John Wyndham’s Planet Plane, or Stowaway To Mars

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Book #23 of 2024

As long as I can remember, I’ve been a completist. If I find a musical artist I like I have to hear all of their albums – which, thankfully, is not so hard to do in this age of streaming services. If I find an author I like, I have to read all of his or her books, whether they’re all good or not. It’s a blessing and a curse – a blessing when the author is as wonderful as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, or Charles Portis. A curse when they are as inconsistent as Iris Murdoch or Frank Herbert.

Anyway, a novel I’ve enjoyed a lot is John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, and when Delphi Classics made all of his works available in ebook format, I jumped at the chance to read them. His first effort, The Secret People, is a not very good tale of a race of humans who live below the surface of the earth and enslave anyone who stumbles upon their world. His second, Foul Play Suspected, I reviewed in an earlier post. It is better than The Secret People, but still far from a classic. His third attempt, Planet Plane, is a marked improvement over the previous two. It was published in serial form as Stowaway to Mars in 1936, under the pseudonym John Beynon. Later that year it was published in book form.

It is set in the far future of 1981(!), where Dale Curtance, daredevil and millionaire manufacturer of the Gyrocurt – an affordable flying car – has decided to go for the Keuntz Prize: five million dollars to the first person who can make it to a planet and back safely. He gathers together a team of four men in addition to himself: the young co-pilot Geoffrey Dugan, the irascible engineer James Burns, the older and milder Doc Grayson, and journalist and gadfly Froud. Soon after they take off for Mars in Curtance’s custom-made rocket, the Gloria Mundi, they discover there is a stowaway, a young woman named Joan Shirning.

She has snuck aboard, because she and her father had made contact with some sort of alien machine that seemed to be sentient. Her father spent months studying it and came to the conclusion that it must be Martian. When he finally decided to go public with his discovery, it dissolved into a puddle of liquid metal. Everyone mocked and rdiculed him, so Joan took it upon herself to restore his good name by proving that Mars is populated by machines.

So far, so good, if formulaic. What makes Planet Plane interesting are the first stirrings of Wyndham’s dystopian vision. There are several lengthy conversations about technology and humanity’s uneasy relationship to it. Do machines serve humanity’s needs, or does mankind adapt itself to technology’s demands?

Women are creators; The Machine is a creator; in that they are rivals. They are afraid of it, too. What is it they fear subconsciously? Is it that man may one day use The Machine to create life? To usurp their prerogative? (p. 100, Delphi Classics Kindle edition)

When Curtance and his team land on Mars, they soon run into machines similar to the one Joan and her father encountered back on Earth. These, however, are misshapen and hostile. As they prevent the Earthlings from returning to the Gloria Mundi, Joan is kidnapped (or rescued?) by a machine who takes her to an ancient Martian city. Joan meets a Martian, Vaygan, one of the last of his dying race. He explains that for his civilization, machines are simply the next evolutionary step:

Our minds will not die yet. The machines are as truly children of our minds as you are the child of your mother’s body. They are the next step in evolution, we hand over to them. (p. 153)

Planet Plane ends up taking some unexpected twists and turns, and it is a lot of fun. Wyndham’s next novel, The Day of the Triffids, is a bonafide classic, and one can see how Planet Plane sets up some of his overarching themes: what makes civilization possible, and how durable is it? While reading Wyndham’s first novels, I have enjoyed seeing him develop into a mature writer with a distinctive style. That said, they certainly aren’t essential. For someone curious about his work, I would recommend starting with The Day of the Triffids, and if you like that one, continue with The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos, and Chocky. Those titles are all deservedly considered sci-fi/speculative fiction classics.