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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[January 20, 1967] Sag in the middle (February Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Tossing and turning

When I was a kid, I had (like everyone else) a cotton-filled mattress. In a lot of ways, I was lucky. I was a skinny kid so I didn't weigh much, and I was just as lief to sleep on the rug as in a bed, so I wasn't picky about where I lay down. Plus, bedbugs weren't a problem in sunny El Centro. They hated the lack of air conditioning as much as we did. So that ol' mattress did me fine.

But I got spoiled by my first innerspring in the 50s. That's sleeping comfort.

The only problem with coil mattresses, of course, is that after a while (unless you managed to stay teen skinny into your middle years) the middle sags. Eventually, you're in this little self-made pit. Oh your aching back!

The latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction is a bit like a saggy mattress.  It's great at the ends, but the middle is the absolute pits.

It started so well


by Chesley Bonestell

The Hall of the Dead, by L. Sprague de Camp and Robert E. Howard

Robert E. Howard is having the best decade in a long time.  It's a pity he's not around to enjoy it, having passed away more than 30 years ago.  But his mighty thewed creation "Conan", warrior of Hyboria, has found new life in the hands of famed Fantasist L. Sprague de Camp.  In addition to compiling (and lightly editing) Howard's old stories for a pair of collections, which Cora will be reviewing in two days, Sprague has also taken unfinished pieces and raw outlines and given the bones flesh.

The Hall of the Dead was only a 650 word outline when Sprague found it.  It is now an intriguing new novelette in the Conan canon, one that I found every bit as exciting as the various pieces I've found in old pulps. 

It's a tale set very early in Conan's life.  He is on the run from the wicked city of Shadazar, a company of police soldiers on his tail led by the Aquilonian mercenary, Nestor.  Conan seeks refuge in the cursed dead city of Larsha.  There, he and Nestor must team up to face a variety of horrors, living and dead.  The reward if they succeed?  Treasure beyond imagining!

It's great, riproaring stuff.  More please.

Four stars.


by Gahan Wilson

A Walk in the Wet, by Dennis Etchison

The lone survivor of a spacewreck is haunted by more than the deaths of dozens.  For, as a telepath, he experienced the fatalites as well as witnessed them.  Now faced with the truth of how he became the mutant he is, the spacer has taken on a grisly mission…if only he can remain sober long enough to carry it out.

That summary makes this sound like a pretty good story.  It's not.  It's impenetrable and rather disgusting.  I suppose its lone virtue is that it's memorable.

One star.

The Next Step, by E. A. Moore

On an overcrowded world, the only hope for humanity is colonizing the stars.  It turns out that the inevitable leukemia that the settlers acquire on their relativistic jaunts is the key to their transcending their physical form and becoming one with the universe.

In addition to being rather amateurishly written, this story requires a lot of leaps of faith.  I have trouble buying the premise that cancer is actually a beneficial development.

Two stars.

The Song of the Morrow, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Ferman is really scraping the barrel if he has to go back 70 years for a piece.  In this vignette, wide-eyed princess meets a crone on a beach, is told many things that come true, and the maid ultimately becomes the next crone.

I like poetic stuff as much as the next person, but this one didn't do it for me.

Two stars.

The Intelligent Computer, Ted Thomas

As usual, Ted starts with an interesting premise (how do you copyright/patent something developed by a computer?) and utterly flubs it.  Mr. Thomas needs to write a real article or stop writing these half-efforts.

Two stars.

The Little People (Part 2 of 3), by John Christopher

The serial continues.  Last month took us to a run-down hostel in rural Ireland where a collection of eight neurotics discovered what they thought was one of The Little People.

In this chapter, we learn that the foot-tall girl and her friends are not faerie folk at all, but something much more sinister–the result of a Nazi experiment in longevity. 

I honestly have no idea where this story is going to end up.  I am still enjoying it, though perhaps not quite so much as last time.

Four stars.

Impossible, That's All, by Isaac Asimov

In this month's article (the Good Doctor's 100th… and we've covered all save the first!), Dr. A talks about why it's impossible to go faster than light, and why we should all just stop bugging him about it.

It's a good piece, particularly in talking about how our advancements in science serve to refine models rather than completely overthrow them (q.v. Newton to Einstein).  On the other hand, sometimes model changes are revolutionary.  Discovering subatomic particles didn't change the life of the average citizen…until we used the knowledge to make atomic bombs and reactors.  We now seem to be on the edge of a revolution in sub-sub-atomic physics as we speak, giving rhyme and reason to the veritable zoo of particles, just as subatomic theory made sense of Medeleev's periodic table.  Who knows if that will result in discoveries in previously impossible fields such as antigravity and faster than light travel?

Asimov is facile, but I suspect he's missing something.  Three stars.

Blackmail, by Fred Hoyle

The champion of out-of-date theories (e.g. "Steady State") offers up this bizarre little fantasy in which a fellow learns to communicate with animals.  Turns out all they want to do is watch people beat each other up on television.  Think of the effect on the Nielsen's!

Forgettable fluff.  Two stars.

Falling out

This sunken mess of a mattress garners a lousy 2.6 stars.  That's still better than most of the other mags out this month, which tells you how bad our job here at the Journey can be.

That said, between the Conan and the Christopher (not to mention Merril's column and Asimov's article), more than half of this month's issue is worth a read.

I'll just have to learn to sleep on the edges, that's all!




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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

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by Gideon Marcus

Joke's on me

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

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

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

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

No laughing matter


by Howard Purcell

Sabotage, by Christopher Anvil

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

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

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

Two stars.


by Gahan Wilson

The Mystery of the Purloined Grenouilles, by Gerald Jonas

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

Two stars.

Doubting Thomas, by Thomas M. Disch

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

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

The Martian Atmosphere, by Theodore L. Thomas

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

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

Two stars.

Von Goom's Gambit, by Victor Contoski

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

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

Three stars.

The Green Snow, by Miriam Allen deFord

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

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

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

The Gods, by L. Sprague de Camp

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

Four stars.

The Symbol-Minded Chemist, by Isaac Asimov

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

Four stars.

Bumberboom, by Avram Davidson

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

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

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

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

The punchline

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

No joke!


Not me this month.



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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 22, 1966] True Idols (the Isaac Asimov issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

The Good Doctor

If generations are measured in 20 year spans, then science fiction is entering its third generation.  It all started with Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and the other more speculative pulps of the mid 1920s.  By the 40s, we were in what folks are calling the "Golden Age", when Astounding ruled the roost.  Since then, we've had what I'd call the "Silver Age" (or perhaps the "Digest Age" or the "Galactic Age") and are just starting one called the "New Wave".

