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[April 14, 1964] COOKING WITH ASH (the May 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Melting Down

The cover of the May 1964 Amazing depicts an astronaut whose space helmet and surrounding objects are melting as the giant sun blazes in through his rather large porthole.  This illustrates Lester del Rey’s story Boiling Point, or more likely the story rationalizes the cover; I suspect more strongly each month that a lot of Amazing’s cover stories are in fact written around an already purchased cover painting. 


by Schelling

Boiling Point

The story starts out as routinely clever.  Protagonist Stasek is a technician residing on Venus and studying “energy-eaters,” amorphous creatures who hang out near the sun and live on its energy.  He is pressed into service to do maintenance on“the ring of satellites strung like beads between the orbit of Venus and the orbit of Mercury.” They are there to relay communications, observe sunspots, absorb energy and beam it to wherever it’s needed. 

Stasek sets out and, of course, quickly comes across an energy-eater wrapped around a satellite he’s supposed to service.  What an opportunity!  He disregards regulations, gets close to it, and finds out why nobody who has done so has come back: it wraps itself around his little spaceship.  Turns out it’s telepathic, and it’s hungry: it wants to go towards the sun, and when Stasek demurs, it takes control of the ship.  Curtains!  Except Stasek, before he cooks completely, figures out a better deal to offer it.

This would be a perfectly acceptable piece of hardware-opera yard goods except that it turns on the assumption that telepathic communication, if it exists at all, could work right off the bat between creatures of such utterly different background and experience.  I read that some guy named Wittgenstein said, “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” Sounds right to me, and that goes at least double for a shape-shifting vacuum-dweller that feeds on pure energy.  Sorry, too much to swallow, downgraded from yard goods to factory reject.  Two stars.

As for the rest of the issue, I can’t say there’s anything especially good here—but at least some of it is bad in more interesting ways than usual.  Also, as someone suggested to me, this seems to be the Special Bad-Mouthing Issue.  Once past the del Rey story, every piece of fiction contains some derogatory stereotype or a character who is nasty to the point of caricature.

Sunburst (Part 3 of 3)


by Schelling

This issue concludes Phyllis Gotlieb’s serial Sunburst, which seems sincere and well-meaning, but ultimately inconclusive. 

Premise (in case you haven't been reading along): years ago, in a small Midwestern city called Sorrel Park, a nuclear reactor accident resulted in the town’s being quarantined under martial law, and in the birth of a number of mutant children with very strong psionic powers.  A few years later these feral superchildren ran rampant through the town destroying everything within reach, and were themselves quarantined behind a force field in a barren place called the Dump (hence, Dumplings).

The main character is Shandy Johnson, a 13-year-old orphaned girl who is an “imperv,” i.e., someone with no psi talent who is undetectable via psi, and who is trying to get by in depressed and police-dominated Sorrel Park.  She is apprehended and taken to the authorities, who want to use her as a go-between with the Dumplings, though that doesn’t actually happen.

Instead the author launches a very busy plot full of escapes, pursuits, disappearances, captivities, disturbances, threats of massive sabotage of essential government functions, etc.  Midway through, Shandy unspools her big idea: psi talents tend to develop in people who are psychopaths anyway—born juvenile delinquents!  I.e., mesomorphs who have had trouble with the police starting early, who mostly “come from families without very strong morals—often immigrants who have trouble coping with a new country. . . . I’ve heard poverty is a cause of delinquency, but I think these kinds of shiftless, helpless people could be a cause of poverty too. . . .”

After this detour into discredited pseudo-science, the busy plot machine cranks up again, with the Dumplings mostly acting like the natural-born delinquents we’ve been told they are, and at the end most of those who are still alive are back in the Dump behind a more secure force field.  That is, after all the hugger-mugger, the story’s basic problem, young people essentially sentenced to life imprisonment in a barren environment because nobody can control their dangerous talents, is unchanged.  It is suggested that Shandy is the real mutant superperson here, though what that means is unclear. 

Meanwhile, we have never seen the Dumplings and their outcast society—the most interesting part of the set-up—except second-hand, and in melodramatic bursts during their breakout.  It’s all perfectly readable, if you can overlook Gotlieb’s frequently clumsy writing.  (Sample: “She had come to a hard decision, and she silently awarded herself the razz for her sense of its altruism, without stopping the ache.”) It just never adds up to much despite the potentially interesting premise.  Two stars.

The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal


by Schelling

Next up is The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal, by Cordwainer Smith, he of the suddenly soaring reputation.  This one is told in high whimsical tall-tale style, about the eponymous Commander who is dispatched to probe the “outer reaches of our galaxy.” He encounters a colony planet where “femininity became carcinogenic,” so the women all died off and the only means of survival was to turn everyone medically into men, which of course had effects beyond the medical.  Smith describes the results at some length.  Here’s a sample:

“They, themselves, were bearded homosexuals, with rouged lips, ornate earrings, fine heads of hair, and very few old men among them.  They killed off their men before they became old; the things they could not get from love or relaxation or comfort, they purchased with battle and death.  They made up songs proclaiming themselves to be the last of the old men and the first of the new, and they sang their hate to mankind when they should meet, and they sang ‘Woe is earth that we should find it,’ and yet something inside them made them add to almost every song a refrain which troubled even them.

“And I mourn Man!”

One must ask whether this is a glimpse of the far future, or of the author’s insecurities.  We don’t hear much about homosexuals here in this small Kentucky town, and what we do hear amounts to locker room talk.  I wonder if Smith is just passing on the locker room talk of intellectuals.  His extravagant fantasy about people I doubt he knows much about reminds me of some of the strange things people in this mostly segregated town say about Negroes.  Anyway, two stars: a story that started out like a bravura performance, brought down by what reads like gross stereotyping.

Incidentally, the blurb to the story reads like the editor tried to get into the swing of Smith’s sometimes outlandish prose.  I wonder if she just appropriated a piece of the story to serve as a blurb.

