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Magazine

[March 12, 1965] Sic Transit (April 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

No-Sale, Sale

The big news, previously rumored, is that Amazing and its stablemate Fantastic are to change hands.  The April Science Fiction Times just arrived, with the big headline “ ‘AMAZING STORIES’ AND ‘FANTASTIC’ SOLD TO SOL COHEN.” Cohen is the publisher of Galaxy, If, and Worlds of Tomorrow, but will resign at the end of next month to take up his new occupation. 

Why is this happening?  Probably because circulation, which had been increasing, started to decline again in 1962 (when I started reviewing it!).  The SF Times article adds, tendentiously and questionably, that “the magazine showed what appeared to be a lack of interest by its editors.” Read their further comment and draw your own conclusions on that point.

Whatever the reason, it’s done.  The last Ziff-Davis issues of both magazines will be the June issues.  Whether they will continue monthly is not known, nor is who will edit the magazine—presumably meaning Cele Lalli is not continuing. 

The Issue at Hand


by Paula McLane

The previous two issues were much improved over their predecessors.  Of course the improvement could not be sustained (viz. the current issue), but it has at least reverted to the slightly less mean than on some occasions.

The Shores of Infinity, by Edmond Hamilton


by George Schelling

Who was it who first said “If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like”?  Dorothy Parker?  Mark Twain?  Pliny the Elder?  Anyway, Edmond Hamilton’s latest in his backwards-looking saga of the far future featuring the Star Kings may not even rise to the level of that truism.  The generically titled The Shores of Infinity spends about 10 of its 33 or so pages on background and build-up, and then the generically named John Gordon of ancient (i.e., contemporary) Earth takes off to the capital of the Galaxy to hobnob with the Emperor in the imperial city of Throon. 

There, he learns of more rumors of the previously encountered mind-controlling menace, is sent off on a dangerous secret mission to investigate, is captured, victimized by treachery and benefited by its reversal, and the author seems as bored by the whole perfunctory and hackneyed business as I was.  It’s ostentatiously inconclusive, so we are guaranteed more.  To paraphrase W.C. Fields, second prize would be two more sequels.

A recurring theme here is Gordon’s alienation from the beautiful Princess Lianna.  This seems to be the special Woman Trouble issue of Amazing; see below.  (Note to Betty Friedan: if the viewpoint characters were female, it would of course be the Man Trouble issue.  Tell women more of them should be writing SF.) Also worth mentioning is the cover, by Paula McLane, which portrays a giant space-helmeted visage peering into a room where two small diaphanous figures are trying to close the door against him.  Obviously metaphorical, right?  Actually, it’s a quite literal rendering of a passing scene in the story.

Anyway, this one has little going for it except the usual space-operatic rhetoric (“The vast mass of faintly glowing drift that was known as the Deneb Shoals, they skirted.  They plunged on and now they were passing through the space where, that other time, the space-fleets of the Empire and its allies had fought out their final Armageddon with the League of the Dark Worlds.”) The problem with this decoration is there’s not much here to decorate.  Two stars, probably too generous.

No Vinism Like Chau-Vinism, by John Jakes


by George Schelling

John Jakes’s long novelet No Vinism Like Chau-Vinism [sic], the title obviously a play on the all too familiar song There’s No Business Like Show Business, inhabits the territory demarcated by Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants, Ron Goulart on a good day, and the Three Stooges.  In the future, everything is showbiz.  The populace is entertained and distracted by constant scripted and broadcast warfare between commercial forces, in this case the American Margarine Manufacturers Association versus the United Dairy Expedition Force, fighting of course in Wisconsin.

The script is disrupted by the appearance of a real gun in the hands of the rogue margarineer (Jakes calls them margies) Burton Tanzy of the Golden-Glo Margarine Company, who executes a cow on live TV, initiating a slapstick plot in which among other things besides real guns, the fake commercial war turns into a real union dispute.  The protagonist Gregory Rooke of the Dairy forces must try to calm things down and restore order, lest the public get wind of the fraudulence of their world.  His chief antagonist proves to be his ex-wife, who has dumped him to pursue her overweening ambitions, consistently with the Woman Trouble motif, though things work out better for Rooke than for poor forlorn John Gordon.

This story is actually quite amusing; Jakes has a knack for the farcical tall tale.  Unfortunately it goes on too long and palls a bit by the end, keeping the final reckoning down to three stars.

De Ruyter: Dreamer, by Arthur Porges

Arthur Porges contributes Ensign De Ruyter: Dreamer, another in his tiresome series about the space navy guy who triumphs over cartoonishly stupid extraterrestrials through the clever use of basic science—in this case, it’s Fun with Electromagnetism.  These stories barely rise to the level of filler.  One star.

Greendark in the Cairn, by Robert Rohrer

Robert Rohrer continues in his “almost there” vein with Greendark in the Cairn, featuring a space captain who is either going nuts, or is being driven nuts by transmissions from the extraterrestrial enemy, but figures out how to defeat them and prevent himself from giving the game away.  It’s gimmicky and facile but well rendered.  Two stars, but do try again.

Speech Is Silver, by John Brunner

The earnest John Brunner undertakes a satire of American commercialism in Speech Is Silver, in which the protagonist Hankin is selected in the Soundsleep company’s “Great Search” for the man with the perfect voice for a program of sleep counseling—that is, counseling while one sleeps on how to handle the difficulties of the day.  Except of course that’s not really how things work, and his new-found fame destroys his life.  (Also—Woman Trouble again—his wife, who prodded him to enter the Soundsleep competition, leaves him, apparently because he was never ambitious enough, like Rooke’s wife in No Vinism [etc.].) At the point where Soundsleep decides to replace him with a younger near-double, Hankin detonates.

Like the Jakes story, this one is an acid satire on contemporary image-mongering American capitalism.  Its problem, aside from being too long (also like Jakes), is that it isn’t crazy enough.  Brunner’s calm and methodical style and storytelling muffle the plot’s antic qualities.  Maybe he should get Jakes to introduce him to the Three Stooges.

Two stars.

Religion in Science Fiction: God, Space, and Faith, by Sam Moskowitz

Sam Moskowitz forges on with Religion in Science Fiction: God, Space, and Faith, rendered on the cover as Science-Fiction Views of God With a Profile of C.S. Lewis.  It’s a rambling description of various SF stories on religious themes, starting reasonably interestingly with several older books that most readers will not have heard of, continuing with the promised account of C.S. Lewis, followed by Stapledon, Heinlein, Wyndham, Simak, Leiber, Keller, Bradbury, Blish, Miller, del Rey, Boucher, and Farmer.

In this recitation Moskowitz manages to miss Arthur C. Clarke’s Hugo-winning The Star and his equally well-known The Nine Billion Names of God; Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question; Leigh Brackett’s tale of a different sort of theocracy, The Long Tomorrow; Harry Harrison’s anti-theological polemic The Streets of Ashkelon; Katherine MacLean’s acerbic Unhuman Sacrifice; and, astonishingly, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.  Remarkably, he says, “Heinlein, who introduced [religion] into the science fiction magazines, has long since tired of it as a focal plot device.”

But this (mis-)observation does not deter him from his conclusion: “Neverthess, the decision is made.  The science fiction writer has come to the conclusion that scientific advance will not mean the end of belief.  He feels certain that a truly convincing portrayal of a hypothetical future cannot be made without considering the mystical aspects of man.”

Can we say fallacy of composition?  Two stars: another “almost,” some interesting material, some of it unfamiliar, the whole brought down by Moskowitz’s fatuous generalizations.

Summing Up

So, mostly not too bad (except for the egregious Ensign Ruyter), but mostly not as good as it should and could have been either.  There have been issues that would make one regret that this regime is ending, but this isn’t one of them.




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Magazine

[February 12, 1965] Mirabile Dictu, Sotto Voce (March 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

It’s an age of minor miracles.  Nothing to shout about, but last month’s pretty good issue of Amazing is followed by another one that’s not bad either. 

The Issue at Hand


by Gray Morrow

Greenslaves, by Frank Herbert

This March issue opens with Frank Herbert’s novelet Greenslaves, a rather startling, if not entirely amazing, performance.  In the future, Brazil and other countries are making war against insect life, since it’s a disgusting reservoir of disease and a source of damage to crops.  (The U.S. is an exception, owing to the influence of the radical Carsonists; the reference is presumably to Rachel, not Kit or Johnny.) But the campaign seems to be backfiring, with insects mutating, and epidemics.  The events of the plot are cheerfully bizarre, but the message is similar to that of the more ponderous Dune epic: attend to ecology.  Things work together and if you mess with the balance, you may harm yourselves.


by Gray Morrow

Unlike the more dense and turgid Dune serials, though, this story is crisply told and moves along quickly and vividly to its point.  It also recalls Wells’s story The Empire of the Ants—not a follow-up or a rejoinder, but a very different angle on the premise of that classic story.  Four stars for this striking departure both from Herbert’s and from Amazing’s ordinary course.

The Plateau, by Christopher Anvil

The ground gained by Herbert is quickly given up by Christopher Anvil’s The Plateau, which if it were an LP would have to be called Chris Anvil’s Greatest Dull Thuds.  Actually, my first thought was that it should be retitled The Abyss, but then I realized it is over 50 pages long.  Maybe—following our host’s example in discussing Analog—it should instead be called The Endless Desert.  It’s yet another story about stupid and comically rigid aliens bested by clever humans, which no doubt came back from Analog with a rejection slip reading “You’ve sold me this story six times already and it gets worse every time!”


by Robert Adragna

The premise: “Earth was conquered. . . .  At no place on the globe was there a well-equipped body of human combat troops larger than a platoon.” Except these platoons seem to have an ample supply of mini-hydrogen bombs and reliable communications among numerous redoubts at least around the US, as they bamboozle the aliens in multiple ways, including a cover of one of Eric Frank Russell’s greatest hits: making the aliens believe the humans have powerful unseen allies on their side.  The whole is rambling, hackneyed, and sloppy (late in the story there are several references to the aliens as “Bugs,” though they are apparently humanoid, and then that usage disappears for the rest of the story).  Towards the end, a sort-of-interesting idea about the nature of the aliens’ stupidity emerges, leading to a moderately clever end, though it’s hardly worth the slog to get there: it’s the same sort of schematic thinking that Anvil typically accomplishes in Analog at a fifth the length or less.  So, barely, two stars.

