Tag Archives: checkpoint lambda

[July 22, 1966] Ridiculous! (August 1966 Amazing)


by John Boston

The Sublime Don’t Work Here No More

. . . Not that it showed up very often when it did.  But the previous issue, which at last attained the status of “not bad,” raised hopes, now dashed again.

The theme of this August 1966 Amazing is plainly announced on the cover, a crude and silly-looking image by James B. Settles, from the back cover of the July 1942 Amazing, titled Radium Airship of Saturn.  You might also think that it doesn’t make much sense, but you’d be wrong!  What you see is actually the top two-thirds of the 1942 version; what you’re missing is the surface of Saturn, and a caption: “The motor in this air-ship is a disintegrating rocket-blast caused by the breaking down of a copper core by a stream of powerful radium rays concentrated on it.  It acts like a giant fireworks rocket.” It’s science!


by James B. Settles

Inside, the theme is carried forward with the conclusion of the Murray Leinster serial begun in June, a new novelet by Philip K. Dick, and five reprinted stories, particulars below.  The brightest spot in the issue is the absence of an editorial, though the usual brief and praiseful letter column is present.

While the editor misses no chance to bad-mouth the magazine’s prior regime, directly and through his selection of letters to publish, one thing has remained constant, and has seemingly intensified: the abominable proofreading.  (“Strickly speaking,” indeed.)

There's also a different sort of difficulty facing Amazing and Fantastic now.  It's been rumored for a while that they are not paying the authors for the reprinted material, which is now confirmed for those not plugged into the more authoritative gossip channels.  Kris Vyas-Myall has helpfully flagged the new issue of the fanzine Riverside Quarterly, in which the editor mentions that he confirmed with Kris Neville that he did not get paid for his recently reprinted story, and confirmed with Damon Knight, president of the newly constituted Science Fiction Writers of America, that this is the general practice. 

I suppose this may reflect the publishing practice prevalent in earlier years of buying "all rights" (sometimes simply by so noting on the author's check, with no more formal contract than that).  So maybe it's legal, but it stinks.  Knight has called on the members of SFWA to boycott the publisher until it changes its ways, and editor Leland Sapiro suggests that readers do the same with the magazines.  I'd take that advice, but duty dictates otherwise.

Stopover in Space (Part 2 of 2), by Murray Leinster

Murray Leinster’s latest Western treads a familiar path.  There’s a new sheriff, but he’s not really quite in town yet, because somebody doesn’t want him there, and it probably has to do with the stagecoach full of gold that is expected to arrive any day now.  It seems like business as usual from the author of Kid Deputy, Outlaw Guns, and Son of the Flying ‘Y’.

Oh, wait.  Sorry.  Wrong rut.  Trying again:

In Murray Leinster’s latest space opera, Lieutenant Scott of the Space Patrol is on his way to take over his first command, Checkpoint Lambda, a station orbiting the star Canis Lambda, whose system is of no special interest except that no fewer than six space lanes cross there.  (Didn’t know space has lanes?  People established them, I suppose so no one will get lost.) En route, Scott learns that several passengers had been supposed to leave Lambda on a ship recently, but didn’t, under peculiar circumstances—and one of them was “a girl.” This bears repetition, to the author and to Scott; a few pages later, Scott is reviewing the available facts, and notes that “passengers—including a girl—hadn’t left the checkpoint when they should.”


by Gray Morrow

Now, what could be happening?  Scott doesn’t know, but he does know the Golconda Ship is expected to show up at Lambda in the near future.  That ship is owned by a bunch of guys who went somewhere nobody knows and came back with a load of “treasure” which made them rich, and they go back for more every four years or so.  What kind of treasure?  Gold, platinum, radioactives, miracle cures from an unknown planet, the secret wisdom of an ancient civilization?  Doesn’t say, now or at any other point until the end of the story.  For the author’s purposes, you don’t need to know.  It’s just a game piece.

So what seems to be going on here?  Owlhoots!  Er, sorry.  Gangsters!  Scott is strongly discouraged from debarking onto Checkpoint Lambda, but insists, and finds himself going through the motions of normality with some slovenly types pretending to be the station crew.  He meets their nominal mastermind, one Chenery, who pretends to know Scott—and, before too long, he encounters the real power, whom Chenery recruited, and who is known as—Bugsy!  He is there to provide and direct the muscle, er, blastermen.*

* No, Bugsy and the Blastermen did not play at last Saturday’s sock hop.  That was somebody else.

