Tag Archives: Hugo Gernsback

Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[November 20, 1967] Fresh Air? (December 1967 Amazing)

9 Comments


by John Boston

A Fresh Heir

We have been harbinged.  When Harry Harrison, recently departed as editor of SF Impulse and suddenly appeared as book reviewer in this magazine that seemed to have eschewed features entirely, I wondered whether it was an omen of a larger change. 

And here that change is, in big letters at the top of the cover of this December Amazing: “HARRY HARRISON New Editor.” Joseph Ross is gone from the masthead and his departure is unheralded elsewhere in the magazine, though Harrison is quite gracious to him in his book review of Ross’s anthology The Best of Amazing.


by Johnny Bruck

Otherwise, the kudos are reserved for the recently-deceased Hugo Gernsback.  Harrison’s editorial is a tribute to him, and Science Fiction That Endures, Gernsback’s own guest editorial from the April 1961 anniversary issue, is reprinted.  Gernsback says among other things that enduring SF stories are those that “have as their wonder ingredient true or prophetic science,” and notes that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells wrote most of their notable SF early in their careers, later succumbing to “science fiction fatigue—the creative science distillate of the mind had been exhausted.” That sounds scientific!

But does this change in masthead mean any actual material change in this too frequently lackluster magazine?

The most visible difference is that the cover and title page have suddenly become more crowded.  Nine items are touted on the cover, five of them touted as “NEW” and others as “SPECIAL” or even “XTRA SPECIAL.” There’s so much puffery going on that the cover illustration, by Johnny Bruck from the German Perry Rhodan periodical, is confined to the bottom third of the cover, though little harm is done, since it’s quite horizontal in orientation, depicting a spaceship traveling very low and being pursued by flying snakes.  Beat that, Frank R. Paul! 

Other aspects of the magazine’s presentation represent both continuity and change.  The proofreading is still terrible; look no farther than the misspelling “Lester del Ray” on the title page of his story.  And curiously, part of the magazine—pages 90 through 125—is in a different, smaller typeface than the rest, though this increase in wordage is not touted on the cover or elsewhere.

As to the contents, the balance is shifted only a little.  Two short stories and the serial installment are original, one story is probably reprinted but this is its first appearance in English, and four short stories are reprinted from earlier issues of Amazing and Fantastic.  And of course we don’t know whether Harrison actually had much of a hand in selecting what went into this first issue of his incumbency.  But the question of reprints versus new material seems to be a continuing sore point.  Note the column on the left side of the cover—five iterations of "NEW"—which musters everything in the magazine that's not a reprint, including the book review column.

So, too early to tell, but promising—it almost has to be, given Amazing’s doldrums of mediocrity to date under Sol Cohen.  As Bob Dylan, the alleged troubadour of my generation, put it:

I wish I was on some Australian mountain range.
I wish I was on some Australian mountain range.
I got no reason to be there, but I imagine it would be some kind of change. 

Santaroga Barrier (Part 2 of 3), by Frank Herbert


by Gray Morrow

First, to the non-reprinted fiction.  The longest piece of fiction here is the second installment of Frank Herbert’s serial Santaroga Barrier, in which the suggestively named Gilbert Dasein tries to unlock the secret of the reclusive town of Santaroga, which seems to involve a psychoactive substance called Jaspers that the locals all consume.  As usual I’ll hold my comments until the story is complete.

The Forest of Zil, by Kris Neville


by Jeff Jones

Kris Neville, who contributed prolifically to the SF magazines during the early 1950s but slowed down considerably thereafter, opens the issue with The Forest of Zil, a cryptic story of space explorers who land on a planet entirely covered in forest and begin to make plans to clear trees to make space for human activities.  The forest begs leave to differ, and its response can be read either as an epic in brief of raising the ante exponentially, like A.E. van Vogt but not as noisy, or as a weary parody of the entire conceptual armamentarium of SF.  Or maybe something else!  How many faces can you find lurking in the coffee shop placemat?  Four stars for this subtly memorable piece.

The Million Year Patent, by Charles L. Harness


by Jeff Jones

Charles L. Harness, a patent lawyer by day, is present with The Million Year Patent, in which the technicalities of patent law collide with those of relativity, not very interestingly to this lay person.  Two stars.

An Unusual Case, by Gennadiy Gor

The “Sensational Story from behind the Iron Curtain” per the cover is Gennadiy Gor’s An Unusual Case, translated from Russian by one Stanley Frye.  Gor, born to a family exiled to Siberia by the Tsar, was apparently part of the avant-garde in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, but survived to write popular science texts as well, and to start writing SF in 1961.  There’s no indication where this story was previously published, if at all.  It’s a first-person account by the creator of an artificial intelligence (apparently at least humanoid; a hand is mentioned) of his rearing of this pseudo-child, which is cut short when representatives of the corporation that financed the project come to take it away, as it protests piteously.  It’s short and poignant, though blunted a bit by not making much sense; the ingenue develops detailed memories of human life that its creator didn’t put there.  Three stars, and I hope we see more of Gor’s work here (or anywhere).

