Those Pesky Asteroid Pirates!

In 1951, Isaac Asimov was asked to write a juvenile science fiction novel that would also be the basis of television show. Asimov wrote the novel, but was concerned with the questionable quality of science fiction on TV of the time. So he used the pen name "Paul French."

The TV show fell through, but Asimov ended up turning out six Juveniles, all starring David "Lucky" Starr, a member of the Council of Science who saves the Solar System on a regular basis. The novels were eventually re-published under Asimov's name.

Much like Doc Savage and Captain Future, Lucky was an orphan raised by scientists who turned out to be brave, smart and able to kick butt when necessary. In the second novel of the series, Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids (1953), he needs to kick some pirate butt.

Lucky's parents had been killed by Asteroid Pirates 25 years earlier. Now there is a resurgence of this and Earth doesn't necessarily have the resources to deal with this, especially with the alien Sirians acting aggressively.

This leads into a great story in which Lucky at first tries to infiltrate the pirates. This doesn't work out as he hoped and he ends up in a duel with a particularly brutal bad guy. He eventually manages to get to an Earth base on Ceres, bringing with him a hermit who had been living on a small asteroid but had been forced to work with the pirates.

A pirate raid on Ceres ends with the hermit getting captured by the pirates, though there is no obvious reason that the pirates should consider him worth that much bother.

Lucky, though, is beginning to put facts together, figuring out various things including:

a. the identity of the leader of the pirates,
b. the existence of an asteroid base equipped with atomic motors with which to change orbits,
c. the economics of space piracy,
d. the identity of his parents' murderer,
e. and the existance of a plot by the Sirians to work with the pirates in an attack on the Solar System.

In the end, Lucky needs to catch a particular pirate ship to prevent a war. That ship, though, has a long head-start. To cut it off, Lucky has to take a short cut that brings him suicidely close to the Sun. But he has a trick up his sleeve that might help him survive this.

Like most Asimov protagonists, Lucky is very intelligent and able to think through problems in a logical manner, whether that involves deducing where an apparently disappearing asteroid has gone or figure out how to survive when tossed into space with a limited supply of oxygen in his space suit. His sidekick Bigman is a fun secondary protagonist and the action sequences are legitimately exciting. Asimov took care to present the Solar System realistically (according to what was known and theorized in the 1950s).

It's interesting to think about how often pirates end up infesting our Asteroid Belt. Buck Rogers (in a 1936 comic strip story line) and Captain Future (in a 1942 novel) both had problems with them and now here they are making Lucky Starr's life difficult. If humanity ever gets out to the asteroids in real life and we don't end up fighting pirates, I'm going to be very disappointed.

An Improbable Hero

Isaac Asimov was an important writer---an innovator who helped lead the maturation of the genre into producing respectable literature.

So there is no intended or implied criticism at all when I point out that his most important works—his Robot stories and the original Foundation trilogy—were concept-oriented rather than character-oriented. The characters in them were perfectly believable, but not necessarily memorable in their own rights. It’s the ideas—the ramifications of the Three Laws of Robotics and the work of the Foundation to subtly guide human history—that make his stories great.

But there are a few exceptions to that---a few stories in which the characterizations really stand out. One of these is “C-Chute,” a short story first published in Galaxy Magazine in 1951. It’s a story that centers around a very memorable character.

During an interstellar war, an Earth ship is captured by aliens. The surviving passengers are locked up. A prize crew of two aliens flood the rest of the ship with a chlorine atmosphere (natural to them) and begin to pilot it towards their home planet.

We quickly get to know the human prisoners and, boy, are they a bunch of jerks. One’s a self-centered cynic. One’s a pompous soldier who’s never seen any action. One’s obsessed with revenge against the aliens. And so one. They get on each other’s nerves and maybe even get on our nerves as we read about them.

Their situation seems hopeless. There does seem one possible method of retaking the ship, which involves sneaking outside the ship through a C-Chute (a casualty chute used for burials at space), then reentering through the “steam tubes,” which are basically the vessel’s control thrusters. Anyone who does this would then have to ambush and kill two armed aliens.

It’s dangerous and at first no one seems willing to give it a try. No one, that is, but Randolph Mullen, a 5’ 2” tall, quiet and apparently emotionless bookkeeper who seems as far from being a hero as one can get.  Everyone is surprised when he volunteers.

Asmiov then does an excellent job of building and maintaining suspense as Mullen begins the risky job of escaping from the ship, then sneaking back in. He skillfully interleaves this with the tension growing among the other humans and the shame they begin to feel over their own lack of courage.

And this all leaves up to great twist at the end, when we finally find out what motivated Mullen to put his life at such risk.

The creation of great characters was not Asimov’s strongest trait as a writer. In fact, I think his later novels (in which he tied his Robot, Empire and Foundation stories together into a single continuity) were badly flawed by some very awkward characterizations. During the height of his career in writing fiction, it was his concepts (often thought out in partnership with editor John Campbell) and his entertaining prose that made his stories great.

But he did understand how to create good characters and, every now and then, he’d create a great one.