Tag Archives: Brian W. Aldiss

Magazine/Anthology

[June 4, 1963] Booked passage (July 1963 IF)

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by Gideon Marcus

How quickly the futuristic becomes commonplace.  Just two years ago, I marveled about how fast one can cross the oceans by jet.  Now, on the eve of another trip to Japan (we really have joined the Jet Set, haven't we?) I look at the flight itinerary and grumble.  Why must we stop in Hawaii?  That adds several hours to the trip — it'll take more than half a day to get from LAX to Haneda.

Spoiled rotten, I tell you.

Speaking of travel stories, a fresh crop of science fiction digests has hit my mailbox.  Many of them will be joining me on my trip to the Orient, but I finished one of them, the July 1963 IF, pre-flight.  All of them feature some element of star-hopping, and so this issue sets a fine mood as we embark on our latest journey:

That Notebook Again, by Theodore Sturgeon

I find it interesting that editor Fred Pohl has gotten Ted Sturgeon to write his editorials for him.  I'm not complaining — it's always nice to see Sturgeon in print in any capacity.  This time around, he treats us to a number of technological proposals, a wishlist of inventions that should be right around the corner, given a little interest and effort.  I found his idea for a home TV-tape camera and player particularly titilating (and not farfetched — my nephew already audio-tapes television shows onto reel-to-reel).

The Reefs of Space (Part 1 of 3), by Jack Williamson and Frederik Pohl

A good third of the issue is given to a new serial (illustrated on the cover — EMSH is big in this issue, though I also like the work of Nodel, who is new to me).  Hundreds of years from now, Earth's population is highly regimented, its economy utterly socialized, under the authority of The Machine and its master Plan.  Dissent is punished by incarceration and the forced wearing of an explosive ring around one's neck.  Further disobedience results in one's "salvage" (dissasembly into component body parts for the use of others). 

Steve Ryeland is an experimental physicist, a touchy job to have when scientific advancement poses both boon and risk for the Plan.  At Reef's beginning, he has been a prisoner for three years, unaware of his crime, but consistently questioned about "spacelings," "fusorians," "reefs of space," and "jetless drive" — terms about which he knows nothing.  Adding to his confusion is a three-day gap in his memory.

And then comes the urgent summons — the Machine will have Ryeland discover the secret of the reactionless drive, and soon, or be sent to the Body Banks.  For at the edge of the solar system lies a biological construct, the tremendous analog of a coral reef created by organisms that live on interstellar hydrogen.  Not only does this alien structure pose a hypothetical threat to the Plan, but it affords sanctuary to a more existential opponent — the revolutionary-in-exile, Donderevo.  Can Ryeland accomplish his mission in time to save his hide and human society?  Is such a goal even worth fighting for?

It's an interesting concept for a novel, but the execution leaves a bit to be desired.  It suffers from the same plodding repetitiveness as Simak's concurrent serial in Galaxy, but betrays none of Simak's literary expertise.  The writing is simple, uninspired, and the scientific concepts (including Hoyle's steady-state theory, which I find uncompelling) feel dated.  Two stars, but with cautious hopes for the next installment.

The Faces Outside, by Bruce McAllister

Here is a short tale of a married couple, the last of humanity, mutated to live in a large alien aquarium with a host of other terrestrial life forms.  The Terrans have the last laugh when the male of the pair develops psychic powers and compels the aliens to commit mass suicide.

McAllister is the first and weaker of the two new authors featured in this issue.  His writing shows potential, though.  Two stars, trying hard for three.

Mightiest Qorn, by Keith Laumer

Another IF, another Retief story.  This time, the omnipotent but much-suffering Terran agent is tapped to investigate the sudden reappearance of the fearsome Qorn, a race of dreadnought-wielding, glory-seeking warriors who appear to have the power of teleportation.

Unfortunately, the Retief shtick is starting to wear thin (arguably, it raveled a while ago), and it's really time Laumer focused his attention to the more worthy efforts we know he's capable of.  The bright spot is that Retief's nominal boss, Magnan, is now pretty game to do whatever his "underling" says.  Some might call that progress.  Two stars.

In the Arena, by Brian W. Aldiss

Given up?  Take heart — it's all better from here.  Prominent British writer, Aldiss, gives us another man-and-woman pair in the thrall of aliens.  In this case, it is two gladiators performing for a race of insectoids who have conquered the Earth (but not all of humanity).  Call it Spartacus for the 30th Century.  It's a nicely written trifle.  Three stars.

Down to the Worlds of Men, by Alexei Panshin

14-year old Mia Havero is part of a society of human space-dwellers, resident of one of the eight galaxy-trotting Ships that represent the remains of Earth's high technology.  She and 29 other young teens are dropped on a primitive colony as part of a rite of passage.  There is always an element of danger to this month-long ordeal, but this episode has a new wrinkle: the planet's people are fully aware (and resentful) of the Ships, and they plan to fight back.  Can Mia survive her coming of age and stop an insurrection?

Panshin hits it right out of the park with his first story, capturing the voice of a young almost-woman and laying out a rich world and an exciting adventure.  Finally, I've got something I can recommend to the Young Traveler.  Four stars, verging on five.

The Shadow of Wings, by Robert Silverberg

The last story introduces Caldwell, an expert in the dead language of Kethlani.  He is called back from a family vacation when a real live Kethlan shows up, bearing the banner of peace.  Can the linguist overcome his revulsion of the alien's form and forge a partnership between the two species?

This piece could have been a throwaway save for Silvergerg's careful drawing of the Caldwell's personality.  I found myself wishing the story had been longer — certainly, it could have taken some of the pages away from the stale stories of the first half.  Four stars.

Like my impending vacation, this month's issue starts with a hard slog but ends with great reward.  I'd say that's the right order of things.  See you in Tokyo!

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Magazine/Anthology

[May 18, 1963] (June 1963 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Every so often, you get a perfect confluence of events that makes life absolutely rosy.  In Birmingham, Alabama, the segregationist forces have caved in to the boycott and marching efforts of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  Two days ago, astronaut Gordo Cooper completed a day-and-a-half in orbit, putting America within spitting distance of the Russians in the Space Race.  And this month, Avram Davidson has turned out their first superlative issue of F&SF since he took the editorial helm last year. 

