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[September 22, 1964] Fall back! (October 1964 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

September 22, 2019 Gideon Marcus 6 Comments

[Don't miss your chance to get your copy of Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963), some of the best science fiction of the Silver Age. If you like the Journey, you'll love this book (and you'll be helping us out, too!)

by Gideon Marcus

To every thing there is a season

Even in timeless southern California, we have seasons. In the Imperial Valley, it is joked, there are four: Hot, Bug, Stink, and Wind. Here in San Diego, spring comes in summer, summer comes in fall, fall comes in winter, and winter not at all.

Yet here and there, we see a deciduous tree start to change color. The end-of-summer mornings have a hint of chill in them. Things proceed in an endless cycle.

The same is true of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Last month, I raved over a superlative issue, an increasing rarity under the current editorship of one Avram Davidson. I am sad to report that things are back to form in this month's issue.

I think part of the problem is that, as Davidson cheerfully confesses, he's not really into science fiction. He bounces off the truly hard stuff, like Martin Caidin's quite good Countdown and fills his magazine with fantastic fluff…and then has the temerity to complain that people don't sent him plain old rocket stories anymore!

On the other hand, the rumor has been confirmed — Davidson has moved to Berkeley from Mexico, and someone else is taking over the magazine. I hear that Joe Ferman, currently publisher, will take the helm, but that his son, Ed, will do all the work. I look forward to seeing what they bring to the table.

But first, let's take a look at what is possibly Davidson's last editorial effort, what he optimistically calls an "All Star Issue".

Autumn Harvest

by Chesley Bonstell

Once again, the cover is stunning — and utterly unrelated to the contents of the issue. It's a depiction of an ion-drive propelled ship off of Mars, and it's from the book Beyond the Solar System, presumably available on bookshelves near you.

Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon, by Leigh Brackett

The first of the All Stars is the legendary Leigh Brackett, queen of pulp and accomplished screenwriter. This tale actually began as a joke nine years ago, when a fictional title was created to represent the kind of fiction Brackett excelled at. Purple Priestess is the author's attempt to turn a joke into reality.

It has all the hallmarks of a pulp Mars, from the thin air to the drying canals, the ancient natives who speak High and Low Martian. And, of course, out in the frigid deserts lies an antediluvian evil so terrible that none can experience its presence and fail to gibber.

I enjoyed Lovecraft's stories well enough in the '30s , but I'm disappointed to find one presented unironically in what was once the premier SF mag. Two stars.

The Pro, by Edmond Hamilton

The subsequent piece, by Brackett's husband (of similar vintage) is better. One can't help but see a bit of the autobiographical in this story about a science fiction author who finally gets to see the rocketships he created in fiction become reality at the Cape. Only the launching of the latest of them is not a joyous occasion, for the writer's child is the pilot. Even if the mission goes well, it marks a final rift between father and son, one the writer is sure can never be bridged.

A bit maudlin but enjoyable. Three stars.

Stomata, by Theodore L. Thomas

Thomas' latest short story idea disguised as a non-fiction article takes the idea of stomata, the pores that allow plants to respire, and posits an race that uses them for everything — breathing, eating, excreting.

I don't know how plausible the idea is. On the other hand, Pinky the Blob, debuting in one of my upcoming books, employs exactly this mechanism. Great minds think alike.

Three stars.

Maid to Measure, by Damon Knight

Five years ago, Damon Knight came out with What Rough Beast, a story so excellent that I'm reading it again in the Spanish edition of F&SF.

Maid to Measure, a joke-ending vignette about a shape-changing girl, is as trivial as Beast is momentous.

Two stars.

Little Anton, by Reginald Bretnor

Bretnor is perhaps better known to the readers of F&SF as Grendall Briarton, composer of the recently finished series of "Feghoot" pun stories. After reading this awful reprint, the story of an idiot savant inventor with a tedious Swiss accent and a penchant for pinching posteriors, I'm actually nostalgic for Briarton.

One star.

First and Rearmost, by Isaac Asimov

Doc A. turns in an above average science article this month, all about how gravity stacks up to the other three primal forces of the universe: electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force (his omission of love and money are probably deliberate). It's all stuff I knew already, but he lays it out nicely for laymen.

Four stars.

The Year of the Earthman, by Hogan Smith

An old, radiation-scarred astronaut goes AWOL to marry a lovely extraterrestrial lass, dying just moments after he learns that they will have a son. And then we learn the truth of the space traveler's existence.

Not a bad tale, though it makes little scientific sense. Also, Hogan Smith is the opposite of an All Star — this is is first story! But he's from San Diego, so all is forgiven.

Three stars.

In What Cavern of the Deep, by Robert F. Young

Robert F. Young's little autobiography at the front of Cavern is quite interesting. Like me, he came into the genre by way of Burroughs and then Wells, and also like me, he tried making an honest living before deciding that writing is the most fun one can have with their hands — especially if one gets paid for it!

Young writes stories inspired by mythology and folklore, and while he has come out with some of my very favorite stories, his works from the last several years have been disappointing and mawkish. His latest falls somewhere inbetween.

David Stuart is a poor young man made rich through inheritance from an uncle. While investigating the deceased's estate, he comes across two swimming sisters and promptly falls in love with Helen, the blonder of them. But the ensuing marital bliss is dashed by the revelation that Helen is growing taller by the week, approaching titanic proportions after just a year. It's sort of an inverse of Richard Matheson's The Incredible Shrinking Man. At the same time, David's wife becomes more and more enamored with bodies of water, swimming constantly and even growing gill slits.

Is Helen a beast of the sea? An alien? And is the story going to end horrifically (as set up in the prologue) with David hurtling five smooth stones to smite his monstrous love?

Cavern is a bit of a departure from Young's previous stories in that, though he makes conscious references to the biblical King David, this is more to obscure the plot than to outline it. The piece is told with Young's usual excellent facility, and I found myself eager to get to the end.

On the other hand, the end is just a bit too pat, too clearly presented to be very satisfying. What could have been a 4 or even 5 star story ends up on the high end of 3.

Empty Cornucopia

If this be Davidson's swansong, he picked a sad note to go out on. Maybe he's got one issue more in him before he shuffles off F&SF's bridge — I'd like to have fonder memories of this phase of his career!

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 11, 1964] Leigh Brackett Times Two: The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman (Ace Double M-101)

August 11, 2019 Cora Buhlert 8 Comments

by Cora Buhlert

So far, this summer has been cold and rainy. Even the cheery tunes of "Liebeskummer lohnt sich nicht" (Heartache does not pay) by Swedish singer Siw Malmkvist, which has been number 1 in Germany for almost as long as it has been raining, can't dispel the summer gloom.

However, rain outside means it's the perfect time to read. And so I was lucky to spot Leigh Brackett's latest in the spinner rack at the local import bookstore. Now a new novel by the queen of space opera, is always a reason to rejoice. And the latest Ace Double offers not one but two new novels by Leigh Brackett.

Though upon closer examination The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman are not so new after all, but expansions of two novellas first published as "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" and "Black Amazon of Mars" in Planet Stories in 1949 and 1951 respectively.

The two novels are more closely connected than Ace Doubles usually are, because not only are both by the same author, but they also feature the same character, Eric John Stark, intergalactic mercenary and outlaw and hero of several stories by Leigh Brackett.

The Wild Man from Mercury

Eric John Stark is a fascinating character. An Earthman born in a mining colony on Mercury, Stark was orphaned as a young child and adopted by natives who named him N'Chaka, the Man Without a Tribe. A few years later, Stark was orphaned a second time, when the tribe that adopted him was exterminated by miners from Earth who wanted the natives' resources for themselves. The miners put Stark in a cage and would have killed him, too, if Stark hadn't been rescued by Simon Ashton, a police officer from Earth. Ashton took the young Stark in and raised him to adulthood.

Though outwardly a civilised man, inside Stark is still N'Chaka, the wild boy from Mercury. There are parallels between Eric John Stark and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan, who was one of the inspirations for the character according to the foreword by Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett's husband. Eric John Stark is also a black man, something which is sadly still much too rare in our genre. Though you wouldn't know it from the covers, as both Planet Stories cover artist Allan Anderson as well as Ed Emshwiller, covers artist for the Ace Double edition, portray Stark as white.

Stark has little time for human civilisation, but a lot of sympathy for the plight of downtrodden natives throughout the solar system. He involves himself in an endless chain of uprisings and guerrilla campaigns, which are reminiscent both of the Indian wars, which were still within living memory when Brackett was born, as well as the various anticolonial movements currently sweeping through Africa and Asia. Stark's activities as a mercenary and weapons smuggler naturally bring him into conflict with the Terran authorities.

