Tag Archives: gideon marcus

Science / Space Race

[Feb. 21, 1960] A birthday treat (A Tale of Two Space Programs)

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Happy birthday to me!  In celebration of the second anniversary of my Jack Benny birthday, here's my gift to you: a quick stop press of some recent military space endeavors, with a side of jocular sarcasm.

You may remember a certain Dr. Von Braun, formerly of the German Third Reich, lately of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) in Alabama.  This esteemed immigrant was a rocket engineer of sorts during the war, and he was prevailed upon to ply his trade in the service of Democracy, developing improvements to the international mail-carrier known as the Vergeltungswaffe 2.  In this role, he helped create the Jupiter IRBM for the Army, currently being deployed at Russia's doorstep in Turkey. 

Von Braun's team was recently transitioned to a civilian position; it now reports to NASA and is hard at work building the Saturn series of moon rockets.  Meanwhile, the former head of ABMA, Major General John Medaris, retired last month, had harsh words for our President's handling of the space program.  He believes the Army should have had free reign to launch a satellite before the Soviets.  Medaris also thinks that splitting up the military and civilian programs is wasteful and redundant.  I can't imagine who Medaris might suggest to lead such a unified space program. 

Personally, I think Ike's handling of our space programs has smacked of subtle genius.  Let the Soviets launch the first satellite so that they can't complain about overflights, create a civilian space agency so the world can see that there are purely peaceful uses for rockets.  It's a public relations masterpiece.  Given the volatile situation in Cuba and Berlin, the good press helps us keep the moral high ground.

Moreover, having a civilian space program allows us to, as a country, focus on science for science's sake rather than forcing it to be a handmaiden to the war machine.  Besides—this country thrives on healthy competition.

In any event, it's not as if the military has got such a great track record.  Just two days ago, the Air Force lost yet another Discoverer, number 10.  The booster veered off course during take-off and had to be destroyed by range safety just a minute into the launch.

I shouldn't be too hard on the Air Force, though.  Their Thor-Able booster (a hybrid military/civilian design) will be launching the first deep space probe next month under NASA auspices.  If the mission is successful, it promises to be a science bonanza.  The probe was developed by Air Force contractor Ramo-Wooldridge, better known for developing ICBMs.  Thus, this upcoming flight shows the advantages of having two separate space programs that can share their expertise.

Vive la difference!

—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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[Feb. 19, 1960] A missing step

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Hello, all!  I'd looked forward to keeping up the three articles per week pace throughout the whole month, but I find myself with a sick family to tend to.  A big dose of space news on the 21st (my 39th birthday… or at least the 2nd anniversary thereof) and then the F&SF wrap-up.

See you soon!

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TV

[Feb. 16, 1960] 1 in 4 (February Twilight Zone round-up)

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Unless you're watching the rather dull Men Into Space, the putatively "realistic" tales of astronaut Colonel MacCauley and his lunar mission crew, there isn't a lot of science fiction or fantasy on television.  Thank goodness we have Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone to tune into every Friday night.  This is a mature show for adults, and while the scripts have not been as cutting edge conceptually as the stories you can read in the digests, they evince a sophistication you won't find much of…well, anywhere, on television.

It has been a month since the last Twilight Zone round-up, so here's a summary of the last four episodes so you're ready come rerun time:

I'd had high hopes for The Hitch-Hiker after seeing its star, Inger Stevens in The World, The Flesh, and the Devil.  Ms. Stevens drives cross-country with a spectral hitcher constantly on her tail.  The story is let down by a couple of points.  The story is largely told in narration—Ms. Stevens mostly tells rather than shows her plight.  This strikes me as lazy storytelling.  I also find the section where she picks up a sailor to keep her company (and maintain her sanity) particulary off-putting; the fellow who accompanies her is far creepier than any shabby hitching bum.  I can't figure out if this was intentional or not.  I suspect not.

The Fever is more of a public service warning against the dangers of gambling in which a normally sober husband is seduced by a demonic slot machine who calls the man's name with an eerie tinkling, silver dollar-laden voice.  It is highly overwrought, and the ending is ridiculous.  Moreover, one can't help feeling glad that the domineering wretch gets his comeuppance; he really is inexcusably rude to his wife, and his initial sanctimony, rather than pointing up the tragedy, is just annoying.

That puts us at two for two episodes involving someone going raving mad by the second act!

