Tag Archives: poul anderson

Magazine

[Feb. 23, 1960] Cepheid Oscillations (March 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

5 Comments

From the depths of mediocrity to the peaks of quality, it looks like our long literary winter may finally be over.  Perhaps the groundhog didn't see a shadow this year.

First, we had an uncharacteristically solid Astounding.  This month's Fantasy and Science Fiction is similarly exceptional without a clunker in the bunch, and some standouts besides.

I used to see Poul Anderson's name and cringe.  The author who had impressed me so much with 1953's Brainwave turned out consistent dreck for the next several years, though to be fair, he generally did so within the pages of Campbell's magazine, not Boucher's.  A couple of years ago he got back into his groove, and his stuff has been generally quite good again. 

He has the lead novella in the March F&SF, The Martyr, set in a far future in which humanity has met a race of clearly superior psionicists.  We are so jealous of these powers, and the possessors so unwilling to give up their secrets, that a small human contingent takes several aliens prisoner to coerce the secrets of psi out of them.  But what if it's a secret better left unrevealed?

It's a beautiful story, but there is nastiness here, and it can be a rough read in places.  It is no less recommended for that, however.  Just giving fair warning.

Ray Bradbury is an author I've never held in much regard, but his Death and the Maiden, about a withered rural crone who shuts herself in an ancient house in defense against mortality, isn't bad. 

It doesn't even suffer too badly when compared to Ted Sturgeon's subsequent Like Young, perhaps because the subject matter is so different (Ray was less successful when both he and Ted wrote mermaid stories in quick succession, Ted's being, by far, the superior.) In Sturgeon's tale, the last surviving 504 humans, rendered sterile by radiation, decide to give their race a kind of immortality by planting cultural and scientific relics so as to bootstrap humanity's evolutionary successor.  The joke is on us in the end, however.

John Collier's Man Overboard is an atmospheric piece about a dilettante sea captain pursuing an elusive sea-going Loch Ness Monster.  It feels old, like something written decades ago.  I suspect that is a deliberate stylistic choice, and it's effective.

Then we have a cute little Sheckley: The Girls and Nugent Miller, another story set in a post-atomic, irradiated world.  Is a pacifist professor any match against a straw man's Feminist and her charge of beautiful co-eds?  The story should offend me, but I recognize a tongue permanently affixed to the inside of the cheek when I see one.

Miriam Allen DeFord has a quite creepy monster story aptly called, The Monster, with an almost Lovecraftian subject (the horror in the cemetery that feeds on children) but done with a more subdued style and with quite the kicker of an ending.

The Good Doctor (Isaac Asimov) is back to form with his non-fiction article on the measuring of interstellar distances, The Flickering Yardstick.  I must confess with some chagrin that, despite my astronomical education, I was always a bit vague on how we learned to use Cepheid variable stars to compute galactic distances (their pulsation frequency is linked to their brightness, which allows us to determine how far away they are).  Asimov explains it all quite succinctly, and I was gratified to see a woman astronomer was at the center of the story (a Henrietta Leavitt).


"Pickering's harem," the computers of astronomer Edward Pickering (Leavitt is standing)

Avram Davidson has a fun one-pager called Apres Nous wherein a dove is sent to the future only to return wet and exhausted with an olive leaf in its mouth.  I didn't get the punchline until I looked up the quote in a book of quotations.

The remainder of the issue is filled with a most excellent Clifford Simak novella, All the Traps of Earth, in which a centuries-old robot, no longer having a human family to serve, escapes inevitable memory-wiping and repurposing by fleeing to the stars.  We've seen the "robot as slave" allegory before in Galaxy's Installment Plan.  In fact, it was Cliff, himself, who wrote it, and I remember being uncomfortable with his handling of the metaphor in that story. 

I had no such problems this time—it's really a beautiful story of emancipation and self-realization, by the end of which, the indentured servant has become a benevolent elder.  A fine way to end a great issue.

So pick up a copy if you can.  At 40 cents (the second-cheapest of the Big Four), it's a bargain.


"Spacecraft landing on the Moon" – cover artwork without overprinting – Mel Hunter

—

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.

5 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

[Feb. 12, 1960] Pulling up (Mar. 1960 Astounding)

5 Comments

It had to happen some day–Astounding has pulled itself out of a nose dive, for now.

Last time, I discussed the most excellent serial, Deathworld.  Still, a single good serial does not a good issue make.  Thankfully, Campbell has at long last, and after a merciless rough patch, delivered a quite readable book.

