128 pages
Published 1955 (magazine version published 1953)
Read from January 27 to January 28
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
My partner R and I are moving to another state sometime this spring. Between us, we have somewhere around a thousand books. (Not an exaggeration.) I’d planned to read as many of my unread novels as I could before the move, so we could sell them back to the used bookstore and not have to pack them, but then I got distracted. The Luminist Archive, where I was able to read the February 1961 issue of Analog, has so many books. Thousands of them, ranging from weird arcane texts from the 1600s to 20th century sci-fi, all free in PDF. Not to mention all the pulp magazines. I want to read them all. (Or at least the ones relevant to my interests.)
I bookmarked a number of them to read later, but today I’m reading my first Leigh Brackett novel since the fine-but-not-impressive The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman. I wasn’t expecting anything as good as her masterpiece, The Long Tomorrow, but I was a little bit disappointed.
For the majority of its run, The Big Jump is middling midcentury sci-fi, with just enough unexpected touches to keep it from being uninteresting. It’s a corporate space novel, almost like a working class perspective on The Space Merchants. A handful of megacorporations control space flight throughout the solar system. They’re competing to make “the Big Jump” to interstellar flight. A ship limps back to Pluto after successfully tripping to Barnard’s Star; Ballantyne, its sole survivor, is comatose when he isn’t raving about transuranics and desolation and darkness. Our POV Comyn bluffs his way into the Cochrane Company’s facility on Mars to discover the fate of his friend on the expedition, and ends up hearing Ballantyne’s seemingly final words. But the dead Ballantyne still moves, and even the powerful Cochranes are alarmed.
Some unlikely pulp plotting — a quick application of fists and the inexplicable interest of a Cochrane family femme fatale — wins Comyn a seat on the next ship to Barnard’s Star, hoping to learn the fate of his friend whatever it takes. But someone in the Cochrane family wants him dead, and the strange physics of the star drive are enough to drive anyone mad.
It’s when Comyn arrives on Barnard II that The Big Jump truly shines. Spoilers: Brackett shifts genres to something far more wondrous and strange, somewhat reminiscent of the 1930s Pan trope. The way I read it, the climax offers wry commentary on how modern capitalist man will reject Eden itself because it lacks “meaning” without manly effort. It isn’t enough to turn Jump into a classic, but it certainly made this slim little novel worth reading.
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