BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY JOHN RUSSELL FEARN

      1,000-Year Voyage: A Science Fiction Novel

      Anjani the Mighty: A Lost Race Novel (Anjani #2)

      Black Maria, M.A.: A Classic Crime Novel (Black Maria #1)

      The Crimson Rambler: A Crime Novel

      Don’t Touch Me: A Crime Novel

      Dynasty of the Small: Classic Science Fiction Stories

      The Empty Coffins: A Mystery of Horror

      The Fourth Door: A Mystery Novel

      From Afar: A Science Fiction Mystery

      Fugitive of Time: A Classic Science Fiction Novel

      The G-Bomb: A Science Fiction Novel

      The Gold of Akada: A Jungle Adventure Novel (Anjani #1)

      Here and Now: A Science Fiction Novel

      Into the Unknown: A Science Fiction Tale

      Last Conflict: Classic Science Fiction Stories

      Legacy from Sirius: A Classic Science Fiction Novel

      The Man from Hell: Classic Science Fiction Stories

      The Man Who Was Not: A Crime Novel

      Manton’s World: A Classic Science Fiction Novel

      The Murdered Schoolgirl: A Classic Crime Novel (Black Maria #2)

      One Remained Seated: A Classic Crime Novel (Black Maria #3)

      One Way Out: A Crime Novel (with Philip Harbottle)

      Pattern of Murder: A Classic Crime Novel

      Reflected Glory: A Dr. Castle Classic Crime Novel

      Robbery Without Violence: Two Science Fiction Crime Stories

      Rule of the Brains: Classic Science Fiction Stories

      Shattering Glass: A Crime Novel

      The Silvered Cage: A Scientific Murder Mystery

      Slaves of Ijax: A Science Fiction Novel

      Something from Mercury: Classic Science Fiction Stories

      The Space Warp: A Science Fiction Novel

      Thy Arm Alone: A Classic Crime Novel (Black Maria #4)

      The Time Trap: A Science Fiction Novel

      Vision Sinister: A Scientific Detective Thriller

      Voice of the Conqueror: A Classic Science Fiction Novel

      What Happened to Hammond? A Scientific Mystery

      Within That Room!: A Classic Crime Novel

      A World Beneath Ice: The New Golden Amazon, Book One

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 1954 by John Russell Fearn

      Copyright © 2003 by Philip Harbottle

      “Introduction” Copyright © 2003, 2012 by Philip Harbottle

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      To the memory of Robert Simms

      INTRODUCTION, by Philip Harbottle

      Although English writer John Russell Fearn died in 1960, his work continues to be reprinted worldwide. In recent years, more than a hundred of his novels in all genres have been returned to print, ensuring that his stories will continue to appear through the twenty-first century in various forms. This has been achieved despite the carping and continued bafflement of some literary critics, who cannot recognize the secret of his enduring appeal. It is a secret shared by several prolific novelists, such as the legendary Edgar Wallace. Quite simply, Fearn was a storyteller.

      As writer Michael Gilbert has pointed out, Wallace—like Fearn—“was a storyteller who had learned, or maybe he knew by instinct, the first secret of story-telling. Something must be happening all the time. Not occurring haphazard, but happening in a consecutive and comprehensible chain of causation, to the resourceful hero and the attractive heroine who have been the protagonists of all real stories since storytelling began.” Despite most of their stories having been written very swiftly, writers like Fearn and Wallace, as Gilbert observed, give the feeling that the author knew “that he had been seized of a good idea, exactly suited to his scope and talents, and that he was on the top of his form.”

      In England, Fearn is known not just as a science fiction author, but as a writer of detective stories and westerns. However, in the USA until recently, Fearn was still best known as a pioneer writer of science fiction, mainly because he began his career in the well-remembered and collectable prewar American pulp sf magazines, such as Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories. Wildside Press has republished The Intelligence Gigantic and Liners of Time (his first two novels), whilst the cream of his early short stories can be found in the two-volume set, The Best of John Russell Fearn. More recently, however, the Borgo Press has launched an ambitious program of reprinting all of Fearn’s many detective novels (including new posthumous titles), together with new science fiction collections and novels.

      This present novel, Voice of the Conqueror, was one of Fearn’s later sf novels, first published (as The Conqueror’s Voice) in 1954 in the prestigious Canadian magazine, the Toronto Star Weekly. It was then serialized as Voice of the Conqueror in the UK British Science Fiction Magazine, under Fearn’s Vargo Statten pseudonym. It is a story which he clearly enjoyed writing, being partly based on personal experience.

      Before the war, whilst Fearn was a full-time writer, his main hobby was the cinema. He was the proud owner of a 9.5 film projector, and used to throw shows to his friends at his home. The films were usually early old silent science fiction classics, such as Metropolis, Caligari, and Girl in the Moon. Fearn was to put his cinematic hobby to practical use in 1941, when Britain was in the grip of war.

      At the outbreak of the war two years earlier, as a full-time writer over thirty (journalism being classed as a “Reserved Occupation”), Fearn was at first exempt from military service. But as the war continued, even journalists over thirty were called upon, and Fearn voluntarily took the medical test. However, he was adjudged as medically unsuitable. He was still obliged to undertake “essential war work,” and so took a job in an aircraft factory. Fearn found the work arduous and crushing (“It damned near killed me,” he later recalled) but fate soon intervened. What happened next was recorded in a letter Fearn sent to his Canadian pen friend Les Croutch, who published in it his fanzine Light in December 1941.

      The previous summer, in a “dashing moment,” Fearn had applied for a job as a cinema projectionist, but failed to get the job. “But my name was left on the books, and that was how my cinema manager friend (whom I’ve seen for years in the normal course of going to the movies) got onto it, him losing projectionists like wildfire where they are A1 medical (I’m C3, remember). I knew nothing about it beyond amateur work when I said I’d take it on, though I spun him a tale—but somehow I got through.… I got the breeze up the first time I opened out myself, but gradually I got a grip on things and now I feel quite at home.”

      I am indebted to Blackpool film and amateur dramatics historian Stephen Nuttall for providing further previously unrecorded fascinating information on Fearn’s cinematic career. In 1998 Stephen published an interview he had conducted with Robert Simms, aged seventy-three, and living in retirement in a rural Fylde village, Little Eccleston.

      In 1941, whilst Fearn was “winging” it as Chief Projectionist at Blackpool’s down-market Empire cinema, the sixteen-year-old Simms was appointed as a trainee projectionist, or third operator, at the much more upmarket South Shore cinema, the Tivoli. Steve Nuttall’s account continues:

      “In 1943, Robert became a second operator and was then rapidly promoted