The Artist


by Schelling

Rosel George Brown contributes The Artist, a purposefully difficult and unpleasant story about an artist, a stupid and nasty jerk who has become successful by painting what his long-suffering wife sees (it’s not too clear how that works).  Now she sees something strange and frightening in a corner of the room, and rather than have him paint what she sees, she provokes him into getting a stepladder and looking for himself, with unpleasant results (for him anyway).  It’s sort of like that playwright of bad marriages, Edward Albee, meeting H.P. Lovecraft, to mutual dislike.  For lagniappe, the action takes place at a party featuring caricatured secondary characters.  Two stars for making the story seem interesting enough to persevere with it (including a second read) long enough to figure out what is going on. 

According to His Abilities


by Schelling

Another nasty jerk is featured in Harry Harrison’s According to His Abilities, though this one isn’t so stupid, and is also rationalized at the end of the story.  The refined milquetoast DeWitt and the boorish thug Briggs have been dispatched to rescue an Earthman from primitive aliens who are pretty boorish and thuggy themselves.  Briggs’s belligerence wins the day, and there’s a facile revelation about him at the end, of an all too familiar sort.  It’s dreary hackwork executed professionally.  Two stars.

For Every Action


by Adkins

C.C. MacApp’s For Every Action starts with a mildly clever idea, spaceborne life forms around the orbit of Pluto that glom on to spaceships’ rocket exhausts so they can no longer steer accurately, then adds another such idea (a guy could move around in space using a bow and arrow!), and sets them in a silly frame of Cold War suspicion, concluding with a reference to Soviet spacemen (implicitly, drunk) floating in space singing Volga Boat Song (sic).  It’s generically similar to Boiling Point but much weaker.  Two stars, barely.

Planetary Engineering

And of course Ben Bova is back with the latest in his interminable series of fact articles though this one gets no farther than the Moon.  It’s about what people will have to do to establish colonies there, and is frankly a rehash of what we’ve seen not only in dozens of SF stories but in plenty of articles in general-interest magazines, complete with platitudes (“Finally, carving out a human settlement in a literally new world will give man an opportunity to create a new society.” Etc.) and observations so mundane as to be suffocating (“Corridors will no doubt be painted in special color codes, to help travellers find their way.”).  Two stars, largely for good intentions.  Also, no one is insulted here.

The Verdict

So: not much here of much merit, but, as already suggested . . . if you can’t be good, at least find an interesting way to be bad.


by Schelling

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Book, Magazine

[March 13, 1964] NOTHING MUCH TO SAY (the April 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Within Narrow Constraints

The April 1964 issue of Amazing features a story titled Prisoner in Orbit and a cover (by Alex Schomburg) depicting a guy in a transparent bubble, scarcely taller than he, looking out into space with a disgruntled expression.  One might suspect that this depiction is overly literal, but no: it’s just what the author called for.  Or, more likely, the story was written around the cover, an old magazine practice that has undoubtedly survived to the present. 

Prisoner in Orbit, by Henry Slesar

The story is by Henry Slesar, a prolific contributor to Amazing in the late ‘50s and an occasional one since then, though that may be changing: he had a story in the last issue and has two in this one.  Here, humans are fighting against the Maks, the android army of the Indasians, and the protagonist and his soldier buddies have been captured and sent to a prison asteroid, run entirely by the Maks.  The story slips into the familiar groove of prisoner of war stories, with the captives scheming to escape and the Maks trying to keep them in line. 

This old plot is made science-fictional by the rigid mechanical thinking of the Maks, who, after being informed that they really don’t need to kill prisoners who misbehave, since a little solitary confinement will do just as well, devise a confinement so solitary it drives the miscreants crazy.  The cover thus justified, the story moves on to its real business: the war is over, won by the humans so conclusively that there’s no chain of command left to tell the authority-minded Maks to stand down and let the humans go.  How to persuade them? 

Clever solution, coming right up.  Slesar has served a rigorous and prolific apprenticeship in Ellery Queen’s, Alfred Hitchcock’s, and other crime fiction magazines as well as in sf, and it shows.  This is a highly professional if rather bloodless performance, with background deftly sketched in, the pace jazzed up with flashbacks and flash-forwards, in as smooth a style as you’ll find anywhere.  Three stars for slick execution, even if there’s no reason to remember the story once you’re done.

The Chair, by O.H. Leslie

Slesar’s other story, The Chair, appears under his pseudonym O.H. Leslie, familiar from the Ziff-Davis magazines but even more so to the readers of Alfred Hitchcock’s. It is a bit livelier than Prisoner in Orbit but just as formulaic, splitting the difference between early Galaxy satire and the cautionary mode of, say, Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont when they are not writing outright fantasy. 

The eponymous Chair is an expensive commercial product that promises the ultimate in comfort and satisfaction of every need, at least if you get the extras like the Food-o-Mat and the Chem-o-Mat Plumbing Unit.  You can see where that is going, and go it does, with the journalist protagonist chronicling the decline of his friend who gets a Chair, until the manufacturer figures out the perfect way to silence him.  This one too is slickly executed, and enhanced by Slesar’s obvious familiarity with advertising style.  Also there’s more of a point to it and you might remember it a little longer than Prisoner in Orbit.  Three stars, a bit more lustrous than those for Prisoner.

The Other Inhabitant, by Edward W. Ludwig

Of course most of us presumably read sf for something other than slick execution.  But we might miss it when it’s not there, as illustrated by this story, in which Astro-Lieutenant Sam Harding, exploring “Alpha III” (a planet of Alpha Centauri, apparently), discovers that he’s not alone; something is following him.  As the story proceeds we learn that Lt. Harding’s situation is not quite what he thinks it is.  This kind of psychological near-horror stands or falls on execution, and this one falls.  In the hands of a more skilled writer it might have been quite effective.  Two stars.

A Question of Theology, by George Whitley

A. Bertram Chandler, using his frequent pseudonym George Whitley for no apparent reason, contributes A Question of Theology, in which humans are about to land on a planet of Alpha Centauri (yes, that one again), which some time ago was visited by an unmanned vessel carrying experimental animals, and which now seems to have a well-developed civilization with cities.  The humans’ reception is predictable to the reader if not to the characters.  It’s perfectly readable—Chandler is no Slesar but he will serve for most purposes—but it reads as if the author wasn’t really very interested in it, and the theme is unfortunately reminiscent of some of his earlier, much better stories: the incisive The Cage, from Fantasy and Science Fiction seven or so years ago, and Giant Killer, the 1945 Astounding novella that made his reputation.  Two stars.

