Today, August 11, is the birthday of Alan E. Nourse (1928-1992). Nourse wrote science fiction to help pay his way through medical school. He received his medical degree in the mid-fifties and continued to write science fiction for roughly a quarter century, from 1951 to the mid-seventies. He also wrote a number of nonfiction books on scienetific and medical topics. Most of these were written in the seventites, eighties, and nineties.

Nourse is pretty much forgotten these days, but he was well-respected when he was writing science fiction. Robert Heinlein dedicated his novel Farnham’s Freehold to Nourse. Heinlein also included Nourse’s wife Ann in his deication to Friday.

I managed to carve out enough time to read one of his stories in time for this post.

“Derelict” was first published in the May 1953 issue of If. I read it in Alan E. Nourse Resurrected.

The story is set on a space station orbiting Saturn. Space ships have been seen entering Saturn’s atmosphere, so the station was established to watch for them. Only screwups and misfits are assigned to this station. So far, no ships have been seen.

Then they see a different ship. It’s coming from outside the solar system. The men on the station manage to capture it. They find it full of dead aliens who have been crushed by high acceleration.

The scone in command and one officer who explore the alien ship lie to the captain of hte statoin and tell him the ship doesn’t have a star drive but has been drifiting though interstellar space for thousands of years.

They plan to steal the ship and escape. Earth is ruled my a military dictatorship. They have had enough.

The only real issue I had with this story is the way the acceleration crushed the aliens was brushed off in their plan to steal the ship. Otherwise, “Derelict” is a decent science fiction story from the early fifties. Not great, but not bad.