To read Eric Frank Russell is to read American.

His stories look, sound and feel American, which is very surprising; Russell is British, through and through.

He was born at Sandhurst in 1905, the son of an Army instructor, and later entered the army himself for a time. After attempts at the usual sorts of careers that those who eventually become professional writers enter into, he published The Saga of Pelican West in the February, 1937 edition of Astounding Stories. From then on, until the 1950s he produced a whole string of stories and novels, most of them published in Astounding under the editorial control of John W. Campbell. In 1955 he received the ultimate accolade by winning a Hugo for his short story Allamagoosa. This is how Isaac Asimov described him, in his introduction to Russell’s story in the 1963 edition of The Hugo Winners:

Let’s see, as I recall, he is six feet seven inches tall (when he’s sitting down, that is) with a long and majestic English face. Then too, I distinctly remember, there was a small flashing golden aura about his head, the occasional play of hissing lightning flashes when he moved it suddenly, and the distant rumble of thunder when he spoke.

Obviously an impressive man. No wonder he wrote for Campbell!

But why did all his stories sound American? Why did he make such a deliberate attempt to turn transatlantic? The answer is not hard to find…money!

When Russell was writing, the best market for SF was Astounding; it paid more than any other outlet, and it paid on acceptance, not on publication, which was normal for many other magazines. Indeed, many of them were so late in their payments that they gained the reputation of paying “on lawsuit”!

Astounding was edited by an idiosyncratic man with some very definite opinions. Russell's stories from this period are almost invariably carbon copies of every one of Campbell’s prejudices. Which is to say that Earthmen are always White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who look and sound like they come from the American Mid-West. And the dastardly aliens are always very dastardly and very alien and very inferior to the brave Earthmen. Campbell loved this sort of thing; I don’t think he ever published a story where the Earthmen lost. His favourite stories were a xenophobic wet dream, and they reflected very accurately his own philosophy of life.

It seems pretty clear that Russell decided quite early on that if he was going to sell to the highest paying market, he would write formula stories designed to push all of Campbell’s buttons. It is a matter of history that he succeeded brilliantly, and was seldom out of the pages of Astounding during that magazine’s heyday. Indeed, he was appearing so often that he adopted at least one pen-name to disguise his frequency; The Mechanical Mice appeared in 1941 under the pseudonym ‘Maurice G. Hugi’. It was an instantly forgettable story of an invention with no apparent function and tiny metal robots that scuttled around stealing watches.

But does all this mean that because Russell was writing to a seemingly cynical formula he was therefore writing poor stories—hackwork?

The answer is certainly no. If formula-writing for Campbell invariably produced poor stories, Astounding would never have been such a popular magazine, and Campbell would never have had the effect that he did on the SF genre. And it cannot be denied that it was Campbell who was principally responsible for forcing the field out of its juvenile beginnings into maturity. As the field grew, it necessarily left him behind, but during the period when Russell was writing, his power and influence were unquestioned. He was, quite simply, the best. And you don’t become the best by encouraging hackwork. So even though Campbell had his prejudices, and even though Russell pandered to them so shamelessly, the result was not always poor writing. Sometimes it was, as I hope to show, but when Russell was firing on all cylinders, there was no-one to touch him. The limits of a formula do not, of themselves, imply mediocrity. That is a function of the skill of the writer and nothing else.

So what of Russell as a writer? What was it that he brought to the Campbell formula that lifted it above itself?

Humour.

Never forget that Russell was British—if you like, typically British. He knew that nothing was really sacred. He knew how to laugh, both at himself and at others. He was the first of the SF humourists. Others have followed the trail that he blazed—Fredric Brown, Harry Harrison, Robert Sheckley—but Russell did it first, and in many respects he did it the best. It is his claim to fame and it allows us to place him among the all time greats.

