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[October 12, 1963] WHIPLASH (the November 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

In all the excitement last month about August’s civil rights march, I forgot to mention the other big news that has reached from Washington all the way to small town Kentucky.  On the first day of school, my home room teacher, sad expression on her face, informed the class that because of the Supreme Court’s decision, issued after the end of the last school year, barring official religious exercises in public schools , we would no longer be able to have prayer and Bible reading at the beginning of each school day.  

What a relief!  But I kept a straight face and eyes front and was thankful that the authorities here decided just to obey the law.  I gather in some places, mostly farther south, the peasants are out with torches and pitchforks. Anyway, one down. Fortunately, we only have to say the Pledge of Allegiance in assemblies every month or two, rather than every school day as is the case in some places.  So it’s a relatively minor annoyance. What a blessing this modern Supreme Court has been. It makes all the right people angry.

The November Amazing doesn’t make me angry, just bored, at least to begin.  It is dominated by Savage Pellucidar, a long novelet by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the fourth and last in a series of which the first three appeared in Amazing in 1942.  This one has been sitting in Burroughs’s safe for two decades, says Sam Moskowitz’s brief introduction. (ERB died in 1950.)

The story is set in Burroughs’s version of the hollow Earth, with land and oceans and a sun in the middle, in which various characters traverse the land- and sea-scapes mostly looking for each other, fending off several varieties of dangerous wildlife (reptilian and mammalian alike) and other perils, as the author cuts from plot line to plot line to maximize the suspense that can be wrung from this rather tired material.  The obvious question: is why wasn’t this story published along with the others? One might guess that it was rejected—or perhaps Burroughs lacked the temerity even to submit it.

There is certainly evidence here that the author had grown a bit tired of the whole enterprise and had difficulty taking it seriously.  One of the characters, a feisty young woman named O-aa, nearly falls to her death after escaping the fangs of a clutch of baby pterodactyls, saving herself by grabbing a vine: “ ‘Whe-e-oo!’ breathed O-aa.”  Burroughs would have been pushing 70 when he wrote this. I gather his once impressive rate of production had slowed pretty drastically by the early 1940s. Maybe he was just too old and tired by then to produce even at his previous level of conviction, and had just enough discernment left to toss this in the safe and forget about it—unlike his heirs.  One yawning star.

Or maybe I am just a cranky voice in the wilderness, or far out to sea.  I see the Editorial celebrating the “astounding revitalization of Edgar Rice Burroughs,” and on the facing page a full-page ad for the new Canaveral Press editions of Burroughs—11 volumes published, eight more coming shortly, including one with the four Amazing novelets of which this one is the last.  Catch the wave! Thanks but no thanks. Humbug for me, shaken not stirred.

So, what’s left to salvage here?  There are three longish short stories, starting with Harry Harrison’s Down to Earth, which begins as an earnest near-space hardware opera, and continues with the astronauts returning from Moon orbit to an Earth—specifically, a Texas—in which the Nazis are in the end stages of conquering the world, though the beleaguered Americans quickly snatch the bewildered astronauts away from the invaders.  A superannuated Albert Einstein appears, stealing the show and providing a solipsistic handwaving explanation. Matters speed to a predictably unpredicted conclusion. Most writers would have stretched this material at least to Ace Double length; Harrison crams it into a very fast-moving short story, and good for him. There’s nothing especially original here, but four stars for audacious presentation.

Philip K. Dick contributes his second story in two months, What'll We Do with Ragland Park?, which despite its title is not about urban planning, but is a sequel to last month’s Stand-By.  Maximilian Fischer is still President, and he’s thrown the news clown Jim Briskin in jail.  Communications magnate Sebastian Hada is scheming from his stronghold (“demesne” as the author calls it) near John Day, Oregon, to spring Briskin so Briskin can revitalize Hada’s failing network.  To the same end, he recruits Ragland Park, a folksinger, whose songs tend to come true, and uses Park’s compositional talent for his own ends before realizing how dangerous it is.

There’s plenty else going on, such as Hada’s consultations with his psychoanalyst, Dr. Yasumi, who speaks in cliched semi-broken English (“Pretty sad that big-time operator like Mr. S. Hada falling apart under stress.”), and the unexplained fact that Hada has eight wives, one of whom is psychotic and is brought back from her residence on Io on 24 hours’ notice by the President to try to assassinate Hada.  There are also things inexplicably not going on, like the alien invasion fleet which is mentioned in passing but doesn’t seem to be doing anything, or maybe the characters just don’t care. By any rational standard, this is a terrible story: loose, rambling, and arbitrary, in sharp contrast to Harrison’s tightly written and constructed story, or for that matter Dick’s own Hugo-winning The Man in the High Castle.  But Dick’s woolly satirical ramblings are still clever and entertaining, like Stand-By more comparable to a stand-up routine than what we usually think of as a story. Three stars.

Almost-new author Piers Anthony—one prior story, in Fantastic a few months ago—is present with Quinquepedalian, which is just what it sounds like: a story about an extraterrestrial animal with five feet.  Monumentally large animal, very large feet, with which it is trying to stomp the space-faring protagonist to death, not without reason. And it seems to be intelligent. How to communicate that it is pursuing a fellow sophont, and persuade it to let bygones be bygones? This one is for anyone who says there are no new ideas in SF, for certain values of “idea.”  Four stars for ingenuity and a different kind of audacity than Harrison’s.


   
Ben Bova, whom I am beginning to think of as the 60-cycle hum of Amazing, has the obligatory science article, The Weather in Space, pointing out that the vacuum of space is no such thing; there’s matter there (though not much by our standards), plenty of energy at least this close to a star, plasma (i.e., ionized gas), the solar wind, solar flares, etc.  This is accompanied by perhaps the most inapposite Virgil Finlay illustration yet for this series of articles. This piece is more interesting than most to my taste, or maybe just better suited to my degree of ignorance; I found it edifying, though Bova remains a moderately dull writer. Three stars.

Well, that was bracing.  What’s the cliche? The night is darkest just before the dawn?  Something like that, anyway. From the doldrums of ERB to three pretty decent short stories, in nothing flat and 130 pages.   But I could do without the whiplash.

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[September 13, 1963] COMING UP FOR AIR (the October 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

So, there was a big civil rights march in Washington—quarter of a million people, the papers say. Lots of eloquent speeches and fine sentiments. It could make you think that the racial caste system that America was built on is finally starting to change. But I wonder. I work after school and on Saturdays at the local public library here in this small Kentucky town. Every now and then some of my fellow high school students drop in and spend some time at the magazine rack. One of the magazines they always look at is Ebony, which as you probably know is sort of a Life magazine for the Negro community: large-sized and glossy, with articles about famous or distinguished Negroes, social problems of interest, etc. It runs the same ads as Life and other slick magazines, but with Negro models.

These students leaf through Ebony looking at the ads, and snickering. Nothing is more hilarious to them than a Negro wearing a well cut suit, sipping an expensive whiskey, or behind the wheel of a prestigious car. These scoffers are not the local hoodlums; they are kids from respected families who make good grades and don’t get in trouble with the police—the Leaders of the Twenty-First Century, as they like to put it on the Mickey Mouse Club.

So marches in Washington are nice, and the proposed civil rights legislation will be great if it passes, but how much difference are they going to make along the back roads of Kentucky and similar places where attitudes like these prevail? I guess we’ll know in a few decades.

The October 1963 Amazing, on the other hand, is right here and we can pass judgment now. It’s a considerable improvement over last month’s, since there’s nothing in it that’s grossly stupid or offensive (Robert F. Young is nowhere in sight.) There’s nothing outstanding either, but at least some of this material falls short in more interesting ways than usual.

The lead story is Cordwainer Smith’s Drunkboat . Smith’s last seven stories—his production over the past three years—have all appeared in Galaxy, If, or Fantasy & Science Fiction, and this one’s appearance in Amazing strongly suggests that it was rejected by those higher-paying and at least slightly more prestigious outlets. It’s not hard to see why: it’s a mess. On the other hand, a Cordwainer Smith mess is more interesting than many other authors’ successes.

Sometimes with Smith, there is in the end a fairly straightforward story, but it’s told backwards or sideways, and swathed in stylistic antics and bizarre inventions, and the reader’s task is to appreciate them without becoming too distracted to figure out what the hell is going on. Here, the basic idea is one you hear every day on Top 40 radio, 30 or 40 times if you leave it on long enough: guy wants his baby back. Another guy, a Lord of the Instrumentality, has figured out a way to exploit this desire into a world(s)-changing discovery. To get there, you navigate a series of flash-backs and –forwards; an absurd if lively series of events at a hospital of the future, which offers some of the more bizarre medical techniques ever proposed; and a court of inquiry of the Lords of the Instrumentality, along with a rather alarming expository lump about how the Instrumentality actually operates. Much of this is told in a rather affected style that lies somewhere between saga and baby-talk. (First sentence: “Perhaps it is the saddest, maddest, wildest story in the whole long history of space.”)

The problem is the center doesn’t hold.  The distractions overcome the story rather than seasoning it; it’s basically out of control. On the other hand, maybe that’s the point: the main character (the guy looking for his love) is called Artyr Rambo, seemingly named after a French poet who I gather was pretty far out of control himself. He was also fond of absinthe, which may have something to do with the story’s title (otherwise very poorly accounted for).

Anyway, three stars for the entertainment value of sorting it all out. A nod also goes to cover artist Lloyd Birmingham, who picks up on the story’s overtones of childishness with a cover that reflects a close reading of the story and is done in a style reminiscent of what children might do with scissors, construction paper, and glue, though of course much more complex and better executed.

The other novelet represents (be very afraid) the Return of the Classic Reprints, in the form of The Prince of Liars by one L. Taylor Hansen, from the October 1930 Amazing. The L is allegedly for Louise, though Sam Moskowitz says in his introduction that it’s not clear whether Louise actually wrote the several stories under this byline or whether she was fronting for her brother. This question might be more interesting if the story were. It starts out with a disquisition on relativity, then turns into a drawing-room frame story in which the narrator recounts what he was told by a mysterious character whose rooms are full of old books and artifacts.

The story proper starts out with more about relativity, then segues into one about a young Greek man, kidnapped by pirates, who escapes and takes refuge in a temple, where he encounters an extraordinarily beautiful woman, who isn’t what she seems, and soon enough he’s on an alien spaceship, and relativity comes back into play, etc. etc. It’s quite well written and is more the stuff of 1900-vintage scientific romance than of 1930s magazine SF, halfway between Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs I suppose, but lacking the intellectual incisiveness that keeps Wells interesting even at this late date. Three stars for literacy and readability, but pretty dated.

Philip K. Dick is here with his first short SF in almost four years, Stand-By . He’s been busy in the interim with his Hugo-winning novel The Man in the High Castle and with All We Marsmen, now being serialized in Worlds of Tomorrow.  He's also, rumor has it, made a few unsuccessful attempts at contemporary novels. Stand-By starts with a brilliant small notion: the news clown (can’t you just see it down the road?) but then mostly throws it away. Instead, we are shown a world in which the American Presidency is occupied by a computer, with a stand-by President in case Unicephalon goes out of commission.

Stand-by dies, and his place is taken by lazy schlumpf Max Fischer, because he’s next on the union seniority list. Then Unicephalon goes on the blink, so it’s Max into the breach just as an extraterrestrial invasion fleet breezes into the Solar System. Unqualified President Max learns to enjoy power and its abuses in ways that I am sure could never happen here. News clown Jim Briskin becomes his completely serious antagonist, and upon Unicephalon’s resuscitation, Max is out and the alien invasion fades into the background. This reads more like a rambling stand-up routine than a story, but nonetheless it’s clever, amusing, and readable enough. Three stars, and a hope that Dick regains the form of some of his older and more penetrating stories like Autofac and The Father-Thing.

Roger Zelazny is back with The Misfit , a minor item on a familiar theme that might seem better if we didn’t know he’s capable of more. Protagonist is trapped in an artificial reality; he wants out to the real one; how will he know if he’s found it? Zelazny has the good sense to keep it very short. Three stars for insubstantiality well turned.

Larry Eisenberg contributes his second SF story, The Fastest Draw, which is clever but contrived and a bit turgid. An electronics genius is hired to perfect a simulated old-West gunfighter game for an eccentric millionaire and succeeds too well. For something this trivial, Eisenberg should take lessons in brevity from Zelazny—then maybe he’d rate more than two stars.

Sam Moskowitz has another SF Profile, this one of Edmond Hamilton, which is well below his usual standard both in substance and execution. It ignores major stretches of Hamilton’s career (all of the 1950s,  and most of the 1940s, and his entire engagement with comic books) and is also execrably written, even for klunkmeister Moskowitz. Consider this sentence: “Romance and marriage was approached via many delays and detours.” Two stars, Sam, and you’re getting off easy. Don’t come back until you take some remedial English!

So, once more, this magazine seems to be looking up. But . . . from the Coming Next Month squib: “From the long-locked safe of Edgar Rice Burroughs comes a never-before-published manuscript” in which the protagonists “sail the fiery seas of Molop Az in the search for Hodon the Fleet One and Dian the Beautiful”! I’m scheduling my lobotomy now.

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[July 24, 1963] The Numbers Game (August 1963 Fantastic)

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[Did you meet us at Comic Con?  Read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Victoria Silverwolf

Those of us living in the United States had to memorize a new number this month.  In addition to our telephone numbers, Social Security numbers, and so on, we now have Zone Improvement Plan numbers, also known as ZIP Codes.  These numbers help the United States Post Office Department direct the mail to its proper destination.  We used to be able to use one or two digit Postal Zone numbers, and only for big cities.  Now every area in the nation has a ZIP Code.  The Post Office sent a postcard to every mailing address in the country –seventy-two million, more or less — listing its five digit ZIP Code. 

They even created a mascot, a cartoon mail carrier named Mr. Zip.

Other numbers in the news this month were 15 (as in the X-15 hypersonic rocket-powered aircraft), 90 (as in Flight 90 of this vehicle), and 100 (as in 100 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, considered to be place where outer space begins.) Just a few days ago, Joseph A. Walker, pilot for the X-15's Flight 90, reached an altitude of 107.8 kilometers and a speed of nearly six thousand kilometers per hour.  That makes him the first person to reach outer space in an airplane, and America's first civilian astronaut.

In popular music, of course, the only number that really matters is one.  Earlier this month, a rhythm and blues group called The Essex reached Number One on the American pop music charts with their catchy, if hardly innovative, tune Easier Said Than Done.  The most unusual thing about the musicians who make up The Essex is that all of them are active members of the United States Marine Corps.

