The Resurrected Man

By E.C. Tubb

From the author of "Lucifer," now adapted into the film "57 Seconds" starring Josh Hutcherson and Morgan Freeman —

Captain Baron, space pilot, is forced to abandon his ship, waiting for a rescue that does not come. Eventually he dies in space, his body frozen and perfectly preserved. Five years later, he is found, and two doctors, Le Maitre and Whitney, restore him to life using an experimental surgical technique.

Returning to Earth, Baron finds that he has been declared legally dead, his commission rescinded, and all his possessions reverted to the State. His only asset is the novelty and notoriety of being a Resurrected Man, and when this is ruthlessly exploited by others, he commits murder and becomes a fugitive from the police. Inspector McMillan enlists the help of Dr. Whitney to track him down, but their task is complicated by the fact that Baron is no longer quite human...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bold Venture Press
• Release date: Dec 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005934026

E.C. Tubb

The author of "Lucifer" — the inspiration for the film "57 Seconds" starring Josh Hutcherson and Morgan Freeman — is best-known for his long-running "Dumarest of Terra" series, featuring a hapless, wandering protagonist searching for his home, the third planet from the sun. His is also known for his adaptations of the "Space 1999" TV-series, and his “Cap Kennedy” novels (writing as Gregory Kern.)In a sixty-year writing career he published over 120 novels, and 200 science fiction short stories in such magazines as Astounding/Analog, Authentic, Galaxy, Nebula, New Worlds, Science Fantasy, and Vision of Tomorrow.His first science fiction short story was published in New Worlds in 1951, and his first novel quickly followed the same year. His earliest novels were written under several pseudonyms (most notably Charles Grey) and were exciting adventure stories, written in the prevailing fashion of the early 1950s. Yet from his very first novel, his work was characterized by a sense of plausibility, logic, and human insight. These qualities were especially evident in his short stories, which were frequently anthologized, most notably by Judith Merrill and Don Wollheim in their World’s Best SF annual compilations. In 1970, Tubb was Guest of Honour at the 28th World Science Fiction Convention in Heidelberg, West Germany.‘Lucifer!’ received a Special Award for Best Short Story at the first Eurocon in 1972. The motion picture 57 Seconds, based upon "Lucifer," debuts in theaters in 2023 from Curmudgeon Films.His output included historical adventure, detective, and westerns, but he remained best known for his numerous science fiction novels, of which Alien Dust (1955) and The Space Born (1956) were acknowledged classics.Tubb continued to write dynamic new science fiction novels right up to his death; his final novel, "Fires of Satan," was published by Gollancz in 2013. New editions of his novels and collections of his best short stories continue to be published posthumously, and all of his books have remained constantly in print.

Book preview

THE RESURRECTED MAN

Captain Baron, space pilot, is forced to abandon his ship, waiting for a rescue that does not come. Eventually he dies in space, his body frozen and perfectly preserved. Five years later, he is found, and two doctors, Le Maitre and Whitney, restore him to life using an experimental surgical technique.

Returning to Earth, Baron finds that he has been declared legally dead, his commission rescinded, and all his possessions reverted to the State. His only asset is the novelty and notoriety of being a Resurrected Man, and when this is ruthlessly exploited by others, he commits murder and becomes a fugitive from the police. Inspector McMillan enlists the help of Dr. Whitney to track him down, but their task is complicated by the fact that Baron is no longer quite human…

THE RESURRECTED MAN

E. C. TUBB

Produced under license from

Cosmos Literary Agency

Bold Venture Press

Copyright © 1954 by E. C. Tubb;

Introduction © 2020 by Philip Harbottle

Introduction by Philip Harbottle

Introduction by Philip Harbottle

The Resurrected Man was originally published in 1954, and has the fascinating premise: what might happen if a man were to die in outer space, only to be later revived and brought back to life?

It is a minor classic of the pulp genre but, like much of Tubb’s early work, it transcends the limitations of many of his pulp contemporaries. In this novel, Tubb was rapidly developing his own distinctive style.

