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[April 14, 1960] Onward and Upwards!  (A new location)

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Dear valued readers of Galactic Journey:

Now that I can count my daily readers on more than two hands, I've decided on trying out a new venue so that y'all can get automatic electronic updates whenever a new article is published. How's that for convenience?

If you're here, that means you've already left the old Dreamwidth column and are firmly in front of the new space. 

Welcome!  Be sure to subscribe and never miss a single article in this wondrous column.  Hard to believe it's been 18 months already.  Thanks to all of you for keeping me going.

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Magazine

[April 13, 1960] An unfulfilled promise (May 1960 F&SF)

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Every month, there is the perennial hope that this will be the month a truly great story will be published. Every month, a stack of science fiction digests arrives at my door. There are few moments as exciting as that day (my postman holds them all so they arrive at once; I like big events). With great enthusiasm, I tear into my magazines. Sometimes the promise is fulfilled. Sometimes it isn't.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction most consistently delivers the stand-out stories, so I usually save it for last. Other months, I am a greedy child and eat dessert first. This time around, I split the difference.

First up is Fritz Leiber's short story, The Oldest Soldier. It's a good piece, very atmospheric. I originally thought it was another story about an immortal, a la Long Live Walter Jameson, the Twilight Zone episode, but upon further reflection, I think it's about one of the many time traveling soldiers in Leiber's The Big Time universe.

Fred McMorrow follows Leiber with the thematically similar, The Man from Tomorrow. It takes place in a New York steak and booze joint. A reporter and a crustily jovial bartender are debating the appeal of gambling when they are accosted by a fellow from the future. As a time traveler, the man has a perfect knowledge of events, and as a marooned prisoner of the 20th Century knowing everything that will happen (down to the most minute detail, it seems, and with no ability to alter events), he is miserable with boredom.

The reader is left with the question: Is it better to know the future and capitalize upon it, or to revel in the uncertainty of what's to come?

I did not like Rex Lardner's American Plan, about a fellow who goes to Mars as a tourist and ends up a prisoner in his hotel. As Damon Knight says in his book review column, it is not sufficient to slap a few science fiction trappings (in this case, a Martian setting) onto an otherwise conventional story and call it "genre."

John Collier's That Tender Age (a New Yorker reprint) is even worse. A would-be lodger interviews with potential landlords. He has a nomadic history, and he's had experience sojourning with cannibals. Early on, he makes it clear, inadvertently, that he has predatory designs upon the landlord's daughter, and at the end, cannibal and landlord's daughter head off to the woods, hand-in-hand, presumably never to return.

What makes this story unbearable is its run-on construction, with no quotation marks or attributions of expression. While Collier does indicate who is speaking through tone and use of proper nouns, it's tedious going. Moreover, the end is telegraphed from the beginning, which makes the conclusion all the more ridiculous. At least it's short.

Gordy Dickson has One on Trial, a short story about a ruthless executive who is forced to go on a sort of robotic safari as penance for his sins.  Never one to play by the rules, he finds his own way out, unrepentant and unchanged.  Not bad.

A Specimen for the Queen is the conclusion (?) to Arthur Porges' "Ruum" series, in which a taxidermist alien robot is deposited in the backwoods of Canada to assemble a preserved zoological collection. In the millions of years that the robot has been on Earth, it has amassed quite an exhibit, including one sentient biped. In this story, the robot encounters a detachment of Galaxy-conquering human-sized bees, who have mounted a scouting expedition to the Canadian wilds.

Has the robot finally met its match? Or are the bees grasping a tiger by its tail? Entertaining, if somewhat disturbing.

Dr. Asimov has a fascinating (if you are mathematically inclined) article on the fundamental constant, Pi. Of particular interest, to me anyway, was his presentation of Liebniz's series, which can be used to calculate Pi, provided one has a lot of spare time. It's quite simple: 4/1-4/3+4/5-4/7+4/9… and so on. You can do it with a pen and paper, but it will take you hundreds of thousands of iterations to get close to the answer, since you'll keep bouncing high and low around it.

Or, you can do what I did and rent some time on a local computer; I borrowed the university's lightning-fast IBM for a few hours. I cleverly reduced the computation time by having my program calculate the average of the last two numbers in the sequence (since one is an upper bound, and the other is a lower bound, to the value of Pi, the actual value must be somewhere about halfway). After 20,000 iterations, I narrowed Pi down to 3.1415926. Good enough for government work!