J.T. McIntosh can always be relied upon to provide entertainment; his lead novella, Immortality for Some is no exception.  In the future, society's most worthy, the 10% with sufficient talents and/or accomplishments to make the cut, are allowed to undergo "Rebirth."  This process erases all memories and restores the body to an adolescent stage of physical development.  The special person gets to live again in a sort of reconstituted reincarnation. 

But what happens when one of the world's intellectual elite doesn't want to cheat death?  This is a world that doesn't want to lose a cultural treasure, and it takes an exceptional person, indeed, to evade Rebirth.

Strongly written, with the first half written from the point of view of an aged woman pianist of superlative talent giving her last concert before Rebirth; the second stars the aforementioned fellow—a seemingly unremarkable caretaker whom the musician befriends.  It's worth your time.

And now, I shall surprise my audience by saying with a straight face that I actually enjoyed Randall Garrett's contribution to this issue: In Case of Fire….  In this far future, the sprawling Terran Empire cannot afford to send its best and brightest as ambassadors to less-esteemed stations.  The story opens on a remote, unimportant world whose embassy is staffed with barely functional neurotics.  Yet in that insanity lies the key to ending an interstellar war.  Garrett manages to be somewhat clever and to not offend.  Quite an accomplishment for him.

Chris Anvil's Shotgun Wedding is another of his unremarkable space-fillers about an alien race whose plan to disrupt humanity by flooding the market with clairvoyant television backfires.  One bit I liked, however, was the depiction of pen pals from different countries using their television screens to correspond across thousands of miles.  When the world is finally wired into OMNIVAC, decades from now, I imagine we'll see such a phenomenon.

Editor Campbell has been trying to make a go of the slick non-fiction section of his magazine for several months.  This issue is the first with readable articles, the first of which is Mars: A Summing Up by R.S. Richardson (perhaps better known by his nom d'plume, Philip Latham).  Mr. Richardson does an admirable, if slightly dry, job of comprehensively summarizing the current state of knowledge regarding the mysterious Red Planet. 

We've enjoyed three relatively close approaches to Mars over the past six years, the likes of which will not recur until 1971, by which time we will probably have sent at least one probe to investigate close-up.  As a result, scientists have amassed a bonanza of information.  Yet it is still unknown whether or not Mars has life, though if it does, it must be of a very low order.  The most exciting work has been done by the astronomer A. Dolfuss, who has determined the nature of Martian soil to examination of its polarization (the non-randomness of the angle of vibration of light that reflects from it).  That we've learned so much about Mars is, of course, a marvel in and of itself.  To quote the author, "To tell anything about a body that never comes closer than thirty-five million miles taxes your ingenuity to the utmost."

Dr. Asimov was also tapped to provide an article after a long hiatus from Astounding's pages.  Microdesign for Living, about the biochemical synthesis of proteins, is not one of his better pieces, which is to say that is readable but not memorable.

Poul Anderson (as his Astounding alter-ego Winston P. Sanders) wraps things up with a short piece called The Barrier Moment.  Scientists may not know why one can't go back in time more than three years, but a philospher believes he has the horrifying answer.  Perhaps there isn't any time to go back to…

All told, the March 1960 Astounding clocks in at a respectable three-and-a-half stars.  That is the best this magazine has been since I started rating the issues in January 1959.  I sincerely hope Campbell can keep this up!

—

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.

5 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

[Jan. 2, 1960] Happy New Year! (January 1960 F&SF)

Leave a comment

Good Lord, is it already 1960?

When I started this endeavor in 1958, I had only a vague notion what it would look like and how long it would last.  Over the past year 14 months, Galactic Journey has settled into what I hope is a consistent, yet varied, mature column.  Moreover, I have suspicion that this column will last just about as long as I do, as I see no reason to ever stop.

It is hard to imagine Galactic Journey with bylines dated with futuristic years like 1965 or 1972 or 1988, but why not?  Perhaps one day, instead of San Diego, Seattle, or Sapporo, the dateline will read Sinus Rorus, Syrtis Major, or Saturn.

Returning to the present, it must be 1960, for that is the date on the current Fantasy and Science Fiction, January to be exact.  Actually, the February issue has already arrived, but that's a topic for a future week.  In the meantime, let's see what the first F&SF of 1960 has to offer:

Poul Anderson is back with another Time Patrol story, The Only Game in Town.  This time, Everard and his faithful Indian companion (I kid; Salgado is quite a well-developed and co-equal character) are dispatched to the American Southwest in the 13th century to stop, get this, a Mongol invasion.

