Who Goes There?

When John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding with the October 1937 issue, there was a sort of mass extinction event for genre SF—although not quite. For one, the changing of the guard from F. Orlin Tremaine to Campbell was gradual, with many of the writers who submitted to Tremaine still being around in the early ’40s, but also a few of the pre-Campbell writers did survive well past what should’ve been well past their expiration date. The most remarkable example of one of these authors succeeding against the odds might be Murray Leinster, which was the pseudonym for real-life inventor Will F. Jenkins. Of course, Leinster also occasionally used his real name as a byline, most memorably with one of his forward-thinking stories, “A Logic Named Joe.” Leinster had his first SF story published in 1919, making him so old that he came about before the launch of Amazing Stories. In the ’30s he wrote his first major work, including today’s short novella, but the consensus among genre historians is that the years 1945 to about 1960 are where Leinster really hit his stride. This is impressive for someone who turned sixty in 1956. “Proxima Centauri” is decidedly pre-Campbell in that it’s an example of the pulpy space opera that dominated SF magazines (it even appeared sometimes in Weird Tales) in the late ’20s through much of the ’30s. It’s more Star Trek than something more intellectual like, say, Robert Heinlein’s “Universe,” which is often regarded as having extrapolated on Leinster’s premise; but really, the two stories have little in common past their settings (big spaceship) being similar.

Placing Coordintes

First published in the March 1935 issue of Astounding Stories. It’s been reprinted in Before the Golden Age (ed. Isaac Asimov), From Wells to Heinlein (ed. James E. Gunn), and too many Leinster collections to count, including Sidewise in Time, The Best of Murray Leinster, and First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster.

Enhancing Image

The Adastra is big. Like monstrously big. Indeed “monstrous” is a word Leinster uses to describe maybe one too many times; the vocabulary for pulp writing was not that varied. The Adastra is a spaceship that has been journeying out to Proxima Centauri for the past seven years, with its crew of a few hundred, plus a fair number of children. When someone brings up “Proxima Centauri” it’s as a precursor to the generation ship subgenre of SF, if you can even call it a subgenre. The idea behind the generation ship is that people live, from cradle to grave, on a spaceship, generation after generation. Going by this criteria, however, this is not an example of a generation ship story, since the people aboard the Adastra are supposed to reach Proxima Centauri and then return for Earth. The trip even one-way takes several years, though. At some point, enough people aboard got tired of the day-to-day monotony that a mutiny happened, although it did not succeed. At the beginning of the story there are basically two factions, those who side with the officers and the captain of the ship, and those who side with the “Muts,” short for mutineers. Jack Gary is one of these Muts; he came aboard as a teenager, when he wasn’t even old enough to serve as crewman, but his father died during the trip and Jack took his place. Jack’s in love with Helen Bradley, who (of course) is the captain’s daughter. Doing some basic math tells us that Jack is 23 while Helen is 21. Unfortunately for the both of them, Captain Bradley does not approve of them marrying, on account of Jack being a Mut; meanwhile Alstair, the first mate, approves of them being a couple even less, given he also has eyes on Helen. Helen, for her part (being “the girl” [Leinster’s words, not mine] of the story), doesn’t seem interested in Alstair at all, which is understandable given that he’s an asshole who wants Jack’s head on a pike.

The love triangle between Jack, Helen, and Alstair forms the human drama of the narrative, which… is fine, I guess. You could do worse. Aside from the aforementioned characters there’s nobody else really worth considering; maybe if Leinster had expanded it to a longer novella we would’ve gotten more from the rest of the crew, but alas. The point of the story is really not the borderline generation-ship conditions of life aboard the Adastra, but instead what the crew meet by total accident as they get close to the star. See, this is actually first contact narrative, and the aliens we meet end up being really something. The crew hide in the ship’s depths when the aliens (let’s call them Centaurians) come aboard, although one unlucky redshirt gets killed instantly for his troubles, the Centaurian’s weapon not only killing him but rapidly mummifying his body. One might think this was just a case of misunderstanding, or that maybe the boarding party of Centaurians were too quick with the trigger and realized their mistake; but no, these aliens are very happy to take home some human corpses. After a skirmish in which armed crewmen are able to fight off the boarding party and taken one of the aliens captive, we find out a few things: that the Centaurians are not animals but rather sentient plants; that the Centaurians see animal life as both a food source and the corpses of animals as collectors’ items; and also that the Adastra is woefully ill-equipped to deal with the Centaurian ship. While some people aboard have weapons with which to defend themselves, the Adastra itself does not, and at the same time the ship is too bulky to maneuver out of the way of attack. To make matters worse, Captain Bradley has died offscreen, from… something. Now Alstair is in command, and Alstair is not the right man for the job.

