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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[September 12, 1969] Earthshaking (October 1969 Galaxy)

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

Time for a change

My local rag, The Escondido Times-Advocate, isn't much compared to, say, The Los Angeles Times.  But every so often, they are worth the subscription fee (beyond the TV listings and the funnies).  Take this article, for instance, which might well be at home in a Willy Ley column:

Basically, CalTech has a new timepiece with more precision, accurate to the hundredth of a second, so that when it is used in conjunction with a seismometer, earthquakes can be better mapped.  More excitingly, the new clock weighs just eight pounds—less than a tenth that of the hundred-pound monster it replaces.

Transistors have made it to geology.

We hear all about small computers and more efficient satellites, but this story really drives home just how quickly the miniaturization revolution is diffusing to all walks of life.  Is a computerized pocket slide rule or a Dick Tracy phone that far off?

Making waves


by Gray Morrow

A lot has happened this year at the old gray lady of science fiction, Galaxy.  They changed editors.  They lost their science columnist.  And as we shall see from the latest issue, things are starting to change, ever so slightly.

Tomorrow Cum Laude, by Hayden Howard


by Jack Gaughan

The revolution does not begin with this piece, a direct sequel to "Kendy's World", which came out at the end of last year.  If you'll recall, Kendy was a boy during the National Emergency, a time of civil and racial strife that rocked the nation into a semi-permanent police state.  Kendy was recruited by a Mr. Smith, who gave him a scholarship at National University—which turned out to be a training camp for spies.  "Tomorrow Cum Laude" details Kendy's first mission.

He is sent to the University of Southern California to take pictures of a biological centrifuge.  Why he is sent on a domestic espionage mission when he has been trained in Russian is never explicitly stated.  Moreover, the overarching mystery remains: why did the first cosmonaut to Mars chicken out after finding…something…on Phobos, and why are the Soviets building a secret base on the Moon?  Did they find a monolith?  Two?

All of this is background to Kendy's personal story, his slow, jerky maturation into adulthood.  His growing feelings for his accidental roommate, the beautiful woman, Amani, from the southern Californian all Black city-state of Nairobi.  His conflicted loyalties to the government of the United States.

Aside from an overuse of the word "amble" (hint: try sprinkling in a "saunter" or two), it's not a bad story, actually.  It reads a bit like a juvenile except the subject matter is rather deep, and at one point, Kendy describes himself as, frankly, horny.

I'm enjoying this series more than his first one, about the Esks.

Three stars.

Truly Human, by Damon Knight

Here is where the change becomes noticeable.  Knight, who predates but has embraced the New Wave, offers up this interesting piece about triune aliens, who can only think as trios.  They abduct three humans to see if they can be adapted to their way of thought.  The test is, unfortunately, not altogether scientific.

The beginning and end are the most interesting bits, creatively rendered.  The middle part is wanly droll, though effectively conveyed.

Three stars.

The God of Cool, by J. W. Schutz

A smuggler is shot by fellow gang members on the steps of the hospital.  As he had willed his body to the organ banks, he finds life after death in a myriad of don-ee bodies.  There are three wrinkles:

  1. The recipients of his organs end up being members of his gang;
  2. The smuggler retains a degree of consciousness in his frozen state; and,
  3. The smuggler retains a degree of control over his scattered parts…

The setup sounds a little silly, but I actually found it quite an effective story.  It's not played for silly, as it might have been in F&SF, and it doesn't try to explain the psi in scientific terms, as might have happened if it had shown up in Analog.  It sure wouldn't work in Niven's universe as detailed in "The Organleggers" and "Slowboat Cargo", though!

Five stars.

Element of Chance, by Bob Shaw

Cytheron is a young being on the cusp of adulthood.  He fears maturity, afraid to lose his identity in the adult shared mind, so he flees to the edge of a quasar.  There, he believes he is free from pursuit as no information can leave the gravitational warping of the dead star/collection of stars.  But he is also trapped—and for him to be freed will require a minor supernova, one which might have an effect on a neighboring star system with a familiar number of planets.

It's a mildly cute story, but I am generally averse to Catastrophism in my science fiction.  The universe seems to work by general rules; our Sun is not unique.  In any event, the piece feels like a veneer of fiction on a science article Shaw happened to read recently, sort of how Niven's "Neutron Star" is based on an Asimov science fact article (I can't remember when it came out—probably '64 or '65).

Two stars.

The Soul Machine, by A. Bertram Chandler

Yet another tale of John Grimes, this one from early in his career when he was a Lieutenant in command of a tiny courier ship.  It is, in fact, the direct sequel to "The Minus Effect", which came out just two months ago.  Is a fix-up novel in the works?

In this tale, the exalted passenger isn't a chef-cum-assassin, but rather an amiable robot on a mission—to lead a mechanical movement that places humans on the bottom of the command chain for a change.  Luckily for Grimes, not all computers think alike.

As always, pleasant but not particularly memorable.  Three stars.

Ersalz's Rule, by George C. Willick


by Jack Gaughan

Two aliens have been playing a competitive sport for the last forty years.  Their playing pieces are one human being each, born at the same time.  The winner of the game is the one whose human survives longer.

At first, it seems one alien has all the advantages: his human can do no wrong, suffer no lasting malaise.  He is, however, bored and reckless.  The other alien's piece is a slob whom the breaks never favor.  These circumstances lead to the rare invocation of Ersalz's Rule, which affords the possibility of the two pieces switching places.  It's a Hail Mary gambit, but it's all the player's got at this point.

The problem with this tale, aside from its heavy handed clunkiness, is that everything is arbitrary.  The rules of the game are introduced such that there are no real stakes, and the ending is just kind of stupid.

Two stars.

Take the B Train, by Ernest Taves


by Jack Gaughan

On a train trip through France with his distant wife, a fellow discovers that his garage opener doesn't just trigger his door—it also swaps out his spouse with parallel universe versions of herself.  Investigating further, the man determines that the gizmo does a lot more than just that, and he ends up hip-deep in a temporal, spatial, and emotional trip from which he may never return.

This would have been a fantastic setup for a stellar novel, perhaps by Ted White.  As it is, I still enjoyed the romantic and fulsome writing of the the piece.  I also appreciated the protagonist's mixed feelings toward the various might-have-been marital partners.  Taves never does explain how how our hero acquired the device, though there are hints.

Four stars, but a bit of a missed opportunity.

For Your Information (Galaxy Magazine, October 1969), by Willy Ley

At the beginning of the century, there were just 92 "natural" elements.  Humanity has added 12 to the roster by dint of atom-smashing effort.  Ley talks about them and provides tables describing their stability (or lack thereof).

Asimov would have done it better (though we might not have gotten tables in F&SF).  Three stars.

Stella, by Dannie Plachta

A lonely man, perhaps one of the last, is sitting on the frozen surface of his world, watching as The Last Star rises.  He is alone, as his estranged wife has sought shelter and warmth underground.  Only a surgically implanted broadcast power receiver protects him from the elements.

Then Stella arrives on a dot of blue flame.  She is invisible, but she describes herself as desirable, and her voice and touch certainly indicate that she is.  When she begs the man for his receiver, he finds he cannot resist her entreaty, though it means his death.

It's all very unclear and metaphorical, and I suspect if I knew what Plachtas was trying to say, I might like it less than I did.  Nevertheless, I found it moving.  Maybe it's a Rorschach Test of a story and it hit me at the right time.

Three stars.

Dune Messiah (Part 4 of 5), by Frank Herbert

This was supposed to be the final installment of Dune Messiah, but the editor said he had just too much good stuff to fill the magazine.  Hence Part 4 rather than Part Ultimate.  Of course, having trudged through the prior three bits, I was not looking forward to yet another slog.

I was pleasantly surprised.  Oh, it's still a series of conversations.  Sure, not a whole lot happens.  But we do have an interesting situation set up and then resolved: Hayt, the resurrected ghola of Duncan Idaho, is mesmerized by Bijaz the Tleilaxi dwarf and given a frightful compulsion.  The tension of Part 4 is how this episode will play out, and Herbert manages it reasonably well.

Sure, there is way too much time spent on the now eyeless Paul and his frightening visions.  Yes, I could give two figs about Chani, Paul's true love, destined to die for the last two installments.  True, everything in the last 150 pages could probably be compressed to 50, and I'm still not sure if the payoff will be worth it.

That said, I was not disposed to skim, as had happened in each of the prior sections.  For that, Frank Herbert, you get…

Three stars.

Aftershocks

Thus, nothing Earth-shattering.  Nevertheless, there's a certain gestalt to this issue that feels a bit fresher than prior ones—even though almost half of the issue is devoted to continued serials!  Maybe it's because those authors are finally turning in better work than they have in a while.

Perhaps we are finally witnessing a moment of change for this fading pillar of SFnal fiction.  It would be pretty neat to see Galaxy transform itself into a leading magazine again.

Stay tuned!


Hopefully, the magazine will fare better than this Ocotillo Wells home that got damaged in last April's quake…




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Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 4, 1969] Plus ça change (October 1969 IF)

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by David Levinson

Silly season

It’s considered a truism in journalism that nothing happens in August, so the papers run filler stories about silly things to make up their page count. Sure, Hurricane Camille killed hundreds as it raged from Mississippi to Virginia, and China and the Soviet Union are on the brink of war, but that doesn’t sell papers. Madison Avenue also has a truism: sex sells. Now, the two have come together.

Newsday columnist Mike McGrady was disgusted by the schlocky, sex-obsessed books that regularly make the best-seller lists, so he recruited a bunch of fellow journalists (19 men and five women, by one count) to write a deliberately bad, oversexed book. The result is Naked Came the Stranger, in which the editors worked hard to remove any literary value from the tale of a New York woman’s sexual escapades.

When the book sold 20,000 copies, McGrady and his co-conspirators decided they’d better come clean. Nineteen of them appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, being introduced as Penelope Ashe (the book’s purported author) and walking out to the strains of A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody. As a result of their confession and discussion of their motives, the book has become even more popular. And as of last Sunday, it’s on the New York Times list of best-sellers. You have to laugh to keep from crying.

Penelope Ashe, in part, with the cover model superimposed.

This puts me in mind of a similar literary hoax with a more sfnal connection. Back in 1956, radio host Jean Shepherd was unhappy with the way best-seller lists were being compiled and urged his listeners to ask their local bookstores to order I, Libertine by Frederick R. Ewing. He offered some vague hints about the plot, and many listeners who were in on the joke created references to the book elsewhere. Demand was so high, publisher Ian Ballantine convinced Theodore Sturgeon to knock out a quick novel based on an outline from Shepherd. Betty Ballantine wrote the last chapter as Sturgeon lay in exhausted sleep on the Ballantines’ couch after trying to write the whole thing in one sitting. The cover by Frank Kelly Freas is full of visual jokes and puns. The book is rumored to have gone to number one, but it doesn’t seem to have been on any lists, probably out of pique on the part of the list makers.


The pub sign features a shepherd’s crook and a sturgeon. Art by Frank Kelly Freas

New and old

I think we’re starting to see some of the influence of new editor Ejler Jakobsson. Editor Emeritus Fred Pohl doesn’t seem have ever had anything nice to say about the New Wave, while there is at least one story in this month’s IF with a nod in that direction. There’s a new printer, with a crisper typeface (though it seems better suited to a news magazine than fiction). No one’s mixed up their e’s and o’s, but instead of lines being printed out of order, some lines are just missing. Hopefully, that will be corrected in future issues.

Supposedly for Seeds of Gonyl. If so, it’s from later in the novel. Art by Gaughan

The Mind Bomb, by Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert appears to have tried to write a Philip K. Dick story. There’s a computer that keeps changing the world in an attempt to carry out its function, an unhappy marriage, and an old man who gets a glimpse of why the world he lives in is the way it is.

