[April 14, 1964] COOKING WITH ASH (the May 1964 Amazing)


by John Boston

Melting Down

The cover of the May 1964 Amazing depicts an astronaut whose space helmet and surrounding objects are melting as the giant sun blazes in through his rather large porthole.  This illustrates Lester del Rey’s story Boiling Point, or more likely the story rationalizes the cover; I suspect more strongly each month that a lot of Amazing’s cover stories are in fact written around an already purchased cover painting. 


by Schelling

Boiling Point

The story starts out as routinely clever.  Protagonist Stasek is a technician residing on Venus and studying “energy-eaters,” amorphous creatures who hang out near the sun and live on its energy.  He is pressed into service to do maintenance on“the ring of satellites strung like beads between the orbit of Venus and the orbit of Mercury.” They are there to relay communications, observe sunspots, absorb energy and beam it to wherever it’s needed. 

Stasek sets out and, of course, quickly comes across an energy-eater wrapped around a satellite he’s supposed to service.  What an opportunity!  He disregards regulations, gets close to it, and finds out why nobody who has done so has come back: it wraps itself around his little spaceship.  Turns out it’s telepathic, and it’s hungry: it wants to go towards the sun, and when Stasek demurs, it takes control of the ship.  Curtains!  Except Stasek, before he cooks completely, figures out a better deal to offer it.

This would be a perfectly acceptable piece of hardware-opera yard goods except that it turns on the assumption that telepathic communication, if it exists at all, could work right off the bat between creatures of such utterly different background and experience.  I read that some guy named Wittgenstein said, “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” Sounds right to me, and that goes at least double for a shape-shifting vacuum-dweller that feeds on pure energy.  Sorry, too much to swallow, downgraded from yard goods to factory reject.  Two stars.

As for the rest of the issue, I can’t say there’s anything especially good here—but at least some of it is bad in more interesting ways than usual.  Also, as someone suggested to me, this seems to be the Special Bad-Mouthing Issue.  Once past the del Rey story, every piece of fiction contains some derogatory stereotype or a character who is nasty to the point of caricature.

Sunburst (Part 3 of 3)


by Schelling

This issue concludes Phyllis Gotlieb’s serial Sunburst, which seems sincere and well-meaning, but ultimately inconclusive. 

Premise (in case you haven't been reading along): years ago, in a small Midwestern city called Sorrel Park, a nuclear reactor accident resulted in the town’s being quarantined under martial law, and in the birth of a number of mutant children with very strong psionic powers.  A few years later these feral superchildren ran rampant through the town destroying everything within reach, and were themselves quarantined behind a force field in a barren place called the Dump (hence, Dumplings).

The main character is Shandy Johnson, a 13-year-old orphaned girl who is an “imperv,” i.e., someone with no psi talent who is undetectable via psi, and who is trying to get by in depressed and police-dominated Sorrel Park.  She is apprehended and taken to the authorities, who want to use her as a go-between with the Dumplings, though that doesn’t actually happen.

Instead the author launches a very busy plot full of escapes, pursuits, disappearances, captivities, disturbances, threats of massive sabotage of essential government functions, etc.  Midway through, Shandy unspools her big idea: psi talents tend to develop in people who are psychopaths anyway—born juvenile delinquents!  I.e., mesomorphs who have had trouble with the police starting early, who mostly “come from families without very strong morals—often immigrants who have trouble coping with a new country. . . . I’ve heard poverty is a cause of delinquency, but I think these kinds of shiftless, helpless people could be a cause of poverty too. . . .”

After this detour into discredited pseudo-science, the busy plot machine cranks up again, with the Dumplings mostly acting like the natural-born delinquents we’ve been told they are, and at the end most of those who are still alive are back in the Dump behind a more secure force field.  That is, after all the hugger-mugger, the story’s basic problem, young people essentially sentenced to life imprisonment in a barren environment because nobody can control their dangerous talents, is unchanged.  It is suggested that Shandy is the real mutant superperson here, though what that means is unclear. 

Meanwhile, we have never seen the Dumplings and their outcast society—the most interesting part of the set-up—except second-hand, and in melodramatic bursts during their breakout.  It’s all perfectly readable, if you can overlook Gotlieb’s frequently clumsy writing.  (Sample: “She had come to a hard decision, and she silently awarded herself the razz for her sense of its altruism, without stopping the ache.”) It just never adds up to much despite the potentially interesting premise.  Two stars.

The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal


by Schelling

Next up is The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal, by Cordwainer Smith, he of the suddenly soaring reputation.  This one is told in high whimsical tall-tale style, about the eponymous Commander who is dispatched to probe the “outer reaches of our galaxy.” He encounters a colony planet where “femininity became carcinogenic,” so the women all died off and the only means of survival was to turn everyone medically into men, which of course had effects beyond the medical.  Smith describes the results at some length.  Here’s a sample:

“They, themselves, were bearded homosexuals, with rouged lips, ornate earrings, fine heads of hair, and very few old men among them.  They killed off their men before they became old; the things they could not get from love or relaxation or comfort, they purchased with battle and death.  They made up songs proclaiming themselves to be the last of the old men and the first of the new, and they sang their hate to mankind when they should meet, and they sang ‘Woe is earth that we should find it,’ and yet something inside them made them add to almost every song a refrain which troubled even them.

And I mourn Man!

One must ask whether this is a glimpse of the far future, or of the author’s insecurities.  We don’t hear much about homosexuals here in this small Kentucky town, and what we do hear amounts to locker room talk.  I wonder if Smith is just passing on the locker room talk of intellectuals.  His extravagant fantasy about people I doubt he knows much about reminds me of some of the strange things people in this mostly segregated town say about Negroes.  Anyway, two stars: a story that started out like a bravura performance, brought down by what reads like gross stereotyping.

Incidentally, the blurb to the story reads like the editor tried to get into the swing of Smith’s sometimes outlandish prose.  I wonder if she just appropriated a piece of the story to serve as a blurb.

The Artist


by Schelling

Rosel George Brown contributes The Artist, a purposefully difficult and unpleasant story about an artist, a stupid and nasty jerk who has become successful by painting what his long-suffering wife sees (it’s not too clear how that works).  Now she sees something strange and frightening in a corner of the room, and rather than have him paint what she sees, she provokes him into getting a stepladder and looking for himself, with unpleasant results (for him anyway).  It’s sort of like that playwright of bad marriages, Edward Albee, meeting H.P. Lovecraft, to mutual dislike.  For lagniappe, the action takes place at a party featuring caricatured secondary characters.  Two stars for making the story seem interesting enough to persevere with it (including a second read) long enough to figure out what is going on. 

According to His Abilities


by Schelling

Another nasty jerk is featured in Harry Harrison’s According to His Abilities, though this one isn’t so stupid, and is also rationalized at the end of the story.  The refined milquetoast DeWitt and the boorish thug Briggs have been dispatched to rescue an Earthman from primitive aliens who are pretty boorish and thuggy themselves.  Briggs’s belligerence wins the day, and there’s a facile revelation about him at the end, of an all too familiar sort.  It’s dreary hackwork executed professionally.  Two stars.

For Every Action


by Adkins

C.C. MacApp’s For Every Action starts with a mildly clever idea, spaceborne life forms around the orbit of Pluto that glom on to spaceships’ rocket exhausts so they can no longer steer accurately, then adds another such idea (a guy could move around in space using a bow and arrow!), and sets them in a silly frame of Cold War suspicion, concluding with a reference to Soviet spacemen (implicitly, drunk) floating in space singing Volga Boat Song (sic).  It’s generically similar to Boiling Point but much weaker.  Two stars, barely.

Planetary Engineering

And of course Ben Bova is back with the latest in his interminable series of fact articles though this one gets no farther than the Moon.  It’s about what people will have to do to establish colonies there, and is frankly a rehash of what we’ve seen not only in dozens of SF stories but in plenty of articles in general-interest magazines, complete with platitudes (“Finally, carving out a human settlement in a literally new world will give man an opportunity to create a new society.” Etc.) and observations so mundane as to be suffocating (“Corridors will no doubt be painted in special color codes, to help travellers find their way.”).  Two stars, largely for good intentions.  Also, no one is insulted here.

