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[April 22, 1964] World Affairs (May 1964 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Hail, Britannia

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the Beatles again have the most popular song on the U.S. charts.  This time is it's a cheerful little melody called Can't Buy Me Love.


You'd be grinning too, if you were that popular.

I suppose there will be no end of imitations.  My sources in the UK tell me a new group just released its first album.  You can't tell from the minimalist cover, but they're called the Rolling Stones.


I thought they were called Decca.

The album isn't yet available on this side of the Atlantic, so I can't tell you what it sounds like.  Judging by the haircuts, I assume it will be a lot like the Fab Four.  Fantastic Five, maybe, if Marvel Comics doesn't object.

The British don't just export music, of course.  They also supply us with sex and violence, in the person of James Bond, Agent 007.  From Russia With Love, the sequel to the hit movie Dr. No opened on Yankee screens this month.


One should always be properly dressed while wielding a pistol.

All's Fair

Other nations besides the United Kingdom have a chance to impress Americans for the next couple of years.  The New York World's Fair opened to the public today, with exhibits from dozens of foreign countries, as well as several states and business corporations.


That's the Unisphere, symbol of the Fair.  I call it a globe.

Those of us with long memories will recall the 1939 New York World's Fair.  It's hard to believe that a quarter of a century has gone by.


The pointy one is the Trylon and the round one is the Perisphere.  They look more modern than the new one, don't they?

It would tedious to try to describe all the stuff going on at this extravaganza, but let me point out a few highlights.  Science fiction fans will want to visit the Space Park.


NASA shows off their fancy equipment.

The state of Wisconsin brags about its most famous products.


Does that mean the World's Largest Cheese gets in free?

Noted puppeteers Sid and Marty Krofft will present a stage spectacular called Les Poupées de Paris (The Dolls of Paris.) So what?  Who cares about a kiddie puppet show?  Well, this musical revue is for adults only.  Seriously.  You have to be at least twenty-one years old to get in.  It's just too sexy and too scary for the little ones.


Here's one of the scary parts.  I can't show you the sexy parts unless you have proof of age.

For those of us who can't make it to the Big Apple this year or next, at least we can explore strange new worlds in the pages of our favorite magazines.  Let's head for the main gate and see what the latest issue of Fantastic has to offer.

Tickets, Please


art by Ed Emshwiller

Adept's Gambit, by Fritz Leiber

Our first exhibit is an oldie but a goodie — this issue's Fantasy Classic deserves the name, and I won't complain about filling more than one-third of the issue with a reprint.  It appeared in the pages of the 1947 Arkham House collection Night's Black Agents.


Cover art by Ronald Clyne

Just over three thousand copies of the book exist, so most fantasy fans won't be familiar with this novella featuring our old friends Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

A brief introductory note explains that the two adventurers are no longer in their usual fantasy realm of Nehwon.  Having made their way through passageways that connect all possible worlds, they are now on Earth.  To be specific, the Eastern Mediterranean area, in what seems to be ancient times.  Don't expect historical fiction, though.  This is a place full of enchantment and supernatural menace.

As they often do, the pair relax after their struggles in the arms of beautiful young women.  Things quickly go wrong when Fafhrd's paramour turns into a sow.  He suspects his companion of playing tricks on him, but this theory explodes when the Mouser's girlfriend changes into a giant snail.  Both ladies regain their normal shapes after a while, but whenever either of the heroes embraces a woman, the same thing happens.

This is, of course, an intolerable situation.  Reluctantly, they seek out their eldritch mentor Ningauble of the Seven Eyes.  That bizarre being sends them on a weird quest, in the company of a mysterious woman.  A long flashback sequence, narrated by the woman, relates the strange connection she has with her brother, a powerful practitioner of black magic.  It all leads up to a final confrontation with the evil sorcerer.

Nobody writes sword-and-sorcery adventures as well as Fritz Leiber.  This tale has just the right balance of wit, imagination, action, suspense, fully realized characters, colorful descriptions, and more than a touch of the macabre. 

Five stars.

To the Victor, by Leo P. Kelley


Cover art by George Schelling

We exit the giant Leiber pavilion and enter the first of four smaller exhibits. 

The setting is a planet inhabited by primitive aliens.  Humans colonized the place long ago, filling it with vast, high-tech buildings.  They want more elbowroom, and the aliens don't want their environment sacrificed to the newcomers.  Conflict is inevitable.  This isn't the usual kind of war, however.  One human being and one alien face each other in single combat.

A man well over one hundred years old, with doubts about what humanity has done to the planet, is the protagonist.  He witnesses the battle, and makes a symbolic gesture of his own.

The author contrasts the rapaciousness of the technological invaders with the aliens' love of the natural world.  I appreciate the point he's trying to make, but he does it in a heavy-handed way.  The combat scene involves odd, almost comic Rube Goldberg devices, which spoils the story's somber mood.

Two stars.

Master of Chaos, by Michael Moorcock


Cover art by Virgil Finlay

Time for a brief excursion outside the American section of this paper World's Fair, and a quick look at what the British have on display.  Will they offer us something as groundbreaking as the Beatles?