Art uncredited, maybe by Gaughan

Unfortunately, none of it works. The lines of reality aren’t blurred; people know the computer is changing things, just not why. And the marriage isn’t as unrelievedly grim as in a Dick story (thank goodness). We’re left with none of the good things that either author brings, and the flaws of both.

Two stars.

By Right of Succession, by Barry Malzberg

A man named Carson shoots the occupant of a motorcade. As he leaves the building he fired from, he’s met by a policeman who escorts him to his next destination on a strict timetable. Eventually, all is explained. Sort of.

Is that Nixon? Art uncredited

Here’s our New Wave—or New Wave-ish—story. It’s fine for what it is, but I don’t quite see the connection between the events and the explanation.

Three stars.

None But I, by Piers Anthony

When last we saw him, interstellar dentist Dr. Dillingham had been accepted as an instructor at the galaxy’s top dental school. Now he’s off to cure the oral ills of a long-buried robot that has vowed to kill the person that frees it from 10,000 years of imprisonment.

Dr. Dillingham meets his patient. Art by Gaughan

Anthony is developing a reputation at the Journey, and not a good one. That’s largely down to the way he writes women. Fortunately, none of that is on display here, possibly because the only female character is a highly efficient secretary who looks like a giant spider. We’re left with an inoffensive and mildly entertaining story, whose only flaw is that it specifically makes note of the old tale it is clearly modeled on of a genie with a similar vow.

Three stars.

Survival, by Steven Guy Oliver

A day in the life of an old man living in the irradiated ruins of a city.

Ignore the blurb. These aren’t the last people on Earth. Art by Gaughan

This month’s new author offers us a grim tale of life after World War Three. It’s very well written, but also very depressing, what I believe kids these days call “a real downer.” I definitely wouldn’t mind seeing more from Oliver. But did I mention that the story is grim?

Three grim stars.

Down on the Farm, by W. Macfarlane

Three agricultural salespeople were brought from Earth to a distant planet. Now their contract is up, and the local autocrat who hired them struggles to find a way to pay what they’re due. Unbeknownst to him, they have ulterior motives.

Erasmus Ballod is having a bad day. Art by Gaughan

A bit old-fashioned, but otherwise an enjoyable enough story. Ask me what it was about a month from now, and I won’t be able to tell you, but it didn’t waste my time. For some reason, Macfarlane’s name was left off the first page; fortunately he was credited in the table of contents.

Three stars.

The Story of Our Earth: 2. The First Traces of Life, by Will Ley

The second part of Willy Ley’s sadly incomplete final book looks at the latest theories as to how life began. He discusses the idea of the “primordial ooze” and how and why it has fallen out of favor. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of continental drift.

While still very good, this chapter didn’t engage me quite as much as the previous did. I can’t say if that’s down to my interest in the subject matter or the quality of Ley’s treatment of it.

A very high three stars.

The Seeds of Gonyl (Part 1 of 3), by Keith Laumer

Jeff Mallory wakes up to discover that three months are missing, the house shows little sign of cleaning and maintenance, and his wife and two younger children are frightened and worn down. Worst of all, no one remembers his oldest daughter, and her room doesn’t even exist. He soon learns that the town has been taken over by things that are barely human, which force everyone to work on a mysterious project.

Remembering that his daughter was planning to stay with a friend who lives well outside of town, Jeff makes his escape. At the friend’s house, he finds only the friend and several unpleasant occupiers, who tell him that the United States has fallen to Russian forces and that his town is a bombed-out, plague-ridden ruin.

He and Sally, his daughter’s friend, move on and are arrested by Russian military. But the Russians are working together with Americans led by a Colonel Strang, who tells him that the Russians were called in to fight the real occupiers, the Chinese. As the installment ends, Jeff finds himself drafted into Strang’s army. To be continued.

Tonight, the role of Colonel Strang will be played by Ronald Reagan. Art by Gaughan

So far, so Laumer. He may be influenced by some of his work on those books he wrote based on The Invaders, what with people not believing in the invading aliens. Honestly, the main thing that stands out to me in this part is the way young Sally abruptly and quickly throws herself at our hero. Jeff put up at least a token resistance so far, though there is a vague paragraph that suggests things could be otherwise. It plays uncomfortably.

Three stars so far, if you like this sort of Laumer story.

To the Last Rite!, by Perry Chapdelaine

One-Girk-Two is undergoing a field test to see if he will be promoted to One-Girk-One. If he passes, he will become the thinking portion of a composite creature called a Unit.

Our hero. Art by Gaughan

This is probably the Chapdelaine story I’ve enjoyed the most. Unfortunately, like all of Chapdelaine’s work, it’s too long. On the other hand, it didn’t go where I thought it was going. Best of all, it has nothing to do with Spork.

Three stars.

Machines That Teach, by Frederik Pohl

Fred took a trip to Tennessee A. & I. In Nashville, where Perry Chapdelaine is a professor of mathematics and is running a lab researching computer aided instruction. There, through a computer in the lab, a computer at Stanford in California administered a test to measure competence in mathematics. Neat stuff, even if the headline is misleading. Maybe even more interesting is the simple fact that he was able to use a computer in Tennessee to interact with another computer a couple thousand miles away

Three stars.

Summing up

We’re starting to see some of the new editor’s influence, though things aren’t really that different. I’m wondering if Jakobsson is going to continue the IF first program, running a story from a new author every month. The issues he’s been in charge of have had such a story, but he hasn’t called attention to it the way Fred did.

The other thing that stands out to me is that the interior art is all uncredited. Where I’ve indicated it’s by Gaughan, it’s because his signature is visible either on the piece reproduced here or a different piece for the same story. I’m not too keen on all the art coming from just one artist (although if the alternative is “art” by Dan Adkins…). More importantly, they give out Hugos for art. If we don’t know who did it, how do we know who to nominate and vote for?

Tiptree is the only name that means anything to me. A bit of a coin flip as an author, but definitely improving with every story.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[August 14, 1969] Twin tragedies (September 1969 Galaxy)

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

Murder in Hollywoodland

Senseless mass death is no stranger to the headlines these days.  We've had the Boston Strangler.  The Texas sniper.  The Chicago nurse murderer.  But this last week, southern California got a shocking introduction into this club.

At least seven were killed on the nights of the 8th/9th and then the 9th/10th, including Valley of the Dolls actress, Sharon Tate (pregnant with her first child), in two Los Angeles neighborhoods: ritzy Beverly Crest and SilverLake.  At first, the scenes were so grisly and bizarre that police suspected some kind or ritual.  Jay Sebring, the famous hairstylist who gave Dr. McCoy his "brainy" JFK-style hair-do, and Tate were found stabbed, tied up and hanging on alternate sides of the same rafter, both wearing black hoods.  Market owners Leon and Rosemary La Bianca, the SilverLake victims murdered on the second night, were similarly hooded, the latter with red X marks carved into her body.


Wheeling Sharon Tate from her home

Homicide squads are currently swarming the San Gabriel Valley, and while Inspector Harold Yarnell and medical examiner Thomas Noguchi had no insights to offer when they appeared before NBC's cameras on the 10th, police do see connections.  "Pig" was scrawled on the door of the Tate home, while "Death to Pigs" was found on the home of the La Biancas, formerly the residence of Walt Disney.  Police have not indicated whether they believe the homicides were done by the same person or persons, or if a copycat was inspired by the first murders.

It's shocking, senseless, and tragic.  While the murders took place in upper class homes (one of the deceased was heir to the Folger coffee fortune), the motive appears not to have been robbery.  Just angry, hateful death.  It's not a happy time in the Southland right now.

Death in New York

While not of the same magnitude, at least in terms of human misery, nevertheless the latest issue of Galaxy science fiction is so bad, that one wonders if someone is trying to put the institution down.


by Donald H. Menzel

Humans, Go Home!, by A. E. van Vogt


by Jack Gaughan

A married human couple, immortal but catching the death-wish that has killed most of humanity, has lived on the world of Jana for 400 years.  They have used that time to accelerate the development of the humanoid species there, urging 4000 years of technological advance in that time—in part through the use of Symbols, abstract concepts made real by the power of belief.  The Janans have their own problems: the women don't like procreation or children, and the men must rape them to propagate the species.

Eventually, the humans are put on trial for their efforts, and (I'm told) we learn there is a lot more to the setup than meets the eye, and that everything the characters believe is actually some kind of falsehood.

I found this first piece impenetrable, giving up about halfway through.  Thankfully, a friend of mine, who is fonder of Van Vogt, gave the piece a write up in his 'zine.  That's good, as I was dreading having to slog through this one and analyze it, as if it were a book report for a hated school-assigned novel.  At 50 years old, I'm allowed to pick my poison.

One star.

Martians and Venusians, by Donald H. Menzel


by Donald H. Menzel

Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences at Harvard offers up his clairvoyant images of Martian wildlife, complete with pictures (q.v. the cover).  I wonder if Dr. Menzel has an eight-year old child who really wanted to get published, as well as some blackmail leverage on Galaxy editor Jakobssen, because I can't see any other way this peurile, pointless piece ever saw print.

One star.

Out of Phase, by Joe Haldeman

Braaxn the G'drellian is the adolescent member of an alien anthropological team.  He was selected to infiltrate the humans for his shape-changing abilities; unfortunately, the youth also has a racial fetish for the infliction and appreciation of pain—common to all of his kind at that age.

Can he be stopped before he unleashes a terror that will exterminate the entire human race?

An unpleasant, but competently written story.  Haldeman is new, so of course, there's a "clever" twist to finish things off.

Three stars

The Martian Surface, by Wade Wellman

Wellman's wishful thinking in poetry is that, despite the obvious hostility of the Martian surface, life could still somehow cling to it.  Written to coincide with the arrival of the new Mariners, it is no more or less accurate for their flyby.

Three stars.

Passerby, by Larry Niven


by Jack Gaughan

A ramscoop pilot stumbles upon a professional people-watcher in a park.  The "rammer" has a story to tell, a tale of being lost among the stars, and of the titanic alien he encounters in the blackness of space.

This is one of Niven's few stories not set in "Known Space", and it's a simple one.  That said, it reads well, particularly out loud, and there is the usual, deft detail that Niven imparts with just a few, well-chosen words.

Janice liked it, but thought it rather shallow.  Lorelei, on the other hand, loved that it had a philosophical message beyond the good storytelling.

So, four stars, and easily the best piece of the issue (not much competition…)

Citadel, by John Fortey


by Jack Gaughan

Aliens descend on Earth, erecting mysterious edifices and offering the secrets of the universe.  Twenty years later, most of humanity is under their thrall; those who enroll for alien "classes" invariably leave society and end up part of the worldwide hive mind.  One organization has a plan to infiltrate the extraterrestrials, to at least find out what's going on, if not stop them.

But can they handle the truth?

Answer: probably, especially if they've seen The Twilight Zone.

Nice setup, but a really novice tale.

Two stars.

Revival Meeting, by Dannie Plachta


by M. Gilbert

A "corpsicle" wakes up after a century, but instead of finding a cure for his disease, he finds he's been roused for a more sinister purpose.

This story doesn't make much sense, and it's also about the bare minimum one can do with the concept of frozen people (again, Niven's covered these bases pretty thoroughly with The Jigsaw Man and A Gift from Earth.

Two stars.

For Your Information (Galaxy, September 1969), by Willy Ley

For reasons that will shortly become apparent, it's a real pity that this non-fiction column is not one of Ley's best.  It's a scattershot on rocket fuel (well, the oxidizer one combines with the rocket fuel to make it burn), modern pictographic writing, and the latest crop of satellites.

