by Gideon Marcus
Heading South
After four lovely days in the Japanese capital, we hopped the train for points southwest, toward the center of the country. Sadly, we were just a few months too early to take the new "bullet train" which will be debuted in October in time for the Olympics. The trip thus took many hours, but the scenery was nice (this year's "rainy season" hasn't been very) and I got a lot of reading done.
Nagoya is Japan's "fourth" city, after Tokyo/Yokohama, Osaka, and Fukuoka. A drab, gray and brown place, it nevertheless was a must-stay location for us given its proximity to so many of our friends: A husband-and-wife couple teach at the local university, our dear friend Hideko (now recently married!) lives in Osaka, and a friend I met when she visited America, Juuri, lives in nearby Shizuoka.
And, of course, there is the super-energetic Nanami, who teaches schoolchildren in Nagoya.
Dan and Jen, whose nieces were visiting at the time, took us up to old Inuyama castle. This is one of the few original castles still intact. It gave us a commanding view of the area.
We also explored the nearby town of Oobu, and we were welcomed into a local home. Here's the bedroom of a little boy who lived there.
The bustling, brash city of Osaka was as smoky and wild as ever. Western culture has thoroughly soaked the place: clothing, music, and food.
The Issue at Hand
Somehow in the midst of all this, I found time to read and review the latest Gamma, a new magazine whose first two issues had greatly impressed me. Sadly, it seems that the stock of great fiction the editors had accumulated prior to launch has been exhausted, and what's left is so much trunk work, the substandard stories by big names that hadn't sold elsewhere. Pity.
by Morris Scott Dollens
The Girl of Paradise Planet, by Robert Turner
The first story illustrates my point well. Here is a piece by a veteran, with a thousand stories to his credit, and it's just mediocre. A fellow on vacation on a pleasure planet goes SCUBA-diving and encounters a young girl under the waves. She's not a mermaid — she has a full complement of human limbs, yet she can breathe underwater. The vacationer quickly falls in love, to the annoyance of his shrewish wife, and spends endless hours with his newfound paramour.
Said romance feels solipsistic, like something a fourteen-year-old might come up with, including plenty of the protagonist's thoughts and precious few of the object of his intention. In fact, near the end, we are led to doubt that the encounter was real at all, which would have made a lot more sense given the sketchiness of the girl's character, who prefers not to talk but rather mostly perform aquatic acrobatics. And smooch.
Alas, it turns out the girl is real. Joy for our hero, disappointment for us. A weak three stars.
by Luan Meatheringham
(speaking of illustrations, Gamma has employed young Luan Meatheringham to produce drawings. While the pieces are nice, in a fanzine-ish way, they don't relate to any of the stories, and I'm not sure why they're here, taking space.)
The Feather Bed, by Shelly Lowenkopf
Shelly (a man, despite the name) Lowenkopf writes of a future where, upon the expiration of copyright after 56 years, literary works are destroyed to a copy, and replacements commissioned as a kind of artistic welfare. When a writer refuses to finish his assignment to rewrite King Lear he is fired, eventually becoming a plumber — an industry in which pipes are torn out and replaced every three years.
I like stories about a future with rampant unemployment and the need for makework, but this one doesn't make a lot of sense, even by its own rules (no good argument is made against creating new works) and the piece doesn't work as satire, either, because I'm not sure what it's supposed to be satirizing.
Two stars.
Angel Levine, by Bernard Malamud
A down-on-his-luck tailor is visited by a shabby, black Jewish angel, who (eventually) eases the man's pain.
Not much to say about this one. Three stars for atmosphere and dialect.
by Luan Meatheringham
The (In)visible Man, by Edward W. Ludwig
Here's a piece about a man who is such a nonentity that the world completely ignores him, and he is able to lead a life of crime. That is, until the fellow finds love and confidence, causing him to become visible again.
I might have enjoyed this story more had Ellison not done it so much better in The Forces that Crush six years ago.
Three stars.
Inside Story, by Miriam Allen deFord
From the pen of one of the genre's most venerable creators comes the tale of a sentient world and the tsuris of a cold given it by a four-being scount team from the Galactic Federation.
Cute, but this is the sort of thing Bob Sheckley used to do, and much better.
Three stars.
The Birth, by George Clayton Johnson
We've seen a lot of Johnson on TV, particularly us fans of The Twilight Zone. This forgettable piece, a first person account of the creation of Frankenstein's Monster, does not even have a Serlingesque twist to redeem it.
Three stars for competent writing.
by Luan Meatheringham
The Gamma Interview: Soviet Science Fiction
The most worthy piece of the issue is an interview with "Ivan Kirov", editor of a Moscow publishing house that produces science fiction. It is worth picking this issue up just for this piece, even though it has an unfortunate ediorial accident that omits a crucial line.
Five stars.
Buttons, by Raymond E. Banks
Along similar lines, Banks offers up the story of a dying spaceman who transfers his consciousness to a set of computerized buttons until such time as his persona might be restored to a human body. Said spaceman decides he likes being a disembodied being better.
It's well-written, but like the rest of the pieces in this magazine, it doesn't really go anywhere.
Three stars.
by Luan Meatheringham
Society for the Prevention, by Ron Goulart
Goulart is known for writing humorous pieces, so this light-hearted tale of the fortunate intersection of an interstellar merchant, his shipment of alien pots which are actually extraterrestrial invaders, and some rabid anti-capitalists is right up the author's alley.
Entertaining, though frivolous. Three stars.
The Snail Watcher, by Patricia Highsmith
Finally, mystery writer Highsmith presents the tale of a man whose love for snails ultimately proves his undoing. The moral: molluscs are for eating, not voyeuring.
Yet another atmospheric piece that doesn't do much. Three stars.
by Luan Meatheringham
Summing Up
Thus ends one of the most mediocre collections of digest-sized pages I've ever read. I have to wonder if this is a momentary blip, or if Gamma is doomed to be short-lived. Only time will tell.
And now, off to Hiroshima! See you in two days…
[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…]
Glad to hear that you are enjoying your stay in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Gamma is turning out to be an odd combination of a "little" literary magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, given all the crime fiction writers in this issue.
The article was quite interesting, despite the serious printing errors. The interior art was pretty good, even if out of place. The cover art, as in previous issues, is fine, realistic space art, which is very misleading when one considers the kind of fiction inside the magazine.
I liked some stories a little more than you did, some a little less.
I didn't care for "The Girl of Paradise Planet" at all. It definitely reads like somebody writing SF for the first time. The SF elements weren't necessary anyway, and this would have worked better as fantasy. I didn't care for the familiar theme of a middle-aged man tired of his shrewish wife and yearning for the much younger woman who appreciates his true worth. The revelation at the end was silly, too, and made nonsense of everything that came before.
"The Feather Bed" was much too implausible, even for satire. The same theme worked much better in Pohl's "The Midas Plague," and even that suffered from what Damon Knight calls an Idiot Plot. (That is, this kind of society can't possibly exist unless everybody is an idiot.)
I liked "Angel Levine" quite a bit. Too bad that the only reprint in the issue is probably the best story. Anyway, this story made me ponder what it's saying about race and religion. There's more to it than there seems to be at first, I think.
"The (In)visible Man" was OK, but suffered from some inconsistencies in the premise. It also reminded me too much of Silverberg's far superior "To See the Invisible Man," although the plot isn't similar at all. I haven't read the Ellison you mention, so I'll take your word for it that it's a better version of the same theme.
I had mixed feelings about "Inside Story." The team of space explorers of many species was interesting, although I wish it hadn't been described in such an adolescent way. This is definitely a one idea story, so a lot that goes on had nothing to do with the simple plot.
"The Birth" was very well written, even if there wasn't really a plot. I could have done without the revelation of the famous name from fiction at the end; letting me figure it out for myself would have been more effective.
"Buttons" had an intriguing idea, developed, for the most part, in a fascinating way. Some things that happened were less logical, unfortunately, but overall it was pretty good.
"Society for the Prevention" did nothing for me at all. Goulart's parodies are a little better than his slapstick comedies. This one, in particular, seemed to be nothing but one random thing after another.
"The Snail Watcher" certainly succeeded in what it set out to do. As far as I can tell, that was to tell a very creepy horror story. No surprises in the plot, but plenty of nightmare material.