Tag Archives: Gerald Jonas

Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[May 20, 1967] Field trips (June 1967 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

A peach of a visit

Here we are again in Atlanta, Gateway to the South.  Our last visit to the Dogwood City was at the invitation of Georgia Tech, who asked me, as a science fiction writer, to discuss predictions of the future.  Particularly, they wanted my opinion on the dangers of overpopulation, pollution, and nuclear annihilation–and what might be done to avoid catastrophe.

The talk went off rather well, and so now I'm at a conference addressing a bevy of biologists on the nascent science of exobiology, or more accurately, how aliens have figured in science fiction, both in our solar system and without. 

I must confess, there is a great feeling of accomplishment in being paid good money to talk about the things I love.  And the pastries are free, too!

A peach of an issue

Accompanying me on this trip is the latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  It has made a most pleasant companion (for the most part).  Let's take a tour, shall we?


by Bert Tanner

Death and the Executioner, by Roger Zelazny

First up, we have the sequel to Dawn in what is clearly a serial by another name (like Poul Anderson's The Star Fox).  As such, I will try to judge each piece as part of a great whole.

And what an excellent part!  Zelazny returns us to an unnamed world that is nevertheless explicitly not Earth (betrayed by its two moons).  Millennia ago, its colonists split into two castes: The Firsts, blessed with psychic powers, have effective immortality by swapping consciousnesses into other bodies.  Everyone else lives in enforced medieval squalor patterned after Hindu tradition.  The Firsts are, of course, associated with the Indian pantheon.

One rebel First, name of Sam, has styled himself the Buddha and is reintroducing Gautama's creed.  In this installment, the First who has made himself Yama, God of Death, arrives at Sam's purple grove to deliver a fatal message from Kali, head of the Firsts.

Just last article, Jessica Dickinson Goodman lamented that there were precious few f&sf stories that didn't derive their settings from a strongly European tradition.  Zelazny has shown that the subcontinent is as fertile a source for inspiration as any other.  And where Herbert's Persia-as-SF (Dune) fell flat for me, mostly due to Herbert's inexpertise as an author, in the hands of Zelazny, ancient India-turned-scientifiction sparkles.  Plus, there's lots of mighty thews-type combat for those who are into that sort of thing (paging Ms. Buhlert.)

Five stars for this segment.

The Royal Road to There, by Robert M. Green, Jr.

The Jackson family is on a seemingly endless freeway, headed for the unveiling of their uncle's will.  Said uncle was an eccentric who kept a horse-and-buggy factory going long after the automobile had become ascendant.

In a Twilight Zone-ish bit, the freeway ensnares the family, depositing them in the town his uncle built, where they are presented with a most unique offer, which may just require them to give up their gas-guzzling beast. 

Is the story anti-progress?  Or does it simply advocate smarter progress?  My brother, Lou, still laments the removal of the little red trains that used to knit Los Angeles together.  Now, the San Gabriel Valley is a basin of smog and a snarl of endless traffic.  If there had been more sensible city planning and incorporation of public transit and rail, perhaps it wouldn't be this way.

Three stars.

Gentlemen, Be Seated, by Charles Beaumont

In the future, comedy is dead.  It seems the progressive types who were offended by racial humor and violent slapstick inadvertently caused the extinction of laughter.  It's up to a secret society, armed with bad puns and blackface, to restore hope to mankind.

I hate to speak ill of the dead (Beaumont died on my 48th birthday this year), but this story is as bad as it sounds.

One star.

"…But for the Grace of God", by Gilbert Thomas

A predator of the masculine variety comes across a much more capable predator of the feminine variety.  A bit too long-winded and predictable to be truly effective, but I appreciate what the author is doing, nevertheless.

Three stars.

Non-Time Travel, by Isaac Asimov

Every so often, the Good Doctor finds himself so at a loss for ideas, that he picks a pointless subject to expound upon.  His piece on the International Date Line is pleasant enough, but it could just as easily have been a paragraph long.

Three stars.

The First Postulate, by Gerald Jonas

On a remote Mexican island, where the Mayan tradition still runs strong, the first two deaths due to natural causes in over forty years of worldwide immortality have been reported.  The scientific team dispatched there encounters increasing resistance from the locals, who ultimately fire their base to retrieve the corpses.  Is it a kind of insanity that drives the indios?  Or is it a natural reaction to an unnatural situation?

Readable, vivid, if not particularly memorable.  Three stars.

A Discovery in the Woods, by Graham Greene

Lastly, another after-the-bomb tale, told from the perspective of a band of bandy youths who encounter a house of the giants.  This one is all in the telling, a lovely tale that reminds me of Edgar Pangborn's Davy.

Four stars.

Miles to go before I sleep

So ends a perfectly suitable (with one small exception) issue.  My only real complaint is that I finished it on the flight out!  Luckily, I've got another book reserved for the flight back, which you'll hear about next month.

In the meantime, please wish me luck for tonight's speech!


by Gahan Wilson



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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 22, 1966] Ha ha.  Very funny.  (December 1966 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Joke's on me

I have a buddy in the Costume Designers Guild (you know her, too — she's Gwyn Conaway).  She keeps me up to date with the inside dope on Hollywood.  One tidbit she offered up recently was something she paraphrased from a manual for actors published this year: the last words of the actor, Edmund Gwenn, who passed away in 1959.  A visitor to his deathbed exclaimed that his final ordeal must be hard for him.

Gwenn replied, "Dying is easy.  Comedy is hard."

I think it was in Lighthouse, a fanzine for pros, that Lester del Rey suggested more writers should go into comedy rather than flogging the same tired "serious" science fiction canards.  The problem is that humor is harder than seriosity.  An inexerpt attempt to make one laugh produces the opposite effect.

And God help us all if an editor decides to fill an entire magazine with failed attempts.  This month's Fantasy and Science Fiction, for example…

No laughing matter


by Howard Purcell

Sabotage, by Christopher Anvil

Chris Anvil normally writes for Analog.  His stories often pit humans outstmarting aliens with a bit of clever sophistry those stupid ETs (inevitably made of straw) could never conceive of, let alone counter.  How one of these tales got into F&SF, I'll never know.

The setup: the vaporous Tamar and Earth are in a stalemated war.  Earth has the technology, but Tamar has the psychology.  They possess our people and try to sabotage our efforts.  None of their attempts have been particularly successful, but the latest threatens to be a doozy.  College students are becoming increasingly disaffected by something they're being taught, and while the immediate effect is small, the cascade could be disastrous.  Luckily, Officer McAmerican (every character's name is in Rank Surname format) is able to counter the insidious teaching with a lesson plan of his own.

Obviously, this is some kind of anti-Communist metaphor; again, one wonders why Campbell didn't pick it up.  Perhaps he's full up on Anvil stories.  F&SF may pay more these days, too.  Anyway, Sabotage is three times longer than it needs to be — or it's infinity times longer, if you feel the story never needed to be written.

Two stars.


by Gahan Wilson

The Mystery of the Purloined Grenouilles, by Gerald Jonas

In his first published story, Jonas gives us a baroquely told tale of a man who creates energy through reverse Galvanism: he hooks frogs up to a generator and tickles their legs.

Two stars.

Doubting Thomas, by Thomas M. Disch

Disch is an author who started so promisingly, but if this story, of a computer designed to suss out the veracity of magical events, is any indicaton of where he's headed, he might as well throw in the Smith-Corona. 

It just ain't funny, nor is it fun to read.  One stars.

The Martian Atmosphere, by Theodore L. Thomas

The "science" article describes what we know about the components of Mars' atmosphere.  Thomas seems to believe that because there's no oxygen that something must have happened to it.  Which presupposes it was ever there in the first place.  He also assumes that the carbon dioxide that makes up the majority of the Martian atmosphere is a byproduct of respiration.

At some point, we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that there's no life on Mars.

Two stars.

Von Goom's Gambit, by Victor Contoski

Take any position of the pieces on the chessboard. Usually it tells of the logical or semi-logical plans of the players, their strategy in playing for a win or a draw, and their personalities. If you see a pattern from the King's Gambit Accepted, you know that both players are tacticians, that the fight will be brief but fierce. A pattern from the Queen's Gambit Declined, however, tells that the players are strategists playing for minute advantages, the weakening of one square or the placing of a Rook on a half-opened file. From such patterns, pleasing or displeasing, you can tell much not only about the game and the players but also about man in general, and perhaps even about the order of the universe.

Contoski's tale, also apparently his first, is about an opening so repulsive, it is irresistible.  I'm a sucker for chess stories, and this is the first readable piece in the issue. 

Three stars.

The Green Snow, by Miriam Allen deFord

At first, it seems deFord will provide a bulwark against the droll tide.  After all, deFord is quite deft with menace and creep, skilled at eliciting deep and dark emotion, but she doesn't do comedy.  Thus, while a story that begins with the gentle falling of green-tinted snowflakes could have been a romp for others, in deFord's hands, it's clear we're in for a horror.

She executes it well-enough, though there's something of the last decade about it in its flavor.  But then, as if prodded by an editor overeager to have every story fit his chosen theme for the month, deFord adds a heavy handed joke at the end.

Which, of course, falls flat.  deFord doesn't do comedy…

The Gods, by L. Sprague de Camp

If there is humor in this short poem about the passage of the gods from human devotion, it is ironic.  In all fairness, I did enjoy this piece quite a bit.

Four stars.

The Symbol-Minded Chemist, by Isaac Asimov

The always good-humored Doctor A manages to stave off the jokeyness for another dozen pages, writing on the origin of chemistry's alphabet soup.  I always enjoy etymological articles, although the list of elements by alphabetical order of their chemical name seems a bit of padding.

Four stars.

Bumberboom, by Avram Davidson

It is centuries after The Bomb, and the resulting, almost anarchic society that sprawls across the Eastern Seaboard is threatened by Bumberboom.  It is a great cannon, though it has not fired a shot in generations, tended by an increasingly inbred crew, whose Captain Mog, somewhere between an idiot and a moron, is the brightest of the bunch.

Enter Mallian, son of Hazelip, who sees the ancient gun as an opportunity to carve a feudal realm out of the upstate New York, with him as its sovereign.

Bumberboom reads something like a cross between Jack Vance and R. A. Lafferty, combining the poetic resonance and creative settings that are the signatures of the former with the sometimes incomprehensible whimsy of the latter.  Davidson's problem is that when he decides to go for funny, he often writes himself into a twisted corner, his sentences meandering to get free of themselves.

Still, once you're into it, it's not so bad. Three stars.

The punchline

But not so bad is also not so good.  My nephew, David, called me last month to let me know he'd let his subscription to F&SF lapse.  I told him he was overreacting, that things had gotten better since Ferman had taken over from Davidson.  Now I can already hear an "I told you so" coming my way.

No joke!


Not me this month.



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Magazine

[Mar. 18, 1965] Per Aspera (April 1965 Fantasy and Science Fiction

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by Gideon Marcus

A Storm is Coming

"These are the times that try men's souls"

Thomas Paine

The times, they are a changing.  If the post-Korea decade was a national honeymoon for the United States, then the tumult following Kennedy's assassination surely marks the dawn of a new era.  To be sure, that decade of "good times" was secured in part on the back of many, be they Black, female, and otherwise.  Nevertheless, it felt like we, as a country, were moving toward racial justice and equality, toward shared prosperity, toward peace in the world.

Not anymore.  Where it seemed there might be rapprochement between East and West, now there is, once again, active American military involvement in Asia.  Some 3,000 troops have been dispatched, and the USAF is taking an active role in the campaign rather than simply propping up our South Vietnamese allies (whomever is leading them this week).

