The
Viagens Interplanetarias series is a
sequence of
science fiction stories
by
L. Sprague de Camp, begun in the late 1940s
and written under the influence of contemporary
space opera and
sword and planet stories, particularly
Edgar Rice Burroughs's
Martian novels. Set in the future in the
twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, the series is named for
the quasi-public Terran agency portrayed as monopolizing
interstellar travel, the Brazilian-dominated
Viagens
Interplanetarias ("Interplanetary Voyages" or "Interplanetary
Tours" in Portuguese). It is also known as the
Krishna
series, as the majority of the stories belong to a sequence set on
a fictional planet of that name. While de Camp started out as a
science fiction writer and his early reputation was based on his
short stories in the genre, the
Viagens tales represent
his only extended science fiction series.
The
Viagens stories were written in two phases; the first,
written between 1948 and 1953 and published between 1949 and 1958,
was a burst of activity that produced the first four Krishna novels
and most of the non-Krishna pieces, including all the short
stories. The second, produced at a more deliberate pace from
1977-1992, comprised the remaining four Krishna novels and the two
novels of the Kukulkan sequence. The early works established the
setting of a cosmopolitan future interstellar civilization
comprising both Terrans and a handful of other space-faring races
who trade and squabble with each other while attempting to maintain
a benign stewardship of the more primitive planetary societies with
which they come into contact. The later works assumed but largely
ignored this background, concentrating exclusively on the
adventures of Terrans on the alien worlds of Krishna and
Kukulkan.
The setting
The
Viagens universe is no mere picturesque backdrop for
exploits of dazzling heroism, like those of de Camp's predecessors
Edgar Rice Burroughs and
E. E. "Doc" Smith, nor is it a carefully constructed and
recounted future history like those of contemporaries
Robert A. Heinlein,
Isaac
Asimov and
Poul Anderson; rather,
it is a fully imagined and realized future setting in which his
protagonists, both ordinary and extraordinary, go about their lives
and adventures. Most of the stories take place in the twenty-second
century, after an initial period of exploration and diplomacy
establishing the ground rules for interstellar commerce and
contact, but before the higher civilization of the space-faring
cultures has completely transformed those of the more primitive,
planet-bound races. Given de Camp's view of even the most
intelligent of beings as subject to the dictates of their
instincts, emotions and self-interest, the
Viagens
universe represents a workable but decidedly imperfect
future.
Just as de Camp attempted to do in the
fantasy genre with his
Pusadian stories for the
Hyborian Age tales of
Robert E. Howard, the
Viagens tales
represent both a tribute to contemporary space opera and sword and
planet fiction and an attempt to "get them right", reconstructing
the premises logically, without what he regarded as their
technological, biological and anthropological absurdities. Thus he
discarded such impossible but commonplace notions such as
interfertility of human beings with humanoid alien races,
civilizations possessing flying machines but no ground transport,
bladed weapons and advanced gunnery coexisting in the same society,
and faster than light travel.
De Camp did, however, underestimate the staggering impediments to
even sub-light interstellar travel, assuming it would both be
achieved quickly and soon develop into a relatively routine and
comfortable system of commerce and travel linking nearby
star-systems, much as sailing ships linked the early modern nations
of Earth. He also assumed the parallel and convergent evolution of
life on other worlds into types of higher multicellular lifeforms
similar to those of Earth, and the ubiquity of intelligent life;
thus his alien planets have both animal and plant life, with at
least one species of animal life usually having achieved
intelligence, and these alien intelligent species are in the main
recognizably mammalian or reptilian.
There are definite story implications to the constraints adopted.
An Earthman may fall in love with and wed an alien princess like
Burroughs'
John Carter of Mars
does, but unlike Carter will never be able to found a dynasty. Nor
will he be able to flit from Earth to the stars and back; an
interstellar voyage takes months of subjective time and many years
in objective time, rendering any decision to leave his own stellar
system a difficult one, fraught with the consequences of being cut
off from his friends, family and native culture for decades, during
which they will age or develop much more than he will himself. De
Camp somewhat mitigates the problem by postulating the development
of longevity treatments that extend human lifespans to two
centuries. Nonetheless, the effect is that space travel primarily
attracts marginal and unattached members of society such as
adventurers, entrepreneurs, con-men, utopian idealists, emigrants,
and various admixtures thereof – or official representatives such
as explorers, diplomats, and bureaucrats. Sterling, selfless heroes
tend to be in short supply.
The relative isolation of each star system from the others
effectively precludes interstellar warfare, and the practical
limitation of even extended lifespans limits the area of effective
routine contact to nearby systems. Within this region an
Interplanetary Council regulates relations between the various
civilizations.
Star systems and planets
The main planets hosting intelligent life and their stars are
Earth and
Mars (
Sol),
Osiris,
Isis and
Thoth (
Procyon),
Krishna and
Vishnu (
Tau Ceti),
Ormazd (
Lalande 21185), and
Kukulkan
(
Epsilon Eridani). These are the
Terran designations; the local ones are rarely revealed. All are
named for Terran gods because de Camp assumes that Terrans will
have carried their penchant for naming planets after deities to
other star systems, with each planetary system being named for a
different pantheon – Egyptian for Procyon, Hindu for Tau Ceti,
Persian for Lalande 21185, and Mesoamerican for Epsilon Eridani.
(There is some confusion regarding the last of these; in addition
to Kukulkan, another planet,
Thor, is also stated
to be a planet of Epsilon Eridani, though Thor belongs to a
different pantheon from Kukulkan.) Some other planets are also
occasionally mentioned in the series, and their inhabitants
sometimes seen.
Terrans and the dinosaur-like natives of the planet Osiris are the
main space-faring peoples; a third, the small, furry and bisexual
natives of Thoth, a neighboring planet to Osiris, is dependent on
Osirian technology. Pre-technological races include the humanoid
inhabitants of Krishna and Ormazd, the ape-like and centaur-like
inhabitants of Vishnu, and the multi-legged inhabitants of Thor.
The dinosauroids of Kukulkan have steam-based technology.
Earth is overpopulated and
governed by a World Federation in which Brazil
has
become the paramount great power, and Terran space travel is
monopolized by the Brazilian-dominated Viagens
Interplanetarias agency. Terrans have colonized Thor
and Kukulkan, straining relations with the native inhabitants, and
are responsible for maintaining a technological embargo against the
primitive planets of Krishna and Vishnu in the Tau Ceti
system.
Isis is inhabited by a trunked and multi-legged
species described as resembling a cross between an elephant and a
dachshund. Isidians are only occasionally encountered in the
series.
Krishna, the setting for most of the stories, is a
world similar to Earth, though its humanoid natives tend to be more
impulsive and volatile. Their planet is drier than Earth, having no
ocean or continents as such, but rather a worldwide landmass dotted
with numerous seas and lakes. As a result, much of its area is
composed of broad desert and steppe regions inhabited by nomads who
periodically overwhelm and destroy the civilizations of the
better-watered and more settled regions. Thus Krishnan
civilization, while older than that of Earth by tens of thousands
of years, has never progressed to a technological stage, having
been forced to continually rebuild itself in the wake of repeated
disasters. In the region of the
Triple Seas, the
planet's largest drainage area and the setting of all the Krishna
stories, the most recent disaster occurred over a thousand years
prior to the contact era, when the
Kalwmian Empire
was destroyed and partially overrun by the
Varastou people. At the time of the stories the
Varastou nations themselves are similarly threatened by the nomads
of
Qaath. The presence of the Terrans with their
superior technology complicates the situation, Despite the
much-resented technological blockade, the local nations are
beginning to develop their own technology after the Terran example,
even as Terran culture undermines its customs and institutions. For
instance, a railway network is slowly spreading around the Triple
Seas, though the trains are pulled by elephantine local beasts
rather than powered engines. The premier example of Krishnan
adaptation is the island nation of
Sotaspé, whose
prince has established a patent system to encourage
innovation.
Kukulkan is resource-poor, which along with the
innate conservatism of its dinosauroid inhabitants inhibits its
venerably ancient civilization from developing technologically. The
natives do make limited use of steam power.
Mars is a dry world with a thin atmosphere whose
inhabitants, described as short and insect-like, are mentioned but
not seen in the stories.
Ormazd is a world whose humanoid natives' unique
biological traits have encouraged the development of hive societies
similar to those of the social insects of Earth. Each is centered
around a single ruling queen who alone can bear young, with a
handful of males forming her harem and a host of sterile workers
who make up the bulk of the population and perform all other
societal roles. Contact with Terrans disrupts this system and leads
to its overthrow.
Osiris is an arid world whose dinosauroid
inhabitants are characterized as both sentimental and rapaciously
capitalistic; they are also possessed of mind-controlling powers,
generally referred to as "telepathic pseudohypnosis," against which
other intelligent species must take special precautions.
Thoth, in the same star system as Osiris, is a wet
planet whose natives are amoral and anarchic.
Vishnu, in the same star system as Krishna, is
lush, tropical, and populated by two different intelligent species,
both barbaric primitives in culture; the ape-like
Romeli
and the centaur-like
Dzlieri.
The stories
The
Viagens tales have never been published together as a
complete set. The shorter pieces were initially published in
several science fiction magazines in the late 1940s and early
1950s, and first appeared in book form in the 1953 collections
The
Continent Makers and Other Tales of the Viagens and
Sprague de
Camp's New Anthology of Science Fiction (which also
includes non-
Viagens stories). The novels were issued at
various times by various publishers;
Ace
Books brought out a standard edition of the first five
Krishna novels in the early 1980s, later adding the sixth
and seventh; the eighth was never part of this edition, appearing
later from a different publisher.
Short stories
De Camp's early short stories in the
Viagens setting
establish the background, provide some hints of his future's back
history, and give glimpses of the routine of interstellar space
travel, typical characters engaging in it, and some of the
intelligent alien races, and the worlds they inhabit. Individual
stories are set on spaceships traveling between planets and
individual planets such as Earth, Krishna, Vishnu and Osiris.
Longer works
The longer tales are all adventures taking place on the planets
themselves, with few passages set aboard spacecraft. They consist
of a few stand-alone stories and two sequences of novels set on the
planets Krishna and Kukulkan.
Stand-alone works
"The Continent
Makers" (1951 novella), in which geophysicist
Gordon Graham helps defeat a Thothian conspiracy
to plant a colony on Earth, has the most extended vision of de
Camp's future Earth and its dominant power, Brazil. The presence of
two Krishnan expatriates serves to tie the story in to the Krishna
sequence.
Rogue Queen
(1951) tells of the second contact of the interstellar civilization
with the newly-discovered planet Ormazd from the point of view of
native humanoid
Iroedh, showing how her hive
society is inadvertently but inevitably undermined and transformed
by the advent of the Terrans. This, de Camp's most influential
Viagens novel, was one of the earliest science fiction
novels to deal with sexual themes.
The Krishna novels
The seven novels and two novellas of the Krishna sequence follow
various Earthmen and occasional other aliens in their encounters
with the pretechnical local culture, in which their pursuit of
their own often petty ends tend to have ramifications ranging from
minor to history-changing on a society struggling to adapt to the
more advanced civilization. The novels were written in two phases,
the first four in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the last four
from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. The earlier series
features different protagonists, and are unified primarily by their
common setting and a number of recurring secondary characters,
generally
Viagens officials based at the Terran spaceport
of Novorecife, but also a few important native Krishans. The later
Krishna novels, some of which de Camp wrote in collaboration with
his wife
Catherine Crook de
Camp, are interwoven with the earlier sequence chronologically.
They concentrate primarily on two recurring protagonists, Terran
tour guide Fergus Reith and his on-again, off-again lover,
anthropologist Alicia Dyckman, usually relegating both major and
minor returning characters from the previous sequence to secondary
roles.
It will be noticed that the titles of all of de Camp's Krishna
novels and one of the novellas have a "Z" in them, a practice he
claimed to have devised to keep track of them. He did not follow
the practice for short stories set on Krishna.
"Perpetual
Motion" (1950 novella) unveils the scheme of con-man
Felix Borel to bilk the knight-rulers of a
Krishnan republic by means of a rigged lottery and a phony
perpetual motion machine.
The Queen of
Zamba (1949) tells of how Canadian private
investigator
Victor Hasselborg disrupts English
adventurer
Anthony Fallon's scheme to break
Earth's technological blockade and unite the backward kingdoms of
Krishna into a single empire.
The Hand of
Zei (1950) shows the adventures of copy-writer
Dirk Barneveldt, would-be rescuer of a kidnapped
explorer, as he finds he must clean out a nest of pirates, break up
a drug trade that threatens Earth, and overthrow a matriarchy in
order to achieve his goal.
The Hostage of
Zir (1977) introduces tour guide
Fergus
Reith as an inexperienced, misfortune-plagued tyro leading
his first tour of Krishna and inadvertently becoming entangled in
Krishnan politics, first in a power-struggle between the bandit
ruler and the religious leader of the restive province of Zir and
afterwards in the machinations of the devious regent of the kingdom
of Dur.
The Prisoner of
Zhamanak (1982) relates the quest of Terran
consul
Percy Mjipa (first introduced in previously
published but chronologically later
The Tower of Zanid) to
free the trouble-prone
Alicia Dyckman from
captivity in the hostile native kingdom of Zhamanak; Dyckman meets
and becomes involved with Reith at the end of the story.
"The Virgin of
Zesh" (1953 novella) follows the flight of missionary
Althea Merrick from an unwanted marriage to a
colony of utopian expatriates, where she becomes embroiled in the
affairs of some peculiarly intelligent aborigines.
The Bones of
Zora (1983) reunites
Fergus
Reith and
Alicia Dyckman, divorced after
a disastrous marriage, as they find themselves assisting rival
palaeontologists attempting to prove competing theories regarding
the evolutionary past of Krishna.
The Tower of
Zanid (1958) returns the spotlight to
Anthony Fallon as he investigates the
disappearance of a number of Terran scientists, helps an
archaeologist penetrate the secrets of an ancient temple, and
juggles dual roles as a member of the local civic guard and spy for
the enemy horde of Qaathian nomads, all the while scheming to
recover his lost throne. The book is notable for its favorable
portrayal of an African character, omnicompetent Terran consul
Percy Mjipa, at a time when most science fiction
still depicted such characters rarely and stereotypically.
The Swords of
Zinjaban (1991) again reunites
Fergus
Reith and
Alicia Dyckman as liaisons for
a Terran company hoping to film the first movie on the planet,
first as guides helping the advance party scout locations, and then
as advisers to the actual production. Complications turn up in the
form of several of Reith's old flames and an invasion of the
nomadic hordes of Qaath.
The Kukulkan novels
Like the Krishna novels, the two books of the late Kukulkan
sequence focus on the adventures of Terrans on a relatively
primitive alien world, in this instance a somewhat more advanced
planet ruled by a species of dinosaur-like creatures superficially
similar to the Osirians. Earth has colonies on Kukulkan, leading to
inevitable friction with the native inhabitants, and the
protagonists must deal with threats from both cultures.
The Stones of
Nomuru (1988) pits archaeologist
Keith
Salazar in defence of his dig against both the development
plans of an avaricious fellow colonist and invasion by a
Kukulkanian warlord.
The Venom Trees of
Sunga (1992), set a generation later, follows
Keith's son, biologist
Kirk Salazar as he studies
a local species and seeks to protect its habitat amid a struggle
between a logging magnate and Terran cultists.
Importance in the history of science fiction
The
Viagens series is notable in the development of
American science fiction of the 1950s for bringing a more realistic
attitude to bear on some of the less credible features then
commonplace to the genre, reimagining them in terms of the
possible. It also leavened the hero-worship, sexism, prudery,
ethnocentricity and nationalism then characteristic of the genre
with a more skeptical view of human nature, strong characters of
both genders for whom sex was a normal aspect of life, and an
ethnically varied, international cast. De Camp's work helped
prepare the field for the works of later, more iconoclastic
writers, to the degree that when he returned to the series in the
1970s his own innovations had themselves come to appear routine and
commonplace.
Bibliography
The stories
- Krishna
- Earth
- Osiris
- Vishnu
- Ormazd
- Kukulkan
Collected editions
About the series
- GURPS Planet Krishna, by James Cambias; edited by Sean
Barrett. ISBN 1-55634-263-2
References
- De Camp, L. Sprague. " The Krishna Stories" (Essay, in New
Frontiers, v. 1, no. 1, Dec. 1959, pages 3–6; later versions
appear in both the Cambias book and de Camp's The Prisoner of
Zhamanak.)
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