Read/Watch ‘em in Order #40
No, no, no, NO! For gosh sake, woman, if you being pursued
by evil-doers and are lost in a monster-filled wilderness, you do NOT tell your
husband that while he searches for your missing riding beasts in one direction,
“I’ll take a look in [another] direction.” You just don’t do that. You are a
warrior princess, not a member of the Scooby Doo gang.
I suppose I should explain what I’m ranting about, shouldn’t
I?
Otis Adelbert Kline’s last volume in his history of Ancient
Venus was first serialized as “The Buccaneers of Venus,” beginning in the
November 1932 issue of Weird Tales. When
reprinted in book form, it was given the title Port of Peril .
In this, Kline gives us his last recorded adventure of former Earthman Robert
Grandon and his wife Vernia.
When we last saw these two at the end of Planet of Peril,
they were married and getting ready to rule over the powerful nation of Reabon
and live happily ever after.
But if you live on an Adventure Planet, you don’t get to live happily ever after—at least not without doing a lot of work first. During their honeymoon, Vernia is kidnapped by pirates.
The pirates are Huitsenni, a race that has kept the location
of their home port a secret for generations while capturing the ships of other
nations for loot and slaves. This means that Grandon can’t just lead his large
navy to capture the port and rescue Vernia—he doesn’t know where the darn place
is. So, though he orders his forces to mobilize, he opts to chase them in a
small ship with just one companion.
His companion is Kantar the Gunner—the best shot on Venus.
Grandon is, of course, the best swordsman, so the two actually make a pretty
nifty team.
What follows is a well-constructed adventure story that uses
a trick Edgar Rice Burroughs often employed. We get a chapter from Vernia’s
point-of-view, ending with a cliffhanger. Then we get a chapter from Grandon’s
point-of-view, ending with its own cliffhanger. Then back to Vernia and so on.
It’s a very effective narrative technique that both keeps the story moving
rapidly and generates quite a bit of suspense.
Anyways, Grandon and Kantar are soon also captured by the
pirates. They escape, but discover Vernia’s been taken by a pirate to a remote
island. Here, she’s captured by a race of toad people who want to sacrifice her
to the giant snake they worship as a god.
Then they get recaptured by the pirates. An attempt by
Grandon and Kantar to rescue Vernia from the pirate emperor goes awry when
Kantar inadvertently rescues the wrong princess. (Though to be fair to him,
Kantar didn’t know the pirates had a spare princess lying about.)
Vernia ends up in the hands of a tribe of Antarctic ape men
who ride zandars—three-horned riding beasts they often sell to the pirates. Kantar
is now busy rescuing Princess #2 from various dangers (and rather perfunctorily
falling in love with her), so Grandon has to get Vernia back on his own.
He succeeds, but when they need to find their lost zandars,
Vernia suggests splitting up. Grandon foolishly allows this and the girl ends
up being CAPTURED BY A GIANT SCORPION WHO
WANTS TO FEED HER TO ITS BABIES! Seriously, how could she not see that coming?
Sword-and-Planet novels depend heavily on the Rule of Cool.
If the adventures, monsters, villains and escapes are cool enough, we can
accept the stories as real and ignore (or happily explain away) any lapses in
logic. Port of Peril succeeds because
it is pretty darn cool. Previous novels in the series had great stuff such as
cavalry riding giant ants or a villain who mind-transfers into a new robot body
if his current one is destroyed. Port
doesn’t quite match this level of coolness, but a hidden pirate city, toad
people, giant snakes and giant scorpions go a long way all the same.
But Vernia is a little disappointing. In Planet of Peril, she was awesome—a brave
and intelligent warrior queen who contributes as much as Grandon does in
foiling the various bad guys they encounter. Here, she’s just a Damsel in
Distress. Even setting aside her mind-numbingly stupid decision to go off on
her own and get captured by a scorpion, she just doesn’t get to do much. Heroes
should be rescuing their princesses, but a some point during the five different
times Vernia needs to be rescued, it would have been nice to have her
contribute something.
Oh, well, taken as a whole, Kline’s Mars and Venus novels
are great reads.
We still have one more Thin Man movie to look at. For the
literary side of the “Read/Watch ‘em in Order” series, I think we’ll examine
the three Captain Zero novels—pulp stories about a hero who turned invisible (whether he wants to or not) at
certain times of the day.
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