It's not so silly as it sounds.  In fact, it sounds downright plausible that the Mongols could, after conquering China, send a scouting expedition to the New World.  It didn't take many horsemen to conquer the Aztecs, and the Mongols were a formidable race, to be sure.  What makes this story interesting, aside from the fine writing and evocative setting, is Everard's dawning realization that the Time Patrol's mission may not be as pure as once thought.  The Time Cops are told they are to preserve the original timeline, but in this story, they appear to be meddling for meddling's sake rather than fixing damage caused by others.

I look forward to learning more about the secret agenda of Everard's future employers.

Then we have A Divvil with the Women, apparently a resubmission of an earlier story once published in a lesser magazine.  It's by Eric Frank Russell (slumming as "Niall Wilde"), and it involves an unpleasant fellow who makes a deal with the devil—with disastrous results, of course.  My, but these stories are popular these days!  It's no longer than it needs to be to deliver the punchline, which is a blessing (pun intended).

Damon Knight has translated a piece from F&SF's French edition: The Blind Pilot by Charles Henneberg.  Sadly, the thing is only half-translated or something; it's well nigh unreadable, and I didn't make it past the first few pages.  Oh well.

Reginald Bretnor, who writes the execrable Ferdinand Feghoot puns in F&SF under a pseudonym, has a very silly short-short ("Bug-Getter") that, you guessed it, ends in a pun.  I must confess that I did laugh, so it couldn't have been all bad.

For once, Asimov has a decidedly unremarkable article.  It's called Those Crazy Ideas, and it segues from a discussion of Asimov's personal creativity to observations on how scientific creativity can be maximized.  Fluffy.

Cliff Simak's Final Gentleman just barely misses the mark.  Quite a long tale for F&SF, it is one of those excitingly creepy tales with a prosaic payoff.  In this case, a respected author retires after 30 years only to find that the trappings and details of his life are largely imaginary, sort of a psychic cloak that surrounds him, altering his surroundings and himself to seem more refined and engaging than they actually are.  I found this notion compelling.  After all, I often swathe myself in a fantasy, pretending to be decades in the past.  I complete the illusion by listening to old music, using obsolete slang, wearing out-of-date clothing.  It is a conceit in which I engage to better understand a bygone era for historical purposes, and simply to have a fun invisible refuge from the real world.  Hey—it's cheaper than heroin.

But in Simak's story, the psychic hoodwink is perpetrated solely to influence the course of history through an implausible Rube Goldberg chain of interactions.  I was disappointed, but you may feel differently.

A Little Girl's Christmas in Modernia, by Ralph Bunch, is next.  In this future, we gradually trade in our flesh parts for metal as we grow older.  Bunch's tale features a fully human moppet and her mostly-converted parents in the kind of inconsequential story I'd expect to find in a slick.  I suppose they needed a Holiday-themed story to fill out this issue.

What do you do when an alien weather probe crashes into your backyard?  You bake it, of course, and thus unintentionally forestall an extraterrestrial invasion.  G.C. Edmondson's The Galactic Calabash is fun, though it took me several sessions to get through the short story, largely because I always picked it up at bedtime.

Rounding out the magazine is the quite good Double Double, Toil and Trouble by Holley Cantine.  An anarchist turned recluse decides to take up magic, eventually learning the secret to doubling anything.  It starts out well enough, but the ending provides a cautionary tale against dabbling in the Dark Arts.  Holley Cantine, I understand, is a bit of a political theorist, and Double has a deeper message wrapped in a gentle fiction coating. 

And so the January 1960 F&SF ends as it began with a four-star story.  In-between, there lies a muddle of uncharacteristic unevenness such that the whole issue clocks in at a mere three stars, the same as this month's Astounding.

That just leaves us with the January IF, whose reading is in progress.  In the meantime, I'll soon have a report on my latest excursion to the drive-in with my daughter.  It don't all gotta be highbrow, after all.

Happy New Year!

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.

No comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

[Dec. 17, 1959] Same ol' Same ol'? (January 1960 Astounding)

Leave a comment

There are times that I feel I could trot out the same Astounding review every month.  It would go something like this:

"Editor John Campbell continues to showcase Human-First, psionic stories with young male protagonists and virtually no female characters.  The table of contents features Randall Garrett, Robert Silverberg, Poul Anderson, and Murray Leinster.  Yet again, the magazine is a disappointment."

For the most part, the above summary would serve this month, but there is a kicker at the end of this review.

Skipping the first part of a serial by a fellow of whom I've never heard (a Harry Harrison), the issue opens up with one of Murray Leinster's weaker outings, Attention Saint Patrick.  Leinster is often excellent, but in this one, he's just boringly droll, telling the story of an Irish space colony that relies on giant serpents to control its vermin problem—in this case, little dinosaurs with diamond teeth. 


by Bernklau

Then we have the truly ridiculous A Rose by Other Name, a Chris Anvil story about how the removal of military and jingoistic jargon from our vocabulary makes it impossible to go to war.  Not good.

