Tag Archives: mildred clingerman

[April 18, 1964] A firm line (the May 1964 Fantasy and Science Fiction)


by Gideon Marcus

World(Con) Affairs

I've heard a rumor that Galactic Journey will be up for Best Fanzine at this year's Worldcon.  I'm not getting my hopes up — after all, we were promised a spot last year, but we ended up nowhere to be found on the 1963 Hugo ballot.  Still, for all of you who nominated us, we give our humblest thanks and hope you keep doing it!  In any event, we intend on attending this year's Worldcon (dubbed Pacificon II) as it will be held quite close to home, in California's Bay Area.

One person who will definitely not be attending Pacificon II is notorious fan Walter Breen.  Unless you live under a rock (or, perhaps, east of the Colorado), Breen is at the center of the "Breendoggle," a crisis that is currently rending apart West Coast fandom.  Berkeley fans report that Breen, an adult, has a penchant for unsavory activities involving fellows too young to give consent.  Far too young.  While fandom is a tolerant bunch (after all, we're definitely a bunch of weirdos), not only are Breen's actions morally reprehensible, but they attach civil liability to any organization he is a part of.

Needless to say, we support Pacificon II's decision to ban Breen from the convention, as do many.  However, Breen has got a lot of defenders, including Big Name Fan John Boardman, and superfan-turned-pro Marion Zimmer Bradley, who we understand is now in a relationship with Breen.  This saddens us, and we hope that Breen's misguided supporters soon see the light. 

My apologies for bringing up an unpleasant topic.  With luck, that's the last we'll have to write about it.

The Issue at Hand


cover by Ed Emshwiller for The Illuminated Man

On a more (but not much) more cheery note, let's take a look at this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Once again, Editor Davidson wails that no one writes space adventure stories anymore.  That's not really true.  They just don't send them to Avram. 

Instead, we get the following mishmash of fantasy and horror, most of it pretty mediocre:

The Illuminated Man, by J. G. Ballard

Out in deep space, the mutual annihilation of matter and anti-matter depletes the universal store of time.  As a result, the remaining matter blooms, spawning crystalline growths that absorb heat and constrain movement.  In Florida, Belorussia, and Madagascar, wild terrain becomes iridescent with the stuff, and mass evacuations ensue.

Our protagonist, a journalist, becomes trapped in the Everglades while the swamp becomes a kaleidoscopic death trap.  But this phenomenon becomes the least of our hero's worries when he gets caught between two feuding vertices of a love triangle: the local chief of police and a lunatic, who are fighting over the woman now married to the former, once to the latter.

Ballard does love his world catastrophes (viz. the recent classic, The Drowned World).  But while I found the story vivid and certainly unique, Ballard's writing has a somber, sepulchral tone that puts me off.  Illuminated Man is a gloomy trip without much of a destination.

Three stars.

Three Times Around, by Jane Roberts

Beware the laundromat, for the item getting permanently pressed just might be you.  I'm glad to see Jane Roberts back in print, and this is a pleasant little piece of horror.

Three stars.

You Have to Stay Inside, by Calvin Demmon

If there is a genre called "Slice of Life," this might be a "Slice of Horror" — a nicely written episode.  But it needs a story to go with it.

Two stars.

No Place Like Where, by Robert M. Green, Jr.

I'm not sure why Avram chose to spoil the twist of Green's story, which illustrates the perils of making apartment buildings too big and look-alike.  Well, it's not much of a story anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter.

Two stars.

The Building of a Protein, by Theodore L. Thomas

This pointless proto-story column continues, this time on the subject of synthetic protein manufacture, which Thomas suggests could ultimately feed the masses. 

The Second Law of Thermodynamics says we're not going to get quick-grown meat any faster or cheaper than cows.  Maybe more humanely.

Two stars.

Invasion, by Christopher Corson

The aliens apparently lulled us to sleep with this rather unimpressive piece of poetry.  Two stars.

A Red Heart and Blue Roses, by Mildred Clingerman

If there's anyone who can bring back the feeling of Weird Tales or Unknown, it's Mildred Clingerman, who in Roses, chills us with the tale of a mother who finds herself adopted by a most unsavory surrogate son. 

I particularly enjoyed the clever double narrative.  The story is recounted by one hospital patient to another; we initially think the story will be that of the viewpoint character, but it's really her roommate's.

Four stars.

Sea Wrack, by Edward Jesby

Far in the future, the Morlocks live in the sea.  They are not hairy brutes but rather civilized, handsome mermen.  Nevertheless, the Eloi still hate and shun them…to surface-dwellers' ultimate despair and ruin.

An interesting tale, too affected and jolting in its execution to be great.

Three stars.

Mar-ti-an, by Robert Lory

Now that the Ferdinand Feghoot pun column is gone, Avram has diversified the sources of his joke stories.  He needs to find better ones.

One star.

Ghost Lines in the Sky, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor brings us a pleasant but rather sterile article on meridians and parallels.  Of course, it's stuff I've known since junior high, so maybe I'm jaded.

Three stars.

Touchstone, by Terry Carr

Just as Ballard doesn't quite do it for me, Terry Carr always does.  You'll enjoy this one, about a Greenwich Village guy who trades his worries for a hunk of magic black rock.

Four stars.

The New Encyclopaedist, by Stephen Becker

Becker serves up one of those non-fact pieces, about nonconformists inheriting the Earth thanks to their uncommon common sense.  Not bad, though more suited to Analog, maybe Galaxy, than here.

Three stars.

Cantabile, by Jon DeCles

Last up is a baroquely pleasant story about a humanoid with a one-month life span, and the Space-Age princess who briefly loves him.  This is Jon's first sale — I look forward to more works from him.

Three stars.

Summing Up

F&SF continues to be much of a muchness, but at least it keeps Ed Emshwiller, artist extraordinaire, in lucre.  I've given up hope that it'll ever be my favorite magazine again, but it wasn't decidedly unpleasant this month.

And given the other news in this article, "not decidedly unpleasant" is pretty good!


[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge!  Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




[September 18, 1962] On the Precipice (October 1962 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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


by Gideon Marcus

Are the times changing?

Summer threatens to change to Fall, and the kids are going off to high school and college.  Is this just another turn of the wheel, or are we on the verge of something different, what Historian of Science Thomas Kuhn might call a new "paradigm?"

I had this feeling once before.  In '53, right after Korea, and after Stalin died, America seemed poised on the edge of an unprecedented era of stability.  Well, really stagnation.  The pendulum had swung heavily in the direction of conservatism.  Black soldiers had come home from the war and were being treated worse than ever.  Ditto women, who had for a while gotten to enjoy some of the rights of men while they were off to war.  The swing music from the prior two decades had gotten overripe and shmaltzy, only somewhat mitigated by the western, blues, and latin music I was able to tune into on nights with clear reception.  The one truly bright spot was science fiction, which had been booming since the late '40s.

Then rock and roll hit, and boy was it a breath of fresh air.  Sure, you couldn't hear Black songs on White stations, but there's no color bar on the airwaves.  Fragile 78 records gave way to durable 45s.  The vacuum tube started to step aside for the transistor.  We were building the missiles that would soon blast us to orbit.  At the same time, sf started to wane.  We went from forty magazines to six over the course of the decade. 

This, then, has been the recent paradigm.  Here we are nine years later, but Elvis and the Everley Brothers still dominate the airwaves.  A new President has asked us what we could do for our country, not what it could do for us; tasking us to go to the Moon before the decade is out, but Black men must still fight even for the right to go to school or ride a bus in much of the nation.  There are now ten thousand Russian troops in Cuba and ten thousand American soldiers in South Vietnam, but are these transitory brush fires or the tip of a belligerent iceberg?

Are the 1960s going to be a continuation of the 1950s?  Or are we overdue for a new epoch?  You tell me.  I'm no soothsayer. 

I suppose in one way, the shift has already happened.  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has become quite different since new editor Avram Davidson took over earlier this year.  It's not bad, exactly, but it has meandered even further into the literary zone.  This has rendered one of my favorite mags almost unreadable on occasion.  The October 1962 issue does not have this problem, for the most part, but it's not great.

Enough dilly-dallying.  Here's the review:

A Kind of Artistry, by Brian W. Aldiss

The son of a baroque and decadent far future Terra journeys across the galaxy to make contact with a most unusual alien intelligence.  Upon his glorious return, he must decide if he has the strength to break the stultifying conditioning of his inbred upringing.

Aldiss wishes he were Cordwainer Smith, and he just isn't.  Nevertheless, despite some rough patches, there are some good ideas here.  The extraterrestrial has a wildly implausible biochemistry, but the meeting of species is genuinely gripping.  Three stars.

There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, by Robert F. Young

Overpopulation continues to be the theme of many of our current science fiction stories.  A common concept is the idea that excess population can be shipped to the stars, but as any student of history knows, neither England, Spain, France, Portugal, nor any other country ever became empty as a result of colonization.  We can't expect spaceships to change that equation. 

Neither does Young.  His story is cute, if one-note, holding our interest for as long as the idea can be stretched.  Three stars.

Twenty-Four Hours in a Princess's Life, With Frogs, by Don White

What if all the fairy-tale princesses were pals, all living together in Hans Christian Andersonville with intersecting storybook plotlines?  Aurora, Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel… the whole neurotic gang of them.  Don White explores that possiblity in a clever, funny piece that makes me hope that Disney never tries to combine its franchises.  What a mess that would be!  Four stars.

Inquest in Kansas (A Modern American Ballad) by Hyacinth Hill

The unknown Ms. Hill (I understand she may be Virginia Anderson) has a poetic piece about a woman seduced from her home and family by a unicorn.  Whether you find it horrifying or liberating depends on how you infer her life history.  Two stars, as it didn't grab me.

Measure My Love, by Mildred Clingerman

What a fascinating, almost excellent, but ultimately disappointing piece this was.  Dodie is a youngish spinster whose actress cousin, Althea, has a penchant for melodramatic love affairs.  When Althea's irresistible romantic nature meets the immovable, unwinnable affections of a married man, Dodie takes her cousin to the local witch, Maude, to cure her of her of broken heart.  Turns out the "witch" is more than meets the eye, but it's an open question whether or not her panoply of equipment can remedy Althea's condition. 

Clingerman is one of the most seasoned veterans our field, and her work has a pleasantly old-fashioned tone to it — appropriate both for the era (just post-war) and the protagonist portrayed.  The story moves you along the plot, slowly unfolding things to maintain your interest.  What hurt Measure for me was that, near the end, Maude mentions that she might also be able to cure Dodie's "little problem," hitherto undiscussed but strongly hinted at.  But then the problem turns out to be something completely different from what I expected (given the close relationship of the cousins, and Dodie's unending patience where things Althea-related are concerned). 

I wonder if I guessed wrong, or if the ending was changed at the editor's insistence for being a bit too…unconventional.  Either way, it turned a four-star story into a three-star one.  I'm probably being unfair, but unsatisfying endings sit poorly with me.

Slow Burn, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor touches on one of my favorite scientific topics — the theory of Phlogiston and how its research eventually led to the discovery of oxygen.  It's one of those fascinating models that almost but not quite got things right, like impetus theory in the 13th Century ultimately led to the concept of momentum.  I mentioned Kuhn's "paradigms" earlier, and Phlogiston is a perfect example of the concept.  Four stars.

The Unfortunate Mr. Morky, by Vance Aandahl

One of my readers once said that Mr. Aandahl really wants to be Ray Bradbury.  Surely, there must be loftier goals.  In any event, this incomprehensible piece about the connection between time travel and the profusion of milquetoast personalities isn't worth your time.  On the other hand, it's only a few pages, so you might as well see why I gave it only one star (and perhaps you'll disagree with me).

The Journey of Joenes (Part 1 of 2), by Robert Sheckley

At long last, Bob Sheckley has come back to us.  It's my understanding that he's been writing mainstream mysteries and such, which probably pays better than sf.  His latest work, which Editor Davidson says is a hacked up version of the novelized form due out later this year, follows the adventures of Joenes, an American ex-power engineer raised in Polynesia.  His pilgrimage to the Mainland to find his destiny is a series of satirical vignettes told from a foreign and futuristic perspective that turns the story into a kind of dark Canterbury Tales.

It's a fun read, though I hope there's light at the end of the tunnel.  Sheckley is better at short stories than novels, so the format plays to his strengths.  I do have to wonder why F&SF prints chopped up novels to fill up half of two consecutive magazines.  I expect that of Ace Doubles, not a high-end digest.  Three stars so far.  We'll see what happens.

And so we find ourselves on the other side of another issue.  On the face of things, it seems to reinforce the trend that F&SF is in a new and duller era.  Will we soon have enough data points to know if the larger world has changed, too?




[February 14, 1962] St. Valentine's Update (The Second Sex in SFF, Part V)


by Gideon Marcus

It's not quite time for a funeral, yet!