It's just sort of limp and dry, a far cry from the scintillating stuff that helped make early '50s Galaxy such a draw.

Three stars.

Dune Messiah (Part 3 of 5), by Frank Herbert


by Jack Gaughan

It is astonishing how little Frank Herbert can pack into 50 pages. In this installment, Paul Atreides, Emperor, is trying to make sense of a recurring vision, that of a moon falling (his precognition having been hampered by the presence of a clairvoyant "steersman"—the spice-addicted navigators of the space lanes).

He visits the Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit, whom he has locked up in prison, to let her know that his consort, the Fremen Chani, is finally pregnant (despite Paul's wife, Irulan, furtively feeding her contraceptives for years).  But Paul also knows that the birth of the heir will mean Chani's death.

Then Paul heads out to the house of a desert Fremen, father of the girl who had been found dead by Alia last installment.  The Emperor heads out there at the girl's invitation—she's not actually alive, but rather, her form has been taken by a shapeshifting assassin.

At the home, Paul meets a dwarf who warns him of impending danger.  Whereupon, an atomic bomb explodes overhead.

Along with the endless viewpoint changes and the nonstop italicized thought fragments, we also have more of the innovation Herbert came up with for this book: repetition of dialogue through slightly different permutation.  Seriously, the whole story so far could have been a novelette, and we're almost done!

Anyway, I didn't hate Dune, but I felt it was overrated.  This sequel, however, is just wretched.

One star.

Credo: Willy Ley: The First Citizen of the Moon (obituary), by Lester del Rey


by Jack Gaughan

And now the real tragedy—Willy Ley is dead.  He was only 62.

I knew that he was a science writer who fled Nazi Germany.  I did not know how integral he was to the field of rocket science.  A key member of the German rocketry club, he was a mentor to Wehrner von Braun.  The key difference between the two is Ley immigrated to the U.S.A. rather than serve Der Fuhrer.  Von Braun did not.

Ley went on, of course, to be one of the most esteemed science writers—up there with Asimov, at least in his main fields, zoology and rocketry.  He died less than a month before Armstrong and Aldrin stepped on the Moon.  Denied the Holy Land, indeed.

I have no idea whether there are more Ley articles in the pipeline.  There was supposed to be a new, twelve-part series, but who knows if it was ever completed or submitted.

Sad news indeed.  Four stars.

Autopsy report

Galaxy hasn't topped three stars since the June hiatus accompanying editor Pohl's departure/sacking, but this is, by far, the worst issue of the magazine in a long time.  Was Pohl fired for his declining discernment?  Or did he accept a bunch of substandard stuff as a flip of the bird to the new ownership?

Whatever the answer, I certainly hope things improve soon.  Without Ley, without quality stories, Galaxy is heading for the skids, but quick.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[July 8, 1969] Nowhere fast (August 1969 Galaxy)

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It's Moon fortnight!

We are broadcasting LIVE coverage of the Apollo 11 mission (with a 55 year time slip), so mark your calendars. From now until the 24th, it's (nearly) daily coverage, with big swathes of coverage for launch, landing, moonwalk, and splashdown.

Tell your friends!

Broadcast Schedule

photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

The Warm War

If you, like me, are a regular watcher of Rowan and Martin's Laugh In, you might be excused for having a rather simple view of the current situation in the Middle East.  According to that humorous variety show, Israel devastated the armies of its Arab neighbors in June 1967, and (to quote another comedian, Tom Lehrer), "They've hardly bothered us since then."

It's true that the forces of the diminutive Jewish state took on Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, like David against Goliath, smiting armies and air forces in just six days, ultimately ending up in occupation of lands that comprise more area than Israel itself.

But all has not been quiet…on any front.  Hardly had the war ended that both Israelis and Arabs began trading significant shots.  A commando raid here, a bombing mission there, a naval clash yonder—none of it rising to the level of a mass incursion, but nevertheless, a constant hail of explosives.  Last summer, Egyptian President Nasser, eager to recover prestige he lost in the '67 debacle, declared a "War of Attrition".  The fighting has escalated ever since.

Just the other day, the Egyptians and Israelis exchanged artillery fire across the Suez Canal—the current de facto border between the nations—for twelve hours.  Two Israelis were wounded; the Egyptians are keeping mum about any of their losses.  Last month, Israeli jets buzzed Nasser's house in Cairo, which Jerusalem claims is the reason for the recent sacking of the Egyptian air force chief and also Egypt's air defense commander.


Israeli mobile artillery shells Egyptian positions

The United Nations views this conflict with increasing concern, worried that it might expand, go hot, and possibly involve bigger powers.  The Security Council this week is working on a resolution calling for an arms embargo against Israeli unless the state abandon its plans to formally annex East Jerusalem, taken from Jordan two years ago.

It seems unlikely that the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) or Prime Minister Golda Meir will buckle to foreign pressure, however.  Nor can we expect that President Nasser, Jordan's King Hussein, or the coup-rattled government of Syria to be particularly tractable either.  The beat goes on.

Same ol'

One generally looks to science fiction for a refreshing departure from the real world, but as the latest issue of Galaxy shows, sometimes you're better off just reading the funnies.


by John Pederson Jr.

The White King's War, by Poul Anderson


by Jack Gaughan

A while back, John Boston noted that Dominic Flandry, an Imperial Officer serving during the twilight of the intragalactic Polesotechnic League, has become a James Bond type, or maybe a Horatio Hornblower.  Basically, he's Anderson's stock character when he wants some kind of adventure story set against the impending Dark Ages of his interstellar setting.  The results are a mixed bag since the tales are less about Flandry and more about whatever nifty astronomical phenomenon Anderson wants to showcase this month.

This time, Flandry, who has just been promoted Lieutenant j.g.  On the backwater planet of Irumclaw, a two-bit crime boss named Leon Ammon offers him a million if he'll go out of his way to survey a planet reputedly rich in heavy metals.  Flandry takes the gig, and since Ammon insists on having one of his mooks accompany him, Flandry opts to have his chaperone be female.  The trip is more fun that way, you see.

The journey takes us to the hostile world of Wayland, a tidally locked moon of a big gas giant.  Airless, except for when the sun sublimes the methane and carbon dioxide ice that comprises Wayland's surface, it nevertheless (and surprisingly) teems with life.  Flandry's scout, Jake, is waylaid by birds and forced to land.  Now, Flandry and his companion, Djana, must trek across the frozen wastes of Wayland to reach an abandoned, sentient mining computer, which just might have the facilities needed to repair Flandry's vessel.

Along the way, we learn that the hostile "life forms" are really robots, and that the old computer just might be responsible for Wayland's unique "ecosystem"…

Unlike a lot of Anderson's work (and certainly the last Flandry story), this piece was pretty interesting.  Sure, the characters are paper thin, but again, this story isn't meant to showcase character.  If you want that kind of story in the same setting, try "A Tragedy of Errors" from last year.

Three stars.

Starhunger, by Jack Wodhams


by uncredited

Starships have been plying the local constellations for decades, but despite the investigation of 31 systems, nothing even vaguely Earthlike has been found.  One last expedition goes out with nought but a forlorn hope.  Even with three systems on the schedule, it is doubtful that the unlucky streak will end—especially since the scientists on board, who want to meticulously evaluate every inhospitable rock, are at odds with the star hungry Captain, who wants to find the next Earth.

This is not a great story, consisting mostly of repetition ad nauseum of the scientist/captain struggle.  However, I did like a couple of things:

1) The notion that terrestrial planets are actually rare.  That's not a common theme in science fiction, and I feel it more likely than the converse.

2) The conflict between a simple, focused mission and a balanced, scientific endeavor is something the Ranger Moon program suffered from, with Rangers 3-5 failing largely because they tried to do too much.  Once NASA focused on just hitting the Moon with a camera, they had three out of four successes.

Three stars.

The Minus Effect, by A. Bertram Chandler


by Jack Gaughan

Speaking of ongoing characters, John Grimes, the spacefaring alter-ego of author (Australian Merchant Marine Captain) A. Bertram Chandler, gets another chapter of his life fleshed out in this tale.  Well, sort of.

Lieutenant Grimes has gotten his first command: a Serpent class courier boat with a crew of six.  On this particular mission, he has been tasked with transporting a VIP.  Mr. Alberto is a strange person, an extremely talented chef, but also something of a cipher and very physically fit.  After Alberto is delivered to the planet of Doncaster, his unusual nature is revealed.

There's not much to this story, and there's no SFnal content at all—at least none that isn't discardable.  It could have taken place in the '60s as easily as the 3060's.

A high two stars.

When They Openly Walk, by Fritz Leiber


by Jack Gaughan

Ages ago, Fritz wrote a cat's-eye view story of Gummitch the suburban feline artist called Kreativity for Kats.  In this long-awaited sequel, we follow Gummitch and his adopted little sibling, Psycho the kitten, as they interact with their family and a bonafide UFO.

It's an adorable piece, spotlighting the inner life of housecats (and demonstrating what I've known my whole life: that cats are clearly Earth's other sentient race).  It reminds me a bit of an episode of Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro I caught in Japan last year, in which cats take over a village and are (properly) revered.

Four stars.

Life Matter, by Bruce McAllister


by Jack Gaughan

In the far future, mankind, mutated by hard radiation, has developed a sentient heart.  Normally, there is an Operation for humans who reach the 21st year of life, the year that the heart begins communicating with the mind in earnest.  The biological heart is replaced with a silent, artificial pump.

Some refuse to lose their heart, pursuing a life of coronary freedom.  But is it really the romantic prospect literature would have us believe?

Like most of Bruce's work, it's a lyrical, metaphorical piece, but not quite as moving as he'd like it to be.  Fans of Bradbury may be more impressed than I was.

Three stars.

I Am Crying All Inside, by Clifford D. Simak


by uncredited

This is a kind of mood piece reminiscent of James Blish's "Okie" stories.  In a flurry of starflight, the cream and even the bulk of humanity has left its homeworld, leaving behind a wretched refuse of humans and robots.  The folk left are essentially poor Appalachians.  The people, as the robots call themselves, are the antiquated and damaged specimens.  Crying is told from the point of view of one of the robots, a farmer, who is at once the lowest of the low, and also the highest.

Fine but incomplete.  Three stars.

For Your Information (Galaxy Magazine, August 1969), by Willy Ley

Our German expat educator explains how ELDO (the European Space Agency) is planning a Jupiter mission.  There are special considerations like how to power the probe so far from the Sun, and how massive the craft can be depending on the rocket.

Interesting, but short.  Three stars.

Dune Messiah (Part 2 of 5), by Frank Herbert


by Jack Gaughan

Last time began the continuation of the story of Paul Atreides, now Paul Muad'dib, Mahdi of a galaxy-wide crusade against the old Imperial order.  Paul, now thirty, sits unsteadily on the Arrakeen throne—endless factions are arrayed against him, and his favored Fremen consort has borne no heir, this the deliberate result of being unwittingly sterilized by Irulan, an Imperial princess, and Paul's other consort.

Foreseeing that a child of Irulan's will spell Paul's doom, he avoids consummating their marriage.  On the other hand, this makes him vulnerable to the allures of his…sister.  Yes, Alia, born a saint and fully sapient from being in the womb of her mother when she overdosed on the precognition-enabling spice "melange".  She's 15, fights mechanical foes in the nude, and is excessively nubile.  As it turns out, an incestuous coupling is exactly what Gaius Helen Moiham, Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit (the organization that is trying to dominate the galaxy through selective breeding) wants, as it foretells ultimate genetic victory.

