Tag Archives: Raymond E. Banks

Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[February 12, 1969] Slick stuff (March 1969 Galaxy science fiction)

February 12, 2024 Gideon Marcus 3 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

The Bad Kind

For 12 days, 21,000 gallons a day of crude oil spilled into the Pacific ocean off the coast of Santa Barbara. Only on February 8 was the leaking undersea well finally capped. This debacle, courtesy of the Union Oil Co., has blackened the harbors and beaches of the San Gabriel Valley coastline, killing hundreds of sea birds. Even Governor Reagan is declaring this mess a disaster, making federal funds available for cleanup.

Nevertheless, the Governor did not relieve the oil company of its obligation to the government agencies and private citizens harmed by this catastrophe. It will likely take more than 1000 men three weeks to clean up the mess.

The silver lining is that only about 1% of the local seabird population has been affected, and virtually none of the seals. Indeed, the damage is only about a quarter of that caused two years ago when the super tanker Torrey Canyon broke up off the coast of Southwest England.

Still, if the best we can say is that this crisis is not as bad as the worst, I think we can do better.

The Good Kind

In refreshing contrast to the environmental incident described above, the latest issue of Galaxy is anything but a tragedy:

by Douglas Chaffee illustrating The Weather on Welladay

And Now They Wake (Part 1 of 3), by Keith Laumer

In 1981, just as broadcast power switches on for the first time, an inmate by the name of Grayle makes a daring escape from a New York prison. He is an enigmatic man, an inmate who looks 35, but who has been incarcerated since before World War 2. He also possesses an uncanny ability to heal from wounds.

At the same time, another fellow with similar powers stumbles drunk out of a bar, making his way to a steam room where he miraculously heals a profound set of scars and ejects an antique Minie ball from a wound in his back.

These events are coincident with the appearance of a tremendous water spout in the middle of the Atlantic, and interwoven with tales from a thousand years ago of a renegade from the Galactic Fleet named Thor, and his comrade-turned-betrayer, Loki.

by Jack Gaughan

Who are these two immortals, and why has their story suddenly come to a head? I don't know…but I'm hooked!

Four stars, so far.

The City That Loves You, by Raymond E. Banks

The Alpha Centauri city of Relax offers everything to its twenty million inhabitants—comfort, company, computerized guidance. But what happens when a citizen wants to leave? What if every inducement, soft and hard, is made to keep him there? Does the fellow really have a choice in the matter?

I read the whole story waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I was not displeased with the result. In the end, for a place to truly be paradise, there must be a way out. The socialiast utopias of the world, from Bulgaria to Beit Ha Shita, might take note.

Four stars.

Leviathan, by Lise Braun

An advanced submarine, akin to the Seaview from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea rescues a primitive fisherman lost at sea in the Atlantic Ocean. This inadvertently gives rise to a number of familiar legends.

This is an old-fashioned story; it would have been right at home in Imagination in 1954. I do like the clever, organic way Braun conveys that the action takes place thousands of years in the past, and the reading is pleasant, if not extraordinary.

Three stars.

The Weather on Welladay, by Anne McCaffrey

by Reese

The sodden, storm-lashed world of Welladay seems too bleak a world for settlement. However, schools of whales that inhabit it produce a valuable radioactive substance prized for medical applications. A team of hardy fishermen taps these whales for their lymphic treasure, braving the waves and weather.

But some pirate has been draining the whales dry, decimating the population and threatening the economy and health of the Federation. Is it one of the four fishers? The mysterious woman space pilot shot down at the beginning of the tale, who crashes on a lonely archipelago? Or someone else?

This is definitely one of McCaffrey's better stories, with far more atmosphere (no pun intended) and far less barely suppressed violence and hokey romance. It goes on a little long, and I find it improbable that this vast planet seems to have exactly six people on it, but I enjoyed it.

Three stars.

For Your Information: Collision Course, by Willy Ley

Mr. Ley's piece this month is on asteroids that cross Earth orbit, particularly Icarus, which precipitated the 49th end-of-the-world scare since the birth of Christ.

Interesting and useful, though rather brief.

Three stars.

The Last Flight of Dr. Ain, by James Tiptree, Jr.

A sick scientist and his dying love make a multi-stop air flight around the world. At each landing, he makes sure to expose as many people as possible to what appears to be an aerosol for cold symptoms, and he feeds bread crumbs to migratory birds. As the story unfolds, told mostly in third-party reports, we learn the scientist was working on a deadly disease, and that he thinks of humanity as a blight on the Earth.

There's no subtext to the story—it's all on the surface—but it's beautifully told and very eerie. I liked it; my favorite from Mr. Tiptree so far. Four stars.

The Theory and Practice of Teleportation , by Larry Niven

Adapted from a lecture Niven gave at Boskone in front of the MIT Science Fiction Society, this is an interesting look at the effects of teleportation, in all its potential developmental paths, on society.

Four stars.

Greeks Bringing Knee-High Gifts, by Brian W. Aldiss

A darkly humorous story set in the near future, satirizing the world of executives. They all hate each other but are not allowed to express it or complain, so they do things that they can claim are generous as an act of passive aggression.

For instance, one gifts another with a genetically tailored midget Tyrannosaurus…which promptly eats the recipient's leg. Said giftee then names the dinosaur after the giftor's coquettish wife and turns up at the giftor's funeral with the creature to terrorise people, but in doing so claims it is a lovely tribute.

Rather obtuse and pointless. I didn't like it.

One star.

(with thanks to Kris for co-writing this review-let).

Godel Numbers, by J. W. Swanson

by Jack Gaughan

200 miles west of Cairo, archaeologists have dug up what they're calling the "Cairo Stone". It is a black tablet, obviously artificial, clearly advanced, and meticulously carved with a series of scratch marks. Dated to 3000 B.C., it could not have been made by a contemporary terrestrial civilization. It's up to three scientists, a melange of linguists and computer engineers, both to crack the code of the tablets and to fend off Soviet agents.

In the end, the tablet serves much the same purpose as the monolith(s) in 2001, jump-starting humanity's progress. It's an amiable, old-fashioned sort of tale, and so esoteric that it probably would have done well, if not better, in Analog.

Three stars.

Cleaning up

All in all, the latest Galaxy makes for pleasant, if not outstanding, reading. I would certainly much rather read about Godel numbers, teleportation, immortals, and isotopic pirates than oil slicks any day!

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 12, 1966] Cool It! (August 1966 Worlds of Tomorrow)

July 12, 2021 Victoria Silverwolf 2 Comments

by Victoria Silverwolf

The Long, Hot Summer

There has been intense heat in many major cities in the eastern United States this month, particularly over the Independence Day weekend. On Sunday, July 3, New York City reached an all-time high for that date with a temperature of 107 degrees. Newark wasn't far behind, at 105 degrees, and Philadelphia was close, with 104.

And Long Island, too.

Cold, Cold Heart

As if editor Frederik Pohl wanted to help us forget about the blistering heat wave, the latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow is centered around a topic that is literally chilling.

Cover art by Paul E. Wenzel.

Before we step into the freezer, however, let's take a look at the lead story, mistakenly called a Complete Short Novel on the title page, although even the magazine's table of contents admits that it's just a novelette.

Heavenly Host, by Emil Petaja

Illustrations by Jack Gaughan.

Our hero's name is Kirk. If what I read in the trade papers is correct, that is also the name of the main character in the upcoming science fiction television series Star Trek. I assume that's just a coincidence. I guess Kirk is a good, manly name.

Anyway, this Kirk serves aboard a spaceship. He's a bit of a rebel, and winds up punching the tyrannical captain of the vessel. He's thrown into the brig, but manages to escape in a sort of lifeboat. (The implication is that the captain and the ship's cook kind of encouraged him to get away.)

This seems to be a case of jumping out of the frying pan and landing in the fire. (Pardon the corny metaphor. The heat must be getting to me.) Kirk winds up on a planet that is covered with a tangle of stinky vines. He manages to survive by eating the smelly plant and drinking rainwater, but life is hardly pleasant. There are holes here and there in the vines, so Kirk goes down to take a look around.

Exploring the world below.

After narrowly escaping being devoured by a giant worm, Kirk discovers that there's a wondrous Utopia under the odoriferous flora. He meets a beautiful woman, dancing gracefully, who quickly starts smooching on him and takes him on a boat ride.

A self-propelled gondola is the best way to travel in style.

At this point, the reader figures that the woman is just a figment of Kirk's imagination. Her name is Sombra, Spanish for shadow, which seems at first to be another hint that she's a phantom. Besides that, we already know that Kirk has imaginary conversations with his wise Mexican grandfather. However, she and the lovely community wherein she dwells turn out to be quite real.

Is this the Emerald City of Oz?

It seems that a bunch of colonists landed on the planet long ago, and managed to create a society without want, the population devoting all its time to artistic endeavors. This seemingly impossible task, they say, was done with the help of a benign deity called Hur. Kirk and Sombra are in love, of course, and he's eager to marry her, but things change when he gets his first look at the god responsible for this paradise.

Kirk meets Hur.

This is a strange story. It starts off as a tale of survival, becomes something of a wish-fulfillment fantasy, adds a touch of horror, and ends in an ambiguous fashion. I wouldn't call it boring, but I never believed anything that was happening. (One major quibble occurs to me: the people in the utopian city claim that they depend on folks like Kirk showing up to avoid inbreeding. Am I supposed to believe that people randomly land on this seemingly worthless planet frequently?)

Two stars.

Immortality Through Freezing, by Long John Nebel, et al.

This is actually an abridged transcript of a panel discussion broadcast on a New York City radio station. The topic is the possibility of freezing people at the moment of death and reviving them in the future, when medical technology will be able to cure their ailments and bring them back to life.

Besides the host, radio personality Long John Nebel, the group included Frederik Pohl, editor of this very magazine; R. C. W. Ettinger, who wrote a book on the subject, an excerpt from which appeared in the second issue of Worlds of Tomorrow; Joseph Lo Presti, an ophthalmologist; Shirley Herz, a public relations consultant; and the famous pianist/comedian Victor Borge.

That's an oddly mixed group of folks, and I wonder if they just happened to grab whoever was hanging around the radio station at the time. In any case, the guests discuss the definition of death and whether extreme cold could keep people in a state of suspended animation. This is nothing new to science fiction fans, and it pretty much just rehashes the previous article I mentioned. At least the subject matter might help you feel a little cooler and beat the heat.

Two stars.

Deliver the Man!, by Ray E. Banks

Illustrations by Norman Nodel

A starship is on its way to a conference of various alien civilizations. It seems that Earth is considered as something of a backwater, worthy only of being conquered. The ambassador aboard the vessel must reach the meeting on time and manage to convince the extraterrestrials otherwise.

Complicating matters is the fact that Martian colonists, now the enemies of Earth, attack the ship while it's on its way. A space battle follows.

A female warrior in a dogfight in space.

Our hero comes to the rescue of an inexperienced pilot, saving her bacon when she faces two opponents at once. She is hurt but survives the skirmish, only to face further challenges aboard the vessel.

Injured in battle.

There's a planet that insists the ship wait around while they celebrate an anniversary, so that the ambassador will be much too late to save Earth from destruction. The captain stays behind, allowing the vessel to sneak away, although he knows this will mean his death when the deception is discovered. An unpleasant fellow takes command, leading to a love triangle that ends in tragedy.

