In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.
Gunner Cade, cowritten by C.M. Kornbluth and Judith Merril using the pen name Cyril Judd, is a book I had long heard about, but only recently got around to reading. I’m glad I did, because it turns out to be a fast-paced adventure story, and a perfect book for summer reading. It follows the adventures of a far-future military man who finds out that just about everything he ever believed is a lie, and must depend on his own code of ethics to guide him as he faces threats from every side.
Gunner Cade originally appeared as a serial in Astounding magazine in 1952, and has been reprinted many times since then. The copy I used for this review is an omnibus, Spaced Out, published by NESFA Press in 2008, where Gunner Cade appeared with two other novels. I recently ran across the omnibus in my basement, immediately remembering that I bought it at a shop called Stillwater Books when they were still located in downtown Pawtucket, RI. (They have since moved to West Warwick, having left Pawtucket when the State of RI walked away from negotiations with the Red Sox and let their AAA team relocate from Pawtucket to Worcester, Massachusetts. It is funny what chains of memory are unlocked when you run across a book you haven’t seen in a long time; one of the strange powers of a printed work.)
There is an interesting account of the writing of Gunner Cade from Judith Merril, where she is quoted as describing how the book was outlined by Kornbluth, with each co-author then writing a chunk of the narrative, which they then traded and rewrote. She is also quoted as saying the co-authors researched the stories published in Astounding to determine the type of tale John Campbell was most likely to buy, and reverse engineered their story to fit his tastes. It seems like this book inspired stories from other authors whose work I enjoy, as the relentless pace of the narrative reminds me of Keith Laumer’s adventure stories, and the portrayal of combat as a spectator sport reminds me of the work of Mack Reynolds.
About the Authors
Judith Merril (1923-1997) was the pen name of Judith Josephine Grossman, an American science fiction fan, writer, editor, and activist. She was a member of the Futurians science fiction fan club, which is where she met her early collaborator Cyril Kornbluth, with whom she wrote under the pen name Cyril Judd. Merril was perhaps most widely known as an editor, publishing science fiction anthologies from 1950 to 1985, with an influential series of “Year’s Best” anthologies appearing from 1956 to 1967. She was a strong advocate for improving literary standards within the science fiction field, and a founder of the Milford Writers’ Conference. She wrote the book review column for Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1965 to 1969, and argued for replacing the term “science fiction” with “speculative fiction.” She was also an advocate for what became known as the “New Wave” of science fiction. Following in the footsteps of her politically active mother, Merril was involved in a number of causes, and her opposition to the Vietnam War was one factor that led to her relocation to Canada in the late 1960s. She was designated as an Author Emeritus by SFWA in 1997, and inducted in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2013. You can find a couple of Merril’s earlier stories here on Project Gutenberg.
Cyril Kornbluth (1923-1958) was an American science fiction author who wrote under a variety of pen names. He was also a member of the Futurians fan club, and his first professional piece was published when he was only seventeen. He was best known for his shorter work, and most of his longer works were written as collaborations, with authors such as Frederik Pohl and Judith Merril. His writing career was short, as he died of a heart attack at 34. I’ve looked at Kornbluth’s work before in this column, reviewing the satire The Space Merchants, which he cowrote with Frederik Pohl, and you can find more biographical information there. You can find several of Kornbluth’s works on Project Gutenberg.
From a Certain Point of View
In addition to enjoying the fast-paced adventure in Gunner Cade, I was impressed by the authors’ use of viewpoint. We see the world from the perspective of the protagonist Cade, and while he is a seasoned professional warrior, he lives his life by vows akin to those sworn by a monk. He knows little about history, little about human relationships, and little about the world around him, and the authors take great pleasure in revealing things to the reader through his eyes.
The readers will soon realize that the distant past before the establishment of the empire is our own world of today. The aversion to change or chaos, and the taboo that bans firing weapons or dropping bombs from an aircraft, implies that our era ended in a massive and destructive war, and the world has chosen millennia of stagnation rather than risking another such conflict. The location of the emperor in the Baltimore/Washington area implies that the empire grew from the United States, although that nation also ceased to exist as a political entity.
Cade also is ignorant of the lives of non-warriors, and his pairing with the con-man Fledwick is the source of some amusing situations. He is also unaccustomed to interacting with women, and completely oblivious to the fact that he is handsome, and that he can influence people by simply smiling.
Cade doesn’t understand the way the world around him works. He has an idealized view of an empire that, while extremely stable, is also irredeemably corrupt. He also doesn’t realize that ordinary people follow military action the way people today follow sports, and that, because of this, he is a minor celebrity.
The best thing about these revelations is that they come organically in the course of the story, and not in the lumps of exposition that mar so many science fiction tales. Cade, in his ignorance and naivety, is a perfect gateway through which we learn about his future world.
