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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 2, 1969] People, Machines, and Other Thinking Entities (October 1969 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Machine Language

Two events occurred today that demonstrate how computers can communicate with each other and with people.

At the University of California in Los Angeles, a gizmo called an Interface Message Processor (IMP) allowed two computers on campus to have a conversation, of sorts.  (I assume it was something like beep boop beep.) Plans are underway to set up another IMP at Stanford University, so the two institutes of higher education can share data.  One can imagine computers all over the planet chatting away, plotting to take over the world . . . well, maybe not that.


The thing that lets computers exchange information.  Don't ask me how it works.

The same day, a device replacing your friendly neighborhood teller appeared at a branch of the Chemical Bank in Rockville Centre, New York.  Apparently it can take your money, give you back your money, etc.  Is it just me, or does Chemical Bank seem like a weird name for a financial institution?  Not to mention the fact that the city doesn't know how to spell center. 


Possibly depositing some of the money his company makes from the robot teller.

Fittingly, the latest issue of Fantastic features machines and other things besides humans who are capable of communicating, and performing other activities that demonstrate intelligence.


Cover art by Johnny Bruck.

As usual these days, the cover image comes from a German publication.  It's not Perry Rhodan for a change.


Translated, this says The Ring Around the Sun.  This seems to be a version of Gallun's 1950 story A Step Further Out, with additional material from German writer Clark Darlton, one of the folks behind Perry Rhodan.

Editorial, by Ted White

The new editor talks about the cancellation of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour because of material CBS considered offensive.  He goes on to discuss the hypocrisy of some members of the older generation, and how science fiction and fantasy might help bridge the gap between young folks and their elders.  Pretty serious stuff.  He also admits that Fantastic is less popular than its sister publication Amazing, and promises to do something about that.

No rating.

It Could Be Anywhere, by Ted White

Maybe printing his own fiction is part of the editor's plan to improve sales of the magazine.


Illustrations by Michael Hinge.

The author spends half a page explaining the provenance of this story.  He was inspired by Keith Laumer's story It Could Be Anything (Amazing, January 1963.) Note the similar title.  My esteemed colleague John Boston gave this work a full five stars.

At first, White's tribute took the form of a novel called The Jewels of Elsewhen a couple of years ago.  The Noble Editor gave that book four stars.  Will this latest variation on a theme reach the same exalted level as its predecessors?


When the familiar becomes unfamiliar.

The narrator is a big guy who works as a private detective.  After a very long day, he tries to ride home on the subway in the wee hours of the morning.  A wino falls out of his seat.  When the gumshoe tries to help the fellow, he finds out that he's not really a genuine human being, but some kind of lifeless simulation.

The only other real person on the subway is a young woman.  (In the tradition of popular fiction, she's always called a girl.) When they get off the subway, they find out that the entire city is fake, just a bunch of empty buildings.

The premise reminds me a bit of Fritz Leiber's short novel You're All Alone, in which almost all people are mindless automatons.  There's an explanation, of sorts, for what's going on.  The characters are interesting, even if they are mostly passive observers of the situation.  The way in which the woman's ring plays a role in the plot struck me as arbitrary.

Three stars.

A Guide to the City, by Lin Carter

This was a big surprise.  I expect Carter to offer very old-fashioned sword-and-sorcery yarns or equally outdated space operas.  Who knew that he could venture into territory explored by Jorge Luis Borges or Franz Kafka?

The story takes the form of an article.  The author lives in a gigantic, possibly infinite, city.  A single neighborhood takes up hundreds of thousands of blocks.  Traveling such a distance is the stuff of legends.  The author explains why mapping the entire city is impossible.

This is not a piece for those who demand much in the way of plot or characters.  It's all concept, an intellectual exploration of an abstract, mathematical premise.  I enjoyed it pretty well; others may find nothing of interest in it.

Three stars.

Ten Percent of Glory, by Verge Foray

In the afterlife, people continue to exist based on how living folks remember them.  George Washington can expect to be part of the collective memory for a very long time; Millard Fillmore, maybe not.

The main character is an agent of sorts, who collects a percentage of the renown of his clients in exchange for promoting them in various ways.  The plot involves the motives of his secretary.

Stuck somewhat between whimsy and satire, this odd little tale winds up with an ending that may raise some eyebrows.  I'm still not quite sure what I thought of it.

Three stars. 

Man Swings SF, by Richard A. Lupoff

This is a broad spoof of New Wave science fiction.  It starts with an introduction by the fictional Blodwen Blenheim, which alternates lyrics from songs performed by Tiny Tim with a rhapsodizing about an exciting new form of speculative fiction coming from the Isle of Man. 

