There should have been soft breezes scented with entrancing perfumes, the soothing warmth of a golden sun, lakes of wine and mountains of grain, trees adorned with fruit and bud and flower, shrubs bearing a profusion of glittering gems. Herbs and spices to provide freedom from pain, a return to youthful zest, an end of aging and decay. Salves and ointments and natural fungi to cure all physical ills. . . For this was Earth, that planet of legend, the paradise for which all yearned and hungered to find. The world of joy and beauty and riches beyond the wildest dreams. Instead Earl Dumarest found a landscape of unremitting hostility. Could this really be the fabled home world for which he had spent his entire life searching . . . ? (First published 2008)
Release date:
September 29, 2011
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
183
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
The Cap Kennedy (F.A.T.E.) Series (E.C. Tubb writing as Gregory Kern)
1: Galaxy of the Lost (1973)
2: Slave Ship from Sergan (1973)
3: Monster of Metelaze (1973)
4: Enemy Within the Skull (1974)
5: Jewel of Jarhen (1974)
6: Seetee Alert! (1974)
7: The Gholan Gate (1974)
8: The Eater of Worlds (1974)
9: Earth Enslaved (1974)
10: Planet of Dread (1974)
11: Spawn of Laban (1974)
12: The Genetic Buccaneer (1974)
13: A World Aflame (1974)
14: The Ghosts of Epidoris (1975)
15: Mimics of Dephene (1975)
16: Beyond the Galactic Lens (1975)
17: The Galactiad (1983)
Alien Dust (1955)
Alien Impact (1952)
Journey Into Terror (originally published as Alien Life (1954, rev 1998))
Atom War on Mars (1952)
Fear of Strangers (first published as C.O.D. – Mars (1968))
Century of the Manikin (1972)
City of No Return (1954)
Death God’s Doom (1999)
Death is a Dream (1967)
Dead Weight (first published as Death Wears a White Face (1979))
Escape into Space (1969)
Footsteps of Angels (2004) (previously unpublished work written c.1988)
Hell Planet (1954)
Journey to Mars (1954)
Moon Base (1964)
Pandora’s Box (1996) (previously unpublished work written 1954)
Pawn of the Omphalos (1980)
S.T.A.R. Flight (1969)
Stardeath (1983)
Starslave (2010) (previously unpublished work written 1984)
Stellar Assignment (1979)
Temple of Death (1996) (previously unpublished work written 1954)
Fifty Days to Doom (first published as The Extra Man (1954))
The Life-Buyer (1965, 2008)
The Luck Machine (1980)
World in Torment (originally published as The Mutants Rebel (1953))
The Primitive (1977)
The Resurrected Man (1954)
The Sleeping City (1999)
The Space-Born (1956)
The Stellar Legion (1954)
To Dream Again (2011)
Venusian Adventure (1953)
Tide of Death (first published as World at Bay (1954))
E. C. Tubb (writing as Arthur MacLean)
The Possessed (revised version of Touch of Evil (1957))
E. C. Tubb (writing as Brian Shaw)
Argentis (1952)
E. C. Tubb (writing as Carl Maddox)
Menace from the Past (1954)
The Living World (1954)
E. C. Tubb (writing as Charles Grey)
Dynasty of Doom (1953)
The Extra Man (first published as Enterprise 2115 (1954) & then as The Mechanical Monarch (1958))
I Fight for Mars (1953)
Space Hunger (1953)
The Hand of Havoc (1954)
Secret of the Towers (originally published as The Tormented City(1953))
The Wall (1953)
E. C. Tubb (writing as Gill Hunt)
Planetfall (1951)
E. C. Tubb (writing as King Lang)
Saturn Patrol (1951)
E. C. Tubb (writing as Roy Sheldon)
The Metal Eater (1954)
E. C. Tubb (writing as Volsted Gridban)
The Green Helix (originally published as Alien Universe (1952))
Reverse Universe (1952)
Planetoid Disposals Ltd. (1953)
The Freedom Army (originally published as De Bracy’s Drug (1953))
Fugitive of Time (1953)
He woke counting seconds, rising through interminable strata of ebony chill to warmth, light and a growing awareness. At thirty-two
the eddy currents had warmed him back to normal. At fifty-eight his heart began beating under its own power. At seventy-three
the pulmotor ceased helping his lungs. At two hundred and fifteen the lid swung open with a pneumatic hiss.
He lay enjoying the euphoria of resurrection.
