Gunner Cade by Cyril Judd

[Anthony G Williams]

Cyril Judd is a pseudonym for Cyril M. Kornbluth and Judith Merril who collaborated over two novels, both published in book form in 1952: Outpost Mars and Gunner Cade. I have owned a copy of the second of these since the late 1960s so thought it might be worth seeing if the story still stood up today.

On a far-future Earth, Gunner Cade is an Armsman; a cadre of professional soldiers highly trained from childhood, living ascetic and celibate lives completely detached from those of the Commoners. They are in the service of the aristocratic Starborn, who are constantly fighting each other, but swear allegiance to the Emperor who rules the planet – and Mars, colonised long before. This situation has lasted for 10,000 years, which was officially the date that the world and everything in it was created. There is no concept of evolution or change – everything must always stay exactly as it is and has always been.

Cade's rock-solid belief in the rightness of all of this begins to be shaken when he falls among Commoners who are planning rebellion, and he is unwillingly forced on a journey of discovery that steadily erodes his faith. Almost everyone he meets seems to want either to use him or kill him, but it should surprise no readers that he works out a satisfactory solution in the end.

While people can draw various lessons from this tale, it is more than a didactic thriller. The observations are laced with humour, and I especially enjoyed the official "Klin philosophy", based on an ancient book whose text is solemnly interpreted by Klin teachers to support the status quo – but we can understand that Klin was a cynic who usually meant something very different.

At almost 200 pages Gunner Cade is fairly long for the period in which it is written, but it's still a quick page-turner. It benefits from a relatively strong characterisation, at least as far as Cade is concerned – the viewpoint character throughout, whom the reader comes to understand and empathise with as he is gradually changed by his experiences. The only jarring note to modern sensibilities was the statement that the atmosphere of Mars, although thin, was breathable. Well worth reading again.

(An extract from my SFF blog: Science Fiction & Fantasy)

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

I read this one a couple of years ago. My thoughts at the time (and on the companion novel it was published with):

Gunner Cade by "Cyril Judd" (C. M. Kornbluth and Judith Merrill) and Takeoff by C. M. Kornbluth.

These two short SF novels from 1952 were bound together into one 1980's paperback, probably because you can't publish short novels anymore. For economic reasons, it seems that most books have to be thick nowadays. The new publisher treated Takeoff as an afterthought; the title of the other novel appears in big letters at the top, with a small note at the bottom reading "and Takeoff by C. M. Kornbluth."

In any case, the two books are quite different. Gunner Cade is set many thousands of years in the future, when Earth is ruled by an Emperor with warring "Stars" serving under him. The title character is a "Gunner" -- an elite soldier in these endless small scale wars. The story follows a familiar pattern for SF of the period. Cade accepts the world in which he lives without questioning that it could ever have been different. After a series of adventures, he learns about the secret flaws in his society, and how it all came about.

Takeoff is set in what was in 1952 the very near future and deals with a group of "rocket nuts" who are building a full-scale model of a spaceship way out in the desert. The protagonist is a ceramics engineer who winds up working for the group. The novel veers into the mystery/suspense genre when one of the scientists working for the group is murdered, and government agents become involved. The protagonist tries to figure out who is supplying the group with all its money, and what's really behind their model-building. The author went to a great deal of trouble to describe the incredible difficulties involved in building a workable spaceship, and this is the most interesting thing about the novel.