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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 16, 1964] The Waiting Game (November 1964 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Patience is a Virtue

If you're like me, you look forward to the arrival of the latest issues of your favorite magazines at the local newsstand. You carefully calculate the exact day they'll show up and get there ahead of time, eager to meet the delivery person who loads all the publications off the truck. There they are, ready for the metal wires that hold them together in bundles to come off so they can go on display.

You may understand my consternation, then, when Worlds of Tomorrow failed to make an appearance on the scheduled date last month. Since it's a relatively new magazine, I figured that, like so many other science fiction publications, it was out of business.

Imagine my delight when I saw it again, thirty days later. Why the delay? Let me hand the microphone to editor Frederik Pohl, who can explain the situation better than I can, and who will also offer us a preview of the next issue.

Thanks for clearing that up, Fred. Now let me take a look at the contents of the current issue.

Better Late Than Never


Cover art by George Schelling

Killer!, by Robert Ray


Illustrations by Gray Morrow

Taking up one-third of the magazine is a novella by an author new to me. The gentleman with the gun, pictured above, is trained as an assassin by the taller man standing next to him, his half-brother. There is no love lost between the two. The intended target is the newly arisen dictator of a planet populated by very human aliens. (The only important difference between the two species is that the aliens are all short, light-skinned, and fair-haired. In this future, almost all human beings are tall, dark-haired, and have black or dark brown skin. Our antihero happens to be one of the rare persons who resemble the aliens.)

The agency for which the half-brothers work believes that the dictator poses a threat to Earth, even though his species does not yet have space travel. If that seems paranoid, well, so do nearly all the characters in this grim story.


The target.

The assassin's mission is to disguise himself as an alien and use a local weapon to kill the dictator, so Earth won't be blamed. What he doesn't know, but the reader does, is that the agency planted a hypnotic suggestion in his brain, so that he will kill himself immediately after the assassination.


Surfing down to the planet.

As soon as he arrives on the alien world, things go wrong. The dictator's forces are far more powerful and technologically advanced than the agency thought, thanks to the secret intervention of another species of alien. (They aren't quite so human, thank goodness, so we can keep track of who's doing what.)


The hero in typical form, about to knock out an innocent bystander.

What follows is an extended series of captures, escapes, chases, and violent battles. The protagonist, formerly ready to murder without qualms, slowly develops a conscience after he kills several aliens.


Take that, alien scum!

He eventually figures out that he's been set up as a sacrificial lamb, and tries to carry out his mission while staying alive. It all leads up to a very dark ending.

This is a fast-moving, action-packed spy adventure, with plenty of twists and turns in the plot. It's a quick read for its length, although some of the author's sentences are a little clumsy. The story's cynical view of espionage reminds me of last year's bestselling novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John le Carré, although I certainly wouldn't say it's as good. Worth reading, but not a classic by any means.

Three stars.

Natural History of the Kley, by Jerome Bixby

This mock article deals with microscopic intelligent beings who live on animal hairs. Humans only find out about them after they've been wiped out by a substance that kills all animal parasites on Earth. The mood changes from black comedy and satire to sheer silliness, as the author treats us to a series of groan-inducing puns. It's inoffensive, and not as bad as a Feghoot, but that's about the best I can say.

Two stars.

The Long Way, by A. Bertram Chandler and Susan Chandler


Illustration by Norman Nodel

A male space explorer and a female artist at a nudist colony, not quite romantically involved, meet a fellow who believes in dowsing. He's able to demonstrate the procedure successfully. (It seems that dowsing works better when you're naked.) Convinced that there's something to it, the spaceman does his own dowsing, in order to find a missing earring for the artist. Because the earring is shaped like a star, and the man is thinking about interstellar travel at the time, they wind up very far from home indeed. They are able to make their way back to Earth by doing some more dowsing, but things don't turn out the way they hope.

This collaboration between a well-known author and his more obscure wife isn't very convincing, as you can probably tell from the above synopsis. The theme of dowsing makes me wonder if it was intended for the pages of Analog. I think even John W. Campbell, Jr., would reject the premise as too unbelievable. The twist ending adds another layer of implausibility.

Two stars.

The Kicksters, by J. T. McIntosh


Illustrations by Gray Morrow

A group of thrill-seeking teenagers, the sons and daughters of the wealthy, play dangerous games of chicken to see who's the bravest. Their latest competition, as shown above, involves free-falling from a great height while wearing a jet pack. The trick is to turn on the jets at the last possible moment, in order to avoid being smashed into a pulp.

The boldest of the gang is a girl named Peach. Bored with risking her life in the usual ways, she decides on an even more hazardous prank. She and her boyfriend, who tries to convince her to drop the whole thing all the way through the story, travel to the Moon under false identities. She sneaks into the main jet of a spacecraft ready to return to Earth. The ship doesn't use the main jet until it's about to land, so she'll be able to survive inside a spacesuit. The joke is to force the ship to turn around and land on the Moon again. (It doesn't need to use the main jet in the lesser gravity of the satellite.)


Peach, approaching the ship unseen.

The captain of the spacecraft hates spoiled brats, particularly female ones. Since he doesn't have absolute proof that anyone is inside the main jet, even though Peach's boyfriend, as planned, lets everybody know, he refuses to delay his journey to Earth. The second-in-command, desperate to save the girl's life, comes up with various plans, but all of them prove to be impossible. It seems as if Peach is doomed.

The sense that the laws of physics are conspiring to kill the heroine reminds me of the famous story The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin. The story creates genuine suspense as to whether the protagonist is going to live or die. I'll admit that the situation is a bit contrived, but I have to give the author credit for thinking up all possible objections to the premise, and answering them in a logical fashion. Peach, although definitely foolhardy and selfish, also manages to be appealing in some ways. The captain and the second-in-command also turn out to be more complex characters than they might seem at first.

Four stars.

The Carson Effect, by Richard Wilson


Illustration by Norman Nodel

At first, this story seems to be nothing but a series of unrelated vignettes. A newspaper reporter struggles over the writing of an article about something that hasn't happened yet. A man, desperate for money to pay for his wife's operation, makes a feeble attempt at robbing a bank, only to have the teller give him much more cash than he demands, without a word of argument. A woman nervously asks her employer for a small amount of money to make up for the taxi she had to take to perform an errand, and winds up getting hundreds of dollars and the rest of the day off. A six-year-old boy thinks he can buy an extremely expensive brooch for his mother from Tiffany's, and the clerk gladly sells it to him for one dollar. The President of the United States resigns his office, turning it over to the Vice President, who is obviously unfit for the job.

We return to the reporter and discover the reason for these strange events, which I won't reveal here. I also won't talk about the ironic ending, which changes everything that happened before. Suffice to say that the story looks at a very big event from several very small perspectives, and does so in an effective manner.

Four stars.

The Fruit of the Tree, by Lester del Rey

This issue's non-fiction article speculates about the possibility of altering the genetic characteristics of living organisms. By 1980, the author believes, we'll be able to produce fruits and vegetables that will stay edible, without refrigeration, for many years, and even have flavors previously unknown. We'll be able to get edible nuts, maple and/or latex sap, and lumber, better than any used today, from a single tree. New kinds of animals will appear, supplying carnivores with novel cuts of meat. (Vegetarians, like myself, will have plants that taste exactly like meat. I'm not sure I want that.) Scientists will create replacement organs, grown from scratch, for those suffering from disease.

