Tag Archives: joseph whitehill

[August 9, 1960] Destructive Pages (the September 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

I've said before that I like my reading to be light and pleasant.  Not exclusively, mind you, but I find the current trend toward the depressing to be… well… depressing.  This month's F&SF is the bleakest I've yet encountered, and under normal circumstances, it would not have been to my taste.  On the other hand, being near Hiroshima on August 6 and then near Nagasaki on August 9, fifteen years after they became testing grounds for a terrible new weapon, is enough to put even the cheeriest of persons into a somber mood, and my choice of reading material proved to be quite complementary.

As usual, I lack the rights to distribute F&SF stories, so you'll just have to buy the mag if you want the full scoop, but I'll do my best to describe the stories in detail.

Poul Anderson starts things off with the The Word to Space.  In this novelette, Project OZMA, humanity's first concerted effort to scan the stars for communications broadcasts, bears almost immediate fruit, discovering a star with intelligent life just 25 light years away.  Unfortunately, the focus of these aliens is proselytizing their strange religion, and with dialogue between planets essentially impossible, a century goes by with Earth learning frustratingly little about its cosmic neighbor.  In the end, the alien theocracy is toppled when humanity requests clarification on some of the finer points of their creed; they just aren't equipped to handle religious debate.  It's too bad none of the aliens were Jewish–we love quibbling over religious details.

Then we have A Day in the Suburbs, a delightfully barbed tale by Evelyn Smith about what housewives really have to deal with when their husbands go to work.  The feuds between the "flat-roofs" and the "peaked-roofs" make the squabbles of the Jets and the Sharks seem like a square dance.  It's a wonder any of them come out alive.

Burton Raffel's Goodbye is the first of the truly dark stories, in which a young ad exec is waylaid, imprisoned, and tortured, all to prove the efficacy of a five-day identity-removal process.  The tale is disturbingly personal, and there is never any explanation as to why this is being done or why the protagonist was chosen (he is apparently not the first, and he surely won't be the last).  Awful stuff… but then, it was meant to be.

Button, Button, by Gordon Dickson, seems almost out of place in this issue.  It's a straightforward story about a crude-mouthed boss of a space freight union, and the beautiful, fiery opera singer he rescues halfway between Earth and Venus.  Enjoyable, but it won't stay with you.

Reginald Bretnor offers up The Man on Top, about a stubborn mountaineer who, through sheer determination, makes it to the summit of one of the world's tallest mountains… only to find that someone has beaten him to the punch.  Mysticism: 1; British pluck: 0.

Isaac Asimov has a sequel, of sorts, to his article on pi.  This one is on the impossibility of "squaring the circle," which is the creation of a square with the same area of a given circle using only a straight-edge and a compass.  I'm glad the good doctor wrote this piece since it's a topic about which I've always been interested. 

On to Damon Knight's acerbic review of Walden Two.  It is, apparently, the last F&SF will see from Mr. Knight–per the editor, he will no longer be reviewing books for the magazine.  I hear, through the grapevine, that it is because Editor Robert Mills disapproved of Knight's justifiably savage critique of Judy Merril's latest book, The Tomorrow People.

Returning to fiction, we have George Elliot's The NRACP (The National Relocation Authority: Colored Persons).  If you find Goodbye to be dark, NRACP is midnight coated in pitch.  It is the portrayal of the systematic extermination of a people, from the point of view of one who has an indirect role in its execution.  I was not surprised to find that this story was originally written in 1949, when the Holocaust was still a fresh wound on the human psyche, and the existence of Israel, a refuge for those who escaped the gas chambers, was still in doubt.  For anyone who wonders how such a tragedy could occur in a civilized country, I suggest giving this tale a read. 

That brings us to Kit Reed's somehow unfinished-feeling Two in Homage, about an evil, human-sacrifice demanding God , upon whom the tables are ultimately turned.  I really should try to meet Ms. Reed someday.  We do live in the same town, after all.

Wrapping up the issue is Joseph Whitehill's Doctor Royker's Experiment.  How best to dissuade an idealist who feels science and scientists can do no wrong?  Why, make him the butt of a scientist's prank, of course.  Resentment cools even the strongest ardor.

Editor Mills saves his column for last.  In it, he asks of if we readers prefer magazines to include stories all of a type or if we prefer a greater variegation of themes.  Regardless of what we think, I gather from reading between Mills' lines that he prints what he gets, and the wave of unhappy tales is largely out of his (and our) control.  I was able to take it this time.  Here's hoping it doesn't become F&SF's signature trait.

And for those following my travels, I am currently at Tokyo's busy international airport awaiting my turn to board a sleek new Japan Air Lines DC-8 bound for home.  It's been a great trip, but I'm ready to return to familiar surroundings.  I imagine I've a huge pile of mail from my fans accumulated (and by fans, I mean advertisers and bill-collectors).

Stay tuned!

[March 26, 1960] Among the Best (April 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction regularly beats out the other regular digests in terms of consistent quality.  This month's, April 1960, is no exception.

There's a lot to cover, so let's dive right in:

Daniel Keyes, who wrote the superb Flowers for Algernon, has returned with the issue's lead novelette, Crazy Maro.  Our viewpoint character is an attorney who has been contracted by unseen agents from the future to secure psychically adept (and invariably disadvantaged) children for work in a later time.  The fellow meets his match, however, when he is asked to recruit the titular Maro, a young black man with an uncanny talent for reading the emotions of others.  Much of the novelette is a mystery story, with the lawyer trying to puzzle out the root of Maro's power.  It's a powerful piece, assuredly, though the very end is unnecessarily melodramatic.

Another serious piece is The Hairy Thunderer by "Levi Crow" (Manly Wade Wellman in disguise).  The writing is deceptively simplistic, describing the arrival of a hairy pale foreigner to the lands of an American Indian tribe.  The European commences to ensnare the tribe with his boom stick and, more effectively and terribly, his firewater.  A young man of the tribe, Lone Arrow, is able to resist him with the magical assistance of a certain eight-legged class of arthropods.

The moral of the story, that one should be kind to spiders for they are misunderstood but fundamentally good creatures, is one that resonates strongly.  I'm always hoping that, when I die, the Spider Gods will look favorably upon me for the compassion and mercy I have shown Their Kind.

G.C. Edmondson's forgettable short story, Ringer features a fellow who is replaced by a robotic doppelganger.  The twist is that the viewpoint is always that character, whether in human or android form.

The incomparable Edgar Pangborn brings us The Wrens in Grampa's Bears, in which "Grampa," the narrator's Great Grandfather, hosts a brood of beneficient angels within his long beard.  Their existence is only hinted at, and the story is mostly a mood piece capturing the sunset of an old man's life in the Summer of '58, a man whose memories encompass both Gettysburg and satellites.  Yet, the theme of the tale is not how much things have changed, but how they stay essentially the same. 

A Certain Room, a short by Ken Kusenberg, translated from German by Therese Pol, is a silly, archaic piece.  What happens when you fiddle with the objects in a room that have a causal connection to bigger, worldwide events?  Not much good.

George Elliott has the issue's second novelette, the fantasy-less, science-fiction-less, but nevertheless compelling Among the Dangs.  It is a mock account of an anthropologist's sojourn amongst the fictional Dang tribe of Ecuador.  Enlisted for his talent for mimicry and his dark skin, the protagonist spends years living with the Dang, learning their customs and even taking a wife, so that he can become one of their high prophets.  His initial motivation is to compose a thesis for an advanced degree.  But so complete is his indoctrination that it is only through a titanic force of will that he breaks free, and the experience forever marks him. 

The piece originally appeared a couple of years back in Esquire, and it is a strange story to find within the covers of F&SF.  On the other hand, while the content is neither science fictional nor fantastic, there is a certain flavor to it that allows it to fit nicely in the middle of this issue.  I'm not complaining for its inclusion.

I'm not sure what to do with Rosel George Brown.  I really want to like her, but she has this tendency toward first-person pieces featuring scatterbrained housewives.  Their situations are tediously conventional and exhaustingly frenetic.  I have to wonder if the stories aren't semi-autobiographical.  A Little Human Contact continues in this vein, and while it's not horrible, it is still not the masterpiece I know Brown is capable of.  Of course, I may be looking in the wrong place–Amazing and Fantastic are still around, and I understand she's due to be published there soon. 

Isaac Asimov has an excellent non-fiction piece this month, It's About Time, describing the evolution and fundamental incompatibility of our various calendar systems.  The conclusion: trust the astronomers and go with Julian dating.

I won't spoil Joseph Whitehill's In the House, Another since it's a one-trick pony.  Cute, though.

Rounding out the issue is Gordy Dickson's latest novelette, The Game of Five.  It is strangely reminiscent of his earlier The Man in the Mailbag, but it's not as good.  Both stories involve a man infiltrating an alien culture to rescue a captured woman.  In both stories, it quickly turns out that the situations are more complex than they seem at first blush.  In both stories, the "captured" woman turns out to be an agent of some kind.

But though Five is competently written, the Hercule Poirot moment, that bit at the end where the hero explains the mystery, is not supported strongly enough by clues in the narrative.  The world is also not as interesting as the one depicted in Mailbag.  Unlike the former title, I don't this one will get nominated for any Hugos.  Not that it's bad, mind you—just not up to the bar Dickson has set for himself.

That's it for April 1960.  I have a whole new crop of magazines and books to review for next month.  I also have far more time to devote to the column now that I am between day jobs.  Cry not for me—it was a decision long coming and well worth it. 

In the meantime, before we get onto things fictional, I have some scientific news with exciting science fiction ramifications…

…but you'll just have to wait two days for it!




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