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[December 2, 1968] Forget It (January 1969 IF)

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by David Levinson

Forget the future

It’s official. As if it weren’t already clear from the events in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia over the summer, the Soviet Union has now openly declared that no communist nation in the Soviet sphere of influence will be allowed to go its own way or engage in any sort of reforms not approved by Moscow. Addressing the Congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party on November 13th, Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev stated, “When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.” That’s the justification for military intervention wherever the U.S.S.R. feels like, especially within the Warsaw Pact. We all know who will get to decide if something is a move towards capitalism.

Leonid Brezhnev after addressing the Soviet Central Committee earlier this year.

The backlash has already begun. After years of strained relations, Albania formally withdrew from the Warsaw Pact in protest over the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Of course, they have Yugoslavia as a buffer state, and the close proximity of Greece and Italy probably also offer a deterrent. As we go to press, Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu has publicly condemned this new doctrine as a violation of the Warsaw Treaty. Only time will tell how this shakes out.

Forget the past

Forgetfulness seems to be the theme of this month’s IF. The issue is book-ended with stories featuring protagonists with amnesia, while two of the remaining three stories offer a man who doesn’t know his name and an entire year blotted from everybody’s memory.

Just some random art not associated with any of the stories. Art by Chaffee

Six Gates to Limbo (Part 1 of 2), by J.T. McIntosh

A man awakens naked in a field with no idea who he is or how he got there. It proves to be a pleasant place about 50 miles in circumference, surrounded by a dome of gray mist. He dubs the place Limbo. Set in the dome, about 20 feet above ground are six ovals that he believes to be portals. Eventually, he also finds a house with a well-stocked kitchen, a library full of books (printed on Earth, all before 3646), and three bedrooms, two of which have women’s clothes in them.

In the basement, he finds three coffins with windows set in the lids. One is empty and is labeled Rex, giving him a name. The second, labeled Regina, contains a very pretty woman, while the third holds a beautiful woman apparently named Venus. Regina comes to, already knowing her name and also with the ability to know where anything (and anyone) is.

After a time, Rex passes through one of the gateways. He discovers a huge city called Mercury, which is laden with a sense of doom that depresses all its inhabitants. On his return, Rex discovers a freezing sub-basement with clues that the gateways are portals to other planets. Regina deliberately triggers Venus’s awakening, and the three get along fairly well, without Venus interfering in the relationship between the other two.

As this installment ends, Rex and Regina pass through another portal and find themselves on a hot, desert planet. While investigating an immigration office, Rex blunders and the police – or worse – are summoned. To be concluded.

Rex investigates the first portal. Art by Jack Gaughan

McIntosh has given us an interesting set-up and an intriguing mystery, but I don’t see how he’s going to extract Rex and Regina from their current predicament and explore four more worlds in just one installment. I’m eager to see the rest of this. But one thing really stood out to me. Take note Robert Silverberg and many other authors, in and out of science fiction: McIntosh makes very clear to the reader that Regina is quite petite without once referring to her breasts or hips, nor is there anything describing her as childlike. He does describe her once as a girl in comparison to Venus, but Rex clearly views her as an adult. Similarly, we know that Venus is voluptuous without any reference to her secondary sexual characteristics.

A high three stars.

The Year Dot, by William F. Temple

Bart Cabot grew up an orphan in a small town. His fascination with the X-men in the next valley repeatedly gets him into trouble with the Sheriff. He’s also curious why the year 1978 is missing from all the records in the library, but nobody else seems to see a discrepancy. Finally, he pushes the Sheriff too far, and only intervention by one of the X-men saves his life. Bart learns a lot about what’s going on and has a choice to make.

Doesn’t look like any of the X-Men I know. Beast maybe? Art by Brock

The story’s well told, if nothing special. There’s a strong implication that what’s going on is global, but the focus of the story makes it feel entirely local. The missing year thing doesn’t make a lot of sense, either. And calling the aliens in the next valley X-men is just confusing to anyone with a passing knowledge of comic books.

Three stars.

If… and When, by Lester del Rey

This month, Lester del Rey looks at changes in agriculture. Sure, we have things like corn that produces large, uniform ears, strains of plants that grow in soil that was once unsuitable, and fertilizers to replenish exhausted fields. But do those fertilizers replenish minerals that occur in vanishingly small amounts; do the new strains take up those sorts of minerals, if the soils they now grow in even have them? Maybe that will affect taste (ask a vintner about how the tiniest variation can affect their product) or maybe the lack of those “unimportant” minerals will have unsuspected health effects. Lots to think about.

Three stars.

The Steel General, by Roger Zelazny

Zelazny picks up where Creatures of Light left off. Wakim, the servant of Anubis, desperate to find out who he once was, and the Prince Who Was A Thousand do battle in time. Eventually they are transported to another planet, where Horus, son of Osiris, comes also seeking to kill the Prince, as does the Steel General, who supports the Prince merely because he is the underdog.

Anubis doesn’t want Wakim to learn who he really is. Art by P. Reiber

Now Zelazny has me hooked. The intermediate material following Wakim leaving the House of the Dead that weakened the previous story might have fit better at the beginning here, but this works without that, too. Although the ending is something of a cliff-hanger, there’s enough here to make a complete tale, and it’s a doozy. Poetic, mythic, Zelazny at his best.

A high four stars.

Operation High Time, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Simes are an offshoot of humanity who must take life energy from normal humans, or Gens (short for Generators; Sime from symbiote maybe?). The process was once fatal, but the two groups have found ways to live together, with many restrictions on the Simes. Protagonist Farris is a Sime who has found a way to ease some of those restrictions. His lobbying in Washington leads to his strongest opponent in the Senate being kidnapped. Following a hunch, Farris is kidnapped as well.

Farris is imprisoned with his political nemesis. Art by Brand

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been complaining about badly-done exposition by authors who should know better. This month’s new author shows how to do it right. The exposition in this story comes in small, natural chunks, giving just enough for the story to make sense while hinting at much more. The rest of the story is also done quite well. This is probably the best IF First debut since Larry Niven.

A very high three stars.

In the Shield, by Dean R. Koontz

The latest from Dean Koontz starts off with an amnesiac man in a spaceship filled with weapons that have no maker’s marks on them. In short order he winds up with two unexpected companions and then follows post-hypnotic orders to go to one of the main worlds in the galaxy.

That was the look on my face at about this point in the story. Art by Reese

The story starts off fine, but quickly brings in two astronomically unlikely coincidences, and then goes completely off the rails, descending into a sophomoric attack on religion. Koontz keeps missing the mark, but he does aim high. Maybe he should aim a little lower until he has the chops to match his ambition.

Right on the line between two and three stars. I’ll be generous and give it the lowest three stars possible.

Authorgraphs: An Interview with Roger Zelazny

Zelazny on himself, science fiction, writing and so on. According to the editor’s blurb this was transcribed directly from a recording of him answering questions (which we don’t get). Interesting and informative, if a bit shallow.

Three stars.

I wonder if he’s always this dapper. Art by Gaughan

Summing up

Yet another middle-of-the-road issue. I’m starting to come around on McIntosh, but he’s on probation until next month. Zelazny managed to pull me in, where I had been less interested, and we got a very impressive debut from an author I hope to see more of. But there are times when I feel like Galaxy gets all the choice stories, and IF is left with the dregs.

Can’t say anything here really excites me.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 10, 1966] Dollars and Cents (September 1966 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Render Unto Caesar

There's a new way to lose your money when visiting Las Vegas. A hotel, showroom, and casino called Caesars Palace (no apostrophe) opened a few days ago. As the name implies, it has an ancient Rome theme rather than the Western theme found in most gambling dens in Sin City.


A showgirl advertises the grand opening. I don't think that's an authentic costume of the time.

The inauguration ceremony is said to have cost one million dollars, including money spent on huge amounts of caviar, filet mignon, crabmeat, and champagne.


A page from a brochure advertising the place. Or possibly an illustration for a time travel story.

The Deuce Gets Loose

Speaking of losing money, today the United States Department of the Treasury announced that it would no longer print two-dollar bills. (The U.S. Mint hadn't actually printed any since June 30, but now they're going to stop completely.)


Thomas Jefferson looks glum about the situation. At least he'll still be on the nickel.

Two-dollar bills only make up a tiny percentage of the paper money in circulation. Some folks think they're unlucky. They're welcome to give any they don't want to me.

Wild Success

One thing you can do with a two-dollar bill is buy a couple of 45 rpm single records, and maybe even have a little change left over. A lot of people are shelling out a buck or so for the current Number One smash hit Wild Thing by the British band the Troggs. This raw, energetic tune was originally recorded last year by an American group called, appropriately enough, the Wild Ones, but failed to reach the charts.


It's the only rock 'n roll hit I can recall that features an extended ocarina solo.

You Pays Your Money And You Takes Your Choice

If you've only got fifty cents to your name, you can still purchase a copy of the current issue of Fantastic. That's less than one-third of a cent per page, so it sounds like a pretty good deal.

Of course, as my esteemed colleague John Boston recently pointed out, both Amazing and Fantastic are publishing lots of reprints without paying the authors. Whether you want to support these publications or boycott them is your choice. As for me, duty calls.


Cover art by Frank R. Paul.

Of course, the image on the front is also a reprint, and I doubt it was paid for either. In any case, it comes from the back cover of the April 1942 issue of Amazing Stories.


Here's the original painting, titled City of the Future. Looks a lot better this way, doesn't it?

For a Breath I Tarry, by Roger Zelazny

As the cover announces, here's the author's newest story.

Wait a minute! Haven't I read this before? Let me see, where could it have been?

Oh, yeah, it appeared in the March issue of New Worlds, and was reviewed by my esteemed colleague Mark Yon just a few months ago. I hope the author got paid twice.


Anonymous cover art.

I cannot hope to match the quality of this outstanding article. I will simply offer my own views, for whatever they might be worth.


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

Long after humanity has disappeared, Earth is controlled by machines. Orbiting the planet is the supreme ruler, Solcom. Dwelling deep underground is a rival machine, named Divcom. (An allegory with God and the Devil seems intended, and some of the story reminds me of the Book of Job. However, the plot is completely original, and not merely a retelling of the Bible story.)

Solcom creates a machine to rule the northern hemisphere, calling it Frost. The ruler of the southern hemisphere is Beta. Frost makes a hobby of studying what little remains of humanity's relics. A machine named Mordel, in the service of Divcom, comes to Frost with a supply of ancient books. These excite Frost's curiosity, and it sets out on a quest to understand human emotions; in fact, to become a human being. Mordel offers Frost a deal. It will give Frost all the aid it requires to achieve this goal, but if Frost comes to realize that the task is impossible, it will have to serve Divcom forever.

(An allusion to the legend of Faust also seems intended. Note the similarity in names.)

Frost travels to the southern hemisphere, in order to witness one of the last places where people dwelled. This act is in defiance of Solcom's will, leading to a conflict between creator and created. (We are told that a temporary malfunction in Solcom's operation, at the time it made Frost, caused Frost to be unique among machines. Perhaps this is a form of original sin.)


What Frost wants to be.

I have barely touched the surface of a remarkable story. I haven't mentioned, for example, the giant ore-digging machine that carries the remains of the human being it accidentally killed within itself, causing all the machines it encounters to listen to its story. The fact that it bears parts of a dead human is enough to make other machines obey it, a subtle and important point. I also haven't talked about the role Beta plays in the plot. Go see for yourself.

Five stars.

"You Can't See Me!", by William F. Temple

If we allow the Zelazny tale to be considered new, our first reprint comes from the June 1951 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


Cover art by Walter H. Hinton.

A fellow discovers that the people around him are happily conversing with folks he can't see. At first, a few others witness the same peculiarity, assuming the chatterers are crazy. Soon everybody succumbs to the delusion, and only the protagonist doesn't have an imaginary companion.


Illustration by Gerald Hohns. I assume all the reprinted drawings failed to earn the artists any new money, just like the writers.

Of course, there's an explanation for this strange happening. It's a pretty weak one, unfortunately, and the story just kind of fizzles out toward the end. Although it's not really a comedy, the fact that the main character has the unlikely name Zechariah Zebedee Zyzincwicz, and that this unusual moniker is relevant to the plot, tells you that you shouldn't take it too seriously.

Two stars.

Carousel, by August Derleth

This chiller comes from the April 1945 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


Cover art by R. E. Epperley.

A little girl lives with her father and a wicked stepmother, straight out of a fairy tale. The evil woman is insanely jealous of the man's affection for his daughter, and would even be happy to see her dead.


Illustrations by Robert Fuqua.

A few years before the story begins, a mob lynched a carnival worker, leaving behind a wrecked merry-go-round. The child often goes to play in the ruins, claiming to be friends with a black man. The wicked stepmother takes advantage of the situation to make sure the girl is punished for her actions, whipping her severely. She follows her to the merry-go-round, hoping that the dangerous machinery will cause the child to suffer a fatal accident. (The implication that the woman intends to cause the accident is pretty clear.) Things don't work out the way she expects.


The haunted carousel.

As you can probably tell from this synopsis, there are no surprises at all in the plot. It's a pretty ordinary horror story, of the supernatural punishment variety. Although the murder of the carnival worker is obviously due to racial hatred, this isn't really relevant, which lessens the story's impact.

Three stars.

The Little People, by Eando Binder

This fantasy novella first appeared in the March 1940 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


Cover art by Robert Fuqua.

A scientist, his adult daughter, and her boyfriend are in a cabin somewhere in a remote area. The gruesome discovery of a cat with its throat cut is the first hint that something weird is going on. The next odd happening is the disappearance of a gold watch.

We find out right away that a community of fairies, or whatever you want to call them, is located nearby. One of them went into the cabin to steal the watch as a sign of bravery, in order to win the hand of the woman he loves, and had to kill the cat to escape.


Illustrations uncredited. They might be by Robert Fuqua again.

A rival for the fairy woman's affection tries to outdo the other by stealing a pair of binoculars. He gets caught by the scientist, who wants to exploit the little people as a scientific curiosity. The two young people are more sympathetic to their plight. The rival acts as a traitor to his kind, helping the scientist capture others.


Happier times, before the big people trap them.

The fairy man who stole the watch undertakes the dangerous task of rescuing his people from their captor, as well as defeating the treacherous rival.

I may as well mention here that Eando Binder is a pseudonym, used by brothers Earl (deceased) and Otto Binder. They're best known for a series of stories about the robot Adam Link. My sources tell me that this story is the work of Otto alone. In any case, it's not a bad fairy tale, if not outstanding in any way. Animal lovers should be warned that the cat is not the only creature to fall victim to the diminutive hero.

Three stars.

The Psionic Mousetrap, by Murray Leinster

The March 1955 issue of Amazing Stories is the source for this Cold War thriller.


Cover art by Edward Valigursky.

Our hero parachutes into the Soviet Union on a suicide mission. His grim task is to kill a kidnapped scientist before he can reveal the secrets of powerful psionic technology to the Reds.


Illustration by Paul Orban.

Things go badly right from the start. The hero winds up in the hands of the enemy. They force him to complete the work of the captured scientist, which turns out to be their undoing.

I didn't get much out of this spy yarn. The plot depends on the fact that the Commies are too materialistic to believe in psionics, which was a little hard to swallow. The story's conclusion strains credulity as well. You'd expect something like this in a mediocre issue of Astounding, given the fact that psionics is pretty much just another word for magic.

Two stars.

No More Tomorrows, by David H. Keller, M.D.

Here's a Kelleryarn (as they used to call the works of this author) from the December 1932 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Leo Morey.

The narrator develops a substance that destroys the part of the brain that allows one to imagine the future. He plans to sell the secret of this stuff to a trio of Soviet agents for a ton of money.


Illustration by Leo Morey also.

He rather stupidly whips up a vial of the substance, as well as a vial of plain water, in order to brag about his plot to the woman he wants to marry. (He figures that being a multimillionaire will win her hand.) Predictably, she winds up switching the two vials, so the narrator is hoist by his own petard.

This story has an intriguing premise, but it isn't developed very well. As I've indicated, the switching of the two vials requires that the narrator act like a complete fool. (There doesn't seem to be any reason at all to have a vial of water around.) The three Soviet agents are bizarrely deformed, as the illustration indicates. I guess the author really hates Communism, but this makes the whole thing seem ridiculous.

Two stars.

Rocket to Gehenna, by Doris Piserchia

At last! A story that hasn't appeared anywhere else. It's the author's first publication, too. It's a comic tale in the form of a series of letters. (A work of epistolary fiction, for those of you with highfalutin vocabularies.)

It seems that Earth sends the bodies of the deceased to the supposedly uninhabited planet Gehenna. It turns out that the place is occupied by a caterpillar-like alien and a very naïve human boy. Since they have the power to transport anything from one place to another, they start sending bodies back to Earth. The boy also captures a woman, because he thinks he needs a wife, although he doesn't even know the basic anatomical facts of life.

This is all very silly stuff. It's obviously trying to be a wacky farce, but I didn't find it very amusing. Let's hope the author does better work in the future.

One star.

Did You Get Your Money's Worth?

The Zelazny story, all by itself, is worth the four bits you'll pay for the magazine. The rest of it goes downhill at a rapid pace. If you have half a buck to spare, you might want to give it a try.


That isn't exactly what I had in mind.

A copy of Rosel George Brown's new hit novel, Sibyl Sue Blue, is worth every penny! Buy one today!




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Book, Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 20, 1966] An Embarrassment of Riches (February Galactoscope #2)

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by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

On Saturday 29th January, Science Fiction and Fantasy fans in England were spoiled for choice in their viewing options.

Doctor Who: Destruction of Time
Doctor Who: Destruction of Time

On the BBC you could see the final part of Doctor Who's recent epic Dalek story. Later in the evening you could see the latest episode of US magical sitcom Bewitched.

Thunderbirds: Cry Wolf
Thunderbirds: Cry Wolf

Over on ATV London the evening stated with Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds, then there was aired the film version of Quatermass II and the evening ended with new horror anthology series Mystery and Imagination, adapting a J. Meade Falkner’s story The Lost Stradavarius.

Mystery and Imagination: The Lost Stradavarius
Mystery and Imagination: The Lost Stradavarius

When ABC Midlands also aired Mystery and Imagination, you could also see a golf themed adventure of The Avengers, along with a new episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

Lost in Space: The Oasis
Lost in Space: The Oasis

Due to the weird TV areas, I can also get a weak Anglia signal. In addition to the above, they started the evening with episodes of The Flintstones and Lost in Space.

Dracula Prince of Darkness - Plague of the Zombies
Poster for Hammer’s latest horror double bill

Whilst, on the radio, The Home Programme was continuing their serialisation of Neil M. Gunn’s novel Green Isle of the Great Deep and in the cinema, you could still see Hammer’s most recent double bill, Dracula: Prince of Darkness and Plague of the Zombies.

When at the end of the last decade we would be waiting months for a single science fiction episode of ITV playhouse, this is a big change for the SF fan.

What also came through to me on that weekend is John Carnell’s latest New Writings:

New Writings in SF 7

New Writings In SF7

Invader by James White

James White should need no introduction to most SF fans, but, though he was a regular contributor to New Worlds up to Carnell’s final issue, he has not had anything published in the new British magazine landscape.

Here he returns with the first Sector General tale since Star Surgeon came out in ’63. This one deals with an interesting problem, where one of their senior physicians, Mannen, may have killed a patient through careless action. Conway, however, is determined to investigate and prove his innocence.

Although there are almost a dozen other Sector General tales printed you can easily pick this one up straight away without foreknowledge and the medical mystery aspect of this story is handled well and kept me engaged for the whole length.

Four Stars

This is not his only return to the SF scene, he also has a new novel out (see below for my review of that).

The Man Who Missed the Ferry by Douglas R. Mason

Usually Mason publishes as John Rankine, but with another story under that name in this issue (see below), we are getting his first non-pseudonymously published story. Given that he has his first novel coming soon under the Mason name, it will be interesting to see which he becomes better known for.

On to the actual piece in this issue: it is a bit of a puzzling one. Arthur Sinclair is a shipping clerk who loses his memory and decides to take a walk across the river Mersey, literally walking across the water without a second thought. More details and powers of his emerge as the story goes on but things do not end up going entirely well.

The whole thing reads more like a description of someone’s dream than a science fiction tale. Too much that is unexplained and seems to happen for reasons that make neither narrative nor thematic sense.

Two Stars

The Night of the Seventh Finger by Robert Presslie

Returning after his confounding piece in the last anthology he does something a little more traditional here.

Sue Bradley travels from the boring Eastwood New Town to the city for an evening of entertainment. There she meets a mysterious man, who may be mad or from the future.

The topic is a bit of a cliched one but what I did appreciate is the focus on the boredom of teenagers in the new planned towns, an area that is very contemporary and unmined by SFF writers in Britain, who tend to either prefer city centres or isolated villages.

Three Stars

Six Cubed Plus One by John Rankine

At Goresville Comprehensive school they have setup a cube shaped annex to house an “automated section” for study groups to use. However, it is actually an experiment in creating a new form of life. As you would expect, things go wrong,

This feels more like a pitch document for an ATV children’s television serial than a modern piece of science fiction. Overall, I didn’t feel there was much to it and I had real trouble maintaining my interest to keep reading. Clearly Carnell likes Rankine\Mason, but I am yet to be convinced by his writings.

Two Stars

Coco-Talk by William F. Temple

Temple has been largely absent from the British magazines for a while, publishing pieces in America which often have a quite old-fashioned sensibility. This, on the other hand, feels like a bit more of a step forward.

It concerns the Minister of Cultural Exchange going to Venus as a spy on the Venusians. The problem is their tendency to speak in Coco-Talk, a form of shocking double-speak. The whole thing then goes into a form of interplanetary espionage which is, in itself, a quite interesting little escapade.

I do have questions about whether the choice of name is meant to evoke non-European cultures, and, if so, if we are meant to read the text as colonialist or an anticolonial satire. It seems to go so close to the line on this point that I struggle to determine intent.

Three stars

A Touch of Immortality by R. W. Mackelworth

In the future there has been developed a means to send bullets into the far future. This is to be used to grant immortality to President Strom. However, there is a method of physical immortality available, but who would want that?

A middling piece on the nature of immortality and largely forgettable.

Two stars

Manscarer by Keith Roberts

Did you really think we would get away from Mr. Roberts? No chance of that!

In this final novelette, a colony of artists have been building a series of giant sculptures, but when a death occurs the colonists begin to question their purpose.

I found this a real struggle to get through, the message had been done many times before and the treatment of women here was terrible.

If you want better treatment of the nature of art and artist I would instead recommend Leaf by Niggle by J. R. R. Tolkien in Tree and Leaf.

Two stars

So this was not an exceptional example of the series, with only one real standout and the rest merely being adequate to average. Carnell also continues to fail to branch out in his author selection. The results tend to be variable, but maybe it is worth taking the lead from If and reserving a few pages for newer writers. Carnell may be a steady hand at the helm but it would be great to see him venture out of his lagoon.

The Watch Below by James White
Cover by George Zeil

The Watch Below

Whilst next month the British hardback is coming out, Ballantine’s edition is already available in the US and I managed to acquire one early.

A few years ago James White was one of the most celebrated British SF authors and seemed to be going from strength to strength. With his Sector General tales being published in the US and Second Ending becoming a Hugo Finalist. But he had nothing new released last year and only Open Prison the year before.

Thankfully Carnell seems to have dragged him back to the SF field once again (White describes Carnell in the dedication as “Friend, Agent, Slave-driver”) with a most unusual take on familiar concepts.

In 1942 the tanker ship The Gulf Trader, sinks in a convoy after a torpedo attack, miraculously those on board find themselves in an air bubble on the ship and begin to work out how to survive down there in their new isolated home. Something they have to do for generations.

Meanwhile, the Uthans, an aquatic species, have left their now uninhabitable planet on giant starships, heading towards a distant world whose surface is mostly water, using freezing technology to keep their crew and passengers alive for the whole journey. However, it turns out multiple freezings and unfreezings causes brain damage. So the only solution is for a selection of the crew to stay unfrozen and have their descendants continue leading the voyage for them.

As you can tell, this is a tale of two accidental generation ships, one of air breathers trapped underwater, one of water breathers travelling through space. The stories, in fact, do not connect until the penultimate chapter so what we are left with is an interesting case of having the themes parallel each other without directly interacting for the most part. This is a trick I am familiar with from literary fiction, but not one I recall seeing in science fiction before.

In fact, I wonder if this is an attempt to keep up with the changing nature of science fiction. I would say I have seen three camps of SF fans: Pulp readers (who want adventure and splashy concepts), Hard SF fans (who want real science and problem stories) and New Wavers (who want experimentation and literary flourishes). This book seems to strive to have something for everyone. It has the bold ideas of an underwater home and an aquatic spaceship. White then also goes to pains to try to explain the science of these ridiculous concepts, having pages of the different crews explain how they will eat, breathe, reproduce, etc. But then adds a lot of literary techniques whilst also touching on areas often considered taboo by some SF writers, such as menstruation, death in childbirth, and orgies.

As you can probably tell this is an ambitious novel trying to do a lot of different things and please a wide audience. The big question is, of course, does White manage to pull it all off? Unfortunately, not entirely. His usual easy readability is lost as he attempts to establish his worlds and I found myself wanting to put down the book as he spends paragraphs discussing the necessary quantities of plant growth.

Even worse, although the decision to make the two crews not meet until the end of the novel is an interesting idea, it results in the ending seeming incredibly rushed, with White moving from a slow paced discussion to a frantic attempt to wrap up the story before he runs out of words.

I can’t help but feel this book too ambitious and in search of a larger page count. In the end I found myself admiring The Watch Below more than enjoying it.

Three Stars

The Lost Perception by Daniel F. Galouye

The Lost Perception

From a Northern Irish writer first published in the US, to an American writer being first published in the UK. However, as far as I know, there is no release date from The Lost Perception yet from Bantam. I am not sure why this is, but I am still glad to be able to get another book from one of the most interesting North American writers.

After his detour into the Philip K. Dick-esque Simulacron-3, he returns to another Post-Disaster tale, reminiscent in many ways of The Lords of Psychon.

As usual Galouye throws a lot at us. In 1983 those known as screamers begin to emerge, people have violent seizures they are not able to escape from. By the mid-90s it is an epidemic causing an almost societal collapse. Gregson, an agent for the Security Bureau (what remains of the former United Nations) is sent to look into the situation with the screamie epidemic.

This is only the start of what is happening. There has also been the appearance of an alien race known as The Valorian, who appear to be trying to infiltrate society. Further, the title of book itself refers to zylphing, a form of ESP that begins to become unlocked for humans.

The whole thing is a very fast paced thriller that throws around concepts and ideas as if they were rice at a wedding. I have read through it a few times now and I am still not sure I fully understand everything that was going on. There are layers of double crosses and conspiracies that made my head spin trying to keep up with all of them.

As such I feel explaining more of the plot is a fool’s errand. Also, with so much going on the characters felt very flat to me, merely serving to be moved around like pieces on a chess board. Helen in particular feels less like a person as a plot device to keep the story going. The attempts to make it feel more global also fall flat, with them talking about “a turbaned Oriental” and a “robed African”.

Two areas where it does shine are in the concepts and the pacing. The story does not let up for one page before you are moving on to the next bizarre occurrence or new piece of information. At the same time this post-disaster world felt very lived-in and believable that this kind of organisation would spring up in the face of such a threat.

So, whilst I was able to read it fast and feel it was an experience, I was often lost. It may be perceptive, but of what I remain unsure.

Three Stars

The Journey is once again up for a Best Fanzine Hugo nomination — and its founder is up for several other awards as well! If you've got a Worldcon membership, or if you just want to see what Gideon's done that's Hugo-worthy, please read his Hugo Eligibility article! Thank you for your continued support.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 6, 1966] Have Archaic and Beat It Too (February 1966 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Slog Through the Bog

Publisher Sol Cohen’s policy of filling his magazines with reprints from older issues continues and solidifies in the February Amazing.  All but two of the stories here are reprints (though some did not originate in Amazing).  The cover is a reprint too!  This vague and busy image titled Mizar in Ursa Major is from the back cover of Fantastic Adventures—Amazing’s companion fantasy magazine—for May 1946, by Frank R. Paul, long past his prime by then.


by Frank R. Paul

Other contents are limited to an editorial by Cohen that is so incoherent I won’t even try to recount his point, and another one-page letter column mostly praising Cohen’s “revitalization” of the magazine “in the old-time tradition” and rejection of the “obscure and often affected themes” of other magazines.  Also, somebody is looking for Jerry Siegel, creator of Superman, in order to make a movie of one of his old stories.

Onward to this mostly grim and laborious adventure.

Sunjammer, by Arthur C. Clarke


by Nodel

The issue opens with Arthur C. Clarke’s Sunjammer—a reprint from, of all places, Boys’ Life, the Boy Scouts magazine, in 1964.  It’s about a race to the Moon among vessels propelled by light pressure from the Sun on diaphanous sails hundreds of miles in area.  It’s not bad—Clarke doesn’t know how to be bad—but it reads a little too much like a lecture on practical astrophysics, and is much less lively than the last recent Clarke story I read, The Shining Ones, in the Judith Merril annual anthology.  Maybe Clarke thinks that writing for young people means he has to be more overtly educational than usual.  It’s reminiscent of his slightly pedantic Winston juvenile of the early ‘50s, Islands in the Sky.  Three stars.

[This is also what Mark Yon gave it when it came out last year in New Worlds (ed.)]

For Each Man Kills, by William F. Temple

After Clarke, things get overripe fast.  William F. Temple’s For Each Man Kills is from the March 1950 Amazing, right after editor Ray Palmer’s regime of “gimme bang-bang” ended.  Suddenly under new editor Howard Browne there was a sprinkling of more respectable bylines among the house pseudonyms, among them Kris Neville, Ward Moore, Fritz Leiber, and Temple—unfortunately, not bringing much improvement, at least in this case.

In For Each Man Kills, protagonist Russ is waiting for his inamorata Ellen Carr to finish dressing, in a room full of pictures of her.  Looking at a portrait, he thinks: “Da Vinci himself couldn’t have put all of Ellen on canvas.” There are a lot of photos, too, but “He realized at once that no photo could ever remotely compensate for her physical absence.” At this point I was tempted to burst into song: “It would take, I know/A Michaelangelo/ . . .to try and paint a portrait of my love.” But I resisted, and carried on.  Just as well, it’s a doozy.

This one-remove ogling is taking place in Pinetown, a town probably in the US, surrounded by desert, and further isolated by an impassable radioactive zone after a nuclear war.  (Pinetown?  Surrounded by desert?  Never mind, move on.) Russ is the Mayor’s right-hand man in trying to rebuild after the war’s destruction.  He asks Ellen to marry him.  But she turns him down.  She’s been swotting atomic theory and her application has just been granted to go work on the radiation-leaking atomic pile outside town.  A side effect of radiation exposure is that women turn into men.  He sees her home, beating up a guy who tries to molest her along the way.


by Leo Summers

The guy shows up next day and shoots at Russ, killing the Mayor instead.  Now Russ is the Mayor, working 18-hour days to restore Pinetown to something like its pre-war condition.  At the atomic pile, there’s no Ellen Carr any more, just a young Alan Carr; Ellen has changed sex, as feared.  Russ’s eye then falls on Maureen, 18, “petite, dainty, uncomplicated.” Before long they are engaged.  But then—Maureen turns up with leukemia.  And who knows the most about how to deal with it?  The young man from the pile, Alan Carr, who treats her with radioactive phosphorus.  Before long, Maureen is getting better, but asks Russ to break the engagement.  She’s in love with Alan Carr.  “The two girls he wanted to marry ended up marrying each other!”

Russ goes home and gets drunk for a week, and comes back to hear that the pile is almost out of fuel.  But there’s an unexploded atomic rocket in the radioactive belt around Pinetown.  Russ dispatches the most knowledgeable person, Alan Carr, to retrieve it so they can exploit it for fuel and keep Maureen in radioactive phosphorus.  But the rocket blows up, killing Alan, and Maureen is on her deathbed.  She tells Russ that Alan had told her to forget him and devote herself to Russ, then she dies.  Meanwhile, Russ has been given a letter, which proves to be from Alan, confessing to being a narcissistic personality and explaining his (her) conduct before and after the sex change.  There’s a buzz in the sky and an airplane appears; Pinetown’s isolation is over.  “Life was beginning for Pinetown.  It had ended for its Mayor.”

At this point the story’s provenance becomes clear.  Temple thought that he had spotted a marketing niche, and tried to sell US radio, and what there was of TV, on something new—a post-atomic soap opera!  And he wrote this story to salvage something from his labors when they laughed him out of their offices.  Two stars, barely, and an overwrought sigh, organ music swelling in the background.

