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[September 4, 1966] British Science Fiction Lives! (Alien Worlds #1 & New Writings in SF #9)


by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

Move over James Bond and John Steed, there is a new dashing science fictional spy on the scene. I am of course referring to the latest hit from the team behind Doctor Who: Adam Adamant Lives!

Adam Adamant Lives

An old-fashioned Victorian swashbuckling hero, Adam Adamant is frozen by a masked supervillain and buried under London. After being found by a construction crew, he finds himself resurrected in the strange world of London in 1966. Teaming up with a young mod woman named Georgina Jones, they solve unusual crimes such as satanic aristocrats or a soap manufacturer drugging the nation with plastic flowers.

However, it is not just Adam Adamant who is returning from hibernation. An old science fiction magazine is returning to the print.

A Brief History of the British SF Magazine

Tales of Wonder

Unlike in the US, the UK did not have many SF specific publications before the war, with Walter Gillings' Tales of Wonder being a notable exception. After the war, Carnell, along with a group of other SF professionals, formed Nova publications and turned the former fanzine New Worlds into a professional magazine, beginning the market as we know it today.

British Science Fiction Magazine, Futuristic Science Stories, Authentic Science Fiction, Nebula Science Fiction
A few of the many former British SF Magazines

As in America, during the magazine boom of the 50s there were numerous UK science fiction magazines but like their American counterparts these too disappeared as the decade wore on. When Scotland’s premier SF magazine Nebula finally went under in 1959, the UK market was only left with Carnell’s trio of New Worlds, Science Fantasy and Science Fiction Adventures. And when he decided to step away from them it looked like the British market might disappear.

New Worlds, Science Fantasy, Science Fiction Adventures
What remained of British SF Magazines by 1960

However, recently this decline has been reversed. Whilst the US SF short fiction markets published around 750 pages of original fiction in July, the British equivalents managed around 450, for a country with only about a quarter of the people. Partially this is due to the continued success of New Worlds and Impulse, which have been able to go monthly and increase their page count. It is also due to other publications from the end of July; the latest New Writings anthology (which I will address shortly) and a new magazine entering the market, Alien Worlds.

The Former Fanzine

Alien Worlds Fanzine issue 15
Alien Worlds Fanzine issue 15

Much like the early New Worlds, Alien Worlds (previously titled Alien) was a British fanzine also featuring film details and some fiction. Last year at Eastercon, editors Harry Nadler and Charles Partington talked to various authors and artists about the possibility of a new professional fiction magazine with full colour illustrations. The result is the new Alien Worlds.

Alien Worlds: Semi Professional or Gifted Amateur?

Alien Worlds #1

I think we need to take a brief moment to talk about the design of this. It is not in the pocketbook style we see in the other British publications, rather a stapled higher end fanzine with colour offset litho printing. The text also looks like it is hand-typed with the occasional mistakes you would expect from an amateur publication. Perhaps a new term is warranted. “Semiprozine”? Doesn't quite roll off the tongue…

Looking inside:

Editorial

Inside Cover

Here Partington and Nadler lay out their complaints of the SF magazine genre. Namely that whilst everything else “from women’s weeklies to ‘build up’ encyclopedias” use full colour illustrations, science fiction publications simply look dull. They hope that Alien Worlds will change that with exciting artwork throughout and therefore make the most use of science fiction’s potential. It is an interesting point, albeit the counter argument is that it costs a lot more to do full colour art and you have to sacrifice space that could be better spent on words. But, then again, if the saying is correct that a picture is worth a thousand words, is this not also economical? It is not an argument I have thought about in depth but is certainly an interesting gauntlet to lay down.

Contact Man by Harry Harrison

Contact Man

Harrison is probably the most well-known contributor to the magazine, recently for his satirical Bill the Galactic Hero. Here he gives us another take on the Starship Troopers style of militaristic SF.

Chesney was found guilty of rebelling against the Admiral-Emperor, the military dictator of Earth, and was given a choice, the death penalty or service in the military. Choosing to sign-up he is made a contact man, whose role is to find natives on new planets and exterminate their villages.

Compared to relative zaniness of Bill, Contact Man is truly brutal. It gives an Orwellian take on militarism, positing a future where the “kill or be killed” mentality is extended to where people’s choices are genocide or suicide.

Disturbing but very worthy. Four Stars

Ken Slater’s Book Column

Slater is a major British fan personality probably best known for being one of the co-founders of the BSFA and producing Vector’s regular column on bookselling, General Chuntering.

In this column, he spends some time stating that this is a “book review column” and laying out his disdain for the field of literary criticism. He holds that the reviewer should simply lay out the facts of the book, if they liked it and possibly why “without being deeply Freudian or whatever.” He then goes on to state that he enjoyed Dobson’s two recent publications, Interstellar 2.5 by John Rankine and New Writings in SF 9 (reviewed below), whilst giving reasonably detailed summaries of the books. Personally, I do not find his style of reviewing that useful as I would rather be surprised by the plot and instead know why the reviewer did or did not enjoy it in depth. But perhaps there are a lot of Ken Slaters out there?

