Frank Belknap Long's Mission to a Distant Star

Mission to a Distant Star is a short science fiction novel by Frank Belknap Long which appeared in Satellite Science Fiction in February 1958 and was later published in book form.

Frank Belknap Long (1903-1994) was an American writer in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres. He was part of Lovecraft’s circle of friends and correspondents and he contributed to the Cthulhu Mythos.

Mission to a Distant Star is a first contact story and an alien invasion story, although whether it’s a conventional alien invasion story is not at first clear.

The novel is set at some unspecified time in the not-too-distant future. At one point there’s a reference to a battered old 1987 model car. Seven years before the events described in the novel the Scorpions arrived on Earth. The Scorpions are alien but they are very very human-like, in appearance at least. They make a request that they be allowed to stay and to move around freely. They back up their request with a demonstration of their power, by vaporising an uninhabited island. Their request is, not surpisingly, granted.

The Scorpions prove to be friendly and harmless. People learn to take them for granted, and even to like them.

The US Government isn’t entirely convinced and Jim Lawrence is given the job of travelling to his home town, Quarry Hill, in Vermont. There’s a damaged Scorpion spaceship there, which the Scorpions are repairing. An old man wandered too close to the stricken spaceship. Now he’s suffering from a kind of amnesia but he’s also now very happy. He has never been so cheerful and content. The Bureau doesn’t like the sound of that, hence Lawrence’s mission.

The Scorpions have taken in a young human woman named Ruth. They didn’t abduct her. She has joined them entirely voluntarily. Ruth has always been a troubled young woman and the Scorpions tell her that they can help her. They are extremely interested in her. They do not understand why so many humans lack joy in their lives. They want to understand this mystery. As we will later discover they have their reasons for being concerned about this problem.

Whether the Scorpions are benign or malevolent remains in doubt until the end of the story. Eventually the action moves to their home planet and we discover just how strange and disturbing their culture is. We discover that the Scorpions are both very human and very non-human.

This book is more concerned with psychology than with action. In fact there’s virtually no action at all. Up until the ending this is a rather interesting tale. Then we get the ending and that’s where disaster strikes. This novel has possibly the worst ending I have ever encountered in a science fiction story. It’s cringe-inducingly bad. It’s the sort of ending that makes one want to hurl the book across the room.

The ending is so bad that even though there’s a lot to admire in this novel I cannot in all conscience recommend it.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with J.F. Bone’s rather good novella Second Chance in yet another of their excellent two-novel paperback editions. Armchair Fiction are to be congratulated for coming up with so many intriguing and often genuinely excellent obscurities for this series. I’ve bought a stack of these Armchair Fiction editions and Mission to a Distant Star is the first significant disappointment I’ve encountered.