Campbell has tried to make his magazine more respectable by including a slick paper non-fiction segment starting this month.  Frank Foote and Arthur Shuck penned Solid Plutonium Headache about the technical and physical difficulties associated with working this dangerous radioactive material.  A more boring article I have never read, which is a shame because there's nothing wrong with the subject matter.  Until Campbell finds himself an Asimov or a Ley, I think his non-fiction section won't be worth much—particularly as the slick paper is not at all absorbent.

Poul Anderson's The Burning Bridge, about a fleet of interstellar colony ships on a 40-year trip to settle a new world, is decent.  Recalled by Earth nearly a few years into their flight, the fleet's Admiral must determine whether or not they will return or press on.  The cast is nicely international, and women play an important (though oddly segregated) part.


by Bernklau

Then we have The Garrett, in this case Viewpoint.  A fellow dreams himself into the future and discovers a strange new world before snapping back to his original time.  The now-typical Randallian gimmick is that the person is a famous figure from the past, and the destination is now-ish.  It's not as bad as it could have been, but Garrett loses a star just for being Garrett.

Finally, we have The Silverberg: Stress Pattern.  This story is hard to rate because there are really two things going on here.  On one hand, we have the story of a sociologist and his assistant wife (no doubt inspired by Bob Silverberg's wife and partner, Barbara) and the slow unraveling and subsequent recovery of their lives.  The characterization and writing are quite good, and I was carried along for the entirety of the tale's 30 pages.

On the other hand, in the end, the story is a rather ham-fisted argument against the leveling qualities of increased socialism (small "s") and social welfare.  The message of the story is that while we might keep the lower classes fat and happy, the secure smart people are just going to get bored and restless.  While such an argument could be made against a uniform public school curriculum, and while in true Socialism, the only way to get ahead is to cheat, I don't think things can progress in America as Silverberg contests.  Moreover, that part just feels tacked on to tickle Campbell's fancy.  It has that "secret society knows all the answers and can manipulate humanity like a machine" conceit I generally find tiresome.

Still, Bob is coming along.  I think if he tried writing for another magazine, he could put his talent for prolific writing and good portrayals toward making something truly good.  He's not Randy Garrett, even though he works with him regularly.

All told, it's a 2.5 star issue.  But I promised a kicker: the serial, Deathworld, is excellent so far, and I'm keenly anticipating next month's installment.  You'll have to wait until next February to get the review, but I think it will be a good one!

Stay tuned!

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.

No comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

[Sep. 12, 1959] Best of the Best (October 1959 Fantasy and Science Fiction, second part)

Leave a comment

Statistics are (is?) fun.  There is a simple joy to compiling data and finding patterns.  Since the beginning of the publishing year, i.e. issues with a January cover date, I have been rating stories and magazine issues in aggregate.  This is partly to help me remember the stories in times to come and also to trace patterns of quality.  In a couple of months, I plan to have my own mini-Hugo awards; perhaps one of you might help me think of a catchy name.

I use a 1 to 5 star rating system, and until this month, individual issues varied between aggregate ratings of 2.5 and 3.5.  But this month, the October 1959 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction broke the curve scoring an incredible, unprecedented 4.5 stars.  That’s about as close to perfection as I can imagine, and I strongly urge all of you to get your hands on a copy while they remain at newsstands.

I talked about the first third of the book last week.  I’ve since finished the rest, and the quality has not dipped an inch. 

To be sure, Charles G. Finney’s The Gilashrikes is only decent.  A biologist mates his gila monster to his shrike, and the resulting hybrid, in an attempt to make up for their ignoble provenance, become the town moralists, enforcing virtue to an increasingly annoying degree.  I know of Finney from the much raved-about Circus of Dr. Lao, and Gilashrikes has a similar, whimsical quality.

Operation Incubus, by Poul Anderson, on the other hand, is fantastic in both senses of the word.  A newlywed magician couple, one a lycanthrope, the other an adept (relearning her trade after losing the maidenhood that was the source of much her power) go on a honeymoon only to run afoul of demonic predators.  It’s lyric, tasteful, and impacting.  Also very exciting.  It paints a universe much like ours, but with magic more intertwined with our lives.  Highly recommended.

Hassoldt Davis’ The Pleasant Woman, Eve is a Garden of Eden story starring God and the Wandering Jew discussing how to get the first humans to make more of themselves independently.  It’s very good, but it could have used an extra paragraph.  Perhaps space concerns dictated the abrupt ending.

The Pi Man is Alfred Bester’s latest tale of a haunted, pursued psychic.  In this case, the protagonist is sensitive to karmic patterns, and he must do good and hateful things, in turn, to maintain balance in the universe.  It’s very strangely written, and it took me a few pages to get into it, but I found the journey ultimately rewarding.

Finally, for the short stories at least (and they are all under 16 pages in length to accommodate Heinlein’s serial) is Avram Davidson’s Dagon.  I must confess that I did not quite understand this rather ominous tale of an American soldier’s rise to virtual Godhood in post-War China.  As the fellow becomes more powerful, he becomes more detached from reality, in the end becoming an intangible viewpoint on the world.–a literal goldfish in a bowl.  Perhaps that is the point—with power comes a loss of free will and agency.  Or perhaps it was just a comeuppance delivered by a mischievous old Chinaman.

As for the novel, Heinlein’s Starship Soldier, the first half is excellent, particularly in contrast to Dickson’s recent military serial, Dorsai!.  Oh, it’s got its share of Heinlein preaching through the mouths of characters, but he has to get it out somewhere.  I’ll devote a full article to the story next month.

As a teaser for the next article, I've just learned that the Soviets have launched their second lunar probe.  It only takes half a day to get there, so we'll know if it was a success in short order!

—

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.

No comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

The Bomb, the Clock, and the Devil (August 1959 Fantasy and Science Fiction; 7-02-1959)

Leave a comment

In this month’s F&SF editorial, editor Doug Mills reports that he’s gotten a number of complaints regarding the oversaturation of stories in the post-apocalyptic, time travel, and deal-with-the-Devil genre.  Mr. Mills’ response was that any genre can be oversaturated, but quality will always be quality, and F&SF will publish quality stories in whatever genre it pleases.  In fact, there are stories dealing with all three of the "oversaturated" genres in this issue.

What do you think?  I have to agree with Mr. Mills.  Personally, I can never get enough of After the Bomb stories, time travel is often a hoot, and the Devil features in relatively few tales these days, in my experience.   But I’d like your opinion on the matter.
I had not realized that Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol story had taken up so much of the current issue; there isn’t much left to review.  There is some goodness, however:

Rosebud, by Ray Russell, is teleological nonsense in a single-pager.  Damon Knight’s book review column deals with horror, and is interesting, as usual.  I wish he were still helming IF (come to think of it, I just received this month’s copy… I wonder who’s in charge.)

Kit Reed’s Empty Nest is well nigh unreadable, but I think it’s a horror about being eaten by anthropoid birds.

Obituary, by Isaac Asimov, is actually quite good, and one of his few stories from the viewpoint of a woman.  It involves domestic abuse, a truly evil (yet in a plausible and everyday sort of way) villain, and a satisfactory, grisly come-uppance.  I hope the good doctor is not writing from experience in this one…

Finally, we’ve got Pact, by Poul Anderson (under his pseudonym, Winston P. Sanders).  This is the aforementioned Devilish Deal story, and it is my favorite story of the issue.  I hear you gasp–an Anderson story is my favorite?  Yes!  It's clever all the way through, this story of a demon summoning a human in the hopes of consumating a contract.  Fine stuff.

My apologies for the shortness of this installment.  I'll make it up next time.  Perhaps.

P.S. One of the reasons I enjoy science fiction so much is the clever gadgets.  In Asimov's story, the villain uses a "desktop computer" with some sort of typewriter keys attached.  Boy, would that be a fine tool to have, and I've never seen the like in a story before.  Something to look forward to in a decade or two?



(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
Magazine

I am Cyrus, King of the World (August 1959 Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1st half; 6-30-1959)

1 Comment

For most people, the beginning of the month coincides with the 1st (or, as my late father might say, the “oneth”—i.e., May the “oneth” followed by May the “tooth”).  For me, and doubtless for most of my science fiction loving sistren and brethren, the month starts around the 26th, which is when the science fiction magazines hit the newsstands.

Of course, those who get their issues via mail-order get them at varying times, but in general, the last week of the month preceding the month preceding the cover date  (I did not stutter; the duplication is intentional) is when the goodies arrive.  For me, that’s The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (generally good), Astounding Science Fiction (often bad, but sometimes good), and on a bi-monthly and alternating basis, Galaxy (generally decent), and IF (quality as yet undetermined).  When these run out, I pray for interesting space news and/or interesting new novels.  Exhausting these, I turn to my collection of older books, preferably ones I have been given the right to distribute freely.

