The last time I encountered A. Bertram Chandler, I was trying to find a generic example of what a perfect pulp science-fiction story would be. As I have been studying Ace Doubles, authors like A. Bertram Chandler have become more familiar to me. During the quarantine, running out of reading material, I wrote an e-Mail to my local used book store and asked if they could just send me every Ace Double they had, sight unseen. When I opened up the package and found four of the stories were by A. Bertram Chandler, I knew what I was expecting. Rocket ships and blaster gun space opera, only the rocket ships are actually powered by dimension warping gyroscopes that can turn you inside-out if you get too close to them.

A Bertram Chandler wrote several dozen science-fiction short stories and novellas, set in a shared universe of "the rim", where distant human colonies have more settled human space on one side, and the emptiness of space on the others. The stories were a little dingier than most space operas, because the heroes are commercial freighters working in banged-up old freighting vessels (Chandler was, in his professional life, a merchant marine officer), but also a bit more ethical and optimistic than that might suggest. This book introduced a new character into this universe, Ensign John Grimes, who would become the main protagonist of the series. John Grimes is freshly commissioned, and boards a commercial freighter to transport him to his new post. Grimes is technically just a passenger on the ship, and as a military man, as an uneasy, but basically non-hostile relationship with the captain and chief purser, a woman named Jane, who are both from the rim worlds (In Chandler's books, women serve on spaceships, although almost always in a clerical role). When the ship finds a freighter that has been attacked by space pirates, the captain of the merchant freighter decides to go on a campaign of revenge, and it is up to Grimes whether his loyalties belong with the captain, or with his space service. It is also up to Grimes to decide whether the purser's seductive acts are a ploy to manipulate him, or whether she is romantically motivated. All of this could be more cynical and grim than it sounds, but it comes across as more of a fun adventure story.

Perhaps the intervening years between 1963's Ship From Outside, and this book, published in 1967, changed Ace's editorial standards. This book was a bit more explicit in certain matters, such as mentioning hard nipples, which as I discovered previously, are the hallmark of serious adult literature. However, the book's sexual themes, language and violence are all quite tame compared to what I am used to.

So after discussing what is in many ways a quite standard, entertaining science-fiction novel, I will address a more abstract question: What is a Text? This story was the other side of The Lost Millennium, a book that was much less of a standard science-fiction book, both in theme and execution. I have previously wondered how much the editors of Ace Doubles were attempting to tie their books in creatively, or whether they were just trying to fill a page count. When Chandler wrote this book, he probably never imagined that it would be paired with a book about the Great Pyramids of Egypt being power plants of a loss civilization, but that is how I read it (and what would have happened it I read the books in the opposite order?). In fact, these books counterpoint each other nicely. On one hand, we have a predictable, but well-structured rocket ship saga, and on the other hand we have a more imaginative, but much more poorly written story of alternative history. Although their placement together might have been coincidental, it is difficult for me not to see them as a single text.

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