Tag Archives: John Boston

Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 24, 1965] "What time is it?" (October Galactoscope)

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By Jason Sacks

Well, so far this has been a great month. Last week saw the end of a dynamite World Series, in which Sandy Koufax, the greatest pitcher of his generation, showed himself to be one of the greatest Jews of his generation as well. It was tremendously meaningful to my family that Sandy refused to start Game 1 for the Dodgers against the Minnesota Twins since the day coincided with our holy day of Yom Kippur.

As Sandy said, "I've taken Yom Kippur off every year for the last 10 years. It was just something I've always done out of respect."

As if that wasn't good enough, Koufax dominated games 5 and 7 of the series, with his electric fastball mowing down batters in a pair of crucial shutout victories. The Twins played well, and  were outstanding American League champs – Tony Oliva is a monster – but it seems the Koufax gave the Dodgers the edge, and turned the '65 Series into a classic.

At the movie theatre, my wife and I caught The Bedford Incident last week at our favorite theatre here in north Seattle. If you haven't had a chance to see it yet, the film is well worth a night out — if, that is, you can handle an intense and sometimes bleak drama.


Richard Widmark turns in a powerful performance as a zealous battleship captain on the search for an elusive Soviet nuclear submarine. Also featuring Sidney Poitier and Martin Balsam, this black and white drama treads similar ground to last year's thrilling Fail Safe and ends in a similarly dramatic way.

The Hunter Out of Time, by Gardner F. Fox

If it seems like I'm dragging my feet a bit before talking about my entry for this month's Galactoscope, well, you're right. Gardner Fox's new novel is the epitome of mediocrity, a book that will give you 40¢ worth of excitement but not a whole lot more. The fantastic Mr. Fox is a prolific author who churns out more books and comic book stories than nearly anyone else living. Sometimes that causes him to create some delightful work. Other times it seems like he is just delivering words just to deliver him a paycheck. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that – I'm sure the man has a mortgage to pay – but it also represents a lost opportunity.

See, this book starts out with one of the most striking first lines I can remember.

I saw myself dying on the other side of the street.

The first page builds on that momentum, with the protagonist describing his body as "blood oozed over my fingers where I held that awesome wound."

I mean, seriously, how can you read a first page like that without feeling like you have to read more? Mr. Fox is an old pro and he clearly knows some classic tricks. As I read that book, I leaned back, took a deep breath, and readied myself for a page-turning thrill ride.


Cover by Gray Morrow

But, dear reader, I'm sorry to inform you that all the best writing in The Hunter Out of Time happens on the first couple of pages. It soon turns out that the man who falls to Earth is a time traveler from the far, far future who traveled back through a supposedly impregnable barrier to steal the man's identity. The time traveler is named Chan Dahl and soon other time-displaced men come to our time, confuse our guy, Kevin Cord for Dahl, and that unleashes the most obvious and cliched adventure you can imagine.

There's little in The Hunter Out of Time you haven't seen before. Fox gives us fantastic devices, headspinning time travel with seemingly arbitrary rules, and the obligatory beautiful, weak babe from the future.  Of course Cord uses his native 20th century skills to overcome his opposition, of course Cord and the woman fall in love, and of course Fox leaves room for a sequel if somehow people want to read more of this frightfully ordinary pap.

I could go on and on about this book, but hey, it costs 40¢, it'll take you a couple hours to read, and it's got a pretty nice cover by artist Gray Morrow. I'd rather spend my time watching young Warren Beatty in Mickey One in the theatres, but you won't hate this book and it's pleasing enough entertainment for a rainy Seattle Sunday.

2 stars.

Solid Fuel


by John Boston

The rising star John Brunner has produced ambitious work such as The Whole Man and the upcoming The Squares of the City, both from Ballantine in the US, and a raft (or flotilla) of unpretentious upscale-pulp adventures for Ace Books. Some of the best of the latter were mined from the UK magazines edited by John Carnell.


by Jacks

But there’s a lot more. Brunner has been one of the mainstays of the UK magazines for a decade, but much of his best magazine work has not been reprinted because it’s too short for separate book publication and too long to fit in the usual anthologies or collections. The UK publisher Mayflower-Dell, previously distinguished by its unsuccessful attempt to bring Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure to the British public, remedies a bit of this omission with Now Then, a collection of three novellas, two from the Carnell magazines and the other, his first professional sale, from Astounding in 1953.

Some Lapse of Time

The book opens with the energetically clever and creepy Some Lapse of Time, from Science Fantasy #57 (February 1963). Dr. Max Harrow is having a bad dream of a group of starving people living in ruins, one of whom is holding a human finger bone in his hand. He wakes and there is someone at his door: the police, because a tramp has collapsed in his garage. The tramp proves to be suffering a rare disease (heterochylia, an inability to metabolize fats, which become lethal) that Harrow is uniquely qualified to recognize, his infant son having died of it only recently, and which should have made it impossible for the tramp to survive to adulthood. The tramp also has clamped in his hand a human finger bone—the same bone, the end of the left middle finger, as in Harrow’s dream.

Unintelligible to the hospital staff, the tramp proves when examined by a philologist to speak a badly distorted version of English, like one might expect a primitive and isolated group to use. Meanwhile, Harrow’s marriage is blowing up under the emotional stress caused by his son’s death and his own preoccupation. When his wife slams the car door in his face, she catches his hand in the door and severs the end of his left middle finger, which falls down a gutter. Meanwhile, the tramp is sent for a head x-ray, but he turns out to be so radioactive that not only do the films turn out unusable but he has to be put in strict isolation.

Brunner brings all these elements to a thoroughly grotesque resolution—it doesn’t entirely work, but is a grimly ingenious nice try. Others apparently think so too; it is rumored that a dramatization will be broadcast later this year in the BBC’s Out of the Unknown TV series. Four stars.

Imprint of Chaos

Next up is Imprint of Chaos, also from Science Fantasy (#42, August 1960), one of a number of outright fantasies Brunner contributed to that underrated magazine. This one introduces us to a character mainly called “the traveler,” who we are repeatedly told has “many names but one nature,” unlike the rest of us who I suppose contain multitudes.

The traveler has been appointed (by whom, or Whom, or What is not explained) as a sort of metaphysical supervisor over part of the universe, charged with ensuring the primacy of order over chaos. He is on his way to Ryovora, a formerly sensible town where they have now decided they need a god.

So the traveler nips out to our Earth and snatches the unsuspecting Bernard Brown from a hike in the wood, tells him he’s unlikely to find his way home, but gives him directions to Ryovora. There, to his discomfiture, Brown is welcomed as a god, and when the next city over hears about it and sends over their god, Brown sends it packing in terror. Then the Ryovorans say they could have done it themselves (though they didn’t), and excuse Mr. Brown, after a final scene where he and the traveler bruit the futility and undesirability of magic.

A fantasy writer bad-mouthing magic may seem incongruous, but this rationalist in spite of himself really hates it, and comes not to praise magic but to bury it, though only after enough colorful magical episodes to entertain the rubes. Here the tension is more extreme than usual. His earlier fantasies mostly featured incursions of magic into the world of ordinary salt-of-the-earth types. Here, the entire setting is exotically magical, and the story is told in the fey and pompous cadences of high fantasy.

For example, from a conclave of the necromantic elite of Ryovora: “The Margrave nodded and made a comforting gesture in the air. He said, ‘But this cannot be the whole story. I move that we—here, now, in full council—ask Him Who Must Know.’” Brunner walks the edge of parody at times (“Tyllwin [a particularly powerful magician] chuckled, a scratching noise, and the flowers on the whole of one tree turned to fruit and rotted where they hung.”). But the story is clever and entertaining and merits its three stars, towards the high end.

Thou Good and Faithful

Thou Good and Faithful is older; as mentioned, it is the first story Brunner sold to an SF magazine—and it was featured on the cover of the top-of-the-market Astounding (March 1953 issue). Moreover, the readers voted it best in the issue, and it was quickly picked up by Andre Norton for her pretty respectable YA anthology Space Pioneers. Not a bad start for an 18-year-old! Though Brunner has had some second thoughts about showing us his juvenilia; the acknowledgements note it appeared in the magazine “in a somewhat different form.” I haven’t compared the two texts, though there’s clearly some updating; in this version Brunner refers to something as “maser-tight,” and masers were barely invented when this story was first published.

The story is for most of its length a bog-standard though well-turned rendition of a basic plot: find a planet, there’s a mystery, what’s going on, are we scared? The mystery is an idyllic Earth-type planet inhabited only by robots, who presumably didn’t make themselves; what happened to the makers? The final revelation is partly in the direction of, say, Clarke’s Childhood’s End, and partly in the one suggested by the story’s title, so in the end it’s much more high-minded than the puzzle story it starts out as. This is all older news nowadays than it was in 1953, but it too merits a high three stars.

Summing Up

Now Then is a solid representation of the mid-length work of this very readable and thoughtful writer, and there’s enough in the Carnell back files for several more worthwhile volumes of Brunner novellas.

Two by Two


by Gideon Marcus

The Journey has made a commitment to review every piece of science fiction released in a year (or die trying). In pursuit of this goal, I've generally tried to finish every book I've started, and if unable to, I simply don't write about it.

It occurs to me, however, that the inability to finish a book is worth reporting on, too. And so, here are reports on two of this summer's lesser lights:

Arm of the Starfish, by Madeleine L'Engle

The latest from Madeline L'Engle, author of the sublime A Wrinkle in Time, starts promisingly. Adam Eddington is a freshman biology minor tapped to work with a Dr. O'Keefe on the Atlantic island of Gaia off the coast of Portugal. O'Keefe (a grown up Calvin, from Wrinkle) is working with starfish, zeroing in on an immortality treatment. Just prior to Adam's departure from Kennedy Airport, he runs across the beautiful young daughter of an industrialist, Kali, who warns Adam to stay away from the sinister-looking Canon Tallis, who is chaperoning the O'Keefes' precocious daughter, Poly.

Adam finds himself embroiled in international intrigue, not knowing who to trust. This is exciting at first, but a drag as things go on. Gone is the quietly lyrical prose of Wrinkle, replaced by a deliberately juvenile style leached of color. Events happen, one after another, but they are both difficult to keep track of and largely uninteresting. By the time Adam made it to Gaia, about halfway through the book, I found myself struggling to complete a page.

