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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 8, 1967] Distant Signals (September 1967 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Rock Around the Clock

If any more proof is needed that rock 'n' roll now dominates the American popular music scene, here it is: a couple of days ago, radio station KMPX in San Francisco (106.9 on your FM dial, for those of you near the city by the bay) started playing a wide variety of rock music (as opposed to the usual Top Forty hits) twenty-four hours a day. As far as I know, it's the first station in the USA to do so.


Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue, programming director for KMPX.

I live a very long way from Frisco, so I won't be able to pick up their signal.

Appropriately, the lead story in the latest issue of Fantastic features the inability to establish contact over a vast distance as a major plot point. As we'll see, other stories in the magazine also deal with difficulties in communication.


Cover art by Frank R. Paul.

As usual, the image on the front is taken from an old magazine. In this case, it's the back cover of the January 1941 issue of Amazing Stories.


The reprinted version omits the pink flamingo in the bottom right corner.

The Longest Voyage, by Richard C. Meredith


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

Three spaceships carry the first astronauts to Jupiter. Incredibly bad luck strikes the mission. Freak accidents destroy two of the vessels and badly damage the third, leaving only one person alive. Seriously injured, the fellow faces a slow and lonely death.

It seems the crippled ship is now in orbit around Jupiter. The sole survivor has enough food, water, and air to last many years, but no way to contact Earth. (As I've indicated above, he's as far out of range as I am with KMPX.) Can our intrepid hero find a way to make his way back?


He also grows a beard.

This technological problem-solving story would be right at home in the pages of Analog. The protagonist makes use of some basic science and a lot of tinkering to overcome a seemingly impossible dilemma.

It's pretty well written for this kind of thing. The author really made me feel the character's suffering and desperation. I'm not sure I believe that a future society advanced enough to send spaceships to the far reaches of the solar system wouldn't figure out a way to talk to them. Without that plot point, the story would boil down to the hero sending out an SOS and waiting for rescue.

Three stars.

Same Autumn in a Different Park, by Peter Tate


Illustration also by Gray Morrow; he seems to be the only artist doing new work for the magazine.

Remarkably, this issue actually has two new stories. This one comes from a Welsh author usually seen in New Worlds. As you might expect, it has more than a little flavor of New Wave SF to it.

In another example of limited communication, a mother and father only talk to each other via teletype. In this grim future, the authorities have decided that the way to prevent violence is to have children raised apart from their parents. For that matter, the boy and girl in the story don't have any contact with anyone except each other and the machines that watch over them.

The devices give the children dolls representing the victims of nuclear war and a sample weapon, in an attempt to warn them about the horrors of violence. It's no surprise that this idea doesn't work out very well.

Typical of the New Wave, this story isn't as clear or linear as I may have made it sound. You have to read carefully and be patient to understand it. The premise is more effective as dark satire than as plausible speculation.

There's a strange scene in which the girl turns into a bird made from a hedge, through some kind of technological miracle. This weird transformation doesn't seem to have anything to do with the rest of the story, unless I'm missing something. It's a striking image, anyway.

This is an intriguing work, but one more to be admired than loved, I believe.

Three stars.

The Green Splotches, by T. S. Stribling

From the January 3, 1920 issue of Adventure comes this early example of interplanetary science fiction.


I'm guessing the cover artist's name is H. Tidlie, but maybe somebody with sharper eyes can make out the signature better than I can.

It was reprinted in the March 1927 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Frank R. Paul, of course.

The magazine is careful to tell me twice that Stribling went on to win a Pulitzer Prize after he lifted himself out of the pulps. For the record, it was for his 1932 work The Store, a novel about the southern United States after the time of Reconstruction.


Illustration by somebody called Gambee, about whom I have no other information.

A scientific expedition heads for a remote area of Peru. The place has a very bad reputation. So much so, in fact, that the only locals willing to guide them there are two condemned criminals who would otherwise face execution.

The first eerie sign that something strange is going on comes when they find a series of carefully articulated skeletons of various animals, including a human being. Pretty soon, one of the two criminals shoots at and chases after somebody, disappearing in the process.

The others receive a visit from a strange person, who treats them as inferior beings. You'll figure things out, from the illustration if nothing else, although the human characters never do.

Although it's a little old-fashioned (this is one of those stories where radium is pretty much a synonym for magic), this is a very readable yarn. What most distinguishes it is a subtle note of satire. Although not comic, and sometimes even horrific, there's a sardonic tone throughout. There's a running joke, of sorts, about the expedition's reporter and his self-published book about reindeer.

Three stars.

The Ivy War, by David H. Keller, M.D.

The May 1930 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this Kelleryarn.


Cover art by Leo Morey.

An aggressive, swift-moving, deadly form of ivy emerges from a pit and overwhelms a small town. Soon the seemingly intelligent plant invades larger cities, moving from place to place via water. Can anything stop it?


Illustration by Leo Morey also.

This reads like a science fiction monster movie of the last decade, with ivy taking the place of a giant bug or some such. It's even got one of those endings where Science discovers the only thing that will stop the menace. There's not much to it other than the premise. For what it is, it's adequate.

Three stars.

Beware the Fury, by Theodore Sturgeon

From the April 1954 issue of the magazine comes this work from one of the masters of imaginative fiction.


Cover art by Augusto Marin.

An astronaut seems to have betrayed Earth to invading aliens, making him the most hated human being in existence. A military type has the unenviable task of interviewing the traitor's wife, in an attempt to understand his actions. He learns of the man's unusual personality quirks, and of the couple's very strange marriage. With this knowledge, he tracks down the fellow when he returns to Earth and goes into hiding.


Illustration by Louis Priscilla.

I may have made this sound like a space war yarn, and there's certainly that aspect to the plot. However, the psychology of the characters is of much greater importance than the melodramatic aspects of the story. Sturgeon excels at this sort of thing, of course.

Four stars.

No Charge for Alterations, by H. L. Gold

The former editor of Galaxy offers this work from the April/May 1953 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Barye Phillips.

A doctor arrives on a colony world to study under a local physician. Medical technology exists that can change the patient not only physically, but mentally.


Interior illustrations by Henry Sharp.

He's shocked to see his mentor use the device to alter the mind of a young woman so she'll give up her dream of moving to Earth and becoming an entertainer, and instead be happy to do farm labor and raise children.


The After, in contrast to the above Before.

The new arrival decides to escape what he sees as an insane perversion of medicine and go back to Earth.  The local doctor contacts the retired physician under whom he studied, in an attempt to keep the new guy from leaving.  He learns something about his own time as a student.

I suppose this is supposed to be an ironic tale, maybe even humorous.  I found the premise distasteful.  The way in which the young woman at the start of the story is brainwashed to be a content farm wife is rationalized as being necessary to support the colony, but it gave me the creeps.

Two stars.

Signal to Noise Ratio

Well, that was a middle-of-the-road issue, rising above and sinking below average in a couple of places, but otherwise mediocre.  It's notable not only for having two new stories, but for having only science fiction and no fantasy.  The whole thing is like a radio station subject to bits of static now and then; worth tuning in for a while, but tempting you to turn the dial to something else.  Something like a corny pun, that may amuse you for a while, but otherwise forgettable.


Like this one, from the same issue as the Sturgeon story, by somebody known only as Frosty.

Still, while I may not be able to tune in to KMPX, I can at least turn the dial to the similarly formatted KGJ. That's some comfort!




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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

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by John Boston

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


by Frank R. Paul

La de da de de.

The Man from Zodiac, by Jack Vance

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


by Gray Morrow

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

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

Martian and Troglodyte, by Neil R. Jones

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


by Leo Morey

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

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

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

Blabbermouth, by Theodore Sturgeon


by Malcolm Smith

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

The Roller Coaster, by Alfred Bester


by Bernard Krigstein

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

One Way Street, by Jerome Bixby


by Augusto Marin

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

North God’s Temple, by Henry J. Kostkos


by Leo Morey

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

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

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

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

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

Summing Up

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




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[March 16, 1967] A Matter of Life and Death (Why Call Them Back From Heaven? by Clifford D. Simak; Tarnsman of Gor, by John Norman)

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[Two VERY different books for you today on the Galactoscope…]


by Victoria Silverwolf

Wonder Stories From Wisconsin

Science fiction readers hardly need an introduction to the works of Clifford D. Simak. Born in Wisconsin in 1904, and working for the Minneapolis Star newspaper since 1939, he published his first story, The World of the Red Sun, in Wonder Stories in 1931.


Getting your name on the cover with your first story is quite an achievement. Art by Frank R. Paul.

His best known work may be City (1952), a book consisting of eight linked stories. It won the International Fantasy Award that year.


Cover art for the first edition by Frank Kelly Freas. There have been many other editions since.

He also won the Hugo Award for Best Novel with Way Station (1963), serialized in two parts in Galaxy as Here Gather the Stars.
(The Noble Editor gave the serialized version a mediocre three star rating. I read the book version and loved it. Chacun son goût!)


Cover art by Ronald Fratell.

Simak has a reputation as a gentle, humane pastoralist. His stories often celebrate nature and the outdoors, particularly the wilds of Wisconsin, and show compassion for all living beings. His latest novel displays this side of his character, to be sure, but it also has a darker, pessimistic mood that may not be as familiar to his readers.


