[Feb. 26, 1960] Fair Warning (a mystery launch)

February 26, 2015 Gideon Marcus Leave a comment

Something took off today from Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, not far from Cocoa Beach.

There was no official announcement, and the mission was almost assuredly solely military in nature. An Atlas ICBM, clearly modified for satellite launch (note the second-stage booster), took off around 10:30 AM, Florida time. After a flawless take-off, observers saw the booster break up before the second stage could separate. No one knows why.

Could the launch have just been a test of this new second stage? Or was there a payload on board? The latter is likely—why waste a perfectly good missile? It must have been something heavy and sophisticated, bigger than the Discoverer spy satellites… er… biological return capsules, to require such a heavy booster. Either that or it was intended for a higher orbit.

The rumor I have been hearing is that the Air Force has been developing satellites for detecting a ballistic missile attack. Right now, it is impossible to tell if the Soviets have launched nuclear missiles against the United States until just a few minutes before impact, when the rockets cross our chain of Alaskan and Canadian radars known as BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System). These installations complement the DEW line of radar outposts designed to spot enemy bombers

Five minutes is not much time for the President to evaluate the magnitude of an attack, much less frame an appropriate response. It would be better if we could see the Soviet missiles as they take off, giving our government perhaps twenty minutes to respond.

Unfortunately, you can't see a Soviet missile launch from the ground; the Earth gets in the way. From space, however, a satellite could detect the hot flash as the Russian birds leave their bases, so the theory goes.

Those fifteen minutes could make all the difference. The longer the lead time, the less of an advantage the Soviets get from a surprise strike, and the less likely they are to launch one. With the Doomsday Clock just two minutes from midnight, any defuser of tension is welcome.

Of course, the details of the launch were classified, and the mission was unsuccessful anyway, so we're not likely to hear about the real purpose of the launch for many years to come. But I thought you'd want the latest space news, speculative as it may be.

See you soon with this month's IF!

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Magazine

[Feb. 23, 1960] Cepheid Oscillations (March 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

February 23, 2015 Gideon Marcus 5 Comments

From the depths of mediocrity to the peaks of quality, it looks like our long literary winter may finally be over. Perhaps the groundhog didn't see a shadow this year.

First, we had an uncharacteristically solid Astounding. This month's Fantasy and Science Fiction is similarly exceptional without a clunker in the bunch, and some standouts besides.

I used to see Poul Anderson's name and cringe. The author who had impressed me so much with 1953's Brainwave turned out consistent dreck for the next several years, though to be fair, he generally did so within the pages of Campbell's magazine, not Boucher's. A couple of years ago he got back into his groove, and his stuff has been generally quite good again.

He has the lead novella in the March F&SF, The Martyr, set in a far future in which humanity has met a race of clearly superior psionicists. We are so jealous of these powers, and the possessors so unwilling to give up their secrets, that a small human contingent takes several aliens prisoner to coerce the secrets of psi out of them. But what if it's a secret better left unrevealed?

It's a beautiful story, but there is nastiness here, and it can be a rough read in places. It is no less recommended for that, however. Just giving fair warning.

Ray Bradbury is an author I've never held in much regard, but his Death and the Maiden, about a withered rural crone who shuts herself in an ancient house in defense against mortality, isn't bad.

It doesn't even suffer too badly when compared to Ted Sturgeon's subsequent Like Young, perhaps because the subject matter is so different (Ray was less successful when both he and Ted wrote mermaid stories in quick succession, Ted's being, by far, the superior.) In Sturgeon's tale, the last surviving 504 humans, rendered sterile by radiation, decide to give their race a kind of immortality by planting cultural and scientific relics so as to bootstrap humanity's evolutionary successor. The joke is on us in the end, however.

John Collier's Man Overboard is an atmospheric piece about a dilettante sea captain pursuing an elusive sea-going Loch Ness Monster. It feels old, like something written decades ago. I suspect that is a deliberate stylistic choice, and it's effective.

Then we have a cute little Sheckley: The Girls and Nugent Miller, another story set in a post-atomic, irradiated world. Is a pacifist professor any match against a straw man's Feminist and her charge of beautiful co-eds? The story should offend me, but I recognize a tongue permanently affixed to the inside of the cheek when I see one.

Miriam Allen DeFord has a quite creepy monster story aptly called, The Monster, with an almost Lovecraftian subject (the horror in the cemetery that feeds on children) but done with a more subdued style and with quite the kicker of an ending.

The Good Doctor (Isaac Asimov) is back to form with his non-fiction article on the measuring of interstellar distances, The Flickering Yardstick. I must confess with some chagrin that, despite my astronomical education, I was always a bit vague on how we learned to use Cepheid variable stars to compute galactic distances (their pulsation frequency is linked to their brightness, which allows us to determine how far away they are). Asimov explains it all quite succinctly, and I was gratified to see a woman astronomer was at the center of the story (a Henrietta Leavitt).

"Pickering's harem," the computers of astronomer Edward Pickering (Leavitt is standing)

Avram Davidson has a fun one-pager called Apres Nous wherein a dove is sent to the future only to return wet and exhausted with an olive leaf in its mouth. I didn't get the punchline until I looked up the quote in a book of quotations.

The remainder of the issue is filled with a most excellent Clifford Simak novella, All the Traps of Earth, in which a centuries-old robot, no longer having a human family to serve, escapes inevitable memory-wiping and repurposing by fleeing to the stars. We've seen the "robot as slave" allegory before in Galaxy's Installment Plan. In fact, it was Cliff, himself, who wrote it, and I remember being uncomfortable with his handling of the metaphor in that story.

I had no such problems this time—it's really a beautiful story of emancipation and self-realization, by the end of which, the indentured servant has become a benevolent elder. A fine way to end a great issue.

So pick up a copy if you can. At 40 cents (the second-cheapest of the Big Four), it's a bargain.

"Spacecraft landing on the Moon" – cover artwork without overprinting – Mel Hunter

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Science / Space Race

[Feb. 21, 1960] A birthday treat (A Tale of Two Space Programs)

February 21, 2015 Gideon Marcus 3 Comments

Happy birthday to me! In celebration of the second anniversary of my Jack Benny birthday, here's my gift to you: a quick stop press of some recent military space endeavors, with a side of jocular sarcasm.

You may remember a certain Dr. Von Braun, formerly of the German Third Reich, lately of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) in Alabama. This esteemed immigrant was a rocket engineer of sorts during the war, and he was prevailed upon to ply his trade in the service of Democracy, developing improvements to the international mail-carrier known as the Vergeltungswaffe 2. In this role, he helped create the Jupiter IRBM for the Army, currently being deployed at Russia's doorstep in Turkey.

Von Braun's team was recently transitioned to a civilian position; it now reports to NASA and is hard at work building the Saturn series of moon rockets. Meanwhile, the former head of ABMA, Major General John Medaris, retired last month, had harsh words for our President's handling of the space program. He believes the Army should have had free reign to launch a satellite before the Soviets. Medaris also thinks that splitting up the military and civilian programs is wasteful and redundant. I can't imagine who Medaris might suggest to lead such a unified space program.

Personally, I think Ike's handling of our space programs has smacked of subtle genius. Let the Soviets launch the first satellite so that they can't complain about overflights, create a civilian space agency so the world can see that there are purely peaceful uses for rockets. It's a public relations masterpiece. Given the volatile situation in Cuba and Berlin, the good press helps us keep the moral high ground.

Moreover, having a civilian space program allows us to, as a country, focus on science for science's sake rather than forcing it to be a handmaiden to the war machine. Besides—this country thrives on healthy competition.

In any event, it's not as if the military has got such a great track record. Just two days ago, the Air Force lost yet another Discoverer, number 10. The booster veered off course during take-off and had to be destroyed by range safety just a minute into the launch.

I shouldn't be too hard on the Air Force, though. Their Thor-Able booster (a hybrid military/civilian design) will be launching the first deep space probe next month under NASA auspices. If the mission is successful, it promises to be a science bonanza. The probe was developed by Air Force contractor Ramo-Wooldridge, better known for developing ICBMs. Thus, this upcoming flight shows the advantages of having two separate space programs that can share their expertise.

Vive la difference!

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[Feb. 19, 1960] A missing step

February 19, 2015 Gideon Marcus 1 Comment

Hello, all! I'd looked forward to keeping up the three articles per week pace throughout the whole month, but I find myself with a sick family to tend to. A big dose of space news on the 21st (my 39th birthday… or at least the 2nd anniversary thereof) and then the F&SF wrap-up.

See you soon!