Check out the June 1963 Fantasy and Science Fiction and see if you don't agree:

No Truce With Kings, by Poul Anderson

Centuries after The Bombs Fell, the North American continent has scratched its way back to the early 20th Century, technology-wise, but enlightened feudalism remains the order of the day.  Kings begins on the eve of civil war in the Pacific States of America after a coup has placed an expansionist government in charge in San Francisco bent on reestablishing Manifest Destiny.  Colonel McKenzie of the Sierra Military Command must fight to preserve the old confederacy in the face of superior forces as well as the belligerent "neutrality" of the Esps — communal mystics who seem to have developed terrible psychic weapons.

Don't worry — the story really does belong in this magazine, and not Analog!

Anderson, of course, has been a pleasure to read for many years (since his inexplicable dip in the late '50s.) Kings is a nuanced, character-driven war story filled with lurid descriptions of battles and strategic considerations.  It's a bit like The High Crusade played straight, actually.  Four stars for the general reader, five if combat is your bag.

Pushover Planet, by Con Pederson

This piece starts well enough, with a pair of dialect-employing space miners landing on an uncommonly idyllic world and meeting an uncommonly friendly alien.  The ending, on the other hand, is pure ironic corn, and on the whole, the story feels like an idea Bob Sheckley rejected as not worth his time to write.  I don't know who Pederson is any more than Davidson does (apparently, the Editor doesn't even know where to send payment for this story written nearly a decade ago).  In any event, I don't think the magazine got its money's worth.  Two stars.

Starlesque, by Walter H. Kerr

About an alien stripper who takes it all off.  Not worth your time.  Two stars.

Green Magic, by Jack Vance

Oh, but Vance's latest work absolutely is!  Dig this: beyond our world lie the realms of White and Black magic, each featuring the powers and denizens you might expect.  But beyond them, and possessing powers more abstract and strange are the realms of Purple and Green magic (and further still, those of the indescribable colors, rawn and pallow).  One Howard Fair would follow in his Uncle Gerald's footsteps to become adept in the wonders of Green magic, no matter the warnings from a pair of its citizens.

A brilliant, unique piece that lasts just long enough and grips throughout.  Five stars.

The Light That Failed!, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor continues with his series on the luminiferous ether, this time discussing the famous Michelson-Morley experiment.  This test was supposed to show Earth's "absolute speed" through the cosmic medium.  Instead, it disproved the ether's existence and set the stage for Einstein's and Planck's modern conceptions of the universe.  Vital stuff to know.  Four stars.

The Weremartini, by Vance Aandahl

Young Vance Aandahl (no relation to Jack Vance) has produced his first readable story in a long time, about an epicurian English professor whose alternate form is exactly as it says on the tin.  Weird, disturbing, but not bad.  Three stars.

Bokko-Chan, by Hoshi Shinnichi

A barkeep builds the perfect assistant — a beautiful but empty-headed robot woman to occupy the attentions (and tabs) of the tavern's patrons.  Billed as the first Japanese SF story to appear in English, it reads like a barbed children's story.  I suspect it's better in the original language (and I'd love to get a copy, since I could read it — I actually was aware of Hoshi-san before he appeared in these pages), but it's not bad, even in translation.  Three stars.

Tis the Season to Be Jelly, by Richard Matheson

Only Matheson could successfully manage this tale of post-atomic, mutated hicks.  Stupidly brilliant, or brilliantly stupid.  You decide.  Three stars.

Another Rib, by John J. Wells and Marion Zimmer Bradley

Just 16 men, the crew of humanity's first interstellar expedition, are all that remain of homo sapiens after catastrophe claims our mother star.  All hope seems lost for our species…until a native of Proxima Centauri offers to surgically alter some of the spacemen, expressing their latent female reproductive organs.

Rib is an interesting exploration of what it means to be a man, and the varying degree of push required (if any!) for a person to transition from one gender to another.  A bold piece.  Four stars.

There Are No More Good Stories About Mars Because We Need No More Good Stories About Mars, by Brian Aldiss

Things wrap up with a bitter poem about how science has ruined Mars for SF, but who cares — we'll always have Barsoom.  Three stars.

The resulting issue is a solid house made of the finest bricks albeit rather low quality mortar.  Good G-d, even Davidson's editorial openings are decent now.  Maybe he reads my column…

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Magazine/Anthology

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

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by Mark Yon

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

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

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

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

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

Onto this month’s New Worlds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

To the other stories.

Confession, by Mr. John Rackham

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

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

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

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

The Jaywalkers, by Mr. Russ Markham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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Magazine/Anthology

[January 10, 1963] (February 1963 Galaxy)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Gideon Marcus

The Traveler family has now been on the island of Kaua'i (in the newest state of the Union, Hawai'i) for five days, and I can feel the shackles of the mainland loosening.  We are staying in a vacant worker cottage on the Waimea Sugar Plantation, guests of one of the manager's, and it's just lovely.  Timeless beauty surrounds us.  There's no question but that this state is destined to be a tremendous tourist attraction some day – but I hope this island never loses its virgin charm.

It's hard to describe the relaxation that comes with visiting this sub-tropical paradise.  In the main room of our three-room cottage, the Young Traveler plucks away at her ukelele, singing Elvis' recent Hawai'ian hit, I can't help falling in love with you, and then the apt Jamaican Farewell popularized by Belafonte not long ago.  Last night, we were guests of the Gaylord family at their Kilohana estate.  After a sumptuous meal of meticulously prepared fish and delectable desserts (including a half-coconut), we dallied in the Sitting Room as one of the family played Scott Joplin tunes on the piano. 

Of course, even in this Westernmost bastion of America, modern civilization is encroaching.  We flew into the new small but international airport at Lihue (and commerce is already relocating from its traditional center here at Waimea to that burgeoning mini-city).  The grocery chain, Safeway, is building a supermarket on the island. 

And then there are the relics of the Mainland we've brought with us in the form of the books packed in our suitcases.  The Young Traveler has been devouring Dale Carnegie's classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People (Watch out World!), while I have just finished this month's Galaxy.

Its editor, Fred Pohl, has spilled much ink over the role of the science fiction writer.  He insists that our job is not to predict the future, and indeed, we're pretty bad at such things, statistically speaking.  Rather than saying, "This is what will happen," we really say, "This is what will happen if."

The timing is no coincidence.  The February 1963 Galaxy is filled with "what will happen ifs," — have a look:

Home from the Shore, by Gordon R. Dickson

Dickson's story asks, "What will happen if the nascent trend of undersea living is carried to its logical conclusion?"  The result is, as we've seen previously explored in The Underwater City, a nation of humans living underwater.  Living in Castle-Homes and Small-Homes on the ocean floor, some six million people, enhanced by genetics and technology, thrive alongside their dolphin companions.

It is an uneasy existence, the Landers resenting the independence of their former brethren (who they'd hoped to use primarily as stock for space exploration).  As Home from the Shore begins, one of the sea people's leaders, Johnny Joya is defecting from the astronaut corps to rejoin his people.  It turns out that the precipitous action is the spark that provokes war between the Landers and the mermen.  Willy-nilly, this fight will catapult the sea people to the next phase of their existence.

Dickson pens a vivid piece, but it feels more prologue than complete tale, and the details are a bit too oblique to follow in places.  In particular, I'm never quite sure just how life underwater works or how it's sustainable.  I found myself stalling at the beginning a number of times.  I think Shore earns three stars, but just barely.

Think Blue, Count Two, by Cordwainer Smith

This latest tale of the "Instrumentality," Smith's unique far future, explores the ramifications of centuries-long space flight given an unchanging temperament for humans.  How will we keep our sanity, our morality, when faced with the yawning vastness of space, divorced from the society that keeps us civilized.

Think Blue, Count Two is a sequel, of sorts, to The Lady who Sailed the Soul, which introduced us to the concept of interstellar sailing ships and deep frozen passengers.  This latest edition stars an ingenue colonist, chosen solely for her beauty, and details how she manages the increasingly neurotic attentions of her two male co-passengers.

It's another beautiful Smith tale, but Think Blue is less about what the protagonist does but what happens around and to her.  Riveting but somehow unsatisfying stuff.  Four stars.

For Your Information: First Flight by Rocket Power, by Willy Ley

To project where we're going, one has to know where we've come from.  This month's science department traces down the very first rocket powered human flight and then describes the important ones since.  Three stars.

(Anyone want to lay odds on whether the Russians will beat Gordo Cooper to be the first person in space in 1963?)

Comic Inferno, by Brian W. Aldiss

Aldiss makes a bold prediction in this story of robots and people: As life gets easy, our breeding instinct will wane, and a hundred years from now, the world will be a fraction as populated.  Mechanical people will fill in the gaps, being our servants and our underclass.  But what if the romen tire of their inferior position?

There are great concepts in here, but Comic Inferno is rather rough sledding, what with its Extremely British satirical style.  Much like the Dickson, it takes time to get into, but in retrospect, the trip was rewarding.  Three stars.

Pollony Undiverted, by Sydney J. Van Scyoc

Here is another journey into an indolent future, in which all needs are met save for the ones that matter most – those that give us emotional satisfaction.  Van Scyoc gives us a tale from a feminine perspective that captures the frivolity of existence and the fleeting nature of happiness in a world made infinitely small by teleportation.  Three stars.

Day of Truce, by Clifford D. Simak

Did you just put up a fence to keep tykes from riding their bicycles and scooters on your property?  Maybe a menacing "No Trespassing" sign?  What if these are the first unplanned shots in an escalating war between the Homeowners and the Punks?

Simak writes a fun, barbed story about a battle deep in the course of the conflict at a time when a man's home is truly a castle, and the teenage delinquents are armed with time bombs and Molotov cocktails.  Four stars.

The Bad Life, by Jerome Bixby

You may remember Bixby from his The Twilight Zone story, It's a Good Life.  His latest story shares no similarities but for the titles and the overwhelming sense of feeling trapped in a hellish situation.

John Thorens is a do-gooder, a Hand of the Helping Hands dispatched to the Jovian artificial moon/penal colony called Limbo to bring solace to the criminals living there.  The extrapolation in this piece is, "How would a first generation Australia in space treat a well-meaning vistor?" 

Not well.  An intellectual among boors, a civilized man among animals, Thorens is hounded and beaten to the point of insanity. 

This is a brutal story, difficult to read, made compelling by Bixby's sheer "writerliness" (as one of my readers might put it).  Not recommended for the easily disturbed, and perhaps Bixby overdoes the writing by 10%.  But it'll sure stay with you.  Three stars. 

And that's that.  A dense read, a hard read at times, but in many ways a rewarding one.  None of the futures depicted are pleasant ones, but they offer valuable signposts of potholes to avoid on the path of progress.

Next up – John Boston and this month's Amazing!

[P.S. If you registered for WorldCon this year, please consider nominating Galactic Journey for the "Best Fanzine" Hugo.  Check your mail for instructions…]




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Magazine/Anthology

[September 18, 1962] On the Precipice (October 1962 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Gideon Marcus

Are the times changing?

Summer threatens to change to Fall, and the kids are going off to high school and college.  Is this just another turn of the wheel, or are we on the verge of something different, what Historian of Science Thomas Kuhn might call a new "paradigm?"

I had this feeling once before.  In '53, right after Korea, and after Stalin died, America seemed poised on the edge of an unprecedented era of stability.  Well, really stagnation.  The pendulum had swung heavily in the direction of conservatism.  Black soldiers had come home from the war and were being treated worse than ever.  Ditto women, who had for a while gotten to enjoy some of the rights of men while they were off to war.  The swing music from the prior two decades had gotten overripe and shmaltzy, only somewhat mitigated by the western, blues, and latin music I was able to tune into on nights with clear reception.  The one truly bright spot was science fiction, which had been booming since the late '40s.

Then rock and roll hit, and boy was it a breath of fresh air.  Sure, you couldn't hear Black songs on White stations, but there's no color bar on the airwaves.  Fragile 78 records gave way to durable 45s.  The vacuum tube started to step aside for the transistor.  We were building the missiles that would soon blast us to orbit.  At the same time, sf started to wane.  We went from forty magazines to six over the course of the decade. 

This, then, has been the recent paradigm.  Here we are nine years later, but Elvis and the Everley Brothers still dominate the airwaves.  A new President has asked us what we could do for our country, not what it could do for us; tasking us to go to the Moon before the decade is out, but Black men must still fight even for the right to go to school or ride a bus in much of the nation.  There are now ten thousand Russian troops in Cuba and ten thousand American soldiers in South Vietnam, but are these transitory brush fires or the tip of a belligerent iceberg?

Are the 1960s going to be a continuation of the 1950s?  Or are we overdue for a new epoch?  You tell me.  I'm no soothsayer. 

I suppose in one way, the shift has already happened.  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has become quite different since new editor Avram Davidson took over earlier this year.  It's not bad, exactly, but it has meandered even further into the literary zone.  This has rendered one of my favorite mags almost unreadable on occasion.  The October 1962 issue does not have this problem, for the most part, but it's not great.

Enough dilly-dallying.  Here's the review:

A Kind of Artistry, by Brian W. Aldiss

The son of a baroque and decadent far future Terra journeys across the galaxy to make contact with a most unusual alien intelligence.  Upon his glorious return, he must decide if he has the strength to break the stultifying conditioning of his inbred upringing.

Aldiss wishes he were Cordwainer Smith, and he just isn't.  Nevertheless, despite some rough patches, there are some good ideas here.  The extraterrestrial has a wildly implausible biochemistry, but the meeting of species is genuinely gripping.  Three stars.

There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, by Robert F. Young

Overpopulation continues to be the theme of many of our current science fiction stories.  A common concept is the idea that excess population can be shipped to the stars, but as any student of history knows, neither England, Spain, France, Portugal, nor any other country ever became empty as a result of colonization.  We can't expect spaceships to change that equation. 

Neither does Young.  His story is cute, if one-note, holding our interest for as long as the idea can be stretched.  Three stars.

Twenty-Four Hours in a Princess's Life, With Frogs, by Don White

What if all the fairy-tale princesses were pals, all living together in Hans Christian Andersonville with intersecting storybook plotlines?  Aurora, Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel… the whole neurotic gang of them.  Don White explores that possiblity in a clever, funny piece that makes me hope that Disney never tries to combine its franchises.  What a mess that would be!  Four stars.

Inquest in Kansas (A Modern American Ballad) by Hyacinth Hill

The unknown Ms. Hill (I understand she may be Virginia Anderson) has a poetic piece about a woman seduced from her home and family by a unicorn.  Whether you find it horrifying or liberating depends on how you infer her life history.  Two stars, as it didn't grab me.

Measure My Love, by Mildred Clingerman

What a fascinating, almost excellent, but ultimately disappointing piece this was.  Dodie is a youngish spinster whose actress cousin, Althea, has a penchant for melodramatic love affairs.  When Althea's irresistible romantic nature meets the immovable, unwinnable affections of a married man, Dodie takes her cousin to the local witch, Maude, to cure her of her of broken heart.  Turns out the "witch" is more than meets the eye, but it's an open question whether or not her panoply of equipment can remedy Althea's condition. 

Clingerman is one of the most seasoned veterans our field, and her work has a pleasantly old-fashioned tone to it — appropriate both for the era (just post-war) and the protagonist portrayed.  The story moves you along the plot, slowly unfolding things to maintain your interest.  What hurt Measure for me was that, near the end, Maude mentions that she might also be able to cure Dodie's "little problem," hitherto undiscussed but strongly hinted at.  But then the problem turns out to be something completely different from what I expected (given the close relationship of the cousins, and Dodie's unending patience where things Althea-related are concerned). 

I wonder if I guessed wrong, or if the ending was changed at the editor's insistence for being a bit too…unconventional.  Either way, it turned a four-star story into a three-star one.  I'm probably being unfair, but unsatisfying endings sit poorly with me.

Slow Burn, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor touches on one of my favorite scientific topics — the theory of Phlogiston and how its research eventually led to the discovery of oxygen.  It's one of those fascinating models that almost but not quite got things right, like impetus theory in the 13th Century ultimately led to the concept of momentum.  I mentioned Kuhn's "paradigms" earlier, and Phlogiston is a perfect example of the concept.  Four stars.

The Unfortunate Mr. Morky, by Vance Aandahl

One of my readers once said that Mr. Aandahl really wants to be Ray Bradbury.  Surely, there must be loftier goals.  In any event, this incomprehensible piece about the connection between time travel and the profusion of milquetoast personalities isn't worth your time.  On the other hand, it's only a few pages, so you might as well see why I gave it only one star (and perhaps you'll disagree with me).

The Journey of Joenes (Part 1 of 2), by Robert Sheckley

At long last, Bob Sheckley has come back to us.  It's my understanding that he's been writing mainstream mysteries and such, which probably pays better than sf.  His latest work, which Editor Davidson says is a hacked up version of the novelized form due out later this year, follows the adventures of Joenes, an American ex-power engineer raised in Polynesia.  His pilgrimage to the Mainland to find his destiny is a series of satirical vignettes told from a foreign and futuristic perspective that turns the story into a kind of dark Canterbury Tales.

It's a fun read, though I hope there's light at the end of the tunnel.  Sheckley is better at short stories than novels, so the format plays to his strengths.  I do have to wonder why F&SF prints chopped up novels to fill up half of two consecutive magazines.  I expect that of Ace Doubles, not a high-end digest.  Three stars so far.  We'll see what happens.

And so we find ourselves on the other side of another issue.  On the face of things, it seems to reinforce the trend that F&SF is in a new and duller era.  Will we soon have enough data points to know if the larger world has changed, too?

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Magazine/Anthology

[March 28, 1962] Paradise Lost (April 1962 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

I used to call The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction "dessert."  Of all the monthly sf digests, it was the cleverest, the one most willing to take risks, and the most enjoyable reading.  Over the past two years, I've noticed a slow but decided trend into the realm of "literary quality."  In other words, it's not how good the stories are, or how fun the reading – they must be experimental and erudite to have any merit.  And if you don't get the pieces, well, run off to Analog where the dumb people live.

A kind of punctuation mark has been added to this phenomenon.  Avram Davidson, that somber-writing intellectual with an encyclopedic knowledge and authorial credits that take up many sheets of paper, has taken over as editor of F&SF from Robert Mills.  Five years ago, I might have cheered.  But Davidson's path has mirrored that of the magazine he now helms: a descent into literary impenetrability.  Even his editorial prefaces to the magazine's stories are off-putting and contrived. 

I dunno.  You be the judge.

Gifts of the Gods, by Jay Williams

The premise of Gifts isn't bad: aliens come from the stars to find Earth's most advanced nation, and it turns out they're the most primitive, technologically.  It's three shades too heavy on the sermon, and it fails by its own rules (i.e. one can lambast states as a whole for not being perfectly self-actualized, but surely there are a thousand qualifying people within any given country that fulfill the ET's requirements).  But then, these aliens seem to have shown up just to rub our noses in it.  Advanced indeed.  Two stars.

The Last Element, by Hugo Correa

Editor Davidson touts Sr. Correa as a brilliant find from Chile.  Sadly, this meandering piece involving (I guess) space soldiers who are undone in their attempts to mine a psychotropic mineral from a distant planet, feels incompletely translated from the Spanish.  It reads like an Italian sf film views.  Two stars.

The End of Evan Essant… ?, by Sylvia Edwards

A cute piece, more The Twilight Zone than anything else, about a fellow who is so determined to be a nebbish that he psychosomatically disappears.  It's no great shakes, but at least it has a through line and is written in English.  Boy, my standards have dropped.  Three stars.

Shards, by Brian W. Aldiss

The editor advises that one give this story time to make sense lest you judge it prematurely.  He has a point.  This piece innovatively describes a traumatic out-of-body experience, and when you know the context, it's not bad.  On the other hand, the context is laid out with surprising artlessness especially given the effort Aldiss puts into the first part (which is only readable in hindsight).  Three stars for effort, though your meter may hover at one star through most of the actual experience.

The Kit-Katt Club, by John Shepley

Something about a young, serious boy who abandons his starlet mother's dissipated hotel life to frequent a bar with a literal menagerie of clientele.  I didn't understand this story, nor did I much like it.  Maybe I'm just bitter at being made to look foolish.  Two stars.

To Lift a Ship, by Kit Reed

One of the few bright lights of this issue is Reed's take on love, hope, greed, and despair involving two test co-pilots of a psionically driven aircraft.  I love how vividly we see through the eyes of the protagonist, and the subtlety (but not to the point of obtuseness!) with which the story unfolds.  Four stars.

Garvey's Ghost, by Robert Arthur

I haven't seen much from Arthur lately.  His stories have all been pleasant, fanciful fare and this one, about a most contrary ghost and the grandson he haunts, is more of the same.  Three stars.

Vintage Wine, by Doris Pitkin Buck

The English professor from Ohio is back, this time with a piece of 'cat'terel (as opposed to the canine variety, which is not as good) that I actually quite enjoyed.  Four stars.

Moon Fishers, by Nathalie Henneberg

Charles Henneberg was a popular French fantasist who, sadly, passed away in 1959.  His wife, with whom he collaborated, has taken it upon herself to flesh out a number of remaining outlines for publication, Damon Knight providing the translations.  She has written well before, but her talents fail her this time.  This tale of time travel, Atlanteans, and ancient Egypt fails to engage at all.  One star.

The Weighting Game, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor takes on the subject of elements and how we determined their mass.  Just discovering that elements had mass was a critical step in understanding the nature of atoms.  Sadly, this article is really a highly abridged and much compromised version of his excellent book, The Search for the Elements, which came out two months ago.  I recommend you grab a copy and skip this article.  Still, substandard Asimov is still decent.  Three stars.

Test, by Theodore L. Thomas

A vignette about failing a driving test.  There's the germ of a good story here, but the ending is too abrupt and affected to work.  Two stars.

Three for the Stars, by Joseph Dickinson

This piece is noteworthy for having one of the least intelligible Davidson prefaces.  Other than that, its a rather overwrought story about a chimp sent to Mars and back, and the scars he bears of the Martians he met.  Satire or something.  Two stars.

***

This issue ends up with a lousy 2.4 star score – by far, the worst magazine of the month, and possibly the worst F&SF I've read!  It's a disappointing turn of events.  F&SF used to be the smart sf mag, and last month's issue was a surprise stand-out.  With the arrival of Davidson, F&SF seems to be careening back toward smug self-indulgence.  I see that the back cover no longer has pictures of notables heaping praise on the book.  I wonder if they're jumping ship… 

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Magazine/Anthology

[February 4, 1962] Promised Land in Sight? (the March 1962 Amazing)

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by John Boston

A couple of months ago I described Amazing, as “promising.” Now here’s the March 1962 issue, with two up-and-comers on the cover and a third on the contents page.

Verdict: promise partly kept.

Maybe “up-and-comer” isn’t quite le mot juste for Frank Herbert; “what have you done for me lately?” might fit better.  Herbert’s reputation was made by the very well-received Under Pressure, a/k/a The Dragon in the Sea and . . . [gag] . . . 21st Century Sub.  But there’s been no new novel, and the short fiction, though much of it is very solid, has not delivered on expectations.  Mindfield!, the lead novelette, doesn’t advance things.  After a cataclysmic war, a religious tyranny suppresses the old technology, but young rebels want knowledge and progress!  This unoriginal premise is decorated with some original details, e.g., everyone is conditioned against violence, and the priests must regularly undergo “Ultimate Conditioning” in some sort of ego-dissolving regeneration tank. 

The story is pretty murky, so I’ll leave it at this detail: The rebels have found an ancient skeleton and have put that into their stolen regeneration tank, and the simulacrum that emerges remembers its name (barely), and later, how to pilot a helicopter.  No disrespect to bones—where would we be without them?—but how do you get memory and complex skills out of them?  The answer: mumble mumble handwave, and not much of that.  This reads like an exercise in sauve qui peut, to salvage something from a larger project that didn’t pan out.  Two stars.

Mindfield! is illustrated on the cover, sort of: it portrays a missile launch that is about to happen at the end.  It’s consistent with Amazing’s habit of featuring machinery on the cover, but this is rather wimpy machinery: the artist Lloyd Birmingham seems to have used some medium like chalk or colored pencil rather than good old forceful oils or the new acrylics.  Lackluster!

Briton Brian W. Aldiss is definitely up and coming, now prolific in the US as well as the UK, and known for pushing the envelope and/or kicking the shins of standard SF practice.  So Tyrants’ Territory, featuring planetary exploration and a science puzzle, played very straight, is a surprise.  Askanza VI has huge mineral-filled oceans and littoral fauna that look like giant turtles, who build rudimentary structures and throw crockery full of acid when threatened.  Their heads are literally empty.  What’s going on?  The heads of the turtles, or more properly pseudo-chelonia (Aldiss has a footnote about that term), are radio receivers; they are guided by radio waves from the ocean, which by virtue of its composition, is a low-power transmitter.  Who’s transmitting, or whether there is some sort of collective mind, is not clear—but once human colonists arrive, they will quickly figure out how to control the pseudo-chelonia, and the worst elements among them will do so—hence the title. 

But why allow human colonists at all where there already is intelligent life? Uncharacteristically for Aldiss, there’s no real questioning of the colonial imperative beyond the protagonist’s bad mood. The only discordant note is the name of this venture—the Planetary Ecological Survey Team, or PEST—but that’s it for moral witness.  Nonetheless, the story is so well conceived, written, and assembled as to merit four stars.

J.G. Ballard is back with The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista , another in his series about Vermilion Sands — a colony of artists and other creative types, not to mention layabouts and poseurs.  It introduces psychotropic houses, which reflect the emotional states and physical reactions of their occupants—including their previous occupants.  This idea is good for gags early on, e.g.: “Rapidly we went through a mock Assyrian ziggurat (the last owner had suffered from St. Vitus’s Dance, and the whole structure still jittered like a galvanized Tower of Pisa).”

Protagonist Talbot and wife buy the house once belonging to Gloria Tremayne, a movie star who shot and killed her husband in the house but was acquitted of murder—with Talbot assisting her defense.  He’s never gotten over his fascination.  The relationship between Talbot and his wife and the house’s memory of Tremayne and her husband reinforce each other until the house tries first to kill Talbot’s wife and then to kill Talbot when he comes home drunk and aggressive, not unlike Tremayne’s husband.  Talbot has, as he later puts it, “reconstructed the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material.”

This superficially jokey story is extremely well done.  Apart from the cleverness of the idea and its development, Ballard (like Aldiss) is a vastly better writer at the word-and-sentence level than the genre standard, with a knack for striking phrases and images (“Starting to walk down to the lounge, I realized that the house was watching me like a wounded animal.”).  The portrayal of Talbot as a narcissistic jerk through his first-person narration is a little tour de force of “show, don’t tell.” Four stars.

Newish writer David Ely is here with The The Wizard of Light, in which multiple copies of artistic masterpieces appear, utterly indistinguishable from the originals—like hundreds of Mona Lisas left outside the Louvre.  The art market is destroyed.  Turns out old Dr. Browl, brilliant inventor of optical devices, has invented a molecular scanner, complete with “cybernetic reactor” to copy whatever was scanned.  And why is he doing this?  To destroy art, which “falsifies nature in general, and light values in particular.” Clever idea, but spun out for too long, and the story is told in a faux-19th Century verbose style; whether as pastiche or just reinventing the square wheel, it talks itself down to three stars.

The Classic Reprint this issue is Euthanasia Limited by David H. Keller, M.D., a power in his time (the 1920s and ‘30s).  It features detective Taine of San Francisco.  Sam Moskowitz’s introduction says Keller “performed a feat of characterization [with Taine] so extraordinary that it should be studied by every student of writing technique.” Whatever.  It begins: “A little white-haired woman was working in her laboratory.” Not bad for 1929!  Anna Van Why (honest) is making a battery—out of apple halves.  She studies death and has learned that all life has electrical potential, and death is its reduction to zero, as she explains for not quite four pages.  Her sociopathic brother is eager to learn more, and a year later a police official comes to discuss with her a series of unusual deaths and arrange a visit from Taine.  Taine arrives and cracks the by now obvious case through tedious chicanery.  To hell with this, bring back Anna Van Why!  Two stars.

Frank Tinsley contributes Cosmic Butterfly, a short article about a spaceship design that uses solar power to ionize a propellant.  Tinsley is a fairly boring writer and this is pitched at a level more elementary than most SF readers are likely to need.  Two stars.

In 1956, F&SF began running a series of vignettes titled Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot, by one Grendel Briarton (hint: think anagram), consisting of elaborate set-ups for terrible puns, usually on cliched sayings.  Now Amazing has commenced Through Time and Space with Benedict Breadfruit, by one Grandall Barretton (not even quite an anagram), consisting of elaborate set-ups for terrible puns on the names of SF authors.  This has been a public service announcement.

[Speaking of which, if you registered for WorldCon by January 31, you should have received your ballot.  Don't forget to nominate Galactic Journey for "Best Fanzine!"]

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Magazine/Anthology

[Nov. 26, 1961] End of the Line (December 1961 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

It's the end of the year!  "What?" you exclaim, "but it's only November!"  True that, but the date on my latest Fantasy and Science Fiction says December 1961, and that means it is the last science fiction digest of the calendar year that will go through my review grinder.

F&SF has been the best magazine, per my ratings, for the past several years.  Going into this final issue, however, it has lagged consistently behind Galaxy.  Would this final issue be enough to pull it back into 1st place?  Especially given the stellar 3.8 stars rating that Galaxy garnered last month?

Well, no.  I'm afraid the magazine that Bouchier built (and handed over to Mills) must needs merit 8 stars this month to accomplish that feat.  That said, it's still quite a decent issue, especially given the rather lackluster ones of the recent past.  So, with the great fanfare appropriate to the holiday season, I present to you the final sf mag of 1961:

Damon Knight seems have gotten a gig as editor Mills' favored French translator.  Perhaps the job was in compensation for Knight's having been laid off as book editor for his scathing (unpublished) review of Judith Merril's The Tomorrow People.  Claude Veillot's The First Days of May is a grim story of a Parisian survivor after the devastating invasion of the bug people from outer space.  Beautifully told, but there are no happy endings here.  Four stars.

My friend, Herbert Gold, returns with The Mirror and Mr. Sneeves.  Well, I shouldn't say returns given that this rather unremarkable story, about a frigid husband who swaps bodies with more vivacious men, was first published in 1953.  Notable mainly for its literary gimmicks and copious sexual teases, I was first inclined to give it just two stars.  However, I found myself remembering the story long after I'd finished it, and that's usually a sign of quality.  Three stars.

You'll definitely remember Anne Walker's The Oversight of Dirty-Jets Ryan for its almost impenetrable future slang (which reads a lot like current slang with a few space-related words thrown in).  Well, it's also a good story, this tale of a none-too-legal trading expedition from Callisto to an alien world.  I'd expect nothing less from the lady who brought us the high point of the August 1959 Astounding.  Three stars.

On the other hand, Will Stanton's You Are with It! is pretty lousy.  Something about a game show in which persons become thoroughly absorbed in the role they play.  Two stars.

The Fiesta at Managuay is an excellent piece by John Anthony West, a metaphor for the destruction of native culture by more "civilized" societies.  If you find yourself in the tourists of Managuay, be justifiably concerned.  And if you do not, look harder.  Four stars.

Isaac Asimov's science fact piece this month, The Trojan Hearse, is an interesting article on Lagrange Points, those points of relative gravitational stability one finds between a big world and an orbiting companion.  For instance, the Sun and Jupiter, or the Earth and the Moon.  The timing is fortunate given that I plan to write about Jupiter (and its "Trojan Points") next month!  Four stars.

I can't quite tell you why I loved Hal Draper's Ms Fnd in a Lbry: or, the Day Civilization Collapsed so much.  Perhaps for its frightening, if satirical, plausibility.  Or maybe because I'm an archivist as well as someone who went through a graduate program where the professors were more interested in the cataloging of knowledge than knowledge itself.  Read it and tell me if it strikes you as it struck me.  Five stars.

Last up is the conclusion to Brian Aldiss' "Hothouse" series (soon to be a fix-up book), Evergreen.  Sadly, what started out so imaginative and interesting has degenerated to near unreadability.  The more said about this future, sun-blasted Earth, the less plausible it gets, and the strained dialogue makes this apocalyptic travelogue a slog(ue).  Two stars. 

And so ends the year for F&SF, and with that, the magazines for all of 1961.  At last, I can dig out my graph paper and copious notes and start compiling data for this year's Galactic Stars awards!  I hope you'll look forward to them as much as I do!

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Magazine/Anthology

[August 26, 1961] Introduce Yourself!  (September 1961 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Just what is the Galactic Journey?  Who is this mysterious "Traveler"?

Every so often, it's good idea to remind my readers who I am and why I do what I do.  This weekend, I am presenting at a local science fiction gathering, so it makes sense that the first article they see makes sense of all of this.

My twin passions are science fiction and outer space.  I live with my wife and daughter in San Diego, the fairest city in the Golden State of California.  From 9 to 5, I run a mid-sized electronics company.  In my off time, I maintain this column, writing about current books, magazines, movies, and science news (as well as other miscellany).

Oh yes.  I live in 1961.

Normally, I wouldn't have cause to mention this fact.  For the longest time, I was the under the impression that we all lived in the same time.  Some of the mail I've been getting, however, suggests that a few of you come from the future — 55 years, to be exact. 

It's quite exciting to have a fan-base from the far-flung time of 2016.  They report on all sorts of far out advances, some of which have been conceived in science fiction, others of which are beyond our wildest dreams. 

Happily, they report that global overpopulation has not been realized.  On the other hand, global warming has.  They say that Pluto is not a planet; well, that's nothing new.

I suspect, of course, that this is all a fannish game.  No one really can know the future.  The best we can do is write down our speculations and hope we're right (or in the case of scary visions, wrong!)

And that leads nicely into the subject of this article, the September 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  For those of you who don't know, F&SF is one of several monthly science fiction digests, each containing a slew of stories.  The story length ranges from single-page vignettes through serialized novels that run over several issues.  Digests used to be the way science fiction was delivered to the public.  They've been on the decline since their peak in 1953, however, and the science fiction novel appears to have taken its place. 

There is still plenty of good stuff to be found in the magazines, however.  Here's what I found in this issue:

Gérard Klein is an author for F&SF's French edition, and his The Monster in the Park was deemed good enough to be translated into English (thank you, Virginia Kidd!) It is a worthy piece, this tale of an alien's landing in a Parisian park.  The pacing is excellent, with the largely expositional setup interpreted through the lens of a worried Frenchwoman's grief over the possibility that her husband has been abducted.  The story builds the tension quite nicely, and the resolution works, though it is a bit abrupt.  Four stars.

Moving on, we have Herbert Gold's satirical The Day They Got Boston, about the diplomatic tit-for-tat that might ensue should the Soviets ever accidentally blow up one of our cities.  His name may be unfamiliar to you if you're the kind who never leaves our particular genre.  In fact, Gold writes a lot, but most of his stuff ends up in the "slicks" — high-paying outlets like Playboy.  Hefner politely declined the offer to print Boston, but his loss is our gain. 


Herbert Gold

Gold, a friend of mine, told me he wrote this genuinely funny little yarn as a reaction to all the panic about The Bomb, which he doesn't personally buy into.  Boston is not really science fiction, but then Gold isn't a science fiction writer.  As he puts it, "the world is bizarre enough without inventing a fantasy science fiction alternative."  A fair assessment from a man who writes with a stylus dipped in his own blood stored in a skull of Goethe he keeps on his desk (or so he claims!) Four stars.

The Timekeeper is Michael Young's first story, an odd vignette about a fellow who escapes mortality by shuffling into the timeless place of waking dreams.  Strangely enjoyable.  3 stars.

Floyd Wallace used to write a lot more, but if saving his strength means we get more stories like Privates All, then I don't begrudge him his rest.  Imagine a stultifying world of scarcity where production is in the hands of a myriad of monopolies: General Housing, General Apparel, General Entertainment, General Food, etc.  A person can work for any of them, but only one at a time.  Within each unit, goods can be secured with relative ease, but without, they cost dearly.  How does one get ahead in a world where wealth in one economic field means poverty in all others? 

Wallace writes powerfully, evocatively, and I'm a sucker for stories set in caste-based societies.  I imagine, rather like Orwell's 1984, that Privates is less a prediction of a future time than a depiction of an existing place — namely, the Soviet Union.  Good stuff.  Four stars.

Pecking Order is a tale of witchcraft, humility, and pride from a virtually unpublished author, Nils Peterson.  Macabre in its mood, wicked in its finale, it is a quintessentially F&SF-ish story.  Three stars.

Hamlin is by another unknown: Rosemary Harris.  She has the sad distinction of being the only female author appearing in the digests I read this month.  Hamlin is the re-telling of an old fable, gussied up in scientifiction trappings.  It's my least favorite story in the issue, but that’s more due to the quality of its competition, than any lack on its part.  Three stars.

Now, all of the Big Three digests (F&SF, Analog, and Galaxy) include a science fact column.  F&SF's is the best as they managed to secure the works of a certain Isaac Asimov, a fellow with a broader breadth of knowledge than Da Vinci. 

I like science fiction, but I love articles that can inspire science fiction stories.  Not As We Know It describes elements and solvents that could be alternatives to our boring old carbon/oxygen/water mix as the basis for alien life.  It is a treasure trove of ideas.  Five stars.

Rosser Reeves, a writer/businessman like me, has made a name for himself with his poetry.  He returns with two more pieces: the mournful Effigy and the inconsequential
E=MC².  Not as good as his last outing, but I wouldn't mind seeing more.  Three stars.

Finally, we have Brian Aldiss' Timberline.  This is the next installment in his "Hothouse" series of novellas, which form a continuous sequence set on an Earth of the far future.  The sun has swelled with age, and our planet has frozen into tidal lock with one face always presented to its parent star.  The Earth's surface has been conquered by vegetable beings, and only a few animals remain — including a diminutive race descendant of once mighty humanity.

Aldiss' is an imaginative world, but this outing in particular felt more travelogue than complete tale.  It might be all right as part of a book (I imagine there will be a compilation when the last novella is completed), but by itself, it feels shallow.  Three stars.

Last month, I lamented that the quality of my favorite digest was declining.  This issue seems to reverse that trend: It scored 3.6 of 5 on the Star-o-meter (TM), easily beating out IF's 2.9 and Analog's 2.6.  It also had the best story (Privates All), the most women (a whopping one), and the best non-fiction.  Pretty good for a magazine with such a large number of authorial first outings!

By next article will be a photologue of my trip to the convention.  If I meet you this weekend, do drop me a line.  I love making new friends!

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Magazine/Anthology

[June 25, 1961] The Twilight Years (July 1961 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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Some 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs vanished from the Earth.  There are many hypotheses as to why these great reptiles no longer walk among us.  One current of thinking goes thusly: dinosaurs were masters of the Earth for so long that they became complacent.  Because their reign was indisputed, they evolved in ways that were not optimized for survival.  Thus, the strange crests of the Hadrosaurs.  The weird dome head of the Pachycephalosaurs.  The giant frills of the Ceratopsians.  Like Victorian ladies' hats, the dinosaurs became increasingly baroque until they were too ungainly to survive.

I worry that The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is heading in that direction.  I'm all for literary quality in my sf mags, but F&SF has been tilting so far in the purple direction that it is often all but unreadable.  I present Exhibit A: the July 1961 "All-Star" issue.

Kingsley Amis is perhaps better known as a fan than a writer, his recent New Maps of Hell being a lauded survey of the current sci-fi field.  Something Strange isn't a bad story, but the fluffy writing can't relieve or distract from the threadbare plot (a retread of The Twilight Zone's first episode): Two married couples are stuck on what they believe is a remote interstellar outpost.  A series of increasingly strange things materialize, first outside and, later, inside the station.  Ultimately, the scouts are given a final message from Earth – they have been abandoned for want of funding to retrieve them!  Of course, the keen reader has already figured out that the base is really just a long-term isolation chamber on Earth, the whole thing being an experiment.  Despite the hackneyed plot, it's still readable.  Three stars, barely.

Package Deal is the latest by Will Worthington, an author given to writing dark pieces.  This one, about a n'er-do-well spoiled rich kid who discovers his latent powers of telepathy, is overly cute and underly memorable.  Two stars.

The new writer, Nicholas Breckenridge, advises ailurophiles to skip the feline ghost story, Cat Lover.  It's a good suggestion; Lover is a tired retread of familiar ground.  Two stars.

Grendel Briarton has a new Ferdinand Feghoot pun story.  I include it in the interests of completeness; do not mistake presentation for endorsement.

The Zookeeper is the first published story by Otis Kidwell Burger, and also the one piece by a woman (despite the unlikely name) to appear in any of the Big Three magazines this month.  It's a tale of the far future, a sort of meet cute featuring a woman secured from present day as a sort of pet, and the all-too-human alien, also a pet, who comes to love her.  Another overly oblique piece, but kind of charming nonetheless.  Three stars.

Kris Neville's Closing Time is more Socratic dialogue than story, a rather insipid piece about disproving the existence of intelligent aliens.  Two stars.

Night Piece, by the usually (these days) excellent Poul Anderson, is even more disappointing.  Something about a scientist becoming aware of dimensions beyond his own, grappling to retain his sanity amid an onslaught to his senses.  It's all very ponderous and overwrought.  One star.

I enjoyed Isaac Asimov's non-fiction article, Recipe for a Planet, all about the elements that make up the Earth and their proportion to each other.  I especially enjoyed the article's wrap-up, describing our planet's composition in cook-book style.

Comprising a good third of the book is its final piece, Brian Aldiss' novella, Undergrowth.  It is a direct sequel to his previous stories, Hothouse and Nomansland, all set on Earth a billion years from now.  The sun has grown hot, and the planet is a jungle.  Humans have long-since stopped being Earth's master and are now diminutive, barely sentient creatures.  In this story, we learn of the event that caused our race to topple from power, thanks to the racial-memory tapping talents of the fungoid symbiotes, the morel. 

As usual, Aldiss paints a vivid picture, and a unique one, but somehow the further adventures of Gren and Poyly and their bonded morel have gotten a bit tedious.  It feels more and more like one of Burroughs' Pellucidar novels – enjoyable, but shallow.  I'm looking forward to learning what happened to the lunar explorers from the first novella, and I expect Aldiss has already got that story plotted out.  Three stars.

Measured on the Star-o-Meter(tm), this "All-Star" issue only earns 2.5 stars.  In fact, not a single magazine broke the 3-star barrier this month!  Moreover, just one woman made it to print.  The two facts may not be unrelated…

In any event, if F&SF wants to win the Hugo this year, it'll have to do better than this.  Otherwise, Analog or Galaxy are likely to take the prize just by failing to decline as steeply.

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