One of Our Asteroids is Missing/The Twisted Men

by A.E. van Vogt, Calvin M. Knox (Pseudonym), Robert Silverberg

The Twisted Men is by A.E. Van Vogt (130pp). Cover Artist: Jack Gaughan. Contains the following novelettes:
The Twisted Men
The Star-Saint
The Earth Killers
One of Our Asteroids is Missing is by Calvin M. Knox (AKA Robert Silverberg) (124 pp). Cover Artist: Ed Emshwiller

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Adventure

254 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Alfred Elton van Vogt was a Canadian-born science fiction author regarded by some as one of the most popular and complex science fiction writers of the mid-twentieth century—the "Golden Age" of the genre.

van Vogt was born to Russian Mennonite family. Until he was four years old, van Vogt and his family spoke only a dialect of Low German in the home.

He began his writing career with 'true story' romances, but then moved to writing science fiction, a field he identified with. His first story was Black Destroyer, that appeared as the front cover story for the July 1939 edtion of the popular "Astounding Science Fiction" magazine.

Reviews

[Jamie]

*Review based on the van Vogt stories only*

van Vogt is a firehose of sci-fi creativity. A little weird, a little raw, and like real life the pieces don't always, or even usually, fit together nicely. But his raw imagination, out of left field ideas and talent for instilling a sense of wonder and mystery (and some confusion) were unequaled in his time, as I believe they still are today.

The Twisted Men (AKA The Rogue Ship) (4.0) - A wild tale of a ship travelling to the Centauri system to escape the imminent destruction of Earth from the sun going nova. The ship unknowingly enters a "zone" outside of normal space/time as it approaches the speed of light. Fantastically, it's not clear the ship will escape the destruction of the nova, even as it seemingly approaches Centauri, light years away. Tension mounts as the ship's owner attempts to save it, while facing a mutiny/revolt on board (which seems to be a recurring theme with van Vogt). Adding to the fun, van Vogt provides some very weird and wacky pseduo-science explanations for the strange phenomena the ship encounters, some of which made the ship and crew appear distorted to him when he first encounters it, hence the title The Twisted Men.

The Star-Saint (4.0) - Human colonists on a lush alien world find death and destruction in mysterious circumstances, some very strange rocks, and an enigmatic, pervasive alien intelligence. It all comes down to some interesting theories on accelerated flows of "life energy".

The Earth Killers (3.0) - This one's a little weak on the sci-fi sauce. The US faces devastating nuclear attacks by a mysterious enemy. One pilot who witnessed the attacks claims they came from space, but nobody believes him, so he sets out on his own to prove it.

[Craig Childs · Rating 3 out of 5]

(A review of Robert Silverberg's One Of Our Asteroids Is Missing)

Johnny Storm has been prospecting for reactive metals in the Asteroid Belt for two years before he finally strikes a claim that will make him fabulously rich. He follows all the legal procedures to establish his claim through the Mars office, but when he returns to Earth, his entire identity has been deleted from the central computer. Someone else wants that asteroid, and they are willing to erase Johnny to have it!

To make matters worse, his long-suffering girlfriend Liz wants to get married and she isn't going to keep waiting around for Johnny if he goes back out into space again…

This novel seems slight by Silverberg standards, both in length and content. It's another rip-roaring Ace adventure yarn, but it lacks the nuance of character and imagination of plot that was already starting to emerge in the early 60's. This is not on the level with "We, the Marauders", Shadow on the Stars, The Planet Killers, or Recalled to Life.

In this novel, Silverberg does make an uncanny prediction about the ease and dangers of identity theft in a totally digitized society. The reality in 2022 is very similar to what he predicted for the year 2019.

The final act introduces a ‘hard right’ plot twist that changes the whole direction of the story. This section strikes me as more mature writing. It almost saves the book, but it is abrupt and does not mesh in tone with the first two-thirds of the novel.

[Phil Giunta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This ACE Double novel from 1964 contains a collection of three delightful SF stories by the legendary A.E. Van Vogt while the flip side is an engrossing SF mystery novella by Calvin M. Knox, a pseudonym often used by veteran writer Robert Silverberg.