The pulp age is now so long ago that we've already lost some of its more prominent writers: Doc Smith passed away last year, Ray Cummings was gone by 1957, Robert Howard and H.P. Lovecraft didn't make it out of the 1930s.  Others are still alive and well…and still active: Murray Leinster, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, Clifford Simak, Frank Bellknap Long, Hugo Gernsback.

The Golden Age spawned a new crop of greats, from Leigh Brackett to John W. Campbell, jr.  And there may be no author of that era of bigger stature, greater prolificity, not to mention bottom line, than Isaac Asimov.

One can say a lot about Isaac.  Garrulous, idiosyncratic, a workaholic, too pushy with his "harmless" romantic advances.  But also brilliant, thoughtful, charming (at least in print).  Love him or hate him, there's no question that he's left his mark on the field — from Nightfall, to I, Robot, to Foundation.  For twenty years, Asimov turned out SF stories with incredible reliability.  Then, with the launch of Sputnik, he turned his pen mostly to science fact.  He's found a permanent home at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, to that publication's credit.  Asimov also churns out a flood of science books for the mass market.  There's really no category of the Dewey Decimal System this fellow hasn't touched upon.  He's an inspiration (a cautionary tale?) to us all.

So it was perhaps inevitable that F&SF would devote an issue to this titan of the genre.  If you can get past the over-the-top cover — but it's nice to see EMSH back — then a decent mag awaits.  Especially at 50 cents, which is cheap these days for a digest.

The Man Behind the Curtain


by Ed Emshwiller

The Key, by Isaac Asimov

First up is Asimov's first new SF story of significant length in quite some time.  Two geologists stumble upon an alien artifact during a selenological expedition.  Its ramifications for humanity are profound, so much so that the two have a lethal brawl.  One escapes to hide the artifact before dying.

He leaves this clue:

It's up to Wendell Urth, the agoraphobe protagonist of several F&SF stories from the mid 1950s, to crack the case.

The beginning is pretty gripping, and I'm happy to say I got some of the clues.  But it boils down to a rather abstruse puzzle with a bit too much punning for my taste.

Three stars.

You Can't Beat Brains, by L. Sprague de Camp

Sprague's short bio of his friend, Isaac, is not entirely flattering, but it does spotlight Asimov's undoubtedly prodigious intellect.

Three stars.

Isaac Asimov: A Bibliography, by Isaac Asimov

If you ever wanted to know what Asimov has been up to (besides chasing skirts) for the last thirty years, this is a good ledger.  25 science fiction books (two of which the Journey has covered), three pages of short stories, three more pages of non-fiction articles (most of which the Journey has covered), and 30+ nonfiction books.

Whereas I've got just two books and four stories (and a thousand non-fiction articles) to my credit.  Ah well.  I'm still young.

Portrait of the Writer as a Boy, by Isaac Asimov

For this month's non-fiction article, Asimov takes on his favorite subject — himself!  Actually, I appreciated this glimpse into the world of science fiction reading and writing in the late 30s.  It's an era I missed, despite having been born just a few months before Asimov (not having gotten into STF in a big way until ~1950).  Perhaps he'll some day use this article as a nucleus for an autobiography.  He's written everything else.

Four stars.

The Prime of Life, by Isaac Asimov

Here's a mildly diverting poem about being a legend in his own time, but too young yet to be taken seriously.

Three stars.


by Gahan Wilson

The Mirror, by Arthur Porges

You didn't think it was going to be all about Asimov, did you?  Sure, he did, but you?

Mr. Porges offers up a paint-by-numbers piece of macabre about an old mansion with a spooky looking glass over the mantle.  The setup and the telling were quite good, but the ending was second-tier early days FSF — or maybe even earlier pulp.

Three stars.

Come Back Elena, by Vic Chapman

The science fictional notion of storing memories in a computer and then inserting them into an android or biological blank slate has been around a while.  This latest take from a new author starts quite promisingly.  A grieving husband finds his wife's doppleganger a decade after the wife's death.  She agrees to contribute sufficient biological material such that he can quick grow a new body as a vessel for her stored memories.  But, of course, All Does Not Go Well.

There's a novel's worth of premise to explore here: is it murder to displace the personality of a human being, even one that has been alive for just a few days?  Is the resulting person a new persona or a ressurrection of the old?  What are the legal ramifications, for the subject and the experimenter?

Chapman avoids all of these, instead turning in a rather humdrum "shock" ending.  It's a pity because the first half is quite strong.

Three stars.

Something in It, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Vignette on the immovable faith of a missionary encountering the irresistible force of an indigene's religion. 

Blink and you'll miss it.  Three stars.

The Picture Window, by Jon DeCles

"There's nothing new under the Sun."  So complains an industrialist to his artist friend.  Or should I say "former" friend as the dam the capitalist has erected is flooding out the beloved valley the painter has made his home.  The artist bets his ex-buddy $50,000 that he can make a truly new piece of art.

What he creates is…well, you be the judge.

Jon (he's a friend, so I call him Jon, even though that's not his actual name) has created a story that is, in execution, something of the opposite to Chapman's and Porges'.  It starts out a bit rocky, all shouty dialogue, but the latter half is memorable.

I'll take a good ending over a good beginning.  Four stars.

Burning Question, by Brian W. Aldiss

Speaking of memorable, here's a story snatched right from the front page.  An inhabited world far from Earth is soon to be a way station to the stars in a galactic continuation of the Cold War.  The indigenes have decided they would rather immolate themselves in protest than tolerate our base.  One sympathetic colonel's attempts to sway the American authorities to give in to native demands just this once fall on deaf ears.

There's some good philosophical stuff in here, and maybe some lessons for Lyndon.  Four stars.

An Extraordinary Child, by Sally Daniell

Lastly, a piece by another newcomer.  This one involves a child with a handicap of the mind.  He is brilliant, but tuned to another wavelength — one that allows him to see the little people.  Only these brownies/faeries/elves all speak like Beatniks, and they have murder on their mind.

Our Esteemed Editor has noted that woman authors are far more likely to have children featured in their stories.  I had high hopes for this one, a well-written piece portraying a sympathetic child with a mental aberration.  Unfortunately, it settles for cheap thrills rather than profound statements.

Three stars.  Maybe next time.

What's Up, Doc?

All told, this Asimovian issue is not one for the ages.  Part of the problem is the two newcomers are not stellar, and Asimov is a bit rusty.  That leaves just a couple of veterans to contribute comparatively good stories, and an old grognard to turn in…a typically unimpressive piece.