Nearly a decade ago, the Chicken Littles of our genre scribbled at length in our magazines and buttonholed each other at conventions to voice their fears that science fiction was dying.  Well, it is true that we are down to just six American sff digests per month, off of the 40 magazine peak of 1953.  On the other hand, I'd argue that we're not that much worse off for having lost the lesser monthlies.  Moreover, sff novels still seem to be doing a brisk trade.

In the three years since I started this column, I've seen a cadre of new writers burst onto the scene; clearly, no one told them that their field is dead!  And while sff continues to be something of a man's world, this fact is changing, slowly but surely.  Since just last year, when I wrote 18 mini-biographies of the women authors of science fiction, I've become exposed to a whole new crop of female bylines.  Some of them are just new to me, having been in the biz for a long time.  Others are genuinely fresh onto the scene. 

Without further ado, the supplemental list for early 1962:

Doris Pitkin Buck

Currently an English teacher at Ohio State University, where at least two authors that I know of might have enjoyed her acquaintance: former OSU students John Jakes and Harlan Ellison.  Mrs. Buck is a comparative rarity in our genre.  Not many manage to balance unabashed love for sff and a "respectable" career in academia.  Said career includes an active college writing stint, a cluster of stories written in the early 50s and a couple of recent pieces, of which I was not particularly fond, but that nevertheless suggest a high degree of literacy. 

Mildred Clingerman

Like Buck, Clingerman is a veteran with ten years of professional sff experience under her belt.  Her consistent career has produced 16 stories, most of them published in the pages of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Sadly for my readers, her last one came out in 1958, just before I started this column.  However, she recently released A Cupful of Space, a collection of all of work to date, so you can enjoy her quirky, often whimsical, occasionally macabre stylings all in a sitting.  Like Buck, she's a teacher, at the University of Arizona.

Kate Wilhelm

The elusive Ms. Wilhelm has enjoyed a prolific career that started in 1956 and yet has rarely crossed my path.  I first encountered her excellent The Mile-Long Spaceship in the April 1957 Astounding.  This tale of a telepathic contact across the stars was impressive despite its extreme shortness; it must have really impressed Astounding editor, John Campbell since his magazine tends to be the most staggish of the digests.  Her latest work, A Time to Keep was not in the same league, but everyone is entitled to periodic variances.  Here's hoping she publishes more works in the magazines I cover – there aren't many that I don't these days…

Otis Kidwell

Otis Kidwell, who acquired the surname Burger some time after her birth, sprang onto the sff scene just last year with the compelling The Zookeeper.  However, it was hardly the first publication of this noteworthy New Yorker (great-grandaughter of famed abolitionist, Sydney Howard Gay) – her short pieces have appeared in The New Yorker since 1957. 

Sydney J. Van Scyoc

"Joyce," as her family and friends know her, took on her mannish first name to help her break into the science fiction market.  It took several years of writing for her work to see print, but her premiere tale Shatter the Wall, which came out just last month, shows real promise. 

Maria Russell

Ms. Russell (real name, Mary R. Standard) is a true newcomer.  Her first (and currently only) story is The Deer Park, a haunting, surreal tale that was a fine addition to the F&SF in which it appeared.  Details on her non-writing career are scarce, but I am given to understand that she is computer systems analyst in Connecticut, a fine career for a science fictioneer. 

Anne Walker


Picture courtesy of the Vassar Chronicle

Ms. Walker (also known as Mrs. Gutterman) is a Vassar graduate and New England resident with but two stories to her name, but boy were they good ones.  She's newish, coming on the scene in 1959, so she has plenty of time ahead of her if she wants to continue.

Joy Leache

I'm afraid I know even less about Joy Leache, whose career started in 1959, and whose latest story, Satisfaction Guaranteed was a good'n.  Does anyone have a clue?

Rosemary Harris

A nurse during World War 2, Ms. Harris is Londoner whose first work, Hamlin, appeared in F&SF last year.  Hamlin is a derivative of the Pied Piper Tale, so it's no surprise that Ms. Harris also writes childrens' books.  Will she keep toes in both genres?

At this rate, we'll soon reach gender parity in scientifiction, which I think will be to its benefit.  After all, that will mean we are finally seeing the best efforts of our entire population, not just one half.  I can' wait to see who will be on the 1963 supplement!