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[May 31, 1966] Worth Remembering (June 1966 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Decoration Day

First the war, then the licking of wounds.  Not all wounds are physical.  After the Civil War rent this nation in two, spring became a time for remembering the dead, their blood shed in almost incomprehensible numbers.  In 1868, the ritual honoring of fallen veterans became an official holiday known as Decoration Day (for the decoration of graves).  Over time, the name changed to Memorial Day, and last month, President Johnson proclaimed the custom's birthplace to be Waterloo, New York, the event first occurring a century ago.

The last Civil War veteran passed away in 1956, but this year's Memorial Day still found us licking our wounds.  Indeed, last week marked the bloodiest seven days for American soldiers since Korea: 966 casualties in Vietnam alone, 146 of them fatal.  Will next year's day of remembrance be worse?

The Issue at Hand

A cute segue would be in poor taste at this juncture, so I'll simply proceed to the review.  The latest issue of Analog drew my attention with its striking astronomical cover.  Let's turn the page and see what delights and disappointments Herr Campbell has for us this month.


by Chesley Bonestell

The Ancient Gods (Part 1 of 2), by Poul Anderson

In the letter column, Poul Anderson talks about discovering a beautiful painting by Chesley Bonestell.  It depicts a the night sky as seen from a planet perhaps 200,000 light years north of the Milky Way.  I would guess that this painting, as well as perhaps a viewing of last year's film, Flight of the Phoenix, provided the inspiration for the author's latest tale. 


by John Schoenherr

I shall give nothing else away save that those who know me know I'm a sucker for astronomically correct tales of exploration, and that Flight of the Phoenix got my nomination for the Best Dramatic Hugo.

Four stars so far.

Early Warning, by Robin S. Scott


by Stan Robinson

Lee is a big man, a skilled man, a man whose job is to throw monkey wrenches into supposedly foolproof systems like the D.C./Kremlin Hotline and Pentagon intelligence computers.  Is he a double-agent?  A mole?  Or something more?

There's really not enough to this story to engage; it feels more like a fragment of a Joe Poyer thriller than a complete piece.  Just some workmanlike action writing and a smug, Campbell-pleasing sting. 

Two stars.

CWACC Strikes Again, by Hank Dempsey


by Gray Morrow

"Hank Dempsey" (I have it on reliable information that this is a pseudonym for Harry Harrison, apparently trying to make the big lucre by pushing all of Campbell's buttons) is back with CWACC: the Committee for Welfare, Administration, and Consumer Control, last seen last year.  Pronounced "Quack," the goal of this two-person operation is the support and representation of eccentric inventors.  You see, to the scientific community, they're just kooks, but we all know that those industrious garage inventors produce way more of the world's innovation than the anonymous folks in white coats.  Right?

Anyway, in this episode, CWACC's administrator teams up with an enemy, the local kook-catching flatfoot, to rescue a CWACCer, whose invention is being used by con artists to sucker in, of all people, the police commissioner.  Along the way, "Dempsey" gets some pseudo-scientific shots in, like the assertion that the common cold can be defeated by sufficient vitamins in one's diet. 

Vaguely readable garbage.  One star.  I hope it was worth selling your soul for four cents a word, Harry!

Live Sensors, by Carl A. Larson

This nonfiction article started auspiciously, promising to compare the biological sensors with which animals are naturally equipped to the most refined artificial detectors.  The overall package is lacking, however.  There are lots of interesting tidbits on the capabilities of creatures, but they are interspersed with larder passages that don't do too much.  Never do we find out how we might utilize or at least learn from natural sensing devices. 

It would also help if Analog employed subheadings.  Three stars.

Stranglehold, by Christopher Anvil


by Kelly Freas

My nephew David rang me the other day (on Sunday, when the rates are lowest) to tell me how much he enjoyed the new Chris Anvil story.  This may be a ringing endorsement (ha ha!) but I always take David's recommendations with a grain of salt, especially where Anvil is concerned.

A scout team following up on a lost comrade lands on a planet despite receiving a warning that such would be dangerous.  Once planetside, they find themselves subjected to illusion after terrifying illusion, only their unshakeable monitors telling the truth about reality (why wouldn't their perception of the monitors also be changed?)

Turns out the inhabitants have some kind of telepathy and can change their perception of reality and those of others.  After the team escapes with their rescued friend, they determine that a race with psychic phenomena cannot develop science since they fudge the results to their liking.  Contrarily, a race that chooses a scientific path atrophies psychic phenomena because…well, just because.

Therefore, all races, including humanity, have psychic potential, and it's only because we chose the path of science that spoonbending isn't more prevalent.  Q.E.D.

Gee, I wonder how this story got published.