This conflict comes to a head in the opening pages of The Secret of Sinharat, which finds Stark on the run with Terran police officers led by Stark's mentor and surrogate father Simon Ashton in hot pursuit. Stark is facing twenty years in prison due to his role in a failed native uprising on Venus, but Ashton offers him a deal. Kynon, a Martian warlord, is planning to lead the desert tribes into a holy war with the help of off-world mercenaries. If Stark joins Kynon's army as an agent for Ashton, the Terran authorities will forget about Stark's crimes.

I really enjoyed the relationship between Stark and Ashton. Both men clearly have a lot of respect for each other and Ashton is probably the only person in the solar system Stark truly cares about. Ashton also clearly cares about Stark, but is not above using their relationship and Stark's sympathies for barbarian tribes, who – as Ashton reminds him – will suffer most from Kynon's holy war, to get Stark to agree to the deal. I would have loved to see more of Simon Ashton and his past with Stark. Alas, he only appears in the opening chapter, then Stark is on his own.

Martian noir

Stark meets with Kynon and steps into a nest of snakes. For starters, Kynon is a fraud who claims to have rediscovered the titular secret, a device which can transfer a person's consciousness into a new body and therefore guarantees eternal life. Kynon is also surrounded by a cast of shady characters who wouldn't seem out of place in the one of the noir movies for which Leigh Brackett wrote the screenplay. There is Delgaun, a Martian gangster, Luhar, a Venusian mercenary and old enemy of Stark's, the Martian femme fatale Berild, who is both Kynon's and Delgaun's lover and seduces Stark as well, and Fianna, Berild's sweet and innocent maid who also takes a shine to Stark. None of these characters are what they seem and all but one will be dead by the end of the novel, either at each other's hands or at Stark's.

The Secret of Sinharat is chockfull of exciting action scenes and atmospheric descriptions of the dying Mars. Stark takes us on a tour of a Martian opium den, survives a deadly sandstorm and a gruelling trek through the blistering desert and explores the ancient city of Sinharat and the mysteries that lurk in its catacombs.

A Strangely Familiar Story

The Secret of Sinharat is a highly entertaining novel, which also seemed oddly familiar, though I knew that I couldn't have read the earlier magazine version. However, I realised that The Secret of Sinharat bore several parallels to a novel I reviewed two months ago for Galactic Journey: The Valley of Creation by Leigh Brackett's husband Edmond Hamilton, the expanded version of a story first published in 1948. The protagonist of both novels is a mercenary recruited to fight someone else's holy war, who realises that he is fighting on the wrong side. Both novels feature ancient technology which can transfer human consciousness into other bodies and both protagonists find themselves subjected to said technology. Both protagonists even share the same first name, Eric.

Of course, there are also differences. The Valley of Creation is set on Earth, in a hidden valley in the Himalaya, while The Secret of Sinharat is set on Mars. And Eric John Stark is a much more developed and interesting character than the rather bland Eric Nelson. Nonetheless, the parallels are striking. Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett are not known to collaborate like C.L. Moore and her late husband Henry Kuttner did. But given the similarities of both stories and the fact that they were written around the same time, I wonder whether Brackett and Hamilton did not both write their own version of the same basic idea.

Into the Gates of Death

People of the Talisman, the other novel in this Ace Double, opens with Eric John Stark once again in a fistful of trouble. A dying friend entrusts Stark with the story's plot device, the talisman of Ban Cruach, an ancient king who founded the city of Kushat to guard a mountain pass known as the Gates of Death in the polar regions of Mars. Stark's friend stole the talisman, but now wants to return it, because without the talisman, Kushat and all of Mars are in grave danger.

Stark wants to honour his friend's dying wish. But before he can fulfil his mission, he is captured by raiders who take him to their leader, Lord Ciaran, yet another Martian warlord who wants to unite the tribes and lead them to victory over the decadent cities. Though Lord Ciaran is a much more interesting and memorable character than Kynon from The Secret of Sinharat. Ciaran is the illegitimate child of a Martian king who never acknowledged him. Hungry for revenge and power, Ciaran dresses in black armour, wields a battle axe and always wears a steel mask.

Ciaran wants Stark to join his army, but Stark is wary, probably due to his previous bad experiences with Martian warlords. Of course, Ciaran also wants the talisman and since Stark refuses to hand it over or say where it is, Ciaran has him brutally whipped.

Stark escapes. Half dead, he makes it to Kushat to warn the city of Ciaran's attack, but has a hard time convincing the city guard of the danger. Nor can Stark reveal that he has the talisman, for the rulers of Kushat have kept its disappearance a secret and would kill Stark to preserve it.

Ciaran Unmasked

Ciaran's forces attack after all and in the pitched battle that follows, Stark faces off against Ciaran himself. Before striking the killing blow, Stark rips off the warlord's mask and gets a surprise that has already been spoiled both by Ed Emshwiller as well as by Allan Anderson on the original Planet Stories cover. For underneath the black mask, the warlord is a striking woman. The unmasking scene is reminiscent of a similar scene in "Black God's Kiss" by C.L. Moore, the story that introduced the swordswoman Jirel of Joiry to the world.

Ciaran is a fabulous character, a strong warrior woman, which is still all too rare in our genre even thirty years after Jirel of Joiry first took off her helmet. Though fascinated by Stark, Ciaran immediately decks him after he has unmasked her. Later, Ciaran tells Stark, "I did not ask for my sex. I will not be bound by it." I suspect Leigh Brackett agrees with her.

Every woman Stark meets in the two novels falls for him and Stark is only too happy to dispense "kisses brutal as blows" (apparently, Simon Ashton's education did not include how to properly treat the other sex). And so Stark falls in lust with Ciaran, even though she had him whipped half to death only days before.

Stark escapes with the talisman and a caravan of refugees through the Gates of Death to seek Ban Cruach's secret with Ciaran and her forces in hot pursuit. A battle ensues in which Ciaran is taken prisoner.

Now the novel takes a sharp turn into Lovecraftian territory. For beyond the Gates of Death lies an ancient city inhabited by alien beings (unlike the humanoid Martians Stark normally deals with). Initially, the aliens claim that they just want to be left in peace. But they quickly show their true colours and attack the humans.

Stark and Ciaran wind up fighting back to back. They escape and Ciaran agrees to leave Kushat alone and conquer the city of her deadbeat father instead. Stark goes with her in what may well be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Fiction versus Reality

I thoroughly enjoyed both novels, though they are clearly relics of an earlier age. Leigh Brackett's Mars with its deserts, ancient cities and even older ruins most likely does not exist, just as Mariner 2 revealed that the fog-shrouded Venus with its swamps and oceans that is a staple of pulp science fiction does not exist either. In fact, I suspect that the reason why Ace has not reprinted the third Eric John Stark adventure "Enchantress of Venus" (which I read in German translation a few years ago) is that the red gas ocean of Venus which Brackett described so evocatively is no longer plausible in our brave new age of space exploration.

Of course, it is the fate of most science fiction that it will eventually become outdated as science and knowledge march on. But even though we know that the solar system Leigh Brackett described is not plausible, the Eric John Stark stories still remain glorious adventure tales with a protagonist who is a lot more complex than the standard square-jawed heroes of pulp science fiction.

Something everyone can enjoy, rain or shine!

Bremen City Parliament building topping out — It stopped raining long enough to celebrate the topping out of Bremen's new city parliament building, sitting right next to the 13th century St. Petri cathedral

[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

[November 17, 1963] Galactoscope (Three Ace Doubles!)

November 17, 2018 Gideon Marcus 4 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

Here at the Journey, we read virtually every piece of science fiction and fantasy published. Our goal is not only to provide you with a complete encyclopedia of available works, but also to ensure we can make informed decisions come award-giving time.

Now, that's a lot of printed words. It used to be that I would publish a separate article for each book, but with such a big backlog of books waiting to be reviewed, I decided it'd be best to do the queue all at once, like they do in the review columns of the various magazines (for instance, Amazing's "Spectroscope").

As it turns out, the volumes you'll hear about today are all Ace Doubles (published with two complete books back-to-back and reversed), so if you're a fan of these odd blue-and-whites, this will help you manage your 1963 shopping list.

Alpha Centauri or Die!, by Leigh Brackett

Leigh Brackett is a legend. One of the relatively few women in the SFF arena, she is also a renowned scriptwriter, having penned the screenplay for The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo. Brackett has managed to keep plugging along in Hollywood in spite of the prevailing opinion of the last decade that women just don't get "male" genres like crime dramas and westerns.

Her SFF works have been recommended to me with increasing volume and frequency so I was delighted to have a chance to enjoy her latest novel, luridly titled (as all Ace Doubles are) Alpha Centauri or Die!. This book is really two stories in one: Part 1 involves a rebel movement on Mars led by the human, Kirby, and his love, the Martian humanoid named Shari. They dare to steal a manually controlled space ark, filled to the brim with colonists eager to emigrate, and evade the robotic sentinel spaceships that patrol the solar system. Their destination: an inhabitable planet in the triple Alpha Centauri system.