One of Our Asteroids is Missing by Knox/Silverberg details the adventures of asteroid prospector Johnny Storm who risks his life, career, and future marriage to travel to the asteroid belt beyond Mars in the hopes of striking it rich on rare metals. This he does after two years of searching. After documenting his find, Storm heads to Mars to file his claim. He then sells his ship and takes a passenger liner back to Earth—only to find both his claim and his identity erased from all computer records. It takes two days of haggling with bureaucrats to restore Storm's identity. He then flies back to his asteroid to determine exactly who jumped his claim and why... only to discover that there is more inside this hunk of rock than precious metals.

Silverberg delivers a perfectly paced space adventure with enough mystery and suspense to keep those pages turning. Flipping the book over brings us to the A.E. Van Vogt side with three delightful stories:

"The Twisted Men" - In an effort to preserve the human race before the destruction of its sun, a ship called Hope of Man was sent to the Alpha Centauri star system ten years ago with a few hundred of the best and brightest aboard. To the shock of wealthy scientist, ship builder, and predictor of doom, Averill Hewitt, the vessel returns—and crashes through the Earth like a fist through tissue paper. Hewitt hires another vessel to take him to the speeding ship and after a herculean effort, manages to board the Hope of Man. There, he discovers its crew out of phase with normal space and time, having nearly reached the speed of light. In fact, to Hewitt, they appear physically flattened and twisted. Can Hewitt stop the ship before it turns in its orbit and obliterates the Earth?

“The Star Saint” – Aboard the Colonist 12 starship, engineer and leader-elect of the human colonists, Leonard Hanley is charged with investigating the inexplicable destruction of the human colony on a planet called Ariel. Assisting him in this matter is the enigmatic explorer known as Mark Rogan, an alien capable of traversing the galaxy without need of a vessel. Viewing Rogan as competition, Hanley insists on being the first to solve the mystery of the dead Ariel colony only to find himself in a near fatal battle of Man versus Nature.

"The Earth Killers" - While piloting an experimental plane, Robert Morlake is called back to base when a salvo of atomic missiles are launched against the United States. One such bomb narrowly misses Morlake's plane and from the pilot's perspective, it had dropped straight down from somewhere above him. Morlake fails in an attempt to use his plane to divert the bomb now headed directly for Chicago. After safely returning to base and filing his report of the incident, Morlake is promptly imprisoned and court-martialed for lying about the trajectory of the bomb. To claim that it came straight down from above would be impossible... unless it was launched from either the moon or a spaceship. Morlake manages to escape custody, steal back the plane, and fly off on a mission to find out.

All three stories were thoroughly enjoyable although in "The Earth Killers," the arrest and court-martial of Morlake was, to me, an extreme and unbelievable reaction to his report. Simply because he saw the bomb as having dropped straight down from above, rather than at an angle (as if launched by another country), was a ridiculous reason to put him on trial.

[Skjam! · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is another Ace Double, two books in one, upside down from each other. According to Larry Niven, during the 1960s Ace Books was known for being particularly skinflint towards authors, so would only be sold to if all other SF publishers turned down the book, and the writer just needed some cash in hand, because royalties and overseas sales would never be forthcoming. When Tom Doherty bought the publishing house, he didn’t talk to any of the writers who’d worked for them, but did do a two-year search for legal complaints. There were none–because the writers had all learned that it was useless. (Mr. Doherty reformed Ace Books’ payment policies, and a lot of authors finally got back payments.)

One of Our Asteroids Is Missing features a young asteroid prospector named John Storm (no relation) who is looking for rare metal deposits in the asteroid belt to feed Earth’s early 21st Century computer technology. He finds a jackpot, but between filing his claim on Mars and getting to Earth to set up the funding to get it mined, the computer network somehow loses his claim. And all of John Storm’s personal records! Since almost everything in the future society revolves around your existence in the computer network, being “unpersoned” like this is a terrible blow.

Of course, this complete erasure of John Storm’s identity belies the suggestion that he somehow screwed up the claim registration. A clumsy typist might have erased one record, but it would take money and dedication to pull this off. “Why?” then is the question; even a jackpot mining asteroid would hardly be worth this much effort, including a physical assassination attempt. John must return to the asteroid belt to investigate, and what he finds there could change everything!

