Tag Archives: mack reynolds

Magazine

[Jan. 28, 1960] But how do you really feel? (February 1960 Astounding)

2 Comments

I've devoted much ink to lambasting Astounding/Analog editor John Campbell for his attempts to revitalize his magazine, but I've not yet actually talked about the latest (February 1960) issue.  Does it continue the digest's trend towards general lousiness?

For the most part, yes.  Harry Harrison's serial, Deathworld, continues to be excellent (and it will be the subject of its own article next month).  But the rest is uninspired stuff.  Take the lead story, What the Left Hand was Doing by "Darrell T. Langart" (an anagram of the author's real name—three guess as to who it really is, and the first two don't count).  It's an inoffensive but completely forgettable story about psionic secret agent, who is sent to China to rescue an American physicist from the clutches of the Communists.

Then there's Mack Reynold's Summit, in which it is revealed that the two Superpowers cynically wage a Cold War primarily to maintain their domestic economies.  A decent-enough message, but there is not enough development to leave much of an impact, and the "kicker" ending isn't much of one.

Algis Budrys has a sequel to his last post-Apocalyptic Atlantis-set story called Due Process.  I like Budrys, but this series, which was not great to begin with, has gone downhill.  It is another "one savvy man can pull political strings to make the world dance to his bidding" stories, and it's as smug as one might imagine.

The Calibrated Alligator, by Calvin Knox (Robert Silverberg) is another sequel featuring the zany antics of the scientist crew of Lunar Base #3.  In the first installment in this series, they built an artificial cow to make milk and liver.  Now, they are force-growing a pet alligator to prodigious size.  The ostensible purpose is to feed a hungry world with quickly maturing iguanas, but the actual motivation is to allow one of the young scientists to keep a beloved, smuggled pet.  The first story was fun, and and this one is similarly fluffy and pleasant. 

I'll skip over Campbell's treatise on color photography since it is dull as dirt.  The editor would have been better served publishing any of his homemade nudes that I've heard so much about.  That brings us to Murray Leinster's The Leader.  It is difficult for me to malign the fellow with perhaps the strongest claim to the title "Dean of American Science Fiction," particularly when he has so many inarguable classics to his name, but this story does not approach the bar that Leinster himself has set.  It's another story with psionic underpinnings (in Astounding!  Shock!) about a dictator who uses his powers to entrance his populace.  It is told in a series of written correspondence, and only force of will enabled me to complete the tale.  There was a nice set of paragraphs, however, on the notion that telepathy and precognition are really a form of psychokinesis. 

I tend to skip P. Schuyler Miller's book column, but I found his analysis of the likely choices for this (last) year's Hugo awards to be rewarding.  They've apparently expanded the scope of the film Hugo from including just movies to also encompassing television shows and stage productions, 1958's crop being so unimpressive as to yield no winners. 

My money's on The World, The Flesh, and The Devil.

—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



(Confused?  Click here for an explanation as to what's really going on)

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where it has comment count unavailable comments. Please comment here or there.

2 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

[Jan. 08, 1960] Between Peaks (January 1960 If)

1 Comment

I've finally finished the January 1960 IF and can report fully on its contents.  January has been a decidedly uninspiring month for digests.  They're all in the 3-star range (though for Astounding, that's actually a good month!) with no knockouts in the bunch.  Perhaps this is the calm before the storm.

The reliable if stolid Mack Reynolds (writing as Mark Mallory) kicks off this issue with The Good Seed.  Can a man trapped on a tiny island by a swelling tide escape before he is drowned?  Perhaps with the help of a sentient, telepathic plant.  It's actually quite a touching story.

James Stamers seems to be a newcomer, and it shows in his unpolished writing.  Despite this, his The Divers, about psionic neutrals (essentially anti-telepaths) with the ability to astrally project, has some fascinating ideas and some genuinely evocative scenes.  Had Stamers given the tale to Sturgeon to work over for a final edit, I think it could have been an epic.  As it is, the story suggests that its author is a diamond in the rough waiting to be polished.

Two Ulsterians, Bob Shaw and Walt Willis, wrote the short Dissolute Diplomat, about an unsavory space traveler who crashes on an alien world, bullies the jelly-ish inhabitants into fixing his ship, and then gets what he deserves in a groan-worthy fashion that is truly pun-ishing.

The Little Red Bag, by Jerry Sohl, is a good piece of thrilling writing, at least until the somewhat callous and abrupt end.  A fellow on a plane has the power of tactile clairvoyance—and he discovers a ticking time bomb in the luggage compartment.  Can he save the passengers before it goes off?  Having flown the route that the plane takes many times (Southerly down California into Los Angeles), the setting is quite familiar, which is always fun.