Flash by Allan Asherman

Terry Jeeves Rocket

A summary of the 1936 film serial Flash Gordon along with some set photos. I guess this might be useful for some as reference material if they have never seen the picture but, honestly, it feels superfluous.

Two Stars

Not Human by Ken Bulmer

Not Human

There is currently a major war between the Terrans and Reldans. Johnny Dent is crushed under a spaceship on the battlefield and will come to understand how far humanity needs to go to defeat the Terrans.

It is very curious they chose to put two such similar stories in the same issue. Of the two, this suffers in comparison to the Harrison. Not Human is over described, feeling less intense and bordering on pulpy.

Two Stars

1 Million Years BC

A small description of the upcoming film, two photos from it and (what I assume are) two pieces of concept art. Less an article and more an advertisement.

Two Stars

The Childish Fear by J. Ramsey Campbell

Childish Fear

J. Ramsey Campbell is a new name to me, but he has apparently had several pieces published by Derleth’s Arkham House imprint. This story convinces me he is one to watch.

In 1960 our narrator begins to become fascinated with horror films, particularly those from Hammer. They spend much of their time going to see them, but they begin to be frustrated with the disturbances from the rest of the audiences. Is it just teenagers or something more sinister?

The fantasy elements are almost tangential to this, it is one of those horror tales where it could be all in the lead’s mind. However, that does not make it any less atmospheric or interesting. As someone else who loves watching Hammer Horror films, it is great to see this creepy take on the cinematic experience.

Four Stars

The Vampire
Illustrating titular leads from, clockwise from top left: Brides of Dracula, Dracula (1958), Dracula (1931), House of Dracula, Nosferatu, Dracula in Istanbul, El Vampiro

2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey is probably the most anticipated science fiction film at the moment, scheduled for release in early 1967 (whilst the book is meant to be coming out from Gollancz imminently). This short piece gives some nice insights into the behind the scenes, although it is very short.

Three Stars

In Conclusion

Textless Back Cover
Textless version of the front cover on the rear

Whilst not amazing, this is also not a terrible start for this short magazine. It contains an interesting mix of fact, fiction and illustrations, and certainly achieves its aim of never looking boring.

One of the biggest problems that needs to be mentioned is the cost. Not having the backing of any major publishers and relying on fan distribution networks, the cost is 2/6 for just 63 pages. By comparison New Worlds cost 3/6 for almost triple the length. If the publication is to continue, they are going to need to work out a way to achieve the economies of scale needed to get a price point that is efficient for the consumer without compromising the ideas behind the magazine.

New Writings in SF 9

New Writings 9

In stark contrast to Alien Worlds, New Writings stubbornly sticks to its unappealing covers, with Carnell instead concentrating on the contents. This quarter’s edition is focused on the problem of overpopulation, which seems to have become the idea of the moment. But what do Carnell’s crew make of it?

Poseidon Project by John Rackham

In this story, the best option for an overpopulated humanity’s future is to be able to live on the seabed. Much like the SEALAB experiments, a group of scientists are selected to live in an isolated habitat underwater. However, in this case it is a large and varied community for an entire year, with each of them paired off into married couples to better simulate future conditions. We follow Peter Sentry six months into the experiment, where he begins to wonder if the isolated conditions are causing psychological issues for some of those in charge.

This is quite old fashioned in its style, acting as an optimistic problem story. Each event is treated as a problem that can be resolved scientifically and a rational outlook can overcome any problem caused by humans. It is an interesting contrast to all the technophobic computer tales and apocalyptic visions of our future we are reading today.

It has one major flaw, however. For a story centered around psychology, Rackham does not fully develop his characters. They all feel like stock cliches. In particular the women characters fall far short. As such it ends up being much more of a surface level tale than it would otherwise have been with a little more depth added (puns-intended).

This could have been an interesting take on this theme, instead I will settle on giving it two stars.

Folly to Be Wise by Douglas R. Mason

Two partnered cave people, Zara and Kaalba, discover a spherical craft in the water. Inside they find a highly powerful and knowledgeable android, who Zara names Tros. Tros shares stories of humans who were able to build vast cities and travel to the stars. Zara wants to take it back to the tribe and use its knowledge, Kaalba is more wary of the android.

I found the story badly written, a cliched topic, and anti-feminist. Save yourself time and avoid it!

One star

Gifts of the Gods by Arthur Sellings

Sellings has not appeared in the New Writings anthologies before but has been in New Worlds several times, as well as being a successful author of SF novels.

In this piece, Brian Dudley and his wife Gwen have moved to the new town of Framley. In their garden Gwen finds a series of strange metal objects, shaped like skittles. After failing to turn up anything interesting in analysis he sells them to a local art dealer. More and more strange objects start appearing in town in larger and larger quantities. What could be causing these mysterious appearances?

