Tag Archives: 1960

Science / Space Race, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[Nov. 30, 1960] Back and Forth (a p/review)

13 Comments

November is done, and the first chill of winter is upon us (for the rest of you, that happened about a month ago—we San Diegans are a happy lot).  As we head into the Christmas shopping season, it's good to take a moment to reflect on where we've been and where we're going.  Then we can dive into 24 commercially hectic days.

November Review

After months of hard campaigning, we have a new president.  The mantle has been returned to the Democrats, who had it for so long before 1952 that Eisenhower seems like a small splice in the tape.  He was practically a compromise candidate anyway—perhaps the Republican party, as we know it, is dead.  Or maybe there's a new movement on the horizon, one that will surprise us. 

There was just one new book out this month, Store of Infinity by Robert Sheckley, and it was his best yet.  You definitely want to get yourself a copy.

On the magazine front, Analog took the prize for the first time since the July issue.  It garnered a solid 3.5 rating, a score it last secured in March.  Galaxy was in the middle of the pack, earning a decent 3 stars.  F&SF, made up of the turgid Rogue Moon and a mixed bag of vignettes barely merited 2.5 stars, a depth to which the normally fine magazine has never sunk (since I started charting it, anyway).  Well, there has to be a first time for anything.  Hopefully there won't be a second!

It was tough selecting a favorite story for this month; both R. A. Lafferty's Snuffles and Poul Anderson's The Long Voyage were quite good.  In the end, I gave the nod to the former, which came out in Galaxy because I felt it was more memorable and unusual.

Finally, out of 22 fiction pieces, only two were written by women.  9% is about par for the course.  Perhaps 1961 will be better.

December Preview

Coming soon, I'll be reviewing the next four episodes of The Twilight Zone–it's gotten better recently.  There are no new movies on the horizon but I did received an advance copy of a new book, Murray Leinster's The Wailing Asteroid, from the publisher in the mail this week.  I've been enjoying it thus far. 

Of course, there will be the Big Three: the January 1961 issues of F&SF, Analog, and IF (Galaxy and IF alternate months).  I'm sure there will also be some noteworthy space shots, too—the Mercury Redstone unmanned mission will likely be tried again, and there's one last Atlas Able moon shot planned.  Fingers and toes crossed!

Speaking of space shots, NASA got up another weather satellite, TIROS 2, on November 23.  I didn't mention it at the time for two reasons: 1) I couldn't figure out how to work it in, thematically, and 2) whether or not it had been a success wasn't known until the next day.  When the probe went up, it was initially pointed in the wrong direction, so all the Weather Bureau got was a lens full of blackness.  TIROS is now properly oriented, but it turns out there is some fuzz on the wide-angle camera blurring its pictures.  The other equipment, including a narrow-angle camera and sensors to measure Earth's heat budget (solar input vs. planetary heat radiation), seem to be working fine, however.  If this new satellite can last until TIROS 3 goes up next Summer, we'll have continuous weather pictures from outer space for the foreseeable future.  That'll be exciting!

13 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

[Nov. 28, 1960] Odds and Ends (the December 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

5 Comments

Here's a math problem for you, kids!  If more than half of your magazine is taken up by a 2-star short novel, how likely is it that you'll still end up with a good issue?

Answer: not very.

I'm used to Fantasy & Science Fiction having a long table of contents page.  This one (the December 1960 issue) comprises just ten entries, and all save the Asimov article are vignettes.  I wonder if we'll be seeing a slew of larger stories now that Editor Mills has depleted his stock of tiny ones.

Anyway, it's quality, not quantity that counts.  So how was the quality?

Winona McClintic is a sporadic contributor to the magazine, and she offers up The Way Out of Town, in which an infestation of snakes blocks all of the vehicular arteries in and out of every city in the (unidentified) state.  They cause havoc, widespread and personal, as one might expect. 

That's about it; the story is over almost as it starts.  Mills says in the prologue, "Readers who like only those stories with beginnings and middles and ends, in which everything is clearly explained,may not be fully satisfied with the following."  He's right!  Two stars.

