Tag Archives: arthur c. clarke

[January 14, 1967] First batch (January Galactoscope)

Big, But . . .


by John Boston

No matter if you don’t believe in Santa Claus. Judith Merril is back with another volume of her annual anthology, 11th Annual Edition the Year’s Best S-F (sic), from Delacorte Press just in time for the Christmas trade. If you missed the boat on Christmas, surely you can make it work for Valentine’s Day.


by Ziel

The overall package is familiar: 384 pages thick, a crowded contents page, a short introduction, but lots of running commentary between items, sometimes about the stories or authors and sometimes, it seems, about whatever crosses Merril’s mind as she assembles the book. There is the usual Summation at the end, but the extensive Honorable Mentions listing is gone, though she mentions some items that didn’t make the cut in the Summation and commentary.

The contents are eclectic as usual, but let Merril tell it: “The stories and poems and essays here have been selected from as wide a range as I could cover of books and periodicals published here and in England last year. About half the entries are from the genre magazines. The rest are from books and from such diverse sources as Mademoiselle and Escapade, The Colorado Quarterly and the Washington Post, Playboy and the Saturday Review (and Ambit and King in England).” “Of the year” in the title is notional at best. This volume includes a story by Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins, which dates from 1940, and an . . . item . . . by Alfred Jarry, who died in 1907.

The usual disclaimer is here, too. From the Introduction:

“This is not a collection of science-fiction stories.

“It does have some science fiction in it—I think. (It gets a little more difficult each year to decide which ones are really science fiction—and frankly I don’t much try any more.)”

Unfortunately this year’s book falls short of most of its predecessors to my taste. Unusually, some of the selections by the biggest-name authors are strikingly lackluster. Isaac Asimov’s Eyes Do More than See, from F&SF, is a short piece of annoying pseudo-profundity about the down side of becoming a disembodied energy being. Gordon R. Dickson’s Warrior (from Analog), part of his militaristic Dorsai series, gives us a protagonist who is such a comprehensive superman that his enemies are rendered helpless by his mere presence, and the story turns quickly into self-parody. J.G. Ballard is represented by one very fine story, The Drowned Giant, from Playboy, and another, The Volcano Dances, which reads like a parody of his recurrent theme of humans happily pursuing self-destructive obsessions: his protagonist takes up residence near a volcano that’s about to blow, refuses all entreaties to leave, and at the end is apparently heading towards it as the volcano’s rumbling becomes more ominous.

There is a decided swerve this year towards the British magazines New Worlds and Science Fantasy, with four stories from each here. The best of this lot is David I. Masson’s Traveler’s Rest (New Worlds), which depicts a world where the passage of time varies with latitude, much faster at the North Pole where a furious high-tech war is ongoing, and more slowly towards the equator where people live more or less normal lives. In some of the others, it is quite unclear what is going on, and purposefully: two of them are (or seem to be) narrated by mental patients (David Rome’s There’s a Starman in Ward 7 and Peter Redgrove’s long poem The Case (both from New Worlds)). Josephine Saxton’s The Wall (Science Fantasy) is a strange, haunting, allegorical-seeming story of lovers who never meet except through a small hole in a wall dividing a world that seems like some sort of artificial construct that they don’t understand and is unexplained to the reader.

As always, Merril has harvested some stories from non-genre sources, most sublimely Jorge Luis Borges’s The Circular Ruins, from 1940. It’s a metaphysical fantasy about a man who travels in a canoe to a ruined temple to carry out a mission: “He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality.” This story, resonantly translated from the Spanish, is the find of the book. Also noteworth is Game, by Donald Barthelme, from the New Yorker, about two guys locked in an underground bunker charged with dispatching nuclear missiles as ordered. They have gone months without relief and are pretty much nuts; it is strongly hinted that the war has happened and they’re never getting relieved. Gerald Kersh’s Somewhere Not Far from Here, from Playboy, is about some ragged revolutionaries against an unidentified tyranny; its portrayal of men struggling in extremity in mud and blood, in a seemingly hopeless cause, may be hokey but it contrasts sharply and favorably with Dickson’s absurd power fantasy of an effortlessly irresistible conqueror, discussed above. But there are also a number of less meritorious, and sometimes outright distasteful items from the non-SF press, including a remarkably sexist story by Harvey Jacobs, The Girl Who Drew the Gods, from Mademoiselle, of all places.

Summing Up

There’s a lot in this big book that’s perfectly adequate, but not so much that made me seriously glad to have read it, and a fair amount that seems silly, trivial, or distasteful. The best of the lot to my taste are mostly mentioned above; others include Arthur C. Clarke’s Maelstrom II, R.A. Lafferty’s Slow Tuesday Night, Johnny Byrne’s Yesterday’s Gardens, and Walter F. Moudy’s The Survivor. The other two-thirds of the book’s contents are things I don’t imagine I will ever think of again.

Interestingly, Merril herself expresses dissatisfaction with the current state of American SF, which she attributes to the lack of a “combining force” or “focal center”: “We have the writers; we have the markets; we have the readers. But nothing is happening to bring them together.” She compares this situation unfavorably to that in the UK. I don’t find this explanation very convincing. I am convinced that Merril would have a better book if she included a few longer stories and accepted a shorter contents page, and dropped a few of the less substantial items from prestigious sources.

As the Los Angeles Dodgers might say—wait ‘til next year.



by Gideon Marcus

The Quy Effect, by Arthur Sellings

This latest book by short story veteran, Arthur Sellings, starts with a literal bang. A factory has blown up, and Adolphe Quy, an eccentric inventor is the culprit. Seems he was doing experiments with an organic room-temperature superconductor, which got overloaded. But in the process, something even bigger was discovered: practical antigravity.

With a setup like that, you'd think this short novel would be about the effect such an invention would have on humanity. Indeed, for the first forty pages or so, Sellings seems to be taking forever to start the plot. Then you realize you've been anticipating the wrong book. The Quy Effect is about the trials and tribulations of a discredited inventor doing his best to bring to light a technology only he believes in.

Which means, of course, that there were two ways the book could have gone that would have been deeply dissatisfying. One is the John Campbell route, in which it is made obvious that everyone but Quy (pronounced 'kwe') is a moron, and the whole book is a satire of our stupid society that quells the inspirations of unsung geniuses. The other is the British route, which would have Quy end up in an insane asylum, the work being sold as "darkly humourous."

Thankfully, despite Sellings actually being British, he avoids both of these potentialities. Instead, The Quy Effect is a quite interesting set of character studies, one that kept me glued to the pages. It really is not certain throughout the entire book whether or not Quy will succeed. Nor does it seem that the odds are artificially stacked against him. Quy, in many ways, made the bed he's stuck in. Now he has to find his way out.

And while science, for the most part, takes a backseat in this book, I did appreciate the bit where Quy dismisses rocket-powered spaceflight as an economic dead end:

Rockets have got as much future as the dirigible airship had. A certain beauty, a kind of glamour, but too damn dangerous and cumbersome and expensive. Riding space in a pint-sized canister on top of a thousand tons of high explosive—that's not the way. We've got all the energy we want, if we can only use it. We shouldn't have to rely, in this day and age, on crude chemical reaction. Subject a man to ruinous accelerations because we have to carry a giant-size gas tank a minimum distance. What we need is more like a nuclear-powered submarine. Point its noise in the air and float up.

Only time will tell if he is right, but I've made similar assertions since Sputnik. I'm delighted to see the latest results from Explorer satellites, to watch the Olympics live from Tokyo (at 3 A.M., Pacific), and I thrill at grainy videos of spacewalking astronauts. But for the kind of mass space exodus so much of our science fiction is based on, I suspect Sellings' mouthpiece is right—rockets won't do the trick.

Anyway, going by the Budrys yardstick of quality (if one enjoys reading the book, it's good), The Quy Effect is very good, once one accepts it for what it is.

And what it garners is a full four stars.


The Second Law of Thermodynamics; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Entropy


by Victoria Silverwolf

Agent of Chaos, by Norman Spinrad

It wasn't very long ago that I reviewed this young author's first novel. It's obvious that he keeps banging away at the typewriter steadily, because here comes another one.


Anonymous cover art, and a misleading blurb. Ending the human race isn't the goal of anybody in the story. And I don't think that calling a novel agonizing is a way to help sales.

I don't know about you, but when I pick up a book I like to look at the stuff that surrounds the text first. Front and back cover, dedication, preface or introduction, afterword, whatever. Let's flip this paperback over and see if we can learn anything.


Is it really possible for a new book to be a classic?

This blurb isn't much more accurate. The Brotherhood of Assassins isn't the dictatorship; that's the Hegemony. Allow me to explain.

Several centuries in the future, long after the two sides of the Cold War got together to avoid total destruction, the combined government known as the Hegemony rules the solar system. The oligarchy in charge controls every detail in the lives of their subjects, known as Wards. Any violation of the rules is punishable by death. The sheep-like Wards mostly accept this, because the Hegemony offers them peace and prosperity.

The Democratic League is an underground organization, literally and metaphorically. It opposes the Hegemony, and is willing to use violence to overthrow it. The novel begins on Mars, where Boris Johnson, a member of the Democratic League, is part of an elaborate plot to assassinate one of the oligarchs. The motive is to convince the Wards that the Democratic League is a serious threat to the Hegemony.

The third player in this deadly game is the Brotherhood of Assassins. Despite the name, the first thing this bunch does is prevent the killing of the oligarch. Like other things they've done in the past, this action seems completely random. Both the Hegemony and the Democratic League think of the Brotherhood of Assassins as deranged fanatics, dedicated to the philosophical writings of the fictional author Gregor Markowitz. Quotations from this fellow's books, which have titles like The Theory of Social Entropy and Chaos and Culture, introduce each chapter in the novel.

The story jumps around the solar system, with plenty of plots and counterplots, ranging from political intrigue within the oligarchy to mass violence. At times, the book reads like a cross between Ian Fleming and Keith Laumer. But Spinrad is trying to say something more profound, I think.

The Hegemony represents any established Order. The Democratic League represents the opposition to that Order. Ironically, that very opposition becomes part of a new Order. The Brotherhood of Assassins represents Chaos, working against both of the other groups. (In another touch of irony, this often means working with one or the other. Such paradoxes, we're told, are part of Chaos.)

There's a major plot twist about halfway through the novel that I won't reveal here. Suffice to say that something found in a lot of science fiction stories changes the situation drastically, leading to a dramatic ending involving the Ultimate Chaotic Act.

The book certainly held my interest. I'm not sure what to think about all the discussion of Order and Chaos, but it was intriguing. At times the novel is melodramatic. Overly familiar science fiction elements appear frequently, from moving sidewalks to laser guns.

One peculiar thing is that there are no female characters in the book, not even a minor one playing the typical role of the Girl. The closest we get to acknowledging that two sexes exist is a line describing a crowd of Wards as placid, indifferent-looking men and women. The Wards are just cannon fodder, casually slaughtered by the three competing forces, so they remain pretty much faceless.

That reminds me of the fact that there are no Good Guys in this novel. All sides are willing to kill to achieve their goals, including wiping out innocent bystanders. The author's sympathies seem to be with the forces of Chaos, but they definitely have as much blood on their hands as the forces of Order. (Why else would they call themselves the Brotherhood of Assassins?)

Overall, a provocative but frustrating book.

Three stars.






[September 14, 1966] All the Old Familiar Places (October 1966 Galaxy)


by Gideon Marcus

Where Men Have Gone Before

Last week saw the debut of the exciting science fiction anthology show Star Trek.  The opening narration describes a five-year mission, going "where no man has gone before."  Indeed, the second pilot of the program bore that very title.  Never mind that in two of the three episodes I've seen thus far (and in the sole episode yet officially aired), the featured space ship Enterprise went places men had gone before; the promise is still there.

This month's Galaxy, on the other hand, treads entirely familiar ground.  Not necessarily in the subject matter or the plots — these are reasonably fresh.  I mean that pretty much every story save the last constitutes the continuation of a prior story or setting.

