Space Ahoy!

LANCELOT BIGGS: SPACEMAN (224 pp.)--Nelson Bond--Doubleday ($2.50).

"We blasted from a Long Island cradle, set course for Europa, waited till we were about six hours away from Earth's gravitational field, then cut over to Biggs's velocity intensifier, using which we could look forward to setting foot on Europa within two days at the most."

Such specialized patter will probably give no trouble at all to admirers of Comic-Strip Hero Buck Rogers and his legion of spaceship-flying, planet-exploring imitators. But to those who have never exposed themselves to the comic strips, the pseudo-scientific gobbledygook that spews forth from every page of Lancelot Biggs: Spaceman may cause some confusion for a while.

The persistent will get the hang of it. Spaceman's hero may live in the 22nd Century, serve as third mate on a 200,000-m.p.h. Earth-to-Venus spaceship, and burble endlessly about ray guns and spaceports, but Lancelot himself is an old standby. Adorned with an "oversized Adam's apple, ears like a loving cup's handles, and a grin like a Saint Bernard puppy," Lancelot is that time-tested hero, the gangling young whippersnapper who loves to tinker--and more often than not tinkers his way to a fabulous discovery. With the greatest of ease he captures a group of space pirates who try to hold up his ship in mid-stratosphere, invents a velocity intensifier which ups his ship's speed to 670 million m.p.h. As his crowning feat, he manages to immaterialize his spaceship so that it can pass straight through the planet Jupiter, then materialize it again on the other side. Author Nelson Bond, who used to write westerns, has merely put a Space Age icing on the old Wild West conventions. There is even a land rush--not by bumpy covered wagons, but by spaceships streaking away with jets blazing toward newly explored planets.

Lancelot Biggs is chiefly notable as a publisher's trailblazer. Until recently, science fiction has been available only in the comic books, in books for boys, and in the publications of a few obscure but dedicated specialized publishing houses (TIME, May 30, 1949). Last year Publisher Doubleday, with one eye on flying saucers and the other on an unexplored trade-book market, plunged into science fiction, quickly issued five titles (Lancelot Biggs is the sixth). With sales and reprint prospects looking brisk, U.S. readers can brace themselves for more long rides into space.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.