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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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Science / Space Race

[June 4, 1960] The Solar Frontier (Pluto: 9th "planet"?)

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Pluto is big news right now; no wonder since this year is the 30th anniversary of its discovery.  But what do we really know about this enigmatic ninth "planet?" (quotes used advisedly, more on this later.)

Not much.  We know that it is an average of forty Astronomical Units from the Sun; that is to say it orbits forty times farther from the Sun than does the Earth.  At this distance, its surface temperature must be a balmy -380 degrees Fahrenheit, cold enough to freeze almost all gasses.  We know that it reflects the sun's light ,displaying the feeble brightness of a 14th magnitude star–about 1600 times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye.  We have some guesses about its mass… which is how the body was found in the first place.  That remarkable story is worth review.

After the discovery of the 8th planet Neptune by measuring the wiggle it caused gravitationally on 7th planet Uranus' orbit, there was the fervent hope that finding further, unexplained wiggles in those outer planets' orbits would betray a 9th planet.  Famed astronomer and Mars enthusiast, Percival Lowell, spent the last years of his life trying to find it.  As it turns out, he did spot Pluto and even snapped pictures of it, but he took it for a star at the time, so slow is the planet's movement at the far end of the Solar System (similarly heartbreaking stories abound regarding early sightings of Uranus and Neptune.) In fact, the existence of Pluto was not confirmed until Clyde Tombaugh definitively found it, right around my 11th birthday, on February 18, 1930.

But is Pluto the planet Lowell was looking for?  "Planet X?"  There were doubts as soon as Tombaugh made his announcement.  For instance, per Lowell's calculations, for Pluto to have the effect it did on the orbits of the outer planets, it would have to have a mass seven times that of Earth (if, indeed, the effect is genuine–we haven't even mapped Neptune through a complete orbit yet, so the non-Neptune-caused Uranus wiggle is our only source of data).  Yet Pluto is so tiny, optically, that for it to have a mass that high, it would need to be a fragment of a dead, collapsed star.  In fact, early on, that's just what was opined by some–that Pluto was a piece of an old White Dwarf.

Well, soberer heads did the math and determined that, based on its size (computed from its brightness at its distance) and its confirmed effect on Uranus, Pluto couldn't have a mass of more than that of the Earth, and probably somewhere between .5 and 1 Earth masses, depending on who you ask. 

So, Pluto is not Planet X, which may still be floating out there.  One astronomer suggests that there is a big planet nearly twice as far from the Sun as Pluto perturbing Neptune's orbit.

Then the next question is: Is Pluto even a planet at all?  This is probably a good question to settle before everyone gets so comfortable with the idea that there are nine planets in the Solar System that they become stubbornly resistant to any change in that perception.

As early as 1936, a Raymond Littleton proposed that because of Pluto's unexpected tiny-ness and its strange orbit (it is tilted nearly 17 degrees to the plane in which all the other planets orbit, and the orbit is much less circular than that of the other planets–almost halfway to a comet's orbit), it is actually probably some rogue moon of Neptune that somehow got separated from the giant planet, perhaps via some primordial impact when the Solar System was formed.  Further evidence in favor of this hypothesis is the fact that Neptune's moon, Triton, orbits backwards, and at a weird angle.  Gerard Kuiper recently endorsed this origin story for Pluto.

My views tend to be more "Uniformitarian" than "Catastrophic," so I hold to the hypothesis of Dr. Frederick Leonard of UCLA.  In August 1930, just six months after Pluto's discovery, he suggested that Pluto might not be unique: "Is it not likely that in Pluto there has come to light the first of a series of ultra-Neptunian bodies, the remaining members of which still await discovery but which are destined to still be detected?"  Compare this to Ceres, the body discovered in 1801–it was once thought to be a planet, but it turned out to be the first of a new class of worlds, the asteroids. 

Is there a slew of Pluto-like objects in the outer solar system?  Only time, and more observation, will tell.

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Magazine

[June 2, 1960] Fewer is Less (July 1960 Astounding)

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What makes a story worth reading? 

As a writer, and as a reader who has plowed through thousands of stories over the past decade, I've developed a fair idea of what works and what doesn't.  Some writers cast a spell on you from the first words and maintain that trance until the very end.  Others have good ideas but break momentum with clunky prose.  Some turn a phrase skillfully, but their plots don't hold interest.

I find that science fiction authors are more likely to hang their tales on plot to the exclusion of other factors.  This is part of the reason our genre is much maligned by the literary crowd.  On the other hand, the literary crowd tends to commit the opposite sin: glazing our eyes over with experimental, turgid passages.