The Runaway Skyscraper, by Murray Leinster

The Runaway Skyscraper is Murray Leinster’s first known SF publication and appeared in the February 22, 1919, issue of Argosy and Railroad Man’s Magazine, as that famous old publication was known for five months or so.  Here it is attributed to the third issue of Amazing, June 1926, where it was first reprinted.  It’s actually a bit of a revelation after the longueurs of Leinster’s recent serial Killer Ship.  A New York office building containing 2000 people suddenly begins racing into the past, with day and night flickering and clocks and watches running backwards (but not the characters’ alimentary processes or their chonological aging.  Go figure.).  The building fetches up in the Manhattan wilderness of thousands of years ago.


by Small

What to do?  Protagonist Arthur Chamberlain, along with the other sound go-getters among the menfolk, and assisted by his secretary the attractive Miss Woodward, calm the crowd, address the immediate problem of feeding 2,000 people (fortuitously assisted by passenger pigeons fatally colliding with the building’s windows) and setting up comfortable separate quarters for the women (men?  They can sleep on the floor somewhere).  It’s like The Swiss Family Robinson—never any serious danger, solutions present themselves almost as soon as problems appear.  This is all interspersed with the charmingly clumsy romance of Arthur and Miss Woodward, who are married by the end.  Overall, it’s quite a well executed piece of light entertainment—not surprising, since by this time Leinster had already published several dozen stories in magazines with titles like Snappy Stories, Saucy Stories, and Breezy Stories.

But (of course there’s a but).  The skyscraper alights right across the not-yet-existent Herald Square from an Indian village, complete with “brown-skinned Indians, utterly petrified with astonishment”; when the Office People approach, the Indians flee in terror, abandoning their homes and belongings.  They reappear in the story a couple of weeks later, and now they are working for the white folks, providing food mostly in return for trinkets, including a broken-down typewriter, which the “savages” cart away “triumphally.” Born to be simple, apparently.


by Frank R. Paul

It gets worse.  After the building has returned to its proper time through Arthur’s scheme of pumping a soap solution into the foundation, it transpires that one tenant, “a certain Isidore Eckstein, a dealer in jewelry novelties,” made some side deals with the Indians, trading necklaces, rings, and a dollar for title to Manhattan Island, and has now sued all landholders in Manhattan demanding rent from them. 

This is a bit malodorous even for 1919 and takes the shine off an otherwise accomplished piece of froth.  Two stars, tolerantly.

The Malignant Entity, by Otis Adelbert Kline


by Leo Morey

The Malignant Entity by Otis Adelbert Kline originated in Weird Tales for May-July 1924, but later appeared in Amazing for June 1926, and again in Amazing Stories Quarterly for Fall 1934.  It is surprisingly good for most of its length—surprisingly since Kline is best known for his knockoffs of Edgar Rice Burroughs, with titles like The Swordsman of Mars.  It’s quite formulaic: Scientist is found shockingly dead in his lab (a skeleton, fully dressed); narrator Evans is conversing with his friend Dr. Dorp when the police ask the doctor to come check out the deceased Professor Townsend, and Evans tags along.  The late Prof had been working on the generation of life from dead matter, and it appears he has succeeded too well; the investigation is all too successful, and they are confronted with the eponymous Entity.  The story is done primarily in dialogue, with the characters all explaining things to each other, but Kline has a knack for brisk banter with few words wasted, so it moves along nicely.  Unfortunately it goes on long enough to overstay its welcome, and gets a bit ridiculous towards the end, sliding down to two stars.

It Will Grow On You

Two of this issue’s stories focus on growth of one sort or another, both sorts to be avoided by the prudent.

The Man from the Atom, by G. Peyton Wertenbaker

G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s The Man from the Atom is credited to the first, April 1926, issue of Amazing, but originated in the August 1923 Science and Invention.  That was another of Hugo Gernsback’s magazines, started in 1913 as Electrical Experimenter, changing to Science and Invention in 1923 and continuing to 1931.  It published occasional fiction early on, and by 1920 was running one or two stories in each issue.  The August 1923 issue, with six stories including Wertenbaker’s, was labelled the “Scientific Fiction Number,” and could be seen as a dry run for Amazing.


by Howard V. Brown

Wertenbaker was one of the early Amazing’s most capable writers; see The Chamber of Life, reprinted during the Cele Lalli regime.  Unfortunately, The Man from the Atom is among his juvenilia; he would have been 16 when it was published.  It shows.  The story is badly overwritten.  The opening lines: “I am a lost soul, and I am homesick.  Yes, homesick!  Yet how vain is homesickness when one is without a home!” The plot is canonical for its time.  The narrator’s friend, Professor Martyn, invites him over to try out his new invention, which can shrink or enlarge a person with the push of a button.  Shrinkage is possible because “an object may be divided in half forever, as you have learned in high school, without being entirely exhausted.” (They never taught me that in high school.  What else are they hiding from me?) Growth is accomplished by extracting atoms from the air, which the machine “converts, by a reverse method from the first,” into atoms suitable for supplementing the various substances of the body. 

So the narrator dons what amounts to a space suit, pushes the expansion button, and off he goes, as the Professor hastily drives off to avoid the expansion of the narrator’s feet.  As he expands into space, and Earth shrinks to a relative diameter of a few feet, whoops!  “My feet slipped off, suddenly, and I was lying absolutely motionless, powerless to move, in space!” Also, so much for the Western Hemisphere, though the author doesn’t mention that.  Only after further observation of the wonders of the shrinking heavens, and finding himself on a planet and realizing his world is likely an atom of this one, does he try to go back, retracing his . . . well, not exactly steps . . . but the Sun is not there!  He realizes that his growth in size brought an acceleration of time, and home is trillions of centuries in the past.  So he fetches up on an available planet.  “I live here on sufferance, as an ignorant African might have lived in an incomprehensible, to him, London.  A strange creature, to play with and to be played with by children.  A clown . . . a savage!”


by Frank R. Paul

Of course all this makes very little sense even in its own terms.  For example, expansion is supposedly made possible by converting atoms from the air, but how did the narrator grow beyond the size of the known cosmos with only the atoms in his airtight suit and the small tank of compressed air attached to it?  One could go on, but why bother?  This relic should have stayed buried.  One star.

Moss Island, by Carl Jacobi

Another kind of growth appears in Moss Island, by Carl Jacobi, from the Winter 1932 Amazing Stories Quarterly, but revised from something called The Quest, May 1930.  Jacobi was an all-around pulpster through the 1930s and into the ‘40s, but settled into the SF/F/weird magazines by the mid-‘40s, and seems to have mostly hung it up late in the ‘50s.  Protagonist goes to do some geological surveying on the island, which is off New Brunswick and inhabited only by trees and other vegetation, Chiseling away, he finds a pocket of mucilaginous (author’s word!) brown stuff, and recognizes it as Muscivol, a substance identified by Professor Monroe at his college (another Professor!  Anyone who’s read this far should realize that they always mean trouble).  Muscivol contains “all the elements of growth”—a lot of growth.  So protagonist fills up his Thermos bottle with the stuff. 


by Leo Morey

Pressing into the forested interior, he finds a lot of moss and drips a little Muscivol on it.  The moss leaps upward so fast that he trips and spills the Thermos contents.  “A great shudder ran through the moss.  A sobbing sigh came from its grasses.  And then with a roar, the rootlets gouged down into the ground, tore at the soil, and the plant with a mighty hiss raced upward, five feet, ten feet.  The tendrils swelled as though filled with pressure, became fat, purulent, octopus folds.  Like the undulations of some titanic marine plant the white coils waved and lashed the air.  Up they lunged, the growth rate multiplied ten thousand times.”

Protagonist runs like hell, with the moss, expanding like the Man from the Atom, hot on his heels.  Fortunately he is able to get down a cliff where his hired boatman is waiting for him, and escapes.  The boatman can’t see the giant wall of moss through the fog that has rolled in, so, as usual in stories of this period, the horror is neatly contained.  It’s less ridiculous than Wertenbaker’s story, but still formulaic, and undistinguished in execution.  Two stars.

The Plutonian Drug, by Clark Ashton Smith

Next, Clark Ashton Smith!  A legendary figure in the 1930s Weird Tales pantheon, with H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.  However, The Plutonian Drug—from the September 1934 Amazing, Smith’s only story in the magazine—is much more pedestrian than either Smith’s usual extravagant titles (The City of the Singing Flame and the like) or his usual florid style.  Balcoth the sculptor is talking with his friend Dr. Manners (not a Professor, but just as dangerous), who discourses at length on interplanetary drugs. He offers Balcoth some plutonium, a drug from Pluto, which he promptly scarfs down, after being assured it will wear off quickly and will not affect his next appointment.  (This is obviously not the plutonium that we have learned to know and love; element 94 was not isolated and named until late 1940 or early 1941.) What this plutonium does is lay out the events of one’s past and future in an array in the mind’s eye, past on the left, future on the right.  For Balcoth, the right-hand range is very short for no apparent reason, and when he leaves and the reason is revealed, it is neither surprising nor interesting.  This story is less obscure than most others in this issue; I was mildly bored by it for the first time in 1958, in the Berkley paperback of August Derleth’s anthology The Outer Reaches.  Two stars, barely.

In with the New

Now to the stories that are original with this issue.

Pressure, by Arthur Porges

Arthur Porges’s Pressure is another Ensign De Ruyter exercise in Fun with Fifth-Grade Science, in which the Ensign figures out how to solve the characters’ problem by harnessing the weight of a large quantity of mercury.  One star as usual.

Mute Milton, by Harry Harrison

Harry Harrison’s Mute Milton is an SF story about Jim Crow, very simple and not the least bit subtle. A professor—this time, the good kind—at one of the South’s Negro colleges is on his way home by bus, carrying a rather important invention, and has a glancing encounter with the police and the racial attitudes that he has been navigating all his life.  He meets another Negro who has aroused even more official ire, and gets fatally in the way when the police catch up to them.  The invention gets stepped on.  It’s a crude and brutal story about a crude and brutal reality that SF writers generally acknowledge only at arms-length and metaphorically.  The only actual reference to contemporary events is to the Freedom Riders, whose activities began and ended in 1961.  I’ll bet this story was written then or shortly after, rejected all around, and has only found a publisher now that there’s a new regime at Amazing.  Good for them, for a change.  Four stars.

Summing Up

Some of the old stuff is well worth reading.  This isn’t it.  The older reprinted stories are variously stale, cliched, boring, bigoted, and/or nonsensical to one degree or another.  You can find something good to say about some of them (how I struggled), but they’re still mostly a waste of time.  The best things in the issue are the new story by Harry Harrison and the almost new one by Arthur C. Clarke.  If Amazing’s reprint policy were an experiment, at this point I would call it a failure.  Unfortunately it doesn’t look like an experiment.  The next issue—April 1966, the 40th anniversary issue—will be nothing but reprints.

[We only give you the plum assignments, John! Or perhaps this is a prune… (ed.)]




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[June 12, 1965] The Number of the Bests

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by John Boston

The Collectors

SF anthologies are not neutral vessels.  They are shaped by editors with agendas.  Sometimes these are as simple as “what can I throw together to make some money,” but usually they advance the editor’s conception of what the field is, or should be. 

The first “best of the year” compilation in SF was the well-received The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949, edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T.E. Dikty, published by Frederick Fell in 1949 but containing stories from 1948.  The Bleiler-Dikty anthologies spawned a companion series, TheYear’s Best Science Fiction Novels (i.e., novellas), which ran from 1952 through 1954.  Bleiler left the project in 1955, to the detriment of its quality, and the series died with a final single volume from Advent, a small specialty publisher, in 1958.


by Frank McCarthy

There was abortive competition along the way.  Donald A. Wollheim of Ace Books, a long-time anthologist, published Prize Science Fiction (McBride, 1953), containing 1952 stories supposedly comprising the winners and runners-up for that year’s Jules Verne Prize, an award and a book title that were not heard of again.  The next year August Derleth, another veteran anthologist, published Portals of Tomorrow (Rinehart, 1954), collecting stories from 1953 and pointedly subtitled The Best of Science Fiction and Other Fantasy.  The editor described it as “covering the entire genre of the fantastic: not only supernatural and science-fiction tales, but also every kind of whimsy and imaginative concept of life in the future or on other planets,” apparently distinguishing it from the Bleiler-Dikty series without mentioning it.  There was no second volume.

But Judith Merril achieved ignition, and kept it.  Her series of annual anthologies shows no signs of flagging after nine years.  The first, SF: The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, appeared in 1956, with 1955 stories, from the SF specialty publisher Gnome Press, in an unusual publishing arrangement: a Dell paperback edition appeared in newsstands, drugstores, etc., more or less simultaneously with the publication of the Gnome hardcover, rather than after the usual year or so interval before paperback publication.  After four volumes, as Gnome tottered towards oblivion, Merril jumped to Simon and Schuster, which published the fifth through ninth books.  We await the tenth, slated for December.


by Ed Emshwiller

Merril’s angle from the first was good SF as good literature, accessible to the non-fanatical reader, with emphasis on character—not necessarily character-driven, but more concerned with the perspective and experience of recognizable human individuals than much SF.  Her taste in cherry-picking the SF magazines was near-impeccable.  She also looked beyond the SF magazines and the writers identified with them.

The latter practice has been both a strength and a weakness, bringing to the SF-reading public many worthy stories that they otherwise would never have heard of, but also including some items that seemed trivial or misplaced but came from a prestigious source or with a prestigious byline.  As a result, the Merril series has become woolier and more diffuse in focus over the years.  Her last volume included stories from Playboy (two), the Saturday Evening Post, the Saturday Review of Literature, the Peninsula Spectator, The Reporter, and the Atlantic Monthly, and such large literary bylines as Bernard Malamud and Andre Maurois, the latter with a novelette that may have been the best of 1930, when it was first published.  Oh, and three cartoons.  Of course it also included, as always, a large and solid selection of indisputable SF and fantasy, both from the genre magazines and from other sources.

Merril’s agenda is clear.  Let her tell you about it.  In her introduction to the last of the Gnome volumes, she wrote:

“The name of this book is SF.
“SF is an abbreviation for Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy).  Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy) is really an abbreviation too.  Here are some of the things it stands for. . . .
“S is for Science, Space, Satellites, Starships, and Solar exploring; also for Semantics and Sociology, Satire, Spoofing, Suspense, and good old Serendipity. . . .
“F is for Fantasy, Fiction and Fable, Folklore, Fairy-tale and Farce; also for Fission and Fusion; for Firmament, Fireball, Future and Forecast; for Fate and Free-will; Figuring, Fact-seeking, and Fancy-free.
“Mix well.  The result is SF, or Speculative Fun.”

English translation, if you need one: What she thinks the SF field is, or should be is . . . not really a field.  That is, not categorically distinguishable in any clear-cut way from the general body of literature, though having a somewhat different set of preoccupations than the typical contemporary novel or short story.

You can debate her argument, but I’m not inclined to.  I think if Merril did not exist it would be necessary to invent her, or someone similar, to help rescue the field (that word again!) from excessive insularity.  I am also glad to have her book to read each year, exasperating as some of its contents may be. 

Yin and Yang

But not everyone feels that way, and it is not surprising that there is once again some competition.  Donald Wollheim is back for a second try, with co-editor Terry Carr, a long-time SF fan and shorter-time author now working at Ace Books, with that publisher’s World’s Best Science Fiction: 1965, a chunky original paperback with a distinct “back to basics” air about it, though there’s no comment at all about Merril’s book and nothing that can be read as a disguised dig at it.

So what’s the more overt angle, besides “here are some stories we think are good”?  First, the title does not include “Fantasy,” a word which for Merril covers a multitude of exogamies.  And the “World’s Best” in the title is not ceremonial; the editors make much of having scoured the world, and not just the US, for stories.  The back cover says “Selected from the pages of every magazine regularly publishing science-fiction and fantasy stories in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and the rest of the world. . . .” The yield: five non-US stories, of seventeen in the book.  Two of these are from the British New Worlds, which is not exactly news, but the others are from less familiar sources, though they are closer to the Anglo-American genre core than some of Merril’s catches.

First of these three is Vampires Ltd., by Josef Nesvadba, a Czech psychiatrist and well-known SF writer, the title story of his recent collection, about the current preoccupation with fast automobiles; the protagonist accidentally gets his hands on an especially fine one, and per the title, finds out that it doesn’t really run on gasoline.  We reach that denouement by way of a surreal and hectic series of events which makes little pretense to plausibility.  But that is beside the author’s point, which is satire.  It’s an interesting look at a different notion of storytelling than you will find in the US SF magazines.  The Weather in the Underground, by Colin Free, best known for his work for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, from the Australian magazine Squire, is more consistent with US conventions.  It takes place in an underground habitat where part of humanity has fled for safety, leaving the rest to freeze in a new ice age.  This life is made tolerable by constantly renewed psychological conditioning, but our protagonist’s conditioning never quite took hold, so he’s miserable and maladjusted, leading to banishment and a sorry end.  It’s a strikingly vehement story, very tightly written and forceful, and one of the best in the book.

The third non-US/UK offering is What Happened to Sergeant Masuro?, by Harry Mulisch, from The Busy Bee Review: New Writing from the Netherlands.  Mulisch is apparently a notable Dutch literary figure, with eight books published.  Sergeant Masuro was a soldier in a Dutch patrol in Papua New Guinea; one of the other soldiers raped a native girl, or tried to; the headman was later seen skulking around; and Sergeant Masuro began to undergo a terrible transformation.  The story is the report to headquarters by the patrol’s superior officer, who recounts both the events and his own anguish at some length.  Amusingly, the plot—white men go into the jungle, transgress against the natives, and are cursed—is a long-familiar pulp plot of which dozens of examples could no doubt be exhumed from Weird Tales, Jungle Stories, and the like.  The literary gloss doesn’t add much to it.

Aside from these foreign trophies, the book is a stiff gust of de gustibus.  Of the five stories which one of us at Galactic Journey thought worthy of five stars (excluding several outright fantasies from Fantastic), none are included.  Nor are any included from our longer end-of-the-year Galactic Stars list.  Of the stories that are in the book, only two were awarded four stars, and one—Leiber’s When the Change-Winds Blow—fled the wrath of Gideon with only one star.

And much of what is here is remarkably pedestrian or worse.  The editors seem determined to reproduce the genre’s weaknesses as well as its strengths.  Starting the book is Tom Purdom’s Greenplace, which features such lively matters as a psychedelic drug and a man in a wheelchair being beaten by a mob, but is essentially an extremely contrived and implausible warning about a genuine problem: how democracy can survive, or not, as psychological manipulation becomes more sophisticated.  Next, and proceeding downhill, Ben Bova and Myron R. Lewis’s Men of Good Will is an equally implausible, but more trivial, story built around a scientific gimmick that’s not even entirely original (remember Jerome Bixby’s The Holes Around Mars?). 

This is followed by Bill for Delivery, by that faithful purveyor of contrived yard goods Christopher Anvil, about the problems some salt-of-the-earth spacemen have carrying a cargo of unruly and dangerous birds from one star system to another.  At this point, a reader who bought the book thinking it was time to check out this “science fiction” stuff people are talking about would probably start to think “How can anybody possibly be interested in this?” and toss it or leave it on the bus.

There’s more of this ilk later on: C.C. MacApp’s weak and gimmicky For Every Action, and Robert Lory’s The Star Party, an annoyingly slick rendition of an original but silly idea.  And Leiber’s When the Change-Winds Blow answers the question that hardly anyone is asking: “What does a talented author do when he can’t think of anything of substance to write?”

But that’s the bad news.  The good news is a number of worthwhile stories.  Four Brands of Impossible by new writer Norman Kagan is at once an amusing picture of aspiring math and science brains in their element, and a chilling one of the uses to which their talents may be put, wrapped around an interesting mathematical idea.  William F. Temple’s A Niche in Time is a smart time travel story that goes off in an unexpected direction.  John Brunner’s The Last Lonely Man (one of the New Worlds items) develops a clever piece of psychological technology in the author’s earnest and methodical way.  Edward Jesby, another new writer, contributes the stylish and incisive Sea Wrack, which starts out as a tale of the idle and decadent rich in a far future where some humans have been modified to live undersea, and and turns into a story of class struggle, no less. 

Philip K. Dick’s Oh, To Be a Blobel! is a sort of slapstick black comedy updating Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.  Thomas M. Disch’s Now Is Forever is a sharp if overlong piece of sociologizing about the effects of wide availability of matter duplicators, which kick the props from under everyone’s getting-and-spending way of life.  New writer Jack B. Lawson’s The Competitors is a breezy rearrangement of stock SF elements that reads to me like a facile parody of the genre, probably done with A.E. van Vogt in mind.

To my taste the most striking item here is Edward Mackin’s New Worlds story The Unremembered, a sort of religious fantasy framed in SF terms.  In the automated and urbanized future, lives have been extended for hundreds of years, but the show seems to be closing from sheer ennui: the birth rate is falling and the youth suicide rate is rising, and older people are queueing up at the euthanasia clinics.  Apparitions of people are appearing and disappearing seemingly randomly, because (it is hinted) the human span has become divorced from its natural length.  The elderly protagonist becomes one of the apparitions, and his consciousness takes a Stapledonian journey through the cosmos before arriving at the final revelation.  C.S. Lewis would appreciate this one if he were still around.  It is quite different from anything I’ve seen from Mackin before, or from anybody else for that matter.

But that’s the only really strikingly memorable story here; closest runners-up are the Colin Free and Edward Jesby stories, based mainly on their intensity in presenting relatively familiar sorts of material.  The writers who are pushing the SF envelope in notable ways are not here—no Lafferty, no Zelazny, no Ellison, no Cordwainer Smith.  And there is too much overt dross.

So, the bottom line: a pretty decent book with much solid material, but it mostly fails the “Surprise me!” test.  Maybe the next one will be more startling.  Meanwhile, Merril will be back to argue with in a few more months.

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




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Magazine, Serial

[February 28, 1965] Tragedy and Triumph (March 1965 Analog)

7 Comments


by Gideon Marcus

Casualty of War

Malcolm X was shot on my birthday.

While I was celebrating with friends on February 21, 1965, enjoying cake and camaraderie at a small Los Angeles fan convention, Malcolm X, one of the highest profile fighters for civil rights in America, was gunned down.  At a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), a group X founded, three shooters attacked the 39-year-old father of four (soon to be five), wounding him sixteen times.  He did not survive the trip to the hospital.

Two of the assailants were captured, but their motive is still unclear.  All fingers point to the Black Muslims, however.  After his disillusionment with and fraught departure from the group, X had cause to worry that they intended to rub out a man they thought of as a traitor.  Indeed, X had received a number of death threats prior to the OAAU meeting. 

Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Black Muslims, had to arrive at a rally at New York's Coliseum on February 26 flanked by police protection.  Addressing the large audience, he made clear that he'd come to savage X, not to praise or bury him. 

Malcolm X was a controversial figure.  Whereas Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent methods have earned him almost universal admiration from America (those who fight the old order, anyway), X was a militant Afro-American.  It was only recently that his attitude toward Whites began to soften, the result of a pilgrimage to Mecca, which he shared with many light-skinned Muslims.  Nevertheless, there is no question that the war for civil rights has claimed one of its most important generals. 

As Black Americans prepare for a freedom march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, the cynic in me wonders who will be next.

Cheering News

In recent months, that kind of a downer headline would segue easily, if dishearteningly, into a piece on how the latest Analog was a disappointment.  Thankfully, the magazine is on an upswing, and the March 1965 Analog, last of the "bedsheet" sized isues, is one of the best in a long while.


by John Schoenherr

The Twenty Lost Years of Solid-State Physics, by Theodore L. Thomas

Theodore L. Thomas takes a break from his rather lousy F&SF science vignettes to talk about the patenting of the first transistor.  Apparently, a fellow named Lilienfeld worked out the theory long before Shockley et. al., filing a patent as early as 1930!  Yet, Lilienfeld never tried to build the thing, and the invention had no effect on the world save for complicating the filing of later patents by others.  Sad, to be sure, although Lilienfeld had a prolific career otherwise, and I'm given to understand that materials technology was not sufficiently advanced to make the device back then anyway.

Still, it makes you wonder what other inventions lie buried at the patent office, lacking a vital something to bring them into common use.

Four stars.

The Case of the Paradoxical Invention, by Richard P. McKenna

Speaking of inventions that haven't found their era, McKenna offers up a motor powered by the stream of radioactive particles from a decaying source.  The problem is, it appears to be both physically possible and impossible simultaneously.

The math is over my head, and probably over the head of most of Analog's readers, too.

Two stars.

The Iceman Goeth, by J. T. McIntosh


by Leo Summers

Andrew Coe is an iceman.  Years ago, he had his emotions wiped clean, both punishment and societal protection, for Coe had murdered an ex-lover for unfaithfulness.  Now he makes a living with a clairvoyant and telepathy act — except it's no act.  He's the real deal. 

It appears nothing will change the colorless unending cycle of work and sleep, but outside Coe's harshly circumscribed life, the city he resides in is slowly going mad.  Psychotic breaks followed by motive-less murders and suicides have been steadily on the rise.  The police are at wits end as to their cause until a scientists pinpoints their origin to an unexploded dementia bomb, dropped in a war 50 years before. 

To find the thing, Coe will have to have to use his full mental powers, only accessible if he gets back his emotions.

There is a five star story here, one where the drama resides in the decision to restore Coe to his former self.  Coe is a killer; is it worth it unleash one madman on the world to stop a hundred?

The problem is, that's not how McIntosh plays it.  Instead, Coe simply finds the bomb, receives a pardon, gets a new girl, and everyone lives happily ever after.  No mention is made of his past crimes.  We never learn about the woman he killed.  If anything, McIntosh almost seems to excuse Coe's act as forgivable given the circumstances.

Deeply dissatisfying, but God, what potential.  Three stars.

(Have we seen this concept of the iceman before?  It seems awfully familiar.)

Balanced Ecology, by James H. Schmitz


by Dean West

The McIntosh is followed by a tale as delightful as the prior story was disappointing.  On the planet Wrake, the ecosystem is uniquely interdependent.  Among the groves of diamondwood trees reside the skulking slurps, whose primary prey are the ambulatory tumbleweeds, whose seeds are tilled by the subterranean and invisible "clean-up squad".  Other denizens are the monkey-like humbugs, with an annoying tendency to mockingbird human expressions, and the giant tortoise-like mossbacks, who sleep for years at a time in the center of the forests.

Ilf and Auris Cholm are pre-teen owners of one of these woods, heir to a modest fortune thanks to their well-moderated timbering operation.  When greedy off-worlders want to effect a hostile takeover for a clearcutting scheme, do a pair of kids stand a chance?  Not without a little help, as it turns out…

I really really liked this story, almost an ecological fable.  The only bumpy spot, I felt, was the part where the villain revealed his evil scheme in a bit too much of a stereotypical, if metaphorical, cackle.

Four stars.

The Wrong House, by Max Gunther


by Adolph Brotman

Out in the suburbs, they're building giant subdivisions with rows of handsome houses on gently curving lanes.  Many find them charming, but others find them unsettling — like the young woman who confesses (in The Wrong House) to her engineer husband that her home seems somehow "unfriendly."  To his credit, the man takes his spouse seriously and determines to understand why the air duct pipe is warm instead of cool, and just what all those strange electronics installed in their attic might be…

Another good story, maybe a little too pat, but well executed.  Four stars.

The Prophet of Dune (Part 3 of 5), by Frank Herbert


by John Schoenherr

Now we come to the centerpiece of the issue, the sweeping serial scheduled across the first five months of 1965.  In this latest installment, Paul Atreides and his mother, the Bene Gesserit Lady Jessica, fulfill prophecy and become spiritual leaders of the Fremen, the indigenes of the desert planet Arrakis.  Meanwhile, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, usurper of the Atreides fiefdom on Arrakis, schemes to parlay his control of the geriatric spice melange into rulership of the entire galactic Empire.

There were times when the immense scope and obvious attention to detail threatened to elevate Dune into four star, even classic territory.  And then Frank Herbert's fat fingers got in their own way and gave us such classic passages as this:

Paul heard hushed voices come down the line: "It's true then–Liet is dead."
Liet, Paul thought.  Then: Chani, daughter of Liet.  The pieces fell together in his mind.  Liet was the Fremen name of the Planetologist, Kynes.

Paul looked at Farok, asked: "Is it the Liet known as Kynes?"

"There is only one Liet," Farok said.

Paul turned, stared at the robed back of a Fremen in front of him.  Then Liet-Kynes is dead, he thought.

I guess Kynes is dead.  He's also called Liet.  I thought.

How about this one:

"This" — [Baron Harkonnen] gestured at the evidence of the struggle in the bed-chamber–"was foolishness.  I do not reward foolishness."

Get to the point, you old fool! Feyd-Ruatha thought.

"You think of me as an old fool," the Baron said.  "I must dissuade you of that."

Fool me thrice, shame on Herbert.  The third-person omniscient/everywhere/everyone vantage is clumsy; a better writer could go without such exposition and switching of viewpoints, instead saving it, perhaps, for the times when Paul goes into one of his prescient fugues.

But I do want to keep reading, if for nothing else than to know what happens.

Three stars.

Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann

For some reason, Analog's editor, John W. Campbell Jr., decided to include a set of homilies from the inside of Old Saint Paul's Church in Baltimore, dated 1692.  At first, my atheistic side bridled, but I ultimately found the platitudes refreshing and timeless.

No stars for this entry, for it's not really a tale nor an article.

The Legend of Ernie Deacon, by William F. Temple


by Dean West

Last up, we follow the exploits of Arthur, captain of a two-place merchant ship plying the lanes between Earth and Alpha Centauri.  It's a twelve year trip, reduced to a subjective 18 months thanks to time dilation.  It's still a long time, but Art finds it lucrative and satisfying, trading full-sense movies called "Teo's" for the life-saving medicine, varos.  Legend is a philosophical piece, discussing the morality of preferring a vicarious life to a "real" one (and of facilitating the addiction thereto), and also evaluating the reality of fictional creations whose existence comes to shadow that of their creators (e.g. Holmes over Doyle).

Good, thoughtful stuff, with an ending that can be viewed as mystical or simply sentimental.

Four stars.

Summing Up

The counter to tragedy is hope, and the latest Analog gives me a lot of hope — that the magazine that ushered in the Golden Age of science fiction will rise to former glory (some may argue that the magazine never fell; it has maintained the highest SF circulation rates for decades.) In fact, Analog is the month's highest-rated mag, at 3.3 stars, for the first time in years.

Fantastic followed closely at 3.2; all the rest of the mags were under water:

Amazing and New Worlds both merited 2.9 stars (but the former made John Boston smile, so that's something).  Science-Fantasy scored a sad 2.6.  Fantasy and Science Fiction was a lousy 2.3.  IF, at 2 stars, was so bad that I'm not sorry to stop reviewing it; that harsh task now falls on the shoulders of one David Levinson, whom we shall meet next month.

And February does end with one more bit of tragedy: out of 45 fictional pieces published in magazines this month, only one was written by a woman.

Here's hoping March offers better news on that front, and others.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 25, 1964] Combat Zones (September 1964 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Wars Near and Far

The involvement of the United States in the conflict in Vietnam reached a turning point this month, with the signing of a joint resolution of Congress by President Lyndon Baines Johnson on August 10.


Doesn't look like much, for a piece of paper sending the nation into an undeclared war.

In response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 2, when three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the United States destroyer Maddox, the resolution grants broad powers to the President to use military force in the region. All members of Congress except Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska, and Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., of New York voted for the resolution. (Morse and Gruening voted against it, while Powell only voted present during roll call. Perhaps that was a wise move on his part.)

The name of the Navy vessel involved in the battle reminds me of the tragic domestic conflict in the USA over racial segregation. That's because restaurant owner and unsuccessful political candidate Lester Maddox shut down his Pickrick diner rather than obey a judicial order to integrate it. Let's hope this is the last we ever hear from this fellow.


This is a recently released recording of a news conference he gave in July defending his refusal to serve black customers. Please don't buy it.

The Battle of the Bands

With all that going on, it's a relief to turn to less violent forms of combat. After withdrawing from the top of the American popular music charts for a couple of months, the Beatles launched an all-out assault with the release of their first feature film, an amusing romp called A Hard Day's Night.


Wilfrid Brambell is very funny in the role of Paul's grandfather.

Of course, the title song shot up to Number One.


I should have known better than to think we'd seen the last of these guys.

Not to be outdone, crooner Dean Martin, no fan of rock 'n' roll, drove back the British invaders with a new version of the 1947 ballad Everybody Loves Somebody, proving that teenagers aren't the only ones buying records these days by replacing the Fab Four at the top.


The Hit Version; as opposed to the forgotten version he sang on the radio in 1948.

His victory was short-lived, however, as a three-woman army entered the fray. Just a few days ago, The Supremes replaced him with their Motown hit Where Did Our Love Go?


I assume he does not refer to Dean Martin.

Order of Battle

The stories in the latest issue of Fantastic feature all kinds of warfare, both literal and metaphoric.


Cover art by Robert Adragna

Planet of Change, by J. T. McIntosh


Interior illustrations also by Adragna

We begin our military theme with a courtroom drama, in the tradition of The Caine Mutiny. This time, of course, the court-martial involves the star-faring members of an all-male Space Navy rather than sailors.

Before the story begins, the crew of a starship refused to land on a particular planet, despite the direct orders of the captain. This seems reasonable, as previous expeditions to the mysterious world disappeared. The mutineers obeyed their commander in all other ways.

During the trial of the second-in-command, who subtly persuaded the others to rebel, the prosecuting attorney investigates the defendant's background. It turns out that records about his past life and service record were conveniently destroyed. Under questioning, the strange truth about the planet comes out.

At this point, I thought the officer was going to be exposed as a shape-shifting alien in human form. I have to give McIntosh credit for coming up with something more original. The secret of the planet is a very strange one. Without giving too much away, let's just say that previous voyages to the place didn't really vanish.

Because the story takes place almost entirely at the trial, much of it is taken up by a long flashback narrated by the defendant. This has a distancing effect, which makes the imaginative plot a little less effective. The motive of the second-in-command, and others like him, may seem peculiar, even distasteful. As if the author knew this, he has the prosecutor react in the same way. Overall, it's worth reading once, but I doubt it will ever be regarded as a classic.

Three stars.

Beyond the Line, by William F. Temple


Illustrated by Virgil Finlay

A war can take place inside one's self also. The main character in this sentimental tale is a woman who is well aware that her asymmetrical face and body are unattractive. After a childhood spent escaping into fairy tales, and later writing her own, she decides to face the harsh truth of reality. Just as she does so, however, a rose appears out of nowhere in her lonely bedroom. It is asymmetrical also, and fades more quickly than a normal flower.

So far this reads like a romantic fantasy, but the explanation for the rose involves concepts from science fiction. Some readers may find it too much of a tearjerker, but I enjoyed it. It reminded me, in some ways, of Robert F. Young and his reworking of old stories, mixed with his emotional love stories. It's very well written, and is likely to pull a few heartstrings.

Four stars.

Fire Sale, by Laurence M. Janifer

Back to the world of armies and soldiers in this variation on one of the oldest themes in fantasy literature. The Devil appears to an important American officer. His Soviet counterpart is willing to sacrifice a large number of his own people to Satan, in exchange for killing the American. The Devil asks the officer if he can come up with a better offer. The solution to the dilemma is a grim one, which could only happen in this modern age.

This mordant little fable gets right to the point, without excess verbiage. You may be a little tired of this kind of story, but it accomplishes what it sets out to do.

Three stars.

When the Idols Walked (Part 2 of 2), by John Jakes


Illustrated by Emsh

It would be tedious to repeat the previous adventures of the mighty barbarian Brak, as related in last issue. The magazine has to take up four pages in its synopsis of Part One. Suffice to say that he faces the wrath of an evil sorceress and the invading army following her. The story eventually builds up to a full scale war between the Bad Guys and the Good Guys, but first our hero has to survive other deadly challenges.

In our last episode, as the narrator of an old-time serial might say, Brak wound up in an underground crematorium, from which nobody has ever returned. In a manner that involves a great deal of good luck, he finds a way out, leading to a rushing river. Next comes an encounter that could be edited out without changing the plot. Brak fights a three-headed avian monster, whose heads grow back as soon as they are chopped off. As you can see, this is stolen directly from Greek myth, and the author even calls the creature a bird-hydra.

Once he escapes from the beast, he finds the city of the Good Guys under attack from without, by the war machines of the Bad Guys, as well as from within, by the giant walking statue controlled by the sorceress. A heck of a lot of fighting and bloodshed follow, until Brak gets to the mechanical controls operating another giant statue, as foreshadowed in Part One.

Jake can certainly write vividly, and the action never stops for a second. The story is really just one damned thing after another, and certain things that showed up in the first part never come back. What happened to the strangling ghost? Whatever became of the magician who fought the sorceress? This short novel is never boring, but derivative and loosely plotted.

Two stars.

A Vision of the King, by David R. Bunch

Like many stories from a unique writer, this grim tale is difficult to describe. In brief, the narrator watches a figure approach with three dark boats. They talk, and the narrator refuses to go with him. As far as I can tell, it's about death, one of the author's favorite themes. It's not a pleasant thing to read, but I can't deny that the style has a certain power.

Two stars.

Hear and Obey, by Jack Sharkey


Illustrated by George Schelling

War can be waged with words instead of weapons, of course. In this version of the familiar tale of a genie granting wishes, a man purchases Aladdin's lamp from one of those weird little shops that show up in fantasy fiction so often. The genie takes everything the fellow says literally. (It reminds me of the old Lenny Bruce joke about the guy who says to the genie "Make me a malted.")

After a lot of frustrated conversation, the man finally gets a million dollars in cash. Since we have to have a twist ending, the fellow says something that the genie takes literally, with bad results. The tone of the story changes suddenly from light comedy to gruesome horror, which is disconcerting.

Two stars.

2064, or Thereabouts, by Darryl R. Groupe

Let me put on my deerstalker hat and do a little detective work here. Take a look at the author's name. Remind you of anything? Well, there's a first name starting with D, the middle initial R, and a last name that is almost like group, which means a collection of objects, just like the word bunch.

Even before reading the story, we can guess that this is David R. Bunch again, under a different name to weakly disguise his second appearance. Once we get started on it, the style and theme are unmistakable.

The setting is a dystopian future full of people whose bodies have been almost entirely replaced by machines. An artist visits, eager to do a portrait of the most extreme example of the new form of humanity, with only the absolute minimum of flesh left. Their encounter leads to a grim ending.

The plot is less coherent than I've made it sound. Like the other story by Bunch in this issue, it holds a certain eerie fascination for the reader, even as it confuses and disturbs.

Two stars.

Mopping Up the Battlefield

With the exception of a single good story, this was yet another issue full of mediocrity and disappointment. Maybe I'm just in a bad mood because of the looming threat of global warfare abroad, and a new civil war at home. I should probably relax and watch a little television to get my mind off it, even if I have to put up with those lousy commercials.

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Book, Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[May 2, 1964] The Big Time (May 1964 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Making it

Many people harbor a desire for fame — their face on the screen, their star on a boulevard, their name in print.  That's why it's been so gratifying to have been given plaudits by no less a personage than Rod Serling, as well as the folks who vote for the Hugos. 

But it wasn't until this month that one of us finally made the big time.  Check out this month's issue of Analog, for in the very back is a letter whose sardonic commentary makes the author evident even before one gets to the byline.  Yes, it's our very own John Boston, Traveler extraordinaire.

Bravo, Mr. Boston.  You've got a bright future.

As for Analog… there the outlook isn't so clear.

The Issue at Hand


Cover by John Schoenherr

The Problem of the Gyroscopic Earth, by Capt. J. P. Kirton

Captain Kirton's treatise on the link between the galactic magnetic field and Earth's precessions is both unreadable and ludicrous.  Basically (he argues), as the axis wobbles, pointing the poles at different sections of the sky in a many thousand-year cycle, the Milky Way works its voodoo and causes mass extinctions.

Pretty pictures are included, but I believe Kirton was indulging in some of Dr. Leary's happy juice when he wrote this.

One star (and only because the scale doesn't go any lower).

Undercurrents (Part 1 of 2), by James H. Schmitz


by John Schoenherr

Two years ago, James Schmitz introduced us to Telzey Amberdon, a 15 year old girl whose telepathic abilities allow her to establish the sentience of an alien species.  It was sort of like Piper's Little Fuzzy, and while it wasn't the most adeptly written piece, the premise and the protagonist were so intriguing that I wanted to see more stories about them.

The good news is that I got another story.  The bad news is that it isn't very good.

In this installment, Telzey goes off to the planet of Orado for advanced schooling at Penhanron College, along with Gonwil Lodis, an older girl on the threshold of adulthood and heir to a vast fortune.  When Telzey makes telepathic contact with Gonwil's fierce canine bodyguard, Chomir, she learns of a plot to murder Gonwil, but the details remain frustratingly out of reach.  Telzey must use her wits and her ever increasing talent to find the would-be assassins before they complete their mission.

It sounds pretty fantastic when written like this and, condensed down to its bare essentials, Undercurrents could be a great story.  But the thing is padded to oblivion with pointless exposition, with whole pages of content that get explained again in a few paragraphs later on anyway.  Moreover, I'm pretty sure that the dog is the lynchpin to the crime — I'll wager that in the conclusion, Chomir will turn out to have some sort of conditioning to turn on his owner.

I'll keep reading because I love the character, and I appreciate that there are a plethora of interesting women in Schmitz's world, but this could have been so much better in the hands of a more skilled (or interested?) writer.

Two stars.

Fair Warning, by John Brunner


by Michael Arndt

On a Pacific atoll, moments before the atom bomb's big brother is about to be set off, a supernatural being manifests to adjust the device's detonator and ensure that it can go off properly.  There's a Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin air about the event, but delivered with a sly smile.  Horrified, the scientists get drunk and smash their equipment. 

It wasn't badly written, but I found it kind of pointless.  Two stars.

Once a Cop, by Rick Raphael


by John Schoenherr

This is the second installment in Raphael's "Code Three" universe, featuring a future where the North American continent is crisscrossed by mile-wide freeways.  Cars hurtle from town to town at speeds over 200 mph, and the job of the Highway Patrolman is more necessary — and dangerous — than ever.

Once again, we follow the exploits of the seasoned Sergeant Ben Martin, rookie Clay Ferguson, and surgeon Kelly Lightfood, crew of "Beulah", a 60-foot patrol behemoth.  The piece depicts a number of crises, from a drunk speedster who soars off a highway curve, to a trucker who gets lost in a sandstorm, but the main arc involves a spoiled rich kid who is taken into custody after zooming through a closed lane and almost plowing into an accident scene.  Said kid's father is a big wheel in corporate America, and he tries everything from bribery to blackmail to get his son out of trouble. 

I hadn't expected to like this series so much, but Rafael does an excellent job of presenting the technical aspects of the story smoothly, and all of the vignettes are exciting.  It reads less like a cop show (viz. the TV show Highway Patrol) and more like a series on firefighters.  Plus, I dig that there is a prominent and tough woman in the crew.

Four stars, and keep 'em coming.

A Niche in Time, by William F. Temple


by Laszlo Kubinyi

Artists are a moody bunch, and apparently, most of the greats had profound moments of doubt that almost stymied their careers.  It turns out that, for many of them, the difference between throwing in the towel and going on to make masterpieces is an organization of time travelers.  They appear on the doorstep of the depressed creators and take them to the future to see the laurels of success.  Then the artists' memories are wiped, but the impetus remains.

No, it doesn't make a lot of sense, and this story would veer strongly into two-star territory if not for the final twist.  And, while the premise is hard to swallow, it is consistent unto itself.

Three stars.

Hunger, by Christopher Anvil


by Laszlo Kubinyi

Last up, we get a look at a failing settlement on a colony planet, whose inhabitants have been laid low by disease and mechanical failures such that just two men and a baby remain.  Their only hope is the sack of potatoes one of the fellows has managed to obtain from another straggling settlement.

The fortunes of the three are made all the worse when a pleasure yacht arrives from Earth and proceeds to set the forest afire with negligent aplomb.  The two colonists are left with but one option: use their resourcefulness to capture the yacht and make the jerks stop their wanton destruction.