Be Yourself, by Robert Rohrer

Robert Rohrer’s Be Yourself is a little hackneyed, too, but at six pages is much more neatly turned and much less exasperating and wearying than the Anvil story.  Alien invaders have figured out how to duplicate us precisely; how do we know which Joe Blow is the real one?  No one who has read SF for more than a week will be surprised by the twists, but one can admire their execution.  Three stars.

Calling Dr. Clockwork, by Ron Goulart

Ron Goulart’s Calling Dr. Clockwork is business as usual for him, an outrageous lampoon, this time of hospitals and the medical profession.  The protagonist goes to visit someone in the hospital, faints when he sees a patient in bad condition, and wakes up in a hospital bed, attended by various caricatures including the eponymous and dysfunctional robot doctor, and it looks like he’s never going to get out.  Three stars for an amusing farce, no longer than it needs to be.

Wheeler Dealer, by Arthur Porges

The difference between an amusing farce and a tedious one is limned to perfection by Arthur Porges’s Wheeler Dealer, in which his series character Ensign De Ruyter and company are stranded on a nearly airless planet inhabited by quasi-Buddhist humanoids with giant lungs who can’t spare time to help the Earthfolk mine the beryllium they need to repair their ship before they run out of air.  Why no help?  Because the locals are too busy spinning their prayer wheels.  So De Ruyter shows them how to make the wheels spin on their own and thereby gets the mining labor they need.  Porges, unlike Goulart, is, tragically, not funny.  The story (like the previous De Ruyter item, Urned Reprieve in last October’s issue) is essentially a jumped-up version of a squib on Fascinating Scientific Facts that you might find as filler at the bottom of a column in another sort of magazine.  It does not help that the plot amounts to the simple-minded offspring of Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God.  Two stars.

The Man Who Discovered Atlantis, by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg provides another smoothly readable and informative entry in his Scientific Hoaxes series, The Man Who Discovered Atlantis, about Paul Schliemann, grandson of Heinrich Schliemann, discoverer of the buried city (cities) of Troy.  The younger Schliemann wasn’t able to accomplish much on his own, so he exploited the fame of his grandfather to perpetrate a hoax about the discovery of Atlantis, or at least of its location and confirmation of its existence.  Silverberg succinctly recounts the origin and history of the Atlantis myth as well as the charlatanry over it that preceded Paul Schliemann’s, and suggests that had Plato known what would come of his references to Atlantis, he probably wouldn’t have brought it up.  Four stars.

Summing Up

So . . . two pretty decent issues of this magazine in a row!  One very good story, two acceptable ones, and quite a good article, and the other contents are merely inadequate and not affirmatively noxious.  Do we have a trend?  One hopes so, but . . . promised for next month is another of Edmond Hamilton’s nostalgia operas about the Star Kings.  We shall see.

[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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Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[January 12, 1965] Last Minute Reprieve (the February 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The Issue at Hand


Paula McLane

Well, what have we here?  A pretty decent issue of Amazing, not a common occasion at all, with some good and/or interesting material, one disappointing item by a big-name author, but no offenses against reason and decency!  Let us count our blessings, and proceed directly to their dissection.

He Who Shapes, by Roger Zelazny


George Schelling

Roger Zelazny’s two-part serial He Who Shapes concludes in this issue, and is the most pleasant surprise here: a capable writer taking on a substantial task and working hard to do a good job of it.  It features a psychiatrist specializing in neuroparticipation therapy: he projects hyper-realistic dreams into his patients’ minds and then stars in them, directing the action to the therapeutic end of his choice.  This is Render, the Shaper—a hokey note, but not misplaced, given the oratorical level of the whole. 

Neuroparticipation is a powerful tool, but sometimes double-edged: the therapist can lose control of the action and wind up in the patient’s movie, not his own.  Render is someone whose roots in his own reality are a little tenuous, by at least unconscious design: after the death of his wife, he maintains a determinedly superficial relationship with his mistress (sic) Jill, and a parental relationship with his son that is ostentatiously concerned (e.g., he changes the son’s school repeatedly) but seems emotionally arms-length.

So when another psychiatrist, brilliant, female, blind since birth, and of course also beautiful, asks Render to instruct her via neuroparticipation in visual imagery so she too can become a neuroparticipation therapist, the sophisticated reader can only think “Uh-oh.” I won’t go further; this is one that deserves to be read.  Not that it’s perfect by any means; unlike almost everything else in sight, it seems too short, and the end in particular seems rushed and underdeveloped.  But it’s a welcome sign both for the magazine and for the author, who seems to have moved from the “promising” column to the “delivering” one.  A strong four stars.

Far Reach to Cygnus, by Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber’s Far Reach to Cygnus, a sequel of sorts to The Goggles of Dr. Dragonet from Fantastic of a few years ago, is labelled a short story but at 23 pages is as long as many novelets in this magazine.  It’s a rambling, low-intensity sort of thing, agreeable enough while reading, but it compares badly to Leiber’s tighter and sharper pieces like Mariana (Fantastic, 1960), A Deskful of Girls (F&SF, 1958), or for that matter the short novel The Big Time (Galaxy, 1958). 

Here’s another psychological theme, of sorts.  To open, our first-person narrator is racing eagerly to Dr. Dragonet’s redoubt in the Santa Monica Mountains, lured by Dragonet’s promise of “a drug that is to mescalin and LSD as they are to weak coffee.” Upon arrival there is some byplay involving the police, a beautiful young woman, and a possibly illusory black leopard.

Our hero then enters a sort of seance featuring another beautiful young woman, recumbent in a long white dress, and already drugged, describing a scene on an extraterrestrial planet featuring blue grass and inhabited by elvish blue people who ride unicorns.  Also present are a Professor, a Father, a Sister, “a handsome crophaired sun-tanned suavely muscled” young Hollywood man in all-white garb, who is “the newest and most successful Brando-surrogate and homegrown Mastroianni” of the media, and of course Dr. Dragonet.

The drug, or “psionic elixir,” is brought in by a third beautiful young woman (now we have a brunette, a blonde, and a redhead, all of them Dr. Dragonet’s nieces, if I am keeping score correctly).  But first, several pages of debate about the mind-body problem!  Finally, sixteen pages in, the characters start to take the drug, one by one, leading into several pages of drug effects, not badly done—the drug, as advertised, is psionic, so each character is seeing through the eyes of all of them.

And of course the drug effects become very palpable and menacing (mind-manifesting rather concretely, one might say) and are banished, and the Brando-surrogate, who it turned out was pretty dangerous, is psychically neutralized, and the white-garbed sort-of-medium recites some appalling developments on the blue planet (invaders with flamethrowers), and the police show up again briefly and comically, and much is made throughout about how fetching the young women are and how aroused and frustrated the narrator is (cheesecake without pictures, one might say). 

But all of these (slowly) moving parts don’t really add up to much (the police and blue planet subplots in particular go nowhere), and certainly don’t disguise the fact that the story is no more than a facile pot-boiler with some trendy furnishings.  Two stars.

The Answerer, by Bill Casey

New writer Bill Casey contributes The Answerer, the sort of story that might have appeared in Unknown in the early ‘40s—a fantastic premise developed like SF—except that editor Campbell wouldn’t have dared publish it.  Suddenly, prayers are being answered.  Everybody’s prayers.  So what happens?  As one of the characters puts it: “There can be nothing more dangerous than a personal god who actively interferes in the lives of men.” Hint: what if a lot of mental patients started praying?  It’s not the vignette one might expect to see on this theme, but an actual story, with a suitably sardonic ending.  Four stars.

Reunion, by David R. Bunch

David R. Bunch, who mostly hangs out in Fantastic these days, has his first appearance here in almost two years.  His short story Reunion is more lucid and less precious than his usual.  The language is also more straightforward though the preoccupation remains the same: the lives of humans whose bodies have been largely replaced with machinery (“new-metal” held together with “flesh-strips”; I think “cyborg” is becoming the fashionable term).  The unnamed protagonist is visited in his Stronghold by his twin brother, who “went with the big Paper Shield” (i.e., became a minister) rather than the metal one.  Protagonist is much troubled about their relationship and the prospect of meeting again, and considers shooting him, but in the end puts on the dog for him, mechanically speaking.  A moment of epiphany follows, but once the brother leaves—back to business as usual, war with the neighbors.  Three stars.

The Gobbitch Men, by Alfred Grossman


George Schelling

There’s a different flavor of the surreal in The Gobbitch Men by Alfred Grossman, who we are assured is “a novelist of some repute” responsible for Acrobat Admits and Many Slippery Errors, which I haven’t read, but which I gather could be described as black humor with anarchist tendencies.  So what’s he doing in Amazing?  I think writers use the term “salvage market.”

Grossman’s protagonist Irving is an ineffectual, incipiently alcoholic graduate student of the future, working on his thesis on the unbearably tedious, advisor-dictated subject of popular music of the late twentieth century, when he is delivered by mistake some spools titled Population and Catastrophe and the like.  He asks questions, learns how things really are in his world, is warned that he should keep on the straight and narrow or else, but the or else is imminent anyway.  Oh, the title?  The gobbitch men make a big racket with the cans, but that’s to cover their more sinister covert errand, which has suddenly become highly relevant to Irving.

This one is an interesting try, a heavy-handed dystopian satire in the mode of early Galaxy, cartoony and overdone, but still quite well written, as befits “a novelist of some repute.” Three stars, and I wouldn’t mind seeing Mr. Grossman slumming here again.

S. Fowler Wright: SF’s Devil’s Disciple, by Sam Moskowitz

Sam Moskowitz soldiers on with the SF Profile series, this time with a less familar and more interesting subject than usual: S. Fowler Wright: SF’s Devil’s Disciple.  Wright is a particularly good subject for Moskowitz, who prefers writing about work of the ‘30s and ‘40s, since almost all of Wright’s SF work was published then or even earlier.  The best-known of his novels include The Amphibians (1924), The Island of Captain Sparrow (1928), Deluge (1928), Dawn (1929), The World Below (1929), Dream, or The Simian Maid (1931), The Adventure of Wyndham Smith (1938), and Spiders’ War (1954).

Titles to conjure with!  But not much else, since as far as I can tell, Wright’s SF is entirely out of print, at least in the US—suffering the fate of his ideas.  Wright, who is still around, 91 next month, is distinguished by his opposition to scientific progress generally and birth control in particular (no hypocrite he—he has ten children), and much of his work is dedicated to extolling the virtues of noble savagery.  Moskowitz’s denunciation of these views helps make this article rather livelier than many of its predecessors, and the unfamiliarity of his work lends it considerable interest.  Four stars.

Summing Up

So—not a bad issue of Amazing, something one doesn’t see more than once or twice a year.  There’s even a sort of unifying theme, psychology, if you count the ostentatiously neurotic protagonist of The Gobbitch Men.  Can Amazing do it again?  Maybe even make it a trend?  The public breathlessly awaits.

[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, Serial

[December 13, 1964] Save us from Yourselves (January 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

That Low

The uproar at the University of California at Berkeley continues, with student leader Mario Savio becoming instantly famous for his cri de couer: “There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

Ever see that corny old silent movie Metropolis, with its oppressed workers desperately struggling against the gigantic levers of a future civilization’s industry?  Do you think Mr. Savio might have had those scenes in mind?  Is our culture now to be dominated by the imagery of old science fiction, recycled through late-night TV?  It can’t come soon enough for me.

The Issue at Hand


by Michael Arndt

Speaking of retrograde imagery, the January Amazing leads off with what seems a striking misjudgment.  Though it features the first installment of a serial by the up-and-coming Roger Zelazny, his longest work to date, the cover is a cartoony though well-executed depiction, by newcomer Michael Arndt, of an extraterrestrial boxer being knocked out of the ring, with a Damon Runyonesque audience looking on, clearly illustrating Blue Boy by the determinedly mediocre Jack Sharkey.  Zelazny’s story is relegated to smaller type above the magazine title, with his name hard to read against a bright background.  Amazing is clearly leading from the wrong side.  (Can’t anybody here play this game?)

He Who Shapes, by Roger Zelazny


by George Schelling

Promising as it seems, I will withhold reading and commenting on Zelazny’s serial He Who Shapes until the concluding installment is at hand, as is my practice.  A look at the first few pages indicates that the story involves psychiatric treatment by mental projection—not exactly a new idea (see Peter Phillips’s Dreams Are Sacred from 1948 and John Brunner’s more recent The Whole Man), but not overly familiar either.  Zelazny also seems to be making the most of his theatrical background in this one.  We will see the results next month.

Blue Boy, by Jack Sharkey

Blue Boy is even worse than I expected.  The protagonist, formerly involved in the boxing world, has been drafted, and is sent with a large crew on a mission to Pluto, where they encounter blue-skinned humanoids, whom they clap into the brig, and hastily head back towards Earth.  The Plutonians are quite muscular and have a knack for footwork, so our protagonist gets the idea of sneaking onto Earth with one and turning him into a boxer. 


by Michael Arndt

That’s about as far as I got (halfway) in this offensively stupid and also interminable screed (34 pages but seems like much more), which is written, and padded, in a stilted and circumlocutory style which seems pretty clearly intended as a pastiche of the above-mentioned Damon Runyon.  “Why?” one might cry, but the wind only whispers . . . “one cent a word.” One star.  No stars.  Heat death of the universe.  Cessation of all brain activity.  Bring back Robert F. Young!

A Child of Mind, by Norman Spinrad


by Virgil Finlay

We return at least to the semblance of sentience with Norman Spinrad’s A Child of Mind, a clever variation on a stock SF plot.  Three guys from Survey land on a planet which seems idyllic, but of course there’s something wrong; there always is.  This time, the majority of the females of the various local fauna have cell structures indicating they are really different organisms under the skin. 

Turns out they spring from “teleplasm,” an inchoate life form whose modus vivendi is, whenever a male of any species passes by, to discern and produce his ideal mate.  Why this all-female survival strategy?  As the hero, ecologist Kelton, Socratically explains to one of the other guys:

“Who pays for a wife’s meals?”

“Her husband, of—Oh my God!”

Er . . . that’s not always how it works.  If a lioness could speak, she would have a rather different account of things, as would many other females of other species.  But never mind, because, of course, very shortly, all three crew members have their own cocoon-grown dream girls: the thuggish one has an adoring slave, the mama’s boy has a sexy mama figure, and well-balanced Kelton has a merely supernaturally beautiful mate who understands his every desire.

This road leads nowhere, of course—to species extinction, since teleplasm doesn’t breed in the usual fashion, and not even to short-term satisfaction for Kelton, to whom

“. . . Woman had always been Mystery.

“And a creature of his own mind could hold no mystery for him, only the unsatisfying illusion of it.”

So Kelton does the only sensible thing, which you can probably guess.  While Kelton’s devotion to the autonomy of Woman may be creditable, there are hints of some pretty strange attitudes drifting through the story.  At one point, as Kelton is musing about how the teleplasm women are custom-made for their men, he thinks, “Swapping them would be like swapping toothbrushes.” Earlier, Spinrad quotes a “saying among Survey men: ‘Planets are like women.  It’s not the ugly ones that are dangerous.’”

Well, let’s reserve the psychoanalysis and give the author credit for a reasonably well-turned story—but meanwhile, Mr. Spinrad, you might think about putting some women on your space crews.  Three stars.

The Hard Way, by Robert Rohrer

Robert Rohrer’s growing competence suffers a setback in The Hard Way, a one-set psychodrama starring the sadistic Lieutenant Percy, who is delivering several prisoners from a penitentiary on Earth to one on Mercury.  Unfortunately they missed the turn towards Mercury and are heading towards the Sun, to die of heat on the way.  May as well have some fun with it! thinks the Lieutenant, and offers the prisoners a choice between slowly roasting to death and opening the airlock for a faster and cleaner exit.  Contrived, cliched, scenery-chewing.  Two stars, barely, and mainly to distinguish it from the abysmal Sharkey story.

The Handyman, by Leo P. Kelley


by George Schelling

Leo P. Kelley’s The Handyman is a pleasantly inconsequential dystopia about a small town where everything seems pretty nice except for the medical facility, the Hive, which spirits sick people away to its sterile and overlit premises and forbids any medical practice but its own.  Old Doc Larkin must ply his profession covertly, masquerading as a handyman and carrying his instruments concealed in a loaf of bread newly baked by his wife.  Three stars, also barely.

The Men in the Moon, by Robert Silverberg


by Virgil Finlay

The second of Robert Silverberg’s “Scientific Hoaxes” articles is The Men in the Moon, concerning the hoax perpetrated by journalist Richard Adams Locke, who published a series of articles in the New York Sun concerning the observations of profuse flora, fauna, and people on the Moon, supposedly made by famed astronomer William Herschel from his observatory at Cape Town, South Africa.  Herschel was indeed in Cape Town but of course made no such observations and didn’t know Locke was making these claims until years later.  Like its predecessor, it’s an interesting story capably told.  Three stars.

Summing Up

So: another dose of mediocrity from this historic magazine that hasn’t done much of anything for us lately, and owes us big time, at least those of us putting down good money for it each month.  Maybe the Zelazny serial will be its redemption.  Hope springs eternal, but it’s getting tired.

[Holiday season is upon us, and Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963), on the other hand, contains some of the best science fiction of the Silver Age.  And it makes a great present! Think of it as a gift to friends…and the Journey!




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 11, 1964] Unloading (December 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The festivities continue, albeit muted, at the University of California at Berkeley, where the administration continues its clumsy and tone-deaf standoff with students and some faculty who are demanding rather ordinary political rights in the public places of what amounts to their home town.  From this distance, it seems the administration is unable to let go of its usual habits of exercising authority in order to deal with the rather concrete issues raised by the students (whose cause now has a name, the Free Speech Movement), practical resolution of which really should not be difficult.  The FSM’s view of its own righteousness creates another sort of rigidity, no doubt strengthened by the American Civil Liberties Union’s announcement that the disputed restrictions violate the First Amendment and that the ACLU would intervene on behalf of the students who were suspended. 

For example, last month’s demonstration around and on top of the police car was resolved with an agreement to establish a committee to discuss and make recommendations about campus political behavior and its control.  So the administration proceeded to name the members of the committee without consulting with the FSM, which responded that the committee was illegitimate and should be disbanded.  The committee went forward anyway and heard a procession of witnesses telling it that shouldn’t exist.  This argument was settled within a couple of weeks with an agreement on the membership of an expanded committee.  One wonders why that conversation couldn’t have been had in the first place, avoiding the antagonism and waste of time.

Meanwhile, University president Clark Kerr made a speech at the Chamber of Commerce in which he said “Students are encouraged, as never before, by elements external to the University.” A few days later, he said at a news conference that he believed some of the demonstrators “had Communist sympathies.” Where have we heard that before?  It’s the standard line of the southern segregationists: we didn’t have any problems until the Communist-inspired outside agitators came, and just the thing to say about people with whom you are supposedly trying to make peace—some of whom just returned from contending with the southern segregationists.

On the substance of the dispute, the university’s explanations for its positions sometimes read like self-parody, like this statement by the Dean of Students: “A speaker may say, for instance, that there is going to be a picket line at such-and-such a place, and it is a worthy cause and he hopes people will go. But, he cannot say, `I'll meet you there and we'll picket’.”

