them and they’re killed.
The novel is set in 1980 but was written twenty-five years earlier. On the one hand, science fiction is not predictive and should never be seen as such. On the other… the first page of Three to Conquer contains so many predictions Russell got wrong you have to wonder why he picked the year 1980…
I call this type of science fiction Men in Hats sf — use as little imagination as possible in extrapolating a future world; in this case, there’s mention of personal helicopters (costing $2000 each!), but everything else is the same as 1950s USA. Including everyone wearing hats.
It’s tempting to consider the Venusians stand-ins for communists, except that would make the telepath… McCarthy? Unlikely. Especially since Russell was British, and likely had a more grown-up response to communism. Perhaps the Venusians were merely foreigners — but they’re indistinguishable from natives, except by the telepath, so that doesn’t really play either. Russell was in his late thirties during World War 2, and served as a RAF wireless operator, but he was likely aware of the influx of Jewish refugees into the UK. Are they the Venusians? Or are the Venusians any group of strangers, and Russell has simply turned the shibboleth into an actual person?
To be fair, there’s little in the book to suggest any such sophistication. It borrows two well-worn pulp fiction plots, “the innocent man on the run” and “the aliens among us”, and mashes them together. The telepath is a tough-talking hero direct from the pages of any random hard-boiled magazine, despite being a small business owner and an engineer skilled at making high-precision equipment. In fact, the only really notable aspect to Three to Conquer is its British author’s skill at aping the prose style of US pulp fiction authors.
Russell was popular in his day, but his day has long since past. I’m a fan of Raymond Chandler’s novels and stories (born in the US, but grew up in the UK, and returned to the US at age twenty-four), and I think his works possess a timeless quality which makes them as impressive today as they were when originally published. Three to Conquer is not set at the time it was written, but in the future. A future Russell had to invent, but failed to do so. Chandler is one of the greatest writers the crime genre has produced, and remains so; Eric Frank Russell’s stature, past or present, in the science fiction genre cannot compare.
Even when considered as a historical document, Three to Conquer can hardly be considered a premier example of its time and place. And yet it was shortlisted for the Hugo Award. Current controversy aside, or indeed the quality of its nominees and winners over the decades, the Hugo has always been a good barometer of what the science fiction movers and shakers in publishing and fandom considered important in, or even defining for the genre for, that particular year. It’s hard to believe Three to Conquer qualified.
But, to be fair, I’m looking back from sixty-eight years later. A lot has changed since then.
