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Secret of the Sunless World
His name was Gondal, most feared of all creatures in the universe. But there was one ravenous ambition he had yet to sat-isfy. On a distant, sunless planet lay the key to the secret of the humanoids who had strangely vanished after reigning over all space. Gondal intended to dis-cover that secret - and become master of the galaxies.
But Gondal needed one man to help him - an Earthling named Vince Cullow. Prisoner on Gondal's spaceship, Cullow was forced to choose between robot-like sub-mission, and the kind of torture only the twisted mind of Gondal could conceive, as they sped toward the unknown...
But Gondal needed one man to help him - an Earthling named Vince Cullow. Prisoner on Gondal's spaceship, Cullow was forced to choose between robot-like sub-mission, and the kind of torture only the twisted mind of Gondal could conceive, as they sped toward the unknown...
204 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1969
31 people want to read
About the author
C.C. MacApp
67 books6 followersC. C. MacApp - pseudonym of Carroll Mather Capps - was an American science fiction author. He also wrote as Carroll J. Clem.
Capps was also a well-known chess player in the San Francisco area.
Capps was also a well-known chess player in the San Francisco area.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 3, 2020
The ending seemed a little rushed and was unsatisfying.
February 22, 2026
The thing I really appreciate about non-standard literature is each book has its own thing going on. What this one has going on is it tries way too hard to do everything in 200 pages with a quaking, self-centered human main character leading a troupe of characters with all the depth of an early movie serial. The book sets up a lot of tension, but unlike most books that dispel that tension too fast, this one seems to just forget about it. Like I said: Different! Yay.
Lots of plots going on. So many it’s not clear which one matters at any given moment before we’re onto another one that could have been, by itself, and entire book series. Although it does manage to end on one of them. Success on that point. Worth finishing if you are reading for that one of the plots.
First off, and this is a first: the author’s name on the cover does not match that on the cover page or reverso copyright information. And this is a Dell book, not someone’s garage printing company. This set my expectations pretty high for this one.
Is this a sequel? I have to ask when we are dropped into the opening pages in medias res. I usually appreciate this, I swear I do, but in this case, its sort of whiplashy and hard to follow. Reading the summaries of the author’s previous novels… No? I suppose it could be the continuation of a short story… It sure feels like we are coming in expecting we know where we are. Okay, chalk it up to wanting to keep things 200 pages. Fine. All good.
So, these aliens want an injured human for some secret mission and the earth military guy is just going to hand one over knowing he’d not be allowed to do this, but off you go, dude with incurable alien virus that apparently is able to infect any protein but apparently doesn’t need containment. Something something FTL, gee wouldn’t that be nice to have and… three and a half pages later end of Chapter 1.
Efficient! I don’t know why anyone is doing anything, but we need a story badly here, so off we go. Okay, I take that back, the guy who’s going to die of the virus has some motivation on that point. Containment though? Aye.
By the way, the summary on the back of the book is like all summaries of this era, a laughable summary of some mythical book you are not going to be reading. I guess that was the book Dell was really hoping for, from someone with a different pen name.
The next chapters are crisp and efficient and we sit on the MC’s shoulder and watch a boring lecture that gets us all up to speed. I’m still bothered by how Vince/Vinz caught this virus if it’s not catching…
Anyway. We arrive at the pirate world that is sunless (this isn’t a spoiler if you read the, um, title of the book and the equally large print on the back) and are subjected to some wonderful, vintage alien world material that is just odd earth-like things dressed up in a sparkly cloak. Guards behave just like earth guards. The city is laid out just like an earth city. The hotel is a hotel. And our MC is way out of his comfort zone such that everything is making him tremble or gut clench or compare things to Earth in cowardly ways, but then he’s okay again. I don’t know what this tick serves, but it’s both sad and hilarious.
The book devolves into James Bond as we again launch our MC on his mission. It’s to rescue a woman! -Ish…Alien….Woman person. That classic vintage sci fi alien archaeologist woman. Except also an alien. Bonus points, MacApp. Points then deducted later because we never get to know this person.
Alien Q: “Here are some atomic piles for your coin purse. Spend them wisely.”
MC: What would James Bond do? Oh yeah, lose at the casino to get the bad guys’ attention! Righto!
Anyway, yeah the casino on the sunless world. Just pretend the alien place is just like earth except alien and scary-weird and let’s keep going. By going I mean lets supposition about everything. 87% of what happens in this book is a guess by one of the characters and then they talk about it until it’s described well enough we all get it. The characters make a wild guess (sometimes even about themselves, lol) they stand around and discuss it and we all move on as if it’s all correct. Repeat as necessary. It’s a book entirely populated by Hermiones.