Well, not really.  Like the lead novella, this is a swashbuckling fantasy adventure yarn.  The hero goes to a castle that lies at the edge of the Earth.  After nearly losing his way inside its labyrinthine corridors, and doing battle with a monster, he confronts the sole inhabitant (As tradition demands, a beautiful and seductive sorceress).  Their meeting leads to a new challenge.

The most interesting and original concept in this story is the idea that Earth is surrounded by ever-changing Chaos.  As Chaos is conquered, Earth grows.  It's a striking notion, and adds a novel touch to an otherwise typical example of the genre.

Three stars.

All For Nothing, by David R. Bunch


Cover art by Lutjens

Back to the States with a writer like no one else, for good or bad.  In this offbeat creation, written in the author's eccentric style, a man creates an exact duplicate of himself.  His mad scheme is to challenge God to accept the double in his place, so he can escape from life and the afterlife.  Adding to the horrific mood is the elaborate machines the fellow intends to use to kill himself in a particularly slow and painful way.

I don't know what to make of this grim account of someone who doesn't want to exist in Earth, Heaven, or Hell.  It certainly held my attention, if only in a depressing way. 

Two stars.

Gulliver's Magic Islands, by Adam Bradford, M. D.


Cover art by Blair

If Fritz Leiber's name brought me into the fairgrounds, then Adam Bradford's made me want to find the exit.  Fair is fair, however, and I have to give the man a chance to redeem himself.  His last two Swiftian pastiches failed to add anything to the original, and missed the satiric point.  Will he stumble again?

(By the way, the magazine's editorial reveals that the author's real name is Joseph Wassersug.  He's a physician who writes medical articles.  As far as I can tell, he's never published any fiction other than this series.  The editorial also promises – or should I say threatens? – another one to follow.)

Once again, the narrator follows in Gulliver's footsteps.  He visits Balnibarbi, the island of scientists; Laputa, the flying island that floats above it; Glubbdubdrib, the island of magicians; and Luggnagg, the home of the immortal struldbrugs.  Not much is done with any of these except Balnibarbi.  I have to admit that the author provides some decent satire on the way in which scientists have to chase after money for their projects.  For that reason, this entry is a little better than the others.

(One odd thing that struck me.  The inhabitants of Glubbdubdrib are described as dark-skinned.  The name of their leader is Loother Krring.  All other words made up by the author seem to be meaningless, but this one appears to be an allusion to Doctor Martin Luther King, the famous civil rights leader.  What the point of this reference might be escapes me.)

Two stars

After the Fair is Over

As night falls and we leave the fairgrounds, souvenirs in our hands, we look back over an eventful day.  Obviously, the Fritz Leiber pavilion was the highlight of the fair.  If the other exhibits were disappointing, well, that's life.  At least we can send a postcard telling the folks back home all about it.

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge!  Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Conventions/Performances, Magazine

[April 18, 1964] A firm line (the May 1964 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

World(Con) Affairs

I've heard a rumor that Galactic Journey will be up for Best Fanzine at this year's Worldcon.  I'm not getting my hopes up — after all, we were promised a spot last year, but we ended up nowhere to be found on the 1963 Hugo ballot.  Still, for all of you who nominated us, we give our humblest thanks and hope you keep doing it!  In any event, we intend on attending this year's Worldcon (dubbed Pacificon II) as it will be held quite close to home, in California's Bay Area.

One person who will definitely not be attending Pacificon II is notorious fan Walter Breen.  Unless you live under a rock (or, perhaps, east of the Colorado), Breen is at the center of the "Breendoggle," a crisis that is currently rending apart West Coast fandom.  Berkeley fans report that Breen, an adult, has a penchant for unsavory activities involving fellows too young to give consent.  Far too young.  While fandom is a tolerant bunch (after all, we're definitely a bunch of weirdos), not only are Breen's actions morally reprehensible, but they attach civil liability to any organization he is a part of.

Needless to say, we support Pacificon II's decision to ban Breen from the convention, as do many.  However, Breen has got a lot of defenders, including Big Name Fan John Boardman, and superfan-turned-pro Marion Zimmer Bradley, who we understand is now in a relationship with Breen.  This saddens us, and we hope that Breen's misguided supporters soon see the light. 

My apologies for bringing up an unpleasant topic.  With luck, that's the last we'll have to write about it.

The Issue at Hand


cover by Ed Emshwiller for The Illuminated Man

On a more (but not much) more cheery note, let's take a look at this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Once again, Editor Davidson wails that no one writes space adventure stories anymore.  That's not really true.  They just don't send them to Avram. 

Instead, we get the following mishmash of fantasy and horror, most of it pretty mediocre:

The Illuminated Man, by J. G. Ballard

Out in deep space, the mutual annihilation of matter and anti-matter depletes the universal store of time.  As a result, the remaining matter blooms, spawning crystalline growths that absorb heat and constrain movement.  In Florida, Belorussia, and Madagascar, wild terrain becomes iridescent with the stuff, and mass evacuations ensue.

Our protagonist, a journalist, becomes trapped in the Everglades while the swamp becomes a kaleidoscopic death trap.  But this phenomenon becomes the least of our hero's worries when he gets caught between two feuding vertices of a love triangle: the local chief of police and a lunatic, who are fighting over the woman now married to the former, once to the latter.