I am currently at the giddy start of a new month, and I’ve decided to eat my dessert first, tearing through the August 1959 F&SF.  Take my hand, and away we go!

Jay Williams generally sticks to juveniles, co-writing the Danny Dunn series, which are pretty fun if you’re the right age to enjoy them (pre-teen).  His Operation LadyBird opens up this month’s issue, and it’s a lighthearted romp on a Venus that a United Nations force has recently cleaned of a loathsome alien menace.  Turns out that we were actually called in (unwittingly) by Venusians (who look just like Hopi Indians) to act as exterminators.  I liked the story better when it was called Cat and Mouse, but the story is not without its charms, and it does feature a strong female character, a resourceful Soviet major.

Asimov’s column is good this month.  The Ultimate Split of the Second begins as a primer on measuring really big and small things.  The Doctor recommends using the time it takes light to travel certain small distances as really small units of time (i.e. a light meter, a light kilometer, etc.).  This the flip side to using light years, minutes, hours, for distance measuring.

Then he gives us a survey of the latest discoveries of subatomic particles, exciting new things that are the very bleeding edge of modern physics.  Their halflives are exceedingly small, so the nomenclature described above comes in handy to describe them. 

The prolific Carol Emshwiller (whose husband’s art graces the pages of many digests under the byline “EMSH”) has an interesting post-apocalyptic mood piece called Day at the Beach.  There’s not much to it; it is largely the depiction of a family in a ruined, but not extinguished, United States.  Gasoline is exorbitantly expensive, most citizens have lost all of their hair, mutations are legion, and there is not much law and order.  Diverting, forgettable.

Fantasist Marcel Aymé’s The Walker-Through-Walls is cute, though it is a reprint from 1943.  Our straight-laced protagonist discovers that, in mid-life, he has the ability to traverse walls as if they did not exist.  He resists exploiting this power, but little by little, he succumbs to temptation.  First, he terrifies his tyrannical boss, then he becomes a dashing, popular thief.  Ultimately, he becomes involved in a torrid affair that proves to be his undoing.  Well-written, somewhat fluffy.

Finally, for today, we have Poul Anderson’s latest Time Patrol story.  As you know, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the good Swede, but this one is pretty good.  For those who don’t know, the Time Patrol is an organization based in the far future that recruits constables from across time to police for alterations in the timeline.  It’s a tough task, but it is made easier by the laws of the universe which have the time stream move along in a way not unlike a river—it takes a lot to get a substantial altering of course.
 Patrolman Manse Everard, nominally stationed in the late ‘50s, is approached by Cynthia, wife of his best friend, and object of Manse’s unrequited affections, to find her husband, who has disappeared without a trace some 2500 years in the past.  Unable to say no, Manse takes an unauthorized trip to the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great to find his friend, who turns out to be none other than the King of Kings himself!  It’s an exciting but somewhat ironic and bittersweet story, and it gets extra stars for being about a rather unsung but personal favorite era of mine.

All told, the first half (and a little extra) of this issue has had no clunkers, but also no home runs, to mix my metaphors.  Call it 3.5?
See you in two days!



(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

Last of the old-time Satellites (May 1959 Satellite; 4-28-1959)

Leave a comment

It's another one of those bittersweet months, much like when I discovered IF only to see it die. 
This month's Satellite (the best in science fiction) is a fair bit better than last month's issue, which makes the magazine's fate all the more tragic.  But we'll talk about that at the end.

The lead tale, Sister Planet, by Poul Anderson, is excellent–except for the last two pages.  I strongly recommend simply stopping before reading the end.  It takes place on Venus, specifically an ocean-planet version.  There is too little oxygen to breathe, and the air is eternally muggy and over-warm.  Yet men (not women, at least not yet) populate a floating base to conduct science and to trade with the natives.  As one would expect, the Venusians are not at all humanoid; their closest terrestrial analog is the bottlenose dolphin, cute, playful creatures.  They have worked out a trade deal with the humans–art and tools for Venusian fire gems.

The characters are well-realized, the descriptions lush and poetic, and the scene in which a Venusian takes the protagonist for a ride down to the underwater city of the cetoids is absolutely spellbinding.  Following which, there is a fine discussion of the pros and cons, moral and economic, of opening Venus up for colonization at the expense of its sentient denizens.  There is also a lot of interesting geophysics, the kind I've come to associate with Anderson, who is a trained scientist.

But then the end…  it's a complete pill, and it makes no sense.  Such a shame.  Thankfully, one can skip the last portion with little ill effect.