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[Feb. 16, 1960] 1 in 4 (February Twilight Zone round-up)

February 16, 2015 Gideon Marcus 2 Comments

Unless you're watching the rather dull Men Into Space, the putatively "realistic" tales of astronaut Colonel MacCauley and his lunar mission crew, there isn't a lot of science fiction or fantasy on television. Thank goodness we have Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone to tune into every Friday night. This is a mature show for adults, and while the scripts have not been as cutting edge conceptually as the stories you can read in the digests, they evince a sophistication you won't find much of…well, anywhere, on television.

It has been a month since the last Twilight Zone round-up, so here's a summary of the last four episodes so you're ready come rerun time:

I'd had high hopes for The Hitch-Hiker after seeing its star, Inger Stevens in The World, The Flesh, and the Devil. Ms. Stevens drives cross-country with a spectral hitcher constantly on her tail. The story is let down by a couple of points. The story is largely told in narration—Ms. Stevens mostly tells rather than shows her plight. This strikes me as lazy storytelling. I also find the section where she picks up a sailor to keep her company (and maintain her sanity) particulary off-putting; the fellow who accompanies her is far creepier than any shabby hitching bum. I can't figure out if this was intentional or not. I suspect not.

The Fever is more of a public service warning against the dangers of gambling in which a normally sober husband is seduced by a demonic slot machine who calls the man's name with an eerie tinkling, silver dollar-laden voice. It is highly overwrought, and the ending is ridiculous. Moreover, one can't help feeling glad that the domineering wretch gets his comeuppance; he really is inexcusably rude to his wife, and his initial sanctimony, rather than pointing up the tragedy, is just annoying.

That puts us at two for two episodes involving someone going raving mad by the second act!

But then you get The Last Flight, which makes up for a lot of prior sins. Yet another Richard Matheson teleplay (and far better than Third from the Sun), it's the story of a Royal Air Corps aviator who takes off from a French airfield in 1917 and lands at a French airfield in 1959. There is some delightful paradox looping and a very pretty Nieuport plane, and it's all a lot of fun. My daughter, who is just old enough to appreciate such things, noted that the pilot's British accent was "so cute!"

Finally, we have The Purple Testament, another war-themed episode, involving a young Lieutenant in the Pacific Theater who can see death in his soldiers' faces several hours before their last breaths. Unremarkable, unambitious, at every turn predictable.

The show started so promisingly that it's frustrating when one gets several mediocre turns in a batch. Still, even the worst episodes generally have something to recommend them, there's no slighting the production values, and the stand-outs keep my daughter and I watching every Friday night.

As you all know, my editor loves to publish reader commentary in this column, so please feel free to tell me your thoughts on this show. Do you agree with my rather curmudgeonly appraisals? Do you wish to set me straight? Sharpen those quills!

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[Feb. 14, 1960] A Valentine's Day gift (…In Distress, original fiction)

February 14, 2015 Gideon Marcus 2 Comments

Today's post is going to be a change of pace. This column is usually reserved for comments on the work of other persons. Today, you get to see the first publication ever of an original piece. If this is a successful experiment, more may follow.

Happy Valentine's Day!

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…In Distress

by Gideon Marcus

illustrated by David Swanson
re.

(removed pending potential publication…)

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Magazine

[Feb. 12, 1960] Pulling up (Mar. 1960 Astounding)

February 12, 2015 Gideon Marcus 5 Comments

It had to happen some day–Astounding has pulled itself out of a nose dive, for now.

Last time, I discussed the most excellent serial, Deathworld. Still, a single good serial does not a good issue make. Thankfully, Campbell has at long last, and after a merciless rough patch, delivered a quite readable book.

J.T. McIntosh can always be relied upon to provide entertainment; his lead novella, Immortality for Some is no exception. In the future, society's most worthy, the 10% with sufficient talents and/or accomplishments to make the cut, are allowed to undergo "Rebirth." This process erases all memories and restores the body to an adolescent stage of physical development. The special person gets to live again in a sort of reconstituted reincarnation.

But what happens when one of the world's intellectual elite doesn't want to cheat death? This is a world that doesn't want to lose a cultural treasure, and it takes an exceptional person, indeed, to evade Rebirth.

Strongly written, with the first half written from the point of view of an aged woman pianist of superlative talent giving her last concert before Rebirth; the second stars the aforementioned fellow—a seemingly unremarkable caretaker whom the musician befriends. It's worth your time.

And now, I shall surprise my audience by saying with a straight face that I actually enjoyed Randall Garrett's contribution to this issue: In Case of Fire…. In this far future, the sprawling Terran Empire cannot afford to send its best and brightest as ambassadors to less-esteemed stations. The story opens on a remote, unimportant world whose embassy is staffed with barely functional neurotics. Yet in that insanity lies the key to ending an interstellar war. Garrett manages to be somewhat clever and to not offend. Quite an accomplishment for him.