Magazine editor Fred Pohl once explained that he has a reliable stable of authors for Galaxy.  As Pohl travels the country on various speaking engagements, he hits his writer friends up for new material.  Cordwainer Smith was on that list until his tragic passing last month.  Frank Herbert is (sadly) also on that list.  And so are most of the authors below.  I imagine each conversation with his pet authors eventually wanders around to "when do you think I might see more of…"

This isn't a bad thing, especially if you like the universes that get expanded.  On the other hand, it is the reason there about are twice as many Retief stories as there should be.

So let's see how this series of sequels fares:

Old Stomping Grounds


by Sol Dember

The Palace of Love (Part 1 of 3), by Jack Vance

In Vance's novel The Star King, we were introduced to Kirth Gersen.  Gersen is a vigilante, roaming the galactic space lanes to track down the elusive and nearly omnipotent "Demon Princes" of crime.  His first target, a fellow named Grendel, is defeated in the wild Beyond, the belt of untamed systems that ring the placid inner worlds.

Now, in Palace, Gerson applies the vast wealth of Grendel toward the next Demon Prince on his list, the volatile slaver and crime boss, Viole Falushe.  This time, the trail leads back to the original home of humanity, specifically, the portion of Europe known as Holland.


by Gray Morrow

I like Vance a lot, but this particular universe has never appealed to me.  Indeed, Palace has the exact same issues that plagued Kings.  At first, Vance's detailed setting descriptions and odd dialogue are compelling.  Over time, they just get tiresome.  Moreover, whereas in stories like The Dragon Masters or The Last Castle, Vance creates a rich world almost from nothing, filled with exciting new places and ideas, the far future in which Kirth Gersen resides feels almost unchanged from 20th Century Earth. 

I have a suspicion that the remainder of this book is going to be a slog.  Three stars so far.

How the Heroes Die, by Larry Niven


by Virgil Finlay

Larry Niven returns us to the Mars he set up in this year's short story, Eye of the Octopus.  The initial expedition that discovered evidence of indigenous Martians has been succeeded by a dozen humans in a bubble dome archaeological base.  When the natives prove elusive, tedium and frustration sets in.  One of the members of the all-male crew makes a pass at another.  Enraged, the target of his advances kicks him in the throat and watches him die.

Knowing that the rest of the team won't stand for it, murderous John "Jack" Carter plunges his Mars buggy through the dome in an attempt to release the air and kill his compatriots.  His plan fails, thanks to the fast reactions of the team.  Alf Harness, the party's linguist, heads out in pursuit.

The cat and mouse chase, with each of the two trying to outsmart the other such that only one can come back alive, working within the constraints of their air supply and their equipment at hand, is a pretty tight bit of writing.  I could have, however, done without the several paragraphs Niven devotes to the motivation of the crime: Lieutenant-Major Shute drafts a report to Earth explaining that a bunch of isolated men together always succumb to homosexuality.  Just like in the Navy.  Or boys-only schools.  Or the Third Reich (I'm not making these examples up).  The solution: Earth needs to send women with them, damn the Morality Leagues that frown on co-ed missions. 

This reminds me of stories I read last decade where female crew members were carried along solely for their convenient orifices.  I had hoped tales endorsing such notions were a thing of the past.  As for modern-day temperance leagues, while I recognize that cultures can regress, it seems to me that women have been serving alongside men for decades now.  Why, I recently saw an episode of Gomer Pyle featuring a woman Marine Captain.  I can't imagine that the trend over the next century is toward a reversal of that practice.

At least the characters in Heroes don't endorse the victim's murder.  The characters (and thus the author) seem to be saying that queers are people too, but that they are the sad creations of circumstance.  (Mr. Niven is apparently unacquainted with Dr. Kinsey, or the excellent documentary on homosexuality, The Rejected).

Three stars.

A Recursion in Metastories, by Arthur C. Clarke

Too short to describe.  A literary joke of unlimited scope if limited value.

Three stars.


by Jack Gaughan

The Ship Who Killed, by Anne McCaffrey


by Nodel

Many years ago, in The Magazine of Science Fiction, Anne McCaffrey introduced us to KH-834, the cybernetic spaceship.  The story was called The Ship Who Sang.  It involved the close relationship between the vessel's female resident brain, Helva, and the ambulatory "brawn" component, a man named Jennan. 

Jennan dies in that story, leaving Helva devastated but still spaceworthy.  She is detached from scout duty, instead being used for a sequence of odd job missions.  Her first, in which Helva's passenger is a doctor dispatched to a plague-ravaged world, was detailed in a recent Analog in a story titled The Ship Who Mourned.

And now Killed, appearing in yet another magazine.  This time, Helva is to be a metallic womb, ferrying a hundred thousand frozen fetuses to a world that has suffered a sterilizing catastrophe.  Her passenger is Kira, responsible for obtaining the unborn children from various worlds and taking care of them on their journey.  She has suffered the recent loss of her partner, too, and is expressedly suicidal.  Helva's orders are explicitly to avoid worlds on which suicide is legal.  Unfortunately, not all such worlds are cataloged…

One interesting bit is that Kira is a "Dylanist", part of a sect of cynical singer-songwriters who have almost deified ol' Bob.  She even plays "Blowin' in the Wind" at one point.  It's rather bold to extrapolate such a huge impact from something so recent as a popular singer (is there a rival faction known as "The Beatlers"?) And while it is possible that the former Mr. Zimmerman may go on to be so influential as to spawn religious adherents, McCaffrey fails to account for musical evolution: Kira employs the acoustic guitar in Killed, an instrument Dylan has already abandoned.

Such is the danger of precise prediction!

Anyway, that's just a side note.  The story itself has a reasonably good setup, but McCaffrey's writing style, filled to the brim with adverbs and acid repartee, just isn't doing it for me.  Each story in this series has been less compelling than the last.  This may explain why each one has been published in a new magazine; usually, editors hold onto writers as long as they can.

Two stars.

For Your Information: The Delayed Discovery, by Willy Ley

Willy Ley meanders through the history of atomic chemistry, covering a great many topics shallowly and without a lot of causality.  Asimov usually needs to trim his articles; Ley needed more connective tissue to make this one work.

Two stars.

Too Many Esks, by Hayden Howard


by Jack Gaughan

We're now four stories into the saga of the Esks, inhuman hybrids of Eskimos and an alien invader, who live above the arctic circle in Canada.  Esks grow to maturity in just five years.  Female Esks gestate and bear a child every month.  This new race has already outgrown its food supply, relying on government handouts to stay alive.

Dr. Joe West has been warning of a Malthusian nightmare for months now.  At last, some folks are starting to listen to him.  But the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, and West is concerned that once the hybrid Esks interbreed with humans (as one did with West), homo sapiens will be displaced by the more fecund breed.  Once this happens, there are signs that the original aliens will return to enslave the Earth.

And so, West hatches a plan to sterilize the Esks through biological warfare.  Like all of West's other endeavors against the Esks, the mission is a dismal and emotionally fraught failure.

These Esk tales oscillate between tedious and mildly engaging, all requiring a healthy dollop of suspension of disbelief.  I've been along for this ride long enough that I'm now kind of curious as to how it will end.

Three stars.

Planet of Fakers, by J. T. McIntosh


by McClane

McIntosh is an author with a long career.  He's written five-star stories, a number of pedestrian pieces, and a few truly awful ones.  Often, his works contain Sexist (or at least anti-feminine) portrayals of women.

So it was that I approached this last piece of the issue with some trepidation (especially given the weird art that suggested a sexual farce).

I am happy to report that I was pleasanty surprised.

Planet starts in medias res.  A tense trio, one man and two women, are subjecting a queue of persons to a test.  Their goal: to prove the humanity of each subject. 

Through adroit exposition, McIntosh slowly clues us in to the situation.  A colony of a few hundred has been besieged by an alien race of body possessors.  The fake humans are in telepathic communion with one another, so while it was once a trivial task to tell humans from sham-people, tests can only be used effectively once.  And the colonists are running out of tests.

While Planet does not take place in a preexisting universe, the bodysnatching genre has been around for decades, including such classics as Campbell's Who Goes There? and Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (and, of course, the 1956 movie which gave the genre its label).  Nevertheless, what McIntosh does with it is so deftly executed, and so neatly contrived, that's it's clear the old subject still has life in it.  At least in the hands of a master.

I'd originally planned to give it four stars, but it has stayed with me such that I think it earns a full five.

Dust Bowl's a comin'

With the exception of the standout final story, the October 1966 Galaxy is pretty mediocre stuff.  I think the lesson I've gotten is that fields can grow fallow, especially ones that weren't very fertile to begin with.

I think Pohl's writers would do themselves well to find some new land to plow.  And maybe Galaxy could use a more diverse set of farmers…



(If you're looking for something new, join us tomorrow at 8:30 PM (Pacific AND Eastern — two showings) for the next episode of Star Trek!)

Here's the invitation!




[June 24, 1966] Increments: World's Best Science Fiction: 1966, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr


by John Boston

Donald A. Wollheim’s and Terry Carr’s World’s Best Science Fiction: 1966—second in this series—is here, so it’s time for the usual pontificating, hand-wringing, viewing with alarm, etc., as one prefers.  This one comes with not one but two blurbs from Judith Merril, their competitor, though the editors say nothing about her anthology series, the next volume of which is due at the end of the year.

The editors have regrettably pulled in their horns a little on the “World” front.  There are no translated stories in this volume, unlike the first; the editors claim that they read plenty of them, but them furriners just don’t cut the mustard.  More precisely, if not more plausibly, “what they have lacked is the advanced sophistication now to be found in the American and British s-f magazines.” Suffice it to say that there are virtues other than “advanced sophistication” and they may often be found outside one’s own culture. 


by Cosimo Scianna

Nor is there anything here from any of the non-specialist markets that have been publishing progressively more SF in recent years.  The only item here that did not originate in the US or UK SF magazines is Arthur C. Clarke’s Sunjammer, originally in Boys’ Life but quickly reprinted last year by New Worlds, and then by Amazing early this year.

So it’s a rather insular party.  But my main complaint last year was that too much of the material was too pedestrian, and the book excluded writers who are pushing the envelope of the genre, like Lafferty, Zelazny, Ellison, and Cordwainer Smith.  The editors seem to have been listening.  This year they’ve got Ellison and Lafferty, though they seem to have missed their chance at Smith, and Zelazny is still among the missing.  More importantly, the book as a whole is livelier than its predecessor.

This is not to say the pedestrian has been entirely banished.  Witness Christopher Anvil’s The Captive Djinn, the only selection from that rotten borough Analog, yet another story about the clever Earthman outwitting cartoonishly stupid aliens.  Anvil has written this story so often he could do it in his sleep, and most likely that is exactly what happened. 

There is a lot more of the standard used furniture of the genre here, but at least it’s mostly done more cleverly and skillfully than dreamed of by Anvil.  In Joseph Green’s The Decision Makers (from Galaxy), Terrestrials covet the watery world Capella G Eight, but it’s already occupied by seal-like amphibians with group intelligence though not much material culture.  Is this the sort of intelligence that should ordinarily bar colonization outright? The “Conscience”—a bureaucrat in charge of making these decisions—thinks so, but proposes to split the baby, allowing colonization but providing that the humans will alter the climate to provide more dry land for the amphibians.  Of course, behind the bien-pensant speechifying, a still small voice says, “We’re just now starting to get rid of colonialism here, and you want to start it up again?” And another: “Ask the American Indians about the promises of colonists.”

Less weighty thoughts are on offer in James H. Schmitz’s Planet of Forgetting (from Galaxy), involving a fairly standard space war scenario with chase on unknown planet, with the wrinkle that some of the local fauna seem to be able to make people briefly forget where they are and what they are doing.  At the end of this smoothly rendered entertainment, suddenly the wrinkle becomes a mountain range. 

