by John Boston
The Issue at Hand
Paula McLane
Well, what have we here? A pretty decent issue of Amazing, not a common occasion at all, with some good and/or interesting material, one disappointing item by a big-name author, but no offenses against reason and decency! Let us count our blessings, and proceed directly to their dissection.
He Who Shapes, by Roger Zelazny
George Schelling
Roger Zelazny’s two-part serial He Who Shapes concludes in this issue, and is the most pleasant surprise here: a capable writer taking on a substantial task and working hard to do a good job of it. It features a psychiatrist specializing in neuroparticipation therapy: he projects hyper-realistic dreams into his patients’ minds and then stars in them, directing the action to the therapeutic end of his choice. This is Render, the Shaper—a hokey note, but not misplaced, given the oratorical level of the whole.
Neuroparticipation is a powerful tool, but sometimes double-edged: the therapist can lose control of the action and wind up in the patient’s movie, not his own. Render is someone whose roots in his own reality are a little tenuous, by at least unconscious design: after the death of his wife, he maintains a determinedly superficial relationship with his mistress (sic) Jill, and a parental relationship with his son that is ostentatiously concerned (e.g., he changes the son’s school repeatedly) but seems emotionally arms-length.
So when another psychiatrist, brilliant, female, blind since birth, and of course also beautiful, asks Render to instruct her via neuroparticipation in visual imagery so she too can become a neuroparticipation therapist, the sophisticated reader can only think “Uh-oh.” I won’t go further; this is one that deserves to be read. Not that it’s perfect by any means; unlike almost everything else in sight, it seems too short, and the end in particular seems rushed and underdeveloped. But it’s a welcome sign both for the magazine and for the author, who seems to have moved from the “promising” column to the “delivering” one. A strong four stars.
Far Reach to Cygnus, by Fritz Leiber
Fritz Leiber’s Far Reach to Cygnus, a sequel of sorts to The Goggles of Dr. Dragonet from Fantastic of a few years ago, is labelled a short story but at 23 pages is as long as many novelets in this magazine. It’s a rambling, low-intensity sort of thing, agreeable enough while reading, but it compares badly to Leiber’s tighter and sharper pieces like Mariana (Fantastic, 1960), A Deskful of Girls (F&SF, 1958), or for that matter the short novel The Big Time (Galaxy, 1958).
Here’s another psychological theme, of sorts. To open, our first-person narrator is racing eagerly to Dr. Dragonet’s redoubt in the Santa Monica Mountains, lured by Dragonet’s promise of “a drug that is to mescalin and LSD as they are to weak coffee.” Upon arrival there is some byplay involving the police, a beautiful young woman, and a possibly illusory black leopard.
Our hero then enters a sort of seance featuring another beautiful young woman, recumbent in a long white dress, and already drugged, describing a scene on an extraterrestrial planet featuring blue grass and inhabited by elvish blue people who ride unicorns. Also present are a Professor, a Father, a Sister, “a handsome crophaired sun-tanned suavely muscled” young Hollywood man in all-white garb, who is “the newest and most successful Brando-surrogate and homegrown Mastroianni” of the media, and of course Dr. Dragonet.
The drug, or “psionic elixir,” is brought in by a third beautiful young woman (now we have a brunette, a blonde, and a redhead, all of them Dr. Dragonet’s nieces, if I am keeping score correctly). But first, several pages of debate about the mind-body problem! Finally, sixteen pages in, the characters start to take the drug, one by one, leading into several pages of drug effects, not badly done—the drug, as advertised, is psionic, so each character is seeing through the eyes of all of them.
And of course the drug effects become very palpable and menacing (mind-manifesting rather concretely, one might say) and are banished, and the Brando-surrogate, who it turned out was pretty dangerous, is psychically neutralized, and the white-garbed sort-of-medium recites some appalling developments on the blue planet (invaders with flamethrowers), and the police show up again briefly and comically, and much is made throughout about how fetching the young women are and how aroused and frustrated the narrator is (cheesecake without pictures, one might say).
But all of these (slowly) moving parts don’t really add up to much (the police and blue planet subplots in particular go nowhere), and certainly don’t disguise the fact that the story is no more than a facile pot-boiler with some trendy furnishings. Two stars.
The Answerer, by Bill Casey
New writer Bill Casey contributes The Answerer, the sort of story that might have appeared in Unknown in the early ‘40s—a fantastic premise developed like SF—except that editor Campbell wouldn’t have dared publish it. Suddenly, prayers are being answered. Everybody’s prayers. So what happens? As one of the characters puts it: “There can be nothing more dangerous than a personal god who actively interferes in the lives of men.” Hint: what if a lot of mental patients started praying? It’s not the vignette one might expect to see on this theme, but an actual story, with a suitably sardonic ending. Four stars.
