by Gideon Marcus

Tunnel light

There have been a lot of happy endings recently.  The postal strike is over, thanks to the government agreeing to an 8% raise for federal employees.  Ditto the air traffic control strike.  Nixon's third nominee to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court, 8th Circuit Court of Appeals Justice Harry Blackmun, isn't somewhere to the right of Ghengis Khan.  The Apollo 13 astronauts made it back home by the skin of their teeth.

But of course, the old stories go on.  The Vietnam war has grown to include Cambodia—if Domino Theory is to be believed, we'll soon be fighting in the streets of Canberra.  Teachers are on strike in California; Governor Reagan says they're "against the children".  And actor Michael Strong says you can't walk the streets of the nation's capital without a good chance of getting mugged.

And so, it is appropriate that the latest issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is a mixed bag.  Some of it will thrill you, some of it will leave you cold.  On the other hand, none of it will mug you.

The Issue at Hand

by Mel Hunter

The Final Quarry, by Eric Norden

Two Englishmen are on the hunt in the backwoods of Thessaly.  One is a corpulent and uncouth Lord, looking to bag the last unicorn.  The other is his guide looking to bag the Lord and take the half million drachmas the noble carries on his person.  Gradually, we learn the exact year of this expedition (a little over half a century ago).  The timing is signicant.

An interesting story that intertwines unicorns with Christian theology and ties their extinction with the death of good things in the world.  The Book of Revelations…with hooves and horns.  It's all very visceral and sensory, with full descriptions of each meal, and with doom dogging every footstep.  A singularly F&SF sort of tale.

Four stars.

by Gahan Wilson

Books, by Barry Malzberg

The F&SF reviewer roulette ball has landed on Barry this month.  He laments that the SF writing community is small enough that one hates to disparage one's peers lest they end up crossing paths on some other project.  This does not keep Malzberg from condeming Moorcock's The Black Corridor ("It is really not at all good…[but] I remain convinced that someday Moorcock will write a subtantial novel, fully worthy of his pretensions and our expectations), Zelazny's Damnation Alley ("The flaw of the novella was that it had no characterological interior or true sense of pace; and instead of concentrating his novelization on those areas whih might have done some good (like ironic counterpoint), Zelazny has simply souped up and extended the action; and, if I don't miss my guess, he has put in a wee bit of sex."), and Orbit 5 ("…not so terribly happy with, and I am not sure why this is so.")

He also was disappointed with the SFWA's latest compilation, Nebula Award Stories Four ("These are good stories, but even the writers, I think, would attest to the fact that better work was published in 1968, if not by others, then by themselves.")

Better luck next time, Barry!

Runesmith, by Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon

If you combine Ellison and Sturgeon and then dedicate the story to Cordwainer Smith, you're setting yourself up for some high scrutiny!  Luckily, this tale (more or less) survives the heightened expectations.

The story's antihero is also named Smith, though perhaps his name is symbolic, for through a knowledge of the occult arts, he has wrought the near destruction of all of humanity.  Unknowingly cultivated and spurred on by the evil ones who lie just beyond the veil of sense, Smith has reduced virtually every city, slaughtered every person, all by casting knuckle bones from a bag and reading their divination.

Now, with guilt gnawing at him, and with the last few survivors aiming to gnaw on him, the true instigators of this hell-on-Earth lick their chops and prepare to return the world they once called theirs.

The problem with this (beautifully told) story is that it has a happy ending.  Now, I like happy endings (viz. the first paragraph of this article) but this tale doesn't really earn its.  It just decides to lurch in a positive direction with no setup, derailing a consistent tone and the macabre satisfaction at seeing just how destructive evil can be.  The conclusion comes off as twee and affected.

Three stars.

Voices Answering Back: The Vampires, by Lawrence Raab

The last couple of lines are the best part of this overlong proem.  Two stars.

The Fourth Tense of Time, by Albert Teichner

An old zillionaire has made his fortune through a talent for close-term prognostication.  He can see just a few hours into the future, which is enough for horse racing and the stock market.  But it comes at a cost: terrible migraine headaches.

When a scientist learns of the zillionaire's talents, he labors to identify the source, in the process, lengthening the rich fellow's future range.

But what happens when one's ability to foretell what's to come crosses over the barrier between life and death?

There's a lot of promise to this story, but there's also a bit of repetitious belaboring, and the conclusion's tea is somewhat weak.  Three stars.

The Fabulous Bartender, by Paul Darcy Boles

The Greek God Bacchus takes a short-term gig as a bartender.  Everyone has a good time.

That's all there is to this affable but longwinded story.  I guess the challenge to the reader is to see how long it takes him to figure out who's serving the drinks.

Two stars.

Nobody Believes an Indian, by G. C. Edmondson

We once again go South of the Border for a flip, steeped-in-Mexican-culture tale of Edmonsdon's "mad friend".  This time around, the narrator and his pal are guests of one of Pancho Villa's generales de dedo (brevet generals) who is rumored to be a pot grower, the kind subject to occasional field burnings to satisfy the Yankees up North.

Turns out that the indio general has got something significantly more harmful than marijuana between his rows.

Fun, frivolous, and more travelogue than tale, it passes the pages pleasantly.  Three stars.

Playing the Game, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor explains the Doppler effect and its application not only to sound waves but to light waves.  Nothing new for me, but it's a very cogent detailing of a fundamental astronomical principle.

Five stars.

Murder Will In, by Frank Herbert

Once again, we have a piece sprouting from the death of Douglas Bailey.  The opening passage is always the same—Bailey is euthanized.  But what comes after that is up to the commissioned author.

In this case, we find that Bailey has been inhabited for most of his life by a pair of thought beings: the Tegas, which seeks out those with inclination to murder as the easiest prey, and the Bacit, which seems to be superego to the Tegas ego (and id?)

The problem is, Bailey was euthanized in a future in which the greatest human technology is that of control.  There are precious few suitable hosts for the Tegas/Bacit to jump to in this mechanized, soulless age.  And when he does manage to escape the dying Bailey, the Tegas learns that humanity is onto him, killing his hosts to find the alien presence.  The alien presence finds himself at the mercy of an interrogator without emotion, only a driving motive.

But perhaps even the most passionless interrogator betrays a passion after all, one that makes him vulnerable to Tegas control…

I give this one marks for creativity, but it is told with the typical Herbert over-the-top quality.  Frank is rarely one for subtlety.  I'd half expected it to turn out that there were multiple Tegases on Earth, and they'd all sought refuge in the last human with emotion, but that turned out not to be the case.

Instead, we get a lot of vivid, emotionally charged passages; some innovative alien perspectives; but nothing particularly exciting.

Three stars.

Summing up

The star-o-meter puts this issue on the positive side of things, and that feels right.  Gone are heady days of the 1950s when Boucher was the editor, but things seemed to have stabilized for F&SF into something consistent and unique.  It's not so much The New Thing now—more of an aping of an old style by folks who don't quite remember the dance moves.  Still, it's good enough for the nonce.

And that's some kind of hope.

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[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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