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Book

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

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by Gideon Marcus

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

Battle on Venus, by William F. Temple

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

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

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

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

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

The Silent Invaders, by Robert Silverberg

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

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

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

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

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

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Magazine

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

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by John Boston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Science Fiction/Fantasy

[May 8, 1963] Breathing New Life (The Second Sex in SFF, Part VI)

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by Gideon Marcus

I didn't start Galactic Journey with the intention of it being a champion for progressive change.  It just sort of happened.  Our joining what's now being called the Second Wave of Feminism, and our frequent spotlight of woman and minority writers and characters, happened by degrees.  I like a broad range of ideas and viewpoints, and it often takes an outsider to write works outside the mainstream.  This is a big reason why we started covering British science fiction, and I'm glad we did.  They are just entering what some have called a "New Wave," featuring some far out concepts and a more literary style. 

Another reason for Galactic Journey's evolving focus is the make-up of our staff.  Most of the team are women (about half of the articles are written by women), and we come from a diverse set of backgrounds and cultures.  That makes us pretty unusual for even this modern year of 1963, and it follows that our tastes would be eclectic. 

Of course, finding unusual authors can still be challenge — particularly these days.  It is a rare month that the number of magazines featuring woman authors requires two fingers to count, and even though Cele Goldsmith has made a name for herself editing Amazing and Fantastic, her magazines don't often contain woman-penned pieces. 

Nevertheless, women still make up a vital population within our genre, both professionally and as fans.  In fact, several new female authors have come on the scene since the last edition of The Second Sex in SFF, many of whom have made a big splash, and who may well herald the beginning of a new upswing.  Let's meet the new group:

Madeleine L'Engle

L'Engle, who had only published one SF story back in '56, had determined to give up writing as a lost cause.  After all, rejections are demoralizing (I grok!) and the income she was making just wasn't worth the time spent.  But then the idea for A Wrinkle in Time came to her in '59, and she persevered through more than 30 rejections to publish what was one of the most spectacular sff books of 1962.  I understand it's on the short list for the Newberry this year, and it certainly earned last year's Galactic Star for best novel. 

So three cheers for L'Engle, who shows that the key to success is perseverance. 

Ursula K. Le Guin

This newly minted author currently has two stories under her belt, both of them published in Fantastic.  Her first, April in Paris so impressed us that we awarded her the Galactic Star.  While Le Guin has not yet received any official accolades for her work, we suspect it's only a matter of time.

Karen Anderson

Anderson began her professional sf career writing with her husband, the rather famous Poul, in 1958.  However, her fanac days started long before then, and her costumage at Worldcon is legendary.  Since last year, she has burst out as an author and poet in her own right, mostly composing works with mythological themes.  A talent on the edge of greatness, Karen has just begun to write.

Gertrude Friedberg

Some authors are renowned in other fields, only occasionally dabbling in our genre.  One such writer is Gertrude Frieberg (formerly Tonkonogy), who is much better known for her plays, Three Cornered Moon and Town House and the collection Short Story 2 (which features several of her works) than her single SF piece, The Short and Happy Death of George Frumkin .  Still, we're happy she took the detour and hope she comes back some day!

Sonya Dorman

I know very little about Sonya Dorman other than she hails from Connecticut, is fond of dogs, and is just beginning her sf writing career.  Her first, The Putnam Tradition showed great promise.  I hope we see more from her soon.

Cele Goldsmith

Let's wrap up with a star who is neither newcomer nor author, and yet, whose impact on the genre has been profound.

Goldsmith's career is a fascinating one.  She started out in '55, at age 22, as a secretary for Howard Browne, who was editor of Amazing and Fantastic.  Browne abandoned ship for a Hollywood career that year, and Paul Fairman took over, retaining Goldsmith.  When he left for other pastures in 1958, Goldsmith ascended to the editorship of two magazines with proud but tarnished reputations. 

In the last five years (coincidentally, the same span of time that the Journey has existed), she has turned both magazines around.  In particular, I like the work that comes out in Fantastic, but Amazing often has worthy stuff, too.  For this outstanding work, her magazines have perennially been nominated for the Hugo, and she, herself, won a Special Committee Award at the last Worldcon.  She is truly an inspiration, proof that neither age nor origin are insurmountable barriers to success.

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Magazine

[May 6, 1963] The more things change… (June 1963 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Around the world, events herald a heightened rate of change.  Civil Rights marchers and boycotters in Birmingham, Alabama have been met with fire hoses, attack dogs, and mass incarceration.  Casualty reports for servicemen killed in Vietnam are becoming a weekly occurrence.  In a more hopeful vein, the nuclear test ban group at the United Nations appears to be making good progress, and it has been reported that the White House and Kremlin will soon be bridged by a "Hot Line:" a secure teletype link for instant communications.

And yet, within the latest pages of Galaxy, a magazine that established the vanguard of new-type science fiction when it came out in October 1950, it appears that time has stood still.  The proud progressive flagship appears to be faltering, following in the footsteps of Campbell's reactionary Analog.  It's not all bad, exactly.  It's just nothing new…and some of it is really bad.  Is it a momentary blip?  Or is Editor Pohl saving the avante-garde stuff for his other two magazines?

In any event, here it is, the June 1963 Galaxy:

Here Gather the Stars (Part 1 of 2), by Clifford Simak

A century after the American Civil War, Union soldier Enoch Wallace is found to still be alive on his Wisconsin family homestead.  Amazingly, he has retained his youth, as has his home, despite the age-decay of the nearby farmhouses.  The government puts the solider under 24-hour surveillance.  Yet, all they are able to learn of the reclusive man is that he no longer farms, goes for a walk for an hour a day, potters in his garden for short periods, and his only "friends" are the mailman and a deaf-mute young woman, a sort of local witch.

We soon learn, however, that Wallace's home is actually a galactic way station, a transfer point for teleporting aliens.  Both the home and Wallace (when he is inside) are freed from the ravages of time.  Day-in and day-out, members of an incredibly diverse collection of extra-terrestrials are translated across the light years into the station's holding tanks.  These are essentially copies of originals — great energies create new beings at each station, killing the earlier copies.  The corpses are then discarded.  It's a grisly kind of travel, when one thinks about it, and it certainly leaves little room for an eternal soul that clings to a physical form. 

Simak is one of the great veterans of our field, and he has been a staple of Galaxy since its inception.  He is unmatched when it comes to evoking a bucolic charm, and he has a sensitive touch when conveying people (human or otherwise).  This particular tale begins promisingly, but it meanders a bit, and it frequently repeats itself.  Either over-padded or under-edited, it could do with about 15% fewer words.  Three stars so far, but I have a feeling the next half will be better.

The Cool War, by Andrew Fetler

In contrast to Simak, Fetler is a newish author and a decidedly minor one.  He's finally made the jump from IF to Galaxy (a step up in pay and prestige), but I don't know how he earned it with this piece, a satire in which robots are used to replace political notables.  It's not very coherent, and it's not at all fun.  One star. 

For Your Information, by Willy Ley

This month's science article is surprisingly good.  The surprise isn't that Willy wrote a good piece — he's the reason I became a Galaxy subscriber in the first place, 13 years ago.  No, it's because I hadn't expected to be interested in the subject matter.

The topic is sounding rockets, those missiles that carry scientific packages into space but not into orbit.  They tend to get little press compared to their bigger cousins, and I've been as guilty of neglecting them as everyone else.  Yet hundreds of these little guys are launched each year by more than a dozen countries, and the scientific return they offer is staggering, particularly in consideration of their low cost.  Plus, the development of these small boosters has direct application to the creation of big ones.

Four stars.  Worth reading.

End as a Hero, by Keith Laumer

Kayle, a space-traveling psychologist is captured by the mind-controlling Gool and implanted with a mission to destroy the Terran Federation at its source: Earth.  But the aliens have picked the wrong subject for this treasonous task.  For Kayle has erected barriers to suggestion while giving himself access to the Gool mind-trust, thus turning the tides.  Now the race is on — can he make it back to Earth and give humanity the secret to instantaneous teleportation before his military colleagues kill him out of an abundance of caution?  And is Kayle really the one calling the shots, or is it just part of a many-layered Gool plot?

It's a strange Rube Goldberg of a tale, and if you stop to think about it, it falls apart.  Yet Laumer is quite a good writer., and sort of makes it work.  Think of it as a straight Retief story.  Three stars.

The Faithful Wilf, by Gordon Dickson

The interstellar Nick and Nora are back in their third diplomatic mystery adventure.  Unfortunately, unlike the last one (which appeared in a truly excellent issue of Galaxy), Wilf is wretched.  The female half of the pair is ignobly reduced to whining and simpering, and the story is told so elliptically that I'm still not quite sure what happened.  It's a shame because Dickson, when he wants to, is one of the genre's better writers.  But he only wants to about a third of the time…  One star.

The Sellers of the Dream, by John Jakes

Last up is an "if this goes on tale," taking the trend of planned obsolescence to its ludicrous end.  Not only are clothes, furniture, and cars all disposed of on an annual basis, but even personalities and bodies are swapped.  Not by stodgy males, of course, but that will come soon enough.  Sellers is the story of an industrial spy who discovers that this year's body model is, in fact, a tragically altered ex-fiancee. 

Thus begins a most improbable scheme to save the captive woman that leads our hero to the wastes of Manhattan, a decrepit penal colony for reactionaries who cling to the notion that things have permanent value.  Along the way, the spy learns the awful secret behind the 21st Century economy. 

Author John Jakes has flitted across the various SF magazines for more than a decade.  He occasionally produces a work of art.  More frequently, he write mediocre space-filler.  Sellers is neither.  While the story doesn't make a lot of sense, the satire is worthy, and I found myself interested the whole way.  Call it an idea piece.  Three stars.

In the end, this month's Galaxy probably won't make you cancel your subscription, but it will leave you pining for change.  Well, every month brings new opportunities (or in the case of this bimonthly magazine, every other month.).  Until then…

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Science / Space Race

[May 4, 1963] The Love of My Life (so far)

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by Victoria Lucas

There is a miracle of modern technology that I haven't yet seen covered in these pages.  It's not much bigger than a breadbox (as Steve Allen would say) and has fewer moving parts than others of its kind.  If it weren't so expensive I would have bought one of my own by now.  Hint: you roll paper into it and type on it.  And it's electrical.

But first… a little story to explain why this invention is so exciting:

When I was 10, my mother, who was not allowed to work outside our home because people might think my dad couldn't support us, worked for my dad.  He purchased a used IBM Executive for her so that she could type a TV guide he published at the time.  I wanted to help, so she taught me to type, and specifically to type on the Executive, which allows for print-type-like spacing (half spaces, etc.). 

It was a little difficult to learn, but I soon got the hang of it.  It was fun to figure out how many words a line could hold and still be flush with the line above it at the right as well as the left, so you could do columns and "justified" pages (the term for flush right and left).  I will never forget typing rows and rows of local television programming of our three network stations in Tucson.
At the same time our baby grand piano that moved with us from California took up so much room that it occupied our small dining room by itself.  I took piano lessons until I was about 12, caressing the 88 keys.  Little did I think that one day I would use a typewriter with 88 characters on each type element!

Reluctantly, I skipped third-year Latin in high school to take secretarial courses (including a typing course) so I could make a living.  That was painful.  The old upright manual (no electricity) typewriters had keys so far apart that it was difficult for my little hands to reach from one side to the other to hit the "Return" key.  And the rows were far apart too.  The Executive had the advantage here: its keyboard had rows of keys at different heights, but the relative height of the keys was less and the spaces between them were filled.  (Coming from a theater background, I would call the height of the keys as they march up to the type basket a "rake.")

On the Executive it was easier to make my fingers fly over the keys, even for my hands as little as they were when I was 10.  On the manuals, my little fingers fell between the keys, squeezing them painfully, almost as often as they hit them.  Even reaching the space bar was a stretch. 

(A friend of mine reads detective stories, and, knowing about my way of making a living, he showed me some lines where Nero Wolfe's man Archie is asked to type and sign a statement.  He replies, "Glad to, if you'll give me a decent typewriter [in 1951]."  Then, he recalls, "What I got was what I expected, an Underwood about my age."  The Underwoods seemed to me to have the highest raked keyboards with the keys the farthest apart, but that's just my impression.)

Of course, in high school, I found myself envying Felicia Samoska, a tall woman with proportionately larger hands that easily spanned the manual keyboards and provided her with
beautiful and A+ CWPM (correct words per minute) scores.  We became friends, nevertheless; hers was the first and so far only wedding I’ve attended.  I had to accept the fact that I could never be a decent typist on a manual typewriter.  Both at home and at my mother's place of work (after she and my dad were divorced), I could use electric typewriters, and I enjoyed that.  (I think she also had an old L. C. Smith manual. Ugh!)

She taught me statistical typing, a specialty that required great accuracy and precise tabulation, done on an electric typewriter with an extra-long carriage.  I wanted to help, so sometimes when she picked me up from school we would go back to her work and I would help her finish up. 

Later I got the portable electric Smith Corona that came with its own rounded case, and except for the fact that it has a key basket and regular keys instead of a molded keyboard, I thought it was great.  I've typed hundreds, maybe thousands of pages on it by now, and it is wearing out.  It tires me out with keys that have to be punched, and my fingers still occasionally get stuck between keys, although the whole typewriter is smaller and has a lower what I think of as "rake" of the keyboard height.

But oh, then came the love of my life, my soul-mate, the IBM Selectric.

The Selectric typewriter one-uped the Smith Corona by singlehandledly destroying the carriage return.  When the Selectric's "carriage" "returns," it does not include the platen.  The only "carriage" is the metallic-looking plastic "type element" that looks like a little golf ball and moves on a slim wire from side to side inside the open top (making it all the more necessary to cover it when not in use to keep dust from getting on the works).  The keys are movable projections from a nearly flat surface, they are closer together than the keys on a manual typewriter, and they take little effort to press. 

"This is the best thing that's happened to typewriters since electricity," the commercial says.  Oh, yes!  Aw, look at its little face.  I want to kiss it! 

I'll never forget the day I first set eyes on you, lovely Selectric, at the University of Arizona Drama Department, where I now work.  You, embraceable you, with the little ball that moves and the platen that stays put, so the whole thing doesn't shake between lines.  You make it possible for me to type 120 correct words per minute without hardly trying.  Where have you been all my life?

Apparently, in the mind of architect Eliot Noyes, a frequent consultant to IBM who designs their buildings as well as their products.  This beautiful machine was first sold in 1961, and according to typewriter salesmen they're still a big hit. 

What are you going to do to steal my heart next, IBM?  For example, where is this computer thing going? Will it be the next love of my life?

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TV

[May 4, 1963] The Twilight Zone, Season 4, Episodes 13-16

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by Natalie Devitt

Last month I touched on the possibility that The Twilight Zone could be running out of ideas, considering that a number of the stories seemed to rehash a number of previously done storylines. I concluded that as long as the recycled stories seemed to work, I was not going to judge the episodes too harshly. That is, until April’s episodes aired. So, which episodes fared the best?

The New Exhibit, by Charles Beaumont

If you have a taste for the macabre, you’ll surely love The New Exhibit. The episode is the story of a dedicated wax museum employee by the name of Martin, who loves his job so much that he takes it home with him. Martin, played by actor Martin Balsam, someone who you may recognize from Psycho and The Twilight Zone's The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine, is informed by his employer that the wax museum where he curates an exhibit called “Murderer’s Row” will be closing soon.

Upon hearing the news, Martin offers to watch over the figures that he has spent years meticulously caring for, until a buyer for the figures can be found. He houses the sculptures in his basement, much to his wife’s dismay. As time passes, Martin begins to care a little bit too much to the effigies of famous murders, like Jack the Ripper and Henri Désiré Landru.

The New Exhibit brilliantly captures one man’s descent into madness. There is not one scene that does not advance the plot. With each moment, the audience sees the great lengths that Martin is willing to go in order to keep the wax figures to himself.

To top things off, Martin Balsam does a great job of playing a man who has an increasingly difficult time telling the difference between fantasy and reality. A man who begins the story innocently wondering what could drive a man to commit some pretty heinous crimes, but then turns into a man who may be willing to commit a few heinous crimes of his own.

Aside from the fairly predictable ending, I really enjoyed The New Exhibit. I give it four stars.

Of Late I Think of Cliffordville, by Rod Serling (based on "Blind Alley," by Malcolm Jameson)

In Of Late I Think of Cliffordville, character actor Albert Salmi plays William, an aging business man, who after achieving great success still feels unfulfilled. One night after work, he gets drunk and confesses to the janitor at his office that his achievements mean nothing, and that he would like nothing more than to return to his hometown of Cliffordville, Indiana.

Shortly after this confession, he discovers a new travel agency in his office building. The travel agency is owned by a striking young woman named Miss Devlin, played by statuesque dancer-turned-actress, Julie Newmar. Miss Devlin, who wastes no time revealing that she is the devil, offers to send William back to his boyhood home of Cliffordville. Insisting that he can keep the knowledge that he has gained over his life, but still start over looking like a young adult, William agrees to Miss Devlin’s offer.

How long has it been since we had a story about some man who tries to change the past or makes a deal with the devil? The answer: one month. I know these have been reoccurring stories throughout the series, but I have to wonder if The Twilight Zone gotten so desperate for stories that they don’t even bother waiting to recycle their ideas anymore.

To make matters worse, I do not really believe Albert Salmi in the scenes where he plays an older version of William. While the episode’s special effects makeup looks fine, it is not great. Additionally , Albert struggles to really disappear into his role as an old man looking back on his life. On the other hand, Julie Newmar makes a very charming villain in this episode.

This episode never really seems to hit its stride. For that reason, I give it two stars.

The Incredible World of Horace Ford, by Reginald Rose

The Incredible World of Horace Ford is about a man consumed by the past. His name is Horace and is played by Pat Hingle. He is in his late thirties, married and has a job designing toys. Wracked with stress for having to be his family’s breadwinner, he escapes by spending most of his days thinking and talking about his childhood.

One day Horace decides to visit his childhood neighborhood, and to his surprise he finds that not a single thing has changed. He returns few more times to find that it is as if the past keeps on playing again and again. If that was not strange enough, he also finds that the boys he knew as a child never grew up. Horace soon realizes through these trips down memory lane that the past is not exactly the way that he remembers it.

While I do not think an audience needs to like a character, they do need to care about them. I hate to admit that I struggled to care about Horace. Pat Hingle is a perfectly capable actor, but I think he may have been miscast as Horace. He just seemed like an annoying man-child. Also, some of the dialogue involving Horace’s overbearing mother, did not flow very well and at times was unintentionally funny.

Overall, this episode was very unsatisfying. I really hate to give it only one and half stars.

With the exception of the stellar The New Exhibit, this was easily the least enjoyable bunch of episodes I have watched this season. I really hope that things improve. We only have a few more episodes left in the season.



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Science / Space Race

[Apr. 29, 1963] When a malfunction isn't (the flight of Saturn I #4 and other space tidbits)

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by Gideon Marcus

Baby's first step… Take Four

Out in Huntsville, Alabama, Von Braun's team is busy making the biggest rockets ever conceived.  The three-stage Saturn V, with five of the biggest engines ever made, will take people to the Moon before the decade is out.  But NASA's is justifiably leery of running before walking.  Moreover, there is use for a yet smaller (but still huge!) rocket for orbital Apollo testing and, also, practice building and launching Saturn rocket components.

Enter the two-stage Saturn I, whose first stage has eight engines, like the Nova, but they are much smaller.  Still, altogether, they produce 1.5 million pounds of thrust — that's six times more than the Atlas that will put Gordo Cooper's Mercury into orbit next month.  The Saturn I's second stage will likely also be the third stage on the Saturn V.

The Saturn I has had the most successful testing program of any rocket that I know of.  It's also one of the most maddeningly slow testing programs (I'm not really complaining — methodical is good, and it's not as if Apollo's ready to fly, anyway). 

The fourth in the series lifted off March 28, and they still aren't fueling the second stage.  They've essentially all been tests of stage #1.  This particular test was interesting because they shut off one of the engines on purpose during the flight to see if the other engines could compensate for the loss.  SA-4 continued to work perfectly, zooming to an altitude of 129 kilometers.

SA-4 was the last of the first-stage-only tests.  Henceforth, we'll get to see what the full stack can do. 

A breath of very thin fresh air

We tend to ignore most of the atmosphere.  After all, the air we breathe and most of the weather are confined to the first few kilometers above the Earth.  But the upper regions of the atmosphere contain the ozone layer, which shields us from deadly radiations; the ionosphere, which bounces radio waves back to Earth; beautiful and mysterious noctilucent clouds, only visible after sunset; and of course, spacecraft have to travel through it on their way up and down.  Knowing the makeup of our atmosphere gives us clues to understand climate, the history of the Earth, the interaction of our planet and the sun, and much more.

And yet, aside from the TIROS weather satellites, which only study the lowest level of the atmosphere, there has never been a dedicated atmospheric study satellite.  Sure, we've launched probes to detect radiation and charged particles and the Earth's magnetosphere.  Some have investigated the propagation of radio waves through the ionosphere.  But none have gone into space just to sample the thin air of the upper atmosphere and find out what's up there and how much.

Until now. 

Explorer 17 is a big, sputnik-looking ball loaded with a bunch of pressure gauges and other instruments.  Its sole purpose is to measure the the pressure and make-up of the upper atmosphere, from about 170 kilometers up. 

Launched on April 3rd, in its first few days of operation, the probe has more than tripled all previous measurements of neutral gases in Earth's upper atmosphere to date.  For instance, the satellite has discovered that the earth is surrounded by a belt of neutral helium at an altitude of from 250 to 1000 miles, a belt no one was sure it existed.  We suspected it, of course — helium, produced in the Earth's crust by the natural radioactive decay of heavy elements, is very light.  Just as helium balloons go up and up, free helium's normal fate is to eventually escape Earth's gravitational influence, leaving behind the heavier gasses. 

This is the first time this hypothesis had a chance to be proven, and by measuring the density of this helium, we should be able to get an idea of how much helium is generated by the Earth each year.  This, in turn, will tell us something about how much radioactive material is left on Earth.  Isn't that neat?  We send a probe far up into space to learn more about what's going on down here.  Your tax dollar hard at work.

The Cosmos opening up for Kosmos

Pop quiz — what did the Soviets accomplish last year in the Space Race?  Right.  The Soviets made big news with the flashy dual mission of Vostoks 3 and 4.  Anything else?  Can you recall a single space accomplishment for the Communists?  In 1962, the United States launched Telstar, the Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO), three Explorer science probes, three Ranger moon probes, Mariner 2 to Venus, and a couple dozen military satellites, not to mention the orbital Mercury flights of John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, and Wally Schirra.

This year is a different story.  We Americans haven't slackened our pace, but the Russians have finally picked up theirs.  They've got a probe on its way to Mars, as well as a new series of satellites called Kosmos.  This month, they launched three, getting up to Kosmos 16.  They are touted as science satellites, but there has been precious little data from them made public or that's worked its way into scientific papers.  This suggests that the Kosmos program is really a civilian front for a military program.  That's the fundamental difference between the Western and Eastern space efforts.  While the American military takes up its share of the national space budget, we still make sure there's room for pure science.  The Soviets have chosen between guns and science in favor of the former (though, to be fair, if we could only afford one option, would we have made the same choice?)

So why did it take so long for the Soviets to get into the groove after having such a seemingly commanding lead in the Space Race?  And just what are the Kosmos satellites really doing up there? 

According to a NASA scientist, the lack of announced flights doesn't mean the Russians didn't try.  Our Communist friends are notorious for talking only about their successes.  In fact, the Soviets were trying a new four-stage version of the booster that launched Sputnik and Vostok, and the fourth stage kept failing.  There might have been a few failed moon missions in there, too, that we never heard about.  We probably only learned about Luna 4, launched April 2, because it took off just fine — it just missed its target (the Soviet reporting after lunar flyby was notably subdued). 

As for what Kosmos is, Aviation Weekly and Space Report suggests the series is really two types of satellites based on weight and orbital trajectory.  One is a small class of probe that stays up for months.  They could be akin to our Explorers, but again, they don't produce science (whereas ours have revolutionized our knowledge of near-Earth space).  More likely, they are engineering satellites designed to test various components for future missions: communications, cameras, navigation.

The other class is big — as big as the manned Vostoks.  They only fly a few days, too, and their orbits cover most of the globe.  These could be unmanned tests of the next generation of Soviet manned spacecraft.  But they also could be repurposed Vostoks designed to conduct spy missions.  Perhaps the Soviet Union is sending up cosmonauts with camera in hand (as we have done on the Mercury missions).  Sure, it's more expensive than our Discoverer spy sats, but everything's free in a command economy, right?

In any event, the world once again has two active space superpowers.  What happens next is anyone's guess…




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Magazine

[April 27, 1963] Built to Last?  (May 1963 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

The modern world is wonderful.  There's so much luxury at our fingertips that it boggles the imagination of those of us who remember living even a few decades ago.  Back when then were things we just couldn't get our hands on, no matter how much time or money we had. 

These days, we can cross the world in half a day, thanks to jets.  Supermarkets are filled with aisles and aisles of national and local products.  Television lets us view events as they happen, from Mercury launches to Macy's Parades.

Most importantly, not only do our newsstands have all of the latest science fiction books and magazines, but now they've also got the classics of our childhood.  Yes, all of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books we grew up on are finally being reprinted.  Tarzan's Africa, John Cartner's Mars, Innes' Pellucidar, Billings' Caspak — such a bounty!  (You can bet that I'll be spending the next several weekends reliving the joys of my youth.)

If this trend continues, we can assume that our children and grandchildren will not only have Burroughs, Wells, Verne, Shelley, and Baum to read, but also reprinted copies of our present-day science fiction, as well as the SF of the future (their present).  Perhaps they'll all be available via some computerized library — tens of thousands of volumes in a breadbox-shaped device, for instance.

The question, then, is whether or not our children will remember our current era fondly enough to want reprints from it.  Well, if this month's Analog be a representative sample, the answer is a definitive…maybe.

Observational Difficulties, by George W. Harper

This month's non-fiction article is as dry as lunar dust, but the subject matter is fascinating.  Harper talks about how difficult it is to tell much about a planet when all you've got to examine is some fuzzy telescope pictures, a few spectrographs, and the vivid imaginations of thousands of observers. 

From the evidence he's collected, Harper concludes that the Red Planet has an atmosphere about 10% as thick as Earth's, mostly made of nitrogen.  He conjectures that erosion and a lack of active geology has created a landscape of smooth plateaus and gentle valleys. 

Most interestingly, he is certain that Mars will be riddled with craters, like the Moon.  After all, Mars must have been subject to the same early bombardment as Earth and its satellite, and there's not a lot of weather to break down impact sites.  Harper goes on to say that it is these craters which we on Earth have mistaken for "cities" at the junctures of the Martian "canals" (which he thinks are probably ejected residue from ancient impacts).

I've never read this hypothesis advanced by any anyone else, but it makes a lot of sense.  I guess when the Soviet "Mars 1" reaches its destination next month, we'll finally get a definitive answer.  Three stars.

The Dueling Machine, by Ben Bova and Myron R. Lewis

In the far future, personal disputes are resolved by a telepathic dueling machine.  It recreates perfectly any setting, any agreed-upon weapons, and participants can battle until one suffers a simulated death, safe in the knowledge that no one actually dies in the process.  But when one unscrupulous government learns how to use the device to assassinate duelists, its up to the inventor to find out how it's being done and, more importantly, how to stop it.

This exciting premise is dragged down by an overlong and, frankly, boring presentation.  And the fact that Ellison did this idea much better in his The Silver Corridor, which came out in the September 1956 Infinity.  Two stars.

Oneness, by James H. Schmitz

It is the future.  Sixty years before, the scientists of the Martian penal colony had invented a stardrive, enabling the escape of nearly 20,000 exiles to a host of other worlds.  Now, one of them has returned to face the "Machine," Earth's autocratic government, and negotiate a peace treaty.  The proud leaders of Terra capture the emissary with the intention of torturing the secret of star travel out of him, but the star people have learned the secrets of "Oneness," the psychic bond, and the Machine soon learns that hurting the prisoner means hurting themselves.  Under such conditions, can a meeting of the minds occur?

It's an old-fashioned story, as one might expect from a pulp-master like Schmitz, but I liked its vividness and brisk pace.  Four stars.

Expediter, by Mack Reynolds

A young citizen of the Peoples Republic of the United Balkans is brought before the Supreme Leader for a special duty: he is to find out why, in an age when the factories report record output, and the farms produce vast surpluses of food, there are still shortages of commercial goods as well as surly discontent amongst the people.  To accomplish this task, the fellow is given a blank check and infinite power. 

It's a silly fairy tale of a story, and of course, it turns out that the problem is the short-sighted, self-interested politicians who simply don't have the technical knowledge to run a modern state.  "Technological society should be left to the engineers!" is the unconvincing moral of this tale. 

Still, as flat as the story's premise may fall, Reynolds still does his excellent job of rendering an alien society, particularly one behind the Iron Curtain.  Perhaps, instead of writing SF, he should become a travelogue writer.  Three stars.

The Ming Vase, by E. C. Tubb

A clairvoyant breaks out of a secret government facility to steal art of great beauty.  Has he turned criminal?  Flipped sides?  Or simply cracked?  And how do you catch someone who sees the future…unless he wants to be caught?

A perfectly decent potboiler, perfectly suited to Analog, the magazine about psychic science fiction.  Three stars.

The Last of the Romany, by Norman Spinrad

Spinrad hits it out of the park with his first tale, portraying a nomad bohemian's efforts to find (or make) more of his kind in a mechanized, homogenized, stultified world.

It's a beautiful piece that I'd expect to have been published in a more fanciful, literary venue like F&SF.  In the mag that Campbell built, it just stands out all the more starkly for its quality and lack of psionic silliness.  Five stars.

Analog thus garners a solid, if psi-tinged 3.2 stars this month.  Compare that to New Worlds and Worlds of Tomorrow, which beat Analog with 3.5 and 3.3 scores, respectively.  On the other hand, Analog beat F&SF (3 stars), Fantastic (2.9), IF and Amazing (both 2.4), and it had (arguably) the best story.

Women wrote just four of the fifty pieces that came out this month.  Four and five-star stories, if printed on their own, would fill two good-sized magazines (out of the seven that came out).

On the one hand, this record hardly suggests that our children and their children will regard May 1963 as a Golden Age of SF.  On the other hand, Sturgeon's Law says 90% of everything is crap, and this month, 28% of what was published was not-crap.  Maybe our grandchildren will rejoice at the reprints after all…




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Magazine

[April 25, 1963] A Brighter Future?  New Worlds, May 1963

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by Mark Yon

Last month I decided I would try and NOT mention the English weather in future transmissions. But I’m a Brit, and it’s become a tradition! So, suffice it to say that the commute to work has been easier this month and, since we last spoke, the weather has been more typically Spring. 

As the weather has improved, so has my mood. Another cause for cheer has been the radios being full of Britain’s latest pop sensation, The Beatles. Some of our other Travellers have mentioned their continuous rise.  Their third single, From Me to You is something we can’t really avoid. 

Thankfully, I do like it a lot. It’s got a great beat and terrific harmonies. I can only see these boys from Liverpool continue to dominate the charts here if they keep this up.

Mind you, the cinema also seems to be determined to dispel the bleak Winter. Britain’s answer to Mr. Elvis Presley, Mr. Cliff Richard, has recently been filling our cinemas with a cheerily bright and colourful musical, Summer Holiday!

It’s very popular and might just chase those Winter Blues away. We may not be quite there yet, but at least we can see that brighter times are ahead, even when the news is somewhat bleaker. The newspapers here are full of stories about marches against nuclear weapons, which seem to be growing year on year:

Onto this month’s New Worlds.

Can you see a problem with that cover? No, not the bright daffodil-yellow colour, nor the lack of author photographs, although that is disappointing. Look at the title of the Mr. Aldiss novella. See it? Such mis-spellings are shoddy and frankly embarrassing. A big minus mark for Mr. John Carnell this month. Does he really care about this magazine?  It’s a shame, because there’s a lot to like in this issue. There’s even a common theme, as many of the stories this month seem to look at the conflict between order and chaos, between discipline and dissent. This also applies to the Editorial! 

From The Edge of the Pond, by Mr. Lee Markham

Australian Mr. Markham has been a regular contributor to the stories of late and here in the capacity of Guest Editor he brings a forthright summary of the ongoing debate on the state of s-f. He doesn’t mince words, though.

“I don’t think any of us were surprised when some of the opinions expressed turned out to be, in turn, introspective, belligerent, and, in the case of John Rackham and Brian Aldiss, personally prejudiced and blandly indifferent.”

Well, I guess that’s telling us! For all that, it’s an interesting summary to this (still) ongoing discussion, made impressive by the sheer number of other authors and works used to argue its case.

Speaking of Mr. Aldiss, it is his novella (with the mis-spelling!) that holds prime position on the cover this month, albeit back at the rear of the magazine again.  More later…

To the other stories.

Confession, by Mr. John Rackham

Like last month’s story from Mr. Rackham, another tale of ‘supermen,’ here called an ‘X-person,’ which even the story banner admits has “slan-like” similarities. Despite this unoriginal concept, Confession was more enjoyable than last month’s effort. It’s set on a nicely imagined thixotropic (ketchupy) world, but really examines the tension created between discipline and intelligence when in a military situation, which was nicely done. Three out of five.

The Under-Privileged, by Mr. Brian W. Aldiss

The return of Mr. Aldiss to New Worlds is a welcome one, especially after his recent success with his Hothouse series in the United States. Mr. Aldiss himself celebrates this return with his usual sense of humour in an inside-cover Profile:

The Under-Privileged is a fine story of immigration and alien resettlement which, under its positive tone, left me with a certain degree of unease, as I suspect is its goal. As ever from Mr. Aldiss, it is a story of social s-f rather than the traditional, but the style and the underlying nuances of the plot suggest a superior piece of work. It’s not Hothouse, but I enjoyed it.  Four out of five.

The Jaywalkers, by Mr. Russ Markham

Mr. Markham’s tale is another reasonable effort in the Galactic Union Survey stories, this time on a planet which is not what it seems. It’s based around a nice idea, but it almost drowns in its scientific gobbledegook explanation towards the end. Three out of five points.

I, the Judge, by Mr. R. W. Mackelworth

I really liked Mr. Mackelworth’s debut in New Worlds in January, but this one is even better. I, the Judge is a story of future law and order, in a style very different from his first story. Shocking and revelatory, I, the Judge, in terms of its literary style and its complexity of concept, dazzled. I felt that it even put Mr. Aldiss’s effort in the shade. Rather made me think of the stories of Mr. Harlan Ellison, and echoes this month’s running theme of discipline and disorder , by highlighting the value of defiance against obedience. This may be the future of s-f. It is one of the most memorable plots I’ve read in recent months. Four out of five, my favourite story of the issue.

Window On The Moon, by Mr. E. C. Tubb

The second part of this serial moves things on-apace, as it should. Our hero, Felix Larsen, tries to get to the bottom of things, whilst others pick up a mysterious means of communication leaked from the British base, which leads to a visit from the Americans. There’s a rather unpleasant parochial part about how the Brits ‘see’ Americans and vice versa, but that aside, it was surprisingly exciting, to the point where I’m going to increase last month’s score from three-out-of-five to four this month. Really looking forward to the conclusion next time.

At the back of the issue there is the return of the Postmortem letters section, although there is only one, admittedly lengthy, letter, where Mr. John Baxter eviscerates Mr. Lan Wright for his Editorial in the December 1962 issue. It makes entertaining reading, if rather painful.

There’s also another The Book Review this month from Mr. John Carnell. There’s reviews of the “interesting revival” of Mr. Robert Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky, Mr. William Tenn’s Time in Advance and the “thoroughly enjoyable, non-cerebral” entertainment of Mr. Mark Clifton’s “wonderfully witty” When They Come from Space. Mr. Eric Frank Russell’s collection of his early work, Dark Tides is rather less polished than his latest efforts, but still recommended.

In summary, the erroneous cover belies an issue that is much better than that typo would suggest. Whilst some stories seem to be marking time, some are great, making this one of the strongest issues I’ve reviewed so far. The future may be bright. However, I am beginning to question Mr. Carnell’s editorship, particularly after the efforts of Mr. Moorcock last month. I am starting to feel that his attention is elsewhere or, just as bad, that he is rather too stretched to focus on producing a quality magazine. This is a concern.




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Magazine

[April 23, 1963] Double, Double (May 1963 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

It might be my imagination, but it seems that events came in pairs this month. 

On April Fools' Day, two new medical soap operas premiered on American television.  I'm not fond of that genre – give me Route 66 or Alfred Hitchcock Presents when I want something other than science fiction and fantasy – so I don't know if General Hospital or The Doctors will catch on.


Can you tell which one is which?

A pair of accidents involving nuclear submarines happened only two days apart.  On April 10, the United States vessel Thresher sank, with the loss of all aboard.

More fortunate was the Soviet submarine K-33, which collided with the Finnish merchant ship Finnclipper on April 12.  Although severely damaged, both vessels managed to reach port safely.

Remaining at the top of the American music charts for double the number of weeks of most hit songs, He's So Fine by the Chiffons filled the airwaves with its memorable background chant doo-lang doo-lang doo-lang.

Appropriately, the latest issue of Fantastic contains stories that fall into pairs, as well as a hidden doubling of two authors.

Devils in the Walls, by John Jakes

The magazine opens with a pair of sword-and-sorcery stories.  The first is the more traditional of the two.  A mighty barbarian, who will remind you of Conan, falls victim to slave traders.  A beautiful woman purchases him.  If he will venture into the haunted ruins of her father's castle to retrieve a great treasure, she will set him free.  He must overcame natural and unnatural menaces to win his freedom.  It moves briskly, and there are some good descriptions, but it is a typical fantasy adventure.  Three stars.

The Cloud of Hate, by Fritz Leiber

The creator of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser relates another tale of this pair.  A supernatural mist made out of hate possesses four of the worst murderers in the magical city of Lankhmar.  The two adventurers must use all their skill to defeat them.  Although this is not the most important incident in the lives of the daring duo, the author adds style, wit, and imagination to the genre.  Four stars.

The Message, by Edward Wellen

In ancient China, a naked man with green skin appears out of nowhere.  A woodcutter takes the man into his hut and educates him.  Eventually he becomes one of the most important persons in the land, and is responsible for some of the great events in Chinese history.  The reasons for his actions are unexpected.  This is mostly a work of historical fiction, with a touch of speculative content.  Although not without interest, I thought it was a bit too long.  Three stars.

Threshold of the Prophet, by Roger Zelazny

A man named Crane appears from nowhere (another doubled theme of this issue) in New York in the far future.  The Brooklyn Bridge is destroyed and falls into the Hudson River.  Crane, who seems to have god-like powers, retrieves it and tries to sell it to an old man in the country.  Without the story's literary allusions (clarified by the editorial introduction), it would be meaningless.  Two stars.

Anything for Laughs, by Ron Goulart

The first of a pair of comedies in this issue is about an unemployed man who is pressured by his girlfriend into entering a job lottery.  He winds up as a court jester on a planet ruled by a dictatorship.  Somebody uses his name on revolutionary pamphlets, and his troubles begin.  Some readers may find this more amusing than I did.  Two stars.

One False Step, by David R. Bunch

A specialist in dystopia offers a grim tale of a man who made one mistake.  His job was a gruesome one.  When he fails at it, his punishment involves tending metallic plants, one of the many unpleasant aspects of this bleak future world.  This story will not be to the taste of all readers, but I found it powerful.  Four stars.

The Screams of the Wergs, by Jay Scotland


John Jakes is the first of two repeated authors in this issue, both hiding under pseudonyms containing the names of nations.  Extraterrestrials experience extreme pain when tourists take flash photographs of them.  A human who tries to protect them goes to extreme lengths.  It turns out that things are not what they seem.  This science fiction story never grabbed me.  Two stars.

Monologue for Two, by Harrison Denmark

As readers of Cele Goldsmith's pair of magazines know by now, this author is really Roger Zelazny.  Only two pages long, this story offers one side of a conversation.  Through it we see a man who suffered at the hands of another obtain great power, and win his revenge.  It's an effective narrative gimmick.  Four stars.

Professor Jonkin's Cannibal Plant, by Howard R. Garis

The second comic story in the magazine is a reprint from the August 1905 issue of Argosy.  A scientist greatly increases the size of an insect-eating plant by feeding it large pieces of meat.  As you might imagine, this is a bad idea.  Nothing surprising happens, and it's not particularly funny.  Two stars.

Love Story, by Laurence M. Janifer

This is a satiric story that begins as light comedy, but turns into something quite different at the end.  A man who truly loves other people causes the Earth to rotate in only four hours.  A scientist, frustrated by his failure to find a rational explanation for this phenomenon, solves the problem in the most direct way possible.  The last two paragraphs makes the reader reconsider the author's intention.  Three stars.

Do all these pairs double your pleasure and double your fun?  More importantly, do they justify the magazine's new price of fifty cents?  Maybe you should enjoy a stick of gum while you consider these questions.

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