by Gideon Marcus
President McKinley once famously observed around the Turn of the Century that everything that could be invented had been invented. He was not entirely correct, as it turned out. However, if one were to read the stultifying pages of F&SF these days, one might be convinced that all the SF that could be written had been written. The February 1964 Fantasy and Science Fiction is a double-handful of cliches with a thin veneer of literary writing to make them "worthy." It's no wonder editor Avram Davidson has moved to Mexico; he is probably fleeing his outraged readers — whomever's left of them, anyway.
The House by the Crab Apple Tree, by S. S. Johnson
The bad ship S. S. Johnson leads the issue with possibly the most offensive piece I've read since Garrett's Queen Bee. It's an After The Bomb piece told from the point of view of one the world's last women, who is shacked up with her wretch of a husband and their fourteen year old daughter. Barely sentient, our protagonist spends most of the story wondering which of the marauding male savages who terrorize her home would make the best husband for her kid. After all, a woman needs a man.
Bad as it was, I read the whole story (for it it is passably well written) hoping to be pleasantly surprised. I wasn't. Mr. Johnson's protagonist shows no initiative at all (and, in fact, each of her episodes is characterized, even precipitated by her inaction), the daughter is violated in the end, and Davidson, in the height of tactlessness, chose to illustrate the gawdam cover of the magazine with a scene of the torture of said little girl.
One star and a new bottom for the magazine. Shame, Mr. Davidson. I hope the mail and telegrams stop service to your new home so you can do no more damage.
[And please see the letter sent in by Mr. Jonathan Edelstein, appended below. It expresses what's fundamentally wrong with this story. Thank you, Jonathan. (Ed.)]
The Shepherd of Esdon Pen, by P. M. Hubbard
Here's a stunner. After spending half the vignette telling us about a Scottish shepherd of legend, a modern shepherd departs into a freak snowstorm, searching for his lost flock, and stumbles across the tomb of none other than the aforementioned herder. When he gets back, his sheep are safe. WAS IT THE SHEPHERD OF EDSON PEN?!?
An ineptly told ghost story that earns two spectrally thin stars.
Ms Found in a Bottle Washed up on the Sands of Time, by Harry Harrison
A pointless bit of doggerel about a fellow intent on disproving the Grandfather's Paradox by doing away with his grandfather — only the old man has quicker draw.
Two stars.
Nobody Starves, by Ron Goulart
A satirical piece (or something) about a dystopian future for whose denizens everything is hunky dory until they stop being useful to society. No one starves, in theory, but it's damned hard to get a bite to eat when you can't work for your supper.
There's probably a point or two buried under the glibness, but my eyes were too dizzy from rolling to find them. Two stars.
One Hundred Days from Home, by Dean McLaughlin
The first ship to return from Mars is met halfway by a new ship zipping around at a good percentage of light speed. The kid driving the speedster guffaws at the old men and their primitive junker, offering them a quick ride home. Indignant, they refuse.
Would NASA really send astronauts to Mars and back and not tell them about a huge breakthrough in space travel? Do these fellows not even have radios? Editor Davidson says he can't get any spaceship yarns these days, so he was happy to get this one. With "science fiction" like this, who needs fantasy?
Two stars.
The Slowly Moving Finger, by Isaac Asimov
The Good Doctor has always done a decent job of making abstruse concepts accessible to the layperson. But this non-fiction piece, about the maximum ages of various animals, is too simple and could have been paraphrased as one sentence: Every mammal but humans lives for one billion heart beats; people get four times that.
Three stars.
Little Gregory, by Evelyn E. Smith
An odd, vaguely SF tale about a woman employed as a governess by a robot for an alien child who turns out to be the vanguard of an extraterrestrial invasion. It works insofar as it fulfills Smith's goal of telling a 21st Century story with 19th Century style, but I'm not sure why the thing was written at all.
Three stars, I guess.
Burning Spear, by Kit Denton
Pointless mood piece about a kid who can capture and wield sunlight, and the folks who die when they demand proof.
Two stars.
In the Bag, by Laurence M. Janifer
An obvious vignette probably inspired by a trip to the local laundry. Blink and you'll miss it. Three stars. Maybe two. Who cares?
