Tag Archives: raymond f. jones

Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 6, 1968] Who's the one? (December 1968 Galaxy)

1 Comment


by Gideon Marcus

Dashed hopes

It really looked like it was going to be a happy Halloween.  On October 31st, President Johnson made the stunning announcement that he was stopping all bombing in Vietnam.  This was in service to the Paris peace talks, which subsequently got a huge shot in the arm: not only were the Soviets on board with the negotiations, but the South Vietnamese indicated that, as long as they had a seat at the table, they were in, too.

The holiday lasted all of five days.  In yesterday's paper, even as folks went to the polls to choose between Herbert Humphrey and Tricky Dixon (or, I suppose, Wacky Wallace), the news was that South Vietnam had pulled out.  They didn't like that the Viet Cong, the Communists in Vietnam (as distinguished from the North Vietnamese government), were going to get a representative at the talks.  So they're out.

It's not clear how this will affect the election.  As of this morning, it was still not certain who had won .  Nevertheless, it is clear that Humphrey's chances weren't helped by the derailing of LBJ's peace plans.  If a Republican victory is announced, it may well be this turn of events led to the sea change.

Well, don't blame me.  My support has always been for that "common, ordinary, simple savior of America's destiny," Mr. Pat Paulsen.  After all, he upped his standards—now up yours.

Respite

Once again, a tumultuous scene provided the backdrop to my SFnal reading.  Did the latest issue of Galaxy prove to be balm or bother?  Read on and find out:


by John Pederson Jr. illustrating One Station of the Way

The Sharing of Flesh, by Poul Anderson


by Reese

Evalyth, military director of a mission to a human planet reverted to savagery after the fall of the Empire, watches with horror as her husband is murdered, then butchered by one of the planet's inhabitants.  Cannibalism, it turns out, is a way of life here; indeed, it is considered essential to the rite of puberty for males.

The martial Evalyth vows to have her revenge, tracking down the murderer, Mora, and taking him and his family back to their base, where they are subjected to fearsome scientific examinations.  But can she go through with executing the killer of her husband?  And does Mora's motivation make any difference?

There' s so much to like about this story, from the exploration of the agony of love lost, to the examination of relative morality, to the development of the universe first introduced (to me, anyway) in last year's A Tragedy of Errors.  It doesn't hurt that it stars a woman, and women are integral parts of this future society, with none of the denigrating weasel words that preface the introduction of female characters in Anderson's Analog stories (could those be editorial insertions?)

This is Anderson at his best, without his archaicisms, multi-faceted, astronomically interesting, emotionally savvy.

Five stars.

One Station of the Way by Fritz Leiber


by Holly

Three humaniforms watch on cameloids as the star descends in the east.  Sure enough, at a home in the east, a divine being prepares to impregnate a local female so that she will bear a divine child.

Heard this story before?  There's a reason.  But the planet of Finiswar is not Earth, the aliens are not remotely human, and the white and dark duo who pilot the spaceship Inseminator are anything but gods.

An excellent, satirical story.  Four stars.

Sweet Dreams, Melissa by Stephen Goldin

A little girl is told a bedtime story about a big computer that stopped doing its job right.  That's because the machine couldn't think of casualties and war statistics as simple numbers, battle strategies as abstract puzzles.  The problem is its personality; if the computer's mind could be reconciled with its function, the machine could work again.  But can any mind be at peace with such a frightful purpose?

A simple piece like this depends mostly on the telling.  Luckily, Goldin is up to the task.  Four stars.

Subway to the Stars by Raymond F. Jones


by Jack Gaughan

Harry Whiteman is a brilliant engineer with a problem: he's too much of a "free spirit" to keep a job, or a wife.  Desperate, when the CIA approaches him about a singular opportunity, he takes it, though the resents being bullied into it.

In deepest, darkest Africa, the Smith Company is working on…something.  Ostensibly a mining concern, it produces no gems.  On the other hand, whatever it is is important enough that the Soviets have based missiles in a neighboring country—pointed right at the company site!

Whiteman is hired, for his irreverence more than his ability, and begins work as a double-agent.  Once on location, he finds the true purpose of the site: it's a switching station of an intergalactic railroad station!  But it turns out that the folks at the Smith Company also have multiple agendas…

A mix of Cliff Simak's Here Gather the Stars (Way Station) and Poul Anderson's Door to Anywhere, it is not as successful as either of them.  It takes too long to get started, and then it wraps up all too quickly.  It's genuinely thrilling as Whiteman peels back the multiple layers of the Smith operation and the factions within it, and when the missiles do find their target, the resultant chaos is compelling, indeed.  But then it turns into a quick, SFnal gimmick story better suited to Analog than Galaxy.

I think I would have rather seen Simak takes this one on as a sequel to his novel.  Jones just wasn't quite up to it.

Three stars.

For Your Information: The Discovery of the Solar System by Willy Ley

As it turns out, the science article in this month's issue addresses two issues on which I've had keen recent interest.  The first is on the subject of solar systems, and if they can be observed around other stars.  Ley discusses how the gravity of an unseen companion can cause a telltale wiggle as the star travels through space, since the two objects orbit a common center of gravity (rather than one strictly going around the other).

In the other half of the article, Ley explains how atomic rocket engines work: shooting heated hydrogen out a nozzle as opposed to burning it and shooting out the resultant water out the back end—it is apparently twice as strong a thrust.

What keeps this article from five stars is both pieces are too brief.  For the first half, I'd like to know about the stellar companions discovered through astrometry.  He mention's Sirius' white dwarf companion, but what about the planets Van de Kamp claims to have discovered around Barnard's Star and so on?  As for the atomic article, I'd like to know what missions a nuclear engine can be used for that a conventional rocket cannot.

Four stars.

A Life Postponed by John Wyndham


by Gray Morrow

Girl falls in love with cynical jerk of a boy.  Boy decides there's nothing in the world worth sticking around for, so he gets himself put in suspended animation for a century.  Girl follows him there.  He's still a cynical jerk, but she doesn't care because she loves him.  They live happily ever after.

I'm really not sure of the point of this story, nor how it got in this month's issue other than the cachet of the author's name.

Two stars.

Jinn by Joseph Green

It is the year 2050, and aged Professor Morrison, stymied in his attempts to make food from sawdust, is approached by a brilliant young grad student.  Said student is brilliant for a reason: he is a Genetically Evolved Newman or "Jinn", with a big brain and bigger ideas.  The student has solved Morrison's problem.  However, another Jinn wants humanity to go to the stars, and he fears if the race gets a full belly, they'll lose interest.

The conflict turns violent, the point even larger: is there room for baseline homo sapiens in a world of homo superior?

Green doesn't paint a particularly plausible future, but there are some nice touches, and the points raised are interesting ones.  I'd say it's a failure as a story but a success as a thought-exercise, if that makes sense.

So, a low three stars.

Spying Season by Mack Reynolds


by Roger Brand

We return, once again, to Reynolds' world of People's Capitalism.  It is the late 20th Century, and the Cold War adversaries have reached a more or less peaceful coexistence.  The greater challenge is existential: ultramation has taken away most jobs, and the majority of the populace is on the dole.  How, then, to avoid stagnation for humanity?

In this installment, Paul Kosloff is an American of Balkan ancestry, one of the few in the United States of the Americas who still has a steady job, in this case, that of teacher.  He is tapped by the CIA to go on sabbatical in the Balkan sector of Common-Europe.  Ostensibly, his job is not to spy for the USAs, but to sort of soak in the culture of the area over a twelve-month span.

Very quickly, Kosloff finds himself entagled with an underground revolutionary group, with law enforcement, and with several fellows who enjoy sapping him on the back of the head.

Suffice it to say that all questions are answered by the end, the major ones being: why an innocuous pseudo-spy should be a target, why the CIA would send him on a seemingly pointless mission in the first place.  In the meantime, you get a bit more history of this world and some tourist-eye view of Yugoslavia.  In other words, your typical, middle-of-the-road Reynolds story.

Three stars.

Counting the votes

While not as stellar as last month's issue, the December 1968 Galaxy still offers a more satisfying experience than, well, most anything going on in "the real world".  It clocks in at a respectable 3.45, which brings the annual average to 3.23.

Compare that to the 2.81 it scored last year, and given that Galaxy is once again a monthly, I think it's safe to say that, at least in one way, "Happy days are here again."




1 Comment Leave A Comment
Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 6, 1967] New Look, New . . . ? (October 1967 Amazing)

5 Comments


by John Boston

The October Amazing is the second instance of what may prove to be the magazine’s New Look.  Like the June issue, it is fronted by a pleasantly garish and nouveau-pulpish cover that, though uncredited, is known to the cognoscenti as another by Johnny Bruck, reprinted from a 1963 issue of the German Perry Rhodan magazine.  Farewell Frank R. Paul?  We’ll see.  And maybe the contents are being updated as well.  Of the five reprinted stories here, all are from the late 1940s or the ‘50s, at least in publication date.


by Johnny Bruck

That is not necessarily good news; Amazing published plenty of dreck through most of its history.  Selection is all.  But this issue’s selection is pretty decent.  Also Harry Harrison’s book reviews are still here, with a fillip.  In addition to Harrison’s own reviews of a new Edgar Rice Burroughs bio, the latest Analog anthology, and an Arthur Sellings novel, there is Brian Aldiss’s review of Harrison’s own The Technicolor Time Machine—back-slappingly complimentary, as one might expect from these close collaborators.  Harrison and Aldiss edited this year’s Nebula Award Stories, due out just about now, and it appears that they will be joining the party with their own “year’s best” anthology next year.

Santaroga Barrier (Part 1 of 3), by Frank Herbert


by Gray Morrow

Frank Herbert’s new novel Santaroga Barrier begins its three-part serialization in this issue.  As usual, I will withhold comment until it’s finished.  A cursory rummage indicates that it seems to have something to do with people in California taking drugs.  It will be interesting to see what Herbert can develop from such an unlikely premise.

The Children's Room, by Raymond F. Jones

Raymond F. Jones is the very model of a modern science fiction writer.  He checks all the boxes.  His career is so generic as to be paradigmatic, or maybe vice versa.  He started out in Campbell’s Astounding, just in time to join new writers George O. Smith and Hal Clement and retread Murray Leinster in keeping that magazine going when such mainstays as Heinlein, Hubbard, Williamson, and de Camp were lost to military service or war work.  After the war, when paper shortages loosened and the pulps returned from wartime quarterly schedules to monthly or bimonthly, Jones—along with Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt, George O. Smith and other Astounding writers—began helping to fill them as well as continuing to appear in Astounding. When specialty publishers began to muster the large backlog of magazine SF for book publication, Jones was there with his Astounding novel Renaissance and a collection of his 1940s stories, The Toymaker.  When Galaxy appeared in 1950 and instantly broadened the range of the field, Jones contributed the shocking A Stone and a Spear, which would likely have been unpublishable anywhere else.  When “juvenile” (the term is becoming “young adult”) science fiction became a big item, Jones provided the well-remembered Son of the Stars and its sequel Planet of Light to the John C. Winston series.  When SF started to be big box office, Jones’s novel This Island Earth was turned into a mediocre but high-profile movie.  But somehow his recognition never kept pace with his resume, and now he seems to have given up and been largely forgotten, with only five new stories since 1960.

The Children’s Room, from the September 1947 Fantastic Adventures, is only the third story Jones published outside Astounding.  It’s about super-people—hardly an unusual theme in that magazine—but it pursues some of the implications of that idea that Campbell may not have found too palatable.  Bill Starbuck, chief engineer at an electronics company, picks up one of the books his IQ-240 son checked out from the university library’s children’s room, and finds himself captivated by a particularly subtle fairy tale.  Next day the kid is sick and the book is due so he returns it, only to be told “We have no children’s department.” But on the way out, he sees the children’s room, returns the book, and the librarian there (having learned that Bill has read the book), gives him more to take home.


by Rod Ruth

So what gives?  Time-traveling mutant super-people, of course—what else?  In the future, humanity is up against an alien species that is out-evolving them!  So they must scour the past for those people with beneficial mutations who never had a chance to amount to much, contact them and get them used to their exalted status (groom them, you might say), and then carry them off to their grand destiny in the future, never to see their time or their families again.  Only the mutants can even read the books, or see the time travellers’ children’s rooms.  Bill’s an exception—he can read the books and see the rooms, but has none of the other talents of the mutants, so he’s not invited to the future; and Mom’s a total loss. 

So the kid gets on board with the plan, and the parents both come around, since there’s not much else they can do.  But there’s a consolation prize for the parents (otherwise they would have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do to the Bureau of Child Welfare), and here Jones twists the knife in this formerly mild story.  (Read it and see.) Or, about as likely, Jones is just naively working out the plot, and it is only we mutants reading it who can perceive its monstrousness.  As, no doubt, Campbell did, and rejected the story, or so I surmise.  Four stars, even if the fourth may have been accidental on Jones’s part.