Meanwhile, members of the Navigation Guild, whose members use spice to navigate hyperspace, want to break the Arrakeen monopoly on the stuff, so they're trying to sequester elements of the Dune planet's biology to start up their own production.

In a final twist, the resurrected form of Duncan Idaho, one of Paul's old sword-companions, begins an affair with Alia.  But this ghoule, who goes by the name Hayt, says he is to be the intrument of Paul's destruction, so maybe this isn't a great development either.

It's all so glacial and pretentious and filled with things that rub me the wrong way: aristocracy, eugenics, fantasy masking as science fiction.  (And it's printed in smaller type face to make it both less readable and more dense.) I really don't like this book.  Frankly, I'd give it one star, but I guess I appreciate how hard Herbert is trying. 

On the other hand, John Norman tries, too, and we don't even review his books anymore.

Two stars, but I'm guessing the work as a whole is going to get one when it's all over.  Bleah.

Rescue Team, by Lester del Rey

A vignette about first contact in a time when humans and robots have become one and the same species.

Kind of pointless.  Two stars.

The New New Frontier

Fred Pohl was editor of Galaxy for almost a decade, taking over from H. L. Gold when he got sick and couldn't do it anymore.  Now he's out, and I'm still waiting for the shoe to drop: to see how different Galaxy gets under the new regime of Ejler Jakobsson.  The biggest new thing is the Dune serial, but Pohl might have bought that anyway.  It's not as if Herbert has been absent from the mag.  I guess we'll see where things are in a year.

All I can say is I hope things get better.  As with the war in the Levant, the status quo is getting us nowhere fast…




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[June 10, 1969] Points West and Above (July 1969 Galaxy)

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

The Orient

Thanks to centuries of tradition, we tend to think of the Far East as…well…east!  But for us, going to Japan means a 12-hour flight west—literally into tomorrow, as we cross the International Date Line to do it. 

This week marked the beginning of our fourteenth trip to Japan.  How things have changed since we first went back in 1948, when flying via Northwest Orient meant an entire day of travel with multiple stops.  Travel these days is practically instantaneous by comparison.

We were even able to hop on a same-day domestic flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka, which is where I'm writing this.  I've been able to develop my first roll of color film, the results of which I am happy to share:

The Alient

The latest issue of Galaxy is, like this month's IF, the first under the helm of Ejler Jakobsson, and it's also a month late.  Will it be more interesting than the rather dull IF?  Well, it's certainly different.  After all, the lead piece is one I would have expected to appear in Analog.  Why wouldn't Campbell want the sequel to the incredibly popular and presumably lucrative Dune.  Dunno… but here it is:


by Dan Adkins

Dune Messiah (Part 1 of 5), by Frank Herbert


by Jack Gaughan

And so we return to Arrakis, the Dune planet, the only source of the spice melange, which gives the power of prophecy, allows the navigators of the Guild to ply the hyperspace lanes, and is the only currency of note in the Empire.

Last time, Paul Atreides, son of the murdered Duke of Arrakis, had seized his destiny as the kwizatz haderach, leading his army of desert Fremen against the Padisha Emperor in a coup that placed the young general in charge of a galactic domain.

It is now twelve years later, and disparate factions are plotting to overthrow Paul, who has become a figurehead in an interstellar Jihad.  The plotters include the Bene Geneserit, the sisterhood that manipulated Paul and his sister, Aria's, genetic destiny; the navigators' Guild, and Irulan, wife of Paul, and daughter of the cruel Baron Harkonnen, who wrested Arrakis from Paul's father. 

We know there's a plot because it is the subject of an endless scene at the beginning of the serial installment.  And because Paul then discusses the plot at length with his companins at an endless meeting of state in the latter part of the serial.  The plot involves predestination, an heir for Paul (his true love, the Fremen Chani, is being kept secretly sterile by Irulan, who wants to beat the child), and the reincarnated form of Duncan Idaho, one of Paul's comrades in the last book.

There.  Now you don't actually have to read this chapter, which is all for the best, as it's as deadly dull and motionless as the worst parts of Dune.  At least the viewpoints don't change every five sentences.

Two stars so far.

Full Commitment, by Robert S. Martin

Senator Clint is on an investigative junket to Burma, where America is in an endless war against… the Capitalists?  What happened to the Communists?  And why do all the soldiers parrot the exact same line when explaining why they're there to fight?

Brainwashing, obviously…which is how Clint is ultimately disposed of.

A pointless story, poorly done.  One star.

The City That Was the World, by James Blish


by Dan Adkins

James Blish tells the story of a man who makes Howard Hughes look like a piker.  John Hillary Dane is a man with vision…or perhaps visions is more appropriate.  First, he builds an enormous pair of telescopes four miles high in the Andes.  Then he erects a mile-high skyscraper in Denver, the mile-high city.  While the reason for the former is never really explained (other than the obvious reasons—the seeing is much better above the majority of the atmosphere), the purpose of the immense building is the point of the story.

I don't really want to spoil things, so I'll just say that the tale deals with time travel, Malthusian overpopulation, and the value (or lack thereof) of friendship.  It's a good story, although few of the elements are really plausible.

Four stars (and the best piece in the issue).

For Your Information: Eugen Sanger and the Rocket-Propelled Airplane, by Willy Ley

Willy Ley's article is on Eugen Saenger, the Austrian cum German rocket scientists perhaps best known for his design of the America Bomber—a rocket-plane that would fly high enough to skip on the upper atmosphere until it reached New York.  There's a lot of good information that probably can't easily be found elsewhere, since Ley relies on at least one personal source.  That said, it's kind of a dull piece.

Three stars.

A Brief History of the Revolution, by David Lunde and James Sallis

In a piece that might well have come out in Fantasy and Science Fiction (or maybe the old Galaxy sister mag, Beyond), we have a young couple hounded by their animate furniture until they are effectively evicted.  The cause of all this appears to be the wife's desire to have a child.

Not very good.  Two stars.

The Kinsolving's Planet Irregulars, by A. Bertram Chandler


by Reese

Last up is the latest journey of Commodore John Grimes, the famed skipper of the Galactic Rim.  In a direct sequel to The Rim Gods, Grimes and his First Mate (though likely not his first mate) Sonya head back to Kinsolving’s Planet.  You may recall from the last story (or the review thereof) that the team Grimes escorted tried to exploit some time-space weakness to psionically summon Jehovah.  Instead, they incarnated the Olympian pantheon.

This time, their efforts throw Grimes into a fantasy land populated exclusively by fictional characters, from a certain Baker Street detective to larger-than-life but real people like Oedipus and Achilles.  Things get really weird when Grimes starts to question his own reality…

I always enjoy Chandler's Rim stories, but this one is just a bit too cute.  It also looks like the author is tired of the Grimes series and would love to end it…if only the money weren't good.

Three stars.

Things that came and things to come

And that's that.  Quality-wise, a thoroughly unremarkable issue.  Indeed, the only real bit of note is how many of the stories seem to be in the wrong magazine.  I confess I am kind of looking forward to the post-Pohl era.  I want to see how things change for this venerable magazine.

Of course, I also know to be careful what I wish for…

(and stay tuned for more updates from Japan!)




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Book, Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[January 14, 1968] As Is (February 1968 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The February 1968 Amazing, the second under Harry Harrison’s editorship, displays two themes on its face, both noted last issue.  The first is puffery: this issue says WORLD’S LEADING SCIENCE-FICTION MAGAZINE at the top of the cover, which also boasts “Katherine MacLean’s outstanding new novelet,” and the table of contents lists this “New Outstanding Novelet,” a “Classic Novelet,” and a “Special Novelet.” The second theme is protesting-too-much discomfort with the mostly-reprint fiction policy, evidenced by the prominent display of “New” on the cover: MacLean’s “Outstanding New Novelet,” “New Features,” “New Article,” “New Frank Herbert Novel.”


by Johnny Bruck

But there’s a third, more substantive theme: commendable initiative in the small amount of space left open by the reprint policy.  The “New Features” listed on the contents page include the first of a promised series of articles on the “Science of Man,” by Leon E. Stover, an anthropologist now at the Illinois Institute of Technology.  The book review column features a long and interesting essay-review by Fritz Leiber of a translation of a book by French author Claude Seignoll, with comments about the state of Gothic fiction generally.  (See below concerning both of these.) There is also the London Letter, said to be the first of a series to include a Milan Letter, a Munich Letter, etc.  This one is by Harrison’s pal Brian Aldiss, and it amounts to an extemporaneous stand-up routine which probably took Aldiss 20 minutes to write.  Parts of it are amusing.

These items are all touted by Harrison in his editorial, but they are not his main matter; the editorial is titled Amazing and the New Wave, and its first half amounts to a disappointingly smarmy exercise in having it both ways:

“There is no New Wave in science fiction.  Or, to put it another way, Amazing is the New Wave. . . .  Science fiction is the new wave that washed into existence in 1926 with the first issue of the magazine. . . .

“To me there are only two kinds of science fiction: the good and the bad. . . .  It is exactly what it says it is, and it is what I happen to be pointing to when I say the magic words ‘science fiction.’ And that is all the definition you are going to get out of me.

“The present New Wave is therefore two things: it is bad SF and it is good SF.  When bad it should be consigned to the nether cellars of our building with the rest of the cobwebbed debris of the years.  When it is good there are plenty of rooms it can slip into and feel comfortable.”

So Harrison spends a page on a subject of current controversy while ostentatiously saying nothing of substance about it.  This banal babble from an otherwise obviously intelligent editor is presumably his way of trying to ingratiate himself and the magazine with everyone while offending no one—a bad idea that will fool nobody and which one hopes is not repeated.

Meanwhile, the actual fiction content of the magazine, except for the above-average serial, is more or less what it has been since the departure of Cele Lalli and the advent of Sol Cohen.

Santaroga Barrier (Part 3 of 3), by Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert’s serial Santaroga Barrier, begun under the previous editor, concludes in this issue, and exits honorably.  To begin, the protagonist Gilbert Dasein, who teaches psychology at Berkeley, is driving to the isolated and reclusive California town Santaroga, hired by an investment company wanting to know why their chain stores were forced out of town.  In Santaroga, there is no reported juvenile delinquency or mental illness.  Cigarettes are purchased only by transients.  Nobody moves away; servicemen always return there upon discharge; and outsiders find no houses for rent or sale.  Jenny, Dasein’s not-so-old flame, moved back to Santaroga when she finished at Berkeley, telling him she couldn’t live anywhere else.  (The profs fooling around with the students?  Shocking!) There’s a dominant local industry, the Jaspers Cheese Cooperative, but it doesn’t produce for the outside market—the stuff “doesn’t travel.” Also, Dasein is the third investigator sent to Santaroga, the two predecessors having sustained accidental deaths.


by Gray Morrow

These cards dealt, Dasein arrives at the town’s sole inn, where he tries to call his handler in Berkeley, but the line goes out, and stays out afterwards.  He is then overcome in his room by a leak from an old gas jet, and rescued just in time.  Jenny, alerted to his presence, and seemingly very happy about it, shows up with breakfast.  It turns out she never received the letters he sent her after her return.

Dasein quickly learns that everyone seems to know who he is.  He encounters new manifestations of the town’s insularity.  Nobody has TV, except for a hidden room full of people whose job it is to monitor it.  There’s a local newspaper, but it’s subscription only, and its concept of reporting the news is unusual: “Those nuts are still killing each other in Southeast Asia.” All commerce appears to be local.  Dasein also learns that Jaspers is not just a brand name, but a substance, one which is near-omnipresent in food and drink.  And he notices a “vitality and a happy freedom” in the movements of people on the streets.

