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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 6, 1968] Treading Water (September 1968 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The beat goes on at Amazing, after the brief syncopation that pushed its schedule back a month.  This September issue, as usual these days, boasts on the cover of all the new (non-reprint) stories inside—four short stories, 35 pages in all, less than a fourth of the magazine.  The rest of the fiction, three novelets, is reprints.  So is the cover—Frank R. Paul’s Great Nebula in Andromeda (“Andromida,” as this barely-proofread magazine has it).  It’s from the back cover of the October 1945 Fantastic Adventures, significantly cropped, and generally pretty cheesy-looking.  By then, Paul’s future was behind him, in more senses than one.


by Frank R. Paul

There is the usual collection of features, ranging from a startlingly inane editorial by editor Harrison, through another “Science of Man” article by Leon E. Stover (see below) and a Sao Paulo Letter by Walter Martins about SFnal doings around Brazil, to what has become the usual lively book review column.  Though this month it’s a little incestuous.  William Atheling, Jr., who is James Blish, reviews Brian Aldiss’s new novel, while Blish’s own byline appears on a review of Harrison and Aldiss’s Best SF 1967.  Alexei Panshin reviews John Wyndham’s new novel, while Leroy Tanner, who is Harrison, reviews Panshin’s book on Heinlein, and Harrison under his own name reviews William Tenn’s new novel Of Men and Monsters.  What is this?  The New York Review of Books?

And—speaking of “What is this?”—there’s a telltale development in the fine print at the bottom of the contents page.  Right under “Sol Cohen, Publisher” and “Harry Harrison, Editor,” is a new line: “Barry N. Malzberg, Associate Editor.” Based on past history (Harrison first sneaked into Amazing as a book reviewer before being named as editor), maybe there’s another change in the works.  That might account for the rather detached and phoned-in quality of Harrison’s editorial this month.  Mr. Malzberg is a recent arrival on the SF scene, having published several stories under the name “K.M. O’Donnell,” which might be said to be notable for their vehemence.  That could be just what this frequently uninspired magazine needs.

Where's Horatius?, by Mack Reynolds


by Jeff Jones

The issue begins with Mack Reynolds’s Where’s Horatius?, on the now-familiar premise of making movies of the past.  Our time-traveling rogues’ gallery of heroes is trying to film the action in 509 B.C., when the Etruscan king Lars Posena marched with his army on Rome.  Reynolds makes the most of his research into the events and the military technology and technique of the age, and generally seems to be having a better time than usual, in a slightly cartoonish way, without the often leaden style and dense didactics of some of his Analog work.  The ending is gimmicky and reads like a chunk of text got dropped somewhere in the last few paragraphs, but it’s readable and amusing nonetheless.  Three stars.

Manhattan Dome, by Ben Bova

Ben Bova’s Manhattan Dome is a perplexing story, sort of an idiot plot writ large.  (For those unfamiliar with the jargon, an idiot plot is one in which there is a story only because the characters act like idiots.) A dome has been constructed over Manhattan to keep out the air pollution wafting over from New Jersey.  However, the part of the proposal that would ban cars and cigarettes from Manhattan was blocked by the City Council after the auto, oil, tobacco, and advertising lobbyists got to work, so the air under the dome is worse than the outside air. 

To top it off, when Ed, the Chief Dome Engineer, encounters his girlfriend’s cranky old father, he is ranting about how the lack of rain under the Dome has ruined his garden.  It’s a disaster, and “Washington” (specified only as the “Public Health people”) has just announced that it’s tearing the Dome down.  All is lost!  But suddenly the light bulb goes on over Ed’s head, and back in the office, he starts turning on the fire sprinklers that are part of the Dome’s construction.  “Rains scrub the air, wash away the aerosols and float them down the sewers.  Air always feels clean after a rain, doesn’t it?” All is saved!


by Dan Adkins

What's wrong with this picture?  Let us count the ways.  Even an entity like the New York City Council (which has been described publicly as having the I.Q. of a cucumber) would probably not be so stupid as to allow the Dome while blocking the measures to keep the air clean under it.  And it’s equally hard to imagine that nobody would have thought about making rain with the sprinklers until long after the Dome was in operation, and about to be torn down.  (Ed says there’s plenty of water available.  I’d like to see the calculations.) And it’s also hard to credit that artificial rain alone would cure the air pollution problem in a giant city, since there are a lot of cities around the world that have terrible air pollution despite being exposed to the rain—notably New York.

Maybe there will be a sequel in which Bova will sell us the Brooklyn Bridge.  But there is one more thing in this story which bears mention.  In the lobby of Dome HQ, the chairman of the Greater New York Evolutionary Society and someone from the American Longevity Society get into it, the former supporting the Dome, the latter opposing it.  The Evolutionary guy is described as “a massive specimen, with an insistent voice and a craggy face topped by a bristling shock of straight white hair.  He had a Roosevelt-type cigaret [sic] holder clamped in his teeth. . . .” They argue, and Mr. Evolutionary declares at his peak:

“I know it’s rough on some individuals.  But evolution isn’t worried about the individual.  This Dome will foster the development of a superior race, able to breathe pure carbon monoxide, impervious to germs!  Magnificent!”

This is an obvious lampoon of Analog editor John W. Campbell and of his views in general, and in particular his opinion that smoking cigarettes is not a serious health hazard, but a boon.  (See his editorial in the September 1964 Analog.) This is interesting, since Bova has made a number of appearances in Analog in recent years.  We’ll see if that continues.  But back to the story: mildly amusing, depending on how high you can suspend your disbelief.  Two stars.

Idiot’s Mate, by Robert Taylor

Bova is followed by Robert Taylor (who, you ask?  He had a story in last month’s F&SF), with Idiot’s Mate, on the familiar theme of staged violence as mass entertainment.  This one features the Chess Tournament, held on the Moon, in which people in spacesuits are assigned to teams and given the names of chess pieces, and apparently given powers to match, though that idea is not well developed.  Mostly everyone just plays hide-and-seek and shoots explosive bullets.  Protagonist Rodgers, imprisoned on trumped-up treason charges, volunteers for the Tournament and is made king of a team.  Needless to say, matters end badly, though the story is not bad; it is a bit overwritten, but capably so, and moves fast.  Three stars.

Time Bomb, by Ray Russell

Ray Russell’s Time Bomb is a time-travel joke, deftly rendered, worth about the two pages it takes up.  Three stars, allowing for its limited ambition.

The Patty-Cake Mutiny, by Winston Marks

The reprints begin with The Patty-Cake Mutiny (Fantastic, February 1955), by Winston Marks, that monstrously prolific contributor to the mid-‘50s SF magazines, to remind us that they sure published a lot of crap in between the undying classics we all remember. 

The Patty-Cake Mutiny is a story of space exploration featuring crew members Slappy Kansas, Conkie Morton, Butch Bagley, Pokey Gannet, Sniffer Smith, and Balls Murphy.  Slappy is unofficial foreman because of his skill in slapping people around.  Sniffer is greatly talented olfactorily.  Conkie conks out under anything more than a gee and a half of acceleration.  Balls—calm down now—is so named because of the “pendulous little knobs of flesh” on his face, each of which contains “a submicroscopic parasite that had baffled Earth doctors” (but it’s OK, they’re not contagious).  Et cetera.  Their mission is to find and mine the incredibly valuable radioactive kegnite.  There is tension among the crew because Balls has won at craps their shares of any profit from the voyage.


by Tom Beecham

This motley crew lands on a planet with a resilient surface and tall grass-like stalks as far as they can see.  Balls goes out exploring and gets into trouble, and is retrieved in a state of “infantile regression”—literally—so they have to put him in a diaper and take turns keeping the baby occupied (hence patty-cake; the mutiny is separate despite the title).  But back to work: they cut into the surface and a red fluid—guess what?—gushes out.  Before the end, they are hacking steaks out of the giant organism they have landed on—Hairy Joe, as they call it.  And it goes on, ending with a fist fight (Slapper lives up to his name) and the explanation of Balls’s regression, which is as silly as the rest of the story.  It’s all too ridiculous and tiresome to be borne.  I’m demanding a raise.  One star.

"Labyrinth", by Neil R. Jones

Neil R. Jones’s Labyrinth (from Amazing, April 1936) is another in his seemingly endless series (22 of them!) about Professor Jameson, revived from his orbiting tomb by the Zoromes (from Zor, of course), and installed like them in a metal body.  Now they all go roaming around the universe looking for entertainment, though of course the author doesn’t put it that way.  The few of these I’ve read were mostly benignly tedious, but this one is a little more dynamic. 

The Prof and the Z’s land on a planet and investigate a city, which at first seems abandoned, but proves to be inhabited by strange beings with four legs and a dozen arms, who flee when our heroes approach.

“ ‘We must seize one of them!’ Professor Jameson exclaimed.  ‘They seem intelligent enough for questioning.’ ” Of course!  (So much for the respectful fellowship of sentient beings.) Once they’ve got a couple in hand, they conclude that their intelligence is “somewhat below the level of an Australian bushboy, an earthly type which lay in the professor’s memory, yet well above the mentality of the beasts he had known.” (So much for . . . oh, never mind.)

The Queegs, as they call themselves, are quite affable once reassured that they won’t be harmed.  They didn’t build the city but say they’ve “always” lived there.  They survive by hunting creatures called ohbs, using wooden weapons, even though they can work metal.  Why?  Metal doesn’t last very long, they say—which seems odd.

So the metal folks tag along on a hunting expedition to a seemingly barren area.  The ohbs prove to be giant gray slug-like creatures who apparently subsist on something in the ground.  A Zorome comes into contact with an ohb, which starts to radiate light and grabs the Zorome.  Another ohb joins in.  What’s going on?

“ ‘It is eating me!’ cried 47B-97.  ‘It is eating my metal body!’”


by Leo Morey

And now—“coming from every direction a vast legion of hurrying ohbs, their antennae quivering, slight radiations of anticipation suffusing their leaping-crawling bodies.  They were being called to the feast, a feast of virgin metal which the gluttonous appetites of their two companions had involuntarily revealed.” The author continues, waxing rhapsodic:

“With as much disregard for self-preservation as they had shown when hunted by the Queegs, the ohbs, fully half as large as the cubed body of a Zorome, seemed possessed of but one unquenchable desire, and that was to glut themselves on pure, refined metal, free of all impurities and unmixed with rock and other foreign material, such as they found regularly in their daily diet.  Nothing less than death stopped their mad charge.”

And a little later, a Zorome cries: “22MM392!  744U-21!  We are helpless!  They are all around us!  Wet, clammy juices they exude from their bodies are turning our metal parts to a fluid which they absorb!  If our metal heads are eaten through, we are doomed!’”

Electrifying!  But the rest of the story is a little anticlimactic, with the Zoromes fleeing into a tunnel mouth, which leads to the labyrinth of the title.  Soon enough they are lost, wandering aimlessly between dangerous encounters with ohbs, until they follow an underground river and are rescued, to resume their peregrinations around the galaxy.  Three corroded stars.

Paradox, by Charles Cloukey

The precocious Charles Cloukey (1912-1931) is back, or re-resurrected (see Sub-Satellite), with Paradox (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Summer 1929), another assuredly executed story, published when he was 17.  It’s a frame story in which the author is a guest at a club where a couple of members are arguing about the possibility of time travel, and the mysterious Raymond Cannes introduces himself as a time traveler and tells his tale. 


by Wally Wallit

Hawkinson, a scientist and old college chum, has received plans for a strange machine, done in Cannes’s handwriting, but Cannes didn’t write them and wouldn’t have been capable of it.  Later, Hawkinson builds the machine—a time machine—and invites Cannes over, and of course (in the usual manner of ‘20s and ‘30s SF), Cannes goes for it and travels a thousand years into the future.  After various adventures he flees home at a cliff-hanging moment to find that Hawkinson is dead and his laboratory burned.  Cannes throws his time-traveling gear into the river, destroying all corroborating evidence (also as usual for this period’s SF). 

The story runs facilely through several now-familiar time paradox themes that were new to the genre when this was written.  Unfortunately some of the plot developments I have passed over are fairly hackneyed, and Cloukey’s stilted style, though well turned, gets a bit wearing over the length of the story, keeping it to three stars.

Science of Man: Naked Ape or Hairless Monkey, by Leon E. Stover

Leon E. Stover’s article, Naked Ape or Hairless Monkey, invoking at least the title of Desmond Morris’s best-selling book, takes on the question whether, evolutionarily speaking, humans are naked apes or hairless monkeys.  Stover follows human ancestry backwards to conclude . . . nobody knows.  A key sentence: “The game seems to be, how much can we learn from the least evidence.” But he thinks he’s got a good guess: an apparently hypothetical animal that he calls Propriopithecus.  Conclusion: “So man is neither a naked ape nor a hairless monkey.  His line of ancestry evolved apart from the monkeys and apes.  He is not simply a depilitated version of either one of them.  Man is what he is—a nudist who made it on his own.”

I am reminded of the form letter that H.L. Mencken reputedly kept handy to respond to some of his more imaginative correspondents: “Dear sir or madam: You may be right!” And so may Stover.  In any case, it’s reasonably interesting and informative if inconclusive, but also pretty dense reading.  Three stars.

Summing Up

Amazing continues to tread water, capably enough this month.  Almost everything here is perfectly readable, with one shameful exception.  The new stories are pretty lively within their limitations.  But we wait in vain for something outstanding, and we’re not likely to get it when only 25% of the magazine is open to new fiction.

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[June 6, 1968] The Stalemate Continues (July 1968 Amazing)

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by John Boston

This July Amazing—wait, what?  You thought Amazing appeared in even-numbered months?  No more.  The mis-dating of the April issue as June means that what was to be the June issue has been pushed back—or at least the cover date has been—to avoid the confusion and likely loss of display time and sales had the publisher released a second issue dated June.  And Fantastic is pushed from July to August to keep these bimonthly magazines in alternate months rather than in direct competition. 

This issue looks a little better than the last.  There’s a new and seemingly higher grade of paper; the pages look less pulpy and the magazine is a bit thinner.  The cover, by Johnny Bruck, is lighter and more attractive than his usual; even though there’s a line of guys waving ray guns, for the foreground he’s borrowed another sort of cliché from Ed Emshwiller—guy with firm jaw, determined expression, and clenched fist staring out towards the viewer, like he just stepped off an Ace Double.  Relatively speaking, it’s a relief.


by Johnny Bruck

Once more, all but one item of fiction are reprints, though this issue’s exception is more considerable than some: House A-Fire, by Samuel R. Delany, described as a short novel (at 33 pages!) on the cover and contents page, though editor Harrison acknowledges in the letter column that it is actually an excerpt from Delany’s new novel Nova, forthcoming from Doubleday.  Delany’s name is misspelled on the cover and contents page and in Harrison’s editorial, spelled correctly on the story’s title page and in the letter column.  Are you getting tired of all this nit-picking?  So am I.  But the persistent sloppiness of this magazine continues to irritate.

Editor Harrison, clearly chafing under the reprint regime, continues to tout the non-fiction contents (seemingly the only part of the magazine that he actually controls) on the cover—“New Feature by HARRY HARRISON” (an editorial) and “New Article by ROBERT SILVERBERG POUL ANDERSON and LEROY TANNER” (the book review column).” There are also a new “Science of Man” article by Leon Stover (see below) and a London and Oslo Letter by Brian Aldiss, recounting his travels in Scandinavia.  The book review column includes Robert Silverberg’s thoughtful review of Brunner’s new novel Quicksand, Poul Anderson’s slightly celebrity-struck review of Asimov’s Mysteries, and two reviews by “Leroy Tanner,” a Harrison pseudonym.  One is a perfectly reasonable review of James Blish and Norman L. Knight’s A Torrent of Faces.  The other, of Algis Budrys’s The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn, spends more space (about a page!) denouncing Budrys for his review in another magazine of a book Harrison co-edited than it does on Budrys’s book.  This is distasteful to read and represents notably bad judgment on the editor’s part.

Harrison’s editorial, titled The Future of the Future, picks up where last issue’s mistakenly truncated editorial left off, reiterating his division of the world into SF-1, SF-2, and SF-3, and proceeding mostly to a series of platitudes.  (“SF-3.  This is wide open now and there are no rules. No one school is SF-3 and no one particular style or clique is any more important than the others.”) He does amusingly recount that he asked J.G. Ballard to tell him what inner space is, and he was about to answer, but just then someone interrupted them and the answer never came.  The letter column, with its traditional title Or So You Say, is back as well, for those who care.

House A-Fire, by Samuel R. Delany

Delany’s excerpt House A-Fire is about a bunch of overprivileged kids who are seemingly able to gallivant around the galaxy at whim.  We first meet Lorq von Ray, son of a mining magnate in the Pleaides Federation (Earth is in Draco), as a child.  Lorq’s parents are big shots in local politics.  They vacation (or something) on an off-the-map world called Brazillia where things are a little primitive; one of the local amusements is a variation on cockfighting.  There, he meets two other children, Prince Red and his sister Ruby Red; their father, Aaron Red, is a hyper-wealthy spaceship mogul from Earth, proprietor of Red-shift Ltd. (I guess Acme was taken.) Prince has an artificial right arm and is belligerently sensitive about it. 


by Gray Morrow

Young Lorq is of course brilliant and among other things, when he’s a little older, has his own spaceship, which he races in the New Ark regatta, coming in second, before heading off to a party thrown by Prince on Earth—in Paris, at the Ile St. Louis.  (“Caliban can make Earth in three days.”) He and his crew arrive and Prince immediately recruits them to rescue Che-ong, “the psychodrama star,” and her hangers-on, who have gotten stuck in a snowstorm in the Himalayas and upon rescue, prove to be a bunch of stereotypically air-headed teenagers.

At the party, everyone must have masks, and Prince has prepared an elaborate pirate mask for Lorq.  Delany has hinted to the reader, but kept Lorq in the dark, about Lorq’s father being involved in piracy.  A bit later, Lorq encounters Ruby Red, who has gotten pretty grown up since last seen, and who lets him in on the joke.  Prince shows up and tells Lorq to get away from his sister, they have a fight, and Prince lays Lorq out and messes up his face with his prosthetic fist.  Lorq’s crew carries him away and Ruby shows up on the river in her skimmer-boat and takes them all to the spaceport.  Later, in a final scene, we see Lorq, now back home, rich, and scarred, and contemplating his future.

This all sounds in summary like an overripe pulp space opera, but it is framed in some striking visualization and writing, as one would expect from Delany.  Like Lorq’s first glimpse of the mature Ruby Red:

“Then there was this: her eyes were smashed disks of blue jade, her cheek bones angled high over the white hollows of her wide face.  Her chin was wide, her mouth thin, red, and wider.  Her nose fell straight from her forehead to flare at the nostrils (she breathed in the wind—and watching her, he became aware of the river’s odor, the Paris night, the city wind); these features were too austere and violent on the face of a young woman.  But the authority with which they set together would make him look again, he knew, once he looked away; make him remember, once he had gone away.  Her face compelled in the way that makes the merely beautiful sick with jealousy.”

Yeah, a bit hokey, but it’s good hokum, suitable to our modern age.  And keep in mind that this is obviously all stage-setting for what one can hope are more substantial doings in the novel it is mined from.  Four stars, optimistically.

Locked Worlds, by Edmond Hamilton

Next up, straight from the September 1929 Amazing Stories Quarterly, is Edmond Hamilton’s Locked Worlds, all 50 pages of it.  It’s a sort of mad scientist story.  Dr. Adams, head of Physics at Northeastern University (a real place!), brilliant but widely disliked, discovers that the seemingly loose electrons sometimes found in atoms are really evidence that matter partakes of two worlds; our world’s electrons going around in one direction, the other world’s going in opposite directions.  Room for everybody! 

The rest of the profession isn’t having it and mocks Adams, who is determined to show them and get his own back.  Shortly he disappears, leaving his apparatus and a pile of bluish clay behind.  His assistant Rawlins comes to narrator Harker with an awful suspicion—and the newspaper clippings to prove it, sort of—that Adams has fled to the other world and that he’s planning his revenge there (the clippings refer to large and small piles of blue clay found at various places around the Earth).  So what to do for Rawlins and Harker but reconstruct Adams’s apparatus, follow him into whatever world he’s gone to, and thwart him?

And so they do, finding themselves on a mostly barren world with a blazing white sun overhead and blue clay under their feet.  And then—the giant spiders attack! 


by Frank R. Paul

Now Hamilton does not seem just to be trading on arachnophobia here.  Going forward, he refers to these giant spiders as spider-men, and shows them with a fairly advanced civilization.  But still, they signify that a cliched plot is about to take off, featuring captivity, aerial escape, pursuit, return in force with Earth’s new allies the bird-men (the birds and spiders engage in a dogfight), confrontation with the mad Dr. Adams, some literal cliff-hanging, and the ultimate triumph of good over evil.

Well, that was tedious.  It’s not for lack of enthusiasm on Hamilton’s part.  A sample, as our heroes escape the spiders with Nor-Kan, the bird-man, in the latter’s aircraft:

“He whirled to the craft’s controls, opened its speed lever to the last notch, and sent the air-boat racing on toward the south in a burst of added speed.  The great flying-platforms swiftly leapt after us, hurtling through the air at immense speed and slowly drawing ever closer toward us moving obliquely toward our own course.  Closer they came, and closer, air-boat and flying-platforms cleaving the air at a velocity unthinkable; now we saw from the foremost of the platforms behind us a shaft of brilliant orange light that burned toward us at the same moment.  Nor-Kan swerved the air-boat to avoid it.  He turned toward us, motioned swiftly toward the long tube-like projector mounted on a swivel at the stern of our own air-boat, and which I had already noticed.

“ ‘The static-gun!’ he cried.  ‘There are a few charges left in it—try to stop them with it!’ ”

Back in 1929 that would have been enough to get everyone’s blood up.  But in this decadent age, hot pursuit by ray-bearing airborne spiders just doesn’t seem to make it any more.  Or maybe it would take Delany to bring the spider-men to life.  Two stars.

The Genius, by Ivar Jorgensen


Uncredited

The other reprints in this issue are all from the 1950s, which is not necessarily good news.  Ivar Jorgensen is present with The Genius, from the September 1955 Amazing, except that Mr. Jorgensen is not really present because he doesn’t exist, being a house name used variously by Howard Browne, Harlan Ellison, Paul W. Fairman, Randall Garrett, Robert Silverberg, and Henry Slesar.  It is alleged in some circles that Randall Garrett is the mystery guest this time.  The story is a caveman epic, about old Zalu, who is trying to prove he’s still worth feeding so his grandson Cabo won’t bash his head in to get rid of him.  His plan doesn’t work, but Zalu does something rather significant en route to getting his head bashed in.  It’s short, readable, and mildly amusing.  Three stars.

The Impossible Weapon, by Milton Lesser


by Julian S. Krupa

None of the above can be said about Milton Lesser’s The Impossible Weapon (Amazing, January 1952), which is the kind of silly finger-exercise fluff that filled the back pages of the lower-level SF magazines in the 1950s.  Earth is losing a war to the League (League of what?  I forget), and our hero Stokes has figured out how to counter their super-weapon, but no one will listen to him, so in cahoots with a spaceman he meets in the wake of a barroom brawl, he commandeers a spaceship and takes off and proves he can do it.  Yeah, that oversimplifies a bit, but mercifully.  Stokes’s invention is silly, as is the supposed scientific rationale for it, as are all the other events from the beginning of the story to the end, so much so that I can’t bear to recount them.  Read the damn thing yourself if you must.  One star, too generously.

This Is My Son, by Paul W. Fairman


by Tom Beecham

Paul W. Fairman’s This Is My Son is from Fantastic for October 1955, during his two-year absence from the editorial masthead of that magazine.  It too is pretty dreadful.  Protagonist Temple, a young physicist with a fixation on getting a son, and his new wife are trying to reproduce, without success.  Temple has a great career opportunity and signs a contract taking him to South America for five years.  Jill is not pleased.  She wires him four months later that his son is due in five months.  But he can’t go back under his contract and if he breaks it he’ll be blacklisted.  After the five years he heads home to meet his son, and everybody’s happy, until he finds the manufacturer’s receipt for the android child, and reacts xenophobically.  Jill slaps him across the chops and then leaves after telling him, double-edgedly, that the child is as human as he is.  So he’s miserable for years, finally begins to see the error of his ways and sends the kid a gift.  Then the kid lands in the hospital after saving a couple of other kids from a fire.  Temple beats it to the hospital, the kid’s on the brink, so he offers an “old-fashioned blood transfusion” instead of the bottled plasma the nurse is about to give him.  Curtain, music swells, everything’s going to be fine.  It’s ridiculously contrived, sentimental, and manipulative, but at least demonstrates a little more craft than The Impossible Weapon.  Grading on the curve, barely two stars. 

Killer Apes—Not Guilty! , by Leon E. Stover

After the last two I am definitely in the mood for the contentious Dr. Stover, whose “Science of Man” article, Killer Apes—Not Guilty!, is suitably abrasive.  He takes on Robert Ardrey’s best-selling African Genesis from a few years ago, and he clearly has been waiting for his chance.  Ardrey attributed the bloody-minded and -handed character of homo sapiens to the apes from whom we descended.  Not so, says Stover; the apes were peaceful vegetarians (though not averse to the occasional grub or worm mixed in with their roughage), and the next step up (homo erectus) were carnivorous browsers, not carnivorous hunters.  We sapiens achieved our predatory status all on our own. 

Along the way Stover asserts with confidence a great deal about such subjects as the effect of domesticating fire on prehistoric social life, though without much explanation of how the dots were connected.  But he is also happy to patronize those of a different view, such as Ardrey’s favorite, the distinguished Professor Raymond Dart, late of the University of Witwatersrand: “Everybody is more than willing to let the old gentleman play with his pet theory that Australopithecus stood up to adult baboons and clouted them with humerus bones taken from antelopes.  Few take it seriously.” Good times!  Three stars.

Summing Up

Once more, business as usual at Amazing: signs of editorial vitality struggling to be seen beneath the clammy wet blanket of the publisher’s reprint policy, against the backdrop of negligent or indifferent production.  The stalemate continues.




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Uncategorized

[April 10, 1968] Things Fall Apart (April 1968 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Entering the Stengel Zone

The April 1968 Amazing displays a deep incompetence at the most basic tasks of assembling a magazine.  For starters, this April issue—identified as such in two places on the contents page—is dated June 1968 on the cover, a blunder that will likely cost the publisher when the next issue appears.  Further, Harry Harrison’s editorial, titled Unto the Third Generation, has apparently been accidentally truncated.  It describes “first generation science fiction, or SF-1” (up to the early forties, relying on novelty of ideas), and then “second generation science fiction, SF-2” (starting in the forties with—it says here—Kornbluth, Pohl, and Wollheim, and reexamining old themes), and then . . . stops.  Abruptly.  What happened to SF-3, the Third Generation of the title?  There’s no continuation anywhere in the magazine, nor is there any hint that Harrison meant to stop short of this third generation or continue the editorial in some future issue. 


by Johnny Bruck

Other evidence of chaos in the composing room is that the texts of two items in the magazine conclude on the inside back cover, which is usually devoted to advertising.  This inside cover has microscopic top and bottom margins, suggesting a last-minute effort to correct earlier miscalculations and cram everything in (except, of course, the end of the editorial, seemingly lost to follow-up).  And the proofreading, which has been routinely abysmal since before Sol Cohen took it over, if anything seems to be getting worse.  In particular: The very first sentence of the editorial reads “In the beginning there was the word, and it was scientifiction.” Except as printed it actually reads “scientification.” You’d expect in this specialist magazine that someone—especially the editor who wrote it—would notice an error that blatant if they looked at it.  Apparently, no one is looking.

Legend has it that Casey Stengel, manager of the hapless 1962 New York Mets, asked in exasperation, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” Amazing now prompts the same question.

The news is no better with respect to the magazine’s content.  Rumor has it that Harrison upon taking the editorship worked out some amicable arrangement with the Science Fiction Writers of America concerning Cohen’s use of reprints—presumably getting him to pay the authors something.  But reprints continue to dominate—they comprise six out of seven of the stories here.

There is new non-fiction material—another “Science of Man” article by anthropologist Leon Stover (see below), and a lively book review column by James Blish, under his pseudonym William Atheling, Jr.  Blish virtually disembowels Sam Moskowitz’s book Seekers of Tomorrow, which collects essays on major science fiction writers, earlier published in Amazing before Cohen.  Blish’s judgment: “inaccurate, prejudiced, filled with false assumptions and jejune literary comparisons, very badly written and utterly unproofread.  If this is scholarship, we could do with a lot less of it.” He makes his case in detail.  About the only defense remaining to the book is that it’s better than the competition, since there is none.  Blish also reviews Harlan Ellison’s anthology Dangerous Visions with measured praise.

And, on the front, there is another Johnny Bruck cover taken from Germany’s Perry Rhodan magazine, badly cropped, and featuring guys in spacesuits running around with ray guns.  Bruck’s work is colorful but cliched, and that is getting old.

All that, before we even get to the fiction!  Sheesh.

Send Her Victorious, by Brian W. Aldiss


by Jeff Jones

The only non-reprint story is Brian W. Aldiss’s Send Her Victorious, which at first seems like a slapdash, thrown-together story, but proves to be about a slapdash, thrown-together world.  It’s minor Aldiss, odd but quite funny in places.  Three stars.

The Illusion Seekers, by P.F. Costello

The Illusion Seekers, a “complete short novel” from the August 1950 Amazing, is bylined P.F. Costello, which is a “house name”—a pseudonym belonging to the publishing company and used by various authors as convenient.  This name is said to have been used often by William P. McGivern, but I don’t think this one is his, since McGivern is rumored to be a competent writer.


by W.H. Hinton

The story opens in a small and isolated colony of people suffering from deformities such as soft bones, woody skin plaques, and multitudes of miniature fingers growing from the backs of their hands.  But young Randy is normal.  Down the road from the east comes a guy named Raymond who calls himself an Illusion Seeker, but won’t explain what that means.  He warns that “death will breathe through the trees” in three days, but throws golden dust into Randy’s face and says he will be saved.  Sure enough, three days later everybody but Randy is dead.  So Randy sets off west following Raymond, discovering that the golden dust has left him with enhanced physical prowess as he fights off wild dogs with an axe.  He encounters two survivors from other groups who, hearing his story, tell him Raymond is responsible for the deaths.  They all continue west and catch up with Raymond.  Randy’s companions kill Raymond.  Then they start heading back east in a state of mutual murderous mistrust, have other picaresque but wearisome adventures, and eventually Randy gets the real story of how his world works, which of course makes very little sense. 

This story is both repellent and remarkably incompetent, written in a dead, flat style, with a pseudo-plot that rambles on and gives every indication of being made up as the author goes along, all set against a sketchy and implausible background.  Overall, it’s a reading experience sort of like the world’s least interesting bad dream, or like listening to a long and tedious monologue by someone who you gradually realize is not all there.  It made me wonder whether it’s Richard S. Shaver, Amazing’s foremost ex-psychiatric patient, making a few bucks behind the pseudonym.  In any case—one star, a burnt-out husk of a black dwarf.

The Way of a Weeb, by H.B. Hickey


by Robert Gibson Jones

H.B. Hickey contributes The Way of a Weeb (from Amazing, February 1951).  A Weeb is a frail humanoid creature native to Deimos who is always scared and always whining about it.  They’ve got one on space ship Virtus, to the great disgust of all the crew except Crag, who takes pity on him.  But things get tight when the evil Plutonians come after the Virtus, and the Weeb comes through and saves the day.  It’s a dreary bag of cliches, professionally rendered.  Two stars.

Stenographer's Hands, by David H. Keller, M.D.

The issue’s “Classic Novelet” is David H. Keller’s Stenographer’s Hands, from the Fall 1928 Amazing Stories Quarterly.  In broadest outline it follows the template of the earlier-reprinted Revolt of the Pedestrians and A Biological Experiment: humanity’s traditional ways of life get drastically altered, the results are disastrous, and there’s an upheaval to set things right (though the upheaval here is a little milder than in the others).


by Frank R. Paul

The president of Universal Utilities is bedeviled by the number of errors his ditzy stenographers make (apparently his business runs on non-form letters), and demands that his house biologist come up with a solution.  Easy-peasy: they’ll breed the perfect stenographer, by the hundreds or thousands, firing the less competent of the current flibbertigibets to make room for an army of promising males to balance the sexes.  Stenographers who marry and breed will get a free house in a special stenographers’ suburb among other perks.  There will be certain other undisclosed manipulations such as providing special food for the kids to help them grow up faster.

Two hundred years later, Universal has achieved world domination economically, with a torrent of flawless letters flowing out from a work force that matures at age 9, marries at 10, and reproduces quickly thereafter.  But the daughter and heir apparent of the current company president, having flunked out of college, says she wants a job as a stenographer.  She is then appalled at the sterility (metaphorical, of course) of the stenographers’ lives, and says when she’s in charge she won’t stand for it.  Conveniently, it is discovered that the stenographers have become so inbred that they are all starting to display nocturnal epilepsy.  Never mind!  The great experiment is reversed and once more the company's letters will be haphazardly produced by flighty young women of normal upbringing.

So, an obviously terrible idea is belatedly discovered to be terrible and is abandoned.  This is not a particularly dynamic plot and nothing else about the story is especially captivating.  Two stars.

Lorelei Street, by Craig Browning

Craig Browning is a pseudonym of Roger Graham Phillips (“Rog” to the readership), and Lorelei Street comes from the September 1950 Fantastic Adventures.  It's a facile but insubstantial fantasy involving a cop named Clancy who is asked by a passer-by for directions to an address on Lorelei Street, which he provides, later realizing that there is no such street.  There are more funny happenings about Lorelei Street.  A man who bought a big bag of groceries there was found later in a state of near starvation despite eating them.  A woman bought a suit which later disappeared, leaving her on the street in her underwear.  A Mr. Calva is the apparent proprietor on Lorelei Street, and Clancy arrests him for fraud.  Calva says he’ll regret it.  Next day the newspapers describe the arrest of “Calva the Great,” a “hypnotist swindler.” Calva vanishes from court on the day of trial, and when Clancy tries to go home, he finds himself on Lorelei Street, and it’s curtains. 


by Edmond Swiatek

There’s more to the plot than that, but not better.  Like Phillips’s “You’ll Die Yesterday!” from the previous issue, the story displays considerable cleverness to no very interesting end.  Two stars, barely.

Four Men and a Suitcase, by Ralph Robin

Ralph Robin’s byline appeared on 11 stories in the SF magazines from late 1951 to late 1953, most of them in Fantasy and Science Fiction or Fantastic, plus one in Amazing in 1936.  Later he made an appearance in Prairie Schooner, a literary magazine published at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; the story wound up in Martha Foley’s annual volume The Best American Short Stories 1958.  He seems to have quit while he was ahead; he has not been heard from since that I can discover.

Robin’s story Four Men and a Suitcase, from Fantastic for July/August 1953, is about some Skid Row drunks discussing what to do with a mysterious object one of them has found.  It looks like a giant hard-boiled egg, and when yelled at threateningly displays diagrams on its . . . skin?  (No shell.) The first one illustrates the Pythagorean theorem.  After several further iterations, one of the characters slaps the egg, with large and regrettable consequences.  The main point here seems to be how hilarious poverty-stricken alcoholics are.  Sorry, can’t get with it.  One star.

The Mechanical Heart, by H.I. Barrett

The issue’s fiction winds up, literally, with The Mechanical Heart by one-story wonder H.I. Barrett, from the Fall 1931 Amazing Stories Quarterly.  Inventor Jim Bard has just learned that his heart could conk out any minute.  But he wants to complete his telephoto machine! (Actually more like television.) The solution?  Make an artificial heart!  His assistant Henry, trained in a Swiss watch factory, hops to it.  It’s a beauty!  And his doctor is persuaded to install it.  Jim will carry a case in his pocket with two six-volt flashlight batteries and a watch to time the impulses that drive it. Just wind the watch, and don’t forget to change the batteries!


by Leo Morey

After the surgery, Jim convalesces, and experiments with increasing the blood flow, which he finds highly stimulating.  “Have to be careful or he’d have himself cutting all sorts of didoes.” (Dido: “a mischievous or capricious act : prank, antic,” says Merriam-Webster.) But he can’t resist, and starts increasing the flow so he can stay up all night working on the telephoto, and then so stimulates himself that he scandalizes Hilda the Swedish maid and has to be restrained and briefly disconnected by Henry.

At the Associated Scientists’ meeting, to demonstrate both the telephoto machine and the heart, Jim gets stage fright, cold sweat and the works, and then realizes he can increase his blood flow.  He sets up the telephoto for a demonstration and discovers—he’s forgotten the C batteries!  In desperation, he snatches the batteries powering his heart, and the show goes on, with his machine relaying the picture from a distant movie theatre, while his unsupported heart races . . . for a while.  And then, time’s up.

This is the best of a bad lot of reprints—corny, but with at least a bit of period charm, while the others lack charm of any sort.  Three stars, grading on the curve.

Science of Man: Dogs, Dolphins and Human Speech, by Leon Stover

Dr. Stover takes on John Lilly’s claim that dolphins can learn to speak English in addition to their accustomed clicks and clacks.  He starts out with dogs, which communicate vocally, he says, “but the level of signaling is that of a call system, quite distinct from that of language.  A call system is no more linguistic than the system of visual signals dogs communicate to each other by means of facial expression, body movement, and position of the tail.” However: “Language and only language is a symbolic form of communication,” one which allows meaning to be assigned arbitrarily to symbols. 

Dolphins?  Same story. Their large brain size has more to do with body weight than with intelligence.  “How the brains of dolphins function to meet the demands of their environment is not yet known, but it is a sure thing that research will show that symbolic behavior, like language and culture, is not part of that adaptation.” And there’s the rub—“it is a sure thing that research will show.” Stover continues with arguments about the evolution of human intelligence in ways that exclude dolphins, but there’s no way for the lay person to tell how much of it is supported by research and how much is his admittedly informed supposition.  Two stars.

Summing Up

Editors change, formats change a bit, but the consistent mediocrity of this magazine abides, firmly rooted in the dominant and seemingly immovable prevalence of reprints of only occasional merit.  One wonders how long this can last.




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Book, Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[January 14, 1968] As Is (February 1968 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The February 1968 Amazing, the second under Harry Harrison’s editorship, displays two themes on its face, both noted last issue.  The first is puffery: this issue says WORLD’S LEADING SCIENCE-FICTION MAGAZINE at the top of the cover, which also boasts “Katherine MacLean’s outstanding new novelet,” and the table of contents lists this “New Outstanding Novelet,” a “Classic Novelet,” and a “Special Novelet.” The second theme is protesting-too-much discomfort with the mostly-reprint fiction policy, evidenced by the prominent display of “New” on the cover: MacLean’s “Outstanding New Novelet,” “New Features,” “New Article,” “New Frank Herbert Novel.”


by Johnny Bruck

But there’s a third, more substantive theme: commendable initiative in the small amount of space left open by the reprint policy.  The “New Features” listed on the contents page include the first of a promised series of articles on the “Science of Man,” by Leon E. Stover, an anthropologist now at the Illinois Institute of Technology.  The book review column features a long and interesting essay-review by Fritz Leiber of a translation of a book by French author Claude Seignoll, with comments about the state of Gothic fiction generally.  (See below concerning both of these.) There is also the London Letter, said to be the first of a series to include a Milan Letter, a Munich Letter, etc.  This one is by Harrison’s pal Brian Aldiss, and it amounts to an extemporaneous stand-up routine which probably took Aldiss 20 minutes to write.  Parts of it are amusing.

These items are all touted by Harrison in his editorial, but they are not his main matter; the editorial is titled Amazing and the New Wave, and its first half amounts to a disappointingly smarmy exercise in having it both ways:

“There is no New Wave in science fiction.  Or, to put it another way, Amazing is the New Wave. . . .  Science fiction is the new wave that washed into existence in 1926 with the first issue of the magazine. . . .

“To me there are only two kinds of science fiction: the good and the bad. . . .  It is exactly what it says it is, and it is what I happen to be pointing to when I say the magic words ‘science fiction.’ And that is all the definition you are going to get out of me.

“The present New Wave is therefore two things: it is bad SF and it is good SF.  When bad it should be consigned to the nether cellars of our building with the rest of the cobwebbed debris of the years.  When it is good there are plenty of rooms it can slip into and feel comfortable.”

So Harrison spends a page on a subject of current controversy while ostentatiously saying nothing of substance about it.  This banal babble from an otherwise obviously intelligent editor is presumably his way of trying to ingratiate himself and the magazine with everyone while offending no one—a bad idea that will fool nobody and which one hopes is not repeated.

Meanwhile, the actual fiction content of the magazine, except for the above-average serial, is more or less what it has been since the departure of Cele Lalli and the advent of Sol Cohen.

Santaroga Barrier (Part 3 of 3), by Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert’s serial Santaroga Barrier, begun under the previous editor, concludes in this issue, and exits honorably.  To begin, the protagonist Gilbert Dasein, who teaches psychology at Berkeley, is driving to the isolated and reclusive California town Santaroga, hired by an investment company wanting to know why their chain stores were forced out of town.  In Santaroga, there is no reported juvenile delinquency or mental illness.  Cigarettes are purchased only by transients.  Nobody moves away; servicemen always return there upon discharge; and outsiders find no houses for rent or sale.  Jenny, Dasein’s not-so-old flame, moved back to Santaroga when she finished at Berkeley, telling him she couldn’t live anywhere else.  (The profs fooling around with the students?  Shocking!) There’s a dominant local industry, the Jaspers Cheese Cooperative, but it doesn’t produce for the outside market—the stuff “doesn’t travel.” Also, Dasein is the third investigator sent to Santaroga, the two predecessors having sustained accidental deaths.


by Gray Morrow

These cards dealt, Dasein arrives at the town’s sole inn, where he tries to call his handler in Berkeley, but the line goes out, and stays out afterwards.  He is then overcome in his room by a leak from an old gas jet, and rescued just in time.  Jenny, alerted to his presence, and seemingly very happy about it, shows up with breakfast.  It turns out she never received the letters he sent her after her return.

Dasein quickly learns that everyone seems to know who he is.  He encounters new manifestations of the town’s insularity.  Nobody has TV, except for a hidden room full of people whose job it is to monitor it.  There’s a local newspaper, but it’s subscription only, and its concept of reporting the news is unusual: “Those nuts are still killing each other in Southeast Asia.” All commerce appears to be local.  Dasein also learns that Jaspers is not just a brand name, but a substance, one which is near-omnipresent in food and drink.  And he notices a “vitality and a happy freedom” in the movements of people on the streets.

Meanwhile, the Jaspers (which is referred to later as “consciousness fuel”) is having an effect on him (“he had never felt more vital himself”), which he doesn’t entirely grasp.  He’s getting a little deranged, though hardly without cause, since he also keeps having near-fatal accidents—tripping over a carpet and being narrowly saved from a three-floor fall; a kid absent-mindedly loosing an arrow that barely misses him; a garage car lift collapsing; a waitress unknowingly poisoning his coffee; and more.  As for his derangement, shortly after the carpet incident, still suffering from a sprained shoulder, he takes a dangerous nighttime climb down into the Jaspers factory, clambering down and through its ventilation shafts despite his injury. Eventually he is questioning his own sanity.

It becomes apparent that consumption of Jaspers has created some sort of shared consciousness among the Santarogans, though Herbert remains vague about exactly how it works.  The people responsible for his “accidents” (poisoning his food, shooting an arrow at him) seem not to have consciously intended harm, but to have unknowingly acted out the hostility and fear of the Jaspers collectivity.  (Monsters from the id!) Jenny hysterically acknowledges that phenomenon: “Stay away from me! I love you!  Stay away!”

Dasein also begins to see some less attractive features of the Jaspers-permeated community.  On his first visit to the Jaspers factory, he finds that Jenny—trained as a clinical psychologist—works on the inspection line. Leaving, he sees through a door left open a line of people with their legs in stocks doing menial work, “oddly dull-eyed, slow in their actions.” He later learns these are the people who flunked the Jaspers initiation—about one in 500.  After wondering where all the children are, he finds them working in the greenhouses, marching and chanting.  Dr. Piaget, the designated spokesperson for the Santaroga way, says: “We must push back at the surface of childhood. . . .  It’s a brutal, animate thing.  But there’s food growing. . . .  There’s educating.  There’s useful energy.  Waste not; want not.”

At this point, Herbert’s thriller has become a philosophical novel, or at least a novel about philosophies.  Dr. Piaget elaborates on Santaroga’s child rearing practices, which reflect Santaroga’s departure from the usual human understandings about everything: “We take off the binding element.  Couple that with the brutality of childhood?  No!  We would have violence, chaos. . . .  We must superimpose a limiting order on the innate patterns of our nervous systems.” Hence, child labor; got to get 'em disciplined early."

Dr. Piaget continues: “We know the civilization culture-society outside is dying.  They do die, you know.  When this is about to happen, pieces break off from the parent body.  Pieces cut themselves free, Dasein.” And Dasein acknowledges the obvious: “Dasein knew then why he’d been sent here.  No mere market report had prompted this. . . .  He was here to break this up, smash it.” Piaget again: “Contending is too soft a word, Dasein.  There is a power struggle going on over control of the human consciousness.  We are a cell of health surrounded by plague. . . .  This isn’t a struggle over a market area. . . .  This is a struggle over what’s to be judged valuable in our universe.”

There is more denunciation of “outside” (another character says, with elaboration, “it’s all TV out there”), and much ambivalence on Dasein’s part about both outside and Santaroga, resolved in a final confrontation when the man who sent him to Santaroga comes looking for him.

This is a pretty solid SF novel, much better than Herbert's previous serial The Heaven Makers, with an interesting if somewhat vague idea capably revealed through a plot dense with incident, though there are minor points where things don’t hang together well.  Though talky, it’s much less of a turgid slog than some of his other work (Ahem, Dune).  The hive-mind idea is not entirely original, but Herbert takes a different angle and asks different questions than some of his predecessors.  In fact, the novel can be viewed almost as the anti-More Than Human—do you really want to give up your individuality and privacy for the comfort of such close and inescapable community?  Especially when you might end up acting violently without even realizing it?  Four stars, with a couple of planetoids thrown in.

Note the portentousness of some of the names in this novel.  An SF fan’s first thought about Gilbert Dasein is likely that it’s homage or satirical swipe at Gilbert Gosseyn, protagonist of van Vogt’s The World of Null-A.  But that’s probably wrong.  “Dasein” is German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s term for existence, as it is experienced by human beings.  Karl Jaspers is another German philosopher.  Jean Piaget is a Swiss psychologist famous for his studies of child development, some of whose work looks as much like philosophy as psychology.  A student of philosophy, which I am not, might make something of these names, but I’d suggest that the novel works well enough without that kind of gloss.

The Trouble with You Earth People, by Katherine MacLean


by Jeff Jones

Katherine MacLean contributed a number of incisive stories to the SF magazines from 1949 into the early ’50s (Defense Mechanism, —And Be Merry, Incommunicado, Contagion, etc.), and a few since then (mainly Unhuman Sacrifice).  Her novelet The Trouble with You Earth People isn’t on that level; it’s an amusing and mildly bawdy story of cultural misunderstanding between doggish alien visitors, whose understanding of humanity is based on watching television, and an easily scandalized elderly scientist.  It reads like it could have used another draft.  Three stars.

Remote Control, by Walter Kateley

To the reprints.  Walter Kateley’s Remote Control (from Amazing, April 1930), opens with the narrator’s friend Kingston showing him around a large construction project.  It is being carried out by animals—whales and sharks carrying heavy freight, apes and elephants unloading it, and as for the typing and computation required for such a project: “The machines were being operated at lightning speed, not by lady typists, as one might expect, but by bushy-tailed gray squirrels!”


by Hans Wessolowski

The author now flashes back to an earlier time, when Kingston has joined the narrator on his family farm, and assists with his observations of ants.  The two are puzzled by the ants’ efficiency in carrying out cooperative tasks without anything much resembling a brain and with no indication of how their activities are coordinated.  Then an accidental mixture of buttermilk and cedar oil gets on one of their lenses, and—revelation!  Now they can see tiny bright lines of energy leading from the ants back into the nest, which when followed to their source reveal a tiny brain that is apparently coordinating all their activity.  The possibilities are obvious, and it’s a short hop from these naturally manipulated ants to whales and elephants working construction, with squirrels on typewriters in the office, and human puppet masters somewhere off premises.

This one is amusing at first, but quickly gets tedious, since the story consists mostly of Kingston and narrator lecturing each other, with the narrator at one point reading aloud a passage from his favorite entomology text.  Fortunately this “novelet” runs only 18 pages of large print and is over quickly.  Two stars.

"You'll Die Yesterday!", by Rog Phillips

Rog Phillips’s “You’ll Die Yesterday!” (from the March 1951 Amazing) is a piece of yard goods by one of Ray Palmer’s stable of hacks—but a pretty capable one.  Phillips published some 44 stories in a little over six years before this one, mostly in Amazing and Fantastic Adventures, and clearly has the knack to meet Palmer’s famous editorial demand to “gimme bang-bang.” Protagonist Stevens, author of a successful book, is giving a lecture; an audience member asks a question but is shot before Stevens can answer; the killer runs out of the auditorium but inexplicably disappears.  Before the cops arrive, Stevens swipes some papers carried by the decedent, Fred Stone, and shows by home carbon-dating that they are from the future.  Also, Stone was carrying a “T.T.” permit (figure it out) and a printed copy of Stevens’s speech, which was extemporaneous, so it could only have been prepared later from a transcript.  Next day, Stevens’s girlfriend sees Stone, alive, on the street.  Turns out his body is missing from the morgue.


by Julian S. Krupa

More developments come thick and fast and there’s a revelation at the end which actually doesn’t resolve much, but might seem to if the reader wasn’t paying close attention, as I suspect was the case with much of the Palmer Amazing’s readership.  So it’s a clever if insubstantial riff on the time paradox theme.  Three stars for good workmanship.

The Great Invasion of 1955, by David Reid

The Great Invasion of 1955, by David Reid, from the October 1932 Amazing, is another tedious old story in which the Japanese are invading the United States and are vanquished by new technology based on now out-of-date science.  It may be of interest to those interested in speculative helicopter design.  Otherwise, one star.

Turnover Point, by Alfred Coppel

Alfred Coppel, author of Turnover Point (Amazing, April-May 1953), helped fill the SF pulps and lower-echelon digests with mostly forgettable material from the late ‘40s until the mid-‘50s, when he disappeared from the genre, briefly reappearing in 1960 with the well-received post-nuclear war novel Dark December.  This story is a bucket of cliches—a Bat Durston, i.e. a displaced Western—which is a surprise, since it appeared in the first issue of the magazine’s brief flirtation with high pay rates and higher quality content.  But here it is, alongside Heinlein, Sturgeon, and Bradbury.  A sample:

“The Patrol was on Kane’s trail and the blaster in his hand was still warm when he shoved it up against Pop Ganlon’s ribs and made his proposition.

“He wanted to get off Mars—out to Callisto.  To Blackwater, to Ley’s Landing, it didn’t matter too much.  Just off Mars, and quickly.  His eyes had a metallic glitter and his hand was rock-steady.  Pop knew he meant what he said when he told him life was cheap.  Someone else’s, not Kane’s.”


by Ed Emshwiller

The bad guy hiring Pop’s battered old spaceship turns out to be the one who killed Pop’s son, a Patrol officer who “was blasted to a cinder in a back alley in Lower Marsport.” Pop knows Kane is going to kill him after “turnover point”—the point at which the spaceship is turned around (a maneuver accomplished with a flywheel) so its business end faces the destination for deceleration and landing.  But Pop has the last laugh—he didn’t turn the ship around to decelerate for landing, but made a full 360 degree turn, so it continues on towards the outer reaches of the solar system, where Kane can starve, suffocate, and go crazy after it is too late to do anything about it.  Whoopee!  Two stars, barely, since it’s at least capably written for what it is.

Science of Man: Neanderthals, Rickets and Modern Technology, by Leon E. Stover

Prof. Leon Stover’s article suggests that the Neanderthals died out because they wore clothes, shielding themselves from sunlight and therefore from vitamin D.  Vitamin D deficiency causes rickets, which has serious enough consequences to affect evolutionary success.  Clothing was the Neanderthals’ technological solution to the glaciation of their habitat; what saved them then killed them off.  Vitamin D absorption, or lack of it, also accounts for the distribution of races: dark skin absorbs less than light skin, so dark-skinned peoples flourish in the tropics where there’s a surfeit of sunlight, while light-skinned people dominate at higher latitudes.  The moral: people must assess the consequences of their technological development, as the Neanderthals failed to, and we need a lot more technically trained people than we’ve got.

It all seems plausible and is lucidly enough written.  Is he right?  Beats me.  Three stars.

The Future in Books

Ordinarily I don’t rate the book review columns, but this one is unusual, containing Fritz Leiber’s review of French writer Claude Seignolle’s The Accursed: Two Diabolical Tales.  Leiber traces the current revival of “Gothic” fiction, recognizable by the paperback covers depicting an anxious-looking woman, with a large house in the background displaying a single lighted window, and notes the less formulaic older books being reprinted under cover of this new wave (excuse the expression) of yard goods. 

This brings us to Leiber’s typology of “the true Gothic or supernatural-horror story,” of which there are two flavors: “Can such things be?” and “Such things are!  So let’s go whole hog!” He continues: “The first type of story aims to make a sensitive, intelligent reader question for a deliciously scary moment the stable, science-proved foundations of the world in which he trusts.  The second provides a feast of grue for those who relish such banquets.” Seignolle’s two novellas (one featuring a young pyrotic, the other a young lycanthrope) are firmly in the second camp, as Leiber shows by judicious description and quotation.

This is all lively and informative, above and beyond the usual book review, though Leiber disappointingly fails to describe where Seignolle’s work fits into the fantastic tradition (or lack of it) in his native France.  Also, the book is introduced by Lawrence Durrell, a rather large noise in contemporary literature after his Alexandria Quartet; Leiber does not mention what Durrell has to say about the book, or about Seignolle generally.  So, three stars; a good piece that should have been better.  (And this rating in no way reflects the other review here, a distasteful hit job on Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light bylined “Leroy Tanner,” well known as a pseudonym of Harrison’s.)

Summing Up

So, a good novel (though one begun under the previous regime), a decent new story, the usual uneven bunch of reprints, and some stirrings of life in the non-fiction departments.  I’m not sure that adds up to “promising”—more like “steady as she goes”—so we’ll have to leave it with a version of the baseball fans’ lament: “wait till next issue.”




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[November 20, 1967] Fresh Air? (December 1967 Amazing)

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by John Boston

A Fresh Heir

We have been harbinged.  When Harry Harrison, recently departed as editor of SF Impulse and suddenly appeared as book reviewer in this magazine that seemed to have eschewed features entirely, I wondered whether it was an omen of a larger change. 

And here that change is, in big letters at the top of the cover of this December Amazing: “HARRY HARRISON New Editor.” Joseph Ross is gone from the masthead and his departure is unheralded elsewhere in the magazine, though Harrison is quite gracious to him in his book review of Ross’s anthology The Best of Amazing.


by Johnny Bruck

Otherwise, the kudos are reserved for the recently-deceased Hugo Gernsback.  Harrison’s editorial is a tribute to him, and Science Fiction That Endures, Gernsback’s own guest editorial from the April 1961 anniversary issue, is reprinted.  Gernsback says among other things that enduring SF stories are those that “have as their wonder ingredient true or prophetic science,” and notes that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells wrote most of their notable SF early in their careers, later succumbing to “science fiction fatigue—the creative science distillate of the mind had been exhausted.” That sounds scientific!

But does this change in masthead mean any actual material change in this too frequently lackluster magazine?

The most visible difference is that the cover and title page have suddenly become more crowded.  Nine items are touted on the cover, five of them touted as “NEW” and others as “SPECIAL” or even “XTRA SPECIAL.” There’s so much puffery going on that the cover illustration, by Johnny Bruck from the German Perry Rhodan periodical, is confined to the bottom third of the cover, though little harm is done, since it’s quite horizontal in orientation, depicting a spaceship traveling very low and being pursued by flying snakes.  Beat that, Frank R. Paul! 

Other aspects of the magazine’s presentation represent both continuity and change.  The proofreading is still terrible; look no farther than the misspelling “Lester del Ray” on the title page of his story.  And curiously, part of the magazine—pages 90 through 125—is in a different, smaller typeface than the rest, though this increase in wordage is not touted on the cover or elsewhere.

As to the contents, the balance is shifted only a little.  Two short stories and the serial installment are original, one story is probably reprinted but this is its first appearance in English, and four short stories are reprinted from earlier issues of Amazing and Fantastic.  And of course we don’t know whether Harrison actually had much of a hand in selecting what went into this first issue of his incumbency.  But the question of reprints versus new material seems to be a continuing sore point.  Note the column on the left side of the cover—five iterations of "NEW"—which musters everything in the magazine that's not a reprint, including the book review column.

So, too early to tell, but promising—it almost has to be, given Amazing’s doldrums of mediocrity to date under Sol Cohen.  As Bob Dylan, the alleged troubadour of my generation, put it:

I wish I was on some Australian mountain range.
I wish I was on some Australian mountain range.
I got no reason to be there, but I imagine it would be some kind of change. 

Santaroga Barrier (Part 2 of 3), by Frank Herbert


by Gray Morrow

First, to the non-reprinted fiction.  The longest piece of fiction here is the second installment of Frank Herbert’s serial Santaroga Barrier, in which the suggestively named Gilbert Dasein tries to unlock the secret of the reclusive town of Santaroga, which seems to involve a psychoactive substance called Jaspers that the locals all consume.  As usual I’ll hold my comments until the story is complete.

The Forest of Zil, by Kris Neville


by Jeff Jones

Kris Neville, who contributed prolifically to the SF magazines during the early 1950s but slowed down considerably thereafter, opens the issue with The Forest of Zil, a cryptic story of space explorers who land on a planet entirely covered in forest and begin to make plans to clear trees to make space for human activities.  The forest begs leave to differ, and its response can be read either as an epic in brief of raising the ante exponentially, like A.E. van Vogt but not as noisy, or as a weary parody of the entire conceptual armamentarium of SF.  Or maybe something else!  How many faces can you find lurking in the coffee shop placemat?  Four stars for this subtly memorable piece.

The Million Year Patent, by Charles L. Harness


by Jeff Jones

Charles L. Harness, a patent lawyer by day, is present with The Million Year Patent, in which the technicalities of patent law collide with those of relativity, not very interestingly to this lay person.  Two stars.

An Unusual Case, by Gennadiy Gor

The “Sensational Story from behind the Iron Curtain” per the cover is Gennadiy Gor’s An Unusual Case, translated from Russian by one Stanley Frye.  Gor, born to a family exiled to Siberia by the Tsar, was apparently part of the avant-garde in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, but survived to write popular science texts as well, and to start writing SF in 1961.  There’s no indication where this story was previously published, if at all.  It’s a first-person account by the creator of an artificial intelligence (apparently at least humanoid; a hand is mentioned) of his rearing of this pseudo-child, which is cut short when representatives of the corporation that financed the project come to take it away, as it protests piteously.  It’s short and poignant, though blunted a bit by not making much sense; the ingenue develops detailed memories of human life that its creator didn’t put there.  Three stars, and I hope we see more of Gor’s work here (or anywhere).

The Smile, by Ray Bradbury


by L. Sterne Stevens

The ”Ray Bradbury Masterpiece” touted on the cover is The Smile, from the Summer 1952 Fantastic, set in what seems like an American town after a nuclear war has mostly destroyed civilization and left everyone who survived destitute.  People of course respond in the only logical way—by destroying or defiling any available relics of the former civilization.  A while back it was smashing an old car with sledgehammers; today everyone is lining up to spit on a fragment of a famous painting (clue: the title).  But young Tom just can’t get with the program.  It’s a bit overdone, but Bradbury’s overdone is better than many writers’ perfectly-baked.  Or something like that.  Three stars.

Stacked Deck, by Lester del Rey

Our Journeyer-in-Chief recently had occasion to mention “the sort of inferior stuff that filled the lesser mags of the ’50s.” Here’s the real article, Lester del Rey’s Stacked Deck from the November 1952 Amazing.  Del Rey is one of SF’s hardy journeyman professionals, in the game since 1937 as writer, first for John Campbell’s Astounding and Unknown, then for everyone in sight during the 1950s’ efflorescence of SF magazines.  In the ‘50s he edited magazines and anthologies and wrote novels as well as stories, including a prodigious ten of them under various pseudonyms for the Winston series of juvenile SF.  Occasionally he excelled, and his work almost always maintained a basic level of competence.

Almost always.  Sometimes a working writer just has to crank it out, inspiration or no, as in this excruciatingly contrived piece.  Before it opens, a man flew to the moon, without enough fuel to get back, expecting to be rescued in time by a later expedition.  (This already makes no sense.) But that rocketeer, inexplicably, showed up again on Earth, talking about entities he encountered on the moon but claiming scrambled memory.  So a better-equipped expedition sets out, only to discover that the Russians are neck and neck with them.  All this is told in an annoyingly jaunty, I’m-just-a-regular-guy first person style, as in the opening sentence: “The bright boys with their pep talks about space and the lack of gravity should try it once!”


by Ed Emshwiller

Upon landing, our heroes find a building with an airlock, and inside, a nice lounge with red leather chairs, a cigarette machine, and plenty of alcohol and food, along with a machine shop and a lot of electronic gear, with signs and manuals in English and Russian—and a vault full of missiles, ready to be armed with warheads.  They surmise the Russians are finding something similar.

So what gives?  All along there have been passing references to gambling, such as the protagonist’s having bought a sweepstakes ticket, and racing magazines lying around, some inside the mysterious building.  Our hero picks up one of the latter and finds a note in it written by the aliens who set up the building, explaining that they are all betting on whether the Earthfolk will blow themselves up in short order, or avoid extermination and come calling on the aliens a bit later.  Narrator ruminates: “I don’t like being the booby prize in a cosmic lottery.  And that’s all the human race is now, I guess.”

And that arid gimmick is the story, with no other redeeming feature.  Del Rey must have been short on the rent that month.  One star. 

Luvver, by Mack Reynolds

Speaking of gimmicks, arid ones that is, Mack Reynolds’s Luvver (Fantastic Adventures, June 1950) is about as contrived as Stacked Deck.  Old Donald Macbride and his flirtatious daughter Patricia are having spaceship problems and make an emergency landing on a handy planet despite the “RESTRICTED ZONE.  LANDING FORBIDDEN” warning that comes over the radio. The local garrison, consisting of Steve and Dave, hustles them off their ship—blindfolded—and into their quarters, warning them not to look around, not to go outside, not to open the windows, without explaining why. 

But Patricia, of course, goes outside, and before Steve can drag her in, she sees a little animal–a luvver.  He knocks her out and the guys shoot her up with “the lethe drug,” since wiping her memory is her only hope.  Steve explains to the old man that all animals have means of defense—speed, size, venom, scent, etc.  The luvvers’ defense is eliciting undying love—“a stronger force than the most vicious narcotic”—in anyone or anything that sees them.  If Patricia retains her memories, she will “die of melancholy” if kept away from them, and if they escaped their world, pandemonium would ensue.

The gimmick is slightly less inane than del Rey’s, and Reynolds writes in a style more facile and natural than del Rey’s artificial and irritating voice, so two stars, barely.

Sub-Satellite, by Charles Cloukey

The gem of the issue, remarkably, is Charles L. Cloukey’s Sub-Satellite, from the March 1928 Amazing.  It recounts a great inventor’s construction of a spaceship and his voyage to the Moon in it, and the attempt on his life there by a disgruntled and demented former employee who has stowed away.  It is well told in an agreeable, slightly stilted but very plain style with a good balance of narration and exposition, reminding me of (my old memories of) Jules Verne.  It too ends with a gimmick—one that has been used in later decades by better-known writers—but there’s much more of a story here than in del Rey’s or Reynolds’s efforts, so it doesn’t detract from the whole.  Four stars.

So who’s this Cloukey?  Never heard of him, though I’m familiar with most of Gernsback’s repeat contributors.  Turns out he died in 1931, at age 19, of typhoid fever, after publishing eight stories, a poem, and a serial novel in Gernsback’s magazines.  Sub-Satellite was his first story, and he was not quite 16 when it was published.  Forget G. Peyton Wertenbaker, whose The Man from the Atom, done when he was 16, was pretty terrible—Cloukey is the real prodigy of the Gernsback years.  Too bad he didn’t last.

Summing Up

So, not a bad issue, with a couple of four-star stories, and some evidence (mainly the cover and table of contents) that the new regime at least wants to make the magazine look a bit livelier.  Whether a sustained improvement is in process of course remains to be seen.




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 6, 1967] New Look, New . . . ? (October 1967 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The October Amazing is the second instance of what may prove to be the magazine’s New Look.  Like the June issue, it is fronted by a pleasantly garish and nouveau-pulpish cover that, though uncredited, is known to the cognoscenti as another by Johnny Bruck, reprinted from a 1963 issue of the German Perry Rhodan magazine.  Farewell Frank R. Paul?  We’ll see.  And maybe the contents are being updated as well.  Of the five reprinted stories here, all are from the late 1940s or the ‘50s, at least in publication date.


by Johnny Bruck

That is not necessarily good news; Amazing published plenty of dreck through most of its history.  Selection is all.  But this issue’s selection is pretty decent.  Also Harry Harrison’s book reviews are still here, with a fillip.  In addition to Harrison’s own reviews of a new Edgar Rice Burroughs bio, the latest Analog anthology, and an Arthur Sellings novel, there is Brian Aldiss’s review of Harrison’s own The Technicolor Time Machine—back-slappingly complimentary, as one might expect from these close collaborators.  Harrison and Aldiss edited this year’s Nebula Award Stories, due out just about now, and it appears that they will be joining the party with their own “year’s best” anthology next year.

Santaroga Barrier (Part 1 of 3), by Frank Herbert


by Gray Morrow

Frank Herbert’s new novel Santaroga Barrier begins its three-part serialization in this issue.  As usual, I will withhold comment until it’s finished.  A cursory rummage indicates that it seems to have something to do with people in California taking drugs.  It will be interesting to see what Herbert can develop from such an unlikely premise.

The Children's Room, by Raymond F. Jones

Raymond F. Jones is the very model of a modern science fiction writer.  He checks all the boxes.  His career is so generic as to be paradigmatic, or maybe vice versa.  He started out in Campbell’s Astounding, just in time to join new writers George O. Smith and Hal Clement and retread Murray Leinster in keeping that magazine going when such mainstays as Heinlein, Hubbard, Williamson, and de Camp were lost to military service or war work.  After the war, when paper shortages loosened and the pulps returned from wartime quarterly schedules to monthly or bimonthly, Jones—along with Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt, George O. Smith and other Astounding writers—began helping to fill them as well as continuing to appear in Astounding. When specialty publishers began to muster the large backlog of magazine SF for book publication, Jones was there with his Astounding novel Renaissance and a collection of his 1940s stories, The Toymaker.  When Galaxy appeared in 1950 and instantly broadened the range of the field, Jones contributed the shocking A Stone and a Spear, which would likely have been unpublishable anywhere else.  When “juvenile” (the term is becoming “young adult”) science fiction became a big item, Jones provided the well-remembered Son of the Stars and its sequel Planet of Light to the John C. Winston series.  When SF started to be big box office, Jones’s novel This Island Earth was turned into a mediocre but high-profile movie.  But somehow his recognition never kept pace with his resume, and now he seems to have given up and been largely forgotten, with only five new stories since 1960.

The Children’s Room, from the September 1947 Fantastic Adventures, is only the third story Jones published outside Astounding.  It’s about super-people—hardly an unusual theme in that magazine—but it pursues some of the implications of that idea that Campbell may not have found too palatable.  Bill Starbuck, chief engineer at an electronics company, picks up one of the books his IQ-240 son checked out from the university library’s children’s room, and finds himself captivated by a particularly subtle fairy tale.  Next day the kid is sick and the book is due so he returns it, only to be told “We have no children’s department.” But on the way out, he sees the children’s room, returns the book, and the librarian there (having learned that Bill has read the book), gives him more to take home.


by Rod Ruth

So what gives?  Time-traveling mutant super-people, of course—what else?  In the future, humanity is up against an alien species that is out-evolving them!  So they must scour the past for those people with beneficial mutations who never had a chance to amount to much, contact them and get them used to their exalted status (groom them, you might say), and then carry them off to their grand destiny in the future, never to see their time or their families again.  Only the mutants can even read the books, or see the time travellers’ children’s rooms.  Bill’s an exception—he can read the books and see the rooms, but has none of the other talents of the mutants, so he’s not invited to the future; and Mom’s a total loss. 

So the kid gets on board with the plan, and the parents both come around, since there’s not much else they can do.  But there’s a consolation prize for the parents (otherwise they would have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do to the Bureau of Child Welfare), and here Jones twists the knife in this formerly mild story.  (Read it and see.) Or, about as likely, Jones is just naively working out the plot, and it is only we mutants reading it who can perceive its monstrousness.  As, no doubt, Campbell did, and rejected the story, or so I surmise.  Four stars, even if the fourth may have been accidental on Jones’s part.

Five Years in the Marmalade, by Geoff St. Reynard


by Bill Terry

Geoff St. Reynard, a pseudonym of Robert W. Krepps, contributes Five Years in the Marmalade (Fantastic Adventures, July 1949), an inane joke.  Two guys walk into a bar—Muleath and Dangeur, who just returned from Alpha Centauri—and after they’ve had a drink, a Martian teleports in, just returned from a stay on Mercury.  The boys call him over, and he tells them about his “single-trav,” which will take him anywhere he can think of, through (of course) the power of thought.  So they recommend he head off next to Marmalade, which Muleath has made up and which exists only in his brain.  Connect the dots.  It's as skillfully executed as it is silly, and remarkably, Everett F. Bleiler and T.E. Dikty thought enough of it to put it in The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1950.  Two stars, barely.

The Siren Sounds at Midnight, by Frank M. Robinson

Frank M. Robinson’s The Siren Sounds at Midnight (Fantastic, November-December 1953) is entirely contrived: “they” have set a midnight deadline to resolve “their” differences, and if things don’t work out, the bombs will be flying and it’s all over for everybody, or close to it.  The story is redeemed by Robinson’s quiet good writing, following a long-married couple as they spend what may be their last hours together.  Three stars.

Largo, by Theodore Sturgeon

“More lyrical science fiction from the typewriter of Theodore Sturgeon,” says the blurb for Largo (Fantastic Adventures, July 1947).  All those terms are debatable except probably “typewriter.” Here’s the alleged science involved, from the opening of the story: “The chandeliers on the eighty-first floor of the Empire State Building swung wildly without any reason.  A company of soldiers marched over a new, well-built bridge, and it collapsed.  Enrico Caruso filled his lungs and sang, and the crystal glass before him shattered.”

The style is not so much lyrical as swaggering and demonstrative.  Here’s the next stretch of text:

“And Vernon Drecksall composed his Largo.

“He composed it in hotel rooms and scored it on trains and ships, and it took more than twenty-two years.  He started it in the days when smoke hung over the city, because factories used coal instead of broadcast power; when men spoke to men over wires and never saw each other’s faces; when the nations of earth were ruled by the greed of a man or the greed of men.  During the Thirty Days War and the Great Change which followed it, he labored; and he finished it on the day of his death.”


by Henry Sharp

That is, “I’m gonna tell you a story and I’m just the guy who can do it.” And, of course, Sturgeon is that guy, on his better days.  The striking thing about this story is the conspicuous confidence and cadence with which he lays out what is actually a pretty hackneyed plot—an extravagant revenge drama.  Drecksall is an eccentric musical genius with an all-consuming work in progress.  He works at menial jobs so support himself and his violin. Then he falls in love with the beautiful but vapid Gretel.  A crassly entrepreneurial type, Wylie, recognizes his genius, exploits it and him, and also ends up marrying Gretel himself. Drecksall continues to perfect his Largo, though it’s sounding darker all the time.  He builds his own auditorium to perform it in, invites Gretel and Wylie to hear it, and then . . . fade to black. 

There’s more, but it’s all in the telling, which is worth reading as a conspicuous demonstration of craft if nothing else.  This is Sturgeon’s fourth SF or fantasy story to be published by someone other than John Campbell, and it contrasts sharply to Blabbermouth, the second such, from Fantastic Adventures a few months earlier.  That one was told in an off-the-rack style that fit Sturgeon like an embarrassing Hallowe’en costume.  This is Sturgeon being himself, performing a circus act of the redemption of hokum by style.  Splitting the difference, three stars.

Scar-Tissue, by Henry S. Whitehead


by Robert Fuqua

The antique of the bunch is Henry S. Whitehead’s Scar-Tissue, which came from the July 1946 Amazing, but was posthumously published; the author died in 1932.  It begins unpromisingly, with the narrator asking his friend the ship’s doctor, “What is your opinion on the Atlantis question?” This becomes a frame story in which one Joe Smith, with Harvard and Oxford’s Balliol College on his resume, describes his past lives in prehistoric times, in Africa under the Portuguese (“Zim-baub-weh,” the place was called), and then Atlantis, where he was a gladiator, and he’s got scars to prove it.  It’s a perfectly readable old-fashioned story.  Three stars.

Summing Up

Not bad, a readable issue of this ill-conceived incarnation of Amazing, and better than not bad if the Herbert serial pans out.  We'll see.




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 20, 1967] Hugo Gernsback, 1884-1967

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by John Boston

The legendary Hugo Gernsback died August 19 at the age of 83.  He started the first science fiction magazine—the first seven of them, in fact.  He is memorialized every year in the Hugo Awards for the best SF of the year.  Sam Moskowitz once proclaimed, “Everyone today knows that the real ‘Father of Science Fiction’ is Hugo Gernsback and no one can ever take the title away from him.” (Moskowitz, A Profile of Hugo Gernsback, Amazing Stories, Sept. 1960, p. 38.)


by Frank R. Paul

But it’s an odd sort of paternity, since plenty of what we think of as science fiction—works by Verne, Wells, Poe, A. Conan Doyle, M.P. Shiel, and Mary Shelley, among others—preceded Gernsback’s involvement, and in some cases his birth.  Opinions are also mixed concerning the merit of much of Gernsback’s SF-related activity.  But before passing any judgments, let’s step back and look at Gernsback’s life and career, relying heavily on Moskowitz’s above-quoted article and its revised version in his book Explorers of the Infinite.  (A more thorough exploration of Gernsback’s rather full life might make a substantial book for some future scholar.)

Gernsback was born in 1884 in Luxembourg, came to the United States in 1904, quickly got into the electrical business manufacturing automobile batteries, and later started an electrical import business.  He devised a low-cost home radio set which was sold widely, followed by the first working walkie-talkie.  In 1908 he started Modern Electrics, the first magazine of its kind.  He started the Wireless Association of America in 1912, which soon had thousands of members.  He founded a new magazine, Electrical Experimenter (later Science and Invention) in 1912, and another one, Radio News, in 1919.  In 1925 he started a radio station, WRNY, which also made some of the earliest rudimentary television broadcasts.  Someone with Gernsback’s cornball sense of humor might say that during those two decades, he was quite a live wire, and encountered little resistance.


Gernsback demonstrating his "Isolator," designed to aid concentration by preventing distraction from external stimuli (Science and Invention, July 1925)

Gernsback also dallied with science fiction early on.  (Gernsback’s own more detailed account of these activities is in his Guest Editorial: Science Fiction That Endures in the April 1961 Amazing.) He wrote the novel with the punning title Ralph 124C41+ (say it out loud), subtitled A Romance of the Year 2660, and serialized it as he wrote it in his own Modern Electrics in 1911.  I haven’t dared try to read it, but it is reputed to be short on literary elements but quite long on predicted future inventions and discoveries, including both radar and space-sickness.  He published others’ fiction as well as his own in Modern Electrics and in Electrical Experimenter and its successor Science and Invention.  His series Baron Munchausen’s New Scientific Adventures began in Electrical Experimenter in 1915. 

In fact, before Gernsback published the first SF magazine, he published the first SF magazine issue: the August 1923 Science and Invention was blurbed “SCIENTIFIC FICTION NUMBER” and left us such treasures as G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s The Man from the Atom.  And in 1924, he made his first abortive attempt to start an SF magazine, Scientifiction, but his large mailing soliciting subscriptions fell flat.

Which brings us to 1926 and the birth of Amazing, this time with no advance solicitation.  The first issue, dated April 1926, included nothing but reprints and foregrounded Wells, Verne, and Poe, but original fiction began to appear quickly enough, with G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s The Man from the Atom (Sequel) in the May issue and his The Coming of the Ice in June.  By late 1928, almost all of the magazine’s contents were original material.


by Frank R. Paul

Gernsback quickly expanded his empire with the very large Amazing Stories Annual in 1927, featuring a specially commissioned Mars novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and followed it with Amazing Stories Quarterly, which also ran a complete novel in each issue.

But a rude awakening was in store.  Gernsback liked to make money, but he was less fond of paying it out, to his authors or anyone else.  H.P. Lovecraft dubbed him “Hugo the Rat” for paying so little for The Colour out of Space, one of his best stories, and H.G. Wells refused further reprint permissions because of Gernsback’s low rates.  Though Gernsback was very far from broke, in 1929 his company was forced into bankruptcy by creditors who had not been paid on time, as permitted by the law at the time.  Its assets were sold, with Amazing going to Teck Publications.  Ultimately the creditors were paid $1.08 on the dollar (“bankruptcy de luxe,” as Moskowitz quotes the New York Times). 

Undaunted, Gernsback announced by mass mailing that he would publish Everyday Mechanics in place of (and to compete with!) Science and Invention, Radio-Craft in place of Radio News, and Science Wonder Stories in place of Amazing.  This time, his solicitation worked.  He received thousands of subscriptions and was quickly back in business.  The last Amazing listing Gernsback as editor was April 1929; the first issue of Science Wonder Stories was dated June 1929.  He promptly added Science Wonder Quarterly, Air Wonder Stories, and Scientific Detective Monthly to his stable, though only the quarterly lasted more than a few issues.


by Frank R. Paul

Gernsback’s new ventures were successful.  For much of the early ‘30s, Wonder Stories (“Science” was dropped in 1930) was reckoned the best of the SF magazines.  By 1936, however, Depression economics had defeated Gernsback, and he sold Wonder Stories to Standard Magazines, where it became Thrilling Wonder Stories, a relatively juvenile pulp magazine.  For the first time in a decade, Gernsback was out of the SF business. 


Unattributed

Gernsback's attempts to get back into the game were abortive.  He started Superworld Comics, an SF comic book, in 1939, but it quickly failed.  In 1953, he started Science Fiction Plus, in the same large size as the early Amazing, bringing back artist Frank R. Paul and some of the writers from his earlier magazines as well as more current fare, but this largely reactionary venture lasted only seven issues.  Though he continued to publish other magazines, notably Sexology and Radio Electronics, his contact with the SF world diminished mostly to the occasional convention visit. 


by Frank R. Paul

Most SF readers from the mid-‘50s on probably know of Gernsback, if at all, from his postage stamp-size photo and endorsement that appeared irregularly on the back cover of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, along with those of such other 1950s celebrities as Clifton Fadiman and Spring Byington.  His message, as seen on the October 1960 F&SF: “Plus ça change, plus c’est le meme chose—is a French truism, lamentably accurate of much of our latter day science fiction.  Not so in the cyclotronic Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction which injects sophisticated isotopes, pregnant with imagination, into many of its best narratives.” Sure.


F&SF, April 1959

So—the “father of science fiction”?  Not by decades.  But Gernsback certainly was the father of the commercial marketing category of science fiction, or, some would say, SF’s ghettoization.  Before Gernsback, SF or proto-SF could be found regularly if not frequently in general fiction magazines of the US and the UK and in the lists of book publishers.  But Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, begun in 1926, was the first periodical devoted entirely to “scientifiction”—the first of what eventually became a legion.

It’s easy to overstate Gernsback’s significance here.  It is nearly certain that there would have been science fiction magazines quickly enough had Gernsback never existed.  From the late 1920s on, pulp fiction magazines multiplied rapidly, specializing to satisfy every conceivable interest—westerns, romances, western romances, “spicy” (mildly suggestive) stories, crime fiction hard-boiled and soft, sports stories, horror and “weird menace” stories, aviation and air war stories.  The quest for market niches led to even narrower specialization: Zeppelin Stories (1929, four issues); Prison Stories (1930-31, six issues); The Wizard: Adventures in Moneymaking (1940-41, seven issues, three under a new title); Civil War Stories (1940, one issue). 

And new ventures required little encouragement.  Astounding Stories of Super-Science, the first SF magazine started by anyone not named Gernsback, was apparently launched after William Clayton, publisher of 13 magazines, realized that he could add more titles cheaply because pulp covers (a major part of the publishing cost) were printed in sheets of 16, and he had blank spaces available.  The self-interested machinations of Clayton editor Harry Bates then tipped the scale towards Astounding and away from the competing proposal, Torchlights of History.  (Bates, “to begin” (sic), Editorial Number One in Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding (1964)).  In Gernsback’s absence, others besides Clayton would surely have found and filled the niche for scientific fiction magazines.

But it is also easy to understate Gernsback’s contributions.  One of them was his facilitation of SF fandom—initially, simply by printing letter-writers’ addresses in Amazing’s letter column, so they could communicate with each other, and later by creating the Science Fiction League with its organizational framework and local chapters.  SF editors have expressed mixed feelings about fandom’s activities and influence, but at the least it has been valuable to have a semi-organized claque to speak up about the worst tendencies in SF publishing, such as the “Shaver mystery” featured in the mid-‘40s Amazing and finally dropped under pressure. 

Gernsback’s other major contribution was his pretenses.  From the beginning, he proclaimed “scientifiction” to be a means of scientific education and speculation—as exemplified in his own Ralph 124C41+ and its exhausting parade of future inventions—and he continued to express that view in Wonder Stories, notwithstanding his dropping “Science” from the title.  I say “pretenses” because much of the fiction he published was not especially scientific or educational, such as the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt that appeared in his magazines as early as 1927.  That is no surprise, since regardless of his preferences he had to attract enough readers to keep his magazines going. 

But still, he would raise the flag now and then, such as in his editorial in the first Science Wonder Quarterly: “In publishing a number of science-fiction magazines, the editors feel that they have a great mission to perform; their mission being to get the great mass of readers, not only to think what the world in the future is likely to become, but also to become better versed in things scientific.” (Science Wonder Quarterly, Fall 1929, p.5) And sometimes he broadened his prescription.  Commenting on the Technocracy movement of the ‘30s, which proposed to reorganize society along more scientific lines, he wrote: “. . . [T]he great mission of science fiction is becoming more recognized, day by day.  This is the triumph of our readers over those who scorned science fiction.  If science fiction can make serious people sit up and take notice, and THINK about the future of humanity, it will have accomplished a tremendous good.” (Wonder Stories, March 1933, p. 741)

The idea that SF should be held to higher standards and purposes than the run of pulp fiction may have made a considerable difference.  One need look no further for a counter-example than the first new non-Gernsback competitor, Clayton’s Astounding Stories of Super-Science.  Alva Rogers says in his informal history A Requiem for Astounding that the Clayton magazine “was unabashedly an action-adventure magazine and made no pretense of trying to present science in a sugar-coated form as did, to some extent, the other two magazines.”


by Hans Wessolowski

You can bet that little of the social speculation and satire, somewhat featured in Gernsback’s magazines and considerably more prominent in the SF of the ‘40s and ‘50s and later, showed up there either.  Had Clayton’s magazine rather than Gernsback’s become the template for magazine SF, we would likely have had a much different and less interesting genre in the ensuing decades.

So—hail and farewell, Pops.

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[July 14, 1967] The Beat Goes On (August 1967 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The August 1967 Amazing looks out on the world through one of Frank R. Paul’s later and less interesting works, trimmed of course from its original pulp size.  This one, titled A City on Uranus, is from the back cover of the April 1941 Amazing, as usual cropped to fit the lower half of this smaller magazine.  The issue’s overall contents and presentation are also as usual: one new story and a bunch of reprints, with Harry Harrison’s intelligent book reviews taking a few pages.


by Frank R. Paul

La de da de de.

The Man from Zodiac, by Jack Vance

Once more I say—at the risk of repeating myself repeating myself repeating myself—when a first-rate author shows up at the bottom of the market, there’s a reason for it.  The one non-reprinted piece of fiction here is Jack Vance’s “Great New Short Novel,” as the table of contents has it, The Man from Zodiac.  Zodiac Control, Inc., is a corporation that sells government services to colony planets across the galaxy, or galaxies (there is ambiguous reference to Andromeda), with competitors like Aetna, Fidelity, and Argus. 


by Gray Morrow

The eponymous Man is Milton Hack, a Zodiac employee (and also a minority shareholder, a fact which ultimately has little significance), who is charged by the main owners with getting and supervising a contract with the Phrones of Ethelrinda Cordas.  The Phrones are cartoon barbarians who have (or whose elite has) little interest in schools, sewer systems, and the other usual appurtenances of government; they wish only to obtain weapons with which to smite their neighbors and enemies, the equally cartoonish Sabo. 

Hack engages in a course of bamboozlement and chicanery and ends up representing both the Phrones and the Sabos with identical contracts, and persuading them to live in something resembling peace, outsmarting everyone in sight at every opportunity since they are all utterly stupid.  It’s frankly pretty crude, devoid of Vance’s usual sharp satirical wit; worse, it’s thoroughly boring, and gives the impression that the author is as bored as the reader.  Or maybe he is attempting to emulate the literary and commercial success of Christopher Anvil.  Two stars.

Martian and Troglodyte, by Neil R. Jones

The reprints are the usual mixed bag, slightly better mixed than in some issues.  The longest and oldest—a “Special—Short Novel” per the contents page—is Neil R. Jones’s Martian and Troglodyte, from the May 1933 Amazing.  Jones is best remembered for his protracted “Professor Jameson” series, about a scientist who is revived from his orbiting tomb and who goes chasing around the universe for a couple of dozen stories with the robot-bodied Zoromes.  In this one, Thrag, a cave guy who has been chased out of his tribe in a dispute over possession of the winsome Tua, is saved from becoming lunch for a cave bear by visiting Martians on a voyage of discovery.  (Jones’s Earth has many perils.  In addition to cave bears and saber-tooth tigers, tyrannosaurs and pterodactyls are still around.) Thrag learns not to be afraid of the Martians and they help him out in his quest to recover Tua from her brutal usurper by lending him lethal Martian technology.  Thrag’s and the Martians’ efforts to figure each other out are surprisingly well done. 


by Leo Morey

Overall, this is a pleasant antique, though Jones’s peculiar verbosity is sometimes a distraction.  (Any resemblance to the present commentator is entirely illusory.) A sample:

“In the depths of space between the earth and its contemporary planet, known to present day man as Mars, a small space ship sped at an inconceivable speed across the millions of miles of space towards the earth.  It was now very close, having been upon its journey through the stellar void for the period of time in which it had taken the great globe it was approaching to turn upon its axis forty times.  Forty times the topographical features of the planet earth had swung lazily before the eager eyes of the two space navigators within their interstellar craft as day by day, according to the rotation of the cosmic sphere, the planet grew larger in proportion as they drew near.”

Two stars; it probably would rate higher by the standards of its time.

Blabbermouth, by Theodore Sturgeon


by Malcolm Smith

Theodore Sturgeon’s Blabbermouth, from the February 1947 Amazing, is about a captivating woman who is telepathic and compulsively blurts out people’s secrets to those from whom they are being kept secret.  This brings ruin to her husband’s career as a prominent New York radio emcee, but by the end he figures out how to make lemonade (i.e., money) from this particular lemon.  The story is told in an affected semi-Damon Runyonesque style that bespeaks a writer trying to execute the cliches he thinks his market requires.  And maybe it did.  Or not.  This is only the second published story Sturgeon sold to an SF or fantasy editor other than John W. Campbell, and maybe he didn’t have much confidence about following his own bent anywhere else.  Two stars.

The Roller Coaster, by Alfred Bester


by Bernard Krigstein

There are two stories here from the magazine’s brief high-word-rate renascence of 1953-54.  Alfred Bester’s The Roller Coaster, from the May-June 1953 Amazing, is also told in an affected style, but it’s Bester’s own affectation, so it’s a lot more convincing than Sturgeon’s off-the-rack costume in Blabbermouth.  It starts with a slap to the reader’s face of Spillaneish violent sadism—quite appropriate in context, as it turns out—and continues without letup or wasted words to retell a familiar SF story.  It’s as if somebody said, “You read Vintage Season?  Here’s how it really goes.” Four nasty stars. 

One Way Street, by Jerome Bixby


by Augusto Marin

In the other renascence item, Jerome Bixby’s One Way Street (Amazing, December 1953-January 1954), the protagonist has a split-second blackout, drives off the road, and wakes up in a wrecked car and a slightly different world—phone numbers are different, his dog is different, there’s no Hamlet, Shelley, Keats, or atomic power, and Stalin’s alive.  His wife’s a little different too, but he likes the differences and is trying to make a life in this new world when he gets a chance to try to go home via an experimental procedure.  The surprise ending is about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning, but overall the story is sharply and economically done.  Three stars, pushing four.

North God’s Temple, by Henry J. Kostkos


by Leo Morey

We dip back into the archaic with Henry J. Kostkos’s North God’s Temple (Amazing, August 1934), in which a Professor Challenger-type blowhard, Professor Norton of the Cosmopolitan Museum, receives a telepathic summons from the historians of the People of the Magnetic God, who live undersea near the North Pole.  So he fakes up a pretext for an expedition to seek out the magnetic pole.  Once there he is summoned alone and sucked underwater and then underground in a rowboat, and finds the Temple of the Magnetic God (it must be, since he’s pinned to the wall until he manages to work his steel revolver out of his pocket).  This Temple landed on Earth after the breakup of the former fifth planet that became the asteroids.  Then Norton gets sucked back underwater in a contretemps that apparently is intended to explain the migration of the magnetic poles.  Two stars for this tiresome period piece.

Vis Scientiae, by Miles J. Breuer, M.D.

But there’s still one more piece of archaic to eat: Vis Scientiae, a poem by Miles J. Breuer, M.D. (Amazing, May 1930), which seems to be a lament by the ancient gods that they’re no longer in charge of those pesky humans.  It must speak for itself:

“They have chained the livid lightning that goes hurtling down the sky,
Made it slave for them and pass them scatheless as it hurtles by;
They have trapped the furious tempest at whose breath the forest reels,
And the angrier it rages all the merrier turn their wheels; . . .”

Et cetera, though the meter varies.  The substance of Tennyson and the accidents of Robert W. Service?  The best to be said for it is that it could have been worse.  Two stars.

Summing Up

A couple of stories well worth reading, a couple more at least readable, and a couple of wastes of time.  La de da de da.




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[May 6, 1967] Stirred?  Shaken? (June 1967 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Is something stirring at Amazing?  After several issues devoid of non-fiction features, this one starts a book review column by Harry Harrison, whose brief stint as nominal editor of the British magazine SF Impulse ended a few months ago.  Is a remake in order?  A change of guard in the wind?  There’s no hint.


by Johnny Bruck

The cover itself is also a change, not having been looted from the back files of Amazing or Fantastic Adventures.  The pleasantly lurid image of space-suited men watching or fleeing a battle of spacecraft is not credited, but other sources attribute it to a 1964 issue of Perry Rhodan, Germany’s long-running weekly paperback novella series, artist’s name Johnny Bruck.  I wonder if the publisher is paying him, or anyone.

Also perplexing is the shift in presentation on the cover.  Last issue, the display of big names was ostentatious.  Here, the only thing prominently displayed is “Winston K. Marks Outstanding New Story Cold Comfort,” sic without apostrophe.  Marks is one of the legion who filled the mid-1950s’ proliferation of SF magazines with competent and forgettable copy.  After a couple of stories in the early ‘40s, he reappeared with a few in 1953, contributed a staggering 25 stories in 1954 and 20 in 1955, and trailed off thereafter; he hasn’t been seen in these parts since mid-1959.  But here he is, name in lights, while Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, and Philip K. Dick are relegated to small type over the title.  Odd, and probably counter-productive, to say the least.

The Heaven Makers (Part 2 of 2), by Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert’s serial The Heaven Makers concludes in this issue.  Imagine an SF novel oriented to the reference points of Charles Fort, Richard Shaver, and soap opera.  And then imagine—this is the hard part—that it’s nonetheless pretty readable.

First, we are property!  Just like Charles Fort said.  You may think you understand human history, but everything you know is wrong!  Earth is secretly dominated by the Chem, a species of very short, bandy-legged, silver-skinned alien humanoids who have been made immortal, and also connected tele-empathically, by a discovery of one of their ancient savants—Tiggywaugh’s web (definitely sic).  Only problem is . . . they’re bored.  Eternity weighs heavily on them.  They must be entertained and distracted!

So, the Chem send Storyships around the galaxy, though Earth’s is the only one we see.  This ship rests on the bottom of the ocean, from which vantage the Chem shape history in large and small ways both by direct intervention and by remote manipulation and heightening of human emotional states.  The result: wars that might be settled quickly at the conference table can be prolonged and intensified, and susceptible individuals can be driven as far as murder.  These events are recorded, processed, spiced up with their own emotional track, and broadcast to pique the jaded souls of the Chem. 

One of the stars of this industry is Fraffin, proprietor of Earth’s Storyship, but he’s suspected of letting hints drop to Earthfolk about what’s going on, a major crime among the Chem.  Kelexel, posing as a visitor, has been sent by the authorities to get to the bottom of things, after four previous investigators have found nothing and, suspiciously, resigned.  But Kelexel is quickly corrupted himself.  Fraffin shows him a “pantovive” of a man manipulated by the Chem into murdering his wife, which Kelexel finds quite gripping.  He also becomes obsessed with the woman’s daughter, Ruth (the Chem are quite captivated by the physiques of humans, and can interbreed with them).  Fraffin, having found Kelexel’s vulnerability, sets out to procure her for him.  So three dwarfish figures show up at her back door, immobilize her with some sort of ray, and carry her away to be mind-controlled and ravished by Kelexel.

At this point, the nagging sense of familiarity I was feeling came into focus.  Herbert has reinvented Richard Shaver’s Deros!  Shaver, a former psychiatric patient, wrote up his delusions of sadistic cave-dwelling degenerates tormenting normal people, which (with much reworking by editor Ray Palmer) boosted Amazing’s mid-1940s circulation to unheard-of levels, until the publisher put an end to the disreputable spectacle a few years later.  Now Herbert has gussied up the “Shaver Mystery” for prime time!  The distorted physical appearance . . . check.  The mind control rays . . . check.  The underground caverns . . . not exactly, these characters are underwater instead.  But that’s a minor detail.


by Gray Morrow

Oh, yes, the soap opera part.  Up on dry land, Andy Thurlow, a court psychologist, is Ruth’s old boyfriend; she threw him over for someone else, who turned out to be a low-life.  Andy’s never gotten over it.  Her father, holed up after his Chem-driven murder of her mother, won’t surrender to anybody but Andy.  Meanwhile, Andy, who is wearing polarized glasses as a result of an eye injury, has started to see what prove to be manifestations of Chem activity, invisible to anyone else.  Andy also gets back with Ruth, who has moved out on her husband; he takes her back to the marital house and waits so she can pick up some possessions.  But the Chem snatch her as described, and her husband falls through a glass door and dies. 

Back at the Chems’ submarine hideout, Kelexel is having his way with the pacified Ruth, who, when he’s not using her, studies the Chem via the pantovive machine, learning more and more, while Kelexel harbors growing misgivings about the whole Chem enterprise.  Andy, up on land, is trying to persuade Ruth’s father the murderer to cooperate with an insanity defense while wondering if the strange manifestations he has seen account for Ruth’s disappearance.  The plot lines are eventually resolved in confrontations among Kelexel, Fraffin, Ruth, and Andy with dialogue that is more reminiscent of daytime TV than Herbert’s turgid usual.  In the end, Herbert actually makes a readable story out of this sensational and largely ridiculous material.  Three stars.

Cold Comfort, by Winston K. Marks


by Gray Morrow

Winston Marks’s "Outstanding New Story" Cold Comfort is an amusing first-person rant by the first man to be cryogenically frozen for medical reasons and revived when his problem can be cured.  He’s pleased enough with his new kidneys, but isn’t impressed by this brave new world in which corporations now overtly dominate the world, there’s a nine-million-soldier garrison in East Asia, etc. etc. E.g. , “I am only now recovering from my first exposure to your local art gallery.  Who the hell invented quivering pigments?” It’s at best a black-humorous comedy routine, but well enough done.  Three stars.

The Mad Scientist, by Robert Bloch


by Virgil Finlay

After Marks it is downhill, or over a cliff.  The Mad Scientist by Robert Bloch, from Fantastic Adventures, September 1947, is a deeply unfunny farce about an over-the-hill scientist who works with fungi, who has a young and beautiful wife with whom the protagonist is having an affair. They want to get rid of the scientist with an extract of poisonous mushrooms, but he outsmarts them, and what a silly bore.  The fact that the protagonist is a science fiction writer and the story begins with some blather about how dangerous such people are does not enhance its interest at all.  One star.

Atomic Fire, by Raymond Z. Gallun


by Leo Morey

Raymond Z. Gallun’s Atomic Fire (Amazing, April 1931) is a period piece, Gallun’s third published story, in which far-future scientists Aggar Ho and Sark Ahar (with huge chests to breathe the thin atmosphere, spindly and attenuated limbs, large ears, a coat of polar fur—evolution!) have discovered that the Black Nebula is about to swallow up the sun and kill all life on Earth. The solution?  Atomic power, obviously, to be tested off Earth for safety (the spaceship has just been delivered).  Unfortunately, their experiments first fail, then succeed all too well; but Sark Ahar’s quick thinking turns disaster into salvation!  As the blurb might have read.  Gallun had an imagination from the beginning, but the stilted writing makes this one hard to appreciate in these modern days of the 1960s.  Two stars.

Project Nightmare, by Robert Heinlein


by William Ashman

In Robert Heinlein’s Project Nightmare, from the April/May 1953 Amazing, the Russians deliver an ultimatum demanding surrender, since they’ve mined American cities with nuclear bombs.  The only hope is a colorful and miscellaneous bunch of clairvoyants to locate the bombs before they go off.  It’s a fast-moving but superficial, wisecracking story, a considerable regression for the author.  Some years ago he published an essay titled On the Writing of Speculative Fiction, and presented five rules for the aspiring writer.  I think this story must illustrate the last two: “4.  You must put it on the market.  5.  You must keep it on the market until sold.” I suspect Heinlein intended this one for the slicks, and when none of them would have it, started down the ranks of the SF mags until it finally came to rest in Amazing, which, compounding the indignity, managed to lose his customary middle initial.  Two stars.

The Builder, by Philip K. Dick


by Ed Emshwiller

Philip K. Dick’s The Builder (Amazing, December 1953/January 1954) is from his early Prolific Period—he published 31 stories in the SF magazines in 1953 and 28 in 1954, handily beating Winston K. Marks’s peak.  How?  With a certain number of tossed-off ephemerae like this one, in which an ordinary guy is obsessed for no reason he can articulate with building a giant boat in his backyard.  A rather peculiar boat too, with no sails or motor or oars.  And then: “It was not until the first great black drops of rain began to splash about him that he understood.” That’s it.  Two stars for this shaggy-God story which is unfortunately not shaggy enough.

Summing Up

Well, that was pretty dreary.  The issue’s only distinction is the unexpected readability of Herbert’s novel, which is the best, or least bad, of the serials this publisher has run.  The most one can say about the reprint policy is that it has its ups and downs, and this issue is definitely the latter.

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[March 14, 1967] Family Matters (April 1967 Amazing)

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Today is the LAST day you can nominate for the Hugos.  Please consider voting for Galactic Journey for Best Fanzine.  And here are all the other categories we and our associates are eligible for this year!


by John Boston

The April Amazing splashes an impressive array of marquee names on the cover: Hugo winners Frank Herbert and Philip K. Dick, the well-remembered sardonic satirist William Tenn, and Richard Matheson and Jerome Bixby, famous not only from the printed page but from celebrated Twilight Zone episodes made from their stories.  The once prominent David H. Keller, M.D., is relegated to the inside of the magazine.


by Frank R. Paul

This blaze of celebrity serves to distract from the cover itself, which looks like it emerged from one of Frank R. Paul’s off days, though that is partly the fault of the present editorial regime; the picture is drastically cropped from its first appearance on the back cover of the July 1946 Fantastic Adventures, where it was considerably more impressive, though still far from the artist’s best.

This is one of the magazine’s accidental theme issues; I can’t speak for the serial yet, but the majority of the short fiction is at least partly preoccupied with domesticity, its meaning and its travails.

The Heaven Makers (Part 1 of 2), by Frank Herbert


by Gray Morrow

Frank Herbert’s The Heaven Makers is a two-part serial, and as usual I will wait for the end before commenting.  The blurb says it “offers the chilling hypothesis that all the world really is a stage with each of us . . . its players.” How many times have we read that one?  To be fair, new ideas are scarce these days, and treatment is all; it’s not the meat, it’s the motion, as a salacious old blues song has it.  A quick glance at the first page reveals the dense and turgid writing for which Herbert has become known.  To be fair (again), his virtues sometimes take longer to announce themselves than his faults.

The Last Bounce, by William Tenn


by Henry Sharp

William Tenn’s The Last Bounce, from the September 1950 Fantastic Adventures, is a remarkably bad story for the writer who at the time was several years past the classic Child’s Play and whose almost as well-known Null-P was a few months away.  It’s a tale of stellar exploration, complete with mystery planet, deadly monsters, scientific mumbo-jumbo, and clichéd characters and dialogue.  There’s even an embarrassing spacemen’s anthem, which shows up more than once.  And domesticity (or its absence) rears its head!  There is considerable musing about Why Men Risk All to Brave the Unknown and Why Their Women Put Up With It and Wait for Them.  It would be nice to be able to read this as satire, but I can’t convince myself.  More likely, Tenn made a barroom bet that he could write the most hackneyed piece of tripe he was capable of and some editor would buy it.  You win!  One star.

A Biological Experiment, by David H. Keller, M.D.

David H. Keller, M.D., is here with A Biological Experiment, from Amazing, June 1928—his third published story.  The blurb says, correctly, that it anticipates 1932’s Brave New World.  (You know the one about tragedy and farce?  Here it’s the other way around.) Here is a veritable epic of domestic relations.  Like Keller’s first story, Revolt of the Pedestrians, this one posits an extreme departure from our natural (well, familiar) social arrangements followed by a drastic reaction and restoration of the traditional.  Unfortunately there’s entirely too much talk here, and the action that follows it is cartoonish.


by Frank R. Paul

In the far future everyone is sterilized at an appropriate age; marriage is “companionate,” easily terminable, and babies are made in factories and provided to couples who apply for and obtain the necessary permit.  But Leuson and Elizabeth, a couple of young rebels, want to go back to the old ways.  Why?  Because no one is happy!  Love has disappeared from the world! 

So says Leuson, towards the end of a seven-page monologue.  (Elizabeth says, midway through: “Tell me again why they are not happy.  I have heard you tell it before but tell me again.  I want to hear it out here in the wilderness where we are alone—together.”) Leuson has stolen some books from the Library of Congress, where he works, to learn the history and how to survive the old-fashioned way.  The happy couple elopes (a word Leuson discovered in his research) to live happily in a mountain cave, along the way capturing a goat to milk.  Unfortunately, far from modern medicine, Elizabeth dies in childbirth (good idea, that goat).  Along the way it has been revealed that this was a covertly sponsored rebellion; the couple’s parents have subtly nudged them along towards this destiny.

And now, the plan’s consummation, at the annual meeting in Washington of the National Society of Federated Women!  “Five thousand leaders of their sex had gathered for the meeting and every woman in the nation was listening to the proceedings over the radio.” Leuson appears, carrying a basket, and reprises his seven-page lecture.  “On and on he talked and as he talked there arose in the hearts of the women who listened a strange unrest and hunger for something that had once been their heritage.”

And at the end of this spiel . . . “He reached down into the basket and, picking up his daughter, held the baby high above the heads of the five thousand women and showed them a baby, born of the love of a man and a woman in a home.” The finale: “And as they marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, the women of the nation cried in unison: ‘Give us back our homes, our husbands, and our babies!’” Fade to black.

Whew!  Two overripe stars, barely.

Little Girl Lost, by Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson’s Little Girl Lost (Amazing, October/November 1953) is a capable potboiler, efficiently recycling with stock characters a stock plot of the 1940s and ‘50s—domesticity upended by the weird and threatening.  Young Tina disappears in her living room; her parents Chris and Ruth can hear her but not see her or figure out where she is.  What to do in the wee hours with an invisible child but call Chris’s friend Bill, “an engineering man, CalTech, top man with Lockheed over in the valley.” Bill quickly susses it out: “I think she’s in another dimension.” (Later, he adds, “probably the fourth.”) Meanwhile, in the spirit of the times, Ruth is more or less continuously hysterical.


by Ray Houlihan

And so is the dog, but to better effect.  He’s whining and scratching to be let in, and when he is admitted—to keep from waking the neighbors—he runs straight to the dimensional hole the people can’t see, and now little Tina has company.  Soon enough, Chris blunders partly into the hole, grabs kid and dog, and Bill pulls him out by his legs, which are protruding into our dimension.  Domestic tranquility is restored, and they switch the couch and the TV so if anything goes through again it will be Arthur Godfrey.  It’s facile and economical, and perfectly fashioned for TV; it made one of the better Twilight Zone episodes five years or so ago.  Three stars.

Small Town, by Philip K. Dick


by Bernard Krigstein

Philip K. Dick’s Small Town (Amazing, May 1954) is equally domestic, but not quite as domesticated, as the Matheson story.  Here, the strains of a bad marriage exacerbated by an oppressive job burst out into the larger world.  Verne Haskel doesn’t get along with his wife, hates his job, and finds comfort only in his basement, where, starting with an electric train layout, he has built a scale model of the entire town and tinkers with it constantly.  As his frustrations build, he begins tearing things out of his faithful representation and remaking the model town, culminating in ripping out Larson’s Pump & Valve, the site of his torment, stomping it to pieces, and replacing it with a mortuary.  And, of course, it turns out reality (or “reality”—this is after all PKD) now conforms to the fruits of Haskel’s tantrum—and things end with a suggestion (this is after all PKD) that there’s a higher power than Haskel keeping an eye on things.

Three stars, more lustrous than Matheson’s to my taste.

Angels in the Jets, by Jerome Bixby


by Paul Lundy

The issue winds up with Jerome Bixby’s Angels in the Jets (Fantastic, Fall 1952).  At least one person likes this story; Frederik Pohl anthologized it in his 1954 anthology Assignment in Tomorrow.  I disliked it when I read that book, and it hasn’t improved much since.  Intrepid space explorers land on an inviting planet; one crew member is inadvertently directly exposed to its atmosphere, which renders her psychotic; she contrives to expose everyone else; and the protagonist, who has been out exploring while all this was going on, returns to the prospect of living in isolation as long as his bottled air holds out, or giving up, joining the crowd, and becoming psychotic right away.  (Not much domesticity here, except for the hints of the deranged social order, or disorder, emerging among the psychotics.) A story that starts out at a dead end and consists of reaffirmations that it’s a dead end is not much of a story to my taste.  But at least it’s well written.  Two stars.

Summing Up

Hey, it's been worse in this bottom-of-the-market magazine.  We have pretty readable and competent stories by Dick and Matheson and an amusing bad period piece by Keller, balanced against lackluster pieces by Tenn and Bixby; and the brooding prospect of Frank Herbert at length looms over it all as final judgment is postponed.  Redemption?  Maybe. To paraphrase generations of disgruntled baseball fans: Wait till next issue.

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