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[January 2, 1961] Closing out the month (the January 1961 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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If you are in the accounting profession, you are familiar with the concept of "closing the books," wherein you complete all your reconciliations and regard a month as finished.  Here at the Journey, Month's End does not occur until the last science fiction digest is reviewed.  Thus, though the bells have already rung for the new year of 1961, December 1960 will not officially end until I get a chance to tell you about the latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction!

It's an uneven batch of stories, but definitely worth wading through the chaff for the wheat.  Avram Davidson's The Sources of the Nile combines both in roughly equal proportions.  The story begins with an encounter between the narrator, a down-on-his-luck writer, and a haggard old fellow who once was able to predict the whims of fashion with uncanny accuracy.  Is it precognition?  Time travel?  Excellent taste?  No–as the protagonist learns, the source of his success is a modest family in a modest apartment that just seems to know.  Next year's popular books, next year's clothing fads.  Well, the narrator is denied certain fortune when, after a glimpse of this locus of prescience, he loses contact with the family.  He is thus doomed, like the guy who tipped him off, to search the world for this holy grail.

Davidson has adopted an avante garde style these days.  At first, I was much impressed.  After a dozen pages of over-cute overexertion, I was tired of it.  I applaud innovation, but not at the expense of readability.  Three stars.

Then we have Vance Aandahl's The Man on the Beach, sort of a poor man's The Man Who Lost the Sea.  Aandahl is not Ted Sturgeon, and his short tale, of an astronaut who lost his ship to murderous aborigines, somehow misses the mark.  Two stars.

But then there's the ever-reliable Cliff Simak with Shotgun Cure, in which an ostensibly benevolent alien visits a country doctor (how Cliff loves those rural settings!) and offers him a cure for every illness in the world.  There's just one catch: it also lowers the intelligence of the cured.  What price health!  A fair idea told in excellent Simak style.  Four stars.

Charles De Vet's The Return Journey is also worthy: What recourse exists when a colony of Terrans expands beyond the boundaries set by treaty with the native aliens?  Sometimes the winning move is never to have played.  Four stars.

Rehabilitated, by Gordon Dickson, is a cross between Keyes' Flowers for Algernon and Sturgeon's More than Human.  A fellow seems ill-suited for work in the modern (read: near future) era.  He is rescued from a life of crime by a do-gooder outfit that rigorously trains him for a new profession: planetary colonist.  But it turns out that he is wholly unqualified for the job, having an IQ of just 92.  What was the point, then?  The organization is actually a network of telepathic misfits, all suffering from some degree of mental illness, from instability to retardation.  Working together, they maintain a balance such that each member's strengths compensate for another's weaknesses.  The training for colonization was just a a sort of dry run.  I have "Three stars" listed in my notes, but upon reflection, I think I'll bump it up to Four. 

This trio of excellence is followed by a twosome of mediocrity.  William Eastlake's What Nice Hands Held is a story of romance, infidelity, poverty, status, and magical realism in an heterogeneous Indian lodge.  Again with the trying too hard.  The other is Robert Young's silly Hopsoil, about Martians visiting a post-apocalyptic Earth and raising a most unusual crop in our oddly fertile soils.  Two stars for both.

Asimov's article this month, Here it Comes, There it Goes, is a bit of a disappointment.  It's a summary of one of the current fads in cosmology, the idea that matter is created and disintegrated continuously, and that's how the Universe is, always has been, and always will be.  The Good Doctor's arguments (which are, to be fair, not his) are not particularly compelling.  Three stars.

F&SF is trying out poetry again.  Lewis Turco's A Great Grey Fantasy didn't strike my fancy.  Perhaps it will strike yours.  Two stars.

Rounding out the issue is a tour de force from an author who has been on fire these days, Poul Anderson.  Time Lag is a gripping novelette of the attempted conquest of one Terran colony by another.  It is told from the point of view of Elva, a married mother from the peaceful, apparently pastoral planet of Vaynamo.  Her husband is killed and her village savaged by an advance party of Chertkonians lead by the ruthless Captain Bors.  Elva is forced into the position of Bors' mistress, and while Bors is not particularly cruel about it, we are never made to forget that Elva is an unwilling partner. 

Interstellar travel is a relativistic affair in this story.  The journeys between Vaynamo and Chertkoi take fifteen years of objective time even though they take only weeks of subjective time.  Thus, Time Lag is told in a punctuated series.  Through Elva's eyes, we get a glimpse of the overcrowded and polluted Chertkoi, stiflingly authoritarian and caste-conscious.  Elva is taken along for the second assault on Vaynamo, in which the capital is atomized from orbit.  She bravely confers with a captured general under the guise of extracting intelligence and learns that the Vaynamonians, possessed of a highly advanced science themselves (as one would expect; they did come from star-travelling stock), are not quite so helpless as the Cherkonians have surmised.  Elva uses her position as consort to the increasingly prestigious Bors to obtain a degree of succor for the Vaynamonian captives, though her efforts are never entirely successful. 

The third assault from Chertkoi is the last.  Thousands of ships, the fruits of the labor of billions of oppressed souls, are unleashed against Vaynamo, a planet with a population of just ten million.  Bors, now a Fleet Admiral, is certain of his victory.  But is it really assured?

What elevates this story above a simple good-versus-evil story is the parallel drawn between the planetary and personal conflicts.  Elva has been enslaved, but she has not been defeated.  Her strengths go far beyond the blatantly visible.  Bors never breaks her; in fact, Elva quickly becomes his master, though he is never aware of the fact.  Similarly, Vaynamo does not need to win by matching the vulgar rapacity of Cherkoi; rather, the world relies on compassion, deliberateness, and immense inner strength.

