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Magazine

[April 27, 1960] Galactic on Galaxy (June 1960 Galaxy)

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It's that happy time of year when the sun is up late and the weather is perfect.  Of course, the weather is usually perfect here in the nicest unincorporated part of northern San Diego County (though there are rumors that our little farming community is going to vote on incorporation soon).

One of my favorite Spring-time activities is to lounge on the veranda (well, my daughter's tree house) with a portable radio, a cup of coffee, and good book.  Today's entree is the newest issue of Galaxy.  It's a double-sized issue, so I'll be breaking it out over two articles.  A body needs time to digest, after all. 

Fred Pohl has written a new serial evocatively titled Drunkard's Walk I won't go into too much detail as it's only half published, but thus far, I'm enjoying it.  In an overpopulated Earth (12 billions, 6 of them in "The Chinas"), university education is the province of the elite.  One young mathematics professor appears to be the target for assassination.  He's attempted to kill himself numerous times, always in that twilight between sleep and waking, as if in a trance. 

There are some neat technologies featured.  In particular, I liked Pohl's depiction of education by television, broadcast via satellite and graded by computer.  As someone who has generally found the classroom stifling, I marvel at how nice it would be to get a college degree in the comfort of my own home.

Next on tap is L.J. Stecher's Upstarts.  How can Earthers hope to parlay on a level playing field with a race that dominates the entire Galaxy?  By developing its own secret, starhopping technologies, of course.  The fascinating idea here is that though there are some 17 starfaring alien species, only two of them (one being humanity) clawed their way to sentience by natural evolutionary processes.  All of the rest were raised to sapience ("Uplifted," to coin a phrase) by the slavering Vegans, who now find themselves a minority group in the new galactic order and want to enlist the assistance of the Terrans to get back on top.


by Dillon

Good stuff, and with a haunting ending.

The Good Neighbors is a fun, short Edgar Pangborn piece about the sudden appearance of an enormous winged beast that terrorizes the American skies for many days before the pitiful creature is harangued to death by a swarm of jet fighters.  Pangborn writes with a pleasant sense of whimsy that I appreciate.


by Wallace Wood

Rounding out the first half, Willy Ley has an interesting piece on rocket fuels and the comparative advantages of liquid vs. solid propellants.  He also answers some of his readers' questions.  They must have been a better crop than usual as VeeLee seems pleasantly less peeved than he has been of late.

See you in two days with the other half.  Get yourself a copy and send me your thoughts!

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Science / Space Race

[April 25, 1960] Long distance fix (The Repair of Pioneer 5)

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Imagine doing brain surgery by remote control.

That's just what STL engineer, Robert E. Gottfried, did over the weekend, on an ailing deep space probe.

Pioneer 5 blasted off on March 11, and it recently passed the 5 million mile distance mark on its way to the orbit of Venus.  For more than a month, the doughty probe returned an excellent stream of data thanks to its digital brain, Telebit.  This little computer allows the spacecraft to store experimental results and beam them back to Earth at regular intervals.  Thus, observers on the ground get continuous readings of the magnetic, radioactive, and micrometeoroid properties of interplanetary space.

But then some of the data Pioneer was sending back became… strange.  For instance, the spacecraft reported that its battery voltage was too low to send signals—as it was sending signals! 

How do you fix something that's twenty times as far away as the Moon?  First, you figure out what the problem is.  Luckily, Pioneer's builders (Space Technology Laboratories in Los Angeles) had the foresight to make a back-up copy of the Telebit hardware.  Gottfried poked and prodded the thing until it started giving him results that matched the ones received from Pioneer's system.  Through painstaking tracing, the culprit was found—a single faulty or damaged diode, a pinhead-sized component, one of 1500. 

The result was that there was a consistency to the flawed data that could be compensated for.  Once Gottfried knew what the problem was, he could create a program that would take data from the bad Telebit and translate it into good data.  The digital patch worked.  While we can't fix Pioneer 5, we can now translate its gibberish into useful science.  For his efforts, NASA's chief administrator, Keith Glennan, dubbed Gottfried "The Long-Armed Repairman" in a congratulatory telegram.