Sunburst (Part 2 of 3), by Phyllis Gotlieb and The Saga of “Skylark” Smith, by Sam Moskowitz

The rest of the issue is taken up by the second installment of Phyllis Gotlieb’s serial Sunburst, to be reviewed next month, and another of Sam Moskowitz’s SF Profiles: The Saga of “Skylark” Smith.  Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., is of course author of The Skylark of Space and numerous other grandiose space operas of bygone days done in a bygone style, and has failed to adapt to a more sophisticated genre and its audience, as Moskowitz essentially acknowledges.  While some of the biographical detail is interesting, the point is otherwise elusive.  Two stars.

Spectroscope

Last month, the editor proudly announced the advent of Lester del Rey as new proprietor of The Spectroscope, the book review column.  This month, with no comment at all, del Rey is gone and the book reviewer is Robert Silverberg, who is knowledgeable and adept.  Let’s hope he lasts more than a month.

Post-Mortem

So, the upshot: nothing terrible, which compared to recent performance is an improvement, but nothing especially interesting either, except possibly the serial installment.  To be continued.

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Book, Magazine

[February 13, 1964] Deafening (the March 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston


Cover by EMSH

The March 1964 Amazing fairly shouts mediocrity, or worse, before one reads a word of the fiction.  The cover, illustrating Robert F. Young’s story Arena of Decisions, portrays a guy working some sort of keyboard in front of video screens displaying . . . a young woman, a lady as some would have it, and a tiger.  Can it be that Young, having rehashed the Old Testament and moved on to Jack and the Beanstalk, is now recapitulating that silly old Frank Stockton story, The Lady or the Tiger, which so many of us were forced to read in junior high?  And just for lagniappe, the editorial says in passing, “For the female of the sf species who may not be quite sure of her facts, billiards is played with balls and a cue on a flat rectangular table with pockets in each corner and at the middle of the two longer sides.” Always glad to help you ignorant . . . ladies . . . out!

Arena of Decisions, by Robert F. Young

That leads us to page 7, where the Young story begins, and yep, the blurb cops to the Frank Stockton replay right up front.  For anyone who hasn’t read or been told the original story, it involves a criminal justice system (if that’s the right word) in which those accused of serious crimes are forced to choose one of two doors to open.  Behind one of them is a hungry tiger; behind the other, a woman whom the no-longer-accused is required to marry.  The story ends just before the fatal choice, with an element of possible skulduggery added. 

Young does not entirely recapitulate Stockton’s plot, but the gimmick is the same, with extra chicanery added, set on a cartoonish colony planet, all told in a style of arch jocularity that mainly conveys the message “I know I’m wasting your time with this facile and vacant crap—let’s see how long I can keep you going.”

I’m about as tired of slagging Young month after month as I am of reading him.  I didn’t think he was always this bad, so I reread a couple of his early stories in anthologies: Jungle Doctor from Startling Stories in 1955 and The Garden in the Forest from Astounding in 1953.  He wasn’t this bad.  These are not great stories—his weaknesses for cliche and sentimentality are evident—but they are reasonably intelligent and capable, if less polished than his current output, with some interesting substance to them rather than the cynical vacuity of Arena of Decisions and its ilk.  I would never have called Young mighty, but . . . how the respectable have fallen.  One star.

Now Is Forever, by Dobbin Thorpe

Like a breath of fresh breeze in a fetid dungeon, or a slug of Pepto-Bismol to the dyspeptic stomach, comes Now Is Forever by Dobbin Thorpe, reliably reported to be Thomas M. Disch.  Intentionally or not, Forever is a rejoinder to Ralph Williams’s clever but facile Business as Usual, During Alterations, which appeared in Astounding in 1958.  In Williams’s story, portable matter duplicators suddenly appear on Earth, planted no doubt by aliens bent on conquest by destroying our economy, and the heroic store manager instantly sorts out the new economy: starting now, everything is done on credit, but everybody can have credit.  Nothing up my sleeve!  Everybody wins!

Disch starts with the same notion but is of course less sanguine.  He asks what people will live for when the getting-and-spending basis of their lives is suddenly yanked from under them.  The answer is the old and established will cling fiercely and futilely to their old habits, and young people will seek thrills—including death, which is no big deal as long as you duplicate yourself beforehand.  This sharply written and well visualized story just misses excellence by being a little too long and rambling for its point.  Three stars.

Jam for Christmas, Vance Simonds

It’s back downhill with Vance Simonds’s Jam for Christmas, the second story about Everett O’Toole, the “telempathist,” who with the aid of a mutant mongoose and a worldwide psionic network of other humans and animals, can scan the world to see how people are feeling about things.  In this case the world is the Moon, where the now-amalgamated capitalist nations are about to broadcast to Earth the equivalent of a USO show, and the now-amalgamated commies want to jam this display of the vitality of capitalism.  (The commies haven’t quite got the know-how to do their own broadcasts.)

Like its predecessor Telempathy, from last June’s issue, the story is swaddled in layers of satirical performance, much of it focusing on O’Toole’s excessive weight and alcohol consumption, the physical attributes of the show’s star, this year’s Miss Heavenly Body, and other cheap targets.  Some of it is actually pretty funny—while the telempathists are scanning their own area for communist spies, they come upon a covert fascist whose attitude is concisely lampooned—but it mainly serves to pad out what is ultimately a pretty thin and humdrum story.  Two stars.

Sunburst (Part 1 of 3), by Phyllis Gotlieb

That’s all the fiction that is complete in this issue.  The longest item is the first installment of Sunburst, a serial by Phyllis Gotlieb, who has had a handful of stories in these Ziff-Davis magazines and in If.  I usually hold off on serials until all the parts are in, but in my weary quest for something more to redeem this lackluster issue, I read this installment.  The set-up is interesting: in a small midwestern town, a nuclear reactor explosion has resulted in the birth of a cohort of psi-talented mutants, who come into their powers as children and wreck a good part of the town and its police force.  These uncontrollably dangerous tykes are isolated in the “Dump” behind a psi-impervious field whipped up by a handy Nobelist in physics.  Now it’s a decade later; what to do with them? 