Chris Anvil's Shotgun Wedding is another of his unremarkable space-fillers about an alien race whose plan to disrupt humanity by flooding the market with clairvoyant television backfires. One bit I liked, however, was the depiction of pen pals from different countries using their television screens to correspond across thousands of miles. When the world is finally wired into OMNIVAC, decades from now, I imagine we'll see such a phenomenon.

Editor Campbell has been trying to make a go of the slick non-fiction section of his magazine for several months. This issue is the first with readable articles, the first of which is Mars: A Summing Up by R.S. Richardson (perhaps better known by his nom d'plume, Philip Latham). Mr. Richardson does an admirable, if slightly dry, job of comprehensively summarizing the current state of knowledge regarding the mysterious Red Planet.

We've enjoyed three relatively close approaches to Mars over the past six years, the likes of which will not recur until 1971, by which time we will probably have sent at least one probe to investigate close-up. As a result, scientists have amassed a bonanza of information. Yet it is still unknown whether or not Mars has life, though if it does, it must be of a very low order. The most exciting work has been done by the astronomer A. Dolfuss, who has determined the nature of Martian soil to examination of its polarization (the non-randomness of the angle of vibration of light that reflects from it). That we've learned so much about Mars is, of course, a marvel in and of itself. To quote the author, "To tell anything about a body that never comes closer than thirty-five million miles taxes your ingenuity to the utmost."

Dr. Asimov was also tapped to provide an article after a long hiatus from Astounding's pages. Microdesign for Living, about the biochemical synthesis of proteins, is not one of his better pieces, which is to say that is readable but not memorable.

Poul Anderson (as his Astounding alter-ego Winston P. Sanders) wraps things up with a short piece called The Barrier Moment. Scientists may not know why one can't go back in time more than three years, but a philospher believes he has the horrifying answer. Perhaps there isn't any time to go back to…

All told, the March 1960 Astounding clocks in at a respectable three-and-a-half stars. That is the best this magazine has been since I started rating the issues in January 1959. I sincerely hope Campbell can keep this up!

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Book, Magazine

[Feb. 9, 1960] Fighting the World (Harry Harrison's Deathworld)

February 9, 2015 Gideon Marcus 5 Comments

Every now and then Astounding (excuse me–"Analog") surprises me. The end of last year saw some of the worst issues of the digest ever, with stories as poor as any that used to populate the legion of now-defunct science fiction pulps.

Then along comes Harry Harrison, a brand-new writer, so far as I can tell, with one of the best serial novels I've read in a long time.

Ever get the feeling that the world is out to get you? What if it were literally true? This is the premise of Harrison's interstellar adventure, Deathworld, in which the psychically gifted (and crooked) gambler, Jason dinAlt, is contracted by the ambassador from the planet Pyrrus to win a tremendous sum of funds to finance a war. It turns out that the war is against the planet, itself, which seems to have mobilized all of its biological forces to wipe out the colony there.

Pyruss is deadliest of planets. With its high gravity, eccentric orbit and overactive vulcanism, its physical qualities alone would be enough to deter any would-be exploiters. But Pyrrus is also home to a highly inimical set of flora and fauna whose sole purpose is to eradicate humans. It is a nightmare assortment employing fang, talon, and poison, continually evolving to make life impossible for the colonists.

For the Pyrrans, it has been centuries-long struggle of increasing difficulty, maintained in the hope of eventual victory. For dinAlt, with a fresh outsider's prospective, the fight is an exercise in futility—and a paradoxical puzzle to be resolved. After all, what motive force could impel an entire ecosystem to direct its fury against one small group?

There is a great deal of physical scope to this story, from the gambling halls of Cassylia, to the drab city of the Pyrran colony, to the vast wilds of the Pyrran hinterlands. There is also an impressive amount of emotional scope. This is not, as one might expect within the pages of John Campbell's magazine, the story of a muscular ubermensch's victorious combats against the savage brainless monsters of Pyruss. Rather, it is the story of the weakest man on a planet trying to effect a peaceful solution to a problem that appears, on its face, insoluble. Deathworld is also supported by a fine cast of characters, particularly the tough Pyrran ambassador, Kerk, and the self-reliant and liberated space pilot, Meta.

I don't want to spoil any more of the novel for you. Go ye and read it. You'll be glad of the time invested.