For the curious, Pioneer 5's cooling systems maintain its internal temperature at a balmy 50 degrees.  Not bad for being in the vastness space!  The probe is still using its lower power 5-watt transmitter, and is still being received clearly at the giant Jodrell Bank radio telescope in England.  However, the smaller "dish" in Hawaii is already having difficulty picking up the spacecraft, so it is likely that Pioneer will start using its bigger 150-watt transmitter next week.  NASA believes we will be able to communicate with the probe as far out as 50 million miles!

To give you an idea of how amazing this is, think about the stations you pick up on your AM radio.  They broadcast at around 50 thousand watts, and you can only hear them if they are relatively close (one can pick up some fairly distant stations at night, but none are more than a thousand miles or so away.)

Of course, your antenna is probably a telescoping rod or a long wire.  The dish at Jodrell Bank is 250 feet across!  Nevertheless, that it can pick up such an unprecedentedly distant and weak signal is almost miraculous.  I say "almost" because it was not luck that made it happen but good engineering and pioneering digital technology.

Quite a remarkable feat, and worthy, I think, of an article. 

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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[April 23, 1960] Unseen Companion (Radio in transition)

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Radio—is her heyday waning?  For three decades, she was the Queen of media.  Families gathered around her dials for the latest news, music, and programming.  Listeners closed their eyes and were transported across the globe.  Some programs allowed them to travel across the universe, like the fairly recent X Minus Zero.

Then radio's upstart little sister, television, came upon the scene.  Now moving pictures were something that could be enjoyed in the comfort of one's home.  To be sure, the 20 inch black and white screens don't hold a candle to the panoramic majesty of the movie theater, but for the visually motivated, they provide more entertainment for the minute than the radio experience.

I'm a bit of a radio freak.  I have one in virtually every room.  The big one is this Philco 38R.  It's a bit the worse for wear—it is twenty years old, after all. 

In '56, I bought a brand new Zenith, a beautiful maroon thing. 

What these two radios have in common, despite their disparity in age, are the vacuum tubes that make up the significant part of their innards.  Vacuum tubes have been virtually synonymous with technology for 50 years.  They've gotten smaller over the years, and more sophisticated, but they still take up a lot of space.  Thus, truly portable radios, the kind that might fit in a pocket or purse, have been science fiction.  They also take a good deal of time to warm up.  One has to patiently wait through ten seconds of low hum before the speakers come to life with actual signal.

But, just 12 years ago, a man named Shockley invented the transistor.  It does everything the vacuum tube does, but on a little germanium crystal rather than a big bulb.  The portable radios coming out now are truly tiny.  Their sound quality leaves much to be desired, but one can't have everything.

The timing is good, too.  Dramatic programming has all but vanished from the air waves, probably never to return.  Music is another thing entirely. 45 rpm records have completely replaced the old 78s, and slick disc jockeys are adding personality to musical programs.  And one doesn't need to watch music to enjoy it (though Dick Clark might say otherwise).  Now I can Shout and do The Twist wherever I may be rather than being tied to the home radio or diner jukebox. 

Radio is dead.  Long live radio. 

P.S.

(If only there were some sort of RADIOVAC with tape recordings of all of these programs…)

X Minus Zero
Dimension X
2000 Plus
CBS Radio Workshop
Escape
Exploring Tomorrow
Tales of Tomorrow
World Security Workshop

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Magazine

[April 21, 1960] Roads not taken (May 1960 IF)

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If there's anything this month's IF, Science Fiction proves, it's that you get what you pay for.

Last year, Galaxy editor, H. L. Gold, cut story rates in half to 2 cents a word.  Shortly thereafter, he took over the helm of the promising but unsuccessful digest, IF.  Its quality has been in steady decline ever since, and I can only imagine that he pays IF writers even less.