It’s a bit amateurish; Gotlieb doesn’t do much to sketch in the background of what living in this now-quarantined town is like or how the quarantine works, and the dialogue and interactions among the characters are pretty unconvincing.  But it gives the sense that she’s getting at something of interest, however clumsily, so I look forward to the rest of it.  No rating, though, until the end.

The Time of Great Dying

Ben Bova departs from his usual cosmological beat for The Time of Great Dying, canvassing the various theories purporting to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs and the ascendancy of mammals at the end of the Mesozoic, including such winners as “racial senescence,” though Bova doesn’t give that one much respect.  He puts his money, or at least his mouth, on the growing prevalence of grasses, for which dinosaurs’ teeth were poorly adapted, though it’s a little unclear why they didn’t evolve more useful teeth over the same time period that the mammals did.  The subject is a little more interesting than usual, but overall it’s about as dull as usual.  Two stars.

The Spectroscope

Book reviewer S.E. Cotts has been replaced by Lester del Rey, to no great effect: there are virtues to having a professional writer as a reviewer, but he contributes no profound insights and is more verbose about it than Cotts.

Loud and Clear

So, overall, the promised mediocrity is delivered, with Mr. Disch again showing flashes of something better, and Gotlieb’s serial extending some hope.  Beyond those two, the wasteland beckons, or fails to.




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[January 12, 1964] SINKING OUT OF SIGHT (the February 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Uh-oh.

The blurb for the lead story in the February 1964 Amazing says: “Once every few years a science fiction story comes along which poses—and probes—philosophical questions: for instance: What is life that Man must live it?  In a novel rich in incident, fascinating of character, John Brunner questions the essential meaning of life and death and purpose.”

That’s the pitch for Brunner’s 74-page “complete novel” The Bridge to Azrael.  The last time we saw such an editorial panegyric, the mountain labored and brought forth—well, not a mouse.  A capybara, maybe.  Anyway, a modestly capable pulp-inflected novella, Daniel F. Galouye’s Recovery Area, not exactly the promised philosophical masterpiece for the ages.  Sort of the same here, but worse: the mountain has labored and brought forth a mess.

But let’s back up.  John Brunner has for years been a mainstay of the British SF magazines, with occasional appearances in the US magazines, growing more frequent in the past couple of years.  His most notable contribution has been a series of solid and unpretentious novellas in the UK’s Science Fantasy, some of which have made their way across the Atlantic to become better-than-usual Ace Doubles, like The 100th Millennium and (my favorite) Echo in the Skull—the top of the line at the bottom of the market.  So news that Brunner had a novella appearing in Amazing was cause for optimism. 

The Bridge to Azrael, by John Brunner

Unfortunately it trips over its pretenses and falls flat.  It is proposed that Earthfolk have gone out to the stars in ships and colonized dozens of planets, with which Earth has since lost touch and which have developed over centuries in wildly varying ways.  Now, however, Earth has FTL travel via a technology called the Bridge, upon which, if the equipment is properly aligned, one can walk across the light-years.  Earth is reopening contact with the the scattered fragments of humanity and trying to bring everyone together by connecting them to the Bridge system.  They’re up to 40 worlds.

This process is presided over by Director Jorgen Thorkild, and we are given to understand that he works very hard at his big and (it says here) “fantastically responsible” job.  However, when he meets with representatives of one of the next two candidates for Bridging, he realizes that one of them isn’t buying it at all, and he starts to go to pieces.  Doesn’t stop, either, and checks into the hospital, overwhelmed with the futility of it all.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to the “programmers.” These are the people charged with scouting and assessing the cultures of the planets to be Bridged, and they are impossibly superior intellectual supermen (if there are women in this clubhouse, they aren’t mentioned).  So completely absorbed in their work are they that they can’t stay interested in anything else, like comely members of the opposite sex who adore them, as we learn from the viewpoint of one of the latter.  But these hyper-competent intellectual powerhouses are ridden with a paralyzing fear of being wrong.  Exactly what will happen if they are wrong is not explained—do they lose their minds?  Commit suicide?  But the very prospect can impair their judgment and lead them into danger (for one of them, a knife in the chest).  Some supermen!

There are plots and subplots here, some of which might be interesting in another context, though the resolution of the reluctant planet problem is irredeemably facile all on its own.  But the two whopping implausibilities just recounted make it difficult to take anything here seriously, and undermine any attempt at grand philosophical argument, if there were one of any coherence.  So Brunner, whose more modest work sometimes transcends its lack of pretense, has tried something pretentious and fallen on his face.  One hopes he takes the lesson.  Two stars, generously.

Beside the Golden Door, by Henry Slesar

There is little succor to be found in the short stories.  The best of them is Henry Slesar’s Beside the Golden Door, a slightly rambling but reasonably agreeable story about extraterrestrials finding a far-future Earth on which humans have gone extinct, leaving artifacts like the one depicted on the cover (one suspects the story was written around the cover) and records that the aliens are able to decipher quickly.  These reveal another story about an earlier wave of aliens who had arrived on Earth seeking refuge after a disaster and were ultimately treated the way humans frequently treat those different from themselves, and there’s an unsurprising revelation at the end that pulls the stories together.  Fine conventional sentiments, adequate if slightly hackneyed execution, three stars.

I Bring Fresh Flowers, by Robert F. Young

From here, it’s downhill.  Next is I Bring Fresh Flowers, marking the return of Robert F. Young, like a recurring influenza epidemic, though this outbreak is at least milder than some.  It’s short, and less of Young is always more.  Rosemary Brooks, a beautiful young woman firmly dedicated to God and the United States, becomes an astronaut (or, as Young of course has it, Astronette), and she accomplishes her mission to orientate (sic!) the satellite that will bring genuine weather control to Earth. 

