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

February 20, 2021 Kris Vyas-Myall Leave a comment

by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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/Anthology

[February 18, 1966] Fixing up the old place (March 1966 Fantasy & Science Fiction)

February 18, 2021 Gideon Marcus 7 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

Inside the Modern Home

Interior decorating has always been a passion of mine, and few times have been as exciting to be a fan of home interiors than today. Gone are the pastels and pillows of the 1950s; the mid 1960s are a time of bold colors, Space Age shapes, and stark contrasts.

Dig this brightly hued dining and living space, vivid in primary colors but also subdued with its Japanese influence and pink walls. This is a pad screaming for a party.

If you want something more intimate, how about this shaggy, flame-themed family room?

(just don't tell these happy folks that their Albers painting is hung sideways…)

Of course, not all innovation is beautiful. Concrete has foundationed the New Brutalism, and I hate it. I understand the new La Jolla campus of the University of San Diego is going to be done up in this shelter chic, which is a pity. It's a good thing I'll never have to attend classes there (Lorelei, on the other hand, might well).

Inside the Modern Magazine

The changing vista of science fiction offers its beauties and eyesores, as well. Thankfully, the latest issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction offers a suite of worlds that, though I may not want to live in all of them, most of them were worth a visit.

by Gray Morrow

Angels Unawares, by Zenna Henderson

Is there anything more eagerly awaited than a new story of The People? In this case, as always, Henderson delivers. I believe this is the earliest story in the series, chronologically, taking place as it does some time in the 19th Century. A young woman and her mining engineer husband are heading West to the bustling copper town of Margin when they come across the burned remains of a home in the wilderness. Four charred bodies are inside, incinerated by zealots as witches. But a child survives, shocked into muteness but possessed of extraordinary powers. The settlers adopt her, and thus ensues a tale of pain, maturity, and rebirth like only this author can tell.

Stories of The People feature a set group of ingredients, and yet somehow Henderson manages to make a delicious new recipe every time. Five stars. Bon appetit.

I Remember Oblivion, by Henry Slesar

In an effort to replace brutality with mercy in our penal system, a young murderer is taken off Death Row and given new memories. Harsh, abuse-filled past is swapped for bright sunny days and love in the hopes of creating a well-adjusted psyche.

But the widower of the killer's last victim has other plans…

There's a kernel of a good idea here: are we the sum of our memories, or is there more to the human soul? Unfortunately, Slesar, a screenwriter who has yet to really impress me, goes for the cheap gimmick. The result is the least satisfying piece of the issue.

Two stars.

by Gahan Wilson

Tomlinson, by Rudyard Kipling

The author of The Jungle Book has been dead for thirty years, long enough (Editor Ed Ferman suggests) for a poem of his to be uncontroversially reprinted. A story of life after death, it's Tomlinson this and Tomlinson that, and Tomlinson go away, as he is rejected by both Heaven and Hell for being a fellow who neither sinned nor achieved good deeds.

Pleasant enough. Three stars.

Lil, Rorrity, and A Foamin' Sea of Steam Beer, by Richard Olin
"Daniel Rorrity was a short, stubby…fisherman," begins the tale, and so it ends as well. In between, from his well-worn stool 'Roarey' regales Lil, the B-girl, of the adventures he'd had and the places he'd visited before his back was lamed. And one day, he swore (when the beers were many and the mood was high), he'd buy his own boat and sail the world with his lady love. Karl, the disdainful barkeep, inadvertently provides the impetus to transform a boastful sot into a captain of fantastic seas.

It's a lot more style than substance, but the style is lovely. Four stars.

White Night, by John Tomerlin

In the South of France, a lost hiker takes refuge in a battered auberge. The serving girl takes a shine to him, and they spend the night together. But the morning reveals a hideous transformation.

A reasonable piece of trivial horror, though if the protagonist doesn't get eaten, I'm honestly not sure what the fuss is. It's not as if he didn't have fun, regardless of what she looks like now…

Three stars.

Grow Old Along with Me, by Julius Fast

In a twist on the Deal with the Devil cliché, Fast's tale is of a young man who declines the offered gifts of Old Nick, and in turn gains something better — a friend.

Lucifer ain't such a bad guy after all!

Three stars.

The Rocks of Damocles, by Isaac Asimov

If Mariner 4 taught us anything, it's that sizable planets are just as prone to being blasted by asteroids and meteorites as moons. In his latest article, the Good Doctor explains why it's only a matter of time before humanity gets walloped by an extraterrestrial bullet.

Sleep well! Four stars.

The Blind God's Eye by Kathleen James

It's our world, but in a bleaker, poorer future, and Alice, living a bleak, poor life, is just trying to muddle through widow-hood as a bar dishwasher. Then she meets Red, a burly young man with an iron liver…and a curious resonance of fate with Hugh Veron, an up-and-coming dictator who will be making a speech right in front of the bar in a few days.

A tale of love and tragedy, it's told in a sort of breathless, diary-like fashion that could have been grating, but for me was riveting.

Four stars.

Mickey Finn, by Doris Pitkin Buck

Lastly, another poem about the afterlife. A man goes to Heaven when he's ready for it, and not before, and when he gets there, it's as dingy as he expects.

Oddly placed and somehow trivial, it is not helped by the typo in the last line.

Three stars.

Digging the Decor

It's not often that a magazine manages to crack the 3.5 star barrier, but F&SF has done it twice in four months. Plus, Zenna Henderson makes any issue worthwhile (though I can't say I'm a fan of the lurid cover — I believe it's Gray Morrow's first for the mag). In any event, if you're looking for a clutch of science fiction to go with your mod decor, the March 1966 F&SF is a safe bet.

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 12, 1966] Past? Imperfect. Future? Tense. (March 1966 Fantastic)

February 12, 2021 Victoria Silverwolf 2 Comments

by Victoria Silverwolf

Straight From the Horse's Mouth

The Noble Editor and my Esteemed Colleagues always do a fine job of informing our fellow Journeyers about what's happening on Earth and in outer space. There is one small piece of news, however, which seems to have escaped notice.

The last episode of Mister Ed appeared on American television screens last week. For those of you fortunate enough not to be familiar with this program, it's about a talking horse.

The star of the program. I believe there are some human actors as well.

I find it remarkable that a show with a premise that does not lend itself to a large number of variations has lasted for more than five years. For those of you who are counting, that's five times as long as the excellent, groundbreaking series East Side/West Side.

George C. Scott as New York City social worker Neil Brock. He doesn't seem happy about being outdone by a loquacious equine.

To add insult to injury, Mister Ed wasn't even original, but an obvious imitation of a series of low budget movies about Francis the Talking Mule, who appeared in no less than seven films from 1950 to 1956.

In Hollywood, changing a talking mule to a talking horse is known as creativity.

How Green Was My Valley

If the success of Mister Ed proves that entertainment was less than perfect in the recent past, a new novel suggests that the future of popular literature may lead to some tension among sensitive readers.

Every Night, Josephine! is a nonfiction book about the author's dog. I can't seem to get away from animals, can I?

Jacqueline Susann's first novel, Valley of the Dolls, appeared in bookstores a couple of days ago. The word on the street is that it is quite racy. I expect the author will earn a fair amount of greenbacks from this fledgling work of fiction.

A Songbird Flies Back

In the world of popular music, even a song a few weeks old can seem dated. A little more than a year ago, multilingual British singer Petula Clark had a Number One hit in the USA with her upbeat number Downtown, which I quite like. I might even say her past success is far from imperfect.

Now she's back with another smash hit. It makes me a little tense to realize that My Love isn't as good a song as Downtown, but I have to admit that the lady can sing, and I wish her more success in the future.

You're going to the top of the charts, dear.

Half a Century for Half a Buck

Given the fact that Fantastic and its sister publication Amazing are now filling their pages with lots of reprints, not all of them classics, we have plenty of evidence that speculative fiction's past hasn't always been perfect. The latest issue goes back in time nearly fifty years, but also features a couple of new works. Appropriately, many of the stories deal with threats from the distant past, while the only futuristic tale describes a tense situation that may confront the people of tomorrow.

Cover art by Frank R. Paul, reprinted from the back cover of the November 1940 issue of Amazing Stories, as shown below.

I don't think this is a very accurate picture of what the surface of the moon Titan might be like.

The Bells of Shoredan, by Roger Zelazny

Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

We've already met Dilvish, a warrior who escaped from Hell, a couple of times before. He returns to the material world to defend his homeland, with the aid of a being that takes the form of a steel talking horse. (There's that again! Francis and Ed, what hath thou wrought?)

In this adventure, he journeys to the ruins of an incredibly ancient, seemingly deserted citadel. His quest is to ring enchanted bells that will summon soldiers from the limbo where they have been trapped for an immense amount of time. Along the way, he acquires a temporary companion in the form of a priest.

The unlikely pair witness a ghostly battle.

Dilvish is an intriguing character, and the author gives readers just enough information about his past to make them want to know more. This sword-and-sorcery yarn is full of imaginative supernatural happenings and plenty of action. I could quibble about the author's attempt to sound archaic — he has a habit of inserting the word did before verbs in order to sound old-fashioned — but that's a minor point. Overall, it's a solid example of the form. I'd place it somewhere between Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, and a little bit higher than John Jakes.

Four stars.

Hardly Worth Mentioning, By Chad Oliver

Cover art by W. T. Mars.

From the pages of the May/June 1953 issue of the magazine comes this tale of unexpected rivals of humanity from the mists of prehistory.

Illustrations by Ernie Barth.

A team of archeologists digging in rural Mexico discovers a plastic disk in a layer of soil from pre-Columbian times. The apparent paradox leads the protagonist to discover that another humanoid species, distinct from Homo sapiens, has been directing human history since the beginning. They even have the ability to travel in time, in order to correct little mistakes, like leaving the plastic disk where it could be found centuries later.

An army of the time travelers arrives in an ancient Indian village.

When the archeologist discovers the truth, the humanoids hurt him in the worst way possible. Knowing that he cannot fight them directly, he resolves to protect the future of humanity in a different way.

The author is an anthropologist by profession, so his portrait of the related field of archeology is completely convincing. The price the protagonist must pay for learning too much carries a powerful emotional impact. I was pleased and surprised to find out that the story avoids a melodramatic battle between the two species, but instead ends in a quiet, hopeful, bittersweet fashion.

Four stars.

Axe and Dragon (Part Three of Three), by Keith Laumer

Illustration by Gray Morrow.

In the first two parts of this novel, we journeyed with our hero, one Lafayette O'Leary, into another reality, that he seemed to create through self-hypnosis. After many wild adventures, he wound up getting blamed for the disappearance of a beautiful princess. Now he sets out to rescue her from a legendary ogre and his dragon.

This segment starts off with an even more comedic tone than the others, bordering on the just plain silly. Lafayette meets with some folks who are obviously intended to be cartoon versions of Arabs. They remind me of a famous novelty song from a few years ago, Ahab the Arab, by comic singer Ray Stevens. As an example of the goofiness, at a feast they not only consume Chinese and Hawaiian dishes, but bottles of Pepsi.

Anyway, Lafayette goes on to acquire a loyal steed in the form of a friendly dinosaur, and finally meets the ogre. The ogre has a very strange brother indeed. After an unexpected scene of bloody violence in such a lighthearted story, Lafayette returns to the palace. He meets an old rival, learns the truth about the king's mysterious wizard, saves the princess, discovers who was behind her kidnapping, finds out about his own special background, and gets the girl (although maybe not in the way you'd expect.)

The whole thing moves at a furious, breakneck pace, so that you don't realize it doesn't always make a whole lot of sense. Lafayette's ability to change reality, for example, seems to come and go, depending on how the author needs to propel the plot. There's a scientific explanation, of sorts, from the so-called wizard about what's really going on, but it might as well just be pure magic. It's entertaining enough to keep you reading, but hardly substantial.

Three stars.

Keep Out, by Fredric Brown

Cover art by Clarence Doore.

The March 1954 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this brief tale, from a master of the short-short story.

Illustration by John Schoenherr.

From birth, a group of people are bred to survive on the surface of Mars. The narrator is one of these folks, and reveals their plans.

Some of Brown's tiny tales are masterpieces of a very difficult form. This one is not. I saw the twist ending coming. Maybe you will, too.

Two stars.

The People of the Pit, by A. Merritt

I have been unable to find out who drew this cover.

We jump back to the January 5, 1918 issue of All-Story Weekly for yet another yarn about danger from the remote past. It was reprinted in the March 1927 issue of Amazing Stories.

Cover art by Frank R. Paul.

Some folks head for a remote part of the Arctic in search of gold. A man who is nearly dead crawls to their campsite and relates his strange story.

It seems that there is an immense pit, bigger than the Grand Canyon, beyond a chain of mountains. Not only that, but a gigantic set of stairs, carved in the remote past, leads down into it.

The fellow descends into the pit, and encounters bizarre beings who enslave him. He tells how he finally escaped, and managed to crawl his way back up to the surface.

Illustration by Martin Gambee.

This story reminds me of H. P. Lovecraft, with its unimaginably old structures and creatures who are almost beyond the ability of the human mind to conceive. Given the original date of publication, I presume Lovecraft was influenced by it. The author creates a genuine sense of weirdness and menace. The old-fashioned use of a narrative-within-a-narrative slows things down a bit, and it's mostly description rather than plot, but it's not bad at all.

Three stars.

Your Soul Comes C.O.D., by Mack Reynolds

Cover art by Leo Summers and Ed Valigursky.

Once you get beyond the face of Joseph Stalin on the front of the March 1952 issue of Fantastic Adventures, you'll find the original appearance of this variation on a very old theme.

Illustration by Leo Summers.

A guy intends to summon a demon in order to exchange his soul for a good life. Before he can even perform the necessary ritual, however, a being appears, ready to make a deal. The man gains forty years of true love, prosperity, and a happy family. When it comes time to pay the price, he finds out what he bargained for.

A story like this depends entirely on the twist in the tail. I have to admit that the author took me by surprise and came up with a new version of the sell-your-soul premise.

Three stars.

How Did You Enjoy Today's Grammar Lesson?

Example of the past imperfect: I was reading Fantastic magazine yesterday.

Example of the future tense: I will finish this article today.

Well, that may not be the best way to study the structure of English, but it gives me something to think about while I sum up my feelings about this issue. For the most part, it was pretty good. Only the Fredric Brown reprint was disappointing, because I expected more from him. There was a good old story, and a good new story. The rest of the stuff was decent filler.

If you don't care for the way I'm acting like a language instructor, maybe you'd prefer something a little more technologically advanced.

Don't blame me if you don't like math.

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Fashion, music, politics, sports, Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[February 8, 1966] Feeling A Draft (March 1966 IF)

February 8, 2021 David Levinson 2 Comments

by David Levinson

Dodging the issue

Conscription has been part of American military planning for a little over a century, and it’s never been popular. From the draft riots of the Civil War to young men burning their draft cards today, there has always been resistance. During the Civil War, wealthy men could hire substitutes to go in their stead, and during the First World War, selection was done by local draft boards, which were subject to local pressure and tended to draft the poor. The interwar period saw the introduction of the lottery system in an effort to overcome the inequities of the past, and, with a brief return to local draft boards during World War Two, it has persisted to today.

On January 6th, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee became the first Black civil rights organization to come out against the draft, citing the lack of freedom at home for so many and the fact that Blacks are over-represented. This statement gave the Georgia House of Representatives an excuse to refuse seating the newly elected Julian Bond. Mr. Bond is one of the founders of the SNCC and endorsed the statement issued by the group. He is probably also the most visible of the eleven Black men recently elected to the Georgia House. The claim was that by endorsing the opposition to the war and the draft, he could not swear to uphold the constitution of the United States.

Julian Bond outside the Georgia House. What possible objection could they have to him?

A long tradition

It is timely that, amid the draft protest furor, January 27th saw the death of Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, once known as America’s most notorious draft dodger (or 'slacker' as they were called during and after WWI). The scion of a wealthy Philadelphia brewing family, he enjoyed a playboy lifestyle before the war. He drove race cars and was one of the first people to learn to fly, even owning a Wright Model B. He registered for the draft, but failed to appear for a physical and was declared a deserter. He managed to stay on the run for two years, but was finally arrested in 1920 in his family home, with his mother waving a gun and threatening the authorities. Sentenced to five years, Bergdoll was released under guard to recover an alleged cache of gold, but he escaped and eventually made his way to Germany. There were two attempts to kidnap him, both ending disastrously for the would-be kidnappers. He married a German woman and settled down, though he made two extended trips back to America. He returned to the States for good with his family in 1939. Sentenced to serve the rest of his original term and an additional three years, he left prison in 1944 and moved to Virginia. He died of pneumonia, aged 72. He is survived by his ex-wife and eight children.

Bergdoll’s original wanted poster.

The issue at hand

In the theme of this heightened era of military involvement (and lack thereof) this month’s IF plays host to several seasoned veterans, as well as the monthly new recruit. The stories range in quality from 1-A to not quite 4-F. The cover is even given to a story about a draft dodger, though one not one tenth as interesting as Grover Bergdoll.

A drab cover for a drab story. Art by Hector Castellon

Continue reading [February 8, 1966] Feeling A Draft (March 1966 IF) →

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Magazine/Anthology

[January 31, 1966] Milk of Magnesia (February 1966 Analog)

January 31, 2021 Gideon Marcus 7 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

Hornet's Nest

Last month, I wrote a rather savage review of the January 1966 issue of Analog, one of the more egregious examples of Campbellian excess married with an aggrieving nadir of quality. In short order, my mailbox was deluged with denouncing letters asserting that:

Campbell, as the genius who founded modern Science Fiction, could do no wrong
I clearly could never understand why people appreciated Analog

It is instructive that when I give an issue of Analog a favorable review, which happens reasonably often, my mailbox stays empty. But disparage the mighty Campbell at your peril! Such are the occupational hazards of the Reviewer.

Anyway, what goes down must come up, and this month's issue of Analog is actually pretty good. Let's take a look at the final mag of the month, shall we?

The issue at hand

by Kelly Freas

The Searcher, by James H. Schmitz

Two guards at an interstellar space port watch with momentary horror as a purple cloud of radiation erupts from a star yacht and devours them in an instant. The alien marauder has traveled light years, from the dense nebula known as The Pit, in search of a purloined navigational beacon. Meanwhile, a local professor with an eye to make a buck, is preparing to fence said beacon, hoping to do so before two private agents hired by the University League thwart his plans.

Thus ensues first a cloak and dagger story followed by a crime thriller and topped off with a mad chase from alien horror.

by Kelly Freas

I was excited to see James H. Schmitz' name on the cover as he's written some of my favorite works. He also has a preference for writing women protagonists, which is refreshing. I'm afraid my review of this piece must be somewhat alloyed. The concept is great, the characters are interesting, and I enjoyed the piece. But.

I think the biggest problem with The Searcher is its length. Had this been a novel length story, Schmitz could have unfolded the mystery of the alien's existence and motivations more organically, rather than relying on straightforward exposition. We get a lot of solid chunks of explanation interspersing the action. And it's certainly not the case that Schmitz can't write action; he does so quite admirably, beginning with the very first scene.

Had I received this manuscript, I'd have asked for an expanded rewrite — and been happy to publish it!

As is, it's a promising but uneven three star work.

The Switcheroo Revisited, by Mack Reynolds

by John Schoenherr

A rather bumbling young Lieutenant in the KGB is dispatched to the United States to find a marvelous invention first depicted in the pages of a science fiction magazine (name unknown, but I think it starts with an A). He's intercepted by the CIA, but rather than simply arrest him, instead they do their best to convince the agent that the fictional invention is real. There's a cautionary sting at the end of the story.

Cute, but rather trivial for Reynolds. I do enjoy how the author has woven a future history of the Superpowers, though, based on his extensive world travels. The geopolitics and slang lend a tang of verisimilitude. Three stars.

Twin-Planet Probe, by Lee Correy

This is a fun piece that purports to report the results of the first Martian probe to the twin worlds of Earth and Luna, written so as to mirror the sparse and potentially misleading data obtained from Mariner 4. The moral of the story is that we don't have enough data to make sweeping conclusions yet.

Four stars (and let's get some more data!)

An Ornament to His Profession, by Charles L. Harness

Patrick Conrad, once a chemist, later an attorney, and now a patent lawyer, is a haunted man. Three years ago, he lost his chemist wife and their young daughter in a car accident. This trauma has left him in something of a working daze, redoubling his vocational efforts in an effort to put the pain out of his mind.

His current problem: the patenting of a company chemical is threatened from several corners, most trivially by the impending poaching of Conrad's highly efficient secretary by another department, more seriously by a key team member's certainty that he has made a deal with the Devil to ensure success of the chemical's synthesis, and most critically by the revelation that the patent is based on a previously published college thesis.

Conrad must untangle all of these intertwined issues, all while wrestling with the pain of loss that seems also to be directly involved with the patent somehow.

by Kelly Freas

While Charles Harness is a name that may be unfamiliar to you, as it is a byline that has not appeared in more than a decade, Analog readers will certainly remember "Leonard Lockhard", a pseudonym for the combined talents of Harness and Theodore L. Thomas, who currently writes for F&SF. I'm pretty sure Harness is a patent attorney in real life as his knowledge of the law seems prodigious.

In any event, Ornament is a beautiful story, lyrical and thoughtful — almost misplaced in this magazine, honestly. I'm not quite sure I understood the ending, though I reread the piece to see if I had missed something; I may have simply missed a subtle reference. In any event, it's my favorite story of the issue.

Four stars.

Minds Meet, by Paul Ash

by Kelly Freas

Lastly, we have the welcome return of Pauline Ashwell (a Campbell discovery from England who goes by both feminine and masculine bylines for some reason). In this tale, a human and alien finally achieve true communication after seven years of frustratingly dissatisfying, if technically successful, discourse. All it took was a little filthy intoxication.

A pleasant three stars.

Summing up

I'm sorry to disappoint those hoping to yell at me for "not understanding why people like Analog", but I liked this month's Analog. Indeed, this issue virtually ties the (similarly returned to form) latest issue of Galaxy with a 3.4 rating, the best of the month. Close behind are New Worlds (3.2), Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.1), and Science Fantasy (3).

Only IF (2.9) and Amazing (2.1) finished below the mediocrity line, and IF has the new Heinlein serial to commend it.

We are back to late 50s levels of female engagement in the genre: 10.2% of the new fiction was by women. There was also a full two magazines' worth of superior content this month, more than twice as much as in December. It really was a pleasure to be a fan this first month of January 1966!

Let's see how February fares…

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[January 26, 1966] Changes Afoot! Science Fantasy and New Worlds, February 1966

January 26, 2021 Mark Yon 10 Comments

by Mark Yon

Scenes from England

Hello again!

After the usual chaos and madness of a year’s end, it is usual for me to say at this point that I/we are now settling into the routines of 1966 nicely. Or are we? There’s change afoot!

Last month I made a half-joking remark that Science Fantasy was filled with old-fashioned and dated material that suggested that it was a placeholder issue. This month’s Science Fantasy seems to show that the Editor has taken this to heart. From next month Science Fantasy is no more – it will now be called Impulse, and this is shown on the cover in the same way that Astounding became Analog.

What difference such a title change will make, I don’t know. But it is clearly something Editor Kyril Bongfiglioli has wanted for a while. In his Editorial he explains the change, but what it mainly seems to be is that Kyril can now go to his newsagent and pick up a copy without fear of embarrassment, and he hopes others will be able to do the same. He also points out that there will also be a rise in price but that the magazine will be about thirty pages longer – “the equivalent of a full length novel.” Every cloud has a silver lining, I guess. But it is noted that both magazines are increasing their price next month.

To this month’s actual stories.

Ballad From A Bottle, by Hugh Simmonds

We’ve not come across Hugh’s writing before. As the title (and cover) suggests, this is a story of what happens when a bottle is found washed ashore on a beach. Simon takes it home and begins to have rather vivid dreams, which leads to him hearing voices and a song coming from the empty bottle. It’s a new version of the genie in the bottle story, isn’t it? Well, in this version the mysterious sounds lead to Simon travelling from Buenos Aires to Durban, South Africa (It’s not quite clear how he can afford it) and has some kind of religious experience (I think) in meeting an Arcturan who has been living in secret for millennia.

This one reads fine, but I can’t help feeling that it is spiritual allegory dressed up as a fictional story. I don’t know enough about such matters to know which religious view it is, but it feels like the purpose is the message, not the plot. 3 out of 5.

The Warp and the Woof-Woof, by John Brunner

Last month John appeared with a non-fiction article in New Worlds, this month a piece of fiction. It’s a nice story of an astronaut training to be the first man to Mars but as seen through the perspective of Jeff, his dog – the “woof woof” of the title. It involves Martians preparing for an invasion of Earth and a case of mistaken identity which doesn’t end well for the Martians. Brunner doesn’t write really bad stories, though this light-of-tone story feels like a minor tale. 3 out of 5.

Marina, by M. John Harrison

A new voice to me. This is a lyrical narrative telling of Marina, who dreams of a life at sea. Although she is separated from her beloved ocean, she knows that in the attic of the house where she lives there are mementos of a life spent there. Her rummaging leads to an unfortunate if predictable end. Despite the story being obvious, this is an interesting debut from an author clearly trying very hard to write imaginatively. 3 out of 5.

Our Man in 1900, by Paul Jents

Last time we had a story from Paul was in the June 1965 issue of Science Fantasy with Peace on Earth, and this month he has a story in both magazines! This story is one of time-travel and espionage, which although I haven’t seen it over here in Britain, makes me think of your Wild, Wild West television series, or something from our Doctor Who. Justini goes to see an act by fellow magician Marvo, only to find that it is not an act, but instead part of a time-travelling holiday company’s itinerary from the Thirtieth Century. The story starts well, and there’s a nicely done if rather obvious twist in the tale at the end. 3 out of 5.

Sing Me No Sorrows, by E. C. Tubb

Is there no end to the stockpile of material from the prodigious Mr. Tubb? This one is one of those “Where am I now?” type stories where the person in the story initially finds themselves somewhere new and unknown until eventually they discover where they are and what they are doing there. Minor-league stuff. 3 out of 5.

Plague in Space (part 3 of 3) , by Harry Harrison

At the end of last month’s serial, Doctors Sam Bertolli and Nita Mendel found themselves at an United Nations World Health meeting where a decision was made to quarantine and then cleanse New York City of a space plague by dosing it with radioactive material.

To finish the story, a decision is made to search the Pericles for any research completed by the hapless astronauts. Nita becomes ill and Sam is detained for protesting about Operation Cleansweep, so the story has an additional element of peril. Like last month, Sam escapes from his detention and enters the zone due for detonation to get to the Pericles.

There with Stanley Yasumura, Gen. Burke, Lieut. Haber and Sgt. Bennet, Sam battles through various challenges to get inside the spaceship. There they meet a Jovian, whose initial contact with the Pericles we are told of through flashback, and who has a cure. Nita is miraculously cured by the serum and in a horrendously clumsy ending everything is sorted and solved, with preparations made for the humans to return to Jupiter and take on the Jovians.

As the last part of the last serial for Science Fantasy, it’s pretty predictable. Issues are resolved satisfactorily, and there’s a reasonable ending. But the fact that I can’t think of much to say about the last part of a serial that takes up half of the issue may ultimately sum up the story’s impact. Overall it feels like a bit of a pot-boiler that is more likely to be liked by non-sf readers than those who have read this sort of thing so many times before. It is better than the pulps of the 1940s and 50s, but there’s little else to recommend it by me, sadly. 3 out of 5.

Summing up Science Fantasy

The last issue of Science Fantasy continues in the manner of the last couple of issues. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, but it seems to have lost its energy. Knowing what we now do, I am hoping that this is just a case of holding the good material over until the next issue, which will hopefully show us how good the magazine can be again. It’s not bad, but it’s not great either.

Farewell Science Fantasy. It has been fun, but your time is past. All hail Impulse (fingers crossed).

Advert for the new magazine. A bold statement!

Onto this month’s New Worlds.

The Second Issue At Hand

A few months ago, I became aware of a group who were not in favour of Moorcock’s changes to New Worlds. They were mainly making their opinions known through groups such as the British Science Fiction Association, who were quite vocal about the reduction in the magazines of “good old-fashioned sf”, replacing it with loftier, more literary material and losing a key core group of readers in the process.

Well, clearly Mike Moorcock has been listening. The editorial this month is his response, a tirade that suffers no fools gladly and is perhaps the boldest statement yet of his intent as Editor. Can this be just coincidental as it happens at the same time as Science Fantasy changing its name? (I doubt it.)

There are some impassioned generalisations here. Moorcock makes some good points and gives some good examples to back his view up about what he is trying to do and why, but mistakenly begins by turning one generalisation (there have been some complaints…) into another (he claims that the views of this vocal minority equate with “All Change is Bad”).

Personally, I hope that my monthly comments here show that I like the old stuff as nostalgic entertainment but I also appreciate what Moorcock is trying to do, even if I don’t always “get it”. Last month I said that New Worlds was “pushing the genre whilst at the same time maintaining some connections to the past,” which I like.

In short, Moorcock’s Editorial is an interesting read that is one from a clearly heart-felt conviction on his part and summarises how far the genre has come in a few years. Might even be worth buying the magazine for that statement of intent alone.

To the stories!

Illustration by James Cawthorn

A Two-Timer, by David I Masson

No serial this month but another different sort of story from Masson, who has been a major supernova as a writer in his brief time here. Moorcock talks about this in his Editorial in glowing terms, and I can only agree. It is written in the form of “ye-olde-English-language” with archaic vocabulary and Lots of Capital Letters in the Middle of Sentences, and as such can be a little difficult to get on with at first – it reminds me of the recent reaction to Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Masson’s first story (Traveller’s Rest, in the September issue of New Worlds) showed us that Masson clearly enjoys playing with language. I understand that David is not only an author but also the Curator of Special Collections at Liverpool University with an interest in language, and this is reflected in his stories here.

However, once the reader becomes accustomed to the prose, it is a great story about time travel that uses the dislocation of language to describe present day lifestyle. Separated by three hundred years, the story is written as if someone from history was recording the events of the present. Our unnamed hero from 1683 finds himself by accident in a time machine that travels to 1964. It’s an entertaining satire as we decipher what our traveller is seeing such as cars, buses, aeroplanes, electricity, television and so on. It is also a deliberate reversal of the historical novel, where events of the past are told with modern prose. It is a great idea, and much of the amusement comes from trying to deduce what our protagonist is describing, but it is really the same idea repeated through one story. I did like the point that as the story progresses and our narrator becomes more fluent with the modern world, the language becomes more modern, which rather reminded me of the linguistics in Daniel Keyes’ recent story Flowers for Algernon. The title’s clever as well – a person who is in two places at once at different times and – there’s another reason as well, but I won’t spoil it for you.

Though it is similar to Paul Jents’ story in this month’s Science Fantasy, this is a comedy of manners that is a magnitude greater in its ambition and its plotting. It’s a little too long – you can only carry this one idea so far – and has a weak ending, yet I found it enjoyable enough. 4 out of 5.

The Orbs, by John Watney

Another new author to me. This is story told through a diary entry by Julia, a sixteen-year-old in the Time of the Orbs. What we discover through the excited Julia is that there is a rite-of-passage that she is about to experience known as the Great Adventure. Guess what? The Orbs are some sort of Alien harvesting machine who suck up humans and butcher them in what is called The Great Descent. Over time humans have adapted this to allowing self-sacrificers, known as Orb-Volunteers to be harvested, which ultimately becomes narrowed down to teenagers, who are prepared for this sacrifice with great pomp and ceremony. It’s an invasion story where the matter-of-fact tone belies horrors on a global scale. Whilst the theme of the story isn’t new, it is chillingly told. 3 out of 5.

Entry from Earth, by Daphne Castell

Another from an author who is almost becoming a regular in the magazines, after her appearance with For One of These in Science Fantasy last month. This time Daphne tells us of the Nine Systems Festival of Sound on the planet Pigauron. This involves lots of dignitaries from strange planets, but this year the excitement is over a competition entry from a relatively unknown planet called Earth. The irony is that the song is a slavery song, sung by slaves. I liked the somewhat florid and baroque nature of the decadent aliens, though the twist in the end is a little weak. 3 out of 5.

Hi, Sancho!, by Paul Jents

And so to Paul’s second published story this month. This is the story of Tip Peters, an escapee who we first meet escaping over an electrified fence for an initially undisclosed reason. Over the course of the story Tip goes to his girlfriend for refuge, but is persuaded to seek further help in escaping. This leads to him informing the authorities of a potential terrorist attack. The twist in the story at the end shows us that Tip is clinically insane and actually returns to an asylum. A story that hints at a dark world outside Tip’s safe haven, with extermination camps in “Africa” possibly being the cause of Tip’s illness, but as with most similar stories unfortunately feels rather ham-fisted. I much preferred the other story this month. 3 out of 5.

Illustration by A Thomson

Temporary Resident, by Philip E. High

Philip’s a regular to the magazines, and one of the old school of writers, but one who is trying to write in a New Wave style. However, with that in mind, this is a fairly inconsequential piece this month. A near-miss with a car on the planet Speriol leads the protagonist (who works in Intelligence) to wonder if the accident was deliberate. This leads to a paranoic spiral, for as he continues his day he increasingly feels that he is carrying on the same as normal but everyone around him is not. The ‘accident’ seems to have led to a “Transition”, moving our hero to a different plane of existence where physical laws are altered. Another one of those “altered perception” type stories which basically takes that idea of inner space and runs with it under the guise of sf, which ends on an unconvincing twist. 3 out of 5.

The Sword Against the Stars, by A. F. Hall

Do you remember me writing of that story a couple of issues back that seemed to throw everything in, from unicorns to spaceships? My first thought on reading this title was that this was going to be another story covering similar ideas, but really it is not. On a planet that is possibly Earth, we are told of what has happened in our future. Man has attempted to go beyond the planet and has sent spaceships travelling into space but they have never returned.

Instead aliens arrived and destroyed the world, leaving the people there unable to leave the planet. There’s lots of descriptions of the harsh lifestyle the people live. There are dust storms and we have people fighting over caches of food. The story tries to end on a positive note, hopeful that a sword the writer owns will become a sign that Mankind will one day return to the stars, but most of the story is about the challenges of eking out a living in a post-apocalyptic environment. Grim and depressing, despite the ending. 3 out of 5.

Book Reviews, Articles and Letters

Assistant Editor Langdon reviews Of Worlds Beyond, a non-fiction book on the craft of sf writing. Jones claims that it’s worth spending your money on if you can’t find anything else – talk about faint praise! – but I must admit that I Iiked some of the quotes given from editors and authors, perhaps enough to buy the book. There’s also reviews of a number of novels in a series by Samuel Delany and The Wizard of Lemuria by Lin Carter from someone we know more for his drawings here – James Cawthorn. R. M. Bennett gives a detailed review of The Best of New Worlds, now in paperback. It’s fairly thorough, though I must admit that I’m always a bit uneasy when a magazine reviews itself. It does gain extra credit from me though for saying that Langdon Jones' story I Remember Anita was "overrated."

In the letters pages there is lots of discussion of Pohl and Kornbluth’s recent novel The Space Merchants reviewed back in the November 1965 issue. First there is a letter suggesting that James Colvin’s review of the book was unfair, which is then followed by a letter agreeing with the review and claiming that the novel is “probably the most over-estimated sf novel ever.” Colvin gives an appropriate reply in response.

There’s also a letter from a new reader complaining about too much sex and religion in the latest magazines, ending with the pithy sentence “As far as I am concerned, true sf writing ceased in 1939.” Clearly not a fan of the new direction the magazine is going in, then! I wonder what this reader will make of Moorcock’s impassioned Editorial this month? The letter is given without editorial comment.

The last letter praises the magazine for trying to maintain a difficult balance between the old and the new, which shows that at least some are getting what Mike is trying to achieve.

Summing up New Worlds

We seem to be on a run of good New Worlds issues at the moment. Moorcock rants aside, it is true that he has a lot to be proud about in this one and although this issue is not the best we’ve seen lately it holds up as readable. Masson’s writing continues to impress, with another very different story from him.

Summing up overall

Whilst I am sad at the passing of Science Fantasy, the difference between the actively energetic if not to say fighting tone of New Worlds and the tired yet staid Science Fantasy is once again quite noticeable. Perhaps it is time for a change. I look forward to seeing if Impulse makes a difference next month. It should not be a surprise though that the ‘winner’ this month for me is New Worlds – even if it is not the best issue we've seen lately.