A handful of short stories and novels; these are all we have. Russell was blind to his own strengths and sometimes he tried to be serious—with dire results. Also, he was not always in perfect control of himself and his medium, and he tried to be funny with results that were equally dire. I defy anyone to read Sentinels From Space or Sinister Barrier or Top Secret without wincing. They are awful—cliched products of a hack era with no lasting value whatsoever. (Yes, I know that Sinister Barrier is one of his most famous stories; but fame does not imply merit. Ask yourself why you’ve never seen a copy of it. As far as I can determine, it hasn’t been available in the UK since 1943.)

But consider Wasp or The Great Explosion or Next of Kin or Men, Martians and Machines or the Hugo-award-winning short story Allamagoosa. These are classic examples of a very funny man in perfect control of his medium.

So that is my thesis—Russell wrote formula stories, hackwork if you like. Some were good, some were bad. But his one great strength was his humour and it brought some of these stories out of the hack pile and elevated them to the status of “classic”—which is a horrible word, but no other will do. All I have to do now is prove the truth of this thesis.

Wasp and Next of Kin concern one man alone against a planet full of nasty aliens. Naturally he wins through and the aliens get their come-uppance. Campbell would never have allowed anything else. (I’m not sure whether Campbell actually published Wasp. My copy gives no details of previous publications. However, it doesn’t make any difference to the argument. It’s a good book no matter who published it.)

The Great Explosion is really a series of linked novelettes about a spaceship exploring Earth’s lost colonies. The planets were colonised by nutters from Earth. Earth was glad to get rid of them, and promptly forgot all about them, which is how they got lost. The spaceship has come along to see how they have made out after all this time, and to re-establish contact.

Diabologic concerns one man against a planet full of nasty aliens. Naturally the aliens get their come-uppance. Campbell would never have allowed anything else. Now, where have I heard that one before…?

Allamagoosa is about an offog.

Thus described, the stories sound banal in the extreme. But style, of course, is everything. Just look at Ray Bradbury. He has been writing beautifully for years about absolutely nothing at all. He is, simply, full of sound and fury. I leave you to determine the significance. At the other extreme is Asimov, who has an almost total lack of style but is brim full of content. Russell, being British, is a master of compromise, and out of the fusion of these two approaches, has produced something greater than the sum of its component parts. Hence the word “classic” that I used a while back. The plots are banal. The cliches so threadbare you could see through them on a foggy, moonless midnight. Nevertheless, the method of handling lifts them above themselves, and they will stand reading and rereading—usually.

And finally they are, dammit, fun. Let’s not lose sight of that, let’s not sneer. No-one would pretend for a moment that Russell produced great literature (whatever that is). But he could entertain you and that is no small talent.

In this extract from The Space Willies (the American title of Next of Kin), Leeming is eavesdropping on a radio conversation between two aliens.

The unknown life-form manning the vessels had loud, somewhat bellicose voices, but spoke a language with sound-forms curiously akin to Terran speech. To Leeming’s ears it came as a stream of cross-talk that his mind instinctively framed in Terran words. It went like this:

First voice: “Mayor Snorkum will lay the cake.”
Second voice: “What for will the cake be laid by Snorkum?”
First voice: “He will starch his moustache.”
Second voice: “That is night-gab. How can he starch a tepid mouse”

They spent the next ten minutes in what sounded like an acrimonious argument about what one repeatedly called a tepid mouse, while the other insisted that it was a torpid moose. Leeming found that trying to follow the point and counterpoint of this debate put quite a strain upon the cerebellum. He suffered it until something snapped. Tuning his transmitter to the same frequency he bawled. “Mouse or moose, make up your goddam minds.”

This produced a moment of dumbfounded silence before the first voice grated, “Gnof, can you lap a pie-chain?”

“No he can’t,” shouted Leeming, giving the unfortunate Gnof no chance to brag of his ability as a pie-chain lapper.

There came another pause, then Gnof resentfully told all and sundry, “I shall lambast my mother.”
“Dirty dog,” said Leeming, “shame on you.”

