#178 The new Argonauts: West of the Sun (1953) by Edgar Pangborn

A transitional 1950s novel of colonisation

I'm somewhat sympathetic to Robert Silverberg's suggestion that the 1950s were the real "golden age of science fiction". In any case, that decade is notable for its fascinatingly transitional works, as SF shifted from the sometimes naive adventurism of the 1930s and 1940s, towards the more contemplative uncertainties of the 1960s and 1970s.

Originally published in 1953, West of the Sun is a good example of this transition. The debut SF novel by Edgar Pangborn, it is a colonisation novel of an intriguingly unusual type.

For more classic SF reviews and discussion, visit andyjohnson.xyz. To get free weekly classic SF updates, sign up here.

Transcript

Upon crash-landing on a distant planet, six humans change and are changed by the alien societies they encounter in West of the Sun. Published in 1953, this is the first science fiction novel by Edgar Pangborn (1909 - 1976), better known for his World Fantasy Award-winning A Mirror for Observers (1954) and the post-apocalyptic Davy (1964), which Joachim Boaz has described as a masterpiece.

In 1953 Pangborn was no neophyte; he was 44 years old and had published his first novel, the mystery A-100, way back in 1930. His sudden emergence into the SF world came in 1951, with the story “Angel’s Egg”. West of the Sun employs a familiar set up, of humans finding themselves stranded on an alien world and encountering intelligent life there. However Pangborn’s treatment of this plot is unusually mature, reflective, and melancholy.

One of Pangborn’s characters states what could be the novel’s central thesis: “humans are neither good nor bad [...] but they can tip the balance.” The castaway crew of the Earth starship have profound effects on the communities they encounter, and are changed irrevocably in turn. This little-known novel of the early 1950s stands some comparison with later works, especially in terms of its depiction of gender, survival, and war.

The new Argo

The novel opens aboard the starship Argo, which has arrived in the Alpha Centauri star system. The vessel’s captain, Jensen, has died during the journey and the six surviving crew members decide to make a landing on an Earthlike planet which they later dub “Lucifer”. The landing is a fiasco. The Argo crash-lands into a large, deep lake, rendering it and its contents unsalvageable. The crew make planetfall in two smaller craft, and begin to explore Lucifer.

Thankfully for the humans, the planet is broadly hospitable. Its gravity, temperature, and atmospheric oxygen content are slightly higher than Earth, and its day is rather longer. While the open plains are the hunting ground for large, batlike flying predators, the extensive forests are safer. Most strikingly, the Argonauts encounter not one but two intelligent humanoid species. Their relationships with these species are the crux of the novel. 

First, the crew meet Mijok, part of a race of imposing, hairy “giants” with a nomadic culture. Next, they encounter the diminutive, copper-skinned "pygmies", who have a more settled, tribal civilisation that recalls neolithic humanity. The pygmies are matriarchal, warlike, and practice both slavery and cannibalism. After some tense early encounters, the humans are able to establish friendly relations with both peoples. Then a new threat emerges - Lantis, a rival pygmy war-leader at the head of an empire, who calls herself “Queen of the World” and is bent on violent conquest.

War for the forest

To an extent, West of the Sun is a standard treatment of a familiar plot. The crew of the Argo are a plucky, determined lot. Wright, Sears, Spearman, Mason, Dorothy, and Ann seem all but immune to fear and despair, and proceed confidently with their “civilising mission”. For a time, Lucifer seems amenable to them, especially in its favourable Earthlike qualities. Both intelligent alien species have a very fortunate facility for quickly learning English. In a number of ways, though, Pangborn complicates this scenario.

The pygmies, for example, have some cultural practices which the humans find abhorrent but are forced to put up with, at least for a time. While the first group they encounter, led by Pakriaa, are open to changing their ways, the sprawling empire of Lantis is definitely not. This forces the Argo survivors into a war for which they are ill-equipped and under-prepared. Other writers, especially in earlier decades, may have had the humans whip Pakriaa’s people into a formidable fighting force, able to win a stirring victory over tyranny. Things are not so easy in West of the Sun, and this complexity is a real strength.

Pangborn’s prose has the confidence and maturity of a writer who had published his first novel over 20 years earlier. There are issues, however - the biggest is the lack of differentiation between the four main male characters. Their roles and personalities are very difficult to distinguish, particularly in the novel’s first half. At the end of the novel there is an awkward exposition dump about the state of affairs on Earth, which indulges some rather crude anti-communist sentiment, which was par for the course at the height of McCarthyism.

New ways of life

The context of 1953 also feeds into the social dynamics of the novel, but again there are intriguing complications. Pangborn - whose other work has been said to invite queer readings - explores gender dynamics within West of the Sun. Within the human group, the men hold the decision-making power, only partly because they are all older than the two women. In some ways, Dorothy occupies a very old-fashioned, conventionally feminine role. She is a home-maker, eager to have children and start a new generation on Lucifer. However, it is also striking that she is a woman of colour in a major role in a novel of 1953.

Ann is a progressive presence in her own way. She shuns stereotypically female roles, and prides herself on her skill with a gun and her knack for exploration. However, her independent-minded nature does not necessarily work out favourably for her. The matriarchy of the so-called “pygmies” is also notable. The human characters seldom challenge Pakriaa’s leadership of her people, and only gently - and successfully - discourage her more cruel practices.

New Eden?

Survival is a fertile theme in West of the Sun. The Argonauts quickly find that in some ways, Lucifer is close to a new Eden. Their immediate needs are met. Soon after making planetfall, they all experience a brief illness, their emergence from which is a clear symbolic rebirth into a new world. Crucially, the humans dream of and begin to build a new kind of society on Lucifer, in which humans, “pygmies”, and “giants” live together harmoniously and communally. 

However, Pangborn elides some surely obvious problems with this dream. Most importantly, the humans surely have only a tiny fraction of the minimum viable population to avoid catastrophic inbreeding. In this and other senses, West of the Sun is the kind of SF story that Joanna Russ ruthlessly targeted in her short novel We Who Are About To…, published in the year Pangborn died (1976). That intensely gloomy work condemns as hopelessly naive the idea that a small human group could colonise an alien world. The role that Dorothy chooses to pursue - as the mother of a new generation - Russ sees as intolerably oppressive.

West of the Sun is a strong example of the 1950s as a transitional period in American SF. Its basic plot would have been treated very differently had the novel been written in, say, the 1930s - and it would have been different again had it been written in the 1970s. Here, Pangborn crafted a novel with an anthropological and humanist focus which is at the same time both dated, and ahead of its time.