Finally, we come to Philip Jose Farmer's Open to me, my sister. Lane, the lone surviving astronaut of a five-man expedition to Mars discovers a wildly alien symbiotic biology. This beautifully described, but somewhat simplistic, set of species is responsible for the life-giving canals of Mars, which are actually biologically constructed water transport tubes.

Stranger still is Martia, also a lone survivor, but from a different solar system, who shelters Lane after he nearly drowns in one of Mars' natural hydroponic pools. Tantalizingly humanoid but repulsively alien, she and Lane enjoy a budding friendship and attraction over 25 fascinating, well-written pages. Near the end, Lane discovers how Martia's race breeds—an exchange of an internally carried worm-like parasite.

Whereupon, revolted by his attraction to a female with such a shocking sex life, Lane goes beserk, binds Martia, and kills her parasite. Lane is, soon after, captured by some of Martia's people, who plan to rehabilitate him (to Lane's horror).

It was such an unnecessarily violent end to such a beautiful story. Moreover, it was implausible. Early on, Farmer took great pains to describe Lane as a fellow in touch with his "feminine" side, able to bend ideologically without breaking. And yet, by the end, Lane cannot suffer this threat to his machismo. He cannot love/lust after an alien whose reproduction is, to him, so distasteful.

I get what Farmer is trying to do here, but I don't like it.

Which raises another question: What's worse? Consistent mediocrity, or the promise of greatness capped by a disappointing ending? Both the story and the issue fall into the latter category.

Ah well. There's still one more magazine to go.


Cover by Mel Hunter

P.S. I have exciting news! Very soon, the format of this column will change, and all of you lovely readers can get automatic notification (via instant telegraphic message) whenever a new piece is published.

P.P.S. I have found a kindred spirit, though his focus is both more scattershot chronologically and focused topically: Science Fiction Ruminations

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TV

[April 11, 1960] A Steady Flame (Twilight Zone wrap-up)

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Some shows start with a bang and quickly lose their spark; some are a slow burn, taking a while to find their stride; The Twilight Zone has remained a class act from the beginning.

As of Friday, April 8, 1960, there have been 27 episodes.  They have ranged in quality from fair to outstanding, and the current crop of four (I like to review them in monthly batches) comprises superior installments.

I think the success of the show can be attributed in large part to the high bar that creator and writer, Rod Serling, has set for its production.  This is a person who clearly knows his craft and seeks out like talents (Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, etc.) to draft screenplays.  Much of the credit must be doled out to the directors, cinematographers, and composer Jerry Goldsmith, to say nothing of the frequently excellent acting talent that CBS has managed to contract.

So much for the general praise.  On to the reviews!

Long Live Walter Jameson sets the standard for this batch.  The eponymous Professor Jameson is a brilliant history teacher with a knack for vivid anecdotes.  It's almost as if Jameson has lived through each of the periods and settings he describes, which is, of course, the case.

This is a thoughtful, fascinating piece that describes the blessing and curse that is immortality.  It's hardly the first, of course.  The one I remember most vividly is The Gnarly Man, by L. Sprague de Camp, but it is always a worthy topic.  In a piece I wrote many years ago, I once put these words into the mouth of a 5000 year old man:

"Imagine being in library with every book you ever want to read, and all the time in the world in which to do so.  And you read them… and you still have all the time in the world."

The following week, People Are Alike All Over.  Two astronauts, a rock-chinned type and a frightened intellectual, go to Mars where they find a remarkably human populace.  But why does the fine house crafted for the scientist (the hero-type having died soon after landing) have no windows or doors? 

I'll spoil it for you.  Roddy McDowell (the panicky scientist's actor) has been turned into a zoo specimen, relegated to live out the rest of his life as an exhibit in his "native habitat."  I get the message, but I still think it was a weak story idea.

Execution is another time travel fish-out-of-water story, but unlike The Last Flight, the voyager is a thoroughly unlikable chap.  Snatched from the hangman's noose in 1880, the murderous viewpoint character finds himself in 1960, the guest of a dapper chronologist (is that what you call a time travel expert?) The criminal remains true to type, killing and looting, being driven close to madness by the ever-present 20th century cacophony.  The ending comes as a surprise, for the most part. 

An interesting point—time travelers often are inordinately worried about changing the past, but no one gives a thought to changing the future.  After all, the present is really just someone else's past, and any gross modification of the present (say, sending one of its inhabitants permanently into the past) must to a resident of the future, make a severe alteration to the timeline.  Food for thought.