The other voice now informed mysteriously, “Mine is a fat one.” “I can imagine,” Leeming agreed.
“Clam-shack?” demanded Gnof in tones clearly translatable as, “Who is that?”
“Mayor Snorkum,” Leeming told him.

That could have come straight out of a Goon Show. Indeed, it was contemporary with the Goons at the height of their popularity. It is pure nonsense, and it has no other purpose than to be nonsense. I cannot help thinking that Spike Milligan would have approved. Certainly, it never fails to induce a minor form of hysterics in me.

However, I don’t want to make extravagant claims. Russell didn’t always get it right.

Consider Diabologic.

The situation is quite simple. A superior Earthman lands on a planet of backward aliens—who nevertheless have space travel. His mission is to prove to them just how superior the Terran culture is to their own. By confusing them with logical paradoxes that twist up their thinking so that they end up bickering about the paradoxes amongst each other, he wins the day. Divided, the aliens fall. Three cheers for the big strong Earthman.

I first read this story as a child, and it made a huge impression on me. I only read it once, but I never forgot it. It was one of the best, the cleverest stories that I’d ever read. It excited and intrigued me. It turned on my “Sense of Wonder”. I loved that story.

Rose coloured glasses, I’m afraid. Rereading the story for this article, I found it appalling.

The difference is, I’ve grown up in the meantime. I know now things that I didn’t know then. I know that the story is derivative. It is tired and unoriginal. Russell confuses the aliens with Zeno’s Paradox. Big deal. None of the paradoxes he invokes so glibly are original with him, and neither is the confusion that they cause. He uses them without thought, straight off the shelf, and with the more sophisticated eyes of an adult I can see that the story is unsatisfying because, as a story, it contains within itself a further paradox that Russell missed. Any aliens sufficiently technologically advanced to get into space (as these have done) would see right through the Earthman’s deception. Nobody that clever can be that simple-minded. Even if the paradoxes were new to them, (unlikely, but allowable in the context), they should have been able to spot the flaws in the argument. Such understanding is basic to the mathematics that allow space travel, among other things.

Paradox—and the story falls apart and disappears up its own flawed premises.

Nevertheless, the child that I was loved that story simply because the child did not know about the paradoxes Russell introduced into the story. That poor child thought they were original and clever and exciting. Who wouldn’t, the first time they met them?

So perhaps the conclusion you can draw is that the reading and appreciating of Russell are a function of the age and maturity at which you approach him. I was very disappointed that rereading Diabologic meant re-evaluating it. There are some memories and impressions that it hurts to lose. That was one of them.

But then I reread Wasp and my faith was restored. Oh what a brilliant book that is. Humourous certainly, but with an underlying seriousness that comes to the fore every now and then. There is some sadness here, some pain. And it is real.

The plot, as usual, is ridiculous in the extreme. The old “Earthman-alone-against-a-planetful-of-hostile-aliens”.

Earth is at war with the Sirian Combine. Sirians are purple humanoids with small, tight ears. Mowry, the Earthman hero, is dyed purple and has his ears surgically altered. He is sent to infiltrate one of the alien’s planets and, all by himself, cause mayhem, sabotage, corruption and destruction. He must bring the entire planet to heel.

That he succeeds brilliantly goes without saying. In one sense, the novel is a textbook on how to undermine the confidence, the very existence, of a civilization, a style of life, a political system. Mowry is the first urban guerilla of SF, and his tactics are horribly familiar:

Next he went to the crowded main post office, took half a dozen small but heavy parcels from his case, addressed them and mailed them. Each held an airtight can containing a cheap clock-movement and a piece of paper, nothing else. The clock-movement emitted a sinister tick just loud enough to be heard if a suspicious-minded person listened closely. The paper bore a message short and to the point.

“This package could have killed you. Two different packages brought together at the right time and place could kill a hundred thousand. End this war before we end you!”

Passages such as this mean that here we have a basically serious book. Despite the humour (and there is humour), it is nevertheless strangely sombre in parts. Perhaps this is as close as Russell ever came to writing “literature”. Certainly the events in it mimic those with which all of us are well acquainted from similar situations today. And the society portrayed in the novel has disturbing overtones of the totalitarian regimes that sprang up around the world as Russell was growing up. The correspondences are obvious, and so is the conclusion. For once, Russell was writing with his heart, rather than his head. This is a very personal book, full of personal statements. And from it we can deduce that his opinions are not Campbell’s opinions. He sets up, and then shoots down, many of Campbell’s sacred cows. This is what makes me suspect that Campbell did not publish this story. Despite the undeniable fact that Earth “wins” in the end, the route to victory is paved with subtle (and not so subtle) attacks on Campbell’s status quo.

For example, this is how the novel explains its title. Wolf, Mowry’s boss, tells him how a car has crashed, killing four people, just because the driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp that had flown in through the window and started buzzing around his face.

“…The weight of the wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being its size is minute, its strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid, and in this case it didn’t even use it.

Nevertheless, it killed four big men and converted a large powerful car into a heap of scrap.”

“I see the point”, agreed Mowry, “but where do I come in?”

“Right here,” said Wolf. “We want you to become a wasp.”

The analogy is clever. Mowry, the human wasp, can destroy a planet, despite his relative weakness. The idea occurs several times throughout the book, and it is a skilful metaphor, very apt, very convincing.

But what about Campbell’s often stated preference for the White Anglo Saxon Protestant hero, WASP as it is frequently abbreviated? If Russell wasn’t poking fun, why did the WASP hero dye himself purple and deny his colour? Here is a small plea for racial harmony. White is purple, but the equation could read black just as easily. So much for the WASP (or wasp) hero.

Despite Campbell, Russell appears to have been somewhat of a preacher for racial equality and tolerance. It appears as a theme in many of his stories (sometimes overtly, other times more subtly). This has been noted by other commentators.

This book reinforces my belief in the cynicism of the prolific Russell sprawling all over the pages of Astounding, pushing all of Campbell’s buttons one after the other. There was much more to him than his hack work implied. Wasp proved it.

Next of Kin (or The Space Willies in America) has almost exactly the same plot as Wasp. But this time the serious undertone is missing. This book is played strictly for laughs. Here Russell has produced a small masterpiece—a genuinely funny novel whose humour does not pall on rereading. The only other one I know of in SF is Harry Harrison’s Bill, The Galactic Hero, and I know of no higher compliment than to compare Russell’s novel with Harrison’s.

Leeming, the hero, is flying around the galaxy spying on the enemy planets. His ship is forced down and he is captured. How can he get home safely and at the same time defeat the aliens? That is the problem.

In this novel, Russell, tired of ray guns and blaster, invents the most ingenious (and funniest) hand weapon I have ever come across.

…he had a defence that was extremely effective but hateful to use, namely a powerful compressed-air pistol that fired breakable pellets filled with a stench so foul that one whiff would make anything that lived and breathed vomit for hours—including, as often as not, the user.

Some Terran genius had worked it out that the real king of the wild is not the lion nor the grizzly bear but a kittenish creature named Joe Skunk, whose every battle is a victorious rearguard action, so to speak. Some other genius had synthesized a horrible liquid seventy-seven times more revolting than Joe’s, with the result that an endangered spaceman could never make up his mind whether to run like hell and chance being caught, or whether to stand firm, shoot, and subsequently puke himself to death.

So how does Leeming escape? He makes a bopamagilvie and talks to his Eustace through it. Wouldn’t you?

A bopamagilvie is simply two bits of copper wire twisted into loops, and a Eustace is an invisible, symbiotic superman. Every Earthman has one, and woe betide anyone who harms an Earthman; his Eustace will take a terrible revenge. Eventually, the aliens become convinced of the truth of this nonsense. And then…

The story is eminently logical, and very farcical. But it is not just surface. It has depth.

Leeming builds his bopamagilvie…

When the right moment arrived he lay on his belly and commenced reciting through the loop the third paragraph of Rule 27, Subsection B, of Space Regulations. He chose it because it was a gem of bureaucratic phraseology, a single sentence one thousand words long meaning something known only to God.

“Where refuelling must be carried out as an emergency measure at a station not officially listed as a home-station or definable for special purposes as a home-station; under Section A (5) amendment A (5)B providing that the emergency falls within the authorized list of technical necessities as given in Section J (29-33), with addenda subsequent thereto as applicable to home-stations where such are…”.

At this point (fortunately for the reader), Leeming is interrupted by his alien jailers.

Russell is indulging in a little harmless leg-pulling. The bureaucratic mind is one of his favourite targets, and he returns to again and again in his work (Allamagoosa is perhaps the cleverest example). His satire is usually gentle and it slides in gently. You don’t feel the barbs until it is too late. But the barbs are there. It is this satirical side to Russell that drove me to compare this book with Bill, The Galactic Hero. Both these works can be accepted on their own terms as simply amusing stories. But both have something beneath the skin, if you care to look. When he wants to, Russell can wield a clever typewriter.

The Great Explosion is perhaps his tour de force. Strictly speaking it is not a novel. Rather it is a sequence of linked novelettes. A spaceship visits several planets which have been colonised by various “Nut Cults” from Earth in the dim and distant past. Each planet gives us one novelette in the sequence.

Again, this is not an original idea. But the wit and wisdom of the writing takes this stock situation and does something quite clever with it, proving yet again that no idea is so hoary that someone can’t do something original with it. It may not be Art, but it will do until the real thing comes along.

One of the novelettes, under the title …And Then There Were None appears with alarming regularity in anthologies and collections with the generic title The Universe’s Best Ever SF of All Time—so it must have something going for it.

The nut cult that have taken over this particular planet are followers of Ghandi, an old Earth mystic. They have a curious economy based on mutual favours (obligations, or “obs” as the story has it), and a secret weapon. The secret weapon is the phrase “Freedom—I won’t”. The basic premise is that if an enemy says “do this” and the entire population refuses, what can the enemy do? The only course open to him, other than giving in, is to punish the entire population—which in practice probably means killing a few people pour encourager les autres. But suppose it doesn’t? Suppose the people still refuse to obey? What then? If the situation continues, to kill more people can only lead to genocide, and that solves nothing because a dead population cannot do what is required of it anyway. But to allow the population to continue to refuse to obey is to admit defeat. The enemy is powerless. It has no choice but to admit defeat, and to depart.

But the weapon is dangerous. It requires an unprecedented degree of solidarity. If even one person weakens and says “I will” then, by implication, the whole culture has lost. The enemy are the victors. Ghandi never managed to make it work properly in real life. It is just too dangerous; the degree of mutual co-operation required is just too large. People aren’t built that perfectly.

However, Russell assumes that it works for this planet, and takes it from there. If you are feeling allegorical, the points made about India and the Raj are self-evident, and I certainly don’t want to belabour the obvious. Russell shows that Empires (on the large scale) and Governments (on the small scale) are basically ridiculous. The will of the people is sufficient to ensure the best for the people, no matter what others may think (or pretend to think, for their own ends) is best for the people. All it needs is solidarity. This can be very nihilistic. In the extreme, nobody wins, and everyone loses. Russell realized this, hence the economy, based on obligations, enforcing a mutual interdependence, ensuring “realistic” goals, and keeping the losers and the parasites on the outside, since they couldn’t build up enough “obs” to fit in, to stay alive.

These are complicated waters, and Russell steers his narrative over them with his usual humour. The philosophy never gets seriously in the way of the story. But his humour is as naked a weapon as he has ever used. The sword is sharp, and he is not afraid to make deep cuts with it. As in Wasp (which had a similar theme concerned with the basic frailty of governments) this is the real Russell talking from the heart. What a strange philosophy for an officer and gentleman raised in the Sandhurst tradition.

At the end of the story, the crew of the spaceship, by and large, recognise the validity of Ghandi’s philosophy. They desert from the ship. They become (in the language of the story) Gands. And then there were none.

It is hard to understand why Campbell published this story. It is a polemic against all that he held dear. It pushes none of his buttons—its nihilism would have been anathema to him. It denied the American Way of Life and the American Way of Government. One can only surmise that he recognized that here was a story of genius. Whether or not you agreed with what it said was unimportant. Some stories just have to be published. Campbell was the best editor in the field. He knew what made a good story. He knew when he had to put up and shut up. This one was just too good to miss. Let a rival magazine have it? Never! And so he published it, in 1951, and it has lasted well, and Campbell’s genius as an editor is unchallenged.

“Suppose that when I go back to the ship that snorting rhinoceros Bidworthy gives me an order. And I give him the frozen eye and say ‘I won’t.’ What happens? It follows as an inviolable law of nature that he either drops dead or throws me in the clink.”

“That would do you a lot of good.”

“Wait a bit, I haven’t finished yet. I’m in the pokey, demoted and a disgrace to the service, but the job still needs doing. So Bidworthy picks on someone else. The victim, being a soul-mate of mine, also donates the icy optic and says ‘I won’t.’ Into the jug he goes and I’ve got company. Bidworthy tries again. And again and again and again. There are more of us crammed in the brig. It will hold only twenty, so they take over the engineers’ mess.”

“Leave our mess out of this,” requested Harrison.

“They take over the mess,” insisted Gleed, thoroughly determined to penalize the engineers. “Pretty soon its filled to the roof with I won’ters. Bidworthy is still raking them in as fast as he can go—if by then he hasn’t burst a dozen blood vessels. So they take over the Blieder dormitories.”

“Why keep picking on my crowd?”

“And pile them ceiling-high with bodies,” Gleed said, deriving sadistic pleasure from the picture. “Until in the end Bidworthy has to get buckets and brushes and go down on his knees and do his own deck-scrubbing, while Grayder, Shelton and the rest take turn for guard duty. By that time His Loftiness the Ambassador is in the galley busy cooking for the prisoners and is being assisted by a disconcerted bunch of yessing pen-pushers.” He had another look at this mental scene. “Holy smoke!”.

Just imagine! Isn’t that what SF is all about?

And finally—Allamagoosa. Russell’s writing career reached its peak in 1955 at Cleveland where he obtained his only Hugo. The story is impossible to summarise without giving away the whole point of it—and that is far too brilliant a thing to spoil. Granted it depends on a trick ending—take away the O. Henry twist and there is little or nothing left. But I don’t care. A story so brilliantly funny needs no excuse. I won’t quote from it—it cannot be quoted from. It is purely and simply brilliant—ephemeral, of no lasting literary merit, but brilliant nonetheless. It never palls on me. I cannot be objective about this story. I love it far too much.

That was the ultimate; the peak of a career. By and large, the later stories do not bear examining. The best was over. Russell’s humour had run out, and there was little left.

There were more publications and republications, but the bolt was shot, the well had run dry and there has been nothing new from his pen in fifteen years or more.

But he has survival value.

Anyone who republishes his “classic” books will make a killing. Russell has a permanent place in the hall of fame, and his reputation endures despite the fact that so much of his work is unobtainable. He deserves a better fate than this. An awful lot of SF is being reprinted at present, riding on a wave of popularity. The letters SF on a book cover seem to mean a guaranteed minimum sale, whatever the quality of the book between the covers, and that means money in the bank.