Huge, important events are conveyed as if guessing is reality, generating a kind of floaty mental state for the reader if they start to fixate on how nothing is for sure, for sure, yet no one in the story seems to think anything is unsure. Hey everybody, I’ve thought of AN explanation for all this craziness I’ve never set eyes on in my life. We’re all set!
Also we have like a legend/prophecy thing… Because of course we do. This book has EVERYTHING.
Middle of the book. Not saggy! The book does not become less “efficient” to keep it kind. It piles it on. More worlds. More parties we don’t know the real motivations of. Well, to be fair we barely know anyone’s motivations… And we don’t know why the main character is being coerced the way he is (avoiding a spoiler)… As a thread it makes no sense to the plot. I guess it’s drama… ? It’s a complication a book this short cannot carry the load of. Like I guess the author knows his quaking flower of an MC wouldn’t do whats needed doing without it? It’s referenced at the moments of highest drama… In that case, fix the character, maybe? Were the readers of that era this pathetic they needed an accessible MC? I just… ugh.
Oh, speaking of movie serials: a bunch of bad stuff potentially happened, but on further investigation, no one was hurt! For sketchy, pasted-in reasons. You know what, MacApp. You do better when you leave stuff un-addressed. Mystery is better.
Well, except for the repeated dropped plot points. Let’s add some drama and then… it doesn’t pay out. Chekov is at the door and he wants his gun back. I mean… You can’t have the bad alien set a thing and then… nothing. Like did you forget you wrote that in? It would demonstrate the lack of re-read I think the book never got. Or was the actual issue that it was just too tiring to again have the characters supposition about something they didn’t know about anyway so there was no way to explain why it didn’t all go boom? Maybe? That didn’t stop the author earlier wanting to be believable by talking it out when it got unbelievable and even guessing about why they were guessing about things they had no business knowing needing guessing about.
Speaking of which, the plot action is straight out of Warner Brothers cartoons. And that only gets worse as the book comes to a close. We’re at paths are physically blocked for convenient reasons, Keystone Kops running around not seeing people skulking in the shadows levels of puppet show here. At the end of the book it got flighty enough to be bad-good. Just absolutely phoned it in. In fact the second to last chapter fades to black and then the last two pages tell us what we missed. And sets up a sequel. But why not, it opens like it is a sequel. An author can dream.
You know, MacCap, if that’s your real name, you could have just slimmed things down to a reasonable set of events and characters and told the whole story.
Anyway. That was a thing all right! Edited at the sentence level and everything so the reading was mostly smooth.
Lots of plots going on. So many it’s not clear which one matters at any given moment before we’re onto another one that could have been, by itself, and entire book series. Although it does manage to end on one of them. Success on that point. Worth finishing if you are reading for that one of the plots.
First off, and this is a first: the author’s name on the cover does not match that on the cover page or reverso copyright information. And this is a Dell book, not someone’s garage printing company. This set my expectations pretty high for this one.
Is this a sequel? I have to ask when we are dropped into the opening pages in medias res. I usually appreciate this, I swear I do, but in this case, its sort of whiplashy and hard to follow. Reading the summaries of the author’s previous novels… No? I suppose it could be the continuation of a short story… It sure feels like we are coming in expecting we know where we are. Okay, chalk it up to wanting to keep things 200 pages. Fine. All good.
So, these aliens want an injured human for some secret mission and the earth military guy is just going to hand one over knowing he’d not be allowed to do this, but off you go, dude with incurable alien virus that apparently is able to infect any protein but apparently doesn’t need containment. Something something FTL, gee wouldn’t that be nice to have and… three and a half pages later end of Chapter 1.
Efficient! I don’t know why anyone is doing anything, but we need a story badly here, so off we go. Okay, I take that back, the guy who’s going to die of the virus has some motivation on that point. Containment though? Aye.
By the way, the summary on the back of the book is like all summaries of this era, a laughable summary of some mythical book you are not going to be reading. I guess that was the book Dell was really hoping for, from someone with a different pen name.
The next chapters are crisp and efficient and we sit on the MC’s shoulder and watch a boring lecture that gets us all up to speed. I’m still bothered by how Vince/Vinz caught this virus if it’s not catching…
Anyway. We arrive at the pirate world that is sunless (this isn’t a spoiler if you read the, um, title of the book and the equally large print on the back) and are subjected to some wonderful, vintage alien world material that is just odd earth-like things dressed up in a sparkly cloak. Guards behave just like earth guards. The city is laid out just like an earth city. The hotel is a hotel. And our MC is way out of his comfort zone such that everything is making him tremble or gut clench or compare things to Earth in cowardly ways, but then he’s okay again. I don’t know what this tick serves, but it’s both sad and hilarious.
