Five Against Venus, written by Philip Latham, is a science-fiction novel first published in the United States in 1952 by the John C. Winston Company. Philip Latham was the nom de plume of Robert S. Richardson, a professional astronomer who also provided technical assistance on movies such as Destination Moon and wrote scripts for the Captain Video television series.[1]
This is one of the thirty-five juvenile novels that comprise the Winston Science Fiction set, which novels were published in the 1950s for a readership of teenage boys. The typical protagonist in these books was a boy in his late teens who was proficient in the art of electronics, a hobby that was easily available to the readers. In this novel, Bruce Robinson differs from that pattern in having no special skill, only a knowledge of astronomy.
Under the article on Venus in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction,[2] the writer says that "Philip Latham's Five Against Venus (1952) is a Venusian Robinsonade." Indeed, in overall form the story is Swiss Family Robinson in space, though the precipitating crisis owes more to the 1950 movie Rocketship X-M.
Characters
Paul Robinson: headed for a new job on the moon, he never dreamed that he would be the leader of an impromptu expedition to another planet.
Helen Robinson: an ordinary American housewife who must regain the pioneer spirit to set up housekeeping in an alien environment.
Bruce Robinson: sixteen years old, he yearns to travel in space, but then finds that it is not what he expected.
Frank Robinson: six years old, he only wants to play with the strange machine retrieved from the wreckage of the spaceship.
Jim Gregor: pilot/navigator of the deep-space ship Aurora, he performs the ultimate act of courage to save the lives of his ship's passengers.
Dr. Bram Simmons: an eccentric scientist, he went to Venus by himself five years ago and was not heard from again – until now.
Plot summary
After another boring day at Los Angeles High School, Bruce Robinson is delighted to hear that his long-unemployed father, Paul Robinson, has found a job – on the moon. A short time later the Robinson family boards the rocketship that will take them to meet the deep-space ship Sirius, which will take them to the moon. But as they approach the disc-shaped deep-space ship they see that, instead of Sirius, they will be riding the Aurora to the moon.
Once the Robinsons have boarded the Aurora and settled in, Bruce meets Jim Gregor, who shows him the ship's controls. Bruce and Gregor then join the engineer and the captain (neither man is named in the story) in the cargo hold to move some boxes. When one of the boxes breaks open and reveals a strange-looking machine, the captain warns Bruce never to tell anyone what he saw.
With the ship under way, Bruce develops a hunch that something has gone wrong. He sees that an emergency light has come on and informs Gregor. The pilot discovers that the ship's engines have been over-running and that the ship is on a course that will pass close to Venus (in the 1950 movie Rocketship X-M the over-running of the engines takes the lunar-bound ship to Mars). With insufficient propellant to return to Earth, Gregor attempts to make an emergency landing on a mountainside and dies in the crash. Prior to the crash, the captain and the engineer bail out in a rocket-propelled lifeboat.
Little more than shaken up in the crash, Bruce and his father recover supplies from the wrecked spaceship. The supplies include, to their astonishment, a pair of carbines and boxes of ammunition. Finding a cave next to a waterfall near the wreck, they move in and set up camp.
On several occasions Bruce hears a soft rustling and on others he hears a ringing in his ears and feels heat on his face. The other members of the family have similar experiences and they dismiss them as part of getting acclimatized to an alien environment.
With their supply of canned food running low, Paul and Bruce go hunting, assuming that Venusian animal life would be edible. They follow the stream coming out of their waterfall and soon find what appears to be an artificial enclosure woven from vines using trees as supports. Inside the improvised corral they encounter a creature similar to Diplodocus, but with a tame demeanor. They drive the docile creature toward their cave, intending to butcher it when they arrive, but change their decision and keep it as a pet after it saves Frank from a carnivorous plant.
Having brought samples of the tubers and the pear-like fruit that the beast had eaten, Paul and Bruce find them edible and the family begins eating them when their canned food runs out. Meanwhile, Paul is getting sick from the infection of a cut he suffered when he hit his arm against a rock. Later, after he has a good amount of sleep, Paul's arm heals, seemingly in spite of having been covered by the fast-growing green mold that grows on any and all organic substances.
While foraging for more tubers, Bruce hears a ringing in his ears, feels his face grow hot, and then loses consciousness. He is awakened by a strange man who introduces himself as Bram Simmons, a scientist who came to Venus alone five years earlier. Nearby stand several man-sized bat-like creatures whose ultrasonic emissions had knocked Bruce out. Simmons shoos the bat-men away and tells Bruce what kind of trouble he and his family are in. The bat-men are vampires, usually drawing blood from the dinosaur-like beasts kept in corrals around the area, and that there is a large colony of bat-men nearby.
After Bruce returns to the cave, as night is falling, the Robinsons come under attack. At first Paul and Bruce repel the attackers with their carbines, but then they run out of ammunition. As all seems lost, star shells and grenades explode in the valley below the cave, and the bat-men, thrown into confusion and distress, flee the scene: the space marines have landed.
