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Book, Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[December 8, 1969] Do Better (January 1970 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The January 1970 Amazing continues in its newly-established course—“ALL NEW STORIES Plus A Classic”—though it’s fronted in the all-too-long-established manner, with another capable enough but generic cover by Johnny Bruck, reprinted from a 1965 issue of Perry Rhodan. Editor White has acknowledged this practice and, I suspect, is looking to end it when circumstances and the publisher permit.

Cover of Amazing Stories for January 1970. The illustration, by Johnny Bruck, shows a team of astronauts walking away from a crashed rocket on a desert with a pink sky. The text on the cover announces the stories Questor by Howard L. Myers, Moon Trash by Ross Rocklynne, Merry Xmas and Post/Gute by John Jakes, a novel by Philip K. Dick, and the essay Science in S F by Greg Benford and David Book.
by Johnny Bruck

The usual complement of features are here, starting with a long editorial meditation about the Moon landing, reactions to it, the progress (or lack thereof) of technology generally, and a note of cogent pessimism about the future of the space program: we can do it, but will we? The book reviews continue long and feisty, with White slagging James Blish’s generally well-received Black Easter, concluding: “At best, then, Black Easter is not a novel, but only an extended parable. At worst, it is a tract. In either case, it pleads its point through the straw-man manipulations of its author in a fashion I consider to be dishonest to its readers.” The milder-mannered Richard Delap says that Avram Davidson’s The Island Under the Earth “isn’t a horrid book like some of the dredges of magazine juvenilia we’ve seen recently; it’s soundly adult and imaginative but just too uneven and incomplete to be a good one.” Damning with faint praise, or the opposite? New reviewer Dennis O’Neil, a comic book scripter and “long a friend of SF, and a one-time neighbor of Samuel Delany,” compliments Thomas M. Disch’s Camp Concentration: “Of all the adjectives which might be applied to Camp Concentration—‘artful,’ ‘brilliant,’ and ‘shocking’ come to mind—maybe the most appropriate is ‘heretical.’ ” He then reads the book in terms of Disch’s assumed religious background. “Catholicism is a hard habit to kick. James Joyce didn’t manage it, and neither does Tom Disch.”

The regular fanzine reviewer, John D. Berry, is on vacation, so White turns the column over to “Franklin Hudson Ford,” apparently a pseudonym of his own, for a long and praiseful review of Harry Warner’s fan history All Our Yesterdays. The letter column is even more contentious than the book reviews, with one correspondent addressing “My Dear Mr. Berry: You and your coterie of comic-stripped idiots” (etc. etc.). John J. Pierce, he of the “Second Foundation” and denunciations of the New Wave, explains that he really does have some taste: “If the romantic, expansive traditions of science fiction are to be saved, they will be saved by the Roger Zelaznys and the Ursula LeGuins, not by the Lin Carters or the Charles Nuetzels”—a point I had not realized was in contention. William Reynolds, an Associate Profession of “Bus. Ad.” at a Virginia community college, tries to correct White about the operation of the Model T Ford and provokes a response as spirited as it is mechanical. One Joseph Napolitano complains about “new wave stories”: These new wave writers “don’t want to work. Its [sic] not easy to come up with an idea for a story and they just don’t want to take the time and use what little brains they have to do this.” (Etc. etc.)

After all this amusing contention, it is unfortunate to have to report that the fiction contents of this issue are pretty lackluster.

A. Lincoln, Simulacrum (Part 2 of 2), by Philip K. Dick

I’m a great admirer of Philip K. Dick’s best work, and some of his less perfect productions as well. So it’s painful to report that A. Lincoln, Simulacrum, is a bust. It has its moments, but there aren’t enough of them and they don’t add up to much, even though the novel’s themes reflect some of Dick’s long-standing preoccupations.

Protagonist Louis Rosen is partner in a firm that manufactures and sells spinet pianos and electric organs. But now his partner Maury is branching out into simulacra—android replicas of historical persons, designed by his daughter Pris. They’ve started with Edwin M. Stanton, President Lincoln’s Secretary of War. How? “. . . [W]e collected the entire body of data extant pertaining to Stanton and had it transcribed down at UCLA into instruction punch-tape to be fed to the ruling monad that serves the simulacrum as a brain.” Ohhh-kay.

More importantly, why? Because Maury thinks America is preoccupied, in this year of 1981, with the Civil War, and it will be good business to re-enact it with artificial people. Pris is now working on a Lincoln simulacrum.

Sepia drawing by Michael Hinge. It shows a man in a business suit talking on a telephone while he smokes a cigarette, and the face of a woman also talking on a telephone.
by Michael Hinge

Staying over at Maury’s house, Louis meets Pris, recently released from the custody of the Federal Bureau of Mental Health, which provides free—and mandatory—treatment for people identified as mentally ill per the McHeston Act of 1975. Louis mentions that one in four Americans have served time in a Federal Mental Health Clinic. Pris was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and committed, in her third year of high school.

Louis asks her to stop her noisy activities because it’s late and he wants to go to sleep. She refuses, and says, “And don’t talk to me about going to bed or I’ll wreck your life. I’ll tell my father you propositioned me, and that’ll end Masa Associates and your career, and then you’ll wish you never saw an organ of any kind, electronic or not. So toddle on to bed, buddy, and be glad you don’t have worse troubles than not being able to sleep.” Louis thinks: “My god. . . . Beside her, the Stanton contraption is all warmth and friendliness.”

In a later encounter: “Why aren’t you married?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Are you a homosexual?”
“No!”
“Did some girl you fell in love with find you too ugly?”

In addition to this finely honed nastiness, Pris is also capable of considerable depression and self-pity. After the Lincoln is completed:
“Oh, Louis—it’s all over.”
“What’s all over?”
“It’s alive. I can never touch it again. Now what’ll I do? I have no further purpose in life.”
“Christ,” I said.
“My life is empty—I might as well be dead. All I’ve done and thought has been the Lincoln.”

Louis is shaken by these encounters. He sees a psychiatrist and gives a paranoid account of events to date, threatening to kill Pris. Further: “I was not kidding when I told you I’m one of Pris’ simulacra. There used to be a Louis Rosen, but no more. Now there’s only me. And if anything happens to me, Pris and Maury have the instructional tapes to create another.” Later he reiterates, in a conversation with the Stanton: “I claim there is no Edwin M. Stanton or Louis Rosen any more. There was once, but they’re dead. We’re machines.” The Stanton acknowledges, “There may be some truth in that.”

And if you’ve missed the point about humans and simulacra, here it is from the other direction. The Stanton says he would have liked to see the World’s Fair. Louis says: “That touched me to the heart. Again I reexperienced my first impression of it: that in many ways it was more human—god help us!—than we were, than Pris or Maury or even me, Louis Rosen. Only my father stood above it in dignity.”

The characters get involved with Sam Barrows, a rich guy who is the talk of the nation, in hopes of a profitable business relationship. Barrows is selling real estate on the Moon and other extraterrestrial locations. He sensibly trashes Maury’s idea of Civil War re-enactment, but his proposal is hardly an improvement; he wants to create simulacra of ordinary folks to go live in his off-planet housing developments and make them seem homier to potential buyers. (Sounds very practical, right?)

Pris then takes up with Barrows and begins calling herself Pristine Womankind. Meanwhile, Louis is getting progressively crazier, propelled by his obsession with Pris, and eventually winds up committed to the Federal Bureau of Mental Health—and is glad. There are a few more events and revelations I won’t spoil.

So, what follows from this prolonged but foreshortened precis?

First, this is not a very good SF novel, because it doesn’t follow through on its SFnal premises and also doesn’t make a lot of sense in general. It starts with the premise that historical replicas can be convincingly manufactured, and can exercise volition and easily adapt to a world a century in their future. OK, show me. But Dick doesn’t. We actually see relatively little of the Stanton and the Lincoln over the course of the novel. Further, we’re told that these artificial people are variations on models developed by the government. For what? And where are they and what are they doing? There’s no clue about the effects of this rather monumental development, other than allowing an obscure piano company to tinker with it.

The novel’s envisioned future doesn’t add up either. We’re told the setting is the USA in 1981, but there is routine space travel and colonization of the Moon and planets. More mind-boggling, there is the Federal Bureau of Mental Health—created by statute in 1975!—under which the entire population must take mental health tests administered in schools, and those deemed mentally ill are committed to a mental health clinic. As already noted, a fourth of the population has been committed at some point. And what political or cultural crisis or revolution has not only countenanced such an authoritarian regime, but also come up with the money for such a gigantic system of confinement?

Dick also seems to have made up his own system of psychiatry. Louis is diagnosed with a mental disorder requiring commitment through the James Benjamin Proverb Test. While interpretation of proverbs is sometimes used in psychiatric diagnosis, I can’t find any indication that this Benjamin Test exists anywhere besides Dick’s imagination.

Louis is asked to interpret “A rolling stone gathers no moss.”

“ ‘Well, it means a person who’s always active and never pauses to reflect—’ No, that didn’t sound right. I tried again. ‘That means a man who is always active and keeps growing in mental and moral statute won’t grow stale.’ He was looking at me more intently, so I added by way of clarification, ‘I mean, a man who’s active and doesn’t let grass grow under his feet, he’ll get ahead in life.’
“Doctor Nisea said, ‘I see.’ And I knew that I had revealed, for the purposes of legal diagnosis, a schizophrenic thinking disorder.’”

Turns out the correct answer—which Louis says he really knew—is “A person who’s unstable will never acquire anything of value.” But if any of the other interpretations of this deeply ambiguous platitude—or acknowledgement of its ambiguity—proves one a schizophrenic, I guess I’d better turn myself in. (Cue soundtrack: “They’re Coming to Take Me Away.”)

The doctor goes on to explain that Louis has the “Magna Mater type of schizophrenia”:

“ ‘The primary form which ‘phrenia takes is the heliocentric form, the sun-worship form where the sun is deified, is seen in fact as the patient’s father. You have not experienced that. The heliocentric form is the most primitive and fits with the earliest known religion, solar worship, including the great heliocentric cult of the Roman Period, Mithraism. Also the earlier Persian solar cult, the worship of Mazda.’
“ ‘Yes,’ I said, nodding.
“ ‘Now, the Magna Mater, the form you have, was the great female deity cult of the Mediterranean at the time of the Mycenaean Civilization. Ishtar, Cybele, Attis, then later Athene herself . . . finally the Virgin Mary. What has happened to you is that your anima, that is, the embodiment of your unconscious, its archetype, has been projected outward, unto the cosmos, and there it is perceived and worshipped.’
“ ‘I see,’ I said.”

Now, nowhere is it written that an SF writer can’t invent future psychiatry, any more than future physics or sociology, or alternative history. But plopping this scheme down in the America of 12 years hence, without support or explanation of how we got there from here, is incongruous and implausible. And the nominal date of 1981 is not the issue. The novel is firmly set in the familiar USA of today or close to it, with androids, spaceships, and psychiatry based on ancient religions in effect stuck on with tape and thumb tacks.

Of course, absurdity and incongruity are far from rare in PKD’s work, but they generally appear in the context of madcap satire or grim lampoon (consider Dr. Smile, the robot psychiatrist-in-briefcase in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, whose function is not to cure, but to drive the protagonist crazy so he can evade the draft). But that’s not what’s going on here. This novel, though it has its witty moments, presents overall as thoroughly sober and serious, assisted by Louis’s flat first-person narration.

So, if it’s not good SF, is it good anything else? Editor White said in the last issue, “It’s more of a novel of character than any previous Philip K. Dick novel, and in writing and scene construction it approaches the so-called ‘mainstream’ novel.” Pris is an appallingly memorable character, both for her conduct and for her effect on others, and her part of dialogue is finely honed. A novel that closely examined her and her effect on those around her might be quite impressive. But in a novel that starts out with android historical figures and ends up in a national coercive mental health system, with spaceships and moon colonies along the way, there’s too much distraction for Pris and her relationships to be adequately developed.

The bottom line is that the author has mixed up elements of SF and the “mainstream” novel without developing either satisfactorily or adequately integrating them.

In the last chapter, the author makes a conspicuous effort to bring the novel’s disparate elements together, and winds things up in the most quintessentially Dickian fashion imaginable. In fact, it all seems a little too pat. But wait. Remember editor White’s cryptic statement in last issue’s editorial that this serial was not cut, but was “slightly revised and expanded” for its appearance here? There’s a rumor that this last chapter was not actually written by Dick, but was added by White. True? No doubt we’ll find out . . . someday.

A readable failure. Two stars.

Moon Trash, by Ross Rocklynne

Ross Rocklynne (birth name Ross Louis Rocklin) started publishing SF in 1935 and became very prolific in the 1940s, placing more than 10 stories most years through 1946, many in the field leader Astounding Science Fiction, but most in assorted pulps. After that his production fell off, he disappeared from Astounding, and ceased publishing entirely from 1954 to 1968, when he reappeared with a burst of stories in Galaxy. He was a heavyweight by production, but seemingly a lightweight by lasting impact. Only five of his stories were picked up in the explosion of SF anthologies of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, and to date he has published no books.

Sepia drawing by Ralph Reese. It shows two boys wearing astronaut helmets looking at a strange, tall alien creature with many tentacles and huge eyes.
by Ralph Reese

Moon Trash is a contrived piece about young Tommy, who lives on the Moon with his cranky old stepfather Ben Fountain; his mother seems to be dead though it’s not explicit. Tommy has bought the official ideology of keeping the Moon spick and span, and Ben gets annoyed when Tommy picks up things that Ben has dropped along the way. Then Tommy finds a bit of trash that somebody dropped about a million years ago, and it leads them to a cave full of artifacts of an alien civilization, including precious gems.

Ben’s not going to tell anybody and is going to see how he can make money from this find, but in his greed he pulls a heavy statue over and it kills him. Tommy reports that Ben fell down a crater wall, returns the artifact Ben had taken to the cave, tells no one about it, and resolves he’s going to work and become a big shot on the Moon. The obvious subtext of the title is that even on the Moon there will be people who are down and out or close to it—people like Ben are the Moon trash, though young Tommy is a class act. Three stars, barely.

Merry Xmas, Post/Gute, by John Jakes

John Jakes had been contributing to Amazing and other SF magazines, mostly downmarket, since 1950, to little notice or acclaim until he devised his Conan imitation Brak the Barbarian for Fantastic. In his very short Merry Xmas, Post/Gute, an impoverished author tries to get the last remaining book publisher to read his manuscript, only to be told it is closing its book division as unprofitable. It’s as heavy-handed as it is lightweight. Two stars.

Questor, by Howard L. Myers

Howard L. Myers—better known by his very SFnal pseudonym, Verge Foray—contributes Questor, a semi-competent piece of yard goods of the sort that filled the back pages of the 1950s’ SF magazines. Protagonist Morgan is part of a raid brigade attacking Earth, without benefit of spaceships, which are passe in this far future. He’s a Komenan; Earth is dominated by the Armans; it's not clear why we should care. Morgan is special; his assignment is to pretend to be a casualty and fall to Earth; but he’s hit by a “zerburst lance” and both he and his transportation equipment are injured. He lands in a Rocky Mountain snowbank and emerges, after some recuperation, to find himself in a valley he can’t climb out of.

Sepia drawing by Jeff Jones. It shows a human figure shooting lightning from a bazooka.
by Jeff Jones

But all is not lost. A talking mountain goat, named Ezzy, appears (intelligence and fingers engineered by long-ago humans), and offers to help him out. We learn just what Morgan is looking for on Earth—it’s called the Grail! Or, the goat says, “it can be called cornucopia, or Aladdin’s Lamp—or perhaps Pandora’s Box. . . . The only certain information is that it has vast power, and has been around a long time.” Morgan later adds, “We only know it appears to assure the survival and success of whatever society has it in its possession.” Can we say pure MacGuffin? And of course there is a wholly predictable revelation at the end involving the goat. Two stars for egregious contrivance.

The People of the Arrow, by P. Schuyler Miller

Sepia drawing by Leo Morey. It shows a prehistoric battle with spears and clubs between minimally dressed humans and apes. A steep mountain can be seen in the background.
by Leo Morey

This month’s “Famous Amazing Classic” is P. Schuyler Miller’s The People of the Arrow, from the July 1935 Amazing, and it does not impress. Kor, the leader of a migrating prehistoric tribe (having recently dispatched his elderly predecessor), returns with a hunting party to discover that their camp has been attacked by ape-men (he can tell by their footprints). They have wreaked terrible carnage and have carried off the women they did not kill. So the hunting party pursues the ape-men and wreaks terrible carnage on them with their superior armament (see the title). Miller does make a credible attempt to suggest the workings of Kor’s mind and his appreciation of the changing landscape he traverses, but it’s all pretty badly overwritten and mainly notable as a large bucket of blood. Miller—now best known as book reviewer for Analog and its predecessor Astounding—did much better work later. Two stars.

The Columbus Problem: II, by Greg Benford and David Book

Last issue’s “Science in Science Fiction” article asked how difficult it would be to locate planets in a star system from a spaceship traveling much slower than the speed of light. This issue, they ask how difficult it would be from a spaceship traveling much faster—say, a tenth of light-speed. (The authors say flatly: “To the scientific community, . . . FTL is nonsense.”) Then they take a quick turn for several pages of exposition about how an affordable and workable sub-light spaceship could be designed. The Goldilocks option, they suggest, is that proposed by one Robert Bussard: a ramscoop (magnetic, since it would need about a 40-mile radius) to collect all the loose gas and dust floating around in space and channel it into a fusion reactor.

Sounds great! Once you solve a few technical problems, that is. And then finding planets is a breeze. They’ll all be in the same plane, as in our solar system—it’s all in the angular momentum. Approach perpendicular to that plane, and Bob’s your uncle. Then a fly-by can reveal basics of habitability—gravity, temperature, what’s in the atmosphere—but looking for existing life and habitability for terrestrials will require landing, preferably by remote probes of several degrees of capability.

This one is denser than its predecessor, but as before, clear, clearly well-informed, and aimed at the core interests of, probably, most SF readers. Four stars.

Summing Up

So, assuming one agrees with me about the serial, there’s not much of a showing here for this resurrected magazine, though it’s far too early to be making any broad judgments. Promised for next issue are (the good news) a serial by editor White, who has demonstrated his capabilities as a writer, and (the bad news) a story by Christopher Anvil! No doubt a Campbell reject. Let’s hope the promising overcomes the ominous.

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Book, Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[October 8, 1969] Suddenly . . . (November 1969 Amazing))

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by John Boston

. . . Amazing has become a normal science fiction magazine. (Stop snickering.) It’s been moving in that direction, but this November issue’s editorial says: “Beginning this issue, our old policy of reprints has been thrown out the window. . . . We will be publishing one, and only one classic story in each issue, and it will be a bonus to the fully new contents of the magazine.” Or, as the cover blurb puts it, “ALL NEW STORIES plus a Famous Classic.”


by Johnny Bruck

That phrase may seem oxymoronic, but here’s how editor White figures it: the magazine, with its new, smaller typefaces allowing more wordage, now contains about 70,000 words of new material, plus another 15,000 words, making a total per issue greater than any of the other SF magazines and allowing him to call the remaining reprints bonuses. Thus the booster’s reach exceeds the mathematician’s grasp, but I’m not complaining.

Promotion aside, congratulations to White for finally prying publisher Sol Cohen loose from his prolonged insistence on filling as much as half the magazine with reprints of (euphemistically) uneven quality. White says he “cannot truly say it was a result of my actions alone”—presumably meaning Cohen had been softened up by the complaints of his predecessors—but good for him for finally getting it done.

So what we have here are one quite long serial installment, a novelet, and two short stories, plus a reprinted short story from 1942, all new, as well as the usual complement of features. As promised last month, there is a science article by Greg Benford and David Book, and as then implied, Dr. Leon E. Stover is conspicuous by his absence, and not missed.

A book review column, shorter than usual but just as vehement, features editor White’s praise of Lee Hoffman’s The Caves of Karst and a new reviewer, Richard Delap, whaling on Bug Jack Barron: “Science fiction’s answer to Valley of the Dolls has now made the scene with all the pseudo-values of its mainstream counterpart unrevised and intact in a transposition to pseudo-sf.” Delap also doesn’t care much for the new collection of old stories The Far-Out Worlds of A.E. van Vogt, but this disappointment is expressed more in sorrow than in gusto. These two reviews are reprinted from a fanzine, but Delap will be contributing regularly to this column going forward.

The fanzine reviews and letter column fill out the issue. In the letter column, White notes that James Blish has moved to England and his book reviews will be less frequent. Other highlights of the letter column include Joe L. Hensley complaining in kind about the misspelling of his name on last issue’s cover, Bob Tucker reviving his 36-year-old beef about staples, to White’s consternation, and both White and John D. Berry, the fanzine reviewer, weighing in on the purpose of that column in response to a complaining reader. White takes issue with a reader who thinks the use of “sci-fi” is only a minor problem, and announces to another reader that he has dropped the movie reviews for the present. He also notes that he continues to write stories but his agent insists on sending them to Playboy—where, I note, nothing by White seems yet to have appeared.

Oh, the cover. I almost forgot. It’s the good cover by Johnny Bruck that we’ve been waiting for—not especially attractive, but very interesting. Foregrounded is an African-looking face peering out from what at first looks like the fur-lined hood of one of the Inuit or other far-North American peoples, but on closer examination is a collage of partial images of pieces of equipment and (I think) living things. It’s a surreal picture that, unusually, doesn’t look like imitation Richard Powers. Provenance is the German Perry Rhodan #250, from 1966.

On the contents page, Greg Benford’s story Sons of Man is listed as “The story behind the cover.” White said last issue that he doesn’t have control over the covers, but he’s been able to commission stories, including Benford’s, to be written around the pre-purchased covers. So I guess Sons of Man is actually the story in front of the cover. Inside, the story is illustrated by none other than editor White—his first professionally published art. It’s adequate, but he shouldn’t quit his day job. In other interior illustration news, Mike Hinge has done small illustrations for the headings of the editorial, book reviews, and other departments.

A. Lincoln, Simulacrum (Part 1 of 2), by Philip K. Dick

The biggest news in this issue is Philip K. Dick’s serial, A. Lincoln, Simulacrum. Per my practice, I won’t read and rate this until both installments are available, but there’s plenty of talk about the novel here. White’s editorial says without elaboration that it is totally uncut—in fact, it’s “slightly revised and expanded” for its appearance here.


by Mike Hinge

White does leave us with a bizarre anecdote. Several years ago, he showed Dick a photo of himself looking rather like Dick (both with full beards and dark-rimmed glasses). Dick asked for a copy, since his agent was after him to provide a photo for a British edition of The Man in the High Castle. So Dick sent the photo of White—and it appeared on the book. White says: “So here’s a chance to say, ‘Thanks, Phil,’ for the chance to associate myself, albeit deceitfully, with one of his best books.”

About the novel, White says:

“. . . Phil told me, ‘I put a lot of myself into this one—I really sweated into it.’ It’s more of a novel of character than any previous Philip K. Dick novel, and in writing and scene construction it approaches the so-called ‘mainstream’ novel. It is also something of a ‘root’ novel, planting as it does in 1981 many of the themes and constructs which pop up in later books of his loose-limned future history. And it is the first and only Philip K. Dick novel to be told in first person by its protagonist.”

Sons of Man, by Greg Benford


by Ted White

Greg Benford’s Sons of Man is a well crafted story using the familiar device of telling two unrelated stories in parallel, gradually revealing that they are not so unrelated after all. In one, Livingstone, who has moved to the northwestern wilderness to get away from civilization, finds a man named King collapsed in the snow near his cabin with severe burn injuries of no obvious origin, then sees a face peering into his window, and later, bare footprints two feet long. King’s been Sasquatch hunting and they seem to be hunting him back.

Meanwhile, on the Moon, Terry Wilk is trying to make sense of the records of an ancient spacecraft that crashed after visiting Earth early in human prehistory. Members of the New Sons of God cult are looking over his shoulder to make sure he doesn’t find out anything heretical. The story reads like it might develop into a series but stands on its own. The style seems a little awkward at the beginning, as if it’s something Benford started earlier in his career and came back to later, but overall, it’s very readable, cleverly assembled, and generally enjoyable. Four stars.

A Sense of Direction, by Alexei Panshin

Alexei Panshin’s short story A Sense of Direction is set in the same universe of “the Ships” as his Nebula-winning Rite of Passage. The interstellar Ships lord it over the people of the colonies that they established. Arpad, whose father married into a planetary culture and left (was left by) his Ship, was reclaimed for the Ship when his father died. He’s miserable in its unfamiliar culture, and makes a break for it during a landing on another planet. But the folkways there are so bizarre and repellent that he quickly changes his mind and sneaks back. So, like most of Panshin’s work, it’s Heinleinian: The (Young) Man Who Learned Better, capably done but just a bit too schematic and pat. Three stars.

A Whole New Ballgame, by Ray Russell

Ray Russell contributes A Whole New Ballgame, a compressed soliloquy on a theme previously aired by Larry Niven (in The Jigsaw Man), with a first-person semi-literate narrator. It’s just about perfect in its small compass and inexorable logic. Four miniature stars.

Sarker’s Joke Box, by Raymond Z. Gallun

The “Famous Classic” this month is Sarker’s Joke Box, by Raymond Z. Gallun, from the March 1942 Amazing. It’s yet another testament to the corrupting effects of Ray Palmer’s editorship. It begins: “Clay Sarker had me covered with his ugly heat-pistol. Kotah, the little Venusian scientist he’d held captive for so long, crouched helplessly chained, there, in one corner of Sarker’s cavernous mountain hideout. My life wasn’t worth the cinders in a discarded rocket-tube.” “Gimme bang-bang” wins out again! Pull out your copy of the June 1938 Astounding Science-Fiction, or the anthology Adventures in Time and Space, and compare Gallun’s much classier Seeds of the Dusk to this one.


by Robert Fuqua

But the story is not a total loss. The narrator is a cop, and he and his buddies have rousted Sarker out of his last stronghold in the Asteroid Belt. Now he’s trapped in a cave on Earth while the other cops are closing in. But Sarker—“that black-souled demon of space”—turns his heat-pistol on Kotah and then on his own apparatus that fills the cave, which blows up quite satisfactorily, then enters a metal cylinder and closes and seals it behind him. When the main body of cops arrive, they try to penetrate it, but—it’s neutronium! They can’t scratch it. And to compound matters, Sarker’s lawyer appears and announces that since they’ve declared Sarker to be in custody, they’ve got to try him within 60 days or he goes free. So the cops redouble their efforts to get through the neutronium. At this point, the story turns into a scientific puzzle without (much) further resort to hokey melodrama. It’s perfectly readable and commendably short. Three stars.

The Columbus Problem, by Greg Benford and David Book

Greg Benford’s second appearance in the issue is the first “Science in Science Fiction” article, done with David Book. It’s called The Columbus Problem and it starts out with a quotation from a Poul Anderson novel about a spaceship arriving at a new star system: “The instruments peered and murmured, and clicked forth a picture of the system. Eight worlds were detected.” Benford and Book then explain just how difficult and time-consuming it would actually be to detect the planets of an unfamiliar star system upon arrival at it, with our present technology or likely enhancements of it. They do a fine job of plain English explanation without becoming tedious. It beats hell out of Frank Tinsley’s earlier science articles for Amazing and edges Ben Bova’s. Four stars.

Summing Up

So, deferring judgment on the serial, here’s a lively issue of which much is quite good and nothing is a chore to read. Amazing!

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[August 10, 1969] Pushing the Envelope (September 1969 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The September Amazing is fronted by one of Johnny Bruck’s more cliched covers, this one from Perry Rhodan #59 from 1962.  It’s notable mainly for the fact that the guy with two guns and a fierce expression seems to be diving through a matter transmitter, and we see, impossibly, both the origin and destination of this dive.  I guess it’s Omniscient Artist point of view.


by Johnny Bruck

This issue, like the last, is dominated by the Silverberg serial Up the Line, which is supplemented by two reprinted novelettes, one new short story, and one short story billed as new: Harlan Ellison’s Dogfight on 101, which is reprinted not from an old Amazing, but from the August Adam, apparently one of the numerous Playboy imitators.  In the letter column, editor White says to a complaining reader: “As you’ll note, the reprints have reached a new minimum in this issue—and we will be using the older, more ‘classic’ stories when possible.” That would be a relief!

As to the covers, White says: “At the present we are using cover paintings originally published in Europe, on European sf magazines.  The reasons for this are complicated, but financial.  In any case, the names of the artists are not known to us, or we would credit them.  While control over the visual package of the magazine is beyond your Managing Editor, I have been able to commission stories around some of the paintings we have—and you’ll be seeing the first in our next issue, Greg Benford’s ‘Sons of Man.’ In cases where this has not been possible, we’ve tried to use covers which are in some sense symbolic of the stories in the issue—as with this issue’s, which seems to me at least loosely evocative of time-travel and Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line.” It’s not a connection I would have ever made on my own.

I complained about the last issue’s assorted typefaces of varying readability, and I wasn’t alone.  White says to a correspondent “this was a result of a change in typesetters, and has been rectified with this issue, as you’ve already noticed.  I share your feelings on the subject, since I proofed the galleys and suffered several headaches therefrom!” This issue’s typefaces are not entirely uniform, but there’s less variation and they are all readable, though all pretty small, making room for a lot more wordage than before.

There’s a long editorial by White, consisting of a potted history of the SF magazines segueing into commentary about Old Wave vs. New Wave, both fair-minded and forceful (and very quotable if only space permitted), ending up at the same obligatory place as his prior comments: he wants good stories from whatever camp.  He mentions that one of the anti-New Wave partisans appears in the letter column—and how:

“New Thing writing has nothing whatsoever to do with style, but it has everything to do with content.  This is the exact opposite of what most commentators say, but most commentators are wrong.

“The basis of the New Thing is what Colin Wilson refers to as the ‘insignificance premise,’ the idea that the universe is unknowable and life is meaningless—a popular notion with the ‘mainstream’ for a long time, as you are aware.

“It is the ‘insignificance premise’ that underlies the elements that are most praised by critics favoring the New Thing—the emphasis on the primacy of evil, on anti-heroes, on plotless stories, the rejection of science in favor of mysticism, and the worship of ugliness and disaster. . . .

“The ‘insignificance premise’ is the common denominator that underlies much-praised writers like Ballard, Disch, Ellison, Spinrad and Vonnegut.  Style has nothing to do with it, in fact, New Thing writers can get away with the most atrocious style provided only their content reflects the devaluation of values.”

This is signed “Yours for the Second Foundation, John J. Pierce, liaison officer.”

Ohhh-kay.  Moving right along: the book review column is as substantial as usual, and more than usually whiplash-inducing.  James Blish reviewing John Brunner, and dismissing the Novel of Apparatus, writes: “I could not finish Stand on Zanzibar, since I disliked everybody in it and I was constantly impeded by the suspicion that Brunner was writing not for himself but for a Prize.  I did finish The Jagged Orbit, but only because it was mercifully shorter.  I recommend against it, and all others of its ilk.  Most of them were dead ends before their authors and their enthusiasts had even been born.”

Turn the page and Norman Spinrad is reviewing Stand on Zanzibar and concluding: “If Stand on Zanzibar proves anything, it proves that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.  None of the sections (the unedited film) are particularly brilliant by themselves.  The total book is.  It’s all in the editing.” But he cautions: “Stand on Zanzibar is a brilliant and dangerous book.  Brilliant because with it Brunner has invented a whole new way of writing book-length sf.  Dangerous because what he has done looks so damned easy.  I predict (while hoping that I am wrong) that a lot of other sf writers are going to try their hands at books like this.” Other reviews include Greg Benford on Piers Anthony (“Omnivore isn’t that bad”), Blish again, as William Atheling, on Fred Saberhagen (lukewarm), and editor White on Hank Stine’s sex change novel Season of the Witch (“if not lip-smackingly good pornography, a reasonably good sf book, and a rather better novel qua novel”).

Leon Stover’s “Science of Man” article, John D. Berry’s fanzine review column and Laurence Janifer’s film review of Charly (“a disaster”) finish out the issue.

Well, that’s a lot of stuff.  How good is it?

Up the Line (Part 2 of 2), by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line concludes in this issue (begun last issue).  Judson Daniel Elliott III (Jud for short), former graduate student in Byzantine history, is at loose ends, having just fled a tiresome legal clerkship for New Orleans—Under New Orleans, that is.  Cities are now underground.  He walks into a sniffer palace (public drug den) looking to meet the pulchritudinous young women swimming nude in a tank of cognac as a come-on out front, and hits it off with Sam (formally, Sambo Sambo), who explains that his daddy bought his very black skin in a helix parlor (DNA shop).  Sam invites everyone home with him for an evening of sex and (more) drugs.

So we are in an aggressively decadent future full of sex and drugs (sorry, no rock and roll).  It’s also a future in which time travel is an amusement as accessible as transatlantic tourism is to us today.  Sam, when he’s not minding the sniffer palace, is a Time Courier, leading tourists around in the past.  Hearing of Jud’s soft spot for Byzantium, he suggests that Jud sign on too.  Jud bites, and soon has his “timer”—“a smooth flat tawny thing that looked like a truss”—that will take him up and down the time-line.

There is training, of course, much of which focuses on paradoxes and how to avoid them, and the new hires are warned that their actions could wreck all of time, including their own present, and that the Time Patrol is watching for any transgressions.

What’s wrong with this picture?  Maybe the idea that a technology that could destroy the world that developed it (speaking of paradoxes) would be left to an operation that screens and trains its employees about as thoroughly as a car rental agency might, and lets them go out leading tourists through past centuries with little visible supervision, is beyond belief, as is the notion that the Time Patrol is going to be able to identify all misdeeds and reliably correct them. 

And in fact, Jud’s Time Courier colleagues mostly have their own anachronistic, or anti-chronistic, side ventures.  His pal Sam has an enviable collection of new-looking period artifacts.  Then there’s Dajani, taken off the Crucifixion beat after being found “conducting a side business in fragments of the True Cross, peddling them all up and down the timelines.” His punishment, decreed by the Time Patrol?  Six months’ demotion to an instructorship teaching Jud and the other new hires!  And Metaxas, who becomes Jud’s mentor, has set up a secondary identity for himself in early twelfth-century Byzantium, as a swell with a luxurious villa and large estate who hobnobs with the Emperor. 


by Dan Adkins

And for some of the Time Couriers, time up the line has become a playground for their . . . pathologies?  Eccentricities?  The Courier Capistrano is systematically seeking out his ancestry, obsessed with the idea that when he is ready to die, he will find a particularly vile ancestor, kill him, and thus erase himself, or else be erased by the Time Patrol who will go further up and make him un-happen.  And Metaxas is systematically seducing his female ancestors, because his father was cold and brutal, and so were his forebears—“It is my form of rebellion against the father-image.  I go on and on through the past, seducing the wives and sisters and daughters of these men whom I loathe.  Thus I puncture their icy smugness.”

Gives one confidence in time-line security, right?  But the implausibility of the set-up is beside the point, since this is not a sober extrapolation of how a time-traveling world would work.  Rather, its point—one of them, anyway—is to provide a hook for Silverberg to write an entertaining, colorful, and richly detailed story about visits to what seems to be one of his favorite stretches of history, which he does quite successfully.  (Especially recommended is the Black Death tour, September issue, pages 41-43).

But there are other things going on. One of them is the author’s determination to smash, or at least drastically stretch, the usual proprieties of SF publishing.  If novels still came with alternative titles (think Moby-Dick; or, The Whale), this one might have been Up the Line; or, Up Yours! The story is full of irreverent sexual references, often with misogynistic overtones.  For example, trainee Jud is given a hypno-sleep course in Byzantine Greek, after which he “could order a meal, buy a tunic, or seduce a virgin in Byzantine argot.” Elsewhere: “The sweet fragrance of her drifted toward me.  I began to ache and throb.” On a tour given by the above-mentioned Capistrano, an oil-lamp seller admires one of the women tourists, “taking a quick inventory and fastening on blonde and breasty Clotilde, the more voluptuous of our two German schoolteachers,” and “feeling the merchandise”; Capistrano chases him away (“I thought she was a slave!” protests the vendor).  “Clotilde was trembling—whether from outrage or excitement, it was hard to tell.  Her companion, Lise, looked a little envious.”

There are also a number of actual sexual encounters, described with a sort of arm's-length near-explicitness rarely found in the demure precincts of the genre magazines: “Metaxas sent his ancestress Eudocia into my bedroom that night.  Her lean, supple body was a trifle meager for me.  But she was a tigress.  She was all energy and all passion, It was dawn before she let me sleep.” And some are much more cursory: “I bathed, slept, had a garlicky slavegirl two or three times, and brooded.” And there are other sorts of in-your-face vulgarity as well (remember Sam, actual name Sambo Sambo).

But back to the main plot and our main man.  Jud doesn’t share Metaxas’s obsession with anachronistic incest, but does become preoccupied with tracing his ancestry in the region (his mother was Greek).  Metaxas then tells him that he knows one of Jud’s ancestors in 1105, and offers to fix him up.  (“She’s ripe for seduction.  Young, childless, beautiful, bored. . . . and she’s your own great-great-multi-great-grandmother besides!”) And when Jud first lays eyes on her—“Our eyes met and held, and a current of pure force passed between us, and I quivered as the full urge hit me.  She smiled only on the left side of her mouth, quirking the lips in, revealing two glistening teeth.  It was a smile of invitation, a smile of lust.” She’s named—what better?—Pulcheria.

Metaxas is all too ready to arrange an opportunity and give Jud a cover story.  And in the event: “She was shy and wanton at once, a superb combination.” As for him?  It transcends the lubricious, and we will draw the curtain.  Except, after a rest: “Redundancy is the soul of understanding.”

But storm clouds are gathering, and there’s a plot to be resolved.  Jud returns from his tryst to find that Sauerabend, one of his tourist charges, has disappeared.  He has gimmicked his timer so he can control it independently.  Jud’s efforts, along with his time-posse of Courier friends, to track down Saurabend and restore the time-line without further disturbance ultimately fall short, at least for Jud’s purposes.  Without giving more away, Silverberg milks the paradoxical possibilities of time travel for all they’re worth.

It’s a very readable and enjoyable novel, chockful of incident and colorful detail as well as definitively head-spinning play with time paradoxes.  It’s also coarse, bawdy, and sexist.  While it’s tempting to say “two out of three ain’t bad,” the treatment of women, who appear almost exclusively as sex objects or as near non-entities or ditzes among the tourists, is hard to swallow, and we will no doubt hear a lot about it when the reviews of the book start to appear.  On balance, though, four stars.

But wait, there’s more!  I have mentioned Silverberg’s assault on the proprieties of SF magazines.  But Up the Line was written for book publication, and behold, the book has appeared from Ballantine as I was writing this.  For those with a prurient interest in prurient interests and their satisfaction, we can compare the proprieties of magazine and book publication very directly.  Usually, novels are cut for serial publication, but my very crude word count reveals little difference in length between book and serial versions, so it doesn’t appear that there’s been major cutting.  Conveniently, both versions are divided into 63 short chapters.  I have done some spot checks of textual differences, and they are mostly the sort you would expect.

Chapter 2 recounts Jud’s meeting Sam and the young women swimming in cognac, described above, and the only differences in text are italicized:

“Wearing gillmasks, they displayed their pretty nudities to the bypassers, promising but never quite delivering orgiastic frenzies.  I watched them paddling in slow circles, each gripping the other’s left breast, and now and then a smooth thigh slid between the thighs of Helen or Betsy as the case may have been, and they smiled beckoningly at me and finally I went in.” There follows some snappy repartee as Jud and Sam meet cute, exchanging religious identities.  Jud: “I’m a Revised Episcopalian, really.” Sam: “I’m First Church of Christ Voudoun.  Shall I sing a [n-word] hymn?”

In Chapter 29, Jud, tracing his genealogy, meets his grandmother, who is at a ripe young age, and:

“It was lust at first sight.  Her beauty, her simplicity, her warmth, captivated me instantly.  I felt a familiar tickling in the scrotum and a familiar tightening of the glutei.  I longed for her to rip away her clothing and sink myself deep into her hot tangled black shrubbery.”

And then there’s the encounter from Chapter 36 quoted above, brief in the magazine text but less so in the book: “Metaxas sent his ancestress Eudocia into my bedroom that night.  Her lean, supple body was a trifle meager for me; her hard little breasts barely filled my hands. But she was a tigress.  She was all energy and all passion, and she clambered on top of me and rocked herself to ecstasy in twenty quick rotations, and that was only the beginning. It was dawn before she let me sleep.”

And in Chapter 41, there’s a rather longer description—too long to quote—of an encounter, with Empress Theodora, no less, that Jud ultimately finds “mechanical and empty.” Then in the book is the following passage, completely omitted from the magazine:

“When I was fourteen years old, an old man who taught me a great deal about the way of the world said to me, ‘Son, when you’ve jizzed one snatch you’ve jizzed them all.’

“I was barely out of my virginity then, but I dared to disagree with him.  I still do, in a way, but less and less each year.  Women do vary—in figure, in passion, in technique and approach.  But I’ve had the Empress of Bysantium [sic], mind you, Theodora herself.  I’m beginning to think, after Theodora, that that old man was right.  When you’ve jizzed one snatch you’ve jizzed them all.”

As for Jud’s rendezvous with Pulcheria, there’s a lot that got cut out of the magazine, but I will remain reticent.  You can compare for yourselves in Chapter 47.

So, writers, editors, and publishers in this year of sixty-nine, er, 1969, you now have some clear signposts, if not a bright line, distinguishing the permissiveness of the magazine industry from that of book publishing.  May you use them prudently.

Dogfight on 101, by Harlan Ellison

Ellison’s Dogfight on 101 is a heavy-handed satire on the less than original premise that highway driving has for some become a field for macho posturing.  George the protagonist, with his wife or girlfriend in the car, is challenged by a punk named Billy and they go sailing down the road in their armed and armored vehicles trying to kill each other.  A sample:

“George kicked it into Overplunge and depressed the selector button extending the rotating buzzsaws, Dallas razors, they were called, in the repair shoppes.  But the crimson Merc pulled away doing an easy 115.

“ ‘I’ll get you, you beaver-sucker!’ he howled.” (Speaking of pushing the limits of SF magazines’ propriety.)


by Rick Steranko

And, in case you haven’t figured it out on your own: “ ‘My masculinity’s threatened,’ he murmured, and hunched over the wheel.”

This goes on for seven pages.  Who knew that slam-bang action could get so tedious so quickly?  In the end Billy gets his through a very old-fashioned maneuver by George, but that’s not the end; the story closes with a clanging anvil of irony. 

But it’s certainly slickly done for what it is.  At the end, Ellison gives credit where it’s due: “The Author wishes to thank Mr. Ben Bova of the Avco Everett Research Laboratory (Everett, Mass.) for his assistance in preparing the extrapolative technical background of this story.”

Two stars.

The Edge of the Rose, by Joe L. Hensley

Joe L. Hensley has published a sporadic trickle of stories in the SF magazines since 1953, with some detours into men’s magazines and several collaborations with Ellison.  His The Edge of the Rose is an extremely well done routine story, with stock elements from the ‘50s SF toolbox nicely fitted together in classroom demo fashion.  Stop here if you don’t want me to spoil the ending!

The SFnal setting, and the big problem: in the future, physical ailments have been conquered, but mental ones have multiplied.  “Life was too technical, too complex, on a planet gone wild with factories supplying jewel-like parts for the light drive, on a planet still divided politically, where any day might bring the end.  And men, the good ones, the ones who thought and tried, retreated from it all far too often—back to the warmth of the womb, security, and total dependency.” Only the extraterrestrial Tanna plant can treat this affliction.  Protagonist Tosti wanted to be a doctor and do good like his dad, who died with back-to-the-wombism, but since the physical ailments are conquered, there’s no need for doctors.  Feeling kind of empty, he signs up to go to Tanna to hunt the plant. 

So along with the big problem, we’ve got a sympathetic character with his own smaller but existential problem.  Tanna harvesting requires men (sic) to scour the rugged terrain of the planet, cut the plants they find, and get to high ground quickly so they can signal their ship to come get them before the plants deteriorate.  But on the way up with his bag of plants, Tosti encounters a group of the Tanna natives, ill from Earth diseases the humans brought with them.  He stops and builds a fire to keep them warm, and finds he can’t leave them; falls asleep; and when he wakes, they’re gone and his bag of plants is empty.

So he returns to base, unsuccessful, and the ship is about to leave, when who appears but a procession of the natives, bringing with them more Tanna plants than the humans have ever seen—live, robust growing plants, in pots!  Tosti realizes he belongs here with the natives.  (“This race had no one, and the terrible need of someone if they were to survive.”) So everybody’s problem is solved: the Tannanians are going to get some help, our empty-feeling protagonist has done good and sees how he can be sort of like Daddy, and Earth may be able to grow its own Tanna plants and cure all the womb-returners!  And the reader gets the warm fuzzy feeling of happy endings for all.  This is all done in hyper-efficient and plain language, scarcely a word wasted.  Three stars for substance, four for craft that makes it read much better than its substance warrants.  Though if every story were like this I’d get tired of them very fast.

Lost Treasure of Mars, by Edmond Hamilton

Edmond Hamilton’s Lost Treasure of Mars, reprinted from Amazing, August 1940, is as hackneyed as its title.  If editor White is going to use “the older, more ‘classic’ stories,” he hasn’t started yet.  Archaeologist Gareth Crane is exulting over his find—"the legended jewel hoard of Kau-ta-lah, last of the great Martian kings of Rylik.” Just the thing to keep the Institute of Planetary Science, which fights the interplanetary microbial diseases that followed the development of space travel, in business!  His servant Bugeyes, an “amphibian swampman” from Venus, is mainly preoccupied with how cold it is on Mars.  (“ ‘Unlucky day when Bugeyes listen to Earthman’s blandishings and sign up for servant,’ he moaned.”) This near-Stepin Fetchit routine—indeed, the whole story—is a considerable comedown from much of Hamilton’s earlier work both in imagination and in maturity.  Well, Ray Palmer was editor by 1940, and this seems to be what he wanted.


by Julian S. Krupa

And speaking of Palmer, and his editorial philosophy “Gimme bang-bang!”, on the next page after Bugeyes’s plaint, a rocket-car lands and two men and a woman get out (“ ‘A girl!’ Crane muttered.  ‘What the devil—’ ”) The “girl” thinks Crane is seeking the treasure that in fact he’s already found by using her imprisoned father’s research.  Her two companions, supposedly hired guides, are actually in business for themselves.  Once they find the jewels Crane is hiding, they are deterred from killing everyone else only by Crane’s offer to lead them to an even greater treasure—the Greatest Treasure, in fact.  So off they go to the ruined city of Ushtu!  They are looking for the palace and its underground treasures, and of course there’s a trap in what seems to be the treasure chamber, and there’s no escape, except Bugeyes saves the day by going down the drain of a large vat of water, and the nature of the Greatest Treasure is revealed.  Two stars, that high only because of Hamilton’s professional rendering of this cliché-pile.

The Shortcut, by Rog Phillips


by Murphy Anderson

Rog Phillips’s The Shortcut (Amazing, July 1949) starts out with henpecked Arthur driving his wife May, an egregious backseat driver, to the Chicago airport.  He picks up a hitchhiker because he knows May will quiet down with a stranger present.  The hitchhiker suggests a shortcut which makes no sense, but it gets them to the airport in five minutes rather than 30. The hitchhiker gives a gibberish explanation for this.  He suggests getting a meal, on him, and gives directions, and after several turns, they are in Hollywood.  The hitchhiker buys a newspaper which reports that May’s plane has crashed, killing all aboard.  Arthur is guiltily elated.  Then the hitchhiker starts talking about shortcuts in time.  He says “you can’t change things, but you can take advantage of them when you know the shortcuts.” Suddenly May is back in the back seat badgering him, and they’re back on the way to the airport.  Arthur takes out a lot of insurance on her.  Then he tries to take shortcuts on his own, gets lost, and winds up at a bigger airport than Chicago’s, where to his shock May disembarks and greets him.  He has taken a final shortcut to where he definitely didn’t want to go.

This story, which revolves around glib double-talk reminiscent of Who’s On First?, reads like it was written for the even then defunct Unknown, though it might not have made the cut there.  Still, clever and amusing.  Three stars.

Wanted—A New Myth for Technology, by Leon E. Stover

In the letter column, one J. Edwards asks: “Dear Sirs: Why do you print ‘The Science of Man’?” Mr. Edwards doesn’t think much of science columns in SF magazines generally, but he also observes: “Stover’s columns read more like editorials than science columns; he seems mostly to be pushing his own opinions, and not much else.” Is there an echo in this subculture?  Of Stover’s last article, I wrote: “Stover seems to have abandoned his project of educating us all about anthropology.  Here we have a protracted editorial on the necessity for humanity to get its act together and get right with the biosphere. . . .” The editor responds: “You may (or may not) be pleased to hear that next issue we inaugurate a new science column, ‘The Science in Science Fiction,’ by Dr. Greg Benford.” While he does not say that Dr. Stover is history, that’s the implication.

Stover’s present article goes even further afield from anthropology than last issue’s, being a talk he gave at a symposium at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he is “Chairman of a science fictionish Committee for Metatechnology.” He starts by summarizing at length an old story by H.G. Wells called The Lord of the Dynamos, and then begins his sermon: “Somehow, we’ve lost our affection for technology. Engineering enrollment is falling, student protests are rising.  Who will make the machines and structures of tomorrow?” Excuse me if I tiptoe out of the church.  Not rated.  Welcome, Dr. Benford!

Summing Up

Not bad, still moving forward.  Up the Line makes up for a number of sins, while adding its own.  Amazing is a work in visible progress.  I am trying not to say “promising” yet again.

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




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Book, Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[June 6, 1969] Blue Skies (July 1969 Amazing)

1 Comment


by John Boston

Samuel Johnson described second marriages as the triumph of hope over experience.  It is tempting to say something similar about changes of editor at Amazing.  But that impulse is at least postponed by the upbeat mien of this July issue.


by Johnny Bruck

That sky is about as blue as any I've seen on a magazine cover, and more importantly, the cover goes some way to answer the cry for a good cover by Johnny Bruck, whose hackneyed spaceships and guys with guns have become so tiresome on recent issues.  This one is a bit cartoonish, but at least it’s clever and amusing—a spaceport scene with some impressive-looking spacecraft, but the people on the ground have eyes only for the bright yellow futuristic automobile, with huge tailfins, a transparent dome over the passenger compartment, and whitewall tires.  Oh, it has side fins too.  Maybe it flies.

The magazine’s contents also lean in a promising direction.  Almost half of the magazine (70 of 144 pages, excluding the front and back covers) is devoted to the first part of Robert Silverberg’s serialized novel Up the Line.  It’s rare for magazines to give that big a chunk of available space to a serial installment, but it makes sense in a bimonthly magazine. As a side benefit, it leaves less room for the reprints, which take up only 27 pages.  The book review column is back, with substantial reviews by William Atheling, Jr. (James Blish) and editor White.  The letter column is here again, and the promised fanzine review column has now appeared, nine pages worth, by John D. Berry.  White’s editorial says that the fan feature in Fantastic will be reprints of selected fanzine articles.  The guest editorials in Amazing will be gone—the editorial spot’s going to be his. It all gives a sense of an energetic editor getting a quick start at implementing his desires.

A more dubious innovation is the new typeface.  Multiple typefaces are nothing new at Amazing, but Silverberg’s serial, Leon Stover’s article, and the book and fanzine reviews and letter column are set in a tiny typeface that challenges my ill-made eyes (see the glasses in my photo?).  Microscopic type for things like letter columns is an old tradition—just check your copies of the Hugo Gernsback Amazing if the silverfish haven’t gotten to them—but for this much of the magazine it spells headache for me and I suspect many others.

Up the Line (Part 1 of 2), by Robert Silverberg

The biggest deal in this issue is of course Robert Silverberg’s serialized novel Up the Line.  Silverberg, formerly a capable journeyman magazine-filler, has in recent years become a much more powerful and original writer. In just the past two years he has produced four novels that put him in a different league entirely than did his earlier work: Thorns, To Open the Sky, Hawksbill Station, and The Masks of Time, with several more out or on the way this year. 


by Dan Adkins

Per my practice, I will hold off reviewing and rating Up the Line until it is finished.  But a quick peek reveals that it is a time travel story, told in the first person by a young man at loose ends who joins the Time Couriers—not the Time Police, the Couriers’ nemesis—and that it is a considerable departure from the relatively serious recent works mentioned above.  Parts of it suggest that the author wrote with the stage in mind.  The vaudeville stage, that is.  E.g., as the protagonist explains to his new friend the Time Courier why he abandoned his budding career as law clerk to a Judge Mattachine:

“My uncle is Justice Elliott of the U.S. Higher Supreme Court.  He thought I ought to get into a decent line of work.”

“You don’t have to go to law school to be a law clerk?”

“Not any more,” I explained.  “The machines do all the data retrieval, anyway.  The clerks are just courtiers.  They congratulate the judge on his brilliance, procure for him, submit to him, and so forth.  I stuck it out for eight days and podded out.”

“You have troubles,” Sam said sagely.

“Yes.  I’ve got a simultaneous attack of restlessness, weltschmerz, tax liens, and unfocused ambition.”

“Want to try for tertiary syphilis?” Helen asked.

“Not just now.”

So Mr. Silverberg appears to be having a good time.  Reading a little further confirms that he also seems to be trying to offend everyone in sight, which may explain why this new novel by a fast-rising author is appearing in the field’s lowest-paying magazine, rather than in the more stately mansions of Pohl, Ferman, or JWC, Jr.  In any case, I look forward to completing these scabrous revels.

Only Yesterday, by Ted White

Editor White’s Only Yesterday is a more somber time travel story, in which the ill-at-ease protagonist Bob approaches a young woman as she gets off a train, asks if he can walk with her, says he’s a friend of a friend (she suggestibly supplies the friend’s name, and he agrees), and she invites him in for refreshments and to meet the family.  He hits it off with her and her brothers and her parents, and offers to tell her fortune—a futuristic vision which turns into nightmarish war.  She’s shocked and disturbed, and he quickly says he was making it up, offers a more palatable vision, and beats a hasty retreat.  Revelation of who he is and why he’s there follows.  It’s smoothly written and well visualized, but the ease with which Bob inserts himself into the family setting is too implausible to overlook.  Still, nice try, very readable, three stars. 

Hue and Cry, by Bob Shaw

Bob Shaw’s Hue and Cry is about as far as one can get from his very well received Light of Other Days.  It's a cartoonish story in which a spaceship full of humans lands among sentient carnivorous reptilians who think of them only as food, scheme to eat them all, and are thwarted with a silly gimmick.  Two stars, generously.

Poison Pen, by Milton Lesser

The reprints in this issue are a mostly malodorous batch from the doldrums of the mid-1950s.  The best that can be said for them is that they don’t take up much space.

Milton Lesser’s Poison Pen (from Amazing, December 1955) is a silly botch of a story.  For thirty years, humanity has been under the thumb of the extraterrestrial Masters.  Now they’ve left, and people are dancing in the streets.  The main thing we know about the Masters is that they made people keep diaries and read from them in neighborhood gatherings, and that practice continues.  Why?  Dr. Trillis says it’s because the Masters taught everyone “from the cradle” to be compulsive exhibitionists (how?) so they could control people, “and the older generation either had to go along with it or feel left out.” So people ought to stop with the diaries and the readings, he says.  But they don’t.  Worse, they start stealing other people’s diaries and making fake entries in them—false confessions of having been “co-operationists.” Executions begin.  Our hero helps Dr. Trillis escape and they wind up in a settlement of people “who somehow haven’t been contaminated,” in New Jersey.


by Paul Orban

If the description sounds sketchy and incoherent, that’s because the story is.  It’s an insult to the readers, pretty clearly dashed off without a thought of anything but a quick check.  One star.

No Place to Go, by Henry Slesar


by Erwin Schroeder

Henry Slesar’s No Place to Go (Amazing, July 1958), by contrast, is at least a competent piece of yard goods.  A crack team of astronauts goes to the Moon, takes a look outside, and sees Earth blow up, leaving them alive but stranded. Shortly, some of the astronauts are blowing up too.  But wait—April fool!  It was all a test!  They were drugged with a hypnotic chemical, visions planted in their heads while they slept!  The captain then tells the guy who didn’t blow up that he’s now second in command, and he’ll be going to Mars.  It's cliches wrapped around a gimmick, but unlike Lesser’s story, it doesn’t reek of contempt for the readership.  Three stars, generously.

Note that in our crude rating system, what I’ve just described as “cliches wrapped around a gimmick” gets the same grade as White’s much more capable effort.  Just remember that there’s a lot of space between 3.0 and 3.9.

Puzzle in Yellow, by Randall Garrett


by Leo R. Summers

Randall Garrett’s Puzzle in Yellow (Amazing, November 1956) is a trivial gimmick story on that ever-popular theme, the Stupid Alien.  Extra-terrestrial Ghevil is scoping out Earth for invasion and pillage by the “hordes of Archeron.” He wants to check out an isolated military installation, so he finds a remote building with big walls and turrets, and figures he’s found what he’s looking for.  He kills the first person he sees emerge from the building, and disguises himself in the man’s uniform.  He tries to enter and is shot dead.  Take a wild guess what the installation he tried to enter actually is. The yellow of the title, by the way, refers to Ghevil’s blood.  Two stars, barely.

The Pendant Spectator, by Leon E. Stover

Leon Stover’s “Science of Man” article this month is The Pendant Spectator, a phrase he got from Samuel Johnson’s novel Rasselas, which means, more or less, someone with a view from a height.  “Spaceship Earth” is also invoked.  Stover seems to have abandoned his project of educating us all about anthropology.  Here we have a protracted editorial on the necessity for humanity to get its act together and get right with the biosphere, limiting population, developing energy sources (i.e., the sun) that will neither pollute the atmosphere like fuel combustion nor overheat the place like nuclear power, engaging in international cooperation, accepting a degree of coercive regulation in these and other causes, etc.  It’s hard to argue with any of it, but it’s also hard to imagine that the SF readership is who needs to hear it, so it seems a bit pointless.  This series seems about ready to die a natural death.  Two stars.

Summing Up

So the harbingers seem to be blowing in the right direction, even if the actual fiction contents, possibly excepting Silverberg, are not much changed from the recent norm.  “Looking good” would be premature, but “looking like it might look good” would fit.  Or—as I’ve said more times than I can count about this magazine—promising.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[April 10, 1969] Low (May 1969 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Here’s the May Amazing, the latest installment of the dreary soap opera that this magazine has become.  The well-qualified Ted White is the new editor, the fourth in ten issues.  Though he’s listed as Managing Editor, and Sol Cohen as Editor and Publisher, White’s editorial makes it clear that he will be running the magazine—within the constraints of Cohen’s policies, of course, most notably the reprint policy.


by Johnny Bruck

As a debut issue, this one does not impress, but that’s probably not a fair judgment.  Given the abrupt departure of White’s predecessor Barry Malzberg, it was likely a scramble to get any issue at all together from available parts.  The fiction contents include an Edmond Hamilton story in a series that has run in Amazing and Fantastic for several years, publication no doubt foreordained; one very short new story; and the usual heavy load of reprints, all from the 1950s consistent with recent practice.  The non-fiction includes, as usual of late, a Laurence Janifer movie review (Barbarella—he likes it!) and a Leon Stover “Science of Man” article.  The only identifiable change is a letter column.  The book review department is missing, one hopes temporarily, since it has been one of the magazine’s brighter aspects.

As for future plans, White provides a rather carefully argued editorial, which starts by analogizing the “New Thing” in science fiction to the ongoing innovations in popular music, noting that despite the “sudden flowering” of rock music, it isn’t forgetting its roots.  After some commentary on the New Thing, sympathetic but cautionary (“One J.G. Ballard can be important, but ten little Ballards?”), White asserts that most of the “New Wave” writers have not neglected their predecessors, citing Zelazny and Delany, noting particularly that Delany has absorbed and transformed old Planet Stories-style space opera plots. “It is my conviction that the science fiction field needs a magazine in which the old and the new can exist side by side, each thriving from its proximity to the other.  And that is what I intend for Amazing: Something of the old (the reprints) and of the new (the best of the new writers). . . .” And he concludes by adding that this issue’s “Star Kings” novelet by Edmond Hamilton exemplifies exploration of the genre’s roots—but next issue we can expect a “new and very different novel by Robert Silverberg.”

It’s all gracefully done, touching the necessary bases with plausible conviction, and starkly contrasting with Harry Harrison’s pandering editorial of February 1968, which made essentially the same substantive points but which struck me as “a disappointingly smarmy exercise in having it both ways.”

The letter column is divided among sober commentary on current SF, the pleasures of letter columns and fanzine reviews, and a quite long letter contesting Stover’s “Science of Man” article War and Peace, which White says he cut down from 14 pages.  Shades of Brass Tacks!  This feature will require some tightening up but White clearly takes it seriously.  As for the reference to fanzine reviews, White promises “fan features” in both Amazing and Fantastic.

And up front—though looking backward—is another cliched cover illustration by Johnny Bruck.  Last issue, fellow Journeyer Cora Buhlert wished that Amazing would use the good Bruck covers rather than the dull ones.  Yes!  If there are any.

The Horror from the Magellanic, by Edmond Hamilton

The lead story is Edmond Hamilton’s “short novel” (33 pages), The Horror from the Magellanic, latest in his series of sequels to his 1947 novel The Star Kings.  I won’t repeat my previous jaundiced comments on the whole enterprise, but will leave it at a couple of samples:

“ ‘Highness, they’ve come out of the Marches.  The Counts’ fleet.  They’re more than twice as strong as we expected . . . and they’re coming full speed toward Fomalhaut!’
“Chapter Two
“Gordon felt a chilling dismay.  The Counts of the Marches were throwing everything they had into this.  And whether their gamble succeeded or not, in the dark background brooded the unguessable purposes and menace of the H’harn.”

And:

“. . . Gordon sat for a long time looking past the moving lights and the uproar and clamorous confusion of the great city, toward the starry sky.  A star kingdom might fall, Narath might realize his ambition and sit on the throne of Fomalhaut, and he, John Gordon, and Lianna might be sent to their deaths.  And that would be a world tragedy as well as tragedy for them.
“But if the H’harn succeeded, that would be tragedy for the whole galaxy, a catastrophe of cosmic dimension.  Thousands of years before they had come from the outer void, bent on conquest, and only the power of the Disruptor, unloosed by Brenn Bir, had driven them back .  Out there in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud they had brooded all this time, never giving up their purpose, filtering back gradually in secret plotting with the Counts, plotting with Narath, making ready some new tremendous stroke.
“Doomsday had come again, after those thousands of years.”


by Dan Adkins

To my taste, this is all an idea whose time has passed.  No disrespect to Hamilton—a working professional writing in a mode he virtually invented—especially since he has shown he can work quite capably in styles other than this bombastic costume drama (see his 1960 novel The Haunted Stars).  Three stars, acknowledging the craft involved, even if I can’t get interested.

Yesterdays, by Ray Russell

The new short story (very short), Ray Russell’s Yesterdays, couples two ancient themes, time running backwards and mad scientists; it’s clever and facile, as one would expect from the long-time fiction editor of Playboy, but no more. Three stars.

The Invaders, by Murray Leinster

The longest story in the issue is Murray Leinster’s The Invaders, from the April/May 1953 issue of Amazing, the first in its short-lived experiment in paying more in order to get better material from more well-known authors.  Leinster shared the contents page with Heinlein, Sturgeon, and Bradbury.  Unfortunately his story begins well but undermines itself, unusually for this professional of decades’ standing.


Uncredited

The scene is set in terms of purest Cold War paranoia.  The protagonist, surveying in Greece, flees an unacknowledged incursion by Bulgarian soldiers, and the author observes:

“It was not the time for full-scale war.  Bulgaria and the other countries in its satellite status were under orders to put a strain upon the outside world.  They were building up border incidents and turmoil for the benefit of their masters.  Turkey was on a war footing, after a number of incidents like this.  Indo-China was at war.  Korea was an old story.  Now Greece.  It always takes more men to guard against criminal actions than to commit them. . .  This was cold war.”

In the midst of this covert crisis, the protagonist discovers powerful evidence of infiltration by extraterrestrials in human guise—but what to do?  Who will believe him?  Leinster builds an atmosphere of suspense and suspicion at first, but it is quickly dissipated by hints that something different and more benign is going on, and by the end there’s no suspense or surprise.  Three stars, barely; it’s at least slickly readable, as usual for Leinster.

King of the Black Sunrise, by Milton Lesser

Milton Lesser’s King of the Black Sunrise is an entirely more rancid kettle of fish.  It’s from Amazing, May 1955, in the midst of the Howard Browne/Paul Fairman era of calculated formulaic mediocrity, and shows it.  It reads like the result of a barroom bet over how many egregious cliches the author could cram into a single story. 

Kent Taggert, fugitive from justice on murder charges (but of course he’s innocent), is tracked down on the obscure planet Argiv by a woman who wants to hire him for a dangerous assignment.  “I looked at her for the first time.  She was beautiful.  So damned beautiful and so damned sure of herself.  I felt like poking her one.” A bit later: “I could smell her perfume, not the kind that slams two sexy fists into your nostrils but the subtle kind, like the girls can buy only on Earth.”


Uncredited

The woman (named Helen, we later learn) discloses that the World Bureau of Investigation is on his trail, and like clockwork, a guy “who was trying too hard not to look like law” shows up at the bar where this conversation is occurring.  Taggert decides he’d better take Helen’s proposition—to guide her party to find and plunder the treasure of the Black Sunrise. 

See, Argiv has three suns—per the natives, the Green God, the Yellow God, and (“greatest of all”) the Purple God.  They all rise and set at different times, but occasionally they are all below the horizon at the same time.  That’s the Black Sunrise, even though it’s really a sunset.  During the Black Sunrise, the barrier to the natives’ treasure cave opens up, and new offerings are deposited to make sure the three Gods come back.  No one who has sought to steal this treasure has emerged alive.

So our freebooters hire some native bearers (“big flabby purple-skinned Argivians”) and march into the jungle (“King Solomon’s Mines, a hundred parsecs out in deep space,” muses Cotton, the hotheaded jerk of the party).  But soon enough the bearers become fearful and desert, and the humans must push on without much of their equipment.

It goes on in similar vein, but recounting it is even more tedious than reading it.  One star.

Wish It Away, by Frank Freeman

Frank Freeman’s Wish It Away (Fantastic, January-February 1954) is a jokey vignette so inane it almost hurts to describe it.  Protagonist Mervin sees a monster every night, psychiatrist tells him to “wish it away,” next night the psychiatrist sees the monster, who says, “Mervin sent me.  I hope it’s all right.” Now nobody else has to read it.  One star.

Race-Zoology and Politics, by Leon E. Stover

The “Science of Man” article by Leon E. Stover suffers the faults of its predecessors, magnified.  Race-Zoology and Politics is an outright polemic, with Stover taking up the cause of Carleton S. Coon, author of The Origin of the Races, who was denounced as a racist a few years ago by the president of the American Anthropological Association.  Stover says Coon “has simply become a ‘non-person’ to the profession,” but: “It is a dead certainty that Coon sometime in the future will be rehabilitated and recognized for the great work he has done, which has been to complete the uncompleted work of Darwin.”

Well, maybe.  Stover proceeds to argue Coon’s case about the evolution of human physical types in his familiar assertively dogmatic fashion.  This one-sided partisan presentation concerning what is apparently a hot ongoing argument in the profession is of little use to the lay reader trying to understand more about the underlying science.  Not rated—it’s just out of place here.

Summing Up

This is the most discouraging issue of Amazing in recent memory.  The magazine continues to limp along under the weight of the reprint policy, and this issue’s batch of them is the worst in some time.  Notably, the original notion of reacquainting the current SF readership with forgotten classics of the field—or at least interesting period pieces—has largely been lost as the reprints have come more frequently from Amazing’s more recent periods of outright mediocrity, mostly ranging from routine to awful.  Will yet another new editor be allowed to make it better?




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[February 8, 1969] So Much for That (March 1969 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Last issue, new editor Barry Malzberg declared that “the majority of modern magazine science-fiction is ill-written, ill-characterized, ill-conceived and so excruciatingly dull as to make me question the ability of the writers to stay awake during its composition,” and proposed to use Amazing and Fantastic to promote the “rebirth—one would rather call it transmutation—of the category.”


by Johnny Bruck

Now, in this March Amazing, Barry is gone.  Sol Cohen, listed as Publisher last issue, is now Editor and Publisher.  Laurence M. Janifer is listed as Associate Editor, and contributes a guest editorial and a movie review.  Ted White, new to the masthead, is listed as Managing Editor.  Most likely he will actually be editing the magazine, having been Assistant and then Associate Editor at Fantasy and Science Fiction until mid-1968.

But as a great philosopher said, you can predict anything but the future.  What we have right now is the last issue of the Malzberg editorship, credited or not, which we know since the new stories are the ones he announced in the last issue. 

So why his sudden departure?  I had a conversation with Barry, and he reported that it had nothing to do with the direction he proposed for the magazine’s fiction or his jaundiced account of the state of the field.  Rather, he bought a cover, which he understood he was authorized to do, and said he would quit if Cohen did not allow him to run it.  Cohen responded, "I don't know anything about stories but I do know about art and I can't run this cover.  [Pause] You're fired."  Barry adds, on reflection, that Cohen was right, and there’s no resentment on his part.

But back to the issue before us.  Overall, it’s business as usual: another tiresome cover by Johnny Bruck, four new short stories (mostly very short) and the conclusion of a new serialized novella, and three reprinted novelets.  There is the usual "Science of Man" article by Leon E. Stover, and the usual book review column, credited as before to William Atheling, Jr., the not-at-all secret pseudonym of James Blish–though the review of The Making of Star Trek is bylined Blish (who is also the author of several Star Trek paperbacks).  Janifer’s above-mentioned movie review is about Hot Millions, a scientific heist film in which Peter Ustinov, as an embezzler, goes up against a giant computer.  (Before long, I am sure, there will need to be a name for such a villain.  Computer . . . hijacker?  Nah, too cumbersome.)

We All Died at Breakaway Station (Part 2 of 2), by Richard C. Meredith

Richard Meredith’s two-part serial novella, We All Died at Breakaway Station, concludes here.  It may well be the most downbeat space opera ever published.  Earth is at war with the Jillies.  Protagonist Captain Absolom [sic] Bracer has been killed in battle and resurrected, and is now hideously disabled and disfigured and patched up with mechanical parts, since there are no replacements to allow him to return to Earth for more seemly regeneration.  Also he is tormented by phantom pain from the missing parts, as well as the psychological impact of his mutilated condition.  His fellow officers are all in similar shape. 


by Dan Adkins

Bracer is charged with escorting a hospital ship full of other casualties back to Earth for better treatment.  But he learns that the relief ships from Earth to Breakaway, a barren planet where the essential faster-than-light communications link to Earth is located, are days away from arriving.  He decides to delay departure so he and his subordinates will be around to protect Breakaway from the expected Jillie attack.  This set-up of course leads to a lot of slam-bang action, with continuing death, destruction, and angst (though a note of glee does creep in here and there), and then the probably obligatory tragic but uplifting ending. 

The writing is amateurish in places but quite readable even as one is noting that Meredith is going on much too long about things that don’t advance the narrative, playing silly games with chapter divisions (there are 36 of these in 79 pages, one of which is four lines long), and writing dialogue some of which seems lifted from World War II B-movies.  But there’s actually a story here, the author is clearly having a good time, and it’s infectious as long as you manage your expectations.  Three stars.

The Invasion of the Giant Stupid Dinosaurs, by Thomas M. Disch


by Bruce Jones

Thomas M. Disch, whose career started in Amazing and Fantastic, makes his first appearance here of the Sol Cohen era.  The Invasion of the Giant Stupid Dinosaurs is a short jokey First Contact story involving a spaceship landing on the property of a small town church.  It is archly told in a fussily stilted style possibly meant to remind the reader of The War of the Worlds (though Wells was generally not arch, stilted, or fussy).  It’s well turned, as always with Disch, but trivial.  Three stars, mostly for style.

The Aggressor, by John T. Sladek

John T. Sladek’s The Aggressor is also short, highly surreal, and seemingly an exercise in dream logic or a satire on the very idea of a story.  Or maybe—since the main character (loosely speaking) is the head of a large computer corporation—it’s supposed to be the output of a defective computer, or perhaps a very advanced one that is unexpectedly beginning to achieve consciousness. Sometimes Sladek’s humor escapes me entirely, and this is one of them.  This dog is too damn shaggy!  Two stars; at least the guy can write.

Prelude to Reconstruction, by Durant Imboden

Durant Imboden is an assistant fiction editor at Playboy, says the blurb to his story Prelude to Reconstruction, with one prior SF magazine appearance.  The story is a slightly rambling farce about a future authoritarian USA in which the work is all done by robots, who are supervised by the Ministry of Slaves.  The robots have to be kept in line lest they get funny ideas about slaving for humans; so Cerebra-1, a giant computer, is devised to monitor their loyalty quotients and reorient those needing it. 


by Bruce Jones

But now Cerebra-1 is getting balky, spitting out ancient political slogans, and things only get worse fast for humans (and the story ceases to be so farcical).  Problem is Imboden hasn’t quite caught on to “show, don’t tell,” so most of the story is the author recounting events after the fact without dialogue or even on-stage characters for stretches of it.  There’s also very little background on exactly what the robots’ and Cerebra-1’s capabilities and limits are, so the analogy to American human slavery (which becomes explicit at the end) falls flat, and there’s not much to be interested in conceptually.  Two stars.

In the Time of Disposal of Infants, by David R. Bunch

David R. Bunch, an avowed editorial favorite, is here again with In the Time of Disposal of Infants, listed among the new stories, but in fact new only to professional publication.  It first appeared in the fanzine Inside #13 (January 1956) along with five other Bunch stories.  It is much more sedate stylistically than his later work, but outrageous enough in content.  The title says it; the story is narrated by a garbage collector whose team finds a four-year-old among the refuse—surprisingly, since if they last that long, the parents usually keep them.  Three stars.

The Man in the Moon, by Mack Reynolds

The first of the acknowledged reprints is Mack Reynolds’s The Man in the Moon (from Amazing, July 1950) , a very early story (his eighth, appearing three months after the first).  It amounts to a tutorial about early space flight, now thoroughly outmoded and a bit boring.  Protagonist Jeff Stevens and two of his fellow trainee astronauts are bundled off to the Moon in separate ships; their voyage was preceded by some unsuccessful (i.e., fatal) tries, and by a number of unmanned ships carrying supplies and materials. 


by Leo Summers

Only Stevens makes it, and he proceeds (despite a broken arm) to assemble several of the unmanned ships into a base.  Human, as opposed to mechanical, interest is provided by the repeated reminders that Stevens is sensitive about being short, and by the fact that his sometime girlfriend left him for one of the other astronauts, who died on an earlier expedition.  But it’s all right, because he finds that astronaut’s body where he expired in his spacesuit in the line of duty.  “’Last Brenschluss, spaceman,’ he whispered.” Hackneyed, maudlin, two stars, generously.

Ask a Foolish Question, by Milton Lesser

Milton Lesser’s Ask a Foolish Question (Fantastic Adventures, June 1952) is a slickly rendered dystopian story.  In this world, most people work long hours for low pay, living in barracks, in order to support the space colony Utopia, where, it is said, everybody lives a lot better.  That’s OK, since the Earth dwellers regularly get the chance to take examinations to see if they can qualify to space out, and some win and depart.


by Tom Beechem

But Citizen Gregory Jones has been notified by the Department of Prognostication that he is to die in five days.  After some plot maneuvers not worth recounting, he winds up killing a government employee, faking his own death a day early, and then impersonating the government man.  But in that fake role, he is given the choice of dying when Jones would have died, or going to Utopia with the lucky exam-winners, since the government can’t allow anyone to stick around who knows that a prognostication didn’t occur on schedule.  Of course, he chooses Utopia, and the next events show that Lesser has clearly taken note of The Marching Morons.  And there's another twist before the end.  Derivative but well turned; three stars.

Death of a Spaceman, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

In Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s Death of a Spaceman (Amazing, March 1954), Old Donegal is a retired spacer bedridden and dying of cancer, though nobody but him acknowledges it, and he goes along with the pretense that he’ll be well before long.  Going to space is a pretty rotten blue-collar job (it killed his son-in-law), his pension and his daughter’s widow’s benefits are lousy, but Donegal can’t let go of it—he wants to stay alive long enough to hear the evening rocket blasting off from the nearby spaceport, demanding that his space boots be put on for the occasion after the priest has come by to administer the last rites. 


by Ernest Schroeder

It’s well written and clearly heartfelt (though thankfully less febrile than the other early Miller stories Amazing has reprinted (like Secret of the Death Dome and The Space Witch), but thoroughly maudlin and hard to take too seriously, especially by comparison with the much better stories Miller was already known for (e.g., Conditionally Human and Dark Benediction).  Three stars.

Science of Man: Apeman, Superman —Or, 2001's Answer to the World's Riddle, by Leon E. Stover

Leon E. Stover’s “Science of Man” article this issue is Apeman, Superman—or, 2001’s Answer to the World’s Riddle, which eschews the usual anthropology for a long synopsis of the film, superfluously I suspect to most readers.  Stover’s interpretation: humans spreading into space will be good (contra C.S. Lewis), we’ll leave all the bad stuff behind along with our bodies, sort of like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin explains: “the gathering force of mind that has come to envelope the surface of the planet Earth must eventuate in a projection into space as a purely spiritual component that will converge ultimately at the Omega point in one single entity, the very stuff of God.  But once all the consciousness of the universe has accumulated and merged in the Omega point, God will get lonely in his completeness, and the process of creation must begin again by way of arousing conscious creatures to reach out once more for closure in one collective identity.” Ohhh-kay, whatever you say, chief.  Next, Stover quotes Nietzsche, and adds: “Now that the theologians tell us that God is dead, it appears that the burden of theology is upon SF.” Three stars, it’s amusing and probably harmless, but Stover should probably get back to writing what he knows.

Summing Up

At Amazing, the beat goes ever ever on, ever more wearily, with some worthwhile material, but burdened by the weight of mostly lackluster reprints.  The ambitious new editor is gone.  The apparent new editor is well qualified, but will he be allowed to give the magazine the makeover it needs?  Yet again, wait and see.

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




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[December 4, 1968] Sign Me Up (January 1969 Amazing)

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by John Boston

In this January's Amazing, on page 138, there is an editorial—A Word from the Editor, it says, bylined Barry N. Malzberg—which suggests a different direction (or maybe I should just say “a direction”) for this magazine.  First is some news.  There will be no letter column; Malzberg would rather use the space for a story.  Second, “the reprint policy of these magazines will continue for the foreseeable future,” per the publisher, but “A large and increasing percentage of space however will be used for new stories.”


by Johnny Bruck

Pointedly, the editor adds, “it is my contention that the majority of modern magazine science-fiction is ill-written, ill-characterized, ill-conceived and so excruciatingly dull as to make me question the ability of the writers to stay awake during its composition, much less the readers during its absorption.  Tied to an older tradition and nailed down stylistically to the worst hack cliches of three decades past, science-fiction has only within the past five or six years begun to emerge from its category trap only because certain intelligent and dedicated people have had the courage to wreck it so that it could crawl free. . . .  I propose that within its editorial limits and budget, Amazing and Fantastic will do what they can to assist this rebirth—one would rather call it transmutation—of the category and we will try to be hospitable to a kind of story which is still having difficulty finding publication in this country.”

Sounds good to me!  This brave manifesto is only slightly undermined by the familiar production chaos of the magazine.  It is not acknowledged on the table of contents, and does not appear in the usual place for an editorial, at the beginning of the magazine.  Instead, there appears a piece labelled Editorial by Robert Silverberg, S-F and Escape Literature, which (though touted as “NEW” on the cover) actually dates from six years ago, when it appeared as a guest editorial in the August 1962 issue of the British New Worlds.  Silverberg is also listed as Associate Editor.

Silverberg’s piece briskly disposes of the “escapist” critique of SF, pointing out that all literature is escape literature; it’s just a matter of where you’re escaping, and how well the escape is executed.  “The human organism, if it is to grow and prosper, needs change, refreshment, periodic escape.”

The other non-fiction in the issue includes another Leon Stover “Science of Man” article (see below).  There is the by-now-usual book review column, attributed to James Blish on the contents page, with reviews by his pseudonym William Atheling, Jr. (mixed feelings about Clarke’s 2001 novelization, praise for D.G. Compton and Alexei Panshin); by Panshin (praise for R.A. Lafferty); and by editor Malzberg (praise for the new edition of Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder, mixed feelings about Alva Rogers’s fan tribute A Requiem for Astounding).  There is also a movie review, by Lawrence Janifer, of Rosemary’s Baby; he finds it well done but dull, and—in an unexpected juxtaposition—quotes Virginia Woolf: “But how if life should refuse to reside there?”

We All Died at Breakaway Station, by Richard C. Meredith


by Dan Adkins

The major piece of new fiction is Richard C. Meredith’s We All Died at Breakaway Station, first part of a two-part serial.  As usual I will read and review it when it’s complete; a quick rummage reveals it’s a space war story whose plot would probably have been right at home in Planet Stories, but which looks much grimmer than the pulps allowed.

Temple of Sorrow, by Dean R. Koontz

Dean R. Koontz’s novelet Temple of Sorrow is a breezily parodic procession of stock genre elements—the protagonist with a mission (“My name is Mandarin.  Felix Mandarin.”—from “International,” we later learn), accompanied by Theseus, his Mutie bodyguard (actually a bear, “developed” in the Artificial Wombs), to pierce the veil of a powerful religious cult (with overtones of the one in Heinlein’s “—If This Goes On,” such as the omnipresence of Naked Angels, female of course).  In this post-nuclear war world, the Temple of the Form predicts the Second Coming of the Form (the mushroom cloud), and it seems is bent on bringing it about by stealing the world’s last atom bomb.


by Jeff Jones

Felix is caught and reduced to near-mindless servitude, but his conditioning is broken by his realization of the Bishop’s sadistic plans for the Angel who has caught Felix’s fancy.  Rejoined by Theseus, who had fled to the wilderness but returned just in time, Felix and the Angel Jacinda fight their way to the Temple’s Innermost Ring (cameo appearance by a giant spider along the way).  And there’s super-science!  Felix figures out that the Innermost Rings of all the many Temples worldwide are interdimensionally connected, so if the Temple bigs can set off a bomb in one Ring, the explosion will be replicated in all the others!  Conservation of energy be damned.

So they hasten from Ring to Ring, find the bomb, and disarm it.  “Any child could disarm an A-bomb if he has read his history and had an instructor in P.O.D. who allowed him to practice live on dummies.” Felix proposes to the Angel Jacinda.  Theseus has somehow gained human intelligence during the interdimensional trek.  Exit, wisecracking.  Or, as the editor put it: “Tied to an older tradition and nailed down stylistically to the worst hack cliches of three decades past . . . .” Good sarcastic fun.  Three stars.

How It Ended, by David R. Bunch

And here is the writer half the readership has long seemed to hate, in his second consecutive issue—David R. Bunch.  Editor Malzberg says, “I think that Bunch is one of the twenty or thirty best writers of the short-story in English.” I might pick a slightly higher number, but I’m happy he is again welcome here.  But this one is called How It Ended—“it” being Moderan, scene of a procession of stories about the Strongholders, their new-metal enhancements held together by the flesh-strips that are all that remain of their human bodies, fighting their endless wars in splendid isolation from each other.  Can it really be the end?  Time will tell whether Bunch can resist returning to the scene. 

But to the matter at hand: during the Summer Truces following the Spring Wars, someone looses a wump-bomb, which is strong stuff indeed.  This sets off a new war which is only ended when the narrator releases the GRANDY WUMP (sic), which puts an end to Moderan entirely.  This is his confession, rendered onto a tape which may or may not ever be listened to, complete with his litany of self-justification.  The inexorable logic leading to complete destruction may be familiar to those who frequent newspapers and government briefing papers.  It’s Bunch as usual and you either like it or you don’t.  I mostly do, with qualifications, but this one goes on a little too long for my taste.  Three stars.

Confidence Trick, by John Wyndham


by Henry Sharp

Moving to the reprints, John Wyndham is here with Confidence Trick (from Fantastic, July-August 1953), about some people going home on a commuter train who discover that it is the train to Hell.  They escape their fate only through the loudly expressed disbelief of one abrasive young man, after which the whole illusion falls apart.  It is suggested that social institutions such as the banking system are not too different from religions in their reliance on unquestioning faith.  It’s smoothly written but becomes a bit heavy-handedly didactic after its comic beginning.  Two stars.

Dream of Victory, by Algis Budrys

In Algis Budrys’s Dream of Victory (Amazing, August/September 1953)—a “complete short novel” at 26 large-print pages—a war has left the world devastated and depopulated.  Androids were developed to provide a work force.  They are apparently human in all respects except for standardization of features (which they can pay to have fixed), and they can’t reproduce.  Fuoss, an android, is not happy about this, or about the fact that there seems to be growing discrimination against androids; he can get jobs but somehow always loses them, and his successful android lawyer friend tells him the creation of androids has now stopped.


by Ed Emshwiller

Fuoss has a recurring dream about a woman bearing his child.  He finds his situation so frustrating that he acts in progressively more self-destructive ways, driving away his android wife, in part because he flaunts his affair with a human woman. Then he loses his latest job, drinks a lot, and his girlfriend throws him out.  When he comes back and finds out she has taken up with somebody else, he smashes a whiskey bottle and cuts her throat after she dismisses his delusional babble that she will have his child.  His lawyer friend (ex-friend by now) visits him in jail and chastises him for the harm he has done to the android cause.  “ ‘Is she dead?’ he asked hopefully.”

I’m not sure what to make of this story.  Budrys has commented on it in the introduction to his second collection, Budrys’ [sic] Inferno (UK edition retitled The Furious Future): “Dream of Victory is the first novelette I ever wrote. . . . Dream of Victory, as I was writing it, seemed a free-wheeling piece of technical bedazzlement.  Happily, most of the experimentation in it was elevated to more comprehensible levels by Howard Browne, the quietly competent editor who bought it and with his pencil made me look a little more mature than I really was.  There is a certain temporary value to a young writer in coming on as a prose innovator and pyrotechnician; I think there is more for the reader and, in the course of time, more for the writer in letting the story speak for itself.”

So, all procedure and no substance about this story in which the protagonist responds to his emotional travail by murdering his girlfriend.  I wonder if it is supposed to be a displaced commentary on race relations, especially since the plot seems to bear some similarity to that of Richard Wright’s Native Son (a book I haven’t read and know only second-hand).  Did Budrys have it in mind?  Probably not.  Probably this is just another example of a writer who can’t think of a more imaginative way to resolve the situation of unbearable frustration he has created than with hideous violence against women—not altogether unrealistically, I have to acknowledge, since I do read the newspapers. 

It’s tempting to say “nice try,” but it really isn’t; the best thing to say is that Budrys got better later, at least a lot of the time, in finding better resolutions (or accepting no resolution) for the intolerable situations he was so good at coming up with.  One star for substance, three for execution (though as Budrys says, much credit goes to editor Browne for that).  Split the difference.

Don't Come to Mars, by Henry Hasse


by Leo Morey

Henry Hasse’s Don’t Come to Mars (Fantastic Adventures, April 1950) is a large comedown from his goofily grandiose classic He Who Shrank, reprinted in the last issue.  Dr. Rahm awakes to see himself walking out the door, and looks down to see he has a whole new tentacled body.  Aiiko the Martian has borrowed his by long-distance projection.  Turns out Aiiko is trying to sabotage Dr. Rahm’s life work developing space travel to Mars so humans will avoid the terrible fate that has befallen the Martians.  It’s routinely executed and reads more like a story from the ‘30s than one from 1950.  Two stars.

Science of Man: Lies and the Evolution of Language, by Leon E. Stover

Leon E. Stover’s “Science of Man” article is Lies and the Evolution of Language, which displays Stover’s faults even more prominently than his earlier articles.  The subject is certainly interesting, but the article is mostly a turgid mass of assertions with very little attempt to convince the reader to believe them or to provide any basis to assess them.  This is less of a problem when he is addressing current or recent times, of which most readers will have some direct knowledge or experience.  But consider: “Without a doubt the first humans replayed the action of the day around the campfire at night in an unabashed display of ceremonial boasting.  And doubtlessly manly valor was an entrance requirement into the hunting team, all the more incentive for a male to boast about what he had seen and done so as to be allowed to become ‘one of the boys.’ ” Certainly plausible, makes sense, but “without a doubt”?  Without more support than Stover provides, I’ve got a doubt.

Some of Stover’s assertions are more than doubtful, such as his claim that animals cannot lie.  In fact there is considerable deception in the animal world.  For example, some birds feign broken wings and walk away from their nests, apparently seeking to distract predators from their eggs or young.  Stover might have an argument that that behavior is not linguistic enough to be relevant to the discussion.  But he doesn’t make it, or acknowledge the question. Two stars.

Summing Up

So, another mixed-bag issue of Amazing (excluding the serial, to be assessed next time), but one that is promising—a word I must have used a dozen times about this magazine, but this time there's an actual promise about what the new editor plans to do with it.  As always, we'll see.

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[October 6, 1968] Snail on the Slope? (November 1968 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Suspicions confirmed—this November Amazing names as Editor Barry N. Malzberg, who was listed last issue as Associate Editor.  Sol Cohen is now merely the Publisher.  Oddly, though, the editorial is by Harry Harrison, now listed as Associate Editor (though most likely gone).  Go figure, or just say it’s more Sol Cohen chaos.

Johnny Bruck is back as the cover artist; this one (from Perry Rhodan #109, published in 1963) looks even more cliched and perfunctory than his earlier covers, making me wonder if they are really getting worse, or if I am just getting more tired of them.


by Johnny Bruck

“New” is sprinkled across the cover wherever possible to distract from the fact that once again, reprints dominate.  Four new short stories take up 36 pages, just under 25% of the magazine. And the prize: “plus stories by: RAY BRADBURY (Winner of the Aviation Space Writers Association’s Top Award). . . .” Does Bradbury need that kind of boosting? 

One of the new stories, interestingly, is a collaboration between Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany.  When Delany appeared with a novel excerpt in the issue before last, his name was misspelled about half the time; this issue, it’s misspelled “Delaney” everywhere—on the cover, on the contents page (twice), on the first page of the story, in the book review column.  Well, small mercy, it’s spelled right in the blurb for the story. 

There are worse production botches, discussed when I get to them.

Harrison’s editorial, Science Fiction and the Establishment, is superficial and banal: the Establishment doesn’t like SF, it’s a problem all over, but it’s starting to get better, someday it will be gone.  The book review column continues interestingly but incestuously, with James Blish as William Atheling reviewing Larry Niven, and Samuel R. Delany reviewing Blish.  Leon E. Stover contributes another in his “Science of Man” series, discussed below.

Despite all the above kvetching about the magazine’s presentation, the good news is that the new short stories are as interesting a batch as we’ve seen in Amazing for a while, and the reprints are all readable or better, unlike many of their predecessors. 

Power of the Nail, by Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany

Ellison and Delany’s Power of the Nail reads like what Ellison was publishing in the SF magazines around 1957, polished up by a smoother writer.  Robert Zagaramendo and his wife Margret are Ecological Observers on the planet Saquetta, and boy howdy is Margret pissed: “You promised me better than this, somewhere.” Robert’s not too thrilled either, especially with Margret.  Bickering is constant.

Saquetta features the Saquettes, mole-like aliens who are not at all cute, but have the interesting trait of being reincarnated when they die naturally, which is most of the time.  But the vibrations of the “phase-antenna of the automatic ecology equipment” that the humans are burying in various locations draw the Saquettes away from their usual hideouts to places where they are vulnerable to attack by giant predatory birds, called molloks because that’s what the Saquettes scream when they’re being hunted.


by Dan Adkins

After further conflict with his wife, including a near-rape, Robert sets up “ecology equipment” near an especially large Saquette colony, complete with lurking molloks, and goes back later to find, as expected, hundreds of dead Saquettes.  He builds little round coffins for them and nails them together, then goes back and tells Margret that they’re going home—and shortly, suffers a terrible and fatal punishment that is not clearly explained, though one may surmise it is related to the operation of the "automatic ecology equipment."  (Compare David H. Keller's The Doorbell if you've ever read it.) In the moral universe of the story, it’s obviously because he decided to sacrifice hundreds of Saquettes in order to escape an emotionally intolerable situation.

It's a very vivid and readable story, which goes some way towards compensating for its ultimate obscurity.  Three stars.

The Monsters, by David R. Bunch

The formerly prolific David R. Bunch, who has not appeared in Amazing since Sol Cohen took over, is back with The Monsters.  It’s short as usual for Bunch, and on a familiar theme: the need to harden one’s small children against the brutalities of life by brutalizing them pre-emptively.  (See Bunch’s earlier story A Small Miracle of Fishhooks and Straight Pins, Fantastic June 1961, and thence to Judith Merril’s annual “year’s best” volume.) Here, the threat the children are to be prepared for is a bit trite, but the writing is brisk and economical.  Three stars.

Try Again, by Jack Wodhams

Jack Wodhams is new to me, though the Journeyer-in-Chief has not thought highly of his work in Analog.  His Try Again is surprisingly good.  Pyler, a psychiatrist, is having a session with the precocious five-year-old Tommy, who says he has lived before and remembers it.  But this isn’t quite the same life as before, since with adult memories he acts differently the second time around.  Tommy is much burdened by his knowledge of future events and the question whether he could do anything about them (it’s 1935, Mussolini has just invaded Ethiopia; and Tommy knows what comes later).  Shortly he is kidnapped to Germany.  An alternative history, even worse than the real one, is telegraphically unfolded.  Tommy, who has disappeared from the plot after his interrogation, reappears at the terrible end.  Four stars—maybe a bit crude, but powerful.


by Jeff Jones

The reading experience is undermined at the end by Amazing’s production values, or lack of them.  The story stops on page 29 in the midst of a sentence with no “continued on” notice, and the reader is left to rummage through the magazine to find the rest of the text on page 138.

This Grand Carcass, by R.A. Lafferty

R.A. Lafferty’s This Grand Carcass is, typically, told in high Tall Tale mode, and it is also clearly a moral tale, though the precise moral may be a bit obscure.  Mord comes to Juniper Tell offering to sell a device cheap that will allow Tell to “own the worlds.” So why is he selling it?  He’s dying. Tell bites and is the new owner of Gahn, for Generalized Agenda Harmonizer Nucleus, which soon enough is outdoing and dominating all the other “general purpose machines.” Shortly, it is a full partner with Tell (in Tell and Gahn—get it?). 

Before long, Tell, like Mord, is almost, er, gone, and Gahn (whose power inputs have been revealed as dummies) candidly admits: “I use you.  I use human fuel.  I establish symbiosis with you.  I suck you out.  I eat you up.” So Tell sells Gahn on to the next high-rolling sucker.  Moral, did I say?  Machines are the Devil?  Anything that makes humans’ work too easy is damnation?  Something along those lines, I’m sure.  This is not one of Lafferty’s best; it is simultaneously obvious and vague and less deliciously absurd than Lafferty at his best.  But it’s amusing enough, good for three stars.

The Dwarf, by Ray Bradbury

In Ray Bradbury’s The Dwarf (Fantastic, January/February 1954), Mr. Bigelow, a dwarf, visits the carnival daily, forks over his dime at the Mirror Maze, and heads straight for the mirror that makes him look large.  Aimee, a carnival worker, hangs out in the booth with ticket-seller Ralph when her business is slow.  She is sympathetic to Mr. Bigelow’s plight.  Ralph isn’t, and makes fun of him, and of her.  Aimee discovers that Mr. Bigelow makes a living writing detective stories, which reveal his inner torments.  Ralph plays a nasty trick on him, proving that Ralph is nasty, which we already knew.


by Sanford Kossln

Rather abruptly, end of story.  Or is it?  There’s no “Continued on . . .” at the end.  As with Try Again, I rummaged through the magazine, but found no loose piece of the story.  So I checked the original 1954 Fantastic . . . and there’s an entire page of text at the end that is omitted from this reprinted version.

No rating, since the full text doesn’t actually appear in the magazine.  It’s not one of Bradbury’s better stories to my taste, but it’s a whole lot better complete than truncated.  Sheesh.

The Traveling Crag, by Theodore Sturgeon

The Traveling Crag, from the July 1951 Fantastic Adventures, is a silly confection by Theodore Sturgeon—a non-trivial category of his ouevre.  On the other hand, silliness by Sturgeon is more palatable than that from less accomplished hands.

Cris is a literary agent with an assistant, Naome, who is obviously in love with him, though he is oblivious.  Cris has received a story, The Traveling Crag, from an unknown, Sig Weiss, which “grabs you by the throat, shakes your bones, puts a heartbeat into your lymph ducts and finally slams you down, gasping, weak, and oh so happy,” and incidentally makes a lot of money fast.  But Weiss sends no more stories.  Cris visits to find out why, and the local storekeeper warns him, “Meanest bastard ever lived,” a judgment Weiss lives up to in the flesh.


by Lawrence (L. Sterne Stevens)

When Weiss finally submits another story at Cris’s urging, it begins: “Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light-years from Sol.” This is the beginning of a notorious subscription ad that ran in Galaxy, headlined YOU’LL NEVER SEE IT IN GALAXY!, designed to distinguish Galaxy’s policy from that of lowbrow pulp magazines like . . . Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories.  So to perpetrate this in-joke, Sturgeon must have convinced not only Galaxy editor H.L. Gold, but also Fantastic Adventures editor Howard Browne, to allow it.

But I digress.  The point is that Weiss has turned in a bunch of crap, continuing his mean-bastard performance.  Meanwhile, Cris meets Miss Tillie Moroney, who is offering a reward for an “authentic case of devil into saint,” and eventually tells him a story—“a science fiction plot”—about a humanoid race that has developed the ultimate weapon, one of which has apparently been lost on Earth for thousands of years.  And she wants Cris to get Weiss to write another blockbuster story and then find out how and where he wrote it.

So Weiss produces another story that makes everyone cry, and Cris and Tillie head out to see him, but Naome the assistant contrives to get there first, and the ultimate weapon, a small object found after a rockslide, proves to have been the key to Weiss’s transformation, but it gets triggered, and one of Tillie’s blouse buttons emits communications from the humanoids, who explain to them all telepathically that the ultimate weapon was one that stops useless conflict, and now a reaction is propagating through the atmosphere to bring the weapon’s benefits to all the world (it’s science!), and by the way Naome has paired off with Weiss, and Nick with Tillie.  “Outside, it was a greener world, and all over it the birds sang.”

It's all just Too Much, but rendered so smoothly as to disarm even the house misanthrope’s ire.  Three stars for this feat of making fatuity charming.

He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse

“Years, centuries, aeons, have fled past me in endless parade, leaving me unscathed, for I am deathless, and in all the universe alone of my kind.  Universe?  Strange how that convenient word leaps instantly to my mind from force of old habit.  Universe?  The merest expression of a puny idea in the minds of whose who cannot possibly conceive whereof they speak.  The word is a mockery.  Yet how glibly men utter it!  How little do they realize the artificiality of the word!”

Yes!  Rave on!  Here is a fine specimen of the peak of cosmos-spanning rhetoric occasionally reached by early (pre-Campbell) SF, and what follows lives up to it in naïve grandeur.  It is the first paragraph of He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse, a novella from the August 1936 Amazing.

The plot is essentially that of The Man from the Atom run backwards.  Atoms are solar systems and galaxies are molecules, and the Professor has devised a substance (called Shrinx!) that will reduce humans to subatomic dimensions so they can explore the sub-universes.  When his unnamed assistant is unenthusiastic about making this one-way trip, the Prof stabs hin with the needle.  As he shrinks, the Prof drops him onto a block of Rehyllium-X (sic!), where he descends into a microscopic scratch on its surface and is chased around by a germ, fearsomely portrayed by illustrator Morey.


by Leo Morey

Soon enough, our hero finds himself surrounded by luminous masses—nebulae!—and then, as he shrinks further, stars and planets.  He alights on one occupied by gaseous intelligences, shrinks further to a planet of cave-dwellers, and then (in a powerful passage) to a planet of machines gone out of control.  Their birdlike creators have fled to the world’s moon, as their mechanical heirs maniacally tear down the remains of their civilization and remake the world closer to their circuits’ desire. 

Our hero continues downward, or smallward, through universes he cannot bring himself to recount except in the most summary form (“Suns dying . . . planets cold and dark and airless . . . last vestiges of once proud races struggling for a few more years of sustenance . . . [etc.]”) But then . . . he is mysteriously attracted to a tiny, distant spark of yellow, which on approach proves to be circled by planets including a tiny blue one that twinkles invitingly, so he approaches, descends, and finds himself in . . . Cleveland!

Well, actually, he lands in Lake Erie, flooding much of Cleveland as well as nearby Toledo.  Upon attaining dry land, he is accosted by aircraft shooting at him, which he finds annoying.  He is bundled into a vehicle and taken to Cleveland, to a building where scientists assemble to interrogate him, but are unable to understand his thoughts, though he can read theirs.  He is not impressed by them, or humanity.  He escapes and flees into the countryside, where he is drawn to an isolated house occupied by a writer, of science fiction of course, who is sufficiently enlightened to be capable of receiving his thought, and to whom the shrinking man tells his tale before continuing his apparently endless and by now wearisome voyage.

In one sense this is an odd story for Amazing to reprint, since it appeared in the 1946 anthology Adventures and Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas—one of the oldest stories in the book, and the only one from Amazing.  That book is so well known that stories included in it are much more likely to be familiar to current Amazing readers than most of Sol Cohen’s other reprints.  I read that anthology when I was a kid and wondered what this old-fashioned story based on scientific nonsense was doing in the company of Heinlein, Asimov, et al.  But I’m younger than that now and can better appreciate its hokey majesty.  Four stars, allowing for its age.

Henry Hasse (b. 1913) began publishing SF in 1933; this is his third published story.  Aside from it, he is best known for collaborating with Ray Bradbury on a few minor early stories.  None of his other work, which has appeared sporadically over the decades, has garnered the recognition that this story has. 

One side note: This story presents a very early occurrence of what later was named Tuckerization, after its heavy use by Wilson Tucker: giving fictional characters the names of real members of the SF community.  The Cleveland writer to whom the shrinking man tells his story is named Stanton Cobb Lentz, obviously a reference to Stanton A. Coblentz, a prolific SF writer mainly of the late ‘20s and ‘30s, whose work is nowadays most charitably described as quaint. 

The Last Day, by Richard Matheson


by Robert Kay

In Richard Matheson’s The Last Day (Amazing, April/May 1953), the Sun is about to destroy Earth (it’s swollen and red and much too hot).  Protagonist wakes up after the last night, which he and friends have spent in drunken, lustful, and/or senselessly destructive pursuits.  He decides this approach to the end is unsatisfactory, and after wrestling with his conscience reluctantly heads to his parents’ house (shooting an attacker en route).  He has avoided this visit for years because of his mother’s excessive piety.  But on this final hot day, she’s cool, and they hang out waiting for the end.  The editor blurbs: “Waxing philosophical is like waxing a floor; it is powerful easy to fall on your face while trying it.” Matheson does not.  Four stars, mainly for keeping just on the right side of bathos as he renders the conventional sentiments.

Science of Man: War Is Peace, by Leon E. Stover

Leon E. Stover is back with another of his “Science of Man” articles, War Is Peace, written in his usual dogmatic style.  He takes on the likes of Konrad Lorenz (of On Aggression), arguing that aggression is not a mode of behavior that we must sublimate or otherwise redirect, but a goal-directed extension of human social organization.  He says: “The ethologists have nothing to offer that can improve on what Karl von Clauswitz said of war in the 19th century: that it is an extension of politics carried on by different means.” And he concludes: “There is no magic solution to be found in animal behavior studies, psychology, or biology.  Do not be misled.  The only solution is better politics.  But we have to know that to want it.” Well, maybe—he has no suggestions for how we get there in practice.  But Stover recounts much entertaining anthropological lore along the way.

Three stars.

Summing Up

Well, that wasn’t bad at all.  The new material is lively and interesting, and even the reprints are all readable or better, with nothing grossly stupid or incompetent.  Admittedly, that shouldn’t be the standard, but in Sol Cohen-world it does make a difference.  This issue is a magazine that one might actually purchase for enjoyment and not as a duty, a change not to be sneezed at.  Can it continue?

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[August 6, 1968] Treading Water (September 1968 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The beat goes on at Amazing, after the brief syncopation that pushed its schedule back a month.  This September issue, as usual these days, boasts on the cover of all the new (non-reprint) stories inside—four short stories, 35 pages in all, less than a fourth of the magazine.  The rest of the fiction, three novelets, is reprints.  So is the cover—Frank R. Paul’s Great Nebula in Andromeda (“Andromida,” as this barely-proofread magazine has it).  It’s from the back cover of the October 1945 Fantastic Adventures, significantly cropped, and generally pretty cheesy-looking.  By then, Paul’s future was behind him, in more senses than one.


by Frank R. Paul

There is the usual collection of features, ranging from a startlingly inane editorial by editor Harrison, through another “Science of Man” article by Leon E. Stover (see below) and a Sao Paulo Letter by Walter Martins about SFnal doings around Brazil, to what has become the usual lively book review column.  Though this month it’s a little incestuous.  William Atheling, Jr., who is James Blish, reviews Brian Aldiss’s new novel, while Blish’s own byline appears on a review of Harrison and Aldiss’s Best SF 1967.  Alexei Panshin reviews John Wyndham’s new novel, while Leroy Tanner, who is Harrison, reviews Panshin’s book on Heinlein, and Harrison under his own name reviews William Tenn’s new novel Of Men and Monsters.  What is this?  The New York Review of Books?

And—speaking of “What is this?”—there’s a telltale development in the fine print at the bottom of the contents page.  Right under “Sol Cohen, Publisher” and “Harry Harrison, Editor,” is a new line: “Barry N. Malzberg, Associate Editor.” Based on past history (Harrison first sneaked into Amazing as a book reviewer before being named as editor), maybe there’s another change in the works.  That might account for the rather detached and phoned-in quality of Harrison’s editorial this month.  Mr. Malzberg is a recent arrival on the SF scene, having published several stories under the name “K.M. O’Donnell,” which might be said to be notable for their vehemence.  That could be just what this frequently uninspired magazine needs.

Where's Horatius?, by Mack Reynolds


by Jeff Jones

The issue begins with Mack Reynolds’s Where’s Horatius?, on the now-familiar premise of making movies of the past.  Our time-traveling rogues’ gallery of heroes is trying to film the action in 509 B.C., when the Etruscan king Lars Posena marched with his army on Rome.  Reynolds makes the most of his research into the events and the military technology and technique of the age, and generally seems to be having a better time than usual, in a slightly cartoonish way, without the often leaden style and dense didactics of some of his Analog work.  The ending is gimmicky and reads like a chunk of text got dropped somewhere in the last few paragraphs, but it’s readable and amusing nonetheless.  Three stars.

Manhattan Dome, by Ben Bova

Ben Bova’s Manhattan Dome is a perplexing story, sort of an idiot plot writ large.  (For those unfamiliar with the jargon, an idiot plot is one in which there is a story only because the characters act like idiots.) A dome has been constructed over Manhattan to keep out the air pollution wafting over from New Jersey.  However, the part of the proposal that would ban cars and cigarettes from Manhattan was blocked by the City Council after the auto, oil, tobacco, and advertising lobbyists got to work, so the air under the dome is worse than the outside air. 

To top it off, when Ed, the Chief Dome Engineer, encounters his girlfriend’s cranky old father, he is ranting about how the lack of rain under the Dome has ruined his garden.  It’s a disaster, and “Washington” (specified only as the “Public Health people”) has just announced that it’s tearing the Dome down.  All is lost!  But suddenly the light bulb goes on over Ed’s head, and back in the office, he starts turning on the fire sprinklers that are part of the Dome’s construction.  “Rains scrub the air, wash away the aerosols and float them down the sewers.  Air always feels clean after a rain, doesn’t it?” All is saved!


by Dan Adkins

What's wrong with this picture?  Let us count the ways.  Even an entity like the New York City Council (which has been described publicly as having the I.Q. of a cucumber) would probably not be so stupid as to allow the Dome while blocking the measures to keep the air clean under it.  And it’s equally hard to imagine that nobody would have thought about making rain with the sprinklers until long after the Dome was in operation, and about to be torn down.  (Ed says there’s plenty of water available.  I’d like to see the calculations.) And it’s also hard to credit that artificial rain alone would cure the air pollution problem in a giant city, since there are a lot of cities around the world that have terrible air pollution despite being exposed to the rain—notably New York.

Maybe there will be a sequel in which Bova will sell us the Brooklyn Bridge.  But there is one more thing in this story which bears mention.  In the lobby of Dome HQ, the chairman of the Greater New York Evolutionary Society and someone from the American Longevity Society get into it, the former supporting the Dome, the latter opposing it.  The Evolutionary guy is described as “a massive specimen, with an insistent voice and a craggy face topped by a bristling shock of straight white hair.  He had a Roosevelt-type cigaret [sic] holder clamped in his teeth. . . .” They argue, and Mr. Evolutionary declares at his peak:

“I know it’s rough on some individuals.  But evolution isn’t worried about the individual.  This Dome will foster the development of a superior race, able to breathe pure carbon monoxide, impervious to germs!  Magnificent!”

This is an obvious lampoon of Analog editor John W. Campbell and of his views in general, and in particular his opinion that smoking cigarettes is not a serious health hazard, but a boon.  (See his editorial in the September 1964 Analog.) This is interesting, since Bova has made a number of appearances in Analog in recent years.  We’ll see if that continues.  But back to the story: mildly amusing, depending on how high you can suspend your disbelief.  Two stars.

Idiot’s Mate, by Robert Taylor

Bova is followed by Robert Taylor (who, you ask?  He had a story in last month’s F&SF), with Idiot’s Mate, on the familiar theme of staged violence as mass entertainment.  This one features the Chess Tournament, held on the Moon, in which people in spacesuits are assigned to teams and given the names of chess pieces, and apparently given powers to match, though that idea is not well developed.  Mostly everyone just plays hide-and-seek and shoots explosive bullets.  Protagonist Rodgers, imprisoned on trumped-up treason charges, volunteers for the Tournament and is made king of a team.  Needless to say, matters end badly, though the story is not bad; it is a bit overwritten, but capably so, and moves fast.  Three stars.

Time Bomb, by Ray Russell

Ray Russell’s Time Bomb is a time-travel joke, deftly rendered, worth about the two pages it takes up.  Three stars, allowing for its limited ambition.

The Patty-Cake Mutiny, by Winston Marks

The reprints begin with The Patty-Cake Mutiny (Fantastic, February 1955), by Winston Marks, that monstrously prolific contributor to the mid-‘50s SF magazines, to remind us that they sure published a lot of crap in between the undying classics we all remember. 

The Patty-Cake Mutiny is a story of space exploration featuring crew members Slappy Kansas, Conkie Morton, Butch Bagley, Pokey Gannet, Sniffer Smith, and Balls Murphy.  Slappy is unofficial foreman because of his skill in slapping people around.  Sniffer is greatly talented olfactorily.  Conkie conks out under anything more than a gee and a half of acceleration.  Balls—calm down now—is so named because of the “pendulous little knobs of flesh” on his face, each of which contains “a submicroscopic parasite that had baffled Earth doctors” (but it’s OK, they’re not contagious).  Et cetera.  Their mission is to find and mine the incredibly valuable radioactive kegnite.  There is tension among the crew because Balls has won at craps their shares of any profit from the voyage.


by Tom Beecham

This motley crew lands on a planet with a resilient surface and tall grass-like stalks as far as they can see.  Balls goes out exploring and gets into trouble, and is retrieved in a state of “infantile regression”—literally—so they have to put him in a diaper and take turns keeping the baby occupied (hence patty-cake; the mutiny is separate despite the title).  But back to work: they cut into the surface and a red fluid—guess what?—gushes out.  Before the end, they are hacking steaks out of the giant organism they have landed on—Hairy Joe, as they call it.  And it goes on, ending with a fist fight (Slapper lives up to his name) and the explanation of Balls’s regression, which is as silly as the rest of the story.  It’s all too ridiculous and tiresome to be borne.  I’m demanding a raise.  One star.

"Labyrinth", by Neil R. Jones

Neil R. Jones’s Labyrinth (from Amazing, April 1936) is another in his seemingly endless series (22 of them!) about Professor Jameson, revived from his orbiting tomb by the Zoromes (from Zor, of course), and installed like them in a metal body.  Now they all go roaming around the universe looking for entertainment, though of course the author doesn’t put it that way.  The few of these I’ve read were mostly benignly tedious, but this one is a little more dynamic. 

The Prof and the Z’s land on a planet and investigate a city, which at first seems abandoned, but proves to be inhabited by strange beings with four legs and a dozen arms, who flee when our heroes approach.

“ ‘We must seize one of them!’ Professor Jameson exclaimed.  ‘They seem intelligent enough for questioning.’ ” Of course!  (So much for the respectful fellowship of sentient beings.) Once they’ve got a couple in hand, they conclude that their intelligence is “somewhat below the level of an Australian bushboy, an earthly type which lay in the professor’s memory, yet well above the mentality of the beasts he had known.” (So much for . . . oh, never mind.)

The Queegs, as they call themselves, are quite affable once reassured that they won’t be harmed.  They didn’t build the city but say they’ve “always” lived there.  They survive by hunting creatures called ohbs, using wooden weapons, even though they can work metal.  Why?  Metal doesn’t last very long, they say—which seems odd.

So the metal folks tag along on a hunting expedition to a seemingly barren area.  The ohbs prove to be giant gray slug-like creatures who apparently subsist on something in the ground.  A Zorome comes into contact with an ohb, which starts to radiate light and grabs the Zorome.  Another ohb joins in.  What’s going on?

“ ‘It is eating me!’ cried 47B-97.  ‘It is eating my metal body!’”


by Leo Morey

And now—“coming from every direction a vast legion of hurrying ohbs, their antennae quivering, slight radiations of anticipation suffusing their leaping-crawling bodies.  They were being called to the feast, a feast of virgin metal which the gluttonous appetites of their two companions had involuntarily revealed.” The author continues, waxing rhapsodic:

“With as much disregard for self-preservation as they had shown when hunted by the Queegs, the ohbs, fully half as large as the cubed body of a Zorome, seemed possessed of but one unquenchable desire, and that was to glut themselves on pure, refined metal, free of all impurities and unmixed with rock and other foreign material, such as they found regularly in their daily diet.  Nothing less than death stopped their mad charge.”

And a little later, a Zorome cries: “22MM392!  744U-21!  We are helpless!  They are all around us!  Wet, clammy juices they exude from their bodies are turning our metal parts to a fluid which they absorb!  If our metal heads are eaten through, we are doomed!’”

Electrifying!  But the rest of the story is a little anticlimactic, with the Zoromes fleeing into a tunnel mouth, which leads to the labyrinth of the title.  Soon enough they are lost, wandering aimlessly between dangerous encounters with ohbs, until they follow an underground river and are rescued, to resume their peregrinations around the galaxy.  Three corroded stars.

Paradox, by Charles Cloukey

The precocious Charles Cloukey (1912-1931) is back, or re-resurrected (see Sub-Satellite), with Paradox (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Summer 1929), another assuredly executed story, published when he was 17.  It’s a frame story in which the author is a guest at a club where a couple of members are arguing about the possibility of time travel, and the mysterious Raymond Cannes introduces himself as a time traveler and tells his tale. 


by Wally Wallit

Hawkinson, a scientist and old college chum, has received plans for a strange machine, done in Cannes’s handwriting, but Cannes didn’t write them and wouldn’t have been capable of it.  Later, Hawkinson builds the machine—a time machine—and invites Cannes over, and of course (in the usual manner of ‘20s and ‘30s SF), Cannes goes for it and travels a thousand years into the future.  After various adventures he flees home at a cliff-hanging moment to find that Hawkinson is dead and his laboratory burned.  Cannes throws his time-traveling gear into the river, destroying all corroborating evidence (also as usual for this period’s SF). 

The story runs facilely through several now-familiar time paradox themes that were new to the genre when this was written.  Unfortunately some of the plot developments I have passed over are fairly hackneyed, and Cloukey’s stilted style, though well turned, gets a bit wearing over the length of the story, keeping it to three stars.

Science of Man: Naked Ape or Hairless Monkey, by Leon E. Stover

Leon E. Stover’s article, Naked Ape or Hairless Monkey, invoking at least the title of Desmond Morris’s best-selling book, takes on the question whether, evolutionarily speaking, humans are naked apes or hairless monkeys.  Stover follows human ancestry backwards to conclude . . . nobody knows.  A key sentence: “The game seems to be, how much can we learn from the least evidence.” But he thinks he’s got a good guess: an apparently hypothetical animal that he calls Propriopithecus.  Conclusion: “So man is neither a naked ape nor a hairless monkey.  His line of ancestry evolved apart from the monkeys and apes.  He is not simply a depilitated version of either one of them.  Man is what he is—a nudist who made it on his own.”

I am reminded of the form letter that H.L. Mencken reputedly kept handy to respond to some of his more imaginative correspondents: “Dear sir or madam: You may be right!” And so may Stover.  In any case, it’s reasonably interesting and informative if inconclusive, but also pretty dense reading.  Three stars.

Summing Up

Amazing continues to tread water, capably enough this month.  Almost everything here is perfectly readable, with one shameful exception.  The new stories are pretty lively within their limitations.  But we wait in vain for something outstanding, and we’re not likely to get it when only 25% of the magazine is open to new fiction.

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




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 12, 1968] The Pioneer and the Gorilla: Heinlein in Dimension, by Alexei Panshin

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by John Boston

A few years ago, when I was reading a lot of fanzines, I came upon an article impudently titled Heinlein: By His Jockstrap, concerning attitudes towards sex in the works of Robert Heinlein.  Wow!  This SF fandom is pretty racy!  Or so I thought. Not everyone appreciated that article, though, starting with Mr. Heinlein.


Alexei Panshin

The article’s author, Alexei Panshin, was a budding SF writer himself, having a few months earlier published the impressive Down to the Worlds of Men in If.  Since then he has published more stories of varying merit, and a just-published novel, Rite of Passage, which on a first and superficial reading seems quite impressive—and, not at all ironically, quite Heinleinesque.  He also published more articles about Heinlein in fanzines.  You’d think the guy was working on a book.

And of course he was.  But it’s more complicated than that.

The Pioneer by Invitation

According to Panshin, in another fanzine article, this one in the April 1965 Yandro, he was solicited by Advent: Publishers in 1964 to write a critical study of Heinlein’s fiction.  Advent publishes books about SF, such as Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder, James Blish’s The Issue at Hand, and the symposium The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism.  The proposed book would be the first book-length study of any writer from within the SF ghetto.  Panshin accepted and got to work.  He wrote to Heinlein, introducing himself, stating he was planning to write a book better than the “Jockstrap” article, and asking some questions about his life and work.  There was no response—to Panshin, anyway. 

Panshin also wrote to a number of others about Heinlein, later learning that Heinlein had been angered by these letters, and had seemingly discouraged the recipients from responding.  In any case he got few responses.  One who did respond was the widow of Sergeant A.G. Smith—the dedicatee of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers—who offered to let Panshin see Smith’s correspondence with Heinlein. 

The 800-Pound Gorilla

Heinlein was furious, and ultimately wrote Advent a letter, which Panshin has seen and which he describes as attacking his qualifications to write the book, accusing him of employing ungentlemanly, unethical, and in part dishonorable and illegal means of gathering material, and forbidding Advent to quote from Heinlein’s copyrighted works, use his name or picture, or do anything else requiring his permission.  He refused Advent’s offer to review the manuscript pre-publication, and reserved the right to sue or bring criminal action as appropriate if the book were published. 

Advent, successfully intimidated, then backed out and sent Panshin a $50 kill fee, leaving him with a completed book and nowhere to go with it.  His efforts to find a way to smooth things over were futile.  Panshin concluded his Yandro article by quoting the man himself:

“FARNHAM’S FREEHOLD, page 88: ‘ . . . a book need never die and should not be killed; books were the immortal part of man.  Book burners—to rape a defenseless friendly book.’ ”

So, what to do?  What Panshin did do was to break out portions of his book manuscript (some with substantial revisions) and submit them for publication in various fanzines, mostly the solemn and prestigious Riverside Quarterly.  Not surprisingly, after having all this impressive material published in a short period of time, Panshin last year received the first Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer.

Meanwhile, Advent had a change of heart.  After Panshin’s award, and also after it reorganized from a partnership to a corporation (thereby protecting the former partners, now owners, from personal liability), it would publish Panshin’s book after all.  And now we have it.

The Book


by Alex Eisenstein

So what exactly do we have?  It’s impressive within its (self-imposed) limits.  It is a work of genre criticism, explicitly in the vein of Knight’s In Search of Wonder, which is cited repeatedly.  It makes no effort to connect with the wider (some might say narrower) world of mainstream literary criticism.  Panshin obliquely justifies his genre focus by conceding that SF is “minor,” but “not because it is essentially trivial, like the endless number of locked-room mysteries, not because it is bound forever to repeat a single form, like the sonnet or Greek drama, and not even because most of its practitioners are second-rate or worse, though most of them are.

“Even the best science fiction is minor to the extent that most people are not prepared intellectually or emotionally to accept it.”

So there!  Fans are slans!  But seriously, this proposition provides at least a fig leaf of a basis for treating SF as its own discrete literary territory, though no one is required to agree.

Panshin then proceeds, year by year and story by story, to summarize and comment on all of Heinlein’s SF, and some non-fiction items, from the beginning through The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.  This material is divided into “The Period of Influence” (1940-42), “The Period of Success” (1947-58), and “The Period of Alienation” (1959-67).  These take up over half the book. 

It sounds deadly, but it is not; the length of the comments is proportional to the interest of the works and what Panshin has to say about them.  They get longer as he gets closer to the present, appropriately, since as he demonstrates, there’s a lot more wrong with the more recent books than many of the older ones.  Panshin is a plain and succinct enough writer that this long exercise mostly retains its interest and does not become wearying, at least to my taste.

Some of Panshin’s judgments are initially startling.  He says of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress—widely welcomed, after several weak books, with cries of “Heinlein is back!”—that it “has its interest, but it is not as a novel.  It is as a dramatized lecture.” To start, he concedes: “Line-by-line, it is fascinating reading” and “less flawed by sermons and constructional weakness” than his other recent books.  But he goes on to nail the book’s sentimentality, lapses of logic, and deficiencies of style (Panshin knows Russian and doesn’t think much of the “babu-Russian” in which the narrator thinks and speaks).  If (like me) you have reread this book and found it less captivating the second time around, Panshin tells you why, if you haven’t figured it out yourself.

Among many other judgments, Panshin thinks Beyond This Horizon and Have Space Suit—Will Travel are Heinlein’s best works, a view I suspect doesn’t command a majority among Heinlein readers.  (“Only a misanthrope could dislike Have Space Suit—Will Travel,” he says.  Calling Dorothy Parker!)

Panshin uncontroversially thinks Heinlein’s best work was done during his middle period, when “he was in solid control of his writing tools and nearly everything he did was first rate.” However, his pick for the five best books of this period are all juveniles, while he dismisses the Hugo-winning Double Star as “good light entertainment, but no more than that,” since Heinlein doesn’t provide a more detailed account of the workings of the political system in which his protagonist is working.  He says the generally well-regarded By His Bootstraps is “tightly constructed, as intricate as a bit of musical comedy choreography, and arrives at a destination”; but it lacks “anything to get your teeth into”; and, later on, he describes it as “neatly composed, if completely empty.” Continuing the latter theme: “Delilah and the Space-Rigger . . . is a smoothly-written but empty little bit of nothing about women breaking into previously all-male space jobs.” I hope Betty Friedan is not a Heinlein reader.  But whatever you think of Panshin’s opinions, he has his reasons and generally shows his work (the “Delilah” comment is an exception).

After slicing Heinlein’s work horizontally by time, Panshin slices it vertically by substance and method, with chapters labelled Construction, Execution, and Content.  (There’s also a short chapter on Heinlein’s non-fiction—if you were curious about Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry?, here’s your chance.) In these chapters he makes a number of observations about Heinlein’s modus operandi, of which some are quite acute while others seem a bit wandering and/or pointless. 

For example of the latter, under the subhead Attitude is a several-page digression-filled discussion of whether Heinlein’s works are realistic or romantic (realism wins, mostly).  The discussions of Context and Characterization are more fruitful.  Panshin says, “Characterizing situations has always been one of Heinlein’s strongest points, and I think it is safe to say that he has always done better with developing his societies than he has with developing individual characters.” Further: “Heinlein in general has preferred to show how things work in such consistent detail that his societies speak for themselves; they don’t need to be explained or justified.” He illustrates this point with an extensive discussion of the building of The Menace from Earth, in what is likely the most sustained attention that story has ever received.  He concludes: “Heinlein has by and large been able to build complex, consistent societies, the complexity coming from individual elements that fit together at the same time that they are used to further the story action,” this time taking Beyond This Horizon as his text and making a good case for its merits, at least in that regard. 

Concerning characterization, he says: “Heinlein’s characterization has not shown the variety that his contexts have, but in a way this makes very good sense.  Basically, Heinlein has used the same general characters in story after story, and has kept these characters limited ones.” And here we arrive at territory that most Heinlein readers will find familiar.  “There is one unique and vivid human Heinlein character, but he is a composite of Joe-Jim Gregory, Harriman, Waldo, Lazarus Long, Mr. Kiku, and many others, rather than any one individual.  I call the composite the Heinlein Individual.  . . .  It is a single personality that appears in three different stages and is repeated in every Heinlein book in one form or another.

“The earliest stage is that of the competent but naïve youngster. . . .  The second stage is the competent man in full glory, the man who knows how things work. . . .  The last stage is the wise old man who not only knows how things work, but why they work, too.” Other characters are barely individualized.  “Their most striking feature is their competence, reflecting that of the Heinlein Individual.” “After this small circle, Heinlein ordinarily relies on caricature, and he has a number of set pieces which he produces as needed.  One is that of Whining, Useless, Middle-Aged Mama. . . .  Matching this is the Pompous Male Blowhard. . . .  A third is the Nasty Young Weasel. . . .  Further caricatures could be named, but let’s stay with those.”

Fair cop!  But, says Panshin, this is all fine.  “Heinlein’s characters, it seems to me, are clear if not striking, and for his purposes this is probably enough. . . .  Heinlein has concentrated on developing unfamiliar contexts for his stories; if he were to populate these contexts with wild characters, the result might seem chaotic.” Note the similarity to C.S. Lewis’s observation, in his 1955 lecture On Science Fiction, recently published in his Of Other Worlds, that “[t]o tell how odd things struck odd people is to have an oddity too much. . . .”

There is much more about the what and how of Heinlein’s work, of varying interest and cogency, but you should read it yourselves; you will anyway, later if not now. 

Panshin sums up in the chapter titled “The Future of Heinlein”—not what Heinlein will do, but how he will be regarded, based on his work to date.  Here, however critical Panshin has been, his bottom line is unequivocal: “It is clear right now that even if his career were to be over, Heinlein would retain a historical place in company with Wells and Stapledon.” That’s because, first, of “the storytelling techniques that Heinlein developed and that have been generally copied within the field”—mainly the shift he exemplified from the basically speculative to the basically extrapolative, which by the way is what killed off the “sense of wonder” mourned by some.  “Heinlein’s insistence in talking clearly, knowledgeably, and dramatically about the real world destroyed forever the sweet, pure, wonderful innocence that science fiction once had. . . .  In a sense, Heinlein may be said to have offered science fiction a road to adulthood.”

Second, Panshin says, SF has mostly “concentrated almost as a matter of course on the atypical situation, the abnormal, the extraordinary.  It has never been willing to stand still and examine the ordinary person functioning normally in a strange context. . . .  We want variety in our fiction, to be sure, but the future is already strange.” Heinlein, says Panshin, “is the one science fiction writer who has regularly dealt with the strange-but-normal.” That’s a considerable exaggeration, but the more-than-a-grain of truth is that Heinlein has paid more consistent non-satirical attention than almost anyone else to the mundane details of life in his future and extraterrestrial settings, and it’s one of the more attractive and influential aspects of his work.

Panshin says he wouldn’t be surprised if Heinlein’s reputation is ultimately similar to Kipling’s.  Maybe so.  My own suspicion is that Heinlein’s reputation will diminish over the years, especially if he continues moving in the direction of his most recent works.  Panshin is right to predict that SF is “likely to receive increasing amounts of serious critical attention and regard” going forward, but I suspect that it is the growing sophistication and competence of its practitioners by the standards of general literature that will drive such a change.  It is those newer writers who will garner the broader recognition, and those they have learned from, like Heinlein, will be largely forgotten except by the remaining hard-core genre enthusiasts.

Summing Up

Heinlein in Dimension is not a great book, but it is a pioneering one, with much of interest and value, and is well worth reading, shortcomings and all.  Four stars.




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