But then you get The Last Flight, which makes up for a lot of prior sins.  Yet another Richard Matheson teleplay (and far better than Third from the Sun), it's the story of a Royal Air Corps aviator who takes off from a French airfield in 1917 and lands at a French airfield in 1959.  There is some delightful paradox looping and a very pretty Nieuport plane, and it's all a lot of fun.  My daughter, who is just old enough to appreciate such things, noted that the pilot's British accent was "so cute!"

Finally, we have The Purple Testament, another war-themed episode, involving a young Lieutenant in the Pacific Theater who can see death in his soldiers' faces several hours before their last breaths.  Unremarkable, unambitious, at every turn predictable. 

The show started so promisingly that it's frustrating when one gets several mediocre turns in a batch.  Still, even the worst episodes generally have something to recommend them, there's no slighting the production values, and the stand-outs keep my daughter and I watching every Friday night.

As you all know, my editor loves to publish reader commentary in this column, so please feel free to tell me your thoughts on this show.  Do you agree with my rather curmudgeonly appraisals?  Do you wish to set me straight?  Sharpen those quills!

—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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[Feb. 14, 1960] A Valentine's Day gift (…In Distress, original fiction)

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Today's post is going to be a change of pace.  This column is usually reserved for comments on the work of other persons.  Today, you get to see the first publication ever of an original piece.  If this is a successful experiment, more may follow.

Happy Valentine's Day!

—-

…In Distress

by Gideon Marcus


illustrated by David Swanson
re.

(removed pending potential publication…)

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Magazine/Anthology

[Feb. 12, 1960] Pulling up (Mar. 1960 Astounding)

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It had to happen some day–Astounding has pulled itself out of a nose dive, for now.

Last time, I discussed the most excellent serial, Deathworld.  Still, a single good serial does not a good issue make.  Thankfully, Campbell has at long last, and after a merciless rough patch, delivered a quite readable book.

J.T. McIntosh can always be relied upon to provide entertainment; his lead novella, Immortality for Some is no exception.  In the future, society's most worthy, the 10% with sufficient talents and/or accomplishments to make the cut, are allowed to undergo "Rebirth."  This process erases all memories and restores the body to an adolescent stage of physical development.  The special person gets to live again in a sort of reconstituted reincarnation. 

But what happens when one of the world's intellectual elite doesn't want to cheat death?  This is a world that doesn't want to lose a cultural treasure, and it takes an exceptional person, indeed, to evade Rebirth.

Strongly written, with the first half written from the point of view of an aged woman pianist of superlative talent giving her last concert before Rebirth; the second stars the aforementioned fellow—a seemingly unremarkable caretaker whom the musician befriends.  It's worth your time.

And now, I shall surprise my audience by saying with a straight face that I actually enjoyed Randall Garrett's contribution to this issue: In Case of Fire….  In this far future, the sprawling Terran Empire cannot afford to send its best and brightest as ambassadors to less-esteemed stations.  The story opens on a remote, unimportant world whose embassy is staffed with barely functional neurotics.  Yet in that insanity lies the key to ending an interstellar war.  Garrett manages to be somewhat clever and to not offend.  Quite an accomplishment for him.

Chris Anvil's Shotgun Wedding is another of his unremarkable space-fillers about an alien race whose plan to disrupt humanity by flooding the market with clairvoyant television backfires.  One bit I liked, however, was the depiction of pen pals from different countries using their television screens to correspond across thousands of miles.  When the world is finally wired into OMNIVAC, decades from now, I imagine we'll see such a phenomenon.

Editor Campbell has been trying to make a go of the slick non-fiction section of his magazine for several months.  This issue is the first with readable articles, the first of which is Mars: A Summing Up by R.S. Richardson (perhaps better known by his nom d'plume, Philip Latham).  Mr. Richardson does an admirable, if slightly dry, job of comprehensively summarizing the current state of knowledge regarding the mysterious Red Planet. 

We've enjoyed three relatively close approaches to Mars over the past six years, the likes of which will not recur until 1971, by which time we will probably have sent at least one probe to investigate close-up.  As a result, scientists have amassed a bonanza of information.  Yet it is still unknown whether or not Mars has life, though if it does, it must be of a very low order.  The most exciting work has been done by the astronomer A. Dolfuss, who has determined the nature of Martian soil to examination of its polarization (the non-randomness of the angle of vibration of light that reflects from it).  That we've learned so much about Mars is, of course, a marvel in and of itself.  To quote the author, "To tell anything about a body that never comes closer than thirty-five million miles taxes your ingenuity to the utmost."

Dr. Asimov was also tapped to provide an article after a long hiatus from Astounding's pages.  Microdesign for Living, about the biochemical synthesis of proteins, is not one of his better pieces, which is to say that is readable but not memorable.

Poul Anderson (as his Astounding alter-ego Winston P. Sanders) wraps things up with a short piece called The Barrier Moment.  Scientists may not know why one can't go back in time more than three years, but a philospher believes he has the horrifying answer.  Perhaps there isn't any time to go back to…

All told, the March 1960 Astounding clocks in at a respectable three-and-a-half stars.  That is the best this magazine has been since I started rating the issues in January 1959.  I sincerely hope Campbell can keep this up!

—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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Book, Magazine/Anthology

[Feb. 9, 1960] Fighting the World (Harry Harrison's Deathworld)

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Every now and then Astounding (excuse me–"Analog") surprises me.  The end of last year saw some of the worst issues of the digest ever, with stories as poor as any that used to populate the legion of now-defunct science fiction pulps.

Then along comes Harry Harrison, a brand-new writer, so far as I can tell, with one of the best serial novels I've read in a long time. 

Ever get the feeling that the world is out to get you?  What if it were literally true?  This is the premise of Harrison's interstellar adventure, Deathworld, in which the psychically gifted (and crooked) gambler, Jason dinAlt, is contracted by the ambassador from the planet Pyrrus to win a tremendous sum of funds to finance a war.  It turns out that the war is against the planet, itself, which seems to have mobilized all of its biological forces to wipe out the colony there.

Pyruss is deadliest of planets.  With its high gravity, eccentric orbit and overactive vulcanism, its physical qualities alone would be enough to deter any would-be exploiters.  But Pyrrus is also home to a highly inimical set of flora and fauna whose sole purpose is to eradicate humans.  It is a nightmare assortment employing fang, talon, and poison, continually evolving to make life impossible for the colonists. 

For the Pyrrans, it has been centuries-long struggle of increasing difficulty, maintained in the hope of eventual victory.  For dinAlt, with a fresh outsider's prospective, the fight is an exercise in futility—and a paradoxical puzzle to be resolved.  After all, what motive force could impel an entire ecosystem to direct its fury against one small group?

There is a great deal of physical scope to this story, from the gambling halls of Cassylia, to the drab city of the Pyrran colony, to the vast wilds of the Pyrran hinterlands.  There is also an impressive amount of emotional scope.  This is not, as one might expect within the pages of John Campbell's magazine, the story of a muscular ubermensch's victorious combats against the savage brainless monsters of Pyruss.  Rather, it is the story of the weakest man on a planet trying to effect a peaceful solution to a problem that appears, on its face, insoluble.  Deathworld is also supported by a fine cast of characters, particularly the tough Pyrran ambassador, Kerk, and the self-reliant and liberated space pilot, Meta. 

I don't want to spoil any more of the novel for you.  Go ye and read it.  You'll be glad of the time invested.

—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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Science / Space Race

[Feb. 7, 1960] The sports that matter (Discoverer 9 and solar radar)

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The score for this week–Civilian Space Science: 1, USAF Space Science: 0.

In the Little Engine That Couldn't department, we have the Air Force's Discoverer project, ostensibly for sending up biological specimens in a returnable capsule, probably for launching recoverable reconnaissance film capsules, actually not much good for anything.

The ninth in the series didn't even make it to orbit, the second stage of its rocket having failed during launch on February 4.  It's a good thing there weren't any animals on board.  Of course, I'm guessing that once they get the bugs worked out of the booster, there still won't be any.

In other news, scientists at Stanford University have just bounced a radar signal off the Sun.  Actually, the transmission happened last April—it's taken all the time since then to verify that the stunt really worked!

It's quite an impressive accomplishment—the 100 watt signal came back at .00000000000001% of its original strength, yet the Stanford team was still able to detect it.  Our ability to receive spacecraft telemetry at tremendous distances has been validated, and this is also a boon to the new science of radio astronomy.  In 1947, scientists first bounced a radar beam off the Moon.  Just two years ago, Venus was added to the list of pinged targets.  Eventually, every object in the Solar System will be systematically bombarded with radar.  This will complement our visual astronomical findings, and we're likely to learn a lot.


"Lovell Telescope Rear" by Mike Peel; Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester.. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lovell_Telescope_Rear.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Lovell_Telescope_Rear.jpg

See you soon!

—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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Magazine/Anthology

[Feb. 6, 1960] Finding my way (February 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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Science fiction is my escape.  When the drudgery of the real world becomes oppressive, or when I just need a glimpse of a brighter future to make the present more interesting, I turn to my growing collection of magazines and novels to buouy my spirits.

I like stories of interstellar adventure filled with interesting settings and characters.  I do not like the psychological horrors that have become popular of late.  Sadly, the February 1960 F&SF contains several such pieces.  But it does end well.

I wrote last time about the flaws in Howard Fast's lead novella that kept me from fully enjoying it. 

Richard McKenna's Mine Own Ways is particularly chilling.  It involves a rite of passage designed by interstellar anthropologists to winnow the intellectually mature of a race from the primitive by essentially torturing them; one passes the test by realizing that the torture is transitory and enduring it.

Apprentice, by Robert Tilley, isn't so bad.  It involves an alien who can take over a person's mind (without ill effect).  The would-be invader possesses a junior flunky on a military base and is revealed when he is able to fulfil tasks that should have been impossible (along the lines of catching snipe, procuring a bottle of headlight fluid or a jar of elbow grease). 

I suppose Jane Rice's The White Pony, about unrequited love in a future of post-apocalyptic scarcity is decent, too, and well-drawn.  It even has a happy ending, after a fashion even if the world has that feeling of best-days-past shabbiness.

Battle-torn France is the setting for The Replacement, in which a Platoon Sergeant is convinced by a certain Private "Smith" that the war is all in his head, and that the world is nothing but solipsistic figments of his imagination.  It is only after Smith unsuccessfully tries the same trick on the company's First Sergeant that we see the trick for what it is.  A creepy piece.

Evelyn Smith's Send Her Victorious is a pun piece whose ending I should have seen coming.  All about a communal colony of aliens who take on the general form of a middle-aged female before time traveling to 19th Century England. 

Algis Budrys has a vignette called The Price about a centuries-old Rasputin(?) surviving an atomic holocaust only to find himself a captive of the few humans who are left.  Are they willing to become gnarled, deranged hunchbacks like him in exchange for eternal life?

Dr. Asimov's piece, The Sight of Home, is a nice astronomical article about the greatest distance at which the sun might still be visible to the naked eye (answer: 20 parsecs.  Not very far, indeed). 

Then we're back to the horror.  We are the Ceiling, by Will Worthington, depicts a fellow who books himself into a sanitarium when it appears his wife has begun consorting with troglodytes.  Of course, she turns out to be one, as does his doctor. 

That leaves us the subject of the cover art, The Fellow Who Married the Maxill Girl, by Ward Moore.  This is the kind of story I read F&SF for—gentle, poignant, starring a woman.  It's a girl meets boy story set in the depths of the Depression; the boy happens to be an alien.  I shan't spoil more, and I hope you like it as much as I did.

I'll have a quick non-fiction stop press tomorrow, and then on to March's batch of magazines!

—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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Book

[Feb. 4, 1960] Nurturing Nature (The First Men, by Howard Fast)

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How do you attract the intelligent fan?  Why, appeal to her/his sense of mental superiority, of course.  Science fiction magazines do it all the time; The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is particularly fond of showcasing the brainy cultured notables who have subscriptions.  There is some justification to this conceit.  After all, science fiction (at least the literary kind) tends to be the province of the creative, the egg-headed.  The ideas are, by definition, innovative and sometimes revolutionary, and it follows that an oversized brain is required to understand them.

Howard Fast's lead novella in this month's issue of F&SF, The First Men, seems a conscious nod to this concept.  Its premise: just as normal humans raised in the wild by animals have a stunted intellectual growth that cannot be remedied once they reach maturity, exceptional humans (geniuses) are stunted by the straight-jacketing society into which they are born.  This society is designed to accommodate the average person, thus the wunderkind does not develop to her/his full potential.  In Fast's story, some far-sighted folk decide to create a new isolated society designed to enable geniuses, identified at infancy, to fully flower into the next level of humanity.

It's a compelling notion, isn't it.  How many of us clever folk have felt stifled and underapplied throughout life?  In school, in work, in social situations, we find insufficient challenge and our faculties atrophy.  Of course, many of the bright figure out how to use their talents to get ahead, but is it enough simply to do better than others at games for dullards? 

What keeps this story from greatness are the fundamental flaws with the premise and the implementation.  For instance, the old fable about only using 10% of our brains is trotted out, much to my dismay.  But setting that aside, how can a group of admittedly normal folk be sure to find the optimal way to hatch a new race of unfettered geniuses?  And what guarantee do we have that they will be, as happens in the story, be utterly benevolent?  I think Golding's Lord of the Flies is a better signpost than Ballantyne's The Coral Island, frankly.

Also, it seems that the Israeli kibbutz is the inspiration for the ideal society depicted in the story.  It may be too early to tell, but it seems that the kibbutz, a sort of commune, may not be the paradise it seems to be.  The second generation of kibbutzniks is coming of age, and many are dissatisfied with the socialism, the provincialism, and the overfamiliarity that comes with living in an isolated village.  Moreover, these young adults have been raised in common with all the other kibbutz kids, without individual parents (as is the norm on the kibbutz, and in The First Men).  This causes them to see their fellow kibbutzniks as siblings rather than potential mates, and they feel they must leave home to marry.  For all of these reasons, some are predicting that the kibbutzim (plural of kibbutz) will not survive as an institution past this generation, much to the dismay of the idealists who founded them.  By extension, I feel Fast's commune is similarly doomed.

Finally, the tale does not end happily, which left me with a bad aftertaste, perhaps more so as we smart readers are supposed to identify with this budding race of liberated humanity.  For all these reasons, I have to give the story no more than three stars.

However, as Oklahoma Senator Mike Monroney is fond of saying, "your mileage may vary."

The rest of the issue in a couple of days!

—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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Magazine/Anthology

[Jan. 28, 1960] But how do you really feel? (February 1960 Astounding)

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I've devoted much ink to lambasting Astounding/Analog editor John Campbell for his attempts to revitalize his magazine, but I've not yet actually talked about the latest (February 1960) issue.  Does it continue the digest's trend towards general lousiness?

For the most part, yes.  Harry Harrison's serial, Deathworld, continues to be excellent (and it will be the subject of its own article next month).  But the rest is uninspired stuff.  Take the lead story, What the Left Hand was Doing by "Darrell T. Langart" (an anagram of the author's real name—three guess as to who it really is, and the first two don't count).  It's an inoffensive but completely forgettable story about psionic secret agent, who is sent to China to rescue an American physicist from the clutches of the Communists.

Then there's Mack Reynold's Summit, in which it is revealed that the two Superpowers cynically wage a Cold War primarily to maintain their domestic economies.  A decent-enough message, but there is not enough development to leave much of an impact, and the "kicker" ending isn't much of one.

Algis Budrys has a sequel to his last post-Apocalyptic Atlantis-set story called Due Process.  I like Budrys, but this series, which was not great to begin with, has gone downhill.  It is another "one savvy man can pull political strings to make the world dance to his bidding" stories, and it's as smug as one might imagine.

The Calibrated Alligator, by Calvin Knox (Robert Silverberg) is another sequel featuring the zany antics of the scientist crew of Lunar Base #3.  In the first installment in this series, they built an artificial cow to make milk and liver.  Now, they are force-growing a pet alligator to prodigious size.  The ostensible purpose is to feed a hungry world with quickly maturing iguanas, but the actual motivation is to allow one of the young scientists to keep a beloved, smuggled pet.  The first story was fun, and and this one is similarly fluffy and pleasant. 

I'll skip over Campbell's treatise on color photography since it is dull as dirt.  The editor would have been better served publishing any of his homemade nudes that I've heard so much about.  That brings us to Murray Leinster's The Leader.  It is difficult for me to malign the fellow with perhaps the strongest claim to the title "Dean of American Science Fiction," particularly when he has so many inarguable classics to his name, but this story does not approach the bar that Leinster himself has set.  It's another story with psionic underpinnings (in Astounding!  Shock!) about a dictator who uses his powers to entrance his populace.  It is told in a series of written correspondence, and only force of will enabled me to complete the tale.  There was a nice set of paragraphs, however, on the notion that telepathy and precognition are really a form of psychokinesis. 

I tend to skip P. Schuyler Miller's book column, but I found his analysis of the likely choices for this (last) year's Hugo awards to be rewarding.  They've apparently expanded the scope of the film Hugo from including just movies to also encompassing television shows and stage productions, 1958's crop being so unimpressive as to yield no winners. 

My money's on The World, The Flesh, and The Devil.

—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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