Clinton Constantinescu’s War of the Universe

Clinton Constantinescu’s novel War of the Universe appeared in Amazing Stories Quarterly for Fall of 1931. Constantinescu is a pretty obscure science fiction writer. I believe he was actually a Canadian scientist. This seems to be his only published work of fiction.

It features super-intelligent giant bugs and also birdmen, so that’s two points in its favour.

At some stage in the distant future all the planets in our solar system have formed a kind of loose federation which appears to be stable and amicable. All the planets are inhabited by native life forms and they’re all human-like and intelligent and they have all developed advanced technological civilisations. In 1931 the idea of the other planets in the solar systems being not only habitable but actually inhabited would not have particularly silly or far-fetched. Almost nothing was known about the true nature of the other planets.

And then the solar system comes under attack. Hostile celestial bodies are headed our way. There’s a hurried conference on Mars. The solar system’s top scientists make plans to repel the attack. The narrator of the novel is a scientist from Earth.

It makes sense that this novel was written by a scientist. This is clearly a society in which scientists make all the decisions. There’s not a single character from our solar system who isn’t a scientist. It’s the sort of idea which appealed to a lot of scientists at that time (and appeals to quite a few scientists today). If only we could get rid of all those pesky non-scientists, or teach them to do exactly what scientists tell them to do, utopia would be just around the corner.

Most of the book is occupied by space battles. If you like your space battles on a truly epic scale you’ll have nothing to complain of here. Meteorites, asteroids, comets and even suns are used as weapons.

It’s not a straightforward war. There are multiple advanced civilisations and all of them aim to exterminate all the others. They’re not even very interested in temporary alliances. It has to be said that the civilisation of our own solar system is just as ruthless, being quite prepared to watch other civilisations destroy each other and then jump in to finish off the survivors.

The characters are extraordinarily flat and lifeless. The author seems to be solely interested in civilisations in the abstract, rather than as collections of individuals.

The science is all very silly but it’s imaginative and there’s plenty of enjoyable technobabble. The author even throws in some equations to convince us that this is Real Science! and not just made-up stuff.

The book does have some structural weaknesses. It’s not much more than endless succession of space battles. There is no attempt to explain the motivations of any of the warring civilisations - the assumption seems to be simply that it’s entirely natural for advanced civilisations to try to destroy each until one achieves total galactic domination.

There’s no dramatic tension, no sense that events are moving in a particular direction for some reason. It’s just non-stop space mayhem.

The ending is a rather contrived attempt to wrap things up neatly, and also perhaps to try to find a belated justification for all that butchery.

The book does however have two interesting alien races. There are the intelligent birds, who had once possessed an advanced civilisation of their own. The birds are friendly and they’re on the side of the good guys (insofar as there any good guys in this tale). The second alien species - giant hyper-intelligent spiders. They’re highly advanced and they’re aggressive and malevolent although the narrator has to admit grudgingly that they’re brave and determined.

There’s no way I’d recommend the purchase of this novel on its own but those fine people at Armchair Fiction have re-issued it in a two-novel paperback edition paired with Otis Adelbert Kline’s Lord of the Lamia. It’s worth buying the paperback for Lord of the Lamia (which is excellent) so if you think of War of the Universe as a kind of bonus novel then by all means give it a read. You might get some amusement out of it, especially if you crave space battles on a truly grand scale.