This story was almost quite good.  The setup was interesting and I like a story that starts with one problem and then brings in another out of left field.  What keeps the piece solidly in the three-star range is the page of moralization at the end, in which a character opines that it's struggle that makes happiness possible, but then takes things too far by saying, "Back home, they're always talking about abolishing hunger.  They might think about it some more."  Plus, there's just some awkwardness and nastiness about the ending, and the suggestion of women as prizes that rubbed me the wrong way.

So, three stars.  Maybe it was better before Editor Campbell got his paws on it.

Summing up

April is done, so let's close the books and do the numbers!  Starting from the bottom, we have Amazing, managing to earn just two stars.  Some folks liked the Smith and Brown better than John Boston, but in general, it was a stinker.  That's a shame since it may be the only magazine to date with more words penned by women than by men.  The Analog we just got through, Boston letter notwithstanding, gets 2.6 stars.  Meanwhile F&SF earns an uninspiring 2.7 stars, but it did feature good stories by Clingerman and Carr (and if you like Ballard, by him, too).  Finally, Fantastic gets 2.9 stars, but if you're a Leiber and/or Moorcock fan, it might earn more from you.

This leaves three mags at three stars or higher, which is pretty good, actually.  IF gets exactly three, with the Cordwainer Smith story making it a worthy acquisition.  Worlds of Tomorrow has got some great stuff in it, even a good Jack Sharkey tale fer Chrissakes, and scores 3.3.  And the new New Worlds gets a respectable 3.4.

Women wrote 4 of the 43 new fiction pieces this month.  And despite the somewhat low showings of a lot of the mags, there were more standout tales this month than most.

Onward to June!

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




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Book

[May 14, 1963] Behind the times (Ace Double F-195)

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by Gideon Marcus

This morning, Gordo Cooper's Faith 7 Mercury spacecraft didn't blast off into the heavens.  It's the kind of disappointment that makes one look in science fiction for a bit of solace.  And so, I have for you, that reliable well of SF adventure (and often mediocrity), the latest Ace Double.  This particular one features two wildly different tales, and yet, both have an air of age about them (in a creaky-jointed way, not a venerable one) that ensures that neither will be stories for the ages.  Nevertheless, they scratch an itch while we wait for NASA to get its act together.  Let's take a look:

Battle on Venus, by William F. Temple

A lone spaceship descends through the thick clouds of the Venus, humanity's first expedition to the Second Planet, only to land in the midst of a planetary war.  Automated torpedo ships, mini-tanks, and oversized buzzsaw wheels terrorize the barren landscape, which is strangely devoid of people.  When the terran spacecraft is damaged in the fighting, wet-behind-the-ears crewman, George Starkey, is sent off in a helicopter to find assistance.  At the end of the grueling trek lies maturity, love, and revelation of the source of the madness that's afflicted the misnamed Planet of Love.

Several factors make Battle on Venus feel like a throwback.  For one, Temple's Venus is wildly archaic in conception, with a breathable atmosphere and comfortable temperatures.  Its inhabitants are human in all but name.  And the romantic subplot could have been lifted (like virtually everything else) straight from a Burroughs novel — all it needed was a scene in which the characters exclaimed that they'd always loved each other; they were just certain the other party didn't return their feelings.

That said, two things make Venus work as a story, if not as science fiction.  For one, the British Temple writes in a mildly droll manner that makes the book feel like a deliberately ironic satire.  Some of the conversational exchanges are genuinely funny, and occasionally even border on profound.  Temple may not conform to the rules of science, but there is internal consistency, in plot and in style. 

But the big selling point for Venus is Mara, a Venusian native who is clever, resourceful, well-developed, and (miracle of miracles) even gets to be the viewpoint character for a decent portion of the book.  She is the real protagonist of the story, far more than the rather hapless George, and you can't help but like her. 

It takes a little while for Venus to engage, but once it does, it's a fun (if frivolous) read.  Three stars.

The Silent Invaders, by Robert Silverberg

After ten long years among the stars, Major Abner Harris is coming home to Earth.  Except the Major is actually Aar Khiilom of the galaxy-spanning Daruu, and his mission is to covertly make humanity allies of his race against the squamous Medlin.  His disguise as a human, which runs surgically deep is perfect — too perfect.  He quickly falls in love with a terran named Beth Baldwin…who turns out to be a Medlin in similar disguise.

It turns out that not only are the Daruu the bad guys of the galaxy, but that the Medlin have been coaxing the birth of a new generation of humans, ones with such telepathic and physical prowess that they will be come the new masters of the galaxy, ending the petty existing squabbles.  Aar must choose between carrying out his mission or becoming a traitor to his people.

Robert Silverberg ("Silverbob") wrote the first version of Invaders five years ago, publishing it in the October 1958 Infinity shortly before that magazine disappeared forever.  That original was a third the length of the novelization.  The plot is identical, however, and 90% of the language was carried over verbatim.  The novel adds local color and ratchets up Aar's uncertainty, both of which don't hurt the story.

What does hurt the story is Silverberg's immature style.  He wrote the bulk of this in his 20s, before he'd obtain much life experience, and it shows.  The emotions don't ring true, and there is an amateur quality to the writing.  Moreover, while the setup is interesting, the introduction of the race of superhumans is a handwave too far.  The book just isn't big enough for two big revelations. 

As a piece of far future worldbuilding, particular with regard to technology, Invaders is something of a success (I particularly liked a scene in which a cabbie is unsure as to the location of an address, so he asks his computer to guide him).  But as a story, and as a piece of literature (such as it is), it's barely fair.  2.5 stars.

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Magazine

[June 11, 1960] Fool me once… (July 1960 Amazing)

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If there is any innovation that defined the resurgent science fiction field in the 1950s, it is the science fiction digest.  Before the last decade, science fiction was almost entirely the province of the "pulps," large-format publications on poor-quality paper.  The science fiction pulps shared space with the detective pulps, the western pulps, the adventure pulps.  Like their brethren, the sci-fi pulps had lurid and brightly colored covers, often with a significant cheesecake component.

Astounding (soon to be Analog) was one of the first magazines to make the switch to the new, smaller digest format.  Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy, and a host of other new magazines never knew another format.  By the mid-'50s, there were a score of individual science fiction digests, some excellent, some unremarkable.  It was an undisputed heyday.  But even by 1954, there were signs of decline.  By the end of the decade, only a handful of digests remained.  The "Big Three" were and are Astounding, F&SF, and Galaxy (now a bi-monthly alternating production with a revamped version of IF).  Also straggling along are Fantastic Stories and Amazing, the latter being the oldest one in continuous production.

My faithful readers know I don't generally bother with the last two titles.  Although some of my favorite authors sometimes appear in them, the overall magazine quality is spotty, and my time (not to mention budget!) is limited.  Nevertheless, Rosel George Brown had a good story in Fantastic last month, and this month's Amazing had a compelling cover that promised I would find works by Blish, Bone, Clarke, and Knight inside. 

I bit.  This article is the result.

Last time I covered Amazing, I noted that the magazine was a throwback both in writing style and plots.  Things haven't changed much.  Though there are a couple of decent stories in here, I wouldn't buy a subscription based on what I read. 

In brief:

J.F. Bone has written some fine stuff.  Noble Redman, about a psionically endowed, red-hued Earthman who teams up with a Martian lowlife (both of them humans), is not one of his best tales, but it's inoffensive 3-star fare.

A good portion of the book is taken up with William F. Temple's novella, "L" is for Lash.  This is pure early '50s stuff: a retired cop named Fred (I don't think we ever learn his last name) is haunted by the criminal he put away decades before, and who was interned for life on Venus.  The convict somehow managed to escape, go on a robbing spree, and attain eternal youth and invulnerability to boot.  The protagonist's solution is not only implausible, it's actually inconsistent. 

I'll spoil things for you: Lash, the criminal, has perfect telekinetic control of everything around him.  Missiles, A- Bombs, guns, all are ineffective against him.  We are told later in the story that the first of Lash's murders had been designed to look like an accident.  He had angered a fellow to the point of firing on Lash, but Lash had gimmicked the assailant's gun to fire backward, thus killing its owner.  At the end of Lash, the hero visits the Scotland Yard crime museum (is there such a place?) to view this unique weapon.  He then uses his powers of prestidigitation to swap his current gun for the gimmicked gun.  When Lash inevitably shows up to force Fred to kill himself, the gun shoots backwards and hits Lash. 

Perhaps Lash was taken by surprise.  I can forgive that.  But there is sloppy writing here.  Before the swap, Fred rewires his standard gun to stun rather than kill its targets.  After the swap, he wires the gun back for killing.  Except the trick gun had never been set to stun.  An author and her/his editor really should proofread a work before it is printed.  I understand that Temple wanted to keep the reveal a secret until the end, but this was just sloppy.

If you liked David Bunch's A Little Girl's Xmas in Modernia, set a world where, as people mature, they swap out their fleshly components for robotics, then you might enjoy Penance Day in Moderan.  This one involves an annual meeting of generals; they wage war on each other in a casually enjoyable way the other 364 days of the year.  Bunch's suite of satirical stories has largely been published in Fantastic and Amazing, so I've missed them.  If you like them, seek them out!

Murray Yaco, who helped contribute to the poor quality of the October 1959 Astounding is back with the mediocre Membership Drive, about the first contact between an all-too humanoid alien and modern humanity.  The ending particularly bothered me for its callous treatment of the one female character; you may feel differently.

One of the reasons I'd purchased the magazine was the non-fiction article by the renowned Arthur C. Clarke.  A New Look at Space is not really a factual article in the style of Ley or Asimov.  Rather it's just a four-page puff piece explaining how great Space is and how soon we'll get there.  I'm not sure what occasioned him to write this space-filler.  Disappointing.

It turns out that the Blish story, …And all the Stars a Stage, is actually the fourth part of a four-part serial.  The description didn't grab me–male hero leads a rebellion against a stifling matriarchy, so I won't seek out the other three parts.

Finally, the Knight (Damon, that is).  Time Enough, or Enough Time, depending on whether you believe the Table of Contents or the story's title page, is a decent coda to the issue.  In the near future, a psychiatrist invents a kind of time machine.  Whether it actually allows one to go back in time or simply return to an episode in one's personal history is left vague.  The story focuses on an individual who attempts to rewrite an humiliating episode from his middle-school days, one that the patient feels is responsible for his problems in adulthood.  He is unsuccessful in his mission.  His doctor gently reminds his patient that the failures of the past are sometimes best left forgotten, and efforts better spent on improving the present person.  Nevertheless, the patient resolves to keep trying until he succeeds.  "There's always tomorrow," the patient states, the irony being that the patient is using his tomorrows to adjust the past rather than to forge a new future. 

It almost goes without mentioning that women are virtually nonexistent, and there are no female writers.  Amazing is still the most conservative of the digests, even more so than Astounding.  I've predicted its demise for some time, yet it manages to defy my expectations.  Maybe there are few enough digests now that Amazing's share of the market is big enough to sustain it.  Or perhaps its 35 cent price tag, the lowest of the digests, is the secret to its survival.

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