Five Years in the Marmalade, by Geoff St. Reynard


by Bill Terry

Geoff St. Reynard, a pseudonym of Robert W. Krepps, contributes Five Years in the Marmalade (Fantastic Adventures, July 1949), an inane joke.  Two guys walk into a bar—Muleath and Dangeur, who just returned from Alpha Centauri—and after they’ve had a drink, a Martian teleports in, just returned from a stay on Mercury.  The boys call him over, and he tells them about his “single-trav,” which will take him anywhere he can think of, through (of course) the power of thought.  So they recommend he head off next to Marmalade, which Muleath has made up and which exists only in his brain.  Connect the dots.  It's as skillfully executed as it is silly, and remarkably, Everett F. Bleiler and T.E. Dikty thought enough of it to put it in The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1950.  Two stars, barely.

The Siren Sounds at Midnight, by Frank M. Robinson

Frank M. Robinson’s The Siren Sounds at Midnight (Fantastic, November-December 1953) is entirely contrived: “they” have set a midnight deadline to resolve “their” differences, and if things don’t work out, the bombs will be flying and it’s all over for everybody, or close to it.  The story is redeemed by Robinson’s quiet good writing, following a long-married couple as they spend what may be their last hours together.  Three stars.

Largo, by Theodore Sturgeon

“More lyrical science fiction from the typewriter of Theodore Sturgeon,” says the blurb for Largo (Fantastic Adventures, July 1947).  All those terms are debatable except probably “typewriter.” Here’s the alleged science involved, from the opening of the story: “The chandeliers on the eighty-first floor of the Empire State Building swung wildly without any reason.  A company of soldiers marched over a new, well-built bridge, and it collapsed.  Enrico Caruso filled his lungs and sang, and the crystal glass before him shattered.”

The style is not so much lyrical as swaggering and demonstrative.  Here’s the next stretch of text:

“And Vernon Drecksall composed his Largo.

“He composed it in hotel rooms and scored it on trains and ships, and it took more than twenty-two years.  He started it in the days when smoke hung over the city, because factories used coal instead of broadcast power; when men spoke to men over wires and never saw each other’s faces; when the nations of earth were ruled by the greed of a man or the greed of men.  During the Thirty Days War and the Great Change which followed it, he labored; and he finished it on the day of his death.”


by Henry Sharp

That is, “I’m gonna tell you a story and I’m just the guy who can do it.” And, of course, Sturgeon is that guy, on his better days.  The striking thing about this story is the conspicuous confidence and cadence with which he lays out what is actually a pretty hackneyed plot—an extravagant revenge drama.  Drecksall is an eccentric musical genius with an all-consuming work in progress.  He works at menial jobs so support himself and his violin. Then he falls in love with the beautiful but vapid Gretel.  A crassly entrepreneurial type, Wylie, recognizes his genius, exploits it and him, and also ends up marrying Gretel himself. Drecksall continues to perfect his Largo, though it’s sounding darker all the time.  He builds his own auditorium to perform it in, invites Gretel and Wylie to hear it, and then . . . fade to black. 

There’s more, but it’s all in the telling, which is worth reading as a conspicuous demonstration of craft if nothing else.  This is Sturgeon’s fourth SF or fantasy story to be published by someone other than John Campbell, and it contrasts sharply to Blabbermouth, the second such, from Fantastic Adventures a few months earlier.  That one was told in an off-the-rack style that fit Sturgeon like an embarrassing Hallowe’en costume.  This is Sturgeon being himself, performing a circus act of the redemption of hokum by style.  Splitting the difference, three stars.

Scar-Tissue, by Henry S. Whitehead


by Robert Fuqua

The antique of the bunch is Henry S. Whitehead’s Scar-Tissue, which came from the July 1946 Amazing, but was posthumously published; the author died in 1932.  It begins unpromisingly, with the narrator asking his friend the ship’s doctor, “What is your opinion on the Atlantis question?” This becomes a frame story in which one Joe Smith, with Harvard and Oxford’s Balliol College on his resume, describes his past lives in prehistoric times, in Africa under the Portuguese (“Zim-baub-weh,” the place was called), and then Atlantis, where he was a gladiator, and he’s got scars to prove it.  It’s a perfectly readable old-fashioned story.  Three stars.

Summing Up

Not bad, a readable issue of this ill-conceived incarnation of Amazing, and better than not bad if the Herbert serial pans out.  We'll see.




5 Comments Leave A Comment
Movies

[July 26, 1966] Along for the Ride ( This Island Earth)

7 Comments


by Robin Rose Graves

Sunday night and nowhere to go with heavy rains keeping me housebound. Luckily, I was in good company, my equally single bosom friend warming the couch besides me. We split a bottle of wine as the tube lazily played before us. We weren't paying the screen much attention until red credits superimposed over a starry background displayed the title of the rerun movie of the night.

This Island Earth originally showed in theatres in 1955. Being that I was only sixteen at the time and hadn’t quite yet discovered my passion for science fiction I missed my opportunity to view it then. Later is better than never, right? I knew nothing of what awaited; I’ve yet to read the book that inspired the film and our TV guide remained folded and ignored on the coffee table. The title and design of the opening credits suggested it was a science fiction film, though of what type, I did not know. We wished to let the story sweep us away with no hint of what was to come – which meant I went in with no pre-formed assumptions of the movie.

The first hint of any unusual activity occurs right off the bat, when main character Dr. Cal Meacham’s plane fails, only to be rescued by a mysterious green light. This was the first suggestion of alien intervention in the movie, but the strangeness only continues from there.

Now at his lab, Dr. Meacham receives peculiar mail from an unknown sender. Parts and instructions to build a device called an “interociter.” Upon assembling the device, a not-quite-human face appears on the screen. Exeter, the man is called. He informs Dr. Meacham that he has passed his test, and offers him a job working with other scientists deemed worthy, with the noble goal of ending war.

This phrase rang a bell of familiarity. I had seen the chilling Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man,” in which aliens came to Earth; in an attempt to uncover the aliens’ motivations, their book was translated into the titular phrase “To Serve Man”, promising something more noble than their true intent.

I thought, what could these aliens really mean when they say they want to end war? What was in it for them?

A windowless plane arrives to take Dr. Meacham away. Inside, the plane is empty, with no one to pilot. Dr. Meacham is curious enough to board the vehicle and allow it to carry him away. He is greeted upon landing by Dr. Ruth Adams. Dr. Meacham recognizes her as an old flame. She insists she has never met him before – at this point, my suspicion was through the roof. Mind control? I thought. Brainwashing? There was definitely more to be seen and this thought was further supplemented by the odd appearance of the assistant lab workers – all looking similar to Exeter. 

Dr. Meacham notes every scientist chosen to work on this project is involved with uranium. His point being that if this project really was to end war, wouldn’t they need scientists of other specialties as well? I found myself nodding in agreement and worried that what the aliens really wanted was to build an ultimate weapon of destruction.

Together with Dr. Adams and another doctor who isn’t worth mentioning by name (for he quickly is killed off) they escape the facility, pursued by a disembodied laser I could only associate with the aliens. Dr. Meacham and Dr. Adams make it to a plane, which the former flies in an attempt to outrun the aliens. It’s then they witness their facility destroyed in an explosion, and their plane becomes trapped in a tractor beam.

This is where the movie truly got exciting.

Exeter reveals to the two surviving scientists that he is an alien (I knew it) and explains his true motivations. His planet, Metaluna, is caught in a losing war with another species of aliens called the Zargons. Metaluna is protected by a failing ionization layer. It requires uranium to fix. Here, I became sympathetic to the Metalunans and thrilled as the movie ventured out into space.

My intimate friend and I are fortunate to both be college educated women, and thus took issue with some of the “science” in this part in the movie. Namely, magnetic handles that restrained Dr. Meacham's and Dr. Adams' hands. Science was not my major, but I am confident magnets do not have that effect on human flesh.

Once our heroes make it to Metaluna, the reality of the aliens’ situation is put on display. Zargons attack the planet by guiding meteoroids into collision with Metaluna. I was simultaneously horrified and stunned by the setting of this alien world. The background was richly done and absolutely convincing.

With a nonstop shower of meteorites falling in the background, our heroes meet the alien in charge: the Monitor. All hope for a peaceful ending flies out the window as the Monitor reveals his plan to abandon the doomed planet Metaluna and instead take the Earth, brainwashing all human inhabitants into submission – starting with Dr. Meacham and Dr. Adams. Fortunately for our heroes, the time Exeter has spent on Earth has caused him to grow fond of human beings. He initially resists his order to brainwash our heroes, until a brutishly strong Mutant appears.

I didn’t know whether to laugh, scream or cry with the appearance of this bug-eyed monster. One thing was for sure, its presence jump-starts a series of intense action scenes right to the end of the film, as the doctors, accompanied by Exeter, make for a hasty exit from the dying planet, with the mutant in pursuit.

The movie ends on Earth, somewhat triumphantly (depending on which character you ask). I shan't give away anything, but I can say that I was left with a somber feeling, knowing I had witnessed something horrifically tragic. I could only be thankful this was a movie and not reality.

Except this science fiction tale did not come from nowhere. Earth’s role in the story, claims author Raymond F. Jones, was inspired by the way Pacific Islands were used as bases and transshipment points during World War II. This also explained the way human characters are utilized in the story. Our heroes do nothing heroic except survive. In fact, characters Dr. Meacham and Dr. Adams offer little to the plot except to serve as witnesses for a greater story they only know a small part of.

While some of the science veered too close to the farfetched for me, I found the storytelling to be deep and compelling, with a backdrop of brilliant special effects that still hold up a decade later! It was truly a treat for a rainy day.

Four stars.




7 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

[March 31, 1966] Shapes of Things (April 1966 Analog)

7 Comments


by Gideon Marcus

Change

Out in the world of music, there's a change brewing. One can hear it in the experimentation of the Beatles' Rubber Soul album or the otherworldly tinge of The Yardbirds' latest hit, Shapes of Things. I've been long planning to write an article on the musical scene, and I'd best get it done quickly before the landscape changes entirely!

My friend and associate, Cora Buhlert, has noted that although the Stones and Beatles are popular in Germany, the number one hit right now is the syrupy Schlager tune by Roy Black, "Ganz in Weiß" (All in white). In other words, even in times of great flux, conservative forces remain steadfast, like stubborn boulders in a stream.

Oh look — it's time to review the latest issue of Analog.

Stagnation


by Kelly Freas

Moon Prospector, by William B. Ellern

It would be hard to find a more emblematic story of the reactionary SF outlet that is Analog than this, the lead story in the April issue. Set early in E.E. Smith's Lensman series, it apparently got the full blessing of "Doc" Smith just a few days before he died! That's pretty remarkable.

The story, however, isn't. A lunar prospector in is semi-sentient "creeper" gets a distress call. Turns out an old buddy has been buried in the aftereffects of a meteor shower, and ol' Pete has to dig him out. But what was the fellow doing out in that quadrant of the Moon to begin with, and does it have anything to do with a centuries-old missile base abandoned around there?


by Kelly Freas

There's no water on the Moon, so I suppose it's appropriate that the story, itself, is dry as a bone. Perhaps it would have been more exciting if I'd had some stake in the universe. Maybe I'd have thrilled at the mention of the Solar Patrol being evolved into a Galactic Patrol. The fact is, I didn't care for Doc Smith's stories much when I was a kid, so they evoke no nostalgia for me now.

Two stars.

Rat Race, by Raymond F. Jones


by Kelly Freas

A century and a half in the future, when a completely computer-planned economy has resulted in plenty for all of humanity, a fellow decides to recreate the hobby of model train running (though not in the destructive manner of the Addams family, more's the pity).

This hobby runs the fellow afoul of the Computer, for when he tries to make his own trains, he is accused of attempting his own production, which will upset the finely balanced economy and lead to scarcity. Our protagonist must find a way to satisfy the human urge to create while not upsetting the economic apple cart. The story ends with the suggestion that do-it-yourselfism will spread and eventually topple the current order.

It's a pleasant-enough story, and I suppose the "stick-it-to-communism" sentiment appealed to editor Campbell. On the other hand, while I appreciate that some folks really like to build things even when they could just be bought (and I have to think that hobbyist building would not break a planned economy), the notion that we've become too centralized and folks should all be able to be self-sufficient, making a living from the land, is unworkable.

The fact is, we've long since populated the Earth beyond its ability to sustain a society of independent farmers. The great island cities, the vast modern nations, they only support their teeming millions through coordinated and interconnected systems. The writer in the air-conditioned apartment, who bangs out a paean to independent living before catching a television show and then popping off to the deli for dinner, is a dreamer, not a visionary.

Three stars.

The Easy Way Out, by Lee Correy


by John Schoenherr

Aliens conduct a survey of planet Earth, evaluating its species for aggressive tendencies. After coming across a grizzly bear and a wolverine, and then the human family that has adopted the latter, they decide Earth is more trouble than it's worth.

Typical Campbellian Earth-firsterism. Two stars.

Drifting Continents, by Robert S. Dietz


by John Holden

If it's a crackpot theory that flies in the face of the scientific establishment, chances are you'll read about it in Analog. But sometimes a theory is crackpot, flies in the face of the scientific establishment, and is probably right. As someone born in earthquake country, I've probably heard more about "continental drift" than many. It's the idea that the continents very slowly move around the globe. It's why the coasts of South America and Africa seem like edges of the same torn newspaper. It explains why there are similar fossils at similar depths across continents that are nowhere near each other…today.

It's a theory I found little reference to in my science books of the 50s, including Rachel Carson's seminal The Sea Around Us. But damned if Dietz doesn't make some very compelling arguments. I would not be surprised if continental drift, as has happened recently with the Big Bang Theory and global warming, did not become thoroughly accepted this decade.

Five stars.

Who Needs Insurance?, by Robin S. Scott


by Kelly Freas

Pete "Lucky Pierre" Albers has always been blessed with good fortune. Twenty years a pilot, he has always managed to avoid even the slightest injury, despite 8500 hours of flying time. He first suspected that his lucky streak was not completely due to chance after a harrowing mission over Ploesti left his B-24 with just one working engine. That tortured device not only held together all the way back to Libya, but it spun with the 800 horsepower needed to keep the plane in the air. After the crash landing, Albers found a little gray box attached to the driveshaft.

Twenty years later, over Vietnam, Colonel Albers was in a bullet-riddled Huey whose engine somehow held together long enough to get him and his charges back to base. Sure enough, a little box was installed on the engine.

Clearly someone, or something, has taken an interest in Albers' survival. It's up to Albers and his closest friends to discover the secret.

I really enjoyed this story, told in narrative fashion. It's a fun mystery, the details are evocative, and I like when a piece includes a competent woman scientist (in this case, Marty the programmer, with her pet 2706).

Four stars.

A Sun Invisible, by Poul Anderson


by Domenic Iaia

With this latest installation in the adventures of David Falkayn, the momentum gained by the magazine comes to a shuddering halt. Anderson's writing is of widely varying quality, and the adventures of this troubleshooting young protogé of Nicholas van Rijn are among the worst.

The plot takes forever to develop, but it's something about a planet of Germanics looking to take on the Polesotechnic League by working with the belligerent Kroaka. The trick is that Falkayn has to figure out where the would-be enemies make their home. By getting the female leader of Neuheim drunk and talkative, Falkayn learns enough astronomical clues to deduce the star around which the insurgents' planet revolves. Falkayn stops the threat and gets the girl.

I do like the astronomy Anderson weaves into these stories and I also appreciated the seamless way he introduced a new pronoun for an alien race with three sexes. Other than that, it's a deadly dull story, and smug to boot. Falkayn is like a boring, Sexist Retief.

Two stars.

Computation

After all that, the conservative reef that is Analog finishes near the bottom of the pack, though that is as much due to the relative excellence of the other mags that came out this month. Campbell's mag clocks in at a reasonable 3 stars, beating out the truly bad, all-reprint Amazing (2.3).

Above Analog, starting at the top, are Impulse (3.5), Galaxy (3.4), IF (3.3), New Worlds (3.1), and Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.1).

It was something of a banner month for SF mags, actually. Enough worthy stuff was printed to fill two full-size mags (and if you take out Amazing, that means a full third of everything printed was four stars and up). Also, women produced 11.5% of the new fiction published this month, the highest proportion I've seen in a long time. We'll see if this trend holds out.

That's it for March! April is a whole new ballgame, starting with the next issue of IF. I'm very keen to see how that magazine does now that the excellent Heinlein serial has ended (I've high hopes for the Laumer/Brown novel.)

Until then, all we can to is keep trying to discern the pattern of Shapes of Things to Come…

Don't miss the next exciting Adventure-themed episode of The Journey Show, taking you to the highest peaks, the deepest wildernesses, the coldest extremes, the vacuum of space, and the depths of the sea. April 3 at 1PM — book your (free) ticket for adventure now!)




7 Comments Leave A Comment
Book, Magazine

[October 12, 1964] Slow Cruising (November 1964 Amazing)

3 Comments


by John Boston

It’s a cliche that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  What can one say about those who don’t learn even from what they see around them?  At the University of California at Berkeley, a city within a city in which many thousands of people study, work, and in many cases live, the administration recently decided it will strictly enforce rules prohibiting political advocacy and speech, appearances by political candidates, and recruitment and fundraising by student organizations at a heavily-travelled area (an intersection of the city’s main street!) where such activities were routinely conducted.

Let’s pause for station identification.  This is 1964.  All over the United States, people are standing up for the rights and freedom of individuals, including political rights, most notably the right to vote.  Most of them are Negroes, but you’d think people in responsible positions would realize that a few white people (as apparently are most of Berkeley’s students) might get some funny ideas too—like the ideas of direct action and civil disobedience that they have been seeing on TV, and in some cases in person, for several years. 

You’d also think they would be aware that a significant number of their own students and some faculty members just got back from the Freedom Summer activities in the segregated South, where they lived daily with the risk of physical assault and even death, and are unlikely to be too fearful of university administrators.

So on October 1, the campus police arrested a guy named Jack Weinberg—one of those who went south this past summer—who was sitting at an information table for the Congress of Racial Equality and refused to show his identification.  A crowd formed around the police car, preventing it from moving, and the car became a speaker’s podium for a crowd said to have swelled to three thousand people.  This went on for 32 hours until the university agreed not to press charges against Weinberg, and also agreed to . . . what else? . . . form a committee!  This is to be a student/faculty/administration committee to discuss “all aspects of political behavior on campus and its control, and to make recommendations to the administration.”

What next? Nobody knows.  But one thing seems to be clear: increasingly, infringement on the rights that politically active Americans have come to expect to exercise will be challenged using the tools we all see on TV every week from the civil rights movement.  Authority is no longer its own justification, and those in positions of power, some of whom seem to look to Louis XVI as their role model, will need to change their approach to survive.  As that folksinger put it—I forget his name, the one with the frizzy hair and nasal voice—“you’d better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone.”

The Issue at Hand


by Alex Schomburg

More prosaically—back to science fiction.  The November 1964 Amazing is distinguished by being the second consecutive issue with a cover depicting a guy in a flying chair, calling to mind the observation of the Hon. Jimmy Walker, erstwhile Mayor of New York City, before fleeing the country to avoid a corruption prosecution: “Never follow a banjo act with another banjo act.” Alex Schomburg’s rather static and solemn depiction of the device contrasts amusingly with Virgil Finlay’s interior illustration, which attempts to imbue the same gadget with all the energy and drama that the cover picture lacks.  Can we say Apollonian versus Dionysian?  I thought not.  Forget I mentioned it.

Rider in the Sky, by Raymond F. Jones


by Virgil Finlay

The story itself, Raymond F. Jones’s long novelet Rider in the Sky, is unfortunately pretty inane, a hardware opera that reads as if it had been dumbed down for prime-time TV.  In the near future, private enterprise is starting to get into the act in space, and Space Products, Inc., has developed the Moon Hopper, essentially a rocket-propelled chair in which a space-suited person can sit and fly over the lunar surface, untroubled by the quantities of fine dust covering it.  But how to market this device?

The Space Products boys (usage highly intentional) decide on a publicity stunt—they’ll get somebody to fly the Moon Hopper from Earth orbit to the moon.  Who?  They’ll ask for volunteers from within the company!  They get one—Sam Burnham, a company accountant and secret space buff, who knows he doesn’t have the right stuff but has indulged his fantasies to the point of installing a centrifuge and an imitation space capsule in his basement. 

Sam’s wife Edna, who spends her copious spare time supporting the cause of the orphans of Afghanistan, is appalled, and leverages her Afghan-symp connections to start a national movement to keep Sam Earthbound.  This, and Edna, are presented in a spirit of condescending sexual oppression of the sort one finds in, say, True: The Man’s Magazine.  I forget if the author refers to “the little woman,” and I’m not going back to look, but that’s the attitude.

After much machination, with the President getting into the act, Sam goes, and his trip takes an unexpected turn, plot mechanics unwind reasonably cleverly, and he and the story are brought to a soft landing.  But the treatment of women, and the smarmy faux-folksy style in which a lot of the story is told, make it difficult to appreciate the admittedly limited virtues of the story.  Two stars, barely.

Enigma From Tantalus (Part 2 of 2), by John Brunner


by Ed Emshwiller

John Brunner’s two-part serial Enigma from Tantalus concludes in this issue.  While it’s not the pretentious mess that his previous effort The Bridge to Azrael was, Brunner has not regained the form of (as I keep saying) his sequence of smart and well turned novellas in the UK magazines. 

Here, humans have discovered Tantalus, a planet inhabited by a singular intelligent life-form with separate units linked telepathically and capable of being molded into a variety of forms and functions.  The crisis that drives the plot is that the Tantalan is believed to have made a fake human (presumably disposing of the real one) and dispatched it on a spaceship to Earth; we can’t let it loose on our planet!  (There is an acknowledgement along the way that the Tantalan appears to be studying humanity just as humanity is studying it.)

So, there’s a bunch of people confined in a small space, and we must learn which is the alien!  This is not exactly an original plot, but Brunner plays it more in the style of a country-house mystery than that of its distinguished and horrific predecessor, Campbell’s Who Goes There?, spiced up by the fact that the passengers are as eccentric a bunch of freaks and neurotics as one could wish for.

Brunner manages the latter parts of the plot capably and trickily enough, but overall the story has two sore-thumb-level problems.  One is that by far the most interesting part is the discovery and opening of communication with the Tantalan, all of which happens off-stage—in fact, before the story opens—and we learn about it only in fragments.  In that sense the story is much too short. 

In another sense, it’s too long.  The other big problem is that here as in The Bridge to Azrael, Brunner wants to wrestle with Big Thinks, in this case chiefly that technological development and affluence have left the run of humanity with a sense of helplessness and lack of purpose.  But his attempts to integrate this notion into the story are perfunctory, or worse; for example, he invokes it to explain the manipulative and nymphomaniacal female journalist who is confined in the spaceship and chewing the furniture.  (This is a conspicuous sour note from a writer whose prior work is notable for strong and relatively cliche-free female characters.) So this exercise in speculative social psychology in the end contributes nothing to the story but verbiage.

Another problem, at least to my mind, is that when something comes up that the machines can’t handle in the ordinary course, Earth is essentially governed by a tiny elite called the “Powers of Earth” (a particularly arrogant and irascible specimen of which conducts the inquiry of the spaceship passengers).  These “Powers” apparently exercise unchecked authority based on their extraordinary powers of deducing correct conclusions from limited information. 

This seems to me a sort of magical thinking, no better than (not much different from, in fact) the recurring notion in another magazine that the future will be dominated by a psionic elite, and about as plausible and useful for thinking about the future as the depiction by Edmond Hamilton and others of galactic empires ruled by hereditary nobles with pompous titles.

One might ask if this criticism is too big a demand to make of popular fiction in newsstand magazines, but Brunner invites it by posing the questions himself.  I don’t want to be hard on the guy for essaying too much, but his ambition is outrunning the format he is writing in, and he will have to find better ways to integrate them, or move on to a different kind of writing.  Anyway, three stars for a nice but flawed try.

Your Name Shall Be … Darkness, by Norman Spinrad


by George Schelling

Norman Spinrad displays his own brand of ambition with Your Name Shall Be . . . Darkness, about an Army psychiatrist captured and subjected to sophisticated brainwashing in the Korean War. He is repatriated, seemingly intact, but . . . .  This is essentially The Manchurian Candidate as applied social psychology, and pretty clever, though done in an overly bombastic style for my taste.  Still, it’s effective: three stars verging on four.

The Seminarian, by Jack Sharkey


by Virgil Finlay

And, last of the fiction, Jack Sharkey . . . is Jack Sharkey, with The Seminarian, about a guy, the son of missionaries, reared on a South Sea island without significant technology who comes to the States to conduct his own missionary work.  It’s a tribute to Sharkey’s superficial skills that his facility distracts one from the story’s complete implausibility.  Two stars.  Sure you don’t want to go into advertising, Jack?

The Lying Stones of Dr. Beringer, by Robert Silverberg


by Virgil Finlay

There’s a new byline on this month’s non-fiction: Robert Silverberg (also now the regular book reviewer) contributes The Lying Stones of Dr. Beringer, apparently the first of a series—it’s labelled “Scientific Hoaxes #1.” It’s about a 16th-Century German scholar who was taken in by a large aggregation of fake fossils, an interesting story in itself (especially in the hands of Silverberg, a much more capable writer than the usual suspect Ben Bova) and one which contributed to a shift in understanding of what fossils actually are.  Three stars.

Summing Up

So, business as usual at Amazing: a couple of nice tries, one dreary failure, one lighter-than-air piece of trivia, plus a better article than usual.  Steady as she goes.

[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…]




3 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

[November 12, 1962] HEADS ABOVE THE CLOUDS (the December 1962 Amazing)

4 Comments


by John Boston

Science fiction becomes science fact!  Well not quite, fortunately for us all.  It appears that we came to the brink of nuclear war last month but our leaders on both sides had sense enough to turn back from it.  These grave events reverberated even here, far from any population center or promising military target.  We were herded to a school assembly to be addressed by the principal, very briefly.  It went more or less like this:

“We, ah, don’t think . . . er, anything . . . is going to . . . ah, happen, but if, er, . . . something . . . ah, happens . . . classes will be dismissed and you will return to your homes” (these last clauses delivered with accelerating confidence, unlike the earlier ones).

Shortly thereafter, I was outside in gym class (physical education, as they call it here).  In a corner of the large outdoor area, the school’s paper trash was burning in a concrete enclosure.  (Isn’t there a better way of disposing of this stuff than burning it in the open air?  There ought to be a law.) The wind shifted, and fine bits of ash began drifting down on us.  “Fallout!” someone yelled.

So much for existential terror, at least in the so-called real world.  There’s a fair dose of it in the December Amazing, however, and this issue is noticeably wider awake than its recent predecessors.

Raymond F. Jones contributes the lead story Stay Off the Moon! Jones is an intermittently prolific 20-year veteran who has produced a lot of cut-to-specs product but sometimes comes up with clever oddball ideas, and here’s one of them.  Our guys at Mission Control succeed in putting a remote-controlled mobile laboratory device on the Moon to take soil (i.e. rock) samples, analyze them, and transmit the results.  Turns out the atomic weights and energy levels are different from the matter we know.  How can that be?  The Moon must have originated a long, long way away, in a place where the laws we thought are universal don’t quite work.  Well, what else is going on up there?  Finding the bizarre but logical (and terrifying) answer is the rest of the story.  This is the kind of thing only an SF fanatic can appreciate, but within those bounds it’s imaginative and well done.  Four stars.

Roger Zelazny’s Moonless in Byzantium—his second Amazing story, fourth published—might have a broader appeal.  It’s a surreal riff on one of the more familiar plots in the warehouse, the lone rebel face to face with an oppressive regime, in this case the Robotic Overseeing Unit.  In this dystopia, machines are in charge, people are mostly machines, and our protagonist is charged with writing Sailing to Byzantium on a washroom wall.  He is also charged with illegal possession of a name—William Butler Yeats, which he appended to Yeats’s poem.  This is the world of Cutgab, in which language itself is drastically restricted and simplified, and writing forbidden.  ROU accuses: “You write without purpose or utility, which is why writing itself has been abolished—men always lie when they write or speak.” The outcome is inevitable save for the accused’s final and futile defiance.  This is one that succeeds on sheer power of writing; in theme and style, it suggests Bradbury with sharper teeth.  Four stars for bravura execution of a stock idea.

This month’s Editorial indicates that some readers thought that this Roger Zelazny was himself a fictional character, and prints Zelazny’s reassurance that he exists; his Polish ancestors were armorers and the name comes from the Polish for “iron”; he’s 25, and possesses an M.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, military training as a guided missile launcher crewman, and his old copies of Captain Future.

The Zelazny is followed by Far Enough to Touch, by Stephen Bartholomew, who had a couple of stories in If and one in Astounding a few years ago.  A space mission is returning from the Moon, and suddenly one of the crew—the young one who seemed most entranced by space—has gone out the airlock in his spacesuit.  Rescued, he’s in an ecstatic delusional fugue, and stays that way.  And the point?  It escapes me, but the story is very smoothly written.  Two stars.

Stewart Pierce Brown contributes an equally well-turned but insubstantial story in Small Voice, Big Man, in which the voice of a washed-up singer suddenly is emanating from radios everywhere, to benign effect.  And the singer, Van Richie, is trying to make a comeback, but had a hard time singing loudly enough until the producer’s electrician rigged up an amplifier for him to wear.  OK, clear enough, but so what?  Two insipid stars—but this one is also smoothly written, not surprisingly from a writer who’s been in Bluebook, Collier’s, Playboy, and the Saturday Evening Post.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, who served up a dish of broken glass in the last issue, is back with something more soothing.  Measureless to Man takes place on yesterday’s Mars, where explorers travel on foot through the mountains with tents and sleeping bags, people get around by flagging down the mail jet, and the fauna include cute scaly sand mice and banshees, giant, stupid but dangerous flightless birds.  I suspect that this story was at least started a decade ago in hopes of a sale to the now-deceased pulps that Bradley admired.  Anyway, it concerns an expedition into the said mountains to the ancient city Xanadu, abandoned ages ago by the seemingly extinct Martians, from which no previous expedition has returned, and you can more or less guess what happens, in broad outline at least.  This used furniture is rearranged agreeably enough, with a slightly ironic, newer-style ending.  Three stars.

Sam Moskowitz’s “SF Profile” this issue is “Psycho”-logical Bloch, which is a little puzzling; Moskowitz readily concedes that Robert Bloch is a fairly inconsequential SF writer and that his main credentials are in horror and psychological suspense, at this point chiefly in film and TV.  Apparently Bloch is here in this series featuring the likes of Asimov and Heinlein because he’s popular among fandom.  But for a relatively pointless article, it’s perfectly readable and informative.  Three stars.

Finally, Frank Tinsley is back with The Mars Supply Fleet, doing his best to make space travel pedestrian again.  Two stars for making interesting information boring.

But still, cause for hope: two items in this issue poke their heads above the cloudbank of routine, in very different ways…

4 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

[January 19, 1962] Killing the Messenger (February 1962 Analog)

17 Comments


by Gideon Marcus

I said in a recent article that science fiction runs the gamut from the hard-nosed to the fantastic, and that the former can be found most consistently inside the pages of Analog magazine.

Well, the February 1962 issue has proved me a liar.

The problem is Analog's editor, Mr. John W. Campbell.  Once a luminary in the field, really hatching an entire genre back in the late 30's, Campbell has degenerated into the crankiest of cranks.  And since he offers 3 cents a word for folks to stroke his ego, he necessarily gets a steady stream of bespoke stories guaranteed to be published.

Want to know the secret to getting printed in Analog?  Just include psi powers and a healthy dose of anti-establishment pseudo-scientific contrarianism, and you're in like Flynn.

Case in point: this issue's lead story, The Great Gray Plague, by Raymond F. Jones.  Never have I seen such a cast of straw men this side of a cornfield.  The setup is that the snooty head of a government agency that oversees science grants refuses to consider the bucolic Clearwater College as a candidate because they rank so low on the "Index."  Said "Index" comprises a set of qualifications, some reasonable like the ratio of doctorates to students and published papers per year, to the ridiculous like ratio of tuxedoes to sport coats owned by the faculty and the genetic pedigree of the staff.  Thus, the "Index" serves as a sort of Poll Tax for institutions, making sure only the right kind remain moneyed.  The Dean of Clearwater makes an impassioned argument to the government employee that such a narrow protocol means thousands of worthy scientists and their inventions get snubbed every year in favor of established science.

So far, so good, I guess.  But then, as if on cue, a pair of "crackpot" farmers submit a request for review of a telepathic crystal they've developed.  Of course, the government man dismisses the request out of hand.  Of course, the progressive Dean investigates.  Of course the thing works.  And, of course, one of the crackpots is really an alien testing humanity's ability to assimilate science that doesn't gibe with current theory (and if you didn't figure that twist out immediately, you're reading the wrong stuff).