To be honest, John’s struggles with the future bureaucracy are more interesting to me than the actual space adventure stuff. Anyone who’s had to deal with a petty official declaring that it must somehow be your mistake that caused their computer system to act unjustly can certainly identify.

John’s fiancee Liz seems to have no goals outside of marrying John whether or not he succeeds (though she would prefer he succeeds), and her offer of help is rejected because space is “too dangerous for a woman.” In our 21st Century, that would get a laugh. She also never learns what actually happened.

There’s an alien involved who looks nothing like the picture on the cover (which is awesomely SF in its own right) and Mr. Silverberg’s fascination with psychic powers shines through. It’s middling-grade but quite readable.

The Twisted Men is actually a collection of three longer stories by A.E. Van Vogt, too long to fit in a regular anthology, but not related enough to turn into a “fix-up” novel.

“The Twisted Men” itself stars Averill Hewitt, a scientist who has discovered that something strange and dangerous is going to happen to the sun in a few years. Apparently he is terrible at explaining his theory, because one person taking his metaphor and saying that said metaphor is not literally possible is enough to put Mr. Hewitt in the Jor-El category. Unlike Jor-El, however, Mr. Hewitt is able to build a full-size spaceship to go to the Proxima Centauri system to look for habitable planets.

He insists that it be staffed by personnel whose wives are pregnant, or can become so; it apparently doesn’t enter his mind that pregnant women might also have space-worthy skills. His own wife refuses to get on board and takes the children with her. This results in some sub-optimal personnel, including several religious fanatics and a captain who wants to marry his ward who doesn’t actually look eighteen. Skeeviness aside, this is the only available captain, so the Hope of Man is launched. Six years later, the ship is detected re-entering the solar system at enormous speed, and not responding to hails.

Naturally, Mr. Hewitt is tapped to try to discover what happened; what he discovers, and the implications, drive the rest of the story. The story is heavy on the speculative science, but not nearly as forward-thinking on the social end. There are some evocative passages as Hewitt explores the ship and struggles to understand what is going on.

“”The Star-Saint” is a planetary colonization story. Leonard Hanley is the leader of a group of colonists who are about to make planetfall only to discover that the previous batch of colonists have vanished, their village completely destroyed. Fortunately (or perhaps not), Mark Rogan has arrived to help out. Rogan is a mutant with strange powers and a detached attitude that drives most other men up the wall. Oddly, women seem to find Rogan extremely attractive. Hanley is unhappy about the help, but it’s not as though he’s got much choice.

Hanley thinks he’s figured out the problem, only to be told by Rogan that he’s actually made things much worse. The situation is finally brought to something of a compromise point–but Hanley suspects this colony will soon have several mutant babies, including his own wife’s/ The treatment of women in this story is frankly kind of creepy, but the fact that it’s told from the perspective of the patriarchal and controlling Hanley means that we don’t know what actually happened.

“The Earth Killers” starts with America being attacked by an unknown party, which wipes out the major cities with atomic bombs. The only surviving witness is Morlake, a test pilot who was trying out an experimental “rockjet” near Chicago when the bombs fell. Unfortunately, the military outpost he manages to land at is run by a fool who has him arrested for treason rather than listen to the truth. Admittedly, the truth is pretty unbelievable–the bombs came from straight up, not in an arc.

It’s months before the remaining Americans can get around to realizing the importance of his testimony–and Morlake is able to uncover the shocking secret behind the war.

This story’s got a nice bite to it, especially since it avoids taking the easy route of making the villains Communists (as was the fashion at the time.)

The creepy treatment of women in the first two stories makes this set hard to recommend–mostly for Van Vogt completists.

[Roddy Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘CAST OF CHARACTERS

John Storm

He had a dream of riches out among the stars, and he knew he had to follow it, even to his own doom.

Liz

She felt his call, even across the depths of space.

UMC

The Universal Mining Cartel was an entity too immense, too impersonal to be any more good or evil than its individual members.

Miss Vyzinski

She had a manner and a smile as coldly mechanical as the machines she worked with.

Jimmy

A records clerk, who liked to supplement his salary with something better.

Clyde Ellins

He did his job, driven by impersonal greed and unhampered by conscience.


John Storm's return to Earth was triumphant: he was about to become a millionaire. Now there was only the routine job of validating his claim to the asteroid he'd found. But there was one problem — the computer had no record of Storm's claim. And stranger yet, the computer had no record of John Storm. He didn't officially exist!
There seemed only one possible explanation to the nightmare Storm found himself in — someone wanted Storm's asteroid. There had to be something on that tiny celestial body worth a great deal more than the reactive ores Storm had discovered. And that something was obviously worth the obliteration of anyone or anything getting in the way.’

Blurb from the F-253 Ace Double paperback edition

If one did not know, it would be difficult to identify this gung-ho macho escapism as the work of SF Grand Master Robert Silverberg, writing under the name Calvin M Knox.
Young John Storm has been offered an engineering job with the stereotypical Big Corporation, UMC (The Universal Mining Cartel) but chooses to take two years off from his work and his girlfriend to go asteroid mining, hoping to strike lucky in the asteroid belt and discover a floating rock laced with rare metals.
Strike lucky he does, discovering a large metal-rich asteroid which will make him wealthy beyond his dreams. He returns to Mars to register his claim, and then to Earth, but finds that not only does his claim not exist on the system but that his own identity has been deleted from the records.
Enraged, he decides to return to Mars and track down whoever is behind the theft of his asteroid.
It’s a simple enough tale, and well-written if a little hastily I suspect. There are echoes of Robert Heinlein here and his juvenile wish-fulfilment pieces. John gets to travel around in his own one-man spaceship challenging the might and authority of UMC (who turn out to be, unsurprisingly, the baddies in this adventure) and ultimately discovering a far greater surprise inside the asteroid he claimed.
Clearly, at this point in his career Silverberg, like Heinlein, didn’t really extrapolate to include social change. Storm is a young man of the American Fifties or early Sixties. Women do not go asteroid mining. They stay home and fret about their manfolk out there in that terrible outer space place. The only other woman who appears in the novel is Miss Vyzinski who works in The Hall of Records and has trouble coping with the concept of records being deleted or falsified.
On Mars there is the quaint concept of a Used Spaceship Salesman since it is cheaper to buy a ship to go prospecting in, and sell it back to the dealer at the end of your mining operation, rather than taking it back to Earth.
In summary, it’s the ‘one man against The Company’ scenario where the litte guy ends up winning (with the help of an unexpected ally in this case) and getting the girl.
As I pointed out, it’s hard to see this as the work of the same author as that of ‘The Book of Skulls’, ‘Dying Inside’ or even ‘The Masks of Time’ from around the same period, although most Silverberg devotees will know of the sea change in his writing just before his best work was produced.

[Yev · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novella really ought to have had a better title as no asteroid goes missing. A more appropriate title would have been "An Unbelievable Claim".

The protagonist is an asteroid prospector and there explicit parallels made to the 1849 California Gold Rush. The first 10% is about the daily life of an asteroid prospector. Just before he's entirely given up all hope, he strikes it rich. He puts in his claim at the Mars office, which has had a colony since 1998.

Thinking that's well and settled, he returns to Earth, only to find that all digital and official proof of his existence has been erased.

[Laura Leilani · Rating 3 out of 5]

One Of Our Asteroids Is Missing was pretty good. Written in the 60's and imagining what the 21st century would be like, that is the most enjoyable part. The protagonist was born in 1992 and after college has decided to take two years off before accepting a job, and spend the time prospecting. You can buy a 1 person space craft for $12,000 and prospect on asteroids. The story is about what he finds and what happens. It's not bad.

The story Twisted Men did not hold my interest.

[SciFiOne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ace Double Novel F253

One of Our Asteroids Is Missing, Calvin Knox (aka R. Silverberg)
1984 Grade C-

Twisted Men, A.E. Van Vogt,
1984 Grade B-

Three separate stories. The first of which was combined with three other stories into the novel Rogue Ship.

[Skjam! · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the Ace Double verion, so my review is over there, or you can see it on my blog, SKJAM! Reviews at http://www.skjam.com/2015/04/22/book-...