White Mutiny E-Book

Malcolm Jameson

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 39

Beschreibung

You don't have to start a fight and shoot your officers to mutiny—and the officers don't have to beat theiri men to drive them to mutiny. A rule-book skipper in a prize-winning ship is dynamite enough for that! Classic science fiction by Malcolm Jameson. Includes an introduction by John Betancourt.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION

WHITE MUTINY

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2021 by Wildside Press LLC.

All rights reserved.

“White Mutiny” originally appeared in Astounding Science-Fiction, October 1940.Copyright © 1940, 1968 by Street & Smith.

INTRODUCTION

Malcolm Jameson (1891–1945) was an American science fiction author who based much of his work on his background as an officer in the U.S. Navy. Jameson’s first published fiction appeared in Astounding in 1938. He was active in American pulp magazines for only 7 years, but he helped set the standard for quality during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. He wrote not just for John W. Campbell’s magazines, Astounding Science Fiction and Unknown Worlds, but also for magazines like Startling Stories and Weird Tales. His writing career began when complications from throat cancer limited his activity.

His stories of Solar System exploration about “Bullard of the Space Patrol” were posthumously collected in 1951 as a fixup novel and won the Boys Clubs of America Award. Reviewing that collection, critics Boucher and McComas praised Bullard as “the most successfully drawn series character in modern science fiction.” P. Schuyler Miller wrote that Jameson drew on his own naval experience to give the stories “a warm atmosphere of reality.”

Jameson’s story “Doubled and Redoubled” may be the earliest work of fiction to feature a time loop. And his story “Blind Alley” from Unknown was filmed as an episode of The Twilight Zone (retitled “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville”).

Alfred Bester described meeting Jameson in about 1939 this way: “Mort Weisinger introduced me to the informal luncheon gatherings of the working science fiction authors of the late thirties... Malcolm Jameson, author of navy-oriented space stories, was there, tall, gaunt, prematurely grey, speaking in slow, heavy tones. Now and then he brought along his pretty daughter, who turned everybody’s head.”

Had he lived another 20 years, the shape of the science fiction field might have been significantly different, with Jameson’s name up there with Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and van Vogt.

—John Betancourt

Cabin John, Maryland

WHITE MUTINY

I

For the first time in his life, Commander Bullard found himself dreading something—dreading it intensely. And, oddly enough, that something was no more than the routine Saturday inspection. In ten minutes he would buckle on his sword, that quaint ceremonial relic of antiquity, put on his awkward fore-and-aft hat, and accompany the new captain—Chinnery—through the mazes of the good spaceship Pollux.

He sighed helplessly, glanced up at Lieutenant Commander Fraser, thence let his eyes rove to the bookshelf where a fathom’s length of canvas bound stood. He stared savagely at them. He had never realized before there were so many of them. Heretofore he had done his duty as he saw it and left chapter and verse to the sky lawyers.

But those fat books contained the awful clauses that regulated the conduct of the Space Guard. There they were—eight thick volumes—of the Regulations Proper. Ranged next were three volumes more of the Ordinance Instructions, and five of the Engineering Instructions. Then came the set relating to Astrogation, and the fourteen learned tomes on Interplanetary Law; then the ones on Tactics and Strategy, then—

Bullard shuddered. It was overwhelming. To violate, even unwittingly, any provision contained in that compact library was technically “neglect of duty.” And the new skipper was a hound for regulations.

“From here out,” he had told Bullard the week before, on the occasion of his confiscation and destruction of all the crew’s tailor-made liberty uniforms, “the regulations are in effect. All of them, not just the ones that happen to please you.” And Bullard remembered the sullen faces of what had been a happy ship’s company as they tossed their trim outfits into the incinerator door. A tapeline in Chinnery’s own hands had revealed the clothing much too tight in the waist, and as much as three inches too full in the shoulders. It was, he said, a clear violation of Article 8878, sections B and D.

So they were destroyed. It did not seem to matter to Chinnery that no self-respecting skyman would allow himself to be seen, even in the lowest dive, clad in the shoddy issue uniform, nor did it matter to him that each of those uniforms stood their owners two or three months’ pay. They were non-reg, and that was that. What if the planet girls had a way of judging sailors by their clothes? What if the men sulked and grumbled at their work?

“A couple of days on bread and water will take that out of them,” said Chinnery tartly when Bullard had protested. “The question is—are we going to run the ship the way the department wants it, or are we going to pamper the men?”