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[June 13, 1963] THUD (the July 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Jack Sharkey’s serialized novella The Programmed People, which concludes in this July 1963 Amazing, describes a tight arc from mediocre to appalling and lands with a thud.  It opens with our hero Lloyd queuing up with everybody else in the Hive in front of the Proposition Screens in order to Vote before the Count.  Yes, it’s another stilted dystopia (a small isolated world run by a big computer, the Brain) in which all the horrors get capital letters.  Also, Voting is mandatory, and there isn’t enough time for everyone to Vote, and Lloyd can’t afford to miss the cut-off because he’s already missed two Votes this quarter out of an allowable Three, excuse me, three.  On the next page, Sharkey has apparently lost count; now he says Lloyd will have to be hospitalized for Readjustment if he misses this Vote.  Lloyd gets the young woman in front of him to let him jump the line, only to discover that she is the pariah they’ve been warned against who has refused to submit to Hospitalization.  He pities her and lends her his girlfriend’s Voteplate (don’t ask) so she can get out of the Temple unrecognized, and then hides her in his room.  She tells him that Hospitalization is a ruse for disposal of anyone who is sick or injured, in order to keep the population steady. 

There are a lot more busy plot mechanics not worth recounting; it’s reminiscent of a TV sitcom, and the characters act and talk like sitcom characters too.  Sharkey has clearly not thought through just what it would be like to live in a state of constant surveillance, fear, and enforced ignorance.  At the end of Part I Lloyd has gone to the Brain that controls everything and asked it “Why is the Hive?” Part II has the answer, in a flashback that starts with the 1972 presidential election and goes on for 19 pages, covering more than 50 years of political history, becoming more absurd as it goes on.  Then there’s another 15 pages of silly melodrama and thankfully we’re done.  One star is too much.

Onward, with trepidation, to the rest of the issue.  The cover story is Robert F. Young’s long novelet Redemption, in which space freighter pilot Drake, en route to Mars, is alone on his ship when there’s a knock on the door.  It’s a girl!  She’s wearing the uniform of the Army of the Church of the Emancipation, but even so, she is, as the author puts it, stacked.  Also, she’s named Annabelle Leigh, an allusion the author does nothing with.  She has stowed away and wants him to drop her off at the planet Iago Iago in time for the expected resurrection of a saint.  He declines and locks her in a storeroom, then his ship runs into a Lambda-Xi field (say what?), which destroys the part of the ship with her in it, and renders the rest of it, and him and his cargo, translucent.  When he gets to Mars, he makes inquiries and learns that Annabelle was a saint. 

He then sets off on a quest both to sell his damaged cargo and to trace her history, hoping to find evidence that she wasn’t so saintly all the time and thereby make himself feel less guilty about accidentally killing her.  He does, sort of, and also learns that this Lambda-Xi field was even more puissant than he realized, capable of generating any contrivance the author needs, including time travel, two varieties of it, the sum of which, overlaid with Young’s characteristic sentimentality, ends up like something A.E. van Vogt might have written for a Hallmark Cards promotion (or maybe vice versa).  There are also further strong hints that Young has a few screws loose on the subjects of women and sex—not surprisingly in light of such previous efforts as Santa Clause and Storm over Sodom in F&SF.  Maybe somebody else can find something to appreciate here, but it leaves me cold, and annoyed as usual with this all too prolific author.  The cover blurb says “A Story You Will Never Forget!” I hope it’s wrong.  One star.

After such Redemption, what redemption?  Some, at least.  Neal Barrett, Jr.’s shorter novelet The Game—his fifth appearance in the SF magazines—is a somewhat crude but grimly effective horror story of Earth colonists who encounter an incomprehensible alien entity that just wants to play a game, with devastating consequences for the humans.  It’s refreshingly straightforward after the metaphysically baroque Young story.  Four stars.

Now, the crumbs at the bottom of the box.  Ron Goulart’s The Yes Men of Venus is a parody of a certain famous pulpster, heavily disguised here as Arthur Wright Beemis, which seems both pitch-perfect and, therefore, almost superfluous.  But it’s short enough to be amusing.  Three stars for trivia well executed.

Arthur Porges’s The Formula is another contrived and arid gimmick story, involving a highly artificial psi experiment undertaken on a bet.  The story turns on appreciating some specialized information that is disclosed in passing about the surroundings.  It’s like a grossly expanded version of a filler item in a science magazine.  Two stars, generously.

Well, that was depressing.  The Barrett story is the sole bright spot in this mostly abysmal issue—and not bright enough by half to redeem (excuse the expression) the disaster of the two lead stories.

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

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by John Boston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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[April 13, 1963] SCRAPING BY (the May 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Another month, another Amazing, and the persistent question: is this magazine worth reading?  Let’s check this May issue against the hopeful benchmark I announced last time: at least something unusually good, and nothing unusually stupid.

It flunks the second criterion right off the bat.  Robert F. Young is back and Biblical again.  His short story The Deep Space Scrolls is the supposed transcript of a Senate hearing involving astronauts who happened upon “Spaceship X,” which contains ancient documentation showing that it is actually Noah’s Ark (apparently the Flood was on another planet and Ararat is us).  What next?  Characters who turn out to be Adam and Eve?  The best that can be said is that Young does capture the bombast and logorrhea of some politicians—meaning the story is fairly tedious as well as dumb.  One star.

The lead novelet, Jobo , by Henry Slesar, seems promising at first.  In backwoods Tennessee, there’s this big strong guy Jobo with a funny face that everybody but his Ma makes fun of.  On the other side of the world, a professor and his sidekick are approaching Easter Island seeking the provenance of a small statue that looks just like the giant Easter Island monoliths but is made of some super-hard material unknown on Earth and impervious to metallurgists’ tricks.  The prof wonders if extraterrestrials could be involved.  His beautiful and brilliant daughter gets into the act on Jobo’s behalf, and the two stories continue in parallel, meeting considerably short of infinity and indeed short of any resolution not obvious and predictable.  Slesar is an experienced and facile writer, so it’s perfectly readable, but progressively less interesting.  Two stars.

Albert Teichner’s story Cerebrum in the January Amazing, I said, “takes a well worn plot device and fails to revitalize it.” Here we go again with The Right Side of the Tracks, which takes perhaps the most-worn plot device in SF—space travelers approach a planet to find out what’s going on there—and doesn’t do much better, though he tries hard.  The investigators are from the Galactic Glia, whose member planets are supposed to be in touch with all the others no less often than once an hour, and this planet Nodar has fallen entirely silent.  Arriving, the investigators are largely ignored and are told that the inhabitants are working on something that will “widen the scope of everyone everywhere” and the investigators are displaying bad manners; indeed, the locals spank them and send them away.  By that time, they have observed the Nodarans are not keeping their robots, machines, and facilities in very good repair, and have seen them frequently making seemingly pointless hand gestures, listening to music over earphones while they converse, and watching visual displays consisting of “blobs rapidly sinking toward the floor and similar patches reappearing near the ceiling while words, mathematical symbols, three-dimensional color patterns and other disconnected symbols streamed in and out of the confusion to add the final touch of chaos.” Anyone who has read Katherine MacLean’s 1950 novella Incommunicado —and many who haven’t—will recognize immediately that the Nodarans have developed new and superior means of thinking and perceiving, as the one sensible member of the ship’s party realizes on the way back home. 

The clumsily derivative premise is matched by Teichner’s incidental and slightly shaky invocation of standard SF notions, e.g.: “Then they were landing, the anti-gravity jets letting the Probe sink slowly into the waiting cradle. . . .” (Why would anti-gravity employ jets?) “They had spent a grueling three months at speeds far beyond that of light and were impatient to be finished with the assignment.” (Does he think travelling faster than light would be any more grueling than travelling at any other speed?) Is this guy paying any attention to what he’s writing, or just cutting and pasting?  This whole low-resolution mess, compared, say, to its distinguished antecedent by MacLean, recalls Mark Twain’s wisecrack about the lightning and the lightning-bug.  Or maybe I should invoke that old Thelonious Monk tune: Well, You Needn’t.” Two stars, mostly for effort.  Thanks for trying, fella, but . . . don’t bother on our account.

It is with palpable relief that I turn to The Road to Sinharat, a novelet by Leigh Brackett, who is definitely paying attention to what she’s writing.  Brackett is a distinguished practitioner of what might be called Chamber Pulp: standard-brand adventure fiction rendered with unusual clarity, precision, intelligence, and feeling.  This story is a pleasure to read at the word-and-sentence level, and would probably be an even greater pleasure to hear read aloud.  “Sinharat was a city without people, but it was not dead.  It had a memory and a voice.  The wind gave it breath, and it sang, from the countless tiny organ-pipes of the coral, from the hollow mouths of marble doorways and the narrow throats of streets.  The slender towers were like tall flutes, and the wind was never still.  Sometimes the voice of Sinharat was soft and gentle, murmuring about everlasting youth and the pleasures thereof.  Again it was strong and fierce with pride, crying You die, but I do not!.  Sometimes it was mad, laughing, and hateful.  But always the song was evil.”

That said, the story is, ultimately, relatively minor.  It’s set in Brackett’s now-obsolete slowly dying Mars of dry sea-beds, canals, and colorful factions of essentially human Martians.  The Earth-dominated government has a Rehabilitation Project to impound the planet’s remaining water and move the population to where the water will be; the ungrateful Martians are having none of it, believing that they know better how to manage the resources of their dying planet.  War looms, which the Martians will lose, and they will be slaughtered by the Earthers’ higher-tech weapons.  Renegade bureaucrat Carey, of Earth, with his Martian compatriots, must reach Sinharat, the forbidden city of the ancient Rama, who achieved near-immortality by taking the bodies of others.  The Rama archives will contain records that will show all the bureaucrats who won’t listen how survival on Mars really works.  So off they go, pursued by a Javert-ish cop, on a perilous (even grueling) journey across Mars, for a rendezvous with a rather perfunctory ending that wastes much of the dramatic tension Brackett has built up.  But still, it’s a luxury getting there.  Four stars.

The usual non-fiction suspect this month is Ben Bova, with Where Is Everybody?: if the galaxy is full of intelligent aliens, why haven’t we heard from them?  After reviewing the state of scientific thought, Bova proposes a variation on Charles Fort: we are not property, but are the subjects of research and surveillance.  Like all Bova’s articles, this one is perfectly readable, but a bit livelier than most.  Three stars.

There’s an unusual suspect here, too: A Soviet View of American SF by Alexander Kazantsev, a writer of SF himself, who has elsewhere proposed that the Tunguska detonation of 1908 was an extraterrestrial spaceship blowing up.  This is an edited translation of his introduction to a Soviet anthology of American SF containing Heinlein, Leinster, and Bradbury, among others.  It’s less ridiculous than some I’ve seen of this type; the author actually knows something about English-language SF; but it is still turgid and ritualistic in places.  E.g., he says of Heinlein’s story The Long Watch: “The story reflects a change for the better in American public opinion which was subsequently so strikingly manifested at the time of the visit by N.S. Khrushchev in America.  Heinlein, like many Americans who yesterday were still deluded, today believes, wants to believe, that crime may be prevented.” Dialectical, comrade!  Two stars, bright red of course.

So Amazing scrapes by another month on the strength of Brackett’s fine writing, Bova’s competence, and Comrade Kazantsev’s amusement value.  Hangman, slack your rope for a while.

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

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by John Boston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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




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[February 12, 1963] HOPE SPRINGS (the March 1963 Amazing)

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[If you live in Southern California, you can see the Journey LIVE at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego, 2 p.m. on February 17!]


by John Boston

Well, hope springs eternal, and a good thing for certain SF magazines that it does.  The March Amazing has a rather distinguished table of contents: a novelet by John Wyndham and short stories by veterans Edmond Hamilton, H.B. Fyfe, and Robert F. Young and up-and-comers like J.G. Ballard, rising star Roger Zelazny, and variable star Keith Laumer. 

But we must temper optimism with realism: since Amazing is about the lowest-paying of the SF magazines, top-market names are probably here with things they couldn’t sell elsewhere.  So, prepared for all eventualities . . .

Edmond Hamilton’s Babylon in the Sky is a simple morality tale for SF fans.  Young Hobie lives in the sticks, where there are no jobs and people survive on doles and make-work, seldom make it past the eighth grade, and resent eggheads and know-it-alls—especially the decadent ones in the orbiting cities that Hobie’s preacher father rails against.  So Hobie runs away to the spaceport and stows away to one of these satellites, planning to sabotage the power plant and blow it up.  He doesn’t get far, and the sane and reasonable people there explain to him that they are not living sybaritic lives but working hard at research to benefit everyone.  We didn’t rob you, Hobie, the home folks did.  So they’re just sending him back, but Hobie, you’re a smart kid, if you go to the Educational Foundation near the spaceport, they’ll take care of you, and then maybe you can join up and come back here.  Hobie buys it.  Well, yeah, that’s more or less my life plan too if I can swing it, but I don’t read SF for homilies even if I agree with them.  It’s slickly enough done, but two stars for unearned propagandizing.

Speaking of slick, here’s Robert F. Young again.  When last he appeared, I said he “knows so many ways of being entirely too cute,” and boy howdy was I right.  In Jupiter Found, the protagonist’s brain, after an auto accident did for the rest of him, is installed in a giant mining and construction machine on Jupiter—a M.A.N. (Mining, Adapting Neo-Processor), model 8M.  He is shortly joined by model EV, who is of course a W.O.M.A.N. (Weld Operating, Mining, Adapting Neo-Processor).  They work for Gorman and Oder Developments, which has strictly forbidden them to process an ore called edenite, and they’ve also been warned to beware of a guy who has been cast out of a high place in the company and is now in business for himself, who will be sending down a mining unit called a Boa 9.  By this point in Young’s arch and labored rendition of the Old Testament I was thinking longingly of some of the more bloodthirsty passages in Leviticus.  One star.  What kind of rubes does this guy think he’s writing for?  Even Hobie wouldn’t go for this.

John Wyndham is best known for his chilly novels of the 1950s, from The Day of the Triffids to The Midwich Cuckoos, less so for Trouble with Lichen (1960), intelligent and readable but much less incisive than its predecessors.  His novelet Chocky is unfortunately in the latter vein.  The protagonist’s kid seems to be having conversations with an imaginary friend, except anybody who’s read a lick of SF will know immediately that he’s communicating with an extraterrestrial intelligence.  So we get the worried parent routine, and the marital tension, and the visit from the child psychologist friend, the rather subdued climax, and then . . . some explanation and it all goes away.  The whole 38 pages worth is so low-key as to be near-comatose.  One wonders if Wyndham is taking some of the new tranquilizers that psychiatrists hand out these days.  It’s benignly readable but there’s not much to it.  Two stars.

Roger Zelazny’s short The Borgia Hand is livelier but insubstantial, about a young man with a withered hand in generic fairy-tale country who chases down a pedlar (sic) reputed to traffic in body parts.  Yeah, he’s got a hand in stock, and here’s a quick gimmick and it’s over.  Two stars.  Snappy writing is nice, but as one noted critic put it, where’s the bloody horse?

But relief is in sight.  There’s nothing especially original about Keith Laumer’s The Walls: future overpopulated Earth with people living regimented lives stuffed into tiny spaces in big apartment complexes; protagonist’s husband is on the make and brings home a Wall, i.e. a TV screen that covers one wall.  You can turn it off but then you’ve got a wall-sized mirror.  Next, another Wall; then another; then . . . .  The story is the wife’s psychological disintegration stuck all day with a choice of all-directions TV-land or a hall of mirrors, but—as with It Could Be Anything from a couple of issues ago—Laumer’s knack for concrete visual detail brings it off and keeps it from being a print version of one of those lame Twilight Zone episodes which end with somebody going crazy.  Four stars.

J.G. Ballard is back with The Sherrington Theory, his most minor effort yet in the US magazines.  Protagonist and wife are at a beach cafeteria terrace, watching the remarkably dense beach crowd (no sand visible), and intermittently discussing the theory of Dr. Sherrington that the imminent launch of a new communications satellite will trigger certain “innate releasing mechanisms” in humans, which of course it does.  This one frankly reads a bit like a self-parody; in fact, the idea is a sort of domesticated knock-off of the one he developed much more effectively in The Drowned World.  Of course it’s written with Ballard’s usual flair (or mannerisms, as you prefer), e.g.: “. . . this mass of articulated albino flesh sprawled on the beach resembled the diseased anatomical fantasy of a surrealist painter.” The situation is more skillfully developed and built up than in Zelazny’s story, bringing it up, barely, to three stars.

