by Gideon Marcus
The gimmick
Everybody's got to have an angle these days to stand out. Volkswagen cars are tiny and cute. Avis, being number two, tries harder. In your heart, you know Goldwater's… right?
Science fiction magazines are no strangers to gimmicks. Fantasy and Science Fiction has "All-star issues" with nothing but big-name authors (though they often turn in second-rate stuff). Analog is trying out a run in "slick" 8.5" by 11" size.
And this month, IF has gotten extra cute. Every story in the issue is written by a guy named "Smith." It's certainly a novel concept, but does it work?
The Issue at Hand
Cover by John Pederson, Jr.
The Imperial Stars, by E. E. Smith, Ph.D.
Leading this month's issue is the latest from Doc Smith, who almost single handedly developed the genre of space opera. In many ways, this affable chap is still stuck in the '30s, with simplistic storylines and swashbuckling adventure. On the other hand, he also has basically ignored the stultifying '50s with their ossified gender roles, which is refreshing.
Stars is about an interstellar circus troupe, the Flying D'Alemberts, who are really a batch of superspies. They hail from the three-gee heavy planet of Des Plaines, and in addition to being stunningly gorgeous, they are all super strong and agile. Jules and Yvette D'Alembert, the creme de la creme, are tapped to ferret out an Empire-wide network of traitors led by a bastard pretender to the Throne of Stanley. Join them as they rollick and banter across the galaxy, slaughtering dozens of goons along the way, in the service of the throne!
by Gray Morrow
Stars reads sort of like a kid's version of Laumer's Retief stories, or maybe a light-hearted version of what might have happened if Kerk and Meta from Deathworld had decided to become covert agents. It's fun, frothy stuff, utterly inconsequential, and inordinately admiring of absolute monarchy.
I most enjoyed the complete parity of status women shared with men in the D'Alembert universe; if anything, Jules is the sex object! Again, Doc Smith seems not to have bought into the notion of more recent years that women don't make good heroes. Good for him.
Three stars.
Fire, 2016!, by George O. Smith
by Nodel
I was looking forward to this one as fire is, by far, the greatest natural threat that faces the San Diego region. Sadly, this piece about the quest for novel firefighting techniques 52 years hence is a dud, dull, and (ironically) highly conventional. In brief: a young firefighter candidate wants to, in order to woo the daughter of the local Fire Marshall, find a replacement for water as a fire combatant. It turns out there isn't one, but using computers, he is able to optimize the amount of water used in putting out a blaze.
It sounds a lot better written out like that, but it's really not very good — better suited to Analog…and Mack Reynolds' typewriter.
Two stars.
The Final Equation, by Jack Smith
This first piece by Jack Smith is a vignette, in which a professor has the hubris to declare his Godhood after deriving the equation for everything. The real God takes umbrage.
It didn't work for me. One star.
The Store of Heart's Desire, by Cordwainer Smith
by John Giunta
Ah, but then we come to the Cordwainer Smith, which is worth double the price of the entire magazine.
I lamented that the Smith "short novel", that had appeared in last month's Galaxy, stopped just as it was getting interesting. In The Boy Who Bought Old Earth, we met Rod McBan, scion of the McBan house of the planet, Norstrilia. His family was rich with the growing and selling of stroon, an anti-aging compound. But he was psychically crippled and, on the eve of adulthood, at risk of being destroyed for his handicap. With the aid of a canny computer, Rod leveraged his fortune into the biggest sum of capital ever amassed, and he used it to buy all of the original home of Man: Old Earth.
At the end of the novel, McBan had made it to Earth disguised as a cat person, one of the many under-races formed in human image but treated like animals. At the starport, Rod meets C'Mell, the cat woman who so poignantly took up the cause of her people in Smith's 1962 classic, The Ballad of Lost C'mell. She is there to protect Rod from those who would seize him for his wealth.
That's where it ends, with Rod on the verge of exploring Old Earth, of doing something with his prize. It was a very unsatisfactory stopping point.
The Store of Heart's Desire is Part 2.
Without giving a thing away (for you really must read this), Cordwainer Smith weaves together every thread of the Instrumentality universe, finally giving flesh to the tiny bits of bone we've seen over the years. The rising discontent of the underpeople, the Reawakening of Man, the Starport, Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, Lord Jestocost, and of course, C'Mell, Old North Australia and Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons.
It is the task of science fiction authors to paint a future. Not the future, for writers are not seers, but a plausible tomorrow. I have yet to see anyone create a setting so vivid, so alien, and yet so accessible as Cordwainer Smith. His world lives, described with a minimum of words and yet with profound depth. And C'Mell is simply the best hero one could want. Getting to see the rest of her story is truly a gift.
Five stars for this segment, and since the Journey is mine and I can do as I please, a retroactive increase of the first part's score to four stars. Four and a half for the whole, and if the resulting full novel doesn't win the Hugo next year, it'll only be because too few people had subscriptions to both magazines in which the serial appeared.
Summing Up
In the end, the Smith experiment was something of a wash. Given Editor Pohl's crowing over the upcoming Heinlein serial, more Smith, and a piece by A.E. Van Vogt, I can't but wonder if the magazine is going backwards. Still, I cannot praise the Cordwainer Smith story enough. Even if this be the last good issue IF ever prints, I'm glad we got this one.
[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]
re "if the resulting full novel doesn’t win the Hugo next year, it’ll only be because too few people had subscriptions to both magazines in which the serial appeared."
Er, "subscriptions"? Some of us DO manage to buy the magazines right off a newstand, you know (which also allows us to make sure we're getting good-condition copies). I shudder to dream of some future time when newstands (and magazine shelves in drug stores, supermarkets. etc. ) might vanish, but let's enjoy them while we have them.
The "All-Smith" idea is cute, but not one that could be duplicated with too many other authorial names. Though I suppose one could move over to first names and have a more plausible set to draw from.
I used to get them at the newsstand. But I'd miss issues. Or in the case of smaller mags like Gamma, they just weren't distributed in San Diego. I think I found that one in New York on a trip.
So, subscriptions for me since the late 50s.
Stultifying!? The 1950s? What was stultifying about More Than Human , Theodore Sturgeon (1953) , A Case of Conscience James Blish, ( 1958), The Space Merchants , Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth (1952), The Long Tomorrow, Leigh Brackett, 1955, The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester (1953)…? I could go on… , even Heinlein’s Door into Summer and Asimov’s Caves of Steel, … Phil Dick and Kurt Vonnegut , … a ton of prose SF that was a star burst over John Campbell’s muddled head. The 1940s had , mostly , banished Pulp SF for good, but the 1950s was an morphing of a genre into a form of vigorous prose that abides.
It's a cute idea, but I don't think Fred needs to go out of his way to find a bunch of like-named authors to try this again. Thank goodness, most SF authors have slightly uncommon names.
I'm on record as not particularly liking Doc Smith and his whiz-bang superscience. This may have been the best thing I've ever read by him. Mind you, three stars is very fair, so that's not saying a whole lot. It also doesn't really read like the rest of his stuff. From Pohl's comments in the editorial, I wonder if he might have exercised a very strong editorial hand on this one.
George O. Smith seems to be making a bit of a comeback. I enjoyed a lot of his earlier work. This, not so much. On top of the other problems already noted, the world he has created has a huge, gaping hole in it. Why on Earth are firefighters so revered and important in a world where fires are so rare that a would-be firefighter has difficulty encountering enough fires to test a thesis?
The Jack Smith story was utterly forgettable. Even based on the review, I remembered absolutely nothing about it and had to go look at it again. I'll probably have forgotten the whole thing again by the time I pull this page from my typewriter and drop it in the mail.
But, oh, Cordwainer Smith. What a wonder! I don't think anybody else writing today commands the language like he does. Not Zelazny, not LeGuin, none of the old hands, nobody. Just astonishing. And kudos to Fred Pohl for finding a way to serialize a novel across two magazines.
I'll admit that I have an irrational prejudice against "Doc" Smith. I tried to read one of his novels long ago, and gave up on page one.
George's story seemed amateurish. All that expository dialogue AND expository narration, the outrageous coincidence (and pretty much admitting to the reader that it was outrageous), the silliness of censored profanity; not a good story at all.
Jack's little fable was sophomoric.
Which leaves Cordwainer, thank goodness. Truly a work of art.