Similar cleverness-as-usual is displayed in Fred Saberhagen’s Masque of the Red Shift (from If), one of his popular Berserker series, in which a disguised Berserker robot appears and wreaks havoc on a spaceship occupied by the Emperor of the galaxy and his celebrating sycophants.  But it is promptly outsmarted and done in by the Emperor’s brother, who is resurrected from suspended animation and lures the Berserker into the clutches of a “hypermass,” which seems to be what scientists are starting to call a “black hole.” (Though on second thought, I’m not sure that “cleverness” is quite le mot juste for a story that falls back on the dreary cliche that a galaxy-spanning human civilization will find no better way to govern itself than an Emperor.) Jonathan Brand’s Vanishing Point (If) is an alien semi-contact story, in which the functionaries of the Galactic Federation have created an artificial habitat, a sort of Earth-like theme park complete with human curator, for the human emissaries to wait in and wonder what is really going on.

Engineering fiction is represented by Clarke’s slightly pedantic Sunjammer (as noted, Boys’ Life by way of New Worlds), concerning a yacht race in space, and by Larry Niven’s livelier Becalmed in Hell (F&SF), whose characters—one of them a brain and spinal column in a box, with vehicle controlled by his nervous system—get stuck on the surface of Venus (updated with current science) and have to improvise a primitive solution to get home.

There are a couple of near-future satires representing very different styles and targets of the sardonic.  Ron Goulart’s Calling Dr. Clockwork (Amazing) is a lampoon of the medical system; protagonist visits someone in the hospital, faints at something he sees there, wakes up in a hospital bed himself attended by the eponymous robot doctor, and can’t get out as his diagnosis shifts and things seem to be falling apart in the institution.  Fritz Leiber’s The Good New Days (Galaxy) is a more densely populated slice-of-slapstick extrapolating the welfare state, with a family living in futuristic but cheaply made housing (“They don’t build slums like they used to,” complains one character), with the TV on every minute, and Ma trying to avoid the demands of the medical statistician who wants her vitals, and everyone struggling to get and keep multiple make-work jobs (the protagonist just lost his job as a street-smiler), and things are all falling apart here, too, and a lot of the sentences are almost as long as this one.  The two stories are about equally amusing, which means above standard for Goulart and a little below standard for Leiber.

So that’s the ordinary, and a higher quality of ordinary than last year. 

A few items are unusual if not extraordinary.  R.A. Lafferty’s In Our Block (If) is an amusing tall tale about various odd characters with unusual talents residing in the shacks on a neglected dead-end block, like the woman who will type your letters but doesn’t need a typewriter (she makes the sound effects orally), and the man who ships tons of merchandise out of a seven-foot shack without benefit of warehouse.  It has lots of slapstick but not much edge, unlike the best by this idiosyncratic writer.  Newish writer Lin Carter (two prior appearances in the SF magazines, a lot in the higher reaches of amateur publications), in Uncollected Works (F&SF), extrapolates the old saw about monkeys on typewriters reproducing the works of Shakespeare, in the direction of Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God, leading to an unexpected and subtle conclusion.

In Vernor Vinge’s Apartness, from the UK’s New Worlds, the Northern War has destroyed the Northern Hemisphere, and generations later, an expedition from Argentina discovers people encamped in Antarctica, living in primitive conditions, who prove to be the descendants of white South Africans who fled from the uprising that followed the war and eliminated whites from the continent.  (Interesting that this American writer didn’t find a market for it at home.) They are not pleased to be discovered by darker-skinned explorers and try to drive them off.  The well-sketched background makes this more than an exercise in irony or just revenge.

On to the extraordinary—three of them, not a bad showing.  Traveler’s Rest, by David I. Masson, also from New Worlds, depicts a world where time varies with latitude, passing slowly at the North Pole (though subjectively very fast), where a furious—and possibly futile—high-tech war is in progress with an unknown and unseeable enemy.  Life proceeds more mundanely in the southern latitudes.  Protagonist H is relieved from duty, travels south, reorients himself to current society, establishes a career, marries and procreates over the years. He's known now as Hadolarisondamo, since names are longer in the slower latitudes.  Then, middle-aged, he is called back to duty, and arrives 22 minutes after he left.  This world’s nightmarish quality is highlighted by the dense mundane detail of the normal life of the lower latitudes; the result is a tour de force of strangeness.

Harlan Ellison’s “Repent, Harlequin!” said the Ticktockman (from Galaxy) is a sort of dystopian unreduced fraction.  In outline, it’s a simple story of a future world where punctuality is all; if you’re late, your life can be docked.  One man can’t take it any more and dresses up in a clown suit and goes around disrupting things until he gets caught by the Master Timekeeper (the Ticktockman), brainwashed, and forced to recant publicly—though the end hints that his legacy lives on.  In substance, it’s business as usual; in style, it’s a sort of garrulous stand-up routine, and quite a good one.  It’s best read as a purposeful affront to the usual plain functional (or worse) prose of the genre (a reading consistent with the story’s theme) and a persuasive argument for opening up the field a bit stylistically.

The other outstanding item here—best in the book to my taste—is Clifford D. Simak’s Over the River and Through the Woods (Amazing), in which a couple of strange kids appear at a farmhouse in 1896 and address the older woman working in the kitchen as their grandma.  The gist: Ordinary decent person confronted with the extraordinary responds with ordinary decency.  It’s plainly written without a wasted word, deftly developed, asserting its homely credo with quiet restraint—a small masterpiece amounting to a summary of Simak’s career.  Simak is one writer who should ignore Ellison’s advice—and vice versa, no doubt.

The upshot: Not bad.  Better than not bad.  The field is taking small steps away from business as usual, and the usual seems to be getting a little better.  The kid may amount to something some day.



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[May 8, 1966] A Respite (June 1966 Amazing)


by John Boston

Hope Springs Eternal

. . . but, as Groucho Marx might put it, hope springs can get rusty, too.

The June Amazing on its face presents bad news and good news.  In the first category is the beginning of a new two-part serial by Murray Leinster, generically titled Stopover in Space.  One can only hope (that word again!) that there is more to it than the empty blather of Killer Ship from last year. 


by James B. Settles

All the shorter stories are reprints.  But two of them are by very reputable authors, Arthur C. Clarke and Henry Kuttner, taken from the magazine’s ambitious false spring of 1953-54 (the Renascence), and two others are from the immediately post-Ray Palmer times (the Liminal Period), by writers who later made pretty good names for themselves, Walter M. Miller, Jr., and Kris Neville.  The fifth is the last published story by G. Peyton Wertenbaker, who commendably learned to write after the fiascoes of The Man from the Atom and its sequel.

Of course the Clarke and Kuttner stories are not exactly rediscoveries.  Clarke’s Encounter in the Dawn, retitled Expedition to Earth, was the title story of the first collection of his stories, published by Ballantine in 1953 and pretty widely known.  Kuttner’s Or Else was the lead story in his collection Ahead of Time, also from Ballantine in 1953.  It was anthologized in the UK in Edmund Crispin’s first Best SF volume, and reprinted again in last year’s The Best of Kuttner from the UK’s Mayflower Books.  These stories will probably be familiar to those well read in SF.

The rest of the package is as usual: another inanely self-serving editorial by editor Ross and a few letters mostly praising the reprint policy, though one of the correspondents also says don’t overdo it with the reprints, it’s time for more Robert F. Young and Ensign De Ruyter.  He appears to be serious.  The cover, simultaneously dull and busy, is reprinted from the back cover of the July 1942 Amazing.  It’s called Satellite Space Ship Station, and artist James B. Settles provides a rather pedestrian view of space travel. 

Stopover in Space (Part 1 of 2), by Murray Leinster


by Gray Morrow

As is my habit, I will hold off reading or commenting on the serial until I have both installments.  I am struggling to reserve judgment, but can’t fail to notice that the same egregious padding that so distinguished, or extinguished, last year’s Killer Ship shows up in the first paragraph here: “Scott ran into the situation on a supposedly almost-routine tour of duty on Checkpoint Lambda.  It was to be his first actual independent command as a Space Patrol commissioned officer.  Otherwise the affairs of the galaxy seemed to be proceeding in a completely ordinary fashion.  On a large scale, suns burned in emptiness, novas flamed, and comets went bumbling around their highly elliptical orbits just as usual.”

If This Be Utopia, by Kris Neville

First after the serial is Kris Neville’s If This Be Utopia, from the May 1950 issue, a slightly heavy-handed satire about a regimented future in which everyone is assigned to a job and pressured mercilessly to perform, and those who don’t measure up—or are made examples of by their superiors—get demoted to worse fates.  Our hero is a middle manager who is cracking under the stress and taking it out on his underlings until his superiors take it out on him.  It’s a bit too obvious, but still decently done.  Three stars.

Encounter in the Dawn, by Arthur C. Clarke

Encounter in the Dawn, from the June-July 1953 issue, is fairly typical for Clarke, a sort of lecture-demonstration of the stuff of SF and his understanding of the cosmos, without too much in the way of plot.  But that’s OK.  Clarke’s writing skill and his restrained sentimentality about the vastness of the universe and the depths of time carry the reader along.  He’s the antithesis of Ray Palmer’s policy of “Gimme bang-bang.”

This one begins: “It was in the last days of the Empire,” which is threatened by an unspecified “shadow that lay across civilization.” Three regular guys of the Galactic Survey, continuing their quest for knowledge despite the doom overhanging their homes, arrive at a new solar system and land on what is obviously Earth.  They take a look around and befriend Yaan, a primitive human or proto-human, with gifts of game killed by their robot.  They get the call to come home for the Empire’s last stand, leave Yaan a few high-tech gifts like a flashlight, and take off.  Tragedy looms over them, but life and intelligence will go on.  Three stars.

Or Else, by Henry Kuttner

Kuttner’s Or Else (August-September 1953 issue) is well done also, as one would expect, but there’s not much to it.  A couple of Mexican subsistence farmers are shooting at each other, contesting the ownership of the only source of water in their valley.  An alien drops in by flying saucer, demonstrates various superpowers, says his race has appointed themselves peacekeepers of the solar system, and Miguel and Fernandez have to stop trying to kill each other because violence is wrong.  They agree and shake hands, the alien buzzes off, and they start shooting again because there’s still only one water hole in the valley.


by Dick Francis

Profound, huh?  While SF may occasionally contribute to the global dialogue on war and peace, this one is best described as chewing less than it purports to bite off.  It also relies on cartoony ethnic stereotyping—but then everything in the story is pretty cartoony, and Kuttner at least lends the viewpoint character, Miguel, some shrewdness.  Thinking the alien is really a norteamericano, he says, “First you will bring peace, and then you will take our oil and precious minerals.” Two stars for execution, not much for substance.

Secret of the Death Dome, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s first published SF story, Secret of the Death Dome (January 1951 issue), is another kettle of sweat altogether, the kind of thing you’d expect to find in a magazine whose cover depicts a hairy-chested guy wrestling with a crocodile. 

The Martians have landed, and how: they have plunked down a large and impervious dome in the desert (actually, a couple of feet above it), where they engage in cryptic communication, and snatch anyone who comes too near and vivisect them.  One guy came back without his legs.  The newly wed Barney came back without his genitals, falling off his horse and dying on arrival.  (The Martians are surveilled by the military on horseback.)


by B. Edmund Swiatek

This makes Jerry mad.  Barney was his best friend and Barney’s new wife was Jerry’s old flame.  So Jerry, who can’t sleep, saddles up and heads out, to do . . . what?  He has no idea.  The Martians scare his horse away, and he hears from base that when it came back riderless, Betty—the widowed Mrs. Barney—took it and is on her way.  So he heads toward the dome and crawls under it looking for a way in. 

You can guess the rest.  He’s captured, gets control of the situation through brains and guts, rescues the by then-captured Betty, sowing death and destruction among the Martians all the way, learns why they are here (the secret of the title, including what the Martians wanted with Barney's genitalia), and drives them away forever.  Whew!  The details don’t matter.  At the end, the just-bereaved Betty tells Jerry not to contact her—“. . . for a couple of months, anyway,” the back of her neck flushing as she turns away.

The style is consistent with the content, cynical tough-guy-isms all the way down.  For example, when the colonel gets the call that Barney has returned, he sends Jerry to check things out.  “Jerry was just a sergeant, but there wasn’t any need for brass.  Death is for privates.” And so on.  Two stars for this testosterone-soaked epic.

Elaine’s Tomb, by G. Peyton Wertenbaker

G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s Elaine’s Tomb, from the Winter 1931 Amazing Stories Quarterly, is, in its quaint way, the best of this issue’s short fiction, and a vast improvement over his earlier work.  Alan, the narrator, teaches at a small college and falls in love with Elaine, one of his students.  Of course he doesn’t do anything about it, and hares off to Egypt with his colleague Weber who has a line on some ancient temples hardly anybody else knows about.  He confesses his romantic situation to Weber en route.  In a temple, there’s a preserved ancient Egyptian king, and a carved curse against anybody who molests him.  Alan touches the recumbent body, and shortly comes down with a fever that shows no sign of abating.  But Weber has found the secret of suspended animation, and promises to put Alan under at the moment of death, and revive him when he finds the secret of life, which must be around the temple somewhere, and unite him with Elaine.


by Leo Morey

Alan awakens, and it’s the far future, Wellsian variant, populated by people who have forgotten most of the know-how of civilization; the machines take care of them, and when one breaks down, they just put another one in its place.  They live pleasant lives and some of them even write books.  In one of these, Alan learns of Elaine’s Tomb, up north near what used to be called Chicago, in the frozen barbarian-populated wastes.  Turns out Weber couldn’t revive him, but he could suspend Elaine to wait for him.  Further adventures and reunion (or union, in this case) follow.

The story is archaic in attitude but modern in its plain style, well imagined and visualized without wasted verbiage, with enough plot to sustain its 40-page length, and altogether a pleasure to read.  Am I really going to give this antique four stars, as I did with another of Wertenbaker’s late stories, The Chamber of Life?  Guess so. 

Summing Up

So, hope fulfilled—admittedly, to expectations lowered by experience.  That's because editor Ross this time selected modern stories, plus an older one that is written in a modern style and not centered around the cranky crotchets of bygone decades, unlike some earlier selections I would prefer not to name.  The result is mostly pretty readable, with a couple of stories better than that, and nothing bloody awful.  But the specter of the Leinster serial still looms over the next issue.  We shall proceed with trepidation.



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


by John Boston

Slog Through the Bog

Publisher Sol Cohen’s policy of filling his magazines with reprints from older issues continues and solidifies in the February Amazing.  All but two of the stories here are reprints (though some did not originate in Amazing).  The cover is a reprint too!  This vague and busy image titled Mizar in Ursa Major is from the back cover of Fantastic AdventuresAmazing’s companion fantasy magazine—for May 1946, by Frank R. Paul, long past his prime by then.


by Frank R. Paul

Other contents are limited to an editorial by Cohen that is so incoherent I won’t even try to recount his point, and another one-page letter column mostly praising Cohen’s “revitalization” of the magazine “in the old-time tradition” and rejection of the “obscure and often affected themes” of other magazines.  Also, somebody is looking for Jerry Siegel, creator of Superman, in order to make a movie of one of his old stories.

Onward to this mostly grim and laborious adventure.

Sunjammer, by Arthur C. Clarke


by Nodel

The issue opens with Arthur C. Clarke’s Sunjammer—a reprint from, of all places, Boys’ Life, the Boy Scouts magazine, in 1964.  It’s about a race to the Moon among vessels propelled by light pressure from the Sun on diaphanous sails hundreds of miles in area.  It’s not bad—Clarke doesn’t know how to be bad—but it reads a little too much like a lecture on practical astrophysics, and is much less lively than the last recent Clarke story I read, The Shining Ones, in the Judith Merril annual anthology.  Maybe Clarke thinks that writing for young people means he has to be more overtly educational than usual.  It’s reminiscent of his slightly pedantic Winston juvenile of the early ‘50s, Islands in the Sky.  Three stars.

[This is also what Mark Yon gave it when it came out last year in New Worlds (ed.)]

For Each Man Kills, by William F. Temple

After Clarke, things get overripe fast.  William F. Temple’s For Each Man Kills is from the March 1950 Amazing, right after editor Ray Palmer’s regime of “gimme bang-bang” ended.  Suddenly under new editor Howard Browne there was a sprinkling of more respectable bylines among the house pseudonyms, among them Kris Neville, Ward Moore, Fritz Leiber, and Temple—unfortunately, not bringing much improvement, at least in this case.

In For Each Man Kills, protagonist Russ is waiting for his inamorata Ellen Carr to finish dressing, in a room full of pictures of her.  Looking at a portrait, he thinks: “Da Vinci himself couldn’t have put all of Ellen on canvas.” There are a lot of photos, too, but “He realized at once that no photo could ever remotely compensate for her physical absence.” At this point I was tempted to burst into song: “It would take, I know/A Michaelangelo/ . . .to try and paint a portrait of my love.” But I resisted, and carried on.  Just as well, it’s a doozy.

This one-remove ogling is taking place in Pinetown, a town probably in the US, surrounded by desert, and further isolated by an impassable radioactive zone after a nuclear war.  (Pinetown?  Surrounded by desert?  Never mind, move on.) Russ is the Mayor’s right-hand man in trying to rebuild after the war’s destruction.  He asks Ellen to marry him.  But she turns him down.  She’s been swotting atomic theory and her application has just been granted to go work on the radiation-leaking atomic pile outside town.  A side effect of radiation exposure is that women turn into men.  He sees her home, beating up a guy who tries to molest her along the way.


by Leo Summers

The guy shows up next day and shoots at Russ, killing the Mayor instead.  Now Russ is the Mayor, working 18-hour days to restore Pinetown to something like its pre-war condition.  At the atomic pile, there’s no Ellen Carr any more, just a young Alan Carr; Ellen has changed sex, as feared.  Russ’s eye then falls on Maureen, 18, “petite, dainty, uncomplicated.” Before long they are engaged.  But then—Maureen turns up with leukemia.  And who knows the most about how to deal with it?  The young man from the pile, Alan Carr, who treats her with radioactive phosphorus.  Before long, Maureen is getting better, but asks Russ to break the engagement.  She’s in love with Alan Carr.  “The two girls he wanted to marry ended up marrying each other!”

Russ goes home and gets drunk for a week, and comes back to hear that the pile is almost out of fuel.  But there’s an unexploded atomic rocket in the radioactive belt around Pinetown.  Russ dispatches the most knowledgeable person, Alan Carr, to retrieve it so they can exploit it for fuel and keep Maureen in radioactive phosphorus.  But the rocket blows up, killing Alan, and Maureen is on her deathbed.  She tells Russ that Alan had told her to forget him and devote herself to Russ, then she dies.  Meanwhile, Russ has been given a letter, which proves to be from Alan, confessing to being a narcissistic personality and explaining his (her) conduct before and after the sex change.  There’s a buzz in the sky and an airplane appears; Pinetown’s isolation is over.  “Life was beginning for Pinetown.  It had ended for its Mayor.”

At this point the story’s provenance becomes clear.  Temple thought that he had spotted a marketing niche, and tried to sell US radio, and what there was of TV, on something new—a post-atomic soap opera!  And he wrote this story to salvage something from his labors when they laughed him out of their offices.  Two stars, barely, and an overwrought sigh, organ music swelling in the background.

The Runaway Skyscraper, by Murray Leinster

The Runaway Skyscraper is Murray Leinster’s first known SF publication and appeared in the February 22, 1919, issue of Argosy and Railroad Man’s Magazine, as that famous old publication was known for five months or so.  Here it is attributed to the third issue of Amazing, June 1926, where it was first reprinted.  It’s actually a bit of a revelation after the longueurs of Leinster’s recent serial Killer Ship.  A New York office building containing 2000 people suddenly begins racing into the past, with day and night flickering and clocks and watches running backwards (but not the characters’ alimentary processes or their chonological aging.  Go figure.).  The building fetches up in the Manhattan wilderness of thousands of years ago.


by Small

What to do?  Protagonist Arthur Chamberlain, along with the other sound go-getters among the menfolk, and assisted by his secretary the attractive Miss Woodward, calm the crowd, address the immediate problem of feeding 2,000 people (fortuitously assisted by passenger pigeons fatally colliding with the building’s windows) and setting up comfortable separate quarters for the women (men?  They can sleep on the floor somewhere).  It’s like The Swiss Family Robinson—never any serious danger, solutions present themselves almost as soon as problems appear.  This is all interspersed with the charmingly clumsy romance of Arthur and Miss Woodward, who are married by the end.  Overall, it’s quite a well executed piece of light entertainment—not surprising, since by this time Leinster had already published several dozen stories in magazines with titles like Snappy Stories, Saucy Stories, and Breezy Stories.

But (of course there’s a but).  The skyscraper alights right across the not-yet-existent Herald Square from an Indian village, complete with “brown-skinned Indians, utterly petrified with astonishment”; when the Office People approach, the Indians flee in terror, abandoning their homes and belongings.  They reappear in the story a couple of weeks later, and now they are working for the white folks, providing food mostly in return for trinkets, including a broken-down typewriter, which the “savages” cart away “triumphally.” Born to be simple, apparently.


by Frank R. Paul

It gets worse.  After the building has returned to its proper time through Arthur’s scheme of pumping a soap solution into the foundation, it transpires that one tenant, “a certain Isidore Eckstein, a dealer in jewelry novelties,” made some side deals with the Indians, trading necklaces, rings, and a dollar for title to Manhattan Island, and has now sued all landholders in Manhattan demanding rent from them. 

This is a bit malodorous even for 1919 and takes the shine off an otherwise accomplished piece of froth.  Two stars, tolerantly.

The Malignant Entity, by Otis Adelbert Kline


by Leo Morey

The Malignant Entity by Otis Adelbert Kline originated in Weird Tales for May-July 1924, but later appeared in Amazing for June 1926, and again in Amazing Stories Quarterly for Fall 1934.  It is surprisingly good for most of its length—surprisingly since Kline is best known for his knockoffs of Edgar Rice Burroughs, with titles like The Swordsman of Mars.  It’s quite formulaic: Scientist is found shockingly dead in his lab (a skeleton, fully dressed); narrator Evans is conversing with his friend Dr. Dorp when the police ask the doctor to come check out the deceased Professor Townsend, and Evans tags along.  The late Prof had been working on the generation of life from dead matter, and it appears he has succeeded too well; the investigation is all too successful, and they are confronted with the eponymous Entity.  The story is done primarily in dialogue, with the characters all explaining things to each other, but Kline has a knack for brisk banter with few words wasted, so it moves along nicely.  Unfortunately it goes on long enough to overstay its welcome, and gets a bit ridiculous towards the end, sliding down to two stars.

It Will Grow On You

Two of this issue’s stories focus on growth of one sort or another, both sorts to be avoided by the prudent.

The Man from the Atom, by G. Peyton Wertenbaker

G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s The Man from the Atom is credited to the first, April 1926, issue of Amazing, but originated in the August 1923 Science and Invention.  That was another of Hugo Gernsback’s magazines, started in 1913 as Electrical Experimenter, changing to Science and Invention in 1923 and continuing to 1931.  It published occasional fiction early on, and by 1920 was running one or two stories in each issue.  The August 1923 issue, with six stories including Wertenbaker’s, was labelled the “Scientific Fiction Number,” and could be seen as a dry run for Amazing.


by Howard V. Brown

Wertenbaker was one of the early Amazing’s most capable writers; see The Chamber of Life, reprinted during the Cele Lalli regime.  Unfortunately, The Man from the Atom is among his juvenilia; he would have been 16 when it was published.  It shows.  The story is badly overwritten.  The opening lines: “I am a lost soul, and I am homesick.  Yes, homesick!  Yet how vain is homesickness when one is without a home!” The plot is canonical for its time.  The narrator’s friend, Professor Martyn, invites him over to try out his new invention, which can shrink or enlarge a person with the push of a button.  Shrinkage is possible because “an object may be divided in half forever, as you have learned in high school, without being entirely exhausted.” (They never taught me that in high school.  What else are they hiding from me?) Growth is accomplished by extracting atoms from the air, which the machine “converts, by a reverse method from the first,” into atoms suitable for supplementing the various substances of the body. 

So the narrator dons what amounts to a space suit, pushes the expansion button, and off he goes, as the Professor hastily drives off to avoid the expansion of the narrator’s feet.  As he expands into space, and Earth shrinks to a relative diameter of a few feet, whoops!  “My feet slipped off, suddenly, and I was lying absolutely motionless, powerless to move, in space!” Also, so much for the Western Hemisphere, though the author doesn’t mention that.  Only after further observation of the wonders of the shrinking heavens, and finding himself on a planet and realizing his world is likely an atom of this one, does he try to go back, retracing his . . . well, not exactly steps . . . but the Sun is not there!  He realizes that his growth in size brought an acceleration of time, and home is trillions of centuries in the past.  So he fetches up on an available planet.  “I live here on sufferance, as an ignorant African might have lived in an incomprehensible, to him, London.  A strange creature, to play with and to be played with by children.  A clown . . . a savage!”


by Frank R. Paul

Of course all this makes very little sense even in its own terms.  For example, expansion is supposedly made possible by converting atoms from the air, but how did the narrator grow beyond the size of the known cosmos with only the atoms in his airtight suit and the small tank of compressed air attached to it?  One could go on, but why bother?  This relic should have stayed buried.  One star.

Moss Island, by Carl Jacobi

Another kind of growth appears in Moss Island, by Carl Jacobi, from the Winter 1932 Amazing Stories Quarterly, but revised from something called The Quest, May 1930.  Jacobi was an all-around pulpster through the 1930s and into the ‘40s, but settled into the SF/F/weird magazines by the mid-‘40s, and seems to have mostly hung it up late in the ‘50s.  Protagonist goes to do some geological surveying on the island, which is off New Brunswick and inhabited only by trees and other vegetation, Chiseling away, he finds a pocket of mucilaginous (author’s word!) brown stuff, and recognizes it as Muscivol, a substance identified by Professor Monroe at his college (another Professor!  Anyone who’s read this far should realize that they always mean trouble).  Muscivol contains “all the elements of growth”—a lot of growth.  So protagonist fills up his Thermos bottle with the stuff. 


by Leo Morey

Pressing into the forested interior, he finds a lot of moss and drips a little Muscivol on it.  The moss leaps upward so fast that he trips and spills the Thermos contents.  “A great shudder ran through the moss.  A sobbing sigh came from its grasses.  And then with a roar, the rootlets gouged down into the ground, tore at the soil, and the plant with a mighty hiss raced upward, five feet, ten feet.  The tendrils swelled as though filled with pressure, became fat, purulent, octopus folds.  Like the undulations of some titanic marine plant the white coils waved and lashed the air.  Up they lunged, the growth rate multiplied ten thousand times.”

Protagonist runs like hell, with the moss, expanding like the Man from the Atom, hot on his heels.  Fortunately he is able to get down a cliff where his hired boatman is waiting for him, and escapes.  The boatman can’t see the giant wall of moss through the fog that has rolled in, so, as usual in stories of this period, the horror is neatly contained.  It’s less ridiculous than Wertenbaker’s story, but still formulaic, and undistinguished in execution.  Two stars.

The Plutonian Drug, by Clark Ashton Smith

Next, Clark Ashton Smith!  A legendary figure in the 1930s Weird Tales pantheon, with H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.  However, The Plutonian Drug—from the September 1934 Amazing, Smith’s only story in the magazine—is much more pedestrian than either Smith’s usual extravagant titles (The City of the Singing Flame and the like) or his usual florid style.  Balcoth the sculptor is talking with his friend Dr. Manners (not a Professor, but just as dangerous), who discourses at length on interplanetary drugs. He offers Balcoth some plutonium, a drug from Pluto, which he promptly scarfs down, after being assured it will wear off quickly and will not affect his next appointment.  (This is obviously not the plutonium that we have learned to know and love; element 94 was not isolated and named until late 1940 or early 1941.) What this plutonium does is lay out the events of one’s past and future in an array in the mind’s eye, past on the left, future on the right.  For Balcoth, the right-hand range is very short for no apparent reason, and when he leaves and the reason is revealed, it is neither surprising nor interesting.  This story is less obscure than most others in this issue; I was mildly bored by it for the first time in 1958, in the Berkley paperback of August Derleth’s anthology The Outer Reaches.  Two stars, barely.

In with the New

Now to the stories that are original with this issue.

Pressure, by Arthur Porges

Arthur Porges’s Pressure is another Ensign De Ruyter exercise in Fun with Fifth-Grade Science, in which the Ensign figures out how to solve the characters’ problem by harnessing the weight of a large quantity of mercury.  One star as usual.

Mute Milton, by Harry Harrison

Harry Harrison’s Mute Milton is an SF story about Jim Crow, very simple and not the least bit subtle. A professor—this time, the good kind—at one of the South’s Negro colleges is on his way home by bus, carrying a rather important invention, and has a glancing encounter with the police and the racial attitudes that he has been navigating all his life.  He meets another Negro who has aroused even more official ire, and gets fatally in the way when the police catch up to them.  The invention gets stepped on.  It’s a crude and brutal story about a crude and brutal reality that SF writers generally acknowledge only at arms-length and metaphorically.  The only actual reference to contemporary events is to the Freedom Riders, whose activities began and ended in 1961.  I’ll bet this story was written then or shortly after, rejected all around, and has only found a publisher now that there’s a new regime at Amazing.  Good for them, for a change.  Four stars.

Summing Up

Some of the old stuff is well worth reading.  This isn’t it.  The older reprinted stories are variously stale, cliched, boring, bigoted, and/or nonsensical to one degree or another.  You can find something good to say about some of them (how I struggled), but they’re still mostly a waste of time.  The best things in the issue are the new story by Harry Harrison and the almost new one by Arthur C. Clarke.  If Amazing’s reprint policy were an experiment, at this point I would call it a failure.  Unfortunately it doesn’t look like an experiment.  The next issue—April 1966, the 40th anniversary issue—will be nothing but reprints.

[We only give you the plum assignments, John! Or perhaps this is a prune… (ed.)]





[December 24, 1965] Gallimaufry du Saison(The Year's best Science Fiction and Paingod and Other Delusions)


by John Boston

Adventures in Miscellany

If it’s 1965, then it must be time for Judith Merril’s annual anthology from 1964.  Admittedly, it’s pretty late in the year, which likely has to do with Merril’s change of publishers.  After five years with Simon and Schuster, the new volume is from Delacorte Press, an imprint of Dell Publishing, which has published these anthologies in paperback since their inception in the mid-1950s.  But here it is, styled 10th Annual Edition THE YEAR’S BEST SF, in time for the Christmas trade.


by G. Ziel

Over the years these anthologies have become larger.  The growth is mostly in density; the page count has gone up a bit (400 pages this year), but the amount of text per page has grown remarkably from the early Gnome Press volumes. 

The books have also grown much more miscellaneous.  Their contents were initially drawn mostly from the familiar SF magazines, with a few other items from the well-known slick magazines.  No more.  This volume includes a gallimaufry of stories, quasi-stories, satirical essays, and what have you from sources as various as The Socialist Call, motive (sic—official magazine of the Methodist Student Movement), New Directions, and Cosmopolitan.  (No cartoons this year, unlike last year’s book.)

This is all in service of Merril’s editorial philosophy of science fiction, which is that it doesn’t exist—or, at least, that there’s no difference between it and everything else, or at least something else.  (See her soliloquy in the previous volume on what “S” and “F” really stand for, quoted in my previous comment on this series.  The theme is continued here in her between-stories commentary, like a background noise you stop noticing after a while). You may find this view intellectually incoherent, but, like the feller (or Feller) said, by their fruits ye shall know them, and Merril makes a pretty interesting fruit salad.  (Even if I have a bone to pick with parts of it.)

Unfortunately it’s hard to review a salad this big without sorting out its ingredients, which Merril might say defeats her purpose.  Nonetheless, onwards.  The book can only be discussed in layers.

Usual Suspects

The top layer, analytically speaking, is the first-class, or at least pretty good, SF and F from genre sources.  The outstanding items here are J.G. Ballard’s The Terminal Beach from New Worlds and Roger Zelazny’s A Rose for Ecclesiastes from F&SF—and stop right there: Merril’s benign eclecticism is nowhere better illustrated than in the contrast between Ballard, driving avant-garde style and imagery and his preoccupation with psychological “inner space” into the genre’s brain like an ice pick, and Zelazny, rehabilitating the old-fashioned pseudo-other-wordly costume drama of the pulps with high style and intellectual decoration.  Runners-up include Thomas Disch’s chilly Descending from Fantastic, John Brunner’s well-turned gimmick story The Last Lonely Man from New Worlds (the only story also to have appeared in the Wollheim/Carr best of the year volume), Norman Kagan’s audaciously zany The Mathenauts from If, and Kit Reed’s sprightly self-help/morality tale Automatic Tiger from F&SF

Barely making the cut is Mack Reynolds’s Pacifist, also from F&SF, a sharp piece of political didacticism about a pacifist underground that uses decidedly non-pacifist means to fight against warmongering politicians, unfortunately too contrived to have much impact.  Surprisingly, Arthur Porges, perpetrator of the dreadful Ensign Ruyter stories in Amazing, rises briefly from the muck with the affecting Problem Child, from Analog, about a professor of mathematics whose wife died bearing a mentally retarded child; the child proves to be anything but retarded in one significant way.  This one gets “better than expected” credit.  So does Training Talk, by the militantly eccentric David R. Bunch (Fantastic), in which he outdoes himself in grotesque lyricism (“It was one of those days when cheer came out of a rubbery sky in great splotches and globs of half-snow and eased down the windowpanes like breakups of little glaciers.”), complementing his even more grotesque plot.  Edging into this category is The Search, a poem by (Merril says) high school student Bruce Simonds, from F&SF, which is minor but clever, pointed, and readable. 

All right, downhill to the next layer, the less distinguished selections from the SF magazines, ranging from the merely competent or inconsequential to the actively dreary. There are several supposedly humorous trifles.  Fritz Leiber’s Be of Good Cheer, from Galaxy, is an epistolary satire, a letter from a robot at the Bureau of Public Morale to a Senior Citizen (as they are known these days) reassuring her unconvincingly that the absence of humans and prevalence of robots that she observes is nothing to worry about.  Larry Eisenberg’s The Pirokin Effect, from Amazing, is a more slapsticky satire about extraterrestrial signals received in a restaurant kitchen which may or may not be from the Lost Tribes of Israel, now resident on Mars; this one is distinguished from the Leiber story by actually being mildly amusing.  The same is true of Family Portrait by new author Morgan Kent, from Fantastic, a vignette about the mundane domestic life of a family that proves to have unusual talents. 

The same is unfortunately not true of The New Encyclopaedist, from F&SF, by Stephen Becker, a novelist (see last year’s A Covenant with Death) and translator of some repute, with no prior SF credits.  This comprises several satirical encyclopedia entries about events in the near future, but their main purpose seems to be to prove the author’s superior sensibilities, and they’re more tedious than funny.  I’m guessing the New Yorker rejected them.  Czech author Josef Nesvadba’s The Last Secret Weapon of the Third Reich belongs here as much as anywhere—it’s from his collection Vampires Ltd., which is apparently devoted to SF stories.  It’s a frenetic black comedy about a last-ditch Nazi effort to generate a new fighting force with a process for developing embryos to adulthood within seven days of conception; the story is less effective than it should be since . . . gosh . . . Nazis are kind of hard to satirize.

There are also a couple of yokel epics here, which is almost always bad news.  Sonny, by Rick Raphael, from Analog (where else?) is a dreary attempt at humor about a kid from West Virginia whose psionic talents come to light after he is drafted into the Army.  The Man Who Found Proteus, by the always promising but never quite delivering Robert H. Rohrer, Jr., from Fantastic, features a caricatured semi-literate miner encountering a hungry shape-changing monster and coming off no better than you’d expect.

Several other more conventional SF stories are just not very lively.  Richard Wilson’s The Carson Effect, from Worlds of Tomorrow, like much of his work to my taste, is a rather limp account of strange human behavior in what everybody thinks are the last days, but prove not to be, a denouement explained by a gimmick reminiscent of Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter.  The Carson of the title is Rachel.  Jack Sharkey’s The Twerlik, from Worlds of Tomorrow, is an alien contact story in which the alien, a planet-encompassing plant, tries to make sense of explorers from Earth landing in a spaceship; it’s an earnest effort (unusually for this author) that doesn’t quite revive a hackneyed theme.  A Miracle Too Many, by Philip H. Smith and Alan E. Nourse, from F&SF, concerns a doctor who wishes he could save all his patients, and suddenly he can, with grim consequences that are all too obvious.  Its problem is not ennui but predictability. 

That’s an awful lot of lackluster for a book with “Best” in the title.  More on that problem later.

Neighboring Provinces

The next stratum consists of fairly straightforward SF/F that Merril has trawled or excavated from the established mainstream magazines in the way of SF/F.  A couple of these are by well-established (or –remembered) genre names.  One of the best in the book is Arthur C. Clarke’s The Shining Ones, from Playboy, about an encounter with the fauna of the sea, rendered with the same dignified enthusiasm as Clarke’s portrayals of human encounters with the Moon and the other planets.  This is a writer who will never lose his sense of wonder, or his discipline in writing about it.  Interestingly, the plot takes off from the notion of powering a city with energy derived from temperature differentials between oceanic depths and the surface.  Maybe somebody should try that sometime.  The other big name is John D. MacDonald, who wrote a lot of quite good SF from 1948 to 1953 but gave it up for crime fiction.  Unfortunately his The Legend of Joe Lee from Cosmopolitan is unimpressive, a lame sort of ghost story about a teen-age hot-rodder whom the cops can’t catch, for reasons revealed at the end. 

The others in this category are all satirical extrapolations of things the authors have seen around them, a standard maneuver in standard SF and a game that anyone can play—though not always well.  The best of the lot is A Living Doll by Robert Wallace, from Harper’s; Wallace is said to be a photographer for Life, and the story to have been inspired by an encounter in a toy store with a doll that spoke to him and nibbled his finger.  The narrator’s sullen and sadistic daughter wants a doll for Christmas, along with some needles and pins and a book on Voodoo.  He discovers that dolls have become more sophisticated than he realized, and purchases one who proves to mix a mean Martini and to discourse knowledgeably about Mexican art—a considerable improvement over his daughter.  The rest follows logically.  Almost as good is Frank Roberts’s It Could Be You, from the Australian Coast to Coast (which seem to be an annual anthology of stories from the previous year, just like this one).  In the future, it posits, the populace will be kept entertained by a televised game: one person in the city is selected to be killed, with a hundred thousand-pound prize to the winner; and clues narrowing down the victim’s identity are given through the day to build suspense (a man; never wears a hat; black hair; blue eyes; etc.).  This is not exactly a new idea to readers of the SF magazines, but it’s sharply written and no longer than it needs to be.  James D. Houston’s Gas Mask, from Nugget, one of many cheap Playboy imitations, is a reasonably well done “if this goes on” piece about future traffic problems and people’s adaptation to them. 

And there are selections from places you wouldn’t think to look, but Merril always casts a wide net.  The satirical motif continues, unfortunately in combinations of facile, arch and ponderous.  Russell Baker’s A Sinister Metamorphosis is apparently one of his regular columns from The New York Times, taking off from the theme that sociologists “thought the machines would gradually become more like people.  Nobody expected people to become more like machines.” James T. Farrell’s A Benefactor of Humanity—the one from the Socialist Call—is about a man who can’t read but loves books; however, he dislikes authors, and devises a machine to replace them.  It’s overlong and not funny.  Hap Cawood’s one-page Synchromocracy, from motive, is a rather undeveloped sketch of government by computer and constant public opinion polling.

Farther Out

From here, things just get weird, for better or worse.  Donald Hall, a well-known poet and former poetry editor of the Paris Review, is present with The Wonderful Dog Suit, from the Carleton Miscellany (literary magazine of Carleton College), about a precocious child who is given a dog suit, and takes to it; the dog becomes rather shaggy by the end.  I suppose this is brilliance taking a day off.  The Red Egg, by Jose Maria Gironella, apparently a well-established Spanish writer, is a jolly tale about a cancer which flees its home on the skin of a laboratory mouse and takes to the air, feeding on industrial smoke and other toxic delicacies, terrorizing the populace while contemplating which human victim to descend upon.  It’s quite entertaining, but the point is elusive; too profound for me, I guess.  This first appeared in a collection titled Journeys to the Improbable, collecting the author’s “psychic experience” over a period of two years. 

Probably the weirdest item here—since I can detect no element of anything resembling S or F even by Merril’s ecumenical standard—is Romain Gary’s Decadence, from Saga (the men’s magazine?  Really?) by way of Gary’s collection Hissing Tales.  A group of mobsters goes to Italy to meet their charismatic leader, who after taking over a union was prosecuted and deported; now he’s eligible to return, but they find he has meanwhile become an acclaimed modernist sculptor with a rather different outlook than they had expected.  M.E. White’s The Power of Positive Thinking, from New Directions, is a first-person story told by a smart, fanatically religious schoolgirl which amounts to a horror story with no trace of fantasy, the horror only suggested, but heightened by the relentless mundanity of the account. 

The book closes with Yachid and Yechida by Isaac Bashevis Singer, from his collection Short Friday.  Singer is among other things the book reviewer for the Jewish Daily Forward, and the story was translated from Yiddish.  It is a theological fantasy about dead souls condemned to Sheol, a/k/a Earth, and their posthumous lives there, and it is absolutely captivating, one of the best things in the book.  This Singer really has something going; if he works at it, he might crack F&SF.

Summing Up

So, what to make of this “best SF” anthology, in which much of the SF/F is just not very interesting and is outshone by some of the loose marbles Merril has found in other yards?  At least part of the problem is her seeming unwillingness to include longer stories, which of course would displace multiple shorter ones and yield a less crowded contents page.  But much of the best SF writing these days is at novella length or close to it; consider Jack Vance’s The Kragen and Roger Zelazny’s The Graveyard Heart, from Fantastic, and Gordon R. Dickson’s Soldier, Ask Not and Wyman Guin’s A Man of the Renaissance, from Galaxy.  Merril would probably be better advised to devote a little more space to substance and less to short trifles.

But still, there’s a lot here—much of it quite good, much of it unexpected, and some of it both.  This anthology series is still in a class by itself.



by Gideon Marcus

Paingod and Other Delusions

Three years ago, Harlan Ellison released his first collection of science fiction stories.  It was a fine collection, representing the era of his writing career before he struck out for Hollywood to become a big-time screenwriter (some of his work not surviving to the small screen unscathed…)

Now he's back with a new collection.  A mix of stories recently written and others excavated from the vault, it offers up a strange combination of mature and callow Ellison, though none of it is unworthy.  Dig it:


by Jack Gaughan

Introduction

After seven stabs at it, Harlan reportedly threw up his hands and decided he wasn't going to write an introduction.  Instead, we get a several page nontroduction that is probably worth the price of the book in and of itself.  I read it aloud to my family while we were waiting to get into a new sushi place in town.  It's excellent, funny, self deprecatory, and illuminating.

Paingod

If God is Love, why does He allow pain to exist?  This moving, brilliant story tries to answer this question.  Nominated for the Galactic Star last year and covered previously by Victoria Silverwolf, there's a reason it leads this book.

Five stars.

"Repent, Harlequin!" said the Ticktockman

In an increasingly time-ordered world, the wildest rebel is he who would gum up the works of society.

I didn't much care for this story when I first reviewed it, finding it a bit overwrought and consciously artistic.  Ellison's introduction, in which he explains his congenital inability to mark time accurately, makes the piece much more understandable.  I'd had trouble relating in part because my time sense is preternaturally perfect (I can tell you what time it is even after being asleep for hours).  So, with the story now in context, I can understand the enthusiasm with which it's been received.

Four stars.

The Crackpots

An exploration of a planet of misfits, who it turns out are the real movers and shakers of the galactic federation.

Based on the odd characters Ellison observed when manning an adult book stand on 42nd Street, this is an older piece, and it shows.  About ten pages too long and a little obtuse, but even young, imperfect Ellison is usually worth reading.

Three stars.

Bright Eyes

The former masters of the Earth have been diminished by war to just one representative and his oversized rodent sidekick.  Like a salmon swimming upstream, he returns to the blasted surface to witness the destruction one last time.

Inspired by a piece of art (that later accompanied the story—you can see it at Victoria's original review—it's a vivid piece.

Four stars.

The Discarded

A plague turns a number of humans into "monsters", who are exiled to an orbiting colony.  When a new outbreak occurs, suddenly the discarded find themselves valued as the potential source of a cure.  But will normal humans ever really tolerate the deviant?

I will go out on a limb here — this is my favorite story of the collection, one I enjoyed when I first read it in the 1959 issue of Fantastic.  It's a much more effective "misfit" piece than the previous story.

Five stars.

Wanted in Surgery

Automated surgeons displace their human counterparts.  Are they truly infallible?  And is it ethical to find fault in them?

This piece doesn't work on a lot of levels, plausibility-wise and narratively, as even Ellison concedes.  I suppose it's here to fill space and to make sure it got in some collection.

Two stars.

Deeper than the Darkness

Another misfit, this time about a pyrokinetic recruited to destroy the star of an enemy race.  Fools be they who expect a hated rebel to suddenly be overcome with patriotism…

This is another flawed, early piece that shows Ellison's potential without realizing it.

Three stars.

Summing Up

Two fives, two fours, two threes, and a two, not to mention a great Intro.  If that's not worth four bits, I'm not sure what is.  Get it!






[February 24, 1965] Doctors, Hunchbacks and Dunes … New Worlds and Science Fantasy, February/March 1965

by Mark Yon

Scenes from England

Hello again!

As I briefly mentioned last time, much of this month has been about the country dealing with the death and subsequent state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill. It has felt like the passing of an era – the old guard, admittedly, but an end, nevertheless. It seems to have cast a cloud over everything.

I turned to the two magazines to try and cheer me up.

The First Issue At Hand

So: which magazine arrived first? The winner was (again)… Science Fantasy.


[Impressive cover this month. Remember the bad old days covers of the Carnell New Worlds era?]

Looking beyond the arty cover by Agosta Morol, I see that the magazine, like New Worlds, now has an Associate Editor. In this case its J. Parkhill-Rathbone (no first name given.) This is, no doubt, to cope with the extra volume created by the magazine going monthly.

Not that that is shown particularly by the Editorial, which even admits that there’s little to say this month and then fills the space by mentioning up-coming works of interest. There’s also an intriguing glimpse into the life of an editor, which involves Kyril, Jim Ballard, Brian Aldiss and some Liebfraumilch.

To the stories themselves.

The Outcast, by Harry Harrison

We start with a big name, the usually wonderful Harry Harrison. He has been here before but in his many guises as short story author, editor and collaborator. It is great to read a longer story. This is one of those “spaceships as cruise liner” type of tales, with a notorious passenger causing unrest amongst the passengers. I guess that it must be akin to being on a holiday with someone like Josef Mengele!

It’s told with the usual Harrison skill, with the occasional plot-point to keep the reader guessing. The protagonist is given a surprisingly nuanced character and is not the monster some would suggest, and by the end the story becomes one of redemption. Solidly thought-provoking, if unremarkable. It’s a good start to the issue. 3 out of 5.

Song of the Syren, by Robert Wells

A story about singing alien plants and the development of bad worker relationships, but also about the trouble women cause in space when surrounded by men. As bad as it sounds, this attempts to tell a mystery plot with misogynistic clichés that I thought went out with the pulps of the 1940’s. For example, “She was a sixth year student, one of the brightest in the unit’s botanical section, but it was an open secret that she would resign when her seven years tour of duty was complete and opt for a mating and reproductive role back in Solar.” Not one of the magazine’s brightest moments. 2 out of 5.

Moriarty, by Philip Wordley

A crime story about the protagonist’s relationship with a female telepathic cop in L.A. The twist here is that the policewoman wants the burglar to hold off from robbing a bank so that she can get a bigger catch, a big-time mobster planning to rob the same bank in a few days’ time. Another predictable story that doesn’t upset things too much. 2 out of 5.

Bring Back A Life, by John Rackham

Peter Raynor is a biochemist who finds himself abducted by a group of VIPs for a secret mission – the Prime Minister has been struck down with Ringer’s Parethis – a brain disease which has only been cured before by accident – before a major political conference in three weeks’ time. Raynor is asked to try and come up with a cure for the PM. The solution appears to be one in the past, so Raynor travels to get it. An adventure story, admittedly fast-paced, that seems rather contrived when you stop to think about it. 2 out of 5.

[Image by the writer]

The Jennifer, by Keith Roberts

What? Another month, another Keith Roberts story? This is the latest from a magazine favourite, an Anita story that was delayed from last month’s issue. If you like the continuing stories of this young teenage witch, described as “shameless” in the banner, I can’t see why you wouldn’t like this one – even with the still-present annoying Granny. This time Anita and Granny Thompson are on holiday at the seaside when Anita meets a mermaid, much to Granny’s disgust. Anita catches a Serpent ride into the sea… and then the story abruptly stops, as if the writer had run out of time and space. I would have liked more, which is the sign of a good story, although I’m going to dock a point for its abrupt end, which makes it feel like more of a story extract than a story. However, like most of these Anita stories, The Jennifer is light and fun, even if Granny still irks me. 3 out of 5.

A Cave in the Hills, by R. W. Mackelworth

Here’s an author you may recognise from the Carnell New Worlds days. He was last seen in the February 1964 issue of New Worlds with The Unexpected Martyr. This is the story of a bored housewife who in a utopian future finds that her boring husband has ended up in debt and in Debtors prison. Her own future is uncertain, dependent on a visit from the Adjudicator. But bigger issues are at play. This is another story of the value of identity and being different from the majority, themes that Mackelworth has examined before, but manages pretty well. 3 out of 5.

Hunt a Wild Dream, by D. R. Heywood

Another new writer. Do you remember recently when editor Kyril Bonfiglioni said that he was a fan of “time-travel safari” stories? Well, this one starts with a safari, at least.

Our hero of the piece is Manfred ‘Mac’ Cullen, known for “bringing them back alive” (which wins points from me, though I’m not entirely sure whether that statement means animals or tourists!) We follow Cullen as he starts a journey into the African grasslands, which suggests that he’s a more complex character than my stereotype might suggest. However, this one just starts to get interesting and then stops. There’s some ruminations on the spiritual beliefs of the local Nandi tribe, that Cullen knows and understands, but as soon as we hear of some murders that may have happened on lands where the locals refuse to go, the story stops, to be continued next month.

Based on what I’ve read here, this could develop into an interesting and scary story or fizzle to nothing. The jury is out, but based on what I’ve read here I’ll give Hunt A Wild Dream a cautious 3 out of 5 so far.

Summing up Science Fantasy

Although this issue of Science Fantasy is more up-beat than the last, I am a little underwhelmed by it. There’s nothing badly wrong – OK, there’s one story that’s really not good – but it’s a solid issue. And that may be the problem. Most of it is entertaining, but there’s nothing here to really grab my attention like the Burnett Swann serial did in previous months. I’m pretty sure that this is another issue that was worth me buying, yet I’ll have forgotten about by the end of the year. The best stories for me are the Harrison, and even that is not the best of his I’ve read, and the Anita story, which has its issues.

So let’s go to my second issue.

The Second Issue At Hand

As the cover heralds, this month’s New Worlds has a couple of well-known authors: J G Ballard and Arthur C Clarke.

This month’s Editorial, I’m pleased to say, is back to the discussion format that we seemed to have lost last month. It’s another call to arms, a rumination that science fiction is moving away from the traditional space exploration story to ones set on Earth and are more involved with inner space – the mind and its “capacities and defects”. It’s an interesting point, and I guess one which makes the British SF increasingly different to the majority of stories I see in the American magazines. It ends with the point that new young writers must look forward and not back as the values of the Sixties are not those of the 1950’s.


[Art by aTom]

All the King’s Men, by B J Bailey

A stand-alone novelette from Barrington J (BJ) Bailey this month. And I liked it very much, up to the end.

In 2034 the Earth has been invaded and peacefully vanquished by aliens, who whilst keeping control over the locals fight against each other over the Earth territories. The story is told by Smith, the human second in command who with Holath Horan Sorn has kept Britain generally peaceful for the alien King of All Britain, although, unsurprisingly, Sorn and our narrator are seen as traitors by many of the native populace.

The story begins with the fact that Sorn has died and there is an impending power struggle to take his place. Smith is bullied by Hotch to take the human’s side and use the disruption to cause chaos for the King, who has relied heavily on the advice of his human advisors to maintain order. It has in the past made decisions that are mistakes that the humans have had to nullify.

At the same time the King is concerned with a war between himself as King of Britain and other aliens who have taken over Brazil. Much of the story is how Smith tries to fulfil the role of Sorn as intermediary between the alien King, who is aware that his thinking is very different to that of Humans, and at the same time Smith struggles to represent the British people, who are constantly fretting under the control of an alien leader.

So why did I really like this one? The setup is intriguing. It’s an engaging mixture of historical ideas (kingdoms, courts, feuding Kings) in a future setting (spaceships, alien art, electric trains), with a character-based tone that I really engaged with. I was going to give this one 4 stars, until I got to the ending, where the author abruptly gives everything up and the lead character basically says “I don’t know what happened.” 3 out of 5.

Sunjammer, by Arthur C Clarke

I really like Arthur’s clarity of prose and this one doesn’t disappoint, although my enthusiasm is tempered by the fact that it is a reprint of a story first published in the USA as a juvenile story in Boy’s Life in March 1964. Sunjammer is the story of a race around the Solar System using spacecraft that use solar winds for propulsion. I really liked it as a good old-fashioned ‘sense of wonder’ story that Clarke is so good at – but it also shows us what was mentioned in the Editorial, that British SF has changed a lot recently and this one is definitely old school. Like I said last month about another old-style story, Sunjammer’s exciting and I enjoyed it a lot, but it is nothing that would be out of place from the magazines of the 1950’s, and it has been printed before. 3 out of 5.

First Dawn, by Donald Malcolm

Here’s the return of an author from the Carnell Era. Donald Malcolm was last seen in the April 1964 issue of New Worlds, the last issue edited by Carnell. I thought that beyond the reach of storms was OK, if nothing special. I liked this one more, though it is a minor piece describing dawn on an ice planet as seen from the perspective of a mole-like alien. It’s nicely done but like Malcolm's last effort nothing to remember for too long. 2 out of 5.

Dune Limbo, by J G Ballard

To say that this story is much-anticipated is an understatement. If you didn’t know already, JG is making an impact not just here in Britain but also overseas with his strange fiction. He is an author that always makes me think and pushes literary boundaries at the same time. I never know what a story of his is going to say, or indeed how it is going to say it!

Dune Limbo is a little bit of a cheat however, as it is an extract from a bigger work. The Drought (also known as The Burning World to you in the US) is due out as a novel later in the year (hurrah!) and Dune Limbo is from the middle part. This is a little disappointing – how do you feel about starting a novel in the middle? – but there is a lengthy summary of what has gone before at the start.

It is obvious early on that Dune Limbo does have some of the usual Ballard-ian themes though. It is basically about a world in decline, where a global drought has changed the world we know. To this Ballard brings his usual types of characters – strange and often unpleasant. This middle part shows us a story of this new harsh environment, with humans hanging on to existence in a world different to our own.

This sounds like the Ballard of The Drowned World and Equinox. But…. dare I say it, Dune Limbo is slightly more straight-forward, perhaps even less challenging than some of Ballard’s other recent work I’ve read. It feels like there’s elements here I’ve read before. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it means that for me it doesn’t quite have the impact that, say, The Terminal Beach had. Don’t get me wrong – there’s some lovely images created by the prose, for example – but it may not create as much of a stir as some of his earlier work. I liked it, though.

Perhaps it may introduce the author to some new readers previously unfamiliar with Ballard’s work, but I felt a little short-changed as it felt more like an advertisement for his upcoming novel than an actual story. Nevertheless, Ballard’s prose is still seductive, and so for all my grumbles it is still 4 out of 5.

Escape from Evening, by Michael Moorcock

And here’s another story by the Editor. This time it is a novelette from the ongoing series that riffs heavily on the later stages of H G Wells’ The Time Machine. (Well, if you’re going to borrow, why not borrow from the best?)

Escape from Evening is set in a distant future, where a Moonite decides to go and live on the Earth. Despite the Earth people feeling that he would find their decaying society boring, Pepin Hunchback revels in the fact that Earth is real and not artificial like the Moon and decides to explore his new home. His travels lead him to Lanjis Liho, where we pick up points and meet characters we have heard of before back in the story The Time Dweller in the February 1964 issue of New Worlds. Lanjis Liho is the home of the fabled Chrononauts who (as we found out in the last Chrononaut story) can travel through time at will. Pepin attempts to travel back in time to a place where he would feel more in tune with their world, but there are revelations it would be wrong for me to reveal here.

There are parts of this story I liked, and it is quite different to Moorcock’s last outing – though the use of a character named ‘Pepin Hunchback’ and a ‘Hooknosed Wanderer’ may be borrowing from the classics a little too much for comfort. 3 out of 5.

The Uncivil War, by R J Tilley

Another war story in this issue, of a sort. RJ Tilley’s tale is an attempt to lighten the mood a little as we read of a young reporter’s first visit to the notorious Firkl’s Bar. Whilst there he is regaled with a shaggy-dog story about an old space-dog’s secret mission where miscommunication and bad assumptions almost start a war. Tired and overlong. 2 out of 5.

Articles

Mixed throughout the issue this month. There’s a review by Alan Dodd of the film Voyage to the End of the Universe (isn’t current thinking that there is no end?) and a summary of the latest amateur magazines.

In terms of Books this month, there is only one book reviewed, but as has been the trend of late, the review is in detail. Assistant Editor Langdon Jones has a quote for a title guaranteed to grab your attention – "That Is Not Oil, Madam. That Is Jellied Consomme", a quote from the Introduction of The Weird Ones, a collection introduced by H L Gold, who you may also know as the Editor of Galaxy magazine.

The book surprises with its unusual introduction (and is where the titular quote comes from) but is quite frugal otherwise. Frederik Pohl’s Small Lords starts well but soon becomes no more than ‘readable’, Poul Anderson’s Sentiment Inc. the same, whilst Milton Lesser’s Name Your Tiger is the most readable and perhaps predictably Eando Binder’s dated Iron Man the worst. There’s some wincingly awful quotes to make that point too.

The Letters Pages are a pleasing mixture of praise and complaint. Moans about Ron Goulart’s review of Aldiss’ Greybeard, praise for the move to monthly and monstrous book reviews – and still more argument about Langdon Jones’ story I Remember, Anita (reviewed back in issue 144).

Ratings this month for issue 146 (January 1965). Very pleased with this one. Well done to David Rome, one of the more accessible New Wave stories of late – and we have a tie!

Summing up New Worlds

Another strong issue this month, perhaps the one I have consistently enjoyed most in a long time. There’s the usual eclectic mixture – it is mentioned as such in the Editorial – but it was one of the rare issues where I loved pretty much everything, even the stuff I would normally say I didn’t. No religious preaching, no apocalyptic Armageddons, for a change.

Summing up overall

Whilst Science Fantasy has its moments, the New Worlds issue is a clear winner.

And that’s it for this time. Until the next…



[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…]

[December 7, 1963] SF or Not SF?  That Is the Question (They came from mainstream, 1963 edition)


by Victoria Silverwolf

A raft of non-SF SF

Readers of this column with long memories will recall that, at the end of 1962, we looked at major science fiction and fantasy novels and collections published as mainstream fiction.  The most important such work this year was Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, already discussed in detail by our own Vicki Lucas. 

Another was The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis, best known for his novel The Hustler, adapted into a major film a couple of years ago.  Once again, Ms. Lucas has provided a fine analysis of this book.


The novel is obviously about the game of pool.


The movie poster doesn't seem to have much to do with pool.

Here are two more books I think should be checked out by SF fans who might have missed them:

Planet of the Apes, by Pierre Boulle

A French import offers another example of the blurred lines between science fiction and the literary mainstream.  Pierre Boulle is famous for Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï (translated into English as The Bridge over the River Kwai, and source of an award-winning movie, with a slight change in the title.)



Don't ask me how over turned into on

This year the author ventured into outer space, with his novel La Planète des singes, known in the United States as Planet of the Apes.

(My sources in the publishing world tell me that the book will be available in the United Kingdom next year, under the title Monkey Planet.)

Boulle's novel begins in the far future, with a couple traveling among the stars.  They discover an old manuscript.  This takes us into a flashback, set in the relatively near future.  Three men journey to an Earth-like planet orbiting the star Betelgeuse.  They discover that intelligent, civilized apes inhabit the world, along with naked, speechless human beings treated as lower animals.  Gorillas are police and military; orangutans are priests and politicians; chimpanzees are scientists and technicians.  The apes are at the same technological level as Twentieth Century Earth, with cities, automobiles, and firearms.  They even smoke tobacco.  The three astronauts meet different fates.  It all leads up to a twist ending.  The author's intent is satiric, showing the reader how little difference there is between people and other primates.  The story may not be very plausible, but it captures the reader's imagination.  Special notice should go to Xan Fielding, who translated both of Boulle's novels into very readable English. 

Three stars.

Glide Path, by Arthur C. Clarke

We've seen how mainstream authors venture into science fiction, sometimes successfully.  It doesn't often happen the other way around.  This year Arthur C. Clarke proved he is just as comfortable writing about the past as he is about the future, with his novel Glide Path.

The story takes place in England during the Second World War.  The protagonist is a young officer in the Royal Air Force.  He is a technician, working on a program known as Ground Controlled Descent.  GCD allows a pilot to land in heavy fog.  Using radar, a controller on the ground talks the pilot down.  The plot is episodic, involving both the new technology and daily life in the RAF.  The author creates a convincing portrait of the time and place, based on his own experiences.  Unlike most war novels, the book lacks scenes of battle.  This may disappoint readers looking for thrilling action.  The most dramatic sequence happens late in the story, when huge amounts of fuel fill the night sky with towering flames, in an attempt to burn off the fog. 

Three stars.

Boulle's science fiction novel is likely to be marketed to readers of mainstream fiction, just as Clarke's war story is likely to be promoted to science fiction fans.  Let us avoid relying solely on arbitrary divisions in literature, and instead keep our eyes open for good reading, no matter how it might be labelled.




[April 15, 1963] Second Time Around (June 1963 Worlds of Tomorrow)


by Victoria Silverwolf

It's déjà vu all over again. — attributed to Yogi Berra

A couple of months ago the first issue of Worlds of Tomorrow offered half of an enjoyable, if juvenile, novel by Arthur C. Clarke, half a dozen poor-to-fair stories as filler, and one excellent work of literature.  The second issue is almost exactly the same, except for the fact that one of the six mediocre stories has been replaced by a mediocre article.

The Star-Sent Knaves, by Keith Laumer

We begin with a madcap farce from the creator of the popular Retief stories.  Great works of art disappear from locked rooms, without any signs of tampering.  The hero hides inside a vault full of valuable paintings and waits for the thieves to show up.  They appear from nowhere, inside a strange device.  The protagonist assumes it's a time machine.  Thus begins a wild chase, involving criminals, aliens, and humanoids from other dimensions.  The pace never lets up, and the story provides moderate amusement.  Three stars.

The End of the Search, by Damon Knight

This is a very brief story.  In the far future, a man searches for the final specimen of the last species that humanity has wiped out.  The plot is somewhat opaque and requires careful reading.  Many will be able to predict the story's twist ending, and some will not care for its mannered style.  I found it troubling and haunting.  Three stars.

Spaceman on a Spree, by Mack Reynolds

A future world government brings peace and prosperity to the planet.  A minimum guaranteed income for everyone means that nobody has to work to survive.  A system resembling the military draft selects people at random for various jobs, depending on their skills.  In return for their labor, they earn a higher income.  The protagonist is the only qualified astronaut.  (The implication is that the universal welfare system has made humanity less interested in dangerous exploration of the solar system.) When he completes his last mandatory mission, he plans to retire on his savings.  In order to keep the space program from dying out, two officials scheme to make him lose all his wealth, so he will have to return to service.  They way in which they do this offers no surprises.  The ending is something of an unpleasant shock.  The author's portrait of a semi-utopian future is interesting.  Three stars.

The Prospect of Immortality, by R. C. W. Ettinger

This is an excerpt from a privately printed book.  It discusses the possibility of freezing people at the time of death, in the hope that future medical technology will be able to revive them.  The concept is a familiar one to readers of science fiction, and the author offers few new insights.  Two stars.

A Guest of Ganymede, by C. C. MacApp

Aliens establish a station on Ganymede.  In exchange for large amounts of a metal that they require, they will inject a human being with a virus that cures all ailments.  They absolutely forbid anyone to take this cure-all outside the station.  A criminal takes a blind man to the aliens.  While they restore his sight, the crook plots to smuggle the virus to Earth.  Things don't work out well.  This is a fairly effective, if rather grim, science fiction story.  Three stars.

The Totally Rich , by John Brunner

A prolific British author offers a story about immense wealth and its limitations.  The narrator is a scientist and inventor who works on a project in a quiet Spanish village.  He soon finds out that a woman with virtually limitless resources carefully manipulated him into accepting this position for her own reasons.  Even the village is an artificial one, created only to give him a place where he could work without distractions.  Richly characterized and elegantly written, this is a compelling tale of love, death, and obsession. It reminds me a bit of the work of J. G. Ballard, although the author's voice is wholly his own.  As a bonus, the story features striking illustrations by the great Virgil Finlay.  Five stars.

Cakewalk to Gloryanna, by L. J. Stecher, Jr.

A spaceman delivers valuable plants from one planet to another.  Multiple complications ensue.  I didn't find this comedy very amusing.  The detailed ecology of the plants is mildly interesting.  Two stars.

People of the Sea (Part 2 of 2), by Arthur C. Clarke

The adventures of our boy hero on a small island near the Great Barrier Reef continue in the conclusion of this short novel.  In this installment, his scientist mentor begins experiments to see if killer whales can be convinced to stop eating dolphins.  A hurricane strikes the island, destroying its medical supplies and radio equipment.  The boy must make a long and dangerous journey across the sea, with the help of two dolphins, in order to save the life of the scientist, who is dying of pneumonia.  Although episodic, and with some major themes brought up and never resolved, this is an enjoyable adventure story.  Young readers in particular will appreciate the author's clear, readable style.  Four stars.

Unlike love, as Bing Crosby reminds us, Worlds of Tomorrow may not be better the second time around, but it's at least as good.




[February 15, 1963] New Kid in Town (April 1963 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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


by Victoria Silverwolf

Frederik Pohl must not be busy enough editing Galaxy and If.  Now he's added another bimonthly magazine to his roster with the appearance of the first issue of Worlds of Tomorrow.

There hasn't been a new American science fiction magazine on the newsstands for about five years, and none of them survived for very long.  (Anybody remember Saturn?) It's been more than a decade since any magazine of SF which is still published in the USA was launched.  If and Fantastic are the most recent success stories. 
Given the death of so many periodicals in the field over the last ten years, the publishers are taking a risk.  Let's take a look at the contents of the premiere issue and see if the quality of fiction justifies their hazardous venture.

People of the Sea (Part 1 of 2) , by Arthur C. Clarke

The magazine begins in fine form with a new novel from this talented British writer.  Set in the middle of the next century, it follows the adventures of a teenage boy as he stows away on a hovercraft bound for Australia.  Barely surviving the sinking of the vessel, he winds up on a small island near the Great Barrier Reef.  He encounters scientists who can communicate with dolphins, and plays an important part in their project.  The first section of this installment is full of fast-paced action.  The second section is mostly a travelogue of this part of the Pacific.  However, the reader's interest never fades, because the author's descriptions are always fascinating.  Clarke obviously knows and loves the Great Barrier Reef, and he writes about the sea as compellingly as he does about space.  One minor quibble is the fact that this novel seems intended for younger readers.  Much like Heinlein's so-called juveniles, it is likely that adults will enjoy it as well.  Four stars.

X Marks the Pedwalk, by Fritz Leiber
This is a brief account of a future war between pedestrians and drivers.  The government steps in to keep the level of violence within certain limits.  Although Leiber is incapable of writing a bad sentence, it's a very minor piece.  Two stars.

The Long Remembered Thunder, by Keith Laumer

A government agent investigates a mysterious transmission coming from a small town.  It involves a recluse who is nearly a century old and the woman he loved at the turn of the century.  The story begins as a realistic tale of intrigue, but eventually becomes an account of a vast conflict across dimensions.  It held my interest, but the climax was too fantastic for my taste.  Three stars.

Where the Phph Pebbles Go, by Miriam Allen deFord

Aliens play a game of throwing rocks.  Some of the stones escape their low-gravity planet and wind up landing on other worlds.  They realize this might draw unwanted attention, so they come up with a plan to eliminate the problem.  This comic tale is inoffensive, but not very amusing.  The author tosses in several silly words like the one in the title.  Two stars.

Third Planet, by Murray Leinster

This story takes place in a future where humanity easily travels hundreds of light-years, but the Cold War is still going on.  The Communists have the upper hand, as they are willing to start a nuclear war if the West ever refuses to give in to their demands.  While this is happening, a starship discovers a planet much like Earth, but with no life.  The reason for this involves a device located on another planet in the same solar system.  The alien technology threatens to destroy the Earth, but also promises to save it.  The author's treatment of the Reds is heavy-handed, depicting them as gleefully plotting to destroy the opposing side without mercy.  There's mention of an implausible scientific law which states that all solar systems must be similar to our own.  Two stars.

Heavenly Gifts, by Aaron L. Kolom

A housekeeper who works at a facility where scientists are attempting to contact other planets uses their equipment to broadcast what she thinks of as prayers.  She asks for simple things like an electric blanket, and they miraculously appear from nowhere.  Meanwhile, radioactive materials begin to disappear from Earth, leading to panic in the governments of the USA and the USSR.  This is a trivial comedy with a weak ending.  Two stars.

The Girl in His Mind, by Robert F. Young

A man purchases the services of an alien (but very humanoid) prostitute.  She has a human girl living in her home, purchased as a slave when the child lost her parents.  After this opening scene, the reader enters the bizarre landscape of the man's mind, where he wanders through scenes of his past while pursuing a woman whom he believes murdered her father.  Meanwhile, three women from his childhood chase him.  The transition between these sections of the story is disorienting, but we eventually find out what's really happening.  Like many stories from this author, the plot involves a man's obsessive love for a woman.  It's strange enough to hold one's attention, but may be too Freudian for many.  Three stars.

To See the Invisible Man, by Robert Silverberg

We end on a high note with this excellent story from a prolific author whose work has not often been distinguished.  He creates a future society where a man guilty of the crime of being cold-hearted is sentenced to a year of symbolic invisibility.  A mark on his forehead warns all who see him that they must act as if he does not exist.  The author goes into a great deal of detail as to how this strange form of punishment might work.  At first, the man enjoys the ability to commit petty crimes without consequences.  He soon discovers the many disadvantages of invisibility, from the fact that he will not receive medical treatment, even if he is dying, to the intense loneliness of complete isolation.  At the end of the story, he learns to reach out to his fellow human beings, even at great cost.  This is a unique and compelling tale, with an important point to make.  Five stars.

If the editor continues to publish stories of the quality of People of the Sea and To See the Invisible Man (while filling up pages with fair-to-middling work), we may still be reading Worlds of Tomorrow when we are living in the world of tomorrow.

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