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Magazine

[Jan. 21, 1960] Siamese, if you please (February 1960 Galaxy, part 2)

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I made fun of Galaxy editor Horace Gold for the slightly panicked tone in this month's editorial.  It's clear that he has concerns that the quality of his magazine might dip unless he can tap a reservoir of new talent.

That said, the February 1960 Galaxy finishes as it started (and as did its sister, the January 1960 IF)–on the good side of three stars, but not too far from the middle.  Let us see how Part 2 turned out.

I am sad to report that Willy Ley's articles just aren't as engaging as once they were.  They were what originally sold me on getting subscription, Galaxy being the first magazine I followed regularly.  The lovable ex-German just seems unfocused and a little cranky these days.

Zenna Henderson's Something Bright, on the other hand, is that engaging mix of magic, grit, unease, and wonder that I have come to expect from her.  This one is told from the point of view of a Depression-era teen who has a close encounter with a peculiar, and rather frightening, neighbor.  It's nice to see work by two woman authors in Galaxy, a sign that the genre as a whole is becoming more balanced.


Dillon

Simak's Crying Jag takes place in a similar setting—he does enjoy those rustic tales, evocative of his home in rural Minnesota.  In this one, the rather soused protagonist becomes the friend and keeper of an alien for whom sad stories are an intoxicant.  Everybody wins in this one, as the storytellers thus find themselves free of their psychological pain.  Not stellar, but enjoyable.


Wallace Wood

For some reason, I really enjoyed David Fisher's East in the Morning, about a intellectual prodigy who must wait until his very old age for his genius to bear fruit.  It is told in this detached yet gripping manner that I found engaging.  Perhaps there is a bit of identification, too—after all, I too blazed through my early life displaying signs of promise and even, perhaps, genius… but I'm still waiting to make my mark.  Someday.


Dick Francis

Sadly, the magazine has stumbles to an unimpressive finish.  Jim Wannamaker is a new face to the science fiction world, and his Death's Wisher, about a psychokinetic who threatens to blow up the world by setting off its hydrogen bombs, is not an impressive first outing.  Truth to tell, I almost fell asleep. 


Dick Francis

Space news is up next.  All about a midget Mercury and its furry astronaut.  Stay tuned!

(all Galaxy magazines can be found here)

—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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Science Fiction/Fantasy

[Jan. 18, 1960] The Winds of Change (Predictions for the 1960s)

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There should be nothing significant about the turn of a decade.  After all, years that end in zero are a completely artificial construction.  Yet, there is a powerful reductive element to the human psyche that demands that decades be put into descriptive boxes.  Perhaps we even shape events to create self-fulfilling prophecies.

Thus, the '30s are the years of Depression (which started in October 1929).  The '40s are the War Years, starting with Hitler's September 1939 invasion of Poland.  While I cannot think of a single dramatic event that sparked the prosperous and reactionary decade of the 50's, the triggers for the next decade have already sprung.  I can already guess the word that will describe the 60's in years to come:

Freedom.

Abroad, the last bastions of colonialism are falling to what British Prime Minister calls "The Winds of Change."  In Kenya, for instance, the black majority has just been fully enfranchised, and independence cannot be far away.  Talks are underway to allow the Congo to break away from Belgian rule.  Independence is scheduled this year for the countries of French West Africa.

In this nation, the "racial problem" is coming to a head; Democratic hopeful Jack Kennedy has called the issue resolved, but this resolution has yet to graduate from the theoretical to the actual.  If the '50s was the "Beat" decade, the '60s will be the decade that Beat goes mainstream in a backlash to straight-jacketing conformity.

As a species, we are approaching an even bigger sort of emancipation.  This year, or perhaps the next at the latest, the first person will be break free from the prison of the Earth, catapulted into orbit on a tower of flame. 

Thus, the '60s will be starkly different from preceding decades.  This can't help but have an effect on our science fiction and fantasy.

We can already see the trends: The pulps have died, replaced by more substantial venues—digests and novels.  The major magazines have had significant editorial changes (Campbell's Astounding is the rule-proving exception).  Women have been allowed into the Men's Club, and several have become luminaries (Katherine MacLean, Judith Merril, Zenna Henderson).  As science advances, science fiction must race ahead to make wilder predictions, and the prognosticators will not all be familiar faces.  Per Galaxy editor Horace Gold, writers tend to have a 5-10 year lifespan in this business, and that means an influx of new blood, mostly from the ranks of fandom.

This all adds up to a whole new literary ball game with the shackles of convention cast to the wind.  Stories will be more nuanced, with more varied characters and more departures from the "gotcha" ending.  Its writers will be far more diverse, lending fresh perspectives to the genre.  The focus may shift from simple technological problems to broader sociological issues; I imagine much of the writing may prove downright subversive.

Many of the fans and writers have lamented that our genre is not taken seriously enough.  As science ficton and fantasy matures, I think we're going to see some truly groundbreaking stories that transcend into the mainstream consciousness.  Ours may even someday become the preferred literary genre, the only one equipped to express the hopes and fears of a society whose rate of change continues to accelerate.

Change is scary.  Change is exciting.  Enjoy the ride.

—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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Magazine

[Jan. 14, 1960] Twin Stars (February 1960 Galaxy)

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Galaxy editor Horace Gold is hard up for writers these days now that he's cut payment rates.  In this month's (February 1960) editorial, he notes that he's getting all kinds of low-quality stuff, and would these would-be authors please try reading a scientific journal or two to get better ideas!

Be that as it may, thus far, this double-sized issue of Galaxy is quite enjoyable.  I'm splitting the book into two columns so as not to overwhelm you and give you a chance to follow along at home.

Bob Sheckley has a new story out: Meeting of the Minds.  I think I've mentioned in an earlier column how one of my best friends has a profound aversion to stories involving a take-over of the body a la Heinlein's The Puppet Masters.  He'd have to give Meeting a miss, because that's its central theme: the bug-like Quedak, psychic coordinator for the extinct hive-mind species of Mars, hitches a ride back to Earth where he intends to conduct a similar conquest. 


Dick Francis

While Bob tends to write in a flip sort of way, he also is capable of some downright creepy prose.  I particularly like how the Quedak is portrayed in glances through other characters' eyes.  The use of limited viewpoints is quite effective.  Moreover, it would be interesting to viscerally feel what a bird or pig or other human feels, were the cost not losing one's individuality to a hive-mind.

Unsettling, but good.

Margaret St. Clair has been a busy bee, with stories appearing both here and in IF this month.  The Nuse Man is a shaggy dog story about a brick salesman from the future, and how he ran afoul of political intrigue in ancient Mesopotamia. You won't remember it long after you read it, but you will enjoy it.


Wallace Wood

Newcomer James Stamers is another author who is filling the pages of two Golden magazines in one month. Dumbwaiter is cute, but eminently forgettable (clearly, as I had to rack my brain for several minutes to remember what it was about!) It opens, excitingly enough, with a master smuggler attempting to secret an extraterrestrial animal through customs.  That half of the story is a pleasant cat and mouser.  The remainder, wherein the animal turns out to be a sort of eager-to-please teleport, who charms the smuggler's fiancée by bringing her numerous treasures, is not as engaging.


Dillion

Finally, in The Day the Icicle Works Closed, we have a solid extraterrestrial whodunit by Fred Pohl featuring body-swapping, kidnapping, politics, and a reasonably compelling detective.  It starts out rather prosaic, but the pace accelerates as the pieces fit together, and the end is worth waiting for.  I shan't spoil any more in the event you want to take a crack at some armchair sleuthing.


Dillon

Stay tuned for Part 2, in which I'll discuss Willy Ley, Zenna Henderson (two women in one Galaxy!) and more.

P.S. Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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TV

[Jan. 12, 1960] Twilight of the 60's (Twilight Zone monthly wrap-up

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I was asked by a dear reader if I had stopped watching The Twilight Zone on Fridays, it having been a month since I last discussed that delightful science fiction/fantasy/horror anthology.  Well, fear not.  I just like to let four episodes get into the queue before describing them.

In fact, if anything the show has only gotten better.  It helps that creator Rod Serling has been joined by a myriad of other established writers, which broadens the themes and tones we get to see.

Four weeks ago, Episode 12, What You Need debuted.  A kindly old sidewalk peddler seems to know exactly what items a given person can use at any given moment to achieve success.  At first, one expects the episode to have a cynical sting in it—perhaps it's a deal-with-the-Devil sort of thing.  But it's not.  In fact, as my daughter and I guessed early on, it turns out that the salesman has a limited sense of precognition.. and a big heart.  But what happens when this fellow runs across an unscrupulous man whose heart is as dark as the peddler's is light?  Has the criminal found a golden goose?  Or a tiger by the tail?

It's really good stuff, though the salesman has a plot-summarizing line at the end that is wholly superfluous, I suppose to drive the point home for the slower folks at home.

The Four of Us are Dying, the following week's episode, involves a man who can change his face to match that of any person he can see, in life or photo.  It just takes a little time to concentrate.  He hatches a scheme to win the heart of a beautiful woman and to bilk a criminal of ill-gotten gains.  But when he puts on the wrong face at the wrong time, he suffers the consequences.  A solid, surreal show that is very effective despite the complete lack of special effects.

I was a little disappointed with Richard Matheson's Third from the Sun, in which two families attempt to flee impending Armageddon by departing their doomed planet in a spaceship.  The kicker, obvious from the title, is that the refugees aren't going from, but rather fleeing to Earth.  It suffers from overlongitis in the middle act, as earlier episodes did, and the constantly crooked camera angles look more silly than atmospheric.

Just the other day, we saw I Shot an Arrow into the Sky, about the first manned spaceflight.  The ship goes off course during take-off and crashes on a remarkable Earth-like "asteroid."  The next twenty minutes involved the crew dealing with thirst, hopelessness, and most significantly, a selfish crewmember gone mad and murderous with the desire to survive.  Both my daughter and I knew how it would end almost from the beginning—in fact, the expedition had crashed on Earth, and the actions of the crazy crewman were wholly unecessary.

I suspected the ending since the "asteroid" had an terrestrial atmosphere, was the same distance from the Sun, and all the other incidentals (including gravity and geology) were identical.  Of course, this sticks in the craw a couple of ways.  On the one hand, to buy that the crew had landed on an "asteroid," you have to believe that the writer has no idea what the surface of an asteroid would really be like.  After all, asteroids have so little mass, relative to a planet, that they have no atmosphere and virtually no gravitational pull.  Moreover, no asteroid routinely comes very close to the Moon.

On the other hand, since it was so manifestly obvious to the audience that the crew had actually crashed on Earth, one has to wonder how the crew was so thick-headed as to miss the fact.

My daughter noted that space stories have been a common topic on this show, which makes sense given the current mania for the Space Race.  I just wish The Twilight Zone had the budget to really pull off stories set off-planet.  I feel the show is more successful when it sticks to intimate, moody, Earth-bound stories.

P.S. Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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Magazine

[Jan. 08, 1960] Between Peaks (January 1960 If)

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I've finally finished the January 1960 IF and can report fully on its contents.  January has been a decidedly uninspiring month for digests.  They're all in the 3-star range (though for Astounding, that's actually a good month!) with no knockouts in the bunch.  Perhaps this is the calm before the storm.

The reliable if stolid Mack Reynolds (writing as Mark Mallory) kicks off this issue with The Good Seed.  Can a man trapped on a tiny island by a swelling tide escape before he is drowned?  Perhaps with the help of a sentient, telepathic plant.  It's actually quite a touching story.

James Stamers seems to be a newcomer, and it shows in his unpolished writing.  Despite this, his The Divers, about psionic neutrals (essentially anti-telepaths) with the ability to astrally project, has some fascinating ideas and some genuinely evocative scenes.  Had Stamers given the tale to Sturgeon to work over for a final edit, I think it could have been an epic.  As it is, the story suggests that its author is a diamond in the rough waiting to be polished.

Two Ulsterians, Bob Shaw and Walt Willis, wrote the short Dissolute Diplomat, about an unsavory space traveler who crashes on an alien world, bullies the jelly-ish inhabitants into fixing his ship, and then gets what he deserves in a groan-worthy fashion that is truly pun-ishing.

The Little Red Bag, by Jerry Sohl, is a good piece of thrilling writing, at least until the somewhat callous and abrupt end.  A fellow on a plane has the power of tactile clairvoyance—and he discovers a ticking time bomb in the luggage compartment.  Can he save the passengers before it goes off?  Having flown the route that the plane takes many times (Southerly down California into Los Angeles), the setting is quite familiar, which is always fun.

Daniel Galouye (how do you pronounce his name?) is up next with the interesting teleportation yarn, The Last Leap.  Three military subjects have gone AWOL after artificially gaining the ability to materialize anywhere.  Surely they were not killed–after all, even the vacuum of space poses no danger, for the 'porters reflexively snap back to a safe spot; moreover, they instinctively avoid teleporting into solid objects.  What could have happened?  You find out in the end…

To Each His Own, by Jack Sharkey, stars a team of Venusians who explore the Earth after a recent holocaust.  The nature of said disaster is never made explicit until the very end, though it is alluded to subtly.  I confess that I should have figured out the gimmick ending, but I didn't.  I suppose that constitutes a point in the author's favor.

Margaret St. Clair has a fun story (The Autumn after Next) about a magical missionary whose job is to convert magic-less cultures into adepts at the Arts.  He meets his match, and his end, attempting to introduce the most reluctant of tribes to the supernatural.  Better than The Scarlet Hexapod, not as good as Discipline, both IF stories.

Finally, we have Cultural Exchange by J.F. Bone wherein a crew of space explorers meets a sophisticated alien race with both superior and inferior technologies.  It is a first contact story of Cat and Mouse with both sides attempting to be the predator.  Not stellar, but satisfying.

That's that!  It's an unremarkable issue, slightly under the standards of its older sibling, Galaxy, I'd say.  Worth a read, but you won't remember it next month (unless, of course, you review my column).

Note: If you like this column, consider sharing it by whatever media you frequent most.  I love the company, and I imagine your friends share your excellent taste!

P.S. Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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Fashion, music, politics, sports, Movies

[Jan. 5, 1960] Perpendicular to Up (4D Man)

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What is it that separates schlock from the sublime in a science fiction movie?  To the nondiscriminating, I suppose they all look the same.  The same may go for the discriminating, but for opposite reasons.  I know I have very high standards when it comes to my science fiction.  This is the price I pay for having read so many excellent stories.  Thus, for me the visual medium generally lacks, though there are exceptions.

So why do I keep going out to the drive-in?  Well, occasionally there are good films, and if I know what I'm getting into, I can enjoy a bad film.  Science fiction movies are generally dreadful, so I am well-prepared for the experience. My daughter, though only 10, is a discerning person, herself, so we always have good conversations about films afterward (and during!)

Last week, 4D Man was on the menu.  It was made by the same crew that brought us The Blob.  In brief, it involves a fellow who is convinced that, using the powers of his mind and some field-generating doohickey, he can force solid objects through other solid objects.  He brings it to the attention of his sober, scientist brother, who eventually masters the art.  In the process, the brother becomes a monster, for the application of said art causes rapid aging, and the only way to regain youth is to steal it from others.  He becomes a sort of vampire, and his ability to become insubstantial renders him all but invulnerable.


The trick is to push really hard.

Quite an odd duck, this movie.  For one thing, the sci-fi twist doesn't really get involved until halfway through.  Instead, we are treated to a love triangle between the brothers and the elder brother's colleague/assistant.  I say treated because I actually quite enjoyed this part.  In particular, I was happy to see that the colleague, played by the talented Lee Merriwether, was intelligent and independent.  When the younger brother, whose actor's name escapes me, attempts to nobly decline the lady's attentions in deference to his older sibling, she makes it perfectly clear that she is her own woman, and she chooses who she wants.  She is also, ultimately, the hero of the movie, managing to vanquish the monster rather cleverly. 


Scientists doing Science.


I think The World, The Flesh, and the Devil taught us how to resolve this situation.

There is a lot to enjoy about the movie.  Robert Lansing plays the older brother in a competent, understated manner, and he is a pleasure to watch.  As I mentioned upstream, Lee Merriwether's smart scientist character is a breath of fresh air.  The younger brother's actor is eager, if nothing else.  One might find the incessant jazz soundtrack somewhat off-putting, but I liked it.  The special effects are inexpensive but convincing.  It's in color, which is still uncommon for sci-fi films.


Big brother masters the art of pushing….


…and uses it predictably.


But is it worth the price?

But how was the science, you ask?  Well, it's ludicrous, of course.  The younger brother attempts to attribute the power of matter phase-through to a fourth-dimensional field that acts as an amplifier for the talented mind; hence, the movie's title.

I think it's hogwash.  It's easier to believe that both brothers are mutants, and that the older brother, with his more-disciplined psyche, is able to master the ability.  This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that Lansing's character is able to phase even without the field generator.

From the reviews, it does not appear that 4D Man will beat out The Blob in popularity or box office.  I attribute this, in part, to the lack of a catchy theme.  It's still a fun 90 minutes if you look at it as a live-action comic book, however, and worth it for Merriwether and Lansing.

By the way, in case you've been under a rock the last few days, Senator Jack Kennedy has tossed his hat into the presidential race for this year.  It is encouraging to think that my chronological peer could run for this nation's highest office.  On the other hand, my political sympathies tend to be more in line with those of Hubert Humphrey and (the yet undeclared) Stuart Symington.  Or Nelson Rockefeller, whose star rose and fell last year.

Just please please don't give us Tricky Dick in November!

Note: If you like this column, consider sharing it by whatever media you frequent most.  I love the company, and I imagine your friends share your excellent taste!

P.S. Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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Magazine

[Jan. 2, 1960] Happy New Year! (January 1960 F&SF)

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Good Lord, is it already 1960?

When I started this endeavor in 1958, I had only a vague notion what it would look like and how long it would last.  Over the past year 14 months, Galactic Journey has settled into what I hope is a consistent, yet varied, mature column.  Moreover, I have suspicion that this column will last just about as long as I do, as I see no reason to ever stop.

It is hard to imagine Galactic Journey with bylines dated with futuristic years like 1965 or 1972 or 1988, but why not?  Perhaps one day, instead of San Diego, Seattle, or Sapporo, the dateline will read Sinus Rorus, Syrtis Major, or Saturn.

Returning to the present, it must be 1960, for that is the date on the current Fantasy and Science Fiction, January to be exact.  Actually, the February issue has already arrived, but that's a topic for a future week.  In the meantime, let's see what the first F&SF of 1960 has to offer:

Poul Anderson is back with another Time Patrol story, The Only Game in Town.  This time, Everard and his faithful Indian companion (I kid; Salgado is quite a well-developed and co-equal character) are dispatched to the American Southwest in the 13th century to stop, get this, a Mongol invasion.

It's not so silly as it sounds.  In fact, it sounds downright plausible that the Mongols could, after conquering China, send a scouting expedition to the New World.  It didn't take many horsemen to conquer the Aztecs, and the Mongols were a formidable race, to be sure.  What makes this story interesting, aside from the fine writing and evocative setting, is Everard's dawning realization that the Time Patrol's mission may not be as pure as once thought.  The Time Cops are told they are to preserve the original timeline, but in this story, they appear to be meddling for meddling's sake rather than fixing damage caused by others.

I look forward to learning more about the secret agenda of Everard's future employers.

Then we have A Divvil with the Women, apparently a resubmission of an earlier story once published in a lesser magazine.  It's by Eric Frank Russell (slumming as "Niall Wilde"), and it involves an unpleasant fellow who makes a deal with the devil—with disastrous results, of course.  My, but these stories are popular these days!  It's no longer than it needs to be to deliver the punchline, which is a blessing (pun intended).

Damon Knight has translated a piece from F&SF's French edition: The Blind Pilot by Charles Henneberg.  Sadly, the thing is only half-translated or something; it's well nigh unreadable, and I didn't make it past the first few pages.  Oh well.

Reginald Bretnor, who writes the execrable Ferdinand Feghoot puns in F&SF under a pseudonym, has a very silly short-short ("Bug-Getter") that, you guessed it, ends in a pun.  I must confess that I did laugh, so it couldn't have been all bad.

For once, Asimov has a decidedly unremarkable article.  It's called Those Crazy Ideas, and it segues from a discussion of Asimov's personal creativity to observations on how scientific creativity can be maximized.  Fluffy.

Cliff Simak's Final Gentleman just barely misses the mark.  Quite a long tale for F&SF, it is one of those excitingly creepy tales with a prosaic payoff.  In this case, a respected author retires after 30 years only to find that the trappings and details of his life are largely imaginary, sort of a psychic cloak that surrounds him, altering his surroundings and himself to seem more refined and engaging than they actually are.  I found this notion compelling.  After all, I often swathe myself in a fantasy, pretending to be decades in the past.  I complete the illusion by listening to old music, using obsolete slang, wearing out-of-date clothing.  It is a conceit in which I engage to better understand a bygone era for historical purposes, and simply to have a fun invisible refuge from the real world.  Hey—it's cheaper than heroin.

But in Simak's story, the psychic hoodwink is perpetrated solely to influence the course of history through an implausible Rube Goldberg chain of interactions.  I was disappointed, but you may feel differently.

A Little Girl's Christmas in Modernia, by Ralph Bunch, is next.  In this future, we gradually trade in our flesh parts for metal as we grow older.  Bunch's tale features a fully human moppet and her mostly-converted parents in the kind of inconsequential story I'd expect to find in a slick.  I suppose they needed a Holiday-themed story to fill out this issue.

What do you do when an alien weather probe crashes into your backyard?  You bake it, of course, and thus unintentionally forestall an extraterrestrial invasion.  G.C. Edmondson's The Galactic Calabash is fun, though it took me several sessions to get through the short story, largely because I always picked it up at bedtime.

Rounding out the magazine is the quite good Double Double, Toil and Trouble by Holley Cantine.  An anarchist turned recluse decides to take up magic, eventually learning the secret to doubling anything.  It starts out well enough, but the ending provides a cautionary tale against dabbling in the Dark Arts.  Holley Cantine, I understand, is a bit of a political theorist, and Double has a deeper message wrapped in a gentle fiction coating. 

And so the January 1960 F&SF ends as it began with a four-star story.  In-between, there lies a muddle of uncharacteristic unevenness such that the whole issue clocks in at a mere three stars, the same as this month's Astounding.

That just leaves us with the January IF, whose reading is in progress.  In the meantime, I'll soon have a report on my latest excursion to the drive-in with my daughter.  It don't all gotta be highbrow, after all.

Happy New Year!

Note: If you like this column, consider sharing it by whatever media you frequent most.  I love the company, and I imagine your friends share your excellent taste!

P.S. Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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Book, Magazine

[Dec. 22. 1959] Put a finer point on it (Starship Troopers)

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It is common practice for serials published in science fiction digests to get turned into stand-alone novels. Not only does this constitute a nice double-dip for publishers and authors, but it offers the writer a chance to polish her/his work further.  Sometimes, the resulting product ends up something of a bloated mess.  In the case of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, the novelization of Starship Soldier (which appeared in F&SF a couple of months ago), the opposite is the case.  Heinlein’s expanded story has turned a flawed gem into a masterpiece.

