by John Boston
On the June 1963 Amazing, the cover by Ed Emshwiller seems to portray humanity crucified, with photogenic fella and gal affixed to the front panels of computers, anguished expressions on their faces and slots cut in them like the holes in a computer punch-card. I guess they are mutilated, if not bent, folded, or stapled. This is done in the hyper-literal and slightly crude mode of Emsh’s Ace Double covers, which compares badly to the less literal but much more imaginative and better-executed work he is contributing to F&SF. Suffice it to say that Emsh has not displaced William Jennings Bryan as our nation’s leading purveyor of Crucifixion imagery. The cover illustrates Jack Sharkey’s two-part serial The Programmed People, on which I will defer until it’s finished next month.
Of the other stories, the longest and best is J.G. Ballard’s novelet The Encounter, a notable departure from his usual tone and attitude. Astronomer Charles Ward takes a position at a California observatory and meets Andrew Kandinski, author of The Landings from Outer Space, who claims to have met a Venusian visiting in (his, her, its) flying saucer, and is trying to spread the revealed word that Earth must abandon its space explorations. Kandinski is clearly suggested by George Adamski, author of Inside the Space Ships and others, who makes similar claims. But the similarity stops there, since Adamski appears to be an outright fraud, while Ballard’s Kandinski is a tortured character who actually believes his stories. Ward becomes fascinated and can’t stay away from him, with personally disastrous consequences when the extraterrestrials come again—or do they?
Ballard deftly preserves the ambiguity, and along the way amusingly notes in passing the variety and similarity of imagery among SF, UFO mania, and more commercial popular culture (the only job Kandinski can get is waiting tables at a space-themed restaurant called The Site Tycho). There is also a brief but telling riff on Jung’s theory of flying saucers as a manifestation of the unconscious in times of impending crisis, and a suggestion that Kandinski may prove to be one of the “mana-personalities of history.” There’s a lot going on here and it is purposefully not tied up neatly.
This is also one of Ballard’s most humane stories. In some Ballard stories—even very good ones like last year’s Thirteen to Centaurus—his characters are more like finely-made constructs, machined to serve the author’s argument, than actual human beings. By contrast, both Kandinski and Ward come across as genuine, flawed, and vulnerable people, and the story as less of an intellectual construct than much of Ballard. (Of course, that’s part of the construct, but let’s not follow that line of argument any further.) This is a story that will be worth coming back to. Five stars.
So: Amazing has justified its existence for one more month. What else is here, besides the serial? Three short stories, two of them very short indeed. Let’s take the longer one, Telempathy, by Vance Simonds, his first in the SF magazines. It’s a story that is best allowed to speak for itself, though unfortunately some length is required to get the full flavor. Here’s the beginning:
“Huckster Heaven, in Hollywood, set out to fulfill the adman’s dream in every particular. It recognized more credit cards than it offered entrees on the menu. Various atmospheres, complete with authentic decor, were offered: Tahitian, Parisian, even Afro-Cuban for the delectation of the Off-Beat Client. In every case, houris glided to and fro in appropriate native costume, bearing viands calculated to quell, at least for the nonce, harsh thoughts of the combative marketplace. Instead, beamish advertisers and their account executive hosts were plied so lavishly that soon the sounds of competitive strife were but a memory; and in the postprandial torpor, dormant dreams of largesse on the Lucullan scale came alive. In these surroundings, droppers of such names as the Four Seasons, George V, and the Stadium Club were notably silent.”
And it goes on like that. If one can push aside the layers of attitude and exhibitionism (a canoe paddle might do it—or maybe a sump pump would be more suitable), a story becomes visible. Everett says he’s got something that will precisely predict the reception of new products or advertising campaigns, which he calls Empathy, and which appears to consist of extra-sensory rapport with several very smart or insightful people, mediated through Everett’s mutant pet mongoose. So Cam the adman takes him to see his client Father Sowles, a Nehemiah Scudder-like figure whose campaign for high office Cam is fronting. The campaign goes into high gear based on Everett’s ultimate inside information, though Father Sowles complains that the message is being lost: e.g., “And what about the race mongrelizers? . . . Trying to subvert America with an Afro-Asian Trojan Horse!”
A lot of this is actually pretty funny, and it’s nice to see such explicit skewering of current politico-religious crackpottery. If Simonds—whose first appearance in the SF magazines this is—had cut the supercilious vaudeville by about 30%, especially in the first several pages of the story, it would have been much more incisive and less irritating. Adding it up, three stars, indulgently.
Thomas M. Disch’s three-page The Demi-Urge is a good example of an old cliche, the report by visiting aliens about how things are on Earth—this time with a minority report and a clever twist, confidently and economically written. Disch is another new writer, with one previous story in Fantastic, also praised here
Arthur Porges is a prolific veteran of the SF and fantasy magazines (though rarely Amazing), and more recently of the crime fiction mags. His stories are invariably either short or shorter. The two and a half-page Through Channels posits that if you can reach millions of eyes with a TV broadcast, you can freeze millions of brains by adding another unspecified frequency. About the only interesting thing here is that one of the programs on at the fatal moment is another fanatical right-wing preacher—two in one issue! Two stars for competent execution of not very much.
Sam Moskowitz is at it again with Eric Frank Russell: Death of a Doubter, consisting of his usual reasonably competent biographical summary and review of Russell’s work, with the usual greater focus on earlier than later work: there is no mention of his novels of the later 1950s, Three to Conquer (serialized as Call Him Dead), Wasp, and The Space Willies, the last an expansion of his very popular novelet Plus X (Astounding, June 1956). Hold that thought, and look at Moskowitz’s subtitle again. He quotes a 1937 letter from Russell to a fanzine describing himself as “another young rationalist of 32 years of age,” and says (after touching base at Thomas Aquinas): “The weakness of the Rationalist viewpoint is that it promulgates no ideas of its own; it waits to be shown. Stubbornly waiting to be shown, Russell had a hard time dreaming up new plot ideas.” Later on, after selectively discussing Russell’s work of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, Moskowitz sums up: “Most significant of all is the final impression the works give of the man. The display of outward toughness of manner, speech and philosophy is a facade. A man who feels not only a reverence for but a communion with life, who transmits those feelings and with them his protests against prejudice in terms of poetry and parable—such a man is not a rationalist.” Here Moskowitz is not only psychologizing without a license, but going about double the speed limit.
Further, Moskowitz is quite right in characterizing some of Russell’s later work, but hardly all of it. Three to Conquer is marked by violent xenophobia, and Wasp and The Space Willies are to varying degrees comedies of condescension to aliens, who are presented as stupid, incompetent, and easily gulled by their betters, homo sapiens. So Russell is not a writer who changed in any identifiable direction; look at the whole picture and you see a writer of utterly contradictory tendencies that he has maintained through his career. Come on, Sam; we saw you palm that card. Two stars.
Well, altogether, not bad so far: one very fine story and two promising efforts by new or newish writers. But the specter of Sharkey’s serial looms over all, to be dared next month.