The Smile, by Ray Bradbury


by L. Sterne Stevens

The ”Ray Bradbury Masterpiece” touted on the cover is The Smile, from the Summer 1952 Fantastic, set in what seems like an American town after a nuclear war has mostly destroyed civilization and left everyone who survived destitute.  People of course respond in the only logical way—by destroying or defiling any available relics of the former civilization.  A while back it was smashing an old car with sledgehammers; today everyone is lining up to spit on a fragment of a famous painting (clue: the title).  But young Tom just can’t get with the program.  It’s a bit overdone, but Bradbury’s overdone is better than many writers’ perfectly-baked.  Or something like that.  Three stars.

Stacked Deck, by Lester del Rey

Our Journeyer-in-Chief recently had occasion to mention “the sort of inferior stuff that filled the lesser mags of the ’50s.” Here’s the real article, Lester del Rey’s Stacked Deck from the November 1952 Amazing.  Del Rey is one of SF’s hardy journeyman professionals, in the game since 1937 as writer, first for John Campbell’s Astounding and Unknown, then for everyone in sight during the 1950s’ efflorescence of SF magazines.  In the ‘50s he edited magazines and anthologies and wrote novels as well as stories, including a prodigious ten of them under various pseudonyms for the Winston series of juvenile SF.  Occasionally he excelled, and his work almost always maintained a basic level of competence.

Almost always.  Sometimes a working writer just has to crank it out, inspiration or no, as in this excruciatingly contrived piece.  Before it opens, a man flew to the moon, without enough fuel to get back, expecting to be rescued in time by a later expedition.  (This already makes no sense.) But that rocketeer, inexplicably, showed up again on Earth, talking about entities he encountered on the moon but claiming scrambled memory.  So a better-equipped expedition sets out, only to discover that the Russians are neck and neck with them.  All this is told in an annoyingly jaunty, I’m-just-a-regular-guy first person style, as in the opening sentence: “The bright boys with their pep talks about space and the lack of gravity should try it once!”


by Ed Emshwiller

Upon landing, our heroes find a building with an airlock, and inside, a nice lounge with red leather chairs, a cigarette machine, and plenty of alcohol and food, along with a machine shop and a lot of electronic gear, with signs and manuals in English and Russian—and a vault full of missiles, ready to be armed with warheads.  They surmise the Russians are finding something similar.

So what gives?  All along there have been passing references to gambling, such as the protagonist’s having bought a sweepstakes ticket, and racing magazines lying around, some inside the mysterious building.  Our hero picks up one of the latter and finds a note in it written by the aliens who set up the building, explaining that they are all betting on whether the Earthfolk will blow themselves up in short order, or avoid extermination and come calling on the aliens a bit later.  Narrator ruminates: “I don’t like being the booby prize in a cosmic lottery.  And that’s all the human race is now, I guess.”

And that arid gimmick is the story, with no other redeeming feature.  Del Rey must have been short on the rent that month.  One star. 

Luvver, by Mack Reynolds

Speaking of gimmicks, arid ones that is, Mack Reynolds’s Luvver (Fantastic Adventures, June 1950) is about as contrived as Stacked Deck.  Old Donald Macbride and his flirtatious daughter Patricia are having spaceship problems and make an emergency landing on a handy planet despite the “RESTRICTED ZONE.  LANDING FORBIDDEN” warning that comes over the radio. The local garrison, consisting of Steve and Dave, hustles them off their ship—blindfolded—and into their quarters, warning them not to look around, not to go outside, not to open the windows, without explaining why. 

But Patricia, of course, goes outside, and before Steve can drag her in, she sees a little animal–a luvver.  He knocks her out and the guys shoot her up with “the lethe drug,” since wiping her memory is her only hope.  Steve explains to the old man that all animals have means of defense—speed, size, venom, scent, etc.  The luvvers’ defense is eliciting undying love—“a stronger force than the most vicious narcotic”—in anyone or anything that sees them.  If Patricia retains her memories, she will “die of melancholy” if kept away from them, and if they escaped their world, pandemonium would ensue.

The gimmick is slightly less inane than del Rey’s, and Reynolds writes in a style more facile and natural than del Rey’s artificial and irritating voice, so two stars, barely.

Sub-Satellite, by Charles Cloukey

The gem of the issue, remarkably, is Charles L. Cloukey’s Sub-Satellite, from the March 1928 Amazing.  It recounts a great inventor’s construction of a spaceship and his voyage to the Moon in it, and the attempt on his life there by a disgruntled and demented former employee who has stowed away.  It is well told in an agreeable, slightly stilted but very plain style with a good balance of narration and exposition, reminding me of (my old memories of) Jules Verne.  It too ends with a gimmick—one that has been used in later decades by better-known writers—but there’s much more of a story here than in del Rey’s or Reynolds’s efforts, so it doesn’t detract from the whole.  Four stars.

So who’s this Cloukey?  Never heard of him, though I’m familiar with most of Gernsback’s repeat contributors.  Turns out he died in 1931, at age 19, of typhoid fever, after publishing eight stories, a poem, and a serial novel in Gernsback’s magazines.  Sub-Satellite was his first story, and he was not quite 16 when it was published.  Forget G. Peyton Wertenbaker, whose The Man from the Atom, done when he was 16, was pretty terrible—Cloukey is the real prodigy of the Gernsback years.  Too bad he didn’t last.

