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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 10, 1968] It's a Man's World (March 1968 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

The Boy's Club

It's hardly shocking news to point out that much of modern American society is dominated by men. To pick a random example, out of one hundred members of the United States Senate, there is only one woman.


Margaret Chase Smith (Republican, Maine) who also served in the House of Representatives from 1940 to 1948, when she was elected to the Senate.

Popular culture isn't much different. Take, for example, a new television series that's drawing a lot of attention. It's named for the two male hosts.


From left to right, straight man Dan Rowan and goofy partner Dick Martin.

I have to admit that I'm already a big fan of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, which premiered last month. Besides the rapid-fire pace of its jokes, I also admire the talents of a quartet of regular female performers on the program. Here's to you, Ruth Buzzi, Jo Anne Worley, Judy Carne, and new cast member Goldie Hawn!

This is not meant to detract in any way from the fine work provided by the men on the series. Bravo, Henry Gibson, Arte Johnson, and announcer Gary Owens!

(I would be remiss if I did not also mention the appearance of a remarkable entertainer calling himself Tiny Tim on the premiere episode. His performance is unique, to say the least.)


Dick Martin is nonplussed.

The same pattern of male domination is often found in the world of popular music (though not always–if the Beatles are the Kings of Pop, the Supremes are the Queens.) Right now, for instance, the Number One hit in the USA is Green Tambourine, a sprightly little psychedelic number performed by some guys calling themselves the Lemon Pipers.


Even the 45 rpm single is groovy-looking.

Proving the old adage that behind every great man there's a great woman, the lyrics for the song were written by Rochelle (Shelley) Pinz.


Pinz with Paul Leka, who wrote the music.

Stag Party

As we'll see, the only original work of fiction in the latest issue of Fantastic takes male domination to an extreme, in a certain way. Let's take a look.


Cover art by Johnny Bruck.

As usual, the cover comes from another source. In this case, it's from an issue of the popular German publication Perry Rhodan.


The original looks better, even if I can't read it.

Spartan Planet (Part One of Two), by A. Bertram Chandler


Illustrations by Jeff Jones.

As the title implies, the setting is a world with a culture based on ancient Greece, particularly Sparta. Society is rigidly divided into various classes, determined at birth. The main character is a military policeman.

The native animals on this planet reproduce by splitting themselves apart, a bloody and painful process. The human inhabitants believe that they used to have children this way, but now make use of a so-called Birth Machine, which makes things much easier. Nobody has access to this fabled device, except for members of the Doctor class.

Did I mention that there are no women to be seen? This is an all-male world, at least as far as the vast majority of the population knows.

There's an implication of homosexual relationships. The so-called helots tend to be slightly effeminate, compared to the red-blooded Spartans, and there's mention of close friendships between members of the two classes.

The planet receives twice-yearly shipments from their only colony world, founded by a group of rebels. The two societies have a distant relationship, trading goods but having no other contact.

The story begins when a starship from another group shows up. Aboard is our old friend John Grimes, who has appeared in a handful of other stories by Chandler. More important is the fact that he's got an ethologist with him, here to study the planet's culture.


The ethologist. Can you tell there will be trouble?

The locals, having never seen a woman before, assume the ethologist is either deformed or an alien. The protagonist feels a peculiar mixture of emotions. (The implication is that males are inherently attracted to females, even if they have no idea that such people exist. That's debatable, at least.)

Meanwhile, a security officer gives the policeman a secret assignment. It seems that the Doctors have some kind of hidden agenda. The hero sneaks into a forbidden area and gets a hint the world doesn't quite work the way he thought it did.

Chandler tips his hand pretty early, so it's probably not giving away too much to reveal that there are, indeed, women on the planet. The Doctors keep them locked away in a sort of harem.

I don't know how the rest of this is going to resolve itself, or what role Grimes will play, but so far it's fairly interesting. As I've noted, there isn't much suspense about the Doctors' conspiracy, but I'll keep reading.

Three stars.

The Court of Kublai Khan, by David V. Reed

The March 1948 issue of Fantastic Adventures supplies this mystical swashbuckler.


Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones.

A fellow is obsessed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous incomplete poem Kubla Khan (note the change in spelling from the title of the story.) So much so, in fact, that he finds himself back in time, in the palace of that fabled ruler. (Let's ignore the fact that the poem has nothing to do with real history.) People from all ages who are passionate about something wind up there. (There's even a prehistoric man around.)


Illustrations by Robert Fuqua.