A few authors have managed to bridge the gap: Theodore Sturgeon, Avram Davidson, Daniel Keyes.  And, in general, I think the roster of science fiction authors, as they mature, are turning out better and better stuff.

Sadly, Astounding is rarely the place you'll find them.

After last month's decent issue, I had looked forward eagerly to this one, the July 1960 edition.  It's not unmitigatedly horrible, but it does sink back into the level of quality I've come to expect from Campbell's magazine.  Let's take a look:

Poul Anderson, with whom I've had a rocky relationship over the last decade, begins a new serial called The High Crusade.  It's about a 14th century English town that gets attacked by an alien scout ship.  Surprisingly, the "primitive" residents manage to overpower the alien crew and commandeer their ship, which they then sail across the suns to another alien outpost, where they defeat a contingent of the more technologically advanced aliens.

Now, this is the kind of story editor Campbell loves: plucky humans defeating inferior space aliens.  I suspect that the humans in Crusade will face increasingly ridiculous odds, always coming out on top.

This should bother me.  On the other hand, the story is really quite well written, with an excellent use of archaic language, a fair depiction of the age, and compelling characters.  Moreover, I have the faintest suspicion that Anderson is satirizing Campbell's fetish, hence my prediction that the story will be ever more over-the-top.

Sadly, this incomplete tale is the high point of the book.  Chris Anvil is up next with The Troublemaker.  It starts out promisingly, involving an interstellar cargo ship and the seditious new cargo inspector who joins the crew.  The fellow has a knack for dividing and conquering, causing friendships to disintegrate and morale to plummet.  But the Captain's solution for the problem comes out of nowhere and is thus unsatisfying.  Which brings me back to my preface.  Writer tip #1: Foreshadowing is important.  No one likes a mystery novel where the murderer is not presented before the detective explains whodunnit.  A good writer introduces concepts earlier in the story if they are to be used later. 

Onto the next story.  Its author, Dean McLaughlin, has been writing for various digests over the past decade.  I know I've read a few of his stories, but they do not stand out in my memory.  In any event, his The Brotherhood of Keepers leaves much to be desired.  In this case, characterization is utterly subverted to an involved, somewhat odious plot.  There is a race of near-sapient upright seals on a harsh alien world.  They are on the brink of becoming sentient, and a human outpost has been established on their planet, despite the uncomfortable conditions, to watch the transition.  There are three main characters, all made of the same grade of carboard. 

You have the fatuous, bleeding heart animal rights activist who wants to bring an end to the suffering of the "floppers," both at the hands of their environment and the scientists (who employ them as slaves and vivisect them every so often).  You have the xenophobic scientist who pushes all of the activist's buttons in the hopes that this will bring about a relief mission, allowing the floppers to be "saved" before they become truly sentient.  Finally, you've got the outpost chief.  He grieves for the cruel plight of the floppers, but he feels it would be more cruel to deny them their destiny of intelligence.

On the face of it, this could have been a very interesting story.  Aside from the truly hackneyed portrayal of the characters, I took umbrage with the way the floppers were treated by the humans.  Granted, the most egregious comments made by the scientist character ("they're only animals," he says of creatures smarter than chimpanzees) were probably designed specifically to goad the activist, but they must reflect, at least in part, the deeply held sentiments of his fellow researchers.  As any sociologist would tell you, the best way to study a society probably does not involve murdering its members.

Asimov has a fair sequel to his article on animal phyla, published month before last.  This one is called, appropriately enough, Beyond the Phyla.  The good doctor makes some interesting speculation on the next evolutionary steps humanity might take.  They will not involve physical adaptations, he opines, but rather a level of social cohesion that will transform our race into a larger, integrated whole.

It's a pity that Isaac doesn't write fiction anymore; I imagine folks will be lifting his non-fiction ideas and turning them into stories soon.

Finally, we have Subspace Survivors, by the renowned Doc Smith, himself.  All due respect to an admitted titan of the field, this is not a very good story.  It's something of a relic from the pulp era, this tale of nine survivors on a wrecked interstellar vessel, four of whom are psionically gifted (of course).  Writer tip #2: Description should be incorporated seamlessly into a narrative, not obtrusively inserted in-between bits of action. 

There are two women in this story.  They acquit themselves rather well against two of the castaways, who turn out to be bad men, but for the most part, they are content to be submissive child incubators, comforted in times of distress by their lantern-jawed officer husbands.  Feh.

