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Exiles on Asperus
Contains
Exiles on Asperus (1933)
No Place Like Earth (1951)
The Venus Adventure (1932)
Exiles on Asperus (1933)
No Place Like Earth (1951)
The Venus Adventure (1932)
160 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 1979
About the author
John Wyndham
364 books2,081 followersJohn Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris was the son of a barrister. After trying a number of careers, including farming, law, commercial art and advertising, he started writing short stories in 1925. After serving in the civil Service and the Army during the war, he went back to writing. Adopting the name John Wyndham, he started writing a form of science fiction that he called 'logical fantasy'. As well as The Day of the Triffids, he wrote The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed as Village of the Damned) and The Seeds of Time.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 20, 2022
This was a strong short story, but I will say that I feel as though it lost momentum towards the second half. I was intrigued by the idea of Martian prisoners-of-war staging a revolt on a spaceship.
January 20, 2019
Two of these three stories are early Wyndham (1930s). "Exiles on Asperus" is pretty good, if a little dated and amateurish in comparison to his later works. "The Venus Adventure" however, (the earliest of the stories) is a bit of a tow to get through and shows little of the brilliance that Wyndham would later demonstrate.
The middle story, "No Place Like Earth", (1951) is an excellent sequel to the sublime "Time to Rest" from the Seeds of Time collection. This book is worth buying for this story alone, which ranks alongside the best of his novels.
The middle story, "No Place Like Earth", (1951) is an excellent sequel to the sublime "Time to Rest" from the Seeds of Time collection. This book is worth buying for this story alone, which ranks alongside the best of his novels.
July 7, 2011
This book features three stories: Exiles on Asperus (1933), No Place Like Earth (1951), and The Venus Adventure (1932). I'd say the first is the strongest. It has a bit of a feel of an episode of Star Trek, and I'd bet stories like this were what inspired Gene Roddenberry. The last story is reminiscent of Doyle's Lost World, with a group of experts setting out to explore a strange new place. I am gathering Wyndham had a fairly negative view of religion, from the way it is used here and in some other works.
May 28, 2021
John Wyndham was one of the big names of British SF in the 1950s and early 60s, most famous for The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids and The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed as Village of the Damned.) Gifted with a plethora of forenames (John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon; his surname was Harris) he wrote under several almost aliases - Lucas Parkes as well as John Harris, John Beynon and John Wyndham. It is these latter, more mature works for which he will be remembered – even if Brian Aldiss did dub the sub-genre of the disaster novel for which they stand as exemplars as ‘cosy catastrophes’. This book contains three tales, two novellas plus one shorter story and could not be more different in intent from those novels.
Exiles on Asperus. Humans have colonised Mars and Venus and the three planets are at loggerheads with each other. A Martian faction has rebelled and prisoners are being taken to the asteroids. On the way they turn the tables on their captors but are forced to land on the asteroid Asperus where another ship had crashed many years before. They find winged aliens called Batrachs have captured the previous humans and forced them to work underground. The factions join together to try to free them. It is not plain sailing. To modern eyes Asperus is an impossibly lush and hospitable place for an asteroid but this novella first appeared in 1933. Expressive of that era’s attitudes the characters too readily resort to violence, marriage is an unquestioned institution and women are called girls.
In No Place Like Earth (first published in 1951) humans live only on Mars and Venus as Earth was shattered into a collection of asteroids (presumably by acts of planetary war.) At the story’s beginning, viewpoint character Bert - this surely verges on breaking Gene Wolfe’s prescription on naming characters Fred - is living on Mars but longs for the old days on Earth. He is persuaded to leave Mars, and the prospect of settling down with Zaylo, a local “girl”, by the arrival of a manned spaceship from Venus offering “a future”. On that planet he works overseeing the labour of the indigenous life-form called griffas but the promise of advancement and acceptance into the dominant layer of Venusian society fails to materialise. He comes to realise there’s no place like Earth.
The Venus Adventure (from 1932) incidentally has people usually come into the world by incubation rather than natural birth but its main tale is of the first two human journeys to Venus – many centuries apart. In that elapsed time the original arrivals have separated into two groups, Dingtons and Wots, descended from the two heads of the expedition, an idea probably prompted by Wells’s TheTime Machine. The Dingtons have made friends with the Venusian Gorlaks with whom the Wots are more or less at war. The newcomers by focrce of circumstance take the side of the Dingtons against the “degenerated” Wots. The characters’ dialogue displays colonial attitudes. One uses the phrase, “went native,” and explains it by, “‘In the tropics we find that a white man either conquers the conditions, or is conquered by them.’”
These stories nowadays have to be read through a filter. It is in the nature of such early tales of interplanetary adventure that science has since overtaken the details of the narrative. Mars does not have sufficient oxygen (or indeed partial pressure) for humans to exist on its surface unprotected. Never mind perpetual rain and lack of visibility, Venus is totally inhospitable. An asteroid such as Asperus will have no atmosphere, full stop. Societal norms have evolved, especially in terms of sexual roles and the prevalence of cigarette smoking. Attitudes to the writing and reading of SF itself have changed profoundly. Characterisation here is rudimentary and the assumption of hostility to humans by aliens is not interrogated. These are primarily stories of action adventure, though No Place Like Earth does have a more reflective side, perhaps since it was presumably written about twenty years after the other two stories here; about the same time as The Day of the Triffids.