The FSM, for its part, has continued to threaten a return to civil disobedience if it didn’t get some concrete results from its demands, and held a rally on November 9.  Some students resumed staffing tables to solicit funds and members for their causes, the practice that started this controversy.  The University then dissolved the agreed-upon joint committee, an action denounced by FSM.  And there, more or less, things stand.

The best judgment on the management of this dispute is probably the one pronounced by Casey Stengel to the 1962 New York Mets: “Can’t anyone here play this game?”

The Issue at Hand


By Robert Adragna

One might seek refuge from this tedious stalemate in the December Amazing, but one would be disappointed.  The issue features a “complete short novel” which exemplifies the literary philosophy “Got no ideas today, but I’ll throw some random crap together and make it move fast enough and nobody will know the difference.”

The Further Sky, by Keith Laumer


By Robert Adragna

The featured story is Keith Laumer’s The Further Sky, in which the disgusting and ill-tempered reptilian Niss are the honored guests (actually, the secret conquerors) of the pusillanimous Syndarch dictatorship of Earth.  Our hero Ame, after being treated contemptuously by a Niss, is visited by a very old guy talking about their Navy days together (which didn’t happen).  The old guy is also the one who just stole a scout spaceship from Pluto, and he boasts about killing Niss.  Ame helps him sneak away when some Niss and Syndarch types come looking, and later finds him dead.  But very much alive is Jimper, a foot-high character adept with a tiny crossbow who says he’s an ambassador from the King of Galliale—er, where?—and he is, or was, with Jason, the deceased senior citizen.

Ame and Jimper have to flee, since Syndarch and Niss are after them, so Ame befuddles a few functionaries, swipes a Syndarch spaceship, and they head for Pluto by way of Mars.  On Pluto they crash-land and struggle across the mountain ice, just ahead of Niss pursuers, and there it is, the portal to Galliale, a sunny and bucolic land of more little people—but whose king, the ample Tweeple, the Eater of One Hundred Tarts, does not know Jimper despite his being an ambassador. 

The king says Ame has to go into the nearby tower to slay the dragon, and Jimper comes with him, and there’s no dragon but there is a glowing cube which proves to be a portal to yet another world, and when the dragon (more like a giant centipede) shows up, they flee through the portal, where godlike four-dimensional beings, one of whom calls them fleas and wants to dispose of them, inform them that they are in the Andromeda galaxy three million years in their past, and explain the time travel gimmick that has been obviously in the wings all along, as well as the relationship among all the various species of beings involved (some of whom I have not bothered to name), and they materialize a spaceship for Ame and Jimper that will get them home at the right time, and don’t the Brits have a phrase for this sort of thing?  Oh, right—“load of old bollocks.” One star for tiresome and unconcealed cynicism in the service of a word count.

The Quest of the Holy Grille, by Robert F. Young


By Robert Adragna

Speaking of tiresome loads, Robert F. Young is back with The Quest of the Holy Grille, one of a series, or cluster, or infestation, of stories about sentient automobiles.  This one begins, “Housing had never been one to go chasing after girlhicles,” and there’s much more about girlhicles and boyhicles, who collectively make up manmobilekind, and towards the end there is some discussion of whether one of the characters is a virginhicle.  This goes on for 31 pages.  Pffft!  Begone!  One star.

The Last of the Great Tradition, by James R. Horstman

The short stories are by no-names, or worse.  James R. Horstman has no prior genre appearances, and his The Last of the Great Tradition is a well enough written but rather obvious satire of a snake-oil salesman who switches to the Wisdom of the Flying Saucers line, and receives poetic justice.  He is assisted by his servant (sic) George Washington Carver-Spokes, who speaks in cliched dialect of the sort that I hoped had gone out with Irvin S. Cobb (1876-1944, and good riddance).  Two stars and a bad taste in the mouth. 

The Day They Found Out, by Les Dennis

Les Dennis, another newcomer, contributes The Day They Found Out, a vignette about Recognition Day, on which all the kids are supposed to bring their pets to school so they can receive a lesson in what real life is about.  It would be shocking if it weren’t so obvious. This guy probably read The Lottery by Shirley Jackson and thought, “Hey, I can do that too.” Well, not really.  It’s capably enough done for what it is, so two grudging stars.

The Moths, by Arthur Porges


By George Schelling

The above-mentioned “worse” is Arthur Porges, who could justly be said to have extinguished himself in his prior appearances.  Porges is back with The Moths, which attempts to carry a little more weight than his previous trivialities, not very successfully.  A disgraced and alcoholic entomologist who is dying of cancer in his hovel encounters a rare moth which proves to be a mutant, absorbing energy from a flame rather than being destroyed.  Fade to not very interesting symbolism.  Two stars, being generous.

Philip Jose Farmer: Sex and Science Fiction, by Sam Moskowitz

Sam Moskowitz’s new “SF Profile” is a departure.  Titled Philip Jose Farmer: Sex and Science Fiction, it features a writer with no work from the ‘30s and ‘40s for Moskowitz to dwell excessively on, and purports to be a subject matter survey as well as an author profile.  It starts off by dismissing the observations on the subject by scholar G. Legman (no sex in SF except in the chambers of mad scientists) as accurate enough but dated, since he stopped looking in 1949.  But now here’s Farmer!  Whose first published SF was the 1952 novella The Lovers, featuring an affair between a human male and an alien female with an insectile life cycle (book version not published until 1961 by the reasonably intrepid Ballantine Books).  Moskowitz notes a modest bump of sexual subject matter immediately after The Lovers, but then says maybe things were going that way anyway (citing earlier examples), but before that the genre magazines were pretty puritanical (but here are the exceptions, some quite amusing), and what there was of sex in SF appeared in hardcover books. 

Why this reticence?  “The answer most probably is that science fiction is a literature of ideas.  The people who read it are entertained and even find escape through mental stimulation.” Oh . . . kay.  Moskowitz then moves on to a brief account of Farmer’s somewhat ill-starred life (he had to stop writing and take a job at a dairy, publishing next to nothing during the late 1950s), ending with an unusually sharp summation of his strengths and weaknesses as a writer.  Surprisingly, this turned out to be one of Moskowitz’s better articles.  Four stars.

Summing Up

Well, that was pointless, wasn’t it?  The fiction is all well below the waterline, with the longer stories by bigger names half-buried in the muck.  The only thing worth reading is the Moskowitz article (except for Robert Silverberg’s book reviews, which roll along in unassuming excellence).  Next month we are promised a “powerful” novel by Roger Zelazny, which might be worth waiting for, and a “rollicking” Jack Sharkey story, which—oh, never mind.

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Book, Magazine

[October 12, 1964] Slow Cruising (November 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

It’s a cliche that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  What can one say about those who don’t learn even from what they see around them?  At the University of California at Berkeley, a city within a city in which many thousands of people study, work, and in many cases live, the administration recently decided it will strictly enforce rules prohibiting political advocacy and speech, appearances by political candidates, and recruitment and fundraising by student organizations at a heavily-travelled area (an intersection of the city’s main street!) where such activities were routinely conducted.

Let’s pause for station identification.  This is 1964.  All over the United States, people are standing up for the rights and freedom of individuals, including political rights, most notably the right to vote.  Most of them are Negroes, but you’d think people in responsible positions would realize that a few white people (as apparently are most of Berkeley’s students) might get some funny ideas too—like the ideas of direct action and civil disobedience that they have been seeing on TV, and in some cases in person, for several years. 

You’d also think they would be aware that a significant number of their own students and some faculty members just got back from the Freedom Summer activities in the segregated South, where they lived daily with the risk of physical assault and even death, and are unlikely to be too fearful of university administrators.

So on October 1, the campus police arrested a guy named Jack Weinberg—one of those who went south this past summer—who was sitting at an information table for the Congress of Racial Equality and refused to show his identification.  A crowd formed around the police car, preventing it from moving, and the car became a speaker’s podium for a crowd said to have swelled to three thousand people.  This went on for 32 hours until the university agreed not to press charges against Weinberg, and also agreed to . . . what else? . . . form a committee!  This is to be a student/faculty/administration committee to discuss “all aspects of political behavior on campus and its control, and to make recommendations to the administration.”

What next? Nobody knows.  But one thing seems to be clear: increasingly, infringement on the rights that politically active Americans have come to expect to exercise will be challenged using the tools we all see on TV every week from the civil rights movement.  Authority is no longer its own justification, and those in positions of power, some of whom seem to look to Louis XVI as their role model, will need to change their approach to survive.  As that folksinger put it—I forget his name, the one with the frizzy hair and nasal voice—“you’d better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone.”

The Issue at Hand


by Alex Schomburg

More prosaically—back to science fiction.  The November 1964 Amazing is distinguished by being the second consecutive issue with a cover depicting a guy in a flying chair, calling to mind the observation of the Hon. Jimmy Walker, erstwhile Mayor of New York City, before fleeing the country to avoid a corruption prosecution: “Never follow a banjo act with another banjo act.” Alex Schomburg’s rather static and solemn depiction of the device contrasts amusingly with Virgil Finlay’s interior illustration, which attempts to imbue the same gadget with all the energy and drama that the cover picture lacks.  Can we say Apollonian versus Dionysian?  I thought not.  Forget I mentioned it.

Rider in the Sky, by Raymond F. Jones


by Virgil Finlay

The story itself, Raymond F. Jones’s long novelet Rider in the Sky, is unfortunately pretty inane, a hardware opera that reads as if it had been dumbed down for prime-time TV.  In the near future, private enterprise is starting to get into the act in space, and Space Products, Inc., has developed the Moon Hopper, essentially a rocket-propelled chair in which a space-suited person can sit and fly over the lunar surface, untroubled by the quantities of fine dust covering it.  But how to market this device?

The Space Products boys (usage highly intentional) decide on a publicity stunt—they’ll get somebody to fly the Moon Hopper from Earth orbit to the moon.  Who?  They’ll ask for volunteers from within the company!  They get one—Sam Burnham, a company accountant and secret space buff, who knows he doesn’t have the right stuff but has indulged his fantasies to the point of installing a centrifuge and an imitation space capsule in his basement. 

Sam’s wife Edna, who spends her copious spare time supporting the cause of the orphans of Afghanistan, is appalled, and leverages her Afghan-symp connections to start a national movement to keep Sam Earthbound.  This, and Edna, are presented in a spirit of condescending sexual oppression of the sort one finds in, say, True: The Man’s Magazine.  I forget if the author refers to “the little woman,” and I’m not going back to look, but that’s the attitude.

After much machination, with the President getting into the act, Sam goes, and his trip takes an unexpected turn, plot mechanics unwind reasonably cleverly, and he and the story are brought to a soft landing.  But the treatment of women, and the smarmy faux-folksy style in which a lot of the story is told, make it difficult to appreciate the admittedly limited virtues of the story.  Two stars, barely.

Enigma From Tantalus (Part 2 of 2), by John Brunner


by Ed Emshwiller

John Brunner’s two-part serial Enigma from Tantalus concludes in this issue.  While it’s not the pretentious mess that his previous effort The Bridge to Azrael was, Brunner has not regained the form of (as I keep saying) his sequence of smart and well turned novellas in the UK magazines. 

Here, humans have discovered Tantalus, a planet inhabited by a singular intelligent life-form with separate units linked telepathically and capable of being molded into a variety of forms and functions.  The crisis that drives the plot is that the Tantalan is believed to have made a fake human (presumably disposing of the real one) and dispatched it on a spaceship to Earth; we can’t let it loose on our planet!  (There is an acknowledgement along the way that the Tantalan appears to be studying humanity just as humanity is studying it.)

So, there’s a bunch of people confined in a small space, and we must learn which is the alien!  This is not exactly an original plot, but Brunner plays it more in the style of a country-house mystery than that of its distinguished and horrific predecessor, Campbell’s Who Goes There?, spiced up by the fact that the passengers are as eccentric a bunch of freaks and neurotics as one could wish for.

Brunner manages the latter parts of the plot capably and trickily enough, but overall the story has two sore-thumb-level problems.  One is that by far the most interesting part is the discovery and opening of communication with the Tantalan, all of which happens off-stage—in fact, before the story opens—and we learn about it only in fragments.  In that sense the story is much too short. 

In another sense, it’s too long.  The other big problem is that here as in The Bridge to Azrael, Brunner wants to wrestle with Big Thinks, in this case chiefly that technological development and affluence have left the run of humanity with a sense of helplessness and lack of purpose.  But his attempts to integrate this notion into the story are perfunctory, or worse; for example, he invokes it to explain the manipulative and nymphomaniacal female journalist who is confined in the spaceship and chewing the furniture.  (This is a conspicuous sour note from a writer whose prior work is notable for strong and relatively cliche-free female characters.) So this exercise in speculative social psychology in the end contributes nothing to the story but verbiage.

Another problem, at least to my mind, is that when something comes up that the machines can’t handle in the ordinary course, Earth is essentially governed by a tiny elite called the “Powers of Earth” (a particularly arrogant and irascible specimen of which conducts the inquiry of the spaceship passengers).  These “Powers” apparently exercise unchecked authority based on their extraordinary powers of deducing correct conclusions from limited information. 

This seems to me a sort of magical thinking, no better than (not much different from, in fact) the recurring notion in another magazine that the future will be dominated by a psionic elite, and about as plausible and useful for thinking about the future as the depiction by Edmond Hamilton and others of galactic empires ruled by hereditary nobles with pompous titles.

One might ask if this criticism is too big a demand to make of popular fiction in newsstand magazines, but Brunner invites it by posing the questions himself.  I don’t want to be hard on the guy for essaying too much, but his ambition is outrunning the format he is writing in, and he will have to find better ways to integrate them, or move on to a different kind of writing.  Anyway, three stars for a nice but flawed try.

Your Name Shall Be … Darkness, by Norman Spinrad


by George Schelling

Norman Spinrad displays his own brand of ambition with Your Name Shall Be . . . Darkness, about an Army psychiatrist captured and subjected to sophisticated brainwashing in the Korean War. He is repatriated, seemingly intact, but . . . .  This is essentially The Manchurian Candidate as applied social psychology, and pretty clever, though done in an overly bombastic style for my taste.  Still, it’s effective: three stars verging on four.

The Seminarian, by Jack Sharkey


by Virgil Finlay

And, last of the fiction, Jack Sharkey . . . is Jack Sharkey, with The Seminarian, about a guy, the son of missionaries, reared on a South Sea island without significant technology who comes to the States to conduct his own missionary work.  It’s a tribute to Sharkey’s superficial skills that his facility distracts one from the story’s complete implausibility.  Two stars.  Sure you don’t want to go into advertising, Jack?

The Lying Stones of Dr. Beringer, by Robert Silverberg


by Virgil Finlay

There’s a new byline on this month’s non-fiction: Robert Silverberg (also now the regular book reviewer) contributes The Lying Stones of Dr. Beringer, apparently the first of a series—it’s labelled “Scientific Hoaxes #1.” It’s about a 16th-Century German scholar who was taken in by a large aggregation of fake fossils, an interesting story in itself (especially in the hands of Silverberg, a much more capable writer than the usual suspect Ben Bova) and one which contributed to a shift in understanding of what fossils actually are.  Three stars.

Summing Up

So, business as usual at Amazing: a couple of nice tries, one dreary failure, one lighter-than-air piece of trivia, plus a better article than usual.  Steady as she goes.

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 12, 1964] A Mysterious Affair of Style (October 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Georgia on My Mind

We’ve just seen that standing up for civil rights in the South is a hazardous business from the murder of the civil rights workers Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner.  It looks like merely being a Negro passing through the South can be just as hazardous, even in the service of one’s country. 

Lemuel Penn was an assistant superintendent in the Washington, D.C., school system, a decorated veteran of World War II, and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve.  There’s an annual summer training camp for reservists, and Colonel Penn went to Fort Benning, Georgia, for the occasion.  Driving back to Washington on July 11, Colonel Penn and two fellow reservists were noticed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, who followed them and killed Penn with two shotgun blasts.

The Klansmen were easily identified and brought to trial remarkably quickly—and acquitted last week by an all-white Georgia jury, according to the local custom. 

But the last word may remain to be spoken.  Days before the murder, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which authorizes prosecution of such civil rights violations in federal court by federal authorities, was enacted.  Will it make a difference, before another Southern jury?  And will the federal government reconsider a practice that requires Negroes to travel to the South where their mere presence may provoke local racist whites to homicide?

The Issue at Hand

The October 1964 Amazing is fronted by an Ed Emshwiller cover that is, if anything, more hideous than the one on the July issue, though more capably rendered.  It looks like something a non-SF artist might do satirically for a mainstream magazine article trashing SF as silly and juvenile; more charitably, like a failed attempt at an Ace Double cover that Emshwiller found in the back of his closet.  I wonder if it was meant for one of A.E. van Vogt’s Null-A books.  The guy in the shiny white flying chair (notice how much it looks like he’s sitting on a toilet?) has a forehead high enough to accommodate an extra brain, or two or three.  The contrast between this and Emshwiller's much more sophisticated work for Fantasy and Science Fiction (for example, the April 1964 issue) is nothing short of . . . amazing.

Enigma From Tantalus (Part 1 of 2), by John Brunner

by Ed Emshwiller

The cover story is John Brunner’s Enigma from Tantalus, a two-part serial beginning in this issue, which per my practice I will read and review when it is complete.  Of course its mere presence is a source of trepidation.  Which Brunner are we getting?  The Brunner of the capable and intelligent novelets and novellas he has been publishing for years in the British SF magazines, some of which have been fixed up into fine books such as The Whole Man and Times Without Number?  Or the pretentiously befuddled Brunner of his last appearance here, February’s The Bridge to Azrael?  Stay tuned.  Stars, hold back your radiance.

In the Shadow of the Worm, by Neal Barrett, Jr.

Once past the serial, the major fiction item is In the Shadow of the Worm, a long novelet by the unevenly talented Neal Barrett, Jr.  The blurb telegraphs this one: “The Beautiful Lady . . . the Android who does but may not love her . . . the Mad Villain . . . the Unutterable Menace . . .  These are stock (almost laughing-stock) figures of science fiction.  Now Neal Barrett . . . takes them and makes them vibrant with suspense, with poetry, with meaning.”

Uh-oh.

Well, the bad news is that the story is in large part an exercise in bombastic oratory and striking of poses.  The mitigating news is that Barrett sort of brings it off, at least in its own terms.  The Lady Larrehne (am I the only one tired of a human future festooned with titles of nobility?), with her non-man Steifen, an artificial person programmed to serve and obey her, have crossed space in the good ship Gryphon (“Oh, fearsome and great she is!  A league and a half of terror and love from silver beak to spiked bronze tail—a’shimmer with golden scales from steel-ruffle neck to dragon wings; and each bright horny shield as wide as fifty humans high.”).

They are now on Balimann’s Moon, presided over by the Balimann (sic), which orbits around a planet called Slaughterhouse, which apparently produces meat for the rest of the galaxy, in the form of parodic engineered animals without much to them except the edible (“terrible blind herds stumbling toward death before birth could register on feeble brains”).  Slaughterhouse in turn is ruled by one Garahnell, who ostentatiously stages phony space battles for the visitors.

But why are Larrehne and Steifen here anyway?  To see the Worm, a/k/a the Eater of Worlds, an entity, force, effigy, or something between our galaxy and Andromeda and heading our way, and Balimann’s Moon is the best vantage point (“the last sprinkled mote of sand before the great sea begins”). 

They are also here to visit Slaughterhouse, though somehow that goal gets lost in the proceedings.  Everything is symbolic, of course, as the characters point out in case you missed it.  Says the Lady: “Is there a more cutting parody of the Good and Evil we have known back there, than Garahnell’s mock war—or the birth-death of Slaughterhouse?  When I think of the life we left—Oh, Steifen, it’s hard to say which nightmare mirrors the other!”

There’s more, much more, including but not limited to the fate of humanity, all saved from terminal tiresomeness by Barrett’s sure touch with his contrived and gaudy style.  This is not at all my cup of tea, but I must concede it’s well brewed.  Three stars.

Urned Reprieve, by Arthur Porges


by Robert Adragna

Next is the trivial and annoying Urned Reprieve by Arthur Porges, another contrived little story of Ensign Ruyter triumphing over adversity with very basic science.  Ruyter is about to be sacrificed by primitive aliens to their jealous god but saves himself with a demonstration of air pressure that wows the savages.  This is dreary enough to start, but Porges notes in passing that these aliens “were quite primitive, roughly on the level, it would seem, of the Red Indian tribes of Earth’s infancy.” Doesn’t this guy know anything besides junior high school science?  Maybe he should start with Edmund Wilson’s Apologies to the Iroquois (1960), about some “Red Indians” who were arguably more civilized than the people who subjugated them.  Two stars, grudgingly.

The Intruders, by Robert Rohrer


by Blair

The suddenly prolific Robert Rohrer is here, for the third consecutive issue, with The Intruders, an improvement over its predecessors.  It’s a jolly romp about a maniac with a meat cleaver trying to avoid and defeat his pursuers, from the maniac’s point of view, set in a spaceship rather than a haunted house (and being in the spaceship is what drove him mad—that’s what makes it science fiction and not just an updated rehash of Poe).  (That’s mostly a joke.  Sort of.) The hackneyed extremity of the plot is made tolerable and quite readable by an economical style that focuses on mundane physical detail and agreeably contrasts with its loony content.  This Rohrer is getting pretty good; if he sticks with it he may produce something memorable.  Three stars, towards the high end.

Demigod, by R. Bretnor


by Virgil Finlay

The last piece of fiction here is Demigod, by R(eginald) Bretnor, who has not previously appeared in Amazing, being most frequently found in Fantasy & Science Fiction, with the occasional foray into Harper’s, Esquire, Today’s Woman, and the like.  The Demigod is a giant golden-green humanoid who emerges from his spaceship at “the isle and port of Porquegnan, where Lucullus Sackbutt’s yacht, the Grand Eunuch, swam at anchor in an emerald sea and an atmosphere delicate with hints of duck and truffle and whispered music.”

We are quickly introduced, inter alia, to Mr. Sackbutt, the Mayor Hippolyte Ronchi, “a large, middleaged woman named, of all things, Mme. Bovary, who had come to deliver Lucullus Sackbutt’s more intimate and finer laundry,” Sackbutt’s “little friend,” Prince Alexei Alexandrovitch Tsetsedzedze, “known familiarly as Poupou . . . but who had nonetheless found his way to Lucullus Sackbutt via dress-designing and interior decorating.” Sackbutt has only just come from his bath, with “a pair of lithe, young, naked Nubian girls, whose duty it was to wash him, and who had long since learned that nothing at all exciting was going to happen to them while at work,” while Prince Poupou read to Sackbutt from his projected biography of Sackbutt, patron of the fine arts and arbiter of taste.

So Sackbutt appears to be a stereotyped homosexual, and the story continues in its arch and mannered fashion to parody what was undoubtedly a parody to begin with.  The Demigod approaches Sackbutt and stares at him, from which Sackbutt infers that he has been selected to parade for this first alien visitor all the achievements of Earthly high culture, while the rest of the world looks on, until the Demigod decides he has had enough and carries Sackbutt off to a summary end.  Bretnor is adept enough at this artificial style (reminiscent of an overstimulated P.G. Wodehouse) to keep it amusingly readable enough, as long as one can ignore the fact that the whole thing is an exercise in exploiting the last prejudice that seems to be acceptable everywhere.  Two stars for execution discounted for silliness, a burnt-out cinder for moral stature.

Jack Williamson: Four-Way Pioneer, by Sam Moskowitz

An almost welcome note of the prosaic is sounded by Sam Moskowitz, with his SF Profile, Jack Williamson: Four-Way Pioneer.  This one begins by quoting a New York Times review stating that Williamson’s writing is “only slightly above that of comic strip adventure”—a review which netted Williamson a job writing a comic strip, Beyond Mars in the New York Daily News Sunday edition.  This may not be the credential Mr. Williamson would most like to see heralded.

Aside from this promotion by pratfall, Moskowitz recounts Williamson’s childhood in the wilds, or at least the farmlands, of Mexico and the Arizona Territory, his discovery of this very magazine in 1927, his success at selling A. Merritt pastiches to it starting in 1928, and his development as a more versatile writer in the 1930s.  Moskowitz describes Williamson’s 1939 novella The Crucible of Power as “a giant step towards believability in science fiction” (read it and draw your own conclusions).  As usual, Moskowitz focuses on Williamson’s material of the ‘20s and ‘30s, with less emphasis on the ‘40s and none at all on his post-1950 work (two novels on his own not worked up from earlier writings, plus one in collaboration with James Gunn and four in collaboration with Frederik Pohl, and a dozen-plus short stories); his sole comment is “But science fiction stories continue to trickle out.”

Oh, the four ways?  “He is an author who pioneered superior characterization in a field almost barren of it; new realism in the presentation of human motivation; scientific rationalization of supernatural concepts; and exploitation of the untapped story potentials of anti-matter.” You might think becoming an academic with a specialty in science fiction was one, too.  Anyway, three stars; this one is a little meatier than Moskowitz’s usual.

Summing Up

Who would have thought it?  An issue of Amazing in which the merit, such as it is, of most of the fiction contents turns on the authors’ mastery of style: in Barrett’s and Bretnor’s cases, their ability to maintain a grossly artificial style consistently enough to keep the reader going, as opposed to laughing at their lapses, and in Rohrer’s, his ability to recount bizarre and grotesque events in the plainest and most matter-of-fact language so the story will not seem as far around the bend as its protagonist.  Well, you take what you can get with this hit-or-miss magazine.

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Fashion, music, politics, sports, Magazine

[August 13, 1964] Plus ça change (September 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Still Long, Still Hot

Big surprise: Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, the three civil rights workers who disappeared in June in Mississippi after being pulled over for speeding in Neshoba County and then released, have been found dead, buried under an earthen dam, two of them shot in the heart, the third shot multiple times and mutilated.  The sheriff of Neshoba County had said, “They're just hiding and trying to cause a lot of bad publicity for this part of the state.” During the six weeks that law enforcement was failing to find their bodies, they did find the bodies of eight other Negroes, five of them yet unidentified—business as usual, apparently, in that part of the country.

The Issue at Hand


by Robert Adragna

The September Amazing has a different look from the usual hard-edged Popular Mechanics-ish style of Emsh and especially of Alex Schomburg.  Robert Adragna’s cover features surreal-looking buildings and machinery against a bright yellow background (land and sky), a little reminiscent of the familiar style of Richard Powers, but probably closer to that of the UK artist Brian Lewis, who brought the mildly non-literal look in bright colors (as opposed to Powers’s often more morose palette) to New Worlds and Science Fantasy for several years. 

The contents?  Within normal limits.  Business as usual here, too, though less grisly.

The Kingdoms of the Stars, by Edmond Hamilton

The issue leads off with The Kingdoms of the Stars, by Edmond Hamilton, a sequel to his novel The Star Kings, which originated in Amazing in 1947, and is to the subgenre of space opera what the International Prototype of the Kilogram is to the realm of weights and measures.  In The Star Kings, regular guy John Gordon of Earth finds his mind swapped with that of Zarth Arn, a prince of the far-future Mid-Galactic Empire, and ends up having to lead the Empire’s space fleets against the forces of the League of Dark Worlds (successfully of course, despite a rather thin resume for the job).  He also hits it off with Princess Lianna of the Fomalhaut Kingdom before he is returned to his own Twentieth Century body and surroundings.

The new story opens in a psychiatrist’s office, with John Gordon much perturbed by his memories of chasing around the galaxy and wooing a star-princess.  He wants to find out if he is delusional.  This may be a case of Art imitating Life, or at least imitating somebody else’s account of Life with the serial numbers filed off.  Hamilton surely knows of (and I think is sardonically guying) The Fifty-Minute Hour (1955), a volume of six case histories by the psychiatrist Dr. Robert Lindner, one of which, The Jet-Propelled Couch, involves a similar story of a patient with detailed memories or fantasies of living in a spacefaring far future, which he ultimately abandoned and admitted were delusions.

But shrink notwithstanding, Gordon is brought back into the future, corporeally this time, by the benevolent machinations of Zarth An.  Princess Lianna is anxiously awaiting him, but this time he’s in his own body and not Zarth An’s, and she’s going to have to get used to it.  Meanwhile, they trundle off to the Fomalhaut Kingdom to attend to the affairs the Princess has been neglecting.  En route, to avoid ambush, they head for the primitive planet Marral, ostensibly to confer with the Princess’s cousin Narath Teyn (who is in fact one of the schemers against her).  Various intrigues and diversions occur there, followed by a narrow escape that sets the scene for the next in what obviously will be a series.

One can’t quarrel with the execution.  Hamilton lays it on thick in the accustomed manner:

“Across the broad loom and splendor of the galaxy, the nations of the Star-Kings were marked in many-colored fire, crimson and gold and emerald green, blue and violet and diamond-white . . . the kingdoms of Lyra, Cygnus, Cassiopeia, Polaris, and the capital of the great Mid-Galactic Empire of Canopus.  The Hercules Cluster blazed with its Baronies of swarming suns.  To the south, as the cruiser beat westward toward Fomalhaut, the Orion Nebula sprawled its coiling radiance across the firmament.  Far northward lay the black blot of the Cloud, where drowned Thallarna lay now in peace.”