There's a lot of action and chases, both planetbound and in the black gulf between the stars, culminating in a an exciting scene in which a squad from the fleeing Lucy Davenport boards and deactivates a pursuing robot fighter ship.

Part 2 takes place on the newly colonized world, which shortly after settlement, is besieged by unseen, psionically equipped aliens that kidnap terrans via teleportation. Will this diabolical race end the colony, or is it all a misunderstanding?

That the two sections are so different in subject matter and tone is no coincidence. Alpha Centauri or Die! is a fix-up of two stories from the early 1950s, both published in Planet Stories. I'd only previously read The Ark of Space (on which Part 1 is based) so I can't tell you if the two tales were ever meant to be linked. In any event, the resultant novel is not a great introduction to Brackett's works. Particularly frustrating is the short shrift the women characters get, even at the hands of a woman author. With the exception of Shari, they are a herd of complaining housewives. The Martian heroine fares a bit better, joining the raiding party against the robot starship and using her esper powers to help deduce the nature of the beasts of Alpha Centauri, but her exploits point out just how alone she stands in representation of an entire gender.

Aside from that, Alpha Centauri or Die! is a competent but not groundbreaking action piece, slightly less than the sum of its parts, not progressing far from the pulp era in which Brackett made her first appearances.

Three stars.

Legend of Lost Earth, by G. McDonald Wallis

It's common practice in SFF for women to initialize their first names (or flat-out take on male pseudonyms). I have been told vociferously by one of my readers that this practice has nothing to do with any bias against women in the genre; nevertheless, it is puzzling that men don't seem to do it. In any event, the "G." stands for Geraldine, and this is her second Ace Double, the first being The Light of Lilith, which I have not read.

Lost Earth takes place on the dusty, red world of Niflhel, its atmosphere foul with the soot of a million mines. Even the memory of Earth, destroyed by a human-caused catastrophe, is taboo. But Giles Chulainn is seduced by the teachings of a secret society that keeps the half-remembered dream of their home planet alive. A cat and mouse game ensues, with Giles taking on the role, by turns, of a subversive, a double, and then a triple agent.

The true nature of the barren colony world and its connection with the lost verdant fields of Earth is ultimately revealed, though by the time you get there, you might not care, having been increasingly bombarded with a bamboozle of pseudo-scientific mysticism, Celtic legend, and plot incoherence. Nevertheless, Lost Earth does have a strong first half and a nice flavor throughout. Three stars.

Captives of the Flame, by Samuel R. Delany

Delany is another author I'm catching on his second Ace book, the first being The Jewels of Aptor, which came out last year. He is noteworthy for being the first black SF novelist (I believe; correct me if I'm wrong).

Captives of the Flame takes place on a blasted Earth, the remnants of humanity confined to just one city and its adjacent shoreline and islands. Around it lies a radioactive barrier that has constricted over the years: just two generations before, it engulfed the city's neighboring polis, forcing its inhabitants to flee. It is implied early on that the barrier is not of human origin.

The novel details the efforts of a mismatched band of heroes, including an exiled member of the royal family rendered invisible by the radiations, a young woman acrobat/thief, and an ambitious Duchess, to determine the true nature of the alien incursion and to use the extraterrestrials' powers to right the bellicose, corrupt human government.

On the plus side, the novel features an interesting world and a refreshingly varied set of characters, male, female, and alien. On the red ink side of the ledger, the plot is sketchy, and viewpoints shift with little warning or context. I have to wonder if this is the author's fault or simply a result of Ace's hatchety editing style.

Three stars.

The Psionic Menace, by Keith Woodcott

Those in the know are aware that "Keith Woodcott" is a pseudonym for English writer, John Brunner. And those who have followed this column since the arrival of author Mark Yon will soon find that The Psionic Menace is an Ace-style retitling of Crack of Doom, which appeared under the Woodcott name in two issues of New Worlds last year. It's about a universe-spanning psychic distress call, and the efforts humanity takes to decipher it.

It is word for word the same book, which means you will enjoy it as much (or little) as the serialized version. Mark gave it three stars.

The Rebellers, by Jane Roberts

What a beginning on this one! Gary Fitch is an artist on a crushingly overpopulated Earth. His job is to take old classics and make copies as vehicles for conveying government propaganda. He and his colleagues live under lock and key in a barracks, barely receiving enough sustenance for survival. Yet their situation is the enviable one for outside their prison walls lies the teeming masses of humanity, hungrier and denied access to the books and artworks the painters have.

One day, rioting plebeians storm the prison walls, providing Fitch an opportunity to escape — from the frying pan into the fire. The artist hooks up with an insurgent organization, "The Rebellers" (why not simply "The Rebels?") but their motives aren't as simon-pure as advertised. Worse yet, a virulent plague is spreading, threatening to wipe out the human race once and for all. Can Fitch take over the remnants of local government to avoid complete catastrophe?

Roberts' book starts out strong but resolves abruptly and rather implausibly. For instance, it is discovered that the plague largely affects pregnant women and mandatory birth control becomes the linchpin on which combating the virus turns. If birth control is so ubiquitous and effective, why wasn't it in common use before our planet was choked with people?

This is the first novel by Roberts, whose short fiction I've greatly enjoyed. While this book is a mixed success, she may get the hang of the form in time for her next effort. In any event, it's nice to see her back after a four-year hiatus.

Three stars.

Listen! The Stars!, by John Brunner

Last up is the novelization of John Brunner's Listen! The Stars!, a novella that appeared in Analog last year. The tale of the "Stardroppers," who use extra-dimensional telescopes to plumb the unknown depths of the universe was one of my favorites from Brunner. In fact, I gave it a Galactic Star.

Unlike The Psionic Menace, this Ace version is significantly revised. The story's no different, and all the same scenes are there, but Brunner (or the editor) has padded every paragraph with enough extra words to fill 96 pages. Or maybe Analog's editor, John W. Campbell, had cut the original to fit the pages of his magazine.

In any event, both versions are good, worthy of five stars. If you want a shorter read, find the magazine, and if you want something lengthier, well, you get this and the Roberts novel, too.

So there you have it, a typical grab bag of Ace production. A good half of it was scoured from the pages of the magazines, and only the Brunner (under his own name) really hits it out of the park. Still, at 20 cents a novel (40 cents for a double), all of it at least readable, you could do a lot worse.

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Magazine

[April 13, 1963] SCRAPING BY (the May 1963 Amazing)

April 13, 2018 John Boston 3 Comments

by John Boston

Another month, another Amazing, and the persistent question: is this magazine worth reading? Let’s check this May issue against the hopeful benchmark I announced last time: at least something unusually good, and nothing unusually stupid.

It flunks the second criterion right off the bat. Robert F. Young is back and Biblical again. His short story The Deep Space Scrolls is the supposed transcript of a Senate hearing involving astronauts who happened upon “Spaceship X,” which contains ancient documentation showing that it is actually Noah’s Ark (apparently the Flood was on another planet and Ararat is us). What next? Characters who turn out to be Adam and Eve? The best that can be said is that Young does capture the bombast and logorrhea of some politicians—meaning the story is fairly tedious as well as dumb. One star.

The lead novelet, Jobo , by Henry Slesar, seems promising at first. In backwoods Tennessee, there’s this big strong guy Jobo with a funny face that everybody but his Ma makes fun of. On the other side of the world, a professor and his sidekick are approaching Easter Island seeking the provenance of a small statue that looks just like the giant Easter Island monoliths but is made of some super-hard material unknown on Earth and impervious to metallurgists’ tricks. The prof wonders if extraterrestrials could be involved. His beautiful and brilliant daughter gets into the act on Jobo’s behalf, and the two stories continue in parallel, meeting considerably short of infinity and indeed short of any resolution not obvious and predictable. Slesar is an experienced and facile writer, so it’s perfectly readable, but progressively less interesting. Two stars.

Albert Teichner’s story Cerebrum in the January Amazing, I said, “takes a well worn plot device and fails to revitalize it.” Here we go again with The Right Side of the Tracks, which takes perhaps the most-worn plot device in SF—space travelers approach a planet to find out what’s going on there—and doesn’t do much better, though he tries hard. The investigators are from the Galactic Glia, whose member planets are supposed to be in touch with all the others no less often than once an hour, and this planet Nodar has fallen entirely silent. Arriving, the investigators are largely ignored and are told that the inhabitants are working on something that will “widen the scope of everyone everywhere” and the investigators are displaying bad manners; indeed, the locals spank them and send them away. By that time, they have observed the Nodarans are not keeping their robots, machines, and facilities in very good repair, and have seen them frequently making seemingly pointless hand gestures, listening to music over earphones while they converse, and watching visual displays consisting of “blobs rapidly sinking toward the floor and similar patches reappearing near the ceiling while words, mathematical symbols, three-dimensional color patterns and other disconnected symbols streamed in and out of the confusion to add the final touch of chaos.” Anyone who has read Katherine MacLean’s 1950 novella Incommunicado —and many who haven’t—will recognize immediately that the Nodarans have developed new and superior means of thinking and perceiving, as the one sensible member of the ship’s party realizes on the way back home.

The clumsily derivative premise is matched by Teichner’s incidental and slightly shaky invocation of standard SF notions, e.g.: “Then they were landing, the anti-gravity jets letting the Probe sink slowly into the waiting cradle. . . .” (Why would anti-gravity employ jets?) “They had spent a grueling three months at speeds far beyond that of light and were impatient to be finished with the assignment.” (Does he think travelling faster than light would be any more grueling than travelling at any other speed?) Is this guy paying any attention to what he’s writing, or just cutting and pasting? This whole low-resolution mess, compared, say, to its distinguished antecedent by MacLean, recalls Mark Twain’s wisecrack about the lightning and the lightning-bug. Or maybe I should invoke that old Thelonious Monk tune: Well, You Needn’t.” Two stars, mostly for effort. Thanks for trying, fella, but . . . don’t bother on our account.

It is with palpable relief that I turn to The Road to Sinharat, a novelet by Leigh Brackett, who is definitely paying attention to what she’s writing. Brackett is a distinguished practitioner of what might be called Chamber Pulp: standard-brand adventure fiction rendered with unusual clarity, precision, intelligence, and feeling. This story is a pleasure to read at the word-and-sentence level, and would probably be an even greater pleasure to hear read aloud. “Sinharat was a city without people, but it was not dead. It had a memory and a voice. The wind gave it breath, and it sang, from the countless tiny organ-pipes of the coral, from the hollow mouths of marble doorways and the narrow throats of streets. The slender towers were like tall flutes, and the wind was never still. Sometimes the voice of Sinharat was soft and gentle, murmuring about everlasting youth and the pleasures thereof. Again it was strong and fierce with pride, crying You die, but I do not!. Sometimes it was mad, laughing, and hateful. But always the song was evil.”

That said, the story is, ultimately, relatively minor. It’s set in Brackett’s now-obsolete slowly dying Mars of dry sea-beds, canals, and colorful factions of essentially human Martians. The Earth-dominated government has a Rehabilitation Project to impound the planet’s remaining water and move the population to where the water will be; the ungrateful Martians are having none of it, believing that they know better how to manage the resources of their dying planet. War looms, which the Martians will lose, and they will be slaughtered by the Earthers’ higher-tech weapons. Renegade bureaucrat Carey, of Earth, with his Martian compatriots, must reach Sinharat, the forbidden city of the ancient Rama, who achieved near-immortality by taking the bodies of others. The Rama archives will contain records that will show all the bureaucrats who won’t listen how survival on Mars really works. So off they go, pursued by a Javert-ish cop, on a perilous (even grueling) journey across Mars, for a rendezvous with a rather perfunctory ending that wastes much of the dramatic tension Brackett has built up. But still, it’s a luxury getting there. Four stars.

The usual non-fiction suspect this month is Ben Bova, with Where Is Everybody?: if the galaxy is full of intelligent aliens, why haven’t we heard from them? After reviewing the state of scientific thought, Bova proposes a variation on Charles Fort: we are not property, but are the subjects of research and surveillance. Like all Bova’s articles, this one is perfectly readable, but a bit livelier than most. Three stars.

There’s an unusual suspect here, too: A Soviet View of American SF by Alexander Kazantsev, a writer of SF himself, who has elsewhere proposed that the Tunguska detonation of 1908 was an extraterrestrial spaceship blowing up. This is an edited translation of his introduction to a Soviet anthology of American SF containing Heinlein, Leinster, and Bradbury, among others. It’s less ridiculous than some I’ve seen of this type; the author actually knows something about English-language SF; but it is still turgid and ritualistic in places. E.g., he says of Heinlein’s story The Long Watch: “The story reflects a change for the better in American public opinion which was subsequently so strikingly manifested at the time of the visit by N.S. Khrushchev in America. Heinlein, like many Americans who yesterday were still deluded, today believes, wants to believe, that crime may be prevented.” Dialectical, comrade! Two stars, bright red of course.