After this, we get a story called In the Kitchen by the imaginary author Ova Hamlet.  Like a lot of New Wave SF, it's hard to describe the plot.  Suffice to say that it's full of outrageous metaphors and features a doomed protagonist.  The piece ends with a mock biography and a ersatz critique of Ova Hamlet.

The (real) author is able to write convincingly in the style of some of the things found in New Worlds, with tongue firmly in cheek.  Amusing enough, even if it goes on a little too long for an extended joke.

Three stars.

A Modest Manifesto, by Terry Carr

This essay, reprinted in the magazine's Fantasy Fandom section, originally appeared in the fanzine Warhoon.  It wanders all over the place, but for the most part it deals with what the author sees as a cultural revolution, both in fantasy and science fiction and in the outside world.  Food for thought.

Three stars.

So much for the new stuff.  Let's turn to the reprints.

Secret of the Serpent, by Don Wilcox

This wild yarn first appeared in the January 1948 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones.

As I noted at the start of this article, we're going to run into a lot of entities that have as much sentience as human beings.  Would you believe that this one is a gigantic people-eating serpent?


Illustration by Jones also.

Let me back up a little.  The serpent used to be an ordinary guy, until he wound up on what the author calls a space island. If that means something other than a planet, it escapes me.

He encounters a huge two-headed cat (don't look at me, I don't make up this stuff) who used to be a woman.  The place is also inhabited by a bunch of pygmies, who used to be people living on Mars.  Not to mention some Mad Scientists.  Or the guy who is a giant skull on a small body.

Very long and complex story short, the formerly human serpent gets partly changed back, and he becomes a serpent with human arms and legs.  Somebody wants to turn him into a skeleton for a museum.  There's a revolution by the enslaved pygmies against the Mad Scientists.  A lot more stuff happens.

I hope I have managed to convey the fact that this is a crazy story.  Plot logic is thrown out the window in favor of action, action, and more action.  The only explanation for the weird transformations?  The water on the space island does it.

Nutty enough to hold the reader's attention for a while, but at full novella length the novelty soon wears off.  I got the feeling the author was pulling my leg at times, but there's not enough humor to make the story a parody.

Two stars.

All Flesh is Brass, by Milton Lesser

The August 1952 issue of Fantastic Adventures supplies this grim tale.


Cover art by Walter Popp.

The Soviet Union has conquered Western Europe, and is now attacking the United States via Canada.  The story takes the form of the diary of a soldier.  He learns that some dead fighters are being replaced by robotic duplicates, who not only copy their bodies but also their minds.


Illustration by Ed Emshwiller.

The replacements don't even know that they're not human, until that fact becomes obvious in one way or another.  They are also designed to be eliminated within a couple of years after they're activated.  Let's just say that the situation doesn't work out well.

In addition to the plot, the story paints a vivid and realistic portrait of warfare, as seen by an ordinary soldier.  I was particularly impressed by the way the author handles the subplot concerning the female fighter encountered by the main character.  I wasn't expecting that to go in the direction it did.

Four stars.

According to You . . ., by Ted White, etc.

After an extended absence, the letter column returns.  I wouldn't bother to mention it, but it's odd in a couple of ways.  First up is a mock letter from Blodwhen Blenheim and Ova Hamlet (remember them?) thanking the editor for printing Hamlet's story.  A cute extension of the joke.

Next are a couple of letters asking for more sword-and-sorcery stories.  One reader includes a poem about Conan.  I probably shouldn't say anything about the quality of the verse.

Last is a missive attacking just about everything in the April issue.  The writer, if he's real, is in jail.  Hmm.

No rating.

Isolationist, by Mack Reynolds

This ironic yarn comes from the April 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones again.

The narrator is a cynical old farmer, suspicious of technology and of the modern world in general.  When an alien spaceship lands in his field, he thinks it's an American vessel of some sort.


Illustration by Julian S. Krupa.

The accents of the friendly inhabitants convince him they're foreigners, which makes them even less welcome than before.  Not to mention that they ruined part of his crop of corn.

This is a very simple story, with an inevitable conclusion.  The crotchety narrator is a decent creation, but there's not much else to it.

Two stars.

The Unthinking Destroyer, by Rog Phillips

The December 1948 issue of Amazing Stories offers this philosophical tale.


Cover art by Harold W. McCauley.

Two guys talk about the possibility of intelligent life being unrecognizable by human beings.  (Back to the theme with which I started this article.) In alternating sections of text, two beings discuss abstract concepts.


Illustration by Bill Terry.

It took me a while to get the point of this story.  It might be seen as a rather silly joke, or as something a bit more meaningful.

Two stars.

Fantasy Books, by Fritz Leiber and Francis Lanthrop

Leiber offers mixed reviews of a collection and a novel.  Lanthrop praises three books by Leiber about the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

No rating.

Worth Talking About?

This was a middle-of-the-road issue, with everything hovering around a three-star rating.  Not a waste of time, but not particularly memorable either.  Maybe someday a computer will be able to read it to you, so you don't have to turn the pages of the magazine.


The Parametric Artificial Talker (PAT), developed by the University of Edinburgh in 1956, was the first machine to synthesize human speech.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 6, 1967] New Look, New . . . ? (October 1967 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The October Amazing is the second instance of what may prove to be the magazine’s New Look.  Like the June issue, it is fronted by a pleasantly garish and nouveau-pulpish cover that, though uncredited, is known to the cognoscenti as another by Johnny Bruck, reprinted from a 1963 issue of the German Perry Rhodan magazine.  Farewell Frank R. Paul?  We’ll see.  And maybe the contents are being updated as well.  Of the five reprinted stories here, all are from the late 1940s or the ‘50s, at least in publication date.


by Johnny Bruck

That is not necessarily good news; Amazing published plenty of dreck through most of its history.  Selection is all.  But this issue’s selection is pretty decent.  Also Harry Harrison’s book reviews are still here, with a fillip.  In addition to Harrison’s own reviews of a new Edgar Rice Burroughs bio, the latest Analog anthology, and an Arthur Sellings novel, there is Brian Aldiss’s review of Harrison’s own The Technicolor Time Machine—back-slappingly complimentary, as one might expect from these close collaborators.  Harrison and Aldiss edited this year’s Nebula Award Stories, due out just about now, and it appears that they will be joining the party with their own “year’s best” anthology next year.

Santaroga Barrier (Part 1 of 3), by Frank Herbert


by Gray Morrow

Frank Herbert’s new novel Santaroga Barrier begins its three-part serialization in this issue.  As usual, I will withhold comment until it’s finished.  A cursory rummage indicates that it seems to have something to do with people in California taking drugs.  It will be interesting to see what Herbert can develop from such an unlikely premise.

The Children's Room, by Raymond F. Jones

Raymond F. Jones is the very model of a modern science fiction writer.  He checks all the boxes.  His career is so generic as to be paradigmatic, or maybe vice versa.  He started out in Campbell’s Astounding, just in time to join new writers George O. Smith and Hal Clement and retread Murray Leinster in keeping that magazine going when such mainstays as Heinlein, Hubbard, Williamson, and de Camp were lost to military service or war work.  After the war, when paper shortages loosened and the pulps returned from wartime quarterly schedules to monthly or bimonthly, Jones—along with Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt, George O. Smith and other Astounding writers—began helping to fill them as well as continuing to appear in Astounding. When specialty publishers began to muster the large backlog of magazine SF for book publication, Jones was there with his Astounding novel Renaissance and a collection of his 1940s stories, The Toymaker.  When Galaxy appeared in 1950 and instantly broadened the range of the field, Jones contributed the shocking A Stone and a Spear, which would likely have been unpublishable anywhere else.  When “juvenile” (the term is becoming “young adult”) science fiction became a big item, Jones provided the well-remembered Son of the Stars and its sequel Planet of Light to the John C. Winston series.  When SF started to be big box office, Jones’s novel This Island Earth was turned into a mediocre but high-profile movie.  But somehow his recognition never kept pace with his resume, and now he seems to have given up and been largely forgotten, with only five new stories since 1960.

The Children’s Room, from the September 1947 Fantastic Adventures, is only the third story Jones published outside Astounding.  It’s about super-people—hardly an unusual theme in that magazine—but it pursues some of the implications of that idea that Campbell may not have found too palatable.  Bill Starbuck, chief engineer at an electronics company, picks up one of the books his IQ-240 son checked out from the university library’s children’s room, and finds himself captivated by a particularly subtle fairy tale.  Next day the kid is sick and the book is due so he returns it, only to be told “We have no children’s department.” But on the way out, he sees the children’s room, returns the book, and the librarian there (having learned that Bill has read the book), gives him more to take home.


by Rod Ruth

So what gives?  Time-traveling mutant super-people, of course—what else?  In the future, humanity is up against an alien species that is out-evolving them!  So they must scour the past for those people with beneficial mutations who never had a chance to amount to much, contact them and get them used to their exalted status (groom them, you might say), and then carry them off to their grand destiny in the future, never to see their time or their families again.  Only the mutants can even read the books, or see the time travellers’ children’s rooms.  Bill’s an exception—he can read the books and see the rooms, but has none of the other talents of the mutants, so he’s not invited to the future; and Mom’s a total loss. 

