Dumarest 33 - Child of Earth (2 page)

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 later namesake. Even so, Tubb clearly thought the name was too good for just a one-off appearance.

Tubb himself points to another story, ‘The Bells of Acheron’, as the direct forerunner to his Dumarest novels. Originally published in
Science Fantasy
magazine in 1957 and later collected in
A Scatter of Stardust
(1972), this too is a melancholy tale, told by the ship’s steward on an interstellar Grand Tour. He relates the events of a visit to the planet Acheron where noises emitted by bell-like glass flowers sound like the voices of dead loved ones to human ears. In his introduction to the English language edition of
The Return
(1997), the 32nd Dumarest novel, Tubb recalled how
The Winds of Gath
developed from a desire to revisit the central concept of ‘The Bells of Acheron’, replacing the glass flowers of Acheron with the mountains of Gath, a geological feature on a dying planet which produces a similar effect when lashed by storm winds, but equally capable of inducing insanity and death. Here is a planet that has become a onestop tourist attraction for the rich and powerful, yet has no home industry, no stable society in which a man can find work to earn the price of the get-away fare. If a traveller arrived here by accident, how would he survive and what lengths would he be prepared to go to in order to escape? What sort of a man would he have to be, and what motive could be strong enough to drive him to leave the planet rather than simply accept his fate as others have done before? So Earl Dumarest was born.

The Winds of Gath
was initially picked up by science fiction writer, editor and publisher Donald A. Wollheim at Ace Books in New York. The editor of Ace’s pioneering science fiction line, Wollheim had added Tubb to his list ten years earlier when he published the first book edition of
The Space-Born
(1956), a story originally serialised in
New Worlds Science Fiction
magazine. Tubb’s best known stand-alone work,
The Space-Born
is an acknowledged masterpiece of the ‘generational starship’ story, telling of a society who are the sixteenth generation of the original crew of a vast starship which is en route to Pollux from Earth, a journey lasting three hundred years. In a plot which prefigured the central premise of William F. Nolan & George Clayton Johnson’s
Logan’s Run
(1967), the protagonist, Jay West, is a psychpoliceman whose job is to eliminate anyone who has become a burden to the society, whether ill, unfit, neurotic, mentally unstable or, crucially, over forty years old. West faces a terrible dilemma when he discovers that his next target is the father of the woman he loves, and his solution changes the lives of everyone on the ship. Bound as an Ace Double – a range of paired paperbacks printed back-to-back – with Philip K. Dick’s
The Man Who Japed, The Space-Born
made little impact at the time, but Wollheim was keen to retain Tubb’s services and Ace published the American editions of his next three SF novels.

The Winds of Gath
was the company’s fifth Tubb book. Bound with Juanita Coulson’s
Crisis on Cheiron
and published in October 1967, Dumarest’s debut was virtually overlooked by the science fiction cognoscenti in a year that also saw the first publication of such genre classics as Robert Silverberg’s
Thorns,
Piers Anthony’s
Chthon,
Roger Zelazny’s
Lord of Light
and Harlan Ellison’s ground-breaking anthology
Dangerous Visions.
Nonetheless,
The Winds of Gath
proved so popular with Ace readers that Wollheim immediately commissioned a sequel,
Derai,
published in 1968, and then six further instalments over the next four years.

The UK rights to
The Winds of Gath
were acquired by Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, whose self-named publishing company was notable for a number of New Wave science fiction novels and the work of such authors as Ray Bradbury, Thomas M. Disch and Angela Carter. For their British edition of
The
Winds of Gath,
some revisions were made to the original manuscript and the title was cut down to just
Gath,
but in contrast to the American edition it was published singularly, and in hardback. To the dismay of British readers, HartDavis declined to print the subsequent Dumarest novels and it was another five years before the series finally took off in the UK. In 1973, Arrow Books, an imprint of the Hutchinson Group, picked up the rights and produced the first British paperback edition of
The Winds of Gath –
reinstating both the original title and Tubb’s original manuscript – together with the first British publications of the next three books in the series,
Derai, Toyman
and
Kalin,
in a simultaneous release.

By this time, the saga had already reached book seven,
Technos,
in the US and Tubb had finished writing an eighth,
Veruchia,
thereby completing his existing obligations to Ace Books. Donald Wollheim had left Ace in 1971 to form his own publishing company, DAW Books, which he claimed was the first such company devoted exclusively to science fiction and fantasy. Here, Wollheim published Tubb’s non-Dumarest novel
Century of the Manikin
(1972), but he desperately wanted to add the ongoing Dumarest series to DAW’s list. He persuaded Tubb to jump ship with Dumarest’s ninth adventure,
Mayenne,
inviting the author to add an extra 10,000 words to a manuscript which Tubb had already completed, a task which Tubb relished as it gave him the freedom to expand and develop the plot.
Mayenne
was issued by DAW in May 1973. Curiously, Ace had held back the publication of
Veruchia
and it did not appear until June that year: the ninth book was published one month
before
the eighth. From
Zenya
(1974) onwards, DAW adopted an umbrella title,
Dumarest of Terra,
for the series. Up to this point, the series had not been known by a collective title—they were simply ‘Dumarest’ novels or ‘Dumarest Space’ novels.
Dumarest of Terra
was subsequently adopted by
Ace for reprints of their Dumarest titles and remains the collective name by which the series is best known in North America.

The Dumarest books continued to be as lucrative for DAW as they had been for Ace and the rights were sold internationally for foreign language editions in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden and Japan. Wollheim encouraged Tubb to provide him with two new Dumarest novels every year for the next decade and Tubb was happy to oblige. Interviewed about the saga in
Sense of Wonder
magazine in 1985, Wollheim was asked how long the novels would go on for. He replied, “Obviously, as long as I’ll buy them and as long as people will keep buying them. I’m sure that E.C. Tubb is not planning to end it because it’s too profitable. They have a nice following. As far as I’m concerned they can go on indefinitely.”

Unfortunately, Wollheim’s health had begun to fail and in 1985 he turned over editorial control of DAW to his daughter Elizabeth. For reasons that remain unclear, the new regime at DAW decided to call time on Dumarest’s adventures. In
The Temple of Truth,
the 31st book, Tubb allowed Dumarest to discover the coordinates of Earth inscribed in gold on the walls of the Holy Place in the Temple of Cerevox on Raniang, and for readers on both sides of the Atlantic this was apparently where the series ended. This was a severe blow to Tubb: he had already completed the manuscript for the next book,
Figures of Earth,
when he learned that DAW would not be publishing any more Dumarest novels.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Arrow had kickstarted their publication of the series again in 1976 with new editions of the first four books and then a simultaneous release of the next four novels early the following year. These were issued under the umbrella title of
The Dumarest
Saga
and this collective name stuck with the series for all subsequent British editions. With the popularity of the series finally established in the UK, Arrow went on to issue the remaining 24 books on a regular basis until 1989, always about four years behind DAW. After publishing DAW’s last four books as two paired omnibus editions (titled
Melome and Angado
[1988], and
Symbol of Terra and The Temple of Truth
[1989]) under the company’s Legend imprint, the option to premiere
Figures of Earth
was available to Arrow, yet they too declined to continue with the saga. Instead, the 32nd Dumarest novel made its debut in a French language edition published by Presses de la Cité/GCEP of Paris, France, retitled
The Return
(1992).

Following DAW’s cancellation of the Dumarest books and then the retirement of his dynamic agent Les Flood, Tubb’s career appeared to come to a premature end. He stopped writing in 1985 and after Arrow’s publication of
Symbol of Terra and The Temple of Truth,
none of his books or stories were reprinted in either America or Britain for seven years. However, when Philip Harbottle, a long time fan and friend of the author, went on holiday to New York in 1995, he promoted Tubb’s backlist and unpublished work to fledgling publisher Gary Lovisi, who had recently launched his Gryphon Books imprint. Lovisi asked Harbottle to edit a new science fiction line for them, Tubb agreed to Harbottle becoming his agent, and thereafter Gryphon issued a steady stream of classic Tubb novels, including a couple of unpublished early manuscripts. Most significantly, they published the first English edition of
The Return
in 1997.

The following year, Tubb’s profile and career received a further boost with the publication of
The Tall Adventurer
(Beccon, 1998). Written by Philip Harbottle and Sean Wallace, this was the first-ever complete E.C. Tubb bibliography, revealing his vast output and all his pseudonyms, fully
annotated, and with much critical and biographical detail. This remarkable work led to Tubb being picked up by other American publishers, resulting in two important collections,
The Best Science Fiction of E. C. Tubb
(2003) and
Mirror of the Night
(2003). In addition, Dumarest’s loyal following was rewarded with two new short stories which appeared in the anthologies
Fantasy Adventures #1
(2002) and
Fantasy Adventures #2
(2003), compiled and edited by Harbottle and published by Wildside Press of Holicong, Pennsylvania. Both stories fleshed out some of the details of Dumarest’s early life, ‘Child of Earth’ describing how he came to stow away on the ship which ferried him away from his homeworld, and ‘Figona’ relating his first encounter with the Cyclan and how he ended up a lone traveller while still a teenager. Although readers were unaware of it at the time, these stories were actually extracts from a longer work in progress, a completely new Dumarest novel entitled
Child of Earth.

One of the most curious anomalies of Tubb’s
Dumarest of Terra
is that not a single book has been adapted for film or television, despite being optioned for American television in 1998. Indeed, only two of Tubb’s works have ever made that transition—
The Space-Born
was dramatised for French television in 1962 by RTF (Radio-Television Française) and a 1955 short story entitled ‘Little Girl Lost’ was faithfully adapted as an episode of Rod Serling’s
Night Gallery
in 1972. But if there’s one thing that Tubb’s readers agree on, it’s that the Dumarest books are ripe with all the elements that any film or television producer could wish for in an exciting, action-oriented SF drama, and that Dumarest’s adventures would be ideal for a long-running TV series or a blockbuster film franchise.

Tubb himself isn’t so sure. “I used to laugh at the different covers that would appear on my Dumarest books, so I can’t begin to imagine how I would feel if somebody was making a film or television series of one of my stories. I think it must be difficult for people like Stephen King who create these characters and then a film-maker changes this, that and the other. I suppose the financial rewards ease things a little.”

Some would argue that television, in particular, has already plundered Tubb’s work for ideas. For Dumarest’s fans, there was something familiar about the format of ABC’s
Battlestar Galactica
when the original series made its debut in 1978. Not only were the protagonists searching for their lost homeworld of Earth, but they were also constantly pursued by emotionless robotic creatures called Cylons. There were more notable similarities in
Farscape,
a Sci-Fi Channel television series produced by the Jim Henson Company, which debuted in 1999.
Farscape
followed the adventures (and misadventures) of American astronaut John Crichton who accidentally travelled through a wormhole to a distant part of the universe where none of the alien lifeforms he meets have ever heard of Earth. Crichton’s search for his home planet was hindered when mysterious omnipotent beings implanted wormhole technology equations in his subconscious, equations that were coveted initially by the villainous hybrid Scorpius and then, later, by the power-hungry Scarrans as part of their plans for the domination of the universe. Crichton’s search for Earth and his pursuit by an evil totalitarian race hellbent on retrieving the equations locked in his mind clearly paralleled Dumarest’s quest for Earth and his knowledge of the affinity twin sequence that is vital to the Cyclan’s plans for universal domination.