The Story So Far

Roan is a pure Terran, originally meant to be the surrogate child of royalty, but instead sold to a husband and wife who sell their passports so that they can raise the boy. Roan’s parents are a mutated human and a humanoid alien, and they’re loving and caring despite the poverty they have to endure. From a very young age, Roan knows he’s unique in this part of the galaxy, for pure humans are hard to come by. The Terran empire once ruled the galaxy, but the empire has since been broken up by a fierce and intelligent race called the Niss, with Niss ships supposedly (we never see them) blockading Earth from the rest of known space. Since childhood it’s been Roan’s dream to find his ancestral home world, as well as meet a fellow pure Terran. Humans, on the occasions that he meets them, are mutated, like his father, as well as the lovely circus dancer Stellaraire. As a teen Roan is forced into joining Gom Bulj’s Extravaganzoo, a flying circus, with “Gooks” and “Geeks” as performers. With his agility, Roan is made to be a high-wire performer, but his time at the circus is made much worse by his antagonistic relationship with Ithc, a strong and fearsome alien who serves as the arch villain of the first installment. Roan eventually kills Ithc, and even gets away with it, but this then begs the question of how he’s supposed to get out of the circus. His only friends here are Stella and the hulking tough-skinned alien Iron Robert. Roan is strong and clever, but also stubborn.

Enhancing Image

A couple things I should talk about before we get into the actual plot of this installment. First, you may have noticed that for reasons beyond human comprehension, Laumer and Brown thought it would be great to use a real-life racial slur to mean something totally different in this novel. Mutated humans and some humanoid races are called Gooks, which is not what that word means in our world. This is a slur that’s typically associated with the Vietnam War, but its usage goes at least as far back as World War II, and has historically been used to dehumanized those who at least appear to be East Asian. Laumer especially (given his military background) would’ve been familiar with the word, which makes you wonder why they use it here, albeit in a different context. It’s something none of the characters comment on, which in a way is understandable since at some point (or so it’s theorized) mankind had crossbred to the point of ethnic boundaries becoming quite blurry. Roan himself is not explicitly said to be white, from my recollection, although illustrations give him Caucasian features, not to mention the look of a stereotypical pulp hero.

On a more innocuous note, I got curious and decided to look into the book version, which aside from cleaning up the many typos of the magazine version seems to feature the same text. The one major difference is scene and chapter breaks, in that there are fewer scene breaks and more chapter breaks in the book version. It’s easy to take for granted, when reading old stuff as it appeared in magazines, that some formatting and finessing with the text is necessary to make it fit a certain number of lines and a certain number of pages. This is doubly the case for serials, where ideally each installment (except for the last) should end on a cliffhanger. The second installment of Earthblood just kind of stops, and indeed for the book version this ending happens in the middle of a fucking chapter! This is something the vast majority of people wouldn’t consider.

Now…

Just when it looks like things are about to get boring, the circus ship is attacked BY PIRATES! In an emergency maneuver, the ship goes into overdrive and takes on three G’s, which is about enough to crush your average person to death. So goes Gom Bulj and everyone else aboard, except for Roan, who by sheer force of will is able to survive and turn off the heavy gravity, and Iron Robert, who is Iron Robert. (Something this book wants to make very clear is that Roan is special.) Even Stellaraire is not spared; on the contrary she gets fridged, having gotten trapped under debris and burned to death. Mind you that up to this point there have been only two notable women in the novel: Stellaraire and Roan’s mum. The mother is alive, but it’s possible we never see her again. The misogyny could certainly be worse, but I have to wonder what Brown was thinking during the weeks she must’ve spent working on this novel.

Roan and his buddy get captured, with Iron Robert ultimately getting locked in a cell. This is maybe better than the big boy getting executed, because the ship’s captain, Henry Dread, really doesn’t like Geeks. Or Gooks, really, but he’s more racist against non-humanoid aliens. Henry does, however, take a liking to Roan, and soon enough Roan becomes a new member of the crew. For the next five years (we only know this because the book tells us directly), Roan does piracy stuff, IN SPAAAAAAAACE. The captain is a human supremacist, so it’s unsurprising when we learn he hopes to rebuild Earth’s space navy. He’s also, like Roan, a pure Terran. Supposedly. The two form a bond over their shared lineage and similar temperaments, but the friendship is a troubled one. Iron Robert is the only friend Roan has, and Henry wants the alien locked up. There’s also the problem of how to save Earth and rebuild a space navy when there are the Niss to consider. Nobody knows what they look like—not even Henry, who’s been prepping to do battle with them. Most of this installment follow the growing friendship between Roan and Henry. The passage of time gets a little strange; there are a few time jumps, which the narrator tells us directly, otherwise we wouldn’t figure Roan is on this ship for five years.

Eventually we get to easily the most frustrating part of the novel thus far, in what I would call a ten-car pileup of stupidity. They come across a Niss ship, and rather than retreat (on account of being outmanned and outgunned), Henry thinks it would be a great idea to attack the ship now. He can’t even be bothered to be reasonable about it. This turns out to be a huge mistake. As the pirate ship gets blown to kingdom come, and with everyone escaping to a single cramped pod, Roan has to make to tough choice to leave Iron Robert behind, on account of him being literally too big to fit in the pod. Or at least Roan would make that choice, if he wasn’t stubborn to the point of lunacy about it, even shooting and killing Henry. Killing the captain ends up being a pointless gesture as well, because they end up having to leave Iron Robert behind anyway. They call it the most unnecessary killing in all of old-timey science fiction. That Roan becomes the de facto head of the crew and sees no repercussions for his mistake is incredible.

A Step Farther Out

Racism and sexism in Earthblood fall under the category of “It can definitely be worse.” I know this because I’ve read enough SF from this period. Robert Silverberg alone probably provided enough miosgyny in the back half of the ’60s to power the Hoover Dam, like a hamster on a wheel powering your desktop computer. It’s not even nearly as problematic as Robert Heinlein was during this period, although I’m not sure if that’s because of Brown’s input or if Laumer really isn’t that bad on his own. On top of aging fairly well, this is just as fairly an entertaining novel thus far. The plot sort of meanders, and I’m starting to get tired of how everything in the universe seems to revolve around Roan (or maybe it’s that Roan is not that interesting a protagonist), but you can do a lot worse.

See you next time.