But something happens during re-entry.  “All that is known is that Rosemary became a falling star.” But not in vain—the weather becomes really fine, all because of her work.  “She is the sun coming up in the morning and the sun going down at night.  She is the gentle rain against your face in spring.” Et cetera, at some length.  In other words, Rosemary has been reincarnated as the pathetic fallacy.  Could be worse.  Has been, in fact.  Two stars.

Heavy, Heavy, by F.A. Javor

Bringing up the rear, or letting it down, is F.A. Javor’s Heavy, Heavy, the tale of a tough guy down on his luck, not as badly written as you might expect, but ending with the revelation of a supposed scientific gimmick so ridiculous as to erase any prior glimmer of merit.  One star.

SF Profile: L. Sprague de Camp: Sword and Sorcery, by Sam Moskowitz

Sam Moskowitz coasts through another SF Profile, L. Sprague de Camp: Sword and Sorcery, as usual with better coverage of his pre-World War II material than his later work, omitting to mention his last several SF novels: The Tower of Zanid (1958), its predecessor The Hand of Zei (1950), and The Glory That Was (1960, magazine 1952), plus two out of three of his major 1950s short stories, A Gun for Dinosaur and Aristotle and the Gun.  (He does mention the other one, Judgment Day.) The commentary is generally superficial and obvious.  Two stars.

Coroner's Report

The cover of this issue, which portrays a deteriorated and morose-looking Statue of Liberty buried up to its armpits, cogently sums up the issue, and, it appears, the state of the magazine generally: sinking out of sight.

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[December 13, 1963] SLOW-DOWN (the January 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The shock of President Kennedy’s assassination remains new and raw in the public consciousness and public discourse, but there are starting to be some discordant notes.  Malcolm X, one of the leaders of the Nation of Islam—the Black Muslims in common parlance—who seems to have appointed himself as the skunk at America’s picnic, was asked about the assassination a couple of weeks ago and described it as a case of “chickens coming home to roost,” which he said “never did make me sad; they've always made me glad.”

Apparently he meant to suggest that the assassination had some relationship to our government’s actions around the world—and of course he is not the only one to make this connection, though it remains to be investigated.  Needless to say he was roundly condemned by everyone in sight, including his own organization, which censured him and barred him from public speaking for three months.

Oh, well.  In Malcolm’s absence, we have the January Amazing to chew on.  Not surprisingly, given this magazine’s manic-depressive history, it is gristlier and less nutritious than last month’s unusually tasty issue.

Speed-Up!, by Christopher Anvil

When a writer seems to have a lock on a high-paying market and suddenly appears in a low-paying one, one of two things has happened: it’s a pretty bad story, or it has hit one of the higher-paying editor’s blind spots.  Or maybe both.  Christopher Anvil has had 21 stories in the SF mags since January 1960, all but three in Analog.  Yet here he is in Amazing, where he’s never appeared before, with Speed-Up! (exclamation point his, or the editor’s). 

This is a story which juggles multiple elements of dubious plausibility, including not one but two psi talents, and only manages to integrate them by blowing the whole thing up, as the cover illustration suggests.  And one of those elements is a movement that thinks science is too dangerous and should be stopped—and is proven right!  On the other hand, it is a pleasant enough read, unlike some of Anvil’s Analog stories: tightly constrained exercises within the confines of editorial expectations, which create a reading experience reminiscent of anoxia.  Two stars.

The Happiness Rock, by Albert Teichner

Albert R. Teichner’s The Happiness Rock is an annoying morality tale of the oh-so-conventional kind, anoxia compounded by anesthesia.  Officer Cramer and Captain Hartley are exploring the asteroids and, landing on one, find silicon dust that makes people happy upon inhalation, without noticeable impairment or physical addiction.  It proves to be a silicon microorganism, but the silicon seems to be quickly metabolized with no lasting effects.  The corrupt Captain keeps the discovery secret and shuts Cramer up, unknowingly abetted by their cartoon military martinet of a superior, who places Cramer in an unlikely status of Probation that keeps him silent, while the Captain takes the dust to his shady friends on Earth to help him covertly market it. 

Cramer struggles to find a way to blow the whistle on this racket.  Why?  Because this seemingly harmless euphoria must exact some terrible price, just because, and of course it does, quite arbitrarily.  The story goes on for 25 pages, most of them unnecessary: mediocre writing skills in the service of cliched thought.  One star.

Skeleton Men of Jupiter, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs is back (one is tempted to say “from the grave, again”) with Skeleton Men of Jupiter, from the February 1943 issue of Amazing, where it should have stayed.  It is labelled a Classic Reprint, but is not decorated or burdened with the usual Sam Moskowitz introduction.  It is another in the series about John Carter of Mars, or Barsoom, and opens with his being kidnapped by the cadaverous characters of the title. 

Oh no.  Not this again.  I read some of the John Carter books a while back, and that seems to be the main plot motivator of Burroughs’s work: kidnappings and captures, followed by the obligatory escape and rescue efforts.  The skeleton men are led, or served, by a red man of Mars, who explains that he is here because his aristocratic girlfriend Vaja was kidnapp…wait a minute.  This is three pages after the first kidnapping.  How many of these are we going to get in this fifty-plus-page story? 

Slogging on: the red man of Mars, U Dan, tells his sad story of servitude in the cause of Vaja to a faction of Jovians, or Sasoomians in ERB’s cosmology, who of course are seeking world domination; they’ve got Sasoom and now they want Barsoom, and are they evil. U Dan says: “They are fiends. . . . when I learned that Vaja would be tortured and mutilated after Multis Par had had his way with her and even then not be allowed to die but kept for future torture, I weakened and gave in.”

Well, life is too short for this.  Literarily speaking, we have moved from the realm of anoxia and anesthesia to that of morbidity and mortality.  In the spirit of the season, bah humbug.  One star and a pile of dust.

Interstellar Flight, by Ben Bova

Those three are the only fiction items in the magazine, anything else having been crowded out by fifty pages of Burroughs.  There is another article by Ben Bova, Interstellar Flight, in which the usually slightly dull author gets positively giddy.  The blurb warns us: “With factual tongue and a lot of imaginative cheek, our man Bova explores the possibility of [title].” And . . . oh no, he’s everywhere!  The article begins with an imaginary TV show panel with an imaginary SF writer, who begins: “Edgar Rice Burroughs, writing some 50 years ago. . . .”