Time Lag is a refreshingly feminine story from a feminine viewpoint, something which Anderson has been getting pretty good at.  I appreciated that there was no suggestion of taint upon Elva for her plight.  Like Vaynamo, she endured violations and pain, but she emerged an unbroken heroine. 

Five stars.

That comes out to an aggregate of 3.25 stars making F&SF the winning digest for the month (IF was just behind at 3.2, and Analog trailed far behind at 2.5).  I think IF wins the best story prize, however, with Vassi, and IF certainly wins the "most woman authors" award, with two (the only ones to appear in all three magazines).

And now 1961 can truly begin!

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[Nov. 28, 1960] Odds and Ends (the December 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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Here's a math problem for you, kids!  If more than half of your magazine is taken up by a 2-star short novel, how likely is it that you'll still end up with a good issue?

Answer: not very.

I'm used to Fantasy & Science Fiction having a long table of contents page.  This one (the December 1960 issue) comprises just ten entries, and all save the Asimov article are vignettes.  I wonder if we'll be seeing a slew of larger stories now that Editor Mills has depleted his stock of tiny ones.

Anyway, it's quality, not quantity that counts.  So how was the quality?

Winona McClintic is a sporadic contributor to the magazine, and she offers up The Way Out of Town, in which an infestation of snakes blocks all of the vehicular arteries in and out of every city in the (unidentified) state.  They cause havoc, widespread and personal, as one might expect. 

That's about it; the story is over almost as it starts.  Mills says in the prologue, "Readers who like only those stories with beginnings and middles and ends, in which everything is clearly explained,may not be fully satisfied with the following."  He's right!  Two stars.

Up next is Rope's End, by Miriam Allen deFord.  The premise is excellent: a Terran accidentally kills an alien on the extraterrestrial's world.  His sentence is to wear a rope around his neck for twenty years–one that is constricted every year.  I like everything about it but the ending; and it's not even the ending that bothers me so much as the protagonist's inability to suspect how things would turn out given how much time he devoted to the problem.  Three stars.

Avram Davidson has a two-pager about sexually frustrated teens whose unfulfilled desires channel into a powerful psychokinetic talent.  Called Yo-ho, and Up, it is silly and rather difficult to read.  Two stars.

I don't usually go for poetry, but Rosser Reeves (who is, apparently, a businessman by day) has a nice piece on alternate worlds called Infinity.  I dug it.  Four stars.

Speaking of digging, The Beatnik Werewolf is (I believe) the first effort by Dan Lindsay.  What's a shaggy vegetarian hepcat…er…dog to do when he falls in love after two hundred years as a lone wolf?  Cute, if inconsequential.  Three stars.

Dr. Asimov's article is on dolphins and echo-location this month.  A could-be fascinating topic, particularly the bits about the ability to produce sound being used for navigation long before its purposing for communication.  But the good doctor seems rather scattered this time around.  Three stars.

The last piece is a reprint from a literary mag New World Writing #16 called The Listener by John Berry.  It's not really science fiction or fantasy, but I enjoyed it a lot, this tale of the meeting between an itinerant fiddler and an old, old lighthouser.  Four stars.

Using my trusty slide rule, this all adds up to about 2.5 stars.  A less than auspicious end of the year for what is normally my favorite science fiction magazine.  It's a good thing the competition was in excellent form this month.

See you at the end of the month for a review of November, a preview of December, and a space-based peeping tom whose presence we can all be thankful for.

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[Nov. 26, 1960] Damaged Goods (Algis Budry's Rogue Moon)

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Sometimes, I just don't get it.

The December 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction is almost completely devoted to one short novel, Rogue Moon, by Algis Budrys.  I like Budrys, and F&SF is generally my favorite magazine, so I've been looking forward to this book since it was advertised last month.

To all accounts, it is a masterpiece (and by "to all accounts", I mean according to the buzz in the local science fiction circles).  The premise is certainly exciting: there is an alien structure on the moon, an amorphous multi-dimensional thing, that kills all who enter it.  To facilitate its exploration, the navy utilizes a matter transporter that disassembles one's molecules in one place and reconstructs them elsewhere.  Volunteers are sent from Earth to their certain death to push a few more feet into the deadly extraterrestrial maze.

Of course, the transporter doesn't actually send anyone anywhere; it destroys the original and creates a copy that thinks it is the original.  In fact, it's possible to make multiple copies of a person, and that is what is done: one copy goes to the moon to die, while the other stays on Earth to live on.  It turns out that the two copies have a limited degree of telepathic contact for a short time, so the Earthbound copy can report on what his moonbound copy experiences.

The project's main hurdle is that it takes a special kind of person to experience one's own death and not go insane.  How, indeed, to find such a person to unlock the riddles of the maze?

Sounds pretty intriguing, doesn't it?  Sadly, Budrys hardly wrote this story.  Instead, he gave us a florid, comically humorous soap opera with personalities as flat as the pages they are printed on.  Here's the dramatis personae:

Edward Hawks: The project's director.  A detached scientist, coldly resigned to his status as a murderer (both in terms of sending people to their death and the destruction of those who go through the transporter), desperate to understand how a person's existence can survive one's death.

Al Barton: A suicidal thrill-seeker. he's already lost a leg to his obsession for death-defying escapades–racing, mountain-climbing, parachuting.  Setting records isn't enough for him; he's got to risk his life doing something no one else has done before.  He spends most of his time attempting to prove his manliness to Hawks (in vain, as Hawks is too coldly impersonal to be impressed).

Vincent Connington: The project's director of personnel who introduces Hawks and Barton.  A fellow whose brash arrogance is really just a facade that hides his love for…

Claire Parks: Barton's gorgeous girlfriend: She spends her entire "screen time" attempting to seduce Hawks and Connington and enrage Barton; she's afraid of men, you see, so she is always trying to manipulate them so she can keep her interactions in a safe, nonthreatening place. 