I’d been meaning to review more Leinster since I tackled his SF-horror yarn “Pipeline to Pluto” about 18 months ago, because I wanted to read a Leinster story that’s maybe less bleak, and also because when I reviewed “Pipeline to Pluto” I was in a terrible headspace myself. Turns out that “Proxima Centauri” is only marginally less dark than that other story, although its body count is higher by several orders of magnitude. Death hangs like a shroud over pretty much every page, and the situation Our Heroes™ find themselves in is really hopeless; there is no magical solution in which both sides get to sort out their differences. Leinster’s Centaurians are unambiguously evil, but his human characters are only better by virtue of sometimes being able to make rational decisions. Much of the conflict comes from Jack and Alstair hating each other’s guts and Helen being able to do very little about that. Even when they devise a way to communicate with the captured Centaurian, there’s no way to see eye-to-eye with the alien; the two races are fundamentally opposed to each other’s existences. This is all a curious foil to Leinster’s later and more beloved story, “First Contact,” in which (spoilers) the human and alien space crews are able to resolve their conflict peacefully. In “Proxima Centauri” there is no such option. The crew of the Adastra were already on the brink of killing each other, but for a lot of them being confronted with the pure evil that is the Centaurians proves to be the tipping point. As you can see with the cover for this issue of Astounding, which depicts “Proxima Centauri,” the Centaurians are vaguely humanoid but do not have heads or necks; instead their eyes are rendered as slits in the upper abdomen, and their limbs are rather spongy, which makes sense given that they are walking plants. The Centaurian ship used radio waves to kill non-animal life before boarding the ship, but then of course the Centaurians themselves are non-animal life so that’s what they would think to use.

Assuming you can put aside the insane logistics of the Adastra, a ship whose dimensions and internal workings either cannot or should not exist, it’s internally consistent enough of a story. Most SF writers at this point were not scientists or inventors, despite people like Hugo Gernsback really wanting to push the “credibility” of scientists as writers, but Leinster could actually claim to have in-depth knowledge of some technology. There’s a seriousness with how Leinster imagines the Adastra and its alien foes, even if the tone of the thing is very pulpy.

There Be Spoilers Here

By the time we get to the final chapter the vast majority of the Adastra‘s crew is dead, either killed by the Centaurians or via suicide. There’s a disturbing little passage wherein one of the officers, about to be taken prisoner by the aliens, kills his family and then himself; unfortunately Leinster does not give this sort of grimness the proper sense of weight, either through pacing or his choice of words. The pulp method of writing is ill-equipped for dealing with a story where by the end a few hundred people have died, along with an entire race of intelligent lifeforms. Since that cat is out of the bag, we may as well talk about the ending, which in looking up opinions on “Proxima Centauri” I’ve found surprisingly little material for. It could be that in the context of when it was written the kill-them-all ending is probably far from unique, but I still think it’s worth noting the sense of inevitability in how Alstair, being the last people aboard the Adastra, rigs its engines so that the ship, in exploding, destroys the Centaurians’ home world. Alstair’s decision to sacrifice himself and let Jack and Helen run off together is treated as heroic, but in sacrificing himself he also commits an act of genocide. The extermination of a whole species. It was them or us. A human ship, following the Adastra by a few years, has apparently been on its way to Proxima Centauri, with no way for the Adastra‘s crew to warn them that the Centaurians would be waiting for them. Worse yet, once the Centaurians heard about Earth, they saw a goldmine in the form of a planet, full of animal life that was for the taking.

What’s curious about Leinster’s resigned position that the Centaurians must be exterminates is that it’s not because they’re a warmongering people, but because they’re such resource hogs that they’ve eliminated all animal life from their home planet, as well as others containing life in their solar system. They see non-plant life like how humans see precious metals, and Leinster makes this comparison explicit because he’s not really talking about some hypothetical race of plant people—he’s talking about us. Human greed may become so all-consuming that it threatens life on an existential level. Spoilers for The Day the Earth Stood Still, but after Klaatu, an alien visiting Earth with his cool robot, is resurrected and able to call upon the leaders of as many human governments as could be managed, he warns us that the galactic council he’s a part of might have to take drastic action if the governments of Earth persist in researching nuclear weapons. Powers from another galaxy apparently see the hydrogen bomb, or at least what it can lead to, as enough of a threat to other planets hosting intelligent life that the message is basically: “Sort your shit out, or we will sort your shit out for you.” Surely if the race of people Klaatu belonged to was real, we would all be dead by now. Likewise the Centaurians are so devastating to whatever environment they come upon that something must be done about them. It’s an extremely bloody ending for how hopeful it is.

A Step Farther Out

“Proxima Centauri” is one of the most important pre-Campbell SF stories of the ’30s, although it’s not necessarily one of the best. It’s a story that gives hints of a deceptively bright talent, but is also beholden to pulp-era tropes that not mix well with modern sensibilities. I also recommend not going into it as a precursor to generation-ship narratives since that’s really not the point of the thing, although it might strike some (like it did Asimov, when he first read it as a teenager) as a pleasant surprise. Leinster would adapt with the time, up to a point, so that a decade after “Proxima Centauri” he would emerge as one of the more mature writers in the field. It helps that the story itself is not a slog to get through; it doesn’t overstay its welcome and it mostly go down smooth. Still, this is the kind of thing you read in 2025 for the sake of studying it than enjoying it.

See you next time.