Coleridge himself is present, because of his love for the maiden he saw in his vision of Xanadu. Our hero tries to help him win the adored lady. If I managed to follow the confusing plot correctly, the same day keeps repeating itself over and over, ending in Coleridge's failure. The protagonist does his best to change this endless cycle.


Sometimes this means using a sword against man or beast.

Part of his motivation is that he wants Coleridge to finish the poem. Complicating matters is a rival for the woman's affection. There's also the peculiar fact that once somebody achieves his passionate desire, he goes back to his own time with no memory of what happened.

The premise is intriguing, but I found the story difficult to follow. I never quite understood how this magical form of time travel was supposed to operate.

The bulk of the text consists of a letter the hero writes to his buddy, chronicling his adventures. (Somehow he manages to remember things just long enough to jot them down.) There's plenty of action, but the ending is anticlimactic.

I was disappointed that I never got to see Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea.

Two stars.

Heart of Light, by Gardner F. Fox

The July 1946 issue of Amazing Stories is the source of this weird tale.


Cover art by Walter Parke.

An archeologist finds an incredibly ancient bronze statue in the Australian desert. He hears a voice coming from inside, and breaks open the very thin outer shell. Inside is a figure made entirely of diamond.

(There's some nonsense about carbon being the source of life. Thus, a diamond being can live. Yeah, sure.)

Anyway, the diamond person turns into a beautiful woman. (At first, the hero assumes the figure is that of a man. I guess the voice and shape weren't enough of a clue.) She takes the fellow on a bizarre journey through time. (At least, I think so. This was another story that confused me.)


Illustration by Julian S. Krupa.

She leads him to an entity made of light. He finds out that a civilization from another planet, led to Earth by the benevolent light being, fought off loathsome creatures straight out of a Lovecraft yarn. (The story even mentions H. P. Lovecraft and his acolyte August Derleth by name.) All the people died, except for the woman, who was preserved by the power of the light entity. Now it's time to wipe out the enemy for good.

The author throws a bunch of stuff at the reader at a breakneck pace. The whole thing doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's not boring.

Two stars.

The Great Steel Panic, by Fletcher Pratt and Irvin Lester

We go way back to the September 1928 issue of Amazing Stories for this disaster story.


Cover art by Frank R. Paul.

Somebody, or something, cuts through the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. The same thing happens to elevators, subways, and other modern devices made of iron and steel.


Illustration also by Paul.

A brilliant scientist figures out what's going on, and what should be done about it.

That's the entire plot. Even the disaster stuff, which kills lots of people, is described dispassionately, in a second-hand fashion. The result is a very uninvolving piece. David H. Keller's similar work, The Metal Doom, wasn't that good, but at least it developed the basic idea to a greater extent.

The nifty Scientifiction symbol on the cover of the old magazine is a lot more impressive.

Two stars.

Incompatible, by Rog Phillips

This science fiction horror story first appeared in the September 1949 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones.

An alien spaceship crashes on Earth. The creature inside lives on the blood of living organisms. (Shades of Queen of Blood!)

She's also telepathic, and uses this ability in an attempt to survive in this very strange world. Besides that, she can change her appearance, eventually looking like a very attractive woman.


Illustration by W. E. Tilly.

Things work out pretty well for her, until a military man gets a little too friendly.

In essence, this is a vampire story. The first part, told from the point of view of the alien, is quite effective. The author does a fine job describing Earth and humans from an extraterrestrial's perspective. The rest of the story goes downhill here from there. Some of the sections told from the human point of view are extraneous.

Two stars.

Fantasy Books, by Fritz Leiber

The first installment of this new book review column discusses the nonfiction tome Spirits, Stars and Spells: The Profits and Perils of Magic by L. Sprague de Camp and Catherine C. de Camp. Leiber gives a glowing review to this skeptical account of human superstitions. I mention this mostly to contrast it with Harry Harrison's editorial, which talks about the same article about dowsing rods used by the United States Marine Corps as appeared in the latest issue of Analog. Buy the de Camps' book instead.

No rating.

I Love Lucifer, by William P. McGivern

Finishing up the magazine is this tale from the December/January 1953/1954 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Mel Hunter.

A little girl who claims her name is Lucifer shows up at a place where a man watches over a junkyard of old spaceships. The only other resident is a boy the same age as the girl. The two kids play together among the worn-out vessels.


Illustrations by Ernest Schroeder.

A government agent shows up at the place, looking for escaped criminals. Meanwhile, the kids meet a seemingly friendly man who wants their help in getting away from bad guys. Let's just say that there are plots and counterplots, and neither the man nor the girl are quite what they claim to be.


Would you name this child Lucifer?

The title may suggest something supernatural, but nothing of the kind occurs. I imagine the author called the girl Lucifer just so he could pun on the name of a popular TV show of the time. (Get it?)

The story caught my interest at first, but quickly lost me. The plot started to reek of space pirates and other corny stuff. The true nature of Lucifer was just silly.

Two stars.

In Need of a Woman's Touch

Maybe my increasing awareness of feminism (they're starting to call it Women's Liberation these days, since the National Organization for Women was created last year) just puts me in a cranky mood, but it seems that this all-male issue wasn't very good. One so-so half of a novel and a bunch of unsatisfactory old stories don't add up to much. A few female writers (and fewer reprints) may not be the whole answer, but it sure wouldn't hurt. Meanwhile, go read a good book.


At least the title is honest about the contents.

You could also catch up on the news and see if they cover the emerging women's movement.



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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[November 24, 1966] Middling (December 1966 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Better Red than . . . ?

The December Amazing, all business, with the editorial and letter column seemingly dropped permanently , makes a nice-looking package, with a cover by Frank R. Paul shamelessly dominated by near-fire engine red.  It’s taken from the back cover of the January 1942 Amazing, where it was titled “Glass City of Europa.” The caption there says "Transparent and opaque plastics make this a wonder city of ersatz science.  Transportation is by means of giant, domesticated insects." 


by Frank R. Paul

Interestingly, this cover is not only cropped from the original, as is usual, but altered: someone has airbrushed Jupiter from the upper left-hand corner!  There’s nothing in its place but more red.  Now that’s editing!  Of a sort.

Born Under Mars (Part 1 of 2), by John Brunner

The featured fiction on the cover is the beginning of John Brunner’s two-part serial Born Under Mars.  As usual I will withhold comment (and reading) until both parts are available.  A quick inspection suggests that this one represents Brunner the capable post-pulp storyteller and not the author in his highly variable philosophical mode, the poles represented by his worthy The Whole Man and his unfortunate mess The Bridge to Azrael.


by Gray Morrow

Vanguard of the Lost, by John D. Macdonald

John D. Macdonald is best known for crime fiction—a lot of it.  Since 1950 he has published 40-odd crime novels, most if not all original paperbacks.  His current project is a series of novels about a private eye named Travis McGee—eight of them in three years.  In all this criminous fecundity it’s easily forgotten that Macdonald was once an up-and-coming SF writer, and pretty prolific at that too.  From 1948 to 1952 he published almost 50 stories in the SF magazines, in addition to a number in the borderline-SF pulp Doc Savage, all the while maniacially generating crime stories as well.  He used multiple pseudonyms and sometimes had multiple stories in the same magazine issue.  In his spare time he cranked out two decently-received SF novels, Wine of the Dreamers and Ballroom of the Skies.  A lot of his work was excellent, too; highlights include A Child Is Crying, Flaw, Game for Blondes, and my own favorite, the compact and nasty Spectator Sport, all of them promptly anthologized.


by Julian S. Krupa

Then it all stopped.  He had one last story in 1953 in Fantasy and Science Fiction, and since then it’s been all crime, almost all the time.  He did appear in the Merril annual “best SF” volume a couple of years ago with a weak fantasy from Cosmopolitan, The Legend of Joe Lee, and in 1962 published The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything, a crime novel (rather, a farce with some crime and attempted crime in it) with an SF premise: the time-slowing gimmick of Wells’s The New Accelerator and its numerous successors, including Macdonald’s own Half-Past Eternity, a novella for the pulp Super Science Stories in 1950.

Crime, it appears, paid—at least better than SF.  And in fact the SF market of the 1950s could never have accommodated the number of novels he produced.  His post-1952 short fiction, meanwhile, was split between the crime fiction magazines and the more lucrative likes of Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post.

After that buildup, it’s unfortunate that Macdonald’s Vanguard of the Lost, from the May 1950 Fantastic Adventures, doesn’t amount to more.  Aliens have landed!  Well, not landed yet, but their fleet of ships is traversing the globe.  Larry Graim, statistician by day and SF writer by night, goes up to his building’s roof to check them out, and meets there Alice, a feisty young woman who proves to be the one who denounces Graim’s work relentlessly in the SF magazine letter columns (“the poor man’s Kuttner and the cretin’s van Vogt”).

Graim is disoriented by the fact that these aliens’ rather beat-up-looking, uncommunicative spaceships first seem to be mapping the earth, and then land and release large machines that start building things with no visible sentient direction.  It’s completely different from the plots he’s familiar with from the SF magazines, so he and Alice go try to figure out what’s behind the seemingly mindless display.  En route there is much mild satire of Everyman reacting to the unprecedented.  The denouement is uninspiring and ends on a note of slapstick, to be followed by wedding bells to complete the meet-cute plot.  It’s readable and vaguely amusing.  Three stars.

The Revolt of the Pedestrians, by David H. Keller, M.D.

The second novelet in the issue is David H. Keller’s first, and probably most famous, story, The Revolt of the Pedestrians (Amazing, Feb. 1928).  In the future, everybody is on wheels, all the time.  The mania for speed has overtaken everything else; the roadways are progressively more dominated by automobiles; pedestrians first become fair game and then are banned altogether, and hounded out of existence—or so it is thought.  By the time of the story, the legs of the ordinary citizen have atrophied, and everyone gets around the house and the office in miniature personal cars.  But . . . hidden in the wilderness, a remnant population of pedestrians is thriving, and scheming, and perfecting their science, and soon they shall declare themselves and their demands. 


by Frank R. Paul

This of course is all quite ridiculous.  But aside from that minor problem, this story is actually pretty good.  It’s well paced in a rambling sort of way, very smoothly written, with engaging central characters, with Keller’s soon-to-be-characteristic expositional chunks going down smoothly, and without the cranky and rancorous ideological overtones of some of his later stories.  And bear in mind that the absurd extrapolations here are a cruder version of the satirical method that later served Galaxy so well (compare Pohl’s The Midas Plague).  Three stars—four if one compares it only to other works of its time.

Dr. Grimshaw's Sanitarium, by Fletcher Pratt

I pinned Fletcher Pratt long ago as one of the more tedious SF writers going (actually, gone: 1897-1956).  I remember as a child trying to force my way through his Double Jeopardy, thinking that if Doubleday published it and it was reprinted as a Galaxy Novel, there must be something to it.  Then I encountered Invaders from Rigel, in which elephantine extraterrestrials turn humans into metal by manipulating radiation, and realized the futility of persevering with it, or with him.  (In fairness, Pratt’s outright fantasy, both his collaborations with L. Sprague de Camp and his unaccompanied work, was much superior.)

The Pratt-fall du jour is Dr. Grimshaw’s Sanitarium, from the May 1934 Amazing.  Our hero John Doherty is sent to the sanitarium by his employer for a rest after his courageous thwarting of a train robbery, which left him with some psychological difficulty.  It soon becomes apparent that Dr. Grimshaw is a sinister character and there’s something funny going on.  He’s turning people into midgets!  Soon enough the Doctor gets wise to Doherty and his friends and really gives them the midget treatment, so they end up having to survive in the grass, which is now apparently taller than they are, and subsist on insects that they manage to kill with makeshift weapons (reportedly, June bugs are reasonably tasty but houseflies are disgusting).  But now the end is near!  Grimshaw’s got a cat, and all is lost.  Two stars, barely.


by Leo Morey

Interestingly (sort of), when editors Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend solicited self-nominations for an anthology to be titled My Best Science Fiction Story, published in 1949, Pratt submitted this one, though he did acknowledge rewriting it for a more modern audience.  I did not investigate the revision.

The Flame from Nowhere, by Eando Binder


by Julian S. Krupa

Eando Binder’s The Flame from Nowhere (Amazing, April 1939) is a routine period adventure story: forest fire proves impossible to stop, turns out it’s really an atomic fire, must have atomic fire-fighting methods, our hero quickly whips them up in a flurry of mumbo-jumbo, making the penultimate sacrifice, two stars.  Next!

The Commuter, by Philip K. Dick


by Bill Ashman

Philip K. Dick’s The Commuter, from the August/September 1953 Amazing, during the magazine’s brief flirtation with high pay rates and a stab at higher quality, is one of many facilely clever stories from his early period of prolific glibness.  It starts with a small man asking a railroad clerk for a ticket book to Macon Heights, being told there is no Macon Heights, and disappearing.  It happens again.  A railroad official takes the train and finds it does stop at Macon Heights, which research shows was a proposed development that was rejected by the authorities years ago.  So what’s happening to reality?  The story, which foreshadows more substantial work by Dick on the same theme, is a trifle with a barb; it effectively conveys the official’s fear for his familiar world and life.  Three stars.

He Took It with Him, by Clark Collins

The issue concludes with He Took It With Him, by Clark Collins, actually a pseudonym of Mack Reynolds, who mostly used it for articles in men’s magazines, such as Beat’s Guide to Paris, in French Frills for October-December of this year (Beat?  In 1966?  What a square.) and Guide to Fallen Women in Sir Knight in 1961.  This story is from the April 1950 Fantastic Adventures. Bentley, a selfish rich guy with cancer who’s got a year to live, buys a noted scientist with a promise to build the research institute the scientist dreams of if he will only figure out how to preserve Bentley until such time as he can be revived and cured.  The new Institute will be charged with keeping him safe, and also hiding his money, converted to gold and diamonds, until he is awakened to (of course) a nasty surprise that’s not too obvious to the reader.  Readable, modestly clever, three stars.


by H. W. MacCauley

Summing Up

So, a middling reading experience—nothing too terrible, most of it at least agreeably readable, one surprise from the unlikely source of Dr. Keller, and the prospect of the Brunner serial pending. 

(For an excellent experience, you don't want to miss Part 2 of "The Menagerie", the next episode of Star Trek — join us tonight at 8:30 PM (Pacific AND Eastern — two showings)!!)

Here's the invitation!



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Book

[April 17, 1960] Stiff Upper Lips (Fletcher Pratt's Invaders from Rigel)

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It is said that dead men tell no tales; but don't tell that to Fletcher Pratt, who has managed to publish a book four years after his death!

I must confess, I did a double-take when I recently saw Invaders from Rigel at the bookstore.  The beloved Fletcher Pratt, one of the genre's titans, and inventor of one of the first playable naval wargames, passed away in 1956.  Yet, here was a brand-new book with Pratt's name on the cover.

Well, not really.  As I began to read the Avalon hardcover, I felt a pang of deja vu.  Not only was I certain that I'd read the tale before, but the writing struck me as belonging to an earlier era—more Savage Pellucidar than Starship Troopers. 

Sure enough, when I went through my voluminous collection, I found the story in the Winter 1932 Wonder Stories Quarterly, edited by the renowned Hugo Gernsback.  It was originally titled Onslaught from Rigel, and surprisingly little modification was made for its novelization, which I suppose honors Pratt's memory.

The story, in brief: It is 1962, and a mysterious comet has crashed into the North American continent.  The virtual entirety of the populace and animals are converted to lifeless iron.  A handful of folk find themselves transformed into metal parodies of human beings.  They are now essentially invulnerable, require no food, air, or water—just an occasional dose of electric charging and lubrication.  The first third of the book is a post-apocalyptic picking up of pieces story.  The remainder details the struggle of these metal men and their blue-skinned allies from the Southern Hemisphere against the elephantoid Rigelians.

It is a ludicrous story written in the pulpiest fashion, and the "science" bits at the end are egregious.  My readers know what a literary snob I am, so I must have hated the book, right?

Actually, I quite enjoyed it.  Sure, it was silly in the extreme, and the battle scenes were a trifle overlong, but three things made the book a worthy read, though perhaps a guilty pleasure:

1) It is well-written and pleasantly rip-roaring.

2) It reads like a cross between Burroughs and a comic book, and I like Burroughs and comic books.

3) It quite intentionally, and rather subversively, has strong female characters.  In both senses of the word "strong."  You see, with both men and women made of tough metal, there is no nonsense about the "weaker" sex.  Instead, you've got the plucky Victoria, who is a better shot than any of the men and becomes the gunner/engineer on a rocket-plane.  And you've got the quippy, tough Hungarian dancer, Marta Lami, who is not only fun to read, but an integral part of the struggle against the aliens.

After reading story upon story featuring nothing but male characters, with the existence of females usually only implied, Invaders from Rigel was a refreshing switch.

Now, because I had both versions of the story, I can tell you what editing was done.  For the most part, it was confined to "updating" the science-y bits.  For instance, the book mentions atomic weapons and jet planes.  At one point, a helicopter is substituted for an autogiro.  The original story took place in 1946.

On the other hand, the editing was not terribly consistent or rigorous.  For instance, in 1962, the Dutch still own Batavia.  Also, airplanes revert from jet to rocket power later in the book.  The editors also took out some of the purpler bits of prose from the original.  I'm still not decided on whether this is an improvement or not.  There's not much cutting, in any event.

Do I recommend picking up a copy of the book?  That's up to you.  It's a quick read, and I enjoyed it, but you may turn up your nose at it, and I wouldn't blame you for it.  Alternatively, you might pick up Judith Merril's Out of Bounds or Agent of Vega, by James H. Schmitz; both are anthologies that came out this month.

Next up, a slew of exciting space news.  Stay tuned!

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