Currently, the top position is held by the vocal duo Jan and Dean, with Surf City.  This is the first song in the relatively new genre of surf music to reach Number One.  Speaking of numbers, this tune begins with a numerical lyric that may raise some eyebrows.
Two girls for every boy

With all these numbers spinning around in my head, I thought I could get away from them for a while and enjoy the latest issue of Fantastic.  It turns out that the simple question How many stories are in this issue? requires some tricky mathematics.

Bazaar of the Bizarre, by Fritz Leiber

Vernon Kramer's colorful cover art accurately portrays the lead story.  The cover blurb, however, is unfair to the Gray Mouser's companion Fafhrd, who actually plays a more active role in their latest adventure.

Two strange sorcerers, who often send the pair on weird and dangerous quests, summon them to a nighttime marketplace in the city of Lankhmar.  The Gray Mouser arrives early.  Having a little time to kill, he investigates a new shop that appears out of nowhere.  It is full of wonderful things.  Of particular interest to the lusty little fellow are the alluring young women within cages hanging from the ceiling.

Meanwhile, his giant friend Fafhrd meets with the wizards.  It seems that an evil force from another universe threatens the land of Nehwon.  They provide him with magical objects and send him to destroy the invader.  What follows is a deadly battle against sinister foes.

No one is better at writing sword-and-sorcery than Fritz Leiber.  Every line begs to be read aloud, the better to appreciate its poetic rhythm and vivid imagery.  Exotic details make the setting seem very real.  The author adds just the right of touch of wit to spice up his story.  The climactic battle is thrilling.  Five stars.

The Red Tape Yonder, by Vance Simonds

A government official dies and tries to make his way to Heaven.  He encounters multiple obstacles.  This is a heavy-handed satire of bureaucracy.  A few lines suggest that the author is a loyal supporter of the G.O.P., so I hope my left-leaning tendencies don't interfere with my ability to judge this story on its merits.  Two stars.

The Grass, More Green, by W. Lee Tomerlin

A henpecked husband receives several miniatures from a friend who feels sorry for him.  The fellow becomes obsessed with his little world, locking himself in his basement.  What happens isn't very surprising.  This story reminded me of Rod Serling's nostalgic tales of men yearning to escape their disappointing lives.  (In particular, the Twilight Zone episodes Walking Distance and A Stop at Willoughby.) Unfortunately, the author doesn't quite have the delicate touch required for this theme.  The man's wife is a caricature of a selfish, nagging woman.  Two stars.

A Hoax in Time (Part 3 of 3), by Keith Laumer

The three protagonists of this novel – a wealthy heir, a carnival worker, and an artificial woman, formed by a computer with immense powers – are in a parallel reality, created by their journey through time.  The heir undergoes an intense training program, which transforms him from a useless, spoiled weakling into a man with extraordinary mental and physical skills.  While on an outdoor test of his abilities, he discovers a plot to overthrow the utopian society he and his companions brought into being. 

The story moves quickly, particularly at the end.  The author relies on a deus ex machina — almost literally, in this case — to tie everything up.  If the first third of this serial was a comic romp, and the second third a philosophical essay, the final third is a fast-paced adventure story.  Although entertaining, the disparate elements of the story never quite come together.  Three stars.

Two More Tales for the Horrid at Heart, by Brad Steiger

Here's where the counting of stories gets complicated.  Two tiny works of fiction appear under the title above, but they also have their own titles. 

Sacrifice Play features an archeologist who discovers an inscription at the ruins of Ankor Wat.  They promise fabulous wealth in exchange for a sacrifice to a demon.  As you might imagine, this is a bad idea.

In One Too Many, a married couple sneaks vodka into the fruit punch of a mysterious fellow who never drinks alcohol.  They soon find out the reason for his abstinence.

Both stories feature twist endings.  The first one is obvious, and the second one is arbitrary.  Two stars.

The Devil in Hollywood, by Dale Clark

This month's reprint comes from the August 8, 1936 issue of Argosy.  A little over a decade ago, it was reprinted in Avon Fantasy Reader. 

Dale Clark (which Fantastic misspells as Clarke in the table of contents and title page of the story, although Sam Moskowitz spells it correctly in his introduction) is a pseudonym used by a writer with the much more interesting name of Ronal Sherwood Kayser.  He writes mostly crime fiction, although I don't think he's published anything for a while.  He also wrote a few fantasy stories for markets such as Weird Tales.

A movie director convinces an unemployed cameraman and an aspiring actress to work on a film he is producing on his own.  The director himself will play the lead role.  The plot of the movie, which reminds me of the early German talkie Der Blaue Engel, involves a man who becomes involved with a heartless dancer.  He makes a pact with Satan in order to acquire sufficient riches to purchase her affection.  This story-within-the-story turns out to be all too real.

This tale of terror is written in a realistic manner, probably due to the author's experience with hardboiled fiction.  The description of the moviemaking industry is very convincing, making the supernatural aspects seem believable.  Four stars.

Sometimes I Get So Happy, by David R. Bunch

A writer that some readers love to hate returns to the dystopian world of Moderan, whose inhabitants have bodies made mostly of metal.  The narrator recalls his former life, when he was made entirely of flesh.  He remembers a failed romance.  The main appeal of this story is the author's unique style.  Three stars.

Fables of the Past & Future, by Thomas M. Disch

Once again, I have to scratch my head and wonder how I should count this trio of vignettes.  The title listed above only appears in the table of contents.  Unlike the pair of tales by Brad Steiger, each of these stories has its own introduction by editor Cele Goldsmith.

In The Return of the Medusae, the inhabitants of New York City turn to stone.  Those who remain alive treat them as statues, destroying them if they fail to please.  This story may be an allegory about the nature of art.

In Master Said-And-Done, a mute hunchback makes a deal with the Devil, damning himself by accepting three wishes.  This familiar theme leads to a twist ending.  Of the three so-called fables, this is the most traditional.

The Enchanted Prince, 1963 is a twisted fairy tale that combines medieval elements with modern touches.  An orphaned princess, raised by a cruel uncle, has to go to public school.  The reason this horrifies her has to do with a serious problem facing the United States today. 

The author writes well, but his sardonic tone will not appeal to all readers.  Three stars.

Cornie on the Walls, by Sydney van Scyoc

The magazine once more makes a spelling error, giving the author's first name as Sidney.  This may disguise the fact that she is a woman.  Since she has only published a small number of stories, mostly in Galaxy, perhaps we can forgive this mistake.

Her latest offering is a strange tale, which requires close reading.  An artist of the future lies motionless, connected to his house by machines.  He uses his mind to create pictures that appear on the walls of his home.  Students and tourists show up to observe them.  Against his will, distorted images of a dead woman, apparently his wife or lover, appear on the walls. 

This is a dark and disturbing story, often gruesome.  The author creates a compelling science fiction horror story.  Four stars.

Let's see; that makes six stories; one-third of a novel; two stories that might be one story; and three stories that might be one story, for a total of . . .

I better go study this crazy New Math that everybody's talking about.

[P.S.  Did you take our super short survey yet?  There could be free beer/coffee in it for you!]

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[July 12, 1963] Shine, little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer (the August 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The August 1963 Amazing features Daniel F. Galouye’s novella Reign of the Telepuppets, a splendid title that apparently evokes a bit of editorial discomfort.  “Editorial director” Norman M. Lobsenz is at pains to explain that “‘Telepuppets’—despite its pulp-fictiony sound—is a word already in good repute with the soberer elements of the scientific community,” brandishing as evidence a statement from the National Research Council.

