Tag Archives: fantasy and science fiction

Magazine

[July 27, 1961] Breaking a Winning Streak (August 1961 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Take a look at the back cover of this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction.  There's the usual array of highbrows with smug faces letting you know that they wouldn't settle for a lesser sci-fi mag.  And next to them is the Hugo award that the magazine won last year at Pittsburgh's WorldCon.  That's the third Hugo in a row. 

It may well be their last.

I used to love this little yellow magazine.  Sure, it's the shortest of the Big Three (including Analog and Galaxy), but in the past, it boasted the highest quality stories.  I voted it best magazine for 1959 and 1960. 

F&SF has seen a steady decline over the past year, however, and the last three issues have been particularly bad.  Take a look at what the August 1961 issue offers us:

Avaram Davidson and Morton Klass's The Kappa Nu Nexus, about a milquetoast Freshman who joins a fraternity that hosts a kooky set of time travelers.  Davidson's writing, formerly some of the most sublime, has gotten unreadably self-indulgent, and William Tenn's brother (Klass) doesn't make it any better.  One star.

Survival Planet, by Harry Harrison, features the remnant colony of the vanquished Great Slavocracy.  It's not a bad story, but it's mostly told rather than shown, the book-ends being highly expositional.  Three stars.

Vance Aandahl, as one of my readers once observed, desperately wants to be Ray Bradbury.  His Cogi Drove His Car Through Hell has the virtue of starring a non-traditional protagonist; that's the only virtue of this mess.  One star.

Juliette, translated from the French by Damon Knight (it is originally by Claude-François Cheiniss), is a bright spot.  It's a sort of cross between McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang and Young's Romance in a Twenty-First Century Used Car Lot.  I found it effective, written in that Gallic light fashion.  Four stars.

For the life of me, I couldn't tell you the point of E. William Blau's first printed story, The Dispatch Executive.  Something about a bureaucratic dystopia, or perhaps it's a special kind of hell for office clerks.  Hell is right, and here's hoping we don't see Blau in print again.  One star.

Then we have another comparatively bright spot: Kit Reed's Piggy.  Per the author, it is "the story of Pegasus, although I don't remember that his passengers spouted verse, and a mashup of first lines from Emily Dickinson, whom I admired, but never liked."  There's no question that it's beautifully written, but there is not much movement as regards to plot.  Three stars.

A Meeting on a Northern Moor, Leah Bodine Drake's poem on the decline of Norse mythology is evocative, though brief.  Murray Leinster's The Case of the Homicidal Robots is a turgid mystery-adventure involving the spacenapping of dozens io interstellar vessels.  Three and two stars, respectively.

Winona McClintic is back with Four Days in the Corner, some kind of ghost story.  It's worse than her last piece, and that's nothing to be proud of.  Two stars.

Then we have Asimov's science fact column, The Evens Have It, on the frequency of nuclear isotopes among the elements.  The Good Doctor's articles are usually the high point of F&SF for me, but this one is the first I'd ever characterize as "dull."  Three stars, but you'll probably give it a two.

Rounding things up is Gordon Dickson's The Haunted Village, about a traveler who vacations in a village whose inhabitants are hostile to outsiders.  The twist?  There is no outside world – only the delusion that such a thing exists.  Dickson is capable of a lot better.  Two stars.

I often say that I read bad fiction so you don't have to.  This was especially true this month.  While Galaxy was quite good (3.4 stars), both Analog and F&SF clocked in at 2.2. 
For those of you new to the genre and wondering why they should bother (why I should bother), I promise – it's not all like this.  Please don't let it all be like this…

Coming up next: The sci-fi epic, Mysterious Island!

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Magazine

[August 22, 1960] If every day were a convention (September 1960 IF)

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It's been a topsy turvy month!  Not only have I been to Japan, but I've just gone to yet another new science fiction convention taking place virtually next door (pictures appended below).  Yet, despite all the bustle, I've managed to find time for my #1 pasttime: my monthly pile of science fiction/fantasy digests.  And here, at long last, is my review of the September 1960 IF Science Fiction.

As Galaxy's lesser sister, its overall quality tends to be a little lower.  There are a couple of stand-outs in this issue that made it a worthy purchase, however.  Moreover, I'm noticing a trend toward the experimental.  H. Gold (and his right-hand, Fred Pohl) seem more willing to take chances with this mag.  I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.