Having assumed that no one survived the crash of the Aurora, the spacemen have come to retrieve the gadget that Aurora's captain had warned Bruce not to mention. It is a top-secret military machine — and Frank has been playing with it! With the machine in hand, the spacemen take the Robinsons back to Earth with them: Simmons chooses to stay on Venus, living with the bat-men.
At home the Robinsons have been hounded by reporters, but now their fame is waning. One man, though, seeks them out to offer them something. He represents a pharmaceutical company to which Bruce took samples of Venusian life, and he tells the Robinsons that the green mold that was such a nuisance produces an antibiotic more powerful than penicillin. He then tells the Robinsons that his company is offering them enough money to solve their financial problems for years to come.
Backstage on Venus
"Backstage on Venus" is the title of Chapter 21, which serves as an appendix. As a professional astronomer the author knew everything that had been discovered or postulated about Venus up to 1952 and he described how he used that knowledge to set his stage.
Publication history
1952 Feb, US, Five Against Venus, The John C. Winston Company (Winston Science Fiction #3), LCCCN 52–5496, hardcover (vii+214 pp)[3]
1952 Nov, Italy, Tra i vampiri di Venere (Among the Vampires of Venus) in Urania #1, publ. Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, digest magazine (160 pp)[3]
1953, The Netherlands, De Vleermuismannen van Venus (The Batmen of Venus), West-Friesland (Wetenschap en Fantasie), hardcover (187 pp)[3]
1956, Germany, Irrfahrt zur Venus (Wandering to Venus), Astron-Bücherei/AWA Verlag/E.F.Flatau Co./München (Munich), hardcover (234 pp)[4]
1956 Mar, US, Five Against Venus, The John C. Winston Company (Winston Science Fiction #3), LCCCN 52–5496, hardcover (vii+214 pp)[3]
1957 Sep, US, Five Against Venus, The John C. Winston Company (Winston Science Fiction #3), LCCCN 52–5496, hardcover (vii+214 pp)[3]
Reviews
In the Kirkus Reviews,[5] the reviewer wrote that the story takes the reader on a journey, "From Earth to Venus and back to Earth again goes Bruce Robinson after his father has been made public relations man of Tycho City on the moon. One result of the journey is the discovery of a bacteria killing mould. Other features are the discovery of an enigmatic scientist marooned on Venus some years before – the dangers of the Venusian batmen and their burning ultra-sonic waves – infra-red plants as the main source of oxygen. There are important human elements here too – the maturing of Bruce; the question of emotions in the batmen and the mysterious scientist's relationship with them. This is written in a flip, tangy manner that seems to complement the fantasies which are described, and the scientific basis for the writer's imagination is discussed in an enlightening last chapter."
Between Planets is a juvenile science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, originally serialized in Blue Book magazine in 1951 as "Planets in Combat". It was published in hardcover that year by Scribner's as part of the Heinlein juveniles.
Dan Dare is a British science fiction comic hero, created by illustrator Frank Hampson who also wrote the first stories. Dare appeared in the Eagle comic story Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future from 1950 to 1967, and dramatised seven times a week on Radio Luxembourg (1951–1956).
Rocketship X-M is a 1950 American black-and-white science fiction film from Lippert Pictures, the first outer space adventure of the post-World War II era. The film was produced and directed by Kurt Neumann and stars Lloyd Bridges, Osa Massen, John Emery, Noah Beery, Jr., Hugh O'Brian, and Morris Ankrum.
Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus is the third novel in the Lucky Starr series, six juvenile science fiction novels by Isaac Asimov that originally appeared under the pseudonym Paul French. The novel was first published by Doubleday & Company in 1954. Since 1972, reprints have included a foreword by Asimov explaining that advancing knowledge of conditions on Venus have rendered the novel's descriptions of that world inaccurate.
Works of fiction about the planet Venus have been written since before the 19th century. Its impenetrable cloud cover gave science fiction writers free rein to speculate on conditions at its surface; as it is very similar in size to Earth but closer to the Sun, the planet was often depicted as warmer but still habitable by humans. Depictions of Venus as a lush, verdant paradise, an oceanic planet, or fetid swampland, often inhabited by dinosaur-like monsters, became common in early pulp science fiction, particularly between the 1930s and 1950s, when science had revealed some aspects of Venus but not yet the harsh nature of its surface conditions. Some other stories portrayed it as a desert, or invented more exotic settings. When portrayed, the native sentient inhabitants, Venusians, were generally portrayed as gentle, ethereal and beautiful. Overall, Venus was considered to have much less of an established setting than its sister planet, Mars.
Queen of Outer Space is a 1958 American science fiction feature film shot in DeLuxe Color and CinemaScope. Produced by Ben Schwalb and directed by Edward Bernds, it stars Zsa Zsa Gabor, Eric Fleming, and Laurie Mitchell. The screenplay by Charles Beaumont, about a revolt against a cruel Venusian queen, is based on an idea supplied by Ben Hecht and originally titled Queen of the Universe. Upon its release, the film was promoted by Allied Artists and distributed to some locations as a double feature with Frankenstein 1970 starring Boris Karloff
Northwest Smith is a fictional character, and the hero of a series of stories by science fiction writer C. L. Moore.
Beyond Mars was a science fiction comic strip written by Jack Williamson and drawn by Lee Elias. The Sunday strip ran in the New York Daily News from February 17, 1952, to May 13, 1955, initially as a full tabloid page and, near the end, as a half tab. It is set in the same universe as the Williamson novels Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock.
Islands in the Sky is a 1952 science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke. It is one of his earliest works. Clarke wrote the story as a travelogue of human settlement of cislunar space in the last half of the twenty-first century.
Abbott and Costello Go to Mars is a 1953 American science fiction comedy film starring the comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello and directed by Charles Lamont. It was produced by Howard Christie and made by Universal-International. Despite the film's title, no character in the film actually travels to the planet Mars
Robert Shirley Richardson was an American astronomer, born in Kokomo, Indiana. He also published science fiction using the pseudonym Philip Latham.
Flight to Mars is a 1951 American Cinecolor science fiction film drama, produced by Walter Mirisch for Monogram Pictures, directed by Lesley Selander, that stars Marguerite Chapman, Cameron Mitchell, and Arthur Franz.
Winston Science Fiction was a series of 37 American juvenile science fiction books published by the John C. Winston Company of Philadelphia from 1952 to 1960 and by its successor Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1960 and 1961. It included 35 novels by various writers, including many who became famous in the SF field, such as Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke, Ben Bova, and Lester del Rey. There was also one anthology, The Year After Tomorrow, edited by del Rey and others. There was one non-fiction book Rockets Through Space: The Story of Man's Preparations to Explore the Universe by del Rey which details the factual science and technology of rocket flight. Many of the dust jackets became science fiction classics; the artists included Hugo Award winners Ed Emshwiller and Virgil Finlay along with Hugo nominees such as Mel Hunter and Alex Schomburg.
Rocket to Luna is a juvenile science fiction novel by prolific author and screenwriter Evan Hunter published in 1953 by The John C. Winston Company with cover illustration by Alex Schomburg. The story follows the adventures of the main character Ted Baker after he mistakenly replaces a member of the first lunar expedition at the last moment before the rocket leaves for the Moon. Rocket to Luna is a part of the Winston Science Fiction set, a series of juvenile novels which have become famous for their influence on young science fiction readers and their exceptional cover illustrations by award-winning artists.
The Sky People is an alternate history science fiction novel by American writer S. M. Stirling. It was first published by Tor Books in hardcover in November 2006, with a book club edition co-published with the Science Fiction Book Club following in December of the same year. Tor issued paperback, ebook, and trade paperback editions in October 2007, April 2010, and May 2010 respectively. Audiobook editions were published by Tantor Media in January 2007.
The Secret of Saturn's Rings is a science-fiction novel by Donald A. Wollheim and was first published in the United States by the John C. Winston Company in 1954. This is the first of three novels that Wollheim wrote for the Winston Company, the other two being The Secret of the Martian Moons (1955) and The Secret of the Ninth Planet (1959).
The Secret of the Martian Moons is a science-fiction novel by Donald A. Wollheim. It was first published in 1955 by the John C. Winston Company. Playing world-class hide-and-seek with the Martians, Nelson Parr believes that he has found them... until the real Martians show up. This is the second novel that Wollheim wrote for Winston, the other two being The Secret of Saturn's Rings (1954) and The Secret of the Ninth Planet (1959).
The Secret of the Ninth Planet is a science-fiction novel written by Donald A. Wollheim and first published in the United States in 1959 by the John C. Winston Co. Wollheim takes his heroes on a grand tour of the Solar System as that team struggles to prevent an alien force from blowing up the Sun. This is the last of three juvenile novels that Wollheim wrote for Winston, the other two being The Secret of Saturn's Rings and The Secret of the Martian Moons.
Sentinels From Space is a science fiction novel by English writer Eric Frank Russell, first published in 1952 by American company Bouregy & Curl, Inc.. It was adapted from a story that appeared in the November 1951 issue of Startling Stories.
The Best of Leigh Brackett is a collection of science fiction short stories by American author Leigh Brackett, edited by Edmond Hamilton. It was first published in hardcover by Nelson Doubleday in July 1977 and in paperback by Ballantine Books in September of the same year as a volume in its Classic Library of Science Fiction. A second hardcover edition was issued by Garland Publishing in March 1983, and Del Rey/Ballantine reprinted the paperback edition in June 1986. The book has been translated into German.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