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Science / Space Race

[Feb. 7, 1960] The sports that matter (Discoverer 9 and solar radar)

February 7, 2015 Gideon Marcus Leave a comment

The score for this week–Civilian Space Science: 1, USAF Space Science: 0.

In the Little Engine That Couldn't department, we have the Air Force's Discoverer project, ostensibly for sending up biological specimens in a returnable capsule, probably for launching recoverable reconnaissance film capsules, actually not much good for anything.

The ninth in the series didn't even make it to orbit, the second stage of its rocket having failed during launch on February 4. It's a good thing there weren't any animals on board. Of course, I'm guessing that once they get the bugs worked out of the booster, there still won't be any.

In other news, scientists at Stanford University have just bounced a radar signal off the Sun. Actually, the transmission happened last April—it's taken all the time since then to verify that the stunt really worked!

It's quite an impressive accomplishment—the 100 watt signal came back at .00000000000001% of its original strength, yet the Stanford team was still able to detect it. Our ability to receive spacecraft telemetry at tremendous distances has been validated, and this is also a boon to the new science of radio astronomy. In 1947, scientists first bounced a radar beam off the Moon. Just two years ago, Venus was added to the list of pinged targets. Eventually, every object in the Solar System will be systematically bombarded with radar. This will complement our visual astronomical findings, and we're likely to learn a lot.

"Lovell Telescope Rear" by Mike Peel; Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester.. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lovell_Telescope_Rear.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Lovell_Telescope_Rear.jpg

See you soon!

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Magazine

[Feb. 6, 1960] Finding my way (February 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

February 6, 2015 Gideon Marcus Leave a comment

Science fiction is my escape. When the drudgery of the real world becomes oppressive, or when I just need a glimpse of a brighter future to make the present more interesting, I turn to my growing collection of magazines and novels to buouy my spirits.

I like stories of interstellar adventure filled with interesting settings and characters. I do not like the psychological horrors that have become popular of late. Sadly, the February 1960 F&SF contains several such pieces. But it does end well.

I wrote last time about the flaws in Howard Fast's lead novella that kept me from fully enjoying it.

Richard McKenna's Mine Own Ways is particularly chilling. It involves a rite of passage designed by interstellar anthropologists to winnow the intellectually mature of a race from the primitive by essentially torturing them; one passes the test by realizing that the torture is transitory and enduring it.

Apprentice, by Robert Tilley, isn't so bad. It involves an alien who can take over a person's mind (without ill effect). The would-be invader possesses a junior flunky on a military base and is revealed when he is able to fulfil tasks that should have been impossible (along the lines of catching snipe, procuring a bottle of headlight fluid or a jar of elbow grease).

I suppose Jane Rice's The White Pony, about unrequited love in a future of post-apocalyptic scarcity is decent, too, and well-drawn. It even has a happy ending, after a fashion even if the world has that feeling of best-days-past shabbiness.

Battle-torn France is the setting for The Replacement, in which a Platoon Sergeant is convinced by a certain Private "Smith" that the war is all in his head, and that the world is nothing but solipsistic figments of his imagination. It is only after Smith unsuccessfully tries the same trick on the company's First Sergeant that we see the trick for what it is. A creepy piece.

Evelyn Smith's Send Her Victorious is a pun piece whose ending I should have seen coming. All about a communal colony of aliens who take on the general form of a middle-aged female before time traveling to 19th Century England.

Algis Budrys has a vignette called The Price about a centuries-old Rasputin(?) surviving an atomic holocaust only to find himself a captive of the few humans who are left. Are they willing to become gnarled, deranged hunchbacks like him in exchange for eternal life?

Dr. Asimov's piece, The Sight of Home, is a nice astronomical article about the greatest distance at which the sun might still be visible to the naked eye (answer: 20 parsecs. Not very far, indeed).

Then we're back to the horror. We are the Ceiling, by Will Worthington, depicts a fellow who books himself into a sanitarium when it appears his wife has begun consorting with troglodytes. Of course, she turns out to be one, as does his doctor.

That leaves us the subject of the cover art, The Fellow Who Married the Maxill Girl, by Ward Moore. This is the kind of story I read F&SF for—gentle, poignant, starring a woman. It's a girl meets boy story set in the depths of the Depression; the boy happens to be an alien. I shan't spoil more, and I hope you like it as much as I did.

I'll have a quick non-fiction stop press tomorrow, and then on to March's batch of magazines!

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55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction