Gerald Vance’s Too Many Worlds

Gerald Vance’s Too Many Worlds was published in Amazing Stories in December 1952. Except that there was no such person as Gerald Vance. It was a Ziff-Davis Publishing house name used by lots of writers. Nobody is sure of the identity of the author of this book although Berkeley Livingston has been suggested. It does have a very similar feel to Livingston’s Queen of the Panther World, and it has the same flaws which we’ll get to later.

It begins with married couple Roger and Lydia Sherman inviting their friend Wayne to joining them on an adventure. It will be quite an adventure - a journey to another dimension or a parallel universe. Roger and Lydia are not quite sure which it is. They’ve invented a machine that can take them to strange new worlds but they themselves don’t understand the science behind the invention. Wayne thinks it sounds silly but he goes along anyway.

A nice touch is that the inter-dimensional travel machine is just the Shermans’ living room. They have made some high-tech alterations to it but it still just looks like a living room.

The three end up on a planet of giants and endless wars. It’s an Earth-like planet but it’s definitely not Earth and the inhabitants are fairly human-like but definitely not quite human.

There are several tribes and they fight these wars because that’s what they’ve always done. Naturally our travellers from Earth are caught in the middle. One tribe is particularly aggressive and is led by a man who is clearly mad and evil. There’s also a High Priest, who is more ambigous.

Roger and Lydia are of course captured and threatened with dire fates. Lydia has her clothes torn off so she has a fair idea of the fate in store for her.

Our Earth travellers do form an alliance with that seems to be the most friendly tribe. And they encounter a beautiful queen. Not a beautiful evil queen. She’s a beautiful noble virtuous queen. Wayne takes quite a shine to her, and the queen thinks Wayne is quite a man.

It all leads up to an epic climactic battle.

Another problem facing our earthly trio is that there is a time factor involved if they hope to return to Earth.

Armchair Fiction have made a huge number of pulp science fiction novels available to modern readers and a very high proportion of them really are either neglected gems or at the least very very good stories. Others however are merely routine.

Too Many Worlds falls into the routine class. The characters are just standard stock types. The setup has been used by other writers and used with much more style and flair. The world-building is unimaginative. This other dimension is simply Earth with taller people with bluish-tinted skin, plus six-legged horses. This world does not feel truly alien and its inhabitants do not feel truly alien. A major weakness is that the queen seems totally human and of normal stature for a human woman but the reason for this is never explained (except that she is intended as the love interest for the hero).

It’s not a terrible book. There’s some reasonable action. It has a certain amount of energy. It just doesn’t have anything that is likely to grab the reader’s attention. It’s competent by-the-numbers stuff. It’s interesting mostly as an example of lesser pulp science fiction which serves to illustrate the difference between inspired pulp writing and routine pulp writing. It’s hard to recommend this one.

Armchair Fiction have paired this short novel with Charles Eric Maine’s novel Wall of Fire (which I have not yet read) in a two-novel paperback edition.

Some Armchair Fiction science fiction pulp reprints that I do highly recommend include Paul W. Fairman’s The Girl Who Loved Death, Henry Kuttner’s Crypt-City of the Deathless One, Into the Fourth Dimension by Ray Cummings, Lester Del Rey’s Pursuit, J.F. Bone's Second Chance and Emmett McDowell's Citadel of the Green Death.