Finally, we have The Big Tall Wish, the first episode to date that features a black protagonist (and several black supporting actors).  An over-the-hill boxer tries to win a come-back fight with the help of the wishes of a little boy. 

The episode doesn't feature the madness or the weirdness of its predecessors.  Rather, it is a slow, wordy piece.  My daughter particularly enjoyed the heart-warming relationship between the boxer and his child friend.  That said, the twist (there's always a twist on this show) is very effective, and we are left with this conundrum: is a fight won with magic preferable to one honestly lost? 

That's the wrap-up for this month.  I'll be back in two days with this month's F&SF!

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Book

[April 7, 1960] Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair (The Haunted Stars)

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From the stars comes a warning… and a challenge.

Time permitting, I like to read a new science fiction book at least once a month.  The digests are reliable sources of good stuff, but there is only so far a writer can develop an idea in the space of a novella or short story.  Sure, there are occasionally serials in the magazines, but then one has to wait three months to see how they turn out. 

There were three science fiction books released last month, so far as I can tell.  One was a collection of Murray Leinster stories called The Aliens.  I understand its best story is the eponymous lead novella, which I reviewed earlier.  Louis Charbonneau released a science fiction horror called Corpus Earthling that I haven't had a chance to pick up.

And then there was The Haunted Stars, by Edmond Hamilton.  Hamilton is a bit of an elder statesman when it comes to science fiction.  He wrote for the pulps as far back as the 20s, and his writing is stylistically rather archaic. 

An example from Stars:

"Fairlie looked up at the sky as he followed Hill.  Orion strode mightily toward the zenith, followed by the upward-leaping stars of Canis Major, and all the heavens were sown with constellations that wavered wind-bright.  He remembered what Christensen had said, that both long-ago enemies had conquered interstellar space, not just interplanetary."

Not that this is a bad thing.  I grew up on Burroughs and Howard and Lovecraft, and I can go for some purple prose every so often.

His latest novel stars urbanite linguist, Robert Fairlie.  When alien artifacts are found in 30,000 year old ruins on the Moon (in 1965—Hamilton is an optimist), Fairlie is tapped as part of a deciphering team.  The alien language is translated with remarkable speed after Fairlie, on a whim, uses Sumerian as a guide.  It turns out that the aliens are completely human, and it is likely that terrestrial humanity are the race's descendants.

Along with this discovery comes a chilling revelation: the aliens did not abandon the stars willingly.  Rather, some other faction wiped out their star empire to a planet, and then admonished them never to attempt star travel again.

Well, who can resist a challenge like that?  Thus, our government works feverishly to develop a starship using alien technology for a mission to the alien's home star of Altair. 

Stars is actually quite reminiscent of Raymond Jones' book, The Aliens.  My favorite part of both tales is the linguistic challenge in the beginning.  One of my very favorite stories, H. Beam Piper's Omnilingual, is only about the translation of an alien tongue.  A similar nonfiction example is presented in C.W. Ceram's recent book, The Secret of the Hittites.

I suppose most readers will not be sated by long discussions of phonology and vowel shift, however.  Hamilton does deliver the literary goods in a punchy, articulate fashion.  While the plot is paint-by-numbers and the characters largely forgettable, there are some masterful touches that make the book worthy reading.

Hamilton takes the time to convey everyday feelings: cold, boredom, fatigue.  These mundane bits are often foregone.  There is a particularly good, almost stream-of-consciousness, passage through most of Chapter 11 as a trepidatious Fairlie packs for his star trek to Altair.  The descriptions of an alien world, superficially similar to Earth but subtly wrong are well done.

There is interesting technology, too.  At one point the scientists all marvel at these little alien recording spheres.  They don't utilize analog magnetic patterns (as one sees in wire and tape recorders) but rather some kind of etched information, perhaps digital, read with some kind of narrow beam.  I've never seen this concept before; it's very exciting yet plausible.

All in all, I rate the book a solid 3 stars out of 5.  It's not literature for the ages, but it is competent and fun stuff.  Pick it up while it's in the bookstores, and send me a letter telling me what you think.  I'll post it in this column, of course.

