6.8 /10 1 Votes6.8
Country United States Publication date 1952 Pages 218 pp Publisher Simon & Schuster | 3.4/5 Goodreads Language English Media type Print (hardback) Originally published 1952 Genre Science Fiction | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar Wolfbane, Gladiator‑At‑Law, Shadow on the Hearth, Search the Sky, Not This August | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Gunner Cade is the second of two science fiction novels written by Cyril M. Kornbluth and Judith Merril (under their Cyril Judd pseudonym), originally serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in 1952. It was issued in hardcover by Simon & Schuster later that year, with an Ace Double paperback following in 1957. An Italian translation was serialized in Scienza Fantastica in 1953; a German translation was issued in 1958; and a French translation appeared in 1979. Gollancz issued a British hardcover in 1964, with a Penguin paperback following in 1966. The Science Fiction Book Club published an edition in 1965, with a Dell paperback appearing in 1969. Reprint editions (in various languages) continued to appear in the 1970s and 1980s. NESFA Press included the novel in a 2008 omnibus of Kornbluth and Merril novels, Spaced Out.
Gunner Cade began as a synopsis, "Time of Troubles", written entirely by Kornbluth. The co-authors broke the story down into planned 5000-word segments, which they wrote alternately. "Cyril would write what was supposed to be a five-thousand-word section in about three thousand words. I would then go back and rewrite his section to make it five thousand words", Merril remembered. "Then I would write the next five-thousand-word section in eight thousand words. He would rewrite my section to shorten it". They completed the novel in six weeks, writing quickly because both were "desperately broke".
The novel deals with the transformation of Cade, the title character, from a loyal member of the elite police force of an authoritarian interplanetary regime into an individualistic rebel. Kornbluth and Merril crafted the novel to appeal to Astounding editor John W. Campbell, using Fritz Leiber's Gather, Darkness! as their model. "We did a really interesting analytical breakdown of what Campbell would and wouldn't buy", Merril later wrote. "The scientific stuff had to be there, but the sort of spiritual fantasy element had to be there as well. Also, the novel had to contain the sort of humor that made sense to Campbell".
Reception
Basil Davenport praised Gunner Cade in The New York Times, calling it "a first-rate melodrama of the neo-Graustarkian school which is one of the shapes of interplanetary fiction. For both action and literacy, this is a long way ahead of most". Michael Moorcock found the novel "a good, intelligently written adventure SF tale, which at times gives a very real impression of a possible future society. . . . Exciting, unpretentious stuff in the best tradition". Boucher and McComas, however, dismissed it as "a competent but not particularly palatable rehash of standard ideas".
Samuel R. Delany remembers that "Brutal and authority-fixated Cade's transformation, as he learns compassion, to understand human rights and a higher sense of ethics, was as powerful to me as a thirteen-year-old reader as anything I'd read. Robert Markley declared that Gunner Cade "updates the anti-totalitarianism of Yevgeny Zamiatin's We . . . Kornbluth and Merril's nightmarish capitalism treats humans, minerals, and foodstuffs as commodities that are used brutally, unthinkingly, without regard to consequences".