I recently exchanged letters with a fan who expressed his dislike for magazines with only a few, longer stories.  I told him that I didn't mind them so long as the stories were good.  But, I am starting to take his point.

See you shortly with more fiction reviews!

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Uncategorized

[May 31, 1960] End of May (New KGJ episodes and June forecast)

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At long last, and with the cooperation of a vast radio production team, the entire month of November 1958 has been produced as a set of radio shows.  You can listen to them all at your leisure on KGJ!  Broacasting most hours of the day from downtown Vista.

For those following along at home, June 1960 looks to be a good month for material.  I'll be reading and reviewing:

The July 1960 Astounding (including the first part of Poul Anderson's new serial, The High Crusade

The July 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction

The July 1960 IF

The July 1960 Amazing (thought I'd give it a shot again)

Mark Clifton's novel, Eight Keys to Eden

The brand new science fiction film, Twelve to the Moon.

The weekly Twighlight Zone episodes.

Note that Bob Sheckley has a new compilation coming out, Notions: Unlimited, and they are reprinting Clarke's Childhood's End. 

So come on and join the Journey, and bring your friends.  There's lots to see!

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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[May 29, 1960] The Outside World (Foreign Affairs wrap-up)

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It's been a tumultuous month in the world; I'd hate to be in the State Department while Ike makes his goodwill tour across the globe, particularly in the wake of the collapse of the recent four-party Peace Summit in Paris less than two weeks ago.


Courtesy of LIFE Magazine

Unless you live in a cave, you've read about the coup in Turkey, replacing the democratically elected government with a military junta led by Colonel Alparslan Türkeş.  This comes on the heels of (former) Prime Minister Adnan Menderes' attempts to secure a line of credit with the Soviet Union, now that the West's Marshall plan checkbook is running dry.  Türkeş is a far right winger, so I'm sure he's not keen on working with the Communists. 

Perhaps our government is secretly delighting in the turn of events.  The coup may not be great for democracy or Turkey's people, but it will likely keep Turkey firmly in the pro-Western NATO camp for some time to come.

Things are still chaotic in South Korea in the wake of mid-April's revolution that saw the step-down of virtual dictator Syngman Lee and the suicide of his Vice President, Lee Ki-Poong.  It's anyone's guess if the new, democratic, government will survive long.

Cuba's Castro has officially given America the raspberry and is publicly looking to grow ties with the Soviet Union.  This comes as the Cuban dictator nationalizes American economic interests in the island country.  The Monroe Doctrine has been subverted from within, and Communism now has an invitation to America's doorstep.  I imagine Cuba will be a talking point in the run up to this year's election.


Hamaya Hiroshi, photographer

Meanwhile, anti-American protests continue at a fever pitch in Japan against the inking of a mutual defense treaty.  I can only hope they blow over before July, when my family intends to take a trip to that wonderful country to visit friends.

As they say in the business, "All the news that fits, we print."  That's what I've got for today. 

Next up, KGJ will be broadcasting a stack of Galactic Journey recordings.  Stay tuned!

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Fashion, music, politics, sports, Science / Space Race

[May 27, 1960] Stalled Flights (Midas 2, Pioneer 5, Ozma, and Eichmann)

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There was another mystery Atlas Agena launch from Cape Canaveral on May 24.  My sources tell me it was in the same series as the mission late February that broke up before it could reach orbit.  It appears to be some kind of infrared missile launch detection system.  I even got my hands on some conceptual art, though there's no way of knowing how accurate it is.  Its project name appears to be MIDAS–I'm guessing this stands for "Missile Infrared Detection Alarm System" or something like that.

I don't know if the system works or if the satellite performed properly, but I understand "MIDAS 2" did make it into orbit.  With tensions between American and the U.S.S.R. at an all-time high, thanks to the whole spy plane kerfuffle and the break-down of summit peace talks, we need probes like this more than ever.

In civilian space news, a bit of a setback.  Pioneer 5 switched on its big 150 watt transmitter a few weeks ago so that it could be heard from any point in its orbit around the sun, perhaps more than 100 million miles from Earth.  Unfortunately, the 150 watt transmitter is now off-line due to battery deterioration, and Pioneer has gone back to using its little 5 watt transmitter.  This means its voice will soon be too faint to pick up from the smaller Hawaii dish, and the Big Ear at Jodrell Bank in England will only be able to track the probe to a range of about 25 million miles.  Of course, that's still quite a feat. 