IF's name is ironic.  Under the stewardship of Damon Knight, it had a short-lived renaissance culminating in the February 1959 issue.  Had this continued, IF might be the leader of the current, heavily winnowed, crop of science fiction digests.  Alas, such a history can only be contemplated, never directly perceived.

Why all the doom and gloom?  The May 1960 IF is definitely the worst issue I've read to date.  While not unmitigatedly bad, it never rises above the passable.  In detail:

Chris Anvil's lead novella, The Tourist Named Death is a bland and amateurishly written interplanetary spy romp with lots of action but little depth.  It is written in a style I like to call sequential: "Bob did this.  Then he did that.  He saw this and reacted like this.  Then he did that."  I'd think that, by now, Mr. Anvil would have matured past this level of ability.  But, perhaps for a penny a word, he doesn't much care to apply himself.

James Bell is a brand-new author whose Freshman effort, Thirty Degrees Cattywonkus, is barely passable.  A fellow, upon exploring his new house,discovers that a parallel dimension is impinging on his, but not quite orthogonally.  The promising premise degenerates quickly.  Maybe next time.

Then you've got When Day is Done by part-time minor-leaguer, Arnold Castle.  The story, about businessmen who engage in simulated big-game hunting after work, would be an interesting first chapter to a longer tale, but as a stand-alone, there just isn't enough there.

C.C. MacApp is another greenhorn whose first-ever story is A Pride of Islands.  I had trouble following this story, perhaps because it failed to ever engage me, but I believe it is about the descendants of a wrecked spaceship crew who have reverted to savagery.

Now, to leaven my harshness, I will say that it's great that Gold (and his executive officer for IF, Fred Pohl) are giving new authors a chance.  With the folding of so many science fiction digests in the last decade, the authors of tomorrow have had precious few venues in which to hone their craft. 

I just wish they'd hurry up and get better…

The first solid story of the issue comes from the reasonably consistent Philip Jose Farmer.  HEEL is basically Homer's Illiad with a science fiction twist: the Gods are really interstellar television producers filming a decade-long epic.  The Greeks and Trojans are just hapless pawns dancing to the tune of a Director they know only as Zeus.


by Virgil Finlay

It's a cute concept, and as I'm currently rereading the plays of Aeschylus, I'm particularly receptive to classically themed works.  On the other hand, there is a dashed-off feeling to the story.  I don't think Farmer strained himself putting this one together.

Back to the crop of new authors, A.M.Lightner's (Alice Martha) first story (I believe) is A Good Day for the Irish.  A Terran entomologist (refreshingly, a female protagonist) emigrates to a paradisical colony only to find it in the midst of a terrible blight.  Could the cure be the very infestations she had been enlisted to prevent?  This is another story that might have benefited from greater length. 

Finally, we have Charles Fontenay's novelette, Matchmaker.  It is an engaging, if unremarkable, piece about the extreme measures to which a government will resort to ensure the computer-ordered union of two otherwise unfated individuals.  On a side note, I liked the vacuum-powered letter delivery systems.  I can imagine such systems being commonplace in the near future.

Thus, the May 1960 IF ends on a stronger note than it began, but all told, it's a pretty unimpressive magazine.  I'll keep my subscription, of course.  There is precious little out there right now, and perhaps things will get better.  Hope springs eternal.

See you soon, and if you have any opinions on these pieces, whether or not they are in line with mine, please drop me a line.  I welcome all comments.

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Science / Space Race

[April 19, 1960] Where we are (Space News Round-up)

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Remember the years before Sputnik when space news comprised semi-annual rocket launch reports, annual Willy Ley books, and the occasional Bonestell/Von Braun coffee table book?

Even after Sputnik, weeks would go by without a noteworthy event.  But, slowly but surely, the pace of space launches has increased.  Just this last week, I caught wind of four exciting pieces of news.  I can imagine a day in the not too distant future when I have to pick and choose from a myriad of stories rather than reporting on every mission.

So what happened this week?  First off, on April 13, 1960, the Navy launched, on an Air Force Thor Able-Star rocket, Transit 1B (somehow, I missed the failed launch of its earlier brother, Transit 1A, last September).  It is a brand new kind of satellite, using the simplest of concepts. 

Have you ever noticed how a train's whistle rises in pitch as the locomotive approaches, and then the pitch lowers as the train moves away?  This is because the sound waves from the whistle are compressed by the train's motion as it nears; conversely, the waves stretch out as the train departs.  The wavelength determines the whistle's pitch, so a moving train's whistle will never play entirely true—unless you happen to be riding the train and, thus, going the same velocity.

Now, if one knows the true pitch of the whistle, one can mathematically figure out how fast the train is going with respect to the listener just by comparing the true pitch to the heard pitch.  Imagine a satellite equipped with a whistle (a radio transmitter, actually; sound doesn't travel through the vacuum of space).  Since the satellite is always moving with respect to the ground observer, if that observer knows the true wavelength of the satellite's signal, then s/he can figure out how fast the satellite is going from the wavelength of the observed signal.  Knowing the orbital path of the satellite, it is then easy to determine exactly where one must be at any given time to hear the satellite's signal at the received pitch.

In other words, using just a satellite, a transmitter, a receiver, and a computerized calculator, one can determine one's position to within one-half of a kilometer.  Now, this isn't good enough to help you navigate your car to work or a weekend party, but it is quite sufficient to help ships find their way at sea.  In particular, America's submarines will use Transit for high-accuracy navigation.  But someday, I can imagine Transit's descendants providing pinpoint accuracy to civilians.  Imagine a suitcase sized machine that could tell you where you are to the resolution of just a few meters!  Yet another way satellites are returning on their investment.  Soon, we'll wonder how we ever did without them.

It may be a while before we say that about the Air Force's Discoverer program.  Designed (ostensibly) to carry biological samples to and from orbit, the series has not yet been successful.  Sometimes the rocket malfunctions.  Sometimes the capsule gets lots on reentry.  And sometimes, the capsule stays forever in space.  That's what happened this time, to Discoverer 11.  The rocket launch on April 15 was successful, but it looks like the reentry capsule suffered separation anxiety after detaching from its mothership.  Both are still in orbit, and it looks like they will remain there, close to each other, until friction with the atmosphere causes them to become artificial meteors.

Speaking of spy satellites (ahem), the first weather satellite, continues to send beautiful pictures of Earth's weather.  Interestingly, NASA goes out of its way to deny that TIROS is being used for espionage (whereas the Air Force has been conspicuously quiet regarding Discoverer's true role).  I believe NASA—TIROS' cameras aren't nearly good enough to return surveillance data, though there is no doubt the military could benefit from accurate weather reports.

Finally, Pioneer 5, the world's first deep space probe, has passed the 5 million mile mark (20 times the distance to the Moon) and is still going strong!  So far, the probe has returned 100 hours of usable data on the "space weather" beyond the Earth's influence.  I can't wait to read the papers resulting from their analysis! 

And for the non-eggheads amongst my readers, while the scientific papers may not be of exceptional interest, the inventions they inspire likely will be.

See you soon!

—

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Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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Uncategorized

[April 14, 1960] Onward and Upwards!  (A new location)

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Dear valued readers of Galactic Journey:

Now that I can count my daily readers on more than two hands, I've decided on trying out a new venue so that y'all can get automatic electronic updates whenever a new article is published. How's that for convenience?

If you're here, that means you've already left the old Dreamwidth column and are firmly in front of the new space. 

Welcome!  Be sure to subscribe and never miss a single article in this wondrous column.  Hard to believe it's been 18 months already.  Thanks to all of you for keeping me going.

—

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Magazine

[April 13, 1960] An unfulfilled promise (May 1960 F&SF)

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Every month, there is the perennial hope that this will be the month a truly great story will be published. Every month, a stack of science fiction digests arrives at my door. There are few moments as exciting as that day (my postman holds them all so they arrive at once; I like big events). With great enthusiasm, I tear into my magazines. Sometimes the promise is fulfilled. Sometimes it isn't.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction most consistently delivers the stand-out stories, so I usually save it for last. Other months, I am a greedy child and eat dessert first. This time around, I split the difference.

First up is Fritz Leiber's short story, The Oldest Soldier. It's a good piece, very atmospheric. I originally thought it was another story about an immortal, a la Long Live Walter Jameson, the Twilight Zone episode, but upon further reflection, I think it's about one of the many time traveling soldiers in Leiber's The Big Time universe.

Fred McMorrow follows Leiber with the thematically similar, The Man from Tomorrow. It takes place in a New York steak and booze joint. A reporter and a crustily jovial bartender are debating the appeal of gambling when they are accosted by a fellow from the future. As a time traveler, the man has a perfect knowledge of events, and as a marooned prisoner of the 20th Century knowing everything that will happen (down to the most minute detail, it seems, and with no ability to alter events), he is miserable with boredom.

The reader is left with the question: Is it better to know the future and capitalize upon it, or to revel in the uncertainty of what's to come?

I did not like Rex Lardner's American Plan, about a fellow who goes to Mars as a tourist and ends up a prisoner in his hotel. As Damon Knight says in his book review column, it is not sufficient to slap a few science fiction trappings (in this case, a Martian setting) onto an otherwise conventional story and call it "genre."

John Collier's That Tender Age (a New Yorker reprint) is even worse. A would-be lodger interviews with potential landlords. He has a nomadic history, and he's had experience sojourning with cannibals. Early on, he makes it clear, inadvertently, that he has predatory designs upon the landlord's daughter, and at the end, cannibal and landlord's daughter head off to the woods, hand-in-hand, presumably never to return.

What makes this story unbearable is its run-on construction, with no quotation marks or attributions of expression. While Collier does indicate who is speaking through tone and use of proper nouns, it's tedious going. Moreover, the end is telegraphed from the beginning, which makes the conclusion all the more ridiculous. At least it's short.

Gordy Dickson has One on Trial, a short story about a ruthless executive who is forced to go on a sort of robotic safari as penance for his sins.  Never one to play by the rules, he finds his own way out, unrepentant and unchanged.  Not bad.

A Specimen for the Queen is the conclusion (?) to Arthur Porges' "Ruum" series, in which a taxidermist alien robot is deposited in the backwoods of Canada to assemble a preserved zoological collection. In the millions of years that the robot has been on Earth, it has amassed quite an exhibit, including one sentient biped. In this story, the robot encounters a detachment of Galaxy-conquering human-sized bees, who have mounted a scouting expedition to the Canadian wilds.

Has the robot finally met its match? Or are the bees grasping a tiger by its tail? Entertaining, if somewhat disturbing.

Dr. Asimov has a fascinating (if you are mathematically inclined) article on the fundamental constant, Pi. Of particular interest, to me anyway, was his presentation of Liebniz's series, which can be used to calculate Pi, provided one has a lot of spare time. It's quite simple: 4/1-4/3+4/5-4/7+4/9… and so on. You can do it with a pen and paper, but it will take you hundreds of thousands of iterations to get close to the answer, since you'll keep bouncing high and low around it.

Or, you can do what I did and rent some time on a local computer; I borrowed the university's lightning-fast IBM for a few hours. I cleverly reduced the computation time by having my program calculate the average of the last two numbers in the sequence (since one is an upper bound, and the other is a lower bound, to the value of Pi, the actual value must be somewhere about halfway). After 20,000 iterations, I narrowed Pi down to 3.1415926. Good enough for government work!

Finally, we come to Philip Jose Farmer's Open to me, my sister. Lane, the lone surviving astronaut of a five-man expedition to Mars discovers a wildly alien symbiotic biology. This beautifully described, but somewhat simplistic, set of species is responsible for the life-giving canals of Mars, which are actually biologically constructed water transport tubes.

Stranger still is Martia, also a lone survivor, but from a different solar system, who shelters Lane after he nearly drowns in one of Mars' natural hydroponic pools. Tantalizingly humanoid but repulsively alien, she and Lane enjoy a budding friendship and attraction over 25 fascinating, well-written pages. Near the end, Lane discovers how Martia's race breeds—an exchange of an internally carried worm-like parasite.