There seems to be an interesting little subgenre appearing in the New Writings pages of late, telling of unnerving goings-on in the new towns. A kind of “Exurban Uncanny”. This is an excellent example of it, the premise is unusual enough to keep you intrigued and the end twist was a great one that I did not expect.

Four Stars

The Long Memory by William Spencer

Based in a future metropolis of ten billion people known only as the City, crime has been eliminated through the use of constant surveillance. The cost, however, is that this level of surveillance required on every citizen means that size of the records keeps increasing, and housing size is thus continually reduced as more space is made to store the recording tape of every person’s actions. Harben monitors the storage and equipment but appears to come across an underground conspiracy to destroy all the records.

There are definitely good parts to this story and the world is original. However, it also never quite feels like it elevates itself above an absurdist satire within the short word count.

Three Stars

Guardian Angel by Gerald W. Page

Returning after his excellent creepy tale in the last edition, Page gives us a tale of art and humanity.

Douglas Copeland is a very successful painter, and, like most rich people, he shares his home with a Guardian Angel, an AI known as Peter. Following the advice of Peter, Douglas has made a very successful career out of painting cogs. However, he is getting bored of the same design over and over again. When he meets a young woman named Philomene she convinces him to paint her, allowing Douglas to find a new passion in the human form. Peter, however, is not happy with this change.

This starts off well as an interesting debate on art and rationality. However, as it goes on it just fizzles out. Still, it is well written and very vivid tale.

Three Stars

Second Genesis by Eric Frank Russell

Second Genesis
The prior appearances of Second Genesis

Our first reprint tale in over a year. This one, from the famed author’s back catalogue, was first published in Blue Book in 1952 and then reprinted in his first collection, Deep Space. Neither has been available for some time so this will be many people’s first reading of it. Unfortunately, there may be good reason it has been largely forgotten.

Arthur Jerrold is to take part in a space voyage around the solar system that will take him mere moments, but two thousand years will pass outside. If he survives the journey, he is to return to wherever humans are in the solar system so they can collect the results of the experiment. However, that may be harder than he realized.
You can probably guess where this is going. It is such an old cliché some editors have included it on lists of stories they will not accept. It is fairly told but nothing special.

Two Stars

Defence Mechanism by Vincent King

Finally New Writings has brought in a new writer!
To the best of my knowledge this is Vincent King’s first published work and, based on this, I very much hope it is not his last.

In the City, society has broken down into a series of small family tribes. They fight each other through the Corridors (common nouns referring to places are sometimes capitalized and sometimes not, I cannot quite work out the pattern) for territory and resources. At the same time, they have to deal with threats from Aliens coming in from the lower Levels and the Green beyond the Edge.

Our unnamed narrator has heard Aliens are coming back so organizes a hunt to track them down. Enroute, he encounters a tribe of Dwarfs (they seem to be just shorter people but this is how our narrator refers to them). The two groups discover that they are both suffering from issues of inbreeding and agree to women mating between the tribes. As the hunt continues it goes to areas beyond the order of the standard Corridors and our narrator is the only one willing to travel onward. In doing so he will discover the truth behind the City and the Aliens.

This is a story that is in the telling. Many of the revelations I had expected but, by putting it through our narrator’s perspective, it allowed me to explore a fantastical world and come to interesting conclusions. It ends up falling halfway between a "Dying Earth" style adventure and Pohl-esque satire. My favorite story in the collection and one that will stick with me for a while.

Five Stars

Summing up

Overall, this is a pretty good edition of the anthology with both a four and a five-star story and only a couple of shorter pieces being poor. The biggest issue is a certain level of chauvinism in some of the writing, which is probably not aided by some of Carnell’s introduction and the lack of any women authors in the series so far.

Adam Adamant Lives Titlecard

Between these two publications they have more good than bad in them, continuing to show there is new life in British Science Fiction yet.



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[February 6, 1965] Too much of a… thing (March 1965 IF)


by Gideon Marcus

Monthly Muchness

We're at a bit of a lull here in early February.  Not that things haven't been exciting, but they've been familiar headlines.  For instance, Sheriff Clark and his merry men locked up nearly 3000 Afro-American demonstrators who were marching in Selma, Alabama for their voting rights.

In Laos, one of the two right-wing factions supporting the neutralist government tried to coup the neutralist government.  It was defeated by the other right-wing faction.  Meanwhile, the Pathet Lao Communists continue to fester in the margins.

And China, a new member of the nuclear club, maintains its fracture with its Communist brethren to the north, the USSR (although the current meeting of Soviet Foreign Minister Kosygin and Chinese Head of State Zhou Enlai may thaw things).

Similarly, the March 1965 IF offers nothing particularly outstanding, as has been the case for several months now.  I really think editor Fred Pohl should consider returning IF to a bimonthly schedule.  Or perhaps Worlds of Tomorrow needs to be retired so that IF can get choicer stories.

In any event, come read what you've missed:

The Issue at Hand


by McKenna

Stone Place, by Fred Saberhagen

First up is the latest in Saberhagen's Berserker tales.  If you've been reading IF for a while, you know that this series involves enormous, sentient battleships that hate life, destroying human fleets and colonies wherever they can.  The author has done a good job developing the unearthly logic of the alien destroyers as well as written good yarns about the victories Terrans have managed to pull off against them.

Stone Place is the final battle.  The Berserkers have pulled together all two hundred of their ships scattered throughout the galaxy.  In counter, the Terrans have assembled a nearly equivalent armada.  The problem is that the human ships do not all owe allegiance to a central government, and there is friction aplenty.  Can humanity unite for long enough to defeat a threat to the entire species?


by Jack Gaughan

A few things make this latest outing a comparative disappointment: the beginning is slow, the politics are frustrating, and the cruelty of the Berserkers shockingly lurid.  Moreover, the tactics employed against the Berserkers are somewhat glossed over, making the ultimate result feel informed rather than earned.  I wish such a momentous chapter in the saga had been given a novel's worth of development.  Without the nuance and cleverness of the prior stories, and because of the heightened nastiness, three stars is all I can award Stone Place.

Meeting on Kangshan, by Eric Frank Russell

On an interstellar cruise liner, one of the veteran ship's officers makes the acquaintance of a grizzled, cantankerous marine.  Conversation ensues.

And that's about it.  I'm not sure what the point was.  Two stars.

All We Unemployed, by Bryce Walton

Written as half screenplay, half epistolary, All We Unemployed details the horrors of being the last employees in a automated factory that has decided that human elements are undesirable.  It's a pretty dumb story, saying nothing new (and in fact, feeling queerly familiar).

One star.

Of One Mind, by James Durham


by Gray Morrow

James Durham is the novice writer of the issue.  He offers up a piece in which humanity discovers barrier-less telepathy before it is ready, with disastrous results.  Very few survive the ensuing massacre, including the protagonist, an astronaut on his way to Mars.

There are some nice bits in Mind, particularly its realistic portrayal of space travel.  But on the whole, it doesn't hang together well at all.  It might make a decent novel, if the writer develops his chops some more.

Three stars

Million-Mile Hunt, by Emil Petaja

By contrast, Petaja is an old hand, a veteran of the pulp era.  However, he's been on hiatus for more than a decade…and it shows.  Hunt, about an ornery space prospector and the odd alien who dogs him mercilessly, just trying to help, is outdated stuff.  The solar system is home to half a dozen alien species, and people zip from setting to setting as if driving from block to block of a city.  The revelation at the end is weird and not particularly well-joined with the narrative.

Two stars.

Starchild (Part 3 of 3), by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson


by Gray Morrow

And finally, we come to the end of this three-part serial, sequel to The Reefs of Space.  At last, we will find out who the mysterious Star Child is, and how the rebels living in the reefs that gird our solar system have been able to subvert Earth's authoritarian Planning Machine and even blink out the Sun.

Except, we don't.  Instead, we're treated to forty pages of exposition that tell us that the ultimatum made to Earth (by whom?  some mystical stellar force centered about the star, Deneb?  it's not clear) to overthrow the Plan of Man involved dozens of years of perfect timing that indicate the outcome was predestined.  See, before the Sun went out, all of the nearby stars winked in succession.  Since light travels at a finite rate, that meant the scheme required not only synchronization of efforts on a galactic scale, but also knowledge that it would work (since they only made plans to do it once). 

Plus, it was apparently child's play for the Denebians(?) to take over not only the Planning Machine on Earth, but its copy that was sent to the reefs on the Earth vessel, Togethership.  In any event, none of the characters are given anything to do but watch.  Not Boysie Gann, the putative protagonist.  Not the stubborn Earth general bent on recovering the Togethership.  Not Quarla, the young woman from the reefs who sails from plot point to plot point on her seal-like fusorian, as the story requires.

It's the worst kind of pulp space opera.  Not even the settings are interesting, and setting is all we have at this point.  The first story of the series was fair, with an exciting middle.  This second installment had promise but quickly went to the dogs.

One star, and please let's not have another.

Summing Up

Wow, that was a stinker.  It's clear Pohl is shoving all of his junk into one drawer, including the stuff he probably couldn't sell anywhere else (Starchild).  And Pohl is touting that we've got novels from Schmitz and Doc Smith to look forward to.  Given that those two produce stuff in the same vein as Starchild, I am really not looking forward to the next several months.

Perhaps it's time I passed on the mantle.  Any volunteers?






[May 12, 1963] SO FAR, SO GOOD (the June 1963 Amazing)


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.  Three stars for revitalizing a usually trivial and tedious gimmick.

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.




[January 21, 1962] January Freeze (The Great Explosion, by Eric Frank Russell)


By Ashley R. Pollard

I mentioned last time I find December winter difficult.  In January it snowed, which reminds me of the song Let it Snow! by Vaughn Monroe, though the cover version sung by Dean Martin may be more familiar to younger readers of Galactic Journey.  So with the frightful weather outside I had a good reason to stay indoors and read, and thanks to the Traveller's influence I have laid hands on preview copy of Eric Frank Russell’s, The Great Explosion, soon to be available at the end of May / beginning of June in hardback from all good bookstores.