Speaking of Jodrell Bank, remember Dr. Frank Drake's Project Ozma, the program designed to listen for messages from the stars?  Would you believe that positive results were found within the first week of operation? 

It seems that no sooner did the investigating astronomers turn their antenna to the nearby star, Epsilon Eridani, they received an intense signal.  They listened for a few breathless minutes and then turned the antenna away to confirm that the star was indeed the source.  The signal faded as the antenna moved from the star.  Excitedly, they pointed the antenna at Epsilon Eridani again and waited. 

And waited.  Nothing happened.  Was it just a spurious signal?  Had the aliens gone off the air?

Dr. Drake and his team gave Epsilon Eridani and the frequency on which they had received the signal extra attention for the next week, but to no avail.  Then it came back, but not just from the star–from somewhere close by.  The astronomers confirmed this by poking a little antenna out of their observatory window, not focused anywhere in particular.  They picked up the signal there, too.  So, it was probably just a high-flying airplane that they'd picked up.  So much for easy pickings.

On a more personal note, Adolf Eichmann, the notorious Nazi right-hand man for Himmler, in charge of "solving" the Jewish Question, has been apprehended by the Israeli secret service and will stand trial.  He disappeared from Germany as the Third Reich fell, and has presumably been living it up in some Latin American refuge.  I look forward to justice being served.

Finally, a happy birthday to that skinny, outspoken fan and writer, Harlan Ellison.  He is 26 today!

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Book

[May 25, 1960] Getting there is half the problem (Judith Merril's The Tomorrow People)

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Every novel is a kind of contract with the reader, a promise that ideas, events, and characters will be presented in the beginning such that, by the end, they will have facilitated a satisfying story.  A corollary to this is that a writer must ensure that all of a story's scenes are interesting to the reader.  Lesser authors pound their keys trying to get "to the good parts," stringing together pearls of interest with thread of mediocre space-filler. 

Judith Merril has managed to break the above-described contract in spectacular fashion, by publishing a story solely of the thread between the pearls. 

Let me explain.  The Tomorrow People, released this month, promises to be quite a book.  Not only is it by Merril, who has proven that she can write on prior occasions, but within the first 30 pages, we get a set up that includes: humanity's first Mars mission, on which one of the crew commits suicide for reasons unknown; the suggestion that life was found on Mars; the possibility of telepathy and/or clairvoyance; the suggestion of an active espionage ring on the American moonbase.  Merril also tempts us with the veneer of a mature piece with discussion of adult topics like closeted homosexuality, menstruation, polyamory. 

The problem is that Merril never delivers on any of these threads (except for a few perfunctory pages at the end).  Instead, we get hundreds of pages of the sort of stuff one hammers out for the sake of hammering out.  Most of the book is presented in quotation marks and italic print.  Pointless dialogues between men done in an overly breezy, almost caricature style.  Endless angsty conversations between characters punctuated by italicized internal monologues (that's right!  You tell 'em!) Dysfunctional relationships between the one female character, the lovely dancer, Lisa, and… virtually every male character in the book (the astronaut who returns from Mars, his psychiatrist, the Moon's chief psychiatrist, random lunar laborers).  Endless depictions of drinking, drunkenness, romantic quarrells.

I don't know if Merril is trying to be avante garde, or if she simply doesn't know how to make a book out of a trilogy's worth of ideas but a novella's worth of action.  The result is an uphill slog.  It's too bad as there is stuff to like.  There is a thoroughly modern feeling about the portrayed universe, a feeling that Merril really does try to convey the world of the mid 1970s, technologically and socially.  I enjoyed the bits about the adaptation of classical dancing to the lunar setting.  And I appreciate a story that doesn't just present the bones of a plot, with the characters playing second fiddle, as is often the case in science fiction. 

Merril's The Tomorrow People, however, is an invertebrate.  Its characters meander about with no plot bracing them into an enthralling narrative.  Maybe that's the point.  Maybe life is like that, and Merril is just trying to capture that feeling of naturalistic randomness.

Or maybe she had a deadline, a page quota, and insufficient inspiration.

Two stars.

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Magazine

[May 23, 1960] Month's End (June 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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With Astounding so good this month, I suppose it was too much to ask that Fantasy and Science Fiction would also be of high caliber.  While it's not a bad issue, it's not one of the better ones, either.

Charles Henneberg (who I understand is actually a Parisian named Nathalie) has the best story of the bunch, The Non-Humans, translated by Damon Knight.  This is the second story the team has published in F&SF, and it is far better than the previous one.  It's a lovely historical tale of an Italian renaissance painter and the androgynous alien with whom he falls in love.  An historical personage has a supporting part; his identity is kept secret until the end, though the half-clever can deduce it before finishing.