Here's the author with his Hugo, looking just as friendly and optimistic as you'd expect.

Cold War


Cover art by Robert Webster.

In the year 2148, society is dominated by the Forever Center, a private company whose headquarters are located in a mile-high skyscraper. Their function is to store the frozen bodies of the recently deceased, in order to revive them into young, healthy, nearly immortal bodies in the near future. The catch is that they haven't quite figured out how to do this yet.

(If this reminds you of a proposal made by R. C. W. Ettinger, and discussed in a few issues of Worlds of Tomorrow, go to the head of the class. Simak explicitly mentions Ettinger in the novel.)


R. C. W. Ettinger. He also published a couple of science fiction stories some years ago.

In the real world, freezing people in the hope of reviving them has already begun. James Hiram Bedford, a professor of psychology, died on January 12 this year. His body was immediately chilled far below zero and placed in storage.


Bedford's body is injected with dimethyl sulfoxide, as part of the preservation process.

Nobody yet has the slightest clue about how to bring people like Bedford back to life. Besides that little technical problem, there's also the dilemma of where to put all these people when they're thawed out, if this process ever gets under way big time. Simak addresses that very issue.

The novel says there are about one hundred and fifty billion frozen corpses by the middle of the 22nd century, and a world population of one hundred billion! That seems very hard to believe, but it's a minor quibble. Simak tell us that food is provided through some kind of matter transformation rather than farming, so maybe that explains, to some extent, the gigantic population.

Humanity has achieved interstellar travel, but has not yet found livable planets for the huge number of expected revived folks. One possibility is terraforming these hostile worlds, but obviously that's going to be very difficult.

Another strategy, even more implausible, is to invent time travel, and send these people back millions of years into the remote past. The brilliant mathematician who is working on this problem vanishes, providing an important subplot.

The third suggested method, and the only one that seems remotely possible to me, is to cover the Earth with gigantic buildings, each one the size of a city.

Do you get the feeling that the Forever Center didn't really think things out too well? I believe that's part of Simak's satiric point, that the practicalities of freezing and resurrecting the dead have escaped those who are promoting it.

Despite these difficulties, the Forever Center virtually rules the world. People avoid risks and minimize spending, in order to have some wealth in their new life. Most people have transmitters near their hearts, so that when they die, rescue teams rush to carry their bodies into cold storage. Some people even choose to die, rather than wait for the Grim Reaper, in order to save money and make sure they're frozen safely.

The only folks who object to the Forever Center are the so-called Holies, who believe that humanity is giving up the hope of spiritual immortality for the promise of physical resurrection. The Holies are the ones who provide the book's title, writing that phrase on walls as a protest slogan.

A Man Alone

The protagonist is Daniel Frost. (An appropriate name!) He works in the public relations department of the Forever Center. A shady part of his job, which is not even known by his boss, is to exert a subtle form of censorship on the media. Anything that might make the company look bad is suppressed.

By sheer accident, Frost obtains a document that exposes corruption within the Forever Center. He doesn't even know what the document means, but it makes him the target of the company's head of security. Frost is knocked out and dragged into a kangaroo court, where he is convicted of treason to humanity, and given the second most dreaded punishment in the world.

(The worst punishment is to have your right to freezing and resurrection taken away. This happens to one of the novel's secondary characters, just because a mechanical breakdown of his vehicle prevented him from taking a dead person to the storage facility in time. His lawyer, who unsuccessfully tried to defend him against the judgement of a computer jury, becomes the protagonist's ally. She also serves as the love interest. Fortunately, Simak handles the romantic subplot in a more mature fashion than some writers.)

Frost is ostracized. Three circles are tattooed on his face, to warn people that they are not to have any relationship with him at all. (This is what gives the book its rather abstract cover image.) He is doomed to scavenge what food he can from garbage cans, and find shelter in ruined buildings.

(This part of the novel reminds me of Robert Silverberg's excellent story To See the Invisible Man, from the first issue of Worlds of Tomorrow.)

This portion of the book reads like one of Keith Laumer's more serious action/adventure/chase novels. Frost eventually winds up at a farm, now abandoned, where he vacationed as a boy. In what struck me as a wild coincidence, the missing mathematician — remember her? — happens to be there as well. She reveals a discovery that changes everything.

Although there's a happy ending for the main characters, with the good guys winning and love blooming, the book ends on a somber note. A fervently religious hermit provides the novel's last lines, and they aren't very hopeful.

The main plot is interrupted by chapters dealing with minor, often unnamed characters. These provide the reader with more details about this future world, and how the people in it react to the promise of physical immortality. There's a priest who has a crisis of faith, because he's chosen to be frozen and revived. There's an author who's written a carefully researched book exposing the Forever Center, but who can't get it published.

In addition to a traditional suspense plot, Simak provides philosophical musings about death and immortality. Although he's clearly on the side of the Holies, he avoids making things black and white.

I could quibble that parts of the story are implausible. (In a world with such a huge population, there are still tracts of unspoiled wilderness.) Some science fiction themes seem out of place. (The mathematician gets her inspiration from ancient alien records.) Overall, however, it's a thoughtful and serious book, well worth reading and pondering.

Why Call them Back from Heaven gets four stars.


by Cora Buhlert

A Ponderous Professor Among the Barbarians: Tarnsman of Gor by John Norman

Tarnsman of Gor by John Norman

During my last visit to my trusty local import bookstore, the trusty paperback spinner rack yielded a book that looked promising. I had never heard of John Norman nor did I have any idea what a Tarnsman is or where Gor is, but the blurb on the back promised an Edgar Rice Burroughs style adventure on an unknown planet.

I took the book home and eagerly cracked it open, only to find myself faced with a lengthy and very dull opening in which our narrator, one Tarl Cabot, holds forth about the origins of his name (from the Italian, though his family hails from Bristol), his family history (father vanished, mother dead), his education (Oxford, naturally) and his position as a professor of English history. The diction and plodding pacing are more reminiscent of justly forgotten Victorian novels than of a thrilling adventure tale.

Frustrated by the demanding duties of a college professor such as grading term papers, Cabot goes camping and finds a glowing envelope with his name on it on the ground. Inside, Cabot finds a signet ring as well as a letter from his missing father. Shortly, thereafter a spaceship arrives and whisks Cabot away to the planet Gor, which shares the orbit of Earth but sits on the opposite side of the sun, rendering it indetectable. The similarities to Mondas from the Doctor Who serial "The Tenth Planet" are notable, but likely a case of both stories drawing on the same discredited cosmology.

Cabot learns all this from his estranged father, who seems genuinely touched to see his son, only to immediately begin lecturing him on the history and society of Gor, on the importance of Home Stones and on the all-powerful Priest-Kings who may be aliens or gods. Of course, neither Cabot nor we have seen anything of Gor yet, so we have no reason to care about Home Stones or Priest-Kings. The dialogue is stiff and unnatural and the lecture portions read like a particularly dull college textbook. John Norman is apparently the pen name of a professor of philosophy, which explains a lot.

Tarl Cabot spends the next few chapters learning about "the history and legends of Gor, its geography and economics, its social structures and customs, such as the caste system and clan groups, the right of placing the Home Stone, the Places of Sanctuary, when quarter is and is not permitted in war" and sadly, so must the reader. The one bit of all this lore that will be relevant later is that Gor has a rigid caste system and practices slavery. As a man of the Sixties, Cabot is horrified by both.

Slaves, Chains and Adventures

The story picks up when Cabot is initiated into the warrior caste and given a tarn – a giant bird of prey – to ride. Cabot is also given a mission, to steal the Home Stone of the rival city Ar. Unfortunately, this raid will also cost the lives of two women, the slave girl Sana and Talena, daughter of the warlord of Ar. Cabot is not happy with this either.

He frees Sana and returns her home, manfully resisting her offer of some very physical gratitude. Then Cabot flies off to steal the Home Stone of Ar. He manages to acquire the stone as well as an unwanted hostage in Talena, who clings to the saddle of his tarn in an attempt to save the stone. Talena succeeds and manages to hurl Cabot from the saddle. He is saved by an intelligent, talking giant spider in one of the few surprising twists of this tale.

Talena's triumph does not last long. The tarn dumps her and takes off, carrying the Home Stone of Ar with it, leaving Cabot to deal with Talena, who alternately needs to be rescued and tries to kill Cabot.

The story now settles into the pattern of capture, deathly peril and escape familiar to readers of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom books and similar fare. With the Home Stone gone, the people of Ar turn on the warlord and want to execute his entire family, including Talena. So Cabot and Talena are stuck with each other now.

To avoid recognition, Cabot pretends to be a wandering warrior and passes off Talena as a new slave he has captured. They join a merchant caravan and prickly Talena becomes more submissive, as she falls for Cabot, who returns the feeling.

Compared to the barbarians of Gor, Cabot views himself as an enlightened man of the twentieth century. That said, his relationship with Talena and the focus on hoods, shackles, collars, leashes, whips and stripping her off her garments is unpleasantly reminiscent of the less savoury entertainment found in certain bars in Hamburg's famous redlight district St. Pauli. The phallic implications of the Goreans' favourite execution method impalement cannot be ignored either. Robert E. Howard's Conan, who actually is a barbarian, treats his female companions with far more respect than Tarl Cabot.