Perhaps Isaac deserves better than this.  Or perhaps, like a revue show featuring an over-the-hill performer, it's exactly what one would expect.

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 22, 1965] Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (November 1965 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Days of Our Lives

I'm stealing the name of a new soap opera, due to premiere on NBC next month, because it sums up the way that past, present, and future came together in the news this month.

Yale University put an item known as the Vinland Map on public display on October 12. This is a map of the world, said to date back to the Fifteenth Century, which seems to indicate that Norsemen visited the Americas long before Christopher Columbus. In case you're wondering about the date, it was Columbus Day, in a nice bit of irony.


A detail of the Vinland Map. That's Greenland to the right, and a chunk of North America to the left.

As you might expect, there's controversy over whether this is the real thing or a forgery. Today, nobody knows for sure if this visitor from yesterday is genuine, but maybe we'll find out tomorrow.

If authentic, the Vinland Map is a voice from the past. In a similar way, folks in the present are trying to send a message to the future.

On October 16, the penultimate day of the New York World's Fair, a time capsule was lowered into the ground. (A similar object was buried nearby, during the 1939 World's Fair.) It is scheduled to be opened in the year 6939. (I'm a little skeptical as to whether such a thing can really survive and be found nearly five thousand years from now, but I like the idea.) The contents include . . . well, see for yourself.


People in that distant era will also know that we weren't very careful about spelling.

The Beatles seem destined to represent the artistic achievements of our time, if somebody actually finds the time capsule, opens it, and figures out how to play a record. They are once again at the top of the American popular music charts this month, and show no signs of leaving that position any time soon.

The latest smash from the Liverpool lads is, appropriately, called Yesterday. Unlike their other hits, it's a slow, melancholy song about lost love. Paul McCartney plays acoustic guitar and sings, backed by a string quartet. The other Beatles do not perform on the record, so it's really a McCartney solo performance.


By the way, Act Naturally is a remake of a Number One song by Buck Owens. The Beatles go Country-Western!

Flipping Through the Calendar

Given the peculiarities of the publishing business, it's no surprise that I'm reading the November issue of Fantastic in October. With their policy of filling about half the magazine with reprints, it's also not a shock to discover that we go back in time to fill up the pages. First up, however, is a new story set in a strange world that mixes up the past and the present.


Cover art by Julian S. Krupa. It's actually taken from the back cover of the July 1939 issue of Amazing Stories.


Look familiar? We'll hear more about the Space Devastator later.

Axe and Dragon (Part One of Three), by Keith Laumer


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

Our hero is one Lafayette O'Leary, an ordinary working stiff, living in a crummy boarding house. He has a lot of intellectual curiosity, performing experiments in his tiny room and reading obscure books. He happens to find a Nineteenth Century volume on hypnotism, and learns about a technique whereby he can experience a dreaming state, while remaining aware that he is dreaming, and exercising some control over it.

(This isn't so crazy a premise as it might seem. More than fifty years ago, the Dutch psychiatrist Frederik Willem van Eeden coined the term lucid dream for such states of mind.)

Of course, he gives it a try. He winds up in a world that seems to be a bit medieval, a touch Eighteenth Century, a tad modern, and partly straight out of a fairy tale. The limitations on his ability to alter this dream world — if that's what it is — show up when he tries to give himself a set of fancy modern clothes, and winds up dressed like somebody in a swashbuckling movie.


Lafayette, ready for action.

At first, he enjoys the situation, happily replacing the lousy wine in a tavern with fine Champagne. Thought to be a wizard, he gets mixed up with the local equivalent of the cops. Still thinking this is just a dream, he tries to disappear, with only partial success.


Our hero tries to vanish, but can't quite do it.

Lafayette winds up in the palace of the King, where he is thought to be a prophesized hero, destined to save the realm from an ogre and a dragon. He also meets the King's magician, who seems to know more about what's going on than he admits. For one thing, he's responsible for the steam-powered coaches and electric lights in this otherwise nontechnological world.


The magician looks on as Lafayette admires himself.

Eventually, our hero meets the King's beautiful daughter, as well as the master swordsman who is her current boyfriend. Jealousy rears its head, and a challenge to a duel arises.

Lafayette assumes that his opponent, like everybody else in this world, is just a product of his imagination. Therefore, he reasons, the foe can't really be any better with a sword than he is. It looks like he might be in for an unpleasant surprise.


Tune in again for the next exciting chapter!

So far, at least, the tone of this novel is very light. Laumer almost seems to be parodying his own tales of the Imperium, with the protagonist finding himself in alternate realities. Unlike those serious stories, this one is a comedy. The people inhabiting the dream world speak in a mixture of archaic language and modern slang. The police are about as effective as the Keystone Kops. It's entertaining enough to keep me reading, but hardly profound.

Three stars.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Ray Bradbury

The rest of the magazine consists of stuff from the old days, both the prose and the art. First we have a piece with a title that is fitting for my chosen theme. It comes from the May 1947 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones, for what looks like a very odd story.

The protagonist is a would-be writer, reduced to pawning his typewriter due to his failure to find his way into print. (Surely based on the author's own early years, I assume.) He comes home to find a strange device. It sends him messages from the far future.


Illustration by Virgil Finlay.

Tomorrow's world is a dreary place, under the rule of a brutal dictator. A woman sent the machine back in time, insisting that the writer kill the remote ancestors of the tyrant. If he doesn't, the woman will be executed. If he does, the future will change, and she won't remember him at all. Since he's fallen in love with her, he will lose her either way. Besides this dilemma, he faces the moral crisis of murdering two innocent people.

This early work shows Bradbury developing his style, although it is not yet fully formed. You may think that's a good thing or a bad thing. Either way, it's got some emotional appeal, some passages of poetic writing, some implausibilities, and some lapses in logic. The ethical problem at the heart of the story — would you kill Hitler's ancestors? — is an important one, but here it's mostly used as a plot point.

Three stars.

I'm Looking for "Jeff", by Fritz Leiber

From the Fall 1952 issue of Fantastic comes this horror story, created by a master of the macabre (and other things.)


Cover art by Leo Summers. The Capote story is his very early work Miriam, which is a fine, eerie tale.

A bartender claims that a mysterious woman shows up regularly, although the owner of the joint can't see her. The reader is aware right from the start that she's a ghost.


Illustration by Emsh.

She uses her feminine wiles to pick up a customer, offering her affection in return for a promise to do something particularly violent to somebody named Jeff. The fellow, entrapped by her seductive charms — even the scar that runs across her face doesn't mar her beauty — agrees. He encounters Jeff, and makes a terrifying discovery.

There are no surprises in this variation on the classic theme of vengeance from beyond the grave. What elevates it above the usual ghost story is truly fine writing. The woman's first appearance, when she is a barely detectable wisp, is particularly fascinating.

Four stars.

Wild Talents, Inc., by Robert Sheckley

The September/October 1953 issue of Fantastic supplies this comic yarn.


Cover art also by Leo Summers, what little you can see of it.

As you'd expect, the company named in the title deals with people who have psychic powers. It's pretty much an employment agency for such folks. Their latest client presents a problem.


Illustration by Emsh

It seems the fellow can observe anyone, at any location. Unfortunately, he's very much an oddball. His only interest is in recording their sexual activities in excruciating detail. The guy in charge of the company has to figure out a way to protect the public from this Peeping Tom, while making use of his peculiar ability in an acceptable way.

The whole thing is pretty much a mildly dirty, mildly clever, mildly amusing joke. You might see it as a spoof of the kind of psi-power stories that appear in Analog far too often. A minor effort from an author who is capable of much sharper satire.

Two stars.

Tooth or Consequences, by Robert Bloch

Another comedy, this time from the May 1950 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Arnold Kohn

It starts off like a joke. A vampire walks into a dentist's office . . .. It seems even the undead need to have their cavities filled. The vampire also swipes blood from the supply kept refrigerated in the same medical building. When the red stuff is then secured under lock and key, to prevent further thefts, the vampire tells the dentist he better get some of it for him, or else. There's a twist at the end you may see coming.

I suppose there's a certain Charles Addams appeal to the image of a fanged monster sitting in a dentist's chair. Otherwise, there's not much to this bagatelle.

Two stars.

The Eye of Tandyla, by L. Sprague de Camp

We go back to the May 1951 issue of Fantastic Adventures for this sword-and-sorcery yarn, one of a handful of stories in the author's Pusadian series. (The best-known one is probably the novel The Tritonian Ring, also from 1951.)


Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones

The setting is far back in time, long before recorded history. (The story goes that de Camp wanted to create a background similar to the one appearing in Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan, but in a more realistic fashion.) A wizard and a warrior must steal a magical gem from the statue of a goddess for their King, or be executed. Their plan involves disguising themselves with sorcery and sneaking into the place.


Illustration by Virgil Finlay.

To their amazement, it proves to be really easy to grab the jewel. So simple, in fact, that they smell a rat. They cook up a scheme to put the gem back in its place, steal a similar one from another place, and present that one to the King instead. Complications ensue.

You can tell that this isn't the most serious story in the world. The plot resembles a farce, with its multiple confusions and running back and forth. It's got the wit often found in Fritz Leiber's work of this kind, but not quite the same elegance. I'd say it's above the level of John Jakes, or even — dare I say it? — Howard himself, if not quite up to the very high standard of Leiber.

Three stars.

Close Behind Him, by John Wyndham

The January/February issue of Fantastic is the source of this chiller.


Cover art by Robert Frankenberg. The so-called new story by Poe is actually Robert Bloch's completion of a fragment.

Two crooks rob the house of a very strange fellow. The guy catches one of them in the act, so the hoodlum kills him.


Illustration by Paul Lundy.

The pair make their getaway, but are followed by blood-red footprints wherever they go. You can bet things won't go well for them.

This is a pretty decent horror story, nicely written, although — once again! — not up to the level of Fritz Leiber, particularly since we've got an example of his excellent work in the field of tales of terror in this very issue.

Three stars.

Space Devastator, by Anonymous

I'm not sure if I should even mention this tiny article, excerpted from the pages of the July 1939 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Robert Fuqua.

Anyway, it's less than a page long, and speculates about a huge station in orbit, equipped with a bunch of big mirrors.


Illustration by Julian S. Krupa

The notion is that such a thing could destroy entire populations from space by focusing the sun's rays and burning up cities. Casual mention is made of the fact that it could supply solar energy as well. I suppose it's imaginative for 1939, but it's so short — the original version was probably somewhat longer — that you can't get much out of it.

Two stars.

What Day is Good for You?

Today comes out a big winner over Yesterday and Tomorrow in this month's Fantastic. Leiber's contemporary ghost story is clearly superior to tales set in the future or in the legendary past. Otherwise, this isn't that great an issue, ranging from OK to below average.

You might well get more entertainment out of an award-winning film, such as this Italian comedy, which got the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film last year. Sophia Loren plays three different women, and Marcello Mastroianni three men, in a trio of lighthearted tales of love.


For some reason, every poster I've seen for this movie features Loren in her underwear. I wonder why that might be.

And you'll definitely enjoy the next exciting musical guest episode of The Journey Show, October 24 at 1PM Pacific!




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[May 18, 1965] Rubber Ball (or Skip the End) (June 1965 Fantasy & Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Bouncin' Back to You

Cast your memories back to the distant past — about four years. Remember when Bobby Vee exploded on the scene with his first hit, Rubber Ball.

It's a song about a fellow who should know better than to stick with an untrue love but, like a rubber ball, keeps coming back to her anyhow.  The tune came to my mind more than once as I read this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction, a magazine that has plumbed depths often enough to tempt me to cancel my subscription, but on occasion (like this one) produces such an excellent issue that I remember the good times of the 1950s, and love is rekindled.

Is it the doing of new editor Joe Ferman?  Statistical variation?  Either way, it was a pleasure to read.  Come join me and see why:

Bounce my heart around


by James Roth

Admiralty, by Poul Anderson

We begin with an ending of sorts, the conclusion to the exploits of Gunnar Heim, late of the Federation Navy, now a privateer savaging the Aleriona patch of stars known as The Phoenix.  His goal, to prosecute an undeclared war to liberate the conquered human world of New Europe before its inhabitants run out of Vitamin C, is about to come to fruition.  But how can one ship achieve victory against a starfaring empire?  More personally, will an old flame of Heim's be waiting for him planetside when all is said and done?

Admiralty is Anderson near the top of his form, which, like a sine wave, has definite positive and negative amplitudes.  What makes the piece frustrating is its incompleteness.  This novella and the other two that have recently appeared in F&SF are about to be compiled into a book called The Star Fox, and I strongly suspect that there will be expansions above and beyond what has appeared in the magazines.  Indeed, some of the most exciting episodes in Admiralty, like the capture of the Aleriona prize, Meroeth, are dispatched in a paragraph or two of exposition.  What remains is something of a Readers Digest abridged version — entertaining but dissatisfying.

Also, I wish Anderson wouldn't assume that we all speak French; there are paragraphs and paragraphs of the stuff that go largely untranslated.  I'm going to start sending him letters in Japanese…

Anyway, four stars, for this and the whole sequence, and I suspect the book will be even better.  Certainly Hugo material.