When I first came across Russell’s work I initially thought he was an American because of his easy use of colloquial American English in his writing.  However, as we say over here, he’s as British as they come.  We not only mix in the same science fiction circle, but also share an interest in the works of paranormalist Charles Fort, which I may be assuming (incorrectly?) readers of the Galactic Journey know about.  Russel also writes under various pseudonyms including Webster Craig, Duncan H. Munro, Niall Wilde (also spelled Naille Wilde), and Maurice G. Hugi.

I can’t remember the first story I read by him, but my guess is probably his Hugo award-winning short story Allamagoosa, which appeared in the May 1955 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.  If you’ve not read it I suggest it is well worth your time to find a copy and do so, despite it being or perhaps I should say because it’s a shaggy dog story.  However, my favourite two books by Russell are his 1957 novel, Wasp, and Next of Kin from 1959.  I will mention that Next of Kin, because it has a bearing on his latest novel, first saw print in Astounding as a novella titled Plus X, and there was also a slightly expanded version of the novella published by ACE Books as The Space Wilies before the definitive Next of Kin was published.

Eric Frank Russell’s new novel is an expansion of his novella And Then There Were None that appeared in the June 1951 issue of Astounding.  However, despite the minor disappointment of this story being an expansion of a previous work, it manages to expand the original work in a way that adds considerably to the context of the setting.

The story starts with a prologue describing the happenchance discovery of the Blieder Drive, a space-drive that takes mankind to the stars.  This being Russell, there’s less manifest destiny and more an anarchic rush to either exploit or get rid of people.  Terra, as a result, sees a large number of people leave because of the Blieder Drive, and the story proper begins 400 years later with the first voyage to reunite the lost worlds to form the Terran Empire.

For any other author this might be a chance to give the ship a suitable grand name, but Russell just refers to it throughout the novel as "the ship."  Russell’s focus is on the foibles of the bureaucratic mindset behind the mission.  The story is split between the relationship between the pompous diplomat, who is only ever referred to as "the Ambassador" or "his Excellency," the phlegmatic Captain Grayder, who is in command of the ship, and the punctilious Colonel Shelton, commander of the military detachment sent to protect the diplomatic staff.

Russell compares their behaviours with those of the people of the worlds the ship visits and contrasts them to the ordinary man aboard: in this case Sergeant Gleed and Tenth Engineer Harrison, who get assigned to various tasks assigned by their betters.  This being an Eric Frank Russell story, the focus of each of the planetary visits is to satirize the beliefs of the great and good.

The first planetfall occurs on a planet where all Earth's prisoners were shipped to when the Blieder Drive made interstellar travel possible.  Unlike, say, Australia, which is our real-world analog, our convicts have created a world where stealing is the norm, and where things we take for granted as decent and proper are laughed at for being foolish.  The natives manage to get one over on the crew in their exchanges, played for comic effect, as what is being described is pretty horrible, but no worse than the lives our ancestors lived in feudal times.  This part of the story is a set-up of the shape of things to come [This sounds a lot like Robert Sheckley's The Status Civilization (Ed.)]

The ship then makes its way to Hygeia, which is dominated by nudists who are health and fitness fanatics and who sneer at the fat and flabby Ambassador; they make the fittest member of the ship’s crew look feeble by comparison.  Here Russell is able to poke fun at both sides: the Hygeians for their fastidious health habits and the Terran’s for their prudishness.  The outcome of the diplomatic negotiations can probably be considered a draw, as neither side will ultimately get what they want.

The third planet visited, called Kassim, is the shortest part of the novel because it’s uninhabited and the colonists are assumed to have died from a disease.  While this is all well and good, I thought Russell missed a chance to have a bit more science on show.  There again that has never really been his forte, which brings us to the final and longest section of the novel (the part published back in 1951).

I unfortunately have not been able to lay my hands on a copy of And Then There Were None, so I cannot compare and contrast the two for changes made by Russell.  For those of you who have not had the pleasure of reading the original, here is a chance to read and enjoy a fabulous story sending up the bureaucratic might of Terra by a bunch of the most philosophically inclined anarchic libertarians you could possibly imagine.  Some of the conversations are what I would call psychological nuggets of pure gold pedantry that will bring tears of laughter to anyone’s eyes.

This is Russell at his best, lampooning social conventions and assumptions to make us question why we do what we do.  My sole criticism would be that this only works here because the crew of the ship from Terra are nice people: as in decent human beings no matter how deluded their beliefs.  Had the ship come from an authoritarian regime prepared to enforce control by whatever means necessary then the story wouldn’t have ended so well.  There again the story would not be a humorous satire, but rather a dystopian tale of a man’s inhumanity to man.  Of the two, I know which I would rather read.