Night clubs on Große Freiheit in Hamburg's famous redlight district St. Pauli by night
Night clubs on Große Freiheit in Hamburg's famous redlight district St. Pauli by night
Jungmühle Hamburg
Jungmühle's Hippdrome in St. Pauli, where you can ride horses and donkeys and camels and watch naked ladies wrestling in the mud.
St. Pauli by Day
St. Pauli's famous Reeperbahn is not quite as enticing by day, though these youths protesting the war in Vietnam in front of a topless bar are causing quite an uproar.

The novel ends, as such stories must, with Tarl Cabot uniting the warring cities of Gor. He rescues Talena from execution, marries her and finally does what has only been alluded to so far. Then… Cabot wakes up in New Hampshire again, even though there is no reason for this except that the same happened to John Carter.

Just Read Burroughs

The parallels to Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars are obvious. But even though A Princess of Mars is already more than fifty years old, it offers more adventure and entertainment than Tarnsman of Gor.

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Once the story gets going, it's fun enough, though not up to the standards Burroughs, let alone Robert E. Howard or Leigh Brackett. But the entire first third of the book is devoted to endless lectures. Even in the later portions, Norman interrupts a scene where Cabot is about to be executed in some awful way by having him discuss philosophy at great length with the villain who just sentenced him to death. Maybe Cabot tries to escape by boring his executioners to death, but given how otherwise earnest this novel is, I seriously doubt it.

Rating this book is difficult. On the one hand, it is less ridiculous than Lin Carter's The Star Magicians. On the other hand, The Star Magicians was also highly entertaining, while large stretches of Tarnsman of Gor are just dull.

One and a half stars



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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

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

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


by John Boston

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


by Frank R. Paul

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

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

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


by Gray Morrow

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

The Last Bounce, by William Tenn


by Henry Sharp

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

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

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


by Frank R. Paul

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

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

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

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

Whew!  Two overripe stars, barely.

Little Girl Lost, by Richard Matheson

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


by Ray Houlihan

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

Small Town, by Philip K. Dick


by Bernard Krigstein

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

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

Angels in the Jets, by Jerome Bixby


by Paul Lundy

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

Summing Up

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

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




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 12, 1967] All's Fair in Love and War (March 1967 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Peace on Earth? No. Peace Above Earth? Maybe.

With the conflict in Vietnam growing ever more bloody, and tensions building between the Soviet Union and China, it seems that war is here to stay on this sad little planet. Dare we look to the skies for a way to escape this endless chaos?

Although humanity is just starting to take its first baby steps into the cosmos, some folks are trying to make sure that it will be filled with plowshares instead of swords. Late last month, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union signed the so-called Outer Space Treaty.


President Lyndon Baines Johnson shakes hands with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin at the signing ceremony. Barely visible between them are British ambassador Sir Patrick Dean and American ambassador Arthur J. Goldberg. I think that's American Secretary of State Dean Rusk at the podium. Don't ask me who the other folks are.

The agreement is formally known as The Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. That's quite a mouthful, but what does it mean?

In brief, it bans nuclear weapons in space; limits use of the Moon and other extraterrestrial bodies to peaceful purposes; and prevents any nation from claiming sovereignty over any region of space or any celestial body. Of course, only three countries have signed it so far, and any treaty is only a piece of paper, so we'll have to wait to see what really happens outside the atmosphere. Hope for the best.

Monkeying Around With My Heart

Let's turn our backs on war and look for romance. Love songs are always popular, and the current Number One hit in the USA is no exception. The upbeat number I'm a Believer by the Monkees has been at the top of the charts since early January, and shows no signs of fading away.


And all this time I thought they were just a fictional band created for a television situation comedy.

Tales of Mars and Venus

The latest issue of Fantastic is full of stories involving wars, both large and small, as well as amorous relationships between women and men. Sometimes both themes show up in the same yarn.


Cover art by Robert Fuqua.

This issue, unsurprisingly, features one new story and a bunch of reprints. The cover illustration is also from an old magazine.


The May 1939 issue of Fantastic Adventures, to be exact.

Happiness Squad, by Charles W. Runyon


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

A personal war meets love gone very bad in the opening of the only original story in the magazine. A man places a timebomb in his wife's flying car, so it will explode during her flight to visit her mother. After this stark beginning, we learn something about this future world, and the man's place in it.

In the tradition of Aldous Huxley's famous novel Brave New World, this is a society bent on eliminating unhappiness through the use of drugs. It has also nearly wiped out the ability of human beings to perform acts of violence on each other, in a way reminiscent of the Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange.

In addition to that, it also manipulates memories, in such a way that it can give people completely new identities. The uxoricidal protagonist accidentally discovers that he was once a brilliant plastic surgeon, who transformed an unattractive woman into a raving beauty. The woman, with the help of the man's rival, then altered his memory so that he imagines himself to be her loving husband.

Because of his programmed aversion to violence, the man sabotages all his attempts to kill the woman he blames for ruining his life. (Besides everything else, he also lost the woman he really loves, who had her memory altered in such a way that she now works in a brothel.) Unable to perform the murder himself, he hires one of the very few people who avoided the programming to do the dirty work. (This fellow was one of the rare folks born on Mars who survived a failed colony and escaped to Earth.)


The killer, the victim, and the man who hired him.

There's a twist ending that changes everything we thought we knew. Without giving too much away, I interpret the conclusion as implying yet another reversal, which the author leaves unwritten. I may be reading too much into this, but what remains unsaid is just as powerful as what is made explicit, I believe.

I have a hard time giving a fair rating to this very disturbing story. It's not exactly pleasant to read, but it held my attention from the beginning to the (incomplete?) end. It's nearly impossible to sympathize with any of the characters, even if they're not really responsible for the kind of people they've been manipulated into becoming. The subtle implications of the conclusion may just be in my imagination. In short, I think I like this story more than I should, if that makes any sense at all.

Four stars.

Shifting Seas, by Stanley G. Weinbaum

The April 1937 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this apocalyptic work from the pen of a pioneering author who died much too young.


Cover art by Leo Morey.

Gigantic volcanic explosions and earthquakes rip apart the isthmus of Central America, driving most of the land under the sea. Besides the immediate deaths of millions, this changes the flow of the Gulf Stream, so that much of Europe becomes much colder. The crisis alters political alliances. In particular, war between the United States and a desperate Europe, led by the sea power of the United Kingdom, seems imminent.


Illustration also by Leo Morey.

Besides war, we also have love. The protagonist is an American man engaged to a British woman. The impending conflict threatens to destroy their relationship, until the man comes up with a way to solve the problem without a clash of arms.

The premise is an interesting one, and I liked the way the author considered the political implications of a major change in world climate. The resolution may be a little too simple, and the narrative style a bit old-fashioned, but the story creates a decent sense of wonder.

Three stars.

Judson's Annihilator, by John Beynon

An author now better known as John Wyndham supplies this war story, which first appeared in a British publication under the title Beyond the Screen.


Cover art by Serge Drigin. This issue, number one of only three ever published, is dated 1938, without specifying the month.

It was quickly reprinted in the October 1939 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Robert Fuqua.

In true Astounding/Analog style, a lone genius invents gizmos producing fields that make anything inside them disappear. When combined German and Italian forces send a huge number of planes to attack England, the devices cause the aircraft to vanish.


Illustration also by Robert Fuqua.

The inventor's sister falls into the field produced by one of the machines and disappears. The hero, in love with her, follows her into it. As the reader suspects by this point, the invention doesn't really destroy what passes through the field, but sends it somewhere else. The place turns out to be an England inhabited by a small number of people living in a primitive way. With the help of a local woman, the hero and his beloved escape from the clutches of the Germans who went through the field.

There's a nice little twist about where they've wound up that is mentioned in passing, but nothing much comes of it. The plot is pretty straightforward once the hero enters the field. I found the imaginary version of World War Two the most interesting part of the story. Other than that, it's a pretty typical science fiction adventure.

Three stars.

Battle in the Dawn, by Manly Wade Wellman

From the January 1939 issue of Amazing Stories comes this vision of the remote past.


Cover art by Robert Fuqua again.

Apparently, this is the first of a series of stories about a caveman named Hok. In this tale, his tribe is moving to better hunting grounds when they run into Neanderthals. Contrary to what modern anthropologists think, these are bestial creatures, who attack the group of Homo sapiens and even kill a baby and eat it. Obviously, a war between the two species begins.


Illustrations also by the ubiquitous Robert Fuqua.

After an initial triumph over the subhumans, Hok steals a woman from a rival tribe of Homo Sapiens, in order to make her his mate. She objects, going so far as to threaten to kill herself if he doesn't let her go. Eventually, the first kiss in history makes the woman fall in love with her captor, and the two tribes unite against the Neanderthals.


Not to mention other challenges.

With nearly three decades of hindsight, it's easy to dismiss this story as a very inaccurate portrait of prehistory. It might better be thought of as a sword-and-sorcery yarn, without swords and without sorcery. The Neanderthals are monsters, the hero is a brave warrior with a beautiful woman to win, and so forth. As such, it's a fair example of the form.

Three stars.

The Draw, by Jerome Bixby

The March 1954 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this tale of the Old West, where war often consisted of one man against another.