So Amazing scrapes by another month on the strength of Brackett’s fine writing, Bova’s competence, and Comrade Kazantsev’s amusement value. Hangman, slack your rope for a while.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy

[March 24, 1961] The Second Sex in SF

March 24, 2016 Gideon Marcus 19 Comments

1961. The year that an Irishman named Kennedy assumed the highest office in the land. The year in which some 17 African nations celebrated their first birthday. The air smells of cigarette smoke, heads are covered with hats, and men run politics, industry, and much of popular culture.

In a field (and world) dominated by men, it is easy to assume that science fiction is as closed to women as the local Elks Lodge. Who are the stars of the genre? Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Sheckley; these are household names. But if there is anything I have discovered in my 11 years as an avid science fiction fan (following another 20 of casual interest), it is that there is a slew of excellent woman authors who have produced a body of high quality work. In fact, per my notes, women write just one ninth of the science fiction stories published, but a full fourth of the best works.

For this reason, I've compiled a list of female science fiction writers active in this, the second year of the 1960s. These authors are just the tip of the vanguard. They are blazing a trail for women to one day share equally in the limelight…and the Hugos!

Here they are, in alphabetical order:

Pauline Ashwell: This young British author is unusual in that her works are confined exclusively (so far as I can tell) to the usually rather stag Analog, the most conservative and widely distributed of the digests. Her Unwillingly to School, and its recent sequel, The Lost Kafoozalum, were both Hugo-nominees. Deservedly so, as they are both unique and a lot of fun. They also feature a creature about as rare as the female author: the female protagonist! Ashwell also wrote the off-the-wall alien/human friendship story, Big Sword, under the transparent pseudonym, Paul Ash. More, please!

Leigh Brackett: A Californian, Brackett was a staple of the pulp era, writing a myriad of short stories and novels all the way through the middle of the last decade. For some reason, she seems to have fallen off the genre radar in the last few years, but I understand she's making a living at Hollywood and television screenwriting. I am chagrined to report that I've not read a single one of her stories, and I worry that I'd find them dated. I'd be happy to be wrong. Recommendations?

Marion Zimmer Bradley: Young Bradley has been writing for at least a decade, but her works have tended to appear in the magazines to which I don't have subscriptions, with the notable exception of The Wind People, which appeared in IF at the end of Damon Knight's short-lived tenure as its editor. She's just come out with her first book, The Door through Space, which is sitting on my "To Read" shelf. She's a bit of an odd duck, having recently founded her own occult religion, the Aquarian Order of the Restoration, filled with trances, discovery of past lives, and clairvoyance. I guess if L. Ron Hubbard can do it…

Rosel George Brown: I'm on firmer ground with Ms. Brown, an author whom I have watched with avid interest since she first appeared in Galaxy in 1958. Her stories hinted at a great talent, and her stories had something to recommend them, even if they were not perfect successes. Her talent flowered with the excellent Step IV, which appeared in Amazing, and her recent Of all possible worlds was even better. An unabashedly feminine, inarguably terrific writer; I can't wait to read what she pens next.

Miriam Allen Deford: One of the eldest (ahem…most seasoned!) of the woman authors, Ms. Deford has been writing since the 1920s, though she did not enter our genre in a big way until Fantasy and Science Fiction inaugurated in 1949. Since then, she has turned out a steady stream of stories. Their common elements are her slightly quaint style, her versatility (writing horror, mystery, and "straight" sf with equal facility), and her consistency. She is solid, if not brilliant, and generally a welcome addition to any magazine's table of contents.

Carol Emshwiller: Say the name "Emshwiller" and you probably first think of the illustrator, Ed Emshwiller, whose drawings have appeared in hundreds (if not thousands) of magazines. But Carol Emshwiller, who married into that improbable surname, has also appeared frequently in scientifiction magazines. I am once again embarrassed to confess that I've only read one of her stories thus far (this is what comes of only having time to read three digests a month; curse my need for a day job!) Perhaps one of my readers can tell me if A Day at the Beach was representative of her work; I recall enjoying it. In fact, while I called it forgettable, I still remember it two years later, so I must have been wrong!

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I'm going to pause at this point because the list is actually quite lengthy, and I think it merits presentation in multiple parts. I apologize for the scantiness of my knowledge in places; until one invents a comprehensive Encyclopedia for science fiction works, whereby one can retrieve information about, and stories by, any given author, any one person's viewpoint will be limited. I do hope I've whetted your appetite, however, and that you will seek out these authors' work.

See you in a couple of days!

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55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction