Tag Archives: 1960

TV

[July 2, 1960] Bottom of the Cup (Twilight Zone 1st Season wrap-up)

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Gabrielle and Chelsea–dig that futuristic dress the latter has on!

Greetings from Westercon San Diego!

Now, with an opening like that, I expect you're expecting a convention report.  Well, this is just day one of a four day extravaganza, so not quite yet.  Just know that I'm having a lovely time, and I've already swept up many fellow travelers.

No, instead I want to talk about the end of an era.  After a successful run of 36 episodes, The Twilight Zone has come to a finish.  Well, for this season, anyway.  I can't imagine that it won't be renewed in Fall 1960. 

This latest one will review just two for the simple reason that there ain't no more:

First up is Rod Serling's The Mighty Casey, possibly the least inspired of the season's line-up.  Here's the set-up: The Hoboken Zephyrs are deep in the cellar, easily the losingest team in the National League.  Along comes a applicant with the goofiest face imaginable.  He is accompanied by a elderly gentleman who makes no obfuscations about the fact that the rookie is, in fact, a robot.  Interestingly, this is the second Twilight Zone to star the quite talented Jack Warden, and both times, a robot co-stars.

Well, the young artificial man, 22 years old in appearance yet just three weeks in existence, proves to be an amazing pitcher, and the Zephyrs come to have a solid shot at the pennant.  Until, of course, it is learned that Casey isn't human.  Now, this is where I expected an interesting debate over what qualifies a player as a "man," and the fine line between natural and artificial sapience.  Instead, I got a dopey resolution where the stellar pitcher is given a heart (so as to gain human status) and then subsequently doesn't have it in him to strike anyone out. 

"Mediocre," was my daughter's assessment. 

A World of his Own, by Richard Matheson, fares a bit better.  Keenan Wynn is a famous but somewhat nebbishy playwright with the uncanny ability to make characters come alive–literally.  In fact, as the episode opens, he is caught by his wife (Phyllis Kirk) in the arms of a mistress of his own creation (Mary La Roche).  Well, that's what the wife sees through a window, but by the time she enters the writer's study, the mistress has vanished.

Eager to save his marriage, the writer explains his talent, but his wife remains dubious, threatening to lock him up so that she can collect all of the community property after obtaining a divorce.  Ultimately (as telegraphed from the first minutes of the show), it turns out that Kirk is also one of Wynn's creations, and Wynn is compelled to destroy her by tossing the dictation tape that contains her description into the fireplace.  He contemplates bringing her back with a fresh dictation, but instead, he resurrects the less shrewish Mary. 

Rod Serling then appears to deliver a rare on-screen coda… only to be disposed of by Wynn in the same fashion as all of the playwright's other creations.  Cute.

There is a rushed, claustrophobic element to these two stories, as if the show had run out of budget, and the Serling/Houghton production team was forced to make them on the cheap.  Here's hoping CBS funds the show more lavishly in Season Two.

Still, there's no cause for complaint.  We got more than 15 hours of some of the best television has to offer, and strong indications that we can look forward to many more in the years to come!

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Science / Space Race

[June 30, 1960] On a roll! (Space Race Wrap-up)

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Something very exciting happened this week: Spaceflight became routine.

Remember just a couple of years ago?  The press was full of flopniks, grapefruit-sized spacecraft, and about a launch every other month.  Every mission was an adventure, and space was the great unknown.

All that has changed.  Not only are we launching more, and more advanced scientific satellites, but we are launching satellite systems.  Only two months ago, the Navy launched the first of the Transit satellites.  These satellites allow a ground-based observer to determine one's location to a fair degree of accuracy.  But since there's no guarantee any one satellite will be overhead at a given time, you need a constellation of Transits.

Number two was launched last week on June 22.  The age of reliable space utilization has dawned.

The news gets even more exciting: The launch of Transit also marked the first piggyback mission.  A little scientific probe called Solrad hitched a ride along with the navigation satellite.  How's that for efficiency?

Solrad is actually quite a neat little device.  For a while, scientists have been trying to study the Sun in the X-Ray spectrum, but the devices carried by Explorer 7 and Vanguard 3 were swamped by the charged particles swirling around the Earth in the so-called Van Allen Belts; thus no useful data was obtained. 

Navy scientists solved this problem in two ways.  First, they put the probe in a lower orbit, avoiding the worst of the Belt radiation.  Second, they employed the simple expedient of placing a large magnet on the front of the detector.  This swept out the unwanted electrons leaving the satellite's sensors clear for observing the Sun.

Solrad doesn't take pictures, mind you.  It just measures the raw value of solar X-ray flux.  But already, the probe has contributed significantly to science–in a rather unexpected field. 