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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[April 6, 1960] First Test (Wisconsin Primary results)

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Provided by the Journal Sentinel

In an upset that no one saw coming (except every pollster in the nation), Massachusetts Senator Jack Kennedy defeated Michigan Senator Hubert Humphrey in a close Wisconsin primary, April 5.  It took most of the night for the final results to come in, but in the end, Kennedy took six out of the ten delegates the state had to offer.  This provides the handsome, boyish Senator the momentum he needs to compete in West Virginia and Nebraska, his next primaries.

Humphrey, however, seems completely unfazed.  In fact, when I heard him on the radio this morning, he sounded positively victorious.  He asserted that his managing to garner any delegates, given how much time and money Kennedy sank into the primary, made him the moral winner of the contest.  Perhaps Humphrey is just whistling in the dark.  Still, one can't help but like the guy.

Stay tuned tomorrow for a review of a brand new book!

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Conventions/Performances

[April 5, 1960] 8th Wonder of the World (Wondercon, 1960)

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No man is an island; but without conventions, the moat can be pretty broad.

Humans are social creatures.  Most of us have a natural desire to share our passions with others.  When we read (or watch) science fiction and fantasy, we are receiving a broadcast from an author, but the communication stops there.  If we want to discuss the experience, we need to find fellow fans.

There are many ways to do this.  You can take out an ad in the newspaper's personal columns.  You can join a local fan group, either public or privately sponsored.  These venues let you find nearby fans, and many clubs have become formidable associations. 

But if you want to meet fans from all over, or change your relationship with your favorite authors from a one-way experience into a face-to-face dialogue, there is no substitute for the convention.

The father of all science fiction conventions is the annual World Science Fiction Convention, at which the Hugo awards are announced.  This year, it will take place in Pittsburgh from September 3-5. 

There are lots of smaller conventions, however.  For instance, there recently was a small affair in Anaheim called "Wondercon" whose focus was comic books, science fiction, and animated films.  Anaheim is very close to my home town of San Diego, so we decided to make a family weekend it.

It was a jolly time.  Being a small convention, the folks were very energetic and creativity abounded.  My daughter hawked mimeographed copies of her home-grown comic book, which the professional writers at DC purchased with gusto.  My wife dressed as the Bat-Woman (of recent prominence in the Batman comics); she pulled it off quite well!  I perused fanzines, expanded awareness of this column, vigorously discussed the ramifications of copyright and trademark laws, and gawked at the well-crafted costumes.

Genre great Robert Heinlein was not in attendance, but a fan circle devoted to him was there leading a blood drive.  I also met up with the family of the late great Edgar Rice Burroughs, who fretted about the upcoming ACE paperback reprintings of the master's works.  Apparently, ACE will not be paying royalties (the original works having fallen out of copright).

Without further ado, here is my slew of photographs from the convention.  My apologies for the blurriness—it is my first time working with color film.

Attendees:

Rose Tyler

Peggy Carter

Amy Saunders (who is an excellent artist; contact her for some excellent comics-inspired and science fiction prints!)

As Anaheim is the home of Walt Disney's theme park, Disneyland, Disney costumes were popular:


Historical dress was also common:



Who doesn't like Captain America?


And, of course, Superman!

The Author, himself

By the way, the Wisconsin Democratic Primary is today.  My bet is on Hubert Humphrey.  After all, he is for all intents and purposes, the state's third Senator.  I can't imagine an East Coast upstart like Jack Kennedy winning more than four of the ten delegates, no matter what the over-enthusiastic polls are predicting.

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Science / Space Race

[April 2, 1960] Aeolus Chained (TIROS 1)

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"Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."  Mark Twain

That sage 19th century observation may not hold much longer if NASA has anything to say about it.

Last year, Vanguard 2 was touted as the first weather satellite because it had a pair of photocells designed to measure the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth.  This way, scientists could quantify the sun's effects on our climate.  No useful data was obtained, however, since the probe quickly became a whirling dervish.  Explorer 7 has a sophisticated radiometer experiment, which is more successfully accomplishing the same mission.

But it was not until yesterday that humanity had an honest-to-goodness weather shutterbug in orbit snapping pictures of clouds from hundreds of miles above them. 

The spacecraft is called TIROS: Television InfraRed Observation Satellite.  Every 90 minutes, TIROS makes a complete circuit of the Earth, with most of the inhabited surface visible to its twin TV cameras.  TIROS' photos are facsimiled to NASA headquarters (normally—I understand that the very first photos were conveyed via helicopter from the tracking station at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey).  They can then be distributed to scientists, weathermen, reporters, the general public.


TIROS' first picture—compare it to the "photo" returned by Explorer 6!

TIROS is going to usher in a new era of meteorology.  Weathermen will make accurate predictions days in advance.  Hurricane courses will be mapped, saving lives and property.  The President won't be rained out on golfing days. 

Perhaps more importantly, TIROS proves once and for all the practical value of satellites.  This isn't some eggheaded application too esoteric for the public to understand.  Nor is it just jingoistic one-upsmanship.  When someone asks you why we bother sending craft into space, you can point to TIROS' picture, the likes of which will soon replace the crude line drawings we currently find in our newspapers.

On a side note, TIROS marks the first homegrown NASA probe.  All of the previous Pioneers and Explorers were made by outside contractors (like Space Technology Laboratories) or absorbed facilities (like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory).  TIROS was made by NASA's Goddard Space Center in Maryland, which first started operation in June 1959.  I'd say they've earned an "A" right out of the gate!

Speaking of reports, we're at a science fiction convention in Los Angeles this weekend.  I'll try to have a wrap-up soon after the photos are developed.  During the con's down-time, should there be any, I plan to finish Edmond Hamilton's recently released The Haunted Stars while lounging in a chair by the hotel pool.  It's anyone's guess whether the convention or the book will get an article first…

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Magazine

[March 31, 1960] What goes up… (May 1960 Astounding)

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Every science fiction digest has a flavor.  Part of it is due to the whimsy of the editor, part of it is the niche the magazine is trying to fill, and part of it is luck of the draw.

Astounding can be summed up in just a few words: psionic, smug, workmanlike, crackpot, inbred.

Not necessarily in that order.

You see, every editor has an agenda.  For F&SF's Tony Boucher, and his successor, Paul Mills, it's to have as literary a magazine as possible.  For Galaxy and IF's H. L. Gold, it's to present solid science fiction without resorting to hackneyed clichés of the pulp era.

For Astounding's John Campbell, the motivation might once have been to mentor young writers so that they could create the best science fiction of the day.  Certainly, Campbell's magazine pioneered the field in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s.  But these days, Campbell seems determined to be the strongest champion of psychic phenomena and other silliness. 

For instance: perpetual motion.  Campbell promises to fully educate us on the "Dean Drive" next month, a flop of a device (so I understand) that supposedly turns rotational energy into linear energy for propulsion purposes. 

For instance: psychic paper.  The "Heironymous Machine," a meaningless circuit that is just as effective (so its creator and defenders claim) whether it be made out of electronic components or simply drawn on a sheet.

For instance: virtually every story that appears in Astounding must feature psychic powers and/or some reference to one of Campbell's pet projects.

It reminds me of how Fantastic Universe catered to the UFO crowd during its sunset years, much good it did them. 

The result of this editorial policy, and the over-reliance on just a few of the field's less exceptional authors, is a magazine that usually ranks lowest of the Big Three (combining Galaxy and IF).  Last month was a striking exception to this rule.  This month, we may not be so lucky.

The May 1960 Astounding only has five pieces apart from the second part of the "Mark Phillips" serial, Out like a Light.  I won't review the serial until its completion next month.

Astounding perennial Randall Garrett contributes the lead novella, the promising but ultimately flawed Damned if you Don't.  In 1981, an enterprising scientist develops a perfect, tiny energy source that threatens to throw the entire planet's economy into chaos.  Everyone is out to stop him, from the power company to the government.  The first half is pleasant reading, with some reasonably good characterization and suspense as to who's actually after the powerful "Converter" machines.  There's another nod to Murray Leinster by name.  At one point, there is a description of a computer small enough to have been knocked over by a single person, which is an interesting extrapolation of miniaturization trends.

But then the story gets talky.  There is a meaningless aside describing a lukewarm Middle Eastern and European war in the late '60s that leads to a clamp down on private scientific investigations.  It is meaningless not only for its implausibility but also for the fact that it doesn't really have any bearing on the story.  Then there are pages of discussion on how release of the device will destroy the world as we know it.  These are capped off with the realization that the device has been stolen, and it's all a moot point.  So much for that story.

Then we have John Cory's three-pager Egocentric Orbit.  Twice before, astronauts have been launched into space and refused to come down.  In this story, following the third orbital astronaut, we find out why. 