The stars hide their faces as we come to H.B. Fyfe’s Star Chamber, a shameless Bat Durston in which a parody of a despicable criminal has crash-landed on an uninhabited planet and a lone lawman has come after him.  It reads like something Fyfe couldn’t sell to Planet Stories until the mildly clever end, which reads like something he couldn’t sell to Analog because they were overstocked on Christopher Anvil.  Two stars, barely.

And here is earnest Ben Bova with Intelligent Life in Space.  Haven’t we seen this already?  Not quite—this time he’s going on about the definition of intelligence, touching base at ants, dolphins, and chimpanzees, and suggesting that we’re not likely to find it in the Solar System but likely will do so farther away.  This one is a more pedestrian rehash of familiar material than most of his earlier articles.  Two stars.

So: one very good story, one amusing one, and downhill—pretty far downhill—from there.  Hope may spring eternal, but one takes what one can get.

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




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

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by John Boston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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by John Boston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by John Boston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by John Boston

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

Left Hand, Right Hand

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

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

The Planet of the Double Sun

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

World Edge

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

The Last Days of the Captain

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

Black and White

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

Life Among the Stars, Part IV

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

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

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[September 13, 2017] GRAZING THE BAR (the October 1962 Amazing)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by John Boston

Space!  Mankind’s dream!  Well, some people’s dream.  A lot of us seem to be more concerned with making a living, taking care of families, trying to keep a straight face at school, and other highly terrestrial activities.  But even in this small town in the boondocks, people mostly seem to take pride in the first human ventures off the planet, though you do hear the occasional grumble that all that money could be better spent right here on Earth.

I wasn’t so confident a couple of years ago, when I witnessed the second most remarkable thing I have seen here.  (First place is claimed by the man I saw walking a raccoon on a leash.  Raccoons do tend to have their own agendas.) I was downtown on a Saturday morning, which is when the farmers come into town to take care of their business.  The banks are open then, which I am told is not the case in larger cities.  The farmers come in their cars, their pickup trucks, and in some cases their horse-drawn wagons, all parked around the courthouse square.  On this Saturday, a man was preaching from the back of one of the wagons . . . against the evils of space travel.  “If Man reaches out to touch the face of God’s Moon,” he thundered, “God will BLAST HIM FROM THE EARTH!” But no one paid any attention, and I’ve heard nothing further about his prophecy.

I was reminded of this episode by the cover story of the October Amazing, Poul Anderson’s Escape from Orbit.  It’s another near-space epic like Third Stage from the February issue, also, like that one, illustrated by a Popular Mechanics-style cutaway depiction of guys in a space vehicle.  The situation: meteor destroys spacecraft, crew escapes in lifecraft without propulsion, now they’re stuck in Moon orbit with no one close enough to rescue them, and a solar flare due in 48 hours.  The only bright spot is that the ship’s big, heavy main air tank is nearby and retrievable, giving them enough to breathe until they get killed by the flare.  The air tank—that’s it!  In a paroxysm of arithmetic (work shown only at the end), the protagonist, second banana at Orbital Command on Earth, sees the solution. 

This five or six pages’ worth of story is stretched to 20 by extensive detail about our hero’s home and inner life, including his unsatisfactory wife, the woman he wishes he had married, his physical deterioration (he’s 34) and how he feels about it, his career anxieties, etc.  It takes five paragraphs to get from the early morning ringing phone to actually answering it, and several pages to get him out the door and on the road to Base.  Maybe somebody told Anderson he needed more human interest in his stories, or maybe he hoped to sell this one to Cosmopolitan (well, no, not with the complaints about the wife) or the Saturday Evening Post.  Whatever.  The whole thing is forced and clumsy.  Two stars.

This month’s “Classic Reprint” is The Young Old Man by Earl L. Bell, from the magazine’s September 1929 issue, which serves mainly to show how boring a story can be even if short.  Campers in the Ozarks encounter a storekeeper who looks about 45 but he’s obviously ancient, just look at his eyes.  The revelation is that immortality, which he received via thaumaturgist in the 11th Century, isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.  How fortunate we are that most SF writers these days at least try to develop their ideas, rather than just laying them out like a dead fish on ice.  One star.

Things look up a bit after that one.  Ben Bova has taken a break from his article series and contributed a short story, Answer, Please Answer , about a couple of guys wintering in Antarctica (draftees in a war with the Soviets), who by coincidence are both astronomers.  So in their considerable spare time, they look for extraterrestrial signals from variable stars, and boy do they find them and are they sobering.  This is as much a one-gimmick story as Anderson’s, but it’s much better done by this guy with a decade’s less experience writing fiction.  It builds up smoothly, dropping in just enough background on the characters to make them characters, comes to its revelation, then stops.  Three stars for unpretentious cleverness and competence.

Jeff Sutton’s After Ixmal is readable but silly: a super-computer develops consciousness, albeit the consciousness of a petulant child, tricks humanity into destroying itself, lords it over the dead Earth for eons until it discovers a rival consciousness, and goes to war with it, just because.  As SF it’s barely thought through at all, and as fable or myth or whatever it lacks the necessary sonority, gravitas, etc.  Two stars.

The versatile Robert F. Young, who knows so many ways of being entirely too cute, is back with Boy Meets Dyevitza.  Captain Andrews of the United States Space Force, who thinks he is the first Earth-person on Venus, encounters Major Mikhailovna of the USSR, who is washing her stockings in a stream, having beaten him there the previous day.  As for conditions on Venus, hey, this is science fiction, so: “The data supplied by the Venus probes during the early 60’s, while inconclusive with regard to her cloud-cover, had conclusively disproved former theories to the effect that she lacked a breathable atmosphere and possessed a surface temperature of more than 100 degrees Centigrade, and had prepared him for what he found—an atmosphere richer in oxygen content than Earth’s, a comfortable climate [etc.].” See?  Science!  Extrapolation!  [And complete bollocks — Young should know better.]

Then the human indigenes show up, wearing brass collars; shocked by the Earthfolks’ naked necks, they later kidnap them and put brass collars on them, which can’t be removed by human tools and prevent them from getting very far from each other.  They are married, Venusian style.  But they discover they don’t really mind, and (to summarize brutally) the folks back home say “Awwww,” and—never mind.  Two stars for Young’s usual professional execution, heavily discounted for cloy.

The fiction contents are rounded out by Pattern, the second story in the SF magazines by the very youthful Robert H. Rohrer, Jr. (b. 1946), less slick but more interesting than Young’s polished artifact: a life form consisting of organized electricity tries to take over and consume the energy flows of human spaceship pilot Captain Brenner.  This is not exactly an original plot—see, or remember, van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle—but it’s much better worked out than, say, After Ixmal, with a nasty twist at the end.  Three stars and good if not great expectations for this new writer.

Sam Moskowitz’s SF Profile is The Secret Lives of Henry Kuttner—not one of his best.  Per his custom, he describes Kuttner’s early pulp stories in detail and gives very short shrift to his later and better work, emphasizing his pseudonyms and what Moskowitz thinks is his work’s derivative aspects (sometimes rightly and sometimes decidedly not), and summarizing his career: “Lured by opportunism, suffering from an acute sense of inadequacy, he refused to stand alone, but leaned for support upon a parade of greats: H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Stanley G. Weinbaum, A. Merritt, John Collier, A.E. van Vogt, and, of course, C.L. Moore.” This about the man who by the early ‘40s had become one of the most capable writers in the field, who produced a disproportionate number of the best-remembered stories of the ‘40s and early ‘50s, and whose work was pored over by the likes of Sturgeon and Bradbury.  Terrible analysis, terrible judgment.  Two stars, being generous.

Frank Tinsley, it turns out, isn’t gone.  He’s here with The Nuclear Putt-Putt, an article about Project Orion, a proposed gigantic spaceship to be powered by a succession of nuclear bombs.  Small ones, to be sure, but still.  Especially since this insane behemoth is apparently supposed to launch from Earth.  Can we say radiation?  Fallout?  Not a word about how these are to be contained.  Two stars for overlooking a rather obvious problem.

And Benedict Breadfruit . . . is gone as of this issue.  His last bow is actually reasonably clever . . . unlike most of its predecessors.

So the magazine bumbles along.  The wearying thing is not how bad its worst stories are, but that the top of its range is still readable competence and little more.

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