Life's too short. I gave up.

Quest Crosstime, by Andre Norton


Cover by Yukio Tashiro

Andre Norton has come out with the long-awaited sequel to her parallel universe adventure, The Crossroads of Time, starring Blake Walker. The universe Walker lives in is a bit like that of Laumer's Imperium series and Piper's Paratime stories: there's one Earth that has mastered the art of crossing timelines, and it has built an empire across these alternate Earths.

On Vroom, the imperial timetrack, there had been a devastating war that killed most of the female population, making them particularly precious. Also, mutation has made psionic ability the rule rather than the exception. The timeline is ruled by an oligarchy of 100 meritocrats.

At the start of Crosstime, Walker is dispatched to assist Marfy, whose twin sister, Marva, has been lost amongst the timeless — and all signs point to a kidnapping. Of course, the allure of all parallel universe books is the exploration of what-if, and so Walker and Marfy's trek spans a dead Earth where life never arose, a strange saurian Earth where sentient turtles and lizardmen rule, and ultimately, an interesting timeline in which Richard III won the battle of Bosworth Field while Cortez lost the battle of Tenochtitlan. By the Mid-20th Century, there is a Cold War between Britain and the Aztec Empire along a militarized Mississippi river. It is to this world that Marfy and her abductors are tracked, and it turns out that the kidnapping is part of a plot to topple Vroom's Ancien Regime.

True to form as of late, Norton sets up some genuinely interesting background, but the characters are as flat as the pages they appear on. This time, I made it through two thirds of the book, partly on momentum from the first book in the series, which I rather enjoyed. In the end, however, disinterest won out.

Call it two stars for both books.

Don't miss the next exciting musical guest episode of The Journey Show, October 24 at 1PM Pacific!




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Magazine, Serial

[September 12, 1965] So Far . . . Well, Fair (October 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Amazing, A.L. (after Lalli)

The shape of the post-Ziff-Davis Amazing and the new publisher’s reprint policy become much clearer in this October issue.  There are seven items of fiction here, and five of them are reprints, comprising about 55% of the magazine’s page count.  If this issue is typical, Amazing is drastically shrinking as a significant market for original fiction.

The two new fiction items are the first part of a two-part serial by Murray Leinster, whose future seems mostly to have been behind him for some years now, and yet another Ensign De Ruyter short story by Arthur Porges.  There is also another in the series of scientific hoax articles by Robert Silverberg. 

There’s an editorial, this time by managing editor Joseph Ross, rather than by Sol Cohen, “editor and publisher” on the masthead.  Ross shows himself to be as boring a writer as Cohen in his paean to Murray Leinster, the Dean of Science Fiction.  The letter column, now just called Letters, reappears, with one very long letter praising the new Amazing by someone who has bought the first Cohen issue, but hasn’t actually read it.  The point is elusive.  The mediocre cover is by Frank Kelly Freas, probably bought at a rummage sale or something; Freas has never appeared on Amazing’s cover before.


by Frank Kelly Freas

With all these inauspicious signs, it’s a bit surprising that the contents of the issue are a considerable improvement over the previous one, the first of the Cohen/Ross regime. 

Killer Ship (Part 1 of 2), by Murray Leinster


by Nodel

As is my practice, I’ll withhold comment on Killer Ship, the Leinster serial, until it’s finished, pausing only to note that Leinster seems to have taken up a hoary theme: space pirates!  And he begins on a determinedly vintage note: “He came of a long line of ship-captains, which probably explains the whole matter.” Hope struggles with trepidation.

The Eternal Eve, by John Wyndham

John Wyndham’s The Eternal Eve, from the September 1950 Amazing, begins as the protagonist Amanda sees a man approaching the cave she is living in and shoots him with her rifle.  She then pushes his body over the nearby cliff to be eaten by the giant crabs that live on the beach below, this being Venus.  From there, a flashback: Amanda has come to Venus for an 18-month job assisting an anthropological expedition.  But Earth blows up, leaving nobody alive but the modest colony on Venus and those humans who were on Mars or in space at the time.


by Rod Ruth

Order starts to erode in the obvious ways, one of which is pressure for Amanda to pair off with one of the men.  She’s not interested, and creates a diversion allowing her to slip off with her rifle and some supplies and set up housekeeping on her own, with the help of the childlike Venusian griffa.  Eventually she realizes she can’t live happily completely outside human society, so she gives in and comes back, facilitated by the appearance of Mr. Right, but not before she shoots him too.  Not fatally, though: think of it as romantic comedy, cordite replacing the flowers.

I’ve made this story sound a bit reactionary; not so.  Wyndham is actually pretty sensitive to the dilemmas posed for independent-minded women by the demands of male-dominated society, even if he doesn’t solve them in this story.  He's continued to chew on this theme in his later work, most notably the novella Consider Her Ways from the mid-1950s.  He is also a much more capable writer at the word and sentence level than most Amazing contributors, new or old, making this story a pleasure to read.  Am I really saying four stars?  Guess so.

Chrysalis, by Ray Bradbury


by McClish

Ray Bradbury’s Chrysalis, from the July 1946 issue, is much better than the execrable Final Victim from the last issue, though considerably cruder than the stories he puts in his collections.  Man here (Smith) has turned green and his skin has become a hard shell; also his metabolism has slowed almost to nothing.  He is being watched over by Dr. Rockwell (the sensible and inquiring one), Dr. Hartley (the near-hysterical one), and Dr. McGuire (the nebbish of the bunch).  Young Mr. Bradbury seems to have been spending a bit too much time at the movies, or else he’s aspiring to work for them, since the story proceeds mainly through scenes of these characters swapping reasonably sharp dialogue, while Smith continues being green and seemingly unconscious as strange transformations continue underneath the green shell.  Dr. Rockwell broaches the possibility of superman, or super-something, and shortly, the story’s title is enacted, unfortunately a bit anticlimactically.  The story is a bit too long, but the author moves it along capably.  Three stars.

The Metal Man, by Jack Williamson

Jack Williamson’s first published story, The Metal Man, from the December 1928 issue, has not worn well.  There’s a very lifelike metal statue of a man standing in the Tyburn College Museum—lifelike because it used to be Professor Kelvin of Geology, who got rich prospecting for radium.  Now he has been delivered in his statuesque form to his old friend, the narrator, in a wooden chest, along (of course) with his manuscript.  This recounts the Prof’s journey to El Rio de la Sangre, the River of Blood, which is highly radioactive.  He’s looking for the source, resorting to a small airplane whose parts he assembles on-site when he gets as far as a boat will take him. 


by Frank R. Paul

He winds up in a strange, colorful lost world.  Very colorful.  The river is like a red snake, and it goes underground and emerges in a mountain crater that holds a pool of green fire, extending to the black ramparts of the other side of the crater, while “the snow-capped summits about were brilliant argent crowns, dyed with crimson, tinged with purple and gold, tinted with strange and incredible hues.” A silver mist begins to descend.  The green lake rises up to a shining peak, and from it emerges—“a gigantic sphere of deep red, marked with four huge oval spots of dull black,” its surface “thickly studded with great spikes that seemed of yellow fire”!

This is all in the space of a few paragraphs.  After a brief respite, Prof. Kelvin finds his plane and himself covered with a pale blue luminosity, he is drawn down into the green (gaseous) lake to land, stumbles around and trips over a bird that has turned to metal, foreshadowing his own fate.  He has more adventures (also very colorful, but enough of that) as he blunders around in this strange world created by lots of radioactivity, becoming more metallic as he goes.  Unfortunately there’s not much more to the story than this parade of menacing wonders, made possible by the fact that back then nobody really knew that much about the effects of radioactivity.  Two stars. 

It should be noted that Williamson went on to produce The Green Girl, Through the Purple Cloud, The Stone from the Green Star, Red Slag of Mars, In the Scarlet Star, and Golden Blood, all within the next five years.  The visible spectrum seems to have been a good career move for him.

The Time Jumpers, by Philip Francis Nowlan


by Leo Morey

Philip Francis Nowlan, perpetrator of the Buck Rogers Yellow Peril epics, is here in a lighter mood with The Time Jumpers (February 1934 Amazing), a mildly amusing period piece (albeit with certain period attitudes) about a guy who invents a time car and, with his platonic girlfriend, first narrowly escapes from marauding Vikings, possibly Leif Ericson’s outfit, then makes a longer foray into the Colonial period, narrowly escaping from marauding Indians, briefly meeting the young not-yet-General Washington, and then narrowly escaping from a French officer and his marauding Indians.  Two stars.

Dusty Answer, by Arthur Porges

Dusty Answer is yet another of Arthur Porges’s tales of Ensign De Ruyter, notable chiefly for the excruciating tedium they achieve in relatively few pages.  Their formula is clever Earthmen outwitting stupid and primitive aliens through elementary science tricks, this time the ignition of dust suspended in air.  One star, if that.

The Kensington Stone, by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg’s scientific hoax article, The Kensington Stone, concerns the finding and subsequent career of an inscription found in Minnesota which purported to show that the Norse Vinland settlement of Leif Erikson (yeah, him again, spelled a little differently) had sent an expedition as far as Minnesota.  This one is just as well written as its predecessors, suffering by comparison only because the underlying story is less captivating, with no picturesque fraudster at its center.  Three stars.

Summing Up

So: whatever one thinks about the new reprint policy at Amazing and Fantastic, new editor Ross has managed this month (or bi-month) to put together a decently readable issue.  Question is how long he can keep it up.

[Speaking of books, Journey Press now has three excellent titles for your reading pleasure! Why not pick up a copy or three? Not only will you enjoy them all — you'll be helping out the Journey!]




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 14, 1965] The New Dispensation (August 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Continuity and Change

Yeah, yeah, I know that’s the most boring headline since the last time Hubert Humphrey made a speech.  But that’s what everybody (well, somebody) wants to know: how is the new Amazing different, or not, from the old one?

Some things we already knew.  It’s still digest size, now bimonthly, with 32 more pages for a total of 162.  On the cover there is a piece of retro-continuity; the new regime has dropped the old title logo for the older title logo, the one used from October 1960 to December 1963, with very minor variations—an improvement, to my taste.  There’s a fairly generic cover by Alex Schomburg (I am certain the departed editor Lalli had a closet full of these) portraying, as you see, a guy in a loincloth brandishing a spear at a giant computer: Progress vs. Savagery, or Regimentation vs. Natural Freedom, as you prefer.  It is said on the contents page to illustrate Keith Laumer’s Time Bomb.  It does not.  There are a number of interior illustrations.  Coming Next Month has not returned.


by Alex Schomburg

And on the contents page . . . oh no.  The blazing insignia of continuity are . . . Ensign De Ruyter and Robert F. Young.  Forty-six pages of Robert F. Young.  Well, let us keep an open mind; here, brace it with this two-by-four.  Anyway, it’s a mistake to infer too much from this month’s fiction contents, since the new management will likely be burning off the inherited Ziff-Davis inventory for some months.

The non-fiction includes another of Robert Silverberg’s articles on scientific hoaxes, and Silverberg’s book review column—good signs if they are signs, but they too may just be what Lalli left behind.  Ironically, the review column is devoted entirely to reprints, ranging from Wells to Sturgeon.  There is also an editorial, in which Sol Cohen—listed on the contents page as Editor and Publisher—first demonstrates that he can be just as boring as his predecessor in editorializing Norman Lobsenz, and then offers a lame explanation of his plans regularly to publish reprints from old issues of the magazine. 

As for the reprints themselves, Cohen has gone for big names, with early short stories from Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury: respectively, The Weapon Too Dreadful To Use from the May 1939 issue, and Final Victim (with Henry Hasse), from February 1946.  Each is accompanied by an unsigned introduction, shorter and less bombastic than those by Sam Moskowitz for the “SF Classic” selections of the Ziff-Davis years.  The original illustrations are reprinted along with the stories.

Time Bomb, by Keith Laumer

Keith Laumer’s novelet Time Bomb begins with Yondor, the son of the chief, going over the mountain to look around.  And he sees—danger!  Wounded on the way back, he makes his way home and reports to the chief that their way of life is at risk and they must act!  But the chief doesn’t want to hear it—hey!  Wake up back there!  If you’re bored, do something useful, like listing all the stories you’ve read that begin with this particular cliche.


by Nodel

Anyway, these primitive characters are the descendants of a human outpost, now menaced by the evil alien Tewk, and Yondor gets away from their attack and into a machine with a transportation system requiring only that he sit in a chair and pull a lever and he’ll be somewhere else.  This is a convenient substitute for a plot, as Yondor blunders his way from place to place before learning enough to get back, rescue his people, and smite the bad guys.  As generic melodrama goes, it’s smooth and clever enough that it might be mildly entertaining, say, if one were stuck in an airport waiting for a late plane.  Two stars.

The City of Brass, by Robert F. Young


by Gray Morrow

On the other hand, remarkably, Robert F. Young’s The City of Brass is actually fairly amusing, and not offensively stupid like most of his other rehashes of myths, legends, testaments, etc.  Billings of Animannikins, Inc., has flown in his time sled back to the days of the Arabian Nights in order to kidnap Scheherazade, here rendered Shahrazad, bring her back to the present so his employers can work up a facsimile for public performance, and then return her to her fate.  But Billings kicks some wires in the sled out of place and they wind up stranded in the age of the Jinn (which proves to be about 100,000 years in the future), not far from the Jinn’s brazen city of the title.

Shahrazad is undaunted.  She doesn’t much like Jinn, and is in possession of a Seal of Solomon (here rendered Suleyman) with which she proposes to force all the Jinn into bottles and seal them up.  Billings considers this a reckless plan, and goes out to reconnoiter, setting in train a ridiculous plot involving ridiculous revelations about the Jinn, their origin, and what has happened to humanity in the intervening millennia.  This actually might have made it into John W. Campbell’s fantasy magazine Unknown if he had run short of material one month.  Young’s familiar sentimentality about beautiful women and the men who are captivated by them threatens to take over, but the story ends quickly enough not to ruin the comic mood.

Three stars.  I’ll put that two-by-four back in the shed.

The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use, by Isaac Asimov


by Julian Krupa

The reprints from Amazing’s past nicely illustrate the problems with reprinting from Amazing’s past.  Asimov’s The Weapon Too Dreadful To Use is his second published story and shows it, with stilted writing, cliched characters and dialogue, and a muddled point.  Humans have occupied Venus and are oppressing the natives, though supposedly racial discrimination and hostility have been eliminated on Earth.  (Not too plausible.) The protagonist and his Venusian friend Antil trek to the ruins of a Venusian city and visit the science museum, which is largely intact, but no one has looked at it in living memory.  (Even less plausible.) In a formerly sealed room, Antil finds the eponymous weapon, which can destroy people’s mental functions at interplanetary distances.  (Plausibility meter breaks.) Venus rebels, Earth sends troops, Venus destroys the minds of a lot of them, Earth backs down and grants independence.  It’s clear there’s a smart guy here trying to figure out how to write stories, but he’s not there yet.  Two stars.

Final Victim, by Ray Bradbury and Henry Hasse


by Hadden

Bradbury and Hasse’s Final Victim is much worse.  It is essentially a Bat Durston—a transplanted Western—about a bad deputy, excuse me, Patrolman, Skeel, who always kills the fugitives he is supposed to apprehend.  His superior Anders knows his excuses are no good but can’t do anything, until Miss Miller, the sister of Skeel’s most recent kill, who has proven to be innocent of the accusation against him, decides to go after Patrolman Skeel.  Anders, noting “the firm line of her chin, the trimness of her space uniform, the hard bold blueness of her eyes which he imagined could easily be soft on less drastic occasions than this,” decides to set her up to ambush Skeel herself out on the plains, I mean asteroids, and take revenge.  But when things get really tough, Miss Miller faints.  I stopped there.  Forget stars.  One mud pie.

The Good Seed, by Arthur Porges

Arthur Porges’s The Good Seed, as mentioned, is another in the series about Ensign De Ruyter.  As usual it has some Earth guys at the mercy of treacherous primitive aliens, and they solve their problem with a scientific gimmick that you might find in the Fun with Science column of a kids’ magazine.  One star.

John Keely’s Perpetual Motion Machine, by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg comes to the rescue in his article about a guy who managed to make a pretty good career out of the perpetual motion con, but ironically might have had a better one developing the means of his fraud in the light of day.  This is by far the best story in the issue, despite the fact that it is apparently true.  Four stars.

Summing Up

Well, that was dismal, wasn’t it?  Except for the Mitigation of Robert F. Young (can someone make a ballad out of that?) and Silverberg’s matter-of-fact competence at storytelling and -finding, nothing to see here, move on, move on.

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[June 12, 1965] The Number of the Bests

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by John Boston

The Collectors

SF anthologies are not neutral vessels.  They are shaped by editors with agendas.  Sometimes these are as simple as “what can I throw together to make some money,” but usually they advance the editor’s conception of what the field is, or should be. 

The first “best of the year” compilation in SF was the well-received The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949, edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T.E. Dikty, published by Frederick Fell in 1949 but containing stories from 1948.  The Bleiler-Dikty anthologies spawned a companion series, TheYear’s Best Science Fiction Novels (i.e., novellas), which ran from 1952 through 1954.  Bleiler left the project in 1955, to the detriment of its quality, and the series died with a final single volume from Advent, a small specialty publisher, in 1958.


by Frank McCarthy

There was abortive competition along the way.  Donald A. Wollheim of Ace Books, a long-time anthologist, published Prize Science Fiction (McBride, 1953), containing 1952 stories supposedly comprising the winners and runners-up for that year’s Jules Verne Prize, an award and a book title that were not heard of again.  The next year August Derleth, another veteran anthologist, published Portals of Tomorrow (Rinehart, 1954), collecting stories from 1953 and pointedly subtitled The Best of Science Fiction and Other Fantasy.  The editor described it as “covering the entire genre of the fantastic: not only supernatural and science-fiction tales, but also every kind of whimsy and imaginative concept of life in the future or on other planets,” apparently distinguishing it from the Bleiler-Dikty series without mentioning it.  There was no second volume.

But Judith Merril achieved ignition, and kept it.  Her series of annual anthologies shows no signs of flagging after nine years.  The first, SF: The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, appeared in 1956, with 1955 stories, from the SF specialty publisher Gnome Press, in an unusual publishing arrangement: a Dell paperback edition appeared in newsstands, drugstores, etc., more or less simultaneously with the publication of the Gnome hardcover, rather than after the usual year or so interval before paperback publication.  After four volumes, as Gnome tottered towards oblivion, Merril jumped to Simon and Schuster, which published the fifth through ninth books.  We await the tenth, slated for December.


by Ed Emshwiller

Merril’s angle from the first was good SF as good literature, accessible to the non-fanatical reader, with emphasis on character—not necessarily character-driven, but more concerned with the perspective and experience of recognizable human individuals than much SF.  Her taste in cherry-picking the SF magazines was near-impeccable.  She also looked beyond the SF magazines and the writers identified with them.

The latter practice has been both a strength and a weakness, bringing to the SF-reading public many worthy stories that they otherwise would never have heard of, but also including some items that seemed trivial or misplaced but came from a prestigious source or with a prestigious byline.  As a result, the Merril series has become woolier and more diffuse in focus over the years.  Her last volume included stories from Playboy (two), the Saturday Evening Post, the Saturday Review of Literature, the Peninsula Spectator, The Reporter, and the Atlantic Monthly, and such large literary bylines as Bernard Malamud and Andre Maurois, the latter with a novelette that may have been the best of 1930, when it was first published.  Oh, and three cartoons.  Of course it also included, as always, a large and solid selection of indisputable SF and fantasy, both from the genre magazines and from other sources.

Merril’s agenda is clear.  Let her tell you about it.  In her introduction to the last of the Gnome volumes, she wrote:

“The name of this book is SF.
“SF is an abbreviation for Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy).  Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy) is really an abbreviation too.  Here are some of the things it stands for. . . .
“S is for Science, Space, Satellites, Starships, and Solar exploring; also for Semantics and Sociology, Satire, Spoofing, Suspense, and good old Serendipity. . . .
“F is for Fantasy, Fiction and Fable, Folklore, Fairy-tale and Farce; also for Fission and Fusion; for Firmament, Fireball, Future and Forecast; for Fate and Free-will; Figuring, Fact-seeking, and Fancy-free.
“Mix well.  The result is SF, or Speculative Fun.”