The Fan: Myth and Reality, by Wilson Tucker
The first of a three-part series on fandom, this one is an historical essay (next month's by Robert Bloch will cover conventions). I'm a big fan of Bob Tucker, as readers well know, but this is a superficial, perfunctory piece. It's over quickly, though. Three stars? [Note: I forgot to cover this piece in the original printing — thanks to those who pointed out the omission! Ed.]
Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming, by Doris Pitkin Buck
Welcome to the overpopulated world of 2061, where the national parks on the Moon have a long waiting list, the domes open to let the air in only on rare occasion, and citizens take hallucinogenic pills to stay sane. Still, despite the hoariness of the subject matter, it's not a bad read. Welcome to the ranks of the prose writers, Ms. Buck. Now go beyond the well-trodden path.
Three stars.
I'm sounding more and more like John Boston every day. My wife likes it when I write snippy, but boy am I tired of having things to be snippy about.
Could we please get Tony Boucher or Robert Mills back in the editorial saddle again?
— — —
(Need something to cleanse your palate? See all the neat things the Journey did last year!)
The link is broken – given your review, was that on purpose? :P
Thank you for the tip!
But yes, you really could avoid this issue.
The Buck is pretty good. OTOH, the Johnson is even worse than I thought it would be.
The single star didn't tip you off? I don't give those out often…
And yep. The Buck is pretty good. Also, the best piece in the issue. When pretty good is outstanding, you've put together a lousy issue. Hang head, Avram.
This link is the right one.
Well, for Davidson…
I did like Wilson Tucker's essay! And though Little Gregory does rather fall between two stools, I found it well worth reading. And give Harrison credit for not taking pages to get to the punch line.
Excellent characterization of the Smith — worth reading, but it doesn't quite.
I'd forgotten to cover the Tucker, which I found a bit too cursory. The mistake has been rectified.
I'm getting a bit of blowback for my savaging of the Johnson (which I stand by). I'd be interested to know what you think. Except I don't want to subject you to something I'm pretty sure you won't like…
I agree it's trying to be unpleasant, and much succeeding. (And should have been only two or three pages.) Worse for you, with the Junior Traveller, too. Definitely not worth publishing.
The Hubbard one was a good setting, if not that original an idea. It did need strong editing: eg Jesse's behaviour. With another editor we could have had a real keeper. But then, I'm a Sutcliff fan – I think Hubbard might be, too.
I said above that the Johnson story was even worse than I'd expected, and that remains my opinion, but let me attempt a defense of it:
1. It has power as a deconstruction of the after-the-bomb stories in which the plucky survivors find a refuge where they can ignore the collapse of civilization. There is no cozy shelter when civilization falls, and the story doesn't sanitize what it really means for the weak to be at the mercy of the strong.
2. I think you're doing the main character a disservice in portraying her actions in terms of non-sentience and passivity; the term you're looking for is "learned helplessness," and women have far too often found themselves in that condition. In many places and times, women did need the protection of men and did have to endure the casual brutality of the men in their lives as the lesser evil to what they might otherwise face. And people in that situation do often accommodate to it in roughly the way the main character did, up to and including forcing others (such as the daughter) into the same behavior pattern.
3. The story is well written – it's brutal, but it's vivid and visceral in its brutality. I'm still thinking about it several hours after reading, in contrast to the insubstantial fluff pieces that I've forgotten already.
Nevertheless, none of the above redeems the story in my eyes. I don't care for stories where the action consists of relentless, casual brutalizing of women, and when the "good," "kind" man half-raped the main character just to show he could, that put the story over the line of what I'm ready to tolerate. But that isn't the only reason.
For one thing, I found it hard to suspend disbelief for the setting given what actually happens when civilization collapses. People fortify their dwellings, band together for self-defense, find leaders (even if only warlords or mafiosi) and establish some kind of society – that happens after every collapse from the Hittites onward. Doing so is innate to being human, and in a world where it's still possible to farm and hunt, I don't buy that there wasn't at least a tribal or clan society, which can of course be oppressive but not in the utterly lawless way we see here.
But that's a minor point compared to the fact that the accommodations made by the women in the story aren't the lesser evil. The devil's bargain made by women through history involves accepting the brutality of one man so that they won't become prey to all the others – but here, the main character is prey whenever the gangs show up even with a male "protector." She really does have nothing to lose by striking out on her own, and that makes her accommodation to brutality, and particularly her willingness to subject her daughter to the same harm, less sympathetic.