Left virtually intact are the first two acts as presented in F&SF.  Johnny Rico is a bright but rather callow youth who joins the "Mobile Infantry" without much forethought.  After an intense and vividly portrayed Basic Training, Rico becomes versed in the art of combat from within a suit of powered armor with enough power to destroy a 20th Century tank company.  He then goes off to fight an interstellar war against the "Bugs," a hive-mind race of Arachnoids, and their co-belligerents, the humanoid "Skinnies."  There is precious little depiction of combat, however, with the exception of a well-executed first chapter (Basic Training is described in flashback).

It was all well done, but the serial just sort of ends without much resolution or pay-off.  The novel includes a full third act wherein Rico is involved in a mission to capture one of the Bug "brains" for interrogation/experimentation purposes.  This is what the novel needed, and I have to wonder if Heinlein intended it to be there all the time, but was limited by space constraints.  It makes the book a must-have, and it is possibly the best thing Heinlein has written to date.

Of course, there is a bit more of the jingoistic, even Fascist pro-militarism speeches issuing from the mouths of various officers and professors.  I imagine a number of impressionable young folk will be motivated to enlist after reading the book.  I can only hope that we don't fight any major wars over the next decade or two, though so long as the minute hand on the F.A.S. Doomsday Clock remains at two minutes to Midnight, that seems wishful thinking.

Then again, so long as there are just 120 seconds to Armageddon, the next major war is likely to be very short.

Note: If you like this column, consider sharing it by whatever media you frequent most.  I love the company, and I imagine your friends share your excellent taste!

P.S. Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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Science / Space Race, Uncategorized

[Dec. 19, 1959] Like Water for Rockets (The testing of the XLR115)

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In other news, the XLR-115 rocket was successfully tested on December 7, 1959.


State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/31535

I see you scratch your head.  "Is that important?" you wonder.  "Aren't rockets tested all the time?"

Yes and yes.

You all have heard of Newton's Third law, "For Every Action, there is an Equal and Opposite Reaction."  This principle powers our rockets: through the controlled rapid combination of fuel and oxygen (also known as burning), exploding gasses are produced, which are given a hole at the base of the rocket through which they can escape.  This action propels the rocket in the opposite direction—up, hopefully.

The heavier the rocket, the more fuel it takes to send it into space.  Fuel is by far the largest component of any rocket through most of the rocket's flight (until it is all used), so it stands to reason that one would want the lightest, most efficient fuel possible.

Up to now, rockets have used familiar fuels, from petroleum derivatives to alcohol, because they are relatively cheap and easy to manipulate.  To break the weight barrier, one needs a truly light material, preferably the smallest stuff that could possibly oxidize.  Hydrogen happens to be the lightest element possible, Atomic Number One.  It burns: most of you know the chemical nomenclature for water is H2O, which simply means that any molecule of water comprises two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen.  Water is, essentially, burnt hydrogen. 

If one could bottle hydrogen safely in a rocket, then it would be the most efficient rocket fuel possible.

It's a tough project.  It won't do for the hydrogen to be kept in gas form, as in a World War I zeppelin.  That would result in an overlarge rocket and very elaborate mixing and ignition mechanisms.  No, you need to store the stuff in liquid form, and that takes a very cold and very good Thermos, indeed.  Just a few years ago, the idea of using liquid hydrogen as rocket fuel was as much science fiction as hyperspace and flying cars.

Until now.  The XLR-115 is a liquid hydrogen rocket.

Thus, the next generation of rocketry has begun.  At first, the XLR-115 will be used in the Centaur second stage, allowing boosters like the Atlas to send large payloads to high orbit, the moon, and the planets.  Ultimately, the liquid hydrogen rocket will likely be a vital component is the first manned lunar rocket. 

And that's why this news is important.  Now you know.

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P.S. Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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