English translation, if you need one: What she thinks the SF field is, or should be is . . . not really a field.  That is, not categorically distinguishable in any clear-cut way from the general body of literature, though having a somewhat different set of preoccupations than the typical contemporary novel or short story.

You can debate her argument, but I’m not inclined to.  I think if Merril did not exist it would be necessary to invent her, or someone similar, to help rescue the field (that word again!) from excessive insularity.  I am also glad to have her book to read each year, exasperating as some of its contents may be. 

Yin and Yang

But not everyone feels that way, and it is not surprising that there is once again some competition.  Donald Wollheim is back for a second try, with co-editor Terry Carr, a long-time SF fan and shorter-time author now working at Ace Books, with that publisher’s World’s Best Science Fiction: 1965, a chunky original paperback with a distinct “back to basics” air about it, though there’s no comment at all about Merril’s book and nothing that can be read as a disguised dig at it.

So what’s the more overt angle, besides “here are some stories we think are good”?  First, the title does not include “Fantasy,” a word which for Merril covers a multitude of exogamies.  And the “World’s Best” in the title is not ceremonial; the editors make much of having scoured the world, and not just the US, for stories.  The back cover says “Selected from the pages of every magazine regularly publishing science-fiction and fantasy stories in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and the rest of the world. . . .” The yield: five non-US stories, of seventeen in the book.  Two of these are from the British New Worlds, which is not exactly news, but the others are from less familiar sources, though they are closer to the Anglo-American genre core than some of Merril’s catches.

First of these three is Vampires Ltd., by Josef Nesvadba, a Czech psychiatrist and well-known SF writer, the title story of his recent collection, about the current preoccupation with fast automobiles; the protagonist accidentally gets his hands on an especially fine one, and per the title, finds out that it doesn’t really run on gasoline.  We reach that denouement by way of a surreal and hectic series of events which makes little pretense to plausibility.  But that is beside the author’s point, which is satire.  It’s an interesting look at a different notion of storytelling than you will find in the US SF magazines.  The Weather in the Underground, by Colin Free, best known for his work for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, from the Australian magazine Squire, is more consistent with US conventions.  It takes place in an underground habitat where part of humanity has fled for safety, leaving the rest to freeze in a new ice age.  This life is made tolerable by constantly renewed psychological conditioning, but our protagonist’s conditioning never quite took hold, so he’s miserable and maladjusted, leading to banishment and a sorry end.  It’s a strikingly vehement story, very tightly written and forceful, and one of the best in the book.

The third non-US/UK offering is What Happened to Sergeant Masuro?, by Harry Mulisch, from The Busy Bee Review: New Writing from the Netherlands.  Mulisch is apparently a notable Dutch literary figure, with eight books published.  Sergeant Masuro was a soldier in a Dutch patrol in Papua New Guinea; one of the other soldiers raped a native girl, or tried to; the headman was later seen skulking around; and Sergeant Masuro began to undergo a terrible transformation.  The story is the report to headquarters by the patrol’s superior officer, who recounts both the events and his own anguish at some length.  Amusingly, the plot—white men go into the jungle, transgress against the natives, and are cursed—is a long-familiar pulp plot of which dozens of examples could no doubt be exhumed from Weird Tales, Jungle Stories, and the like.  The literary gloss doesn’t add much to it.

Aside from these foreign trophies, the book is a stiff gust of de gustibus.  Of the five stories which one of us at Galactic Journey thought worthy of five stars (excluding several outright fantasies from Fantastic), none are included.  Nor are any included from our longer end-of-the-year Galactic Stars list.  Of the stories that are in the book, only two were awarded four stars, and one—Leiber’s When the Change-Winds Blow—fled the wrath of Gideon with only one star.

And much of what is here is remarkably pedestrian or worse.  The editors seem determined to reproduce the genre’s weaknesses as well as its strengths.  Starting the book is Tom Purdom’s Greenplace, which features such lively matters as a psychedelic drug and a man in a wheelchair being beaten by a mob, but is essentially an extremely contrived and implausible warning about a genuine problem: how democracy can survive, or not, as psychological manipulation becomes more sophisticated.  Next, and proceeding downhill, Ben Bova and Myron R. Lewis’s Men of Good Will is an equally implausible, but more trivial, story built around a scientific gimmick that’s not even entirely original (remember Jerome Bixby’s The Holes Around Mars?). 

This is followed by Bill for Delivery, by that faithful purveyor of contrived yard goods Christopher Anvil, about the problems some salt-of-the-earth spacemen have carrying a cargo of unruly and dangerous birds from one star system to another.  At this point, a reader who bought the book thinking it was time to check out this “science fiction” stuff people are talking about would probably start to think “How can anybody possibly be interested in this?” and toss it or leave it on the bus.

There’s more of this ilk later on: C.C. MacApp’s weak and gimmicky For Every Action, and Robert Lory’s The Star Party, an annoyingly slick rendition of an original but silly idea.  And Leiber’s When the Change-Winds Blow answers the question that hardly anyone is asking: “What does a talented author do when he can’t think of anything of substance to write?”

But that’s the bad news.  The good news is a number of worthwhile stories.  Four Brands of Impossible by new writer Norman Kagan is at once an amusing picture of aspiring math and science brains in their element, and a chilling one of the uses to which their talents may be put, wrapped around an interesting mathematical idea.  William F. Temple’s A Niche in Time is a smart time travel story that goes off in an unexpected direction.  John Brunner’s The Last Lonely Man (one of the New Worlds items) develops a clever piece of psychological technology in the author’s earnest and methodical way.  Edward Jesby, another new writer, contributes the stylish and incisive Sea Wrack, which starts out as a tale of the idle and decadent rich in a far future where some humans have been modified to live undersea, and and turns into a story of class struggle, no less. 

Philip K. Dick’s Oh, To Be a Blobel! is a sort of slapstick black comedy updating Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.  Thomas M. Disch’s Now Is Forever is a sharp if overlong piece of sociologizing about the effects of wide availability of matter duplicators, which kick the props from under everyone’s getting-and-spending way of life.  New writer Jack B. Lawson’s The Competitors is a breezy rearrangement of stock SF elements that reads to me like a facile parody of the genre, probably done with A.E. van Vogt in mind.

To my taste the most striking item here is Edward Mackin’s New Worlds story The Unremembered, a sort of religious fantasy framed in SF terms.  In the automated and urbanized future, lives have been extended for hundreds of years, but the show seems to be closing from sheer ennui: the birth rate is falling and the youth suicide rate is rising, and older people are queueing up at the euthanasia clinics.  Apparitions of people are appearing and disappearing seemingly randomly, because (it is hinted) the human span has become divorced from its natural length.  The elderly protagonist becomes one of the apparitions, and his consciousness takes a Stapledonian journey through the cosmos before arriving at the final revelation.  C.S. Lewis would appreciate this one if he were still around.  It is quite different from anything I’ve seen from Mackin before, or from anybody else for that matter.

But that’s the only really strikingly memorable story here; closest runners-up are the Colin Free and Edward Jesby stories, based mainly on their intensity in presenting relatively familiar sorts of material.  The writers who are pushing the SF envelope in notable ways are not here—no Lafferty, no Zelazny, no Ellison, no Cordwainer Smith.  And there is too much overt dross.

So, the bottom line: a pretty decent book with much solid material, but it mostly fails the “Surprise me!” test.  Maybe the next one will be more startling.  Meanwhile, Merril will be back to argue with in a few more months.

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Magazine, Serial

[May 12, 1965] Da Capo (June 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Changing of the Guard

So here we are at the end of the Ziff-Davis Amazing and the editorship of Cele Lalli.  What’s next?  The magazine doesn’t say.  “Coming Next Month” is conspicuous by its absence, as are interior illustrations.  But the story is being told elsewhere.  The banner headline on Science Fiction Times for last month—if “banner” is the word for large crude mimeographed lettering—says “ ‘AMAZING’ AND ‘FANTASTIC’ GO BI-MONTHLY & ADD 32 PAGES,” just above “DON FORD IS DEAD!”

The first post-Z-D issue will be the August Amazing, and thereafter the magazines will be published in alternate months as the new owner and editor try to build circulation, by leaving each issue on sale for a longer time, in preparation for a return to monthly publication.  The new publisher, as previously disclosed, will be Sol Cohen, and now it is announced that the managing editor—presumably, the guy who picks the stories—will be Joseph Ross, actual name Joseph Wrzos, but he is showing mercy to native English spellers.

Part of the plan for the new Amazing (and the new Fantastic too) is to use reprints as part of the contents, along with the original illustrations, a policy the SF Times describes as a “well-liked” recent feature of the Ziff-Davis Amazing.  Well-liked by some, no doubt, but most of the stories seemed to me to have only historical interest. 

Worse, even partial reliance on reprints from Amazing is a bad bet at least for any long term, since Amazing has been pretty mediocre through most of its history.  During the 1930s it fell progressively further behind the limited competition of the day, both in circulation and in interest, and then was purchased by Ziff-Davis and put in the charge of the notorious Ray Palmer, whose instruction to writers is said to have been “Gimme bang-bang.” From 1938 to 1949 Palmer filled the magazine with formulaic and juvenile adventure fiction, much of it produced by a coterie of local Chicago writers who mostly published little or nothing elsewhere, with much of their output in Amazing appearing under “house names” (pseudonyms maintained by the publisher for work by multiple writers).

The magazine enjoyed a brief renaissance (well, maybe a nascence) starting in 1953 when it switched from pulp to digest size and, more importantly, raised its pay rates, attracting bigger names and better material.  But it didn’t last; the rates were cut, and the magazine reverted by late 1954 to calculated mediocrity: mostly formulaic contents written by a new stable of regulars, though they kept some of the old house names, such as the durable Alexander Blade, a byline that flourished from 1940 to 1958.  Little improvement was visible until about 1959, when new editor Cele Goldsmith began her salvage operation.

So the past of Amazing is a barrel whose bottom will be scraped quickly, full of fish mostly not worth shooting.  One hopes for something more forward-looking as well from the new regime.

