by Gideon Marcus
Every so often, you get a perfect confluence of events that makes life absolutely rosy. In Birmingham, Alabama, the segregationist forces have caved in to the boycott and marching efforts of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Two days ago, astronaut Gordo Cooper completed a day-and-a-half in orbit, putting America within spitting distance of the Russians in the Space Race. And this month, Avram Davidson has turned out their first superlative issue of F&SF since he took the editorial helm last year.
Check out the June 1963 Fantasy and Science Fiction and see if you don't agree:
No Truce With Kings, by Poul Anderson
Centuries after The Bombs Fell, the North American continent has scratched its way back to the early 20th Century, technology-wise, but enlightened feudalism remains the order of the day. Kings begins on the eve of civil war in the Pacific States of America after a coup has placed an expansionist government in charge in San Francisco bent on reestablishing Manifest Destiny. Colonel McKenzie of the Sierra Military Command must fight to preserve the old confederacy in the face of superior forces as well as the belligerent "neutrality" of the Esps — communal mystics who seem to have developed terrible psychic weapons.
Don't worry — the story really does belong in this magazine, and not Analog!
Anderson, of course, has been a pleasure to read for many years (since his inexplicable dip in the late '50s.) Kings is a nuanced, character-driven war story filled with lurid descriptions of battles and strategic considerations. It's a bit like The High Crusade played straight, actually. Four stars for the general reader, five if combat is your bag.
Pushover Planet, by Con Pederson
This piece starts well enough, with a pair of dialect-employing space miners landing on an uncommonly idyllic world and meeting an uncommonly friendly alien. The ending, on the other hand, is pure ironic corn, and on the whole, the story feels like an idea Bob Sheckley rejected as not worth his time to write. I don't know who Pederson is any more than Davidson does (apparently, the Editor doesn't even know where to send payment for this story written nearly a decade ago). In any event, I don't think the magazine got its money's worth. Two stars.
Starlesque, by Walter H. Kerr
About an alien stripper who takes it all off. Not worth your time. Two stars.
Green Magic, by Jack Vance
Oh, but Vance's latest work absolutely is! Dig this: beyond our world lie the realms of White and Black magic, each featuring the powers and denizens you might expect. But beyond them, and possessing powers more abstract and strange are the realms of Purple and Green magic (and further still, those of the indescribable colors, rawn and pallow). One Howard Fair would follow in his Uncle Gerald's footsteps to become adept in the wonders of Green magic, no matter the warnings from a pair of its citizens.
A brilliant, unique piece that lasts just long enough and grips throughout. Five stars.
The Light That Failed!, by Isaac Asimov
The Good Doctor continues with his series on the luminiferous ether, this time discussing the famous Michelson-Morley experiment. This test was supposed to show Earth's "absolute speed" through the cosmic medium. Instead, it disproved the ether's existence and set the stage for Einstein's and Planck's modern conceptions of the universe. Vital stuff to know. Four stars.
The Weremartini, by Vance Aandahl
Young Vance Aandahl (no relation to Jack Vance) has produced his first readable story in a long time, about an epicurian English professor whose alternate form is exactly as it says on the tin. Weird, disturbing, but not bad. Three stars.
Bokko-Chan, by Hoshi Shinnichi
A barkeep builds the perfect assistant — a beautiful but empty-headed robot woman to occupy the attentions (and tabs) of the tavern's patrons. Billed as the first Japanese SF story to appear in English, it reads like a barbed children's story. I suspect it's better in the original language (and I'd love to get a copy, since I could read it — I actually was aware of Hoshi-san before he appeared in these pages), but it's not bad, even in translation. Three stars.
Tis the Season to Be Jelly, by Richard Matheson
Only Matheson could successfully manage this tale of post-atomic, mutated hicks. Stupidly brilliant, or brilliantly stupid. You decide. Three stars.
Another Rib, by John J. Wells and Marion Zimmer Bradley
Just 16 men, the crew of humanity's first interstellar expedition, are all that remain of homo sapiens after catastrophe claims our mother star. All hope seems lost for our species…until a native of Proxima Centauri offers to surgically alter some of the spacemen, expressing their latent female reproductive organs.
Rib is an interesting exploration of what it means to be a man, and the varying degree of push required (if any!) for a person to transition from one gender to another. A bold piece. Four stars.
