Bears better than robots on a wild planet? Hugo winning story Exploration Team by Murray Leinster

[00:00:00]Welcome to Vintage SF and to Rocket Summer 2026. I've been looking at the fiction of Murray Leinster. This is the third of three videos. I'll be looking at a 1956 story called exploration team and also a story from the 40s. It has two titles.

[00:00:19]The magazine title had been the laws of chance and a small pulp publication of it was called Fight for Life. We're going to get to that one later cuz I was a little bit disappointed with it. But otherwise, I've been very, very excited about all the stories that I've read by Murray Leinster.

[00:00:38]And exploration team is no change from that. In fact, this story won the Hugo Award for Novellettes in 1956.

[00:00:47]Let's take a look at the story itself.

[00:00:50]Exploration team was originally published in the March 1956 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The cover art and interior illustrations are by renowned science fiction artist Ed Emshwiller, who often signed his work simply as Emsh. The setting is a planet named Loren 2 and is incredibly hostile with terrifying wildlife, most notably the Sfes, a creature described as a cross between a spitting cobra and a wildcat possessing both hydrophobia and homicidal mania. The Sfes can travel in packs and if blood is spilled, they gather from miles and miles away. How do you deal with a dangerous creature like this when its death attracts more and more of the creatures themselves? On this planet, we find our protagonist Hewens, an independent unauthorized settler. He has four highly intelligent, specially mutated Kodiak bears. The Kodiak bears have been genetically altered to be loyal to the human in much the way that dogs are to humans. There's also a giant trained eagle. This eagle is equipped with cameras so humans on a screen can scout ahead of what's going on. Unknown to human, on another part of the planet, a government exploration team lands and their robot dependent base is overrun by sfexes. The Colonial Survey Agency sends an agent down to the planet to try and find out what has happened to this colony. Instead, he comes face to face with humans, an unauthorized settler, and his bears and eagle. Technically, he's supposed to arrest humans. He's not supposed to be on this planet, but they team up because they have to find a way across the planet to the colony to see if there are survivors.

[00:02:33]Human's symbiotic relationship with the mutated Kodiak bears and his giant trained eagle is the highlight of the story as they find their way across this dangerous planet and battle sfexes and other animals.

[00:02:47]This is a rugged story famous for its ingenuity. You can find audio and ePub and PDFs of this story online.

[00:02:54]Project Gutenberg has published the story online and I'll put a link in the description below. So, I've given you six great short stories and one great novelette from Leinster. I hope this makes you curious to read more of his work.

[00:03:09]But now, the bad.

[00:03:13]The Laws of Chance was the lead story featured in the March 1947 issue of the famous pulp magazine Startling Stories.

[00:03:21]It featured the cover art of Rudolph Belarski. It was later republished in this pulp form here in something called Prize Science Fiction Novels. This is number 10. Other novels included mysteries and westerns. There were only two issues that were science fiction.

[00:03:40]Number 10, the renamed Fight for Life, A Novel of the Atomic Age by Murray Leinster. And then, number 11, Sojourn of Titan by Manly Wade Wellman. Prize Novels continued on, but there were no more science fiction novels.

[00:03:59]There's no other publications, at least printed publications that I'm aware of.

[00:04:03]I think there's an ebook format that collects some Leinster stories that haven't been published or aren't widely published and it's in there.

[00:04:11]So, why was it published twice in 1947 and then hard to find after that?

[00:04:17]Well, let me tell you a little bit about the story.

[00:04:20]The Laws of Chance open in a chaotic United States where nuclear bombs have destroyed many of the cities and even conventional bombing has occurred.

[00:04:30]Things have fallen apart, communication and government. People don't know who they are fighting. They just know a nuclear exchange has happened and the world's in trouble and there's still one power out there that's bombing the United States.

[00:04:45]Communities are breaking down and there's political and psychological themes framing the struggle for survival. The story focuses on a band of rational survivors, protagonists who refuse to succumb to hysteria. They approach survival as a complex equation.

[00:05:01]How can they establish again ethical conduct and rational cooperative behavior? Well, it seems impossible because the enemy is still targeting communities that are built. If they see farmland being farmed, then they will bomb that area. One character who calls himself Lucky has found a stone in the middle of a nuclear crater that seems to provide him luck. Don't ask me about radiation and how it just blows away and they can go and step into nuclear craters, but this stone, apparently produced from the atomic reaction, is something that can tune in to some of the wishes that people have.

[00:05:41]Now, rather than this just being magic or fantasy, Leinster tries to explain this scientifically. The things that you wish for, that you hope for, have a resonance in your mind, and this stone can magnify that resonance.

[00:05:56]Now, it only works on things that are possible, not impossibilities.

[00:06:03]So, we have some very small examples to start with. Why this guy is called lucky. But, they start to take a look at it scientifically and decide, we can build some machines with this process.

[00:06:14]We'll find some more of these stones.

[00:06:17]If we can build something that is easier to use, that we can figure out probabilities, we can start to calculate probabilities against other actions that are happening around us, like raiders, or like the enemy finding us.

[00:06:32]A second discovery is also made. All they can remotely detonate things, including nuclear bombs. They can protect themselves now from that detonation if they know something is coming. They can project a ray of sorts, targets the generators of these machines. This story was written shortly after World War II, and you can see some of the influence of World War II here in terms of how there are enemies that are just shot or taken prisoner and tortured for their information. We can also see how people try to band together to survive and to try to keep some semblance of civilization.

[00:07:10]It was a very pulpy story to me, and what that means is that it was, you know, boy meets girl.

[00:07:17]Boy and friend find some sort of magic solution to the problem that they have.

[00:07:24]That they can find a way to scientifically not only find probabilities of the future, but also to be able to find ways of detonating objects farther away just by simple machines.

[00:07:37]This all felt a little bit too convenient to me.

[00:07:41]And it was a little bit cringeworthy when the probabilities was applied to the love relationship. So, I'm not surprised that it hasn't been widely reprinted.

[00:07:51]If you're interested, you can find a copy. So, that does it for my look at Murray Leinster and Rocket Summer 2026.

[00:08:00]There is one more week and I'm looking at the 1960s and I chose to look at The Goblin Reservation by Clifford D. Simak.

[00:08:08]It's from 1968.

[00:08:10]I'm about halfway through and this is a lot of fun. I think you're going to want to hear about it. So, that'll be coming up in my next video. Until next time, keep reading.

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