I don't want to spoil the stories for you, so I'll keep the synopses brief:

Daniel Galouye has the opening number, a longish novelette called Kangaroo Court.  It's an interesting murder mystery in a world where telepathy has made crime obsolete.  An extra twist is the development of memory copying–a technology that lets one create a full simulacrum of a person's personality up to the date of storage.  I'm given to understand that a writer should only present one revolutionary technology per story, but I think Galouye pulls it off.  Three stars.

Margaret St. Clair is also back with her short story, Parallel Beans, a cute little piece about the dangers of bartering across alternate time streams.  Three stars.

Wedge, by H.B. Fyfe, is about a human prisoner who is the subject of an alien intelligence test.  Is he the testee or the tester?  The first weak piece of the issue: Two stars.

But it is followed up by To Choke an Ocean by the reliable J.F.Bone.  I like stories without antagonists, and they get bonus points if they involve interesting alien civilizations.  Four stars.

That brings us to Arthur Porges, who turned 45 yesterday (Happy Birthday!) His Words and Music, about a man who can tell a person's future in a decidedly off-beat (or perhaps "on-beat" is more appropriate) fashion, would make a fantastic episode of The Twilight Zone.  Another four star tale.

There is a brief interlude during which Fred Pohl contributes a longish book-review column.  It includes praise for the rather awful The Tomorrow People, by Judy Merril.  It is followed by Robert Shea's unusually written, but rather pointless, Star Performer, involving a Martian aborigine and his effect on the decadent, overripe population of Earth.  Two stars.

Finally, R.A. Lafferty offers up Six Fingers of Time, about a fellow who discovers a talent for living life at an accelerated rate.  The writing is odd, and the subject matter uninspired, and yet…it has a certain charm.  Three stars.

That puts us at exactly three stars for the issue no matter how you slice it, which ranks it above Astounding and below F&SF this month.  No surprises there.  F&SF also wins the prize for best story: George Elliott's The NRACP, though to be fair, it's a reprint.  I might give the nod for best original story to Bone.  Your mileage will almost assuredly vary. 

Finally, of the 22 stories, serial portions, and non-fiction articles appearing in the three magazines, exactly two of them were written by women.  I'll leave this datum here without further observation or opinion.

This weekend, I'm off to the movies to watch Dinosaurus, the new flick from the team that brought us The Blob and 4D-Man.  Sadly, neither of the members of my immediate family will go with me.  Perhaps I'll run into one of you, my beloved fans.

And for those who came here to see the pretty pictures, here are the costumes from our local science fiction convention:

And some attendees, not in costume:

Yes, that's the Traveller, himself (on the left).

That's all for today, and if you're one of the gracious attendees who allowed me to take her/his picture, do drop me a line!

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Magazine

Farewell, older brother (June 1959 Fantasy & Science Fiction;5-14-1959)

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We live in such exciting times that it's no wonder science fiction is flourishing.  It seems not a month goes by without some kind of space shot, and yet we're still perhaps years away from the first manned orbit (not to mention a lunar jaunt).  Science fiction lets us see the headlines of tomorrow long before they are thrown onto our doorstep.

Of course, not all science fiction deals with space, and not all science fiction magazines deal exclusively in science fiction.  The latter half of this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction comprises naught but fantasies.

Not that this is a bad thing.  With Berlin under siege, Israel and its neighbors barely restrained from coming to blows, Cuba in the throes of revolution, any kind of escape is a welcome one.

You've hopefully read my review of the rest of the June 1959 Fantasy and Science Fiction. Most of the rest of this month's ish is taken up by Philip Jose Farmer's The Alley Man, a gritty, rambling story that is as hard to take as it is to put down.  It spotlights the grubby life of the what may be the last of the Neanderthals consigned, like the rest of his race, to survive off the scraps cast off by the superior Homo Sapiens Sapiens.  Not that Old Paley is any dumber than us.  Quite the contrary.  While he has the rough manner and speech as might be expected of the lowest of the lower economic class, he is a fine raconteur and rather wise. 

No, what did in the Neanderthals 50,000 years ago, was the loss of their chieftain's sacred headpiece (and the fact that Neanderthals were worse shots with the bow and arrow).  Over the millenia, the Neanderthals have slowly dwindled away, until just one remained (though it appears there are plenty of half-breeds and quatroons around).  Old Paley is a garbage scavenger who lives with a half-Neanderthal woman called "Gummy" and a physically blemished former socialite intellectual named Deena with a fetish for rough treatment.