So, here are the pieces in play: a good guy, some bad guys, treasure to be fought over, “a girl” to be protected.  What else do we need?  Oh yes, an external menace.  How about the Five Comets?  The Canis Lambda system has no planets—they all blew up eons ago, and the Checkpoint is attached to one of the bigger pieces—but it has some really fine comets, and they are all going to arrive at about the same time, right athwart the Checkpoint’s orbit—and there’s no astrogator, except for Scott!  (One might ask why the powers that be wouldn’t put the Checkpoint in some other location than the entirely predictable convergence point of multiple comets, but one would be wasting time to do so.)

The “girl”—an adult woman, of course—does have a name, Janet, though no others are disclosed.  Her full name would have to be (apologies to Alfred Hitchcock) Janet S. MacGuffin (“S” for Secondary), since she drives a part of the plot.  One of Scott’s challenges is to keep her safe from . . . well, let her tell it.  She says that Chenery “did keep the others from—harming me.” Such an eloquent dash! 

But clearly, as in last year’s Killer Ship, women have no role in tough situations other than to create the need for men to protect them.  At one point, Scott parks Janet for safekeeping in one of the Checkpoint’s lifeboats, gives her a snap course in operating it if necessary, and reassures her: “It’s not a very good chance.  But there aren’t many women who could make it a chance at all.  I think you can.” She doesn't have to try.  Later, though, Scott gives her something to do—maneuver the station to avoid comet debris while he’s busy elsewhere—and she blows it.  But he promises himself not even to hint at criticizing her, and at the end, after all is safely resolved, she is performing women’s other function in Leinster’s fiction as she and Scott get better acquainted.

This one is a little less vapid than Killer Ship, and considerably less irritating, since it lacks the constant reminders that interstellar travel will be just like the eighteenth century.  It’s just as verbose as Killer Ship, but the padding is a little better connected to what is actually going on in the story, and there is a bit more cleverness to the plot.  So, two stars for this played-out and left-behind author. 

Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday, by Philip K. Dick

The other new story is Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday, by the more-prominent-every-day Philip K. Dick, which once more vindicates my warning: when big names show up at the bottom of the market, there’s a reason for it.  This is a story about time running backwards.  It starts with a guy getting up in the morning (wait a minute—morning?), getting some dirty clothes to put on, and picking up a packet of whiskers to glue evenly onto his face, presumably to be absorbed over the course of the day.  So where do these whiskers come from, and who puts them into packets, and how are they distributed?  What happens if you run out?  And why does anyone bother with them?


by Gray Morrow

It goes on.  People begin conversations with “good-bye” and end with “hello,” but they don’t talk backwards in between.  Et cetera.  Sorry, it doesn’t work.  PKD’s specialty is making preposterous ideas at least momentarily plausible, but this one is too long a stretch.  It’s not enough for the reader to suspend disbelief; for this story you’d have to shoot it out of a cannon.

There’s more, of course, but not better.  Dick does have enough knack as a storyteller to keep things readable as the reader fumes over the contradictions, so, two stars.

The Voice of the Void, by John W. Campbell, Jr.

The Voice of the Void was John W. Campbell, Jr.’s fourth published story, from the Summer 1930 Amazing Stories Quarterly, and at first it’s sort of refreshing: the story of humanity’s quest for survival as the sun is burning out, first disassembling large parts of the solar system and moving pieces closer to the sun, then looking for a new home around a younger or longer-lived star. 


by Hans Wessolowski

The story is about 98% character- and dialogue-free, though the astronomer Hal Jus has several cameos along the way.  Instead, it chronicles a long course of human discovery and problem-solving, grandiose and grave in equal measure.  It is a little reminiscent of Edmond Hamilton’s Intelligence Undying of a few issues back, if that story had been administered a mild sedative.

But things turn dark soon enough.  Humanity wants Betelgeuse for its new home.  But it turns out there’s no vacancy there—that system is inhabited by energy beings who don’t take kindly to human invasion.  Allegedly they are not intelligent, but their facility at fatally repelling unwanted visitors suggests otherwise.  Now, Betelgeuse is not necessary to human survival.  There’s another star handy; it doesn’t have planets, but the human fleet is so large that humanity could hang out for a few years in orbit and build some suitable planets.  But we want Betelgeuse!  So the indigenes have to go, and are exterminated in a siege of human-devised energy rays.

Well, that puts a damper on things.  Gratuitous genocide can ruin one’s whole reading experience.  Two stars with clothespin on nose.

The Gone Dogs, by Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert’s The Gone Dogs (November 1954 issue) is a slightly more interesting bad story than many, rather crudely written—surprisingly so, since it appeared only a year before Herbert’s much more capable and ambitious Under Pressure a/k/a The Dragon in the Sea.  On the other hand, it’s free of the turgidity of his current work, especially the characters’ internal monologues about the motives and intentions of one another.  Pick your poison. 

In the story, an artificially mutated virus is killing off all the world’s dogs, abetted by the fact that humans carry the virus; how to save the species?  One solution, highly unauthorized, is to give the last few to the Vegans, who are trying to breed dogs, or something like them.  Matters are enlivened along the way by a psychotic dog lover who’s determined to grab one of the last living dogs for herself (and will kill it with the virus she’s carrying).  At the end there's a slightly silly and anticlimactic twist.

One thing that’s annoying here is the hyper-facile and acontextual (thoughtless, for short) deployment of standard components from the SF warehouse.  At one point the main character needs to dodge a congressional subpoena.  What better way than to flee to Vega?  All by himself, with a forged pass to a faster-than-light spaceship which any idiot, or at least a biologist, can apparently navigate solo across interstellar distances, without notice and whenever the need arises.  There’s no reason in the rest of the story to believe in this capability.  This sort of thing was common in ‘50s SF but that doesn’t make it more palatable.  Two stars.

The Pent House, by David H. Keller, M.D.

David H. Keller, M.D., is in the position, unusual for him, of providing the least ridiculous story in the issue, chiefly because he essays so little.  The Pent House, from the February 1932 Amazing, is a minor exercise in benign crankiness.  A rich guy who is also a doctor discovers that humanity is about to be wiped out by the spread of a cancer germ, so he sets up a nice sealed-off apartment on top of a tall building, makes arrangements for a generous supply of life’s necessities and amenities, and advertises for a couple who really like each other to take on a lucrative job for five years.  The lucky winners persuade him to stay with them in the (large) apartment. 


by Leo Morey

Blissful years pass.  The woman of the couple is not feeling well, so the old rich doctor goes in to look at her and some hours later tells the husband, “It’s a girl.” He hadn’t noticed his wife’s pregnancy.  Maybe this is not the least ridiculous story here after all.

More time passes, the five years are up, and the old guy goes downstairs to check things out.  Turns out the cancer epidemic was thwarted by medical science.  So things are the same?  No—noisier, dirtier, generally less civilized (to summarize an extensive rant).  “It seemed to me that the world has escaped the cancer death so it could die from neurasthenia,” pronounces the doctor.  He’s ready to pay the couple the fortune they have earned and bid them adieu, but the wife says forget it, just order up some more supplies and let’s lock the door for another five years of "Heaven in a penthouse."  Two stars for competent rendering discounted for triviality.

The Man Who Knew All the Answers, by Donald Bern

The Man Who Knew All the Answers, from the August 1940 Amazing, is bylined Donald Bern, who was actually Al Bernstein, who has half a dozen or so credits in Amazing and Fantastic Adventures in 1940-42, and nothing else in the SF magazines.  Frankly, just as well.  This is a silly story about a nasty guy named Scuttlebottom, who stumbles (literally) into Ye Village Book Stall, and encounters the proprietor (“He wore a pince-nez.  He looked exactly like a person who wears a pince-nez.”), who sells him a book called The Dormant Brain.  The book teaches him to become telepathic, so now he knows what everybody thinks of him, which is unpleasant, and he then comes to a contrived bad end as a result of his new talent.  One star per the ground rules, despite this story’s utter lack of any reason for existing. 

The Metal Martyr, by Robert Moore Williams

Robert Moore Williams’s The Metal Martyr, from the July 1950 Amazing, is a mildly clever but overall pretty silly story about a robot, named Two, who develops the delusion that he is a man—this in the far future, long after a rumored rebellion by robots against humans, and the fall of human civilization.  Two flees the robot enclave to avoid having its brain dissolved and replaced, and comes across a couple of humans, named Bill and Ed, never mind the intervening millennia.  Two visits them at their home cave, but some of the humans get scared and threaten it, so Two flees deeper into the cave.  There it discovers the remains of an ancient mining site full of machinery, skeletons, and books explaining the past and how things got to their present metal-poor state—and showing no robots, revealing that humans once did just fine without them.  Two recovers from its delusion of humanity.  After giving the humans their past back (although they, unlike robots, can’t read), Two heads back to robotdom and its rendezvous with the acid vat.


by Edmond B. Swiatek

Williams was once a titanically prolific contributor to pulps of all genres, but most frequently SF and fantasy, and within them, most frequently to Ray Palmer’s Amazing and Fantastic Adventures, where he was part of the regular crew that filled those magazines with juvenilia.  Palmer was gone before this one appeared, but it is true to the tradition.  Two stars, charitably.

Summing Up

There’s not much to say.  The last issue finally achieved consistent readability, a first for the Sol Cohen regime.  Now, back into the murk and muck.






[May 8, 1966] A Respite (June 1966 Amazing)


by John Boston

Hope Springs Eternal

. . . but, as Groucho Marx might put it, hope springs can get rusty, too.

The June Amazing on its face presents bad news and good news.  In the first category is the beginning of a new two-part serial by Murray Leinster, generically titled Stopover in Space.  One can only hope (that word again!) that there is more to it than the empty blather of Killer Ship from last year. 


by James B. Settles

All the shorter stories are reprints.  But two of them are by very reputable authors, Arthur C. Clarke and Henry Kuttner, taken from the magazine’s ambitious false spring of 1953-54 (the Renascence), and two others are from the immediately post-Ray Palmer times (the Liminal Period), by writers who later made pretty good names for themselves, Walter M. Miller, Jr., and Kris Neville.  The fifth is the last published story by G. Peyton Wertenbaker, who commendably learned to write after the fiascoes of The Man from the Atom and its sequel.

Of course the Clarke and Kuttner stories are not exactly rediscoveries.  Clarke’s Encounter in the Dawn, retitled Expedition to Earth, was the title story of the first collection of his stories, published by Ballantine in 1953 and pretty widely known.  Kuttner’s Or Else was the lead story in his collection Ahead of Time, also from Ballantine in 1953.  It was anthologized in the UK in Edmund Crispin’s first Best SF volume, and reprinted again in last year’s The Best of Kuttner from the UK’s Mayflower Books.  These stories will probably be familiar to those well read in SF.

The rest of the package is as usual: another inanely self-serving editorial by editor Ross and a few letters mostly praising the reprint policy, though one of the correspondents also says don’t overdo it with the reprints, it’s time for more Robert F. Young and Ensign De Ruyter.  He appears to be serious.  The cover, simultaneously dull and busy, is reprinted from the back cover of the July 1942 Amazing.  It’s called Satellite Space Ship Station, and artist James B. Settles provides a rather pedestrian view of space travel. 

Stopover in Space (Part 1 of 2), by Murray Leinster


by Gray Morrow

As is my habit, I will hold off reading or commenting on the serial until I have both installments.  I am struggling to reserve judgment, but can’t fail to notice that the same egregious padding that so distinguished, or extinguished, last year’s Killer Ship shows up in the first paragraph here: “Scott ran into the situation on a supposedly almost-routine tour of duty on Checkpoint Lambda.  It was to be his first actual independent command as a Space Patrol commissioned officer.  Otherwise the affairs of the galaxy seemed to be proceeding in a completely ordinary fashion.  On a large scale, suns burned in emptiness, novas flamed, and comets went bumbling around their highly elliptical orbits just as usual.”

If This Be Utopia, by Kris Neville

First after the serial is Kris Neville’s If This Be Utopia, from the May 1950 issue, a slightly heavy-handed satire about a regimented future in which everyone is assigned to a job and pressured mercilessly to perform, and those who don’t measure up—or are made examples of by their superiors—get demoted to worse fates.  Our hero is a middle manager who is cracking under the stress and taking it out on his underlings until his superiors take it out on him.  It’s a bit too obvious, but still decently done.  Three stars.

Encounter in the Dawn, by Arthur C. Clarke

Encounter in the Dawn, from the June-July 1953 issue, is fairly typical for Clarke, a sort of lecture-demonstration of the stuff of SF and his understanding of the cosmos, without too much in the way of plot.  But that’s OK.  Clarke’s writing skill and his restrained sentimentality about the vastness of the universe and the depths of time carry the reader along.  He’s the antithesis of Ray Palmer’s policy of “Gimme bang-bang.”

This one begins: “It was in the last days of the Empire,” which is threatened by an unspecified “shadow that lay across civilization.” Three regular guys of the Galactic Survey, continuing their quest for knowledge despite the doom overhanging their homes, arrive at a new solar system and land on what is obviously Earth.  They take a look around and befriend Yaan, a primitive human or proto-human, with gifts of game killed by their robot.  They get the call to come home for the Empire’s last stand, leave Yaan a few high-tech gifts like a flashlight, and take off.  Tragedy looms over them, but life and intelligence will go on.  Three stars.

Or Else, by Henry Kuttner

Kuttner’s Or Else (August-September 1953 issue) is well done also, as one would expect, but there’s not much to it.  A couple of Mexican subsistence farmers are shooting at each other, contesting the ownership of the only source of water in their valley.  An alien drops in by flying saucer, demonstrates various superpowers, says his race has appointed themselves peacekeepers of the solar system, and Miguel and Fernandez have to stop trying to kill each other because violence is wrong.  They agree and shake hands, the alien buzzes off, and they start shooting again because there’s still only one water hole in the valley.


by Dick Francis

Profound, huh?  While SF may occasionally contribute to the global dialogue on war and peace, this one is best described as chewing less than it purports to bite off.  It also relies on cartoony ethnic stereotyping—but then everything in the story is pretty cartoony, and Kuttner at least lends the viewpoint character, Miguel, some shrewdness.  Thinking the alien is really a norteamericano, he says, “First you will bring peace, and then you will take our oil and precious minerals.” Two stars for execution, not much for substance.

Secret of the Death Dome, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s first published SF story, Secret of the Death Dome (January 1951 issue), is another kettle of sweat altogether, the kind of thing you’d expect to find in a magazine whose cover depicts a hairy-chested guy wrestling with a crocodile. 

The Martians have landed, and how: they have plunked down a large and impervious dome in the desert (actually, a couple of feet above it), where they engage in cryptic communication, and snatch anyone who comes too near and vivisect them.  One guy came back without his legs.  The newly wed Barney came back without his genitals, falling off his horse and dying on arrival.  (The Martians are surveilled by the military on horseback.)


by B. Edmund Swiatek

This makes Jerry mad.  Barney was his best friend and Barney’s new wife was Jerry’s old flame.  So Jerry, who can’t sleep, saddles up and heads out, to do . . . what?  He has no idea.  The Martians scare his horse away, and he hears from base that when it came back riderless, Betty—the widowed Mrs. Barney—took it and is on her way.  So he heads toward the dome and crawls under it looking for a way in. 

You can guess the rest.  He’s captured, gets control of the situation through brains and guts, rescues the by then-captured Betty, sowing death and destruction among the Martians all the way, learns why they are here (the secret of the title, including what the Martians wanted with Barney's genitalia), and drives them away forever.  Whew!  The details don’t matter.  At the end, the just-bereaved Betty tells Jerry not to contact her—“. . . for a couple of months, anyway,” the back of her neck flushing as she turns away.

The style is consistent with the content, cynical tough-guy-isms all the way down.  For example, when the colonel gets the call that Barney has returned, he sends Jerry to check things out.  “Jerry was just a sergeant, but there wasn’t any need for brass.  Death is for privates.” And so on.  Two stars for this testosterone-soaked epic.

Elaine’s Tomb, by G. Peyton Wertenbaker

G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s Elaine’s Tomb, from the Winter 1931 Amazing Stories Quarterly, is, in its quaint way, the best of this issue’s short fiction, and a vast improvement over his earlier work.  Alan, the narrator, teaches at a small college and falls in love with Elaine, one of his students.  Of course he doesn’t do anything about it, and hares off to Egypt with his colleague Weber who has a line on some ancient temples hardly anybody else knows about.  He confesses his romantic situation to Weber en route.  In a temple, there’s a preserved ancient Egyptian king, and a carved curse against anybody who molests him.  Alan touches the recumbent body, and shortly comes down with a fever that shows no sign of abating.  But Weber has found the secret of suspended animation, and promises to put Alan under at the moment of death, and revive him when he finds the secret of life, which must be around the temple somewhere, and unite him with Elaine.


by Leo Morey

Alan awakens, and it’s the far future, Wellsian variant, populated by people who have forgotten most of the know-how of civilization; the machines take care of them, and when one breaks down, they just put another one in its place.  They live pleasant lives and some of them even write books.  In one of these, Alan learns of Elaine’s Tomb, up north near what used to be called Chicago, in the frozen barbarian-populated wastes.  Turns out Weber couldn’t revive him, but he could suspend Elaine to wait for him.  Further adventures and reunion (or union, in this case) follow.

The story is archaic in attitude but modern in its plain style, well imagined and visualized without wasted verbiage, with enough plot to sustain its 40-page length, and altogether a pleasure to read.  Am I really going to give this antique four stars, as I did with another of Wertenbaker’s late stories, The Chamber of Life?  Guess so. 

Summing Up

So, hope fulfilled—admittedly, to expectations lowered by experience.  That's because editor Ross this time selected modern stories, plus an older one that is written in a modern style and not centered around the cranky crotchets of bygone decades, unlike some earlier selections I would prefer not to name.  The result is mostly pretty readable, with a couple of stories better than that, and nothing bloody awful.  But the specter of the Leinster serial still looms over the next issue.  We shall proceed with trepidation.



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