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, by Fredric Brown and Carl Onspaugh

Dooley Hanks, a clarinetist of modest talent but tremendous desire, scours the world looking (listening?) for The Sound.  When he finds it, in an obscure town in Germany, the temptation to claim it for his own becomes overpowering…and hazardous.

A powerful story, evocative and beautifully told, it's the kind of reworked fable Robert F. Young wishes he could write.

Five stars.


by Gahan Wilson — better than his previous ones

Books, by Judith Merril

Normally, I don't give inches to the book column, but Ms. Merril is cutting and insightful in a way I can only hope to approximate. Don't miss her take on the latest SF to cross her desk (many of which have been covered by the Journey).

Rake, by Ron Goulart

Ben Jolson, shape-changing agent of the Chameleon Corps, is back for another adventure.  This time, in the guise of a student, he's investigating the development of a super-weapon by an academic ensconced at a public college.

This tale is far more obviously slapstick than his previous one, which I had quite liked.  Rake is just too silly, too random to be very good, and there's no reason for such a short piece to begin in medias res followed by a flashback to How It All Began.

Two stars.

Phoenix (the Science Springboard), by Theodore L. Thomas

Normally, Thomas' non-fiction vignettes, more story seed than article, aren't worth the two pages they're printed on.  This time, I quite liked his postulation that at the center of every gas giant lies a terrestrial core.  I don't know if it's accurate; I don't know how we could verify the accuracy, but it is an exciting idea that the planets of the solar system all started out as roughly similar planetoids that grew atmospheres as time went on.  Only the inner ones lost theirs because it was too warm so close to the Sun.

Of course, it's easy to make models that fit the one set of data we have.

Four stars, anyway.

The Ancient Last, by Herb Lehrman

The first of two reader-submitted stories fulfilling the call for tales involving Univac and Unicorns.  This is the more poetic of the pair.  Interestingly, its poignant ending is somewhat marred by two additional paragraphs; because the offending superfluity occurs on a following page, I didn't originally see them, and I thought the ending was stronger than it ended up being.

Funny enough, I was recently rejected by F&SF, whose editor suggested I trim out my terminal line to give the ending more punch.  I did.  We'll see how it does.

Stand-In, by Greg Benford

Another first from a fellow San Diego native.  This Univac/Unicorn story is more swinging and fun, but not particularly consequential.

I give three stars to both.  I'm glad the authors got their breaks and I hope this sets them on their way to stardom.

Story of a Curse, by Doris Pitkin Buck

Earth spacers are forever restless in search of change, intolerant of stagnation.  But when Earth, itself, has changed, the astronauts see the folly of their wanderlust.

Long on emotion, short on coherence, Story is more prose-poem than science fiction.  I liked it well enough, though.  Three stars.

Nabonidus, by L. Sprague de Camp

Archaeologist meets a ghostly colleague of ancient vintage.  This poem has a strange meter, but again, it's appealing.  Three stars.

Future? Tense!, by Isaac Asimov

In a surprise disappointment, the science column is probably my least favorite piece of the issue.  The Good Doctor begins by relating how on-the-spot he feels when asked to predict the future, then says he'll do it anyway, and then doesn't really do it at all.

At a recent bookstore interview, I was asked if a science fiction story's value is based on its predictive accuracy.  I felt that the answer I gave ("No — its value is in how well it entertains; science fiction can't predict the future; it can only extrapolate current trends.") was better and more succinct than the one Dr. A offers.

Two stars.

Of Time and the Yan, by Roger Zelazny

The Last Man of Earth meets the Last Man of Mars; unfortunately, time is not on the side of humanity.

Zelazny increasingly makes his stories more affectedly "literate."  It may get his stories sold, but it's getting tedious.  Two stars.  (Your hue and cry tells me I'm a too-harsh boor.  I do not disagree.)

Jabez O'Brien and Davy Jones' Locker, by Robert Arthur

Lastly, here is the tale of a young New England fisherman who seeks to win fame, fortune, wisdom and happiness through the capture of a mermaid.  Instead, he winds up…well, best not to spoil this gem of a story.

It's an absolutely charming work, the best I've seen from Mr. Arthur, and made all the better for my imagining it being narrated by Fractured Fairy Tale's Edward Everett Horton (now you'll have his voice in your head, too!)

Five stars.

My heartstrings, they just snap

In the end, even this issue bounces around like a rubber ball, but the pages of quality far outnumber the momentary lapses.  The June 1965 issue of F&SF is a stand-out…and my love is rekindled.

Don't break my heart, Joe!

Don't forget to register for our show on May 23 at 1PM DT!  We really want to see you there and hear your questions.





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Magazine

[April 22, 1965] Cracker Jack issue (May 1965 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

A surprise at the bottom

I'm sure everyone's familiar with America's snack, as ubiquitous at ball games as beer and hotdogs.  As caramel corn goes, it's pretty mediocre stuff, though once you start eating, you find you can't stop.  And the real incentive is the prize waiting for you at the bottom of the box.  Will it be a ring?  A toy or a little game?  Maybe a baseball card.

This month, like most months recently, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is kind of like a box of Cracker Jacks.  But the prize at the end of the May 1965 issue is worth the chore of getting there.

A handful of corn


by Mel Hunter

Mr. Hunter continues to make beautiful covers that have nothing to do with the interior contents.  Also, his spaceships look like something out of the early 1950s.  With so many real spaceships to draw inspiration from, it's sad that our rocketships still look derived from the V2.

The Earth Merchants, by Norman Kagan

As early as 1963, folks have been complaining about the space program.  In Kagan's latest work, there is a tight conspiracy to topple NASA through a comprehensive propaganda campaign.  On the eve of the launch of the Behemoth, the first commercially profitable spaceship, the media is filled with advertisements like this:

Dear Elder Citizen;

Hungry?  Too bad that your social security allotment is so small, but just think, six months ago an astronaut circled Mars.  He had a steak dinner the night before he blasted off–

And

Billions for the moon, because the work will have byproducts for medical research?  Why not billions for medical research–it's just as likely to have byproducts for space flight!

The inevitable result is that when things go wrong at launch time, the NASA engineers throw up their hands and let disaster occur.  The viewpoint character, a psychologist who initially leads the project with vigor ends the story with a migraine and a profound sense of guilt.

There are a lot of problems with this story, from its plodding, heavy-handedness to its utter implausibility, not to mention the casual male-chauvinism.  I'm not sure if it's being deliberately provocative to inspire support of the space program or if it's just being satirical for satire's sake.  Either way, its effectiveness is compromised by its inept execution.

