Planet, Plane, Plan, A Man, Panama!

 

Planet Plane (1936), by ‘John Beynon’, concerns a British rocket to Mars. There it is, in cover-art by Russian illustrator Serge Drigin (1894-1977), who moved to the UK in the 1920s, and provided a range of artworks for 1920s and 1930s books and magazines (as, variously, Sergie, Sergey, S, S R, or Serge R Drigin). In fact ‘John Beynon’ is one of the pseudonyms by which John Wyndham originally published (John Wyndham’s birth name was “John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris” and he rearranged this elaborate moniker variously to mine pen-names for his work). The novel was originally serialised as Sleepers of Mars ...

 

... then reprinted as Stowaway to Mars, as by John Benyon (cover below); and then once again, after his later 1950s fame, as Stowaway to Mars by John Wyndham. There’s something charming, if edge-of-comical, about the chubby lines of Drigin’s rocket, almost penguin-like in delineation, and requiring a variety of extra rockets in addition to the main thruster to lift it into space, as obese folk sometimes need a little extra lift to hoik them out of the comfy chair. The homeliness of this image doesn't quite capture the vividness of Beynon/Wyndham's description of launch:

A flash stabbed out between the tail fins. The great rocket lifted. She seemed balanced upon a point of fire, soaring like the huge shell she was into the blue above. Fire spewed from her ports in a spreading glory of living flame like the tail of a monstrous comet. And when the thunder of her going beat upon the ears of the crowd, she was already a fiery spark in the heavens.

... but perhaps it has its own charm, and period specificity.

The Stowaway to Mars reissue came with a different, rather crumpled-looking version of another rocket (not the story's main vessel) discovered on Mars: like a rocket in baggy trousers, or something vaguely techno-Dali-esque.

The story is not complicated: in the dizzyingly unimaginable far-future of 1982, a lucrative prize is offered to the first person to fly to Mars and return; international playboy, millionaire aircraft designer Dale Currance takes up the challenge, building a rocket, assembling a crew and blasting off. Only once the journey is underway does he discover a female stowaway aboard, who throws his plans into disarray. Navigating a straightforwardly-presented (in a ‘but who could blame these red-blooded males sequestered in a spaceship for twelve weeks with an attractive woman?’) but gobsmacking and offensive rape-threat narrative, the ship eventually gets to Mars, meets Martians (some biological, some mechanical) and the characters have various adventures. Later editions went for a less human-scale, more tech-sublime visual correlative of the story.