A crime of passion.

As if that weren't enough trouble, there's the possibility that an alien spy, disguised as a human being, is aboard the ship, intending to sabotage the mission. More deaths follow.

Another murder aboard ship.

All seems hopeless by the end, until our hero steps up and does what has to be done. The conclusion involves the ship's navigator, an eccentric woman who also serves as the hero's love interest.

The enigmatic navigator.

There's certainly enough action going on to satisfy readers looking for slam-bang adventure. The hero has so many obstacles in his way that it almost becomes ludicrous. You also have to assume that starship officers are going to act in completely irrational ways out of sexual jealousy.

Although partly depicted as objects of lust, it was nice to see women aboard the ship in important positions. The navigator, in particular, is an interesting character, although you'll probably figure out what role she plays in the plot.

Two stars.

The Most Delicious Foe, by Lawrence S. Todd

Illustrations by the author.

Our hero runs a business that will perform just about any service for the right fee. (I was reminded of Robert A. Heinlein's 1941 story "–We Also Walk Dogs". Proofreader, please note that the dash and quotation marks are part of the story's title.)

His latest job is to stop a war between two alien species. Each one wants to eat the other. The reptilian aliens just think the centipede-like aliens are tasty, while the centipede-like aliens savor the experience of imagining the lives of the reptiles while devouring them.

Two reptilian aliens read the news. Yes, the text states that they wear tam-o'-shanters.

Our hero has to figure out a way to please the appetites of both species in order to prevent wholesale slaughter.

Who is having whom for dinner?

As you can tell, this is a silly story, apparently intended as a comedy, although nothing particularly funny happens. The author is much better known as a cartoonist and illustrator, and he might want to stick to that line of work in the future.

Two stars.

Tom Swift and the Syndicate, by Sam Moskowitz

The indefatigable historian of all things related to science fiction delves into the subject of children's adventure books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the title suggests, the main focus is on the countless stories of Tom Swift and his amazing inventions. However, the article also includes many other endless series, such as Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. The bulk of these were plotted by a single man and actually written by a bunch of authors under house names. The Tom Swift, Jr., series continues to this day.

As usual, the author possesses an absolutely astounding amount of information about the subject. Also as usual, the resulting essay is less than compelling.

Two stars.

Homogenized Planet, by Allen Danzif

Illustrations by Dan Adkins.

One of the members of an exploration team on Mars goes off for several days, much longer than he could possibly survive with his limited air supply. Incredibly, he comes back just fine. In fact, he can survive in the extremely thin Martian atmosphere without any problems.

The other folks sedate him and strap him down during the voyage back to Earth. I guess they don't want to take the chance that he's really a Martian shapeshifter or something. Despite their precautions, things start to go wrong. People change from one person into another, or disappear entirely.

An eerie transformation.

At this point, you might think of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s 1938 novella Who Goes There?, with its shapeshifting alien. (Not so much the 1951 movie The Thing from Another World, which eliminated the shapeshifting. On the other hand, I was reminded of the 1958 film It! The Terror from Beyond Space.)

However, things turn out quite differently than expected, and the mood changes drastically. When we finally find out what's really going on, the premise is of some interest, but it requires pages and pages of exposition. The story really grinds down to a halt during its last section.

Two stars.

Island of Light, by Lawrence A. Perkins

Illustrations by Arkin. I have not been able to discover the artist's last name. Could it possibly be Alan Arkin, the star of this year's hit comedy The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming? He's had a couple of stories published in Galaxy.

In the near future, a city in the northwestern part of the United States takes drastic measures against crime. There is only one way to get into the place, which has expanded so greatly that it takes up part of three states. The normal activities of everyone in the city are recorded, so that computers can predict their whereabouts at any particular time with reasonable accuracy. There are many other methods used to ensure that it is nearly impossible to get away with a crime.

Citizens of Utopia?

A detective from outside the city arrives to observe the local crimefighters. A woman is beaten and robbed, left alive but in a coma. The investigation demonstrates the city's unusual methods, and reveals something about the visiting detective.

The premise is an interesting and provocative one, raising many questions about the proper way to balance freedom and security. Frankly, this story came as something of a relief after all those outer space adventures. The biggest flaw is that it's full of long expository speeches, as the local detective explains things to his guest.

Three stars.

We're Havin' a Heat Wave

Well, that was a disappointing issue, not doing much to take my mind off the hot weather. Perhaps the best way to use it would be to flap the pages against your face to cool down. Either that, or read it while sitting in a room made nice and comfortable by modern technology.

You don't really need to wear a snowsuit while running an air conditioner.

Tune in to KGJ, our radio station, for the coolest and the hottest hits!

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Book, Magazine

[July 2, 1964] Completing the Tour (July 1964 Analog)

July 2, 2019 Gideon Marcus 6 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

Last Days

After three lovely weeks, our trip to Japan is sadly drawing to a close. Someday, I can see relocating here for months out of the year — after all, my job really only requires a typewriter and access to a good postal service. That's for the future, though, when the Young Traveler has finished school and left the nest.

After Nagoya, we took a train to Hiroshima, the city made famous on August 6, 1945.

It has been nineteen years since the first atomic blast on Japan leveled a square mile of city and killed tens of thousands in an instant. Hiroshima, a port city on the west end of the island of Honshu, has largely recovered since then, but the scars of that day still bear mute witness to the attack.

It is a sobering thing to visit a place of such megadeath, not dissimilar to the eerie feelings I experienced walking down "Bloody Lane" at Antietam, where thousands died in a few hours just miles away from where my wife's mother now lives.

Yet, life goes on. Hiroshima is a vibrant city, peaceful and productive. They're building a new train station that will further stimulate the local economy. We like the people and the feeling here; this may well be come a standard stop for us in the future.

After several days in Hiroshima, we headed further south to our final stop, the island of Kyusuhu and the metropolis of Fukuoka.

Our main reason for stopping here was to visit our adoptive family, the Fujiis. Just after the war, the Fujii family sent their teenaged daughter, Miwako, to the States for a few weeks as part of a student exchange. The next year, my wife's little sister spent a year studying in Kyoto, where the Fujii's lived. They accepted her into their family, even including her in the annual family photo. Since then, Miwako, her sister Hideko, and their parents, Yuko and Yukio, have essentially become beloved in-laws, and we try to see them whenever possible.

Yukio, a former policeman, retired to his home town of Amagi, a little farm community a couple of hours from Fukuoka. He and Yuko reside in an ancient house there, a relic that dates back to before Commodore Perry sailed his black ships into Tokyo Harbor.

It's a beautiful, peaceful residence, and as luck would have it, Miwako, who had gotten married and moved to San Francisco, was also there for a visit. With her adorable handful, Jin.

We all took turns playing with the tyke until he, in the way of small children everywhere, wore himself out and fell asleep in his grandfather's arms.

The Issue at Hand

It is appropriate that the end of our trip coincides with the wrap-up of the science fiction magazines for this month. As always, the last magazine to be reviewed is this month's Analog. So how did this oversized slick of a mag do this time?

by Kelly Freas

Origin of the Solar System, by William F. Dawson and Ben Bova

Opening up the issue is an informative piece on a rather unusual suggestion for how the planets came to be. It lies somewhere between the Catastrophism of the stellar collision theory (which would make our solar system almost unique in the universe) and the Uniformitarianism of the "disk theory" which postulates that virtually all stars should be born with planets. The hypothesis advanced by Bova and Dawson is that solar systems result in binary systems in which the second star is not of sufficient size to ignite and thus breaks up into a bunch of smaller worlds.

I don't know if I buy it, but since the article does a good job of presenting both this concept and more traditional ones, it's a decent read.

Three stars.

Sleeping Planet (Part 1 of 3), by William R. Burkett, Jr.

by Kelly Freas

This new serial, written by a fellow I've never heard of, is a Mack Reynoldsy piece about an extraterrestrial attack on the Earth in the 26th Century. The aliens use some kind of sleeping powder that puts all of humanity, save for a few immune holdouts, into a state of suspended animation. Planet is the story of our resistance against the invaders.

I have to applaud Burkett for being willing to jump into the deep end on his first effort, turning in a novel-sized endeavor. He's a good writer, too, with the first half of the installment quite vivid and engaging. The aliens are just a bit too stupid, though (a big piece of the plot involves one of the survivors convincing the ETs that his dead grandfather will wreak vengeance on the invaders from beyond the grave…and they believe it!) and the light-hearted portions jar with the gritty ones.

Three stars so far, with a suspicion that this piece will end with a whimper, not a bang.

The Sea-Water Papers, by Raymond E. Banks

by John Schoenherr

An eccentric genius dies before he can explain how his desalination tablets work — is it the invention or the ingestion?

This is another too-cute piece starring clever garage-based scientists, the kind Analog editor, Campbell, loves. The kind that champion dowsing, perpetual motion machines, and reactionless drives.

Two stars.

A Day in the Life of Kelvin Throop, by R. A. J. Phillips

by John Schoenherr

In this one, Mr. Throop, late of the Canadian Northern Territories Public Relations Division, tells the citizens what he really thinks of their letters.

Not particularly entertaining nor remotely science fiction.

Two stars.

The Master Key, by Poul Anderson

Last up, we have the latest Let the Spacemen Beware. This one is really Van Rijn's story, in which he tells of a frozen world that seemed ideal for trade, but the not-quite-human (or perhaps too-human) aliens become inexplicably hostile upon learning of our fealty to a God, ending the affair in tragedy.

With this piece, Anderson, who had been slacking of late, returns to form. While the premise is a tad contrived, mainly so the reason for the aliens' change of heart can be explained neatly at the end, the telling is vintage Poul.

Four stars.

Doing the Math

On the whole, it's been a good month for SF. Analog finished at 2.9 stars, just on the disappointing side of good, but that's more an artifact of the scoring system. It's a decent issue, all things considered. Decidedly worse were F&SF and Worlds of Tomorrow, both clocking in at 2.3 stars.

All the other mags were better, from the disappointing by comparison but still 3.1 stars earning Gamma, to the decent Amazing and IF (3.2 stars) up to the well worth reading New Worlds and Fantastic (3.5 stars).

It's enough to make me eager to go back home and collect my accumulated subscriptions for August!

(Note: for those keeping track, women wrote 7 out of the 49 new fiction pieces published this month. Not great, but not as bad as it has been previously.)

[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…]

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Magazine

[June 30, 1964] A big Delta (June 1964 Gamma)

June 30, 2019 Gideon Marcus 1 Comment

by Gideon Marcus

Heading South

After four lovely days in the Japanese capital, we hopped the train for points southwest, toward the center of the country. Sadly, we were just a few months too early to take the new "bullet train" which will be debuted in October in time for the Olympics. The trip thus took many hours, but the scenery was nice (this year's "rainy season" hasn't been very) and I got a lot of reading done.

Nagoya is Japan's "fourth" city, after Tokyo/Yokohama, Osaka, and Fukuoka. A drab, gray and brown place, it nevertheless was a must-stay location for us given its proximity to so many of our friends: A husband-and-wife couple teach at the local university, our dear friend Hideko (now recently married!) lives in Osaka, and a friend I met when she visited America, Juuri, lives in nearby Shizuoka.