Meanwhile, the Jaspers (which is referred to later as “consciousness fuel”) is having an effect on him (“he had never felt more vital himself”), which he doesn’t entirely grasp.  He’s getting a little deranged, though hardly without cause, since he also keeps having near-fatal accidents—tripping over a carpet and being narrowly saved from a three-floor fall; a kid absent-mindedly loosing an arrow that barely misses him; a garage car lift collapsing; a waitress unknowingly poisoning his coffee; and more.  As for his derangement, shortly after the carpet incident, still suffering from a sprained shoulder, he takes a dangerous nighttime climb down into the Jaspers factory, clambering down and through its ventilation shafts despite his injury. Eventually he is questioning his own sanity.

It becomes apparent that consumption of Jaspers has created some sort of shared consciousness among the Santarogans, though Herbert remains vague about exactly how it works.  The people responsible for his “accidents” (poisoning his food, shooting an arrow at him) seem not to have consciously intended harm, but to have unknowingly acted out the hostility and fear of the Jaspers collectivity.  (Monsters from the id!) Jenny hysterically acknowledges that phenomenon: “Stay away from me! I love you!  Stay away!”

Dasein also begins to see some less attractive features of the Jaspers-permeated community.  On his first visit to the Jaspers factory, he finds that Jenny—trained as a clinical psychologist—works on the inspection line. Leaving, he sees through a door left open a line of people with their legs in stocks doing menial work, “oddly dull-eyed, slow in their actions.” He later learns these are the people who flunked the Jaspers initiation—about one in 500.  After wondering where all the children are, he finds them working in the greenhouses, marching and chanting.  Dr. Piaget, the designated spokesperson for the Santaroga way, says: “We must push back at the surface of childhood. . . .  It’s a brutal, animate thing.  But there’s food growing. . . .  There’s educating.  There’s useful energy.  Waste not; want not.”

At this point, Herbert’s thriller has become a philosophical novel, or at least a novel about philosophies.  Dr. Piaget elaborates on Santaroga’s child rearing practices, which reflect Santaroga’s departure from the usual human understandings about everything: “We take off the binding element.  Couple that with the brutality of childhood?  No!  We would have violence, chaos. . . .  We must superimpose a limiting order on the innate patterns of our nervous systems.” Hence, child labor; got to get 'em disciplined early."

Dr. Piaget continues: “We know the civilization culture-society outside is dying.  They do die, you know.  When this is about to happen, pieces break off from the parent body.  Pieces cut themselves free, Dasein.” And Dasein acknowledges the obvious: “Dasein knew then why he’d been sent here.  No mere market report had prompted this. . . .  He was here to break this up, smash it.” Piaget again: “Contending is too soft a word, Dasein.  There is a power struggle going on over control of the human consciousness.  We are a cell of health surrounded by plague. . . .  This isn’t a struggle over a market area. . . .  This is a struggle over what’s to be judged valuable in our universe.”

There is more denunciation of “outside” (another character says, with elaboration, “it’s all TV out there”), and much ambivalence on Dasein’s part about both outside and Santaroga, resolved in a final confrontation when the man who sent him to Santaroga comes looking for him.

This is a pretty solid SF novel, much better than Herbert's previous serial The Heaven Makers, with an interesting if somewhat vague idea capably revealed through a plot dense with incident, though there are minor points where things don’t hang together well.  Though talky, it’s much less of a turgid slog than some of his other work (Ahem, Dune).  The hive-mind idea is not entirely original, but Herbert takes a different angle and asks different questions than some of his predecessors.  In fact, the novel can be viewed almost as the anti-More Than Human—do you really want to give up your individuality and privacy for the comfort of such close and inescapable community?  Especially when you might end up acting violently without even realizing it?  Four stars, with a couple of planetoids thrown in.

Note the portentousness of some of the names in this novel.  An SF fan’s first thought about Gilbert Dasein is likely that it’s homage or satirical swipe at Gilbert Gosseyn, protagonist of van Vogt’s The World of Null-A.  But that’s probably wrong.  “Dasein” is German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s term for existence, as it is experienced by human beings.  Karl Jaspers is another German philosopher.  Jean Piaget is a Swiss psychologist famous for his studies of child development, some of whose work looks as much like philosophy as psychology.  A student of philosophy, which I am not, might make something of these names, but I’d suggest that the novel works well enough without that kind of gloss.

The Trouble with You Earth People, by Katherine MacLean


by Jeff Jones

Katherine MacLean contributed a number of incisive stories to the SF magazines from 1949 into the early ’50s (Defense Mechanism, —And Be Merry, Incommunicado, Contagion, etc.), and a few since then (mainly Unhuman Sacrifice).  Her novelet The Trouble with You Earth People isn’t on that level; it’s an amusing and mildly bawdy story of cultural misunderstanding between doggish alien visitors, whose understanding of humanity is based on watching television, and an easily scandalized elderly scientist.  It reads like it could have used another draft.  Three stars.

Remote Control, by Walter Kateley

To the reprints.  Walter Kateley’s Remote Control (from Amazing, April 1930), opens with the narrator’s friend Kingston showing him around a large construction project.  It is being carried out by animals—whales and sharks carrying heavy freight, apes and elephants unloading it, and as for the typing and computation required for such a project: “The machines were being operated at lightning speed, not by lady typists, as one might expect, but by bushy-tailed gray squirrels!”


by Hans Wessolowski

The author now flashes back to an earlier time, when Kingston has joined the narrator on his family farm, and assists with his observations of ants.  The two are puzzled by the ants’ efficiency in carrying out cooperative tasks without anything much resembling a brain and with no indication of how their activities are coordinated.  Then an accidental mixture of buttermilk and cedar oil gets on one of their lenses, and—revelation!  Now they can see tiny bright lines of energy leading from the ants back into the nest, which when followed to their source reveal a tiny brain that is apparently coordinating all their activity.  The possibilities are obvious, and it’s a short hop from these naturally manipulated ants to whales and elephants working construction, with squirrels on typewriters in the office, and human puppet masters somewhere off premises.

This one is amusing at first, but quickly gets tedious, since the story consists mostly of Kingston and narrator lecturing each other, with the narrator at one point reading aloud a passage from his favorite entomology text.  Fortunately this “novelet” runs only 18 pages of large print and is over quickly.  Two stars.

"You'll Die Yesterday!", by Rog Phillips

Rog Phillips’s “You’ll Die Yesterday!” (from the March 1951 Amazing) is a piece of yard goods by one of Ray Palmer’s stable of hacks—but a pretty capable one.  Phillips published some 44 stories in a little over six years before this one, mostly in Amazing and Fantastic Adventures, and clearly has the knack to meet Palmer’s famous editorial demand to “gimme bang-bang.” Protagonist Stevens, author of a successful book, is giving a lecture; an audience member asks a question but is shot before Stevens can answer; the killer runs out of the auditorium but inexplicably disappears.  Before the cops arrive, Stevens swipes some papers carried by the decedent, Fred Stone, and shows by home carbon-dating that they are from the future.  Also, Stone was carrying a “T.T.” permit (figure it out) and a printed copy of Stevens’s speech, which was extemporaneous, so it could only have been prepared later from a transcript.  Next day, Stevens’s girlfriend sees Stone, alive, on the street.  Turns out his body is missing from the morgue.


by Julian S. Krupa

More developments come thick and fast and there’s a revelation at the end which actually doesn’t resolve much, but might seem to if the reader wasn’t paying close attention, as I suspect was the case with much of the Palmer Amazing’s readership.  So it’s a clever if insubstantial riff on the time paradox theme.  Three stars for good workmanship.

The Great Invasion of 1955, by David Reid

The Great Invasion of 1955, by David Reid, from the October 1932 Amazing, is another tedious old story in which the Japanese are invading the United States and are vanquished by new technology based on now out-of-date science.  It may be of interest to those interested in speculative helicopter design.  Otherwise, one star.

Turnover Point, by Alfred Coppel

Alfred Coppel, author of Turnover Point (Amazing, April-May 1953), helped fill the SF pulps and lower-echelon digests with mostly forgettable material from the late ‘40s until the mid-‘50s, when he disappeared from the genre, briefly reappearing in 1960 with the well-received post-nuclear war novel Dark December.  This story is a bucket of cliches—a Bat Durston, i.e. a displaced Western—which is a surprise, since it appeared in the first issue of the magazine’s brief flirtation with high pay rates and higher quality content.  But here it is, alongside Heinlein, Sturgeon, and Bradbury.  A sample:

“The Patrol was on Kane’s trail and the blaster in his hand was still warm when he shoved it up against Pop Ganlon’s ribs and made his proposition.

“He wanted to get off Mars—out to Callisto.  To Blackwater, to Ley’s Landing, it didn’t matter too much.  Just off Mars, and quickly.  His eyes had a metallic glitter and his hand was rock-steady.  Pop knew he meant what he said when he told him life was cheap.  Someone else’s, not Kane’s.”


by Ed Emshwiller

The bad guy hiring Pop’s battered old spaceship turns out to be the one who killed Pop’s son, a Patrol officer who “was blasted to a cinder in a back alley in Lower Marsport.” Pop knows Kane is going to kill him after “turnover point”—the point at which the spaceship is turned around (a maneuver accomplished with a flywheel) so its business end faces the destination for deceleration and landing.  But Pop has the last laugh—he didn’t turn the ship around to decelerate for landing, but made a full 360 degree turn, so it continues on towards the outer reaches of the solar system, where Kane can starve, suffocate, and go crazy after it is too late to do anything about it.  Whoopee!  Two stars, barely, since it’s at least capably written for what it is.

Science of Man: Neanderthals, Rickets and Modern Technology, by Leon E. Stover

Prof. Leon Stover’s article suggests that the Neanderthals died out because they wore clothes, shielding themselves from sunlight and therefore from vitamin D.  Vitamin D deficiency causes rickets, which has serious enough consequences to affect evolutionary success.  Clothing was the Neanderthals’ technological solution to the glaciation of their habitat; what saved them then killed them off.  Vitamin D absorption, or lack of it, also accounts for the distribution of races: dark skin absorbs less than light skin, so dark-skinned peoples flourish in the tropics where there’s a surfeit of sunlight, while light-skinned people dominate at higher latitudes.  The moral: people must assess the consequences of their technological development, as the Neanderthals failed to, and we need a lot more technically trained people than we’ve got.

It all seems plausible and is lucidly enough written.  Is he right?  Beats me.  Three stars.

The Future in Books

Ordinarily I don’t rate the book review columns, but this one is unusual, containing Fritz Leiber’s review of French writer Claude Seignolle’s The Accursed: Two Diabolical Tales.  Leiber traces the current revival of “Gothic” fiction, recognizable by the paperback covers depicting an anxious-looking woman, with a large house in the background displaying a single lighted window, and notes the less formulaic older books being reprinted under cover of this new wave (excuse the expression) of yard goods. 

This brings us to Leiber’s typology of “the true Gothic or supernatural-horror story,” of which there are two flavors: “Can such things be?” and “Such things are!  So let’s go whole hog!” He continues: “The first type of story aims to make a sensitive, intelligent reader question for a deliciously scary moment the stable, science-proved foundations of the world in which he trusts.  The second provides a feast of grue for those who relish such banquets.” Seignolle’s two novellas (one featuring a young pyrotic, the other a young lycanthrope) are firmly in the second camp, as Leiber shows by judicious description and quotation.