Two stars.


by Gahan Wilson

The powers at F&SF have replaced the Feghoot puns with Wilson's art.  God help me, but I think I preferred Feghoot.

Romance in an Eleventh-Century Recharging Station, by Robert F. Young

The Master of Maudlin returns with a sci-fi spin on the Sleeping Beauty story.  Young is a great writer, but his Fractured Fairy Tales are always the least of his works.

I suspect John Boston would give this a one and Victoria Silverwolf a three.  I'll split the difference.  Two stars.

Mammoths and Mastodons, by L. Sprague de Camp

I'm not sure why F&SF included an article on extinct members of Family Elephantidae, but it suffers greatly for being in a magazine that eschews pictures.  It would have been far better suited to, say, Analog.

Three stars, I guess.

The Gritsch System, by Robin Scott Wilson

How to keep a dozen scientists disciplined long enough to put together an engineering project in space?  Give them a distasteful thirteenth teammate to be their scapegoat and whipping boy.

I really disliked the message of this one ("the best way to unite a team is a common enemy") and the one-note story didn't need nineteen pages to tell it.

On the other hand, at least it was actually science fiction taking place in space.  So, two stars.

Short Cut, by Deborah Crawford

Newcomer Deborah Crawford offers an odd poem about the lack of art appreciation in a computerized world.  It lacks much rhyme or meter, but I appreciated the joke at the end. 

Three stars.

Books, by Judith Merril

I normally don't include mention of F&SF's book column.  I just found it noteworthy as it appears Ms. Merril is now the regular reviewer (this magazine is a good home for her given her more progressive predilections), and two of the books she reviews have been reviewed here (Andromeda Breakthrough by Fred Hoyle and The Alien Way, by Gordy Dickson).

Sonny, by Robert L. Fish

SAC base gets a spiffy replacement for its IBM computer.  Between its alcohol-based coolant and a couple of prankster scientists, it proves less than a success.

If I never see a sentient computer gag story again, it'll be too soon.  I would like an author to appreciate that 1) computers will never be sentient, and 2) if they ever do obtain a kind of consciousness, it will in no way mimic that of humans.

One star.

To Tell a Chemist, by Isaac Asimov

In this month's (second) non-fiction article, The Good Doctor expounds on moles, the chemical kind, and the origin of Avogadro's number.  I found this article more disjointed than most, and it felt like, if I hadn't know most of the stuff already, I wouldn't have made much sense of it.

Three stars.

The Prize

No Different Flesh, by Zenna Henderson

Ah, but the last quarter of the magazine is sublime, passing the bedtime test (i.e. if I'm supposed to be asleep but I will not turn out the light until I finish a story, it's gotta be good).

This is a The People story, featuring an ordinary Terran couple with highly relatable sorrows.  They take in a seemingly abandoned child with extraordinary powers, a merciful act that is repaid in the most satisfying of ways.

The Journey's esteemed editor has a maxim: "Good writing is the art of making small things matter."  Zenna Henderson is a good writer.  One of the best.

Five stars.

Aftertaste

Cracker Jack really isn't that good, is it?  But that prize, though!  So even though the magazine scores just 2.7 stars overall, it might be worth picking up a copy for the Henderson.

On the other hand, since there's already been one anthology of People stories, there probably will be another.  In which case, you might well wait until then.  Better a box of prizes than a box of Cracker Jack!

Our last two Journey shows were a gas!  You can watch the kinescope reruns here).  You don't want to miss the next episode, April 25 at 1PM PDT featuring flautist Acacia Weber as the special musical guest.





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Magazine

[January 12, 1964] SINKING OUT OF SIGHT (the February 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Uh-oh.

The blurb for the lead story in the February 1964 Amazing says: “Once every few years a science fiction story comes along which poses—and probes—philosophical questions: for instance: What is life that Man must live it?  In a novel rich in incident, fascinating of character, John Brunner questions the essential meaning of life and death and purpose.”

That’s the pitch for Brunner’s 74-page “complete novel” The Bridge to Azrael.  The last time we saw such an editorial panegyric, the mountain labored and brought forth—well, not a mouse.  A capybara, maybe.  Anyway, a modestly capable pulp-inflected novella, Daniel F. Galouye’s Recovery Area, not exactly the promised philosophical masterpiece for the ages.  Sort of the same here, but worse: the mountain has labored and brought forth a mess.

But let’s back up.  John Brunner has for years been a mainstay of the British SF magazines, with occasional appearances in the US magazines, growing more frequent in the past couple of years.  His most notable contribution has been a series of solid and unpretentious novellas in the UK’s Science Fantasy, some of which have made their way across the Atlantic to become better-than-usual Ace Doubles, like The 100th Millennium and (my favorite) Echo in the Skull—the top of the line at the bottom of the market.  So news that Brunner had a novella appearing in Amazing was cause for optimism. 

The Bridge to Azrael, by John Brunner

Unfortunately it trips over its pretenses and falls flat.  It is proposed that Earthfolk have gone out to the stars in ships and colonized dozens of planets, with which Earth has since lost touch and which have developed over centuries in wildly varying ways.  Now, however, Earth has FTL travel via a technology called the Bridge, upon which, if the equipment is properly aligned, one can walk across the light-years.  Earth is reopening contact with the the scattered fragments of humanity and trying to bring everyone together by connecting them to the Bridge system.  They’re up to 40 worlds.

This process is presided over by Director Jorgen Thorkild, and we are given to understand that he works very hard at his big and (it says here) “fantastically responsible” job.  However, when he meets with representatives of one of the next two candidates for Bridging, he realizes that one of them isn’t buying it at all, and he starts to go to pieces.  Doesn’t stop, either, and checks into the hospital, overwhelmed with the futility of it all.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to the “programmers.” These are the people charged with scouting and assessing the cultures of the planets to be Bridged, and they are impossibly superior intellectual supermen (if there are women in this clubhouse, they aren’t mentioned).  So completely absorbed in their work are they that they can’t stay interested in anything else, like comely members of the opposite sex who adore them, as we learn from the viewpoint of one of the latter.  But these hyper-competent intellectual powerhouses are ridden with a paralyzing fear of being wrong.  Exactly what will happen if they are wrong is not explained—do they lose their minds?  Commit suicide?  But the very prospect can impair their judgment and lead them into danger (for one of them, a knife in the chest).  Some supermen!