The story itself, like Galouye’s earlier novella Recovery Area, is ambitious but a bit of a misfire.  The Bureau of Interstellar Exploration has left a crew of telepuppets—robots designed for particular tasks—somewhere (“a satellite,” no explanation) in the Aldebaran system.  They are named to fit their tasks: Bigboss, Sky Watcher, Scraper, Peter the Meter, etc.  Bigboss has decided he’s the Supreme Being who created everything but somehow forgot the details, which doesn’t affect the puppets’ work or Bigboss’s role in supervising them, but they have stopped communicating with Earth.  Also, Minnie—Mineral Assessor—is jealous of Bigboss’s position and keeps attacking him.  The source of these derangements is not clear, in part because the telepuppets’ capabilities and limits are not much explained, compared, say, with Asimov’s I, Robot sequence, which contains much more and better handwaving on that subject. 

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the Bureau is mounting an expedition to stop off at Aldebaran and straighten out the puppets en route to the more distant Hyades, where seven or eight Earth-type planets have been discovered.  But upon their arrival, the telepuppets quickly fade out—there’s a spaceship full of reptilian aliens lurking, its megalomaniac captain looking for an opportunity to start an interstellar war.  That plot line is followed for a bit, then the rug is pulled out entirely: nothing is what it seems.  Then the rug is pulled out again; there’s a new revelation, and the story ends rather quickly thereafter.  While some SF writers have made effective use of this kind of plot device, here it just seems that Galouye couldn’t decide which story he wanted to write and wound up with something of a mess.

Galouye does decide to let the girls into this clubhouse, though execution does not quite match good intentions.  Carol Cummings joins the crew because she is a “radio empathy specialist,” practicing a talent which is mainly confined to women.  The men refer to her as the Maid of the Megacycles.  When she pulls a mild prank on one of them, he is about to spank her when another crewman appears and interrupts him.  She is (of course) good-looking (pause for mention of “the shapeliness of her lithe, five-foot-four frame”), and by the end she is (of course) paired off with the main character.  For a while it seemed like a nice try, though.  Overall, three stars for competent and readable copy, and a clever idea (the telepuppets’ becoming independent) poorly developed.

Galouye’s long novella is followed by four short stories—very short, in the case of Thomas M. Disch’s three-page “Utopia?  Never!” It’s a well-written but cartoony gimmick story, in which a visitor insists to his tour guide that this planet can’t be the Utopia it seems, and finds out all too quickly that he’s right.  Three stars for arid but well-turned cleverness.

Next up is John Rackham’s Dr. Jeckers and Mr. Hyde, in which young Katherine, secretary at a research facility, makes a play for mild and befuddled Dr. Jeckers, whom she drives out to her aunt’s country house, except that he gets so unexpectedly fresh en route that she shoves him out the door and over a cliff.  But . . . moments later, Dr. Jeckers, driving his own car, is right behind her, trying to get her to stop.  She doesn’t, and he goes over the cliff too.  Suffice it to say we have not seen the last of Dr. Jeckers, or Dr. Jeckerses.  This ridiculously amusing story might make a good Twilight Zone episode if TZ had a sense of humor.  Four stars, believe it or not, for the usually mediocre Mr. Rackham, or John T. Phillifent as I believe he is known to Inland Revenue and readers of Analog.

David Rome’s The Lesson for Today sharply changes the mood.  It’s a child’s-eye view of going to school in a starship fleeing an apparently ruined Earth, told seemingly with Bradbury in the back of the author’s mind and a prudent study of David R. Bunch in front.  Remarkably, Rome brings off this tightrope walk; four stars for avoiding mawkishness.

Mine is the Kingdom by Roger Zelazny, disguised once more as Harrison Denmark, is something else entirely.  There’s one human left on another ruined Earth, and aliens—the “puffies”—are trying to persuade him to leave, to go where the other humans went, so they can convert what’s left of Earth to their own liking.  The protagonist is apparently being cared for by nearly omnipotent machines who can manufacture any illusion that he wants while keeping him drunk, as he demands.  It’s theatrical in the most literal sense; Zelazny is making the most of his education in drama here, with the events obscured, or transfigured as you prefer, in oratorical language and gaudy imagery.  (“The walls were rough-woven allegories of bright color, the heads of vanquished predators, and axes with complexions of smoke and eyes of rust.”) Pretentious?  Yeah, but hand it to the guy, he delivers on his pretenses, at least to my taste.  Feller does have a way with words.  You could also call it decadent, I suppose, but who cares?  Four stars, leaning towards five.  Nothing rotten in this Denmark.

Gosh—three stories in a row in Amazing that I am actually glad I read.  That is amazing! and suggestive of better things to come, except we’ve been around that track before.

Coming down to Earth, here’s Sam Moskowitz again, with John W. Campbell: The Writing Years.  This task is tailor-made for Moskowitz, who doesn’t like to acknowledge work from any later than the 1940s, since with one minor exception Campbell stopped writing in 1940 or so.  It’s the usual perfectly competent rehash of a (brief) career, enhanced by much hitherto-unknown (to me at least) biographical data.  Most interestingly, Campbell’s mother had a twin sister who didn’t much like him, and at times young Campbell didn’t know who he was dealing with, an experience that gave rise to Campbell’s most powerful story, Who Goes There? It’s not clear to what extent that is Campbell speaking, versus Moskowitz amateur-psychologizing.  In any case, three stars, and a more interesting job than some recent entries in this series.

So, three pretty good stories, and two adequate ones.  Amazing is above water for now, but it never seems to last.  What ho—be that the specter of Robert F. Young, there lurking in the shadows?

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[May 12, 1963] SO FAR, SO GOOD (the June 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

On the June 1963 Amazing, the cover by Ed Emshwiller seems to portray humanity crucified, with photogenic fella and gal affixed to the front panels of computers, anguished expressions on their faces and slots cut in them like the holes in a computer punch-card.  I guess they are mutilated, if not bent, folded, or stapled.  This is done in the hyper-literal and slightly crude mode of Emsh’s Ace Double covers, which compares badly to the less literal but much more imaginative and better-executed work he is contributing to F&SF.  Suffice it to say that Emsh has not displaced William Jennings Bryan as our nation’s leading purveyor of Crucifixion imagery.  The cover illustrates Jack Sharkey’s two-part serial The Programmed People, on which I will defer until it’s finished next month.

Of the other stories, the longest and best is J.G. Ballard’s novelet The Encounter, a notable departure from his usual tone and attitude.  Astronomer Charles Ward takes a position at a California observatory and meets Andrew Kandinski, author of The Landings from Outer Space, who claims to have met a Venusian visiting in (his, her, its) flying saucer, and is trying to spread the revealed word that Earth must abandon its space explorations.  Kandinski is clearly suggested by George Adamski, author of Inside the Space Ships and others, who makes similar claims.  But the similarity stops there, since Adamski appears to be an outright fraud, while Ballard’s Kandinski is a tortured character who actually believes his stories.  Ward becomes fascinated and can’t stay away from him, with personally disastrous consequences when the extraterrestrials come again—or do they? 