This is all lively and informative, above and beyond the usual book review, though Leiber disappointingly fails to describe where Seignolle’s work fits into the fantastic tradition (or lack of it) in his native France.  Also, the book is introduced by Lawrence Durrell, a rather large noise in contemporary literature after his Alexandria Quartet; Leiber does not mention what Durrell has to say about the book, or about Seignolle generally.  So, three stars; a good piece that should have been better.  (And this rating in no way reflects the other review here, a distasteful hit job on Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light bylined “Leroy Tanner,” well known as a pseudonym of Harrison’s.)

Summing Up

So, a good novel (though one begun under the previous regime), a decent new story, the usual uneven bunch of reprints, and some stirrings of life in the non-fiction departments.  I’m not sure that adds up to “promising”—more like “steady as she goes”—so we’ll have to leave it with a version of the baseball fans’ lament: “wait till next issue.”




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[November 20, 1967] Fresh Air? (December 1967 Amazing)

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by John Boston

A Fresh Heir

We have been harbinged.  When Harry Harrison, recently departed as editor of SF Impulse and suddenly appeared as book reviewer in this magazine that seemed to have eschewed features entirely, I wondered whether it was an omen of a larger change. 

And here that change is, in big letters at the top of the cover of this December Amazing: “HARRY HARRISON New Editor.” Joseph Ross is gone from the masthead and his departure is unheralded elsewhere in the magazine, though Harrison is quite gracious to him in his book review of Ross’s anthology The Best of Amazing.


by Johnny Bruck

Otherwise, the kudos are reserved for the recently-deceased Hugo Gernsback.  Harrison’s editorial is a tribute to him, and Science Fiction That Endures, Gernsback’s own guest editorial from the April 1961 anniversary issue, is reprinted.  Gernsback says among other things that enduring SF stories are those that “have as their wonder ingredient true or prophetic science,” and notes that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells wrote most of their notable SF early in their careers, later succumbing to “science fiction fatigue—the creative science distillate of the mind had been exhausted.” That sounds scientific!

But does this change in masthead mean any actual material change in this too frequently lackluster magazine?

The most visible difference is that the cover and title page have suddenly become more crowded.  Nine items are touted on the cover, five of them touted as “NEW” and others as “SPECIAL” or even “XTRA SPECIAL.” There’s so much puffery going on that the cover illustration, by Johnny Bruck from the German Perry Rhodan periodical, is confined to the bottom third of the cover, though little harm is done, since it’s quite horizontal in orientation, depicting a spaceship traveling very low and being pursued by flying snakes.  Beat that, Frank R. Paul! 

Other aspects of the magazine’s presentation represent both continuity and change.  The proofreading is still terrible; look no farther than the misspelling “Lester del Ray” on the title page of his story.  And curiously, part of the magazine—pages 90 through 125—is in a different, smaller typeface than the rest, though this increase in wordage is not touted on the cover or elsewhere.

As to the contents, the balance is shifted only a little.  Two short stories and the serial installment are original, one story is probably reprinted but this is its first appearance in English, and four short stories are reprinted from earlier issues of Amazing and Fantastic.  And of course we don’t know whether Harrison actually had much of a hand in selecting what went into this first issue of his incumbency.  But the question of reprints versus new material seems to be a continuing sore point.  Note the column on the left side of the cover—five iterations of "NEW"—which musters everything in the magazine that's not a reprint, including the book review column.

So, too early to tell, but promising—it almost has to be, given Amazing’s doldrums of mediocrity to date under Sol Cohen.  As Bob Dylan, the alleged troubadour of my generation, put it:

I wish I was on some Australian mountain range.
I wish I was on some Australian mountain range.
I got no reason to be there, but I imagine it would be some kind of change. 

Santaroga Barrier (Part 2 of 3), by Frank Herbert


by Gray Morrow

First, to the non-reprinted fiction.  The longest piece of fiction here is the second installment of Frank Herbert’s serial Santaroga Barrier, in which the suggestively named Gilbert Dasein tries to unlock the secret of the reclusive town of Santaroga, which seems to involve a psychoactive substance called Jaspers that the locals all consume.  As usual I’ll hold my comments until the story is complete.

The Forest of Zil, by Kris Neville


by Jeff Jones

Kris Neville, who contributed prolifically to the SF magazines during the early 1950s but slowed down considerably thereafter, opens the issue with The Forest of Zil, a cryptic story of space explorers who land on a planet entirely covered in forest and begin to make plans to clear trees to make space for human activities.  The forest begs leave to differ, and its response can be read either as an epic in brief of raising the ante exponentially, like A.E. van Vogt but not as noisy, or as a weary parody of the entire conceptual armamentarium of SF.  Or maybe something else!  How many faces can you find lurking in the coffee shop placemat?  Four stars for this subtly memorable piece.

The Million Year Patent, by Charles L. Harness


by Jeff Jones

Charles L. Harness, a patent lawyer by day, is present with The Million Year Patent, in which the technicalities of patent law collide with those of relativity, not very interestingly to this lay person.  Two stars.

An Unusual Case, by Gennadiy Gor

The “Sensational Story from behind the Iron Curtain” per the cover is Gennadiy Gor’s An Unusual Case, translated from Russian by one Stanley Frye.  Gor, born to a family exiled to Siberia by the Tsar, was apparently part of the avant-garde in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, but survived to write popular science texts as well, and to start writing SF in 1961.  There’s no indication where this story was previously published, if at all.  It’s a first-person account by the creator of an artificial intelligence (apparently at least humanoid; a hand is mentioned) of his rearing of this pseudo-child, which is cut short when representatives of the corporation that financed the project come to take it away, as it protests piteously.  It’s short and poignant, though blunted a bit by not making much sense; the ingenue develops detailed memories of human life that its creator didn’t put there.  Three stars, and I hope we see more of Gor’s work here (or anywhere).

The Smile, by Ray Bradbury


by L. Sterne Stevens

The ”Ray Bradbury Masterpiece” touted on the cover is The Smile, from the Summer 1952 Fantastic, set in what seems like an American town after a nuclear war has mostly destroyed civilization and left everyone who survived destitute.  People of course respond in the only logical way—by destroying or defiling any available relics of the former civilization.  A while back it was smashing an old car with sledgehammers; today everyone is lining up to spit on a fragment of a famous painting (clue: the title).  But young Tom just can’t get with the program.  It’s a bit overdone, but Bradbury’s overdone is better than many writers’ perfectly-baked.  Or something like that.  Three stars.

Stacked Deck, by Lester del Rey

Our Journeyer-in-Chief recently had occasion to mention “the sort of inferior stuff that filled the lesser mags of the ’50s.” Here’s the real article, Lester del Rey’s Stacked Deck from the November 1952 Amazing.  Del Rey is one of SF’s hardy journeyman professionals, in the game since 1937 as writer, first for John Campbell’s Astounding and Unknown, then for everyone in sight during the 1950s’ efflorescence of SF magazines.  In the ‘50s he edited magazines and anthologies and wrote novels as well as stories, including a prodigious ten of them under various pseudonyms for the Winston series of juvenile SF.  Occasionally he excelled, and his work almost always maintained a basic level of competence.

Almost always.  Sometimes a working writer just has to crank it out, inspiration or no, as in this excruciatingly contrived piece.  Before it opens, a man flew to the moon, without enough fuel to get back, expecting to be rescued in time by a later expedition.  (This already makes no sense.) But that rocketeer, inexplicably, showed up again on Earth, talking about entities he encountered on the moon but claiming scrambled memory.  So a better-equipped expedition sets out, only to discover that the Russians are neck and neck with them.  All this is told in an annoyingly jaunty, I’m-just-a-regular-guy first person style, as in the opening sentence: “The bright boys with their pep talks about space and the lack of gravity should try it once!”


by Ed Emshwiller

Upon landing, our heroes find a building with an airlock, and inside, a nice lounge with red leather chairs, a cigarette machine, and plenty of alcohol and food, along with a machine shop and a lot of electronic gear, with signs and manuals in English and Russian—and a vault full of missiles, ready to be armed with warheads.  They surmise the Russians are finding something similar.

So what gives?  All along there have been passing references to gambling, such as the protagonist’s having bought a sweepstakes ticket, and racing magazines lying around, some inside the mysterious building.  Our hero picks up one of the latter and finds a note in it written by the aliens who set up the building, explaining that they are all betting on whether the Earthfolk will blow themselves up in short order, or avoid extermination and come calling on the aliens a bit later.  Narrator ruminates: “I don’t like being the booby prize in a cosmic lottery.  And that’s all the human race is now, I guess.”

And that arid gimmick is the story, with no other redeeming feature.  Del Rey must have been short on the rent that month.  One star. 

Luvver, by Mack Reynolds

Speaking of gimmicks, arid ones that is, Mack Reynolds’s Luvver (Fantastic Adventures, June 1950) is about as contrived as Stacked Deck.  Old Donald Macbride and his flirtatious daughter Patricia are having spaceship problems and make an emergency landing on a handy planet despite the “RESTRICTED ZONE.  LANDING FORBIDDEN” warning that comes over the radio. The local garrison, consisting of Steve and Dave, hustles them off their ship—blindfolded—and into their quarters, warning them not to look around, not to go outside, not to open the windows, without explaining why. 

But Patricia, of course, goes outside, and before Steve can drag her in, she sees a little animal–a luvver.  He knocks her out and the guys shoot her up with “the lethe drug,” since wiping her memory is her only hope.  Steve explains to the old man that all animals have means of defense—speed, size, venom, scent, etc.  The luvvers’ defense is eliciting undying love—“a stronger force than the most vicious narcotic”—in anyone or anything that sees them.  If Patricia retains her memories, she will “die of melancholy” if kept away from them, and if they escaped their world, pandemonium would ensue.

The gimmick is slightly less inane than del Rey’s, and Reynolds writes in a style more facile and natural than del Rey’s artificial and irritating voice, so two stars, barely.

Sub-Satellite, by Charles Cloukey

The gem of the issue, remarkably, is Charles L. Cloukey’s Sub-Satellite, from the March 1928 Amazing.  It recounts a great inventor’s construction of a spaceship and his voyage to the Moon in it, and the attempt on his life there by a disgruntled and demented former employee who has stowed away.  It is well told in an agreeable, slightly stilted but very plain style with a good balance of narration and exposition, reminding me of (my old memories of) Jules Verne.  It too ends with a gimmick—one that has been used in later decades by better-known writers—but there’s much more of a story here than in del Rey’s or Reynolds’s efforts, so it doesn’t detract from the whole.  Four stars.

So who’s this Cloukey?  Never heard of him, though I’m familiar with most of Gernsback’s repeat contributors.  Turns out he died in 1931, at age 19, of typhoid fever, after publishing eight stories, a poem, and a serial novel in Gernsback’s magazines.  Sub-Satellite was his first story, and he was not quite 16 when it was published.  Forget G. Peyton Wertenbaker, whose The Man from the Atom, done when he was 16, was pretty terrible—Cloukey is the real prodigy of the Gernsback years.  Too bad he didn’t last.

Summing Up

So, not a bad issue, with a couple of four-star stories, and some evidence (mainly the cover and table of contents) that the new regime at least wants to make the magazine look a bit livelier.  Whether a sustained improvement is in process of course remains to be seen.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 6, 1967] New Look, New . . . ? (October 1967 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The October Amazing is the second instance of what may prove to be the magazine’s New Look.  Like the June issue, it is fronted by a pleasantly garish and nouveau-pulpish cover that, though uncredited, is known to the cognoscenti as another by Johnny Bruck, reprinted from a 1963 issue of the German Perry Rhodan magazine.  Farewell Frank R. Paul?  We’ll see.  And maybe the contents are being updated as well.  Of the five reprinted stories here, all are from the late 1940s or the ‘50s, at least in publication date.


by Johnny Bruck

That is not necessarily good news; Amazing published plenty of dreck through most of its history.  Selection is all.  But this issue’s selection is pretty decent.  Also Harry Harrison’s book reviews are still here, with a fillip.  In addition to Harrison’s own reviews of a new Edgar Rice Burroughs bio, the latest Analog anthology, and an Arthur Sellings novel, there is Brian Aldiss’s review of Harrison’s own The Technicolor Time Machine—back-slappingly complimentary, as one might expect from these close collaborators.  Harrison and Aldiss edited this year’s Nebula Award Stories, due out just about now, and it appears that they will be joining the party with their own “year’s best” anthology next year.