Long distance communications on Earth are largely conducted via radio.  Sometimes, signals will fade out for no (hitherto) discernible reason.  Solrad has found out why–the level of solar X-ray emissions directly affects the radio-reflective properties of the Earth's ionosphere, that upper atmospheric layer of charged particles that causes radio waves to bounce across the planet rather than simply flying off into space.  Thanks to Solrad, and probes like it, I can imagine a time in the near future when we'll not only have a daily weather report, but also a radio reception report.

Speaking of communications, the Air Force reports that, in about a month, it will be launching a real communications satellite (unlike SCORE which just broadcast a prerecorded message).

It's not all good news on the Space Front, however.  I present to you the Galactic Journey obituaries for the month of June:

The Air Force has lost yet another Discoverer satellite: Discoverer 12 never made it to orbit; its booster suffered a second stage failure and crashed into the Atlantic.  Better luck next time.

Transit 1 went offline the day before Transit 2 launched.  I don't know if that was intentional or coincidental.

TIROS 1, the world's first weather satellite, threw in the towel on June 18, 1960.  It is my understanding that the probe did not perform as reliably as had been hoped, but we should see a TIROS 2 in the near future.

Pioneer 5, the first deep space probe, appears to have passed beyond the range of radio reception.  My sources inform me that the last telemetry was received on June 27.  STL engineers will continue to try to resume contact, however.

Services will be held next Sunday at 12:00 PM.  In attendance will be the currently functioning satellites: Vanguard 1, Explorer 7, Transit 2, and Solrad 1. 

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Science Fiction/Fantasy

[June 27, 1960] July Sneak Preview!

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The end of June is here, and it's time for the Galactic Journey preview listings for July.  This way, all of you who have joined the Journey, can share my adventures:

For reading material this month, we have the usual line-up of magazines in the order in which I'll read them:

July 1960 Astounding

July 1960 Galaxy

July 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction

I've decided not to order a subscription to Amazing after last month's rather dismal example.

As for books, it looks like the only new one that's coming out is Brian Aldiss' Galaxies Like Grains of Sand. 

On the other hand, it looks like July will be a great month for movies.  This is good since The Twilight Zone's last episode for this season airs in four days.

Lined up, we've got:

The Lost World

Beyond the Time Barrier

Dinosaurus

Stay tuned for a stellar Space Race roundup in two days.  You won't want to miss it.

In the meantime, tune in to KGJ–now broadcasting through the end of January 1959 over your local radio and television stations (February 1959 coming soon!)

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Movies

[June 25, 1960] Sting in its Tale (The Wasp Woman)

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Necessity is the mother of invention.  What is a review writer to do when all the literary science fiction material to review has dried up?

Why, it's time to head to the drive-in and sample the visual science fiction material!

Now, I've been dreading this avenue because the Summer blockbuster line-up hasn't hit the silver screen yet, and all the schlock-houses are filled with, well, schlock.  Like 12 to the Moon.  Moreover, my daughter is away at camp, so I don't have my usual date for the movies.

Still, I have a duty to provide entertaining reading and listening material for my fans, now that you number over ten.  It wouldn't do to take a week hiatus just because my queue is empty.  So I scoured the listing in the local paper and found a cinema in Oceanside that still had The Wasp Woman (paired with another film, in which I had no interest) and resigned myself to a lonely, miserable evening with naught but Roger Corman and a bag of popcorn. 

Imagine my surprise when my wife, who normally has an allergic aversion to sci-fi drek, offered to come along! 

As it turns out, the movie was surprisingly decent (and very short–about an hour), and we never got to emulate our parked neighbors by engaging in a proper bout of necking.  Here is what we got for our troubles:


Africanized Honey Wasps

I was expecting one of those rural numbers where a bunch of badly acted cops chase after a rubber-suited monster, the kind that feasts on young couples in lover's lane.  The sort of thing that Ed Wood is (in)famous for.

Instead, Wasp Woman takes place almost entirely within the board room and offices of the Starling Cosmetics Company, a business with an 18-year history of success that is currently suffering a precipitous downturn.  Why?  The ad execs (not all of whom are men!) and the company executive (a woman!) are in agreement that the lag in sales occurred when the owner of the company, Janice Starlin, stopped supporting the product lines with her own face.  Ms. Starlin believes that a 40-year old, no matter how lovely, cannot be a convincing glamour girl.


Absolutely hideous

This sets up a plausible motivation for Starlin's next actions.  She has recently received a letter from a Mr. Zinthrop, an eccentric old scientist who claims to have found the secret to eternal youth: enzyme extracted from the wasp royal jelly.  She is skeptical, at first, but he convinces her by reverting a cat to a kitten and a guinea pig to… a rat.  Well, I suppose it was meant to be a guinea piglet.  Starlin then requests that Zinthrop test the product on her.  He is reluctant to begin human trials so soon, but he ultimately gives in.


Sherlock Holmes: The Later Years

Starlin gives Zinthrop carte blanche, and he proceeds to produce enough enzyme to restore Starlin's youth. 