The Issue at Hand


by Gray Morrow

This final Ziff-Davis issue exemplifies the decidedly mixed bag of the Cele Goldsmith/Lalli regime: a potboiler of a serial from a prominent writer, an exercise in the higher self-parody by one of her best-known discoveries, a brief inconsequential story by a completely unknown new writer . . . the inescapable nemesis Robert F. Young . . . and David R. Bunch, the writer the readers loved to hate.  Not only is his story flagged and illustrated on the cover, but Bunch is also profiled and quoted extensively in the final editorial.  (Usually they’re by Lobsenz, but this one isn’t signed.  Lalli, maybe, at last?) This celebration of Bunch might be viewed as a final gesture of defiance from the editorial team, especially given the cover illustration of a robot waving two sledge hammers in fury.  But . . . probably not.  After all, Lalli is sticking around Ziff-Davis to edit Modern Bride.

The Corridors of Time (Part 2 of 2), by Poul Anderson

The largest fiction item is the conclusion of Poul Anderson’s perfectly adequate but neither inspired nor inspiring serial The Corridors of Time, the title of which is unfortunately literal.  Our hero Lockridge has been hired by the beautiful, enigmatic, and imperious Storm Dalloway to help her find some buried treasure in Jutland, but what she’s really about is a time war.  Turns out there are two contending factions, the Wardens and the Rangers, the former (Storm’s side) supporting a relaxed social philosophy consonant with matriarchal religion and traditional knowledge, the latter supporting a more regimented view consonant with science and patriarchal religion (to oversimplify grossly—and it is a bit of a set-up on Anderson’s part). 

So how does this time war work?  Well, there’s the rub, or lack of one.  Unlike its predecessors—Leiber’s Change War series, Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time, Anderson’s own Time Patrol stories—in this one, you can’t change history.  So . . . what’s the point?  Well, as the synopsis (presumably written by Anderson) puts it, an agent can “become part of it, setting the mark of his own civilization on a culture and thus building up reserves for a final showdown.” That’s not changing history?  Maybe just a little?

This makes no sense at all, and undermines the story.  The time travel mechanism doesn’t help either.  The Corridors of Time are just that, long corridors buried in the earth at various places, with access to various times over spans of a few thousand years; just walk or ride down the corridor, and you go 35 days per foot, and you take the exit you want for the time you want, and also you can have chases and shootouts up and down the corridor, as happens within the first few pages.  As icons of the imagination go, this is pretty unimaginative.

On the plus side, Anderson gets to chase his characters around various historical eras, which Anderson seems to know well and in most cases to prefer to the present, and Lockridge reluctantly finds himself with an appealing Neolithic girlfriend (setting up an . . . unusual . . . triangle with Miss Dalloway), and ultimately Lockridge decides not to go back to the Twentieth Century, in a final affirmation of the barbarian virtues.  Overall, perfectly readable product, but below standard for a writer who has done much better.  Three stars, barely.  There’s a note indicating an expanded version is to come from Doubleday later.

The Furies, by Roger Zelazny

Roger Zelazny’s novelet The Furies is ridiculous—purposefully so, it seems.  The author spends the first six pages in exposition, introducing us to Sandor Sandor, catastrophically disabled, but also a non-idiot savant with encyclopedic knowledge and memory of places all around the galaxy; Benedick Benedict, who upon shaking hands with another person, becomes privy to all that person’s most shameful secrets, which he proceeds to gossip about—and his talents extend to inanimate objects and animals; Lynx Links, who “looked like a beachball with a beard” but by calling is the galaxy’s most accomplished assassin; and (former) Captain Victor Corgo, “the man without a heart” (literally, replaced by a machine), formerly “a terror to brigands and ugly aliens, a threat to Code-breakers, and a thorn in the sides of evil-doers everywhere,” but now gone wrong.

The first three of these are the Furies, so-called by the author after the ancient Greeks’ “chthonic goddesses of vengeance” (says the Britannica), here retained by the authorities to chase down Corgo, a sort of Captain Nemo figure who has turned against humanity based on outrages we need not recount.  The story is rendered throughout in extravagant language and stylized dialogue.  A mid-range sample of the former:

“One time the Wallaby [Corgo’s spaceship] was a proud Guardship, an ebony toadstool studded with the jewel-like warts of fast-phase projectors.  One time the Wallaby skipped proud about the frontier worlds of Interstel, meting out the unique justice of the Uniform Galactic Code—in those places where there was no other law.  One time the proud Wallaby, under the command of Captain Victor Corgo of the Guard, had ranged deep space and time and become a legend under legendary skies.”

So what we have here is midway between a technical exercise and a barroom bet.  Zelazny has taken about the most hackneyed materials available and tried to render them publishable by pure force of his considerable writing skill, no doubt enhanced by his theatrical background, and he has succeeded.  That is, he has dazzled enough rubes to get this into print, and has considerably amused me.  If the young Shakespeare had started out in comic books (the names and talents of the Furies certainly suggest comic-book superheroes), the result might have been similar.  Four stars, but watch it, guy: you can’t get away with this more than once.  Or can you?

The Walking Talking I-Don't-Care Man, by David R. Bunch

As for Bunch (and speaking of extravagant language) the latest Moderan tale The Walking Talking I-Don’t-Care Man is made of that, though it’s more straightforward and lucid than some of its predecessors.  The titular Man has had himself entirely replaced with metal, unlike Bunch’s protagonist in his Stronghold who still hangs on to his flesh-strips.  The Man purports to have resolved the great philosophical dilemma of human existence by giving up humanity . . . but he still wouldn’t mind finding God and going after it with his sledge hammers. 

One could conclude that this meditation, or harangue, on last things might be the end of the Moderan series . . . except the point seems to be that last things really aren’t last.  But hey, four stars, at least in the spirit of “best of breed,” which I’d say this is for Bunch.  Note to future bibliographers: the commas in the title on the cover do not appear inside the magazine.

Rumpelstiltskinski, by Robert F. Young

And now comes the inexorable reckoning: Robert F. Young, square athwart the road, and no shoulder to slip by on.  First the bad news: Rumplestiltskinski is another of Young’s affected fairy tale rehashes, beginning “Once there was a miller who was car-poor but who had a luscious dish of a daughter named Ada.” The good news: it’s quite short and ostentatiously pointless, a sort of shaggy fairy story, perhaps signifying that Young is getting tired of himself.  Let me encourage him in that.  One star.

Satyr, by Judith E. Schrier

Finally, and almost imperceptibly, we have Satyr, a (very) short story by Judith E. Schrier.  Who?  Precisely—no one else has heard of her either, at least according to the available indexes.  An unmarried older woman works the night shift as a computer operator and the computer professes its love, she realizes how masculine it is, etc. etc. to the obvious end. Slickly written, at least.  Two stars, barely.

Lo! The Poor Forteans, by Sam Moskowitz

Sam Moskowitz plays out his season (rumor having it that he won’t be part of the new Amazing) with Lo! The Poor Forteans, a moderately interesting biographical sketch of Charles Fort and history of the Fortean movement, such as it is or was.  There is also some rambling and mostly perfunctory discussion of the Fortean influence in science fiction, much of which we know about because the authors (like Edmond Hamiliton and Eric Frank Russell) have commented on it, but much of which is questionable (The Children’s Hour by Lawrence O’Donnell a/k/a C.L. Moore?  I doubt it).  Moskowitz has also omitted some other fairly obvious candidates like Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters.  Moskowitz also tediously belabors his own disdain for Forteanism.  But still, three stars, chiefly for the history and not the commentary.

Summing Up

The Ziff-Davis Amazing under Lalli was always full of promise but never managed to deliver on it for more than a month or two at a time.  It winds down on a respectable note, with above-average stories from two of its most characteristic authors, plus a competent middle-of-the-road serial.  Quo nunc vadis Amazing?

Speaking of changed circumstances at publishing houses, please read this — it's important!




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[April 12, 1965] Not Long Before the End (May 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Still Bleeding

Another month, another civil rights murder.  Viola Liuzzo lived in Detroit and participated in civil rights activities there.  Horrified by the carnage of the “Bloody Sunday” attack on civil rights marchers on March 7, she went to Alabama, where the Southern Christian Leadership Conference put her to work on administrative and logistical tasks, including driving volunteers and marchers from place to place as needed.

On March 25, Liuzzo drove some marchers and volunteers from Montgomery back to Selma.  On her way back to Montgomery, with a Negro associate in the car, she was passed by a car full of Ku Klux Klansmen, who fatally shot her in the head.

This murder was well publicized, even in remote places like my small town in Kentucky, where it was briefly a major subject of conversation.  The consensus: “She should have stayed home with her kids.” The notion that Americans should be able to travel safely in America and that people shouldn't murder other people seems somehow to have been forgotten.

Of course she was not the only one killed by the anti-civil rights forces, though her killing received more publicity than most.  The Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, was beaten with clubs by segregationists on March 9 and died of his injuries in a hospital.  In February, Jimmie Lee Jackson was beaten and shot by state troopers who attacked civil rights marchers and then pursued marchers who took refuge from the violence in a cafe.  His death prompted the Selma-Montgomery march.

Looks like there’s a long way to go.

The Issue at Hand


by Gray Morrow

The end is much nearer for the departing regime at Amazing.  This next to last Ziff-Davis issue is fronted by one of the more ill-considered covers to appear on the magazine.  It features what looks like a theatrical mask, with several items of disconnected clockwork behind it, against a sort of green starscape.  Well, the colors are nice.  It illustrates or represents in some fashion Poul Anderson’s two-part serial The Corridors of Time, which begins in this issue (though there’s no corridor to be seen on the cover; probably just as well).

The Corridors of Time (Part 1 of 2), by Poul Anderson


by Gray Morrow

I will await the end of the Anderson serial before commenting, as is my practice.  A quick look indicates that it is a time war or time policing story, in the general territory of Asimov’s The End of Eternity and Leiber’s The Big Time, not to mention Anderson’s own Time Patrol stories, and the protagonist is dispatched to Northern Europe around 1200 B.C.  More next month.

The Survivor, by Walter F. Moudy


by Virgil Finlay

Walter F. Moudy, who has published a novel but whose first magazine story appeared only last month, contributes the novelet The Survivor, another in the growing genre of future violence-as-entertainment.  That roster includes last month’s lampoon by John Jakes, There’s No Vinism Like Chau-Vinism, a couple of Robert Sheckley stories, Charles V. De Vet’s energetic Special Feature from Astounding in 1958, and no doubt others.  In the future, Moudy proposes, the US and Russia are still antagonists, but now they channel their rivalry into the Olympic War Games: each side puts 100 armed soldiers into an arena 3000 meters long and 1000 meters wide, and they fight it out until one side is eliminated, and the viewers out in TV-land see every drop of blood.

The author alternates between a fairly naturalistic account of the thoughts and experiences of the clueless Private Richard Starbuck as he fights, wonders why he is doing it, is grievously wounded, and nearly dies, and the performances of the commentators and their special guests, which treat the event just like the sporting matches we are all familiar with.  This is 99% of a pretty good story, with the TV commentary close to pitch-perfect, and the effects on the protagonist of immersion in pointless and terrifying violence are well rendered. 

Unfortunately Moudy trips over his feet in the last paragraph with a gross departure from Show Don’t Tell, beating the reader over the head with his message rather than letting events speak (or scream) for themselves. This is the sort of rookie mistake that editors are there to save writers from, and they didn’t.  This provides at least a scintilla of support for the charge by Science Fiction Times that the editors seemed to have lost interest.  Three stars, unfortunately; it was on its way to four.

The Man from Party Ten, by Robert Rohrer

Robert Rohrer embraces cynicism unreservedly in The Man from Party Ten, a characteristically well-turned, quite short story about factional warfare in the ruins of an extraterrestrial Earth colony, as brutal within its shorter compass as Moudy’s longer story, though also more obviously contrived.  Nonetheless, well done.  Three stars.

Over the River and Through the Woods, by Clifford D. Simak

Relief from brutality arrives in the issue’s last story, Clifford D. Simak’s Over the River and Through the Woods, an unassuming small masterpiece.  A couple of strange kids appear at a farmhouse in 1896 and address the older woman working in the kitchen as their grandma.  It is quintessential Simak: Ordinary decent person confronted with the extraordinary responds with ordinary decency.  It’s plainly written without a wasted word, deftly developed, asserting its homely credo with quiet restraint, all in eight pages.  Wish I could do that.  Wish more writers would do that.  Five stars.

Yardsticks in Space, by Ben Bova

This month’s nonfiction piece is Ben Bova’s Yardsticks in Space, about the measurement of stellar distances. It's typical fare from this writer: reasonably interesting material rendered in a fairly humdrum style under a humdrum title.  Perfectly readable but a far cry from the better efforts of Isaac Asimov and Willy Ley.  Two stars.

Summing Up

So, not bad: one excellent story, one that’s quite good until the very end, and one capable story, plus a reasonably promising-looking serial by a prominent if uneven author, and no Robert F. Young or Ensign De Ruyter!  Maybe Goldsmith and Lobsenz will go out on a relatively high note.

We had so much success with our first episode of The Journey Show (you can watch the kinescope rerun; check local listings for details) that we're going to have another one on April 11 at 1PM PDT with The Young Traveler as the special musical guest.  As the kids say, be there or be square!




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Magazine

[March 12, 1965] Sic Transit (April 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

No-Sale, Sale

The big news, previously rumored, is that Amazing and its stablemate Fantastic are to change hands.  The April Science Fiction Times just arrived, with the big headline “ ‘AMAZING STORIES’ AND ‘FANTASTIC’ SOLD TO SOL COHEN.” Cohen is the publisher of Galaxy, If, and Worlds of Tomorrow, but will resign at the end of next month to take up his new occupation. 

Why is this happening?  Probably because circulation, which had been increasing, started to decline again in 1962 (when I started reviewing it!).  The SF Times article adds, tendentiously and questionably, that “the magazine showed what appeared to be a lack of interest by its editors.” Read their further comment and draw your own conclusions on that point.

Whatever the reason, it’s done.  The last Ziff-Davis issues of both magazines will be the June issues.  Whether they will continue monthly is not known, nor is who will edit the magazine—presumably meaning Cele Lalli is not continuing. 

The Issue at Hand


by Paula McLane

The previous two issues were much improved over their predecessors.  Of course the improvement could not be sustained (viz. the current issue), but it has at least reverted to the slightly less mean than on some occasions.

The Shores of Infinity, by Edmond Hamilton


by George Schelling

Who was it who first said “If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like”?  Dorothy Parker?  Mark Twain?  Pliny the Elder?  Anyway, Edmond Hamilton’s latest in his backwards-looking saga of the far future featuring the Star Kings may not even rise to the level of that truism.  The generically titled The Shores of Infinity spends about 10 of its 33 or so pages on background and build-up, and then the generically named John Gordon of ancient (i.e., contemporary) Earth takes off to the capital of the Galaxy to hobnob with the Emperor in the imperial city of Throon. 

There, he learns of more rumors of the previously encountered mind-controlling menace, is sent off on a dangerous secret mission to investigate, is captured, victimized by treachery and benefited by its reversal, and the author seems as bored by the whole perfunctory and hackneyed business as I was.  It’s ostentatiously inconclusive, so we are guaranteed more.  To paraphrase W.C. Fields, second prize would be two more sequels.

A recurring theme here is Gordon’s alienation from the beautiful Princess Lianna.  This seems to be the special Woman Trouble issue of Amazing; see below.  (Note to Betty Friedan: if the viewpoint characters were female, it would of course be the Man Trouble issue.  Tell women more of them should be writing SF.) Also worth mentioning is the cover, by Paula McLane, which portrays a giant space-helmeted visage peering into a room where two small diaphanous figures are trying to close the door against him.  Obviously metaphorical, right?  Actually, it’s a quite literal rendering of a passing scene in the story.

Anyway, this one has little going for it except the usual space-operatic rhetoric (“The vast mass of faintly glowing drift that was known as the Deneb Shoals, they skirted.  They plunged on and now they were passing through the space where, that other time, the space-fleets of the Empire and its allies had fought out their final Armageddon with the League of the Dark Worlds.”) The problem with this decoration is there’s not much here to decorate.  Two stars, probably too generous.

No Vinism Like Chau-Vinism, by John Jakes


by George Schelling

John Jakes’s long novelet No Vinism Like Chau-Vinism [sic], the title obviously a play on the all too familiar song There’s No Business Like Show Business, inhabits the territory demarcated by Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants, Ron Goulart on a good day, and the Three Stooges.  In the future, everything is showbiz.  The populace is entertained and distracted by constant scripted and broadcast warfare between commercial forces, in this case the American Margarine Manufacturers Association versus the United Dairy Expedition Force, fighting of course in Wisconsin.

The script is disrupted by the appearance of a real gun in the hands of the rogue margarineer (Jakes calls them margies) Burton Tanzy of the Golden-Glo Margarine Company, who executes a cow on live TV, initiating a slapstick plot in which among other things besides real guns, the fake commercial war turns into a real union dispute.  The protagonist Gregory Rooke of the Dairy forces must try to calm things down and restore order, lest the public get wind of the fraudulence of their world.  His chief antagonist proves to be his ex-wife, who has dumped him to pursue her overweening ambitions, consistently with the Woman Trouble motif, though things work out better for Rooke than for poor forlorn John Gordon.

This story is actually quite amusing; Jakes has a knack for the farcical tall tale.  Unfortunately it goes on too long and palls a bit by the end, keeping the final reckoning down to three stars.

De Ruyter: Dreamer, by Arthur Porges

Arthur Porges contributes Ensign De Ruyter: Dreamer, another in his tiresome series about the space navy guy who triumphs over cartoonishly stupid extraterrestrials through the clever use of basic science—in this case, it’s Fun with Electromagnetism.  These stories barely rise to the level of filler.  One star.

Greendark in the Cairn, by Robert Rohrer

Robert Rohrer continues in his “almost there” vein with Greendark in the Cairn, featuring a space captain who is either going nuts, or is being driven nuts by transmissions from the extraterrestrial enemy, but figures out how to defeat them and prevent himself from giving the game away.  It’s gimmicky and facile but well rendered.  Two stars, but do try again.

Speech Is Silver, by John Brunner

The earnest John Brunner undertakes a satire of American commercialism in Speech Is Silver, in which the protagonist Hankin is selected in the Soundsleep company’s “Great Search” for the man with the perfect voice for a program of sleep counseling—that is, counseling while one sleeps on how to handle the difficulties of the day.  Except of course that’s not really how things work, and his new-found fame destroys his life.  (Also—Woman Trouble again—his wife, who prodded him to enter the Soundsleep competition, leaves him, apparently because he was never ambitious enough, like Rooke’s wife in No Vinism [etc.].) At the point where Soundsleep decides to replace him with a younger near-double, Hankin detonates.

Like the Jakes story, this one is an acid satire on contemporary image-mongering American capitalism.  Its problem, aside from being too long (also like Jakes), is that it isn’t crazy enough.  Brunner’s calm and methodical style and storytelling muffle the plot’s antic qualities.  Maybe he should get Jakes to introduce him to the Three Stooges.

Two stars.

Religion in Science Fiction: God, Space, and Faith, by Sam Moskowitz

Sam Moskowitz forges on with Religion in Science Fiction: God, Space, and Faith, rendered on the cover as Science-Fiction Views of God With a Profile of C.S. Lewis.  It’s a rambling description of various SF stories on religious themes, starting reasonably interestingly with several older books that most readers will not have heard of, continuing with the promised account of C.S. Lewis, followed by Stapledon, Heinlein, Wyndham, Simak, Leiber, Keller, Bradbury, Blish, Miller, del Rey, Boucher, and Farmer.

In this recitation Moskowitz manages to miss Arthur C. Clarke’s Hugo-winning The Star and his equally well-known The Nine Billion Names of God; Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question; Leigh Brackett’s tale of a different sort of theocracy, The Long Tomorrow; Harry Harrison’s anti-theological polemic The Streets of Ashkelon; Katherine MacLean’s acerbic Unhuman Sacrifice; and, astonishingly, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.  Remarkably, he says, “Heinlein, who introduced [religion] into the science fiction magazines, has long since tired of it as a focal plot device.”

But this (mis-)observation does not deter him from his conclusion: “Neverthess, the decision is made.  The science fiction writer has come to the conclusion that scientific advance will not mean the end of belief.  He feels certain that a truly convincing portrayal of a hypothetical future cannot be made without considering the mystical aspects of man.”