The author lets his imagination run wild, coming up with a lot of ideas for science fiction stories, if nothing else. I doubt I'll see all these wonders a mere sixteen years from now, but I could be wrong. Even if it's hard to believe everything this essay says, it makes for interesting reading.

Three stars.

Somewhere in Space, by C. C. MacApp


Illustrations by John Giunta

Some time before this story begins, people found alien teleportation technology on Mars. Since then, it's been used routinely, with few problems. Up until now, that is. Without explanation, folks without close relatives or friends disappear into thin air after using the teleportation device. The protagonist is a technician who accepts the dangerous but extremely lucrative assignment of figuring out what's going on. Not only does he know as much about the technology as any human being can, he's another loner, expected to vanish when he goes inside the machine.

He winds up on an unknown planet, naked and without any of his equipment. There to meet him is a very human alien, a young woman whose only differences from a human female are the fact that she has no thumbs, and that her skin is an odd color. She's one of the slaves that another group of aliens kidnap from all over, including Earth. (Our hero is very lucky that the slavers aren't around to grab him. They happen to be at some kind of celebration, getting drunk.)

With the help of the woman, the protagonist gets away from the slave facility, facing the challenge of surviving on a strange, alien world. Things get really weird when he reaches a mountain, which is really an ancient, all-powerful being, able to take on any form it pleases.


The ball of light the mountain uses to communicate with the man.

After many adventures, and falling in love with the alien woman, the hero battles the slavers against seemingly impossible odds, using only simple weapons like rocks and wooden spears. Can he possibly defeat the Bad Guys, return to Earth, and win the Girl? Well, maybe with a little help from a deus ex machina, in the form of a god-like mountain-being.


Chaos at the slave camp.

You might be able to tell from my tone that I found it hard to take this wild adventure seriously, although it's certainly not intended as a comedy. The nonstop mishaps that the hero faces kept me reading, even if I didn't believe a second of it. The mountain, alien, god, or whatever you want to call it, is the most interesting character. Although it reminds me of the lead novella in some ways, it's got a much more optimistic mood.

Three stars.

Worth Waiting For?

So, did the delay in receiving this issue have any effect on my reaction to it? Did I have high expectations that it failed to meet? Or, did I assume that the extra month would sour me on the magazine, so that I wouldn't be able to fully enjoy it?

None of the above, really. This is a typical issue. A couple of decent, if not great, adventure yarns; a couple of good stories; a couple of poor stories; and a so-so article. Good enough for half a buck, I'd say.

I guess biding my time until it appeared paid off. It's better than, say, waiting around for somebody who never shows up.

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[April 14, 1964] COOKING WITH ASH (the May 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Melting Down

The cover of the May 1964 Amazing depicts an astronaut whose space helmet and surrounding objects are melting as the giant sun blazes in through his rather large porthole.  This illustrates Lester del Rey’s story Boiling Point, or more likely the story rationalizes the cover; I suspect more strongly each month that a lot of Amazing’s cover stories are in fact written around an already purchased cover painting. 


by Schelling

Boiling Point

The story starts out as routinely clever.  Protagonist Stasek is a technician residing on Venus and studying “energy-eaters,” amorphous creatures who hang out near the sun and live on its energy.  He is pressed into service to do maintenance on“the ring of satellites strung like beads between the orbit of Venus and the orbit of Mercury.” They are there to relay communications, observe sunspots, absorb energy and beam it to wherever it’s needed. 

Stasek sets out and, of course, quickly comes across an energy-eater wrapped around a satellite he’s supposed to service.  What an opportunity!  He disregards regulations, gets close to it, and finds out why nobody who has done so has come back: it wraps itself around his little spaceship.  Turns out it’s telepathic, and it’s hungry: it wants to go towards the sun, and when Stasek demurs, it takes control of the ship.  Curtains!  Except Stasek, before he cooks completely, figures out a better deal to offer it.

This would be a perfectly acceptable piece of hardware-opera yard goods except that it turns on the assumption that telepathic communication, if it exists at all, could work right off the bat between creatures of such utterly different background and experience.  I read that some guy named Wittgenstein said, “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” Sounds right to me, and that goes at least double for a shape-shifting vacuum-dweller that feeds on pure energy.  Sorry, too much to swallow, downgraded from yard goods to factory reject.  Two stars.

As for the rest of the issue, I can’t say there’s anything especially good here—but at least some of it is bad in more interesting ways than usual.  Also, as someone suggested to me, this seems to be the Special Bad-Mouthing Issue.  Once past the del Rey story, every piece of fiction contains some derogatory stereotype or a character who is nasty to the point of caricature.

Sunburst (Part 3 of 3)


by Schelling

This issue concludes Phyllis Gotlieb’s serial Sunburst, which seems sincere and well-meaning, but ultimately inconclusive. 

Premise (in case you haven't been reading along): years ago, in a small Midwestern city called Sorrel Park, a nuclear reactor accident resulted in the town’s being quarantined under martial law, and in the birth of a number of mutant children with very strong psionic powers.  A few years later these feral superchildren ran rampant through the town destroying everything within reach, and were themselves quarantined behind a force field in a barren place called the Dump (hence, Dumplings).

The main character is Shandy Johnson, a 13-year-old orphaned girl who is an “imperv,” i.e., someone with no psi talent who is undetectable via psi, and who is trying to get by in depressed and police-dominated Sorrel Park.  She is apprehended and taken to the authorities, who want to use her as a go-between with the Dumplings, though that doesn’t actually happen.

Instead the author launches a very busy plot full of escapes, pursuits, disappearances, captivities, disturbances, threats of massive sabotage of essential government functions, etc.  Midway through, Shandy unspools her big idea: psi talents tend to develop in people who are psychopaths anyway—born juvenile delinquents!  I.e., mesomorphs who have had trouble with the police starting early, who mostly “come from families without very strong morals—often immigrants who have trouble coping with a new country. . . . I’ve heard poverty is a cause of delinquency, but I think these kinds of shiftless, helpless people could be a cause of poverty too. . . .”

After this detour into discredited pseudo-science, the busy plot machine cranks up again, with the Dumplings mostly acting like the natural-born delinquents we’ve been told they are, and at the end most of those who are still alive are back in the Dump behind a more secure force field.  That is, after all the hugger-mugger, the story’s basic problem, young people essentially sentenced to life imprisonment in a barren environment because nobody can control their dangerous talents, is unchanged.  It is suggested that Shandy is the real mutant superperson here, though what that means is unclear. 

Meanwhile, we have never seen the Dumplings and their outcast society—the most interesting part of the set-up—except second-hand, and in melodramatic bursts during their breakout.  It’s all perfectly readable, if you can overlook Gotlieb’s frequently clumsy writing.  (Sample: “She had come to a hard decision, and she silently awarded herself the razz for her sense of its altruism, without stopping the ache.”) It just never adds up to much despite the potentially interesting premise.  Two stars.

The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal


by Schelling

Next up is The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal, by Cordwainer Smith, he of the suddenly soaring reputation.  This one is told in high whimsical tall-tale style, about the eponymous Commander who is dispatched to probe the “outer reaches of our galaxy.” He encounters a colony planet where “femininity became carcinogenic,” so the women all died off and the only means of survival was to turn everyone medically into men, which of course had effects beyond the medical.  Smith describes the results at some length.  Here’s a sample:

“They, themselves, were bearded homosexuals, with rouged lips, ornate earrings, fine heads of hair, and very few old men among them.  They killed off their men before they became old; the things they could not get from love or relaxation or comfort, they purchased with battle and death.  They made up songs proclaiming themselves to be the last of the old men and the first of the new, and they sang their hate to mankind when they should meet, and they sang ‘Woe is earth that we should find it,’ and yet something inside them made them add to almost every song a refrain which troubled even them.