Laurence Janifer, one half of the pair that is Mark Phillips (the other being Randall Garrett) has a decent story under the pseudonym "Larry M. Harris."  It's a period piece set in 1605 called Wizard, and it involves a brotherhood of telepaths attempting to thwart the inquisition, which threatens to wipe their breed from the Earth.

The final fiction entry is Mack Reynold's pedestrian Revolution, which entertains a number of ridiculous propositions.  Item: the Soviet Union will surpass the United States in production in just seven years.  Item: a revolution is easy to incite so long as you throw lots of money at the problem.  Item: if you think the USSR is productive now, wait until bright-eyed Syndicalist Technocrats take over!

Much like Garrett's opening story, the latter half is composed mostly of speeches justifying the plot line, and the ending features the revolution's catalyst, a western agent, suggesting that the revolution be aborted lest the USSR someday truly trounce the West.  Pretty bad stuff.

On the other hand, Dr. Asimov is back with a nice long piece (The March of the Phyla) on the various animal groups and the successive adaptations that allowed them to increasingly become masters of their environment rather passive creatures vulnerable to the caprice of Mother Nature.  It's a bit teleological in its presentation, but quite informative. 

I just have to wonder when Asimov will supplant Ley at Galaxy and monopolize all of the digests.  Nice racket if you can get it…

So, there you have it.  A magazine largely written by just two authors (Garrett and Janifer), suffused with smugness, even the non-fiction, featuring psionics and super-inventions, none of it terribly well-written.  Campbell's got to find some new blood, or Astounding is going to founder, I fear.  Perhaps Harry Harrison offers some hope—his Deathworld was the overwhelming favorite of the fans, per the Analytical Laboratory (the magazine's reader survey) for January and February.  More like that would help.

There's an exciting launch coming tomorrow.  If it's successful, I'll see you on the 2nd with an update on… TIROS.

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Science / Space Race

[March 28, 1960] Calling all Stars! (Project Ozma begins)

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Imagine installing telephone service in your home for the first time only to have it ring almost immediately.  This is the hope of scientists working on the colorfully named "Project Ozma" at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.

Simultaneously with humanity's first steps into space, we are developing brand new methods of sensing the stars from the ground.  Radio astronomy is an exciting field that allows us to sweep wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation well beyond the range of the human eye, revealing heretofore unknown features of the universe. 

It also may allows us to eavesdrop on signals emanating from another star.  Project Ozma, named after the fairy princess ruler of L. Frank Baum's magical kingdom, Oz, operates on the assumption that alien races will be as gregarious as humans.  Dr. Frank Drake, Ozma's chief, is hoping that once a species gets the ability to send high power messages across the galaxy, it will (and already has).

Starting next week, Drake and his team will aim their 85 foot wide "ear" to scan nearby Sun-like stars.  Their first two targets are Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, a yellow and orange star (respectively) about the same age as our sun.  If you're wondering why the telescope isn't being directed at Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to ours, it's because that promising target is only visible from the Southern Hemisphere.

Now, there's a haystack worth of bandwidth that a needle of a broadcast could hide in.  We can't search all of it at once, so Drake has arbitrarily picked a narrow band of wavelengths—around 21 centimeters in size.  His is not an entirely uneducated guess.  The 21 centimeter band is a sort of cosmic yardstick, home to a background hiss emitted by galactic hydrogen, that any astronomically advanced species will know about.  Moreover, targeting this band allows Drake to do some "real" astronomical research and thus further justify his funding.

What will a message from the stars sound like?  It will have to be some kind of modulated, non-random pattern.  Perhaps a series of pulses spelling out a universal constant in binary?  A simple on-off code?  The possibility I find the most fun is the idea of an alien race picking up our radio broadcasts and beaming them back at us.  That would be the surest sign that our presence in the universe has been acknowledged.

On the other hand, I'm not sure Fibber McGee and Molly are the best ambassadors Earth has to offer…

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Magazine

[March 26, 1960] Among the Best (April 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction regularly beats out the other regular digests in terms of consistent quality.  This month's, April 1960, is no exception.

There's a lot to cover, so let's dive right in:

Daniel Keyes, who wrote the superb Flowers for Algernon, has returned with the issue's lead novelette, Crazy Maro.  Our viewpoint character is an attorney who has been contracted by unseen agents from the future to secure psychically adept (and invariably disadvantaged) children for work in a later time.  The fellow meets his match, however, when he is asked to recruit the titular Maro, a young black man with an uncanny talent for reading the emotions of others.  Much of the novelette is a mystery story, with the lawyer trying to puzzle out the root of Maro's power.  It's a powerful piece, assuredly, though the very end is unnecessarily melodramatic.