What I really don't understand is what possible advantage the alien trait of mass hallucination affords.  If it were real transmutation being employed in this story, there might be something to it, but there isn't.  A being that thinks it is having its physical needs met when it is not quickly becomes a sick and/or dead being.  Maybe it's more of a reality enhancer, as in the first Cugel the Clever story, which I guess would make more sense.

Anyway, Stranglehold feels like what would happen if Bob Sheckley ever wrote for Campbell.

Two stars.

Escape Felicity, by Frank Herbert


by Kelly Freas

In Frank Herbert's latest, a lone interstellar scout plunges his ship deep into a nebulous cloud.  He is determined to fight off the "push" that causes all of his corps to return to Earth after a certain point.  But is the compulsion programmed in by BuPurs to keep scouts from going native?  Or is there an external agency involved?

I found this one of Herbert's more compelling pieces, though it falls apart a bit at the end.  And it feels like the title is a pun in search of a story; I can't figure out its applicability to this one.

Three stars.

Doing the Math

Thus, Analog ends up near the bottom of the pack with a 2.6 star rating, only beating out the mostly-reprint (and consistently lackluster) Amazing 2.5.  Ahead of Campbell's mag are New Worlds (3.1), Galaxy (3.1), Impulse (3.0), IF (3.0), and Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.8).

Worthy material comprised about an issue-and-a-half out of six this month.  Women produced 11.25% of the new fiction, at the high end of the usual range.

All told, June 1966 may not be remembered in times to come, particularly as impressive as last month was.  But, as noted at the beginning of the article, sometimes having to remember is painful.

Until next month…

If you need a mood-lifter now, tune in to KGJ, our radio station!  Nothing but the newest and best hits!




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Magazine/Anthology, Serial

[September 20, 1965] Unfinished Business (October Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Leaving things hanging

There's something compelling about things left incomplete – from Schubert's Unfinished Symphony to President Kennedy's first term.  In the gaps of what could have been, we can fill in countless possibilities rather than just the one.

This month's Fantasy and Science Fiction (like this month's Galaxy, an "All-Star" anniverary issue) trades almost exclusively in incompletes, its pieces ending in ellipses dots rather than hard stops.

Does this make for an effective magazine?  Let's dig in and find out:

Beginnings…


by Chesley Bonestell

… And Call Me Conrad (Part 1 of 2), by Roger Zelazny

Hundreds of years from now, a war-ravaged, radiation-scoured Earth is little more than a colony of the blue-skinned Vegans who lease our planet out of historical curiosity.  Humanity is much reduced, confined to the former backwaters of civilization. 

Against this backdrop, we are introduced to Conrad Nomikos, head of the world's antiquities preservation bureau, who is tapped to escort a Vegan journalist as the alien gathers information for a travelogue of blasted Earth.

But there is far more to Conrad than he likes to let on.  Something of a rogue, and possessed of pretenatural strength, skills, and psychic abilities, he is actually Konstantin Karaghiosis – mutated into a Methusaleh by radiation and erstwhile leader of a radical anti-Vegan colonial movement that had, decades before, spiked Vegan ambitions to take all of Earth.

Now Conrad finds himself embroiled in multiple intertwined plots as the Vegan journalist becomes the target of an assassination attempt, his mission to Earth having a more significant goal than just a John Gunther volume.  Conrad, too, is personally imperiled, though who wants him dead and why are open questions.

This first part of a serial leaves off just as the second attempt on Conrad's life (if such they were; he cannot be certain) has failed.  It looks as if Conrad may well have to resume the revolutionary mantle of Konstantin to navigate the crisis.

Zelazny can sometimes be a tough pill for me to swallow.  One of the Journey's regular readers observed that he's done more than any current SF writer to bring Hemingway to our genre, and I feel that Roger sometimes trades readability for that stylistic choice.  That said, after a somewhat plodding beginning, the fleshed out background and advanced storyline becomes quite compelling.

Call it three stars for now, but with potential for the ending (if and when it come) to raise things retrospectively.

Mirror, Mirror, by Avram Davidson

Milquetoasty fan of A. Merritt spends his spare hours scouring local second-hand shops for jade mirrors with which to escape our reality into something more fantastical and swashbuckling.  What he doesn't count on is someone from another reality with a similar passion finding their way to his world.

As a premise, it's a fantastic mirror to works like The Incomplete Enchanter.  As a vignette, however, it suffers for an overlong beginning (relative to the length of the piece) and the lack of a real resolution.  In this case, unfinished means unsatisfying.

Three stars.


by Gahan Wilson

(here's a rather pointless doodle by Mr. Wilson, one that doesn't even pertain to our genre; the reason for its inclusion escapes me)

The Future, Its Promoters and False Prophets by E. Brandis and V. Dmitrevskiy, and
Replies by Poul Anderson and Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury and Mack Reynolds

Here's an interesting piece: a critique of American science fiction by two Soviets followed by replies by the authors specifically mentioned (including reference to Asimov's foreword to More Soviet Science Fiction).  It makes for a fascinating debate, one that is clearly ongoing.  I hope F&SF continues to cover it.

Five stars.

No Jokes on Mars, by James Blish

A journalist is sent to the Red Planet to check up on a colleague whose work has become perfunctory and cynical.  While on a tour of the Martian wilderness, her escorts poach a pomander from the pouch of a native dune-cat; the aromatic ball is of high value on Earth as a perfumed ornament, but its heist dooms the Martian creatures (who prove to be sentient) to a slow death.  Can she make it off Mars with the story?

It's a good story, but it suffers both for its 1950s depiction of Mars and the extremely sudden ending, which I ended up reading several times, wondering if I'd missed a paragraph or two somewhere.  Here, the unfinished nature left me wanting rather than dreaming.

Three stars.

The Glorious Fourth, by Jack Sharkey

Three astronauts from Earth land on an Eden teeming with an ecology so vigorous that its creatures refuse to die.  One of the crew, despairing of service under the martinet captain, goes native – literally.  And while the process is pleasant for him, the interaction between the remaining two and the planet's life forms is ultimately less enjoyable.

Jack Sharkey's byline is one I'm normally wary of, but he delivers a decent story here, and the vague ending, only hinting at the horrors the two spacemen will face (and the reason for their unpleasantness), is effective.

Three stars.

Minutes of A Meeting At The Mitre, by Robert F. Young

Old Nick meets Samuel Johnson.  With a punchline telegraphed from the beginning, the only motivation for this piece seems to be Young's desire to do a Boswell pastiche. 

Well, the story may have finished, but it's clear that the hoary "Deal with the Devil" subgenre of fantasy is not.

Two stars.

The Land of Mu, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor picks up where he left in his elementary physical particles, this time discussing the differences between electrons and mu mesons (muons).  It's an absolutely fascinating piece, and it's very clear from its conclusion that there is still so very much we don't know about the universe's tiniest components.

Five stars.

Something Else, by Robert J. Tilley

A punctilious, nature-hating music professor crashlands on a deserted planet with only a clarinet and box of jazz music spools to keep him company.  Well, not quite deserted: there is also a solitary shaggy alien with the ability to mimic music perfectly.  Thus begins an interspecies friendship.

Perhaps intentionally, the ultimate story in this collection does have a definite ending, which is sadly to its detriment.  Rather than building to some kind of revelatory peak offering some sort of interesting insight on the human condition, there is, instead, a pointless downer of a conclusion, better suited to a lesser episode of The Twilight Zone.  Tilley, the piece's author, is also about 20% more wordy than he needs to be.

Three stars.

Endings?

I would say that this month's reliance on the unfinished story had mixed results.  However, at the very least, I am now looking forward to the conclusion of the Zelazny piece; at most, I find my thoughts returning to the other uncertain endings, imagining the myriad outcomes that might have better resolved these otherwise unsettled lines.

Art reflects reality indeed!

Our next Journey Show: At the Movies, is going to be a blast!

DON'T MISS IT!




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 22, 1964] Fall back!  (October 1964 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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[Don't miss your chance to get your copy of Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963), some of the best science fiction of the Silver Age.  If you like the Journey, you'll love this book (and you'll be helping us out, too!)


by Gideon Marcus

To every thing there is a season

Even in timeless southern California, we have seasons.  In the Imperial Valley, it is joked, there are four: Hot, Bug, Stink, and Wind.  Here in San Diego, spring comes in summer, summer comes in fall, fall comes in winter, and winter not at all.

Yet here and there, we see a deciduous tree start to change color.  The end-of-summer mornings have a hint of chill in them.  Things proceed in an endless cycle.

The same is true of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Last month, I raved over a superlative issue, an increasing rarity under the current editorship of one Avram Davidson.  I am sad to report that things are back to form in this month's issue.

I think part of the problem is that, as Davidson cheerfully confesses, he's not really into science fiction.  He bounces off the truly hard stuff, like Martin Caidin's quite good Countdown and fills his magazine with fantastic fluff…and then has the temerity to complain that people don't sent him plain old rocket stories anymore!

On the other hand, the rumor has been confirmed — Davidson has moved to Berkeley from Mexico, and someone else is taking over the magazine.  I hear that Joe Ferman, currently publisher, will take the helm, but that his son, Ed, will do all the work.  I look forward to seeing what they bring to the table.

But first, let's take a look at what is possibly Davidson's last editorial effort, what he optimistically calls an "All Star Issue".

Autumn Harvest


by Chesley Bonstell

Once again, the cover is stunning — and utterly unrelated to the contents of the issue.  It's a depiction of an ion-drive propelled ship off of Mars, and it's from the book Beyond the Solar System, presumably available on bookshelves near you.

Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon, by Leigh Brackett

The first of the All Stars is the legendary Leigh Brackett, queen of pulp and accomplished screenwriter.  This tale actually began as a joke nine years ago, when a fictional title was created to represent the kind of fiction Brackett excelled at.  Purple Priestess is the author's attempt to turn a joke into reality.

It has all the hallmarks of a pulp Mars, from the thin air to the drying canals, the ancient natives who speak High and Low Martian.  And, of course, out in the frigid deserts lies an antediluvian evil so terrible that none can experience its presence and fail to gibber.

I enjoyed Lovecraft's stories well enough in the '30s , but I'm disappointed to find one presented unironically in what was once the premier SF mag.  Two stars.

The Pro, by Edmond Hamilton

The subsequent piece, by Brackett's husband (of similar vintage) is better.  One can't help but see a bit of the autobiographical in this story about a science fiction author who finally gets to see the rocketships he created in fiction become reality at the Cape.  Only the launching of the latest of them is not a joyous occasion, for the writer's child is the pilot.  Even if the mission goes well, it marks a final rift between father and son, one the writer is sure can never be bridged.

A bit maudlin but enjoyable.  Three stars.

Stomata, by Theodore L. Thomas

Thomas' latest short story idea disguised as a non-fiction article takes the idea of stomata, the pores that allow plants to respire, and posits an race that uses them for everything — breathing, eating, excreting.

I don't know how plausible the idea is.  On the other hand, Pinky the Blob, debuting in one of my upcoming books, employs exactly this mechanism.  Great minds think alike.

Three stars.

Maid to Measure, by Damon Knight

Five years ago, Damon Knight came out with What Rough Beast, a story so excellent that I'm reading it again in the Spanish edition of F&SF. 

Maid to Measure, a joke-ending vignette about a shape-changing girl, is as trivial as Beast is momentous.

Two stars.

Little Anton, by Reginald Bretnor

Bretnor is perhaps better known to the readers of F&SF as Grendall Briarton, composer of the recently finished series of "Feghoot" pun stories.  After reading this awful reprint, the story of an idiot savant inventor with a tedious Swiss accent and a penchant for pinching posteriors, I'm actually nostalgic for Briarton.

One star.

First and Rearmost, by Isaac Asimov

Doc A. turns in an above average science article this month, all about how gravity stacks up to the other three primal forces of the universe: electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force (his omission of love and money are probably deliberate).  It's all stuff I knew already, but he lays it out nicely for laymen.

Four stars.

The Year of the Earthman, by Hogan Smith

An old, radiation-scarred astronaut goes AWOL to marry a lovely extraterrestrial lass, dying just moments after he learns that they will have a son.  And then we learn the truth of the space traveler's existence.

Not a bad tale, though it makes little scientific sense.  Also, Hogan Smith is the opposite of an All Star — this is is first story!  But he's from San Diego, so all is forgiven.

Three stars.

In What Cavern of the Deep, by Robert F. Young

Robert F. Young's little autobiography at the front of Cavern is quite interesting.  Like me, he came into the genre by way of Burroughs and then Wells, and also like me, he tried making an honest living before deciding that writing is the most fun one can have with their hands — especially if one gets paid for it!

Young writes stories inspired by mythology and folklore, and while he has come out with some of my very favorite stories, his works from the last several years have been disappointing and mawkish.  His latest falls somewhere inbetween.

David Stuart is a poor young man made rich through inheritance from an uncle.  While investigating the deceased's estate, he comes across two swimming sisters and promptly falls in love with Helen, the blonder of them.  But the ensuing marital bliss is dashed by the revelation that Helen is growing taller by the week, approaching titanic proportions after just a year.  It's sort of an inverse of Richard Matheson's The Incredible Shrinking Man.  At the same time, David's wife becomes more and more enamored with bodies of water, swimming constantly and even growing gill slits.

Is Helen a beast of the sea?  An alien?  And is the story going to end horrifically (as set up in the prologue) with David hurtling five smooth stones to smite his monstrous love?

Cavern is a bit of a departure from Young's previous stories in that, though he makes conscious references to the biblical King David, this is more to obscure the plot than to outline it.  The piece is told with Young's usual excellent facility, and I found myself eager to get to the end.

On the other hand, the end is just a bit too pat, too clearly presented to be very satisfying.  What could have been a 4 or even 5 star story ends up on the high end of 3.

Empty Cornucopia

If this be Davidson's swansong, he picked a sad note to go out on.  Maybe he's got one issue more in him before he shuffles off F&SF's bridge — I'd like to have fonder memories of this phase of his career!

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




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