Averting my eyes briefly, I move on.  SF writer says we must go to the stars, physicist says “Impossible!” and explains why, engineer and astronomer chime in with assorted factual constraints, mathematician gets into the act, and the problems of interstellar travel are laid out reasonably neatly.  Then: “ ‘Excuse me,’ said the astronomer.  ‘Have any of you ever heard of the Bussard Interstellar Ramjet?’ ”

Now that you mention it, no.  It’s actually a pretty interesting idea for sublight but very fast travel: take just enough fuel to get moving fast enough (and build a scoop big enough) to take advantage of the clouds of hydrogen gas floating around most places in the galaxy, and use them as fuel for fusion; the faster you go, the more fuel you can gather, so the faster you can go.  This doesn’t solve the problem of relativistic time dilation—but so what?  Somebody will want to go, and maybe take the whole family! Most satisfyingly, Bova concludes: “Edgar Rice Burroughs, hah!”

Well, that was actually informative, and less dull than usual, though slightly marred by the absence of the customary completely inappropriate Virgil Finlay illustration .  Three stars—the brightest spot in this otherwise bleak landscape. 

Summing up

Feh.

Next month, the editor promises a novella by the capable and prolific John Brunner, who has not previously appeared in the magazine, and, one hopes, may provide enough publishable copy to keep away the shade of ERB.

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[November 24, 1963 cont.] Kennedy: Making sense of it all

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CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite reports that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

[You have likely gotten much of your news from one source during this crisis — the television.  Once a junior partner in the new business, TV has come full flower in its coverage of the Kennedy assassination. 

Part of it is propitious timing.  This season, news broadcasts expanded from 15 to 30 minutes.  Steps had already been undertaken to provide live coverage of events, as was demonstrated so shockingly with Jack Ruby's murder of Lee Harvey Oswald just a few hours ago. 

And so, television news has transformed from sideshow to centerpiece.  May we never have to be glued to it for such a spectacle again…]


by John Boston

I learned of the assassination in high school geometry class, after returning to school from lunch. Then I understood why one of the right-wing S.O.B.s among the students had been standing outside the school door as I came in, clasping his hands over his head in the manner of a victorious prize fighter.

Tragedy, drama, outrage, grief.  Yeah, we’re all together, we all agree, at least the reasonable ones among us.  But what next?  What does this mean?

We’ve all heard that this is the American Century, and at least since the end of World War II, the US of A has been riding high internationally, both in public prestige and power and in less obvious ways, exercising its will in more covert fashion in countries all around the world, getting its way with little meaningful challenge.

We are told that the accused assassin lived for several years in the Soviet Union, and that he is involved with something called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee—Cuba, one of the countries the United States tried to dominate, in that case with disastrous results publicly exposed.  Is the murder of our President a response to our government’s covert activity in Cuba, or in the world generally?

We do not know and we may never know.  But this terrible event is America’s first significant reminder since Pearl Harbor that it does not look down on the world from a protected height and is not immune either to the sweep of history or to its caprice.  Will our government and people take the lesson and conduct themselves circumspectly in the world, for example in Vietnam, where there seems to be developing an open-ended American commitment to prop up a government as incompetent as it is undemocratic, regardless of cost or consequences?

We will all know soon enough.

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[November 13, 1963] Good Cop (the December 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Amazing is starting to resemble a good cop/bad cop routine, and this December 1963 issue is brought to us by the good cop. 

The cover story is To Plant a Seed, a longish novelet by Neal Barrett, Jr., in which this still fairly new writer earnestly wrestles with one of the more familiar plots in SF’s cupboard: Earthfolks go starfaring, encounter colorful primitive aliens, usually highly religious; observe them under a strict rule of noninterference; then the aliens start doing really strange stuff.  After the mystery is milked for a while, the revelation: typically, the aliens aren’t so primitive after all, or at least they are the remnants of something greater. 

Here the aliens are the barely humanoid Kahrii, who cultivate the Shari, plants which are the only other life form here on the extremely hot and otherwise barren Sahara III (and how likely is that ecology?).  The Shari provide their food, clothing, and everything else they have.  So why have they suddenly cut down their entire crop and begun using the pieces to build something in this desert that looks like a boat, which they could never have seen?  And should the human observers break the command against interfering to stop this racial suicide?  Barrett wrings a decent amount of suspense out of these questions; one knows generally what is going to happen, but why and how remain interesting enough. 

As for the human observers: these are Gito, the assigned observer (male of course), and Arilee, whose job title is Mistress, the latest of several in Gito’s career.  But she’s pretty smart for a Mistress—a Nine, in fact, on some completely unexplained social ranking scale—and Gito has allowed her to wander around the tunnels of the Kahrii and make her own observations.  Despite her formal designation as a male plaything, she is a significant actor in the story, and she ultimately saves Gito’s bacon.  And in fact that’s part of Barrett’s point, that she transcends the condescending role she occupies.  But it’s still frustrating and annoying to see a reasonably capable SF writer displaying more imagination in devising a completely alien society than in thinking about the likely future of his own.  Aside from that, this is a pretty solid performance on a well-established theme.  Three stars, towards the top of the range.

The other novelet is The Days of Perky Pat by Philip K. Dick, who has now had stories in three consecutive issues.  This one is far better than the others, which I described as resembling rambling stand-up routines.  Here he reverts to his long-standing preoccupation with life after catastrophe, in this case, as in many others, a nuclear war.  The characters, called “flukers” because it’s only by a fluke that they survived, live underground in the old fallout shelters, kept alive by the grace of the “careboys,” mollusk-like Martians who drop food and other goods to sustain the flukers’ lives. 

The adult humans are completely preoccupied with Perky Pat, a blonde plastic doll that comes with various accessories including boyfriend, which the flukers have supplemented with various improvised objects in their “layouts,” which seem to be sort of like a Monopoly board and sort of like a particularly elaborate model train setup.  On these layouts, they obsessively play a competitive game, running Perky Pat and her boyfriend through the routines of life before the war, while their kids run around unsupervised on the dust- and rock-covered surface chasing down mutant animals with knives.