Until the next…

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Magazine/Anthology

[January 20, 1966] Bombs, duds, and happy endings (February 1966 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

January 20, 2021 Gideon Marcus 5 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

Near miss

Three days ago, a B-52 nuclear bomber crashed into a KC-135 tanker aircraft off the southern coast of Spain. The tanker was immediately destroyed, killing its four crew, and the B-52 crashed — four of its seven crew survived.

The payload of said bomber had a similarly mixed fate: two of the bombs exploded upon hitting the ground, though the nuclear device did not activate. As a result, there is now an irradiated zone near the fishing village of Palomares. The third bomb did not go off at all.

A fourth bomb fell into the Mediterranean Sea. We're still looking for that one; with luck, it will be found and all will be fine. I can't imagine Franco will want us flying our bombers over Spanish airspace anymore, though.

Turbulent flying

While The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has not plumbed the same depths it often did under the brief editorship of Avram Davidson, nevertheless Joe Ferman's F&SF has almost as many ups and downs as a Japan-bound 707 crossing a jet stream boundary. After last month's lousy outing (which followed the previous month's excellent issue), we're on something of a level flight path. The stories in this month's issue range from fair to middlin' with only one stand-out and one definite clunker.

by George Salter

The Gadge System, by Reginald Bretnor

Assembly line schmo, Joe Gadge, decides to quit his job and light for Burma. His goal: to secure the inset ruby of an idol whereby to become a millionaire and win the hand of his sweetheart. Thus ensues an amusing send-up of the typical pulp jungle adventure. I particularly appreciated the subversion of racist clichés.

Bretnor has mostly stayed away from the SFF scene, having devoted his energies instead to the monthly pun columns that used to curse…er…grace F&SF. This latest piece feels like a relic of the last decade, but it's pleasant reading.

Three stars.

by Gahan Wilson

Against Authority, by Miriam Allen deFord

Two young men and an extraordinary young woman are poised to rid New Turkey of "Authority", the long-installed dictator who sprang to power in the wake of a devastating alien invasion. But the revolt is subverted even as it starts, and the plot appears to be some kind of grooming by Authority himself to find talented agents.

Where one wheel exists within another, one can be certain a third ring remains to be discovered as well.

While this story is an enjoyable pageturner, the plot is archaic (no surprise — deFord is one of the genre's longest serving veterans) and it all ends too abruptly for satisfaction.

If the previous story scraped the line between three and four stars, Against Authority hovers just above this ranking's lower boundary.

An Afternoon in May, by Richard Winkler

A library is under siege, its elderly operators determined to turn its shelves into a literary Alamo against the ignorant mob of would-be book burners. May covers the same ground as Bradbury's The Fireman, though with a lighter touch ("The situation is hopeless, but not serious.")

Three stars.

Witness for the Persecution, by Randall Garrett

On a far off human planet in a binary system, Walt Gayle finds himself the target of a vigorous assassination plot after purchasing the secret of artificial gravity from the Interstellar Traders. He is only saved by the ministrations of one Jeremiah, who seems to be almost omnipotent. Why is Gayle hunted, and what lies at the other end of the chase?

I'm not sure why this story didn't get sold to Analog, where it would seem more at home. I do know that F&SF has been trying to get more space stories of late (to maintain the "SF" part of its name).

Anyway, it's not bad, but it's also nothing you haven't seen before, and you likely won't remember it next month. Certainly, the "surprise" reveal at the end is anything but.

Three stars.

Desynchronosis, by Theodore L. Thomas

There is a new malady that afflicts those of us in the Jet Set: "time zone syndrome". In this article, surprisingly bereft of the Thomas' half-baked SF story seeds, the author posits that there may be other cycles beyond the 24-hour one that rule our biology.

Three stars. I wish it had been a full length article.

The New Men, by Joanna Russ

In 1986, a East Bloc dignitary stranded in Poland by a broken down car seeks shelter in an ancient bougeois fortress. Its resident appears to be a 400 year old Count, dusty but well-preserved. Literate (if obtuse and veiled) horror ensues.

Russ is very good at aping older styles of writing, and she has produced some near masterpieces in the process. This latest story will not be one of them, I'm afraid. Perhaps I'm not versed enough in the legend it's modernizing.

Three stars.

The Way Back, by D. K. Findlay

Often, a science fiction story will be spawned by the latest scientific discovery. In The Way Back's case, it's the recent revelation that the universe not only was created in a Big Bang, but that it may eventually collapse under its own gravitation back into a gravitational point source.

This rather incoherent piece suggests that the process of collapse will begin in the next few decades (it won't) and that accompanying the collapse will be a gradual de-evolution of humanity (what?!)

Two stars.

Up and Down the Earth, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor takes up the subject of mountains, describing the highest heights by continent, and also under various other circumstances: distance of peaks from the Earth's core, height of mountains if the oceans were drained, etc. Missing is the most important statistic, of course: length of ascent from base to summit.

Another geographical dart throw. Three stars.

The Mountains of Magnatz, by Jack Vance

Speaking of mountains…

Despite the punnish name, there is no relation between this story and Lovecraft's swansong, In the Mountains of Madness. Instead, we have the sequel to the first story of Cugel the Clever, a charlatan tasked by a sorcerer to find and return an ancient magical relic. Cugel navigates whirlpools, deodands, and trecherous townsfolk in an adventure that is half Howard, half Baum.

A little too trivial to be sublime, it is nevertheless quite clever and a lot of fun.

Four stars.

Girls Will Be Girls, by Doris Pitkin Buck

Last up as sort of a postlude is a cautionary tale about telepathy. A young esper woman is weary of her access to the primitive and lewed thoughts of the men around her — but she's even more horrified when the thoughts of an intended beaux do not incline toward the crude.

At least, I think that's the point of this story.

Three stars.

Cruising Altitude

And so we make it through another month of F&SF, this time without any untoward accidents, but also without many memorable incidents. At some point, I expect the Vance will be fixed up into a book, and there won't be much reason to return to this issue.

I suppose tolerable mediocrity is better than significant dross. We're due for a really good issue, though, I hope we get one next month!

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 16, 1966] Getting There Is Half The Fun (March 1966 Worlds of Tomorrow)

January 16, 2021 Victoria Silverwolf 6 Comments

by Victoria Silverwolf

Modes of Transportation

I hope that the Cunard Line will forgive me for stealing their famous slogan. By the way, isn't this a lovely advertisement?

In this modern world, there are all kinds of ways of getting around. There are luxury liners, as shown above. There are airplanes, complete with friendly attendants to cater to your every whim.

This ad is about ten years old. It must have come from a magazine in a doctor's waiting room.

There are, of course, automobiles, that you can either own or rent when you need them.

I do not, however, recommend jumping directly from a plane to a car.

In science fiction, we have lots of futuristic devices to send us from one place to another, from moving sidewalks to starships. The latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow features people transported through space and time in various ways. The lead novella includes a method of getting from Point A to Point B that I haven't seen before, and that I don't think I would enjoy.

Dying To Be Somewhere Else

Cover art by Gray Morrow.

The Suicide Express, by Philip Jose Farmer

Illustrations by Jack Gaughan.

We return to the planet known as Riverworld, where everyone who has ever lived on Earth is reincarnated into a young and healthy body. Our hero is, once more, the Nineteenth Century adventurer Richard Francis Burton. It turns out that anyone who dies on Riverworld is reincarnated again, but in a different location on the giant planet.

Burton discovers that his old nemesis, the infamous Nazi leader Hermann Goering, has been reincarnated in the same place he now resides, after Burton killed him. We'll find out later that the two enemies come back to life in identical locations more than once. There is some kind of bond between them, it seems, although why remains a mystery.

The enormous river that gives this world its name runs from the north pole, all the way around the planet, then back to where it started. That doesn't make geographic sense, of course, so it's clear that some kind of super-advanced technology is involved. There are tales of a bold explorer who spotted a vast tower at the head of the river, beyond impassible mountains. Determined to unlock the secrets of Riverworld, Burton sets out to find the tower. Because sailing all the way to the north pole, if it is even possible, would take many decades, he uses another method of travel.

He kills himself. Seven hundred and seventy-seven times, to be exact. The odds are low that he'll be reincarnated near the north pole, but he's willing to take the chance.

Meanwhile, the so-called Ethicals who created Riverworld are hunting down Burton, apparently because he seems to be the only person who was conscious, in some kind of storage area, before being reincarnated. There's also a rogue Ethical, working against the others, who claims to be protecting Burton.

Along the way we meet John Collop, a Seventeenth Century poet. Like Burton and Goering, this is a real historical figure, if not quite as famous. In Farmer's tale, he's a saintly fellow, who is an evangelist for a new religion, the Church of the Second Chance. We also witness the transformation of the guilt-ridden, drug-addicted Goering into what possibly might be a better human being.

Burton meets the Ethicals.

The plot moves swiftly, and there's always something interesting going on. Farmer has latched on to a premise that allows him a lot of room to bring in folks from all sorts of places, from the prehistoric past to the near future. My only quibble is that he raises more questions than he answers. I assume there will be more stories in this series. They might clear things up.

Four stars.

The Kindly Invasion, by Christopher Anvil

Let's see; a story by Christopher Anvil. Do I even have to read it to find out that it's about clever humans outwitting technologically superior but foolish aliens?

In this variation on his favorite theme, the extraterrestrials come to Earth bearing gifts. Among other blessings, they offer a serum that prevents aging. They communicate with humans via telepathy.

Our main character smells something fishy. He assumes the telepathy is really brainwashing. He's the big boss of an arms company, and he decides to sell an excellent firearm to the public dirt cheap, so that lots of people will buy them. (Can you see where this is going?)

Sure enough, the aliens turn out to be bad guys, and the heavily armed folks who didn't fall for their propaganda are ready to take them on.

I was really, really hoping that the arms dealer's suspicions would turn out to be unjustified. Instead, there is nothing at all surprising about the plot. This yarn would have found a more appropriate home in the pages of Analog.

Two stars.

The Super-Sleuths of Science Fiction, by Sam Moskowitz

In the previous issue, we had the first part of a look at crimefighters in SF. This section is exactly like the other. We get a long list of science fiction detective stories, most of which sound really lousy. At the end we get a quick look at modern examples, such as Asimov's robot novels.

My opinion has not changed. I admire the author's scholarship, but the resulting article is as dry as dust.

Two stars.

Like Any World of Gree, by C. C. MacApp

Illustrations by Peter Lutjens.

A bunch of stories about a resourceful hero fighting the slaveholding minions of Gree have already appeared in If. I'm not sure why this one appeared in its sister magazine, but maybe editor Frederik Pohl ran out of room for it.

Anyway, in this adventure we're on Earth. The home world is already occupied by the villains, but the good guys are coming to the rescue. There's just one big problem. Once the followers of Gree are defeated in a space battle, they'll wipe out all life on the planet. Our hero has to sneak in, disguise himself as a human bounty hunter working for the bad guys, work with the local resistance underground, and, as usual, sneak his way into the enemy compound.

Take that, Gree-loving scum!

The series as a whole has been a little repetitious. This one has the novelty of being set on Earth, but otherwise it's the same old espionage and sabotage plot we've seen before.

Two stars.

Umpty, by Basil Wells

A couple of hundred years from now, most folks are unemployed. Some of them eke out a living with subsistence farming, other are outlaws. The protagonist, a fellow hoping to get a job, rescues a woman from a gang of hoodlums. She claims to be from the past, with her mind transported into a body of the future. After some adventures, they find out what's really going on.

There really isn't much to this story other than the twist ending, which I thought was kind of silly. I suppose the background is mildly interesting, but that's about it.

Two stars.

Comets Via the VJSEH, by Robert S. Richardson

The author speculates about the origin of comets having orbits associated with Jupiter. He dismisses the idea that they were captured by the gravity of the giant planet, because there are far too many of them still around, considering their relatively short lifetimes. Did they emerge from Jupiter? No, because they could not possibly escape the immense gravitational pull. Instead, he promotes the hypothesis that they were ejected from Jovian moons, due to volcanic activity.

It seems to me that the argument falls apart if you accept the possibility that there's a steady supply of comets coming from deep in space, maybe beyond Pluto. In that case, there would be plenty of them for Jupiter to grab. The article also has some illustrations that are not reproduced very well, so I haven't bothered to photocopy them here.

Two stars.

Choice of Weapons, by Richard C. Meredith

Illustration by Gray Morrow

A motley collection of folks gets transported from all kinds of places on Earth, and from different times, in this yarn. There's the hero, an American (I presume) hunter of the present; there's a naked, seemingly comatose little girl; a royal woman of ancient Egypt; a huge fellow of prehistoric times; a woman from a decadent future; an ancient Roman soldier; an Asian woman who might be from just about any time; and a soldier from a brutal future dictatorship.

These very confused people find themselves in a metal room. Food appears from time to time, but the amount keeps shrinking. Given this threat to their existence, not to mention conflict over the affections of the sexually provocative woman from the future, it's not a big surprise when violence breaks out. (I forgot to mention that the hunter has his gun, the Roman has his sword, and the man from the future has his laser. The prehistoric man just has his body, which is enough of a weapon.)

There's an explanation for their situation, of course. It also turns out that the little girl, who does not respond to anything at all in any way until the end of the story, is the key to saving the lives of those who survive the ordeal.

I have very mixed feelings about this tale. The frequent killing, along with implied rape, make it disturbing to read. On the other hand, the way in which the author portrays characters from many different times and cultures is convincing. In particular, the half-intelligible language spoken by the woman from the future is fascinating.

Three stars.

Did You Have A Nice Trip?

The good ship Worlds of Tomorrow, under the command of Captain Frederik Pohl, set sail with streamers flying. Her first port of call was well worth the price of boarding. The rest of the voyage, maybe not. As we disembark, we may wistfully wonder if the excursion was really a vital one.

If it's a Galactic Journey, I have to say Yes!

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Serial

[January 8, 1966] Seems like old times (February 1966 Galaxy)

January 8, 2021 Gideon Marcus 6 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

Nostalgia

Stop me if you've heard this one before ("Stop! Stop!") but when I picked up that first issue of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in October 1950, I was hooked. I had encountered SF previously, as a kid with Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne. I'd devoured L. Frank Baum's works. And through the 30s and 40s, I leafed through the odd issue of Astounding. But it wasn't until I read H. L. Gold's mag that SF really seduced me. Here were mature stories for adults going beyond the "gimmick" story.

In 1954, I became voracious, buying every mag in sight. Some were worthy, like Fantasy and Science Fiction, Satellite, Beyond and (often) Astounding and Fantastic Universe. Others were…less than worthy: Amazing, Infinity, Imagination, Super Science, and on and on. But I read them all. I was hooked.

Gold left the editorship in 1961, and the esteemed Fred Pohl took over. The magazine has been in a bit of a holding pattern since the turn of the decade, rarely being outright bad, but rarely evoking the heights of those first few years of publication, when virtually every story was a stunner.

The latest issue is a stunning return to form.

The Issue at Hand

by Virgil Finlay

Under Old Earth, by Cordwainer Smith

The enigmatic Mr. Smith has been a staple of Galaxy from early days, and I understand he is one of the folks Mr. Pohl regularly visits to obtain new stories. Under Old Earth is the latest installment in the Instrumentality series, portraying a happy, fatuous humanity atop a slave class of altered beasts and robots.

In this particular story, Sto-Odin, a dying Lord of the Instrumentality heads to the Gebiet, the vast underworld separate from the laws and enforced happiness of the surface world. There, he expects to find the vital spark of humanity that can restore the race. He encounters a self-styled Sun-God who has purloined a piece of the congohelion, a vast structure that regulates the output of stars, to make inhumanly powerful music. And tending his altar is Santuna, dismayed with what the Sun-God has become, and destined for a great role in the eventual Rediscovery of Man.

As always, it is lyrical and lovely, different from anything else you'll ever read. Four stars.

by Virgil Finlay

Courting Time, by Tom Purdom

The excellence continues with this marvelous treatment of polygamy in the mid-21st century on the eve of a great world fair: A composer in love with a woman comprising one eighth of an 8-way marriage wishes to become the next spouse in the cluster. But he has strong competition in the form of a ruthless and irresistable playboy. What's a lovelorn fellow to do?

Tom happens to be a friend of mine, and here are his notes on the genesis of this tale:

I got the idea several years before I wrote the story, when one of the older women in the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society told me she thought every woman needed four husbands, each one good at a different specialty–making money, romance, companionship, parenting. I felt that would work for men, too.

Most stories about group marriage that I'd read, it seemed to me, were stories about group sex. Courting Time is about the sociology of marriage. It owes something to Morton Hunt's The Natural History of Love, a book about the history of Western ideas about sex and marriage. Hunt concludes that our modern vision of marriage essentially demands that a two person relationship fulfill all the needs people once satisfied with their relationships with larger groupings like the extended family. You're supposed to find one person who can be your business partner, sexual partner, romantic partner, parent to your children, and lifelong companion. No single individual can do a five star job in all those roles.

I really liked the idea of the global world's fair. The world fair in New York was going on at that time and I asked myself what a world fair might look like in the future.

I called the story "Courting". I like one word titles. Fred Pohl changed it to "Courting Time", querying my approval, which has more of a lilt.

Other than Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Courting Time is the only SF story dealing with polygamy I've read in recent history. It's a very good story, though it could use a little more development with the protagonist's falling in love with each of the spouses. Tom agrees with my four star assessment.

Read it!

For Your Information: The Wreck of La Lutine, by Willy Ley

160 years ago, the gold ship, La Lutine, was capsized in a storm off the coast of Holland. Since then, numerous attempts of increasing sophistication have been made to recover the lost bullion, with limited success. Ley's account of these efforts is fascinating — maybe the Journey should put together a recovery mission of its own!

Four stars.

The Echo of Wrath , by Thomas M. Disch

Little Ilisveta, an eight year old Martian, is bored with her rough frontier life and yearns for something better, something like the Earth-trotting days her grandfather Dmitri and grandmother Sally enjoyed some sixty years prior. But such a life can never be.

Echo is a relatively unremarkable story until the end, which struck me in the gut with the force of a train. You've done it again, Mr. Disch.

Four stars.

Where the Changed Ones Go, by Robert Silverberg

by Jack Gaughan

Just last issue, Robert Silverberg gave us the second in a series one might call Blue Fire, a collection of loosely related novellas set in a future where the secular scientific religion of Vorsterianism has achieved currency across the Earth.

But not across the planets. The aloof Martians and the arrogant Venusians will have no truck with the Vorsterians. However, for some reason, the heretical Harmonists have managed to get a foothold on the hostile second planet from the Sun. So Nicholas Martell, a Vorsterian minister from Earth discovers when he runs across Brother Mondschein (who we met in the last story), who warns Martell that his errand is futile.

Martell, who has undergone a massive physical alteration just to live on Venus, will not be easily deterred — especially as he seems to have found his first potential convert, a young boy with the power of telekinesis.

Silverberg's Venus might as well be a random alien world, so little resemblance does it bear to the actual Venus. Astronomical quibbles aside, however, it's a fine story.

Four stars.

Eye of an Octopus, by Larry Niven

The first expedition to Mars finds Martians, and they're far more like (and unlike!) humans than they could have imagined. Is the well they discover for drinking or something else?

A well-drawn little puzzle story. We've taken to reading Niven stories, when they come out, at bedtime. Janice appreciated the wealth of detail briefly described and gave it four stars. Lorelei was less thrilled, giving it a solid three.

I'd split the difference if I could, but it's not a novel, so I can't. I'd say it's a worthy three star tale.

In the Imagicon, by George H. Smith

What do you give to the man who has everything? Why, nothing of course. A whole lot of it.

And vice versa.

Smith is a fellow who used to write for the lesser mags back in the 50s. He's been AWOL pretty much since I started the Journey so, until I did some digging, I thought he was a new author rather than a veteran.

Anyway, Imagicon is a pretty obvious tale. Not bad, just primitive by Galaxy's standards. I wavered between two and three stars, but just as suspots are pale in comparison to their surroundings despite their great heat, so Imagicon suffers for being in the company of so many good stories.

Two stars.

Mulligan, Come Home!, by Allen Kim Lang

Okay, Imagicon does have the virtue of being next to the only dud story in the issue. Lang's tale is about a fix-it man dispatched by the government to find the elusive trickster and malcontent Mulligan Mondrian. Along the way, we get Mondrian's full life history, detailing his start as a two-bit con man and womanizer and onward to his culmination as a larger-than-life, interplanetary con man and womanizer.

Some cute turns of phrase, but the story collapses under the weight of its own attempted cleverness.

Two stars.

The Age of the Pussyfoot (Part 3 of 3), by Frederik Pohl

by Wallace Wood

At last, we come to the thrilling conclusion of The Age of the Pussyfoot, the misadventures of a 20th Century man unfrozen after death in a 26th Century utopia. When last we left Chuck Forrester, he had not only been fired by his alien employer, he had unwittingly been an accomplice to the alien's escape from Earth. But when the Sirian left, presumably to return at the head of an invasion, he left the penniless Forrester nearly $100 million.

But profound wealth does little to assuage the guilt of the man out of time, especially when he is abandoned by all his newfound friends and his romantic partner. Is he the lynchpin to humanity's salvation or its ruin?

A sparkling, farcical story, just serious enough to keep your attention, Pussycat reads like a Sheckley short story at novel length (Pohl succeeds here where Sheckley, himself, usually can't quite make long pieces work).

That said, it's a little too sketchy and silly to merit four stars. Call it three and a half — worth reading, but probably not good enough to clinch a Galactic Star this year.

Summing Up

What a good issue this was! 3.4 stars is nothing to sneeze at. In fact, it might well end up being the best mag of the month, though we still have five more titles to review. If you're a long time Galaxy reader, enjoy this breath of fresh air. And if you're new to Galaxy, perhaps this issue will tempt you into a subscription, just as that first issue did for me more than fifteen years ago…

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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

January 6, 2021 John Boston 5 Comments

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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55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction