Triangle of Power by John Russel Fearn (Wild Side Press, 1950, reprint 2012)
Golden Amazon, Triangle of Power, 2012 edition.
As I continue to read more or John Fearn’s Golden Amazon books, I admit that the man was one of the last of the pulp writers. Not pulp in a sense of style, but pulp as it originally existed with writers knocking out fiction at an incredible rate no human can sustain. By the best accounts, Fearn wrote close to a hundred novels in different genres over a period of twenty years. Think about that for a minute. He was a writing machine. The man did all these books in a burst of activity which might have led to his early death in 1960. When you are writing at such a speed, it doesn’t leave much room for character development. As a professional writer myself, I understand the need to crank out a set amount of words to keep those bills paid. And Fearn did it all with a manual typewriter and no Internet. If he needed to look something up for a story, he had to run down the library or consult an encyclopedia.
Which brings us to Triangle of Power, the third novel in the rebooted Golden Amazon series. Here we have Violet Brant as Mistress of Earth marrying the last survivor of the Atlantis she helped to destroy on planet Jupiter. What does she did do her groom on their honeymoon besides travel to the inner planets? Why she drugs him and dumps his gigantic butt on a habitable planetoid. How dare he assume he could marry the Golden Amazon! Some books have surprise endings, Triangle of Power has a surprise opening. I’ve heard of men jilted on their wedding night, but this book wins the prize.
As she tells him:
“All I have done, Abna, is paralyze every faculty by which you can shield your thoughts from me. Shortly you will be unable to move, but your thoughts will be bare for me to read. Every secret you have ever had will be there for me to take—and your will power being deadened, you will not be able to protect yourself.”
Meanwhile, on Earth the evil Sefner Quorne had survived the attack on the Atlantean dome city on Jupiter and has his own machinations worked out. He plans on enslaving the population of Earth and bending the will of its inhabitants toward his own. He can accomplish this because he’s a mad scientist bent on total domination. I’ve known a few bent scientists in my years working in labs, but they never had world domination on their mind, just higher pay. However, none that I know hailed from planet Jupiter, so perhaps this is the reason.
With Violet Brant off Earth and dumping her unsatisfactory husband on a planetoid, there is nothing to stop him. Quorne soon takes control of the Earth’s population centers by the use of inhuman androids and hypnotic ray beams. Hypnosis plays a big part in this book, which I find a little funny. However when written , few people understood how hypnosis worked. If the book was written today, it might discuss mind control and all kinds of cognitive theory. The author had to work with whatever scientific information he could find
Ultimately, the Golden Amazon comes off as one Queen Bitch. She doesn’t hesitate to blast anyone out of existence if she thinks they are a threat to her plans. She finally rescues her cuckolded husband and allows a Jovian to help her free the people of Earth from the clutches of the mad scientist. Along the way she builds a three-dimensional printing machine and a teleportation device to get her across the solar system in a hurry. She also finds a way to create a nuclear-powered chastity device which the Golden Amazon forces all Earth men to wear. Okay, I made the last one up, but it would be in keeping with the story arc.