“And I mourn Man!”

One must ask whether this is a glimpse of the far future, or of the author’s insecurities.  We don’t hear much about homosexuals here in this small Kentucky town, and what we do hear amounts to locker room talk.  I wonder if Smith is just passing on the locker room talk of intellectuals.  His extravagant fantasy about people I doubt he knows much about reminds me of some of the strange things people in this mostly segregated town say about Negroes.  Anyway, two stars: a story that started out like a bravura performance, brought down by what reads like gross stereotyping.

Incidentally, the blurb to the story reads like the editor tried to get into the swing of Smith’s sometimes outlandish prose.  I wonder if she just appropriated a piece of the story to serve as a blurb.

The Artist


by Schelling

Rosel George Brown contributes The Artist, a purposefully difficult and unpleasant story about an artist, a stupid and nasty jerk who has become successful by painting what his long-suffering wife sees (it’s not too clear how that works).  Now she sees something strange and frightening in a corner of the room, and rather than have him paint what she sees, she provokes him into getting a stepladder and looking for himself, with unpleasant results (for him anyway).  It’s sort of like that playwright of bad marriages, Edward Albee, meeting H.P. Lovecraft, to mutual dislike.  For lagniappe, the action takes place at a party featuring caricatured secondary characters.  Two stars for making the story seem interesting enough to persevere with it (including a second read) long enough to figure out what is going on. 

According to His Abilities


by Schelling

Another nasty jerk is featured in Harry Harrison’s According to His Abilities, though this one isn’t so stupid, and is also rationalized at the end of the story.  The refined milquetoast DeWitt and the boorish thug Briggs have been dispatched to rescue an Earthman from primitive aliens who are pretty boorish and thuggy themselves.  Briggs’s belligerence wins the day, and there’s a facile revelation about him at the end, of an all too familiar sort.  It’s dreary hackwork executed professionally.  Two stars.

For Every Action


by Adkins

C.C. MacApp’s For Every Action starts with a mildly clever idea, spaceborne life forms around the orbit of Pluto that glom on to spaceships’ rocket exhausts so they can no longer steer accurately, then adds another such idea (a guy could move around in space using a bow and arrow!), and sets them in a silly frame of Cold War suspicion, concluding with a reference to Soviet spacemen (implicitly, drunk) floating in space singing Volga Boat Song (sic).  It’s generically similar to Boiling Point but much weaker.  Two stars, barely.

Planetary Engineering

And of course Ben Bova is back with the latest in his interminable series of fact articles though this one gets no farther than the Moon.  It’s about what people will have to do to establish colonies there, and is frankly a rehash of what we’ve seen not only in dozens of SF stories but in plenty of articles in general-interest magazines, complete with platitudes (“Finally, carving out a human settlement in a literally new world will give man an opportunity to create a new society.” Etc.) and observations so mundane as to be suffocating (“Corridors will no doubt be painted in special color codes, to help travellers find their way.”).  Two stars, largely for good intentions.  Also, no one is insulted here.

The Verdict

So: not much here of much merit, but, as already suggested . . . if you can’t be good, at least find an interesting way to be bad.


by Schelling

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[March 13, 1964] NOTHING MUCH TO SAY (the April 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Within Narrow Constraints

The April 1964 issue of Amazing features a story titled Prisoner in Orbit and a cover (by Alex Schomburg) depicting a guy in a transparent bubble, scarcely taller than he, looking out into space with a disgruntled expression.  One might suspect that this depiction is overly literal, but no: it’s just what the author called for.  Or, more likely, the story was written around the cover, an old magazine practice that has undoubtedly survived to the present. 

Prisoner in Orbit, by Henry Slesar

The story is by Henry Slesar, a prolific contributor to Amazing in the late ‘50s and an occasional one since then, though that may be changing: he had a story in the last issue and has two in this one.  Here, humans are fighting against the Maks, the android army of the Indasians, and the protagonist and his soldier buddies have been captured and sent to a prison asteroid, run entirely by the Maks.  The story slips into the familiar groove of prisoner of war stories, with the captives scheming to escape and the Maks trying to keep them in line. 

This old plot is made science-fictional by the rigid mechanical thinking of the Maks, who, after being informed that they really don’t need to kill prisoners who misbehave, since a little solitary confinement will do just as well, devise a confinement so solitary it drives the miscreants crazy.  The cover thus justified, the story moves on to its real business: the war is over, won by the humans so conclusively that there’s no chain of command left to tell the authority-minded Maks to stand down and let the humans go.  How to persuade them? 

Clever solution, coming right up.  Slesar has served a rigorous and prolific apprenticeship in Ellery Queen’s, Alfred Hitchcock’s, and other crime fiction magazines as well as in sf, and it shows.  This is a highly professional if rather bloodless performance, with background deftly sketched in, the pace jazzed up with flashbacks and flash-forwards, in as smooth a style as you’ll find anywhere.  Three stars for slick execution, even if there’s no reason to remember the story once you’re done.

The Chair, by O.H. Leslie

Slesar’s other story, The Chair, appears under his pseudonym O.H. Leslie, familiar from the Ziff-Davis magazines but even more so to the readers of Alfred Hitchcock’s. It is a bit livelier than Prisoner in Orbit but just as formulaic, splitting the difference between early Galaxy satire and the cautionary mode of, say, Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont when they are not writing outright fantasy. 

The eponymous Chair is an expensive commercial product that promises the ultimate in comfort and satisfaction of every need, at least if you get the extras like the Food-o-Mat and the Chem-o-Mat Plumbing Unit.  You can see where that is going, and go it does, with the journalist protagonist chronicling the decline of his friend who gets a Chair, until the manufacturer figures out the perfect way to silence him.  This one too is slickly executed, and enhanced by Slesar’s obvious familiarity with advertising style.  Also there’s more of a point to it and you might remember it a little longer than Prisoner in Orbit.  Three stars, a bit more lustrous than those for Prisoner.

The Other Inhabitant, by Edward W. Ludwig

Of course most of us presumably read sf for something other than slick execution.  But we might miss it when it’s not there, as illustrated by this story, in which Astro-Lieutenant Sam Harding, exploring “Alpha III” (a planet of Alpha Centauri, apparently), discovers that he’s not alone; something is following him.  As the story proceeds we learn that Lt. Harding’s situation is not quite what he thinks it is.  This kind of psychological near-horror stands or falls on execution, and this one falls.  In the hands of a more skilled writer it might have been quite effective.  Two stars.

A Question of Theology, by George Whitley

A. Bertram Chandler, using his frequent pseudonym George Whitley for no apparent reason, contributes A Question of Theology, in which humans are about to land on a planet of Alpha Centauri (yes, that one again), which some time ago was visited by an unmanned vessel carrying experimental animals, and which now seems to have a well-developed civilization with cities.  The humans’ reception is predictable to the reader if not to the characters.  It’s perfectly readable—Chandler is no Slesar but he will serve for most purposes—but it reads as if the author wasn’t really very interested in it, and the theme is unfortunately reminiscent of some of his earlier, much better stories: the incisive The Cage, from Fantasy and Science Fiction seven or so years ago, and Giant Killer, the 1945 Astounding novella that made his reputation.  Two stars.