And, of course, there is the super-energetic Nanami, who teaches schoolchildren in Nagoya.

Dan and Jen, whose nieces were visiting at the time, took us up to old Inuyama castle. This is one of the few original castles still intact. It gave us a commanding view of the area.

We also explored the nearby town of Oobu, and we were welcomed into a local home. Here's the bedroom of a little boy who lived there.

The bustling, brash city of Osaka was as smoky and wild as ever. Western culture has thoroughly soaked the place: clothing, music, and food.

The Issue at Hand

Somehow in the midst of all this, I found time to read and review the latest Gamma, a new magazine whose first two issues had greatly impressed me. Sadly, it seems that the stock of great fiction the editors had accumulated prior to launch has been exhausted, and what's left is so much trunk work, the substandard stories by big names that hadn't sold elsewhere. Pity.

by Morris Scott Dollens

The Girl of Paradise Planet, by Robert Turner

The first story illustrates my point well. Here is a piece by a veteran, with a thousand stories to his credit, and it's just mediocre. A fellow on vacation on a pleasure planet goes SCUBA-diving and encounters a young girl under the waves. She's not a mermaid — she has a full complement of human limbs, yet she can breathe underwater. The vacationer quickly falls in love, to the annoyance of his shrewish wife, and spends endless hours with his newfound paramour.

Said romance feels solipsistic, like something a fourteen-year-old might come up with, including plenty of the protagonist's thoughts and precious few of the object of his intention. In fact, near the end, we are led to doubt that the encounter was real at all, which would have made a lot more sense given the sketchiness of the girl's character, who prefers not to talk but rather mostly perform aquatic acrobatics. And smooch.

Alas, it turns out the girl is real. Joy for our hero, disappointment for us. A weak three stars.

by Luan Meatheringham

(speaking of illustrations, Gamma has employed young Luan Meatheringham to produce drawings. While the pieces are nice, in a fanzine-ish way, they don't relate to any of the stories, and I'm not sure why they're here, taking space.)

The Feather Bed, by Shelly Lowenkopf

Shelly (a man, despite the name) Lowenkopf writes of a future where, upon the expiration of copyright after 56 years, literary works are destroyed to a copy, and replacements commissioned as a kind of artistic welfare. When a writer refuses to finish his assignment to rewrite King Lear he is fired, eventually becoming a plumber — an industry in which pipes are torn out and replaced every three years.

I like stories about a future with rampant unemployment and the need for makework, but this one doesn't make a lot of sense, even by its own rules (no good argument is made against creating new works) and the piece doesn't work as satire, either, because I'm not sure what it's supposed to be satirizing.

Two stars.

Angel Levine, by Bernard Malamud

A down-on-his-luck tailor is visited by a shabby, black Jewish angel, who (eventually) eases the man's pain.

Not much to say about this one. Three stars for atmosphere and dialect.

by Luan Meatheringham

The (In)visible Man, by Edward W. Ludwig

Here's a piece about a man who is such a nonentity that the world completely ignores him, and he is able to lead a life of crime. That is, until the fellow finds love and confidence, causing him to become visible again.

I might have enjoyed this story more had Ellison not done it so much better in The Forces that Crush six years ago.

Three stars.

Inside Story, by Miriam Allen deFord

From the pen of one of the genre's most venerable creators comes the tale of a sentient world and the tsuris of a cold given it by a four-being scount team from the Galactic Federation.

Cute, but this is the sort of thing Bob Sheckley used to do, and much better.

Three stars.

The Birth, by George Clayton Johnson

We've seen a lot of Johnson on TV, particularly us fans of The Twilight Zone. This forgettable piece, a first person account of the creation of Frankenstein's Monster, does not even have a Serlingesque twist to redeem it.

Three stars for competent writing.

by Luan Meatheringham

The Gamma Interview: Soviet Science Fiction

The most worthy piece of the issue is an interview with "Ivan Kirov", editor of a Moscow publishing house that produces science fiction. It is worth picking this issue up just for this piece, even though it has an unfortunate ediorial accident that omits a crucial line.

Five stars.

Buttons, by Raymond E. Banks

Along similar lines, Banks offers up the story of a dying spaceman who transfers his consciousness to a set of computerized buttons until such time as his persona might be restored to a human body. Said spaceman decides he likes being a disembodied being better.

It's well-written, but like the rest of the pieces in this magazine, it doesn't really go anywhere.

Three stars.

by Luan Meatheringham

Society for the Prevention, by Ron Goulart

Goulart is known for writing humorous pieces, so this light-hearted tale of the fortunate intersection of an interstellar merchant, his shipment of alien pots which are actually extraterrestrial invaders, and some rabid anti-capitalists is right up the author's alley.

Entertaining, though frivolous. Three stars.

The Snail Watcher, by Patricia Highsmith

Finally, mystery writer Highsmith presents the tale of a man whose love for snails ultimately proves his undoing. The moral: molluscs are for eating, not voyeuring.

Yet another atmospheric piece that doesn't do much. Three stars.

by Luan Meatheringham

Summing Up

Thus ends one of the most mediocre collections of digest-sized pages I've ever read. I have to wonder if this is a momentary blip, or if Gamma is doomed to be short-lived. Only time will tell.

And now, off to Hiroshima! See you in two days…

[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…]

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Magazine, Uncategorized

[July 27, 1960] Footloose and Fancy Free (Japan and the August 1960 Fantasy & Science Fiction)

July 27, 2015 Gideon Marcus 9 Comments

Perhaps the primary perquisite of being a writer (certainly not the compensation, though Dr. Asimov is the happy exception) is the ability to take one's work anywhere. Thanks to 'faxes and patient editors, all of this column's readers can follow me around the world. To wit, I am typing this article in the lounge of my hotel deep in the heart of Tokyo, the capital of the nation of Japan.

Japan is virtually a second home for me and my family, and we make it a point to travel here as often as time and funds permit. Now that the Boeing 707 has shrunk the world by almost 50%, I expect our travels to this amazing, burgeoning land will increase in frequency.

Tokyo, of course, is one of the world's biggest cities, and the crowds at Shinjuku station attest to this. And yet, there are still plenty of moments of almost eerie solitude–not just in the parks and temples, but in random alleyways. There are always treasures to find provided one is willing to look up and down (literally–only a fraction of Tokyo's shops is located on the ground floor!)

Gentle readers, I have not forgotten the main reason you read my column. In fact, the timing of my trip was perfect, allowing me to take all of the September 1960 digests with me to the Orient. But first, I need to wrap up last month's batch of magazines. To that end, without further ado, here is the August 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction!

Robert F. Young has the lead short story, Nikita Eisenhower Jones. I'd liked his To Fell a Tree very much, so I was looking forward to this one, the story of a young Polynesian who finagles his way onto the first manned mission to Pluto only to find it a lonely, one-way trip. Sadly, while the subject matter is excellent, the tale is written in a way that keeps the reader at arm's length and thus fails to engage in what could have been an intensely powerful, personal story.

The Final Ingredient is a different matter altogether. Jack Sharkey had thus far failed to impress, so I was surprised to find him in F&SF, a higher caliber magazine, in my opinion. But this tale, involving a young girl whose efforts at witchraft are frustrated until she abandons love entirely and embraces wickedness, is quite good indeed.

John Suter's The Seeds of Murder, a reprint from F&SF's sister magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery, is about telling the future through regressive (or in this case progressive) hypnosis. It's cute, but something I'd expect to find in one of the lesser mags. I suppose this should come as no surprise–this is Suter's first and only science fiction/fantasy story, so far as I can tell.

Rosel George Brown is back with another dark tale: Just a Suggestion. When aliens subtly introduce the idea that the way to win friends and influence people is to be less impressive than one's peers, the result is economic downturn and, ultimately, planetary destruction. Obviously satirical; rather nicely done.

This brings us to Robert Arthur's novelette, Miracle on Main Street. A boy wishes on a unicorn horn that all of the folks in his small town, good and bad, should get what they deserve. There is no ironic twist, no horrifying consequences. It's a simple tale (suitable for children, really) that very straightforwardly details the results of the wish. It should be a vapid story; Arthur goes out of his way to ensure there are no surprises. Yet, I enjoyed it just the same. I suppose a little unalloyed charm is nice every so often.

The Revenant, by Raymond Banks, is a fascinating little story about human space travelers who explore a planet less fixed in sequence and probability than ours. Their lives are far less dependable, but infinitely more varied and interesting. The closest approximation would be if our dreams were our waking lives and vice versa (and perhaps this was the tale's inspiration). Good stuff.

Avram Davidson has a one-pager, Climacteric, about a man who goes hunting dragons in search of romance. He finds both. It is followed by G.C.Edmondson's Latin-themed The Sign of the Goose, a strangely written story about an alien visitation that, frankly, made little sense to me. It stars the same eccentrics as The Galactic Calabash.

Asimov has an article about the Moon as a vacation spot whose main attraction is the lovely view of Earth. Catskills in the Sky, it is called, and it's one of his weaker entries.

Finally, we have Stephen Barr's Calahan and the Wheelies, about an inventor who creates a species of wheeled little robots with the ability to learn. The concept is captivating, and the execution largely plausible. Sadly, the story sort of degenerates into standard sci-fi clichés: the robots, of course, become sentient and rather malicious. It's played for laughs, but I can just imagine a more serious story involving similar machines being put to all sorts of amazing uses. Imagine a semi-smart machine that rolled around your house vacuuming and mopping your floor. Or a programmable dog-walker. I like robots that don't look like people or act like living things, but which are indispensible allies to humanity. I want more stories featuring them.

All told, I think this issue clocks in about a shade over 3 stars. A thoroughly typical F&SF, which is no bad thing.

See you in a few days with more from the Land of the Rising Sun!

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[Apr. 29, 1960] A Banks Shot (June 1960 Galaxy, Part 2)

April 29, 2015 Gideon Marcus 11 Comments

Without preamble, let's get to the second half of this month's Galaxy, the June 1960 issue. I hope you've all been reading along with me because there will be a quiz next period.

by Wood

Jack Sharkey is a prolific newcomer who started out in the lesser mags. His The Dope on Mars, the first-hand account of a journalist sent to the Red Planet, is fair. The title actually is a clever (if intentional) pun, as it suggests both the true story about Mars and the moron sent to cover it. And that's ultimately what I found frustrating—the reporter really comes off as a putz. On the other hand, recalling my competition back in my reporting days, perhaps the depiction isn't that far off the mark.

Transstar is a dense novelette, and is the first thing by Raymond Banks that I've really enjoyed. In fact, were it not for the slightly disappointing ending, it would have earned the coveted 5-star award. In the far future, humanity has spread across a thousand star systems. Protecting it is the extra-governmental agency, Transstar, with millions of ships at its disposal. This overwhelming force comes with a hefty price tag, however, and partial mobilization does not appear to be an option. This sounds implausible on its face, but recall that the French mobilization of the last war had similar problems, which was one of the reasons there was no armed resistance to the German taking of the Rhineland in '36.

Despite the massive scope of the backdrop, Transstar is a very personal story, that of one agent stationed at a small colony that happens to be next in line for conquest by the sadistic Eaber, who also have a thousand systems under their control. The story is by turns poignant and horrifying, written in an excellent, understated fashion. My only issues are with the ending, which was both too glib and somewhat inconsistent. But I'll save the rest of my commentary for the letter column.

by Dillon

I remember Charles de Vet largely from his propping up the rather dismal January 1959 Astounding. Monkey on his Back, de Vet's contribution to this month's Galaxy is an interesting adventure story. Imagine if Harrison's Slippery Jim diGriz suddenly got amnesia and went to a shrink for help.

Fredric Brown's Beware Earthmen Bearing Gifts is over almost before it starts. Taken at face value, it's a silly premise, but there are two valid themes conveyed: the principle that nothing can be observed without affecting it, and, our methods of exploration may be more destructive than necessary.

by Dillon

Idea Man, by British neophyte John Rackham (who wrote the lead story for the November 1959 issue of IF) has a fun piece on what it's like to have a great concept but limited vision for its application.

by Dillon

Finally, we have Inside John Barth, by the brand new William W. Stuart (I'm seeing a trend; ever since lowering his rates, editor Gold is having trouble getting old pros to work for him). It's a rather fascinating tale about a fellow who becomes a colony (in the 17th century sense of the word) for a clan of aliens. Their relation is symbiotic, for the most part, though the "host" increasingly resents the salutary restrictions placed on his activities to ensure the benevolence of his internal environment. A good first effort, for sure.

So there you have it: a solid 3-star issue (sadly, with nary a female writer nor much of a female character presence). Let me know what you think, and I'll see y'all in a few days!

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[March 1, 1960] The Slow Sibling (March 1960 IF)

March 1, 2015 Gideon Marcus 2 Comments

It is March Oneth, as my father would say, and it's time to review the last of the March 1960 science fiction digests.

Last on my plate was IF Science Fiction, which in 1959 had proven a slightly erratic but worthy sibling to Galaxy Science Fiction, also edited by Horace Gold. Sadly, this current issue reminds me more of the inferior issues of Imagination or Amazing. It's not all bad, just rather weak.

It has been said of Clifford Simak that when he's good, he's very good, and when he's not, he's forgettable. It appears he used up all of his energy on his masterpiece appearing in this month's F&SF, because his lead novella for IF, The Gleaners, is mediocre. It's a story about a fellow who coordinates a for-profit time travel agency that sends agents back in time to observe, but not to meddle. It's a tough job: the agent defection rate is high, and there is much pressure to verify the historical assertions of the various world faiths. It sounds like it would be a great read, but it doesn't do much interesting development. Perhaps Cliff should start over and try making a novel on the concept.

Raymond Banks has a short story called to be continued about colonists marooned on a tiny island hundreds of light years from Earth for centuries. The beginning and ending are a bit slipshod, but the meat of the story is pretty good, and I particularly like that the story features a starship crewed by a pair of women.

In The Upside-Down Captain, by Jim Harmon, an ethnologist joins the crew of a starship to seek out truly unusual planets. The ship is aided in its endeavor with the help of a cybernetic brain—but is the robot really being much help? It's oddly paced and written, weakening what might have been a strong story.

There are a couple of very short vignettes that I shan't spoil other than to give their titles and authors since any description would give away most of their game. They seem to be written by unknowns, either amateur auteurs or pseudonymic regulars. They are Old Shag, by Bob Farnham, and Monument, by R.W. Major; neither are good, but nor are they long.

Ray Russell has something of a career writing for Playboy. His Father's House is an story about an heir forced to inhabit his deceased father's home, bullied by ghostly holograms of his abusive parent, for five years in order to collect an inheritance. The protagonist seemingly has two choices—be a penniless but satisfied writer and husband or endure a lonely, unfulfilling life in the hopes of inheriting a fortune. In the end, he comes up with a third path with no down sides.

Ignatz, by Ron Goulart, is a cute story about a fellow who leads a one-man crusade against the fad of "Applied Lycanthropy," whereby the citizens of his sleepy town transform into cats for fun and relaxation. The fellow hates cats, you see; they make him feel "crawly." It's cute, though I can't imagine what anyone could have against felines, of whom I am far more fond than dogs.

The magazine ends rather strongly with Daniel Galouye's satirical Gravy Train, in which a retired couple on a remote planetoid gets mistaken for an important Third-World state and finds itself the recipient of a torrent of aid from both the Capitalist and Communist intergalactic empires.

All in all, it's not so much a bad issue as a merely weak one. Most of the stories end rather abruptly with a decidedly last-decade sci-fi slammer, and the writing has a slapdash feeling about it. Perhaps it's just a temporary lull.

In any event, I've got a whole new crop of magazines for this month that I'm looking forward to sharing with you. See you soon!

—

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!

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Starting strong (July 1959 Fantasy and Science Fiction;6-13-1959)

June 13, 2014 Gideon Marcus Leave a comment

It's those haunting, evocatively written F&SF stories that keep me a regular subscriber. July's issue opens with Robert F. Young's To Fell a Tree, about the murder (mercy killing?) of the tallest tree imaginable, and the dryad that lived within. It'll stay with you long after you turn the last page, this sad, but not entirely desolate, tale. So far, it's the best I've seen by Young.

Asimov's column, this month, is a screed against the snobbery of the champions of liberal arts and humanities to the practitioners of science. I'm told that the rivalry is largely good-natured, but Dr. Asimov seems to have been personally slighted, and his article is full of invective.