So the kid gets on board with the plan, and the parents both come around, since there’s not much else they can do.  But there’s a consolation prize for the parents (otherwise they would have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do to the Bureau of Child Welfare), and here Jones twists the knife in this formerly mild story.  (Read it and see.) Or, about as likely, Jones is just naively working out the plot, and it is only we mutants reading it who can perceive its monstrousness.  As, no doubt, Campbell did, and rejected the story, or so I surmise.  Four stars, even if the fourth may have been accidental on Jones’s part.

Five Years in the Marmalade, by Geoff St. Reynard


by Bill Terry

Geoff St. Reynard, a pseudonym of Robert W. Krepps, contributes Five Years in the Marmalade (Fantastic Adventures, July 1949), an inane joke.  Two guys walk into a bar—Muleath and Dangeur, who just returned from Alpha Centauri—and after they’ve had a drink, a Martian teleports in, just returned from a stay on Mercury.  The boys call him over, and he tells them about his “single-trav,” which will take him anywhere he can think of, through (of course) the power of thought.  So they recommend he head off next to Marmalade, which Muleath has made up and which exists only in his brain.  Connect the dots.  It's as skillfully executed as it is silly, and remarkably, Everett F. Bleiler and T.E. Dikty thought enough of it to put it in The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1950.  Two stars, barely.

The Siren Sounds at Midnight, by Frank M. Robinson

Frank M. Robinson’s The Siren Sounds at Midnight (Fantastic, November-December 1953) is entirely contrived: “they” have set a midnight deadline to resolve “their” differences, and if things don’t work out, the bombs will be flying and it’s all over for everybody, or close to it.  The story is redeemed by Robinson’s quiet good writing, following a long-married couple as they spend what may be their last hours together.  Three stars.

Largo, by Theodore Sturgeon

“More lyrical science fiction from the typewriter of Theodore Sturgeon,” says the blurb for Largo (Fantastic Adventures, July 1947).  All those terms are debatable except probably “typewriter.” Here’s the alleged science involved, from the opening of the story: “The chandeliers on the eighty-first floor of the Empire State Building swung wildly without any reason.  A company of soldiers marched over a new, well-built bridge, and it collapsed.  Enrico Caruso filled his lungs and sang, and the crystal glass before him shattered.”

The style is not so much lyrical as swaggering and demonstrative.  Here’s the next stretch of text:

“And Vernon Drecksall composed his Largo.

“He composed it in hotel rooms and scored it on trains and ships, and it took more than twenty-two years.  He started it in the days when smoke hung over the city, because factories used coal instead of broadcast power; when men spoke to men over wires and never saw each other’s faces; when the nations of earth were ruled by the greed of a man or the greed of men.  During the Thirty Days War and the Great Change which followed it, he labored; and he finished it on the day of his death.”


by Henry Sharp

That is, “I’m gonna tell you a story and I’m just the guy who can do it.” And, of course, Sturgeon is that guy, on his better days.  The striking thing about this story is the conspicuous confidence and cadence with which he lays out what is actually a pretty hackneyed plot—an extravagant revenge drama.  Drecksall is an eccentric musical genius with an all-consuming work in progress.  He works at menial jobs so support himself and his violin. Then he falls in love with the beautiful but vapid Gretel.  A crassly entrepreneurial type, Wylie, recognizes his genius, exploits it and him, and also ends up marrying Gretel himself. Drecksall continues to perfect his Largo, though it’s sounding darker all the time.  He builds his own auditorium to perform it in, invites Gretel and Wylie to hear it, and then . . . fade to black. 

There’s more, but it’s all in the telling, which is worth reading as a conspicuous demonstration of craft if nothing else.  This is Sturgeon’s fourth SF or fantasy story to be published by someone other than John Campbell, and it contrasts sharply to Blabbermouth, the second such, from Fantastic Adventures a few months earlier.  That one was told in an off-the-rack style that fit Sturgeon like an embarrassing Hallowe’en costume.  This is Sturgeon being himself, performing a circus act of the redemption of hokum by style.  Splitting the difference, three stars.

Scar-Tissue, by Henry S. Whitehead


by Robert Fuqua

The antique of the bunch is Henry S. Whitehead’s Scar-Tissue, which came from the July 1946 Amazing, but was posthumously published; the author died in 1932.  It begins unpromisingly, with the narrator asking his friend the ship’s doctor, “What is your opinion on the Atlantis question?” This becomes a frame story in which one Joe Smith, with Harvard and Oxford’s Balliol College on his resume, describes his past lives in prehistoric times, in Africa under the Portuguese (“Zim-baub-weh,” the place was called), and then Atlantis, where he was a gladiator, and he’s got scars to prove it.  It’s a perfectly readable old-fashioned story.  Three stars.

Summing Up

Not bad, a readable issue of this ill-conceived incarnation of Amazing, and better than not bad if the Herbert serial pans out.  We'll see.




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