The Winds of Gath, Chapter One
When Earl Dumarest stepped for the first time from a casket in the cargo hold of an unnamed interplanetary freighter, his creator
could not possibly have imagined that the character’s quest for his lost homeworld would still be entertaining readers over
four decades later, spawning a purely literary cult at a time when science fiction cults have become almost exclusively the
territory of film and television properties. That E.C. Tubb’s best known creation should have achieved such status largely
by word of mouth and then, whilst almost entirely out of print, gone on to expand its readership and fanbase in the 21st century
is even more remarkable.
Consistently imaginative, intelligent and exciting throughout its considerable length, Tubb’s Dumarest of Terra is a fast-moving action-adventure in the space-opera mold, focused as closely on character as on plot, and respectful of
science—particularly with regard to the realities of interstellar travel—without ever going over the head of the science novice.
The canvas is a far future where mankind has spread across the universe, populating hundreds of planets so far distant from
Earth that its existence has been forgotten and its whereabouts erased from star maps. Only a handful of people are prepared
to believe that mankind once originated on a single planet and that Earth is anything other than a legend.
Earl Dumarest knows the truth. A native of Earth, he left the planet as a child, stowing away aboard a visiting space freighter
to leave behind a savage, primitive life on a world scarred by ancient wars. The captain was kinder than Dumarest deserved:
instead of ejecting the boy into space, he took him on as a member of his crew. At the opening of the first Dumarest novel,
The Winds of Gath (1967), Dumarest has been travelling for many years and now seeks to return to Earth, searching for clues that will lead
him to the lost coordinates of his home planet.
A skilled fighter with almost superhuman reflexes, Dumarest takes on whatever employment comes his way – mercenary, bodyguard,
gladiator, escort, soldier – in order to pay for passage to the next world on his trail. When he can afford it, he rides High,
biological processes slowed by drugs to compress the subjective travel time from months to weeks. The alternative is travelling
Low: doped, frozen and ninety percent dead, riding in caskets meant for livestock, risking the fifteen percent death rate
for the sake of cheap travel.
Dumarest’s universe is an empire in decline ruled by aristocratic families, merchant houses and consortiums. Often these rulers
and landowners are in the thrall of the Cyclan, dispassionate robot-like humans known as cybers, who act as advisors to those
in positions of power. Trained from boyhood to extrapolate known data and predict the logical outcome of any action or sequence
of events, each cyber has undergone an operation on the thalamus to remove the capacity for emotion. Homochon elements grafted
to their skulls enable them to achieve a telepathic communion with the Cyclan gestalt, a collective central intelligence consisting
of a million naked brains hooked in sequence at the Cyclan’s secret headquarters buried beneath miles of rock, deep in the
heart of a lonely planet.
Early in his travels, Dumarest discovers that the Cyclan have a hidden agenda, using their influence with the ruling classes
to place themselves in a position of absolute power and authority across the universe. Later, he comes to realise that they
are also responsible for the proscription of Earth and the purging of all records of the planet’s existence. Following the
events of the fourth novel, Kalin (1969), Dumarest becomes a target for the Cyclan when he comes into the possession of the affinity twin, an artificially-created
symbiote based on a molecular chain of fifteen units, which has been stolen from a Cyclan laboratory. Injected into the blood
stream, the symbiote nestles in the rear of the cortex, meshes with the thalamus and takes control of the central nervous
system, enabling one brain to completely dominate another. Dumarest alone knows the correct sequence of the molecular units
composing the chain, preventing the Cyclan from using the affinity twin to accelerate their goals of universal supremacy.
On his long quest Dumarest journeys to the fungus encrusted planet of Scar, the juscar mines of Elysium, the circus of Chen
Wei on Baatz and a city of treasure on the fabled Ghost World of Balhadorha, among many other fantastical locations and cultures,
all evocatively described by Ted Tubb’s lyrical prose. Everywhere there is danger and death as Dumarest encounters sadistic
princes, greedy entrepreneurs, fanatical scientists and vulnerable children with strange psychic abilities, and always there
are intimate relationships with fascinating, beautiful and exotic women.
The origins of Tubb’s Dumarest of Terra can be traced throughout the author’s earlier work in the 1950s when he was a frequent contributor to SF magazines such as
New Worlds, Nebula Science Fiction, Science Fantasy and Authentic Science Fiction. Born in London in 1919, Edwin Charles Tubb made his first sale as a writer in 1951, a short story entitled ‘No Short Cuts’
which was published in issue 10 of New Worlds. The same year he was invited to pen three novels for pulp paperback publisher Curtis Warren. Tubb accepted the invitation
and Saturn Patrol, Planetfall and Argentis were duly published, but each was credited to one of Curtis Warren’s house names—King Lang, Gill Hunt and Brian Shaw respectively—denying
Tubb the recognition for his work.
Nonetheless, within three years Tubb had become one of British science fiction’s most prolific and popular writers with a
further 27 novels to his name and dozens of short story contributions to SF magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. He became
a five-time winner of the Nebula Science Fiction Magazine Literary Award (1953-1958) and received the 1955 Cytricon Literary Award for Best British SF Writer. From February
1956 to October 1957, he was also editor of Authentic Science Fiction where his deadlines often meant that he had to write most of the contents too, crediting his stories to a variety of pen
names such as Alan Innes, Julian Carey and Alice Beecham.
“I wrote whatever I could to keep the money coming in,” Tubb recalls of his early writing career. “I did westerns, a few thrillers
and some gangster things, but it was the science fiction that I personally enjoyed. I began to write under different names,
some of which were my own invention – Charles Grey, Carl Maddox, George Holt and Alan Guthrie—and others which were given
to me by publishers as they were house names—Volsted Gridban, Roy Sheldon, Arthur Maclean and so on.
“I learned that, more than anything else, speed was everything. You had to write fast—don’t edit, just let it flow. Sometimes
what you wrote was awful, but mostly it was alright and you got away with it. If you were paid by the word, you would use all sorts of little tricks to fill the page. I had characters spending a whole paragraph just stubbing
out a cigarette and going through a door. It was like that in those days.
“I learned a lot of things in the early days. I was naive and I was ripped off once by a bloke who claimed that he was better
known than I was and would be more likely to have a book published than me. He told me that once my book was published he
would give me the fee for it and I would have my foot in the door, as it were, with his publisher. He paid me for the first
one, so I wrote another two, which he submitted in the same way, as having been written by him. These too were published—but
he then vanished, and I was never paid for them! I learned from that.
“When I was first writing, I used all of the things that I had soaked up about the real universe and astronomy and so on.
I had read other people’s stories with characters going to different planets without space-suits or breathing equipment and
I just thought it was all a bit daft. I always wanted to make the stories exciting and interesting but I didn’t want them
to be totally silly and outrageous. I knew about rockets and the pressures that space flight can put upon the human body so
I tried to put all of that into my stories. I always felt that it was a little unfair actually. I don’t claim to be a scientist
myself, but I am a writer with an understanding of science. Yet there I was, earning the same as people who were just making up everything
with no regard to realism at all. But that was how it was.
“People have this idea that writing is a kind of romantic life but it isn’t. If you’re already well off and write to express
yourself I suppose it is romantic, but for me it was hard work. I had a family to support and really just sitting in front
of a typewriter makes it a bloody lonely life, not a romantic one. You don’t meet anybody and you lose touch with the real world because you spend all of your time in one that you have invented – such as the one for the Dumarest stories.”
The genesis of the universe that Tubb invented for Dumarest to roam can be found in Saturn Patrol (1951), Tubb’s very first novel. Despite the title, the story has nothing to do with Earth’s solar system and is instead
set far across the galaxy at an unspecified (presumably future) time. The book follows the exploits of Gregg Harmond, a former
space pilot, who leaves an unrewarding life as a farmer on the Rim world of Lagos to join the Warbirds, a band of space mercenaries,
before going on to reunify the warring Galactic Centre as the commander of his own Warbird group, the Eagles. Much of the
structure and style of the backdrop of Saturn Patrol resembles that of Dumarest of Terra, to the extent that it would be easy for readers to imagine that they are one and the same.
Five years later, Tubb first wrote about a character named Dumarest in a short story for Galaxy, published in both the American and British editions of the magazine in 1956 and later included in Tubb’s short story collections
Ten from Tomorrow (1966) and The Best Science Fiction of E.C. Tubb (2003). A melancholy tale with a devastating twist in the final paragraph, ‘Vigil’ tells of an interplanetary truck-driver
and the old man he meets every time he arrives at a cargo terminus on the Moon, a father waiting for his missing son to return
home from space. Prototypes of Earl Dumarest—tall, survivalist adventurers with a logical and deductive mind—can be found
in many of Tubb’s early works, primarily in Curt Gregson, the protagonist of ‘The Troublemaker’, a novelette published in
Nebula magazine in 1953. The Dumarest of ‘Vigil’, however, is not one of them, being a hard-drinking colleague of the storyteller
with no connection whatsoever to his. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