Daniel Galouye (how do you pronounce his name?) is up next with the interesting teleportation yarn, The Last Leap.  Three military subjects have gone AWOL after artificially gaining the ability to materialize anywhere.  Surely they were not killed–after all, even the vacuum of space poses no danger, for the 'porters reflexively snap back to a safe spot; moreover, they instinctively avoid teleporting into solid objects.  What could have happened?  You find out in the end…

To Each His Own, by Jack Sharkey, stars a team of Venusians who explore the Earth after a recent holocaust.  The nature of said disaster is never made explicit until the very end, though it is alluded to subtly.  I confess that I should have figured out the gimmick ending, but I didn't.  I suppose that constitutes a point in the author's favor.

Margaret St. Clair has a fun story (The Autumn after Next) about a magical missionary whose job is to convert magic-less cultures into adepts at the Arts.  He meets his match, and his end, attempting to introduce the most reluctant of tribes to the supernatural.  Better than The Scarlet Hexapod, not as good as Discipline, both IF stories.

Finally, we have Cultural Exchange by J.F. Bone wherein a crew of space explorers meets a sophisticated alien race with both superior and inferior technologies.  It is a first contact story of Cat and Mouse with both sides attempting to be the predator.  Not stellar, but satisfying.

That's that!  It's an unremarkable issue, slightly under the standards of its older sibling, Galaxy, I'd say.  Worth a read, but you won't remember it next month (unless, of course, you review my column).

Note: If you like this column, consider sharing it by whatever media you frequent most.  I love the company, and I imagine your friends share your excellent taste!

P.S. Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



(Confused?  Click here for an explanation as to what's really going on)

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where it has comment count unavailable comments. Please comment here or there.

1 Comment Leave A Comment
Magazine

Something new (June 1959 Astounding; 5-28-1959)

4 Comments

One of the main reasons I read science fiction is to see something truly new.  I don't just want to see a view of the future–I want to see a brand new culture, or a completely alien creature, or an innovative take on psionics.  Only science fiction (and fantasy) really can do this, and even then, writers are often locked into clichés informed by the current world they live in.

The June 1959 issue of Astounding is pretty good.  More significantly, it has got a lot of neat ideas that I had not seen before.  Let's take a look, shall we?


by Van Dongen

The opening story is Cat and Mouse, by Ralph Williams.  Williams has been writing since the late 30s, and his craft is finely honed with this excellent tale of an grizzled Alaskan outdoorsman, his cat, and the alien pest he is (unwittingly) recruited to eradicate.

Many factors make this story so good: Ed Brown, aged 60, is well developed.  Williams captures the stiffened limbs but heightened wisdom of an older protagonist.  The portrayal of both the Alaskan and off-planet wildernesses is vivid, as one might expect, Williams being a resident of Homer, Alaska.  But it's the alien race, the Harn, that is the stand-out element.  The not-quite-sentient creature is actually a symbiotic tribe of species, or perhaps the same species with differing pre-natal modifications to produce a variety of offspring classes: to wit, there is a central, immobile "brain," stinging units designed to bring down prey, carrier units that are mostly leg and sack designed to bring food to the brain mass, and fighting units whose role is to defeat larger adversaries.

Brown is just barely up to the task of vanquishing the alien menace, and it is a nail-biting battle of cunning to the end.  Sadly, this story may turn out to be Williams' swan song.  It is my understanding that the fellow passed away very recently on a fishing trip in the 49th state.  I will have to seek out more offspring of his pen; if they are all of this quality, the world has lost a treasure.


by Van Dongen

I enjoyed All Day September by Roger Kuykendall.  It's an almost slice-of-life (and I love slice-of-life) account of several weeks on the Moon after a meteor shower savages a moon base and leaves a prospector stranded out in the airless lunar desert.  The prospector's salvation, and indeed that of the lunar population as a whole, is his discovery of frozen water in caves hidden from the sun.  This is an exciting concept that I've never seen in science fiction or science.  The general assumption is that the moon is bone-dry, but it is certainly plausible that there could be stores of water, either primordial or from ice comet impact.  The only strain to my credulity came when it was learned that the prospector carried no radio because local transmitters had too short a range (acceptable–there is no ionosphere on the moon to bounce AM waves), but transmitters that used Earth relays were too bulky.  It would seem to me that, if we establish a population on the moon, we'd precede it with satellites in orbit that could be used for communication.

Transfusion, by Chad Oliver, is a strange story.  The premise is that a galaxy-spanning race of humans found itself bested by a savage, implacable foe, and its only hope was to seed a small colony of brain-wiped people on an out-of-the-way planet (Earth) and hope that this new society might come up with a completely innovative way to fight humanity's enemy.  As a test, the starfaring humans salt the planet with fossils of Homo Sapiens, Neanderthals, Australopithecines, etc.–basically every member of our evolutionary tree, along with colonies of great apes.  The idea is that once we discover that we've been hoaxed, we are ready to do battle with the aliens.

It's a silly idea, but reasonably well executed.  Humanity invents time travel in the early 1980s, goes back in time to do some physical anthropology, and catches the starfaring aliens in the act.  Traveling back to the present, the story's protagonist determines that his old anthropology professor is, in fact, an emissary of the old humans (the last).  The professor tells his student the whole story and gives him the keys to his spaceship with its advanced technology.  I would guess that between the ability to time travel and fly faster than light, humans will be well-nigh unstoppable. 

Perhaps we'll become the implacable scourge.


by Freas

Finally, we have the silly Unborn Tomorrow, by Mack Reynolds.  A private eye is sent to Oktoberfest to find time traveling tourists.  Not only does he find them, but they keep slipping the detective mickeys and sending him back in a time loop to ensure that their cover is never blown.  All the dick has to show for his efforts is a massive hangover and memories of three trips to Bavaria.  He wisely refuses a fourth time around.  The slightest of the bunch, but still decent.

Of course, there are virtually no female characters to be seen.  On the other hand, as I've said before, if you can't do it right, it's best not to try.  Despite the absence of the half of the human race from this issue, it's still a good book–let's call it 3.5 stars.

My bi-monthly Galaxy came in.  Expect that to be the topic day-after-tomorrow.  Thanks for reading!

(Confused?  Click here for an explanation as to what's really going on)


This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where it has comment count unavailable comments. Please comment here or there.

4 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

December 1958: Astounding (1st half) 11-08-1958

Leave a comment

With December's Galaxy and F&SF done and reviewed, I now turn to the last of the Big Three: Astounding.  The elephant in this magazine is, of course, the second half of Poul Anderson's dreary short novel, “Bicycle Built for Brew.” It lurks at the end of the magazine like an oncoming train at the end of a tunnel.  Thus, I abandoned my usual haphazard reading habits and began at the beginning, like normal people.

Good thing, too.  The first three stories, comprising 65 pages, are good and somewhat of a theme.  I have to congratulate myself for making it through a full three quarters of Campbell's blatherous editorial before skipping to story #1.

“Ministry of Disturbance” is a fun story of a week in the life of the august ruler of a 1300-planet galactic imperium, one that has persisted virtually unchanged for centuries.  At first it seems that it will be a sort of light farce, but the story takes several turns before arriving at an unexpected conclusion.  It's a little bewildering: there are a lot of moving parts including a large cast of characters and several concurrent event threads.  Ultimately, there is something of a happy ending.  My favorite line from the story is, “If you have a few problems, you have trouble, but if you have a whole lot of problems, they start solving each other.”

Did I mention it's by H. Beam Piper?  That should be enough to recommend it.  He did that lovely tale, Omnilingual (from which story the lady in my masthead derives), which you can find in the February 1957 Astounding.

Next up is “Triggerman” by a fellow I'd never heard of before, an “R.T. Bone.” Rather than a tale of the far future, it is highly contemporary.  We've all heard of the metaphorical “button” on which the collective finger of the President and his generals rests, the pressing of which initiates atomic armageddon.  In Bone's story, the button is real, and one man has his finger on it.  It's a silly concept, but it is thankfully just the set up for a interesting short tale of an overwhelmingly destructive attack on the United States.  As with the last story, there is a surprise, and the subject matter is not apolitical.

The third in the initial trio is “Pieces of the Game” by Mack Reynolds.  Mack has been around for a while, bouncing from digest to digest, but I believe this is his first appearance in Astounding.  Like “Triggerman,” it is set in the Cold War, but a few years in the future, in a recently Communist Austria.  There is mention of a war, but it is clear that both sides are still active, as this story is a tale of espionage by an unlikely-looking agent.  It's a pretty standard thriller; I hesitate to even call it science fiction.  But it is entertaining, and it fits in well with the theme of the first two stories.

That makes a solid 4 out of 5 stars for the first half of December's Astounding!  Lord knows where that score will finish, however…

(Confused?  Click here for an explanation as to what's really going on)

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where it has comment count unavailable comments. Please comment here or there.

No comments Leave A Comment