E Gubling Dow, by Gordon Dickson, is something of a second-rater.  An egg-like being crashes to Earth in a spaceship, is rescued by a couple of rural types, and dies slowly, agonizingly, from its wounds.  Sad and unpleasant.

On the other hand, the non-fiction column continues to be excellent.  This month's feature (by Sam Moscowitz) spotlights the short but prolific life of Stanley G. Weinbaum.  It's nearly unbelievable that this fellow wrote so much in just one year's time before his untimely death.  A short-short of Weinbaum's is included at the back of issue–it's called Graph.

The other non-fiction piece, on French fantasist Albert Robida (by Don Glassman), is a bit florid but educational.  I never would have known about this 19th century poor-man's Verne otherwise.

Oh, and there's a silly short non-fiction piece by Ellery Lanier speculating that the reason "real" scientists haven't ventured a design for a hyperspace drive is because they are too terrified of the great unknown.  Right.

If you've ever been in a relationship with an over-needy person (what my friends and I knowingly call a "black hole of need") then the plot of Robert Silverberg's Appropriation will ring true.  Clingy aliens come within an ace of consumating a psychologically unhealthy relationship with a set of human colonists, but the terrestrials are saved by a bit of bureaucratic chicanery.  The best part of the story is the empathic aliens. 

Last, but definitely not least, is a beautifully atmospheric story about a Great War veteran and the French wood he falls in love with.  The Woman of the Wood, by A. Merritt, naturally has a twist: the trees are really dryads engaged in a centuries-long slow war with the French peasants who occupy the same land.  Really good stuff. 

With an issue that started and ended so well, not to mention the advertisements for a new Frank Herbert story and a biography of Hugo Gernsback, I was really looking forward to picking up the June edition.  But shortly after picking up this issue and last month's, I learned that publisher Leo Margulies has tossed up the sponge.  Satellite joins the long list of science fiction publications that has recently disappeared.  I'm even told that the June issue was printed, but that it's not going to be distributed.  What a treasure that would be to find. 

As sad as that is, at least I still have that stack of Galaxy novels to get through.  And next up, provided there are no new space spectaculars, I'll be previewing the movie I saw last week with my little girl.  I know, I know.  I'm an irresponsible dad, not for taking her to see sci-fi horror films, but for taking her to see bad ones.

So stay tuned.  I'm sorry about the widely varying spaces between articles–between work and my hands, it can be tough to stick to a regular schedule.  Rest assured, I will keep up the fight.

P.S. And if that pair of teens I met at the record store is reading, thanks for joining the (small) club!

(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
Magazine

Anderson breaks the mold! (April 1959 Astounding; 3-18-1959)

Leave a comment

Good gravy!  Two good Andersons in a row?

This month's Astounding opens with Wherever you are, by "Winston P. Sanders."  If it wasn't the swashbuckling yet science-adoring prose, it was the heroine protagonist's name and ethnicity (Ulrica Ormstad–couldn't get more Swedish!) that suggested Mr. Sanders might well be the well-known nordic science fiction writer, Poul Anderson.  A quick checking of sources confirmed the suspicion.

Well, it's really good.  The fierce soldier, Major Ormstad, gets to be the viewpoint character for half the novelette, whereupon her meek and brainy shipmate, Didymus Mudge, becomes the reader's eyes.  Both have become marooned on an alien planet, an ocean away from the local Terran base.  Ship's instruments have been destroyed, and constant cloud cover and a lack of a magnetic pole preclude navigation.  It is up to Mudge to puzzle out a way home, and up to Ormstad to deal with the fierce mini-Tyrannosaurs so as to secure transportation.  My favorite line of the story goes to Ormstad, who initially thinks little of Mudge yet deigns to speak to him anyway:

"For one honest human conversation, in any human language, she would trade her soul.  Make it Swedish, and she'd throw in her sidearm."

On to the next story.  When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was John Dough and the Cherub, by L. Frank Baum, sort of a Wizard of Oz side story.  In one of the chapters, the story's heroes (John Dough and Chick the Cherub) are captured and threatened with execution.  However, this execution is delayed when Chick the Cherub begins to tell the tale of "The Silver Pig."  So entranced are the heroes' captors that they delay the execution every night so as to hear more of the pig's adventures.  Of course, the story is designed to be endless so as to forestall the execution long enough for John Dough and the Cherub to escape.

I learned much later that this had been the plot to 1,001 Arabian Nights, and the cliché has been used a myriad of times since then.  Usually, the set-up is that sentence of death will follow some religiously or legally prescribed ritual, with the sentenced to have some choice as to the format of the ritual.  Virtually every story has the same format–the reader is informed that our hero has worked out the puzzle to prolong his/her life, but we don't get to find out the solution until the end.  Since classic science fiction favors the "gotcha" ending, I've seen this kind of story a lot in my literary travels.

So it is with Now Inhale, by Eric Frank Russell.  I didn't much care for his last story, but this one is fine.  A Terran is imprisoned for suspected espionage on an alien world.  Condemned to death, he is allowed one final game of his choice before strangulation.  The trick is to prolong the game, to neither win nor lose.  The record was 17 days.  Our hero beats this record a dozen-fold and is prepared to play the game forever, if need be.  Can you guess the game?

I'm afraid the rest of the ish meanders into mediocrity (which is perhaps above par for Astounding these days.  Chris Anvil's The Sieve is nothing special–on a brand new colony world, half the pioneers take up smoking the local marijuana and become lazy and shiftless.  The rest of the colonists decide to let them starve over the winter.  Reefer madness, indeed.

Gordy Dickson turns in a disappointing performance with The Catch, in which a galactic federation fairly begs humanity to retake the reins after thousands of years of retirement.  It seems those darned aliens just can't stand the burden of leadership.  And it turns out they got all of their technology from humanity the last time we were ascendant.  Poor little primitive aliens. 

Definitely a story after Campbell's heart.

Finally, we have Set a Thief by H. Chandler Elliott, a Canadian brain doctor whose stuff I've never before read.  It's an interesting first contact story, though told in a flip off-hand manner I didn't much care for.  Is it a set of thieves' tools or a lady's handbag?  An interesting case of convergent evolution, to be sure.

The rest of the ish is the final installment of The Pirats of Ersatz so there's nothing more to report for this month.  My hands are throbbing, so I may take a break until March 24.  I'll have lots to write about by then, though.

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.

No comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

Fire from the Sky (March 1959 Fantasy & Science Fiction; 3-10-1959)

Leave a comment

Last time on this station, I informed all of you that Part 2 of this (last) month's Fantasy & Science Fiction review would have to wait since I'd wanted to get through the Poul Anderson novelette before reporting.

Well, I'm glad I did.  Damn that Anderson, anyway.  How dare he write a good story!  Now I can't justify skipping him.  But more on that later.

Of Time and Cats by Howard Fast, who normally doesn't dip his toe in the science fiction pool, is a fun tale of the multiplicity that ensues when time travel is involved.  A slick, paradoxical story.

Algis Budrys has another winner with The Distant Sound of Engines about impending death and the urgent need to impart a lifetime's accumulated wisdom before final departure.  Sad.  Good.

Avram Davidson's The Certificate is dystopic in the extreme, and probably inspired by the recent Holocaust.  A subjugated humanity is reduced to bitter slave labor.  The only "gift" from their new overlords is perfect health.  How does one escape?

I liked Three Dimensional Valentine by Stuart Palmer (who had a story in the very first F&SF) quite a lot.  It is fun and frivolous and rather old-fashioned.  It is also unexpected.  The author has given me permission to distribute this one, but I haven't quite received it in the mails yet.  I'll let you know when I do.

And now to Poul Anderson's The Sky People.  As you know, I always approach Anderson with trepidation.  Apart from the amazing Brainwave, his work is generally turgid, and I don't like his manly men and absent women.

This one was different.  There is still plenty of swashbuckling in this post-apocalyptic tale, but it is done in the style and with the flaire of a good pirate movie like Black Swan.  It is set in old San Antone, in the heart of the decaying "Meycan" Empire, south of Tekas and north of S'america.  Their technology and mindset is mired in the 16th century.  The eponymous "Sky People" are dirigible-driving corsairs from the Kingdom of "Canyon."  Though rapacious and ruthless, they possess a greater technology than their target–the Meycans.  Unfortunately for them, the timing of their attack proves to be inauspicious as it coincides with the arrival of a delegation from the Federation, successors to the Polynesian nations of Oceania. 

Told by three viewpoint characters, one Polynesian, one sky pirate, and one Meycan (a woman!), it is really quite good.  Not only has Anderson managed to convincingly portray a wide variety of cultures, he has done a fine job of projecting recovery from an atomic catastrophe in a world that has used up most of its natural resources.  I don't know if Anderson has written other stories in this universe or if he intends to, but I would enjoy reading more.

The final story is Alfred Bester's Will You Wait?.  The deal with the Devil story has been just about done to death, but this is an infernally cute story about how the modern way of business has made the process Hell on Earth.

Gosh, where does that leave us for the issue?  4 stars?  4 and a half?  Definitely a good read worth picking up–if there are any left on the stands, that is.

See you on the 12th!



(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