Dumarest 33 - Child of Earth
E.C. Tubb
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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
W
hen 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.”