Enter Dorothy, the aide of a physical anthropologist, who befriends Old Paley to study him.  It becomes clear over the course of the story that she becomes rather attracted to him (in part due to the powerful stench of the Neanderthal, like "a pig making love to a billy goat on a manure pile," but laden with powerful pheremones), but theirs is not fated to be a happy relationship.  In fact, the resulting love quadrangle is all kinds of dysfunctional and, ultimately for Old Paley, fatal.

But you can't deny it's well-written and compelling.

There are three remaining odds and ends: an interesting article on orbits, Satellite Trails by Ken Rolf, about not just the course satellites take around the Earth, but the interesting and sometimes unintuitive patterns they make to ground observers (something like Ptolemy's epicycles); Charles Finney's Iowan's Curse, a cautionary tale about the karmic danger of being a Good Samaritan; and Robert Young's Production Problem, a short-short about a creativity shortage in the far future.  They fill the pages, but are not particularly noteworthy.

I think that leaves us at an uninspiring 3.5 or so for the issue.  The lead story is very good, and Alley Man is worth reading, I suppose, but the rest is lackluster.

But you can decide for yourself!  And should.  Until next time (and do stay tuned–I have many interesting updates to come).

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Magazine

Star Dim.. (May 1959 Fantasy & Science Fiction, second part; 4-07-1959)

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How scary is a truly dark night sky?

In Asimov's Nightfall, a certain planet's orbital situation ensures that there is always a sun overhead.  On the rare occasion that all of the nearby stars align on the opposite side of the planet, the planet's population is consumed with hysteria.  I suppose it's a justifiable extrapolation of the impressive and cowing effect on our ancestors caused by eclipses of the sun.

In A. Bertram Chandler's The Man Who could not Stop (which I will discuss at length further on in the article), there are inhabited planets at the edge of the galaxy.  When the lens of the galaxy aligns with a rim planet's sun, the result is a near-featureless dark sky marred only by a few far-away solitary stars and nebulae.  As Chandler describes it, the effect is unsettling in the extreme, and most natives move away to planets comfortably surrounded with stars.

I suppose it's Chandler's world, and he can do what he wants, but would a truly empty sky be that disconcerting?  Even today, on Earth, there are plenty of locales where cloud cover renders the stars invisible.  In downtown Tokyo or New York, the lights of the city drown out any puny stellar competition.  I should think that the spectacle of the full lens of the galaxy, visible at least half of the year, would more than make up for a half-year of darkness. 

What do you think?

As you can probably guess, I have finished this month's Fantasy & Science Fiction, and I've got a report for you.  I can honestly say that the magazine ended on a rising trend, quality-wise.

The lovely Rosel George Brown is back with the light-hearted Lost in Translation.  It's a silly tale of time travel featuring a drippy but lovely fan of the classics (the Greek classics, that is), but the whole thing is really just a set-up for a bad pun at the end.  I like Brown's writing–I'm just waiting for one of her stories to really wow me.

Avram Davidson's The Montavarde Camera is a moody piece (does he write any other kind?) about an antique camera whose pictures spell doom for their subject.  Well-written (does he ever write poorly?), but rather a second-rate premise.

I enjoyed (with reservations) Jack London's tale of present-day adventure told in past-tense, The Angry Mammoth, in which a hunter recounts his adventures tracking down and killing the last of the hairy elephant cousins.  Not for the animal-lover.  Of course, it is a reprint, the original story having been published in 1901 (and it reads like it).

But the real jewel of this issue is the aforementioned The Man Who could not Stop.  It is a little reminiscent of those stories where people who could not fit into the regimented roles meted out by society (a la Asimov's Profession) become its masters.  In Chandler's story, the protagonist (name of Clavering) is a hardened criminal fleeing justice.  He runs from Earth to the galaxy's rim, from where extradition is impossible.  Once there, however, he quickly runs afoul of the law.  The first time is intentional–he wants to be incarcerated to locate a fence so as to offload a haul of stolen jewelry.  The second time is unintentional, but criminal habits are hard to break (and the rim planets make recidivism all but inevitable).  The third time is intentional–our anti-hero is told that criminals are deported third time 'round. 

Except it turns out that deportation is a one-way trip into the abyss; Clavering ends up press-ganged into the crew of a starship heading out deep into inter-galactic space.  So we learn that this is standard operating procedure on the rim worlds: attract the incorrigible and shanghai them.

I liked it a lot, and I understand there may be more tales of the rim worlds on the way.  I'm looking forward to it.

That's that for today.  I've largely finished this month's Galaxy (which is excellent, by the way), but I understand that NASA plans to announce the Mercury astronauts on April 9, so I'm sure that event will feature prominently in my next article.

Thanks for reading!

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Movies

Too close to home? (I Married a Monster from Outer Space; 3-31-1959)

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Remember how I went to the flicks to see a double feature of science-fiction horror the other day?  The follow-up to The Blob was I Married a Monster from Outer Space.  You would think that, with a title like that, this was the B-movie stinker of the bunch.

As it turns out, while definitely having a comparatively low budget, in some ways, it is a more chilling and thoughtful film.

In the small town of Morrisville (or Morristown or Morrisburg… something like that), getting hitched is a chore, tantamount to a death sentence.  At least, it is to hear the guys tell it.  Every night, the fellas go to the local boozery to drown their sorrows and commiserate. 

Except for Bill.  He's getting married the next day, and he wants to see his lovely bride-to-be. 

But then…

An ugly space alien smothers Bill in a cloud, and when next we see him, Bill is a changed man.  Faltering, more brutal, his fiancee, Marge, marries him anyway.  One year later, an abortive letter from Marge to her mother indicates that she's aware of the change in Bill.  Not only is he remote, but animals instinctively dislike him (in one chilling scene, Bill snaps the neck of a dog Marge had given him as an anniversary present).  At this point in the film, we're still not sure if Bill has been possessed, if the alien has taken his form, or if Bill is still in there, just a bit altered.

One by one, the men in town are taken.  Bill's friends.  The local law enforcement. 

Bills friend, Sam, adapts to human life with the most gusto, marrying his fiancee, being smarmily sadistic, and otherwise enjoying all of the pleasures existence on Earth has to offer.  Except booze.  The aliens can't stomach the stuff.

Or, apparently, oxygen.  When alien-Sam falls off a rowboat at a park outing, he succumbs when the local doctor gives him pure oxygen to revive him.

Now, through all of this, Marge is the viewpoint character, and this is where the movie is really poignant.  She catches on pretty quickly that something is wrong with Bill, and she has a run-in with an undisguised alien fairly early-on.  The problem is that no one will believe her.  No matter where she turns, whether to the lushes in the bar or her good friend, the chief of police, she is told not to worry her pretty little head.  When she tries to phone the FBI, all the lines are down.  When she tries to wire the capital, the telegrapher surreptitiously tears up the telegram.  In a man's world, when all the men are aliens, who is there for a woman to run to?

Well, I'd sort of hoped that Marge might team up with the other women of the town.  After all, the aliens only go after men.  Sadly, this never happens, in part because Marge can't get any of the lady-folk to believe her either.

In a very good scene, Marge confronts Alien-Bill, telling him she knows he's an alien.  Alien-Bill does not deny it.  In fact, Alien-Bill explains the plot: his race fled from a dying world, but all of the females were killed in the flight.  They need to inhabit human bodies to mate with human females to make more aliens.  Except alien-inhabited people are incapable of mating with human females.  Thus, they are trying to genetically modify the females of Morristown/burg/ville to be compatible with the alien males.

What makes this scene so interesting is Alien-Bill's confession that although his motives are selfish, and before he inhabited Bill's body, he had no emotions, Alien-Bill has come to understand and appreciate human feelings.  He does not regret his actions, exactly, but he has fallen in love with Marge, and he does not seem to be enjoying is current role.  The acting is good enough that Alien-Bill becomes a sympathetic character (despite being rather a bastard).

Ultimately, Marge convinces the town doctor of the truth, and he rounds up a few of the unaffected men to break the alien spaceship.  The aliens have ray guns, but the humans have dogs…  dogs apparently beat aliens with ray guns.

Once inside the ship, the men discover that all of the possessed males are actually still alive, their bodies in some kind of stasis.  They disconnect the apparatus, whereupon the aliens turn into applesauce and die.  Happy ending.

Taken as a commentary on the plight of the modern woman, this movie really packs a wallop.  How many women have felt trapped and helpless in a marriage with a man who turned out to be a jerk?  How often have women's reports of abuse been ignored with a dismissive chuckle?  The aliens aren't really so alien, are they?

P.S. Fair warning: Work has been a bear, and my hands can only take so much.  I don't want to go to a every-three-days schedule because I have too much to say.  Just be aware it may not always be every other day.  Thanks for your understanding and your patronage!

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