Double in Space

by Fletcher Pratt

Contains two short novels from the classic pulp magazine "Thrilling Wonder Stories" -- "The Wanderer's Return" and "Project Excelsior."

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

Murray Fletcher Pratt (1897–1956) was a science fiction and fantasy writer; he was also well-known as a writer on naval history and on the American Civil War.

Pratt attended Hobart College for one year. During the 1920s he worked for the Buffalo Courier-Express and on a Staten Island newspaper. In the late 1920s he began selling stories to pulp magazines. When a fire gutted his apartment in the 1930s he used the insurance money to study at the Sorbonne for a year. After that he began writing histories.

Wargamers know Pratt as the inventor of a set of rules for civilian naval wargaming before the Second World War. This was known as the "Naval War Game" and was based on a wargame developed by Fred T. Jane involving dozens of tiny wooden ships, built on a scale of one inch to 50 feet. These were spread over the floor of Pratt's apartment and their maneuvers were calculated via a complex mathematical formula. Noted author and artist Jack Coggins was a frequent participant in Pratt's Navy Game, and L. Sprague de Camp met him through his wargaming group.

Pratt established the literary dining club known as the Trap Door Spiders in 1944. The name is a reference to the exclusive habits of the trapdoor spider, which when it enters its burrow pulls the hatch shut behind it. The club was later fictionalized as the Black Widowers in a series of mystery stories by Isaac Asimov. Pratt himself was fictionalized in one story, "To the Barest", as the Widowers’ founder, Ralph Ottur.

Pratt is best known for his fantasy collaborations with de Camp, the most famous of which is the humorous Harold Shea series, was eventually published in full as The Complete Compleat Enchanter. His solo fantasy novels Well of the Unicorn and The Blue Star are also highly regarded.

Pratt wrote in a markedly identifiable prose style, reminiscent of the style of Bernard DeVoto. One of his books is dedicated "To Benny DeVoto, who taught me to write."

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book collects two novellas by Pratt which had originally appeared in issues of the pulp magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1951. Confusingly, there was a book with the same title but with one different novella substituted by Pratt published in the U.K. in 1954. Project Excelsior appeared in both books. It's a fairly standard near-future spies-in-space story of intrigue in which the female red spy learns that love can conquer all. Yea McCarthy! The Wanderer's Return is a fun far-future romp, an interstellar war story with a heavily mythic influence. I'd rate the former a two and the latter a four. This paperback edition from Curtis books in 1968 has a nifty cover (recycled from the German edition of a Raymond Z. Gallun novel from 1967) from the under-appreciated Johnny Bruck, who painted a zillion-and-a-half nifty covers for the Perry Rhodan series, amongst many other works.

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of two novellas, which must have been published in hardcover form almost as soon as their publication in Thrilling Wonder Stories—they hit both in 1951.

The first story, Project Excelsior is by far the weaker of the two. We always wonder at the amazing extrapolations science fiction authors make which come true, but there were a whole lot more than not only didn’t come true but seem incomprehensible in retrospect. Orbiting space stations in the world of Excelsior were nearly completely cut off from home, because the “Heavyside layer” blocks almost all radio waves from entering or leaving the atmosphere. Cosmic radiation was known to be a huge problem, but radiation sickness itself was treated as only mildly serious and something to be put up with on every trip… except that it also blinds and kills.

The biggest problem with it is the cooks, though. Space stations are cramped. They can’t fit all the technicians and workers they need to maintain the station. But they do have room for cooks who are practically untrained in anything other than being a cook. Worse, fuel costs are a big issue as well, but they waste fuel by sending “big, burly” men to be cooks.

It’s not so much that Pratt’s extrapolations were wrong, but that he barely did any extrapolation at all.

The Wanderer’s Return was a whole lot more fun. You’ll probably get the schtick almost as soon as you start reading it, but saying it is a bit of a spoiler. However, this was a surprising take on the super-psychology subgenre in science fiction. The ending took me by surprise even though I saw that pattern and knew the story took place in that subgenre that privileges psychology over the hard sciences and even over chance. Having once taken a degree in psychology, I’m sympathetic to these stories even though they’re obviously bullshit. This one, however, laid out a nice red herring even while all the real clues were there.

So on the whole, a good read.

[Marsh "Bad Sci Fi" Bloom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Both stories in this collection are straight up WWII adventures set in space with mixed attempts at adaptation to the future.

The first would be a cynical pastiche of spy thriller, high tech warfare, hopeless romance, political gamesmanship, and countdown plot except Pratt is stubbornly earnest about it all.

Maybe it’s a genre of that era problem that nothing would be believable if it isn’t completely obvious before it happens… ? Fortunately it was short enough to survive. Also it set out its parameters in a way that made them more palatable than expected.

Second story is a quaint retelling of Homer’s Odyssey that ruins it by going meta about it. Lots of potential left untapped in that one. It could have been a full novel except the author might not have had it in him to invent actual characters to hold it up…