There are plots and subplots here, some of which might be interesting in another context, though the resolution of the reluctant planet problem is irredeemably facile all on its own.  But the two whopping implausibilities just recounted make it difficult to take anything here seriously, and undermine any attempt at grand philosophical argument, if there were one of any coherence.  So Brunner, whose more modest work sometimes transcends its lack of pretense, has tried something pretentious and fallen on his face.  One hopes he takes the lesson.  Two stars, generously.

Beside the Golden Door, by Henry Slesar

There is little succor to be found in the short stories.  The best of them is Henry Slesar’s Beside the Golden Door, a slightly rambling but reasonably agreeable story about extraterrestrials finding a far-future Earth on which humans have gone extinct, leaving artifacts like the one depicted on the cover (one suspects the story was written around the cover) and records that the aliens are able to decipher quickly.  These reveal another story about an earlier wave of aliens who had arrived on Earth seeking refuge after a disaster and were ultimately treated the way humans frequently treat those different from themselves, and there’s an unsurprising revelation at the end that pulls the stories together.  Fine conventional sentiments, adequate if slightly hackneyed execution, three stars.

I Bring Fresh Flowers, by Robert F. Young

From here, it’s downhill.  Next is I Bring Fresh Flowers, marking the return of Robert F. Young, like a recurring influenza epidemic, though this outbreak is at least milder than some.  It’s short, and less of Young is always more.  Rosemary Brooks, a beautiful young woman firmly dedicated to God and the United States, becomes an astronaut (or, as Young of course has it, Astronette), and she accomplishes her mission to orientate (sic!) the satellite that will bring genuine weather control to Earth. 

But something happens during re-entry.  “All that is known is that Rosemary became a falling star.” But not in vain—the weather becomes really fine, all because of her work.  “She is the sun coming up in the morning and the sun going down at night.  She is the gentle rain against your face in spring.” Et cetera, at some length.  In other words, Rosemary has been reincarnated as the pathetic fallacy.  Could be worse.  Has been, in fact.  Two stars.

Heavy, Heavy, by F.A. Javor

Bringing up the rear, or letting it down, is F.A. Javor’s Heavy, Heavy, the tale of a tough guy down on his luck, not as badly written as you might expect, but ending with the revelation of a supposed scientific gimmick so ridiculous as to erase any prior glimmer of merit.  One star.

SF Profile: L. Sprague de Camp: Sword and Sorcery, by Sam Moskowitz

Sam Moskowitz coasts through another SF Profile, L. Sprague de Camp: Sword and Sorcery, as usual with better coverage of his pre-World War II material than his later work, omitting to mention his last several SF novels: The Tower of Zanid (1958), its predecessor The Hand of Zei (1950), and The Glory That Was (1960, magazine 1952), plus two out of three of his major 1950s short stories, A Gun for Dinosaur and Aristotle and the Gun.  (He does mention the other one, Judgment Day.) The commentary is generally superficial and obvious.  Two stars.

Coroner's Report

The cover of this issue, which portrays a deteriorated and morose-looking Statue of Liberty buried up to its armpits, cogently sums up the issue, and, it appears, the state of the magazine generally: sinking out of sight.

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Magazine

[December 24, 1962] The Year 2 A.D. (After Davidson – the January 1963 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Gideon Marcus

Trends are tricky things.  They require multiple data points to become apparent, and even then, careful analysis may be required to draw a proper conclusion.

I think I can safely say, however, that one-plus year into Avram Davidson's tenure as editor of F&SF, the magazine's quality has trended sharply and consistently downward.  Stories tend toward the obtuse, the purple, the (and this surprises me) hackneyed.  It's just not the sublime lyric beauty it used to be.

Why is this?  Let's explore some possible explanations:

1) F&SF can't get good writers anymore.

This clearly isn't true.  The Table of Contents of any given issue reads like a who's who of the genre.

2) Nobody is writing good sf anymore.

Demonstrably false.  Just look at the other mags.

3) The good writers save their best stuff for other magazines

This could be true, but given that F&SF pays some of the best rates (for science fiction anyway – three or four cents a word), I'd can't image F&SF is a second-resort mag.

4) Davidson's editorial preferences are driving the direction of F&SF.

A ha.  Davidson has been a writer of sf for many a year, and the trend in his writing has been toward the obscure and the prolix.  It shouldn't be a surprise to see the Davidson style creep into his magazine.  One trend I find particularly disturbing is the disappearance of women from F&SF's pages.  This magazine used to be the stand-out leader in publishing of woman authors, and its pages were better for it.  Now, female writers been conspicuously absent for two issues, and there had been fewer than normal in the months prior.  Nor can one argue that women are leaving the genre — F&SF's loss is the gain for the other digests.

The inevitable destination of this downward trend, the limit of quality as the time of Davidson's tenure goes to infinity, as it were, appears to be zero stars.  Sure, there are still stand-out issues, but they come fewer and farther between.  And the January 1963 F&SF isn't one of them…

The Golden Brick, P. M. Hubbard

The issue starts off well enough with this story of a Cornish ghost ship, imprisoned in which is a four hundred year old mad Alchemist with the Midas touch.  The tale is nicely crafted and atmospheric, but stories like this have been a dime a dozen in this mag.  Competent writing and imagery aren't enough.  Three stars.

Zap! and La Difference, Randall Garrett

Ugh.  Go away, Randy.

Dragon Hunt, L. Sprague de Camp

De Camp's life is the stuff of legends, as shows this essay on the globetrotting he undertook to familiarize himself with the locales of his recent historical fiction.  The piece contains tidbits of genuine interest, but the presentation is somehow lackluster.  Three stars.

Myths My Great-Granddaughter Taught Me, Fritz Leiber

In which the author's precocious descendant notes the frightening parallels between the Cold War of the 1980s and Ragnarok of Norse Myth.  This is the best story of the magazine, but again, we're treading familiar ground.  A minor piece from a major author.  Three stars.  (Happy 52nd birthday, by the way, Fritz.)

He's Not My Type!, Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor's non-fiction articles always get read first, but I was disappointed this time around.  Perhaps it's because I felt Asimov explained blood types better in his recent book, The Living River, or maybe Davidson's too-barbed introduction put me in a bad mood (I must stop reading those first).  In any event, it is readable, which is the worst Asimov ever gets.  Three stars.

Way-Station, Henry Slesar

Imagine Zenna Henderson wrote a The People story, but rather than have it end in poignance, instead wrote a stock "horror" ending that one could see a mile away.  That's what scriptwriter Slesar offers up.  Where is Henderson, anyway?  Two stars.