Another serious piece is The Hairy Thunderer by "Levi Crow" (Manly Wade Wellman in disguise).  The writing is deceptively simplistic, describing the arrival of a hairy pale foreigner to the lands of an American Indian tribe.  The European commences to ensnare the tribe with his boom stick and, more effectively and terribly, his firewater.  A young man of the tribe, Lone Arrow, is able to resist him with the magical assistance of a certain eight-legged class of arthropods.

The moral of the story, that one should be kind to spiders for they are misunderstood but fundamentally good creatures, is one that resonates strongly.  I'm always hoping that, when I die, the Spider Gods will look favorably upon me for the compassion and mercy I have shown Their Kind.

G.C. Edmondson's forgettable short story, Ringer features a fellow who is replaced by a robotic doppelganger.  The twist is that the viewpoint is always that character, whether in human or android form.

The incomparable Edgar Pangborn brings us The Wrens in Grampa's Bears, in which "Grampa," the narrator's Great Grandfather, hosts a brood of beneficient angels within his long beard.  Their existence is only hinted at, and the story is mostly a mood piece capturing the sunset of an old man's life in the Summer of '58, a man whose memories encompass both Gettysburg and satellites.  Yet, the theme of the tale is not how much things have changed, but how they stay essentially the same. 

A Certain Room, a short by Ken Kusenberg, translated from German by Therese Pol, is a silly, archaic piece.  What happens when you fiddle with the objects in a room that have a causal connection to bigger, worldwide events?  Not much good.

George Elliott has the issue's second novelette, the fantasy-less, science-fiction-less, but nevertheless compelling Among the Dangs.  It is a mock account of an anthropologist's sojourn amongst the fictional Dang tribe of Ecuador.  Enlisted for his talent for mimicry and his dark skin, the protagonist spends years living with the Dang, learning their customs and even taking a wife, so that he can become one of their high prophets.  His initial motivation is to compose a thesis for an advanced degree.  But so complete is his indoctrination that it is only through a titanic force of will that he breaks free, and the experience forever marks him. 

The piece originally appeared a couple of years back in Esquire, and it is a strange story to find within the covers of F&SF.  On the other hand, while the content is neither science fictional nor fantastic, there is a certain flavor to it that allows it to fit nicely in the middle of this issue.  I'm not complaining for its inclusion.

I'm not sure what to do with Rosel George Brown.  I really want to like her, but she has this tendency toward first-person pieces featuring scatterbrained housewives.  Their situations are tediously conventional and exhaustingly frenetic.  I have to wonder if the stories aren't semi-autobiographical.  A Little Human Contact continues in this vein, and while it's not horrible, it is still not the masterpiece I know Brown is capable of.  Of course, I may be looking in the wrong place–Amazing and Fantastic are still around, and I understand she's due to be published there soon. 

Isaac Asimov has an excellent non-fiction piece this month, It's About Time, describing the evolution and fundamental incompatibility of our various calendar systems.  The conclusion: trust the astronomers and go with Julian dating.

I won't spoil Joseph Whitehill's In the House, Another since it's a one-trick pony.  Cute, though.

Rounding out the issue is Gordy Dickson's latest novelette, The Game of Five.  It is strangely reminiscent of his earlier The Man in the Mailbag, but it's not as good.  Both stories involve a man infiltrating an alien culture to rescue a captured woman.  In both stories, it quickly turns out that the situations are more complex than they seem at first blush.  In both stories, the "captured" woman turns out to be an agent of some kind.

But though Five is competently written, the Hercule Poirot moment, that bit at the end where the hero explains the mystery, is not supported strongly enough by clues in the narrative.  The world is also not as interesting as the one depicted in Mailbag.  Unlike the former title, I don't this one will get nominated for any Hugos.  Not that it's bad, mind you—just not up to the bar Dickson has set for himself.

That's it for April 1960.  I have a whole new crop of magazines and books to review for next month.  I also have far more time to devote to the column now that I am between day jobs.  Cry not for me—it was a decision long coming and well worth it. 

In the meantime, before we get onto things fictional, I have some scientific news with exciting science fiction ramifications…

…but you'll just have to wait two days for it!

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55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction