Category Archives: Science Fiction/Fantasy

Conventions/Performances, Magazine

[March 2, 1961] Presenting… and Concluding (ConDor and March 1961 IF)

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At ConDor, a local gathering of science fiction fans, my wife and I led a panel on the state of the genre, particularly how our s-f digests are doing.  Their boom began in 1949 and peaked in 1953, when there were nearly 40 in publication.  That number is down to less than 10, and many are (as usual) predicting the end of the fun. 

While it is true that the volume of production is down, I argued that the quality is up…or at least evolving.  I used Galaxy's sister magazine IF as an example.  IF pays its writers less than Galaxy, and it is a sort of training ground for new blood.  Fred Pohl, the magazine's shadow editor, also prints more unusual stories there.  As a result, the magazine's quality is highly variable, but the peaks tend to be interesting.

Sadly, this month's IF is chock full of valleys.  You win some, you lose some.  Still, for the sake of completeness, here's my review; as always, your mileage may vary!

IF has a tradition of leading the magazine with its best stories, but IOU, by Edward Wellen, is an exception.  The premise is promising: it's about a future in which people can buy custom experiences, to be lived out upon dying to simulate the appearance of going to Heaven.  It's dull as dirt, however, and I ended up skimming the last 10 pages or so.  That automatically makes it a one-star story.  Perhaps you can tell me what I'm missing.

Then there's Jim Harmon's February Strawberries.  When a man brings his wife (most of the way) back to life, is it a technological horror or a paranoid delusion?  Macabre and second-rate, it reads like an inferior episode of The Twilight Zone.  Two stars.

Minotaur, by Gordy Dickson, is pretty effective.  A one-man scout ship happens upon a ghost cruiser in the vastness of space.  Its crew is missing, as is its cargo of zoological specimens.  I liked the spooky atmosphere, and I'm a sucker for spaceship stories, but the end is a little pat.  Three stars.

Sylvia Jacobs is back, but her second IF effort isn't much better than her first.  Strike that.  Young Man from Elsewhen, about a crippled, bitter old man, and the deal he makes with a time traveling dandy, is very well written; it's just that there are no twists or turns from Point A to Point B.  Two stars.

The first tale from Julian F. Grow, The Fastest Gun Dead, is a good one.  Westerns are still popular on the airwaves, and this story, featuring a sawbones, an unsavory shopkeeper, and an alien supergun, shows that the milieu has legs in our genre, too.  Gun is also marred by a too-cute ending, but I think Grow has a real shot at growing into a fine author.  Three stars.

Max Williams' The Seeder, is almost too short, and certainly too hackneyed to describe.  R.A. Lafferty's pleasantly whimsical In the Garden, about a starship crew that stumbles upon the second Garden of Eden, almost garnered four stars…until the last line.  Le sigh.

The issue closes with The Well of the Deep Wish by Lloyd Biggle Jr.  It is the best of the bunch, a thoughtful piece showing us the world of television production in a post-apocalyptic, subterranean future.  Three stars.

Thus, the March 1961 IF meters in at a disappointing 2.25 stars.  This explains why it took me so long to get through it!

Crunching the numbers on the Star-o-Meter 2000, we have a surprising winner for March 1961: Analog!  F&SF was just a sliver behind, however, and both were head and shoulders over IF.  All told, there were 21 stories, two of which were written by women, one of those being my favorite of the month: Zenna Henderson's Return. 

Stay tuned for a new batch of magazines, a new Frederic Brown novel, and a whole lot more…and a hearty wave to a few new fan friends that I met over the weekend: David Gerrold, John and Bjo Trimble, and Dorothy Fontana.

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TV

[February 26, 1961] A Choice to Make (The Odyssey of Flight 33)

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Friday night is The Twilight Zone night.  It's true that the second season has not been as consistent in terms of quality as the show's first season, but it has had enough good episodes to remain regular watching. 

Normally, I wait until I have a month's worth of episodes before I summarize, but this week's episode, The Odyssey of Flight 33 impacted me such that I wanted to talk about it with my readers.

The episode takes place entirely within the confines of a (refreshingly accurate mock-up of a) 707 jetliner.  On its way from London to New York, flight Global 33 comes across a superpowerful tail wind.  The hapless plane is accelerated to a ground speed of 3000 miles per hour and then plunged through a barrier of turbulence.  The flight crew loses all radio contact with the ground.

A dramatically changed ground—all traces of habitation have disappeared from the mid-Atlantic coast, though the contours of Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Hudson River are all recognizable.  When the co-pilot spots a Brontosaurus grazing in primeval jungles of New York, it is clear that the plane has somehow been transported far into the past.

On a hunch, the pilot takes the jet back into the heavens to ride the mysterious tailwind again.  Another crash of turbulence, and the plane's radios come to life, the familiar skyline of Manhattan appears, and all seems well.

That is, until the pilot surveys the site of the United Nations.  Instead of that familiar building, he sees the distinctive structures of the World Exposition of 1939.  The plane has come back, but not quite all the way.

At that point, the pilot is faced with a choice: risk a landing at La Guardia, low on fuel, without radar, and on a runway that's too short, or ascend again for one last try.  He chooses the latter, and on that note, the episode ends.

There is much to like and dislike about the episode.  On the con side, it is ploddingly paced and utterly predictable.  Within the first ten seconds, my daughter exclaimed, "Is the plane going to go back in time?"  The scene with the dinosaur is ludicrous, not just in the dodgy special effects, but conceptually.  The Hudson Valley is an artifact of the last glacial period.  Certainly no aspect of the Eastern seaboard would be remotely identifiable 100 million years ago.  The cockpit of Global 33 is cramped with five crewmembers, one of whom seems to have no purpose but to take dictation for the Captain.

On the other hand, the cockpit action is extremely accurate (aside from that last point).  As an aviation enthusiast and former leisure pilot, the terminology and procedures are spot-on.  The acting is universally good (we've seen the Captain before, as an angel in the first season episode , A Passage for Trumpet).  The soundtrack is excellent.

Most importantly, the show provoked a long, thoughtful discussion afterwards.  What a choice to have to make.  Is it worth the gamble that you might end up in the primordial past or the unfathomable future just to get a little closer to your proper time?  Could you relive the last 22 years, understanding that the entire course of history would be altered?  Knowing that every person on the plane had a younger self down there? 

I'll say it flat out: I would land the plane.  22 years is close enough.  I would not risk the lives of my passengers on a slim hope, nor could I pass up the opportunity to avoid the horrendous toll of the second world war.  It's not an ideal solution, but it entails the lesser risk, in my estimation.

Of course, as my wife points out, I spend much of my life dreaming about the past, anyway.  Perhaps the thought of being a temporal castaway is less appealing to most.  Or playing God with history…

What would you do?

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Book

[February 24, 1961] Six into One (A.E. Van Vogt's War Against the Rull)

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Action!  Adventure!  A physicist/swashbuckler pitting his wits against the most dangerous planets in the universe!

This is a new book?  Well…

A.E. VanVogt is a prominent space opera writer, dominating the Golden Era of Science Fiction.  A half-dozen of these stories depict an interstellar war pitting a human-led federation against the implacable Rull: iridescent worm aliens from another galaxy.

As written, these stories are only tenuously related.  They are, however, unified by Van Vogt's riproaring style, the backdrop of the Rull war, and the overall theme of survival under hostile conditions, against deadly environments and personal adversaries.

So why not tie them together using the time-worn format of the "Fix-up novel"?  This is where a collection of stories is spliced together with linking material, sometimes with substantial revision.  Brian Aldiss had one called Galaxies like Grains of Sand, and VanVogt, himself, recently did it with The Mixed Men.

Thus, we have The War against the Rull (published in hardcover in 1959, reprinted this month in paperback), comprising the following stories, all of which debuted in Astounding Magazine: Cooperate or Else, 1942; Repetition, 1940; The Second Solution, 1942; The Green Forest, 1949; The Sound, 1950; and The Rull, 1948.

The non-chronological order is deliberate—this is the order in which they appear in the novel.  Polymath protagonist, Trevor Jamieson, ties them together.  The excitement starts on Page 1: trapped on a planet with the fearsome, telepathic ezwal, Jamieson must persuade the murderous alien to work with him long enough for both of them to survive a planet of horrors.  This ordeal convinces Jamieson that the ezwal could be the linchpin in the war against the Rull. 

But prejudice against the ezwal, who have killed countless human colonists and done their best to convince humanity that they are no more than stupid animals, is high.  So high that, on the heels of Jamieson's presentation to the colonist council on the ezwal homeworld, he is the target of an assassination attempt.  Once again, he must work with a hostile companion to defeat a menagerie of alien beasts.

We then awkwardly segue to my favorite bit of the book, wherein a baby ezwal ends up on Earth, evading humanity and attempting survive in the wild.  Told quite effectively from the alien's perspective, it is a nice role reversal. 

Then we're back to the original hero for the next section.  Jamieson thwarts a Rull attempt to sabotage production of an anti-Rull bioweapon.  This is where we learn that the Rull are master spies, able to change their apparent shape at will.

Jamieson's 9-year old son gets to be the viewpoint of the next story.  With some help from an ezwal, the child helps nab an entire Rull spy ring before it can wreck a giant spaceship.

The book concludes with a one-on-one confrontation between Jamieson and a Rull general.  They play a cat and mouse game to capture each other, both convinced that a live prisoner will be the key to understanding the enemy.  It builds on all the previous stories; the final victory would have been impossible without Jamieson's prior triumphs. 

Does it work?  Some of the stitching is a bit clumsy.  Having not read the original stories, I can't tell if they worked better independently; I suspect Jamieson was not the star of all of them, originally.  The writing is in an outdated style, as one might expect.  The novel is like a rollercoaster with six peaks and subsequent wild rides.  As such, the plot doesn't exactly make sense, and Jamieson's life comes off a bit too outrageous.  For all that, War is an enjoyable read.  Van Vogt writes fun, creative, and occasionally thoughtful adventure.

Three stars.

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Magazine

Feb. 15, 1961] Variable Stars (March 1961 Fantasy and Science Fiction

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I want to tell you about this month's "All Star" issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but I'm too busy tapping my heels to a groovy new song I was just turned on to.  Last year, I thought the instrumental group, The Ventures, were The End, but after hearing the new disc from The Shadows, Apache, I may have to change my vote.  Is it too late to rejoin with England?

Back to our show.  Every year or so, Fantasy and Science Fiction releases an "All Star" issue in which only Big Names get published.  It's a sort of guarantee of quality (and, presumably, sales).  I'll tell you right now that, with the notable exception of the lead novelette, it's largely an "All Three Star" issue.  Perhaps it's better to leave things to the luck of the draw.  That said, it's hardly an unworthy read, and Zenna Henderson, as always, makes the issue a must buy.

Ms. Henderson is best known for her stories of The People, now spanning a decade of publication, and to be released on March 17 of this year as a compilation anthology!  The People are humans from another world, with the ability to do all manner of psychic tricks that look to us Outsiders as akin to magic.  Henderson's stories are generally bittersweet tales of misfit refugees from the stars attempting to make do on a primitive, often unfriendly, but nevertheless beautiful world.

Last time we saw The People, in F&SF two years ago, the Earthbound had finally been rediscovered by their star-dwelling brethren, and many had elected to return to more familiar surroundings.  But many also chose to stay in their adoptive home.  In Return, one of the People who left, Debbie, yearns to go back to Earth.  Her homesickness becomes a palpable thing, and weeks before her baby is to be born, she convinces her new husband, Thann, to make the journey back to Earth to live with her kind there.

Things don't go as planned.  There is now a lake in the valley where the People had made their home.  Debbie and Thann crash land, the latter dying soon after.  What follows is a beautiful story of a lost, lonely, somewhat selfish woman on the eve of motherhood, and the old human couple that offers her shelter.  It's a lovely complete story arc of a woman's maturation impelled by crisis–the kind of story only a woman (a remarkable one like Ms. Henderson) could give us.  Five stars.

The rest of the magazine, while never bad, never lives up to the standard of that first story.

Jay Williams, writer of the Danny Dunn franchise (which I quite enjoy) has a slight, if evocatively bitter piece, about a murderous man who gets his comeuppance after doing away with a romantic rival.  It's called The Beetle, and it's strong but not novel.  Two stars.

Saturn Rising is a pleasant nuts-and-bolts piece from one of the fathers of modern science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke.  A teen builds his own telescope, espies Saturn in all its ringed glory, and then his father cruelly breaks the instrument.  The youth grows up to become a wealthy hotel magnate, but that first-hand glimpse of a celestial body remains the seed for an undying dream–to build a resort in full view of the sixth planet.  I visited a telescope store today, and the story made a fitting tale with which to regale my daughter as she perused the reflectors and refractors.  Three stars.

John Wyndham offers up a time travel tale in A Stitch in Time wherein an old woman, spending her last years in the same home in which she was raised, is at last reunited with her high school beaux–some 50 years late for a date.  It's nicely written, and who doesn't have a space where time seems to have stood still for decades, in which, at any time, some memory might resurrect itself?  And yet, it's a thin idea despite the fine characterization.  Three stars.

I quite enjoyed Dr. Asimov's The Imaginary that Wasn't, all about "imaginary numbers", i.e. multiples of the square root of negative one.  Not only is a cogent description of their origin and utility (though he never mentions electric circuits, in which they are invaluable), but the anecdote in the beginning is priceless: Some 20 years ago, Isaac showed up a smug philosophy teacher with his mathematical knowledge, earning the latter's rancor forever.  Said teacher asserted that mathematicians were mystics for they believed in imaginary numbers, which have "no reality."

Asimov contended that imaginary numbers were just as real as any other.  The teacher pounced.  "Show me a piece of chalk that has the length of the square root of negative one."  Asimov replied that he would–provided the teacher gave him a one-half piece of chalk.  The professor promptly broke a piece in half and handed it to Asimov in triumph.  What ensues, Asimov describes thusly:

"Ah, but wait," I said: "you haven't fulfilled your end. This is one piece of chalk you've handed me, not a one-half piece."  I held it up for the others to see.  "Wouldn't you all say this was one piece of chalk?  It certainly isn't two or three."

Now the professor was smiling.  "Hold it. One piece of chalk is a piece of regulation length. You have one that's half the regulation length."  I said, "Now you're springing an arbitrary definition on me.  But even if I accept it, are you willing to maintain that this is a one-half piece of chalk and not a 0.48 piece or a 0.52 piece?  And can you really consider yourself qualified to discuss the square root of minus one, when you're a little hazy on the meaning of one-half?"  But by now the professor had lost his equanimity altogether and his final argument was unanswerable. He said, "Get the hell out of here!"

This parallels my experience, also some 20 years ago, when I showed up a smug anthropology professor.  He, trying to shock his students with an amoral argument, asserted that cannibalism was abandoned simply because it was economically inefficient, not for any cultural reasons.  I decided to call his bet and pointed out that raising any meat is inefficient–if we really liked the taste of people, we'd still be eating them.  The teacher made it clear that I was not welcome in his class.  Why do instructors never recognize the genius of their students?

Four stars, from one smart-mouth to another.

Philip J. Farmer's Prometheus takes up most of the rest of the issue.  This is the sequel to A Father to the Stars starring the corrigible Father Carmody, an ex-con cum hapless priest…with an alien egg symbiotically stuck to his chest.  In this new story, Carmody goes to the planet of the horowitzes, a sentient but uncultured race, one member of which expregnated the monk.  A much more serious story, it depicts Carmody's attempts to enlighten the horowitzes by bringing them language, technology, science, and ultimately, religion.  Three stars because, while it was fun reading, I never got the impression that the putatively alien horowitzes were anything other than feathered people.  Moreover, the profundity of the final revelation was insufficiently profound.

Against my better judgment, I am distributing the Ferdinand Feghoot pun of the month.  Perhaps I'll make it "a thing." 

Wrapping up the issue is John Berry's very short The One Who Returns, a subtle story about a priest who is educated in the true faith by an Indian lama, and the measures another member of the flock goes to so as to avoid seduction by the compelling heresy.  Four stars.

Three and a half stars overall.  Respectable, but not what I'd expect from an "All Star" issue. 

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Magazine

[February 10, 1961] Two for two!  (March 1961 Analog)

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Analog (my errant fingers keep wanting to type “Astounding”) was even better than last time.  This particular copy is a seasoned traveler, having ridden with me to the lovely shores of Kaua'i and back.  At long last, I've finished reading, and I can tell you about it.  A sneak preview: there's not a bad piece in the book!

In lieu of a serial, nearly half of the issue's pages are taken up with Mack Reynold's novella, Ultima Thule.  My nephew, David, was so enamored with this one that he specifically recommended it to me in a recent letter.  It's the story of Ronny Bronston, an agent employed by the mysterious Section G, responsible for maintaining mutual non-interference between the 2000 member planets of the Galactic Federation.  Bronston is sent on the trail of “Tommy Paine,” an elusive agitator who travels from planet to planet, upending the various status quos.  Can you figure out who Paine really is?  I particularly liked Bronston's 'assistant,' the highly capable, and delightfully reproachful Tog Lee Chang Chu.  Reynolds never has trouble writing good female characters.  Three stars.

Cliff Simak is back with another rustic-themed story, Horrible Example.  Can a robot programmed to be the town drunk rise to be more than the sum of his code?  A sensitive piece in that inimitable Simak style.  Four stars.

G. Harry Stine used to be a professional rocketeer—until his calls to action in response to Sputnik rubbed his superiors the wrong way.  Now, he is a technology evangelist.  In his latest piece, Sub-Mach Rockets, he explorers the much neglected field of rocketry at speeds below the speed of sound.  Makes me want to build a baby missile or two!  Three stars.

The next piece was written with tongue firmly in cheek, a bit of engineering fluff by Maurice Price descriptively entitled, An Introduction to the Calculus of Desk-Cleaning.  See Price illustrate the correlation between engineer output and desk-based chaos; it's surprisingly informative!  Four stars.

Next, we've got one of those “non-fact” articles, though it's just billed as fiction.  The Four-Faced Visitors of Ezekiel, by Arthur W. Orton, is a science fictional interpretation of the biblical book of Ezekiel.  It's as good an explanation for that bizarre book as any!  Three stars

Now, I admit it.  I am biased toward stories of interstellar travel with ships and captains and interesting situations.  Poul Anderson's Hiding Place is a wonderful puzzle cloaked in all the trappings I like: a refreshingly multi-racial starship crew finds itself trapped in deep space between a pirate fleet and a quickly diminishing provisions supply.  Only by making contact with a friendly alien ship do they have a hope of seeing the fires of home.  Unfortunately, said alien ship, a zoological vessel with a menagerie of beasts for its cargo, takes the humans for pirates and hides in the animal cages.  Can the terrestrials discern the sentient creatures from their beasts and plead their case in time?  Five stars.

That all adds up to a 3.5 star issue—well worth the half dollar you'll fork over at the newsstand (less if you buy a subscription, which, if the quality continues to be this good, might be a fine investment).

Aloha!

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TV

[February 7, 1961] TV Addiction (The Twilight Zone, Season 2, Episodes 13-16)

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I've been watching a lot of television, lately.  It's embarrassing.  I should be reading more books or doing more than cursorily scanning the front page of the newspaper.  Instead, after work I flip on the set and vegetate for an hour.  I hope this doesn't become a habit!

It's certainly not as if TV has gotten significantly better.  Mr. Ed, My Sister Eileen, the umpteenth season of the Jack Benny Show, none of these are going to win any awards.  On the other hand, The Twilight Zone has already won an award (an Emmy last year), and I'm hoping that my continued watching and review of that show excuses my overindulgence in the others.

What did we see last month?  First off, there was Back There.  Corrigian, a youngish historian, departs for home from his Gentleman's Club after a rousing discussion on time travel.  One step outside the Club, and he finds himself in April 1865 on the eve of Lincoln's shooting.  Of course, he tries to avert the tragedy, but only one fellow, a sympathetic policeman believes him.  Then Corrigan is waylaid by none other than the assassin, John Wilkes Booth.  The President is slain, despite the policeman's herculean efforts to warn him, and the professor returns to a seemingly unchanged present.  Or is it?  The servant who saw Corrigan out is now a wealthy businessman.  It turns out he's the great grandson of the policeman from the past, whose attempts to save Lincoln won him acclaim.  The lesson: the river of time doesn't like to make drastic changes of course, but it can meander a little.  Not bad.  Not great.  Three stars.

Second up, we have yet another of the hard-to-watch videotape episodes, The Whole Truth.  The gimmick for this one was spoiled in the prior week's preview and in the opening of the episode: a crook of a used car salesman buys a haunted Model A, the purchase of which compels the new owner to always tell the truth.  This proves fatal to the fellow's business until he hatches a plan to sell the vehicle to none other than Nikita Khruschev.  It's an episode that relies on the charisma (or convincing lack thereof) of the main character.  Jack Carson does a pretty good job.  Three stars.

I looked forward to Invaders; Richard Matheson did the screenplay, and it was billed as a masterpiece of lines-less drama.  Something must have happened between the writer's pen and the screen because watching 22 turgid minutes of a farm woman menaced by a pair of miniature Michelin Men was excruciating.  My first instinct is to put a good portion of the blame on the actress, Agnes Morehead.  There was enough ham in her silent performance to poison a dozen shuls.  On the other hand, it might be the director's fault.  I heard through the grapevine that Matheson was not happy with the final product—he'd written in twice the action, and the alien invaders (who turn out to be human astronauts in a world of giants) had their screen time kept to a minimum in his version.  That would have been nice; they did not bear being in full view very well.  My daughter spent much of the show groaning in agonized boredom, pounding the floor.  I'm lucky the cops didn't come to take me away for bad parenting.  One star.

Thankfully, the follow-up show was a lot of fun.  Dick York plays a harried banker who gains the ability to read minds for a day.  He figures out what's going on with refreshing haste and uses the gift to great advantage, preventing a potential robbery, halting a bad loan, and getting the girl (who was too shy to verbalize her interest).  The scene where he listens in on the thoughts of a vacant-eyed bank patron who turns out not to be thinking about anything is a nice touch.  Four stars.

Not a bad run, and good enough to keep us watching on Fridays.  Are you tuning in, too?

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Science / Space Race, TV

[February 4, 1961] Sputniks and Supercars!

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A bit of a grab bag while I finish up the March 1961 Analog:

There was a rather unusual Soviet launch yesterday.  We're calling it Sputnik 7 for lack of a better term, but it is still unclear just what the seven-ton satellite is supposed to be doing.  It is bigger than the capsules it has orbited before, the ones that carried dogs and mannequins.  It is also, apparently, not designed to reenter.  At least, it hasn't, and the Russians have not indicated that they plan to retrieve it.

Per Professor Yevgeny Klinov of the International Committee for Meteoric Studies of the World Geophysical Association, the probe was designed “to study the earth as a planet and to make a study of its nearest environment, including that of meteoric dangers. 

That would suggest it is an orbital laboratory in the vein of Sputnik 3, but who needs seven tons to do that?  In any event, aside from Klinov's reported comments and a bit of muted praise from TASS (the Soviet news agency), there's been hardly a peep about the flight, which some observers are interpreting as a sign that the mission hasn't gone as planned.  Usually, Moscow Radio gives lurid details of the cities Soviet probes will fly over and the radio frequencies on which one can pick up their beep-beeps.  This time, it's zilch-ville.

Maybe we'll know more in a week or so.

In other news, an exciting scifi kids show had debuted across the pond in Jolly Old England.  Supercar came out on January 28 (if ITC stuck to the schedule I read in the trade magazine I got from overseas), and it looks like a hoot.  The eponymous vehicle, piloted by American “Mike Mercury” can drive, fly, and even submerge.  Mike and his Supercar will be involved in a number of adventures, rescuing folks in distress, fighting bad guys, and helping the progress of science.  Interestingly, the world of Supercar is populated entirely by marionettes, using a newly developed technique called “Supermarionation.” It looks a little creepy, if you ask me, but perhaps one gets used to it.


Here's hoping the show gets syndicated in the U.S.  I'm still waiting for Danger Man to come over…

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Magazine

[January 29, 1961] Take a little off the bottom (February 1961 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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Greetings from sunny Kaua'i!  It seems like only yesterday I was reporting from this island's idyllic shores.  Much has changed, of course–Hawai'i is now a state!  50 is a nice round number, so perhaps we won't see any new entries into the Union for a while.

Accompanying me on this trip is the last science fiction digest of the month, the Fantasy and Science Fiction.  On a lark, I decided to read from the end, first.  In retrospect, I'm glad I did, but it certainly made the magazine a challenge.  You see, the stories at the end are just wretched.  But if you skip them (or survive them, as I did), the rest of the magazine is quite excellent.

Let's get the drek over with straight-away, shall we?

Some unknown named C. Brian Kelly offers up the disgusting and sadistic The Tunnel, three pages about a vengeful cockroach that you need never read. 1 star.

Meanwhile, the normally excellent Robert F. Young offers the strangely prudish Storm over Sodom, which somehow rubbed me the wrong way all the way through.  2 stars.

Whew.  Now let's go to the beginning and pretend the last 20 pages never happened. 

Brian Aldiss, who wrote the variable fix-up Galaxies like grains of sand is back with what I hope is the first in a series of tales about life on Earth in the very distant future.  Hothouse portrays a hot, steamy world dominated by vegetable life.  Indeed, a single banyan tree has become a global forest, and within it reside a myriad of mobile plant creatures that comprise almost all of the planet's species.  Humanity is a savage race, clearly on the decline.  Their only hope, perhaps, will come from the outer space they once called their own domain. 

It's a beautifully crafted world, the characters are vivid, and if the science stretches credulity, it does not entirely break it.  Five stars

Time was is a pleasant piece by Ron Goulart involving a homesick young woman, the trap that tries to lure her back to the 1939 of her childhood, and the dilettante detective of occult matters who tries to save her.  Four stars.

I've said before that Rosel George Brown is a rising star, and Of all possible worlds is my favorite story of hers yet.  A beautiful tale of an interstellar explorer and the almost-humans he meets on a placid, emerald-sand beach.  They seem to be primitives, but sometimes the end result of scientific progress is a pleasant, contemplative rest.  Anthropology, biology, love, and loss.  Five stars.

Marcel Ayme is back with his The Ubiquitous Wife, about a young woman who can multiply herself infinitely and thus live a thousand lives at once.  Like his other stories, it is droll and engaging.  The translator did a good job of conveying Ayme's clever turns of phrase.  Three stars.

Theodore L. Thomas provides The Intruder, a subtle time travel story featuring a backpacker fishing trilobites at the dawn of the Devonian era.  In a nice touch, it turns out he is not the intruder; rather it is the little blot of algae that threatens to inevitably populate the fisher's pristine, lifeless world.  Four stars.

Finally, we have Isaac Asimov's non-fiction article, Order, Order!, on the subject of entropy (the amount of energy unavailable for work; or the amount of disorder in the universe). It's a topic that everyone knows something about, but few have a real handle on.  The Good Doctor does an excellent job of explaining this esoteric matter.  Four stars.

What a pity–if not for the two lodestones at the end of the issue, this would be a rate 4-star magazine.  Still, even with them, the score is a comfortable 3.5 stars, which makes F&SF the best digest of the month.  It also has the best story of the month: Hothouse.  Finally, it features fully 50% of the month's woman authors; sadly, there are just two. 

See you on February Oneth–if NASA's hopes are fulfilled, I will have an exciting Mercury Redstone mission to talk about!

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Magazine

[Jan. 25, 1961] Oscillating circuit (the February 1961 Analog)

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John Campbell's science fiction magazine continues to defy my efforts to chart a trend.  Following on the heels of last month's rather dismal issue, the February 1961 Analog is an enjoyable read.  Let's take a look, shall we?

It took me a little while to get into Everett Cole's lead novella, The Weakling, but once I understood what he was doing, I was enthralled.  Cole paints a world in which people with psi powers dominate those without.  It is a planet of slave-owning aristocrats who can force people to do their bidding through mental will alone.  The viewpoint character is Barra, scion of a noble family.  His ascension to lordhood was accidental, caused by the premature deaths of his father and brother.  Without the aid of an array of potent psychic enhancers, he would be barely more powerful than the "pseudo-men" he controls. 

Weakling is the account of this bitter, cruel man, contemptuous of the slaves he resembles, jealous of his psychically more powerful peers, who entices rich merchants to his estate, murdering them for plunder.  The story can be hard to read at times, but it is an excellent insight into the mindset of the 19th Century slave-owner (and thus an indictment of the sentiment that still prevails over much of the modern South).  Four stars. 

Teddy Keller's short, The Plague, is more typical Analog fare.  When a sickness sweeps the nation, with no apparent rhyme or reason to its epidemiology, one doctor must race against time to find a cure.  The solution is contrived and rather silly.  Two stars.