The world of the story is one of unrelenting evil, and although its power may overcome that for other readers, it doesn't for me.
You, sir, have said everything that need be said!
I am now ashamed that I did not explicate more what I hated about it, but glad I did not, for it left room for you to do so.
I disliked the Johnson as well, though not as much as "The Queen Bee", which is truly incomparable in its sheer awfulness.
As for the protagonist, she is deeply unpleasant, but there were quite a few women like her in Europe (and likely elsewhere) during and in the immediate aftermath of WWII who had relationships with occupying soldiers to keep them supplied with food and other necessities and protect them against the predations of the other soldiers. Nationality and affiliation don't really matter – this happened on all sides. Did some of these women pimp out out their teenaged daughters? Very likely.
Do I judge them for what they did? No, because I wasn't there. A lot of women did whatever they had to do to protect and feed themselves and their families. Though it's notable that there always were women who did not do such thing. A woman who was a child in WWII once told me, "We were always hungry and poor, unlike my aunts and cousins. Because my Mom did not have a soldier boyfriend, unlike her sisters." These was in an American occupied area BTW, where rape was much less of a problem than in Soviet occupied areas.
But just because such things did happen and will continue to happen wherever there is war or widespread collapse (we're probably seeing similar dynamics in Vietnam right now) doesn't mean that I necessarily want to read about it. Besides, handling such a subject required a lot of sensitivity and S.S. Johnson simply doesn't have that. And though the initials are ambiguous and initials often equal female author in our genre, I strongly suspect that S.S. Johnson is a man.
Long before I got to the end of your review, I was thinking you sounded as cranky as John often is. And then you went and stole my comment. This is far from a good issue, but it's possible the first story put you off so much, it colored your view of the rest. Though not by a lot.
Jonathan Edelstein summed up everything right and wrong with the Johnson story. Well-written and dark, but flawed and not as powerful as it was aiming for. I think I might still give it two stars.
Shepherd also missed the mark, but not by as much as the first story. It has a touch of M.R. James, but is too muddled at the climax.
Harrison's poem was about as filling and satisfying as a cream puff with no flavoring. Harry should be better than this.
I liked the Goulart. Perhaps I just like the breezy style better than you do. It was a solid 3 stars for me. The breaking down of systems seems to be something of a theme for the author and his glib and often humorous style offers an interesting contrast to the subject matter.
I have a bit of a soft spot for Dean McLaughlin and I think the point he was trying to make is a good one. Alas, the whole story hinges on a lack of radio communication between Earth and any ships in space. Obviously once a ship gets far enough out you can't have conversations, but that certainly doesn't preclude sending information in both directions. Also, how many times have we seen this story for an interstellar flight, where the crew awakens from cold sleep or has simply been awake for decades only to find they've been beaten to their destination by new technology?
Dr. A. padded out his article by far too much. He also missed the mark in his discussion of lifespans. Most of those shorter human lives from days gone by are the result of childhood mortality. If you made it to adulthood, you had almost as much chance of reaching your 70s then as now. Not for nothing does the Bible allot us "three score and ten" and that was written something like 3000 years ago. He ignores the more interesting question: if we already get four times as many heartbeats as other mammals, what does that imply for extending our lives even further? Have we already pushed the line as far as we can?
Little Gregory was, well… words on a page in a mildly entertaining order. Davidson obviously bought this one for the style, reminiscent of his story that F&SF printed a month or two ago.
Both Denton and Janifer went for the Twilight Zone ending and both demonstrated that that sort of ending is a lot harder to do than it looks. I also found the Tucker article superficial. We'll see what the other two authors give us. And the Buck seemed to be another story that missed the mark.
So all in all, a lot of stories that didn't quite achieve what they were attempting. It probably is time for Davidson to move on. He's published some very good stories, but most of the peaks aren't all that high and the troughs are very wide and deep.
Well said, as always. The Journey is turning into a panel (probably a good thing; I haven't cornered the market on insight. Sometimes I wonder if I've even entered it.)
There is very little I can add to the erudite comments already offered by those more eloquent than I. Suffice to say that I thought that the controversial cover story was effectively brutal, for good or bad, and that I found "Burning Spear" enjoyable, if almost entirely without a real plot.