Up next is Rope's End, by Miriam Allen deFord.  The premise is excellent: a Terran accidentally kills an alien on the extraterrestrial's world.  His sentence is to wear a rope around his neck for twenty years–one that is constricted every year.  I like everything about it but the ending; and it's not even the ending that bothers me so much as the protagonist's inability to suspect how things would turn out given how much time he devoted to the problem.  Three stars.

Avram Davidson has a two-pager about sexually frustrated teens whose unfulfilled desires channel into a powerful psychokinetic talent.  Called Yo-ho, and Up, it is silly and rather difficult to read.  Two stars.

I don't usually go for poetry, but Rosser Reeves (who is, apparently, a businessman by day) has a nice piece on alternate worlds called Infinity.  I dug it.  Four stars.

Speaking of digging, The Beatnik Werewolf is (I believe) the first effort by Dan Lindsay.  What's a shaggy vegetarian hepcat…er…dog to do when he falls in love after two hundred years as a lone wolf?  Cute, if inconsequential.  Three stars.

Dr. Asimov's article is on dolphins and echo-location this month.  A could-be fascinating topic, particularly the bits about the ability to produce sound being used for navigation long before its purposing for communication.  But the good doctor seems rather scattered this time around.  Three stars.

The last piece is a reprint from a literary mag New World Writing #16 called The Listener by John Berry.  It's not really science fiction or fantasy, but I enjoyed it a lot, this tale of the meeting between an itinerant fiddler and an old, old lighthouser.  Four stars.

Using my trusty slide rule, this all adds up to about 2.5 stars.  A less than auspicious end of the year for what is normally my favorite science fiction magazine.  It's a good thing the competition was in excellent form this month.

See you at the end of the month for a review of November, a preview of December, and a space-based peeping tom whose presence we can all be thankful for.

5 Comments Leave A Comment
Book, Magazine

[Nov. 26, 1960] Damaged Goods (Algis Budry's Rogue Moon)

14 Comments

Sometimes, I just don't get it.

The December 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction is almost completely devoted to one short novel, Rogue Moon, by Algis Budrys.  I like Budrys, and F&SF is generally my favorite magazine, so I've been looking forward to this book since it was advertised last month.

To all accounts, it is a masterpiece (and by "to all accounts", I mean according to the buzz in the local science fiction circles).  The premise is certainly exciting: there is an alien structure on the moon, an amorphous multi-dimensional thing, that kills all who enter it.  To facilitate its exploration, the navy utilizes a matter transporter that disassembles one's molecules in one place and reconstructs them elsewhere.  Volunteers are sent from Earth to their certain death to push a few more feet into the deadly extraterrestrial maze.

Of course, the transporter doesn't actually send anyone anywhere; it destroys the original and creates a copy that thinks it is the original.  In fact, it's possible to make multiple copies of a person, and that is what is done: one copy goes to the moon to die, while the other stays on Earth to live on.  It turns out that the two copies have a limited degree of telepathic contact for a short time, so the Earthbound copy can report on what his moonbound copy experiences.

The project's main hurdle is that it takes a special kind of person to experience one's own death and not go insane.  How, indeed, to find such a person to unlock the riddles of the maze?

Sounds pretty intriguing, doesn't it?  Sadly, Budrys hardly wrote this story.  Instead, he gave us a florid, comically humorous soap opera with personalities as flat as the pages they are printed on.  Here's the dramatis personae:

Edward Hawks: The project's director.  A detached scientist, coldly resigned to his status as a murderer (both in terms of sending people to their death and the destruction of those who go through the transporter), desperate to understand how a person's existence can survive one's death.

Al Barton: A suicidal thrill-seeker. he's already lost a leg to his obsession for death-defying escapades–racing, mountain-climbing, parachuting.  Setting records isn't enough for him; he's got to risk his life doing something no one else has done before.  He spends most of his time attempting to prove his manliness to Hawks (in vain, as Hawks is too coldly impersonal to be impressed).

Vincent Connington: The project's director of personnel who introduces Hawks and Barton.  A fellow whose brash arrogance is really just a facade that hides his love for…

Claire Parks: Barton's gorgeous girlfriend: She spends her entire "screen time" attempting to seduce Hawks and Connington and enrage Barton; she's afraid of men, you see, so she is always trying to manipulate them so she can keep her interactions in a safe, nonthreatening place. 

Elizabeth Cummings: A wholesomely beautiful random stranger whom Hawks falls in love with.  Her primary story function is to listen to Hawks' morose reflections on life and occasionally offer pithy observations.

Virtually no time is devoted to the actual exploration of the moon structure, and when the reader finally does get to see the jaunt through the maze, Budrys manages to make it the dullest part of the book. 

Budrys does largely succeed at exploring the fascinating ramifications of "soul" duplication.  What happens when there are two of you, when a moment ago, there was just one?  And are the copies really you?  Are you more than the sum of your memories?  If not, is the communication of your memories to others, no matter how imperfectly, a kind of immortality (this is implied in the last line of the book, an admittedly powerful one.)

Which would have been great had it been less mawkishly presented, and the characters at all plausible.  Budrys set out to make an insightful character study in the Sturgeon vein, depicting a disparate brood all struggling to find "The Meaning of Life."  Instead, he ended up writing something more akin to Merril's The Tomorrow People: full of stilted dialogue, expository speeches, and precious little story.  Fully 30 pages go by before we even get into the plot, which is a lot of time to waste in a 90 page novella.

I'm not sure how to rate Rogue Moon.  Despite all the eye-rolling moments (quite literally), I did finish the short book in one sitting, which suggests there must have been something compelling about it.  There were thought-provoking ideas.  It was the execution which was disappointing, particularly for being by the normally excellent Budrys.  I think, in the end, the book's prime failure is the introduction of so many interesting elements which are completely subordinated to the inferior, implausible psychological drama that Budrys, for some reason, was so hot to present. 

Maybe the book, due to be released next month, will be better. 

Two stars.

Stay tuned for the rest of the magazine!

14 Comments Leave A Comment
Science / Space Race

[Nov. 23, 1960] Premature Ejection (Mercury-Redstone 1)

1 Comment

The American manned space program is on a tight schedule if it wants to place an astronaut in orbit before the Soviets.  The Communists already have a striking lead.  They had it three years ago when they launched the first Sputnik, and they've maintained it with the recent Sputnik 5, which featured two Muttniks, who were returned safely to Earth after an orbital flight. 

It may well be that, as I write this, the Soviets will already have put a man in space.

NASA is moving at as brisk a pace as they can manage while doing their best to guarantee the safety of our spacemen.  I can only imagine the frustration and impatience of the seven Mercury Astronauts, who were picked a year and a half ago as they cool their heels watching the test program play out.

So far, we've seen several low altitude launches of the Mercury spacecraft (Little Joe).  There has been a test of the Atlas orbital booster (Big Joe).  But there had yet to be an all-up suborbital test of the Mercury-Redstone, mimicing the first few missions that will be flown.

Until the day-before-yesterday.

MR-1 has been on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral in Florida since late October.  No pilot was assigned to the Mercury capsule, not even a monkey or a dog.  The flight was just to ensure that all of the components would work properly during a 15-minute trip.  The mission was originally scheduled for November 7, but a sudden loss in fuel pressure during the countdown caused launch to be aborted.

A similar problem was caught and fixed on the launch pad the morning of November 21.  As the count went to zero, all systems were go.  The Redstone booster ignited at 9 a.m. 

And promptly shut off a second-and-a-half later.  The booster stack was just four inches off the ground, and it settled back onto its fins without tipping over.  But the true ignominy of the event happened at the top rather than the bottom of the stack.  The escape tower, designed to drag the Mercury capsule to safety in the event of a booster failure, took off like a scared rabbit but left the spacecraft behind.  Adding insult to injury, the main and reserve Mercury parachutes then popped out the top of the capsule.  You probably saw this comic event on the TV news.

Yesterday, some brave engineers went out to unplug the booster and figure out what went wrong.  It turns out that the culprit was a safety mechanism, a little two-prong plug designed to shut off the booster engine if there was too much of a time delay between the disconnection of the prongs as the rocket launched.  The plug has been designed for the stock Redstone missile; the Mercury-Redstone combination, being heavier, took longer to launch and thus set off the safety mechanism.

The booster is damaged but reusable.  We'll likely see it fly in December.  Still, it's a setback in the program, which still has a few more test flights to go until a person can be launched.  I'm guessing we won't see an American in space until next Spring or Summer.

1 Comment Leave A Comment
Comics, Movies, Science / Space Race

[Nov. 21, 1960] I aim at the Stars (but sometimes I hit London)

6 Comments

If the United States is doing well in the Space Race, it is in no small thanks to a group of German expatriates who made their living causing terror and mayhem in the early half of the 1940s.  I, of course, refer to Wehrner von Braun and his team of rocket scientists, half of whom were rounded up by the Allies after the War, the other half of whom apparently gave similar service to the Soviets. 

I don't know if the Russian group is still affiliated with the Communist rocket program–I don't think so.  Last I heard, they had all been repatriated.  But bon Braun's group is still going strong.  Until last year, they worked under the auspices of the Army, but now they are employed in a civilian capacity by NASA.  Their giant Saturn project is the backbone of our nascent lunar program.

Of course, the fact that an ex-Nazi is playing such a pivotal role in our space program may not sit well with some.  Perhaps to address this concern, the rather hagiographic movie, I Aim at the Stars has been released.  Interestingly, it's not quite so sympathetic as it might have been.  Von Braun is played as a rather soulless figure, unconcerned with the political ramifications of his work.  He cares only about his rockets.

Or as a math student from the Bay Area has sung:

"Don't say that he's hypocritical.
Say instead that he's 'apolitical'.
'Once the rockets are up, who cares
where they come down. 
That's not my department,'
says Wehner von Braun."

A special comic book was made for the movie and handed out at some of the premieres.  I've gotten my hands on one of them, and having been given permission to reprint, my editor is reproducing it in its entirety for those of you who won't make it to the flicks to enjoy Curt Jurgens do a rather good job of not looking at all like Wehrner von Braun.

Enjoy!

6 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

[November 19, 1960] Saving the Best for Last (December 1960 Analog)

5 Comments

As the year draws to a close, all of the science fiction magazines (that is to say, the six remaining–down from a 1953 peak of 45) scramble to publish their best fiction.  Their aim is two-fold: firstly, to end the year with a bang, and secondly, to maximize the chances that one of their stories will earn a prestigious award.

By which, of course, I refer to my Galactic Stars, bestowed in December.  There's also this thing called a Hugo, which some consider a Big Deal.

And that's probably why the December 1960 Astounding was actually a pretty good ish (for a change).  I'll gloss over Part 2 of Occasion for Disaster, co-written by Garrett and Janifer, and head straight into the stand-alone stuff.

First, you've got an editorial foreward with Campbell whinging about the Dean Drive again.  But this time, he promises never to talk about it again.  This ostensible reactionless drive has finally gotten a review from some government agency or another, which is all Campbell says he really wanted.  But even Campbell seems doubtful that Dean's work will be vindicated, probably on account that the thing is a fraud.

The first piece of actual fiction is Poul Anderson's novelette, The Longest Voyage.  It's an atmospheric gem featuring the first circumnavigation of a globe.  I say a globe because it becomes clear early on that this sailing vessel, even though it be crewed by men, and men who speak an archaic dialect of English, is not plying the oceans of Earth, but rather some colony world where technology has regressed only to rise again.  The Captain's destination, aside from his port of origin, is an island where (it is rumored) a spaceship crashed decades ago. 

There is a real richness to this tale, which borrows liberally from the argot Anderson showcased in his excellent The High Crusade.  And then there's the deep theme–if given a chance to leapfrog one's culture from the Renaissance to the Interstellar, skipping the centuries of investigation and discovery, would one, should one do it?  What's more important when solving a problem: The answer or the process?

Four stars.  It's what Garrett wishes he could have done with Despoiler of the Golden Empire.

Harry Harrison is back with The K-Factor.  Sociometry is perfected such that human cultures can be reduced to a set of variables, the most important being our K-Factor or propensity for war.  But what happens when someone deliberately stimulates a world's violence factor?  An interesting premise marred by being told largely through exposition.  Three stars.

The Untouchable, by Stephen A. Kallis, a fellow I've never heard of before, is a tiny thing that was probably included to fill a space rather than on its merit.  Oh, it's not bad, this story of an invention that makes objects intangible, but it feels like the beginning of something rather than a complete piece.  Three stars.

Campbell writes the science-fact article this issue: They do it with Mirrors.  Either Astounding's editor is too cheap to pay for outside help, or he thinks too much of himself to let anyone else write the column.  Perhaps both.  In any event, this one is on Project Echo, and Campbell spends a dozen pages writing what I managed to convey in two (in my article on Courier).  I did appreciate him pointing out, however, the the world's first communications satellite is as much a triumph of rocketry as it is ground-based computer signal processing.

Gun for Hire is another Mack Reynolds piece that features some element of violence in the title.  It's actually a lot of fun, this story of a hit man transported to the future by pacifists who want him to rub out a would-be dictator.  I was particularly impressed with the assassin's characterization.  Four stars.

Finally, we have Donald E. Westlake, another unknown author (though come to think of it, I might have seen his name in a table of contents of a lesser mag last year).  He gives us Man of Action, again a case where a 20th Century fellow is abducted by folks from the future.  In this instance, the man is not a thug but an effete interior decorator.  He is compelled by his robotic captors to play a sort of 20 Questions game to determine why the future has stagnated, and how to put some pep back into it.  The execution is very nice, though the solution is a bit pat.  Three stars.

Wowsville.  For the first time in memory, Analog has delivered an issue with no clunkers, and with some genuine sparklies to boot.  Well done, Mr. Campbell.  More of this, please.

5 Comments Leave A Comment
Science / Space Race

[November 16, 1960] Fully Fledged (a November Space Race update)

1 Comment

The bird finally has wings!

By bird, I mean that lawn-dart of a rocket plane, NASA's X-15.  Until yesterday, that sleek black vehicle, designed to probe the edges of space from underneath, had been a work in progress.  The X-15 had already flown 25 times, zooming at faster than Mach 3 and climbing to a height of 40 kilometers.  But its engines, a pair of Reaction Motors XLR11s, were an old set of training wheels: virtually the same rockets that pushed Chuck Yeager's X-1 past the sound barrier in 1947. 

Together, these engines gave the plane a thrust of 32,000 lbf (pounds of force–or the force of Earth's gravity on one pound of matter).  That's nothing to sneeze at, but it was always an interim solution.  Yesterday, veteran test-pilot Scott Crossfield took the X-15 for a spin with the engine it was always meant to have: the Reaction Motors XLR99. 

Unlike the XLR11, the XLR99 can be throttled smoothly from 0-100% (as opposed to the XLR11, which had eight discrete speed settings depending on how many sub-engines were firing).  Moreover, just one XLR99 delivers 57,000 lbf, almost twice as much as two of its predecessors.

Now, Crossfield didn't really test the new engine to its limit, "only" taking the craft to Mach 2.97 and a height of 24 kilometers.  However, the XLR99 is going to make a whole new class of flights possible.  In a couple of years, expect to see the X-15 hitting Mach 6 and reaching the 100,000 kilometer mark. 

Who knows?  Someday, you might take off for orbit from your local airport instead of strapped to the top of a firecracker.

Speaking of which, the first full test of the suborbital Mercury-Redstone (NASA's Mercury one-man space capsule on top of a Redstone booster, the kind at the base of the Juno 1) is set for November 21.  There won't be anyone on board for the mission, but it is the next critical step in the flight-test schedule.

Finally, the Air Force has, at last, come clean regarding its Discoverer capsule-return program.  The newspaper coverage of the latest launch on November 12 and the subsequent recovery of the Discoverer reentry capsule on November 14 was surprisingly detailed.  Discoverer 17 did carry a camera (though, ostensibly, only for testing equipment to be carrried on the next-generation SAMOS satellite).  Moreover, the military even disclosed that they used an upraded Agena second stage on its Thor-Agena boosters.  This means they can lift heavier payloads to higher orbits–great news for the civilian program since NASA will be using Agenas in its upcoming Venus and Mars flights.  This is actually a case of decreased government redundancy since, until the Air Force revealed the Agena, NASA was going to develop its own version, called the Vega.  Now they don't have to.

Discoverer 17 actually did some science this time around, too.  Propitiously timed to launch during a solar flare, the satellite carried a bunch of human tissue samples and a silver bromide emulsion block.  Scientists will study the effects of heightened space radiation on these items, which should provide some useful information to the manned space program.

So smiles all around from all three corners of the American space industry.  1961 is going to be a fun year, methinks.

1 Comment Leave A Comment
Magazine

[November 13, 1960] Evening out (December 1960 Galaxy, second half)

10 Comments

It's hard to keep the quality up in a long-format magazine like Galaxy, especially when your lower tier stuff gets absorbed by a sister magazine (IF).  Thus, it is rare to find a full issue of Galaxy without some duds that bring the average down.  Editor Gold has saved this month's weak entries for the second half.

Not that you could tell at first, given the fascinating Subject to Change, by Ron Goulart.  A creepy story about a woman, her gift for transformation, her struggle with kleptomania, and her increasing estrangement from her fiancee.  Four stars.

H.B. Fyfe's Round-and-Round Trip is a hoot.  If you're an inveterate traveler like me, you'll especially appreciate this tale of a fellow who seems to be trapped on the interstellar version of the M.T.A., endlessly shuttling from planet to planet, never reaching his destination.  But does he actually have one?  Or is the journey the thing?  I'm torn between three and four stars.

But then we have Blueblood, by Jim Harmon.  Human explorers find a planet of blue humanoids racially divided based on the depth of the skin's hue.  The darker ones are seemingly dumber than the lighter ones.  I held my breath for some kind of satire or allegory regarding our present prejudicial woes in this country, but the story took a left turn somewhere and just left me with a bad taste in my mouth.  If it's allegory, the message to be gleaned is disturbing, and if it is not, then it's just a weak tale.  It's too bad–Harmon is fairly consistently good.  Two stars this time.

Patrick Fahy is another complete novice, and Bad Memory, illustrated by Mad Magazine's Don Martin, is unimpressive.  A space horticulturalist sacrifices all to turn his planet into a Jovian swamp.  On the upside, he falls in love.  On the downside…well, I didn't like the downside.  Two stars (you might like it more than me).

The issue is wrapped up by Daniel Galouye's Fighting Spirit, about a space force clerk who shennanigans his way into real combat only to find that war isn't quite the rifle and stiff upper lip type.  More the garlic, cross, and mirror type…  Three stars.

All told, we end up with an issue that just barely crests the three-star line on the Journey-meter.  Still, that's pretty good for an issue in "decline," and there are some definite gems, albeit more amethyst than emerald.

By the way, speaking of Don Martin, the newest Mad Magazine has hit the stands.  As you can see, they successfully predicted the outcome of the race:

But they also hedged their bet–this was the outside cover:

10 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

[Nov. 11, 1960] A Celebrated Veteran (December 1960 Galaxy)

12 Comments

Ten years ago, a World War Two vet named H. L. Gold decided to try his luck as editor of a science fiction digest.  His Galaxy was among the first of the new crop of magazines in the post-war science fiction boom, and it quickly set an industry standard. 

A decade later, Galaxy is down to a bimonthly schedule and has cut author rates in half.  This has, predictably, led to a dip in quality, though it is not as pronounced as I'd feared.  Moreover, the magazine is half-again as large as it used to be, and its sister publication, IF, might as well be a second Galaxy.  All told, the magazine is still a bargain at 50 cents the issue.

Particularly the December 1960 issue.  There's a lot of good stuff herein (once you get past yet another senilic Gold editorial):

The reliable J.T. McIntosh leads off with The Wrong World, in which the Earth is conquered…accidentally.  There was some misunderstanding by our invaders as to the technological level of our world; for the more advanced planets, we're supposed to get an invitation to interstellar society, not a savaging.  It's kind of an oddball piece, but it kept my attention despite the late hour at which I began it.  Three stars.

Next up is brand-newcomer, Bill Doede with Jamieson, an interesting tale of teleporting humans whose talents are viewed as akin to witchcraft.  Not a perfect tale, but definitely a promising beginning to a writing career, and with a female protagonist.  Three stars.

For Your Information is interesting, if not riveting, stuff about a Polynesian feast involving thousands of mating sea worms.  I understand they're a delicacy.  I'll take their word for it…  Three stars.

Charles V. de Vet is back with Metamorphosis, a story about a symbiotic life form that makes one superpowered… but which also turns the host into a ticking time bomb.  You spend much of the story pretty certain that you know how to defuse the bomb, such that it strains the credulity that there should be anything to worry about.  The ending, however, addresses the issue nicely.  Three stars.

Finally (for today) we have Snuffles by the rather odd but compelling R.A. Lafferty.  He writes stories in a style that shouldn't work but somehow does.  That's either some innate talent or blind luck.  Given his track record, I'm betting on the former.  In any event, the novelette details the misadventures of a six-person planetary exploration crew (two women, life scientists–women are always cast as biologists for some reason) who are at first charmed and then menaced by a sexless Teddy Bear monster with delusions of Godhood.  A fascinating story.  Four stars.

Next time, we'll have works by Ron Goulart, H.B. Fyfe, Jim Harmon, Patrick Fahy, and Daniel Galouye.  That's a pretty good lineup!

12 Comments Leave A Comment
Fashion, music, politics, sports

[Nov. 8, 1960] Across the Finish Line (the 1960 Presidential Election results)

10 Comments

At long last, the contest is over.  Not since the 1876 clash between Hayes and Tilden for this nation's highest office have the results been this close; it was not until this morning that anyone could really be sure who would be taking possession of the Oval Office in January 1961.

In fact, as I took in a late lunch yesterday, the big IBM computer at CBS had already predicted a Nixon win with overwhelming confidence.  This was an artifact of the flow of voting in this country: the day belongs to the Republican voter–it is only when the Democratic voter clocks out of his urban, blue-collar job that the tide begins to shift. 

By dinnertime, CBS' big brain had switched opinions based on the torrent of Kennedy votes streaming in from the Northeastern seaboard and the big Eastern cities.  New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago all threw the balance of their support for the Democratic candidate.  Just as the tide was cresting, President Eisenhower took to the airwaves exhorting me and my fellow West-Coasters not to give up the fight (the message was lost on me, of course; I'd voted that morning). 

Because the contest was not yet over.  The Senator from Massachusetts had acquired a hefty lead, but it was slowly eroded as the night went on.  When the polls closed in California, it became clear fairly quickly that the Union's second largest state was still undecided.  The Los Angelinos had not followed the example of the other big cities, their ardor for Kennedy moderated by their fondness for native son Nixon.  By midnight Pacific Time, when I decided to turn in (I still had work the next day, after all), the fate of the presidency rested on four states: Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, and California.

It was all over when I turned on the news at around 8.  Kennedy had won Minnesota.  California and Illinois canceled each other out.  Michigan had gone Democratic at around 3 AM, putting a seal on the event.  When all was said and done, the national margin was only about 100,000 votes, barely .1% of the electorate.  At first blush, this result flies in the face of the wild enthusiasm that greeted Kennedy wherever he toured.  But elections in this country are not dictated by the mob, and Nixon's supporters were bound to be more "conservative" in their exuberance.

I'm still processing this victory in my thoughts and feelings.  A year ago, the Vice President seemed a shoe-in.  All he had to do was ride the coattails of Eisenhower prosperity.  Senator Kennedy was too untested, too highfalutin to be a winner.  And yet, after the TV debates, no one could argue that Jack Kennedy wasn't ready for the Big Leagues.  Nixon's tone became more bitter and defensive.  It was hard to imagine this angry man carrying on the tradition of his gentle, moderate predecessor.  Despite this, both men fought with tenacity to the very end, and the outcome was never certain until it was upon us.

And so the 1960 election ends with the country divided sharply, not just demographically, but physically.  Nixon swept the West and Appalachia.  Kennedy won the Northeast and South.  Yet, it is a testament to how far we've come since the election just a century ago that the losing half of the populace will not riot or secede.  In two months, they will give their respect and reverence (though perhaps with a modicum of grumbling) to the new President. 

The burgeoning Space Race, decolonization, Communist expansionism, and desegregation are going to be the volatile issues of the 1960s.  Let's all hope that President Kennedy, whether he's in the White House for four or eight years, will be up to tackling them.

10 Comments Leave A Comment