Avengers of the Moon

December 12, 2016
This affectionate pastiche of Edmond Hamilton’s mid-20th-century Captain Future space operas is all about first loves—both romantic connections and genre fandoms. Curt Newton, orphan son of murdered scientists, grows up in a secret Moon base, raised by a cyborg, an android, and a robot. Pursuing the murderer, who’s now a powerful Lunar politician, he disrupts an assassination attempt on the president of the Solar Coalition and accepts a commission, as Captain Future, to uncover the Martian conspiracy behind the attempt. Naturally, a beautiful female inspector of the Interplanetary Police Force is by his side in more ways than one. Steele (Arkwright), who won awards for his reflective 1995 novella, “The Death of Captain Future,” ably re-creates the pulp milieu with its clumsy-cute terms (Curt uses a “plasmar” pistol; natives of Venus are “aphrodites”) and a linear narrative that ploughs a straight furrow through the Lunar and Martian soils, turning up femmes fatales, mysterious million-year-old alien artifacts, and supervillains. The retro feel is enjoyable but may overwhelm readers who dislike seeing an otherwise strong female character needing to “overcome her disgust” or gape with “fear evident on her face” at alien threats.

March 1, 2017
Captain Future and friends struggle to save the solar system from a separatist plot in a rebooted 1940s pulp science-fiction franchise.Curt Newton--aka Captain Future--is the child of two scientists murdered by greedy Sen. Victor Corvo and raised by unlikely guardians: Grag, an intelligent robot; Simon Wright, his parents' sometime colleague, now a brain housed in a drone; and Otho, an android originally intended to be Wright's replacement body. Curt is trained as the typical action-adventure Renaissance man until Wright tells him of his parents' murderer. Curt sets out for vengeance but accidentally discovers--and foils--a presidential assassination attempt instead. Curt is drafted by the authorities to find the assassins' leader with the aid of obligatory love interest/space cop Joan Randall. The assassins are revealed as some of the setting's "aliens": humans genetically modified to settle other planets who identify now as Martians, etc. If all of this sounds familiar to pulp fans, it's because there's precious little new here. Steele's nostalgic devotion to the original leaves the narrative trapped in the 1940s. Curt is a Boys' Own hero who is cringingly immature around Joan, supposedly because of social naivete (yet Otho, raised the same way, manages not to stare at Joan's breasts); Curt's character arc is the simplistic realization that you shouldn't murder people for revenge (but offing nameless thugs is fine); and the "aliens" are, awkwardly, drawn entirely from non-Anglo cultures. The cast of supposed geniuses are frequently idiots to further the plot, and whenever the story risks getting interesting--such as exploring the legitimate frustrations of the Martians--things quickly revert to bar fights. Had Steele spent as much effort deepening the characters as he does explaining a plasma gun, Captain Future might have a future; as is, this effort flounders in the past.

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