Exiles on Asperus. Humans have colonised Mars and Venus and the three planets are at loggerheads with each other. A Martian faction has rebelled and prisoners are being taken to the asteroids. On the way they turn the tables on their captors but are forced to land on the asteroid Asperus where another ship had crashed many years before. They find winged aliens called Batrachs have captured the previous humans and forced them to work underground. The factions join together to try to free them. It is not plain sailing. To modern eyes Asperus is an impossibly lush and hospitable place for an asteroid but this novella first appeared in 1933. Expressive of that era’s attitudes the characters too readily resort to violence, marriage is an unquestioned institution and women are called girls.
In No Place Like Earth (first published in 1951) humans live only on Mars and Venus as Earth was shattered into a collection of asteroids (presumably by acts of planetary war.) At the story’s beginning, viewpoint character Bert - this surely verges on breaking Gene Wolfe’s prescription on naming characters Fred - is living on Mars but longs for the old days on Earth. He is persuaded to leave Mars, and the prospect of settling down with Zaylo, a local “girl”, by the arrival of a manned spaceship from Venus offering “a future”. On that planet he works overseeing the labour of the indigenous life-form called griffas but the promise of advancement and acceptance into the dominant layer of Venusian society fails to materialise. He comes to realise there’s no place like Earth.
The Venus Adventure (from 1932) incidentally has people usually come into the world by incubation rather than natural birth but its main tale is of the first two human journeys to Venus – many centuries apart. In that elapsed time the original arrivals have separated into two groups, Dingtons and Wots, descended from the two heads of the expedition, an idea probably prompted by Wells’s TheTime Machine. The Dingtons have made friends with the Venusian Gorlaks with whom the Wots are more or less at war. The newcomers by focrce of circumstance take the side of the Dingtons against the “degenerated” Wots. The characters’ dialogue displays colonial attitudes. One uses the phrase, “went native,” and explains it by, “‘In the tropics we find that a white man either conquers the conditions, or is conquered by them.’”
These stories nowadays have to be read through a filter. It is in the nature of such early tales of interplanetary adventure that science has since overtaken the details of the narrative. Mars does not have sufficient oxygen (or indeed partial pressure) for humans to exist on its surface unprotected. Never mind perpetual rain and lack of visibility, Venus is totally inhospitable. An asteroid such as Asperus will have no atmosphere, full stop. Societal norms have evolved, especially in terms of sexual roles and the prevalence of cigarette smoking. Attitudes to the writing and reading of SF itself have changed profoundly. Characterisation here is rudimentary and the assumption of hostility to humans by aliens is not interrogated. These are primarily stories of action adventure, though No Place Like Earth does have a more reflective side, perhaps since it was presumably written about twenty years after the other two stories here; about the same time as The Day of the Triffids.
September 10, 2026
There is something absolutely charming about reading science-fiction written almost a century ago (1933 in this case). The Victorian concept that the planets got older the further from the sun (so Mars is an old, decaying civilisation, and Venus has dinosaurs on it) was still prevalent. The explorers treat these planets like a new continent to be conquered and colonized, like Africa. The indigenous people treated as second class to humans and the "white saviour" trope is very present.
Wyndham wrote these while he was very young, before jet engines had been invented and thirty years before the first man in space. Even so, his more thoughtful approach to "what if" questions is clear. I smiled at the third story (The Venus Adventure) where man finally cracks the problem of space travel (i.e. developing a rocket capable of leaving Earth) in the year 2925, and yet has apparently made no other technological advances in that time (nor social ones either, given the roles assigned to the female crew members!)
I ache for the time when people considered the universe full of wonder and mystery, and that science would solve all of our problems and that it only required brave men and women to seize the opportunities before them.
Wyndham wrote these while he was very young, before jet engines had been invented and thirty years before the first man in space. Even so, his more thoughtful approach to "what if" questions is clear. I smiled at the third story (The Venus Adventure) where man finally cracks the problem of space travel (i.e. developing a rocket capable of leaving Earth) in the year 2925, and yet has apparently made no other technological advances in that time (nor social ones either, given the roles assigned to the female crew members!)
I ache for the time when people considered the universe full of wonder and mystery, and that science would solve all of our problems and that it only required brave men and women to seize the opportunities before them.
September 19, 2024
They aren’t Batrachs they’re Bat People. Quaintly crappy, Wyndham must have real a lot of ERB. Man evolved opposable thumbs? Not after Mendel he didn’t. Modern mythology intrudes once more. BTW humans aren’t fallen angels, they’re fallen devils. Even devils don’t twerk.
August 7, 2024
A great collection of three novellas by John Wyndham (writing as John Beynon) that evoke the very best of the Pulp Fiction era. A must for fans of John Wyndham, or 'sense of wonder' Golden Age SF.
January 28, 2012
It was good.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews