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Magazine/Anthology, 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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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[November 12, 1966] A Family Tradition (December 1966 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Identical cousins

My brother Louis and I diverge quite a lot.  He's an observant Jew, I'm an atheist.  He served in World War 2 (drafted into the Navy), I did not.  He's an affluent pawnbroker.  I'm a writer of questionable success.

But where we differ the most is the subjects of our avocational devotion.  Lou loves opera.  Specifically operas written in 1812 between October and November.  I kid, but his musical tastes are really quite narrow; his radio knob never turns from the FM classical stations.  I am far more catholic in my interests, enjoying everything from classical, to the swing of my teen years, to the brand new sounds.

Also, Lou hates science fiction.

Interestingly, his son David (thus, my nephew), loves SF as much as I do.  Must be this newfangled "generation gap" we're starting to hear about. 

For the last 15 years or so, he and I have swapped recommendations, and he's even lent me some of his magazines.  Our tastes are not identical.  He recently canceled his subscription to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and he is a big fan of Analog.  But we have some strong overlap, particularly where it comes to Galaxy.  In fact, that picture is him in his San Pedro home enjoying this month's issue.

I am thankful that my own daughter, David's first cousin, is also a devoted science fiction fan.  I'd hate to have to throw her out of the house before her eighteenth birthday.

Kidding, again!  I'd surely wait for her to be of age before disowning her.

But, that's not anything we have to worry about, for we are all one big happy family of fen, and we all dug the December 1966 Galaxy — read on and see why!


by Paul E. Wenzel

The issue at hand


by Virgil Finlay

Door to Anywhere, by Poul Anderson

Humanity has developed teleportation technology, and Mars has become a hub for galactic exploration.  But a recent jaunt to the edge of the known universe caused the destruction of several portals and the loss of a senator's brother-in-law.  Now the politician has arrived on the Red Planet to investigate.

When Poul Anderson sets his mind to it, he can write.  Not only is this an effective story, with the mystery disclosed one layer at a time, but it is technically interesting.  It's the first depiction of teleportation I've read that takes relative velocities into consideration.  A trip to a nearby star could require hops to a dozen intermediaries across the galaxy, or multiple galaxies, to ensure the difference in relative momenta is not too great.  I also appreciated the political discussion over the virtues and peril of building a teleporter too close to the Earth.

Where the story falters to some degree is its characterization: Anderson is still in the Kowalski, Yamamoto, Singh habit of defining players by their nationality — and women are strangely absent.  Also, the Hoylean/Hubblean fusion of cosmological theories seems like a lot of gobbledegook.

Nevertheless, it's a riveting read.  Definitely four stars.

Children in Hiding, by John Brunner

I'm told there are two John Brunners.  One is the brilliant Englishman who produced Listen…the Stars! and The Whole Man, both Star-winners and Hugo nominees.  The other is the American who produces schlock.

The latter wrote Children in Hiding.  The premise: the children on a colony world are born healthy but never develop mental capacities beyond that of infants.  A terran troubleshooter is brought in to fix the problem.  He does, but not to the benefit of the colony.

There's a lot of angry dialogue and excessive use of exclamation points, and the end is just stupid.  I'll give the piece two stars because both Brunners write coherently, but all in all, it's a disappointing story.

The Modern Penitentiary, by Hayden Howard


by Jack Gaughan

Ah, and now we have another story of the Esks, a race of Eskimo/alien hybrids that spawn children every month.  Children that mature in five years.  Throughout the series, we've seen the Esks explode in population, exhausting their environment and crowding out the real Eskimos.  In this, they are facilitated by the do-gooder Canadians, who refuse to see the Esks for the meance they are.  Instead, they give the Esks food, relocate them to other areas, etc.

Only one man, Dr. West (who always conjures up the Lovecraft character), knows the truth.  When no one listened to his Cassandra cry, he tried to sterilize them with a disease (last story).  The plan backfired, killing 23 actual Eskimos.  For this, he was imprisoned in the nicest cell ever, complete with a therapeutic nurse-lover.  Modern Penitentiary details West's attempts to escape, as well as his rather difficult-to-read sexual adventures.

These installments stand less and less on their own, and they become more implausible every time.  Thankfully, we've only one left. 

Two stars.

For Your Information: The Sound of the Meteors, by Willy Ley

I really dug this article, all about whether or not one can hear a meteor.  It was timely, too, as I read it right before our trip out to the desert to stargaze last weekend.

Four stars (and enjoy these pictures of Borrego Springs!)

At the Bottom of a Hole, by Larry Niven


by Hector Castellon

The latest Niven story is another set on Mars, a locale we've visited in Eye of the Octopus and How the Heroes Die.  Hole takes place a good seventy years after the last story.  A smuggler on the run from Belter cops tries to take refuge on Mars at the old base.  He finds the crew long dead, murdered when someone, or several someones, slashed their bubble.  Was it Martians?

The story also features the return of Luke Garner and Lit Schaeffer from World of Ptavvs, tying Mars to that universe.  Along with this month's A Relic of the Empire, which ties Ptavvs in with The Warriors (featuring the Kzinti) and the Beowulf Schaeffer stories set several centuries hence, it appears Niven has knit together six hundred years of future history to play in.  Fun stuff!

Four stars.

Decoy System, by Robin Scott

This is a Mack Reynoldsy thriller featuring an American agent's meeting with his Soviet counterpart.  Some third party has been sabotaging both the US and USSR's early warning systems so that they will indicate massive nuclear strikes.  Aliens are determined to be the culprit.  An era of peace and cooperation ensues.

Of course, it was all a Yankee plot.  I think I'd have liked this story if I hadn't read the premise before (and seen it as recently as The Architects of Fear).  It feels a lot like an Analog story.  Also, it's a lot of buildup for an ending that is obvious early on.

Two stars.

The Palace of Love (Part 2 of 3), by Jack Vance


by Gray Morrow

Last time, if you'll recall, I hadn't been overly enamored with Jack Vance's latest novel, a direct sequel to The Star King.  Kirth Gersen, a rich and supertalented assassin, is on the hunt for Viole Falushe, one of the "Demon Kings" of crime who murdered his parents.  The prior installment took us to Earth, where Gersen, disguised as a reporter (working for a paper he has purchased), investigates Falushe's childhood home.  Back then, he was known as Vogel Filschner.  His best friend and inspiration, before he went into kidnapping and slaving, was the poet, Garnath. 

It is the houseboat-dwelling, nigh-incomprehensible Garnath, who provides Gersen his opportunity to meet and kill Falushe.  Along the way, he becomes increasingly entangled with Garnath's ward, "Zan Zu of Eridu", who is an exact likeness of Falushe's childhood infatuation. 

The first two thirds, in which Gersen plays a cat and mouse game with Falushe, is riveting.  The final section, which sees Falushe invite Gershen to his private sanctum ("The Palace of Love") in the far reaches of space, is heavy on description but light on interest. 

Still, I'd give this section four stars.  It'll be up to the last installment to determine if the whole affair ends up on the three or four star side of the ledger.

Primary Education of the Camiroi, by R. A. Lafferty

Last up, an obtuse piece on the differences in educational policy and success between two planets.  It's supposed to be whimsical (when isn't the word applied to Lafferty?), but it's mostly tired.

Two stars.

Summing up

Finishing up at 3.1 stars, I'd say Fred Pohl has done his job to keep Galaxy on our subscription lists for another year at least.  And I do mean our — you have to count me in, too!

[Speaking of stories you and your family will enjoy, Sirena, the second book in The Kitra Saga, is out!  Fun for adults, young and old.

Buy a copy…you'll be supporting me and getting a great read at the same time!]



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[November 6, 1966] Starting Over (December 1966 IF)

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by David Levinson

Autumn is a strange time for new beginnings, but that seems to be something of a theme, both in life and in the latest edition of IF.

Carnival atmospheres

On October 5th, the highest appeals court in Texas ruled that Jack Ruby, the man who shot the man who shot President Kennedy, should be granted a new trial. The court said that, given the tremendous amount of publicity in Dallas about the shooting, the judge should have granted the request for a change of venue made by Ruby’s lawyer, Melvin Belli. The court also ruled that some statements made by Ruby to the police should have been excluded. Oddly, the court didn’t have a problem with people who watched the shooting on television being on the jury. The new trial will probably be the big news story early next year.


Jack Ruby shortly after his arrest.

The Texas court may have followed the Supreme Court ruling in Sheppard v. Maxwell back in June. In 1954, Dr. Sam Sheppard was convicted of the brutal murder of his wife Marilyn. He maintained that she was killed by a “bushy-haired” man, but he was tried and convicted in the press before he was even arrested. The story became a national sensation, and the jury was exposed to further declarations of Sheppard’s guilt in the press throughout the trial. Before the trial began, the judge even told Dorothy Kilgallen that Sheppard was obviously “guilty as hell.” Jury selection for a new trial began on October 24th, and the prosecution should have begun to present their case by the time you read this.


Sam Sheppard’s mug shot from 1954.

Rising from the ashes

In this month’s IF, it seems like almost everybody is starting over. Whether it’s their personal lives, civilization or the human race, they’re all trying to put things back together.


This doesn’t look like it has anything to do with the Niven story. And they got the title wrong. Art by Gaughan

Continue reading [November 6, 1966] Starting Over (December 1966 IF) →

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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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[October 10, 1966] Let's Take A Trip (November 1966 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

The Acid Test

I believe that certain young people — hippies is the term, I think — are using the word trip to refer to something other than hopping on a bus, train, or airplane. In particular, they often mean taking a dose of lysergic acid diethylamide, understandably shortened to LSD, and known informally as acid.


A poster for an event held in Vancouver earlier this year.
Note the name of the festival, and the psychedelic art.
I'll bet lots of attendees took a trip to Canada in order to take a trip elsewhere.

Until this month, this hallucinogenic drug was legal everywhere in the USA. On October 6, it became illegal in the state of California. In response to the new law, on the same day thousands of people showed up for a so-called Love Pageant Rally in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. They enjoyed music from local artists, and many took doses of LSD in defiance of the law.


Some guys calling themselves the Grateful Dead entertain the crowd. There was also a young blues singer from Texas named Janis Joplin.

Way, Way Out

Even if you live in California, you can enjoy a trip deep into your imagination in a perfectly legal manner, simply by opening the latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow. Fittingly, almost all the fiction takes place in the far reaches of interstellar space.


Cover art by Sol Dember.

Crown of Stars, by Lin Carter


Illustrations by Jack Gaughan.

Here's a lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek adventure yarn featuring an ultra-competent protagonist. The editor's blurb compares him to James Bond and Sherlock Holmes, but he reminds me more of Derek Flint.


Our hero and his pet dragon.

Mister Quicksilver is a professional, legal thief. (There's some nonsense about how crime is legal and legal activity is outlawed, but forget about that. This isn't the most logical story in the world.) He lives in a castle on an asteroid, hidden among other chunks of rock orbiting a distant star. This method of concealing his location — which doesn't seem to prevent folks from finding him — offers the opportunity for the reader to enjoy the first of several bits of doggerel that present Quicksilver's philosophy in poetic form.


Home Sweet Home.

Three people show up, one at a time, each wanting to hire Quicksilver to steal a jeweled crown, a relic of an ancient, extinct race of reptilian aliens. The prize is guarded by a sect of fanatical cultists. The three clients include a scholar who turns out to be an imposter, an aristocrat, and a government agent. The latter is a woman who is in love with him. For his part, Quicksilver prefers women who (unsuccessfully) resist his charms.

The quest involves a trip to a planet of criminals, to learn the current whereabouts of the only thief who escaped from the cultists with his life. A clue leads Quicksilver to Earth, where the fellow resides. Meanwhile, multiple assassins make attempts on our hero's life.

Eventually, with the help of the government agent, Quicksilver arrives on the planet of the cultists, where a surprise awaits him. Is there any doubt that Quicksilver will prevail, and that the woman will fall into his arms?


The reptilian aliens, who don't actually show up in the story.

The author revels in the clichés of space adventure, offering tons of odd names and exotic details. Although it's not an out-and-out comedy, there are silly jokes along the way. (There's a reference to various folk heroes from the local religion of far future Earth: Abe Lincoln, Mickey Mouse, Fidel Castro, and Joan Blondell.) These quips tend to take the reader out of the story, which is pretty hard to take seriously anyway.

Quicksilver is an arrogant son-of-a-gun, and the way he forces a kiss on the protesting heroine at the end isn't very pleasant. The whole thing is like a great big bowl of whipped cream; tasty at first, maybe, but you'll soon wish for something more substantial.

Two stars.

The 1991 Draftee, by Joseph Wesley

The author has written about the future of the military several times for the magazine. This latest article includes letters from a young guy serving in the army a quarter of a century from now. It's a pretty depressing picture.

The military secretly induces hypnotic suggestions into the minds of its recruits. There's also some discussion of small robotic weapons that crawl like spiders or fly like insects. Nonlethal but debilitating gases fill the battlefield, so the soldiers wear protective, air-conditioned suits.

It's all highly speculative, particularly the idea that young men of the future will want to shave their heads bald, so the army has to give them regulation haircuts by applying hair-growing treatments! (A wry comment on today's fad for long hair on male hippies?)

Two stars.

Frost Planet, by C. C. MacApp


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

With the permission of the bear-like aliens who inhabit the place, humans have set up mining facilities and a colony under the ice of a frozen world. A crisis threatens to upset the uneasy relationship between the two species when a man is found stabbed to death with an alien knife. A military officer investigates the crime.

Things get even worse when small atomic heating devices go missing. It turns out that several of them have been placed in the ice near the human outpost, intended to destroy the colony. Later, an alien is killed by a human rifle, leading to open conflict. Can our hero prevent disaster?


Firing at a mysterious enemy.

This is a pretty decent science fiction suspense story, which develops quite a bit of tension. You may be able to figure out the whodunit aspect of the plot. The aliens are intriguing, but not enough is done with them.


A duel to the death.

I had to wonder why people are here in the first place. The extreme cold (effectively conveyed, by the way) is hardly conducive to human habitation, and we never find out what the mines produce.

As in many SF stories, the assumption seems to be that future folks will inhabit lots and lots of alien worlds, even those with their own native population. In any case, it's a lot better than the author's seemingly endless Gree series.

Three stars.

Report on the Slow Freeze, by R. C. W. Ettinger

From fictional cold to (possibly) factual cold. The magazine has discussed the possibility of freezing people at the time of death and then reviving them in the future a couple of times before. In this current variation on the theme, the author offers a history of the idea, and speculates about why it has failed to catch on.

A lot of this is going over old ground. The most interesting aspect of the article may be that the author seems to believe that appealing to the emotions, rather than the intellect, is the most effective way to promote the technique.

Two stars.

To the War is Gone, by Richard C. Meredith


Illustrations by Burns. I have been unable to discover the artist's first name.

There's a war going on between ordinary humans and those who have become attached to alien symbiotes that give them a single group mind. After a space battle that destroyed both ships, a lone human survivor with a broken leg waits for death, stranded in a detached segment of the vessel. There's an intact lifeboat not too far away, but he has no way to get to it.


The man. That buzz is goofy.

The only living inhabitant of the enemy ship shows up, floating through the void in a spacesuit. She can reach the lifeboat, but can't operate it. The two can communicate through radio, but can they work together to survive? More importantly, can they trust each other?


The woman, apparently producing the buzz.

I was reminded both of Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Puppet Masters (1951) and Tom Godwin's story The Cold Equations (1954) when I read this piece. Unfortunately, although it was compelling at first, it collapsed into melodrama by the end.

One interesting aspect of the story is the fact that the protagonist is a musician, and the text includes excerpts from real folk songs, as well as fictional ones of the future. Less enjoyable was making the other character a member of a group of women noted for their erotic appeal. This makes the man's decision to help her a matter of sheer lust. (Many of his folk songs are pretty bawdy, too.)

Two stars.

Until Armageddon, by Dannie Plachta

As a break from all this deep space stuff, we have a tiny story set on good old Mother Earth. The Pope and the Premier of Israel (sounds like the start of a joke) meet to ask a super-computer how to achieve world peace. The response is unexpected.

I said a joke, and this thing ends with a punch line, but it's not intended to be funny, as far as I can tell. I don't really know what to think about the twist the author throws at me.

One star.

The Jew in Science Fiction, by Sam Moskowitz

Starting with an analysis of the 1959 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., the author delves into the way that science fiction has depicted the Chosen People. With a few exceptions, it's a depressing account of virulent antisemitism. The article includes a discussion of the many talented Jewish writers and editors in the field, noting that they have produced hardly any works relating to the topic.

This was much more interesting than the author's previous scholarly but lifeless articles. I suspect this is because he cares passionately for the subject. The conclusion serves as something as an indictment of the supposedly progressive genre of science fiction, which Moskowitz sees as less enlightened than mainstream fiction.

Three stars.

Seventy Light-Years From Sol, by Stephen Tall


Illustrations by Dan Adkins

Back to voyages to faraway worlds. A team of experts explore an Earth-like but very strange planet. The only form of life seems to be plants resembling lettuce covering the ground. While investigating holes in the dirt, they discover what appear to be millstones.

That's weird enough, but things really get odd when big cubes of various colors show up out of nowhere. (They're actually quite a bit larger than shown in the illustrations.)


The team's biologist, surrounded by cubes.

It seems that the cubes are alive, and are able to communicate, to some extent, with the humans telepathically. The millstones are predators of the cubes, spewing out a substance — which turns out to be aspirin! — that dissolves their prey so they can absorb them.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that the planet's other continent is inhabited by gray, imperfect cubes, that threaten to invade the land of the perfect, colorful cubes.

As you can see, this is a really nutty plot, almost like something out of one of Lafferty's tall tales. What makes it work reasonably well is the fact that the human characters are a likable bunch, each with their own quirks. I particularly like the fact that the crew includes a painter, an eccentric older woman. She's a refreshing change from the scientists, officers, and technicians aboard the exploratory starship.

Three stars.

Down to Earth

Coming back home after this imaginary voyage to other star systems was something like returning from a disappointing LSD trip. Some of the pieces were moderately diverting, but nothing was outstanding. Maybe it's time to turn to some other form of entertainment.


A recent children's book. It might be a safer way to travel than acid.




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[October 2, 1966] At Heart (November 1966 IF)

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by David Levinson

Throughout the millennia in every human culture, the heart has been a key symbol. From the center of the body to the seat of life, emotion, mind or soul, its meaning varies, but it is always important. These days, it’s mostly a symbol of love, but it’s also connected with courage and desires of other kinds. It can also mean the center of something, from arguments to artichokes. Whatever it may mean, you gotta have it.

Hearts of darkness and light

It’s been a rough month for the civil rights movement. On September 2nd, Alabama governor George Wallace signed a bill refusing Federal education funds, believing that will prevent the integration of Alabama schools. Two days later, the Congress of Racial Equality marched in Cicero, Illinois and was met by a mob hurling rocks and bottles. By the end, 14 were injured and nearly 40 people (mostly white) had been arrested. But the ugliest scenes were in Grenada, Mississippi.

Back in June, the March Against Fear passed through Grenada, and marchers spent about a week there. Town officials appeared cooperative. They gave police protection to the marchers, six Black voter registrars were hired and 1,000 Black voters were registered. But it was all for show. Once the country’s attention moved on, the registrars were fired, and it was discovered that none of the voters were actually registered. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference set up shop in town and went to work.

In August, a Federal judge ordered Grenada to allow Black students to enroll in previously all white schools. Many parents took advantage of this, but a campaign of intimidation caused many to change their children’s enrollment to Black schools. School started on the 12th, and things went smoothly at one elementary school, but it was very different at the local high school. A white mob prevented Black students from entering the school, chasing Black children through the streets and beating them with chains and pipes. They even attacked reporters. And the police turned a blind eye to the whole thing. Federal protection finally arrived for the children on the 17th.


Martin Luther King walking children to school in Grenada, Mississippi. Photo by Bob Fitch

A few days earlier, a car carrying Martin Luther King and some other SCLC leaders was stopped at a red light in Grenada. A man at a nearby gas station recognized him, ran over, stuck a gun in Dr. King’s face and threatened to blow his brains out. Dr. King simply looked the man in the eye and said, “Brother, I love you.” Stunned, the man lowered his gun and walked away. That is a heart full of courage and love.

Hearts of men and robots

From the heart of battle to the heart of the galaxy, this month’s IF is full of action. Let’s dive right in.


Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots dispute the best way to care for humans. Art by Adkins

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[September 14, 1966] All the Old Familiar Places (October 1966 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Where Men Have Gone Before

Last week saw the debut of the exciting science fiction anthology show Star Trek.  The opening narration describes a five-year mission, going "where no man has gone before."  Indeed, the second pilot of the program bore that very title.  Never mind that in two of the three episodes I've seen thus far (and in the sole episode yet officially aired), the featured space ship Enterprise went places men had gone before; the promise is still there.

This month's Galaxy, on the other hand, treads entirely familiar ground.  Not necessarily in the subject matter or the plots — these are reasonably fresh.  I mean that pretty much every story save the last constitutes the continuation of a prior story or setting.

Magazine editor Fred Pohl once explained that he has a reliable stable of authors for Galaxy.  As Pohl travels the country on various speaking engagements, he hits his writer friends up for new material.  Cordwainer Smith was on that list until his tragic passing last month.  Frank Herbert is (sadly) also on that list.  And so are most of the authors below.  I imagine each conversation with his pet authors eventually wanders around to "when do you think I might see more of…"

This isn't a bad thing, especially if you like the universes that get expanded.  On the other hand, it is the reason there about are twice as many Retief stories as there should be.

So let's see how this series of sequels fares:

Old Stomping Grounds


by Sol Dember

The Palace of Love (Part 1 of 3), by Jack Vance

In Vance's novel The Star King, we were introduced to Kirth Gersen.  Gersen is a vigilante, roaming the galactic space lanes to track down the elusive and nearly omnipotent "Demon Princes" of crime.  His first target, a fellow named Grendel, is defeated in the wild Beyond, the belt of untamed systems that ring the placid inner worlds.

Now, in Palace, Gerson applies the vast wealth of Grendel toward the next Demon Prince on his list, the volatile slaver and crime boss, Viole Falushe.  This time, the trail leads back to the original home of humanity, specifically, the portion of Europe known as Holland.


by Gray Morrow

I like Vance a lot, but this particular universe has never appealed to me.  Indeed, Palace has the exact same issues that plagued Kings.  At first, Vance's detailed setting descriptions and odd dialogue are compelling.  Over time, they just get tiresome.  Moreover, whereas in stories like The Dragon Masters or The Last Castle, Vance creates a rich world almost from nothing, filled with exciting new places and ideas, the far future in which Kirth Gersen resides feels almost unchanged from 20th Century Earth. 

I have a suspicion that the remainder of this book is going to be a slog.  Three stars so far.

How the Heroes Die, by Larry Niven


by Virgil Finlay

Larry Niven returns us to the Mars he set up in this year's short story, Eye of the Octopus.  The initial expedition that discovered evidence of indigenous Martians has been succeeded by a dozen humans in a bubble dome archaeological base.  When the natives prove elusive, tedium and frustration sets in.  One of the members of the all-male crew makes a pass at another.  Enraged, the target of his advances kicks him in the throat and watches him die.

Knowing that the rest of the team won't stand for it, murderous John "Jack" Carter plunges his Mars buggy through the dome in an attempt to release the air and kill his compatriots.  His plan fails, thanks to the fast reactions of the team.  Alf Harness, the party's linguist, heads out in pursuit.

The cat and mouse chase, with each of the two trying to outsmart the other such that only one can come back alive, working within the constraints of their air supply and their equipment at hand, is a pretty tight bit of writing.  I could have, however, done without the several paragraphs Niven devotes to the motivation of the crime: Lieutenant-Major Shute drafts a report to Earth explaining that a bunch of isolated men together always succumb to homosexuality.  Just like in the Navy.  Or boys-only schools.  Or the Third Reich (I'm not making these examples up).  The solution: Earth needs to send women with them, damn the Morality Leagues that frown on co-ed missions. 

This reminds me of stories I read last decade where female crew members were carried along solely for their convenient orifices.  I had hoped tales endorsing such notions were a thing of the past.  As for modern-day temperance leagues, while I recognize that cultures can regress, it seems to me that women have been serving alongside men for decades now.  Why, I recently saw an episode of Gomer Pyle featuring a woman Marine Captain.  I can't imagine that the trend over the next century is toward a reversal of that practice.

At least the characters in Heroes don't endorse the victim's murder.  The characters (and thus the author) seem to be saying that queers are people too, but that they are the sad creations of circumstance.  (Mr. Niven is apparently unacquainted with Dr. Kinsey, or the excellent documentary on homosexuality, The Rejected).

Three stars.

A Recursion in Metastories, by Arthur C. Clarke

Too short to describe.  A literary joke of unlimited scope if limited value.

Three stars.


by Jack Gaughan

The Ship Who Killed, by Anne McCaffrey


by Nodel

Many years ago, in The Magazine of Science Fiction, Anne McCaffrey introduced us to KH-834, the cybernetic spaceship.  The story was called The Ship Who Sang.  It involved the close relationship between the vessel's female resident brain, Helva, and the ambulatory "brawn" component, a man named Jennan. 

Jennan dies in that story, leaving Helva devastated but still spaceworthy.  She is detached from scout duty, instead being used for a sequence of odd job missions.  Her first, in which Helva's passenger is a doctor dispatched to a plague-ravaged world, was detailed in a recent Analog in a story titled The Ship Who Mourned.

And now Killed, appearing in yet another magazine.  This time, Helva is to be a metallic womb, ferrying a hundred thousand frozen fetuses to a world that has suffered a sterilizing catastrophe.  Her passenger is Kira, responsible for obtaining the unborn children from various worlds and taking care of them on their journey.  She has suffered the recent loss of her partner, too, and is expressedly suicidal.  Helva's orders are explicitly to avoid worlds on which suicide is legal.  Unfortunately, not all such worlds are cataloged…

One interesting bit is that Kira is a "Dylanist", part of a sect of cynical singer-songwriters who have almost deified ol' Bob.  She even plays "Blowin' in the Wind" at one point.  It's rather bold to extrapolate such a huge impact from something so recent as a popular singer (is there a rival faction known as "The Beatlers"?) And while it is possible that the former Mr. Zimmerman may go on to be so influential as to spawn religious adherents, McCaffrey fails to account for musical evolution: Kira employs the acoustic guitar in Killed, an instrument Dylan has already abandoned.

Such is the danger of precise prediction!

Anyway, that's just a side note.  The story itself has a reasonably good setup, but McCaffrey's writing style, filled to the brim with adverbs and acid repartee, just isn't doing it for me.  Each story in this series has been less compelling than the last.  This may explain why each one has been published in a new magazine; usually, editors hold onto writers as long as they can.

Two stars.

For Your Information: The Delayed Discovery, by Willy Ley

Willy Ley meanders through the history of atomic chemistry, covering a great many topics shallowly and without a lot of causality.  Asimov usually needs to trim his articles; Ley needed more connective tissue to make this one work.

Two stars.

Too Many Esks, by Hayden Howard


by Jack Gaughan

We're now four stories into the saga of the Esks, inhuman hybrids of Eskimos and an alien invader, who live above the arctic circle in Canada.  Esks grow to maturity in just five years.  Female Esks gestate and bear a child every month.  This new race has already outgrown its food supply, relying on government handouts to stay alive.

Dr. Joe West has been warning of a Malthusian nightmare for months now.  At last, some folks are starting to listen to him.  But the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, and West is concerned that once the hybrid Esks interbreed with humans (as one did with West), homo sapiens will be displaced by the more fecund breed.  Once this happens, there are signs that the original aliens will return to enslave the Earth.

And so, West hatches a plan to sterilize the Esks through biological warfare.  Like all of West's other endeavors against the Esks, the mission is a dismal and emotionally fraught failure.

These Esk tales oscillate between tedious and mildly engaging, all requiring a healthy dollop of suspension of disbelief.  I've been along for this ride long enough that I'm now kind of curious as to how it will end.

Three stars.

Planet of Fakers, by J. T. McIntosh


by McClane

McIntosh is an author with a long career.  He's written five-star stories, a number of pedestrian pieces, and a few truly awful ones.  Often, his works contain Sexist (or at least anti-feminine) portrayals of women.

So it was that I approached this last piece of the issue with some trepidation (especially given the weird art that suggested a sexual farce).

I am happy to report that I was pleasanty surprised.

Planet starts in medias res.  A tense trio, one man and two women, are subjecting a queue of persons to a test.  Their goal: to prove the humanity of each subject. 

Through adroit exposition, McIntosh slowly clues us in to the situation.  A colony of a few hundred has been besieged by an alien race of body possessors.  The fake humans are in telepathic communion with one another, so while it was once a trivial task to tell humans from sham-people, tests can only be used effectively once.  And the colonists are running out of tests.

While Planet does not take place in a preexisting universe, the bodysnatching genre has been around for decades, including such classics as Campbell's Who Goes There? and Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (and, of course, the 1956 movie which gave the genre its label).  Nevertheless, what McIntosh does with it is so deftly executed, and so neatly contrived, that's it's clear the old subject still has life in it.  At least in the hands of a master.

I'd originally planned to give it four stars, but it has stayed with me such that I think it earns a full five.

Dust Bowl's a comin'

With the exception of the standout final story, the October 1966 Galaxy is pretty mediocre stuff.  I think the lesson I've gotten is that fields can grow fallow, especially ones that weren't very fertile to begin with.

I think Pohl's writers would do themselves well to find some new land to plow.  And maybe Galaxy could use a more diverse set of farmers…

(If you're looking for something new, join us tomorrow at 8:30 PM (Pacific AND Eastern — two showings) for the next episode of Star Trek!)

Here's the invitation!

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[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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[September 2, 1966] On the Edge (October 1966 IF)

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by David Levinson

Big Trouble in China

Back in May, I wrote about the political maneuvering going on in China, and I predicted purges would follow. Rarely have I been so sorry to be right. On August 13th, Mao Tse-tung announced a purge of Party officials as part of the Cutural Revolution. And he has a frightening new tool to carry out his will.

At the end of May, a group of high school and university students calling themselves Red Guards embraced the principles of the Cultural Revolution and hung up posters criticizing university administrators. Originally condemned as counterrevolutionaries and radicals, they were officially endorsed by Mao early in August. On the 18th, a mass rally was held in T’ien-an-min Square in Peking. A reported one million students listened to speeches by various Party officials. Mao appeared in military fatigues for the first time in years, a look favored by the Red Guards.

On the 22nd, they began putting up posters “advising” people to abandon bourgeois habits such as Western clothing and warned shopkeepers against selling foreign goods. They gave people a week before they would “take action”. Since then, the Red Guards have run amok. On the 26th, they gave foreigners and bourgeois Chinese to the end of the day to leave Peking. They poured into the Tibetan capital Lhasa, destroying ancient relics, vandalizing shrines and abusing monks. Now, word has come out that they are beating and killing people in the Ta-hsing and Ch’ang-p’ing districts of Peking, and the police have been ordered to look the other way. This is likely to get worse before it gets better, and however it ends won’t be pretty.


Soong P’in-p’in, a Red Guard leader, pins an armband on Mao Tse-tung.

Life on the edge

This month’s IF features not one, but two stories set on the edge of the galaxy, and just about everyone else is on the edge in some way or another.


Amazingly well done for Dan Adkins. Art by Adkins

Continue reading [September 2, 1966] On the Edge (October 1966 IF) →

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Magazine/Anthology, 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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