Dinosaurs, Space Battles and Fist Fights

 

Read/Watch 'em In Order #170

I don't care what NASA says! Venus is a jungle planet populated by dinosaurs. It's true! Everyone knows that!

By golly, Tom Corbett, Roger Manning and Astro know it. In Revolt on Venus (1954), the three space cadets are given thirty days leave. They decide to take a trip to Astro's home planet of Venus and hunt a tyrannosaurus. Astro has some experience in this, though the story he tells about it leaves no doubt that T-Rex hunting is dangerous.

But the poor cadets are soon involved in much more than a hunting trip. There is trouble afoot on Venus. A group called the Nationalists is pushing to secede from the Solar Alliance. They've stepped over a legal line in the sand by threatening farmers who don't join them and have several times burned down buildings.

A side-note: This book was written for young American readers. It's likely the author realized that our natural sympathies might lie with a colony wanting to break away from a distant government. So the point that Venus has equal representation in that government is quickly made--as well as gradually revealing the Nationalists to be brutal and hypocritical in their actions. This is an action-adventure novel, so the politics are dealt with very lightly, but the story quickly zeroes in on the Solar Alliance being the good guys and the Nationalists being the bad guys, with no grey zone inbetween.

Anyway, the cadets get involved in this even before they get to Venus, when they find a bomb planted on their spaceship during the trip there. Once on Venus, the cadets go hunting, while a Solar Guard officer named Connell begins to investigate the Nationalists.

Tom and his friends get involved after being chased out of the jungle by a T-Rex and stumbling onto a plantation being attacked by Nationalists, with Major Connell desperately trying to fight off the attackers. 

So the cadets find their vacation cut short. After they foil an attempt to kidnap them, the cadets and Connell pretend to go hunting while really searching for the secret Nationalist base. That leads to another encounter with the T-Rex that chased them earlier. Then they end up getting captured.

But getting captured is not necessarily a bad thing. If one of them can escape and bring back the Solar Guard fleet, while the others sabotage the Nationalists' early warning system, then the movement can be crushed.

This leads to more action, including a large-scale space battle, some brutal ground combat, a hostage situation, a double-crossing "friend" and a last-minute save. 

I've been enjoying the Corbett novels enormously, but this is my clear favorite so far. The action is varied--covering the gamut from hungry dinosaurs to fisticuffs to ray guns-- and often intense, with each of the cadets getting a few Moments of Awesome along the way. The plot twists are good ones and the overall atmosphere generates quite a bit of tension. Especially good are the scenes set in the Venusian jungle, with thick foilage and dangerous fauna keeping both the protagonists and the readers on edge.

And, by golly, the book describes Venus properly. It's a jungle planet full of dinosaurs. It really is. Why would we accept the existence of a universe that allowed anything else?