Sunburst (Part 2 of 3), by Phyllis Gotlieb and The Saga of “Skylark” Smith, by Sam Moskowitz

The rest of the issue is taken up by the second installment of Phyllis Gotlieb’s serial Sunburst, to be reviewed next month, and another of Sam Moskowitz’s SF Profiles: The Saga of “Skylark” Smith.  Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., is of course author of The Skylark of Space and numerous other grandiose space operas of bygone days done in a bygone style, and has failed to adapt to a more sophisticated genre and its audience, as Moskowitz essentially acknowledges.  While some of the biographical detail is interesting, the point is otherwise elusive.  Two stars.

Spectroscope

Last month, the editor proudly announced the advent of Lester del Rey as new proprietor of The Spectroscope, the book review column.  This month, with no comment at all, del Rey is gone and the book reviewer is Robert Silverberg, who is knowledgeable and adept.  Let’s hope he lasts more than a month.

Post-Mortem

So, the upshot: nothing terrible, which compared to recent performance is an improvement, but nothing especially interesting either, except possibly the serial installment.  To be continued.

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[February 13, 1964] Deafening (the March 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston


Cover by EMSH

The March 1964 Amazing fairly shouts mediocrity, or worse, before one reads a word of the fiction.  The cover, illustrating Robert F. Young’s story Arena of Decisions, portrays a guy working some sort of keyboard in front of video screens displaying . . . a young woman, a lady as some would have it, and a tiger.  Can it be that Young, having rehashed the Old Testament and moved on to Jack and the Beanstalk, is now recapitulating that silly old Frank Stockton story, The Lady or the Tiger, which so many of us were forced to read in junior high?  And just for lagniappe, the editorial says in passing, “For the female of the sf species who may not be quite sure of her facts, billiards is played with balls and a cue on a flat rectangular table with pockets in each corner and at the middle of the two longer sides.” Always glad to help you ignorant . . . ladies . . . out!

Arena of Decisions, by Robert F. Young

That leads us to page 7, where the Young story begins, and yep, the blurb cops to the Frank Stockton replay right up front.  For anyone who hasn’t read or been told the original story, it involves a criminal justice system (if that’s the right word) in which those accused of serious crimes are forced to choose one of two doors to open.  Behind one of them is a hungry tiger; behind the other, a woman whom the no-longer-accused is required to marry.  The story ends just before the fatal choice, with an element of possible skulduggery added. 

Young does not entirely recapitulate Stockton’s plot, but the gimmick is the same, with extra chicanery added, set on a cartoonish colony planet, all told in a style of arch jocularity that mainly conveys the message “I know I’m wasting your time with this facile and vacant crap—let’s see how long I can keep you going.”

I’m about as tired of slagging Young month after month as I am of reading him.  I didn’t think he was always this bad, so I reread a couple of his early stories in anthologies: Jungle Doctor from Startling Stories in 1955 and The Garden in the Forest from Astounding in 1953.  He wasn’t this bad.  These are not great stories—his weaknesses for cliche and sentimentality are evident—but they are reasonably intelligent and capable, if less polished than his current output, with some interesting substance to them rather than the cynical vacuity of Arena of Decisions and its ilk.  I would never have called Young mighty, but . . . how the respectable have fallen.  One star.

Now Is Forever, by Dobbin Thorpe

Like a breath of fresh breeze in a fetid dungeon, or a slug of Pepto-Bismol to the dyspeptic stomach, comes Now Is Forever by Dobbin Thorpe, reliably reported to be Thomas M. Disch.  Intentionally or not, Forever is a rejoinder to Ralph Williams’s clever but facile Business as Usual, During Alterations, which appeared in Astounding in 1958.  In Williams’s story, portable matter duplicators suddenly appear on Earth, planted no doubt by aliens bent on conquest by destroying our economy, and the heroic store manager instantly sorts out the new economy: starting now, everything is done on credit, but everybody can have credit.  Nothing up my sleeve!  Everybody wins!

Disch starts with the same notion but is of course less sanguine.  He asks what people will live for when the getting-and-spending basis of their lives is suddenly yanked from under them.  The answer is the old and established will cling fiercely and futilely to their old habits, and young people will seek thrills—including death, which is no big deal as long as you duplicate yourself beforehand.  This sharply written and well visualized story just misses excellence by being a little too long and rambling for its point.  Three stars.

Jam for Christmas, Vance Simonds

It’s back downhill with Vance Simonds’s Jam for Christmas, the second story about Everett O’Toole, the “telempathist,” who with the aid of a mutant mongoose and a worldwide psionic network of other humans and animals, can scan the world to see how people are feeling about things.  In this case the world is the Moon, where the now-amalgamated capitalist nations are about to broadcast to Earth the equivalent of a USO show, and the now-amalgamated commies want to jam this display of the vitality of capitalism.  (The commies haven’t quite got the know-how to do their own broadcasts.)

Like its predecessor Telempathy, from last June’s issue, the story is swaddled in layers of satirical performance, much of it focusing on O’Toole’s excessive weight and alcohol consumption, the physical attributes of the show’s star, this year’s Miss Heavenly Body, and other cheap targets.  Some of it is actually pretty funny—while the telempathists are scanning their own area for communist spies, they come upon a covert fascist whose attitude is concisely lampooned—but it mainly serves to pad out what is ultimately a pretty thin and humdrum story.  Two stars.

Sunburst (Part 1 of 3), by Phyllis Gotlieb

That’s all the fiction that is complete in this issue.  The longest item is the first installment of Sunburst, a serial by Phyllis Gotlieb, who has had a handful of stories in these Ziff-Davis magazines and in If.  I usually hold off on serials until all the parts are in, but in my weary quest for something more to redeem this lackluster issue, I read this installment.  The set-up is interesting: in a small midwestern town, a nuclear reactor explosion has resulted in the birth of a cohort of psi-talented mutants, who come into their powers as children and wreck a good part of the town and its police force.  These uncontrollably dangerous tykes are isolated in the “Dump” behind a psi-impervious field whipped up by a handy Nobelist in physics.  Now it’s a decade later; what to do with them? 

It’s a bit amateurish; Gotlieb doesn’t do much to sketch in the background of what living in this now-quarantined town is like or how the quarantine works, and the dialogue and interactions among the characters are pretty unconvincing.  But it gives the sense that she’s getting at something of interest, however clumsily, so I look forward to the rest of it.  No rating, though, until the end.

The Time of Great Dying

Ben Bova departs from his usual cosmological beat for The Time of Great Dying, canvassing the various theories purporting to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs and the ascendancy of mammals at the end of the Mesozoic, including such winners as “racial senescence,” though Bova doesn’t give that one much respect.  He puts his money, or at least his mouth, on the growing prevalence of grasses, for which dinosaurs’ teeth were poorly adapted, though it’s a little unclear why they didn’t evolve more useful teeth over the same time period that the mammals did.  The subject is a little more interesting than usual, but overall it’s about as dull as usual.  Two stars.

The Spectroscope

Book reviewer S.E. Cotts has been replaced by Lester del Rey, to no great effect: there are virtues to having a professional writer as a reviewer, but he contributes no profound insights and is more verbose about it than Cotts.

Loud and Clear

So, overall, the promised mediocrity is delivered, with Mr. Disch again showing flashes of something better, and Gotlieb’s serial extending some hope.  Beyond those two, the wasteland beckons, or fails to.




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[August 8, 1963] Great Escapes (September 1963 IF)

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by Gideon Marcus

In the United States, the Fourth of July is perhaps our biggest holiday, celebrating our declaration of independence from our former motherland, Great Britain.  It was our escape from taxation without representation, from capricious colonial government, and from forced tea-drinking. 

This latest Independence Day saw the premiere of one of the biggest and best summer blockbusters ever made, the appropriately themed The Great Escape.  Directed by John Sturges, and starring James Garner, Richard Attenborough, and Steve McQueen, it is the vaguely true-to-life story of a prison break from a Nazi Stalag.  Exciting, moving, and beautifully done, it's sure to be a contender for an Oscar or three.  Watch it.

The September 1963 Worlds of IF Science Fiction continues the escape motif.  Not just in the normal sense in that it provides an escape from reality, but rather, each of its stories involves an escape of some kind. 

Was this a deliberate editorial choice by Fred Pohl or simply a happy circumstance?  Either way, it makes for an enjoyable issue that is better than the sum of its parts.

The Expendables, by A. E. van Vogt

Van Vogt, one of space opera's most prominent lights, has been away from the SF scene for fourteen years.  So it's quite a scoop for Pohl to have gotten this latest piece, depicting the final stages of a generation ship's journey.  A mutiny against the authoritarian captaincy is brewing as the ship nears its destination, and when it turns out the planet intended for colonization is already inhabited, all-out rebellion ensues.

This is a tale that combines two of my favorite topics, first contact and generation ships, and I'm a big fan of Van Vogt.  However, I am disappointed to report that Expendables just doesn't hang well together.  The science is shaky, the dialogue rather implausible, and the characters a bit too gullible.  There is also a queer, slapdash quality to the writing.  I suspect this was written in a hurry; a do-over could turn it into a fine story, indeed.  Two stars as is.

The Time of Cold, by Mary Carlson

Curt, a spacewrecked man trapped without water on a parched world has little hope of surviving long enough to be rescued.  Xen is an amorphous hot-blooded being, native to the planet, desperate for more warmth.  Both are menaced by liquid scorpions, beasts who kill in an instant and don't care what world you come from.  Are the two aliens the key to each other's survival?

There is an art to telling a story from alternating perspectives such that each scene moves the story forward without repetition.  Mary Carlson, a young lady from South Dakota, mastered that art in her first published piece.  It's a beautiful, uplifting tale.  Bravo.  Five stars.

Manners and Customs of the Thrid, by Murray Leinster

In Thrid culture, the Governor can never be wrong, and woe be to one who disputes him.  Jorgenson, a representative of the Rim Star Trading Corp., dares to stand up for his native business partner, Ganti, whose wife the Governor would have for his own.  Both are exiled for life to a barren rock in the middle of the ocean, escape from which would daunt even the fellows who broke out of Alcatraz. 

But, escape they do, and the method is quite ingenious — and logical given the central tenet of Thrid society.  Writing-wise, it's a rather workmanlike piece, but the thrilling bits more than compensate.  Three stars.

Science on a Shoestring – Or Less , by Theodore Sturgeon

In this month's science column, Sturgeon extols the merits of UNESCO's book, Sourcebook for Science Teaching.  I love Ted Sturgeon, don't get me wrong, but sometimes his article topics just don't merit the space they take up.  Two stars.

The Reefs of Space (Part 2 of 3), by Jack Williamson, and Frederik Pohl

In the future, Earth is a dystopia under the stifling computerized control of the Machine and its inscrutable Plan.  Those who resist the Plan, or for whom the Machine can make no use, are condemned to the Body Bank for reclamation.  The last installment, in which state criminal Steve Ryeland was forced by the Machine to develop a reactionless drive, only mentioned the Body Banks in passing.  Part 2 deals almost exclusively with them.

In the midst of his work, Ryeland, accused of plotting a wave of disasters around the world, is exiled to Cuba.  The tropical paradise has been turned into a kind of leper colony, except limbs and organs are not lost to disease, but instead, according to the demands of the citizens for whom parts are harvested.  Over time, the residents lose more and more of themselves until there is not enough to sustain life.  One might survive as long as six years, if you can call a limbless, mouthless existence survival.  Of course, the tranquilizing drugs they put in the food and water keep you from minding too much…

Fred Pohl already proved he could write compelling horror in A Plague of Pythons.  This latest installment of The Reefs of Space would do fine as a stand-alone story (and I have to wonder if it was originally intended as such).  The tale of Ryeland's attempt to escape an escape-proof prison is gripping, even if the trappings of the greater story aren't so much.  Four stars.

The Course of Logic, by Lester del Rey

A mated pair of parasitic aliens, who use other creatures as their hosts, have been trapped on a bleak world for eons.  Their home galaxy has been destroyed, and the only compatible beasts they've found lack the fine motor skills to construct spaceships for escape — or any other kind of technology.  So they are delighted when they come across a pair of humans, for our form is absolutely perfect for their needs.  Will these puppet masters, once ensconced in our guise, escape their planetary prison and become unstoppable conquerors?

Lester has been too long from our ranks, but it looks like he's back to stay, given his recent record of publication.  This is a grim piece but with a splendid sting in its tail.  I also particularly enjoyed this bit of evolutionary teleology, said by the dominant female to her mate:

"The larger, stronger and more intelligent form is always female.  How else could it care for its young?  It needs ability for a whole family, while the male needs only enough for itself.  The laws of evolution are logical or we wouldn't have evolved at all."

And before you scoff, recall the hyenas and the bees.  Four stars.

The Customs Lounge, by E. A. Proulx

This vignette appears to be a Tale from the White Hart, but it's really a story of human cleverness under alien domination.  It is apparently the first piece by Proulx, "a folk singing star-gazing man from upstate New York," and while it's nothing special, it's also not bad.  Three stars.

Threlkeld's Daughter, by James Bell

Last up, we have a tale not of escape, but of entrapment.  A six-legged, tailed tree-creature from Alpha Centauri takes on comely human female form and travels to Earth to secure a male homo sapiens specimen for study.  But with the human body comes human hormones and emotions, and love creates its own entrapments. 

It's a cute little piece, more like something I'd find in F&SF.  Three stars.

Thus ends a fine issue of an improving magazine.  If you ever find yourself imprisoned, in gaol real or virtual, one of these stories might give you the inspiration to break out.  Or, at the very least, make a few hours of your sentence more pleasant.

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[July 10, 1963] (August 1963 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Last week, we marked the 187th birthday of the United States in traditional fashion.  We launched fireworks, marched in parades, read the Declaration of Independence, and otherwise honored the creation of the world's oldest extant constitutional democracy.  There is a lot to be proud of in the last two centuries of progress, which has seen our nation elevated to the status of first among equals.

At the same time, we still have a long way to go, as evidenced by the numerous Civil Rights protests that have occurred and are occurring around the country every day.  In them, one can see echoes of the original revolution, the one sparked by the land-holding, enfranchised WASPs of the colonies.  Let us hope that the benefits secured by that small group will one day extend to everyone.


Protesters of segregation at Gwynn Oak Park, just outside Baltimore, including Allison Turaj, who had a rock thrown at her.

Speaking of revolutions, every two months, we get to take the pulse of the one started by H.L. Gold, who threw down the gauntlet at the feet of pulp sci-fi in 1950 when he started his scientifiction magazine, Galaxy.  It was once a monthly magazine, but since 1959 it has been a half-again-sized bi-monthly.  This was a cost-saving measure, as was the reduction of writers' rates.  The latter caused a tangible (if not fatal) drop in quality, and it is my understanding that it either has recently been or will soon be reversed.

Thus, the August 1963 Galaxy is a mixed bag, with standout stories by lesser authors and lesser stories by standout authors.  Take a look:

Hot Planet, by Hal Clement

The once great Hugo-winner, Hal Clement, again brings us a scientifically rigorous but largely unreadable tale of an alien planet.  Last time, it was The Green World, about a young planet with paradoxically old features.  This time, the subject is closer to home.  Mercury, as we have described previously, orbits closest to the sun of all the planets, and the sun's gravity likely has frozen the planet's rotation such that it always presents one face to its parent. 

Clement posits that Mercury is so close to the sun, in fact, that the tides (the differential of gravity between the near and far sides of the planet) are strong enough to melt the planet's insides.  This, in turn, causes tremendous vulcanism such that giant cones belch forth internal gasses and give the little world an atmosphere (albeit a scalding and unbreathable one).  This is the Mercury portrayed in The Hot Planet.

It's a fascinating idea, one I've not seen advanced in any of the scientific literature.  It's also highly plausible, and I suspect similar tidal heating is underway in some of the close-in moons of the giant planets. 

Unfortunately, the characters are cardboard, the plot is threadbare, and the writing soporific.  Perhaps Analog can pick Clement up to be their regular science writer, a role for which he is likely better suited.  Two stars.

The Great Nebraska Sea, by Allan Danzig

I've got a friend whose bag is disaster stories.  The bigger, the better.  Climatological events, nuclear wars, flashy alien invasions — he imagines them in the backdrop of his daily life to make it more exciting.  He'd really dig this new "history" written by newcomer, Allan Danzig. 

It's a simple, straightforward recounting of the great crustal shift of '73 that caused the Great Plains to sink dozens of feet and a great rift at the Gulf Coast to form, causing the ocean to permanently flood the central United States.  The event that caused the deaths of 14 million Americans is spun positively, seen through the lens of a far future that has used the Great Nebraska sea to great economic advantage.  Lyric in its matter-of-factness, it's a fun read.  Four stars.

Earthbound, by Lester del Rey

A tiny vignette which asks the question, "At one point does a prison the size of the world become intolerable confinement?"  It punches.  Four stars.

The Problem Makers, by Robert Hoskins

A covert agency of the Terran Empire is tasked with "advancing" the other planets of the galaxy.  Their philosophy is essentially Utilitarianism — if it benefits the most people, it is worthy…no matter how many people must suffer along the way.  Decently written, but it's a smug story, the kind I'd expect in Analog.  If Hoskins meant it as satire, it was too subtle for me.  It offended.  Two stars.

The Pain Peddlers, by Robert Silverberg

This is one of those truly unpleasant tales that I can't help admiring.  In the future, the medical credo has evolved to, "First, do no harm — unless you can make a buck by televising it."  And future television lets you feel as well as watch.  So a nation of sado-masochists gets to viscerally participate from the viewpoint of the patient, who undergoes surgery without anesthesia!  The Pain Peddlers is a dark tale of the production of such hospital shows.

It's good, feeling like it might have come from the pen of Robert Sheckley (where are you these days, Bob?) Four stars…but skip it if you're squeamish.

Here Gather the Stars (Part 2 of 2), by Clifford D. Simak

Last month, Cliff Simak introduced us to Enoch Wallace, a Civil War soldier who retired to rural Wisconsin, ultimately to become the immortal operator of a cosmic way-station.  There, he facilitates the teleportation of aliens across the galaxy.  This issue concludes Wallace's tale.

I mentioned in the first article that the work seemed strangely unpolished.  It meandered, and there was much duplication, as if the novel had not been strongly edited.  That feeling is even stronger in this second half, in which new concepts are introduced in an ad hoc matter. 

There are many several-page sequences which are cul-de-sacs, adding little to the story, and not particularly engaging in and of themselves (for instance, when Wallace goes into his virtual shooting gallery and fights a sequence of imaginary beasts).  We get a parade of alien visitors and gifts and Wallace's somber musing upon them, and sprinkled among them are plot points quickly introduced and resolved:

One of Wallace's actions, done at the request of an alien visitor, nearly causes Earth to be barred from admission to the interstellar group.  There is a Talisman that ties the universe together, but its keeper is unworthy, and so the galactic community is falling apart.  Then it turns out the Talisman has been stolen, and its thief chooses Earth to hide out on.  He is thwarted in his plans by Wallace as well as Lucy, the psychic healer, who it turns out is perfectly suited to be the new keeper.  All of this happens in Part 2 — none of it is hinted at in Part 1!

This all could have made for an interesting story, but the pacing is jagged.  In the end, Simak presents a dozen components but fails to unify or develop them in a satisfying manner.  It saddens me, for Simak is a great author, and there is the germ of a great story here.  As is, it's a three star novel badly in need of a complete rewrite. 

The Birds of Lorrane, by Bill Doede

Last up, Doede brings us the story of an Earther who plunges far beyond the pale of humanity to a desert world on which (it has been told) live a pair of sentient, talking birds.  He finds them, but at such cost that he is left at death's door.  Are the birds his salvation or his ruin?  Interesting, if a bit underdeveloped.  Three stars.

All in all, the revolution seems to have hit a rough patch.  Perhaps Galaxy's new editor, Fred Pohl, can weather this literary Valley Forge such that his ragtag army of new recruits can yet prevail…

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[March 12, 1963] TOO MUCH TO ASK? (the April 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

So: another not-very-good issue, this April Amazing, where the outstanding item is a piece of well-turned yard goods.  So what’s the reasonable expectation here?  Let’s not be too greedy.  How about at least something in each issue that’s unusually good, and nothing that’s unusually stupid?  Is that too much to ask?  Seems like it is, certainly this month.

“It didn’t happen twice a year that Gustavus Robert Fry, Chief Commissioner of the Interstellar Police Authority, allotted more than an hour in his working day to any one appointment.” That’s the opening line of James H. Schmitz’s Beacon to Elsewhere.  Am I the only one who’s gotten tired of stories that begin by announcing what a big shot—interstellar police commissioner, President, Galactic Coordinator, or what have you—one of the characters is? 

Transitory irritations aside, Beacon to Elsewhere—at 64 pages labelled a “novel”—is a reasonably agreeable piece of hokum, involving the discovery of a new series of elements, compounded into Ymir 400, which has many interesting and dangerous properties including emitting a new sort of radiation.  Two 34-kilogram cases of Ym-400 have been stolen from a space ship in transit.  The story starts with 10 pages of talk, with Howard Camhorn, the Overgovernment’s Coordinator of Research, explaining all of this and more to Chief Commissioner Fry.  This is followed by about 45 pages of the gumshoeing adventures of the more plebeian Lieutenant Frank Dowland, on the case in western North America, investigating the activities of some subversive ranchers who may be trying to use the stolen Ym-400 and may or may not be achieving time travel. 

Some large and daunting aliens make cameo appearances, their gravitas unfortunately impaired by the cover depiction which makes one of them look a bit like an oversized Shmoo (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmoo).  And the story fades out with another nine pages of talk, first Dowland’s debriefing, and then Camhorn and one of his guys talking about the debriefing.  And here is Schmitz’s unusual talent: he renders all this talk in such genial and readable style that he gets away with a way of constructing stories that would get anybody else a quick rejection letter.  I described the last Schmitz story in this magazine as “just capably rearranging the usual SF furniture”; that will do for this one too.  Three stars.

Schmitz’s competent piece of product is accompanied by a suite of fairly lackluster, or worse, short stories.  Roger Zelazny’s Circe Has Her Problems is not metaphorical; Circe has set up shop on a stray asteroid floating loose in interstellar space, hoping for some male company that can withstand her signature talent of turning them into animals.  An android shows up.  It’s as cartoony as it sounds.  Two stars, fewer in the hands of a less lively writer.  Now that Zelazny has broken in, are we getting his earlier practice pieces?

In David Bunch’s Somebody Up There Hates Us, an alien walks into a bar (actually, a night club on New Year’s Eve—and it walks into all of them at the same time, by the clock anyway) and hands out little wish-fulfillment devices, asking only that the patrons wait until midnight to operate them.  Things are not of course what they seem, and humanity (most of it anyway) is saved only because the bartenders are robots and we have time zones.  There is a smattering of ostentatious futuristic jargon (the protagonist is drinking an old fashioned space squeezings) in what is said to be 1972, but otherwise the writing is fairly mundane, unlike Bunch’s Moderan stories, which at least have the virtue of surface novelty.  There is a recurring theme of the mutual dislike between the protagonist and his wife, which is apparently supposed to be funny but is distasteful.  One star.

J.F. Bone’s For Service Rendered is a deal-with-the-Devil story, the Devil having come through Enid Twilley’s malfunctioning TV set, no pentagram needed.  He doesn’t want her soul, he wants her body, and he’s offering to cure the pancreatic cancer she didn’t know she had and give her another ten years or so free before whisking her off to Hel (sic), which he wants her to know isn’t half as bad as it’s cracked up to be.  This is all laid out in reasonably amusing detail, and then concludes in a stupid male-chauvinistic joke.  Another one-star job.

Harrison Denmark’s [a pseudonym if I've ever seen one…(Ed.)] The Stainless Steel Leech is about a werebot, who’s gotten free from Central Control but, to live (so to speak), needs to get his batteries charged by draining other robots, so he’s also a vampbot (my term, not the author’s) and an object of terror among the other robots (humans having disappeared from the scene).  This mildly clever joke is less annoying than but somewhat similar in tone to Circe Has Her Problems, not too surprisingly since rumor has it that Mr. Denmark is actually Zelazny.  Two stars, clutching futilely for a third.

Frank Tinsley is back after a six months’ absence with The Cosmic Wrecker, a more fanciful exercise than his usual; nobody else seems to be proposing a specialized vehicle to tool around and collect all the burnt-out and abandoned satellites and other assorted hardware we’re going to be leaving in near space.  It’s the usual slightly humdrum rendition, but three stars for originality, never mind that SF writers have been there before—see James White’s Deadly Litter, in New Worlds not long ago (US and UK editions).


And Sam Moskowitz, this time, profiles Lester del Rey, with the usual intense focus on his earliest work, and very spotty coverage of his post-1950 work.  (It’s not just me.  One of the readers’ letters this months calls Moskowitz out for “the manner in which they progress in pertinent detail up to about the mid and late ‘forties and then hastily run a bee-line to the nearby closing sentences.  There is hardly any mention of the author’s latter-day achievements.”)

There’s also a concluding psychological diagnosis that seems incoherent and nonsensical to me.  Del Rey has “never learned the lesson of self-discipline”—a guy who has maintained a very high level of free-lance professional productivity of several kinds for the last decade-plus.  Or: “His facade of toughness would seem to be fabricated more to maintain his own self-estimation than as a defense against the world.  Nevertheless its manifestation in his writing represents a psychological conflict that dams up the release of a reservoir of compassion.”

Huh?  What’s he talking about?  Del Rey has always seemed to me one of SF’s more compassionate writers; take a look at the stories in his Ballantine collection of a few years ago, Robots and Changelings.  Moskowitz seems almost laughably off base here, though as usual there’s interesting biographical information here that you won’t find elsewhere (but adding it all up I’m not sure how much of it to believe).  Anyway, two stars.

So, another waste of time for the most part.  Is there hope?  Maybe.  They are touting Leigh Brackett for next month.  If we’re lucky, she’s still better than her husband (fellow SFF-writer Edmond Hamilton).

[P.S. If you registered for WorldCon this year, please consider nominating Galactic Journey for the "Best Fanzine" Hugo.  Your ballot should have arrived by now…]




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[May 15, 1962] RUMBLING (the June 1962 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Oh groan.  The lead story in the June 1962 Amazing is Thunder in Space by Lester del Rey.  He’s been at this for 25 years and well knows that in space, no one can hear—oh, never mind.  I know, it’s a metaphor—but’s it’s dumb in context and cliched regardless of context.  Quickly turning the page, I'm slightly mollified, seeing that the story is about Cold War politics.  My favorite! 

Only a few weeks ago, one of my teachers assigned us all to write essays about current affairs, to be read to the rest of the class.  Mine suggested that the government of China is no more to be found on Taiwan than the government of the United States is in London, and it might be wise to drop the current pretense keeping Taiwan in China’s United Nations seat, along with the fantasy of invading mainland China and reinstating Chiang Kai-shek to the power he couldn’t hold on to.  After I had read this, one of the other students turned to me and said, “John . . . are you a communist?” I assured him I am not, but in hindsight, I should have said, “That’s right, Jimmy.  I get my orders straight from Albania.”

Compared to this black and white comic-strip world-view, Thunder in Space is a masterpiece of sophistication—it’s at least on the level of the Sunday funnies, which are in color.  (A few colors, anyway.) There are two nuclear-armed space stations, the US Goddard and the Russian Tsiolkovsky.  An apparent accident destroys the Soviet space fleet, and the American government refuses to help out by resupplying their station unless they unilaterally disarm it. 

But our boys in space are having none of it, and our and their space crews realize they have more in common with each other than with their governments, so there’ll be some changes made.  This feel-good fable for SF fans and other technophiles is not especially plausible—the response of governments to insurrection on military bases in low orbit would likely be speedy and definitive—but the story is reasonably readable and conventionally well-assembled, and refreshing in the acknowledgment that our leadership may be as brutal and ruthless as theirs.  On the other hand, del Rey can’t let the title go, and there are annoying attempts to justify it, such as one character’s declaration that “Most of the thunder down there is caused by the chained lightning we’re carrying up here.” Three grudging stars.

Near-future political problems also preoccupy Tom Purdom in The Warriors, in which a foreign mercenary force is struggling to get to the airport despite the resistance of the local forces.  But violence has been abolished!  So the contending mercenary armies maneuver respectively to evade and to block each other, since touching in combat is now a crime, and the result is a taut narrative of bobbing and weaving.  This all seemed silly and annoying at first, but maybe that’s the point: we’ve got to do something to abolish warfare as we know it, and if not this, what?  Got a better idea? 

So it’s at least thought-provoking: but there’s something else to think about here too.  The casus belli is the USA’s attempt to spirit away the African country Belderkan’s resident genius, Doctor Warren, whose inventions have helped make Belderkan prosperous; the locals are trying to get to him to persuade him to change his mind. 

Right now, we’re in the age of decolonization.  Almost 20 countries have become independent in the last couple of years; Algeria will vote on independence in July, after years of bloody warfare.  But will their independence be real, or just another guise for the exploitation of their resources by more powerful countries?  Consider the former Belgian Congo, which elected someone a little too independent for some tastes, who was quickly deposed and murdered in a rebellion sponsored by the ex-colonial power (and, it is rumored, by others, maybe including us).  I’m not sure Purdom meant to evoke all these concerns, or if he just needed a plot motor, but either way, the result is to his credit and mitigates the story’s weakness as fiction.  Three stars.

But enough of politics; let’s have something gaudy and irresponsible.  The most well-turned piece of fiction here is from J.G. Ballard, though Passport to Eternity is not among his best.  It’s a trifle about an affluent, bored future couple trying to decide where to go on vacation.  Each option is more ridiculous than the last, and then the options show up uninvited at their house with their sales pitches.  It ends badly. 

This hectic lampoon is mostly a satire on the profligate and disjointed invention of much grade-B SF.  Ballard refers to clothing made of “bioplastic materials,” then: “Upstairs in her wardrobes the gowns and dresses purred on their hangers like the drowsing inmates of some exquisite arboreal zoo.” Or: “She was a Canopan slave, hot-housed out of imported germ, a slender green-skinned beauty with moth-like fluttering gills.” So: amusing, but in an hour you’ll be hungry again.  The story’s first line, “It was half past love on New Day in Zenith and the clocks were striking heaven,” recalls the famous first line of Orwell’s 1984.  Is Ballard comparing the tyranny of excessive consumer choice to the tyranny of Big Brother?  Beats me.  Three stars, plus for style and minus for content.

(Note that in this one-dimensional rating system, the middle rating covers a multitude of sins and virtues in various combinations.) [One dimensional indeed! (ED)]

This month’s Classic Reprint is a cut above the usual: ridiculous, but amusingly so, rather than stupidly or offensively.  The Council of Drones by the mysterious W.K. Sonneman, from the October 1936 issue, follows a standard plot of the times: ordinary guy, Fred, living on his father’s farm, is invited by his friend the brilliant scientist to see his invention; things go wrong; perilous adventures ensue.  This time it’s “Cross-Rays, with Lifex Modulation”: swapping of human consciousness with other organisms.  Fred’s father keeps bees, so obviously Fred’s consciousness should be swapped with a queen bee’s.  But the promised five minutes turns into hours and days.  Fred is in despair.  But then his father comes, smoking the hive and stealing the honey, and Fred, enraged, goes bee, as it were. 

He persuades the other bees to go along with his schemes, first of self-defense and then of . . . why not . . . world domination, much assisted by the fact that bees from the eggs the queen lays after the insertion of human intelligence are themselves pretty intelligent.  This is all done straight, or at least straight-faced, with a number of apiaristic footnotes along the way.  Sam Moskowitz’s introduction praises the author’s “intimate knowledge of the bee society,” plausibly speculates that he was a beekeeper himself, and touts the value of “scientifically informative science fiction.” (Come back Lamarck, all is forgiven!) Three charmingly archaic stars.

Ben Bova is back, this time with a science article, Extra-Terrestrial Life: An Astronomer’s Theory.  It is a somewhat rambling and disorganized article touching on how life arose on Earth and what it might look like elsewhere, by way of much biochemistry, emphasizing this DNA stuff we are starting to hear a lot about.  But Bova is an engaging writer and there’s a lot of interesting information here.  Three stars. 

Bova is also featured in the editorial, complete with low-resolution photo, making me wonder whether he is about to replace the unfortunately dull Frank Tinsley as the regular science-monger.  Incidentally, the astronomer of the title is Bova, employed as a “technical communications executive,” but also described as “an ardent amateur astronomer.”

Sam Moskowitz contributes another “SF Profile,” this one The Saintly Heresy of Clifford D. Simak.” It’s reasonably perceptive and informative, but—like his profile of Theodore Sturgeon—it neglects Simak’s excellent recent stories while dwelling in detail on his apprentice work of the 1930s, with no mention, for example, of his well-received novels Ring Around the Sun (1953) and last year’s Time Is the Simplest Thing.  And Moskowitz’s clumsy and often outright ungrammatical writing is even more noticeable than usual.  Three stars.

And finally . . . to break the three-star monotony . . .

Bndct Brdfrt.

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[July 6, 1961] Trends (August 1961 Galaxy, second half)

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Human beings look for patterns.  We espy the moon, and we see a face.  We study history and see it repeat (or at least rhyme, said Mark Twain).  We look at the glory of the universe and infer a Creator. 

We look at the science fiction genre and we (some of us) conclude that it is dying.

Just look at the number of science fiction magazines in print in the early 1950s.  At one point, there were some forty such publications, just in the United States.  These days, there are six.  Surely this is an unmistakable trend.

Or is it?  There is something to be said for quality over quantity, and patterns can be found there, too.  The last decade has seen the genre flower into maturity.  Science fiction has mostly broken from its pulpy tradition, and many of the genre's luminaries (for instance, Ted Sturgeon and Zenna Henderson) have blazed stunning new terrain.

I've been keeping statistics on the Big Three science fiction digests, Galaxy, Analog, and Fantasy and Science Fiction since 1959.  Although my scores are purely subjective, if my readers' comments be any indication, I am not too far out of step in my assessments.  Applying some math, I find that F&SF has stayed roughly the same, and both Analog and Galaxy have improved somewhat.

Supporting this trend is the latest issue of Galaxy (August 1961), which was quite good for its first half and does not decline in its second.

For instance, Keith Laumer's King of the City is an exciting tale of a cabbie who cruises the streets of an anarchic future.  The cities are run by mobs, and the roads are owned by automobile gangs.  It's a setting I haven't really seen before (outside, perhaps, of Kit Reed's Judas Bomb), and I dug it.  In many ways, it's just another crime potboiler, but the setting sells it.  Three stars.

Amid all of the ugly headlines, the blaring rock n' roll, the urban sprawl, do you ever feel that the romance has gone out of the race?  That indefinable spark that raises us to the sublime?  Lester del Rey's does, and in Return Engagement, his protagonist discovers what we've been missing all these years.  A somber piece, perhaps a bit overwrought, but effective.  Three stars.

Willy Ley's science column, For your Information, is amusing and educational, as usual, though its heyday has long past.  This time, the subject is the preeminent biologist, Dr. Theodore Zell, whom Dr. Ley never got to meet, though he tried.  Three stars.

Deep Down Dragon, by Judith Merril, depicts a lovers' jaunt on Mars that ends in a brush with danger.  Told in Merril's deft, artistic style, the rather typical boy-rescues-girl story isn't all it appears to be.  Three stars.

I can't lay enough praise upon the final novella, Jack Vance's The Moon Moth.  Science fiction offers a large number of themes and techniques that provide building blocks for stories.  Every once in a while, a writer creates something truly new.  Vance gives us Sirenis, a planet whose denizens communicate with musical accompaniment that conveys mood beyond that inherent in words.  Moth is a murder mystery, and that story is interesting in and of itself, but what really makes this piece is the struggle of the Terran investigator to master the native modes of communication and to overcome the pitifully low status that being a foreigner affords.  Really a beautiful piece.  Five stars.

That puts the total for this issue at a respectable 3.4 stars.  So far as I can tell, science fiction has got some life left in it…

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