Job title?  Er… how about 'mad scientist'?

Over the course of several weeks, the elixir begins to work, but its progress is not quick enough for Starlin, who feels (perhaps justifiably) that her company is teetering on the brink, and only her face can bring it back.  After Zinthrop mentions off-handedly that he is working on a stronger version of the formula for use in topical creams, Starlin sneaks a dose.


Heroin is good for the skin, you know

The new concoction works a miracle, restoring Starlin to her early 20s.  She announces that, not only will she be launching the new line of Starlin cosmetics, but she intends to market this astounding new product. 

But all is not well in mad science land.  One of the cats injected with the new formula grows vestigial wasp wings and attacks Zinthrop.  He survives, but he is crestfallen.  Unusually, he's got a conscience, and he wants to tell Starlin as soon as possible, but he is involved in an automobile accident before he can convey the message.

Starlin, desperate to retain her youth (it's never stated that multiple doses are necessary, but perhaps she's just become addicted to the formula), quickly runs through the rest of Zinthrop's injections, unaware of the danger to herself… and others.

Meanwhile, Starlin's staff continue to worry for their bosses' physical and mental health.  At first, they are concerned that Zinthrop is a simple confidence man.  Then they become convinced he is a quack, and that his promises will do irrepairable harm to Starlin's psyche.  When Starlin rejuvenates, their worries allay briefly, but then she begins suffering from piercing headaches.


"She retracted her support for Kennedy right after she started taking wasp extract…"

The oldest of the execs decides to snoop around in the laboratory and see what's up.  There, he is attacked by a hideous wasp woman, who beats him unconscious and devours him completely.  This effect is as low-budget as one might expect from a movie with a $50,000 bankroll.  Still, the transformed Starlin does look sufficiently creepy, and Corman wisely keeps her in the shadows.


The New Face of Starlin Cosmetics!

After the susbsequent grisly death of the company's night watchman, concern rises.  Zinthrop is found and taken to the company building, but he can't remember what he was going to tell Starlin.  She pleads with him to help her, but he cannot. 


"Blink twice if I should stop taking wasp extract and killing innocent people."

Agitated, she turns into a wasp woman again and kills Zinthrop's nurse.  Starlin's secretary and her boyfriend show up shortly thereafter.  Starlin bites and drags off the secretary, but the wasp woman is stopped by a combination of carbolic acid and a velocitious defenestration before she can kill again.

Cue credits.

This is such an odd movie.  I've said many times that my favorite part of a horror film is the first twenty minutes when it seems that things will be hunky dory for all concerned.  The stronger extract isn't even introduced until halfway through the movie's running time, and the wasp woman doesn't make her debut until the last 20 minutes. 

As a result, what you really have is an interesting sort of character drama.  Aging cosmetics company queen must cope with an increasingly desperate situation.  What sells this drama is Ms. Susan Cabot (originally Harriet Shapiro).  Yes, the Ms. Cabot who was the paramour of the young King Hussein of Jordan last year before he found out she was Jewish.  She takes the role seriously, and I found myself caring less about seeing the wasp monster and more about her dilemma.  In fact, the whole thing feels a bit like an episode of The Twilight Zone: a personal crisis with a detour into the surreal. 

It's hardly perfect, of course.  It's a clear filching of The Fly, even down to the utterance of "Heeeelp me!"  The frenetic jazz soundtrack, a hallmark of a lot of movies these days, will either be your cup of tea or it won't.  While Cabot is generally good, the rest of the cast has its uneven moments, though rarely distractingly so.

On the other hand, the film's watchability is aided by its rather progressive attitude.  The cast is balanced quite evenly, gender-wise, and there is very little of the sexism that characterizes our culture these days.  Starlin is a quite sympathetic character, with the sort of strength and poise one would expect of a corporate head.

Add to that the not-unsuccessful moralizing (an anti-drug message, an anti-reckless science message), and you've got a thoroughly enjoyable hour of entertainment.  Of course, it's just that.  It's not art for the ages.  But as we saw in I married a Monster from Outer Space, one can find quality in the oddest of places.

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TV

[June 22, 1960] Here comes Summer! (Twilight Zone wrap-up)

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Summer is here, and that means the television season is wrapping up, freeing time for a slew of blockbusters.  But the small screen hasn't quite finished with all it has to show us–between Maverick, Bonanza, and The Twilight Zone, there's still plenty to enjoy.  I must confess a guilty affection for What's My Line, too.  I like to close my eyes when they display the guests' professions so I can play along with the contestants in guessing.

Twilight Zone, in particular, continues to impress.  The latest three episodes (there was another gap in the schedule for some reason) are all interesting, and they break from the early season mold of featuring a fellow descending into madness and screaming through the second act.

In fact, it's rather hard to pick a favorite from this bunch.  Perhaps you can help:

Jack Klugman stars in A Passage for Trumpet as an alcoholic, down-on-his-luck trumpeteer with a real talent for horn.  His rendezvous with the bottle has killed his career, spiraling him into a depression for which booze is his medication.  Seeing no way out of the vicious cycle, he throws himself in front of a speeding car.  Surprisingly, he seems unscathed… except now no one can see him anymore.  Is he a ghost?  Perhaps the mysterious trumpeteer named Gabe knows the answer…  Klugman is particularly great in this role, but he is great in everything (q.v. 12 Angry Men).

Mr. Bevis is an altogether different sort of episode, though like the last, it is excellent and marked with more than a little touch of the supernatural.  The eponymous protagonist, played by Orson Bean, is eccentric in the extreme.  He wears a mismatched suit topped with an archaic bow-tie.  He drives an ancient Rickenbacker.  His apartment hasn't a square inch of free space, so crammed is it with half-built models, random toys, instruments, clocks.  He plays football in the street with urchins.  He listens to zither music.  His demeanor is uncommonly, unhealthily cheerful and engaging.  At work, he's a disaster, bouncing from job to job with seasonal frequency.  He rarely makes rent on time.

In fact, the episode begins with Mr. Bevis being fired, evicted, and losing his vehicle.  But then he's offered a second chance by his family guardian angel.  Will he trade his happy-go-lucky lifestyle for security and success?  Would you?

After Hours, starring mostly women (at last!  In this case, Ann Francis and Elizabeth Allen), throws a curve ball.  A young woman goes to a department store looking for a gold thimble to give her mother as a present.  She is taken to the all-but deserted ninth floor… of a building that has only eight floors, where she is sold the item by a most unsettling saleswoman.  When she later sees the retailer is just a mannequin, she faints, waking up after the employees have departed and the store has been locked up.  It's set up like a conventional episode with a mystery, an increasingly distraught protagonist, and a manic second act.  The ending isn't what you think it will be, however.

My contacts at the studio tell me there are only two episodes left before the season is out.  I'll cover those, and pick out my favorites for the season, in just a few weeks.

Stay tuned!

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Magazine

[June 19, 1960] Half Measures (July 1960 IF Science Fiction)

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I'm glad science fiction digests haven't gone the way of the dodo.  There's something pleasant about getting a myriad of possible futures in a little package every month.  You can read as much or as little as you like at a time.  The short story format allows the presentation of an idea without too much belaboring.

Every month, I get several magazines in the mail: Astounding and Fantasy and Science Fiction are monthlies; Galaxy and IF are bi-monthlies, but since they're owned and edited by the same folks, they essentially comprise a single monthly.  I don't have subscriptions to the other two digests of note, Amazing and Fantastic (again, both run by the same people); they just aren't worth it, even if they occasionally publish worthy stuff.

This month, IF showed up last; hence, it is the last to be reviewed.  As usual, it consists mostly of moderately entertaining stories that weren't quite good enough to make it into Galaxy.  Let's take a look:

In a Body is the lead novella by J.T. McIntosh, and it's frustrating as all get out.  I often like McIntosh, though others find him competently forgettable.  This particular story has all the makings of a great one: shape-changing alien is shipwrecked on Earth and must find a soulmate to survive.  She adopts human form and chooses a man afflicted with leukemia to be her husband–but he's already betrothed to another.  In the hands of Theodore Sturgeon, this could have been a classic.  Even had McIntosh just given it a good rewrite, showing more and telling less, it would have easily garnered four of five stars.  As is, it is readable, even compelling, but it could have been much more.

Psycho writer Robert Bloch's Talent, on the other hand, is perfect as is.  Featuring a boy with an extraordinary talent for mimicry, Talent is one of those stories that starts intriguingly and descends slowly into greater horror.  The style is nicely innovative, too.  This piece is easily the highlight of the issue.

It is followed by one of the lesser lights: Time Payment by Sylvia Jacobs, a rather incoherent tale about a device that allows one to time travel to the future.. sort of.  Really, one just lives one's life normally, but with no lasting memory of living, until the destination time is reached.  Then, the recollections all flood in.  It doesn't make a lot of sense.

The prolific and not-untalented Jim Harmon offers us The Last Trespasser, a 3-star tale about the humanity's encounter with a race of beneficial symbiotes and the one fellow who finds himself unable to take on an alien "Rider."  It's a little uneven, and the reveal doesn't quite make sense, but I liked his creative prediction of future slang.

Usually reliable Fred Pohl has an uninspired entry called The Martian in the Attic, about a rather nebbishy would-be blackmailer who discovers that the inventor behind many of the wonders of the Modern Age actually had help from a pet alien.  It feels archaic. 

The Non-Electronic Bug, by newcomer E. Mittleman, is a bog-standard psi-endowed card sharking tale better suited to the pages of mid-1950's Astounding than a modern magazine.  It is in English, however, and perhaps Mr. Mittleman will improve with time.

Capping off this issue is Hayden Howard's Murder beneath the Polar Ice, a talky, technical thriller involving an American Navy frogman and the Soviet listening post he investigates in the Bering Strait.  Howard has been in hibernation as a writer for seven years after a short stint penning tales for the defunct Planet Stories, and Murder doesn't herald an auspicious re-awakening. 

And that brings us to the end of our journey through July 1960's magazines.  F&SF is the clear winner, at 3.5 stars to IF's and Astounding's 2.5s.  It's hard to award a "best story"–it may well be Bloch's Talent, but it might also be It is not My Fault from F&SF.  I think I'll give the nod to the former.

Finally, out of the 20 stories that appeared in the Big Three, just three were penned by women.  Unless it turns out "Mr." Mittleman is a woman.  That's actually a number we haven't seen since February.  Here's hoping we break 15% in the months to come!

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Book

[June 16, 1960] Skimming the Cream (Robert Sheckley's Notions: Unlimited)

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As a rule, I don't review anthologies.  By definition, they are composed of stories already published elsewhere, and since I cover the magazines regularly, chances are I've already seen most of an anthology's contents.

I make an exception for Bob Sheckley.

Sheckley is the master of the science fiction short story.  They are sometimes humorous, sometimes terrifying, never bad.  And since the novel I'd planned on reading, Mark Clifton's Eight Keys to Eden bored me right out of the gate, I gratefully picked up a copy of Sheckley's new anthology Notions: Unlimited.

Here's what I found:

Gray Flannel Armor features a young man within whom, behind his drab gray exterior, beats a heart yearning for romance.  This cute little story gives a sneak preview into the world of commercially arranged dating.  It's a cynical story, but not so much as his earlier works dealing with romance.  This makes sense: it was published in 1957, after his marriage to his second wife.

The Leech, and Watchbird are of a kind, though their plots differ widely.  In each, a problem is presented, a solution is found, and it then turns out that the solution makes everything worse.  Both are older stories.  The former is better than the latter.

A Wind is Rising is a good, evocative piece about a colonist who gets stuck out of shelter during one of its frequent super-hurricanes.  As someone who used to live in the windy desert, where sandstorms would turn the landscape into something from Mars, I can empathize with his situation.

Morning After deals with one of my favorite subjects of science fiction: just what will we all do for a living once everything has been mechanized?  In this case, we all become freelance voters, tossing our ballot for the candidate who schmoozes us the most.  And when that ceases to be of sufficient interest, we go elsewhere…

Native Problem is a fun story in the classic silly Sheckley mold.  A social misfit decides to colonize his own planet on the frontier.  His life is a lonely paradise until a new bunch of colonists, arriving via generation ship sent out decades before, makes planetfall. 

Feeding Time is another older story, a very short piece about a young, inexperienced bibliophile who takes up gryphon-rearing.  As is well known, the gryphon feeds only on young virgins.  The results are… predictable.

I'd never read Paradise II before, about a pair of space explorers who come across a planet rendered lifeless by biological warfare, such destruction being triggered by intense resource competition, particularly squabbling over limited food stocks.  Upon investigating a station orbiting around the planet, one of them is absorbed by the structure's brain, and the other finds himself a linchpin solving the planet's food problem.  It's a dark story, and rather ridiculous, a little bit like what Ellison has written late last decade.

Back to the fun ones, Double Indemnity involves an unscrupulous time traveller attempting to collect on a particular clause of his insurance that pays out when one finds oneself duplicated in the course of a chronological excursion.  It doesn't make a lick of sense, but it is a pleasure to read.

Almost all of these stories came out in Galaxy, Sheckley's prefered home, so I was surprised to discover that the next one, Holdout was published in F&SF.  It involves a dramatically multi-racial crew, and the one intolerant fellow who refuses to work with a person of a particular ethnic background.  Of course, the mystery of the story, not revealed until the end, is the identity of that ethnicity. 

Dawn Invader, another F&SF story, pits a human and an alien against each other in symbolic mental combat.  It's a bit like Ellison's The Silver Corridor, which had been published in Infinity the year before, but with a happier ending.  I like happy endings–they are harder to write.

Finally, we have the excellent The Language of Love, in which a young suitor refuses to marry his sweetheart until he can find the exact words to express his feelings toward her.  The punchline is hilarious, and it has been much bandied about my household ever since my wife and I read it.

Of the four collections Sheckley has published to date, Notions may be my least favorite.  That is not to say it is bad; it's just his least good.  It's still well worth reading, and I zoomed through it quite quickly and enjoyably.

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Movies

[June 14, 1960] 12 Angry Astronauts (12 to the Moon)

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Sometimes, the Journey goes to the movies; sometimes, we're sorry we did.

If you are a regular reader of this column, or you tune in to KGJ, you've probably read some of my film reviews.  An off-script discussion was broadcast recently summing up all the movies my daughter and I have watched since the Journey took off. 

We've seen some excellent flicks and some bad flicks, but I don't think we've ever seen anything quite so bad as what we saw last weekend, the newly released…

First, the summary.  12 to the Moon is, as one might expect, the story of the world's first lunar landing, some time near the end of the 20th Century.  The incredibly capacious spacecraft, Lunar Eagle One, features a truly international crew, and two of them are even women.  The leader of the expedition is, naturally, an American and the hunkiest of the bunch.  Other nationalities represented include the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Israel, Russia (not the Soviet Union), Poland, Brazil, Turkey, Japan, Sweden, and Nigeria.

The ship is atomic powered, so the whole flight takes all of three hours.  Yet, in that time, the crew feels compelled to take a shower (don't worry–they use waterless sonic showers to get clean).  I'm thinking the lead actor really wanted to do this scene, or perhaps the director really wanted to see him in this scene.  Why buy beefcake if you're just going to leave it in the freezer?

Along the way, the ship runs into a swarm of meteors that make little whizzing noises as they fly by.  Thanks to the skillful Nigerian navigator, and the help of a conventional two dimensional compass, they avoid the hazard.

The Moon turns out to be a place of wonders.  Water vapor sublimates from open vents.  Gold is found in giant nuggets.  Two of the crew, apparently lovebirds with a long history, find a cave with air inside.  They promptly take off their helmets to sample it, the most scientific method available to them, I'm sure.



But the Moon also holds its horrors.  First, the romantic pair disappear into a misty portal.  Then, the Russian scientist burns his hands on a stream of liquid.  Several of the crew get caught in a deep pool of pumice quicksand.

The crew returns to the ship at least three members short (it's hard to keep track).  Whereupon they begin getting teletype messages from the telepathic inhabitants of the Moon.  The script is ostensibly East Asian, and the Japanese scientist can read it.  But I can tell you as someone fluent in Japanese, that ain't no Kanji.

In any event, the Moon People are sick of humanity bombarding them with probes.  They've decided to keep the romantic pair for study of the emotion called "love."  They also want a couple of cats, which were thoughtfully brought along aboard Lunar Eagle One.  They don't ask for the dog or the monkeys.  Well, there's no faulting the aliens for taste.  Then, the aliens tell the remaining humans to go home.

On the way back, there is more drama.  They dodge another swarm of meteors–I guess they just sort of hang out in cislunar space.  The Israeli and the German, who started the journey wary of each other, become fast friends when the latter has a heart attack and reveals that his father was an inhuman Nazi, for whose memory he has devoted his life to atoning.

As the ship nears the Earth, an ominous silence greets the radio calls from Lunar Eagle One.  Upon closer inspection, it appears that the entire Western Hemisphere has undergone some sort of deep freeze, the obvious work of the Moon People.

The Russian hatches a plan to save the Earth–by dropping an atomic bomb into a big volcano.  Of course.  Why didn't I think of that?  And why, if it's so obvious, didn't anyone in the Eastern Hemisphere think of it?

The German and the Israeli, now the best of pals, draw the short straws to drop the bomb in a little shuttlecraft.  Their aim is true, but it has no effect on the alien ray.  Moreover, they die in the process.

But not in vain!  For the Moon People were watching their noble sacrifice, and they decide that people ain't so bad after all.  Thus, they turn off their freeze beam (which by this time was chilling Lunar Eagle One as well), and it develops that everyone who was frozen is actually just fine, thank you.

Cue happy music…

And…

So, that probably all sounds pretty good, doesn't it?  It looks pretty good, too, thanks to the cinematography of veteran John Alton.

But it's not.  It's stultifyingly boring.  The "plot" is just a series of events, one after another, with no real cohesion.  The acting is the worst kind of wooden.  The science is poor (though I did appreciate that the ship turned around half way to the Moon rather than accelerating the whole way).  There are concessions to the tiny budget–for instance, the helmets don't even have visors.  Halfway through, my daughter was pounding her seat in frustration and asking to leave. 

I'm a bad dad.  I wouldn't let her go.

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Magazine

[June 11, 1960] Fool me once… (July 1960 Amazing)

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If there is any innovation that defined the resurgent science fiction field in the 1950s, it is the science fiction digest.  Before the last decade, science fiction was almost entirely the province of the "pulps," large-format publications on poor-quality paper.  The science fiction pulps shared space with the detective pulps, the western pulps, the adventure pulps.  Like their brethren, the sci-fi pulps had lurid and brightly colored covers, often with a significant cheesecake component.

Astounding (soon to be Analog) was one of the first magazines to make the switch to the new, smaller digest format.  Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy, and a host of other new magazines never knew another format.  By the mid-'50s, there were a score of individual science fiction digests, some excellent, some unremarkable.  It was an undisputed heyday.  But even by 1954, there were signs of decline.  By the end of the decade, only a handful of digests remained.  The "Big Three" were and are Astounding, F&SF, and Galaxy (now a bi-monthly alternating production with a revamped version of IF).  Also straggling along are Fantastic Stories and Amazing, the latter being the oldest one in continuous production.

My faithful readers know I don't generally bother with the last two titles.  Although some of my favorite authors sometimes appear in them, the overall magazine quality is spotty, and my time (not to mention budget!) is limited.  Nevertheless, Rosel George Brown had a good story in Fantastic last month, and this month's Amazing had a compelling cover that promised I would find works by Blish, Bone, Clarke, and Knight inside. 

I bit.  This article is the result.

Last time I covered Amazing, I noted that the magazine was a throwback both in writing style and plots.  Things haven't changed much.  Though there are a couple of decent stories in here, I wouldn't buy a subscription based on what I read. 

In brief:

J.F. Bone has written some fine stuff.  Noble Redman, about a psionically endowed, red-hued Earthman who teams up with a Martian lowlife (both of them humans), is not one of his best tales, but it's inoffensive 3-star fare.

A good portion of the book is taken up with William F. Temple's novella, "L" is for Lash.  This is pure early '50s stuff: a retired cop named Fred (I don't think we ever learn his last name) is haunted by the criminal he put away decades before, and who was interned for life on Venus.  The convict somehow managed to escape, go on a robbing spree, and attain eternal youth and invulnerability to boot.  The protagonist's solution is not only implausible, it's actually inconsistent. 

I'll spoil things for you: Lash, the criminal, has perfect telekinetic control of everything around him.  Missiles, A- Bombs, guns, all are ineffective against him.  We are told later in the story that the first of Lash's murders had been designed to look like an accident.  He had angered a fellow to the point of firing on Lash, but Lash had gimmicked the assailant's gun to fire backward, thus killing its owner.  At the end of Lash, the hero visits the Scotland Yard crime museum (is there such a place?) to view this unique weapon.  He then uses his powers of prestidigitation to swap his current gun for the gimmicked gun.  When Lash inevitably shows up to force Fred to kill himself, the gun shoots backwards and hits Lash. 

Perhaps Lash was taken by surprise.  I can forgive that.  But there is sloppy writing here.  Before the swap, Fred rewires his standard gun to stun rather than kill its targets.  After the swap, he wires the gun back for killing.  Except the trick gun had never been set to stun.  An author and her/his editor really should proofread a work before it is printed.  I understand that Temple wanted to keep the reveal a secret until the end, but this was just sloppy.

If you liked David Bunch's A Little Girl's Xmas in Modernia, set a world where, as people mature, they swap out their fleshly components for robotics, then you might enjoy Penance Day in Moderan.  This one involves an annual meeting of generals; they wage war on each other in a casually enjoyable way the other 364 days of the year.  Bunch's suite of satirical stories has largely been published in Fantastic and Amazing, so I've missed them.  If you like them, seek them out!

Murray Yaco, who helped contribute to the poor quality of the October 1959 Astounding is back with the mediocre Membership Drive, about the first contact between an all-too humanoid alien and modern humanity.  The ending particularly bothered me for its callous treatment of the one female character; you may feel differently.

One of the reasons I'd purchased the magazine was the non-fiction article by the renowned Arthur C. Clarke.  A New Look at Space is not really a factual article in the style of Ley or Asimov.  Rather it's just a four-page puff piece explaining how great Space is and how soon we'll get there.  I'm not sure what occasioned him to write this space-filler.  Disappointing.

It turns out that the Blish story, …And all the Stars a Stage, is actually the fourth part of a four-part serial.  The description didn't grab me–male hero leads a rebellion against a stifling matriarchy, so I won't seek out the other three parts.

Finally, the Knight (Damon, that is).  Time Enough, or Enough Time, depending on whether you believe the Table of Contents or the story's title page, is a decent coda to the issue.  In the near future, a psychiatrist invents a kind of time machine.  Whether it actually allows one to go back in time or simply return to an episode in one's personal history is left vague.  The story focuses on an individual who attempts to rewrite an humiliating episode from his middle-school days, one that the patient feels is responsible for his problems in adulthood.  He is unsuccessful in his mission.  His doctor gently reminds his patient that the failures of the past are sometimes best left forgotten, and efforts better spent on improving the present person.  Nevertheless, the patient resolves to keep trying until he succeeds.  "There's always tomorrow," the patient states, the irony being that the patient is using his tomorrows to adjust the past rather than to forge a new future. 

It almost goes without mentioning that women are virtually nonexistent, and there are no female writers.  Amazing is still the most conservative of the digests, even more so than Astounding.  I've predicted its demise for some time, yet it manages to defy my expectations.  Maybe there are few enough digests now that Amazing's share of the market is big enough to sustain it.  Or perhaps its 35 cent price tag, the lowest of the digests, is the secret to its survival.

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Magazine

[June 9, 1960] To Pluto and the Future (July 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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I was recently told that my reviews are too negative, and that I should focus on telling the world about the good stuff; for that hopeful fan, I present my assessment of the July 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction.  There's not a clunker in the bunch, and if none of the stories is a perfect gem, several are fine stones nevertheless.

My receipt of this month's issue was accompanied by no small measure of eagerness.  The cover promised me two stories by female authors (Zenna Henderson and Miriam Allen deFord) as well as a novella by Wilson Tucker, who wrote the excellent The City in the Sea.  Here's what I found inside:

Stephen Barr is no stranger to Fantasy and Science Fiction, having appeared in the book twice before.  His lead short story, Oh I'll take the High Road is softer stuff than his usual science fictiony fare, but I enjoyed it.  It features a poet scientist, who invents a thought-propelled space drive, and the eternal love he shares with a professor's daughter.  Where he ends up, and how that love endures, makes for a pleasant (if not particularly remarkable) story.

I'd never head of Hollis Alpert before.  His newness may explain the unusual nature of his premiere science fiction piece, a mock academic presentation called The Simian Problem, in which a professor discusses the relatively recent (fictional) phenomenon that involves women giving birth to degenerate ape children.  The occurrence of such "monsters" is on the exponential increase, it seems, and an effective treatment remains elusive.  The format meanders jarringly from first person expository to dialogue, but the sting in the story's tail is worth waiting for.

Moving on, we have the delightful Theodore Cogswell with The Burning, a portrayal of a dystopic future from the point of view of a most unusual teen gangster.  Those involved in a certain ubiquitous youth organization may get more out of it than I did.

Zenna Henderson is always good, of course.  Her Things is the story of a first encounter between an alien aboriginal race, told from the point of view of its female spiritual leader, and humanity.  The Terrans bring all manner of technological gifts, but are they worth the physical and philosophical price?  Should one sacrifice one's very cultural identity for the chance to "progress" scientifically?  Tough questions, and Henderson pulls no punches.

I wasn't quite sure how to react to A.H.Z.Carr's It is not my fault, though upon reflection (and the measure of a good story is how much it makes you reflect), I think it's quite good.  In brief: when a down-on-his-luck fellow collapses and dies in broad daylight near a busy thoroughfare, a momentarily attentive God dispatches an angel to determine who was at fault for the miserable death and dispense punishment.  Sometimes justice isn't so easy as all that.

Then we have Miriam Allen deFord's All in Good Time, another first person exposition story.  In this case, the setting is a first year law classroom a century from now, but this is largely incidental to the plot, which involves a cross-time bigamist.  It's cute, and the presentation is more expertly handled than in the above-described Alpert story.  I particularly appreciated that, in the future, female lawyers seem to be as common as male ones.

Ever wonder what to give the fellow who's had everything?  What is Heaven to someone who enjoyed life to its fullest?  Gordy Dickson asks those questions in his excellent The Last Dream.  Of course, for many, just being close to the Almighty is reward enough, but most like to think of Heaven (if it exist) providing physical benefits, too.  I bet the doughnuts are fantastic, for instance.  And non-fattening.

Dr. Asimov has a good, timely article on Pluto and what lies beyond this month.  It was one of my motivations for writing my own piece on the subject.  He spends a good bit of space on the interesting Titius-Bode Law that seems to govern orbital spacing in our system, at least out to Uranus.  I'm still not convinced that the "Law" isn't a statistical fluke–I look forward to being able to resolve systems outside ours so we can have a data set larger than one.

Fair Trade, by Avram Davidson, reads like a Clifford Simak piece.  A pair of aliens make a forced landing in a backwoods town and party the natives before being rescued by another alien-crewed ship.  Before departing, they swap their super-knives for a local manufactured good.  Its identity is not disclosed until the end.  One of the few non-somber pieces from the author.

Finally, we have Wilson Tucker's To the Tombaugh Station, a very good, novella-sized mystery involving a man, an asteroid miner by trade, suspected of murder, a tough woman bounty hunter sent to investigate him, and the long long trip across the solar system they spend together.  Wilson Tucker has a penchant for writing strong female characters, and he does an excellent job here.  The whodunnit aspect is nicely done, too. 

I note that there is a Planet X beyond Pluto in this story, Tombaugh Station having been established solely for the purpose of investigating it.  Tucker, at least in the instant tale, subscribes to the popular theory that Pluto was once a moon of Neptune. 

Tallying up the numbers, we have a strong 3.5-star issue, well worth your time and 40 cents.  See you soon with something Amazing!

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