The Verdict

So: not much here of much merit, but, as already suggested . . . if you can’t be good, at least find an interesting way to be bad.


by Schelling


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5 thoughts on “[April 14, 1964] COOKING WITH ASH (the May 1964 Amazing)”

  1. Well, it's certainly not a good issue, though I get there by a slightly different route than John.

    "Boiling Point" was tedious from the get-go. And most of the plot hinged on the protagonist doing incredibly stupid things. Del Rey hasn't written all that much in the last few years. Just a couple of novels and a handful of stories, which sounds like a lot, but isn't compared to his heyday. I remember him being better than this.

    "Sunburst" is probably a little better than John makes it out to be, at least as a whole. The first part was definitely the best, with each succeeding part not as good as its predecessor. The conclusion really isn't earned, and I'm not even sure it makes much sense in the context of the rest of the story. This is Mrs. Gotlieb's first novel and it shows. But I think she has promise, based more on some of her short stories.

    "Commander Suzdal" is probably where I disagree most with John, yet come to much the same conclusion. I certainly wouldn't call the style whimsical. It's fairly in line with most of Smith's stories (the two Rod McBan stories were more mainstream in tone than most of his work). And we've seen the title character before, in "A Planet Named Shayol". This is how he found himself condemned there. But the story doesn't really work. The attitudes towards homosexuality are unfortunate at best. I also found myself thinking about a story from several months ago by, I think, Marion Zimmer Bradley (and maybe Juanita Colson?) where aliens help the all male crew of a starship keep humanity going after the Earth is destroyed. That was a case of some men becoming women, rather than all women becoming men, as it is here. But the comparison is obvious.

    "The Artist" was full of deeply unpleasant characters. Some of it may have been a satire on modern artists and how they're received by the snobbish intellectual community. Albee meets Lovecraft is a fair description, though I saw a bit of Robert W. Chambers in there. Mrs. Brown is usually better than this.

    The Harrison is the only story I might rate higher than John did, but maybe not. It's fairly readable, as one would expect from Harrison, but that's about all it has going for it.

    The MacApp felt like he was trying to write a Gordon Dickson or Poul Anderson story. And going for the joke at the end was likely a mistake. The elements of a decent story are there, but they aren't put together quite right. I'm actually surprised this wasn't in Analog.

    Bova's science article was a bit of a step back for him. He's improved a lot recently, but this one fell back to his older "corporate report" style. The title was also misleading. I thought it would be about terraforming (and maybe the follow-up articles will be).

  2. I actually think you were a little too harsh on a couple of the stories.  To be sure, "Boiling Point" was sketchy and obvious, the Harrison was mediocre, and "For Every Action" was trivial.

    But I thought the Smith was worthy of that fine author, if not his absolute best.  I could bend over backwards and claim his depiction of the all-male society wasn't so much a caricature of homosexuality as one of pure masculinity, untempered by any trace of femininity; but even without that defense, I think this is a very good, albeit tragic story.

    I also found "The Artist" to be compelling, no matter how unpleasant the characters might be.  I noted the resemblance to Edward Albee, and I think "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is an extraordinary play, so that aspect of it added to my enjoyment of it.

  3. I was a honored to be a guest at the Fiorello La Guardia home a couple of weeks ago, and its current owner had a story to tell about "Boiling Point".

    Lester Del Rey had accepted a commission to write a story based on the Emshwiller cover for this issue, but he found himself blocked, and asked Robert Silverberg to ghost the story for him.  Silverberg complied. 

    I think that after making a pile of cash churning out all of those smut paperbacks, Robert Silverberg would like to rebrand himself as a more literary author.  Last year's "To See the Invisible Man" and "The Pain Peddlers" are early indicators of this "new" Silverberg. 

    For a ghosting job like this SilverBob turned out a story more typical of his 1950s hack work: competently done but nothing special.  And he was happy to hide it under Lester's moniker.

    1. That's an interesting tale. The story does have a bit of the same feel as some of Silverberg's hack work of a decade ago. I know Del Rey often complains of writer's block. I wonder if he's done this before. And maybe he'd be better off as an editor. I know! He could take over from Davidson at F&SF.

  4. I was wondering if the Del Rey was among the ghost jobs he's becoming mildly famous for commissioning…often from the previous, much worse editor of AMAZING, Paul Fairman. Likewise, I wonder if Goldsmith Lalli is writing the blurbs, as opposed to the apparently otherwise mostly unoccupied Norman Lobsenz?

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