Whereupon, revolted by his attraction to a female with such a shocking sex life, Lane goes beserk, binds Martia, and kills her parasite. Lane is, soon after, captured by some of Martia's people, who plan to rehabilitate him (to Lane's horror).

It was such an unnecessarily violent end to such a beautiful story. Moreover, it was implausible. Early on, Farmer took great pains to describe Lane as a fellow in touch with his "feminine" side, able to bend ideologically without breaking. And yet, by the end, Lane cannot suffer this threat to his machismo. He cannot love/lust after an alien whose reproduction is, to him, so distasteful.

I get what Farmer is trying to do here, but I don't like it.

Which raises another question: What's worse? Consistent mediocrity, or the promise of greatness capped by a disappointing ending? Both the story and the issue fall into the latter category.

Ah well. There's still one more magazine to go.


Cover by Mel Hunter

P.S. I have exciting news! Very soon, the format of this column will change, and all of you lovely readers can get automatic notification (via instant telegraphic message) whenever a new piece is published.

P.P.S. I have found a kindred spirit, though his focus is both more scattershot chronologically and focused topically: Science Fiction Ruminations

—




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TV

[April 11, 1960] A Steady Flame (Twilight Zone wrap-up)

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Some shows start with a bang and quickly lose their spark; some are a slow burn, taking a while to find their stride; The Twilight Zone has remained a class act from the beginning.

As of Friday, April 8, 1960, there have been 27 episodes.  They have ranged in quality from fair to outstanding, and the current crop of four (I like to review them in monthly batches) comprises superior installments.

I think the success of the show can be attributed in large part to the high bar that creator and writer, Rod Serling, has set for its production.  This is a person who clearly knows his craft and seeks out like talents (Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, etc.) to draft screenplays.  Much of the credit must be doled out to the directors, cinematographers, and composer Jerry Goldsmith, to say nothing of the frequently excellent acting talent that CBS has managed to contract.

So much for the general praise.  On to the reviews!

Long Live Walter Jameson sets the standard for this batch.  The eponymous Professor Jameson is a brilliant history teacher with a knack for vivid anecdotes.  It's almost as if Jameson has lived through each of the periods and settings he describes, which is, of course, the case.

This is a thoughtful, fascinating piece that describes the blessing and curse that is immortality.  It's hardly the first, of course.  The one I remember most vividly is The Gnarly Man, by L. Sprague de Camp, but it is always a worthy topic.  In a piece I wrote many years ago, I once put these words into the mouth of a 5000 year old man:

"Imagine being in library with every book you ever want to read, and all the time in the world in which to do so.  And you read them… and you still have all the time in the world."

The following week, People Are Alike All Over.  Two astronauts, a rock-chinned type and a frightened intellectual, go to Mars where they find a remarkably human populace.  But why does the fine house crafted for the scientist (the hero-type having died soon after landing) have no windows or doors? 

I'll spoil it for you.  Roddy McDowell (the panicky scientist's actor) has been turned into a zoo specimen, relegated to live out the rest of his life as an exhibit in his "native habitat."  I get the message, but I still think it was a weak story idea.

Execution is another time travel fish-out-of-water story, but unlike The Last Flight, the voyager is a thoroughly unlikable chap.  Snatched from the hangman's noose in 1880, the murderous viewpoint character finds himself in 1960, the guest of a dapper chronologist (is that what you call a time travel expert?) The criminal remains true to type, killing and looting, being driven close to madness by the ever-present 20th century cacophony.  The ending comes as a surprise, for the most part. 

An interesting point—time travelers often are inordinately worried about changing the past, but no one gives a thought to changing the future.  After all, the present is really just someone else's past, and any gross modification of the present (say, sending one of its inhabitants permanently into the past) must to a resident of the future, make a severe alteration to the timeline.  Food for thought.

Finally, we have The Big Tall Wish, the first episode to date that features a black protagonist (and several black supporting actors).  An over-the-hill boxer tries to win a come-back fight with the help of the wishes of a little boy. 

The episode doesn't feature the madness or the weirdness of its predecessors.  Rather, it is a slow, wordy piece.  My daughter particularly enjoyed the heart-warming relationship between the boxer and his child friend.  That said, the twist (there's always a twist on this show) is very effective, and we are left with this conundrum: is a fight won with magic preferable to one honestly lost? 

That's the wrap-up for this month.  I'll be back in two days with this month's F&SF!

—




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Book

[April 7, 1960] Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair (The Haunted Stars)

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From the stars comes a warning… and a challenge.

Time permitting, I like to read a new science fiction book at least once a month.  The digests are reliable sources of good stuff, but there is only so far a writer can develop an idea in the space of a novella or short story.  Sure, there are occasionally serials in the magazines, but then one has to wait three months to see how they turn out. 

There were three science fiction books released last month, so far as I can tell.  One was a collection of Murray Leinster stories called The Aliens.  I understand its best story is the eponymous lead novella, which I reviewed earlier.  Louis Charbonneau released a science fiction horror called Corpus Earthling that I haven't had a chance to pick up.

And then there was The Haunted Stars, by Edmond Hamilton.  Hamilton is a bit of an elder statesman when it comes to science fiction.  He wrote for the pulps as far back as the 20s, and his writing is stylistically rather archaic. 

An example from Stars:

"Fairlie looked up at the sky as he followed Hill.  Orion strode mightily toward the zenith, followed by the upward-leaping stars of Canis Major, and all the heavens were sown with constellations that wavered wind-bright.  He remembered what Christensen had said, that both long-ago enemies had conquered interstellar space, not just interplanetary."

Not that this is a bad thing.  I grew up on Burroughs and Howard and Lovecraft, and I can go for some purple prose every so often.

His latest novel stars urbanite linguist, Robert Fairlie.  When alien artifacts are found in 30,000 year old ruins on the Moon (in 1965—Hamilton is an optimist), Fairlie is tapped as part of a deciphering team.  The alien language is translated with remarkable speed after Fairlie, on a whim, uses Sumerian as a guide.  It turns out that the aliens are completely human, and it is likely that terrestrial humanity are the race's descendants.

Along with this discovery comes a chilling revelation: the aliens did not abandon the stars willingly.  Rather, some other faction wiped out their star empire to a planet, and then admonished them never to attempt star travel again.

Well, who can resist a challenge like that?  Thus, our government works feverishly to develop a starship using alien technology for a mission to the alien's home star of Altair. 

Stars is actually quite reminiscent of Raymond Jones' book, The Aliens.  My favorite part of both tales is the linguistic challenge in the beginning.  One of my very favorite stories, H. Beam Piper's Omnilingual, is only about the translation of an alien tongue.  A similar nonfiction example is presented in C.W. Ceram's recent book, The Secret of the Hittites.

I suppose most readers will not be sated by long discussions of phonology and vowel shift, however.  Hamilton does deliver the literary goods in a punchy, articulate fashion.  While the plot is paint-by-numbers and the characters largely forgettable, there are some masterful touches that make the book worthy reading.

Hamilton takes the time to convey everyday feelings: cold, boredom, fatigue.  These mundane bits are often foregone.  There is a particularly good, almost stream-of-consciousness, passage through most of Chapter 11 as a trepidatious Fairlie packs for his star trek to Altair.  The descriptions of an alien world, superficially similar to Earth but subtly wrong are well done.

There is interesting technology, too.  At one point the scientists all marvel at these little alien recording spheres.  They don't utilize analog magnetic patterns (as one sees in wire and tape recorders) but rather some kind of etched information, perhaps digital, read with some kind of narrow beam.  I've never seen this concept before; it's very exciting yet plausible.

All in all, I rate the book a solid 3 stars out of 5.  It's not literature for the ages, but it is competent and fun stuff.  Pick it up while it's in the bookstores, and send me a letter telling me what you think.  I'll post it in this column, of course.

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