Summing Up

So, not a bad issue, with a couple of four-star stories, and some evidence (mainly the cover and table of contents) that the new regime at least wants to make the magazine look a bit livelier.  Whether a sustained improvement is in process of course remains to be seen.




9 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 20, 1967] Hugo Gernsback, 1884-1967

6 Comments


by John Boston

The legendary Hugo Gernsback died August 19 at the age of 83.  He started the first science fiction magazine—the first seven of them, in fact.  He is memorialized every year in the Hugo Awards for the best SF of the year.  Sam Moskowitz once proclaimed, “Everyone today knows that the real ‘Father of Science Fiction’ is Hugo Gernsback and no one can ever take the title away from him.” (Moskowitz, A Profile of Hugo Gernsback, Amazing Stories, Sept. 1960, p. 38.)


by Frank R. Paul

But it’s an odd sort of paternity, since plenty of what we think of as science fiction—works by Verne, Wells, Poe, A. Conan Doyle, M.P. Shiel, and Mary Shelley, among others—preceded Gernsback’s involvement, and in some cases his birth.  Opinions are also mixed concerning the merit of much of Gernsback’s SF-related activity.  But before passing any judgments, let’s step back and look at Gernsback’s life and career, relying heavily on Moskowitz’s above-quoted article and its revised version in his book Explorers of the Infinite.  (A more thorough exploration of Gernsback’s rather full life might make a substantial book for some future scholar.)

Gernsback was born in 1884 in Luxembourg, came to the United States in 1904, quickly got into the electrical business manufacturing automobile batteries, and later started an electrical import business.  He devised a low-cost home radio set which was sold widely, followed by the first working walkie-talkie.  In 1908 he started Modern Electrics, the first magazine of its kind.  He started the Wireless Association of America in 1912, which soon had thousands of members.  He founded a new magazine, Electrical Experimenter (later Science and Invention) in 1912, and another one, Radio News, in 1919.  In 1925 he started a radio station, WRNY, which also made some of the earliest rudimentary television broadcasts.  Someone with Gernsback’s cornball sense of humor might say that during those two decades, he was quite a live wire, and encountered little resistance.


Gernsback demonstrating his "Isolator," designed to aid concentration by preventing distraction from external stimuli (Science and Invention, July 1925)

Gernsback also dallied with science fiction early on.  (Gernsback’s own more detailed account of these activities is in his Guest Editorial: Science Fiction That Endures in the April 1961 Amazing.) He wrote the novel with the punning title Ralph 124C41+ (say it out loud), subtitled A Romance of the Year 2660, and serialized it as he wrote it in his own Modern Electrics in 1911.  I haven’t dared try to read it, but it is reputed to be short on literary elements but quite long on predicted future inventions and discoveries, including both radar and space-sickness.  He published others’ fiction as well as his own in Modern Electrics and in Electrical Experimenter and its successor Science and Invention.  His series Baron Munchausen’s New Scientific Adventures began in Electrical Experimenter in 1915. 

In fact, before Gernsback published the first SF magazine, he published the first SF magazine issue: the August 1923 Science and Invention was blurbed “SCIENTIFIC FICTION NUMBER” and left us such treasures as G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s The Man from the Atom.  And in 1924, he made his first abortive attempt to start an SF magazine, Scientifiction, but his large mailing soliciting subscriptions fell flat.

Which brings us to 1926 and the birth of Amazing, this time with no advance solicitation.  The first issue, dated April 1926, included nothing but reprints and foregrounded Wells, Verne, and Poe, but original fiction began to appear quickly enough, with G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s The Man from the Atom (Sequel) in the May issue and his The Coming of the Ice in June.  By late 1928, almost all of the magazine’s contents were original material.


by Frank R. Paul

Gernsback quickly expanded his empire with the very large Amazing Stories Annual in 1927, featuring a specially commissioned Mars novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and followed it with Amazing Stories Quarterly, which also ran a complete novel in each issue.

But a rude awakening was in store.  Gernsback liked to make money, but he was less fond of paying it out, to his authors or anyone else.  H.P. Lovecraft dubbed him “Hugo the Rat” for paying so little for The Colour out of Space, one of his best stories, and H.G. Wells refused further reprint permissions because of Gernsback’s low rates.  Though Gernsback was very far from broke, in 1929 his company was forced into bankruptcy by creditors who had not been paid on time, as permitted by the law at the time.  Its assets were sold, with Amazing going to Teck Publications.  Ultimately the creditors were paid $1.08 on the dollar (“bankruptcy de luxe,” as Moskowitz quotes the New York Times). 

