I had a blast last month at the last-for-now CoKoCon, but one of my highlights was getting to meet the folk behind the 'Galactic Journey' website, who are living their lives 55 years behind the rest of us. I picked up a stack of their books, some of which they've written or edited but some of which are old material by other hands that they're merely bringing back into print. Case in point, this book, a novel by Rosel George Brown that was originally published in hardback in 1966 and in paperback a couple of years later as 'Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue'.

I hadn't of it or her, but the 'Galactic Journey' folk made it seem like an underread gem anomalous in its time and I'm all for that sort of thing, so dived into it first and am very happy that I did so. I'd have to say that they were absolutely right and now I need to find a copy of its sequel, 'The Waters of Centaurus', to see what its heroine got up to next. Sadly, Brown died soon afterwards, in 1967 of lymphoma at the unfortunate young age of only 41.

The cover of this reprint labels Blue "The Original Woman Space Detective". While "original" here might suggest "the first", I'm not sure if that's true, but I'd be interested to find out otherwise. It has to be said, however, that she's absolutely "original" in the sense of "groundbreaking". This is a fresh, perky and modern read throughout, with only a few aspects anchoring it in its era, such as a fondness Blue has for smoking cigars or the use of moonlight music on a hifi in a spaceship. By far the freshest, perkiest and most modern aspect, however, is Blue herself.

Let's face it, she's about as far from the typical lead in a 1966 science fiction novel as it gets, only a vague ethnicity omitted from a shopping list of originality. Given that the Centaurans, aliens who have visited Earth and many of whom now live here, are clear avatars for black Americans, living in their own segregated areas with prejudice against them widespread, it's perhaps appropriate for Blue to be white, as indeed Brown was, to be able to reach across the racial barrier. Otherwise, it's not hard to read Blue as black.

What we know for sure is that she's female, which is unusual to begin with, even if it shouldn't be. She's middle-aged but working for a living. She owns her sexuality, even sleeping with a Centauran she's rather fond of, and very possibly members of both sexes. She certainly gets around. She's a single mother, her husband lost a decade earlier on an expedition to Radix. Oh, and she's a cop, a sergeant working in Hammond in New York state, now a spaceport; even though she also happens to study Thucydides in the original Greek. That doesn't stop her taking down big burly Centaurans.

Now, she still does girly things—she wears nice things and she sobs when she forgets her comb—but otherwise she constantly flouts expectation because, while she's way ahead of the curve, as is entirely appropriate for a futuristic detective story, many of the other characters aren't, bogged down in the prejudices of the sixties. She finds herself on the receiving end of lines like "Don't go in there" and "I expect you're handy with a needle". She does and she isn't. She's informed that a majority of women would have remarried after a decade. "I don't want to be tied down,” she says.

It's almost like Brown wanted her to be all the things that women like her couldn't be back in the sixties, if not because of the law then because of social convention, which can be even more strict. She even drinks and often, with her favourite tipple the most confusing aspect of the book for me. Eventually I had to look up "gin and 'gin", which doesn't seem to be a common term for what must be a gin with ginger, which is usually referred to as a 'gin-gin mule".

Given how thoroughly original she is, it's almost distracting to remember that there's a story that we should be paying attention to. It's an interesting one too, though the pacing is off and it shifts in ways that it really shouldn't. Initially, it's about a mystery, a set of deaths labelled "the benzale murders" in which young women are torn open so that their livers can be stolen. That's important throughout but the story grows into something much broader, a threat to the planet Earth, which warrants Blue having to seduce a millionaire and so hitch a ride to Radix, where she hopes to track down her lost husband Kenneth and extinguish the threat in one fell swoop. Talk about ambitious!

I liked this book a lot, but it feels like a beginning to me. Of course, it was, not only the first of two novels about Sibyl Sue Blue that perhaps could have become more had the author lived longer, but also Rosel George Brown's first novel. To be this original this quickly is admirable and I wonder how far she might have grown had the lymphoma not taken her. It does feel like a first novel in terms of plotting, something that would surely only have got better, but it feels so advanced in attitudes as to not feel far out of place on the shelves in 2023.

There is one other oddity that I should call out, one that I don't quite understand. What dates the book is the smoking and the sixties appliances, but there's also a commonly used word in "waked". Ironically, given the context, not one character "woke" in this book or was "woken" or "awakened". They all "waked" and they do it surprisingly often. I don't recall bumping into that before, even in books much older than this one. I wonder where it came from.

I couldn't be happier with my first book from Journey Press. It looks good, it feels good and it plays as a discovery, which is really what it is. It's an obscure novel by an obscure author who died before I was born, but it's a book that should be read today, when it ought to be received better than ever it was back in the sixties. The fact that it's set in 1990 feels somehow surprising, because it feels as if it was written after that point and we start to wonder why Brown would set a futuristic novel in the past. And then we remember. ~~ Hal C F Astell