Elizabeth Cummings: A wholesomely beautiful random stranger whom Hawks falls in love with.  Her primary story function is to listen to Hawks' morose reflections on life and occasionally offer pithy observations.

Virtually no time is devoted to the actual exploration of the moon structure, and when the reader finally does get to see the jaunt through the maze, Budrys manages to make it the dullest part of the book. 

Budrys does largely succeed at exploring the fascinating ramifications of "soul" duplication.  What happens when there are two of you, when a moment ago, there was just one?  And are the copies really you?  Are you more than the sum of your memories?  If not, is the communication of your memories to others, no matter how imperfectly, a kind of immortality (this is implied in the last line of the book, an admittedly powerful one.)

Which would have been great had it been less mawkishly presented, and the characters at all plausible.  Budrys set out to make an insightful character study in the Sturgeon vein, depicting a disparate brood all struggling to find "The Meaning of Life."  Instead, he ended up writing something more akin to Merril's The Tomorrow People: full of stilted dialogue, expository speeches, and precious little story.  Fully 30 pages go by before we even get into the plot, which is a lot of time to waste in a 90 page novella.

I'm not sure how to rate Rogue Moon.  Despite all the eye-rolling moments (quite literally), I did finish the short book in one sitting, which suggests there must have been something compelling about it.  There were thought-provoking ideas.  It was the execution which was disappointing, particularly for being by the normally excellent Budrys.  I think, in the end, the book's prime failure is the introduction of so many interesting elements which are completely subordinated to the inferior, implausible psychological drama that Budrys, for some reason, was so hot to present. 

Maybe the book, due to be released next month, will be better. 

Two stars.

Stay tuned for the rest of the magazine!

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[Oct. 30, 1960] Halloween Candy (the November 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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With Halloween around the corner, one might have thought that there would have been an extra spooky issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction this month.  Nothing doing.  The current issue is nothing extraordinary, if not completely forgettable.  Having covered the end novellette in my last article, it's time to cover the rest of the magazine.

I've never heard of Vance Aandahl before, but his tiny It's a Great Big Wonderful Universe, about a sad Terran who has everything but the planet he hails from, is a good aperitif.  Four stars.

Robert F. Young is up next with his Romance in a Twenty-First Century Used-Car Lot.  It's a weird extrapolation and intersection of two trends: an increased sanction of promiscuity coupled with a perverse need to be armored against the world.  In this story, everybody, but everybody, is expected to wear their own personal automobile at all times.  To go without is to be shunned as a "nudist."  It's all very strange and allegorical, but too silly to be effective.  Once again, it's not up to the standard set by his excellent To Fell a Tree, though I did appreciate that the protagonist was female, and the story's focus on the very real difficulties they face vis. a vis. men and society.  Three stars.

Who dreams of Ivy? is another macabre piece by Will Worthington set in a world marred by institutionalized violence and fear.  I'm afraid I didn't quite get it, or maybe there isn't much to get.  Is there a message to this dark look at election season, where mayors live in constant fear for their lives, and thus take this fear out on their citizens?  I feel as if Sheckley's Ticket to Tranai did it better and more humorously.  Three stars.

Next up is an old old reprint, Funk, by John W. Vandercook.  It's a well-written if somewhat pedestrian tale of dark magic on the steamy coast of West Africa.  What happens when you build a bank vault right square on the spot where the Crocodile God slithers to devour its periodic sacrifices?  Nothing good, I assure you.  The closest we get to a seasonal ghost story.  Three stars.

I did quite enjoy Combat Unit, from newcomer Keith Laumer, in which a damaged but still-sentient robot tank finds itself behind enemy lines.  This is a fine portrayal of metallic, sexless intelligence.  Four stars.

Yes, we have no Ritchard, by Bruce J. Friedman (normally a writer for the slicks), is a cute tale about an usual afterlife situation.  There is a Heaven and a Hell, but no one goes to Heaven, and Hell isn't so bad.  So how does one distinguish the good from the bad?  And what happens to the ego of a good man in such a demoralizing predicament?  Three stars.

Finally, we have Isaac Asimov's latest non-fiction piece, The Element of Perfection.  As one might gather from the title, it's on the discovery of Helium (and, incidentally, the other noble gases).  It's one of my favorite articles from the good doctor–educational and entertaining.  Five stars.

No surprises this month: an F&SF that finishes slightly on the positive side of three stars.  You won't regret the expenditure of 40 cents (quite reasonably, really), but I suspect you won't find yourself returning to this issue very often, either.

Tomorrow, a sneak preview at the month of November!

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[Oct. 28, 1960] Point of Inflexion (The Future of Plenty)

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Science fiction is not prediction.  It is extrapolation.  No one can see the future, but a gifted writer can show you, dramatically, what will happen "if this goes on." 

It's no surprise that science fiction writing has enjoyed a boom since 1950.  Never has our world been on the brink of so many exciting and dangerous potentialities.  On the positive side: space travel, automation by computers and robots, atomic energy.  On the negative side: pollution, global warming, and atomic annihilation. 

As a species, we stand on the edge of superabundance created by fewer and fewer people.  It used to be that the vast majority of us made our living through subsistence farming.  By the end of World War 2, the percentage of Americans employed in farming of all kinds was down to 14%, and since then, it has declined to about 8%. Over the next few decades, thanks to mechanization, the profession of farmer as we know it may cease to exist.  We can expect the same trend to happen globally as the poorer parts of the world catch up. 