Britisher H.F. Ellis offers up Fireside Chat, a reprint from Punch.  It involves a haunted house and leaves the reader wondering just who are the ghosts, and who are the current residents?

I know many of my readers are Howard Fast fans, but his latest, Cato the Martian is not among his best.  For the past fifty years, the Martians have listened to our radio broadcasts and watched our television programming with avid interest and increasing concern.  A certain Martian lawmaker, nicknamed after the famous anti-Carthaginian Roman, concludes each speech with "Earth must be destroyed!" until, finally, he gets his comrades in litigation to agree.  The ensuing war does not turn out well for the dwellers of the Red Planet. 

It's not really science fiction.  If anything, it's perhaps the other side of the coin to Earthmen Bearing Gifts, in which the Martians eagerly await the arrival of their Terran neighbors, but with a similar ending.

The Swamp Road, by Will Worthington, is an interesting After-the-Bomb piece about a community held together by a bitterly strict Christian doctrine a la Salem, Massachusetts.  Every so often, one of the citizens changes, developing a second eyelid and otherwise adapting to a dessicated, alien world.  When the change happens to the storyteller and his love, they are forced out of the village and must learn the true nature of their metamorphosis.  It's a good, atmospheric yarn, though I feel it could have been longer.  Some subjects deserve more than just a taste.

Some, on the other hand, don't deserve the space.  Slammy and the Bonneygott is the story of an alien child who crosses dimensions in a tinker toy spaceship and plays with a few children for an afternoon.  It was apparently written by a neophyte named "Mrs. Agate," and the plot was provided by her six-year old son.  One can tell.

Avram Davidson has two settings: amazing and passable.  The Sixth Season is a passable story about a small crew of humans stuck on an anthropological expedition to a backwoods alien-inhabited world for 200 days.  They endure five miserable seasons–can they survive the sixth?

It reminds me of my days growing up in the desert community of El Centro.  I used to lament that we had four seasons like everyone else, but they were Hot, Stink, Bug, and Wind.  That's not being entirely charitable, of course.  We had a balmy Winter, too.  For about two weeks.

Asimov's column this month is Bug-eyed Vonster.  No, it has nothing to do with aliens; it's how the good Doctor remembers the term BeV.  It is an abbreviation for "Billion electron Volts," a unit of electric energy commonly encountered when discussing cosmic rays and atom smashers.  I learned what Cerenkov radiation is (the radiation given by particles going faster than the speed of light in a given material).

Cliff Simak's The Golden Bugs takes up most of the rest of the book.  This time, he trades the poetic farmlands for the prosaic suburbs for the story's setting.  A swarm of extraterrestrial crystal turtle-beetles ride into town on an agate meteorite and begin to wreak havoc on an average American family.  It's fun while it lasts, but it ends too abruptly, and there isn't much to it.  It's the sort of thing one cranks out between masterpieces.

Finally, there is the nigh impenetrable Beyond Ganga Mata by John Berry, a space-filler originally published in The Southwestern.  A fellow travels to India, meets a holy man, journeys for a year, and meets him again.  Perhaps it was simply the lateness of the hour, but had the story not been blessedly short, I'd have had trouble finishing the magazine.

For those who like to keep score, this issue of F&SF was, depending on how you average things, earned between 2.78 and 2.88 stars.  Compare that to Galaxy, which got between 3 and 3.13 stars, and Astounding, which earned exactly three stars even.

Though it could be argued on the numbers that Galaxy was thus the better magazine, and it was certainly the biggest, I'm going to give the June 1960 crown to Astounding.  All of the fiction was decent to very good, and it's not Janifer, Anvil, and Berryman's fault that Campbell wrote a stinker of a "science" article.  Plus, Charley de Milo was the choice story for the month.

Continuing my analysis, this means that the Big Three magazines (counting Galaxy and IF as one) each took the monthly crown twice–all of them tied.  And that's why I keep my subscriptions to all of them.

A more depressing statistic: there was only one woman author this month, and she wrote under a male pseudonym!

By the way, remember Sputnik 4?  The precursor to Soviet manned space travel?  Well, it looks like the Communists won't be orbiting a real person any time soon.  In an uncharacteristically candid news announcement, the Soviets disclosed that the ship's retrorocket, designed to brake the capsule for landing, actually catapulted the craft into a higher orbit.  It'll be up there for a while.  Oh well.

See you soon with a book review!

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