Four stars.

[Jan. 2, 1960] Happy New Year! (January 1960 F&SF)

Good Lord, is it already 1960?

When I started this endeavor in 1958, I had only a vague notion what it would look like and how long it would last.  Over the past year 14 months, Galactic Journey has settled into what I hope is a consistent, yet varied, mature column.  Moreover, I have suspicion that this column will last just about as long as I do, as I see no reason to ever stop.

It is hard to imagine Galactic Journey with bylines dated with futuristic years like 1965 or 1972 or 1988, but why not?  Perhaps one day, instead of San Diego, Seattle, or Sapporo, the dateline will read Sinus Rorus, Syrtis Major, or Saturn.

Returning to the present, it must be 1960, for that is the date on the current Fantasy and Science Fiction, January to be exact.  Actually, the February issue has already arrived, but that's a topic for a future week.  In the meantime, let's see what the first F&SF of 1960 has to offer:

Poul Anderson is back with another Time Patrol story, The Only Game in Town.  This time, Everard and his faithful Indian companion (I kid; Salgado is quite a well-developed and co-equal character) are dispatched to the American Southwest in the 13th century to stop, get this, a Mongol invasion.

It's not so silly as it sounds.  In fact, it sounds downright plausible that the Mongols could, after conquering China, send a scouting expedition to the New World.  It didn't take many horsemen to conquer the Aztecs, and the Mongols were a formidable race, to be sure.  What makes this story interesting, aside from the fine writing and evocative setting, is Everard's dawning realization that the Time Patrol's mission may not be as pure as once thought.  The Time Cops are told they are to preserve the original timeline, but in this story, they appear to be meddling for meddling's sake rather than fixing damage caused by others.

I look forward to learning more about the secret agenda of Everard's future employers.

Then we have A Divvil with the Women, apparently a resubmission of an earlier story once published in a lesser magazine.  It's by Eric Frank Russell (slumming as "Niall Wilde"), and it involves an unpleasant fellow who makes a deal with the devil—with disastrous results, of course.  My, but these stories are popular these days!  It's no longer than it needs to be to deliver the punchline, which is a blessing (pun intended).

Damon Knight has translated a piece from F&SF's French edition: The Blind Pilot by Charles Henneberg.  Sadly, the thing is only half-translated or something; it's well nigh unreadable, and I didn't make it past the first few pages.  Oh well.

Reginald Bretnor, who writes the execrable Ferdinand Feghoot puns in F&SF under a pseudonym, has a very silly short-short ("Bug-Getter") that, you guessed it, ends in a pun.  I must confess that I did laugh, so it couldn't have been all bad.

For once, Asimov has a decidedly unremarkable article.  It's called Those Crazy Ideas, and it segues from a discussion of Asimov's personal creativity to observations on how scientific creativity can be maximized.  Fluffy.

Cliff Simak's Final Gentleman just barely misses the mark.  Quite a long tale for F&SF, it is one of those excitingly creepy tales with a prosaic payoff.  In this case, a respected author retires after 30 years only to find that the trappings and details of his life are largely imaginary, sort of a psychic cloak that surrounds him, altering his surroundings and himself to seem more refined and engaging than they actually are.  I found this notion compelling.  After all, I often swathe myself in a fantasy, pretending to be decades in the past.  I complete the illusion by listening to old music, using obsolete slang, wearing out-of-date clothing.  It is a conceit in which I engage to better understand a bygone era for historical purposes, and simply to have a fun invisible refuge from the real world.  Hey—it's cheaper than heroin.

But in Simak's story, the psychic hoodwink is perpetrated solely to influence the course of history through an implausible Rube Goldberg chain of interactions.  I was disappointed, but you may feel differently.

A Little Girl's Christmas in Modernia, by Ralph Bunch, is next.  In this future, we gradually trade in our flesh parts for metal as we grow older.  Bunch's tale features a fully human moppet and her mostly-converted parents in the kind of inconsequential story I'd expect to find in a slick.  I suppose they needed a Holiday-themed story to fill out this issue.

What do you do when an alien weather probe crashes into your backyard?  You bake it, of course, and thus unintentionally forestall an extraterrestrial invasion.  G.C. Edmondson's The Galactic Calabash is fun, though it took me several sessions to get through the short story, largely because I always picked it up at bedtime.

Rounding out the magazine is the quite good Double Double, Toil and Trouble by Holley Cantine.  An anarchist turned recluse decides to take up magic, eventually learning the secret to doubling anything.  It starts out well enough, but the ending provides a cautionary tale against dabbling in the Dark Arts.  Holley Cantine, I understand, is a bit of a political theorist, and Double has a deeper message wrapped in a gentle fiction coating. 

And so the January 1960 F&SF ends as it began with a four-star story.  In-between, there lies a muddle of uncharacteristic unevenness such that the whole issue clocks in at a mere three stars, the same as this month's Astounding.

That just leaves us with the January IF, whose reading is in progress.  In the meantime, I'll soon have a report on my latest excursion to the drive-in with my daughter.  It don't all gotta be highbrow, after all.

Happy New Year!

Note: If you like this column, consider sharing it by whatever media you frequent most.  I love the company, and I imagine your friends share your excellent taste!

P.S. Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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[Oct. 24, 1959] Bleah! (November 1959 Astounding–the worst yet!)

I've found the bottom, and it isn't the Mariana Trench.

They say fifty cents won't buy you what it used to, and that's certainly true of Astounding, a science fiction digest.  The November issue, which has a hastily pasted price of four bits on its cover (replacing the original 35 cents) is, without a doubt, the worst pile of garbage I've read in a very long time.

I'll spare you the gory details and give you a quick thumbnail sketch of its contents.  Opening the ish is the first part of a two-part story, The Best Made Plans.  I didn't even make it through the first half of this first part.  So dull was the tale, so linearly and prosaicly was it told, that I can't even remember what it's about.  I'll read the summary next month and, perhaps, try again.

Eric Frank Russell's Panic Button features two exploring aliens who happen across a lone Terran on an otherwise uninhabited planet.  Upon finding him, the human pushes a blue button, which frightens off the aliens.  This is all part of a brilliant human scheme to seed the planets of the universe with convicts equipped with panic buttons.  The assumption (proven correct, of course; aliens are so dumb, says editor Campbell) is that the button must do something and the lone humans must be there for a reason, and the overactive imaginations of the would-be conquering aliens do the rest. 

And this is one of the book's better stories!

Then you've got A Filbert is a Nut, by newcomer Rick Raphael.  In this one, a crazy person makes atom bombs out of clay that work.  Or does he?  Passable–for 1953 Imagination, perhaps.

Randall Garrett's The Unnecessary Man should have been titled "The Unnecessary Story."  Young man learns that democracy is a sham and the galaxy is run by a dictatorship.  But it's a benevolent one, so that's okay.  Bleah.

I've never heard of Richard Sabia before, and if his I was a Teen-age Secret Weapon is any indication, I hope I don't see him again.  Yokel causes harm to anyone around him.  He is eventually inducted into the army, dropped off to be captured by the enemy, and Communism's collapse ensues.  Lousy.

Finally, we have Robert Silverberg's Certainty, which is almost decent.  Alien ship lands on a human outpost planet, and the crew of the garrison ship is helpless against the intruders' mind-control powers.  Again, it's the sort of thing I'd expect from a decade-old lesser mag.

As for the Analytical Laboratory for the far-superior August issue, the readers' results are well in line with mine, with Leinster's The Alien's a clear winner.

I'm sorry I don't have anything cheery to report.  It took me most of the month to get through this awful, 1.5 star book.  I'm about ready to cancel my subscription…


Note: I love comments (you can do so anonymously), and I always try to reply.
P.S. Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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Anderson breaks the mold! (April 1959 Astounding; 3-18-1959)

Good gravy!  Two good Andersons in a row?

This month's Astounding opens with Wherever you are, by "Winston P. Sanders."  If it wasn't the swashbuckling yet science-adoring prose, it was the heroine protagonist's name and ethnicity (Ulrica Ormstad–couldn't get more Swedish!) that suggested Mr. Sanders might well be the well-known nordic science fiction writer, Poul Anderson.  A quick checking of sources confirmed the suspicion.

Well, it's really good.  The fierce soldier, Major Ormstad, gets to be the viewpoint character for half the novelette, whereupon her meek and brainy shipmate, Didymus Mudge, becomes the reader's eyes.  Both have become marooned on an alien planet, an ocean away from the local Terran base.  Ship's instruments have been destroyed, and constant cloud cover and a lack of a magnetic pole preclude navigation.  It is up to Mudge to puzzle out a way home, and up to Ormstad to deal with the fierce mini-Tyrannosaurs so as to secure transportation.  My favorite line of the story goes to Ormstad, who initially thinks little of Mudge yet deigns to speak to him anyway:

"For one honest human conversation, in any human language, she would trade her soul.  Make it Swedish, and she'd throw in her sidearm."

On to the next story.  When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was John Dough and the Cherub, by L. Frank Baum, sort of a Wizard of Oz side story.  In one of the chapters, the story's heroes (John Dough and Chick the Cherub) are captured and threatened with execution.  However, this execution is delayed when Chick the Cherub begins to tell the tale of "The Silver Pig."  So entranced are the heroes' captors that they delay the execution every night so as to hear more of the pig's adventures.  Of course, the story is designed to be endless so as to forestall the execution long enough for John Dough and the Cherub to escape.

I learned much later that this had been the plot to 1,001 Arabian Nights, and the cliché has been used a myriad of times since then.  Usually, the set-up is that sentence of death will follow some religiously or legally prescribed ritual, with the sentenced to have some choice as to the format of the ritual.  Virtually every story has the same format–the reader is informed that our hero has worked out the puzzle to prolong his/her life, but we don't get to find out the solution until the end.  Since classic science fiction favors the "gotcha" ending, I've seen this kind of story a lot in my literary travels.

So it is with Now Inhale, by Eric Frank Russell.  I didn't much care for his last story, but this one is fine.  A Terran is imprisoned for suspected espionage on an alien world.  Condemned to death, he is allowed one final game of his choice before strangulation.  The trick is to prolong the game, to neither win nor lose.  The record was 17 days.  Our hero beats this record a dozen-fold and is prepared to play the game forever, if need be.  Can you guess the game?

I'm afraid the rest of the ish meanders into mediocrity (which is perhaps above par for Astounding these days.  Chris Anvil's The Sieve is nothing special–on a brand new colony world, half the pioneers take up smoking the local marijuana and become lazy and shiftless.  The rest of the colonists decide to let them starve over the winter.  Reefer madness, indeed.

Gordy Dickson turns in a disappointing performance with The Catch, in which a galactic federation fairly begs humanity to retake the reins after thousands of years of retirement.  It seems those darned aliens just can't stand the burden of leadership.  And it turns out they got all of their technology from humanity the last time we were ascendant.  Poor little primitive aliens. 

Definitely a story after Campbell's heart.

Finally, we have Set a Thief by H. Chandler Elliott, a Canadian brain doctor whose stuff I've never before read.  It's an interesting first contact story, though told in a flip off-hand manner I didn't much care for.  Is it a set of thieves' tools or a lady's handbag?  An interesting case of convergent evolution, to be sure.

The rest of the ish is the final installment of The Pirats of Ersatz so there's nothing more to report for this month.  My hands are throbbing, so I may take a break until March 24.  I'll have lots to write about by then, though.

Thanks for reading!

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To the Moon (Alice?); Wrap-up of January 1959 Astounding and more (11-30-1958)

I promised a wrap-up of this month's Astounding, so here it is.  “Study in Still Life,” by Astounding's resident satirist, Eric Frank Russell.  It is a 20-page depiction of governmental bureaucracy whose only connection (I should say connexion; Russell is British) with science fiction is its having been printed in a science fiction magazine.  I'm sure some find tedious depictions of tedium humorous (humourous?).  I just find them tedious.  Oh well.

This makes the January 1959 issue of Astounding the worst in quite some time.  With the exception of the lead story, which is undoubtedly good, but not exceptional, and the brief “Seedling,” the book was a bore.  2 stars at most.

Still, it did inspire a think.  I like my science fiction with a touch of verisimilitude.  One of the clichés I find tiresome is “spaceship as automobile”.  Particularly, where one man builds a rocketship in his backyard and flies it to the Moon.  Now, I have no doubts that the Space Age will have spaceship pilots, and they may well be a rare breed.  I also don't have too much trouble swallowing the idea that, in the far future, spaceships may be as reliable as the present-day automobile. 

But for the foreseeable future, spaceships, and their atmospheric cousins, airplanes, are incredibly finicky beasts that require dozens of hours of prep time for every hour of flight.  The recent Pioneer launches had crews topping one hundred.  Manned jaunts are sure to require more crew, and a lunar shot will have, I'll bet, thousands of people involved.  A few authors have gotten it right.  I recently read Satellite E One by Jeffery Lloyd Castle, which is half textbook, half British wish-fulfillment, and it does a good job of depicting the long logistical tail any expensive, high-tech aeronautic project has/will have.

I blame World War II, specifically post-war depictions of the war.  We've gotten used to tales of doughty pilots soaring into the skies on a moment's notice, and we've forgotten just how much sweat goes into building and maintaining the crates.  Movies don't get made about mechanics, anymore than they get made about quartermasters and cooks.  And so science fiction stories not only fail to depict their space age counterparts, they omit them entirely.  I think that's too bad.  While the general public may like reading stories of plucky rocket-jocks making it to the moon on ingenuity and baling wire, I think a far more meaningful story is made when the spaceships sent to the moon (hopefully with more than just one person inside!) have thousands, if not millions of people behind them as part of the effort.  It's like a mountain, with the spaceship comprising just the very top, and the rest being not just the people who were directly involved in building and supporting the ship, but a collective effort representing all of humanity.

(Note: Danny Dunn and the Antigravity Paint, published in 1956, is actually a delightful story; I almost feel bad using it as my demonstrative picture, but it's what I have on hand)

By the by, the Air Force may have failed in America's first efforts toward the moon (Pioneers 0-2), but it looks like the Army plans to launch a probe on a modified Jupiter IRBM next week.  I think their odds are pretty good.  Their “Juno II” rocket is identical to the Jupiter-C that launched Explorer, at least from the second-stage up, and I understand the Jupiter to have a decent record.  Moreover, the probe is smaller and less sophisticated than its Air Force predecessors, and Von Braun said there is no intention of hitting the moon or sending it into orbit; a near miss will be good enough.  I suppose if one sets the bar low enough, it's hard not to clear it!  I shall cross my fingers, toes and eyes.

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