Reunion, by David R. Bunch
David R. Bunch, who mostly hangs out in Fantastic these days, has his first appearance here in almost two years. His short story Reunion is more lucid and less precious than his usual. The language is also more straightforward though the preoccupation remains the same: the lives of humans whose bodies have been largely replaced with machinery (“new-metal” held together with “flesh-strips”; I think “cyborg” is becoming the fashionable term). The unnamed protagonist is visited in his Stronghold by his twin brother, who “went with the big Paper Shield” (i.e., became a minister) rather than the metal one. Protagonist is much troubled about their relationship and the prospect of meeting again, and considers shooting him, but in the end puts on the dog for him, mechanically speaking. A moment of epiphany follows, but once the brother leaves—back to business as usual, war with the neighbors. Three stars.
The Gobbitch Men, by Alfred Grossman
George Schelling
There’s a different flavor of the surreal in The Gobbitch Men by Alfred Grossman, who we are assured is “a novelist of some repute” responsible for Acrobat Admits and Many Slippery Errors, which I haven’t read, but which I gather could be described as black humor with anarchist tendencies. So what’s he doing in Amazing? I think writers use the term “salvage market.”
Grossman’s protagonist Irving is an ineffectual, incipiently alcoholic graduate student of the future, working on his thesis on the unbearably tedious, advisor-dictated subject of popular music of the late twentieth century, when he is delivered by mistake some spools titled Population and Catastrophe and the like. He asks questions, learns how things really are in his world, is warned that he should keep on the straight and narrow or else, but the or else is imminent anyway. Oh, the title? The gobbitch men make a big racket with the cans, but that’s to cover their more sinister covert errand, which has suddenly become highly relevant to Irving.
This one is an interesting try, a heavy-handed dystopian satire in the mode of early Galaxy, cartoony and overdone, but still quite well written, as befits “a novelist of some repute.” Three stars, and I wouldn’t mind seeing Mr. Grossman slumming here again.
S. Fowler Wright: SF’s Devil’s Disciple, by Sam Moskowitz
Sam Moskowitz soldiers on with the SF Profile series, this time with a less familar and more interesting subject than usual: S. Fowler Wright: SF’s Devil’s Disciple. Wright is a particularly good subject for Moskowitz, who prefers writing about work of the ‘30s and ‘40s, since almost all of Wright’s SF work was published then or even earlier. The best-known of his novels include The Amphibians (1924), The Island of Captain Sparrow (1928), Deluge (1928), Dawn (1929), The World Below (1929), Dream, or The Simian Maid (1931), The Adventure of Wyndham Smith (1938), and Spiders’ War (1954).
Titles to conjure with! But not much else, since as far as I can tell, Wright’s SF is entirely out of print, at least in the US—suffering the fate of his ideas. Wright, who is still around, 91 next month, is distinguished by his opposition to scientific progress generally and birth control in particular (no hypocrite he—he has ten children), and much of his work is dedicated to extolling the virtues of noble savagery. Moskowitz’s denunciation of these views helps make this article rather livelier than many of its predecessors, and the unfamiliarity of his work lends it considerable interest. Four stars.
Summing Up
So—not a bad issue of Amazing, something one doesn’t see more than once or twice a year. There’s even a sort of unifying theme, psychology, if you count the ostentatiously neurotic protagonist of The Gobbitch Men. Can Amazing do it again? Maybe even make it a trend? The public breathlessly awaits.
[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…]
I liked the Leiber quite a bit more than you did, it seems. For one thing, it's so darn well-written. The sentences just sing, drawing me along.
"The Answerer" was certainly provocative. The ending certainly made me think.
"Reunion" had a lot of the typical Bunch flavor and quirks. As said, a little less opaque than some of his stuff.
"The Gobbitch Men" was, as noted, like an old Galaxy satire, of a particularly dark sort. Not the most plausible premise in the world, maybe.
Definitely an improvement. Perhaps Cele has finished adjusting to all the changes in her life in the last year and gotten back into her groove, as the jazz men say.
Zelazny has certainly proven now that he can write at novel length. Indeed, he probably needs full novel length, rather than the slightly abbreviated magazine serial format. The ending was just a tiny bit rushed. Still, Zelazny continues to impress.
I'm closer to John than Victoria on the Leiber. It was far too long, if nothing else. He appeared to be attempting to write in the mode of Sturgeon or Davidson, maybe with a bit of Dick thrown in. Kudos to an author, especially a well-established one, for stretching his skills. Alas, it didn't really work. It's not quite Leiber's forte, though you can definitely see flashes of his usual skill.
"The Answerer" was a solid story. I might not go all the way to four stars, but it was decent read.
The more Bunch I read, the less I like him. This was better than a lot of his more recent stuff. Had I read this a couple of years ago, I might still be wondering about all the hate mail the Z-D mags get when he appears. At this point, though, I'm tiring of his various tics and quirks. Here's an author who needs to stretch his skills and try something different.
"The Gobbitch Men" was a fair read, a solid three stars. The underlying premise might be a touch difficult to believe, but decent enough to work with in the bounds of the story.
The profile was another interesting read. Apparently the shift to making the profiles more thematic is working.
Finally, John didn't touch on it, but I found Poul Anderson's guest editorial on science and poetry rambling and tedious. Given the improved story selection this month, I'd rather have had the usual page to page-and-a-half of Lobsenz's usual trivialities and another story.