Cover art by Clarence Doore.

You may have already seen it in a paperback collection of the author's stories that came out a few years ago.


Cover art by Ralph Brillhart.

An onery teenager — we'd call him a juvenile delinquent these days — is an excellent marksman, but not good at all when it comes to pulling his pistol from his holster. This is the only factor that keeps him from becoming an infamous killer.


Illustrations by William Ashman.

Through sheer force of will, he develops the telekinetic ability to instantaneously transport his gun to his hand, making him the deadliest gunman around. After terrorizing the local townsfolk, he challenges the sheriff to a gunfight. As you'd expect, things don't go well for him.


A scene from Gunsmoke?

I don't have a lot to say about this story. The ending is somewhat anticlimactic, but there's nothing particularly wrong with it. The usual Western clichés are present, which may be inevitable.

Three stars.

Masters of Fantasy: A. Merritt Illustrated, by Anonymous

The magazine ends with a few drawings by Frank R. Paul that accompanied a reprint of Abraham Merritt's 1919 fantasy novel The Moon Pool, which was serialized in Amazing Stories in the May, June, and July 1927 issues.


I guess this is the Moon Pool.


All cover art by Frank R. Paul as well.


I didn't notice the frog people at first.


I'm guessing this is a scene from The Moon Pool.


Is she doing the Twist?


Caution! Mad Scientist at Work!

What can I say? Three stars.

Fighting for Something to Love

In this magazine full of love and war, the stories were fair. Not that great, not that bad. I predict that Runyon's new novelette is going to produce strong reactions, both positive and negative. The reprints are likely to be less controversial.

As for the choice between the two great themes I've noted, it seems like an easy one.


Somebody came up with this catchy slogan a couple of years ago, and now you can get it on a poster.

 



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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[December 8, 1966] Flesh and Blood (January 1967 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Burning Curiosity

It's probably just my morbid imagination, but it seems to me that the most intriguing, if horrifying, event in recent days was the demise of Doctor John Irving Bentley earlier this month. The elderly physician was reduced to a pile of ashes (except for part of one leg) in what some people are calling a case of spontaneous human combustion.


The scene of the fire. Notice the large hole in the floor caused by the flames. I have deliberately avoided sharing more gruesome photographs.

Church Music

After that piece of news, it's a relief to turn to a piece of light entertainment. The unique novelty song Winchester Cathedral by some British folks calling themselves the New Vaudeville Band, currently at the top of the American music charts, is a deliberately old-fashioned number. It sounds like something Rudy Vallee might have offered in the 1920's, complete with singing through a megaphone and a finishing chorus of oh-bo-de-o-do.


Rumor has it that the song was recorded by session musicians hired for the occasion, and that the band was hastily put together when it became a hit.

Well, that got me to thinking about all the folks buried in Winchester Cathedral. (There's that morbid imagination at work again.) The most familiar one — to me, at least — is the great author Jane Austen.


It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a dead woman in possession of a good reputation must be in want of a lengthy epitaph.

Gore on the Pages

Given my grim mood, it's appropriate that the
latest issue of Fantastic is full of violence, horror, and bizarre manipulations of the human body.


Cover art by Frank R. Paul, stolen from the back cover of the March 1941 issue of Amazing Stories.


The original, with brighter colors. The Reptile Men (no women?) are cute.

The Ultimate Gift, by Bryce Walton

We begin our journey into the macabre with the magazine's only original work.


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

Aliens arrive at the Moon. They seem ready to conquer the world, but are hesitant about humanity's ability to put up a fight. They allow envoys to pay a visit, but kill them for some unknown violation of protocol. The dying words (thoughts, really, but let's not get into that subplot) of the most recent victim lead to an unusual choice for the next diplomat.

The so-called Basket Man was born without arms or legs. After years of misery, he winds up as a sideshow freak, making use of advanced technology to move around and manipulate things. In his bitterness, he refuses to have artificial limbs attached to his torso. A representative from the United Nations, based on the hint noted in the paragraph above, convinces him to acquire robotic arms and legs, and to head to the Moon to meet the aliens.


The fact that they're reptilian, sort of like the creatures on the cover, is relevant.

A little knowledge of zoology may lead you to predict the reason for the aliens' violent reaction to their visitors. As you may have guessed from my description, this is a ghastly little story, with a particularly disquieting scene near the end. It has a certain raw power, I suppose. Given the infamous thalidomide tragedy of not so many years ago, the premise may strike many readers as being in poor taste.

Two stars.

The People of the Black Circle, By Robert E. Howard

Dominating the issue is a bloody sword-and-sorcery adventure, featuring a hero who seems to be making a comeback of sorts. This novella was originally serialized in three parts, in the September, October, and November 1934 issues of Weird Tales.


All cover art by Margaret Brundage.


Brundage often painted scantily clad young ladies for the magazine.


Two scantily clad young ladies.

Before I get into the story itself, let me talk about the revival of interest in Robert E. Howard and his most famous creation. The tales of Conan were left in the yellowing pages of old pulp magazines until specialty publisher Gnome Press starting collecting them in several volumes.


Cover art by David A. Kyle. The novella under discussion appears in this book, number two in the Gnome Press series, from 1952.

Earlier this year, the story appeared in a paperback collection. (It should be noted here that L. Sprague de Camp completed some of Howard's unfinished works about Conan.)


Cover art by Frank Frazetta.

The setting is an imaginary ancient past. There are clues that this takes place in a fantasy version of the Afghanistan/Pakistan/India region. (Some of the hints are a bit too obvious, such as a chain of mountains called the Himelians.) We begin with a king whose soul is about to be stolen by evil sorcerers. Rather than allow this to happen, he orders his sister to kill him.


Illustrations by Hugh Rankin.

This opening scene is just a hint of the carnage to follow. The plot is a complex one, with various factions scheming against each other, betrayals, allies becoming enemies, and foes forced to work together. Frankly, I had some trouble following it. In brief, the sister wants to force Conan, now the leader of a group of hill people, to wreak revenge on the sinister forces that attacked her brother. This involves several of his men who have been taken prisoner by another realm. (It's complicated.)

Instead, Conan kidnaps the sister, hoping to exchange her for the freedom of his men. This plan is ruined when a sorcerer, betraying the dark forces for whom he was working, works with the sister's disloyal servant on their own scheme to rule the land, which results in the death of Conan's men. (I said it was complicated.)


Conan, his captive, and a horse.

After a whole bunch of wild adventures, with plenty of killings, the pair wind up at the mountain where four powerful sorcerers dwell, along with their less powerful minions and one ultra-powerful sorcerer. By this time, the sister's hatred for Conan has turned to love, just in time for her to be kidnapped from her kidnapper, if you see what I mean.


One of the many torments to which the sister is subjected.

I hope this gives you some idea of the breakneck pace, non-stop action, and frequent plot twists in this story. I lost count of how many people are slaughtered by sword or magic. (At one point, Conan acquires a magic item that protects him from deadly sorcery. This seems awfully convenient.) There are even battle scenes, with hundreds or thousands of warriors massacring each other.

There's plenty of weird magic as well, which may be the most interesting part of the story. I was particularly impressed by the floating cloud on which the four sorcerers travel.

Howard had an undeniably important influence on sword-and-sorcery fiction, and his imitators continue the tradition. (Brak the Barbarian, created by John Jakes, comes to mind.) The raw intensity of Howard's style and the bloodthirstiness of his plots aren't for all tastes. Personally, I prefer the wit and elegance of Fritz Leiber's tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

Three stars.

The Young One, by Jerome Bixby

From the April 1954 issue of the magazine comes this supernatural yarn.


Cover art by Augusto Marin.

Jerome Bixby is probably best known to SF fans for his chilling tale It's a Good Life and the memorable episode of Twilight Zone adapted from it. He has also dabbled in screenwriting, coming up with the kind of B movies I enjoy, such as It! The Terror From Beyond Space.


Illustration by Sanford Kossin.

A young boy meets a fellow his own age, newly arrived in the United States from Hungary. He seems nice enough, but all animals hate him. What's even stranger is that his parents eat raw meat and have very sharp teeth. (You can already see where this is going, can't you?)

The immigrant boy says he absolutely has to be back home before seven at night. The American kid tricks him by taking him into a cave, then pretending to be lost, so the Hungarian lad can't return until after his strict curfew. You can probably guess what happens.

It's an decent story, if predictable. (The exact way the plot is resolved may be a little bit unexpected.) The description of the cavern is intriguing, if nothing else.

Three stars.

The Ambidexter, by David H. Keller, M.D.

This Kelleryarn comes from the April 1931 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Leo Morey

The world's two greatest surgeons, one American and one Chinese, have a meeting. The American has a brain tumor, so he wants the Chinese physician to remove part of his brain and replace it with part of a brain from another person. Can you guess that this is going to go very badly wrong?


Illustration by Leo Morey also.

This tale of Mad Science reminds me of old horror movies, the kind that show up on Shock Theater. In particular, the transplant theme brings to mind things like Mad Love, although that was about hands and not brains.

The partial brain transplant concept is unique, as far as I know, and Keller's background as a physician makes the crazy idea seem somewhat plausible. The character of the Chinese surgeon reeks of the old Yellow Peril stereotype, unfortunately. Replace him with, say, Boris Karloff and you might have the basis for a decent black-and-white chiller. I don't think the censor would care for the ghastly ending, however.

Two stars.

Mad House, by Richard Matheson

The January-February 1953 issue supplies this reprint.


Cover art by Robert Frankenberg.

Like Bixby, Matheson is associated with Twilight Zone and has written screenplays for feature films. His movies are too many to list, but a couple worth mentioning are the Jules Verne adaptation Master of the World and The Last Man on Earth. (Apparently Matheson wasn't happy with this version of his novel I am Legend, so he used the pseudonym Logan Swanson for his share of the screenwriting credit. I actually thought it was pretty good.)

As with Howard's novella, Matheson's story has already been reprinted in a couple of collections. The first one is named after his first published story, already considered a classic.


Cover art by Mel Hunter.

The second one is sort of a reduced version of the first one, omitting some stories.


Cover art by Charles Binger.

This psychological horror story features a frustrated writer who ekes out a living as a poorly paid instructor of literature. He's nearly always boiling over with anger about his inability to be published, lashing out at his students and just about everyone else. Fed up with his rage, his wife leaves him.


Illustrations by Bill Ashman.

He also fights a daily battle with inanimate objects around the house. They seem to be conspiring to harm him. An acquaintance — he can't be called a friend, given the fact that the main character is as nasty to him as he is to everybody else — suggests that the house is sort of absorbing his anger.


Chaos ensues.

Like other stories in this issue, it leads to a blood-soaked conclusion. It's also similar in that it's pretty predictable. The best part of it is the author's style, full of short, rage-filled sentences that really get you into the main character's head. That's not a very nice place to be, of course.

Three stars.

Worth All That Suffering?

The magazine ends with this appropriately macabre anecdote, which I offer without comment.


I don't believe it. Oh, wait a minute, that was a comment, wasn't it? Sorry about that.

Not a great issue, although a bare majority of the stories were at least worth reading. The Conan story is of historical importance, anyway. I suppose the magazine would be enjoyable enough if you happen to be in a situation where you need to be waiting around.


Cartoon by somebody called Salame, from the same issue as the Matheson story.

[Join us tonight for the next episode of Star Trek — airing at 8:30 PM Pacific and Eastern!]




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[November 24, 1966] Middling (December 1966 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Better Red than . . . ?

The December Amazing, all business, with the editorial and letter column seemingly dropped permanently , makes a nice-looking package, with a cover by Frank R. Paul shamelessly dominated by near-fire engine red.  It’s taken from the back cover of the January 1942 Amazing, where it was titled “Glass City of Europa.” The caption there says "Transparent and opaque plastics make this a wonder city of ersatz science.  Transportation is by means of giant, domesticated insects." 


by Frank R. Paul

Interestingly, this cover is not only cropped from the original, as is usual, but altered: someone has airbrushed Jupiter from the upper left-hand corner!  There’s nothing in its place but more red.  Now that’s editing!  Of a sort.

Born Under Mars (Part 1 of 2), by John Brunner

The featured fiction on the cover is the beginning of John Brunner’s two-part serial Born Under Mars.  As usual I will withhold comment (and reading) until both parts are available.  A quick inspection suggests that this one represents Brunner the capable post-pulp storyteller and not the author in his highly variable philosophical mode, the poles represented by his worthy The Whole Man and his unfortunate mess The Bridge to Azrael.


by Gray Morrow

Vanguard of the Lost, by John D. Macdonald

John D. Macdonald is best known for crime fiction—a lot of it.  Since 1950 he has published 40-odd crime novels, most if not all original paperbacks.  His current project is a series of novels about a private eye named Travis McGee—eight of them in three years.  In all this criminous fecundity it’s easily forgotten that Macdonald was once an up-and-coming SF writer, and pretty prolific at that too.  From 1948 to 1952 he published almost 50 stories in the SF magazines, in addition to a number in the borderline-SF pulp Doc Savage, all the while maniacially generating crime stories as well.  He used multiple pseudonyms and sometimes had multiple stories in the same magazine issue.  In his spare time he cranked out two decently-received SF novels, Wine of the Dreamers and Ballroom of the Skies.  A lot of his work was excellent, too; highlights include A Child Is Crying, Flaw, Game for Blondes, and my own favorite, the compact and nasty Spectator Sport, all of them promptly anthologized.


by Julian S. Krupa

Then it all stopped.  He had one last story in 1953 in Fantasy and Science Fiction, and since then it’s been all crime, almost all the time.  He did appear in the Merril annual “best SF” volume a couple of years ago with a weak fantasy from Cosmopolitan, The Legend of Joe Lee, and in 1962 published The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything, a crime novel (rather, a farce with some crime and attempted crime in it) with an SF premise: the time-slowing gimmick of Wells’s The New Accelerator and its numerous successors, including Macdonald’s own Half-Past Eternity, a novella for the pulp Super Science Stories in 1950.

Crime, it appears, paid—at least better than SF.  And in fact the SF market of the 1950s could never have accommodated the number of novels he produced.  His post-1952 short fiction, meanwhile, was split between the crime fiction magazines and the more lucrative likes of Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post.

After that buildup, it’s unfortunate that Macdonald’s Vanguard of the Lost, from the May 1950 Fantastic Adventures, doesn’t amount to more.  Aliens have landed!  Well, not landed yet, but their fleet of ships is traversing the globe.  Larry Graim, statistician by day and SF writer by night, goes up to his building’s roof to check them out, and meets there Alice, a feisty young woman who proves to be the one who denounces Graim’s work relentlessly in the SF magazine letter columns (“the poor man’s Kuttner and the cretin’s van Vogt”).

Graim is disoriented by the fact that these aliens’ rather beat-up-looking, uncommunicative spaceships first seem to be mapping the earth, and then land and release large machines that start building things with no visible sentient direction.  It’s completely different from the plots he’s familiar with from the SF magazines, so he and Alice go try to figure out what’s behind the seemingly mindless display.  En route there is much mild satire of Everyman reacting to the unprecedented.  The denouement is uninspiring and ends on a note of slapstick, to be followed by wedding bells to complete the meet-cute plot.  It’s readable and vaguely amusing.  Three stars.

The Revolt of the Pedestrians, by David H. Keller, M.D.

The second novelet in the issue is David H. Keller’s first, and probably most famous, story, The Revolt of the Pedestrians (Amazing, Feb. 1928).  In the future, everybody is on wheels, all the time.  The mania for speed has overtaken everything else; the roadways are progressively more dominated by automobiles; pedestrians first become fair game and then are banned altogether, and hounded out of existence—or so it is thought.  By the time of the story, the legs of the ordinary citizen have atrophied, and everyone gets around the house and the office in miniature personal cars.  But . . . hidden in the wilderness, a remnant population of pedestrians is thriving, and scheming, and perfecting their science, and soon they shall declare themselves and their demands. 


by Frank R. Paul

This of course is all quite ridiculous.  But aside from that minor problem, this story is actually pretty good.  It’s well paced in a rambling sort of way, very smoothly written, with engaging central characters, with Keller’s soon-to-be-characteristic expositional chunks going down smoothly, and without the cranky and rancorous ideological overtones of some of his later stories.  And bear in mind that the absurd extrapolations here are a cruder version of the satirical method that later served Galaxy so well (compare Pohl’s The Midas Plague).  Three stars—four if one compares it only to other works of its time.

Dr. Grimshaw's Sanitarium, by Fletcher Pratt

I pinned Fletcher Pratt long ago as one of the more tedious SF writers going (actually, gone: 1897-1956).  I remember as a child trying to force my way through his Double Jeopardy, thinking that if Doubleday published it and it was reprinted as a Galaxy Novel, there must be something to it.  Then I encountered Invaders from Rigel, in which elephantine extraterrestrials turn humans into metal by manipulating radiation, and realized the futility of persevering with it, or with him.  (In fairness, Pratt’s outright fantasy, both his collaborations with L. Sprague de Camp and his unaccompanied work, was much superior.)

The Pratt-fall du jour is Dr. Grimshaw’s Sanitarium, from the May 1934 Amazing.  Our hero John Doherty is sent to the sanitarium by his employer for a rest after his courageous thwarting of a train robbery, which left him with some psychological difficulty.  It soon becomes apparent that Dr. Grimshaw is a sinister character and there’s something funny going on.  He’s turning people into midgets!  Soon enough the Doctor gets wise to Doherty and his friends and really gives them the midget treatment, so they end up having to survive in the grass, which is now apparently taller than they are, and subsist on insects that they manage to kill with makeshift weapons (reportedly, June bugs are reasonably tasty but houseflies are disgusting).  But now the end is near!  Grimshaw’s got a cat, and all is lost.  Two stars, barely.


by Leo Morey

Interestingly (sort of), when editors Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend solicited self-nominations for an anthology to be titled My Best Science Fiction Story, published in 1949, Pratt submitted this one, though he did acknowledge rewriting it for a more modern audience.  I did not investigate the revision.

The Flame from Nowhere, by Eando Binder


by Julian S. Krupa

Eando Binder’s The Flame from Nowhere (Amazing, April 1939) is a routine period adventure story: forest fire proves impossible to stop, turns out it’s really an atomic fire, must have atomic fire-fighting methods, our hero quickly whips them up in a flurry of mumbo-jumbo, making the penultimate sacrifice, two stars.  Next!

The Commuter, by Philip K. Dick


by Bill Ashman

Philip K. Dick’s The Commuter, from the August/September 1953 Amazing, during the magazine’s brief flirtation with high pay rates and a stab at higher quality, is one of many facilely clever stories from his early period of prolific glibness.  It starts with a small man asking a railroad clerk for a ticket book to Macon Heights, being told there is no Macon Heights, and disappearing.  It happens again.  A railroad official takes the train and finds it does stop at Macon Heights, which research shows was a proposed development that was rejected by the authorities years ago.  So what’s happening to reality?  The story, which foreshadows more substantial work by Dick on the same theme, is a trifle with a barb; it effectively conveys the official’s fear for his familiar world and life.  Three stars.

He Took It with Him, by Clark Collins

The issue concludes with He Took It With Him, by Clark Collins, actually a pseudonym of Mack Reynolds, who mostly used it for articles in men’s magazines, such as Beat’s Guide to Paris, in French Frills for October-December of this year (Beat?  In 1966?  What a square.) and Guide to Fallen Women in Sir Knight in 1961.  This story is from the April 1950 Fantastic Adventures. Bentley, a selfish rich guy with cancer who’s got a year to live, buys a noted scientist with a promise to build the research institute the scientist dreams of if he will only figure out how to preserve Bentley until such time as he can be revived and cured.  The new Institute will be charged with keeping him safe, and also hiding his money, converted to gold and diamonds, until he is awakened to (of course) a nasty surprise that’s not too obvious to the reader.  Readable, modestly clever, three stars.


by H. W. MacCauley

Summing Up

So, a middling reading experience—nothing too terrible, most of it at least agreeably readable, one surprise from the unlikely source of Dr. Keller, and the prospect of the Brunner serial pending. 

(For an excellent experience, you don't want to miss Part 2 of "The Menagerie", the next episode of Star Trek — join us tonight at 8:30 PM (Pacific AND Eastern — two showings)!!)

Here's the invitation!



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[October 16, 1966] Only the Lonely (November 1966 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf
with apologies to Roy Orbison

Solitary Confinement

To be a citizen of a nation inside another nation must be a very lonely feeling. Italy contains two of these countries, the tiny nations of San Marino and Vatican City. A third member of that exclusive club came into existence on October 4, when the former British colony of Basutoland won full independence, changing its name to the Kingdom of Lesotho. Lesotho is completely surrounded by the nation of South Africa.


King Moshoehoe II, constitutional monarch of Lesotho.

A Song for the Sorrowful

You don't have to be living in any of those three countries to feel lonely, of course. People experiencing that painful emotion might obtain some solace from the current Number One song on the American popular music charts. The Four Tops have a smash hit with their powerful ballad Reach Out (I'll Be There), with lyrics that are clearly aimed at a lonesome listener.


They seem to be reaching out to the record buyer.

Fiction for the Forlorn

Appropriately, the latest issue of Fantastic is full of stories featuring characters who are literally, or metaphorically, isolated.


Cover art by Bob Hilbreth, stolen from the December 1946 issue of Amazing Stories.


The original, illustrating a story that was part of the infamous Shaver Mystery.

Broken Image, by Thomas N. Scortia


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

The only new story in this issue features a protagonist who feels himself estranged from those around him, human or not.

His name is Baldur, and he has been surgically altered to resemble one of the humanoid aliens inhabiting a planet for which Earthlings have plans. It seems that humanity has evolved beyond sectarianism and violence, and seeks to bring the blessings of peace to other worlds.

(If I sound a little sarcastic, that's because the story's view of humanity is somewhat ambiguous. Baldur is completely loyal to the idea of Man as a perfect being, but his vision of the species is, as we'll see, a little distorted.)

One group of aliens oppresses another, going so far as to execute rebels in a particularly gruesome way.


Such as this.

The plan is to have Baldur act as a messiah for the lower class. Highly advanced technology allows him to perform healings and other miracles.

(At this point, you've probably figured out that Baldur is intended as a Christ figure. The oppressors are kind of like the Romans, the lower class is sort of like the Judeans, and so on. Given that analogy, some of what happens won't surprise you. The character's name also suggests an allusion to myths about the Norse god Baldr, sometimes spelled Balder or — a ha! — Baldur.)

There's a human woman, also in disguise, to help Baldur in his role as the savior of the oppressed. However, it turns out that she's hiding something from him, and that the folks in the starship orbiting the planet have schemes of which he is not aware.

This is a pretty good story, which held my interest all the way through. The Christian metaphor might be too blatant, and there's a twist ending that made me scratch my head. It explains why Baldur thinks of humanity as superior to other species, but I'm not sure if it really works.

(One interesting thing is that Baldur is not only physically changed, but mentally as well. His memories seem to be slightly distorted. Since we see everything from his point of view, although the story is told in third person, he serves as what some literary critics are starting to call an unreliable narrator. This all goes along with the twist ending.)

Three stars.

You're All Alone, by Fritz Leiber


Illustrations by Henry Sharp.

There's a title that suggests loneliness, for sure.

Before I get into the story itself, let me go over the rather complex history of the text. It seems that Leiber intended it to appear in Unknown, the fantasy magazine edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. as a companion to Astounding. Unknown died before the story could be published.

Leiber expanded the work from about forty thousand words to approximately seventy-five thousand, hoping to have a book publisher accept it as part of their fantasy line. The company stopped publishing fantasy before it sold.

Back to the drawing board! Leiber next sent it to Fantastic Adventures, who agreed to buy it if — guess what? — it was cut back to forty thousand words. It finally appeared in the July 1950 issue. That's the version that's been reprinted in the current issue of Fantastic.


Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones.

We're not done yet! The seventy-five thousand word version wound up as one half of a double paperback, under the name The Sinful Ones. The publisher came up with the suggestive new title, altered the text slightly to make it racier, and added sexy chapter titles like The Strip Tease and Blonde Prostitute, trying to convince the reader that it was hot stuff.


Anonymous cover art. The companion novel, about a lady bullfighter, looks . . . interesting.

Back to the story itself. (At forty thousand words, it actually justifies, if just barely, its label by the magazine as a Complete Novel.)

Carr Mackay works at an employment agency in Chicago. A frightened young woman comes into his office, followed by a big blonde woman. The younger woman is obviously terrified of the blonde, but tries to ignore her. She talks to Carr, pretending to have a job interview, and asking him if he's one of them.


By the way, the blonde woman has a big, vicious, scary pet dog, but it's not anywhere near as large as shown in this illustration, or the cover of Fantastic Adventures!

Before leaving, she scribbles a note warning him to watch out for the blonde and her two male companions, and leaving a cryptic message to meet her at a certain location if he wants to learn more.

Of course, this all sounds like the paranoid ravings of a lunatic. Things get weirder when the blonde slaps the young woman across the face, and she forces herself not to react. Then a co-worker shows up, acting as if he's introducing Carr to somebody, but there's nobody there. Some kind of practical joke?

It's hard to deny that something strange is going on when Carr shows up at his girlfriend's place, and she goes through the motions of greeting and kissing him, but he's not where she apparently thinks he is. She ignores the real Carr, and continues to interact with an imaginary one.


She should really be smooching the empty air instead of a ghostly figure, but that's artistic license for you.

Although he's reluctant to accept the truth, Carr realizes that almost all humans are mindless automatons, just going through the motions like wind-up toys. Only a very few, like the young woman, the blonde and her companions, and himself, are conscious beings. He meets with the woman, leading to dangerous encounters with sinister folks and wild adventures in a world full of clockwork people and those who take advantage of the situation.


A moment of happiness in a public library after hours. I like the subtle hint that the light above their heads is an eye watching them.

The premise is a fascinating one, and the author conveys it in a convincing manner. There's some philosophical depth to the idea, too. Who among us hasn't felt like a cog in a big machine? It moves very quickly, almost like a Keith Laumer novel. (Maybe the longer version allows for more exploration of the concept.)

I could quibble that not everything about the plot is completely logical. Inanimate objects sometimes act as if they're part of the mindless mechanism of life, and sometimes don't. The conscious people are able to knock off the hats of the automatons, for example, and steal their drinks, but the keys of a piano move by themselves when the person supposed to be playing them isn't there.


The floating hands are more artistic license.

Despite this tiny flaw, and the fact that the ending seems rushed, it's an enjoyable short novel. As you'd expect from Leiber, it's well-written. As a bonus, it provides a vivid portrait of the city of Chicago, in all its bright and dark aspects.

Four stars.

Breakfast at Twilight, by Philip K. Dick


Cover art by Clarence Doore.

From the July 1954 issue of Amazing Stories comes this tale of a family isolated from their own time.


Anonymous illustration.

Mom, Dad, and three kids are enjoying a typical morning at home, although there's some kind of fog or smoke outside, and the radio isn't working. The lone boy heads off for school, but quickly comes back. There are soldiers everywhere blocking his way.

It turns out that their home is now seven years in the future. The Cold War has heated up, leading to a dystopian society. (Apparently a bomb caused the time travel effect.) The soldiers are stunned to see a woman and children out in the open, and are even more amazed at the food available in the house.

A political officer (another sign that the United States government has become authoritarian, along with the casually mentioned book burning) suggests that they wait for another bomb to send them back to their own time.

Although the plot is simple enough for an episode of Twilight Zone, this is a powerful story, sending a clear warning of the dangers of escalating world conflicts. (The theme seems even more relevant today, with the situation in Vietnam, than it did just after the Korean War.)

Four stars.

Scream at Sea, by Algis Budrys


Cover art by Vernon Kramer.

The January-February 1954 issue of the magazine provides this example of extreme loneliness.


Illustrations by Ernie Barth.

A man survives an explosion that destroys his ship. He manages to hang on to a piece of the vessel that's got some canned ham and water, so it serves him as a sort of raft. The ship's cat happens to escape the disaster as well.


The only other character in the story.

The author manages to create a true sense of isolation and desperation. It's not a bad piece, but there isn't a trace of science fiction or fantasy at all! There's a twist in the tail that would have been more appropriate for Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine than Fantastic.

(By the way, the editor's blurbs for the last two stories are backwards! I guess that's a sign of how little the publisher cares for these poorly funded magazines full of unpaid reprints.)

Three stars.

Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Artists Behind Him, by Anonymous

Serving as a coda is this portfolio of illustrations for stories by ERB that appeared in Amazing years ago.


For The Land That Time Forgot (1918, reprinted 1927), illustration by Frank R. Paul.


Same credits as above.


For The City of the Mummies (1941), illustration by J. Allen St. John.


For Black Pirates of Barsoom, same year, same artist.


For Goddess of Fire, same year, same artist.

I don't have much to say about these old-fashioned pictures. They're OK.

Three stars.

Some Solace For Solitude

If you're feeling lonesome, picking up a copy of this issue might provide some relief for a few hours. All the stories are worth reading, and a couple of them are better than average. If that doesn't raise your spirits sufficiently, visiting your neighbors might do the trick.


That astronaut won't be lonely. Cartoon by Frosty from the same issue as the Budrys story.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 8, 1966] The Bare Hardly-Essentials (October 1966 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Last issue, the good news was that the customary editorial was dropped.  In this October Amazing, there’s more good news—the self-serving letter column is gone too.  Since there are only four items of fiction here, it makes for a scanty contents page.  That is not necessarily bad.


by Frank R. Paul

The cover is by Frank R. Paul, captioned Martian Spaceships Invade New York, reprinted from the back cover of the May 1941 Amazing.  Like last issue’s cover by James B. Settles, it is significantly cropped from the original.  The image also bears a very superficial similarity to last issue’s cover.  The difference between Paul and Settles, though, calls to mind Mark Twain’s remark about the difference between the lightning and the lightning-bug.  Even in his waning days, Paul did archaic style with class. 

Ensign Flandry, by Poul Anderson

The main reason for the sparse contents page is the very long (100 pages) feature item, Poul Anderson’s Ensign Flandry.  Anderson began his series about Flandry, intelligence agent of the Terran Empire, desultorily, producing four shorter stories from 1951 to 1958.  Then there was a spasm of three novellas for Fantastic and Amazing in 1959 and 1960, all of which were transformed almost instantly into Ace Doubles.  Last year, however, most of the Flandry canon was compiled into hardcover collections from Chilton, Flandry of Terra and Agent of the Terran Empire.

Now Flandry is back with this novel, which suggests that Anderson intends to spin him into a character with the raffishness of James Bond and the career longevity of Horatio Hornblower, providing a framework and formula for potboilers as far as the eye can see.  That’s a fine plan for the author but not so good for the reader looking for something more than product.


by Gray Morrow

So: Ensign Flandry, age 19, is dispatched to Starkad, a remote planet inhabited by a seafaring species, the Tigery, and a sea-dwelling species, the Seatrolls, who are fighting a sort of proxy war, backed by the Terran Empire and Merseia respectively, with overtones (emphasis on the “overt”) of the Cold War and Vietnam. 

Flandry is there with his wise mentor, and they are trying to neutralize the soft-on-Merseia peacenik who is nominally on their side.  There is a lot of intrigue and double-dealing and opportunity for Flandry to be in danger and distinguish himself and become the bigger shot we’ve seen in the earlier stories.  Anderson being the professional he is, there’s a secret and a revelation at the end that trumps everything else that’s been going on, distinguishing the work from the wholly formulaic.  But still—it’s mostly formulaic, maybe decent airport reading if your plane is delayed.  Two stars.

The Space Witch, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

The Space Witch, by Walter M. Miller, Jr., from the November 1951 Amazing, is a piece of work, in the more extreme sense of that phrase.  Protagonist Kenneth Johnson has invited his ex-wife Marcia and her new milquetoast husband for a stay at his lake cottage.  His feelings are still raw, and Marcia is a self-centered and manipulative sexpot.  The overwrought psychodrama is interrupted by a mysterious dark cloud which generates an intense local storm, causing Ken and Marcia to take refuge in his boat as a gleaming metallic sphere appears and Marcia decompensates (“Own me like a piece of furniture, Kennie.  That’s what I want to be.”). 


by Edward Valigursky

The boat gets sucked out into the lake, Marcia drowns, Ken gets pulled into the sphere, and Marcia reappears, except it’s not really Marcia.  “We found it necessary to adopt her image, because she was the only thinkhuman [sic] available for detailed biosimulation.” Non-Marcia explains that she is a fugitive from her race and has been hiding on the Moon for 30 years watching Earth, but now her kin-aliens have tracked her down and are about to destroy the area for 150 miles around.  There ensues a discussion of options for preserving themselves and half of New England, which turns into more and higher-volume psychodrama and back-stabbing, and an ending that can only be described as twisted.  Miller’s first story, Secret of the Death Dome, was a bit crazy.  This one is a lot crazy, and Miller is getting better at crazy.  Three stars.

Mr. Dimmitt Seeks Redress, by Miles J. Breuer

Miles J. Breuer’s Mr. Dimmitt Seeks Redress (from the August 1936 Amazing) is about as tiresome as its title.  Mr. Dimmitt is a mild-mannered shrimp of a scientist.  His wife and children have been killed in a car accident caused by the reckless driving of the rich bully Graw.  Back in the lab, Dimmitt is accidentally exposed to an experimental substance that drastically slows time for him.  Initially he is frightened.  “He had read of persons who had tried a dose of cannabis indicia [sic] having terrifying experiences from the effects of the drug.  Was the effect of this thing going to be permanent?” It isn’t, but he doses himself again, goes out for a walk, sees Graw speeding (crawling, to Dimmitt) towards his house, and grabs Graw’s young son who is playing in the yard and puts him in the path of the car, too close to stop.  The gimmicky story has a gimmicky ending.  Two stars.

Eddie for Short, by Wallace West

Wallace West, he of the appalling The Last Man, seems to have learned some things in the course of two decades.  In Eddie for Short (from the December 1953-January 1954 issue), World War III seems to have killed everybody except Lita, a lounge singer in Miami, whose husband has just died of radiation poisoning at his post in the radio station that is broadcasting her, leaving everything going.  So, having not much else to do, she keeps on singing every night.


by Ernie Barth

Then, one night . . . someone is following her.  It’s Verna, a Negro woman from Key West, who speaks in a thick stereotypical accent, and who has heard Lita on the radio and trekked to Miami in search of her.  She’s going to take care of Lita, which is a good thing, since Lita turns out to be pregnant.  So Verna takes care of the household chores while Lita “literally hurl[s] herself” at the City Library and then at the local university, educating herself, since now it seems the world is not going to end (she’s convinced herself she’s carrying twins of opposite sex). 

It’s easy to make fun of this story’s racial stereotypes, but hey, it’s not bad for 1953, and West means well.  Also he’s a lot better writer than he was in 1929, and he’s still at it (he hit Analog and Magazine of Horror last year).  So, some positive reinforcement: three stars.

Summing Up

For a change, the reprinted material (some of it) has more going for it than the new material, and neither is too awful.  It’s a relief.

(And don't forget to tune in tonight at 8:30 PM (Pacific AND Eastern — two showings) for the world television premier of Star Trek!)

Come join us!

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 10, 1966] Dollars and Cents (September 1966 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Render Unto Caesar

There's a new way to lose your money when visiting Las Vegas. A hotel, showroom, and casino called Caesars Palace (no apostrophe) opened a few days ago. As the name implies, it has an ancient Rome theme rather than the Western theme found in most gambling dens in Sin City.


A showgirl advertises the grand opening. I don't think that's an authentic costume of the time.

The inauguration ceremony is said to have cost one million dollars, including money spent on huge amounts of caviar, filet mignon, crabmeat, and champagne.


A page from a brochure advertising the place. Or possibly an illustration for a time travel story.

The Deuce Gets Loose

Speaking of losing money, today the United States Department of the Treasury announced that it would no longer print two-dollar bills. (The U.S. Mint hadn't actually printed any since June 30, but now they're going to stop completely.)


Thomas Jefferson looks glum about the situation. At least he'll still be on the nickel.

Two-dollar bills only make up a tiny percentage of the paper money in circulation. Some folks think they're unlucky. They're welcome to give any they don't want to me.

Wild Success

One thing you can do with a two-dollar bill is buy a couple of 45 rpm single records, and maybe even have a little change left over. A lot of people are shelling out a buck or so for the current Number One smash hit Wild Thing by the British band the Troggs. This raw, energetic tune was originally recorded last year by an American group called, appropriately enough, the Wild Ones, but failed to reach the charts.


It's the only rock 'n roll hit I can recall that features an extended ocarina solo.

You Pays Your Money And You Takes Your Choice

If you've only got fifty cents to your name, you can still purchase a copy of the current issue of Fantastic. That's less than one-third of a cent per page, so it sounds like a pretty good deal.

Of course, as my esteemed colleague John Boston recently pointed out, both Amazing and Fantastic are publishing lots of reprints without paying the authors. Whether you want to support these publications or boycott them is your choice. As for me, duty calls.


Cover art by Frank R. Paul.

Of course, the image on the front is also a reprint, and I doubt it was paid for either. In any case, it comes from the back cover of the April 1942 issue of Amazing Stories.


Here's the original painting, titled City of the Future. Looks a lot better this way, doesn't it?

For a Breath I Tarry, by Roger Zelazny

As the cover announces, here's the author's newest story.

Wait a minute! Haven't I read this before? Let me see, where could it have been?

Oh, yeah, it appeared in the March issue of New Worlds, and was reviewed by my esteemed colleague Mark Yon just a few months ago. I hope the author got paid twice.


Anonymous cover art.

I cannot hope to match the quality of this outstanding article. I will simply offer my own views, for whatever they might be worth.


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

Long after humanity has disappeared, Earth is controlled by machines. Orbiting the planet is the supreme ruler, Solcom. Dwelling deep underground is a rival machine, named Divcom. (An allegory with God and the Devil seems intended, and some of the story reminds me of the Book of Job. However, the plot is completely original, and not merely a retelling of the Bible story.)

Solcom creates a machine to rule the northern hemisphere, calling it Frost. The ruler of the southern hemisphere is Beta. Frost makes a hobby of studying what little remains of humanity's relics. A machine named Mordel, in the service of Divcom, comes to Frost with a supply of ancient books. These excite Frost's curiosity, and it sets out on a quest to understand human emotions; in fact, to become a human being. Mordel offers Frost a deal. It will give Frost all the aid it requires to achieve this goal, but if Frost comes to realize that the task is impossible, it will have to serve Divcom forever.

(An allusion to the legend of Faust also seems intended. Note the similarity in names.)

Frost travels to the southern hemisphere, in order to witness one of the last places where people dwelled. This act is in defiance of Solcom's will, leading to a conflict between creator and created. (We are told that a temporary malfunction in Solcom's operation, at the time it made Frost, caused Frost to be unique among machines. Perhaps this is a form of original sin.)


What Frost wants to be.

I have barely touched the surface of a remarkable story. I haven't mentioned, for example, the giant ore-digging machine that carries the remains of the human being it accidentally killed within itself, causing all the machines it encounters to listen to its story. The fact that it bears parts of a dead human is enough to make other machines obey it, a subtle and important point. I also haven't talked about the role Beta plays in the plot. Go see for yourself.

Five stars.

"You Can't See Me!", by William F. Temple

If we allow the Zelazny tale to be considered new, our first reprint comes from the June 1951 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


Cover art by Walter H. Hinton.

A fellow discovers that the people around him are happily conversing with folks he can't see. At first, a few others witness the same peculiarity, assuming the chatterers are crazy. Soon everybody succumbs to the delusion, and only the protagonist doesn't have an imaginary companion.


Illustration by Gerald Hohns. I assume all the reprinted drawings failed to earn the artists any new money, just like the writers.

Of course, there's an explanation for this strange happening. It's a pretty weak one, unfortunately, and the story just kind of fizzles out toward the end. Although it's not really a comedy, the fact that the main character has the unlikely name Zechariah Zebedee Zyzincwicz, and that this unusual moniker is relevant to the plot, tells you that you shouldn't take it too seriously.

Two stars.

Carousel, by August Derleth

This chiller comes from the April 1945 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


Cover art by R. E. Epperley.

A little girl lives with her father and a wicked stepmother, straight out of a fairy tale. The evil woman is insanely jealous of the man's affection for his daughter, and would even be happy to see her dead.


Illustrations by Robert Fuqua.

A few years before the story begins, a mob lynched a carnival worker, leaving behind a wrecked merry-go-round. The child often goes to play in the ruins, claiming to be friends with a black man. The wicked stepmother takes advantage of the situation to make sure the girl is punished for her actions, whipping her severely. She follows her to the merry-go-round, hoping that the dangerous machinery will cause the child to suffer a fatal accident. (The implication that the woman intends to cause the accident is pretty clear.) Things don't work out the way she expects.


The haunted carousel.

As you can probably tell from this synopsis, there are no surprises at all in the plot. It's a pretty ordinary horror story, of the supernatural punishment variety. Although the murder of the carnival worker is obviously due to racial hatred, this isn't really relevant, which lessens the story's impact.

Three stars.

The Little People, by Eando Binder

This fantasy novella first appeared in the March 1940 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


Cover art by Robert Fuqua.

A scientist, his adult daughter, and her boyfriend are in a cabin somewhere in a remote area. The gruesome discovery of a cat with its throat cut is the first hint that something weird is going on. The next odd happening is the disappearance of a gold watch.

We find out right away that a community of fairies, or whatever you want to call them, is located nearby. One of them went into the cabin to steal the watch as a sign of bravery, in order to win the hand of the woman he loves, and had to kill the cat to escape.


Illustrations uncredited. They might be by Robert Fuqua again.

A rival for the fairy woman's affection tries to outdo the other by stealing a pair of binoculars. He gets caught by the scientist, who wants to exploit the little people as a scientific curiosity. The two young people are more sympathetic to their plight. The rival acts as a traitor to his kind, helping the scientist capture others.


Happier times, before the big people trap them.

The fairy man who stole the watch undertakes the dangerous task of rescuing his people from their captor, as well as defeating the treacherous rival.

I may as well mention here that Eando Binder is a pseudonym, used by brothers Earl (deceased) and Otto Binder. They're best known for a series of stories about the robot Adam Link. My sources tell me that this story is the work of Otto alone. In any case, it's not a bad fairy tale, if not outstanding in any way. Animal lovers should be warned that the cat is not the only creature to fall victim to the diminutive hero.

Three stars.

The Psionic Mousetrap, by Murray Leinster

The March 1955 issue of Amazing Stories is the source for this Cold War thriller.


Cover art by Edward Valigursky.

Our hero parachutes into the Soviet Union on a suicide mission. His grim task is to kill a kidnapped scientist before he can reveal the secrets of powerful psionic technology to the Reds.


Illustration by Paul Orban.

Things go badly right from the start. The hero winds up in the hands of the enemy. They force him to complete the work of the captured scientist, which turns out to be their undoing.

I didn't get much out of this spy yarn. The plot depends on the fact that the Commies are too materialistic to believe in psionics, which was a little hard to swallow. The story's conclusion strains credulity as well. You'd expect something like this in a mediocre issue of Astounding, given the fact that psionics is pretty much just another word for magic.

Two stars.

No More Tomorrows, by David H. Keller, M.D.

Here's a Kelleryarn (as they used to call the works of this author) from the December 1932 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Leo Morey.

The narrator develops a substance that destroys the part of the brain that allows one to imagine the future. He plans to sell the secret of this stuff to a trio of Soviet agents for a ton of money.


Illustration by Leo Morey also.

He rather stupidly whips up a vial of the substance, as well as a vial of plain water, in order to brag about his plot to the woman he wants to marry. (He figures that being a multimillionaire will win her hand.) Predictably, she winds up switching the two vials, so the narrator is hoist by his own petard.

This story has an intriguing premise, but it isn't developed very well. As I've indicated, the switching of the two vials requires that the narrator act like a complete fool. (There doesn't seem to be any reason at all to have a vial of water around.) The three Soviet agents are bizarrely deformed, as the illustration indicates. I guess the author really hates Communism, but this makes the whole thing seem ridiculous.

Two stars.

Rocket to Gehenna, by Doris Piserchia

At last! A story that hasn't appeared anywhere else. It's the author's first publication, too. It's a comic tale in the form of a series of letters. (A work of epistolary fiction, for those of you with highfalutin vocabularies.)

It seems that Earth sends the bodies of the deceased to the supposedly uninhabited planet Gehenna. It turns out that the place is occupied by a caterpillar-like alien and a very naïve human boy. Since they have the power to transport anything from one place to another, they start sending bodies back to Earth. The boy also captures a woman, because he thinks he needs a wife, although he doesn't even know the basic anatomical facts of life.

This is all very silly stuff. It's obviously trying to be a wacky farce, but I didn't find it very amusing. Let's hope the author does better work in the future.

One star.

Did You Get Your Money's Worth?

The Zelazny story, all by itself, is worth the four bits you'll pay for the magazine. The rest of it goes downhill at a rapid pace. If you have half a buck to spare, you might want to give it a try.


That isn't exactly what I had in mind.

A copy of Rosel George Brown's new hit novel, Sibyl Sue Blue, is worth every penny! Buy one today!




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