What have we been doing now that we don't have to farm?  Building things.  By the end of the War, Blue-collar workers made up 40.7% of the labor force.  As of 1959, they were down to 37%.  This seems like a small dip, but the decline is consistent.  Automation is getting cheaper every day, and it is pretty certain that the industrial sector will experience the same downturn as the agricultural sector. 

Well, then, what is everyone else doing?  White-collar workers, the professionals, the managers, the clerks, and those in sales, have grown in percentage of the work force from 35% in 1947 to around 42% last year.  Moreover, service workers, both domestic and for-hire, have gone up from 10.4% to 12.2%.  In other words, fewer people are using their hands and their backs to produce things.  More are using their brains to produce…or entertain.

That's a snapshot at this place and time.  What happens "if this goes on?"–when everyone has all the food and goods they need, what will people want?  At what profession will people work?  Will we all take turns serving each other at restaurants (until robo-waiters come into vogue)?  Will we all write sonnets and paint pictures for each other in a sort of round-robin gift economy (until machines write songs and craft art better than we can)?  Will we all become citizen-scientists, pioneering the limits of knowledge (before computers figure out ways to do it better and faster)?  Or will we all ultimately end up loose-mouthed in a torpor watching endless robot-created television programs?

I just reread George Orwell's 1984, a tale of crushed free will in an ultra-totalitarian post-nuclear England.  In his world, the people in power reason that the obstacle to their retention of power is superabundance.  Once everyone has all they need, they reason, class distinctions disappear.  Thus, the Party takes control and diverts all surplus production (and much besides) to the waging of a futile, endless war.  Orwell essentially dodges the question–the road to plenty is nipped in the bud for the sake of a greedy few.

On the other side of the coin, we have Mack Reynolds' Russkies Go Home!, which appeared in this month's (November 1960) Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Mr. Reynolds reportedly just returned from a trip behind the Iron Curtain, which explains the multitude of Russia-related stories he's recently turned out.  Clearly, the trip impressed the writer, as the stories all posit a Soviet Union that fulfills Senator Kennedy's nightmare prophecies by surpassing the United States in prosperity by 1970.

Russkies takes place furthest along of all the stories, chronologically.  While it is never explicitly stated, we can assume it is somewhere around 1990.  The USA is suffering from chronic unemployment since no one will buy our products.  This is because the USSR, forced by USA-led trade embargoes in the 50s and 60s, has become self-sufficient superproducer.  Now they can dump exports on the world market at a fraction of the price of products made in the "Free World."  And dump they do, not because they need imports from other countries, but to obtain foreign currency. 

Because the tourism bug has hit big in the Soviet Union.  No longer penned in by the secret police, and no longer eager to defect the abundance at home, the Communists now have a driving urge to see the world during their overlong work vacations (the Soviets, with their command economy, do not have unemployment, but they do have awfully short work weeks!)


from here

And so, Russian tourists swarm the world, spending freely, drinking heavily, and generally making raucous nuisances of themselves.  This is the new hedonism.  Meanwhile, the Americans want to regain customers for their trade products, but they can't so long as the Soviets are undercutting.  The story's protagonist hits upon the idea of promulgating a religion of moderation, hoping that such will keep the Communists at home and allow the Americans some breathing room to restore trade connections.  And perhaps address their juvenile delinquency problem; unemployed, unmoderated folks have lots of time on their hands to make trouble.

The funny thing is that it seems to work, this command economy religion (generated from scratch with an enormous outlay of government funds).  And the Soviets, far from being upset by this development, ask if they can help–it seems they want to do something about the tens of millions of Chinese tourists they've been dealing with lately…

It's a silly story, and while the first half is rather excellent, the rest is barely an outline.  Moreover, I think Reynolds' fundamental premise, that Communism will somehow surpass Capitalism, is flawed, though I did particularly like his observation that the "Free World" includes places like Spain, Formosa, and Saudi Arabia. 

But that doesn't matter.  The root of the story is our impending superabundance and the potentially devastating consequences for society.  This is a subject I don't see addressed very often, in part because it's just so damned hard to guess what the world will look like after the labor sector transformation is complete.  It is coming, though, and it's probably best we work out how we're going to deal with it sooner rather than later. 

In short, what will we do when there's nothing we need to do?

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[Sep. 18, 1960] Keeping things even (October 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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I've said before that there seems to be a conservation of quality in science fiction.  It ensures that, no matter how bad the reading might be in one of my magazines, the stories in another will make up for it.  Galaxy was pretty unimpressive this month, so it follows that Fantasy and Science Fiction would be excellent.  I am happy to say that the October 1960 F&SF truly is, as it says on the cover, an "all star issue."


from here

"After-the-Bomb" stories always appeal to me.  I like stories about starting with a clean slate, rebuilding, and pushing onward.  Thus, James Blish's The Oath, this month's lead novelette, starts with an advantage that it, thankfully, never gives up.  In this story, an atomic apocalypse has decimated humanity, which has reverted to subsistence farming.  Specialization is virtually impossible, in part because most of the specialists were slaughtered early on by a resentful populace.  But everyone needs a doctor, and in one remote part of the former U.S.A., an erstwhile copywriter becomes an amateur pharmacologist.

In doing so, he attracts the attention of a real doctor, a recruiter for one of the few bastions of civilization left standing.  The resulting dialogue is a compelling one that gives the reader much to think about.  What is a doctor without the Hippocratic Oath?  Is it better to be a demigod among savages than an intern amongst professionals?  What is more important: fulfillment of personal dreams or serving a larger community?  Excellent stuff, if a bit speechy.  Four stars.

Something, in which an elderly antiquities curator comes face to face with an ancient evil presence, is brought to us by Allen Drury.  He won the Pulitzer this year for his novel, Advise and Consent.  Atmospheric, it's a mood piece more than a story piece.  Three stars.

Arthur C. Clarke, the hybrid who stands precisely in the gap between scientist and fictioneer, brings us the rather archaic-seeming Inside the Comet.  The crew of the Challenger, dispatched to investigate a comet, become trapped in its coma when the ship's computer breaks down.  Without the machine to compute orbital calculations, the ship might never get home.  Until, that is, a canny crewman teaches his shipmates to use abaci.  The description of the comet feels quite current, scientifically, and I like the idea of humans being able to rely on low technology solutions when the advanced options have failed.  It's just a bit dated in its structure and with its gimmick ending.  Three stars.

The least of the issue's stories is Poul Anderson's Welcome, featuring a fellow who time travels from modern day to five centuries in the future.  He is received as an honored guest, which is why it takes him so long to realize the crushing poverty in which most of the world lives.  The kicker at the end is the reveal that the future's elite literally dine on the poor.  Readable satire treading ground long since flattened by Swift and Wells.  Three stars (barely).

But then we have From Shadowed Places from that master, Richard Matheson.  The premise is simple: an adventurer in Africa offends a witch doctor and is hexed with a fatal curse.  Only the help of a woman anthropologist / part-time ju ju practitioner can save him.  It's a perfect blend of horror, suspense, social commentary, and erotica–the kind that made Matheson's The Incredible Shrinking Man a book for the ages.  Extra praise is earned for having a strong Black woman as the focal (if not the viewpoint) character.  This story definitely pushes the envelope in many ways.  Five stars.

I'm happy, as always, to see Katherine MacLean in print.  Interbalance, her first tale in F&SF, is a meet cute set in Puerto Rico some twenty years after the Bomb has wiped out most of the world.  More is at stake than simple romance, however–it is a clash between the straightlaced mores of the old world and the liberated, survival-minded culture of the new.  Delightfully suspenseful.  Four stars.

A quick dip in quality accompanies Howard Fast's tale, The Sight of Eden, in which Earth's first interstellar travelers find themselves barred from a park-like pleasure planet.  It seems that humans are unbiquitous in the Galaxy, but only Earthlings are nasty and violent.  The planet's caretaker offers no words of advice to cure the peculiar ailments of our species; he just sends the Terrans packing.  Fast tells the story well enough…I just don't like what he has to say.  Three stars.

Asimov has a good article this month, Stepping Stones to the Stars, about the halo of icy objects in our solar system orbiting so far out that it takes a year for the light of the Sun to reach it!  Too dim to see, we only know about these little planets because, every so often, one gets nudged out of its orbit such that it careens into the inner solar system.  As it approaches the sun, its volatile contents sublime, creating a dramatic glowing tail.  And so, these inconspicuous bodies become comets.  If one thinks of this cloud of comets-to-be as the edge of our solar system, and if we presume that our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, hosts a similar cloud, then our systems are probably less than two light years from each other.  It's a fascinating revelation, and it makes me feel similarly to when I discovered that the Soviet Union and the United States are just twenty miles apart…by way of Alaska.

By the way, both James Blish and the good Doctor have come to the conclusion that Pluto has no moon of significant size.  They thus urge people to save their good underworld-related names for the 10th and 11th planets, should they ever be discovered.

Back to fiction, writing duo Robert Wade and William Miller, writing as Wade Miller, offer up How Lucky We Met.  We've all heard of were-wolves, but what happens when the condition is more subtle and constant than the traditional malady?  Four stars.

Finally, Philip Jose Farmer once again has the concluding novella.  A Few Miles is the fourth in a series detailing the life of ex-con and current-monk, John Carmody.  Carmody and Harrison's "Stainless Steel Rat" have a lot in common.  They are both canny former criminals for whom the transition to law-abiding citizen is not 100% complete.  In this story, the good Brer John is given orders to sojourn to the planet "Wildenwoolly," presumably to demonstrate his worthiness for ascension to the priesthood.  He does not even make it halfway through his hometown of Fourth of July, Arizona, thwarted by a series of increasingly difficult obstacles. 

I imagine Farmer will compile all of these stories into a book someday.  It will be a good one.  Four stars.

All told, this has been the best issue of F&SF of the year, with a needle quivering solidly above the 3.5 mark.  A good way to end this month's digest reading.  Stay tuned for a review of Ted Sturgeon's new book, Venus Plus X!

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[August 9, 1960] Destructive Pages (the September 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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I've said before that I like my reading to be light and pleasant.  Not exclusively, mind you, but I find the current trend toward the depressing to be… well… depressing.  This month's F&SF is the bleakest I've yet encountered, and under normal circumstances, it would not have been to my taste.  On the other hand, being near Hiroshima on August 6 and then near Nagasaki on August 9, fifteen years after they became testing grounds for a terrible new weapon, is enough to put even the cheeriest of persons into a somber mood, and my choice of reading material proved to be quite complementary.

As usual, I lack the rights to distribute F&SF stories, so you'll just have to buy the mag if you want the full scoop, but I'll do my best to describe the stories in detail.

Poul Anderson starts things off with the The Word to Space.  In this novelette, Project OZMA, humanity's first concerted effort to scan the stars for communications broadcasts, bears almost immediate fruit, discovering a star with intelligent life just 25 light years away.  Unfortunately, the focus of these aliens is proselytizing their strange religion, and with dialogue between planets essentially impossible, a century goes by with Earth learning frustratingly little about its cosmic neighbor.  In the end, the alien theocracy is toppled when humanity requests clarification on some of the finer points of their creed; they just aren't equipped to handle religious debate.  It's too bad none of the aliens were Jewish–we love quibbling over religious details.

Then we have A Day in the Suburbs, a delightfully barbed tale by Evelyn Smith about what housewives really have to deal with when their husbands go to work.  The feuds between the "flat-roofs" and the "peaked-roofs" make the squabbles of the Jets and the Sharks seem like a square dance.  It's a wonder any of them come out alive.

Burton Raffel's Goodbye is the first of the truly dark stories, in which a young ad exec is waylaid, imprisoned, and tortured, all to prove the efficacy of a five-day identity-removal process.  The tale is disturbingly personal, and there is never any explanation as to why this is being done or why the protagonist was chosen (he is apparently not the first, and he surely won't be the last).  Awful stuff… but then, it was meant to be.

Button, Button, by Gordon Dickson, seems almost out of place in this issue.  It's a straightforward story about a crude-mouthed boss of a space freight union, and the beautiful, fiery opera singer he rescues halfway between Earth and Venus.  Enjoyable, but it won't stay with you.

Reginald Bretnor offers up The Man on Top, about a stubborn mountaineer who, through sheer determination, makes it to the summit of one of the world's tallest mountains… only to find that someone has beaten him to the punch.  Mysticism: 1; British pluck: 0.

Isaac Asimov has a sequel, of sorts, to his article on pi.  This one is on the impossibility of "squaring the circle," which is the creation of a square with the same area of a given circle using only a straight-edge and a compass.  I'm glad the good doctor wrote this piece since it's a topic about which I've always been interested. 

On to Damon Knight's acerbic review of Walden Two.  It is, apparently, the last F&SF will see from Mr. Knight–per the editor, he will no longer be reviewing books for the magazine.  I hear, through the grapevine, that it is because Editor Robert Mills disapproved of Knight's justifiably savage critique of Judy Merril's latest book, The Tomorrow People.

Returning to fiction, we have George Elliot's The NRACP (The National Relocation Authority: Colored Persons).  If you find Goodbye to be dark, NRACP is midnight coated in pitch.  It is the portrayal of the systematic extermination of a people, from the point of view of one who has an indirect role in its execution.  I was not surprised to find that this story was originally written in 1949, when the Holocaust was still a fresh wound on the human psyche, and the existence of Israel, a refuge for those who escaped the gas chambers, was still in doubt.  For anyone who wonders how such a tragedy could occur in a civilized country, I suggest giving this tale a read. 

That brings us to Kit Reed's somehow unfinished-feeling Two in Homage, about an evil, human-sacrifice demanding God , upon whom the tables are ultimately turned.  I really should try to meet Ms. Reed someday.  We do live in the same town, after all.

Wrapping up the issue is Joseph Whitehill's Doctor Royker's Experiment.  How best to dissuade an idealist who feels science and scientists can do no wrong?  Why, make him the butt of a scientist's prank, of course.  Resentment cools even the strongest ardor.

Editor Mills saves his column for last.  In it, he asks of if we readers prefer magazines to include stories all of a type or if we prefer a greater variegation of themes.  Regardless of what we think, I gather from reading between Mills' lines that he prints what he gets, and the wave of unhappy tales is largely out of his (and our) control.  I was able to take it this time.  Here's hoping it doesn't become F&SF's signature trait.

And for those following my travels, I am currently at Tokyo's busy international airport awaiting my turn to board a sleek new Japan Air Lines DC-8 bound for home.  It's been a great trip, but I'm ready to return to familiar surroundings.  I imagine I've a huge pile of mail from my fans accumulated (and by fans, I mean advertisers and bill-collectors).

Stay tuned!

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[July 27, 1960] Footloose and Fancy Free (Japan and the August 1960 Fantasy & Science Fiction)

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Perhaps the primary perquisite of being a writer (certainly not the compensation, though Dr. Asimov is the happy exception) is the ability to take one's work anywhere.  Thanks to 'faxes and patient editors, all of this column's readers can follow me around the world.  To wit, I am typing this article in the lounge of my hotel deep in the heart of Tokyo, the capital of the nation of Japan. 

Japan is virtually a second home for me and my family, and we make it a point to travel here as often as time and funds permit.  Now that the Boeing 707 has shrunk the world by almost 50%, I expect our travels to this amazing, burgeoning land will increase in frequency.

Tokyo, of course, is one of the world's biggest cities, and the crowds at Shinjuku station attest to this.  And yet, there are still plenty of moments of almost eerie solitude–not just in the parks and temples, but in random alleyways.  There are always treasures to find provided one is willing to look up and down (literally–only a fraction of Tokyo's shops is located on the ground floor!)

Gentle readers, I have not forgotten the main reason you read my column.  In fact, the timing of my trip was perfect, allowing me to take all of the September 1960 digests with me to the Orient.  But first, I need to wrap up last month's batch of magazines.  To that end, without further ado, here is the August 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction!

Robert F. Young has the lead short story, Nikita Eisenhower Jones.  I'd liked his To Fell a Tree very much, so I was looking forward to this one, the story of a young Polynesian who finagles his way onto the first manned mission to Pluto only to find it a lonely, one-way trip.  Sadly, while the subject matter is excellent, the tale is written in a way that keeps the reader at arm's length and thus fails to engage in what could have been an intensely powerful, personal story. 

The Final Ingredient is a different matter altogether.  Jack Sharkey had thus far failed to impress, so I was surprised to find him in F&SF, a higher caliber magazine, in my opinion.  But this tale, involving a young girl whose efforts at witchraft are frustrated until she abandons love entirely and embraces wickedness, is quite good indeed. 

John Suter's The Seeds of Murder, a reprint from F&SF's sister magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery, is about telling the future through regressive (or in this case progressive) hypnosis.  It's cute, but something I'd expect to find in one of the lesser mags.  I suppose this should come as no surprise–this is Suter's first and only science fiction/fantasy story, so far as I can tell.

Rosel George Brown is back with another dark tale: Just a Suggestion.  When aliens subtly introduce the idea that the way to win friends and influence people is to be less impressive than one's peers, the result is economic downturn and, ultimately, planetary destruction.  Obviously satirical; rather nicely done.

This brings us to Robert Arthur's novelette, Miracle on Main Street.  A boy wishes on a unicorn horn that all of the folks in his small town, good and bad, should get what they deserve.  There is no ironic twist, no horrifying consequences.  It's a simple tale (suitable for children, really) that very straightforwardly details the results of the wish.  It should be a vapid story; Arthur goes out of his way to ensure there are no surprises.  Yet, I enjoyed it just the same.  I suppose a little unalloyed charm is nice every so often. 

The Revenant, by Raymond Banks, is a fascinating little story about human space travelers who explore a planet less fixed in sequence and probability than ours.  Their lives are far less dependable, but infinitely more varied and interesting.  The closest approximation would be if our dreams were our waking lives and vice versa (and perhaps this was the tale's inspiration).  Good stuff.

Avram Davidson has a one-pager, Climacteric, about a man who goes hunting dragons in search of romance.  He finds both.  It is followed by G.C.Edmondson's Latin-themed The Sign of the Goose, a strangely written story about an alien visitation that, frankly, made little sense to me.  It stars the same eccentrics as The Galactic Calabash.

Asimov has an article about the Moon as a vacation spot whose main attraction is the lovely view of Earth.  Catskills in the Sky, it is called, and it's one of his weaker entries.

Finally, we have Stephen Barr's Calahan and the Wheelies, about an inventor who creates a species of wheeled little robots with the ability to learn.  The concept is captivating, and the execution largely plausible.  Sadly, the story sort of degenerates into standard sci-fi clichés: the robots, of course, become sentient and rather malicious.  It's played for laughs, but I can just imagine a more serious story involving similar machines being put to all sorts of amazing uses.  Imagine a semi-smart machine that rolled around your house vacuuming and mopping your floor.  Or a programmable dog-walker.  I like robots that don't look like people or act like living things, but which are indispensible allies to humanity.  I want more stories featuring them.

All told, I think this issue clocks in about a shade over 3 stars.  A thoroughly typical F&SF, which is no bad thing.

See you in a few days with more from the Land of the Rising Sun!

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[July 10, 1960] Eye of the Storm (August 1960 Analog)

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Once again, I find myself on vacation in my home town.  San Diego is hosting two science fiction conventions back to back this July, and this second one promises to be the larger of the two.  Of course, neither of these conventions holds a candle to the big one starting in Los Angeles tomorrow, the one that will determine our next Democratic candidate for President of the United States.

But that's a topic for another article.  You came here to find out about this month's fiction, right?

John Campbell is continuing his magazine's slow transitioning of names from Astounding to Analog.  Both names are still on the cover of this month's issue, superimposed upon each other in a confusing mess, but the spine now unequivocally says Analog, so that's how I'll refer to it from now on.  R.I.P. Astounding.  Here's to 24 years of an influential, if not entirely consistent, existence.

It's not a bad mag.  Poul Anderson's The High Crusade continues to be excellent, if wholly implausible.  This story of a 14th Century English village transformed into a nomadic band of universe-conquering marauders is played completely straight, with lovely characterization and an authentic ear for the language.  I find it hard to imagine that I won't enjoy it through all three parts at this point.

The magazine fares less well in its shorter pieces.  The lead novella, Mack Reynold's Adaptation, for instance, doesn't quite work.  A galactic Terran federation is trying to bring old, backward human colonies into the fold, but first, these wayward settlements must be brought to modern status sociologically and technologically.  Two planets are the subject of a 50-year project, one of which has reverted to a European-style feudalism, the other emulating Aztec culture and advancement.  Of course, the inhabitants all speak English and are descended from American stock. 

The team dispatched to elevate the planets to galactic standard splits in twain.  They determine that a healthy competition is in order, one of them championing a controlled economy a la the Soviet Union.  The other employs capitalism.  While both divisions manage to raise the economic output of their charge planets, they are accompanied by serious growing pains, and it is not clear which course is better (or if either be optimum). 

The set-up is terribly forced, but I just pretended the contact team was really trying to improve the lot of a couple of real cultures from the past, perhaps in alternate timelines.  The characterization is largely incidental, and there are no female characters at all.  Still, Reynolds does get you from point A to B, and he does get you invested in the outcomes of the experiments.

Next up is Pushbutton War by brand-newcomer Joseph P. Martino, and it reads like someone's freshman work.  It's the story of an Air Force pilot, who zips around at Mach 25 in a rocket-powered anti-missile interceptor.  Not only is the concept silly, but the story alternates between walls of actionless dialogue and soulless action.  And yet, despite this, it's not horrible.  I'd have suggested a rewrite or two, however.


by John Schoenherr

John Brunner has the exceedingly slight, Report on the Nature of the Lunar Surface, a few-pager that exists solely to set up the punchline.  In short (as there is no long), a technician's sandwich ends up on the Moon, the result of carelessness around a lunar probe.  The bacteria in the dairy products thus introduced to Earth's celestial companion result in a transformation of the Moon's crust of a decidedly viridian and odorous nature…

Since the magazine is now Analog Science Fact and Fiction, it is apt that there are two science articles in this issue.  One is a comprehensive summary on Venus by R.S.Richardson, the fellow who recently wrote a similar piece on Mars in a recent issue.  The current scientific consensus seems to be that we still really don't know much about "Earth's Twin" save that it has an impenetrable veil of clouds.  As we get better at radar studies, and once we send a spacecraft out to the solar system's second planet, perhaps the Goddess of Love will reveal her secrets.

The other article is an interesting, if dry, essay by Alastair Cameron on how elements heavier than helium were formed in the universe.  The popular theory these days is that everything north of atomic weight two on the Periodic Table formed amidst the unimaginable pressures existing in the center of stars.  The idea that our bodies are composed of the remains of long-dead suns is a romantic, mind-boggling one, I think.

Last up is Christopher Anvil's A Taste of Poison, about a canny businessman who convinces a set of alien would-be invaders that the inhabitants of Earth are a far tougher conquest than our comparatively primitive technologies might indicate.  A typical Anvil story that might pass the typical editorial filters of Campbell.

All told, it's a 3-star issue buouyed by the Anderson and the non-fiction articles and shackled by the pedestrian shorter fiction.  Still, that's two thirds of a winning combination.  If Campbell manages to get a decent new set of writers, he could pull his magazine out of its recent nosedive.

See you very soon with a gallery of photos from "Comic Con."  Don't let the name fool you–it's a general science fiction/fantasy convention.

Stay tuned!

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[June 9, 1960] To Pluto and the Future (July 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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I was recently told that my reviews are too negative, and that I should focus on telling the world about the good stuff; for that hopeful fan, I present my assessment of the July 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction.  There's not a clunker in the bunch, and if none of the stories is a perfect gem, several are fine stones nevertheless.

My receipt of this month's issue was accompanied by no small measure of eagerness.  The cover promised me two stories by female authors (Zenna Henderson and Miriam Allen deFord) as well as a novella by Wilson Tucker, who wrote the excellent The City in the Sea.  Here's what I found inside:

Stephen Barr is no stranger to Fantasy and Science Fiction, having appeared in the book twice before.  His lead short story, Oh I'll take the High Road is softer stuff than his usual science fictiony fare, but I enjoyed it.  It features a poet scientist, who invents a thought-propelled space drive, and the eternal love he shares with a professor's daughter.  Where he ends up, and how that love endures, makes for a pleasant (if not particularly remarkable) story.

I'd never head of Hollis Alpert before.  His newness may explain the unusual nature of his premiere science fiction piece, a mock academic presentation called The Simian Problem, in which a professor discusses the relatively recent (fictional) phenomenon that involves women giving birth to degenerate ape children.  The occurrence of such "monsters" is on the exponential increase, it seems, and an effective treatment remains elusive.  The format meanders jarringly from first person expository to dialogue, but the sting in the story's tail is worth waiting for.

Moving on, we have the delightful Theodore Cogswell with The Burning, a portrayal of a dystopic future from the point of view of a most unusual teen gangster.  Those involved in a certain ubiquitous youth organization may get more out of it than I did.

Zenna Henderson is always good, of course.  Her Things is the story of a first encounter between an alien aboriginal race, told from the point of view of its female spiritual leader, and humanity.  The Terrans bring all manner of technological gifts, but are they worth the physical and philosophical price?  Should one sacrifice one's very cultural identity for the chance to "progress" scientifically?  Tough questions, and Henderson pulls no punches.

I wasn't quite sure how to react to A.H.Z.Carr's It is not my fault, though upon reflection (and the measure of a good story is how much it makes you reflect), I think it's quite good.  In brief: when a down-on-his-luck fellow collapses and dies in broad daylight near a busy thoroughfare, a momentarily attentive God dispatches an angel to determine who was at fault for the miserable death and dispense punishment.  Sometimes justice isn't so easy as all that.

Then we have Miriam Allen deFord's All in Good Time, another first person exposition story.  In this case, the setting is a first year law classroom a century from now, but this is largely incidental to the plot, which involves a cross-time bigamist.  It's cute, and the presentation is more expertly handled than in the above-described Alpert story.  I particularly appreciated that, in the future, female lawyers seem to be as common as male ones.

Ever wonder what to give the fellow who's had everything?  What is Heaven to someone who enjoyed life to its fullest?  Gordy Dickson asks those questions in his excellent The Last Dream.  Of course, for many, just being close to the Almighty is reward enough, but most like to think of Heaven (if it exist) providing physical benefits, too.  I bet the doughnuts are fantastic, for instance.  And non-fattening.

Dr. Asimov has a good, timely article on Pluto and what lies beyond this month.  It was one of my motivations for writing my own piece on the subject.  He spends a good bit of space on the interesting Titius-Bode Law that seems to govern orbital spacing in our system, at least out to Uranus.  I'm still not convinced that the "Law" isn't a statistical fluke–I look forward to being able to resolve systems outside ours so we can have a data set larger than one.

Fair Trade, by Avram Davidson, reads like a Clifford Simak piece.  A pair of aliens make a forced landing in a backwoods town and party the natives before being rescued by another alien-crewed ship.  Before departing, they swap their super-knives for a local manufactured good.  Its identity is not disclosed until the end.  One of the few non-somber pieces from the author.

Finally, we have Wilson Tucker's To the Tombaugh Station, a very good, novella-sized mystery involving a man, an asteroid miner by trade, suspected of murder, a tough woman bounty hunter sent to investigate him, and the long long trip across the solar system they spend together.  Wilson Tucker has a penchant for writing strong female characters, and he does an excellent job here.  The whodunnit aspect is nicely done, too. 

I note that there is a Planet X beyond Pluto in this story, Tombaugh Station having been established solely for the purpose of investigating it.  Tucker, at least in the instant tale, subscribes to the popular theory that Pluto was once a moon of Neptune. 

Tallying up the numbers, we have a strong 3.5-star issue, well worth your time and 40 cents.  See you soon with something Amazing!

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