Now, there is merit to the idea that science is not a gradual evolution towards perfection.  In fact, Historian of Science Dr. Thomas Kuhn recently advanced the notion that science works within "paradigms" that are only overthrown with some violence and replaced with other paradigms.  For instance, there was no gentle, step-by-step transition from Ptolemy to Copernicus – the Sun went around the Earth, and the data was squeezed into that model (however ill-fitting) until suddenly the Earth was determined to orbit the Sun and everything fit into place.  Another example is phlogiston theory, which almost did a good job of explaining why substances gained weight when they burned…said theory being turned on its ear when the true nature of oxidation was discovered.

However, Plague isn't really making Kuhn's point.  It's making Campbell's, which is, in short, "If all these highfalutin 'scientists' would actually give a chance to people pushing psi, reactionless drives, and perpetual motion machines, then they'd quickly see the merit to these 'crackpot' ideas."

Sorry, John.  Whatever bad things one might say about inertia in the scientific establishment, the fact is that it exists for a reason.  Science must, necessarily, be incredulous.  It must seek out and process data according to the scientific method.  And let's be honest, John – science has given the Dean Drive and the Heironymous Machine and Dr. Rhine a fair shot.  They've been found wanting.  Give it up and stop kneeling at the altar of charlatans like L. Ron Hubbard. 

Or turn over Analog's reins to someone else.  There's a paradigm shift I'd love to see.

Having used up so much space with the above rant, I shall endeavor to be brief with the rest.  Pandemic, by the consistent J. F. Bone, is a gripping, grim tale of planetary disaster…with a rather silly resolution.  If anything, however, the first three quarters of the story give ample evidence that Bone can write – does he have any novels in print I don't know about?  Three stars.

This month's science fact article, Power Supplies for Space Vehicles (Part 1 of 2) by J. B. Friedenberg is a refreshing departure from Analog's usual offerings, featuring as it does actual science.  Friendeberg's piece discusses photovoltaic, thermoelectric, and thermionic power supplies in a comprehensive (if unentertaining) fashion.  About as much fun as reading the encyclopedia, which I generally enjoy, but you may not.  Two stars.

Neil Goble is a brand new author from Okie whose cute Master of None hints at a fair talent to come.  The story's moral: pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake is a worthy endeavor.  I heartily agree.  Three stars.

That leaves Hail to the Chief by "Sam and Janet Argo."  It's a meandering piece about the lengths to which a politician goes to get a non-politician elected President of the United States.  It's not particularly plausible, nor is it remotely science fiction, seemingly more a platform for a series of puns on the candidate's name ("Cannon").  This is a story with Randy Garrett's fingerprints all over it.  Two stars.

Thus ends the worst issue of Analog since the magazine took on the new moniker.  The proof is in the pudding, and Chef John's fare is poor stuff indeed.  I hope we get a new cook soon.

(By the way, it certainly seems that this month's cover was influenced by the new tower planned for Los Angeles airport – you decide…)

17 Comments Leave A Comment
Book

Space Opera Redux! (The Alien, Galaxy Novel No. 6; 3-24-1959)

Leave a comment

Sorry for the long delay, folks!  It's not for lack of things to talk about, that's for sure.

As you know, I am an avid fan of Galaxy (formerly Galaxy Science Fiction–retitled, perhaps, for those embarrassed to be science fiction buffs).  I recently discovered that Galaxy, in addition to publishing a monthly (now bi-monthly) digest, also puts out complete novels in digest format.  These are not serials, mind you, but full-length novels.

This month was a little light in the digest department, there only being Astounding and Fantasy & Science Fiction to review, so I went down to a second-hand store and got me a truckload of old Galaxy novels.  I, sensibly, began with the earliest one I was able to get my hands on, The Alien, by Raymond F. Jones, published in 1951.

Raymond Jones has been around since the early 40's, and you proably recognize his name from having penned This Island Earth, which was turned into a fairly popular movie.  I confess that I don't recall having read anything of his before The Alien, and I don't know if this title has made me hungry for more, though this is not meant to be a disparagement.

This is a surprisingly uninspiring cover for a book that is quite bombastic once you get inside.  Written in true Space Opera style, it is a sweeping tale covering millenia and the galaxy, pitting scientist heroes against religious fanatics.

So far so good…

Actually, the set-up is excellent.  A few hundred years in the future, automation has given humanity overmuch leisure time.  With little to do but argue politics and philosophy, the average lifespan of a government is measured in months, and the people are hungry for a strong leader on whom to latch.

Del Underwood is an archaeologist with no taste for modern Earth.  His self-imposed exile takes him to the asteroid belt, where mysterious artifacts of a long-dead race are scattered.  Apparently, Jones subscribed to the now outmoded idea that the asteroids are the remains of a planet that once exploded (it turns out that there is not nearly enough mass in the asteroids to make a proper planet, and the orbits don't line up properly to have had a common origin). 

The first third of the book is about how Underwood and his team figure out how to gain entry to a seemingly impenetrable vault.  I love stories like this–essentially first contact through artifacts. 

Once inside the vault, the story gets a bit hackneyed.  The team finds the organic remains of a galactic warlord along with instructions on how to revive him.  Though Underwood quickly gets cold feet about the affair, the people of Earth, desperate for novelty and a leader, insist on the overlord's resurrection.

After a short gestation, Demarzule is born and immediately takes up the reins of power.  This is Underwood's cue to leave Earth in a scout ship with a small crew (including the one female character, the talented surgeon, Illia) in search of the weapon that had been used to destroy Demarzule's planet (now the asteroid belt).

The most likely spot where the weapon might be found is the home planet of the Dragborans, the race that had defeated Demarzule's people.  Unfortunately for Underwood, the mighty Terran fleet, now serving Demarzule with fanatic zeal, gets there first and loots the planet of all valuables before putting a torch to its ancient (abandoned) cities.  Underwood's team sneaks to the Dragboran planet's moon, where some Dragborans still live, though in an apparently primitive state (how Demarzule's Terrans missed that, I couldn't say.)

Appearances are deceiving, however, as the remnant Dragborans (who look just like people, as does Demarzule), have secret psionic powers that make them quite formidable indeed. 

The third part of the book, detailing Underwood's return to Earth to take on Demarzule, aided by the Dragboran power, is pure, overwritten, scientific romance.  Which is not to say it's bad.  In fact, it was fast and enjoyable reading.  The climax is suitably… climactic. 

On a side note, I appreciated the "softness" of the science fiction.  There is little to date the novel (other than the style, of course), and so it will age reasonably well, I imagine.

So if you spot a copy at your local book shop, or if the thing gets reprinted, and if you like this sort of story, you will not likely regret picking up The Alien.

Next time, some rather scary non-fiction.  If you follow the papers, you know the bombshell (literally) that the Air Force dropped on the press last Friday.  But I'll save that for the 26th…

(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