![[January 20, 1970] Jolly good Ffelowes (February 1970 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/700120fsfcover-672x372.jpg)
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by Gideon Marcus
Up in the sky!
There are some intrepid women whose names are household words: Willa Brown, Jerrie Mock, Amelia Earhart. Others are not so familiar. The other day, I read the obituary for a pioneering soul I'd not known of before.
Blanche Stewart Scott was born in 1885. A native of Rochester, she was 25 when she drove a 25-horsepower Overland stock car from New York to San Francisco, her 69 hour journey marking the second time a woman had made a transcontinental drive.
This attracted the interest of aviation pioneer Glen Curtiss, who took her under his wing (so to speak) and trained her to fly. Apparently, Mrs. Scott had never seen an airplane before her coast-to-coast jaunt; she was caught in a traffic jam outside Dayton, Ohio, caused by a flying exhibition out of Wright Field.
After just three days of instruction, she made her first solo flight on September 5, 1910 from an airfield in Hammondsport—what may well be the first time an American woman piloted an aircraft.
Over the next four years, until she gave up flying, she suffered 41 broken bones in a number of crashes. She was one of the lucky ones: "Most of the early women fliers got killed," she once observed.
Scott's later career included working as a scriptwriter, film producer, and radio broadcaster in Hollywood. In 1948, she became the first woman to ever ride in a jet aircraft. During the '50s, she combed the country for vintage planes to stock the U.S. Air Force Museum near Dayton.
She died on January 12 at Genesee Hospital in her native town of Rochester, New York.
Down in the mud
by Michael Gilbert
Another pioneer of sorts had something of a flutter, if not yet a brush with death (I hope). The latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction is pretty bad…
From the Moon, with Love, by Neil Shapiro
Who says you can't still publish Adam and Eve stories? This time, our parabolic (is that the adjective form of parable?) two are "Dorn" and "Lara", respectively the Master and Mistress of Fortress Desire and Fortress Hope. They are young clones, the last two humans alive, residing in twin, invulnerable bastions on the Moon.
Three centuries after atomic apocalypse destroyed their planet, the two beings are still conducting weekly mutual bombardments, begun ages before by their predecessors. Then the "Ezkeel", alien guardians of Earth, return to unite them so that they can repopulate their home planet. I leave it to you to decipher the thinly disguised biblical reference in their race name.
Anyway, Shapiro manages to write both in a peurile fashion and for the Playboy set (perhaps the two aren't that divergent, after all).
One star.
M-1, by Gahan Wilson
Illustrator Wilson (he gets around; I see him drawing for Playboy too) takes a stab at short story writing. In this vignette, mysterious forces have erected a thousand-foot statue of Mickey Mouse in the Nevada desert. The point of the story, aside from the feeble joke ending, is to see how long it takes the reader to realize what has happened, as the figure is obliquely described as characters ascend it like a cliff face.
I got the joke halfway through page 2. The rest seemed superfluous.
Two stars.
Books (F&SF, February 1970), by James Blish
Blish tags in for Russ this month, reviewing five classic fantasies and one new novel:
James Branch Cabell: FIGURES OF EARTH,
James Branch Cabell: THE SILVER STALLION.
Lord Dunsany: THE KING OF ELFLAND's DAUGHTER.
William Morris: THE WOOD BEYOND THE WORLD.
Fletcher Pratt: THE BLUE STAR.
All from Ballantine Books, New York, paper, 95¢: 1969.
He likes and recommends all of them. I've read none of them…
He is less effusive about Josephin Saxton's THE HIERos GAMOS OF SAM AND AN SMITH. He appreciates the surrealism of it, but he would have preferred that this odd Adam-an-Eve story had remained in its own world rather than transitioning into ours.
by Gahan Wilson
His Only Safari, by Sterling E. Lanier
Brigadier Ffelowes relates of the time he went to the Kenyan highlands and came face to face with the man-eating monster that inspired the Egyptian god Anubis.
Lanier does a good job of reviving the pulp era for modern audiences. A brisk, taut read.
Four stars.
Watching Apollo, by Barry N. Malzberg
Our astronauts may be the stalwart vanguard of humanity, but they also have to shit, sometimes.
Three stars for this cheeky poem.
Initiation, by Joanna Russ
A precious homosexual and a straight-laced starship captain escape a spacewreck, landing on an odd human colony. In contrast to their overcrowded, overconfining Earth, the new world's people are free, untechnological, and possessed of profound psionic powers. The skipper is unable to adapt or understand. The Terran civilian, unpleasant and mistrustful, eventually loses his inhibitions (and, apparently, his proclivity for men), becoming one with the outworlders.
Told in a dreamlike fashion to suggest the odd psychic phenomena and the constant wordless communication, I found this story's affected style off-putting. Sex was described obliquely, less to avoid offense, it seemed; more as if Russ was embarrassed of describing the act.
I also didn't like anyone in the story, nor did I care much what happened to them. The alienness of the colonists would have had more impact had things started with a more familiar, constrasting viewpoint.
I understand this story is also actually a detached piece of a larger novel due out later this year. Perhaps it would make more sense in context.
Two stars.
The Tracy Business, by Gene DeWeese and Robert Coulson
Fans of the fanzine Yandro know who Robert "Buck" Coulson is (Juanita Coulson's husband). He and DeWeese write Man from U.N.C.L.E. novels under the name "Thomas Stratton".
This story follows a private dick hired by a shrewish woman to find out why her husband disappears every four weeks for three days, spending a boodle of money in the process. Hint: it's not another woman, and it's not blackmail.
It's a rather obvious tale, and unpleasant to boot. Two stars.
The Multiplying Elements, by Isaac Asimov
The Good Doctor explains those "rare earths" that have their own separate spot on the periodic table, and also how they were first isolated from their containing ores. However, we have yet to learn why they occupy their own sub-table.
Chemistry is not my strong suit, and this article is necessarily incomplete, but I'll give it four stars for now.
Dream Patrol, by Charles W. Runyon
Way back in 1952, J.T.McIntosh (when he still was calling himself M'Intosh) wrote a neat story called Hallucination Orbit. The premise was that there were these solitary garrison stations at the edge of the solar system, manned for months at a time. Eventually, the folks stationed there started having hallucinations, which was the sign they needed to be relieved. The sentry of that story dreamed a succession of increasingly convincing female companions. The tension of that tale lay in our hero's increasingly challenging attempts to distinguish fantasy from reality.
It was a warm and ultimately sweet story, and it is one of my favorites. There's a reason it got republished in the Second Galaxy Reader (1953).
Dream Patrol has the same premise, except the illusions are caused by hostile aliens, and there is no cure. There's also a streak of misogyny to the whole thing. Hell, almost 20 years ago, McIntosh had women in his space navy; that's unfathomable to Runyon.
Two stars.
Autopsy report
Given how good last month's issue was, this abyssmal 2.3-star mag is quite the surprise. Let's hope this constitutes an outlier. One prominent obituary this month is quite sufficient!
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