Undaunted, Gernsback announced by mass mailing that he would publish Everyday Mechanics in place of (and to compete with!) Science and Invention, Radio-Craft in place of Radio News, and Science Wonder Stories in place of Amazing.  This time, his solicitation worked.  He received thousands of subscriptions and was quickly back in business.  The last Amazing listing Gernsback as editor was April 1929; the first issue of Science Wonder Stories was dated June 1929.  He promptly added Science Wonder Quarterly, Air Wonder Stories, and Scientific Detective Monthly to his stable, though only the quarterly lasted more than a few issues.


by Frank R. Paul

Gernsback’s new ventures were successful.  For much of the early ‘30s, Wonder Stories (“Science” was dropped in 1930) was reckoned the best of the SF magazines.  By 1936, however, Depression economics had defeated Gernsback, and he sold Wonder Stories to Standard Magazines, where it became Thrilling Wonder Stories, a relatively juvenile pulp magazine.  For the first time in a decade, Gernsback was out of the SF business. 


Unattributed

Gernsback's attempts to get back into the game were abortive.  He started Superworld Comics, an SF comic book, in 1939, but it quickly failed.  In 1953, he started Science Fiction Plus, in the same large size as the early Amazing, bringing back artist Frank R. Paul and some of the writers from his earlier magazines as well as more current fare, but this largely reactionary venture lasted only seven issues.  Though he continued to publish other magazines, notably Sexology and Radio Electronics, his contact with the SF world diminished mostly to the occasional convention visit. 


by Frank R. Paul

Most SF readers from the mid-‘50s on probably know of Gernsback, if at all, from his postage stamp-size photo and endorsement that appeared irregularly on the back cover of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, along with those of such other 1950s celebrities as Clifton Fadiman and Spring Byington.  His message, as seen on the October 1960 F&SF: “Plus ça change, plus c’est le meme chose—is a French truism, lamentably accurate of much of our latter day science fiction.  Not so in the cyclotronic Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction which injects sophisticated isotopes, pregnant with imagination, into many of its best narratives.” Sure.


F&SF, April 1959

So—the “father of science fiction”?  Not by decades.  But Gernsback certainly was the father of the commercial marketing category of science fiction, or, some would say, SF’s ghettoization.  Before Gernsback, SF or proto-SF could be found regularly if not frequently in general fiction magazines of the US and the UK and in the lists of book publishers.  But Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, begun in 1926, was the first periodical devoted entirely to “scientifiction”—the first of what eventually became a legion.

It’s easy to overstate Gernsback’s significance here.  It is nearly certain that there would have been science fiction magazines quickly enough had Gernsback never existed.  From the late 1920s on, pulp fiction magazines multiplied rapidly, specializing to satisfy every conceivable interest—westerns, romances, western romances, “spicy” (mildly suggestive) stories, crime fiction hard-boiled and soft, sports stories, horror and “weird menace” stories, aviation and air war stories.  The quest for market niches led to even narrower specialization: Zeppelin Stories (1929, four issues); Prison Stories (1930-31, six issues); The Wizard: Adventures in Moneymaking (1940-41, seven issues, three under a new title); Civil War Stories (1940, one issue). 

And new ventures required little encouragement.  Astounding Stories of Super-Science, the first SF magazine started by anyone not named Gernsback, was apparently launched after William Clayton, publisher of 13 magazines, realized that he could add more titles cheaply because pulp covers (a major part of the publishing cost) were printed in sheets of 16, and he had blank spaces available.  The self-interested machinations of Clayton editor Harry Bates then tipped the scale towards Astounding and away from the competing proposal, Torchlights of History.  (Bates, “to begin” (sic), Editorial Number One in Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding (1964)).  In Gernsback’s absence, others besides Clayton would surely have found and filled the niche for scientific fiction magazines.

But it is also easy to understate Gernsback’s contributions.  One of them was his facilitation of SF fandom—initially, simply by printing letter-writers’ addresses in Amazing’s letter column, so they could communicate with each other, and later by creating the Science Fiction League with its organizational framework and local chapters.  SF editors have expressed mixed feelings about fandom’s activities and influence, but at the least it has been valuable to have a semi-organized claque to speak up about the worst tendencies in SF publishing, such as the “Shaver mystery” featured in the mid-‘40s Amazing and finally dropped under pressure. 

Gernsback’s other major contribution was his pretenses.  From the beginning, he proclaimed “scientifiction” to be a means of scientific education and speculation—as exemplified in his own Ralph 124C41+ and its exhausting parade of future inventions—and he continued to express that view in Wonder Stories, notwithstanding his dropping “Science” from the title.  I say “pretenses” because much of the fiction he published was not especially scientific or educational, such as the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt that appeared in his magazines as early as 1927.  That is no surprise, since regardless of his preferences he had to attract enough readers to keep his magazines going. 

But still, he would raise the flag now and then, such as in his editorial in the first Science Wonder Quarterly: “In publishing a number of science-fiction magazines, the editors feel that they have a great mission to perform; their mission being to get the great mass of readers, not only to think what the world in the future is likely to become, but also to become better versed in things scientific.” (Science Wonder Quarterly, Fall 1929, p.5) And sometimes he broadened his prescription.  Commenting on the Technocracy movement of the ‘30s, which proposed to reorganize society along more scientific lines, he wrote: “. . . [T]he great mission of science fiction is becoming more recognized, day by day.  This is the triumph of our readers over those who scorned science fiction.  If science fiction can make serious people sit up and take notice, and THINK about the future of humanity, it will have accomplished a tremendous good.” (Wonder Stories, March 1933, p. 741)

The idea that SF should be held to higher standards and purposes than the run of pulp fiction may have made a considerable difference.  One need look no further for a counter-example than the first new non-Gernsback competitor, Clayton’s Astounding Stories of Super-Science.  Alva Rogers says in his informal history A Requiem for Astounding that the Clayton magazine “was unabashedly an action-adventure magazine and made no pretense of trying to present science in a sugar-coated form as did, to some extent, the other two magazines.”


by Hans Wessolowski

You can bet that little of the social speculation and satire, somewhat featured in Gernsback’s magazines and considerably more prominent in the SF of the ‘40s and ‘50s and later, showed up there either.  Had Clayton’s magazine rather than Gernsback’s become the template for magazine SF, we would likely have had a much different and less interesting genre in the ensuing decades.

So—hail and farewell, Pops.

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




6 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[March 6, 1966] Is More Less? (April 1966 Amazing)

12 Comments


by John Boston

Two Weeks in Philadelphia

“GIANT 40TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE”
“BIG 196 PAGES”

These are the blurbs on the cover of the April Amazing.  Yeah, and W.C. Fields said, “Second prize is two weeks in Philadelphia.” After February’s dreary procession of the better forgotten from Amazing’s back files, the promise of an all-reprint issue with 32 more pages is dubious at best.  The architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe likes to say, “Less is more.” We are about to test the converse hypothesis.


by Frank R. Paul, Robert Fuqua, and Hans Wessolowski

But first, the setting for this diamond.  You see the drab cover, with the collage of tiny reproductions of early Amazing covers crowded to the edge by a bulldozer of type.  Inside, besides the fiction, there is Hugo Gernsback’s editorial from the first issue of Amazing, no more interesting than you would expect, and a two-page letter column, which unlike prior columns includes a letter critical of the reprint policy.  More interesting and commendable is A Science-Fiction Portfolio: Frank R. Paul Illustrating H.G. Wells, seven pages of illustrations from early issues of Amazing featuring Wells reprints. 

But onward, to the fiction.  To begin, or to warn, I should note that much of this issue is dedicated to Big Thinks: the fate of humanity, the proper roles of the sexes in human society, and . . . class struggle!

Beast of the Island, by Alexander M. Phillips

Things begin reasonably well, and not too grandiosely, with Alexander M. Phillips’s Beast of the Island, from the September 1939 Amazing.  A couple of guys are plane-wrecked on an uninhabited Pacific island and discover there seems to be some large animal snuffling around—an animal that can talk, or try to.  On exploration, they find a cave, complete with ancient skeleton and trunk, which contains a journal detailing the failed struggle of some 17th century sailors to survive the attacks of this terrible beast, foreshadowing their own struggle.  This is a quite competent adventure story and the ultimate revelation of the nature of the beast (not to coin a phrase) is reasonably clever for its time.  Three stars.


by Robert Fuqua

The mostly-forgotten Phillips first appeared in Amazing in 1929 and published about a dozen stories in the SF/F magazines, the last in 1947.  Best known of these is probably his fantasy novel The Mislaid Charm, published first in Unknown, then in hardcover by Prime Press, one of the early SF specialty publishers.  He is also that unusual figure, a pro turned fan, having become a mainstay of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, which did not exist when he started writing. 

Intelligence Undying, by Edmond Hamilton

Edmond Hamilton’s Intelligence Undying, from the April 1936 issue, is in equal measure splendid and ridiculous.  The brilliant but elderly Doctor John Hanley, frustrated because life is too short to complete all the work he has imagined, has a solution: he orders up a newborn infant (prudently, a “white male child”) from the legions of abandoned children, and decants the contents of his brain into the child’s.  (Never mind that old country saying about trying to put ten pounds of . . . whatever . . . into a five-pound bag.) This kills the old Hanley, but he has named a young graduate student friend to be the child’s guardian.

That is an interesting set-up, but Hamilton immediately abandons it.  We flash forward to John Hanley the 21st, interrupted in his laboratory in the year 3144 because the rocket ships of the Northern and Southern Federations are fighting.  (“The fools, the blind fools!  After I’ve worked a thousand years and more to give them greater and greater powers, and they use them—.”) Soon enough the victorious Northerners show up to “protect” him, so he immobilizes them and the rest of the world by activating a device that disturbs their semi-circular canals so no one can stand up.  Hanley announces to the world that nations are abolished and he will be ruling them now.  Wounded, he orders the Northerners to go immediately and pick him up another male child.


by Leo Morey

Flash forward again to John Hanley 416, or the Great Jonanli, as he is worshiped worldwide.  The world’s population is idle, supported by the great automated factories Jonanli has established.  But now, he announces to the world, he has discovered that the Sun is about to collapse, rendering Earth uninhabitable.  There is nothing for it but to move to Mercury!  “There was stunned silence and then from the view-screens came back to him a tremendous, wailing outcry of terror. ‘Save us, Jonanli!  Save us from this death that comes upon us!’ ” He tells them that they’ve got to do some work to save themselves but just gets more wailing in return.

So the Great Jonanli reprograms (as our great scientists would put it today) all the auto-factories to crank out robots to build the spaceships, give Mercury some rotation (it was not known in 1936 that it does rotate), terraform it (as we put it today), build cities, and start plants growing.  “The humans of Earth helped in none of this but lay supine in terror, crying out constantly to Jonanli and staring in terror at the sun.”

As the sun visibly falters, Earth’s population is ushered onto the spaceships, ferried to Mercury, and dumped there by the robots, who then destroy themselves.  John Hanley stays on Earth awaiting the end and dies buried in snow, having learned his lesson, leaving humanity to figure out once more how to take care of itself.

Technological progress leading to stagnation and rebirth (or the lack of it) is of course one of the great themes of SF, both its regular practitioners and drop-ins like that E.M. Forster guy.  Here Hamilton renders it with studied crudeness, a comic book without the pictures, terror and majesty pitched to the guy reading the racing form on the subway, forget the Clapham omnibus.  Three stars for this absurd tour de force.

Woman’s Place

Two of the stories courageously address the question that haunts . . . somebody’s . . . mind: what is to be done about women—and before it’s too late!  Two tales of women-dominated societies probe this urgent question.

The Last Man, by Wallace West

Brightness falls from the air in Wallace West’s The Last Man (from the February 1929 issue); all ridiculous, no splendor, Sexists in the saddle, bad taste in mouth.  In the far future, men have been abolished.  “The enormous release of feminine energy in the twentieth to thirtieth centuries, due to the increased life span and the fact that the world had been populated to such an extent that women no longer were required to spend most of their time bearing children, had resulted in more and more usurpation by women of what had been considered purely masculine endeavors and the proper occupations of the male sex.


by Frank R. Paul

“Gradually, and without organized resistance from the ‘stronger’ sex, women, with their unused, super-abundant energy, had taken over the work of the world.  Gradually, complacent, lazy and decadent man had confined his activities to war and sports, thinking these the only worth-while things in life.

“Then, almost over night, it seemed, although in reality it had taken long ages, war became an impossibility, due to the unity of the nations of the earth, and sports were entered into and conquered by the ever-invading females.”

Artificial reproduction was developed and “the men were dispensed with altogether,” except for a few museum specimens.  Later: “In the ages which followed, great physiological changes took place.  Women, no longer having need of sex, dropped it, like a worn-out cloak, and became sexless, tall, angular, narrow-hipped, flat-breasted and un-beautiful.”

So here we are with M-1, the Last Man, physically a throwback (i.e., pretty hunky), who lives in a (rarely visited) museum with a caretaker, and is obliged to put himself on display in a glass cage one day a week for the benefit of women who want to gawk at this freak.  These women are “narrow-flanked flat-breasted workers, who stood outside the cage and gazed at him with dull curiosity on their soulless faces.”

But there’s an exception—an atavistic woman, conveniently telepathic, who shows up one night outside the glass cage, having slipped away from her keepers: “Hair red as slumberous fire—eyes blue as the heavens—a face fair as the dream face which sometimes tortured him.” Later: “her face assumed a faint pink tinge which puzzled him, yet set his pulses throbbing.” She calls herself Eve, and of course decides to call him Adam.  M-1 is horrified and fascinated, and slowly comes around to her rebellious point of view as she shows him around and takes him covertly to the birth factory, which has replaced cruder forms of reproduction.  Eve broaches the idea that they might escape and restart humanity the natural way. They are discovered, flee, and Eve hides in the museum and shares his rations.

In the museum, they find a large quantity of TNT, and hatch their plot to destroy the birth factory.  Afterwards, as they escape in a flying car, heading for the mountains, “the first rays of the rising sun splashed into the cockpit a shower of pale gold,” and never mind that they have just destroyed the prospects of a society of millions of people, like it or not.

So: women, if they don’t have to spend all their time minding children, will take over the world of work, and then somehow push men out of the world of sport (“sports were entered into and conquered by the ever-invading females”), and kill almost all of the men, and then (despite the earlier talk of “feminine energy”) create a stagnant, joyless, and regimented world in which progress has ceased and all but a few must spend twelve hours a day in tedious labor.  Whoa!  Guess we better keep them barefoot and pregnant!  Sounds like the author’s unconscious taking out its garbage.  One star, and a coupon good at any psychiatrist’s office. 

Pilgrimage, by Nelson Bond

Nelson Bond’s Pilgrimage offers a more genial take on the evils of matriarchy—that is, with less unalloyed misery on display than in The Last Man.  This story is said to be revised from its first appearance as The Priestess Who Rebelled in the October 1939 Amazing. 


by Stanley Kay

Civilization has fallen, and in the Jinnia Clan (not far from Delwur and Clina), the Clan Mother is in charge—of the warriors, with (like Wallace West’s future women) “tiny, thwarted breasts, flat and hard beneath leather harness-plates”; the mothers, the “full-lipped, flabby-breasted bearers of children . . . whose eyes were humid, washed barren of all expression by desires too often aroused, too often sated.” Then there are the workers: “Their bodies retained a vestige of womankind’s inherent grace and nobility. But if their waists were thin, their hands were blunt-fingered and thick.  Their shoulders sagged with the weariness of toil, coarsened by adze and hod.”

And there are the Men, with their “pale and pitifully hairless bodies,” not to mention their “soft, futile hands and weak mouths”; apparently they are in short supply and excluded from all useful activity except breeding.  There are also Wild Ones, rogue unattached males who want nothing more than to get their hands on Clan women and have their way with them.  They are sometimes recruited to join Clans, but their supply is dwindling too.

Our heroine, young Meg, has just hit puberty, and doesn’t much like the prospects she sees around her.  Nothing will do but to be a Clan Mother herself.  And with no hesitation, the wise and learned Clan Mother takes her on.  Meg learns “writing” and “numbers” and is introduced to “books.” But before she’s ready to roll as a Clan Mother, she’s got to go on her Pilgrimage to the Place of the Gods, far west and to the north.  She’s made it past the “crumbling village” of Slooie and into Braska when she is attacked by a Wild One, but saved by someone unexpected—Daiv of the Kirki tribe, “muscular, hard, firm,” who quickly tells her twice that she talks too much, and suggests that she mother a clan with him.

Daiv is quickly dismissed, and Meg sets out again, on foot, because her horse ran away during the affair of the Wild One.  But Daiv shows up again and introduces her to “cawfi,” and also to kissing.  “Suddenly her veins were aflow with liquid fire.”

At last, after the long journey northwest from Jinnia, she arrives at the Place of the Gods, and there they are: “stern Jarg and mighty Taamuz, with ringletted curls framing their stern, judicious faces; sad Ibrim, lean of cheek and hollow of eye; far-seeing Tedhi, whose eyes were concealed behind the giant telescopes.” The Gods are Men!  Real men, like Daiv!  What to do?  Return to the sterile and diminishing life of the Clan?  No!  She heads “back . . . back to the fecund world on feet that were suddenly stumbling and eager.  Back from the shadow of Mount Rushmore to a gateway where waited the Man who had taught her the touching-of-mouths.”

This of course makes very little sense, to send the Clan Mother-in training off on a pilgrimage that will undermine the entire basis of the society she is supposed to preside over, but that lapse of logic would seem to be beside the author’s urgent point.  Two stars; it’s less unpleasant than The Last Man. 

White Collars, by David H. Keller

White Collars, by David H. Keller, M.D., from the Summer 1929 Amazing Stories Quarterly, is a social satire, of sorts.  Keller was known for absurd extrapolation.  His most famous story may be Revolt of the Pedestrians, in which humanity has evolved, Morlocks-vs.-Eloi style, into automobilists (of cars and powered wheelchairs), whose legs have atrophied, and back-to-nature pedestrians, and of course they struggle for supremacy. 


by Hynd

Here, the trend towards more education for everybody has resulted in a huge oversupply of the college and professional school graduates, who are all too ready to remove your tonsils or teach you Greek, if only more people needed those services.  These White Collars, who are on the march with picket signs as the story opens, demand employment fitting their educations, and refuse to perform any of the practical work that is actually needed or accept the decline in social status that would go with it.  They’d rather live in desperate but genteel poverty and complain about it. 

The story consists largely of conversations between Hubler, a millionaire plumber, and Senator Whitesell, who is in the dam-building business but (as he puts it) “bought a seat in the Senate,” encouraged by his business associates, who “felt that our group was not being properly cared for.” (It’s hard to tell if this too is satire, or if everyone was a little less subtle about these things in Keller’s day.) Hubler takes Whitesell on a tour of the White Collars’ neighborhood, including a visit to the Reiswicks, the family whose daughter Hubler’s son is in love with.  The family will have none of an offer of productive but lower-status work and the daughter will have nothing to do with the son of a plumber. 

Senator Whitesell goes back to Washington, and the general problem is resolved with draconian legislation providing for involuntary servitude, complete with labor camps, and suppression of criticism.  This does wonders for formerly idle intellectuals: “They became different men and women, they sang at their work, and the number of babies born in the Labor Hospitals to happy mothers and proud fathers steadily increased.” The private problem of the Reiswicks is solved by a combination of emigration and the last-minute kidnapping and forced marriage of their daughter to the plumber’s son—but she decides she likes the idea after she sees his modern kitchen.

This of course is all mean-spirited and reactionary, as well as ridiculous, but hey, it’s satire, though Keller is no Jonathan Swift.  (And I wonder what Keller had to say a few years later about the New Deal.) Keller is at least a competent writer.  So, two stars, barely.

Operation R.S.V.P., by H. Beam Piper


by Robert Jones

Between West and Keller, we have a brief respite from gravity in H. Beam Piper’s Operation R.S.V.P., from the January 1951 issue, which presents the lighter side of the struggle for world domination.  Piper at this point had published several solid and well-received stories in Astounding, still one of the field’s leaders.  This one is flimsier: an epistolary story, told in memos among the Union of East European Soviet Republics and the United People’s Republics of East Asia, which are engaging in nuclear saber-rattling, and Afghanistan, which is outsmarting them both.  It is clever and well-turned and not much else; it aspires to little and achieves it handily.  Two stars.

The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years, by Don Wilcox

Don Wilcox, whose actual name is Cleo Eldon Wilcox, but who has also appeared as Buzz-Bolt Atomcracker (in Amazing, May 1947, for Confessions of a Mechanical Man), published SF from 1939 to 1957, almost entirely in Amazing and its companion Fantastic Adventures, mostly in the Ray Palmer era.  The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years, from October 1940, is a fairly well-known if not much-read story, chiefly because it was the first to explore the idea of a generation starship, preceding and possibly inspiring Robert Heinlein’s much more famous Universe.


by Julian Krupa

The good ship S.S. Flashaway carries 16 couples, plus the narrator, Prof. Grimstone.  He will serve as Keeper of the Traditions, traveling in suspended animation and being revived every hundred years to keep things on track, handily providing a viewpoint character for this centuries-long story.  Upon his first revival, he hears many babies crying; there is a population crisis.  Why?  Boredom, apparently.  Grimstone suggests wholesome activities: “Bridge is an enemy of the birthrate, too.” But alas: “The Councilmen threw up their hands.  They had bridged and checkered themselves to death.”

Solutions?  One character says, “We’ve got to have a compulsory program of birth control.” Prof. Grimstone in his recommendations “stressed the need for more birth control forums.” Not to be indelicate, but I don’t think people trying to avoid pregnancy use a forum.  And you’d think the people planning this trip would have made some provision for it—maybe even something futuristic, like, oh, a pill that would suppress ovulation or fertilization.  But I guess you couldn’t really talk much about that in a family magazine in 1940.

So, leap forward 100 years, and Grimstone awakes to find people lying around starving.  Babies are still the problem.  These people were born outside the quota, and by decree are not allowed to eat regularly.  Grimstone sets matters straight: everybody eats, there’s a new regime, everybody outside the quota is surgically sterilized, and inside the quota they’re sterilized after the second child.  And they’re all happy about it.

A century later, there’s no population problem, but factions are at each other’s throats, and Grimstone has to make peace.  And it goes on, century by century.  Wilcox has put his finger on the central problem of the generation ship idea: there’s no reason for the intermediate generations, who didn’t sign up for life in a big tin can and have nothing else to look forward to, to remain loyal to the mission and to keep the discipline necessary for a small community to survive for centuries.

There’s a pretty decent story here, unfortunately swathed in wisecracking Palmerish pulp style—the first line is “They gave us a gala send-off, the kind that keeps your heart bobbing up at your tonsils,” and that’s pretty representative.  It’s also weighed down by the taboos of the time in the overpopulation episode.  Wilcox gives the impression of a writer of limited gifts struggling to do justice to a substantial theme, which is both refreshing and frustrating.  Three stars, for effort and for originality in its time.

The Man from the Atom (Sequel), by G. Peyton Wertenbaker

The issue closes with G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s The Man from the Atom (Sequel)—yes, that’s the title—from the May 1926 Amazing.  You will recall that the narrator Kirby was invited over to Dr. Martyn’s place to try out his expander/contractor, pushed the Expand button like any good SF mark-protagonist of the 1920s and ‘30s, and found himself growing so large that his feet slipped off Earth and he wound up in a super-cosmos in which our universe was but an atom, trillions of years in the future.  He’s not thrilled about it, either. 


by Frank R. Paul

But he works the Shrink button and gets himself sized to land on another planet, thrusting his feet through the clouds as he downsizes.  There he falls into the hands of supercilious humanoids who imprison and interrogate him, but shortly the beautiful Vinda—daughter of the King of the planet, of course—shows up, providing “endless days of wonder and enchantment” (not biological, we are assured), and also offering a way back.  Well, not exactly back.  The way back is forward, because (after invocation of Einstein and the curvature of space), “the whole history of the universe is rigidly fore-ordained, and so, when time returns to its starting point, the course of history remains the same.” More or less, anyway.

So the humanoids make some calculations, he pushes the Expand button again, and before long arrives on (a slightly different) Earth, only to learn that Dr. Martyn has been imprisoned for murder after his disappearance, or rather, the disappearance of the corresponding Kirby in this world.  Now he's released, of course.  But after a while, home, or near-home, is not enough for Kirby; he pines for Vinda; and soon enough he is pushing the Expand button again, hoping to rejoin her in the next cycle of the universe, even if he has to fight the other version of himself that this cycle’s Dr. Martyn has previously dispatched.

This sequel is a noticeably higher class of ridiculous than its forerunner, better written and with considerably more ingenuity of detail along the way, so it laboriously climbs to two stars.

And I Only Am Escaped Alone To Tell Thee

Well, it could have been worse.  Two of these stories, Beast of the Island and, barely, The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years, are actually worth reading for reasons other than laughs or historical interest.  The rest are not, except for the overdone spectacle of Intelligence Undying.

[Don't miss TODAY'S episode of the Journey Show, starting at 1:00 PM Pacific — we have an all star cast of artists who will be doodling to YOUR specification.

Y'all come!]




12 Comments Leave A Comment