The Chicago Tribune says the national mood is tilting in favor of this involvement, a recovery from dashed morale just a few weeks ago after several Viet Cong incursions.  At the same time, the peace movement, which I wholly endorse, has also picked up steam, viz. the sit-in of 11 protesters at the White House last week.  I take this as a hopeful sign.

Progress toward civil rights has been a matter of two steps forward followed by one backward.  The "backlash" against newly won Black rights was in full display on March 7 when uniformed police brutally shut down a planned march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.  Quickly dubbed "Bloody Sunday," it was an adamant Southern rejection of the Negro's right to basic humanity.

Even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s arrival on March 8 could not immediately change affairs, and an attempt made March 9 was blocked at the bridge out of town.

But the South has never lead this nation, not in the 1860s, nor in the 1960s.  Those who saw this injustice were appalled, and this disgust reached the highest quarters of government.  On March 13, President Johnson declared this restriction of free expression to be "a national tragedy", and on March 15, in an address to the jointly assembled Congress, announced sweeping Voting Rights legislation.

Yesterday, a federal judge set aside restrictions against the march.  It will proceed as planned, starting as early as tomorrow or the next day.  Again, a sign that we can make it through adversity to our dreams.

Weathering Through

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has had its own tribulations after a decade of unparalleled excellence under its first two editors.  The Avram Davidson era, 1962-64, was something of a nadir for the proud publication.  Now that the magazine's owner, Joe Ferman, has taken over the editorial helm (though there are rumors that it's his son, Ed, doing the work), the magazine seems to be pulling out of its nosedive.  Come take a look at the latest issue:


by Bert Tanner

Arsenal Port, by Poul Anderson

Once again, Poul Anderson takes the cover with the continuation of the adventures of Gunnar Heim, last seen in January 1965's Marque and Reprisal.  The retired space captain had obtained a letter of marque from the French government to harry the Alerion regime, which had taken the Terran planet of New Europe hostage after a short war.  Off went Heim to space in the cruiser, Fox 2, along with a scurvy crew, and there the first story ended.

Port takes place on the environmentally hostile planet of Staurm, where Heim has stopped to obtain arms for the trek.  Possessed of heavy gravity and a toxic atmosphere, not to mention carnivorous trees and insane battle robots, it is perhaps even more difficult a world than Harrison's Pyrrus.

Complicating matters is the arrival of Heim's ex-lover, a xenobiologist named Jocelyn, who rather pointedly rekindles the affair.  But is her love sincere, or is it merely to sabotage Heim's mission in furtherance of the goals of the Peace Party?

On the one hand, this installment is beautifully written, and the depiction of Staurm's weird planetology is hard science fiction at its best.  We get a bit more of Heim's background and some nice color on his executive crew, too.  On the other hand, Port boils down to a fairly simple adventure trek and doesn't further the main plot.  It's roughly analogous to the middle third of Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, which also featured in F&SF.  It's enjoyable reading, but you could just as easily skip it.

I waver between three and four stars.  I'm going to settle for a high three and wait for the outrage.


F&SF is now experimenting with cartoons.  Here's one by Gahan Wilson.  There will be others.

Keep Them Happy, by Robert Rohrer

In the future, the death penalty is retained; but in order to be as humane as possible, the condemned are made as happy as possible before the execution.  The story begins with a convicted murderer being told he has been acquitted and can go free — before being killed by a blow to the head by Kincaid, the psychologist/executioner-in-chief.  The rest of the tale involves a bitter widow who killed her husband for infidelity, and Kincaid, who undertakes to find out what it will take to make her happy. 

I found Happy to be disturbing and not a little anti-woman.  And, in the end, completely predictable. 

It's decently written, however, so it gets a low two star rating.


F&SF by Ed Emshwiller

Imaginary Numbers in a Real Garden, by Gerald Jonas

Here's a cute poem that utilizes mathematical symbols to complete its rhymes.  But I fail to see why one looks beyond the stars for complex numbers (you look in electric circuits) and in any event, "i" is the symbol that should have ended the piece.

Three stars.

Blind Date, by T. P. Caravan

Hapless lab assistant is catapulted to the future by a mad scientists, only to find himself immediately made part of festivities celebrating his trip through time.

This tale is the very definition of forgettable; twice, I had to refer to the magazine to remember what this rather goofy tale was about.

Two stars.

The History of Doctor Frost, by Roderic C. Hodgins

Ah, but here's a good one.  Frost is a fresh take on the Deal with the Devil genre (indeed, it's stil possible!) On the threshold of making a vital mathematical discovery, Dr. Frost is visited by a servant of Satan who offers to guarantee the man's success if only he will surrender his intellect and abilities to the devil after his demise.  Frost demurs and is given 24 hours to make his decision, which he uses to consult with, in turn, a Jesuit Priest, a psychologist, and a female friend.  In the end, the decision is entirely Frost's.

It's rather beautifully done, an archetypical F&SF story.  Four stars.

Lord Moon, by Jane Beauclerk

Jane Beauclerk is back with another tale set on the nameless world we were first introduced to in July 1964's We Serve the Star of Freedom.  Said planet is inhabited by humaniform aliens under the authoritarian regime of the Stars, venerable scholar/tyrants each with their own specialties. 

This story involves Lord Moon, a sort of knight, who sails to the lawless twelve thousand islands of Lorran hoping to free and marry the daughter of a Star held captive there.  It is not until the end that we have any encounters with actual Terrans, and the whole story is told in a magical legend sort of way.  Indeed, it is left an open question whether or not magic works, side-by-side with science, on this particular world.

It's an acquired taste, but I enjoyed it.  Three stars, like the last one.

The Certainty of Uncertainty, by Isaac Asimov

Doc A offers up a non-fiction article on quantum mechanics.  Such is always a bold decision as it is an abstruse topic that does not lend itself well to popularization.  Indeed, Asimov runs into the same problem as everyone else: he doesn't end up explaining it very well.

Having taken quantum mechanics in college (it was very new stuff then), I can tell you that it's not that complicated or difficult to comprehend — provided you have a solid grounding in calculus and second-year physics.  Without them, any explanation is just pointless analogy. 

I'm not trying to be a snob, and the Good Doctor does do a good job of explaining how tiny things live in a universe of their own, increasingly different from our everyday world as the scale shrinks.  But in the end, you're left with a lot of gee whiz stuff and not much understanding.

Three stars.

Eyes Do More Than See, by Isaac Asimov

F&SF's science columnist by-and-large gave up fiction writing with the launch of Sputnik.  He still keeps his hand in, every so often, though.  Eyes involves energy beings of the Trillionth Century, our long distant descendants, who decide to return to dabbling with physical forms…and quickly discover why they'd given it up.

Apparently, this short-short was originally rejected by Playboy.  In any event, it displays a rarely seen poetic side of the author, but whether you'll find it moving or maudlin depends on your particular sensibilities.

I fall right in the middle.  Three stars.

Aunt Millicent at the Races, by Len Guttridge

And last, here's a modern-day Welsh fairy tale about a boy whose aunt is transformed into a horse, and how the boy's father exploits the occurrence for financial gain.

Normally, this kind of silly plot would be too trivial to keep my interest, and no doubt played for laughs.  Neither is the case.  Guttridge's writing, so tight and evocative, so cinematically vivid, makes this my favorite piece of the issue.  It misses five stars, but only just.

The Star of Hope

Yes, times are currently tumultuous, and things can often seem hopeless.  It's important at junctures like these that we reflect on what's positive in our life, the power we have to make things better, and the security that comes of knowing that things that have gone bad can truly come 'round.

And that's something to celebrate!


New York's Saint Patrick's Day parade, yesterday




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