by Victoria Silverwolf

Hello, Satchmo (And Mary)

A certain British quartet, which shall remain unnamed here, finally toppled from the top of the American popular music charts this month after dominating it for most of the year.  Whether or not this means the end of their extraordinary career on this side of the Atlantic remains unknown.  Whatever their fate may be, I wish them a fond farewell, at least for the nonce, and extend an equally warm welcome to two vocal artists from the United States.

Along with the proverbial flowers brought by April showers, the early part of May offered a hit song from a jazz legend whose career stretches back four decades.  Taken from a hit Broadway musical of the same name, Louis Armstrong's rendition of Hello, Dolly! reached Number One, and is likely to send more people flocking to the St. James Theatre to see Carol Channing in the title role.

Have you purchased your tickets yet?

Gotta love that smile.

Just recently, a much younger singer achieved the same chart position with a romantic rhythm-and-blues ballad.  Mary Wells, currently the top female vocalist for the Motown label, has a smash hit with the catchy little number My Guy.

The juxtaposition of the two titles on this single amuses me.

I suppose it's too early to tell if we're witnessing the slow demise of rock 'n' roll in the USA in favor of other genres, but perhaps the popularity of these two songs indicates something of a trend.  In any case, it's encouraging to see that, in a time when racial animosity threatens to tear the nation apart, music can cross the color line.

The Prodigal Returneth

by Robert Adrasta

Just as American performers reappear in jukeboxes and on transistor radios after an extended absence, a multi-talented author who has been away from the field for a while returns to his roots in imaginative fiction in the latest issue of Fantastic, and even earns top place on the cover.

Paingod, by Harlan Ellison

by Leo and Diane Dillon

After some years spent publishing a large number of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as crime fiction, mainstream fiction, and a nonfiction account of his experiences with juvenile delinquents, Ellison migrated to the greener pastures of Hollywood.  Writing for television definitely pays better than laboring for the magazines, and you may have seen his work on Ripcord and Burke's Law.  The lure of Tinseltown hasn't kept him completely away from the pages of the pulps where he got his start, however, nor has he lost his talent for creating tales of the fantastic.

Trente, the alien illustrated on the cover, serves the mysterious, all-powerful rulers of all the universes that exist, known as the Ethos, as their Paingod.  He dispenses suffering to all the sentient beings in all the worlds that exist throughout all possible dimensions.  After performing this duty without feeling for an unimaginably long time, Trente develops something completely unexpected: a sense of curiosity, even concern, about those to whom he sends misery and sorrow.  At random, he enters the body of one lifeform on an insignificant planet, which happens to be Earth.  In the form of an alcoholic derelict, he speaks to a sculptor, who is mourning over the loss of his talent.  They both learn something about the nature of suffering, and Trente discovers the motives of the Ethos, and why they selected him to be the Paingod.

This is a powerful story with an important theme, told in a way that holds the reader's attention throughout.  Particularly effective are the scenes in which Trente dispenses suffering to an extraordinary variety of entities, described in vivid and imaginative detail.  I also greatly enjoyed the life story of the man whose body Trente inhabits.  Although the character really plays no part in the plot – he's merely a shell for the alien to wear – the complete and compassionate biography of one who knew more than his share of unhappiness adds to the story's theme, and displays the author's skill at characterization.

The rationale offered for the existence of suffering is, almost inevitably, a familiar one, philosophers having debated this question for millennia.  Ellison has a slight tendency to write with more passion than clarity; the phrase centimetered centuries threw me for a loop.  Despite these quibbles, this is a fine story, likely to remain in memory for a long time to come.

Four stars.

Testing, by John J. McGuire

by Dan Adkins

With the exception of one story in a recent issue of Analog, McGuire is another author we haven't seen around for a while.  Unlike Ellison's success with screenwriting, the explanation for this absence is simply that McGuire isn't very prolific, his few stories mostly written in collaboration with H. Beam Piper.  Our Illustrious Host didn't like his previous solo effort at all, which doesn't bode well for this one, but let's give the fellow a chance.

The narrator is the pilot of a starship carrying a small team of experts whose mission is to determine if a planet is suitable for colonization, a premise that may seem overly familiar to many readers of science fiction these days.  Also unsurprising is the fact that only one of the members of the team is female, and it's obvious that her role in the story is to be the Girl.  They foolishly break with Standard Operating Procedure and step out onto the surface of the Earth-like world without taking full precautions.  Instantly teleported far away from their landing site, they find themselves under observation by a floating sphere with dangling tentacles.  An agonizingly long and dangerous journey begins, as the team makes their way back to the starship through lifeless deserts and snowy mountains, facing deadly alien creatures, constantly under the watch of the inscrutable sphere. 

The only suspense generated by the story is wondering who's going to get killed next, and by what, since the bodies pile up quickly once the sphere shows up.  The mystery of the sphere remains unsolved, although the narrator makes some educated guesses about its nature and motivation.  If the author's main intention is to make the reader feel the suffering of his characters, he does a fair job of acting as a Paingod.  Otherwise, I found it overly long and tedious, as I kept reading about one random, violent death after another.

Two stars.

Illusion, by Jack Sharkey

by Blair

Unlike the first two writers in this issue, Sharkey shows up in the genre magazines on a routine basis, which is sometimes a good thing, and sometimes not such a good thing.  His latest yarn is a variation on the old, old theme of a deal with the Devil.  (Well, technically, a demon, and not Satan himself, but you know what I mean.) The protagonist gets three wishes in exchange for his soul, which isn't the most original idea in the world, either.  The first is for a never-ending pack of self-lighting cigarettes; the second for complete invulnerability, unless he deliberately tries to harm himself; and the third is for the power to make illusions become reality.  If you've ever read one, or two, or a zillion of these stories, you know that things don't work out well, after some slapstick antics. 

Sharkey uses the word illusion in an odd way, meaning anything from tricks of perspective (objects looking smaller when they're far away) to whatever appears on a TV screen.  The whole thing is inoffensive, I suppose, but lacking the rigid logic this kind of story needs and not very amusing.

Two stars.

Body of Thought, by Albert Teichner

by Dan Adkins

Teichner, like Sharkey, also hasn't gone away, making an appearance in Fantastic or Amazing or If every few months or so.  This time he offers us a tale about a secret government project to collect the brains of outstanding intellectuals soon after they die, keep them alive, and attach them to a computer that will allow them to work together, producing results far beyond anything one mind could do alone.  The story moves at a very leisurely pace.  We follow the main character, an elderly physicist contacted by the folks behind the project, as he visits the lab where this is going to take place, and discusses it with a colleague who is also one of its subjects. 

I had no idea where the plot was going, or what point the author was trying to make, until near the end, when a group of potential brain donors argue about what use should be made of this symbiotic, semi-organic supercomputer, each one claiming that his (never her) field is the most important.  I can appreciate the statement Teichner is trying to make about the human ego, but he sure takes a long time getting around to it.

Two stars.

Genetic Coda, by Thomas M. Disch

Disch is another perennial of Cele Goldsmith's pair of publications, either as himself or as Dobbin Thorpe, a pseudonym that always makes me smile, just because it sounds so silly.  Under his own name Disch comes up with a sardonic vision of the future.  Sextus is a humpbacked freak, living with his equally deformed father, his physically normal but perpetually angry mother, and several tutoring robots.  After his mother dies and his father vanishes, he lives alone with the machines, hidden from a world that would force him to undergo castration because of his abnormal genes.  (His father managed to escape that fate through bribery and isolation.) Determined to father a child, Sextus invents a time machine, leading to the kinds of paradoxes you expect, as well as some very Freudian complications.

I have mixed feelings about this story, which some might see as nothing more than a dirty joke, and others as a razor-sharp satire on human aspirations and pretentions.  It's very clever, but you're always aware that the author knows exactly how clever he is — far more than the dolts he writes about.  I'm going to have to be wishy-washy about it and give it a barely passing grade.

Three stars.

From the Beginning, by Eando Binder

by Michael Arndt

We haven't seen that byline in the pages of a science fiction magazine for a long time.  That's not a surprise, since this Fantasy Classic is a reprint from the June 1938 issue of Weird Tales.

As many SF fans know, Eando Binder is actually a pen name for brothers Earl and Otto Binder; E and O Binder, get it?  The introduction by Sam Moskowitz explains that Earl stopped writing after a few years, and most stories under the name of Eando are the work of Otto alone.  The present example is one of those tales, old-fashioned even in the late 1930's, where one man invents or discovers something amazing, so his friend comes over and they talk about it. 

Cover art by Margaret Brundage, who drew a lot of scantily clad ladies for this publication.

The gizmo, in this case, is an incredibly ancient metal ball, found during a paleontological expedition.  When placed in an electrical field, it produces telepathic messages from the remote past.  These reveal that a race of robotic beings with radium-powered brains came to the solar system from another star in search of radium to replace their dwindling supply.  We get a blow-by-blow history of the planets, as the robots create things like the Great Red Spot of Jupiter and the canals of Mars in their quest for radium.  Eventually they come to Earth, after they have drained the outer planets of the vital substance.  They set out for yet another star system, allowing only a small number of the elite to escape (there is only enough room aboard their spaceship for a few, so of course the upper class gets to go). The others to perish at the metal hands of an executioner.  The source of the telepathic messages is a rebel, who chose to remain on Earth alone rather than die (which seems like a reasonable choice to me.) The climax of the story tells us about the origins of the human race. 

Although some of the events in the story create a Sense of Wonder, overall it's a creaky example of Gernsbackian, pre-Campbellian scientifiction, of historic interest only.  I had to look twice to make sure it came from 1938 and not 1928. 

Two stars

Many Happy Returns?

Other than Harlan Ellison's hard-hitting fable, this is a weak issue, full of disappointing stories.  It makes me hope that the author of Paingod won't be blinded by the bright lights of show business, and will stick around for a while.

The Chicago airport probably doesn't have Ellison in mind, but what the heck.

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