Can we say fallacy of composition?  Two stars: another “almost,” some interesting material, some of it unfamiliar, the whole brought down by Moskowitz’s fatuous generalizations.

Summing Up

So, mostly not too bad (except for the egregious Ensign Ruyter), but mostly not as good as it should and could have been either.  There have been issues that would make one regret that this regime is ending, but this isn’t one of them.




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Magazine

[February 12, 1965] Mirabile Dictu, Sotto Voce (March 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

It’s an age of minor miracles.  Nothing to shout about, but last month’s pretty good issue of Amazing is followed by another one that’s not bad either. 

The Issue at Hand


by Gray Morrow

Greenslaves, by Frank Herbert

This March issue opens with Frank Herbert’s novelet Greenslaves, a rather startling, if not entirely amazing, performance.  In the future, Brazil and other countries are making war against insect life, since it’s a disgusting reservoir of disease and a source of damage to crops.  (The U.S. is an exception, owing to the influence of the radical Carsonists; the reference is presumably to Rachel, not Kit or Johnny.) But the campaign seems to be backfiring, with insects mutating, and epidemics.  The events of the plot are cheerfully bizarre, but the message is similar to that of the more ponderous Dune epic: attend to ecology.  Things work together and if you mess with the balance, you may harm yourselves.


by Gray Morrow

Unlike the more dense and turgid Dune serials, though, this story is crisply told and moves along quickly and vividly to its point.  It also recalls Wells’s story The Empire of the Ants—not a follow-up or a rejoinder, but a very different angle on the premise of that classic story.  Four stars for this striking departure both from Herbert’s and from Amazing’s ordinary course.

The Plateau, by Christopher Anvil

The ground gained by Herbert is quickly given up by Christopher Anvil’s The Plateau, which if it were an LP would have to be called Chris Anvil’s Greatest Dull Thuds.  Actually, my first thought was that it should be retitled The Abyss, but then I realized it is over 50 pages long.  Maybe—following our host’s example in discussing Analog—it should instead be called The Endless Desert.  It’s yet another story about stupid and comically rigid aliens bested by clever humans, which no doubt came back from Analog with a rejection slip reading “You’ve sold me this story six times already and it gets worse every time!”


by Robert Adragna

The premise: “Earth was conquered. . . .  At no place on the globe was there a well-equipped body of human combat troops larger than a platoon.” Except these platoons seem to have an ample supply of mini-hydrogen bombs and reliable communications among numerous redoubts at least around the US, as they bamboozle the aliens in multiple ways, including a cover of one of Eric Frank Russell’s greatest hits: making the aliens believe the humans have powerful unseen allies on their side.  The whole is rambling, hackneyed, and sloppy (late in the story there are several references to the aliens as “Bugs,” though they are apparently humanoid, and then that usage disappears for the rest of the story).  Towards the end, a sort-of-interesting idea about the nature of the aliens’ stupidity emerges, leading to a moderately clever end, though it’s hardly worth the slog to get there: it’s the same sort of schematic thinking that Anvil typically accomplishes in Analog at a fifth the length or less.  So, barely, two stars.

Be Yourself, by Robert Rohrer

Robert Rohrer’s Be Yourself is a little hackneyed, too, but at six pages is much more neatly turned and much less exasperating and wearying than the Anvil story.  Alien invaders have figured out how to duplicate us precisely; how do we know which Joe Blow is the real one?  No one who has read SF for more than a week will be surprised by the twists, but one can admire their execution.  Three stars.

Calling Dr. Clockwork, by Ron Goulart

Ron Goulart’s Calling Dr. Clockwork is business as usual for him, an outrageous lampoon, this time of hospitals and the medical profession.  The protagonist goes to visit someone in the hospital, faints when he sees a patient in bad condition, and wakes up in a hospital bed, attended by various caricatures including the eponymous and dysfunctional robot doctor, and it looks like he’s never going to get out.  Three stars for an amusing farce, no longer than it needs to be.

Wheeler Dealer, by Arthur Porges

The difference between an amusing farce and a tedious one is limned to perfection by Arthur Porges’s Wheeler Dealer, in which his series character Ensign De Ruyter and company are stranded on a nearly airless planet inhabited by quasi-Buddhist humanoids with giant lungs who can’t spare time to help the Earthfolk mine the beryllium they need to repair their ship before they run out of air.  Why no help?  Because the locals are too busy spinning their prayer wheels.  So De Ruyter shows them how to make the wheels spin on their own and thereby gets the mining labor they need.  Porges, unlike Goulart, is, tragically, not funny.  The story (like the previous De Ruyter item, Urned Reprieve in last October’s issue) is essentially a jumped-up version of a squib on Fascinating Scientific Facts that you might find as filler at the bottom of a column in another sort of magazine.  It does not help that the plot amounts to the simple-minded offspring of Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God.  Two stars.

The Man Who Discovered Atlantis, by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg provides another smoothly readable and informative entry in his Scientific Hoaxes series, The Man Who Discovered Atlantis, about Paul Schliemann, grandson of Heinrich Schliemann, discoverer of the buried city (cities) of Troy.  The younger Schliemann wasn’t able to accomplish much on his own, so he exploited the fame of his grandfather to perpetrate a hoax about the discovery of Atlantis, or at least of its location and confirmation of its existence.  Silverberg succinctly recounts the origin and history of the Atlantis myth as well as the charlatanry over it that preceded Paul Schliemann’s, and suggests that had Plato known what would come of his references to Atlantis, he probably wouldn’t have brought it up.  Four stars.

Summing Up

So . . . two pretty decent issues of this magazine in a row!  One very good story, two acceptable ones, and quite a good article, and the other contents are merely inadequate and not affirmatively noxious.  Do we have a trend?  One hopes so, but . . . promised for next month is another of Edmond Hamilton’s nostalgia operas about the Star Kings.  We shall see.

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[January 12, 1965] Last Minute Reprieve (the February 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The Issue at Hand


Paula McLane

Well, what have we here?  A pretty decent issue of Amazing, not a common occasion at all, with some good and/or interesting material, one disappointing item by a big-name author, but no offenses against reason and decency!  Let us count our blessings, and proceed directly to their dissection.

He Who Shapes, by Roger Zelazny


George Schelling

Roger Zelazny’s two-part serial He Who Shapes concludes in this issue, and is the most pleasant surprise here: a capable writer taking on a substantial task and working hard to do a good job of it.  It features a psychiatrist specializing in neuroparticipation therapy: he projects hyper-realistic dreams into his patients’ minds and then stars in them, directing the action to the therapeutic end of his choice.  This is Render, the Shaper—a hokey note, but not misplaced, given the oratorical level of the whole. 

Neuroparticipation is a powerful tool, but sometimes double-edged: the therapist can lose control of the action and wind up in the patient’s movie, not his own.  Render is someone whose roots in his own reality are a little tenuous, by at least unconscious design: after the death of his wife, he maintains a determinedly superficial relationship with his mistress (sic) Jill, and a parental relationship with his son that is ostentatiously concerned (e.g., he changes the son’s school repeatedly) but seems emotionally arms-length.

So when another psychiatrist, brilliant, female, blind since birth, and of course also beautiful, asks Render to instruct her via neuroparticipation in visual imagery so she too can become a neuroparticipation therapist, the sophisticated reader can only think “Uh-oh.” I won’t go further; this is one that deserves to be read.  Not that it’s perfect by any means; unlike almost everything else in sight, it seems too short, and the end in particular seems rushed and underdeveloped.  But it’s a welcome sign both for the magazine and for the author, who seems to have moved from the “promising” column to the “delivering” one.  A strong four stars.

Far Reach to Cygnus, by Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber’s Far Reach to Cygnus, a sequel of sorts to The Goggles of Dr. Dragonet from Fantastic of a few years ago, is labelled a short story but at 23 pages is as long as many novelets in this magazine.  It’s a rambling, low-intensity sort of thing, agreeable enough while reading, but it compares badly to Leiber’s tighter and sharper pieces like Mariana (Fantastic, 1960), A Deskful of Girls (F&SF, 1958), or for that matter the short novel The Big Time (Galaxy, 1958). 

Here’s another psychological theme, of sorts.  To open, our first-person narrator is racing eagerly to Dr. Dragonet’s redoubt in the Santa Monica Mountains, lured by Dragonet’s promise of “a drug that is to mescalin and LSD as they are to weak coffee.” Upon arrival there is some byplay involving the police, a beautiful young woman, and a possibly illusory black leopard.

Our hero then enters a sort of seance featuring another beautiful young woman, recumbent in a long white dress, and already drugged, describing a scene on an extraterrestrial planet featuring blue grass and inhabited by elvish blue people who ride unicorns.  Also present are a Professor, a Father, a Sister, “a handsome crophaired sun-tanned suavely muscled” young Hollywood man in all-white garb, who is “the newest and most successful Brando-surrogate and homegrown Mastroianni” of the media, and of course Dr. Dragonet.

The drug, or “psionic elixir,” is brought in by a third beautiful young woman (now we have a brunette, a blonde, and a redhead, all of them Dr. Dragonet’s nieces, if I am keeping score correctly).  But first, several pages of debate about the mind-body problem!  Finally, sixteen pages in, the characters start to take the drug, one by one, leading into several pages of drug effects, not badly done—the drug, as advertised, is psionic, so each character is seeing through the eyes of all of them.

And of course the drug effects become very palpable and menacing (mind-manifesting rather concretely, one might say) and are banished, and the Brando-surrogate, who it turned out was pretty dangerous, is psychically neutralized, and the white-garbed sort-of-medium recites some appalling developments on the blue planet (invaders with flamethrowers), and the police show up again briefly and comically, and much is made throughout about how fetching the young women are and how aroused and frustrated the narrator is (cheesecake without pictures, one might say). 

But all of these (slowly) moving parts don’t really add up to much (the police and blue planet subplots in particular go nowhere), and certainly don’t disguise the fact that the story is no more than a facile pot-boiler with some trendy furnishings.  Two stars.