Oh, and don’t forget the “vast wilderness of the Marches of Outer Space” (in space, can anyone hear you march?), presided over by the Counts of the Marches, who are allied to the Empire.  And so on.  Along the way there is plenty more colorful decoration, not least the telepathic struggle between a sinister gray-cowled alien and the deeply loyal Korkhann, Fomalhaut’s Minister of Non-Human Affairs, five feet tall and resplendent in gray feathers.  At the end, Gordon concludes that this world beats hell out of the “sordid dream” of Twentieth Century life to which the psychiatrist wanted to confine him.  Fiddle-de-dee, Dr. Lindner!

But—kings?  It’s ultimately pretty depressing to be told that after two hundred thousand years, humanity hasn’t come up with something better than monarchy and all its cheesy pageantry.  Bah!  What this galaxy needs is a few good tumbrils and guillotines.

Three stars—a compromise between capable execution and shameless cliche.

Clean Slate, by James H. Schmitz


by George Schelling

There’s no monarchy in the issue’s other novelet, James H. Schmitz’s Clean Slate, but exactly what there is remains murky.  It’s fifteen years since the Takeover, when several “men of action” . . . well, took over, though there’s no more explanation than that.  There seem to be elections, or at least the risk of them, and public opinion has to be attended to if not necessarily followed.

The viewpoint character is George Hair, a Takeover functionary in charge of the Department of Education, and nominally supervisor of ACCED—a post-Takeover research program designed to develop “accelerated education” to produce enough adequately trained people to keep this complex modern civilization humming.  Problem is the high-pressure regime of experimental ACCED, very successful in the short run, causes severe psychological problems as the kids get a little older.  It seems having a personality gets in the way of this educational force-feeding for the greater good.

So they go to younger kids—less personality to get in the way–and when that doesn’t work, they get some newborns, who should have even less.  Still doesn’t work.  So they apply techniques of SELAM—selective amnesia—to get some of people’s inconvenient memories out of the way.

Maybe you’ve noticed that this is completely crazy.  It gets more so: hey, why not just get rid of all the memories, to create the clean slate of the title?  The guy running the ACCED program is the first subject of this total memory elimination, which, followed by intensive ACCED, will make him a superman!

But there’s a snag.  A big one, with huge implications for the program, and the government, and the story ends on the brink of a denouement that is hair-raising, not to mention Hair-razing.

The story is a meandering mix of scenes with actual dialogue and action and long stretches of Hair’s ruminations and recollections about the history of ACCED and the politics of the post-Takeover government and his place in it.  Like many of Schmitz’s stories, it really shouldn’t work at all, and does so only because he is such a smooth writer one is lulled into keeping on reading.  That smoothness also distracts one from the fact that what he is writing about—the subjection of children first to an educational program that destroys them psychologically, and then to the eradication of part or all of their memories—is utterly monstrous, worthy of the Nazis’ Dr. Mengele (also something not unknown in Schmitz).  Three stars and a shudder.  This one is hard to put out of one’s mind.

The Dowry of Angyar, by Ursula K. Le Guin


by George Schelling

Fomalhaut rears its head again in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dowry of Angyar, which takes place on a human-and-other-sentients-inhabited planet in that system, one with enough contact with humans to be taxed for wars by them, but not much more.  Semley, a princess of the Angyar, covets an elaborately jeweled necklace which has somehow vanished from her family’s treasury, goes on a quest for it among the planet’s other sentient species, and gets badly burned by her greed and by not understanding enough about what is going on.  It’s very well written and visualized, as always with Le Guin, but its ostentatiously folk-taley and homiletic quality is a bit tedious to my taste, and it’s too long by about half—an off day for a class act.  Nonetheless, three stars for capable writing.

The Sheeted Dead, by Robert Rohrer


by Virgil Finlay

Robert Rohrer is back with The Sheeted Dead, blurbed as “A tale of horror . . . a story not for weaklings,” illustrated by Virgil Finlay in a style reminiscent of the old horror comics that were driven out of existence by public outcry and congressional hearings.  The story is written in the same spirit.  In the future, humans have fought wars all over space, and as a result, “great clouds of radioactive dust blew through the galaxy.” To avoid extinction, Earth has Withdrawn—that is, surrounded itself with some sort of electronic barrier so no radiation can get in, meanwhile leaving its armies stranded around the galaxy to die. 

A mutated virus brings the local deceased and decayed veterans to life, or at least to animation, in their mausoleums on Earth, and they set off for the illuminated cities searching for revenge for their abandoned comrades, and for the field generator, so they can turn it off, allowing them to see the Sun again, and also killing off everyone left alive.  William Blake said, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” We’re waiting.  Meanwhile, this is at least (over)written with a modicum of skill and conviction.  Two stars and a suppressed groan.

The Alien Worlds, by Ben Bova

Ben Bova’s The Alien Worlds continues his series on how humans could live on the planets of the Solar System, this time focusing on Mercury, Jupiter and the planets further out, and the planetoid belt (as he calls it, ignoring the more common usage “asteroid belt”).  The material is mostly familiar and rendered a bit dully, as is frequent with Bova.  Two stars.

Summing Up

Overall, not bad; most of the issue’s contents are at least perfectly readable, reaching the median through different combinations of fault and virtue.  As always, one would prefer something a little bit above the ordinary; as all too frequently, one does not get it.  In print and elsewhere.

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Magazine

[July 14, 1964] TO THE MOON, ALICE (the August 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Long Hot Summer, Barely Begun

So, we have a new civil rights law, one which should transform life in the segregated South—not to mention the less overtly segregated North—if implemented.  Note the last phrase.  Meanwhile, in Mississippi, three civil rights workers involved in voter registration efforts have been missing for three weeks, after being pulled over for speeding by a local sheriff, then released.  Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner: remember those names.  I wonder if we will hear them again. 

The Issue at Hand

This August Amazing features on its cover Robert F. Young’s The HoneyEarthers, on its face a depressing prospect.  After his tiresome rehashes of Bible stories and fairy tales, is Young now sending Ralph Kramden into space?  Fortunately, no.  This time, Young has actually tried to write a story.  It’s pretty terrible, but still, the effort is there.  Attention must be paid to this man . . . briefly.


by Richard McKenna

The HoneyEarthers, by Robert F. Young

Young essays a rather complicated plot, and if you have any interest in reading the story, you might want to do so now.  Okay, back?  It begins with an unnamed kid working as an ice miner in Saturn’s rings, and he gets into fatal-looking trouble.  Next, there’s an older man, Aaron, escorting a younger woman on the HoneyEarth Express to the Moon—his son’s wife Fleurette.  His son Ronny (Aaron Jr.) has left her and is fleeing prosecution for tax evasion.  The father is in love with his son’s wife, but this trip is to be entirely chaste, even though the voyage is typically for honeymooners, some of whose amatory antics on the flight are mentioned with disapproval. 

On the Moon, Aaron discloses that Ronny was the doomed ice miner, whom Aaron rescued in the nick of time and then adopted.  But Ronny experienced space fright and developed space fugue and can’t remember anything before the rescue.  And there’s more!  In the interim, Aaron went to the stars, spent a number of years on two different planets, and made a bunch of money.  Now, he says, Ronny (having fled to space) is about to have a second space fright episode, which will bring back his memory of the years he lost to amnesia from the first episode, while cancelling out his memory of the intervening years, including Aaron and Fleurette. 


by George Schelling

By this point it seems clear that Aaron and Ronny, decades apart in age, are the same person.  But . . . where’s the necessary time travel?  As mentioned, Aaron traveled to two extrasolar planets, then came back to Mars, and headed for Saturn to rescue Ronny.  Now I know what you’re thinking—this guy has confused time dilation from faster-than-light interstellar travel with time travel! 

But no.  Young has instead relied on that time-honored technique of the field: just making stuff up.  In this case, it’s called “circumventing the space-time equalization schedule,” a phrase that is not explained but which the author apparently thinks means he can bend time to his will and the needs of the plot.  And after Aaron’s long anguished confession of all this history to Fleurette, it looks like he’s going to get his just reward.

All this takes place in the overarching context of Young’s familiar overbearing sentimentality about beautiful young women, which reaches a crescendo, fever pitch, or something like that.  To wit:

“A girl stepped into the room.

“She had dark-brown hair. She was tall and slender. She had gray eyes and a round full face. The girlish dress she was wearing began below her shoulders, and the firelight had
already fallen in love with her smooth clear skin. Meadow flowers grew around her, and her mouth had the redness of the wild raspberries that grew in the fields of his youth. Spring resided in the dew-brightness of her eyes; her cheeks held the hue of frost-kissed leaves. Spring, summer, fall and finally winter in the snow-whiteness of her hands. . . .

“She came like a summer wind across the room and kissed him, and he knew the fields once again: the fields and the woods and the warm summer sun, and the red and succulent berries that had stained his lips and filled his mouth with sweetness.”

I believe the critics’ technical term for this is “icky.” There’s plenty of it.  There are also other comment-worthy items, such as the notion of space fright, which causes amnesia, but a second episode of space fright will bring back the errant memories, a height of contrivance equal to the “space-time equalization schedule.” But enough.  One star, with a ribbon for the labor this confection obviously required.

Selection, by Ursula K. Le Guin


by George Schelling

This jokey short story is in some ways the antithesis of The HoneyEarthers (by being jokey, for starters).  On a colony planet, marriages are arranged by computer, and there’s no appeal.  The protagonist, Miss Ekstrom-Ngungu, intensely dislikes her designated husband, Mr. Chang-Oliver, but in the absence of other options, they go through with it, and the bottom line seems to be that people get over things fairly easily in the face of a little danger and the need to get on with life.  The selection process is presided over by a Mr. Gosseyn-Ho; appropriating the name of the protagonist of van Vogt’s The World of Null-A seems to be a dig at the long history of pseudo-rationality in SF.  The story is a lightweight satire but is less cartoony than most of its type, with more density of detail than usual about the colony planet and the work of the colonists.  Le Guin is a very solid writer even in her more relaxed moments.  Three stars.

Valedictory, by Phyllis Gotlieb


by George Schelling

Phyllis Gotlieb, author of the rather overblown but underperforming serial Sunburst, is back with a miniature, Valedictory, in which a woman in training to be a time-traveling researcher thinks she needs to go back and comfort her younger self.  Like Le Guin’s (and unlike Young’s!), this is a story about getting over things, rendered with nice economy.  Three stars.

Furnace of the Blue Flame, by Robert Rohrer


by Robert Adragna

The precocious Robert Rohrer (b. 1946), who I would guess has just graduated from high school, contributes Furnace of the Blue Flame, but might as well not have bothered.  It’s a capably written but terminally cliched post-apocalyptic story—you know, the kind that refers to “the still-scorched fields south of Nuyuk . . . the rocky wastes surrounding Bigchi . . . the plains of baked clay north of Lanna,” and so forth.  Morg, a lone wanderer and apostle of knowledge, disposes of a local petty tyrant who keeps his people in ignorance. Morg uses the surviving nuclear reactor of the title to beat the bad guys.  Two stars.

Zelerinda, by Gordon Walters


by George Schelling

The last item of fiction is Zelerinda, a long and turgid novelet by Gordon Walters, said to be a pseudonym of George W. Locke, who has published a few scattered stories under the two names.  Zelerinda is a planet that is missing half the elements in the periodic table and has a temperature of 600 degrees F., so life on it is impossible—or so one would think.  There’s been a series of nuclear explosions, which aren’t exactly natural, are they?  So two guys are sent to investigate, one of whom possesses a poorly defined psi talent called delvining, or possessing a delvin, which he thinks he has to hide, though that idea is quickly forgotten.  It’s quite badly written and about three times too long, though the ultimate revelation is at least mildly clever.  Two stars.

Mort Weisinger: The Superman Behind Superman, by Sam Moskowitz

Sam Moskowitz’s SF Profile is Mort Weisinger: The Superman Behind Superman, which immediately raises two questions: who cares, and why bother?  Meaning no disrespect to that shallow debasement of the conceptual armory of science fiction—er, let me try that again.  While Superman in all his incarnations is no doubt of interest to students of popular culture, broadly speaking, one would think that Moskowitz would find higher priorities in this series on prominent SF writers.  That said, it’s a perfectly adequate summary of a low-profile brief career in SF leading to a more substantial one in comics.  Most interestingly, during World War II, the government found it necessary to suppress two Superman strips concerning atomic energy.  Two stars.

Summing Up

So Amazing continues to idle, with the occasional loud backfire from the likes of Robert F. Young, and intervals of smooth humming from, this time, the very competent Ursula K. Le Guin and the getting-the-hang Phyllis Gotlieb.  Next month, Edmond Hamilton and James H. Schmitz are promised.  Expect no sudden shifting of gears.

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Magazine

[June 12, 1964] RISING THROUGH THE MURK (the July 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Wishing Waiting Hoping

Can it be . . . drifting up through the murk, like a forgotten suitcase floating up from an old shipwreck . . . a worthwhile issue of Amazing?

You certainly can’t tell by the cover, which is one of the ugliest jobs ever perpetrated by the usually talented Ed Emshwiller—misconceived, crudely executed, and it doesn’t help that the reproduction is just a bit off register.


by Ed Emshwiller

Mindmate, by Daniel F. Galouye

This hideous piece illustrates Mindmate, an amusingly hokey long novelet by Daniel F. Galouye, an improvement over his last two pieces in Amazing if not up to the standard of his Hugo-nominated novel Dark Universe.  In the near future, the Foundation for Electronic Cortical Stimulation, a/k/a the Funhouse chain, is raking it in selling ersatz experience, but is being chivvied by the Hon. Ronald Winston, chairman of the House Investigative Subcommittee on Cultural Influences, who thinks the Funhouses are addictive and should be stopped. 


by Ed Emshwiller

So the Funhousers do the only sensible thing—they kidnap Winston and, before killing him corporeally, use their technology to install him as a secondary personality in the brain of protagonist Sharp, who has been surgically altered to be a dead ringer for Winston.  It’s Sharp’s job to subvert the Subcommittee’s investigation, though he’s actually thinking of playing a double game. 

Sharp’s access to Winston’s memories and habits permits him to impersonate Winston quite successfully, to the point where he sometimes wonders whether he or Winston is really in charge.  And that, along with his mixed motives, sets the theme for the story: he’s not the only one playing a double game, or the only one with a double personality and questions about who is dominant. The attendant rug-pulling is executed reasonably well, though the author cheats a little: which personality emerges as dominant seems determined by plot needs and not by any identifiable aspect of the invented technology.  And it’s all acted out in the slightly incongruous context of a gangland melodrama.  But it’s sufficiently well turned and entertaining to warrant some generosity.  Four stars.

Placement Test, by Keith Laumer


by Virgil Finlay

There are two other novelets.  Keith Laumer’s Placement Test is one of his aggressively dystopian pieces, similar in degree of oppression but much different in mood from The Walls in the March 1963 Amazing, and less effective.  In a hyper-stratified future society, protagonist Maldon, who has done everything by the book, is excluded from his chosen career path through no fault of his own, relegated to Placement Testing for a menial future, and, if he doesn’t like it, Adjustment (of his brain). 

Instead of accepting his fate, he rebels, and through a combination of chutzpah and chicanery manipulates the rigid and stupid system to get what he wants . . . only to be told (here’s a revelation as massive as the cliche involved) that it was all a set-up, his rebellion was the real placement test, and he’s going to be a Top Executive (sic).  The hackneyed gimmick is offset by Laumer’s usual propulsive execution, so three stars for competence.  But if this is Laumer’s placement test . . . he’s not quite as promising as we might have thought from The Walls, It Could Be Anything, and others. 

A Game of Unchance, by Philip K. Dick


by George Schelling

The third novelet is Philip K. Dick’s A Game of Unchance, set among colonists on a Mars every bit as unrealistic as Ray Bradbury’s, but much more depressing.  A spaceship lands at a settlement, promising a carnival: “FREAKS, MAGIC, TERRIFYING STUNTS, AND WOMEN!”—the last word painted largest of all.  But the colony has just been fleeced by another carnival ship!  This time, though, the colonists have a plan: their half-witted psi-talented Fred can go to the carnival and win the games with the most valuable prizes.

The prizes turn out to be dolls with intricate internal wiring (microrobs, they’re called), which attack and escape, and later prove bent on harm to the colonists, wiring up the local fauna and the livestock.  The UN says the colonists will have to evacuate while they flood the area with poisonous gas; then a higher-powered UN guy shows up and says that they will probably have to evacuate Mars entirely in the face of this extraterrestrial invasion, for that is what it is.  At story’s end, yet another carnival ship has shown up—this one with prizes consisting of little mechanical devices claimed to be “homeostatic traps” that will catch the little things the colonists can’t catch themselves—and at the end, they are falling for it. 

In outline, this sounds like a tight little piece of irony, but on the page it’s quite atmospheric.  Dick has become hands down SF’s master of dreariness.  (“The night smelled of spiders and dry weeds; he sensed the desolation of the landscape around him.”) But more than that, he is a master of a particular kind of horror, the horror of being trapped, not necessarily physically, but in events and situations that can only have a bad end and that his characters cannot turn away from.  The fact that some of the situations (like this one) make very little sense does not detract from their power; this is a sort of dream logic at work.  It doesn’t work for everybody, but for my taste, four stars.

The Mouths of All Men, by Ed M. Clinton, Jr.


by McLane

Ed M. Clinton is a very occasional SF writer, with eight stories scattered over the past decade, almost all in second-tier magazines.  In his short story The Mouths of All Men, Soviet and American astronauts are launched simultaneously, intending to meet in space and return together in a show of brotherhood, but while they’re en route someone triggers World War III, destroying humanity.  So they match velocities, dock, and immediately try to kill each other; then they calm down, show each other their pictures of their now incinerated families, inscribe a proclamation on their viewport, and purposefully botch re-entry so they’ll be killed on the way down.  This is more of a harangue than a story—not a badly done harangue, but the sentiments are quite familiar to SF readers, and starting to get that way for everyone else.  Two stars.

The Scarlet Throne, by Edward W. Ludwig


by Blair

The Scarlet Throne by Edward W. Ludwig, a little more prolific but about as obscure as Clinton, is another Message story, this one less well done than Clinton’s.  Esteban, the patriarch of a poor Mexican family who lives near a desert rocket launching facility in the US, is troubled by the fact that space is being conquered while his family and his neighbors still lack indoor plumbing, and decides to take his message to the launch site where the President will be in attendance.  He doesn’t get far.  The story ends with a crude but appropriate joke.  The worthiness of the message is overtaken by the story’s heavy-handedness and the rather patronizing portrayal of the Mexican family.  Two stars.

Operation Shirtsleeve, by Ben Bova

Ben Bova soldiers on with Operation Shirtsleeve, discussing how to transform Venus and Mars so we can walk around in our shirtsleeves on them—i.e., terraform them, though Bova avoids this term for some reason.  Instead, he uses “shirtsleeve” as a verb at least once.  I don’t think that usage will stick.  Anyway, the answers, respectively, are bombard Venus with algae and bombard Mars ith energy and hydrogen.  (I am simplifying a little bit.) It’s the usual fare of interesting information presented dully. 

Bova does venture outside his specialties with one observation: “While the moon has some political and perhaps even military advantages, Mars is too far away for any nation to attempt to reach single-handedly.  Manned expeditions to Mars will probably be international efforts supervised by the United Nations.” I wonder if he’s giving any odds.  Bova then concludes: “The real question is: Why bother?  That is a question that can only be answered by the men who actually land on Mars.” I would think that the people who will pony up the trillions of dollars or other currency needed to pay for this project, and their representatives, might have something to say about it too.  But the fact that Bova is even asking this question gets him a grudging three stars.

In Conclusion

So: nothing terrible, everything readable, and a couple of items distinctly above average.  Celebrate! . . . while you can. 

Next month . . . Robert F. Young.

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