I really enjoy the broadness of Galaxy's 196-page format. It allows for novellas and novelets, which is a story size I've come to prefer. F&SF has lots of stories per issue, too, but they tend to be very short. Astounding likes serials, which can be fine if they're good, but dreary if they're not. I mentioned last time that this month's issue was looking to be a star all through. Let's see if that prediction held true.
All pictures by Dick Francis
Wilson Tucker's King of the Planet certainly did not disappoint. You may remember that Tucker wrote the excellent Galaxy novel, The City in the Sea. His writing skills are on full display in the instant story, about a old old man who has outlasted all of his comrades. and now lives a solitary existence in a mausoleum, the one remaining survivor of a colony of humans. Every so often, he is visited by other humans from faraway stars. They question him, conduct surveys, and then they leave, puzzled at the self-styled king's longevity and solitude. King is the story of one such visit. There is an interesting, religious twist at the end; what is your take? Let me know, would you?
Silence, by Englishman John Brunner, is also fine reading. Abdul Hesketh has been the captive of the inhuman Charnogs, with whom humanity has been at war with for decades, for 28 years. When he is at last rescued, his mind has been thoroughly damaged by the ordeal, and his treatment at the hands of his saviors, which amounts to near-torture as they attempt to pry useful intelligence from him, is anything but therapeutic. A little let down by the ending, but a fascinating psychological exploration.
Sadly, the last two stories are not up to the standard set by the rest of the magazine. Elizabeth Mann Borgese, polymath daughter of the famed German philosopher, Thoman Mann, has never written anything I really liked, and True Self is no exception. It is a story of plastic surgery and feminine beautification taken to an absurd level. A worthy topic of satire, but not a very engaging piece.
Lastly, "Charles Satterfield" (co-editor Fred Pohl, presumably working for peanuts) has a rather mediocre novelette (Way Up Younder) set on a future colony world with a decidedly Ante-bellum Southern culture with robots standing in for Black slaves. It’s not bad; it just sort of lies there.
Where does that leave us with the star tally?
Sadly, the last two stories dropped the issue from 4 to 3.5 stars. A pity, really. What’s better? A tight, good issue, or a less-good longer issue?
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