Gunner Cade
Gunner Cade is a consecrated Brother in the Order of Armsmen, an order that, through the Power Master, serves the Emperor who rules the Realm of Man. Cade lives in a monastery-like Chapter House, and serves the Star of France, a local lord, who is clashing over scarce resources with the Star of Muscovy. We follow Cade as he goes through his morning ritual and liturgy, and checks the ray gun that is the traditional weapon of his order, for today is a Battle Morn. His preparations are disturbed by a Mars-born Armsman, who has strange ideas about loyalty that Cade finds disturbing. The battle goes well for Cade and his men, until an old civilian woman offers him some cider, which turns out to be drugged, and he falls unconscious.
Cade awakens to find himself captive to a beautiful and strangely forceful commoner woman. She tries to give him a drug that will make him compliant, but he spits it out, knocks her over, and tries but fails to escape. They are in the house of a religious group that seems to be a front for revolutionaries—and in Baltimore, on a different continent! Cade is programmed with a hypnotic compulsion to murder the Power Master, and taken to a house of prostitution called Cannon’s. There, he meets the beautiful commoner woman again, and she tells him that the hypnosis will not hold him because he had not taken the drug. She tries to reason with Cade, but he can’t make sense of what she wants, and he attracts the attention of a Watchman, who arrests them both.
Cade tries to tell his jailers who he is, but they don’t believe him, because they just heard the famous Gunner Cade was recently killed in battle, and one of them lost a bet because of it. Cade is thrown into a cell with a con-man named Fledwick. Cade is desperate to report the conspiracy to murder the Power Master, and decides that his best course of action is to go to the Gunner Supreme, who can be found in Alexandria, near Washington, in a cave that is not a cave. He enlists Fledwick’s help in escaping, and the two of them hit the road. Cade is an uneasy fugitive, but Fledwick proves to be useful in helping him travel without drawing notice from the authorities. And in Alexandria, they find the partially ruined five-sided building that is their destination (which the reader will recognize as the Pentagon). They find the apartment of a seductive woman who turns out to be the concubine of the supposedly chaste Gunner Supreme.
Cade is confused, but the Gunner Supreme thanks him for his devotion, writes him a pardon, and sends him to a room for the night. He says Fledwick will also be rewarded for his service. Cade’s troubled sleep is interrupted when he hears something outside, and looks out to see Fledwick executed in the courtyard. Between the concubine and the murder, Cade realizes the Gunner Supreme cannot be trusted, and slips out of his room. Before he leaves, he loots the concubine’s apartment to help fund his escape. He is a fugitive again, with only a few days of instruction from Fledwick to guide him while he is on the run. He decides his only hope is to go back to Cannon’s in Baltimore, and find the beautiful commoner woman again, as she seems to be a key to unravel the mysteries that surround him. Along the way, he learns much more about the way the world works.
Mrs. Cannon is attracted to Cade, takes pity on him, and offers him a room. She likes his smile, and gives him the nickname “Smiley.” Cade takes to paying for people’s drinks if they will tell him their stories, desperate for any clues that will help his quest. He decides his best course of action is to go to the Power Master himself and tell him both about the conspiracy and the Gunner Supreme’s corruption. He is aided when a fellow Gunner recognizes him, and gains an introduction to the Power Master. The Power Master kills the fellow Gunner, not wanting anyone else to know Cade is alive. He tells Cade the Emperor and Gunner Supreme are both corrupt, but in ways that preserve the stability of the Empire, which is all that matters. And he tells Cade that the wars he fought in are all staged in order to keep the Stars pitted against each other, and too weak to rebel against the Empire. Cade’s head is spinning from all this, but the Power Master has a task for Cade: to go to Mars and kill the Star of Mars.
Cade is suspicious, and while he accepts his orders, he has his doubts. Fortunately, the mysterious and beautiful commoner woman Cade had been looking for reappears. It turns out she is anything but a commoner, and soon the two of them are on the run, off on a desperate flight to Mars, pursued by rammer ships determined to kill them. I’ll not spoil any more surprises, except to say that the story then gallops through battles in space and across the surface of Mars, where it reaches a thrilling and satisfying conclusion.
Final Thoughts
Gunner Cade is first and foremost an energetic action tale that moves at a frantic pace, but it also has a lot of depth. Cade is an interesting character study in what happens when a man of honor finds that everything he has been taught is a lie. And the supporting characters are also well drawn, especially the mysterious woman who becomes Cade’s ally. The future society is fairly standard, but is carefully crafted and feels real and lived-in. I can see why the story has seen so many reprints and drawn so much praise over the years.
And now I turn the floor over to you: If you’ve read Gunner Cade, I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts!
Was Cade armed with a ray gun? It’s been a long time since I read this, but as I recall the Armsmen carried projectile weapons.
There are not a lot of specifics on how the guns work, but when they fire, it is a “blast,” and when they hit a target, it is “incinerated.”
In his introduction to the collection “The Best of C.M. Kornbluth,” Kornbluth’s sometime collaborator and sometime agent, Frederik Pohl, wrote that at the time of Gunner Cade, he and Kornbluth were on the outs with each other, and so “Fledwick” was meant to be an unflattering caricature of Pohl.
I did not know Fred was such a Pohl-arizing figure. ;-)