Freedom, the latest in Mack Reynolds' slew of stories set in the Soviet Union of the 1980s, is a horse of a different color.  Once again, Reynolds expertly conveys the character of life behind an Iron Curtain where Communism has achieved its economic goals, but not its social ones.  In this tale, we see how difficult it is to extirpate a desire for intellectual freedom once it has taken root.  I appreciate the evenhandedness with which Reynolds evaluates both the East and West.  I also liked the romantic element, portrayed as between two equals unencumbered with conservative moral values.  Four stars.

Campbell trumpeted his expanded coverage of science fact in his magazine, and it seemed a worthy experiment at the start.  I'm always happy to see more Asimov articles, after all.  But recently, the "non-fiction" portion of the magazine has been devoted to self-penned articles on the editor's hobbies or favorite crackpot inventions.  We get a blessed break from these with a short photo-feature showing rockets of the past and present.  Too short to garner a rating.

I don't think I quite got H.B. Fyfe's The Outbreak of Peace, a short short that takes place at an interstellar peace conference.  I even read it twice.  Would someone explain it to me, please?  Two stars (for now).

At last, we have Chris Anvil's latest, The Ghost Fleet.  A space fleet commander is forced to ignominious flight when the enemy strikes with an unbeatable weapon.  Can he recover his honor (and save the day) with an audacious gambit?  It's good, if something of a one-trick pony.  Three stars.

The issue finishes off with the conclusion to Occasion for Disaster, which I previously covered.  All told, the book clocks in at a slice over three stars, which is perfectly acceptable for 50 cents of entertainment. 

Now let's see if this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction can top that.

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Movies

[Jan. 23, 1961] 20,000 Leagues over the Air! (Master of the World)

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Every once in a while, my faith is restored in Hollywood, and I remember why I sit through the schlock to get to the gold.

My daughter and I sat through 90 minutes of the execrable, so bad it's bad Konga because we had been lured in by the exciting posters for Master of the World.  It promised to be a sumptuous Jules Verne classic a la Journey to the Center of the Earth, and it starred the inimitable Vincent Price to boot.

It was worth the wait–the movie is an absolute delight.

The year is 1868, and a team of intrepid adventurers takes off in a steam-powered balloon to investigate what appears to be a volcanic eruption in the midst of Pennsylvania.  They include the doddering but genuinely humorous arms maker, Mr. Prudent, his lively daughter, Dorothy, her outwardly chivalrous but really quite petty fiance, Philip Evans, and the enigmatic yet utterly capable government agent, John Strock. 

As it crests the crater of the Mid-Atlantic's newest volcanic crater, the balloon is shot down by a stream of missiles.  When the aeronauts awake, they find themselves on a tremendous flying ship, part helicopter and part battleship.  It is captained by the fearsome Robur (Price) festooned with shaggy facial hair appliques.  The skipper's goal is mad yet laudable: to end war on Earth by destroying each nation's ability to make war.  With the captured Pennsylvanians in tow, Robur launches a crusade of terror against the navies and armies of the world.  Can this madman be stopped?  You'll have to watch to the end to find out!

It is an amibitious movie for American International Pictures, an attempt at an epic from a studio better known for it's "B"-level drive-in fare.  It very well could have been a classic-based dud like last year's The Lost World.  Certainly, the special effects are nothing special–primarily rather limp model-work, back-projection, and liberal use of stock footage.

And yet…

The script is by Richard Matheson, possibly the best fantasy/science fiction screenwriter in the business.  The performances turned out by the five stars are excellent.  Price's Robur conveys single-minded fanaticism sublty tinged with resignation and regret.  Here is a villain one can sympathize with, even admire, despite the insanity of his vision.  Henry Hull's Prudent captures the archaicisms of early 19th Century speech and manners.  The clear attraction between Dorothy Prudent (Mary Webster) and John Strock (Charles Bronson), much to the dismay of Mr. Evans (David Frankham), is convincing. 

Moreover, there is a consistent tone and pacing to the movie.  It is never dull.  The story twists and turns such that you are never certain what will happen next.  It is fun in an over-the-top way that mitigates the enormity of Robur's actions, making them watchable rather than sickening.  The humor is intentionally funny.  The action scenes are exciting.  The doffing of shirts by the ship's muscular crew mid-way through the film is inexplicable, but not unwelcome (for at least half of the audience). 

And in the end, it is both satisfying and touching.  More, please. 

Four stars.

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