My wonderful friends and family.

This is the first tome in a series of books that combines Dumas’ Three Musketeers with a Falstaff character (as Henryk Sienkiewicz did in his trilogy, which commences with Ogniem I Mieczem, or With Fire and Sword) but gives the story a futuristic setting in space. This novel is also fascinating because it was published in 1935, many years before humans went into space, yet the book describes the many aspects of space exploration and its consequences. This review will be in two parts – in the first, I will comment upon this novel as a work of science fiction, and, in the second, I will explore its relations to Dumas’ Three Musketeers.
The book is set theoretically in the future – I say theoretically because the prologue tells of a man who could see the future, and it is his tale of what he saw in the future that makes up the story in the book. In this future, humans have colonized the solar system, but they dare go no farther, for beyond the edges of the solar system are terrors for humankind, such as the Medusae who want to destroy humankind. It suggests that, even though the author has imagined a time when humans have gone into space, he dares not imagine the expansion of humankind beyond Pluto (this was back when it was actually considered a planet). Yet the author accurately imagines what space exploration could mean for us as human beings.
To begin with, he explores the ways in which space exploration could help us understand the universe around us. Let us examine the following paragraphs from the book about nebulas and understanding them:

Star gazing nomads of the earth, from the beginning, had wondered at those dark clouds against the firmament. Star roving nomads of space, more recently, had sometimes perished in them. Even yet, however, they were little-known, and all prudent spacemen kept well away from their vast maelstroms of fire and cosmic fury.

Back at the Legion Academy, John Star had listened to a renowned astrophysicist lecturing learnedly on Intranebular Dynamics.” He knew the fine-spun theories of counterspace, of inverse curvature, of pseudo-gravitation and negative entropy. The nebulae, according to the theories, were the wombs of planets and suns and even of future galaxies; the second law of thermodyamics was somehow circumvented in their anomalous counter-spaces, and radiation trapped in their mysterious depths somehow re-integrated into matter; their final awesome destiny was to re-wind the run-down universe itself. So that famous astrophysicist believed – but he had never ventured near the dark, supernal fury of such a storm in space. (84)

Here, the author brings to mind (at least, to my mind) a mind-blowing idea – the idea that, instead of instead of having to rely on telescopes and spectrograms, we could actually go there and collect data about the universe. Instead of having to calculate the “spectroscopic success rate” of the distant galaxies whose emission lines we barely see and worry about how accurate our data is, we could actually go there and see what’s there. It might even help resolve the problem of dark matter – the fact that more than three quarters of our universe is made up of “dark matter,” about which we know little besides the fact that it holds galaxies and galaxy clusters together. Yet these paragraphs suggest that the author isn’t completely sure of his idea – he mentions that explorers have perished exploring these nebulas. So, although such exploration could open a world of opportunity (after all, John Star survived this nebula that physicists have only theorized about), it is also dangerous (some explorers perished from venturing into such nebulas). This is what comes to mind when John Star navigates a nebula scientists have only talked about – space exploration open a whole new world of science for us, a world in which we don’t have to send robots to distant planets and worry about them breaking down, but in which we can experience what we’re studying.
Furthermore, the astronauts who have gone to space after this book was written have often reported that it was a humbling experience, allowing them to realize how small our planet really is in the midst of a great universe. The author, too, understands and describes how small and insignificant we can be in the Universe. He states ““It was five days’ flight to Pluto, most distant outpost of the System; so far that even its sun was but a bright star, its daylight eternal twilight.” When the author says “its sun” he means our sun – the Sun. He imagines for us what it’s like to travel so far from earth that our Sun, something that is everpresent and indispensable to us, becomes but a speck of light, no different than the stars we see at night, dots of light millions of light-years away. It is a frightening though that he proposes, when he says, “and the splendid star that was the sun began to fade and dwindle in Orion,” that the sun we rely on for life is but a speck of light, that if we were to travel sufficiently far into the universe, our sun would in fact appear to us like one star among many, in fact, no different from the others. We might not even know which of those specks of light is our sun, which contains our home planet! It suggests how many solar systems and planets could be out there, surrounding those stars we see (and don’t see), and yet we know only one solar system, only one world – ours – and so we call it The solar system, The sun. And one day, our star will explode and die just like the others we see and study. The sun and the stars have always been opposites for us, symbolizing the eternal contrast between night and day – and yet they are the same thing. And so space exploration, even when imagined, can reverse our way of thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.
At a time when space exploration had never yet occurred, this is also an interesting attempt at “hard sci-fi” – a sub-genre of science fiction in which the author attempts to use scientific principles to explain technology and phenomena that exist in the books but not our world. In particular, the description of Barnard’s Star and its world are interesting and accurate. Williamson describes Barnard’s Star as “a swelling, perfect sphere, sharp-edged against the ebon void. A type M dwarf, old beyond imagination, so far gone in stellar death that their eyes could safely look upon it, with no filters behind the lenses.”(94) Class M is the most common class of stars, and it includes red dwarfs – stars that are smaller and cooler than our sun, and which therefore give off less heat as they fuse elements at a slow rate. An old dwarf in particular would have fused most of its lighter elements into heavier elements, until it had very little energy left to continue the process of fusion. Thus, this seems like a perfectly accurate description. Furthermore, the author uses scientific principles in a particularly ingenious way to create impediments for the characters and describe the planet rotating around Barnard’s Star. One of the characters in the novel says, “This planet is much larger than Earth. About three times the diameter. Its rotation is very slow, its day about fifteen of Earth’s. The nights are fearful. A week long, and bitterly cold – a type M dwarf hasn’t much heat left, you know”(106) It makes sense that a larger planet would rotate more slowly, therefore making the ‘night’ in a particular place that is facing away from the sun much longer. And, of course, a cool dwarf star has much less heat than the sun, and therefore that heat would have much more difficulty reaching the part of the planet that is facing away from the sun.
That is not to say that all the science in this book is accurate; for example, the author calls sun spots “dreadful vortices”; they are nothing of the sort. Sunspots are regions of intense magnetic activity where convection is inhibited by strong magnetic fields, reducing energy transport from the hot interior to the surface (thank you Wikipedia). The description of hyperspace, too (which was not made up by George Lucas, by the way), seems to have an explanation that makes little sense for why the characters travel as a speed faster than light. The author explains travel at a speed faster than that of light thus: “with the full power of the geodynes, whose fields of force reacted against the curvature of space itself, warped it, so that they drove the ship not through space, to put it very crudely, but around it, and so made possible terrific accelerations without any discomfort to passengers, and speeds far beyond even the speed of winged light. Apparent speeds, a mathematician would hasten to add, as for both acceleration and velocity were quite moderate in the hyper-space it really went through.” However, it is possible that this, like much else, is the author’s mistake and not a reflection of scientific knowledge at the time, thus I will not dwell much on these points.

(look for part 2 of the review soon)