Santaroga Barrier (Part 1 of 3), by Frank Herbert


by Gray Morrow

Frank Herbert’s new novel Santaroga Barrier begins its three-part serialization in this issue.  As usual, I will withhold comment until it’s finished.  A cursory rummage indicates that it seems to have something to do with people in California taking drugs.  It will be interesting to see what Herbert can develop from such an unlikely premise.

The Children's Room, by Raymond F. Jones

Raymond F. Jones is the very model of a modern science fiction writer.  He checks all the boxes.  His career is so generic as to be paradigmatic, or maybe vice versa.  He started out in Campbell’s Astounding, just in time to join new writers George O. Smith and Hal Clement and retread Murray Leinster in keeping that magazine going when such mainstays as Heinlein, Hubbard, Williamson, and de Camp were lost to military service or war work.  After the war, when paper shortages loosened and the pulps returned from wartime quarterly schedules to monthly or bimonthly, Jones—along with Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt, George O. Smith and other Astounding writers—began helping to fill them as well as continuing to appear in Astounding. When specialty publishers began to muster the large backlog of magazine SF for book publication, Jones was there with his Astounding novel Renaissance and a collection of his 1940s stories, The Toymaker.  When Galaxy appeared in 1950 and instantly broadened the range of the field, Jones contributed the shocking A Stone and a Spear, which would likely have been unpublishable anywhere else.  When “juvenile” (the term is becoming “young adult”) science fiction became a big item, Jones provided the well-remembered Son of the Stars and its sequel Planet of Light to the John C. Winston series.  When SF started to be big box office, Jones’s novel This Island Earth was turned into a mediocre but high-profile movie.  But somehow his recognition never kept pace with his resume, and now he seems to have given up and been largely forgotten, with only five new stories since 1960.

The Children’s Room, from the September 1947 Fantastic Adventures, is only the third story Jones published outside Astounding.  It’s about super-people—hardly an unusual theme in that magazine—but it pursues some of the implications of that idea that Campbell may not have found too palatable.  Bill Starbuck, chief engineer at an electronics company, picks up one of the books his IQ-240 son checked out from the university library’s children’s room, and finds himself captivated by a particularly subtle fairy tale.  Next day the kid is sick and the book is due so he returns it, only to be told “We have no children’s department.” But on the way out, he sees the children’s room, returns the book, and the librarian there (having learned that Bill has read the book), gives him more to take home.


by Rod Ruth

So what gives?  Time-traveling mutant super-people, of course—what else?  In the future, humanity is up against an alien species that is out-evolving them!  So they must scour the past for those people with beneficial mutations who never had a chance to amount to much, contact them and get them used to their exalted status (groom them, you might say), and then carry them off to their grand destiny in the future, never to see their time or their families again.  Only the mutants can even read the books, or see the time travellers’ children’s rooms.  Bill’s an exception—he can read the books and see the rooms, but has none of the other talents of the mutants, so he’s not invited to the future; and Mom’s a total loss. 

So the kid gets on board with the plan, and the parents both come around, since there’s not much else they can do.  But there’s a consolation prize for the parents (otherwise they would have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do to the Bureau of Child Welfare), and here Jones twists the knife in this formerly mild story.  (Read it and see.) Or, about as likely, Jones is just naively working out the plot, and it is only we mutants reading it who can perceive its monstrousness.  As, no doubt, Campbell did, and rejected the story, or so I surmise.  Four stars, even if the fourth may have been accidental on Jones’s part.

Five Years in the Marmalade, by Geoff St. Reynard


by Bill Terry

Geoff St. Reynard, a pseudonym of Robert W. Krepps, contributes Five Years in the Marmalade (Fantastic Adventures, July 1949), an inane joke.  Two guys walk into a bar—Muleath and Dangeur, who just returned from Alpha Centauri—and after they’ve had a drink, a Martian teleports in, just returned from a stay on Mercury.  The boys call him over, and he tells them about his “single-trav,” which will take him anywhere he can think of, through (of course) the power of thought.  So they recommend he head off next to Marmalade, which Muleath has made up and which exists only in his brain.  Connect the dots.  It's as skillfully executed as it is silly, and remarkably, Everett F. Bleiler and T.E. Dikty thought enough of it to put it in The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1950.  Two stars, barely.

The Siren Sounds at Midnight, by Frank M. Robinson

Frank M. Robinson’s The Siren Sounds at Midnight (Fantastic, November-December 1953) is entirely contrived: “they” have set a midnight deadline to resolve “their” differences, and if things don’t work out, the bombs will be flying and it’s all over for everybody, or close to it.  The story is redeemed by Robinson’s quiet good writing, following a long-married couple as they spend what may be their last hours together.  Three stars.

Largo, by Theodore Sturgeon

“More lyrical science fiction from the typewriter of Theodore Sturgeon,” says the blurb for Largo (Fantastic Adventures, July 1947).  All those terms are debatable except probably “typewriter.” Here’s the alleged science involved, from the opening of the story: “The chandeliers on the eighty-first floor of the Empire State Building swung wildly without any reason.  A company of soldiers marched over a new, well-built bridge, and it collapsed.  Enrico Caruso filled his lungs and sang, and the crystal glass before him shattered.”

The style is not so much lyrical as swaggering and demonstrative.  Here’s the next stretch of text:

“And Vernon Drecksall composed his Largo.

“He composed it in hotel rooms and scored it on trains and ships, and it took more than twenty-two years.  He started it in the days when smoke hung over the city, because factories used coal instead of broadcast power; when men spoke to men over wires and never saw each other’s faces; when the nations of earth were ruled by the greed of a man or the greed of men.  During the Thirty Days War and the Great Change which followed it, he labored; and he finished it on the day of his death.”


by Henry Sharp

That is, “I’m gonna tell you a story and I’m just the guy who can do it.” And, of course, Sturgeon is that guy, on his better days.  The striking thing about this story is the conspicuous confidence and cadence with which he lays out what is actually a pretty hackneyed plot—an extravagant revenge drama.  Drecksall is an eccentric musical genius with an all-consuming work in progress.  He works at menial jobs so support himself and his violin. Then he falls in love with the beautiful but vapid Gretel.  A crassly entrepreneurial type, Wylie, recognizes his genius, exploits it and him, and also ends up marrying Gretel himself. Drecksall continues to perfect his Largo, though it’s sounding darker all the time.  He builds his own auditorium to perform it in, invites Gretel and Wylie to hear it, and then . . . fade to black. 

There’s more, but it’s all in the telling, which is worth reading as a conspicuous demonstration of craft if nothing else.  This is Sturgeon’s fourth SF or fantasy story to be published by someone other than John Campbell, and it contrasts sharply to Blabbermouth, the second such, from Fantastic Adventures a few months earlier.  That one was told in an off-the-rack style that fit Sturgeon like an embarrassing Hallowe’en costume.  This is Sturgeon being himself, performing a circus act of the redemption of hokum by style.  Splitting the difference, three stars.

Scar-Tissue, by Henry S. Whitehead


by Robert Fuqua

The antique of the bunch is Henry S. Whitehead’s Scar-Tissue, which came from the July 1946 Amazing, but was posthumously published; the author died in 1932.  It begins unpromisingly, with the narrator asking his friend the ship’s doctor, “What is your opinion on the Atlantis question?” This becomes a frame story in which one Joe Smith, with Harvard and Oxford’s Balliol College on his resume, describes his past lives in prehistoric times, in Africa under the Portuguese (“Zim-baub-weh,” the place was called), and then Atlantis, where he was a gladiator, and he’s got scars to prove it.  It’s a perfectly readable old-fashioned story.  Three stars.

Summing Up

Not bad, a readable issue of this ill-conceived incarnation of Amazing, and better than not bad if the Herbert serial pans out.  We'll see.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 31, 1967] Canceling waves (August 1967 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Phase shift

Every science fiction magazine has a stable of regular contributors.  Maybe there just aren't enough good writers to fill a magazine otherwise.  Perhaps it's a reflection of the conservative tendency to stick with what works.  Occasionally, you'll see a mag make an effort to recruit new talent, with mixed results.  Others, like Analog are famously steady.

Thus, it is usually with a heavy sigh that I open each new issue of John Campbell's mag.  It's not that his stable is bad per se.  But reading the same authors, month in and month out can get monotonous.  Also, because they are guaranteed spots, quality can be somewhat, shall we say, variable.

On the other hand, that variability means that it's rare that any single issue of Analog is all bad (or all good).  August 1967 Analog is no exception, with the bad turns being more than counteracted by the good ones.  Throw in an excellent science fact article from a newcomer, and this issue is one of the better mags of the month.

Interference pattern


by Chesley Bonestell

Starfog, by Poul Anderson

The latest Poul Anderson story inspired by a lovely Chesley Bonestell painting (this one of a planet around a red supergiant), is pretty neat.  The Makt, an incredibly primitive hyperdrive ship, makes planetfall at the farflung human colony of Serieve.  The crew are human, though of a somewhat radical type, far more resistant to radiation than baseline homo sapiens, and with a taste for arsenic salt.  More remarkable, they claim that their homeworld, Kirkasant, lives in another universe.  This universe is just a few hundred light years across, and jam packed with bright young stars.

Ranger Daven Laure and his sapient ship, Jaccavrie, are dispatched to Serieve to deduce just where Kirkasant is, and, if possible, to get the crew of the Makt home.  Easier said than done — how does one go looking for a pocket universe?  And if it posssess the properties described, then navigation in that electromagnetic hell would be virtually impossible.


by John Schoenherr

This is one of those highly technical stories that Anderson likes, but done with sufficient characterization that it doesn't require the Winston P. Sanders (Winnie the Pooh) alias that Anderson's lesser works go under.  Laure's solution to finding Kirkasant requires a bit too much overt hiding from the audience, but it is pretty clever, at least in a society of libertarian worlds motivated by little more than personal profit (a society that does make sense, in the context portrayed).

Four stars.

Babel II, by Christopher Anvil


by Rudolph Palais

Chris Anvil, on the other hand, is at a low ebb.  This piece is less of a story than a series of examples of how technical speak makes advanced technology all but inaccessible to anyone but the most arcane experts.  I suppose this is a point to be made, but I disagree with the conclusion that a user of technology must know everything about the technology.  That is, after all, the whole point of the new programming language, BASIC.  One can avail themselves of the nearest Big Iron computer and make sophisticated calculations without having the first clue how to IPL an operating system from a DASD.

Two stars.

The Misers, by William T. Powers

This month's science article is unusually excellent.  It's about the latest advances in digital imaging for astronomy, and how it might someday supplant the astronomical photograph.  Chatty and engaging, but not dumbed down, its only sin is length.  To be fair, there is a lot to cover.

Five stars.  An invaluable resource.

The Featherbedders, by Frank Herbert


by Leo Summers

Here's a real surprise: a Frank Herbert story I unreservedly like!

The Slorin are shapeshifters bent on infiltrating Earth's society for possibly sinister, but mostly benign purpose.  When a scattership breaks up before it can safely land, two members of the crew, Smeg and his son, Rick, go off looking for a rogue comrade who has gone native.

And how.  Using his mind control powers, this renegade has taken up residence in a small Southern town as a sheriff, maintaining order with an iron fist, thought control, and the use of hostages.  But when Smeg finally confronts the sheriff, he encounters an even deeper secret — one that threatens the entire Slorin operation.

Aside from the final twist, which I found a little superfluous, the only other off-putting issue is the use of the exact same poem that ends this month's F&SF story, Bugs.  One wonders if the poem was prominently featured a few months ago or something.

But all of Herbert's typical tics, including copious italics and ever-shifting viewpoints, are completely absent from the piece.  It's light rather than ponderous, but not overly frivolous.  I'd not have been surprised to find it in the pages of Galaxy in the first half of the last decade (when that magazine was at its zenith).

Four stars.

Cows Can't Eat Grass, by Leigh Richmond and Walt Richmond


by Kelly Freas

Galactic Surveryor Harry Gideon (great surname, by the way) is marooned on a planet that should have killed him.  Somehow, he has managed to find sufficient edible foods to sustain himself until relief arrives.  But all of their tests show the alien life to be completely toxic.  What's Gideon's secret?

The Richmond combo has produced some of the worst stuff Analog's printed, but they've gotten better of late (and I quite enjoyed their first book, Shockwave.  This latest piece is on the good end of things.

Three stars.

Depression or Bust, by Mack Reynolds


by Leo Summers

Reynolds, on the other hand, offers up another one of his history lessons wrapped in a throwaway story.  When Marvin and Phoebe Sellers decide to return their brand new freezer, it starts a chain that results in a national depression.  The only way to fix it is by reversing the trigger.

This is not only a rather pointless piece, it is so clumsily exaggerated, the characters made of straw (the President has never heard of the Depression, and it must be explained to him by an adviser).  And Reynolds can't help making a dig at Indians.  Reynolds has an issue with Indians.

One star.

Plugging in the oscilloscope

What have we got?  Two clunkers, one decent piece, and two good long ones, not to mention a great article.  That puts us at 3.2 on the star-o-meter.  Not bad at all! That barely beats out Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.2) and roundly trounces Galaxy (2.9), IF (2.8), Famous Science Fiction #1 (2.7), Famous Science Fiction #2 (2.4), and Amazing (2.4).

Only New Worlds (3.3) and Famous Science Fiction #3 (3.4) score higher.

For those keeping score, women wrote 9% of the new fiction pieces this month (including all the back issues of Famous). 

Last week, I wondered if a copy of a copy could be better than the original.  Thus far, it looks like the answer is no.  Keep it up, Analog!



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Book, Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[May 6, 1967] Stirred?  Shaken? (June 1967 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Is something stirring at Amazing?  After several issues devoid of non-fiction features, this one starts a book review column by Harry Harrison, whose brief stint as nominal editor of the British magazine SF Impulse ended a few months ago.  Is a remake in order?  A change of guard in the wind?  There’s no hint.


by Johnny Bruck

The cover itself is also a change, not having been looted from the back files of Amazing or Fantastic Adventures.  The pleasantly lurid image of space-suited men watching or fleeing a battle of spacecraft is not credited, but other sources attribute it to a 1964 issue of Perry Rhodan, Germany’s long-running weekly paperback novella series, artist’s name Johnny Bruck.  I wonder if the publisher is paying him, or anyone.

Also perplexing is the shift in presentation on the cover.  Last issue, the display of big names was ostentatious.  Here, the only thing prominently displayed is “Winston K. Marks Outstanding New Story Cold Comfort,” sic without apostrophe.  Marks is one of the legion who filled the mid-1950s’ proliferation of SF magazines with competent and forgettable copy.  After a couple of stories in the early ‘40s, he reappeared with a few in 1953, contributed a staggering 25 stories in 1954 and 20 in 1955, and trailed off thereafter; he hasn’t been seen in these parts since mid-1959.  But here he is, name in lights, while Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, and Philip K. Dick are relegated to small type over the title.  Odd, and probably counter-productive, to say the least.

The Heaven Makers (Part 2 of 2), by Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert’s serial The Heaven Makers concludes in this issue.  Imagine an SF novel oriented to the reference points of Charles Fort, Richard Shaver, and soap opera.  And then imagine—this is the hard part—that it’s nonetheless pretty readable.

First, we are property!  Just like Charles Fort said.  You may think you understand human history, but everything you know is wrong!  Earth is secretly dominated by the Chem, a species of very short, bandy-legged, silver-skinned alien humanoids who have been made immortal, and also connected tele-empathically, by a discovery of one of their ancient savants—Tiggywaugh’s web (definitely sic).  Only problem is . . . they’re bored.  Eternity weighs heavily on them.  They must be entertained and distracted!

So, the Chem send Storyships around the galaxy, though Earth’s is the only one we see.  This ship rests on the bottom of the ocean, from which vantage the Chem shape history in large and small ways both by direct intervention and by remote manipulation and heightening of human emotional states.  The result: wars that might be settled quickly at the conference table can be prolonged and intensified, and susceptible individuals can be driven as far as murder.  These events are recorded, processed, spiced up with their own emotional track, and broadcast to pique the jaded souls of the Chem. 

One of the stars of this industry is Fraffin, proprietor of Earth’s Storyship, but he’s suspected of letting hints drop to Earthfolk about what’s going on, a major crime among the Chem.  Kelexel, posing as a visitor, has been sent by the authorities to get to the bottom of things, after four previous investigators have found nothing and, suspiciously, resigned.  But Kelexel is quickly corrupted himself.  Fraffin shows him a “pantovive” of a man manipulated by the Chem into murdering his wife, which Kelexel finds quite gripping.  He also becomes obsessed with the woman’s daughter, Ruth (the Chem are quite captivated by the physiques of humans, and can interbreed with them).  Fraffin, having found Kelexel’s vulnerability, sets out to procure her for him.  So three dwarfish figures show up at her back door, immobilize her with some sort of ray, and carry her away to be mind-controlled and ravished by Kelexel.

At this point, the nagging sense of familiarity I was feeling came into focus.  Herbert has reinvented Richard Shaver’s Deros!  Shaver, a former psychiatric patient, wrote up his delusions of sadistic cave-dwelling degenerates tormenting normal people, which (with much reworking by editor Ray Palmer) boosted Amazing’s mid-1940s circulation to unheard-of levels, until the publisher put an end to the disreputable spectacle a few years later.  Now Herbert has gussied up the “Shaver Mystery” for prime time!  The distorted physical appearance . . . check.  The mind control rays . . . check.  The underground caverns . . . not exactly, these characters are underwater instead.  But that’s a minor detail.


by Gray Morrow

Oh, yes, the soap opera part.  Up on dry land, Andy Thurlow, a court psychologist, is Ruth’s old boyfriend; she threw him over for someone else, who turned out to be a low-life.  Andy’s never gotten over it.  Her father, holed up after his Chem-driven murder of her mother, won’t surrender to anybody but Andy.  Meanwhile, Andy, who is wearing polarized glasses as a result of an eye injury, has started to see what prove to be manifestations of Chem activity, invisible to anyone else.  Andy also gets back with Ruth, who has moved out on her husband; he takes her back to the marital house and waits so she can pick up some possessions.  But the Chem snatch her as described, and her husband falls through a glass door and dies. 

Back at the Chems’ submarine hideout, Kelexel is having his way with the pacified Ruth, who, when he’s not using her, studies the Chem via the pantovive machine, learning more and more, while Kelexel harbors growing misgivings about the whole Chem enterprise.  Andy, up on land, is trying to persuade Ruth’s father the murderer to cooperate with an insanity defense while wondering if the strange manifestations he has seen account for Ruth’s disappearance.  The plot lines are eventually resolved in confrontations among Kelexel, Fraffin, Ruth, and Andy with dialogue that is more reminiscent of daytime TV than Herbert’s turgid usual.  In the end, Herbert actually makes a readable story out of this sensational and largely ridiculous material.  Three stars.

Cold Comfort, by Winston K. Marks


by Gray Morrow

Winston Marks’s "Outstanding New Story" Cold Comfort is an amusing first-person rant by the first man to be cryogenically frozen for medical reasons and revived when his problem can be cured.  He’s pleased enough with his new kidneys, but isn’t impressed by this brave new world in which corporations now overtly dominate the world, there’s a nine-million-soldier garrison in East Asia, etc. etc. E.g. , “I am only now recovering from my first exposure to your local art gallery.  Who the hell invented quivering pigments?” It’s at best a black-humorous comedy routine, but well enough done.  Three stars.

The Mad Scientist, by Robert Bloch


by Virgil Finlay

After Marks it is downhill, or over a cliff.  The Mad Scientist by Robert Bloch, from Fantastic Adventures, September 1947, is a deeply unfunny farce about an over-the-hill scientist who works with fungi, who has a young and beautiful wife with whom the protagonist is having an affair. They want to get rid of the scientist with an extract of poisonous mushrooms, but he outsmarts them, and what a silly bore.  The fact that the protagonist is a science fiction writer and the story begins with some blather about how dangerous such people are does not enhance its interest at all.  One star.

Atomic Fire, by Raymond Z. Gallun


by Leo Morey

Raymond Z. Gallun’s Atomic Fire (Amazing, April 1931) is a period piece, Gallun’s third published story, in which far-future scientists Aggar Ho and Sark Ahar (with huge chests to breathe the thin atmosphere, spindly and attenuated limbs, large ears, a coat of polar fur—evolution!) have discovered that the Black Nebula is about to swallow up the sun and kill all life on Earth. The solution?  Atomic power, obviously, to be tested off Earth for safety (the spaceship has just been delivered).  Unfortunately, their experiments first fail, then succeed all too well; but Sark Ahar’s quick thinking turns disaster into salvation!  As the blurb might have read.  Gallun had an imagination from the beginning, but the stilted writing makes this one hard to appreciate in these modern days of the 1960s.  Two stars.

Project Nightmare, by Robert Heinlein


by William Ashman

In Robert Heinlein’s Project Nightmare, from the April/May 1953 Amazing, the Russians deliver an ultimatum demanding surrender, since they’ve mined American cities with nuclear bombs.  The only hope is a colorful and miscellaneous bunch of clairvoyants to locate the bombs before they go off.  It’s a fast-moving but superficial, wisecracking story, a considerable regression for the author.  Some years ago he published an essay titled On the Writing of Speculative Fiction, and presented five rules for the aspiring writer.  I think this story must illustrate the last two: “4.  You must put it on the market.  5.  You must keep it on the market until sold.” I suspect Heinlein intended this one for the slicks, and when none of them would have it, started down the ranks of the SF mags until it finally came to rest in Amazing, which, compounding the indignity, managed to lose his customary middle initial.  Two stars.

The Builder, by Philip K. Dick


by Ed Emshwiller

Philip K. Dick’s The Builder (Amazing, December 1953/January 1954) is from his early Prolific Period—he published 31 stories in the SF magazines in 1953 and 28 in 1954, handily beating Winston K. Marks’s peak.  How?  With a certain number of tossed-off ephemerae like this one, in which an ordinary guy is obsessed for no reason he can articulate with building a giant boat in his backyard.  A rather peculiar boat too, with no sails or motor or oars.  And then: “It was not until the first great black drops of rain began to splash about him that he understood.” That’s it.  Two stars for this shaggy-God story which is unfortunately not shaggy enough.

Summing Up

Well, that was pretty dreary.  The issue’s only distinction is the unexpected readability of Herbert’s novel, which is the best, or least bad, of the serials this publisher has run.  The most one can say about the reprint policy is that it has its ups and downs, and this issue is definitely the latter.

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