Punch, Frederik Pohl

Pohl is a busy boy – not only does he edit two mags (three, come early next year), but he finds time to be published in all of them and Davidson's.  In Punch, it turns out that the many technological gifts of the newly encountered galaxy-spanning aliens have a sinister motivation.  It would have made a decent, if typical, episode of The Twilight Zone.  Three stars.

Speakeasy, Mack Reynolds

Last up is a short novel from a fellow who is typically featured in Analog.  Speakeasy depicts a future in which society has been stultified by success, a meritocracy that has calcified thanks to nepotism and inertia.  Only a few revolutionaries remain to shock life into the decaying culture of the Technocracy. 

Reynolds can do very good political thriller, viz. Mercenary from last year's Analog.  Unfortunately, Speakeasy is a rambling, naive mess that jumps the tracks about halfway through and runs headlong into a wall near the end.  I wonder if Analog's editor Campbell rejected it.  If so, I wonder why Davidson accepted it.  It doesn't really fit F&SF, either the current or past iterations of the magazine.  Two stars.

—

So there you have it, an issue that clocks in at a miserable 2.3 stars.  Even Davidson seems to agree that his stuff hasn't been very good – check out the scathing letter at the end of the mag (which may or may not have come from Davidson's pen, itself).  No more "purple cows," indeed.

Ah well.  That's enough kvetching for this season.  It's Christmas Eve, as well as the fourth night of Hannukah.  Go light a candle, illuminate a tree, drink some eggnog.  Or as a recent fancard admonishes, let there be "Goodwill to mellow fen."

[P.S. If you want the chance to nominate Galactic Journey for Best Fanzine next year, you need to register for WorldCon before the end of the year! (or have registered last year… but then you can only nominate, not vote.) The Journey will be at next year's WorldCon, so don't miss your chance to meet us and please help put us on the ballot for Best Fanzine!]




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Magazine

[May 14, 1961] Friendly disputes (June 1961 Analog)

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I've got a long-running feud going on with Mike Glyer, editor of the popular fanzine, File 770.  Well, feud is probably too strong a word given that we're good friends and avid mutual readers.  In fact, we usually get along quite well.  All fans are united by love for the genre and our status as oddballs, after all.  But Mike and I just can't seem to agree on Analog, a monthly science fiction magazine.

Here are the indisputable facts: Analog is the elder statesman of the digests; it pioneered real sf back when all the other outlets were pushing pulp adventure.  Analog has the biggest circulation of any of the current digests, somewhere around 200,000 per month. 

Now for the disputable ones.  Analog is the most conservative of the mags.  It's generally Terran-centric, with Earthlings portrayed as the most cunning, successful beings in the galaxy (which is why, of course, most aliens look just like us).  While the serialized novels in Analog are often excellent, the accompanying short stories tend to be uninspiring.  The science fact columns are awful.  Editor John Campbell's championing of psionics and reactionless engines (in real-life, not just fiction), crosses into the embarrassing.  All these factors make Analog the weakest of the Big Three magazines, consistently lagging in quality behind Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. 

Of course, Mike disagrees.  He's even wagered that Analog will take the Hugo award for Best Science Fiction Magazine this year.  I think he's dreaming.  F&SF has won three years in a row, and barring some unexpected decline in quality, it will do so again. 

I'll take that bet, Mike Glyer!  Two beers to your one.

As evidence for my case, I present this month's Analog, dated June 1961.

I will give Campbell credit where it is due.  While women are rare in Analog (as they are everywhere in published sf lit), Campbell does make an effort to "discover" female authors.  That's how we got the delightful Pauline Ashwell, and now we have the promising Leigh Richmond.  Her first story, Prologue to an Analogue, involves a coven of witches that solves world crisis after world crisis with their televised incantations.  Is it sorcery, technology, or something entirely different?  A story that manages to be both Campbellian yet also pretty neat.  Three stars.

I'm not sure why L. Sprague de Camp's Apollonious Enlists was included.  Normally, Sprague writes fun, light fantasy.  This piece is non-fiction, an essay on the labyrinthine bureaucracy of Ptolemaic Egypt, with some pointed parallels drawn with our modern methods of government.  I guess there weren't any fiction vignettes handy to fill the 8-page slot.  Two stars.

Fallen Angel shows us a far future in which the Terran dominion is but a small corner of a larger Galactic Federation.  We have something of an inferiority complex as, compared to the blond, perfect Grienan, leader race of the Federation, humanity seems barely out of childhood.  In fact, we have only made it as far as we have thanks to "Experiment," an anarchistic enclave in which humans express their base impulses until they are thoroughly tired of them.  Only a small proportion of the population are truly incurable, and they become permanent residents.  It's a program that seems barbaric to the rest of the civilized galaxy and is ridiculed accordingly.

In Angel, the aristocratic Grienan are taken down a peg when its ambassador volunteers to go through Experiment and loses all of his highfalutin culture and manners, almost losing his very humanity (Grienanity?) See?  Terrans really do know best!

High is a prolific writer who's hitherto stayed on the British side of The Pond.  His latest work does little to recommend that he emigrate.  Two stars.

Lloyd Biggle Jr. is like a Cepheid star – highly variable.  His latest, Monument, may be the high point of his career to date.  I wasn't optimistic.  The set-up involves a backward paradise planet, populated by (of course) completely human aliens, a marooned Terran who vows to protect the natives from a rapacious Earth Federation, and the inevitable coming of the representatives of said polity.  There's no real science fiction in this tale of classic exploitation – you could transplant the "aliens" to an island in the Pacific Ocean and replace the Federation with the United Nations (and, perhaps, that's the point; I prefer my analogies slightly less direct).

And yet.  It's a well-told story, engaging throughout, and it's fundamentally an honest one.  There are no gimmicks or silly twists.  Just a series of interesting scenes, compelling characters, and a problem to be solved.  Four stars.

The science fact this month, George Willard's The Complex Problem of the Simple Weather Rocket starts well enough, describing the armada of radio balloons deployed daily by meteorological agencies, but it quickly degenerates into a fannish gush, recommending a switch to little sounding rockets based on the machines currently employed by model rocket enthusiasts.  Kind of a pointless article, especially given that weather balloons are cheap, and now they are augmented by the TIROS weather satellites with their hourly photos.  Two stars.

That leaves the third installment of Cliff Simak's very good serial, The Fisherman, which I won't review until it's all done next month.  Running the numbers, Analog clocks in at a straight three of five stars: acceptable, but not astonishing.  Certainly not Hugo material.  At least not this year…

Sneak preview: Last night, the Young Traveler and I went to the drive-in to take in George Pal's latest, Atlantis: the Lost Continent.  It was a hoot, and we'll tell you all about it next time…on Galactic Journey!

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TV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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