Ballard does love his world catastrophes (viz. the recent classic, The Drowned World).  But while I found the story vivid and certainly unique, Ballard's writing has a somber, sepulchral tone that puts me off.  Illuminated Man is a gloomy trip without much of a destination.

Three stars.

Three Times Around, by Jane Roberts

Beware the laundromat, for the item getting permanently pressed just might be you.  I'm glad to see Jane Roberts back in print, and this is a pleasant little piece of horror.

Three stars.

You Have to Stay Inside, by Calvin Demmon

If there is a genre called "Slice of Life," this might be a "Slice of Horror" — a nicely written episode.  But it needs a story to go with it.

Two stars.

No Place Like Where, by Robert M. Green, Jr.

I'm not sure why Avram chose to spoil the twist of Green's story, which illustrates the perils of making apartment buildings too big and look-alike.  Well, it's not much of a story anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter.

Two stars.

The Building of a Protein, by Theodore L. Thomas

This pointless proto-story column continues, this time on the subject of synthetic protein manufacture, which Thomas suggests could ultimately feed the masses. 

The Second Law of Thermodynamics says we're not going to get quick-grown meat any faster or cheaper than cows.  Maybe more humanely.

Two stars.

Invasion, by Christopher Corson

The aliens apparently lulled us to sleep with this rather unimpressive piece of poetry.  Two stars.

A Red Heart and Blue Roses, by Mildred Clingerman

If there's anyone who can bring back the feeling of Weird Tales or Unknown, it's Mildred Clingerman, who in Roses, chills us with the tale of a mother who finds herself adopted by a most unsavory surrogate son. 

I particularly enjoyed the clever double narrative.  The story is recounted by one hospital patient to another; we initially think the story will be that of the viewpoint character, but it's really her roommate's.

Four stars.

Sea Wrack, by Edward Jesby

Far in the future, the Morlocks live in the sea.  They are not hairy brutes but rather civilized, handsome mermen.  Nevertheless, the Eloi still hate and shun them…to surface-dwellers' ultimate despair and ruin.

An interesting tale, too affected and jolting in its execution to be great.

Three stars.

Mar-ti-an, by Robert Lory

Now that the Ferdinand Feghoot pun column is gone, Avram has diversified the sources of his joke stories.  He needs to find better ones.

One star.

Ghost Lines in the Sky, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor brings us a pleasant but rather sterile article on meridians and parallels.  Of course, it's stuff I've known since junior high, so maybe I'm jaded.

Three stars.

Touchstone, by Terry Carr

Just as Ballard doesn't quite do it for me, Terry Carr always does.  You'll enjoy this one, about a Greenwich Village guy who trades his worries for a hunk of magic black rock.

Four stars.

The New Encyclopaedist, by Stephen Becker

Becker serves up one of those non-fact pieces, about nonconformists inheriting the Earth thanks to their uncommon common sense.  Not bad, though more suited to Analog, maybe Galaxy, than here.

Three stars.

Cantabile, by Jon DeCles

Last up is a baroquely pleasant story about a humanoid with a one-month life span, and the Space-Age princess who briefly loves him.  This is Jon's first sale — I look forward to more works from him.

Three stars.

Summing Up

F&SF continues to be much of a muchness, but at least it keeps Ed Emshwiller, artist extraordinaire, in lucre.  I've given up hope that it'll ever be my favorite magazine again, but it wasn't decidedly unpleasant this month.

And given the other news in this article, "not decidedly unpleasant" is pretty good!

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge!  Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Magazine

[March 17, 1964] It's all Downhill(April 1964 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

A friend of mine inquired about an obscure science fiction story the other day.  She expressed surprise that I had, in fact, read it, and wondered what my criteria were for choosing my reading material.  I had to explain that I didn't have any: I read everything published as science fiction and/or fantasy. 

My friend found this refrain from judgment admirable.  I think it's just a form of insanity, particularly as it subjects me to frequent painful slogs.  For instance, this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction continues the magazine's (occasionally abated) slide into the kaka.  With the exception of a couple of pieces, it's bad.  Beyond bad — dull.

The Issue at Hand


Cover by Jack Gaughan illustrating Into the Shop

Fred One, by James Ransom

We start off on reasonably sound footing, with a pair of preternaturally intelligent laboratory rats named Freds One and Two.  One is a genius, the brains of the operation.  The other, though possessed of a high order of intelligence for his kind, is clearly a sidekick.  It is not made clear whether the rats gained their smarts as a result of human intervention, or if they've always been bright and endure testing for their own reasons.

Not much happens, really.  The author relies on the humor of the conceit, writing with deadly earnestness from the brain rat's point of view.  The result is a fun but somewhat inconsequential story.  It might make a good cartoon someday.

Three stars.

Beware of the Dog, by Gahan Wilson

Here's a one-page vignette that's far better than the monthly Feghoots (which have recently stopped being produced).  I found it funny enough to read to my daughter.

Four stars.

Sun Creation, by B. Traven

Author Traven is some kind of ethnologist, a German who transplanted himself to Mexico and now translates native creation myths.  Sun Creation is about a brave warrior who makes a new sun after the old one is devoured by evil spirits; it's as good (if not better) than any of the Greek myths I grew up with.  I don't know if it belongs in this magazine, but it was my favorite piece of the issue.

Four stars.

A Piece of the Action, by Isaac Asimov

And now begins our downward slide.  The Good Doctor, brilliant as he may be in chemistry, has oft confessed to having a blind spot when it comes to math.  This is especially unfortunate as regards to this month's article, in which he tries to explain quantum mechanics and the discovery of Planck's constant.

The problem is, there are just some things you can't explain without math.  I remember being bored and frustrated with high school physics; it wasn't until college, when they taught us the calculus-based stuff that things really clicked.  I went on to take quantum mechanics my junior year in college (as part of an astrophysics curriculum).  Let me tell you, it is a subject that is absolutely beautiful with the proper mathematical underpinning…and utterly meaningless without it.

Asimov's explanation of the subject, bereft of any math, doesn't work.  I was barely able to follow along thanks to my prior education.  I can't imagine any of his readers will be able to make much of it.

My first two-star score for Dr. A.

Welcome, Comrade, by Simon Bagley

Ugh continues.  Here's a piece about a top secret project to orbit a brainwashing satellite.  The goal is to instill every human on Earth with a love for and inability to sway from American values.  You know: capitalism, democracy, and dispute resolution by fisticuffs.  The title gives away the ending, which you'd have seen miles away anyhow. 

Decent beginning, Analog-esque middle (especially if Bagley'd played it straight rather than satire), numbskull predictable ending.

Two stars.

Urgent Message for Mr. Prosser, by J. P. Sellers

Night watchman, so British that the rendition seems farcical, receives breathless calls at 1 AM.  The caller urgently desires to warn Mr. Prosser, the watchman's boss, that he is in danger of being poisoned by his wife.  Our protagonist meets with the caller one night and finds that he is, in fact, a dead ringer for Mr. Prosser.

The odd situation is never explained, though my guess is the caller is some sort of phantom made real out of the real Prosser's paranoid fears.  In any event, this is another facile story that doesn't do much but mildly entertain and take up pages.  Three stars, I suppose.

Van Allen Belts, by Theodore L. Thomas

I'm not sure why Thomas has this column; it's never worth reading.  This one, like all his others, starts like a non-fiction article and ends with a science fictional tail-sting.  Thomas recommends that the electrical current created by the charged particles circling the Earth could power satellites.  This is nonsense — the sun's photons provide far more energy than the weak fields in orbit could ever provide.

One star and stop wasting my time.

The Old Man Lay Down, by Sonya Dorman

A poem by an author I generally look forward to.  I couldn't make heads or tails of it.  Explain it to me?  Two stars.

The Crazy Mathematician, by R. Underwood

Mad scientist finds a way to travel the universes by way of a shrinking machine.  He takes a handsome journalist along on his journeys, who spends the trip romancing the various versions of femininity he finds at the various stops. 

Complete fantasy and not worth your energy.  Two stars.

Fanzine Fanfaronade, by Terry Carr

The third in F&SF's series on fandom, it is neither as good as last month's (on conventions), nor as mediocre as the one from the month before (on fandom in general).

Three stars.

The Compleat Consumators, by Alan E. Nourse

The premise to this piece is that two lovers, ideally matched, will not just become one metaphorically, but will fuse into a single physical identity.  It's a lovely idea, but here it's played for horror, and abandoned right when it could have become interesting. 

Two stars.

Into the Shop, by Ron Goulart

Intelligent cop car mistakes everyone for a suspect, including its human partner, with fatal results.  Sub-par stuff, and doubly disappointing given Goulart's fine reputation.

Two stars.

Oreste, by Henry Shultz

And here we hit the bottom with a reprint from 1952(!) about an eight year old child and the odd uncle with whom he has a telepathic connection.  It seems young Titus is stealing the thoughts of Uncle Oreste, writing books and composing music on borrowed talent.

Or something.  There's a twist ending, but after 20+ pages of a story that could easily have fit into five, I was too bored to care.

One star.

Summing Up

Oh dear.  Didn't I pledge just last month to be a lot nicer in my reviews?  I guess there's something about reading eighty pages of muck that puts me in a bad mood.  Like Uncle Oreste, someone has stolen my beautiful F&SF (my favorite magazine until Editor Davidson showed up in '62), and replaced it with nonsense.

I do bring one piece of good news, though.  I've got prints of my performance at San Diego Comic Fest.  If you've got a sound-capable 8mm, let me know, and I'll Parcel Post it to you:

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge!  Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Book, Magazine

[February 13, 1964] Deafening (the March 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston


Cover by EMSH

The March 1964 Amazing fairly shouts mediocrity, or worse, before one reads a word of the fiction.  The cover, illustrating Robert F. Young’s story Arena of Decisions, portrays a guy working some sort of keyboard in front of video screens displaying . . . a young woman, a lady as some would have it, and a tiger.  Can it be that Young, having rehashed the Old Testament and moved on to Jack and the Beanstalk, is now recapitulating that silly old Frank Stockton story, The Lady or the Tiger, which so many of us were forced to read in junior high?  And just for lagniappe, the editorial says in passing, “For the female of the sf species who may not be quite sure of her facts, billiards is played with balls and a cue on a flat rectangular table with pockets in each corner and at the middle of the two longer sides.” Always glad to help you ignorant . . . ladies . . . out!

Arena of Decisions, by Robert F. Young

That leads us to page 7, where the Young story begins, and yep, the blurb cops to the Frank Stockton replay right up front.  For anyone who hasn’t read or been told the original story, it involves a criminal justice system (if that’s the right word) in which those accused of serious crimes are forced to choose one of two doors to open.  Behind one of them is a hungry tiger; behind the other, a woman whom the no-longer-accused is required to marry.  The story ends just before the fatal choice, with an element of possible skulduggery added. 

Young does not entirely recapitulate Stockton’s plot, but the gimmick is the same, with extra chicanery added, set on a cartoonish colony planet, all told in a style of arch jocularity that mainly conveys the message “I know I’m wasting your time with this facile and vacant crap—let’s see how long I can keep you going.”

I’m about as tired of slagging Young month after month as I am of reading him.  I didn’t think he was always this bad, so I reread a couple of his early stories in anthologies: Jungle Doctor from Startling Stories in 1955 and The Garden in the Forest from Astounding in 1953.  He wasn’t this bad.  These are not great stories—his weaknesses for cliche and sentimentality are evident—but they are reasonably intelligent and capable, if less polished than his current output, with some interesting substance to them rather than the cynical vacuity of Arena of Decisions and its ilk.  I would never have called Young mighty, but . . . how the respectable have fallen.  One star.

Now Is Forever, by Dobbin Thorpe

Like a breath of fresh breeze in a fetid dungeon, or a slug of Pepto-Bismol to the dyspeptic stomach, comes Now Is Forever by Dobbin Thorpe, reliably reported to be Thomas M. Disch.  Intentionally or not, Forever is a rejoinder to Ralph Williams’s clever but facile Business as Usual, During Alterations, which appeared in Astounding in 1958.  In Williams’s story, portable matter duplicators suddenly appear on Earth, planted no doubt by aliens bent on conquest by destroying our economy, and the heroic store manager instantly sorts out the new economy: starting now, everything is done on credit, but everybody can have credit.  Nothing up my sleeve!  Everybody wins!

Disch starts with the same notion but is of course less sanguine.  He asks what people will live for when the getting-and-spending basis of their lives is suddenly yanked from under them.  The answer is the old and established will cling fiercely and futilely to their old habits, and young people will seek thrills—including death, which is no big deal as long as you duplicate yourself beforehand.  This sharply written and well visualized story just misses excellence by being a little too long and rambling for its point.  Three stars.

Jam for Christmas, Vance Simonds

It’s back downhill with Vance Simonds’s Jam for Christmas, the second story about Everett O’Toole, the “telempathist,” who with the aid of a mutant mongoose and a worldwide psionic network of other humans and animals, can scan the world to see how people are feeling about things.  In this case the world is the Moon, where the now-amalgamated capitalist nations are about to broadcast to Earth the equivalent of a USO show, and the now-amalgamated commies want to jam this display of the vitality of capitalism.  (The commies haven’t quite got the know-how to do their own broadcasts.)

Like its predecessor Telempathy, from last June’s issue, the story is swaddled in layers of satirical performance, much of it focusing on O’Toole’s excessive weight and alcohol consumption, the physical attributes of the show’s star, this year’s Miss Heavenly Body, and other cheap targets.  Some of it is actually pretty funny—while the telempathists are scanning their own area for communist spies, they come upon a covert fascist whose attitude is concisely lampooned—but it mainly serves to pad out what is ultimately a pretty thin and humdrum story.  Two stars.

Sunburst (Part 1 of 3), by Phyllis Gotlieb

That’s all the fiction that is complete in this issue.  The longest item is the first installment of Sunburst, a serial by Phyllis Gotlieb, who has had a handful of stories in these Ziff-Davis magazines and in If.  I usually hold off on serials until all the parts are in, but in my weary quest for something more to redeem this lackluster issue, I read this installment.  The set-up is interesting: in a small midwestern town, a nuclear reactor explosion has resulted in the birth of a cohort of psi-talented mutants, who come into their powers as children and wreck a good part of the town and its police force.  These uncontrollably dangerous tykes are isolated in the “Dump” behind a psi-impervious field whipped up by a handy Nobelist in physics.  Now it’s a decade later; what to do with them? 

It’s a bit amateurish; Gotlieb doesn’t do much to sketch in the background of what living in this now-quarantined town is like or how the quarantine works, and the dialogue and interactions among the characters are pretty unconvincing.  But it gives the sense that she’s getting at something of interest, however clumsily, so I look forward to the rest of it.  No rating, though, until the end.

The Time of Great Dying

Ben Bova departs from his usual cosmological beat for The Time of Great Dying, canvassing the various theories purporting to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs and the ascendancy of mammals at the end of the Mesozoic, including such winners as “racial senescence,” though Bova doesn’t give that one much respect.  He puts his money, or at least his mouth, on the growing prevalence of grasses, for which dinosaurs’ teeth were poorly adapted, though it’s a little unclear why they didn’t evolve more useful teeth over the same time period that the mammals did.  The subject is a little more interesting than usual, but overall it’s about as dull as usual.  Two stars.

The Spectroscope

Book reviewer S.E. Cotts has been replaced by Lester del Rey, to no great effect: there are virtues to having a professional writer as a reviewer, but he contributes no profound insights and is more verbose about it than Cotts.

Loud and Clear

So, overall, the promised mediocrity is delivered, with Mr. Disch again showing flashes of something better, and Gotlieb’s serial extending some hope.  Beyond those two, the wasteland beckons, or fails to.




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Magazine

[May 12, 1963] SO FAR, SO GOOD (the June 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

On the June 1963 Amazing, the cover by Ed Emshwiller seems to portray humanity crucified, with photogenic fella and gal affixed to the front panels of computers, anguished expressions on their faces and slots cut in them like the holes in a computer punch-card.  I guess they are mutilated, if not bent, folded, or stapled.  This is done in the hyper-literal and slightly crude mode of Emsh’s Ace Double covers, which compares badly to the less literal but much more imaginative and better-executed work he is contributing to F&SF.  Suffice it to say that Emsh has not displaced William Jennings Bryan as our nation’s leading purveyor of Crucifixion imagery.  The cover illustrates Jack Sharkey’s two-part serial The Programmed People, on which I will defer until it’s finished next month.

Of the other stories, the longest and best is J.G. Ballard’s novelet The Encounter, a notable departure from his usual tone and attitude.  Astronomer Charles Ward takes a position at a California observatory and meets Andrew Kandinski, author of The Landings from Outer Space, who claims to have met a Venusian visiting in (his, her, its) flying saucer, and is trying to spread the revealed word that Earth must abandon its space explorations.  Kandinski is clearly suggested by George Adamski, author of Inside the Space Ships and others, who makes similar claims.  But the similarity stops there, since Adamski appears to be an outright fraud, while Ballard’s Kandinski is a tortured character who actually believes his stories.  Ward becomes fascinated and can’t stay away from him, with personally disastrous consequences when the extraterrestrials come again—or do they? 

Ballard deftly preserves the ambiguity, and along the way amusingly notes in passing the variety and similarity of imagery among SF, UFO mania, and more commercial popular culture (the only job Kandinski can get is waiting tables at a space-themed restaurant called The Site Tycho).  There is also a brief but telling riff on Jung’s theory of flying saucers as a manifestation of the unconscious in times of impending crisis, and a suggestion that Kandinski may prove to be one of the “mana-personalities of history.” There’s a lot going on here and it is purposefully not tied up neatly. 

This is also one of Ballard’s most humane stories.  In some Ballard stories—even very good ones like last year’s Thirteen to Centaurus—his characters are more like finely-made constructs, machined to serve the author’s argument, than actual human beings.  By contrast, both Kandinski and Ward come across as genuine, flawed, and vulnerable people, and the story as less of an intellectual construct than much of Ballard.  (Of course, that’s part of the construct, but let’s not follow that line of argument any further.) This is a story that will be worth coming back to.  Five stars.

So: Amazing has justified its existence for one more month.  What else is here, besides the serial?  Three short stories, two of them very short indeed.  Let’s take the longer one, Telempathy, by Vance Simonds, his first in the SF magazines.  It’s a story that is best allowed to speak for itself, though unfortunately some length is required to get the full flavor.  Here’s the beginning:

“Huckster Heaven, in Hollywood, set out to fulfill the adman’s dream in every particular.  It recognized more credit cards than it offered entrees on the menu.  Various atmospheres, complete with authentic decor, were offered: Tahitian, Parisian, even Afro-Cuban for the delectation of the Off-Beat Client.  In every case, houris glided to and fro in appropriate native costume, bearing viands calculated to quell, at least for the nonce, harsh thoughts of the combative marketplace.  Instead, beamish advertisers and their account executive hosts were plied so lavishly that soon the sounds of competitive strife were but a memory; and in the postprandial torpor, dormant dreams of largesse on the Lucullan scale came alive.  In these surroundings, droppers of such names as the Four Seasons, George V, and the Stadium Club were notably silent.”

And it goes on like that.  If one can push aside the layers of attitude and exhibitionism (a canoe paddle might do it—or maybe a sump pump would be more suitable), a story becomes visible.  Everett says he’s got something that will precisely predict the reception of new products or advertising campaigns, which he calls Empathy, and which appears to consist of extra-sensory rapport with several very smart or insightful people, mediated through Everett’s mutant pet mongoose.  So Cam the adman takes him to see his client Father Sowles, a Nehemiah Scudder-like figure whose campaign for high office Cam is fronting.  The campaign goes into high gear based on Everett’s ultimate inside information, though Father Sowles complains that the message is being lost: e.g., “And what about the race mongrelizers? . . . Trying to subvert America with an Afro-Asian Trojan Horse!”

A lot of this is actually pretty funny, and it’s nice to see such explicit skewering of current politico-religious crackpottery.  If Simonds—whose first appearance in the SF magazines this is—had cut the supercilious vaudeville by about 30%, especially in the first several pages of the story, it would have been much more incisive and less irritating.  Adding it up, three stars, indulgently.

Thomas M. Disch’s three-page The Demi-Urge is a good example of an old cliche, the report by visiting aliens about how things are on Earth—this time with a minority report and a clever twist, confidently and economically written.  Disch is another new writer, with one previous story in Fantastic, also praised here.  Three stars for revitalizing a usually trivial and tedious gimmick.

Arthur Porges is a prolific veteran of the SF and fantasy magazines (though rarely Amazing), and more recently of the crime fiction mags.  His stories are invariably either short or shorter.  The two and a half-page Through Channels posits that if you can reach millions of eyes with a TV broadcast, you can freeze millions of brains by adding another unspecified frequency.  About the only interesting thing here is that one of the programs on at the fatal moment is another fanatical right-wing preacher—two in one issue!  Two stars for competent execution of not very much.

Sam Moskowitz is at it again with Eric Frank Russell: Death of a Doubter, consisting of his usual reasonably competent biographical summary and review of Russell’s work, with the usual greater focus on earlier than later work: there is no mention of his novels of the later 1950s, Three to Conquer (serialized as Call Him Dead), Wasp, and The Space Willies, the last an expansion of his very popular novelet Plus X (Astounding, June 1956).  Hold that thought, and look at Moskowitz’s subtitle again.  He quotes a 1937 letter from Russell to a fanzine describing himself as “another young rationalist of 32 years of age,” and says (after touching base at Thomas Aquinas): “The weakness of the Rationalist viewpoint is that it promulgates no ideas of its own; it waits to be shown.  Stubbornly waiting to be shown, Russell had a hard time dreaming up new plot ideas.” Later on, after selectively discussing Russell’s work of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, Moskowitz sums up: “Most significant of all is the final impression the works give of the man.  The display of outward toughness of manner, speech and philosophy is a facade.  A man who feels not only a reverence for but a communion with life, who transmits those feelings and with them his protests against prejudice in terms of poetry and parable—such a man is not a rationalist.” Here Moskowitz is not only psychologizing without a license, but going about double the speed limit.

Further, Moskowitz is quite right in characterizing some of Russell’s later work, but hardly all of it.  Three to Conquer is marked by violent xenophobia, and Wasp and The Space Willies are to varying degrees comedies of condescension to aliens, who are presented as stupid, incompetent, and easily gulled by their betters, homo sapiens.  So Russell is not a writer who changed in any identifiable direction; look at the whole picture and you see a writer of utterly contradictory tendencies that he has maintained through his career.  Come on, Sam; we saw you palm that card.  Two stars.

Well, altogether, not bad so far: one very fine story and two promising efforts by new or newish writers.  But the specter of Sharkey’s serial looms over all, to be dared next month.

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Magazine

[December 19, 1961] AMAZING . . . NOT YET (the January 1962 Amazing)

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[Several months ago, I put out the call for someone to help me review the two science fiction digests I didn't have time to read: Fantastic and Amazing, both edited by young Cele Goldsmith.  I've generally considered them the least of the sff magazines, but given how few of them are left these days, I reasoned that they could not be entirely worthless.  Moreover, I want Galactic Journey to provide as complete a picture of the genre as I can, covering virtually every story produced in this country (and many in the UK as well!) Hence, my delight when super-fan Victoria Silverwolf took up the pen and started reviewing Fantastic. 

Now, a second long-time Journeyer, precocious John Boston, has also responded.  As 1962 begins, we now have all of the big periodicals presented.  Read on and see what's you've missed…]


by John Boston

As a a maladjusted high school freshman in a reactionary and pious small town, I'm always glad of the opportunity to get away, if only for a little while.  Mostly, that means a flight of fancy facilitated by a trip to the library stacks or, if I've got a couple of bits, the newsstands.  And now, the Journey affords me a chance to reach all of you, the fellow travelers who follow this column. 

What I have for you today is the January 1962 Amazing Stories, subtitled Fact and Science Fiction.  For some years, this magazine has been slowly digging itself out of a hole of purposeful mediocrity, with much improvement — but it's not quite at ground level yet.

The headliner in this issue is Mark Clifton’s serial Pawn of the Black Fleet, to be discussed when it concludes next month.  The issue actually leads off with a novelette, The Towers of Titan by relatively new author Ben Bova.  On Titan, humans have found a number of towers full of extraterrestrial machinery, still running after a million years, operation and purpose incomprehensible.  There’s a scientific puzzle, solved scientifically (at least enough to fool me).  Of course, there is a bit of serendipity, and there's no question the solving process is beneficial to protagonist Dr. Lee’s romance with Elaine the resident archaeologist.  This is a clever and well constructed piece of hard-science SF, written in a determinedly plain style with considerable facility, which is both good news and bad.  It’s good when Bova is describing scientists discussing their findings and research methods, which otherwise could get pretty boring, but bad when he wallows in handy cliches. 

Visiting the towers:

"He could feel it again—the alienness, the lurking presence of an intelligence that scorned the intruders from Earth."

After telling Elaine that his wife has left him:

"Do you still love her?"  Elaine asked. 

"I don’t know.  I don’t think I know what love is, anymore.  All I know is, on that long trip out to Vega, when I had nothing to do but sit and think, it wasn’t Ruth I was thinking about.  It was you."

"Oh . . ."

And of course in the next paragraph, "she was his, at least for a while."

Actually, it all fits.  This is only Bova’s second SF magazine appearance, but he has published the Winston juvenile The Star Conquerors, the flap copy of which reveals that he’s been a technical editor for Project Vanguard.  He is also now a screenwriter for a scientific educational outfit.  So he’s experienced at word-slinging with a premium on clarity as well as appealing to the least common denominator.  He may have a bright future in hard-science SF if he can lose some of the schmaltz.  Weighing cleverness and obvious enthusiasm against cliches, three stars.

These Towers are depicted on the cover, by Ed Emshwiller, which typifies the current look of Amazing: colorful, sharp-edged, cartoony, and emphasizing hardware — in this case the characters’ space suits and helmets (Elaine’s spacesuit being rather tight-fitting).  The previous year’s covers almost all prominently feature spaceship, space station, or launch facility.  They are all a trifle crude, garish, and frankly unimaginative compared to most of their current competition.  Compare, especially, this Emsh cover to his subtler, better-rendered and generally more interesting work for F&SF (say, his last three covers for 1961). 

The most interesting fiction here is J.G. Ballard’s The Insane Ones.  Ballard has been prolific and well received in the British SF magazines, but this is his first appearance in an American magazine; he is known here only via the Judith Merril annual anthologies and the short-lived US reprint of New Worlds.  His work displays a preoccupation with psychological themes, and this is no exception: an ultraconservative world government has outlawed mental health treatment.  Everybody has the right to be insane, but remains criminally responsible for conduct.  The result: "psychotics loitering like stray dogs in the up-town parks, wise enough not to shop-lift or cause trouble, but a petty nuisance on the cafe terraces, knocking on hotel-rooms at all hours of the night."

Dr. Gregory, just released from prison for continuing to practice psychiatry, encounters a troubled young woman who kills herself when she can’t get any help from him.  Then he finds a disturbed young man, Christian, rifling his suitcase for barbiturates to keep himself from trying to kill the leader of the government.  Gregory yields and renders covert and cursory treatment—and Christian then sets off to kill the world leader, saying he is completely rational and someone has to do it.  He drives off, with Gregory chasing after him, yelling "Christian, you’re insane!"  This is not one of Ballard’s best: the idea is interesting but underdeveloped at this short length.  But even in this minor and facile (that word again) story Ballard’s style is vivid and incisive and one hopes that he will now appear regularly in the US.  Three and a half stars.

Miriam Allen de Ford’s SF career comprises some three dozen stories over the past decade or so, and yet is almost an afterthought.  Her 50-year-plus career has emphasized mystery fiction and true crime, with a detour through Big Little Books, authoring such titles as Astronomy for Beginners and What Great Frenchwomen Learned About Love.  In her spare time, she was an early disseminator of birth control information (when you could go to jail for it), and did some field work for Charles Fort.

If only de Ford’s writing were as fascinating as her life must have been.  The Akkra Case is blurbed as "a criminologist’s lecture-report" and it reads like one.  A young woman is found murdered in the rarely-entered Central Park in "Newyork I" in a diluted Brave New World-ish future: murder is nearly unknown, no one works until age 25 and then they can retire at 45, and a "healthy system of sexual experimentation" has replaced all the old hang-ups.  But the murder victim was a virgin, and that’s the clue: she and family were involved with the Naturists, a subversive cult opposed to all modern practices including sexual freedom. 

Yeah, but who killed her?  Her younger sister cracks the case, and the solution turns out to be as uninteresting as the lead-up.  En passant, the Naturists were rounded up, locked up, and then lobotomized, and it’s a measure of how detached the presentation is that one can’t really tell what de Ford thinks about that, or anything else in the story.  Two stars, being generous.

We are not done with de Ford.  The Editorial consists mostly of the text of a speech by de Ford on SF criminology, in which she describes three of her other stories, which sound no more interesting than this one. 

[ED: I have not read these stories, but I've generally found DeFord's work more engaging than Mr. Boston does.  Perhaps these are bad examples…or perhaps I've encountered the good ones]

The Mars Snooper by Frank Tinsley, is a rather basic description of the engineering problems involved in getting a spaceship to Mars and back.  It’s a piece of straight exposition and nothing more.  Three stars.

Interestingly, this Tinsley, who has contributed several such pieces to Amazing, started out as an artist, providing cover and interior illustrations for pulp magazines, then art and text for a comic strip, then text and illustrations for articles in Mechanix Illustrated, and now in Amazing with text and a single illustration.

The remaining story is Inconstancy by Roger Dee (Roger D. Aycock), whose 50 stories in the SF mags since 1949 have had little discernible impact.  This one certainly has none.  Mars and Earth, their populations having common ancestry, exchange ambassadors, who are going to have to remain away from home for a couple of years.  The Martian ambassador, selected to look Earth-ish, is introduced to a nice young woman, and the Earth ambassador, selected to look Martian, hits it off with the Mars ambassador’s wife.  Problems solved!  One star to this piece of filler.

So: the fiction here, exclusive of the serial, yields an overall rating of a little under two and a half stars.  The best one can say of this issue is that it shows promise: promise of more Ballard and better Bova. 

[I'll take promise.  It's more than Analog delivers much of the time!]

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