Ballard deftly preserves the ambiguity, and along the way amusingly notes in passing the variety and similarity of imagery among SF, UFO mania, and more commercial popular culture (the only job Kandinski can get is waiting tables at a space-themed restaurant called The Site Tycho).  There is also a brief but telling riff on Jung’s theory of flying saucers as a manifestation of the unconscious in times of impending crisis, and a suggestion that Kandinski may prove to be one of the “mana-personalities of history.” There’s a lot going on here and it is purposefully not tied up neatly. 

This is also one of Ballard’s most humane stories.  In some Ballard stories—even very good ones like last year’s Thirteen to Centaurus—his characters are more like finely-made constructs, machined to serve the author’s argument, than actual human beings.  By contrast, both Kandinski and Ward come across as genuine, flawed, and vulnerable people, and the story as less of an intellectual construct than much of Ballard.  (Of course, that’s part of the construct, but let’s not follow that line of argument any further.) This is a story that will be worth coming back to.  Five stars.

So: Amazing has justified its existence for one more month.  What else is here, besides the serial?  Three short stories, two of them very short indeed.  Let’s take the longer one, Telempathy, by Vance Simonds, his first in the SF magazines.  It’s a story that is best allowed to speak for itself, though unfortunately some length is required to get the full flavor.  Here’s the beginning:

“Huckster Heaven, in Hollywood, set out to fulfill the adman’s dream in every particular.  It recognized more credit cards than it offered entrees on the menu.  Various atmospheres, complete with authentic decor, were offered: Tahitian, Parisian, even Afro-Cuban for the delectation of the Off-Beat Client.  In every case, houris glided to and fro in appropriate native costume, bearing viands calculated to quell, at least for the nonce, harsh thoughts of the combative marketplace.  Instead, beamish advertisers and their account executive hosts were plied so lavishly that soon the sounds of competitive strife were but a memory; and in the postprandial torpor, dormant dreams of largesse on the Lucullan scale came alive.  In these surroundings, droppers of such names as the Four Seasons, George V, and the Stadium Club were notably silent.”

And it goes on like that.  If one can push aside the layers of attitude and exhibitionism (a canoe paddle might do it—or maybe a sump pump would be more suitable), a story becomes visible.  Everett says he’s got something that will precisely predict the reception of new products or advertising campaigns, which he calls Empathy, and which appears to consist of extra-sensory rapport with several very smart or insightful people, mediated through Everett’s mutant pet mongoose.  So Cam the adman takes him to see his client Father Sowles, a Nehemiah Scudder-like figure whose campaign for high office Cam is fronting.  The campaign goes into high gear based on Everett’s ultimate inside information, though Father Sowles complains that the message is being lost: e.g., “And what about the race mongrelizers? . . . Trying to subvert America with an Afro-Asian Trojan Horse!”

A lot of this is actually pretty funny, and it’s nice to see such explicit skewering of current politico-religious crackpottery.  If Simonds—whose first appearance in the SF magazines this is—had cut the supercilious vaudeville by about 30%, especially in the first several pages of the story, it would have been much more incisive and less irritating.  Adding it up, three stars, indulgently.

Thomas M. Disch’s three-page The Demi-Urge is a good example of an old cliche, the report by visiting aliens about how things are on Earth—this time with a minority report and a clever twist, confidently and economically written.  Disch is another new writer, with one previous story in Fantastic, also praised here.  Three stars for revitalizing a usually trivial and tedious gimmick.

Arthur Porges is a prolific veteran of the SF and fantasy magazines (though rarely Amazing), and more recently of the crime fiction mags.  His stories are invariably either short or shorter.  The two and a half-page Through Channels posits that if you can reach millions of eyes with a TV broadcast, you can freeze millions of brains by adding another unspecified frequency.  About the only interesting thing here is that one of the programs on at the fatal moment is another fanatical right-wing preacher—two in one issue!  Two stars for competent execution of not very much.

Sam Moskowitz is at it again with Eric Frank Russell: Death of a Doubter, consisting of his usual reasonably competent biographical summary and review of Russell’s work, with the usual greater focus on earlier than later work: there is no mention of his novels of the later 1950s, Three to Conquer (serialized as Call Him Dead), Wasp, and The Space Willies, the last an expansion of his very popular novelet Plus X (Astounding, June 1956).  Hold that thought, and look at Moskowitz’s subtitle again.  He quotes a 1937 letter from Russell to a fanzine describing himself as “another young rationalist of 32 years of age,” and says (after touching base at Thomas Aquinas): “The weakness of the Rationalist viewpoint is that it promulgates no ideas of its own; it waits to be shown.  Stubbornly waiting to be shown, Russell had a hard time dreaming up new plot ideas.” Later on, after selectively discussing Russell’s work of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, Moskowitz sums up: “Most significant of all is the final impression the works give of the man.  The display of outward toughness of manner, speech and philosophy is a facade.  A man who feels not only a reverence for but a communion with life, who transmits those feelings and with them his protests against prejudice in terms of poetry and parable—such a man is not a rationalist.” Here Moskowitz is not only psychologizing without a license, but going about double the speed limit.

Further, Moskowitz is quite right in characterizing some of Russell’s later work, but hardly all of it.  Three to Conquer is marked by violent xenophobia, and Wasp and The Space Willies are to varying degrees comedies of condescension to aliens, who are presented as stupid, incompetent, and easily gulled by their betters, homo sapiens.  So Russell is not a writer who changed in any identifiable direction; look at the whole picture and you see a writer of utterly contradictory tendencies that he has maintained through his career.  Come on, Sam; we saw you palm that card.  Two stars.

Well, altogether, not bad so far: one very fine story and two promising efforts by new or newish writers.  But the specter of Sharkey’s serial looms over all, to be dared next month.

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[March 12, 1963] TOO MUCH TO ASK? (the April 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

So: another not-very-good issue, this April Amazing, where the outstanding item is a piece of well-turned yard goods.  So what’s the reasonable expectation here?  Let’s not be too greedy.  How about at least something in each issue that’s unusually good, and nothing that’s unusually stupid?  Is that too much to ask?  Seems like it is, certainly this month.

“It didn’t happen twice a year that Gustavus Robert Fry, Chief Commissioner of the Interstellar Police Authority, allotted more than an hour in his working day to any one appointment.” That’s the opening line of James H. Schmitz’s Beacon to Elsewhere.  Am I the only one who’s gotten tired of stories that begin by announcing what a big shot—interstellar police commissioner, President, Galactic Coordinator, or what have you—one of the characters is? 

Transitory irritations aside, Beacon to Elsewhere—at 64 pages labelled a “novel”—is a reasonably agreeable piece of hokum, involving the discovery of a new series of elements, compounded into Ymir 400, which has many interesting and dangerous properties including emitting a new sort of radiation.  Two 34-kilogram cases of Ym-400 have been stolen from a space ship in transit.  The story starts with 10 pages of talk, with Howard Camhorn, the Overgovernment’s Coordinator of Research, explaining all of this and more to Chief Commissioner Fry.  This is followed by about 45 pages of the gumshoeing adventures of the more plebeian Lieutenant Frank Dowland, on the case in western North America, investigating the activities of some subversive ranchers who may be trying to use the stolen Ym-400 and may or may not be achieving time travel. 

Some large and daunting aliens make cameo appearances, their gravitas unfortunately impaired by the cover depiction which makes one of them look a bit like an oversized Shmoo (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmoo).  And the story fades out with another nine pages of talk, first Dowland’s debriefing, and then Camhorn and one of his guys talking about the debriefing.  And here is Schmitz’s unusual talent: he renders all this talk in such genial and readable style that he gets away with a way of constructing stories that would get anybody else a quick rejection letter.  I described the last Schmitz story in this magazine as “just capably rearranging the usual SF furniture”; that will do for this one too.  Three stars.

Schmitz’s competent piece of product is accompanied by a suite of fairly lackluster, or worse, short stories.  Roger Zelazny’s Circe Has Her Problems is not metaphorical; Circe has set up shop on a stray asteroid floating loose in interstellar space, hoping for some male company that can withstand her signature talent of turning them into animals.  An android shows up.  It’s as cartoony as it sounds.  Two stars, fewer in the hands of a less lively writer.  Now that Zelazny has broken in, are we getting his earlier practice pieces?

In David Bunch’s Somebody Up There Hates Us, an alien walks into a bar (actually, a night club on New Year’s Eve—and it walks into all of them at the same time, by the clock anyway) and hands out little wish-fulfillment devices, asking only that the patrons wait until midnight to operate them.  Things are not of course what they seem, and humanity (most of it anyway) is saved only because the bartenders are robots and we have time zones.  There is a smattering of ostentatious futuristic jargon (the protagonist is drinking an old fashioned space squeezings) in what is said to be 1972, but otherwise the writing is fairly mundane, unlike Bunch’s Moderan stories, which at least have the virtue of surface novelty.  There is a recurring theme of the mutual dislike between the protagonist and his wife, which is apparently supposed to be funny but is distasteful.  One star.

J.F. Bone’s For Service Rendered is a deal-with-the-Devil story, the Devil having come through Enid Twilley’s malfunctioning TV set, no pentagram needed.  He doesn’t want her soul, he wants her body, and he’s offering to cure the pancreatic cancer she didn’t know she had and give her another ten years or so free before whisking her off to Hel (sic), which he wants her to know isn’t half as bad as it’s cracked up to be.  This is all laid out in reasonably amusing detail, and then concludes in a stupid male-chauvinistic joke.  Another one-star job.

Harrison Denmark’s [a pseudonym if I've ever seen one…(Ed.)] The Stainless Steel Leech is about a werebot, who’s gotten free from Central Control but, to live (so to speak), needs to get his batteries charged by draining other robots, so he’s also a vampbot (my term, not the author’s) and an object of terror among the other robots (humans having disappeared from the scene).  This mildly clever joke is less annoying than but somewhat similar in tone to Circe Has Her Problems, not too surprisingly since rumor has it that Mr. Denmark is actually Zelazny.  Two stars, clutching futilely for a third.

Frank Tinsley is back after a six months’ absence with The Cosmic Wrecker, a more fanciful exercise than his usual; nobody else seems to be proposing a specialized vehicle to tool around and collect all the burnt-out and abandoned satellites and other assorted hardware we’re going to be leaving in near space.  It’s the usual slightly humdrum rendition, but three stars for originality, never mind that SF writers have been there before—see James White’s Deadly Litter, in New Worlds not long ago (US and UK editions).


And Sam Moskowitz, this time, profiles Lester del Rey, with the usual intense focus on his earliest work, and very spotty coverage of his post-1950 work.  (It’s not just me.  One of the readers’ letters this months calls Moskowitz out for “the manner in which they progress in pertinent detail up to about the mid and late ‘forties and then hastily run a bee-line to the nearby closing sentences.  There is hardly any mention of the author’s latter-day achievements.”)

There’s also a concluding psychological diagnosis that seems incoherent and nonsensical to me.  Del Rey has “never learned the lesson of self-discipline”—a guy who has maintained a very high level of free-lance professional productivity of several kinds for the last decade-plus.  Or: “His facade of toughness would seem to be fabricated more to maintain his own self-estimation than as a defense against the world.  Nevertheless its manifestation in his writing represents a psychological conflict that dams up the release of a reservoir of compassion.”

Huh?  What’s he talking about?  Del Rey has always seemed to me one of SF’s more compassionate writers; take a look at the stories in his Ballantine collection of a few years ago, Robots and Changelings.  Moskowitz seems almost laughably off base here, though as usual there’s interesting biographical information here that you won’t find elsewhere (but adding it all up I’m not sure how much of it to believe).  Anyway, two stars.

So, another waste of time for the most part.  Is there hope?  Maybe.  They are touting Leigh Brackett for next month.  If we’re lucky, she’s still better than her husband (fellow SFF-writer Edmond Hamilton).

[P.S. If you registered for WorldCon this year, please consider nominating Galactic Journey for the "Best Fanzine" Hugo.  Your ballot should have arrived by now…]




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[January 13, 1963] LATHER, RINSE, REPEAT (the February 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Last month’s issue raised high expectations, but this February Amazing reminds me of an infantile and scatological joke which I believe I heard in fifth grade, the punchline of which is “Coffee break’s over, squat down again.” If you never heard it, count your blessings.

Daniel F. Galouye’s novella Recovery Area comes highly touted.  Last month’s Coming Next Month squib described it as “destined to become a classic” and “brilliantly original, and with a depth of meaning and emotion”; the story blurb says “There is no reason to write a blurb that will try to lure you into being interested in this story.  It will grip you of itself within ten lines, and hold your mind and heart far beyond its last sentence.”

Actually, it’s a decent and well-meaning pulp novella, recalling the beginning of Galouye’s career in SF: 20 of his first 21 published stories appeared in Imagination, that most pulpish of digest magazines, in the space of two years.  But it’s a step backward from the much more sophisticated Dark Universe. 

On Venus, it’s proposed, there is a species of giant humanoids (hideously illustrated on the cover by Vernon Kramer) featuring “quazehorns.” Say what?  Horns that quaze, obviously—that is, they endow the bearer with a not-well-defined extrasensory power to perceive objects and entities at a distance, read personalities and attitudes if not quite thoughts, and perceive the nature of the contents of closed containers (i.e., the supply capsules for the Earth expedition that is about to land, which are dropped at various points near the landing site; hence the title.)

The Venutians (author’s spelling [others are using it, too.  (Ed.)]) are materially primitive but highly philosophical, as attested by the extensive deployment of capital letters.  In the first couple of pages, we encounter Meditative Withdrawal, Cognitive Posture, Ascetic Ascendancy, the First Phase of Ascendancy, the Dichotomy of Endlessnesses (comprising Upper and Lower), and the Eternal Day (where the Venutians live, squeezed in between the two Endlessnesses).  These are the preoccupations of K’Tawa, the Old One, who is constantly beset by interruptions from the youngster Zu-Bach, always Materialistic.  Right now Zu-Bach is concerned with Presences from the Upper Endlessness, who of course are the Earth explorers, and who Zu-Bach is convinced are malign after he sees one of their dropped capsules snatching an animal specimen which later turns up dead.  Matters escalate when the explorers arrive and the Venutians quaze hate, scorn, treachery, and greed, mostly from one misfit member.  Violent conflict ensues.  Meanwhile, K’Tawa is achieving Phase Eight Meditation, putting him in touch with the memories of his ancestors, which murkily reveal a local cosmological history reminiscent of the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky, and suggest a startling provenance for the Venutians and a revised view of the universe.  Understanding triumphs, facile happy ending follows.  It’s competent and well-intentioned product, but we’ve come to expect better, from Galouye and everyone else, especially from something that is presented (and presents itself) as a major work.  Three stars with a side of nostalgic indulgence.

The biggest name here, also featured on the cover, is Philip Jose Farmer, with his short story How Deep the Grooves, which is pretty terrible.  In a future police state, Dr. Carroad has, through the magic of electroencephalography, devised a machine that can turn thoughts into audible words, thereby unmasking deviationists.  Now, with high officials watching, he’s going to use it to transmit, not receive, and indoctrinate his own unborn child to be unable to question the dictates of the state.  Instead, the machine keeps receiving, and broadcasts the child’s thoughts at various future ages, demonstrating that we are all automatons programmed to play roles, and ending with an unsavory revelation about the futures of father and son.  It’s reminiscent of an old silent movie filled with posturing and mugging, and all for the sake of an idea that would have seemed pretty silly even in the days of Hugo Gernsback.  One star.

Speaking of Gernsback, he was six years gone from Amazing but his spirit was clearly still around when this month’s Classic Reprint was published (February 1935 issue).  The Tale of the Atom, fortunately the only story by Philip Dennis Chamberlain, rings another silly change on the silly universe-as-atom theme, the silliness of which has been apparent since before this story was published.  One star.

A higher class of silliness, maybe, is represented by Phoenix, a short story by Ted White and Marion Zimmer Bradley.  Protagonist Max is standing swathed in flames, which it says here “feels like satin ice,” when his girlfriend walks in.  Extinguishing himself, he says, “Hell of a time for you to show up, Fran,” noticing that the carpet is singed and smoking where he’s been standing on it.  Oops!  Max has had a sudden accession of psi powers, or something, including levitation and the ability to heat up his coffee by thinking about it and to dress himself psychokinetically, in addition to cloaking himself in flames and perceiving all of reality at the molecular level, or something like that.  The story is his losing effort to maintain some human contact in the face of this transcendent experience, and his surrender to the latter.  Something might have been made of this at greater length and with more writerly competence (Bradley’s been around but this is White’s first professionally published story), but in this form it’s alternately risible and merely inadequate.  Two stars for ambition.

The remaining item of fiction is Jack Sharkey’s The Smart Ones, which is reminiscent of a Twilight Zone episode, both generally and specifically.  (You’ll know the one.) Nuclear war is on the way, and ordinary people!  just like you and me! are trying to figure out what to do.  The story proceeds in a series of scenes that are both strongly visual and carried by dialogue—whether to go to the fallout shelter, whether to take the opportunity to get onto a Moon-bound ship—the best of which is the couple arguing about whether Vanity Fair and Coningsby should get space on the fallout shelter bookshelves.  Later, after the bombing:

“ ‘I think the baby needs a change, or something,’ said Corey, looking down at his infant son.

“ ‘Read him Coningsby,’ said Lucille.  Then she started laughing again, until Corey was forced to slap her face crimson to quiet her.”

You just know this guy wants to write for TV, or at least the stage, and he’d probably be pretty good at it.  The more I look at this the better I like it in its black-humoresque way.  Four stars, if only by comparison to its company.

Sam Moskowitz is back with another SF Profile, Arthur C. Clarke (guess he couldn’t think of a snappy title or subtitle), which bears the usual virtues and faults: interesting biographical material, sometimes dubious critical judgment, and a close focus on Clarke’s earliest work at the expense of the more recent.  In Clarke’s case this is less jarring than in some of the other profiles, since Clarke didn’t start publishing SF professionally until 1946 and all but one of his novels are from the ‘50s and later, so Moskowitz has to discuss some recent work (he even mentions the 1961 A Fall of Moondust a couple of times, though he can’t get the title straight).  Three stars.

So: a step forward, a step back.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

[P.S. If you registered for WorldCon this year, please consider nominating Galactic Journey for the "Best Fanzine" Hugo.  Check your mail for instructions…]




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[December 12, 1962] UP THE SPOUT AGAIN (the January 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

All right, Frogeyes,* dust off all the stars.  We’re finally going to need them for this January 1963 Amazing, specifically for Keith Laumer’s novelet It Could Be Anything.
*Those without a classical education may ignore this and similar allusions.

“Things are not what they seem” is a well worn SF device, employed by the likes of Heinlein, Sturgeon, and more recently Philip K. Dick.  But it’s not worn out, as Laumer demonstrates.  Young Brett is about to take the train out of the stereotypical small town of Casperton, heading for the unnamed big city, despite stereotypical remonstrances.  His Aunt Haicey says, “It was reading all them books that done it.  Thick books, with no pictures in them.  I knew it would make trouble.” The stationmaster offers, “If I talk to Mr. J.D., I think he can find a job for you at the plant.” His girlfriend Pretty-Lee doesn’t show, not after their big argument in Rexall’s over her preoccupation with a movie magazine.  But he boards anyway, and some time later finds himself on a deserted stopped train in the middle of a field where the tracks just stop, no clue as to why, but the city is visible on the horizon.  So he walks.  I won’t spoil the story’s revelations in detail, but Brett quickly learns that the people he encounters in the city, engaged in ordinary mundane activities like walking down the street and eating in restaurants, are not real—they are automatons acting out routines.  What’s going on?  The answer is pretty nasty, and the story quickly turns crude and violent.  At the end, Brett is heading home to Casperton, with the similarity between the automatons’ routines and the behavior of the home folks not lost on him.  The story is exceedingly well visualized, gaining power from Laumer’s attention to mundane sensual detail even in the midst of violent melodrama.  Its impact is also enhanced by what isn’t there—an explanation.  The story is told entirely from Brett’s limited viewpoint, ignorant of the larger picture even after his shattering experiences in the city, leaving the reader knowing very little about the comprehensive catastrophe that seems to have overtaken the world, but creating an unusually strong sense of a larger world outside the confines of the story about which one can only speculate.  Five stars.

The cover story, Cerebrum by Albert Teichner, makes a nice contrast to the Laumer story—“nice” in the original sense of precise or fine, not the current debased usage—since it takes a well worn plot device and fails to revitalize it.  In the future, everybody’s telepathic, and they’re all hooked up to the Central Synaptic Computation Receptor and Transmitter System, which routes thoughts like a telephone exchange, only better.  Otherwise, nobody could hear themselves think through everyone else’s mental noise.  But people who think negative thoughts about Central get Suspended, and now there’s a large and growing underclass of Suspendeds since Central seems to be making a lot of mistakes lately—but don’t think that or you’ll be Suspended too.  Protagonist and family get Suspended and have to learn to live as outcasts on the margins; they discover what passes for an underground; then Central falls apart entirely and the brewing problems between Suspendeds and paraNormals (sic) conveniently disappear.  So, it’s the early Galaxy routine of society distorted by an innovation, with The Machine Stops thrown into the mix, no more than routinely clever connect-the-dots stuff.  Two stars; ten years ago when this sort of thing was newer, it might have seemed better.  The cover, by Lloyd Birmingham, merits a comment as well: de Chirico repeats, this time as farce.

Jack Egan’s Cully, like his earlier World Edge from November, is a short tale told by (or for) a damaged consciousness, which any further explanation would spoil; this one is better written and less busy than its predecessor.  Maybe Egan is getting the hang of it.  Generously, three stars.

S. Dorman—presumably the Sonya Dorman who appeared in the October Ladies’ Home Journal—provides something else entirely in The Putnam Tradition, her first in the SF magazines: sort of like Zenna Henderson with sharper edges.  The Putnams are a matriarchal and rather change-resistant New England family, witches or psi-talented as you prefer, whose children (the healthy ones) are mostly daughters, and whose husbands “spent a lifetime with the long-lived Putnam wives, and died, leaving their strange signs: telephone wires, electric lights, water pumps, brass plumbing.” And now young Simone’s husband Sam has brought them an “invasion” of large and small appliances, and their daughter doesn’t seem to have inherited the family talents.  Is tradition dead?  Or is something else going on?  The story is told in sort of fairy-tale fashion, with the occasional startling image (“. . . power lines had been run in, and now on cold nights the telephone wires sounded like a concert of cellos, while inside with a sound like the breaking of beetles, the grandmother Cecily moved through the walls in the grooves of tradition.”).  Dorman’s writing seems a little amateurish in places but it conveys the sense of a real individual behind the typewriter and not (unlike, say, Teichner’s) some device grinding up and recycling the last 50 SF stories she read.  Four stars, and thanks for the fresh air.

Bringing up the rear, or letting it down, is the “Classic Reprint” from the January 1933 issue: Omega, the Man by Lowell Howard Morrow, about Omega, the last human alive (well, he starts out with his wife Thalma and briefly acquires a son—Alpha, of course) on a dying Earth, with a schematic plot and the sort of bombastic style that one could barely get away with even then, and nowadays reads like parody.  A bizarre Frankensteinian plot twist at the end comes much too late to redeem this fiasco.  Moskowitz’s praise of it is almost as risible.  One star.

Ben Bova soldiers on with another article, Progress Report: Life Forms in Meteorites, again beautifully but inaptly illustrated by Virgil Finlay.  Bova reviews findings on exactly what the title says, as usual assembling a fair amount of interesting information.  He does seem to have his thumb on the scales sometimes, though, as when he recounts several competing theories about the nature of seemingly organic particles found in some meteorites: are they fossilized life forms, or crystalline structures that are the “intermediate step” between DNA molecules and living cells, or inorganic materials that contain lots of iron, or fossils that have been partly replaced by iron through a petrifaction process?  “On balance, though,” Bova says, “it would appear that the particles are life forms, or at least, fossils of once-living cells.” But he doesn’t explain why he’s choosing one side or another in this technical debate.  Still, three stars for pulling this material together in more or less plain English.

So: one excellent story, another very good one, and only one complete pratfall.  Looks like progress.  Of course I said that early last year too.  Da capo.  If the magazine can retain good new contributors like Dorman, Zelazny, and Ballard, maybe it can keep it up this time.

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

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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…

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Magazine

[October 14, 2017] A SIGN OF LIFE? (the November 1962 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Once more, the question: must the middle of the road be the ceiling?  Will this November Amazing present us anything more interesting than the competently readable fare featured in recent issues?  Well, yeah, a little, but it takes a while to get there. 

Left Hand, Right Hand

James H. Schmitz’s lead novelet Left Hand, Right Hand recalls my comment on his last story: “capable, even lively, deployment of material that otherwise would border on cliche.” It’s essentially a POW escape story: nasty aliens have captured the interstellar explorers from Earth, upon which they seem to have designs.  The protagonist is plotting to get away and warn Earth in a drone ship he has been surreptitiously converting under the aliens’ noses, while the people in charge of the Earth expedition seem to be collaborating with their captors.  As the title suggests, there’s actually more than that going on, and the plot is actually pretty clever; the aliens are well developed and the resolution turns on what’s been learned about them.  But ultimately Schmitz is just capably rearranging the usual SF furniture.  Three stars.

Schmitz gives the impression of a formerly part-time writer who has quit his day job and turned full-time.  From 1949 through 1961, he published zero to three stories a year in the SF magazines.  In 1962, he has published eight stories in the SF magazines plus one in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, plus the novel A Tale of Two Clocks.  Maybe the demands of high production have something to do with the routine character of these recent stories.

The Planet of the Double Sun

The other novelet is the “Classic Reprint,” Neil R. Jones’s The Planet of the Double Sun (from the February 1932 issue), the second in the series about Professor Jamieson.  The Prof had himself put into orbit when he died, and was resurrected eons later when the exploring Zoromes—brains in robotic metal bodies—installed him in his own metal body and took him with them.  Now, on a planet with one blue sun and one orange one, they quickly encounter a sinister mystery about the apparent extinction of anything larger than birds, and almost as quickly are threatened with extinction themselves from a menace having everything to do with the suns.  In fact the end of the story seems to be the end for everyone, except that Sam Moskowitz’s introduction says the series extended to 21 stories.  This one is told in a peculiar naive style, plain and simple (except for the occasional long word) to the point where it sometimes reads as if written for those just graduated from See Spot Run, or new immigrants striving to learn English.  It has a certain archaic charm.  Three charitable stars.

World Edge

World Edge by Jack Egan—apparently his first story—is set in a world which seems hallucinatory and soon enough is shown to be just that.  Unfortunately it’s about the least interesting hallucination I’ve encountered, reminiscent of something you might see on the Saturday morning cartoon shows, and the “explanation” is no more interesting.  Two stars, again being charitable.

The Last Days of the Captain

Unusually, this issue has two stories by women.  Kate Wilhelm contributes The Last Days of the Captain, in which a colony planet has to be evacuated because the terrible aliens are coming, but Marilyn Roget has to wait for her husband and son to return from a hunting trip.  The rigid and dutiful Captain Winters stays behind the main party to wait with her as long as possible, then leaves with her on an arduous futuristic-car trip through the wilderness, leaving a vehicle so husband and son can follow if they ever show up.  Various psychological tensions are acted out along the way, but it never adds up to much for me, and the Captain is still standing at the end despite the title.  Three stars, barely, for good writing.

Black and White

Black and White by Marion Zimmer Bradley is something else entirely.  Nuclear war has ended the world as we know it, leaving only two survivors, who live in a New York bar that has miraculously survived—though the bottles didn’t, so they can’t get drunk, and they can’t go barefoot for all the broken glass embedded in the floor.  Problem: he’s a Negro and she is white.  They have agreed that their racial animosity precludes any attempt to continue the species, and in any case he’s hiding a terrible secret: he’s a Catholic priest.  They row over to New Jersey to hunt rabbits, and there they discover that they aren’t the only survivors after all—there’s a white guy, and nothing good comes of it.  The story quickly turns nasty and powerful, most likely fuelled by the revulsion prompted by certain recent events like the attacks on the Freedom Riders.  In any case, it is intense, and it cuts sharply through the haze of the routine that otherwise attends this magazine.  Four stars.

Life Among the Stars, Part IV

Ben Bova has Life Among the Stars, the fourth in what was billed as a four-article series on extraterrestrial life.  It mainly concerns stars, how little we know about whether they have planets, and how hard it is to find out.  He concludes with the declaration that we’ve gotta have faith that there is life and intelligence elsewhere than Earth.  Further: “Those of us who have the faith—scientists and science fictioneers, dreamers and technicians—realize full well that this is the only adventure worthy of a civilized man.” (Emphasis in original.) The only one?  How about making peace, promoting civil rights, curing diseases, and alleviating poverty, for starters?  I think you’ve gotten a little carried away, Mr. Bova.  Nonetheless, three stars for interesting material well presented.

And—what’s that sound?  Oh, it’s the silence left by the departure of Benedict Breadfruit.  Requiescat in pacem, no revenants please.

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