There Are No More Good Stories About Mars Because We Need No More Good Stories About Mars, by Brian Aldiss
Things wrap up with a bitter poem about how science has ruined Mars for SF, but who cares — we'll always have Barsoom. Three stars.
The resulting issue is a solid house made of the finest bricks albeit rather low quality mortar. Good G-d, even Davidson's editorial openings are decent now. Maybe he reads my column…
Overall, a good issue, with a few clunkers.
The Anderson is a good, complex story; maybe too complex. It's got enough stuff in it for a full-length novel.
The Pederson, Kerr, and, sad to say, Matheson didn't appeal to me at all.
I didn't like the Vance as much as you did, but it was a good, interesting story.
Besides being extremely strange, the Aandahl was notable for its racial themes, in what one would expect to be just another silly farce.
The Wells and Bradley collaboration wasn't bad, but I thought it tried too hard to be shocking.
Which leaves the Japanese story. I actually thought it was highlight of the issue. I can't judge the translation, and you would know about the author and his place in Japanese literature, subjects of which I know nothing, but I found it to be the most realistic, convincing robot story I have ever read. I suspect a robot such as the one that appears in this story could be built in the very near future, as it has no real consciousness but is only an excellent imitation. The story also says something important about the relationship between the sexes (as does "Another Rib," in a different way.)
I'm not the biggest fan of Bradley, so I always have to objectively assess how I feel about her work. I didn't think Rib was trying to be shocking as trying to convey how shocking the subject matter was to the viewpoint character.
The Anderson was very good. As Victoria notes, it could easily have been expanded to novel length. On the other hand, it could have been a bit shorter. But what bothered me most was the rather impassioned defense of feudalism as humanity's natural state. I'm well aware that not everything an author writes reflects his personal beliefs, but Colonel McKenzie was the primary sympathetic character and his speech was very heartfelt.
I didn't think much of the Pederson. It occurs to me that if Davidson doesn't know where to send the check, he also didn't know who to ask for editorial rewrites. That's really got me wondering about him as an editor.
The Kerr was utterly forgettable.
I didn't particularly care for the Vance. It was well enough written, it just didn't appeal to me in the least.
The Aandahl was unusual. I liked it, but it was certainly different from what I was expecting from a title like that. I was expecting something more like Ron Goulart wackiness.
I thought the Japanese story was very good. It might make an interesting Twilight Zone episode without being too much of the Twilight Zone has become. The ending was quite cinematic. I do enjoy seeing science fiction from other cultures.
I don't really know if I like the Matheson or not. It felt a bit as though he were trying to write like Samuel Beckett. Or maybe Samuel Beckett writing Li'l Abner.
"Another Rib" certainly had a fascinating concept to work with and dealt with some difficult issues. Alas, I found the writing heavy going at best and not really up to the task. I've been generally unimpressed with Mrs. Bradley's work and this seems to just reaffirm that assessment. I've heard a rumor that co-author Wells is actually noted fan Juanita Colson. Don't know if it's true, but maybe somebody who regularly reads Yandro could say more.
Yes, the co-author was Juanita Coulson. She told me so herself.
Thank you for the clarification, Sandra!
> Michelson-Morley
My instructor covered that in physics class. We were told that the experiment "proved" there was no aether. I observed that was incorrect; the experiment only showed that there was no detectable aether within the limits of its resolution.
My instructor was Not Amused, and graded me accordingly. But I may get the last laugh; seven or eight years ago a physicist named John Wheeler postulated "quantum foam", which sure sounds like aether wearing a different hat. While Wheeler's idea is pretty far out, my nephew at CalTech says nobody there is laughing at it, and some of the physicists there have found it to be useful.
I also thought the Anderson and the Vance very good, the latter especially so for the way it hints at much, much more than it actually describes.
I also liked the Aandahl, Matheson, and the Coulson/Bradley–I thought the latter a good example of the 'New Wave' type of stories that Davidson publishes (a taboo breaker in this case).
I'm surprised no-one mentioned Emsh's lovely cover, or that Davidson raves about Phil Dick's 'The Man in the High Castle' for two pages in his book review column, and admits "how he has escaped my notice until now, I own to you I do not know. I don’t think he will elude me again."
I'm not overly enamored with the fuzzy yellow covers F&SF has done of late. As for the Dick, I thought it was good, but not great.