Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids

Lore & Background

The novel is set a year after the events of David Starr, Space Ranger. The spaceship TSS Waltham Zachary has been taken and gutted by pirates based in the asteroid belt. David 'Lucky' Starr, who harbors a personal dislike of the pirates for their murder of his parents, devises a plan involving an unmanned survey ship, the Atlas, which will explode when captured. Unknown to anyone, Starr leaks the plan and sneaks aboard to infiltrate the pirates. Captured, he tells pirate leader Captain Anton his alias is Williams and offers to join; Anton has Starr fight a duel in open space, which Starr wins. Starr is left in the care of a hermit named Joseph Patrick Hansen on an anonymous asteroid. Hansen recognizes Starr as Lawrence Starr's son, and Starr admits his identity. Hansen convinces Starr to pilot them to Ceres. On Ceres, Starr plans to send his friend Bigman to infiltrate the pirates, but realizes Hansen's asteroid is not where it should be. Starr and Bigman search for it and land, where Starr is captured by Dingo, the pirate he beat in the duel. Dingo reveals a hyperatomic engine used to move the asteroid. After a fight, Starr is struck with a neuronic whip and loses consciousness. He wakes in a spacesuit on the surface, is flung into space by Dingo via catapult, but uses his oxygen reserve to return. He and Bigman defeat some pirates and learn a pirate fleet is attacking Ceres. Returning to Ceres, Starr realizes the pirates' real object was to capture Hansen, and learns Captain Anton's ship is taking Hansen to a secret Sirian base on Ganymede. Starr passes Anton to Ganymede by skimming his ship past the Sun. When Anton makes for Ganymede, Starr threatens to ram his ship; Hansen kills Anton and orders surrender. The Terran fleet arrives, and Starr convinces the admiral to concentrate on asteroid pirates, revealing Hansen as their leader. The Council of Science, on Starr's orders, captured the Sirian base. Hansen is sent to incarceration on Mercury. Starr reveals that Hansen was not his father's acquaintance but his parents' murderer.

Reader's Guide

Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids marks a shift in the series from Starr's masked crime-fighter role to a Cold War-like secret agent. It introduces the Sirians as the main threat to Earth and contains the first hints of an overpopulated Earth facing hostility from younger worlds. The novel was praised by The New York Times as 'grand science fiction for all ages.' Reviewer Groff Conklin described it as 'almost entirely conceived in the straight gee-whiz adventure technique' and 'Excellent for the Junior set.' Astounding reviewer P. Schuyler Miller called it 'fast-moving space opera of a type we all know, with no particular regard for scientific plausibility.' The novel's plot involves personal revenge, infiltration, and a twist revealing the hermit Hansen as the pirate mastermind and murderer of Starr's parents.

Did You Know?

• The novel was published under the pseudonym Paul French.
• The spaceship TSS Waltham Zachary was taken and gutted by pirates based in the asteroid belt.
• Starr's alias in the novel is Williams, the same alias from David Starr, Space Ranger.
• The hermit Joseph Patrick Hansen is revealed to be the leader of the asteroid pirates and the murderer of Starr's parents.

The Pen Name Behind the Pirate

The Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels was the work of Isaac Asimov, though readers would never have known it from the byline. Writing under the pseudonym Paul French, Asimov crafted this series as part of his enormously prolific output—he wrote or edited more than five hundred books across his career. As an American writer who held a professorship in biochemistry at Boston University, Asimov was widely regarded during his lifetime as one of the "Big Three" science fiction authors alongside Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. The Lucky Starr novels, while aimed at a younger audience, emerged from the same creative well that produced his hard science fiction, his mysteries, his fantasy, and his popular science works. His literary range was so vast that his output touched nine of the ten broad categories in the Dewey decimal classification system, making the juvenile adventure novels just one strand in a remarkably diverse body of work.

Roots in Pulp and Wonder

The Lucky Starr series grew out of a childhood steeped in the written word. Asimov's parents ran a succession of candy stores in Brooklyn that also sold newspapers and magazines, and young Isaac credited those shelves as a major influence in his lifelong love of reading. Pulp science fiction magazines were among the material that flowed through those stores, and he began reading the genre at age nine, just as science fiction was shifting toward more science-centered storytelling. He was also a regular visitor to the Brooklyn Public Library during his formative years. Having taught himself to read at five, Asimov carried an insatiable appetite for stories into adulthood. The juvenile science-fiction novels of the Lucky Starr series, published under the name Paul French, can be seen as a direct descendant of that early fascination with serialized, imaginative adventure—a tradition he absorbed from the very pulp pages that first captured a small immigrant boy's attention in a Brooklyn candy shop.

One Thread in a Vast Tapestry

Within Asimov's staggering literary output, the Lucky Starr novels occupy a distinctive niche. He authored more than three hundred and eighty short stories, including "Nightfall," which in 1964 was voted the best short science fiction story of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America. His major series—the Foundation novels, the Galactic Empire series, and the Robot series featuring The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun—built an interconnected "future history" spanning millennia of fictional time. The Foundation trilogy earned a one-time Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series in 1966. Against that backdrop of epic space opera and hard science fiction, the Lucky Starr series stands as a lighter, youth-oriented contribution, written under the Paul French pen name. Yet it shares the same authorial imagination that also produced popular science books explaining concepts from their simplest historical origins, guides to the Bible and Shakespeare, and works spanning chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, and literary criticism.

The Man Behind the Pirate's Name

The name on the title page of the Lucky Starr novels—Paul French—belonged to a man whose real identity would eventually be honored in ways both terrestrial and celestial. Isaac Asimov, born in the Russian SFSR around 1919 to 1920 and raised in Brooklyn after his family's 1923 arrival in the United States, became a naturalized U.S. citizen at age eight. He served as president of the American Humanist Association. After his death in April 1992, multiple entities were named in his honor: the asteroid (5020) Asimov, a crater on Mars, a Brooklyn elementary school, Honda's humanoid robot ASIMO, and four literary awards. The surname itself carries a story—derived from azimy khleb, meaning "winter bread," with the S spelling a result of his father's 1923 Latin-alphabet transcription. Readers who encountered the Lucky Starr adventures under the Paul French name were, without knowing it, reading the work of a man whose legacy would stretch from a Brooklyn candy store to the surface of Mars.