The theme of a man being brought back from the dead is one of the oldest and most powerful ideas in imaginative fiction. It had its origins in the Gothic fiction of the early nineteenth century, combining elements from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1827) with its laboratory-engendered reanimation of a composite body made up from the flesh of several corpses, with such tales as Balzac’s Elixir of Life (1830) wherein a corpse can be reanimated by the application of the elixir-of-life. These stories set the pattern for the treatment of the theme as a tale of terror, with ghastly consequences for both the reanimated and their re-animator. Sometimes the theme was given a facetious spin, as in the work of Edgar Allan Poe (Some Words with a Mummy 1845), but the accepted development in all of these old quasi-scientific horror stories became that of the protagonists meeting a terrible fate. The revived corpses are generally tortured souls, as in H. P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West, Re-Animator (1922).

However, the literary inspirations of Tubb’s novel do not appear to have been drawn from the Gothic horror school. His initial inspiration was far more likely to have come from the American pulp magazines, of which he had been a voracious reader in his formative years.

Neil R. Jones was one of the early pioneer writers for the pulps, and his most famous story was his first, The Jameson Satellite, appearing in Amazing Stories for July1931. This well-known story was the first in a long series of stories depicting the adventures of Professor Jameson, an Earth scientist whose brain is transplanted into an immortal mechanical body by a space-faring alien race, the Zoromes. Jameson becomes an adopted member of the Zorome race, and travels the universe in search of adventure. As the critic Sam Moskowitz has noted, Jones himself had almost certainly taken his inspiration from an earlier story by Edmond Hamilton, The Comet Doom (Amazing Stories January 1928) wherein his alien protagonists’ intelligence is now forever free from its former body of flesh, residing as it does now in the untiring metal body, which requires neither food nor sleep….And so, for ages, the comet-people lived, undying brains cased in bodies of metal. A precise description of Jones’ Zoromes!

As Don Wollheim and other critics have pointed out, the ideas of the early sf pulp writers, once they had been set forth, entered the tool room of the sf writer. Science fiction builds upon science fiction, Wollheim observed. And in The Jameson Satellite Jones himself contributed a further significant new idea — that an unprotected human body, once cast adrift in outer space, would remain in perfect preservation, while on Earth millions of generations of mankind would live and die, their bodies to moulder into the dust of the forgotten past…his body would remain intact and as perfect in its rocket container as on that day of the far-gone past when it had left the Earth to be hurled out on its career. What a magnificent idea!

A magnificent idea, indeed! Jones’ plot of the preservation of a body in the vacuum of space passed into the sf tool room, and many writers have used it to fashion their own stories. Two major writers in particular have went on to make substantial use of the idea. Fittingly, one of them was Edmond Hamilton himself, whose space travelling hero in The Star of Life (1947) dies from asphyxiation in the open airlock of his spaceship when its air is exhausted into space. He is revived hundreds of years later when his spaceship re-enters a planetary atmosphere possessing the necessary revitalising elements. Late in his career, Hamilton returned to the theme with one of his finest stories, The Stars, My Brothers (Amazing Stories May 1962).

The second major writer to create even more memorable stories on the theme was E.C. Tubb. His initial version was a short story, First Effort (Worlds of Fantasy September 1952). The crew of the first Earth-to-Venus spaceship are thrown off course, and are trapped in an elliptical orbit around the sun. Facing certain death by starvation or asphyxiation, as their supplies of food and air run out, the crew finally decide on a desperate gamble. They open the airlock and expose their bodies (prepared by drugs) to the vacuum of space. They have resigned themselves to waiting in frozen stasis for possible rescue in the future—hundreds, or perhaps thousands of years hence! Tubb’s concentration on the psychological interplay of the characters rather than melodramatics, made for a memorable tale.

So that when, two years later, Tubb came to write his first novel on the theme, The Resurrected Man, he was almost certainly taking his inspiration from his own short story, although the subconscious influence of Jones and Hamilton, both of whose stories he would have read many years earlier, is highly likely.

The Resurrected Man is a remarkable story, with a truly attention-grabbing opening line, such as only a master of pulp fiction like Tubb could write:

Death was a tin can drifting in the void five million miles from Mars.

The opening chapter introduces us to Captain Baron, a space pilot engaged in action, fighting in a two-man spaceship in a Mars-Terran space war. His character is deftly described — a dedicated military man, whose young life has been sacrificed to the space militia. His vessel is attacked and destroyed in space, his companion, Carlos, fatally injured. Tubb describes the swift, savage action and the resultant human tragedy with power and poetry:

"He blinked as fired blossomed from the distant hull of the abandoned vessel. It gushed in a fury of released energy, ripping hull and plates to slumped fragments as the exploding torpedo ripped and detonated the fuel tanks. For a moment it seemed to fill all the universe, then it died in expanding incandescence and the cold night of space reclaimed its own …

… Silence and the silent burning of the distant stars, gleaming like candles on the altars of heaven, keeping watchful vigil over one who was no more."

Abandoning the wreck in his spacesuit, Baron waits in space for a rescue that does not come.

The Mars-Terran war ends soon afterwards, and Earth is again at peace with the (presumed) Martian colonists. Five years later, the dead body of Baron is found drifting in space, perfectly preserved in the vacuum of space, and brought to Mars. Here, two doctors, Le Maitre and Whitney, carry out experimental surgery, and restore Baron to life.

Spurning their entreaties for him to remain on Mars as a scientific guinea pig, Baron optimistically returns to Earth. However, he finds that with the war over, his military skills are not needed, and since he is legally dead, his former employer refuses to give him any back pay. He then suffers various misfortunes in a corrupt future society. Events conspire against him, relentlessly building to a weird and stunning climax.

Tubb takes another fascinating sf idea from the pulp writers’ tool room — that of the mystery of the so-called dead areas of the human brain. The plot possibilities had first been postulated by John Russell Fearn in his classic novel The Intelligence Gigantic (Amazing Stories June-July 1933) but Tubb extrapolates them in a truly original and startling manner.

What makes the novel fascinating is that every plot development, every twist and turn of the story, is buttressed by logic, and the events are entirely character-driven. The operation to restore Baron to life is no off-stage magic sideshow event — Tubb describes it in convincing scientific detail, and those details become an integral part of Baron’s ultimate fate. All of the characters, sympathetic and unsympathetic, are vividly portrayed, and each of them has a part to play in the unravelling of the strange saga of what befalls the Resurrected Man.

Four years after it had been paperbacked in England, in May 1954 by a pulp publisher, Scion Ltd, it was accorded the then-unusual and rare distinction of being reprinted in a leading American science fiction magazine, Satellite Science Fiction, December 1958. Tubb’s story is so thoroughly modern in its technique that it could well have been written—and published—today! So, this new edition is confidently recommended to modern readers.

Philip Harbottle

THE RESURRECTED MAN

CHAPTER ONE

DEATH was a tin can drifting in the void five million miles from Mars. A sleek hull studded with venturis and stuffed with torpedoes, filled with instruments and heavy multiple cannon. A man-made wasp of space, able to jerk into tremendous velocity, to strike and destroy, to run, to strike again. A tiny patrol ship of the Terran Fleet, its hull darkened against reflection, unarmored, depending on speed and maneuverability for safety. It drifted in a silent orbit around the red planet, ready to smash any vessel attempting to run the blockade, and around it the invisible fingers of radar detectors swept space for a million miles.

The control room was a coffin. A tiny area in which two men lived and slept, breathed and ate, waited and watched. They were as much part of the ship as the instruments were, strapped in high acceleration padding and chafed by the harsh fabric and metal of spacesuits. Their food was capsules from a box, essential vitamins and drugs, for