Avram Davidson's Author, Author is next: venerable British mystery writer is ensnared by the very butlers and baronets who were the subjects of his novels. I found most interesting the interchange between the author and his publisher, in which the latter fairly disowns the former for sticking to a stodgy old format, the country-house murder, rather than filling pages with sex and scandal. I found this particularly ironic as my wife is a mysteries fan who appreciates whodunnits of an older vintage, from Conan Doyle to Sayers. She has, of late, become disenchanted with the latest, more cynical crop of mysteries. I suspect she would have words for the publisher in Davidson's story.

For Sale, Reasonable is a short space-filler by Elizabeth Mann Borgese about a fellow soliciting work in a world where automation has made human labor obsolete. Damon Knight's following book review column is devoted to The Science Fiction Novel, Imagination and Social Criticism, a book of essays written by some of the field's foremost authors. It sounds like a worthy read.

Jane Roberts' Impasse hits close to home–a young lady loses her last living relative, her grandfather. So great is her grief that, by an act of will, she returns him to life, though the old man is not too happy about it. The story struck a chord with me as I lost my family when I was quite young, and I can certainly identify with the poor girl's plight.

The Harley Helix is another fill-in-the-space short short by Lou Tabakow, the moral of which is There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (i.e. the First Law of Thermodynamics). Success Story, which I reviewed last time, is next.

Raymond E. Banks has the penultimate tale, with Rabbits to the Moon, a thoroughly nonsensical tale about the teleportation of creatures (including humans). Its only flaw, that the transported arrive without a skeleton, is made into a selling point.

Last up is The Cold, Cold Box by Howard Fast. The richest man in the world becomes afflicted with terminal cancer and has himself frozen in 1959 so that the future can cure him. But the members of his company's board of directors have a different agenda, particularly after they become the world's de facto controlling oligarchy.

It's good reading all the way through, but it's the lead novella that really sells it. 3.5 stars, I'd say.

I'm off to the movies tonight, so expect a film review soon!

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F&SF–for the Right kind of people (February 1959 wrap-up; 1-27-1959)

January 27, 2014 Gideon Marcus 4 Comments

Do you know who reads The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction?

Clifton Fadiman, writer, editor, judge of the Book-of-the-Month Club does. It supplies him his “special escape-reading…the finest the field has to offer in the way of short fiction.”

Spring Byington, famous star of the Broadway Stage does. It improves the imagination, she says.

Basil Davinport, another writer and editor for the Book-of-the-Month Club does. “F&SF gives us some of the best writing in the field, and the field is one of great importance.”

Orville Prescott, Book Review Editor for the New York Times does. He says, “People who think that their literary I.Q. is too high for them to enjoy [F&SF] don't know what they're missing.”

In other words, snobs read F&SF–and you can be a snob, too. Unlike those other lowbrow sci-fi mags, F&SF is the real stuff. Just stay away from Astounding, and for God's sake, avoid Amazing!

I know H.L.Gold was a bit nose-in-the-air when he contrasted Galaxy with Space Westerns, but F&SF is positively the caviar set by comparison. I'm for the promotion of science fiction's respectability, but I don't think F&SF has the sole claim on quality. In fact, I think F&SF's editorial policy leans a bit overmuch toward the superfluously florid.

On the other hand, they are the favored home of more female authors than any other science fiction magazine. And I've never read a Garrett or Silverberg story between its pages, though I did read a horrible Poul Anderson story in F&SF's, thankfully defunct sister magazine, Venture.

Good-natured ribbing aside, while many issues of F&SF may suffer from overwriting-itis, the February 1959 issue is good stuff all the way though (even if the rest of the magazine is not as amazing as its lead story).

Continuing where we left off, Misfit by G.C. Edmondson (the only Mexican science fiction author I know of, and a San Diego native!) is a good yarn about the perils of time travel–to the timeline if not the traveler.

Last month's issue had the first of George Elliot's Venusian stories, Invasion of the Planet of Love. Its sequel, Nothing but Love depicts the Venusian counter-attack. It is less satirical, less impactful, and less interesting. On the other hand, I don't know that I liked the first one very much either. It's not bad, exactly. It's just odd.

I did enjoy Charles Fontenay's Ghost Planet, in which a presumably failed Martian colony is found to have survived through an unexpected and happy circumstance. Apparently, Martian sage grass traps oxygen, so as long as one stays crouched within the grass, there is air and warmth.

Now here's where I need help: I have the strangest feeling that I've seen this gimmick before in another story. Does this sound familiar? I'm hoping one of my many (Webster defines “many” as “more than three”) readers will solve this mystery for me. Drop me a line and let me know. If you don't know the answer, please share this article with someone who might.

Raymond Banks wrote the next story, Natural Frequency, about what happens when someone's voice naturally hits the resonant frequency of… well.. everything. People, glasses, bridges… It's a silly story, reminiscent of that scene from the Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs, impersonating the great conductor, Leopold, makes an opera singer sing a high note until his pants fall off and his tuxedo rolls up like a Venetian blind. Filler.

Jane Rice's The Willow Tree is the last piece of the magazine. Per the editorial preface, Ms. Rice wrote for Unknown back in the late '30s, and I have it on good authority that she wrote for a solid ten years after that for various magazines. This story marks the end of a subsequent ten-year hiatus. Tastes vary, but I liked it, this tale of two children sent to the past after losing their parents. It is written like a fairly conventional children's fantasy, much like something Edward Eager would write, but with a much more sinister undertone and ending.

And thusly, we have come to the end. I'd say 4 stars out of 5. The lead story is fantastic, and the rest are decent to quite good.

Normally, one might expect (this being the 27th) that I have the new Astounding and/or F&SF in hand for the next review. However, I am still out in the Territory of Hawai'i, and deliveries are understandably delayed. Forward thinker that I am, I will still have something to discuss on the 29th.

But you'll just have to wait until then to find out what it is.

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55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction