An Aerial Adventure, or The Secret of a Scientist (1909-1910) by Victor D. A. Courtney – final part of the review.
By November 1909, readers were informed that the three characters had been on the unknown planet in our Solar System, Lic-a-loo-ka, for over 2 years. Yet, still, how they got their food and water remains a mystery. Incidentally, by the end of the story, 15 years had past since Barrington had left Earth.
Sat 11 Dec 1909 edition, the story finally describes some of the alien beasts in detail:
“The principal beast of burden was the Barl, a long-necked, fur-covered quadruped, about one and a half times the size of a horse. There were no cows in Lica-a-loo-ka, but a milk substitute was derived by squeezing a certain plant called a Rop. A three-legged beast called a Ban Gon supplied the Lics with flesh meats. The Ban Gon was a peculiar animal , and how it propelled itself along was a mystery to me. It was a somewhat larger beast than our bullocks, but it possessed neither teeth, horns, nor tail. The animal’s body was covered with a mass of long, disordered hair. It had but one eye, and was totally deaf. These creatures ran wild in the forest, and often inflicted serious injuries on the hunters, for though they had no horns they could leap to a considerable height, and when pursued would suddenly turn, charge the hunter, and on coming within about 15 yards of him would leap upon him, and crush him by their enormous weight.”
The seeds of the crazy crackpot inventor were throughout the story, but the ultimate is in the March 1910 edition.
“Barrington,” cried the inventor, moving closer to me; and I could see his eyes glowing in the darkness like two live coals, “to-morrow spells freedom, and when we are free I shall dethrone this monarch and proclaim this planet one vast republic, with myself as the first President. Then I will, with the help of these creatures and a certain powerful destroyer of life that I discovered, I will build a fleet of aeroplanes, and, with an army of men, speed to our earth, and with the help of this wonderful destroyer of life that I have discovered, will make our own earth a universal republic, with myself as head.”
Soon we are greeted with a civil war, a beheading with a sword, a main character being mangled to bits in a knife machine, the crazed inventor using a discovered powder that dissolves everything on contact to avenge his fallen servitor, and a plan for genocide, in the avenging scientist’s desperation to eradicate every last Lic from the planet, before heading back to Earth to rule it as well.
The story ends with Barrington being the only one that survives the descent into Earth’s atmosphere, visiting his relatives and finding fifteen years had passed.
While aspects of this story might be considered space opera, fighting an alien king on another planet and a ship that can travel there and back, the admiration of the narrator for the villain scientist is disturbing. The torture and beheadings, death by bullets and swordplay that happen in the story are gruesome and hardly something for the children’s pages of a newspaper, and the psychotic character that started, caused almost every conflict, and finished the story is somehow written as a hero – It is difficult to place this story in a modern genre and so perhaps it must languish at the bottom of the space opera barrel along with anything Mars related by Edgar Rice Burroughs, though his Princess of Mars (aka Under the Moons of Mars) wasn’t serialised until 1912, so Courtney beat him to that in Australia.
Perhaps Courtney had tapped into the zeitgeist of the time and written something along the lines of what readers were enjoying in the UK and the USA.
One of the things I am looking for in retrieving lost space opera is an amazing story that could be rereleased for future generations to enjoy. Unfortunately, only a third of this story is space opera. Overall, I would have to assign it the vague genre of speculative science fantasy, and keep looking.