The Answerer, by Bill Casey

New writer Bill Casey contributes The Answerer, the sort of story that might have appeared in Unknown in the early ‘40s—a fantastic premise developed like SF—except that editor Campbell wouldn’t have dared publish it.  Suddenly, prayers are being answered.  Everybody’s prayers.  So what happens?  As one of the characters puts it: “There can be nothing more dangerous than a personal god who actively interferes in the lives of men.” Hint: what if a lot of mental patients started praying?  It’s not the vignette one might expect to see on this theme, but an actual story, with a suitably sardonic ending.  Four stars.

Reunion, by David R. Bunch

David R. Bunch, who mostly hangs out in Fantastic these days, has his first appearance here in almost two years.  His short story Reunion is more lucid and less precious than his usual.  The language is also more straightforward though the preoccupation remains the same: the lives of humans whose bodies have been largely replaced with machinery (“new-metal” held together with “flesh-strips”; I think “cyborg” is becoming the fashionable term).  The unnamed protagonist is visited in his Stronghold by his twin brother, who “went with the big Paper Shield” (i.e., became a minister) rather than the metal one.  Protagonist is much troubled about their relationship and the prospect of meeting again, and considers shooting him, but in the end puts on the dog for him, mechanically speaking.  A moment of epiphany follows, but once the brother leaves—back to business as usual, war with the neighbors.  Three stars.

The Gobbitch Men, by Alfred Grossman


George Schelling

There’s a different flavor of the surreal in The Gobbitch Men by Alfred Grossman, who we are assured is “a novelist of some repute” responsible for Acrobat Admits and Many Slippery Errors, which I haven’t read, but which I gather could be described as black humor with anarchist tendencies.  So what’s he doing in Amazing?  I think writers use the term “salvage market.”

Grossman’s protagonist Irving is an ineffectual, incipiently alcoholic graduate student of the future, working on his thesis on the unbearably tedious, advisor-dictated subject of popular music of the late twentieth century, when he is delivered by mistake some spools titled Population and Catastrophe and the like.  He asks questions, learns how things really are in his world, is warned that he should keep on the straight and narrow or else, but the or else is imminent anyway.  Oh, the title?  The gobbitch men make a big racket with the cans, but that’s to cover their more sinister covert errand, which has suddenly become highly relevant to Irving.

This one is an interesting try, a heavy-handed dystopian satire in the mode of early Galaxy, cartoony and overdone, but still quite well written, as befits “a novelist of some repute.” Three stars, and I wouldn’t mind seeing Mr. Grossman slumming here again.

S. Fowler Wright: SF’s Devil’s Disciple, by Sam Moskowitz

Sam Moskowitz soldiers on with the SF Profile series, this time with a less familar and more interesting subject than usual: S. Fowler Wright: SF’s Devil’s Disciple.  Wright is a particularly good subject for Moskowitz, who prefers writing about work of the ‘30s and ‘40s, since almost all of Wright’s SF work was published then or even earlier.  The best-known of his novels include The Amphibians (1924), The Island of Captain Sparrow (1928), Deluge (1928), Dawn (1929), The World Below (1929), Dream, or The Simian Maid (1931), The Adventure of Wyndham Smith (1938), and Spiders’ War (1954).

Titles to conjure with!  But not much else, since as far as I can tell, Wright’s SF is entirely out of print, at least in the US—suffering the fate of his ideas.  Wright, who is still around, 91 next month, is distinguished by his opposition to scientific progress generally and birth control in particular (no hypocrite he—he has ten children), and much of his work is dedicated to extolling the virtues of noble savagery.  Moskowitz’s denunciation of these views helps make this article rather livelier than many of its predecessors, and the unfamiliarity of his work lends it considerable interest.  Four stars.

Summing Up

So—not a bad issue of Amazing, something one doesn’t see more than once or twice a year.  There’s even a sort of unifying theme, psychology, if you count the ostentatiously neurotic protagonist of The Gobbitch Men.  Can Amazing do it again?  Maybe even make it a trend?  The public breathlessly awaits.

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Magazine, Serial

[December 13, 1964] Save us from Yourselves (January 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

That Low

The uproar at the University of California at Berkeley continues, with student leader Mario Savio becoming instantly famous for his cri de couer: “There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

Ever see that corny old silent movie Metropolis, with its oppressed workers desperately struggling against the gigantic levers of a future civilization’s industry?  Do you think Mr. Savio might have had those scenes in mind?  Is our culture now to be dominated by the imagery of old science fiction, recycled through late-night TV?  It can’t come soon enough for me.

The Issue at Hand


by Michael Arndt

Speaking of retrograde imagery, the January Amazing leads off with what seems a striking misjudgment.  Though it features the first installment of a serial by the up-and-coming Roger Zelazny, his longest work to date, the cover is a cartoony though well-executed depiction, by newcomer Michael Arndt, of an extraterrestrial boxer being knocked out of the ring, with a Damon Runyonesque audience looking on, clearly illustrating Blue Boy by the determinedly mediocre Jack Sharkey.  Zelazny’s story is relegated to smaller type above the magazine title, with his name hard to read against a bright background.  Amazing is clearly leading from the wrong side.  (Can’t anybody here play this game?)

He Who Shapes, by Roger Zelazny


by George Schelling

Promising as it seems, I will withhold reading and commenting on Zelazny’s serial He Who Shapes until the concluding installment is at hand, as is my practice.  A look at the first few pages indicates that the story involves psychiatric treatment by mental projection—not exactly a new idea (see Peter Phillips’s Dreams Are Sacred from 1948 and John Brunner’s more recent The Whole Man), but not overly familiar either.  Zelazny also seems to be making the most of his theatrical background in this one.  We will see the results next month.

Blue Boy, by Jack Sharkey

Blue Boy is even worse than I expected.  The protagonist, formerly involved in the boxing world, has been drafted, and is sent with a large crew on a mission to Pluto, where they encounter blue-skinned humanoids, whom they clap into the brig, and hastily head back towards Earth.  The Plutonians are quite muscular and have a knack for footwork, so our protagonist gets the idea of sneaking onto Earth with one and turning him into a boxer. 


by Michael Arndt

That’s about as far as I got (halfway) in this offensively stupid and also interminable screed (34 pages but seems like much more), which is written, and padded, in a stilted and circumlocutory style which seems pretty clearly intended as a pastiche of the above-mentioned Damon Runyon.  “Why?” one might cry, but the wind only whispers . . . “one cent a word.” One star.  No stars.  Heat death of the universe.  Cessation of all brain activity.  Bring back Robert F. Young!

A Child of Mind, by Norman Spinrad


by Virgil Finlay

We return at least to the semblance of sentience with Norman Spinrad’s A Child of Mind, a clever variation on a stock SF plot.  Three guys from Survey land on a planet which seems idyllic, but of course there’s something wrong; there always is.  This time, the majority of the females of the various local fauna have cell structures indicating they are really different organisms under the skin. 

Turns out they spring from “teleplasm,” an inchoate life form whose modus vivendi is, whenever a male of any species passes by, to discern and produce his ideal mate.  Why this all-female survival strategy?  As the hero, ecologist Kelton, Socratically explains to one of the other guys:

“Who pays for a wife’s meals?”

“Her husband, of—Oh my God!”

Er . . . that’s not always how it works.  If a lioness could speak, she would have a rather different account of things, as would many other females of other species.  But never mind, because, of course, very shortly, all three crew members have their own cocoon-grown dream girls: the thuggish one has an adoring slave, the mama’s boy has a sexy mama figure, and well-balanced Kelton has a merely supernaturally beautiful mate who understands his every desire.

This road leads nowhere, of course—to species extinction, since teleplasm doesn’t breed in the usual fashion, and not even to short-term satisfaction for Kelton, to whom

“. . . Woman had always been Mystery.

“And a creature of his own mind could hold no mystery for him, only the unsatisfying illusion of it.”

So Kelton does the only sensible thing, which you can probably guess.  While Kelton’s devotion to the autonomy of Woman may be creditable, there are hints of some pretty strange attitudes drifting through the story.  At one point, as Kelton is musing about how the teleplasm women are custom-made for their men, he thinks, “Swapping them would be like swapping toothbrushes.” Earlier, Spinrad quotes a “saying among Survey men: ‘Planets are like women.  It’s not the ugly ones that are dangerous.’”

Well, let’s reserve the psychoanalysis and give the author credit for a reasonably well-turned story—but meanwhile, Mr. Spinrad, you might think about putting some women on your space crews.  Three stars.

The Hard Way, by Robert Rohrer

Robert Rohrer’s growing competence suffers a setback in The Hard Way, a one-set psychodrama starring the sadistic Lieutenant Percy, who is delivering several prisoners from a penitentiary on Earth to one on Mercury.  Unfortunately they missed the turn towards Mercury and are heading towards the Sun, to die of heat on the way.  May as well have some fun with it! thinks the Lieutenant, and offers the prisoners a choice between slowly roasting to death and opening the airlock for a faster and cleaner exit.  Contrived, cliched, scenery-chewing.  Two stars, barely, and mainly to distinguish it from the abysmal Sharkey story.

The Handyman, by Leo P. Kelley


by George Schelling

Leo P. Kelley’s The Handyman is a pleasantly inconsequential dystopia about a small town where everything seems pretty nice except for the medical facility, the Hive, which spirits sick people away to its sterile and overlit premises and forbids any medical practice but its own.  Old Doc Larkin must ply his profession covertly, masquerading as a handyman and carrying his instruments concealed in a loaf of bread newly baked by his wife.  Three stars, also barely.

The Men in the Moon, by Robert Silverberg


by Virgil Finlay

The second of Robert Silverberg’s “Scientific Hoaxes” articles is The Men in the Moon, concerning the hoax perpetrated by journalist Richard Adams Locke, who published a series of articles in the New York Sun concerning the observations of profuse flora, fauna, and people on the Moon, supposedly made by famed astronomer William Herschel from his observatory at Cape Town, South Africa.  Herschel was indeed in Cape Town but of course made no such observations and didn’t know Locke was making these claims until years later.  Like its predecessor, it’s an interesting story capably told.  Three stars.

Summing Up

So: another dose of mediocrity from this historic magazine that hasn’t done much of anything for us lately, and owes us big time, at least those of us putting down good money for it each month.  Maybe the Zelazny serial will be its redemption.  Hope springs eternal, but it’s getting tired.

[Holiday season is upon us, and Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963), on the other hand, contains some of the best science fiction of the Silver Age.  And it makes a great present! Think of it as a gift to friends…and the Journey!




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