The book devolves into James Bond as we again launch our MC on his mission. It’s to rescue a woman! -Ish…Alien….Woman person. That classic vintage sci fi alien archaeologist woman. Except also an alien. Bonus points, MacApp. Points then deducted later because we never get to know this person.
Alien Q: “Here are some atomic piles for your coin purse. Spend them wisely.”
MC: What would James Bond do? Oh yeah, lose at the casino to get the bad guys’ attention! Righto!
Anyway, yeah the casino on the sunless world. Just pretend the alien place is just like earth except alien and scary-weird and let’s keep going. By going I mean lets supposition about everything. 87% of what happens in this book is a guess by one of the characters and then they talk about it until it’s described well enough we all get it. The characters make a wild guess (sometimes even about themselves, lol) they stand around and discuss it and we all move on as if it’s all correct. Repeat as necessary. It’s a book entirely populated by Hermiones.
Huge, important events are conveyed as if guessing is reality, generating a kind of floaty mental state for the reader if they start to fixate on how nothing is for sure, for sure, yet no one in the story seems to think anything is unsure. Hey everybody, I’ve thought of AN explanation for all this craziness I’ve never set eyes on in my life. We’re all set!
Also we have like a legend/prophecy thing… Because of course we do. This book has EVERYTHING.
Middle of the book. Not saggy! The book does not become less “efficient” to keep it kind. It piles it on. More worlds. More parties we don’t know the real motivations of. Well, to be fair we barely know anyone’s motivations… And we don’t know why the main character is being coerced the way he is (avoiding a spoiler)… As a thread it makes no sense to the plot. I guess it’s drama… ? It’s a complication a book this short cannot carry the load of. Like I guess the author knows his quaking flower of an MC wouldn’t do whats needed doing without it? It’s referenced at the moments of highest drama… In that case, fix the character, maybe? Were the readers of that era this pathetic they needed an accessible MC? I just… ugh.
Oh, speaking of movie serials: a bunch of bad stuff potentially happened, but on further investigation, no one was hurt! For sketchy, pasted-in reasons. You know what, MacApp. You do better when you leave stuff un-addressed. Mystery is better.
Well, except for the repeated dropped plot points. Let’s add some drama and then… it doesn’t pay out. Chekov is at the door and he wants his gun back. I mean… You can’t have the bad alien set a thing and then… nothing. Like did you forget you wrote that in? It would demonstrate the lack of re-read I think the book never got. Or was the actual issue that it was just too tiring to again have the characters supposition about something they didn’t know about anyway so there was no way to explain why it didn’t all go boom? Maybe? That didn’t stop the author earlier wanting to be believable by talking it out when it got unbelievable and even guessing about why they were guessing about things they had no business knowing needing guessing about.
Speaking of which, the plot action is straight out of Warner Brothers cartoons. And that only gets worse as the book comes to a close. We’re at paths are physically blocked for convenient reasons, Keystone Kops running around not seeing people skulking in the shadows levels of puppet show here. At the end of the book it got flighty enough to be bad-good. Just absolutely phoned it in. In fact the second to last chapter fades to black and then the last two pages tell us what we missed. And sets up a sequel. But why not, it opens like it is a sequel. An author can dream.
You know, MacCap, if that’s your real name, you could have just slimmed things down to a reasonable set of events and characters and told the whole story.
Anyway. That was a thing all right! Edited at the sentence level and everything so the reading was mostly smooth.
September 13, 2024
Fun, fast-reading, relatively short (204 pages) science fiction adventure story published in 1969. Written by Carroll Mather Capps (1917 – 1971), an American science fiction author. Also wrote under the pseudonym of C. C. MacApp, published six other novels and had short stories published in _Galaxy Science Fiction_ , _Worlds of If_, and _Worlds of Tomorrow_ (which later merged into _Worlds of If_).
This novel centers on Colonel Vince Cullow of the Space Force. He has contracted a rare disease not native to Earth, one that will leave him blind. There is no cure…though a friendly alien species, the furred humanoid Nesse, know someone who can cure the disease. Humanity doesn’t have faster-than-light travel yet, the Nesse do, and basically are offering Vince a FTL capable ship, passage as the first human being to leave the solar system and to take him to someone who will cure his blindness, and all he has to do is perform a secret mission for the Nesse. “Think it over?...When can I go?” asks Vince.
Vince’s contact is a pirate named Gondal, a member of a definitely non-humanoid species called the Onsians. Gondal is intensely curious what the Nesse have Vince doing, something Vince doesn’t share, but then Gondal adds his own conditions, basically “a favor to be named later.” Vince doesn’t really have any choice, and does what he has to get treatment on the permanently sunless (but very much life-bearing) world of Shann, one inhabited by still another alien species, the Vred, who are not native to the world, while performing the secret mission for the Nesse and keeping that mission secret from Gondal while figuring out how to satisfy Gondal’s own added conditions.
There are other alien species, notably the ipsisumoedans, the incredibly dangerous and war-like Chullwei, and the mysterious Lenj, who once ruled over this part of the galaxy and who gave not only the Nesse their current language but a language that is a common one throughout this part of the galaxy, but a species that completely disappeared thousands of years ago.
Good worldbuilding, some parts of the story are noirish, essentially crime and espionage science fiction, there are space opera/military science fiction elements, and some gee whiz epic golden age feel science fiction as well. Gondal was a hoot at times, with a definite personality and way of talking. Interesting aliens, some action, cool worlds, I wish it had been a little longer actually.
This novel centers on Colonel Vince Cullow of the Space Force. He has contracted a rare disease not native to Earth, one that will leave him blind. There is no cure…though a friendly alien species, the furred humanoid Nesse, know someone who can cure the disease. Humanity doesn’t have faster-than-light travel yet, the Nesse do, and basically are offering Vince a FTL capable ship, passage as the first human being to leave the solar system and to take him to someone who will cure his blindness, and all he has to do is perform a secret mission for the Nesse. “Think it over?...When can I go?” asks Vince.
Vince’s contact is a pirate named Gondal, a member of a definitely non-humanoid species called the Onsians. Gondal is intensely curious what the Nesse have Vince doing, something Vince doesn’t share, but then Gondal adds his own conditions, basically “a favor to be named later.” Vince doesn’t really have any choice, and does what he has to get treatment on the permanently sunless (but very much life-bearing) world of Shann, one inhabited by still another alien species, the Vred, who are not native to the world, while performing the secret mission for the Nesse and keeping that mission secret from Gondal while figuring out how to satisfy Gondal’s own added conditions.
There are other alien species, notably the ipsisumoedans, the incredibly dangerous and war-like Chullwei, and the mysterious Lenj, who once ruled over this part of the galaxy and who gave not only the Nesse their current language but a language that is a common one throughout this part of the galaxy, but a species that completely disappeared thousands of years ago.
Good worldbuilding, some parts of the story are noirish, essentially crime and espionage science fiction, there are space opera/military science fiction elements, and some gee whiz epic golden age feel science fiction as well. Gondal was a hoot at times, with a definite personality and way of talking. Interesting aliens, some action, cool worlds, I wish it had been a little longer actually.
July 28, 2020
A 50¢, 50 year old Sci-Fi found in the recycle bin. A nice break from my regular fare, only 202 pages.
The author avoids technicalities by saying "It's from a superior race."
An Astronaut becomes the first human to be afflicted with an inter stellar virus leaving him blind & dying. He jumps at a chance when a Space pirate offers a cure, for a price.
Big bad Gondal cures the virus and gives our Major Vince eyes that can see in total darkness. Vince is sent to a sunless planet to investigate rumors of a lost artifact.
Better than expected light and fast. 3.6 stars.
The author avoids technicalities by saying "It's from a superior race."
An Astronaut becomes the first human to be afflicted with an inter stellar virus leaving him blind & dying. He jumps at a chance when a Space pirate offers a cure, for a price.
Big bad Gondal cures the virus and gives our Major Vince eyes that can see in total darkness. Vince is sent to a sunless planet to investigate rumors of a lost artifact.
Better than expected light and fast. 3.6 stars.
March 23, 2021
This one is old but the story is readable because it isn't too dated technologically. A man is recruited to do some spying for some aliens in return for Earth getting a working Starship. In the course of his mission, he explores a dark "wanderer" and discovers the way to an older vanished more advanced alien race. Another old Sci-Fi Classic Adventure on par with Andre Norton's Galactic Derelict.
March 14, 2014
Stare, dobre SF. Wartka akcja, świetnie zarysowani bohaterowie, ciekawe uniwersum z imponującą techniką i tajemniczą starą supercywilizacją w tle. Intrygi, werbunki i społeczne dylematy. Fajnie się czyta tę literaturę z lat 70-tych. Ona się nie starzeje...
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