Obviously the author has had an encounter with a Barbie doll complete with accessories, and didn’t much care for it.  This is as grotesque a black comedy as you’ll find, with plot developments reminiscent of Robert Sheckley, but not at all played for yocks.  Some years ago Anthony Boucher reviewed one of Dick’s books and used the phrase “the chilling symbolism of absolute nightmare.” Here it’s mixed with over-the-top satire and is still pretty chilling.  Four stars.

F.A. Javor’s Killjoy is a rather short story on another familiar theme: Earthfolk starfaring to find exotic alien fauna and hunt and kill it, with a twist that will probably be morally satisfying to many.  But the whole thing is hyper-contrived.  Two stars.

The oddest item in the issue is The God on the 36th Floor by Herbert D. Kastle, who has had a scattered handful of stories in the SF magazines (many more in other genres), but also edited the last two issues of Startling Stories, for what that may be worth.  His main credentials, though, are contemporary novels, mostly original paperbacks, with titles like One Thing On My Mind and Bachelor Summer.  So it’s not surprising that this story doesn’t read much like what you’d find in an SF magazine; it’s more like something adapted from a script for The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. 

Protagonist Der (a nickname) works in Public Relations in a big company, but he’s had some sort of breakdown and can’t actually function any more.  Through happenstance he’s managed to stay on, collecting his salary and pretending to do a nonexistent job.  But a new man, Tzadi, shows up and seems to know a lot about him, and everybody else too.

Further interaction with the mysterious Tzadi suggests that Der is at even more risk than he feared; and things keep moving until we are in the territory of such paranoia epics as Heinlein’s They and Dick’s Time Out of Joint.  So it’s another familiar idea, but nicely developed through dialogue and visualization, not to mention unobtrusively slick writing.  Three stars, again near the top of the range. 

The issue’s biggest surprise is H.B. Fyfe’s The Klygha, which features more spacefaring Earth explorers (I refuse to say Terrans like the author; nobody but SF writers will ever use that word), lobster-like inhabitants of the planet they are exploring, another spacefaring explorer from somewhere else entirely (the Klygha), a cat, lots of telepathy, and some hidden motives. 

I am not saying more because the author has juggled these absolutely stock elements from the back pages of the last decade’s SF magazines into an extremely clever construction, and much of the pleasure of it initially is just figuring out what’s going on, in a way a little reminiscent of Bester’s Fondly Fahrenheit. It’s not quite on that level, but it’s certainly a little tour de force, much better than the other Fyfe stories I’ve read, mostly in Astounding and Analog, which are clever enough but entirely too gimmicky and superficial.  Four stars.

Sam Moskowitz is back with another “SF Profile,” Fritz Leiber: Destiny x 3, one of his better efforts: he doesn’t say anything overtly wrong or ridiculous, there are no gross offenses against the English language that cannot be attributed to Amazing’s proofreading, and (unlike his usual practice) he gives as much attention to Leiber’s recent work as to that of the ‘30s and ‘40s.  Indeed he goes so far as to describe Leiber’s latest novel, called The Wanderer, which has not even been published yet.  The title refers to the fact that Leiber has had two significant hiatuses in SF writing and thus has started his career three times, and also to an early novella titled Destiny Times Three, which deserves neither its present obscurity nor Moskowitz’s over-praise.  While Moskowitz skips over some of Leiber’s more significant work, that probably has as much to do with space limitations as his preference.  Three stars.

And just to put a cap on it, I read The Spectroscope, the book review column by S.E. Cotts, who generally gets little respect . . . and it’s not bad!  These are fairly perceptive reviews despite Cotts’ slightly stuffy manner.  No stars, since we don’t ordinarily comment on these things at all, but another pleasant surprise.

So: this is certainly the best issue of Amazing this year; in fact, you have to go back to March and April 1962 to find anything comparable.  But the bad cop, as always, lurks outside the interrogation room, slapping his blackjack into his palm.  Next month, we are promised more Edgar Rice Burroughs.

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[October 12, 1963] WHIPLASH (the November 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

In all the excitement last month about August’s civil rights march, I forgot to mention the other big news that has reached from Washington all the way to small town Kentucky.  On the first day of school, my home room teacher, sad expression on her face, informed the class that because of the Supreme Court’s decision, issued after the end of the last school year, barring official religious exercises in public schools , we would no longer be able to have prayer and Bible reading at the beginning of each school day.  

What a relief!  But I kept a straight face and eyes front and was thankful that the authorities here decided just to obey the law.  I gather in some places, mostly farther south, the peasants are out with torches and pitchforks. Anyway, one down. Fortunately, we only have to say the Pledge of Allegiance in assemblies every month or two, rather than every school day as is the case in some places.  So it’s a relatively minor annoyance. What a blessing this modern Supreme Court has been. It makes all the right people angry.

The November Amazing doesn’t make me angry, just bored, at least to begin.  It is dominated by Savage Pellucidar, a long novelet by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the fourth and last in a series of which the first three appeared in Amazing in 1942.  This one has been sitting in Burroughs’s safe for two decades, says Sam Moskowitz’s brief introduction. (ERB died in 1950.)

The story is set in Burroughs’s version of the hollow Earth, with land and oceans and a sun in the middle, in which various characters traverse the land- and sea-scapes mostly looking for each other, fending off several varieties of dangerous wildlife (reptilian and mammalian alike) and other perils, as the author cuts from plot line to plot line to maximize the suspense that can be wrung from this rather tired material.  The obvious question: is why wasn’t this story published along with the others? One might guess that it was rejected—or perhaps Burroughs lacked the temerity even to submit it.

There is certainly evidence here that the author had grown a bit tired of the whole enterprise and had difficulty taking it seriously.  One of the characters, a feisty young woman named O-aa, nearly falls to her death after escaping the fangs of a clutch of baby pterodactyls, saving herself by grabbing a vine: “ ‘Whe-e-oo!’ breathed O-aa.”  Burroughs would have been pushing 70 when he wrote this. I gather his once impressive rate of production had slowed pretty drastically by the early 1940s. Maybe he was just too old and tired by then to produce even at his previous level of conviction, and had just enough discernment left to toss this in the safe and forget about it—unlike his heirs.  One yawning star.

Or maybe I am just a cranky voice in the wilderness, or far out to sea.  I see the Editorial celebrating the “astounding revitalization of Edgar Rice Burroughs,” and on the facing page a full-page ad for the new Canaveral Press editions of Burroughs—11 volumes published, eight more coming shortly, including one with the four Amazing novelets of which this one is the last.  Catch the wave! Thanks but no thanks. Humbug for me, shaken not stirred.

So, what’s left to salvage here?  There are three longish short stories, starting with Harry Harrison’s Down to Earth, which begins as an earnest near-space hardware opera, and continues with the astronauts returning from Moon orbit to an Earth—specifically, a Texas—in which the Nazis are in the end stages of conquering the world, though the beleaguered Americans quickly snatch the bewildered astronauts away from the invaders.  A superannuated Albert Einstein appears, stealing the show and providing a solipsistic handwaving explanation. Matters speed to a predictably unpredicted conclusion. Most writers would have stretched this material at least to Ace Double length; Harrison crams it into a very fast-moving short story, and good for him. There’s nothing especially original here, but four stars for audacious presentation.

Philip K. Dick contributes his second story in two months, What'll We Do with Ragland Park?, which despite its title is not about urban planning, but is a sequel to last month’s Stand-By.  Maximilian Fischer is still President, and he’s thrown the news clown Jim Briskin in jail.  Communications magnate Sebastian Hada is scheming from his stronghold (“demesne” as the author calls it) near John Day, Oregon, to spring Briskin so Briskin can revitalize Hada’s failing network.  To the same end, he recruits Ragland Park, a folksinger, whose songs tend to come true, and uses Park’s compositional talent for his own ends before realizing how dangerous it is.

There’s plenty else going on, such as Hada’s consultations with his psychoanalyst, Dr. Yasumi, who speaks in cliched semi-broken English (“Pretty sad that big-time operator like Mr. S. Hada falling apart under stress.”), and the unexplained fact that Hada has eight wives, one of whom is psychotic and is brought back from her residence on Io on 24 hours’ notice by the President to try to assassinate Hada.  There are also things inexplicably not going on, like the alien invasion fleet which is mentioned in passing but doesn’t seem to be doing anything, or maybe the characters just don’t care. By any rational standard, this is a terrible story: loose, rambling, and arbitrary, in sharp contrast to Harrison’s tightly written and constructed story, or for that matter Dick’s own Hugo-winning The Man in the High Castle.  But Dick’s woolly satirical ramblings are still clever and entertaining, like Stand-By more comparable to a stand-up routine than what we usually think of as a story. Three stars.

Almost-new author Piers Anthony—one prior story, in Fantastic a few months ago—is present with Quinquepedalian, which is just what it sounds like: a story about an extraterrestrial animal with five feet.  Monumentally large animal, very large feet, with which it is trying to stomp the space-faring protagonist to death, not without reason. And it seems to be intelligent. How to communicate that it is pursuing a fellow sophont, and persuade it to let bygones be bygones? This one is for anyone who says there are no new ideas in SF, for certain values of “idea.”  Four stars for ingenuity and a different kind of audacity than Harrison’s.


   
Ben Bova, whom I am beginning to think of as the 60-cycle hum of Amazing, has the obligatory science article, The Weather in Space, pointing out that the vacuum of space is no such thing; there’s matter there (though not much by our standards), plenty of energy at least this close to a star, plasma (i.e., ionized gas), the solar wind, solar flares, etc.  This is accompanied by perhaps the most inapposite Virgil Finlay illustration yet for this series of articles. This piece is more interesting than most to my taste, or maybe just better suited to my degree of ignorance; I found it edifying, though Bova remains a moderately dull writer. Three stars.

Well, that was bracing.  What’s the cliche? The night is darkest just before the dawn?  Something like that, anyway. From the doldrums of ERB to three pretty decent short stories, in nothing flat and 130 pages.   But I could do without the whiplash.

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[September 13, 1963] COMING UP FOR AIR (the October 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

So, there was a big civil rights march in Washington—quarter of a million people, the papers say. Lots of eloquent speeches and fine sentiments. It could make you think that the racial caste system that America was built on is finally starting to change. But I wonder. I work after school and on Saturdays at the local public library here in this small Kentucky town. Every now and then some of my fellow high school students drop in and spend some time at the magazine rack. One of the magazines they always look at is Ebony, which as you probably know is sort of a Life magazine for the Negro community: large-sized and glossy, with articles about famous or distinguished Negroes, social problems of interest, etc. It runs the same ads as Life and other slick magazines, but with Negro models.

These students leaf through Ebony looking at the ads, and snickering. Nothing is more hilarious to them than a Negro wearing a well cut suit, sipping an expensive whiskey, or behind the wheel of a prestigious car. These scoffers are not the local hoodlums; they are kids from respected families who make good grades and don’t get in trouble with the police—the Leaders of the Twenty-First Century, as they like to put it on the Mickey Mouse Club.

So marches in Washington are nice, and the proposed civil rights legislation will be great if it passes, but how much difference are they going to make along the back roads of Kentucky and similar places where attitudes like these prevail? I guess we’ll know in a few decades.

The October 1963 Amazing, on the other hand, is right here and we can pass judgment now. It’s a considerable improvement over last month’s, since there’s nothing in it that’s grossly stupid or offensive (Robert F. Young is nowhere in sight.) There’s nothing outstanding either, but at least some of this material falls short in more interesting ways than usual.

The lead story is Cordwainer Smith’s Drunkboat . Smith’s last seven stories—his production over the past three years—have all appeared in Galaxy, If, or Fantasy & Science Fiction, and this one’s appearance in Amazing strongly suggests that it was rejected by those higher-paying and at least slightly more prestigious outlets. It’s not hard to see why: it’s a mess. On the other hand, a Cordwainer Smith mess is more interesting than many other authors’ successes.

Sometimes with Smith, there is in the end a fairly straightforward story, but it’s told backwards or sideways, and swathed in stylistic antics and bizarre inventions, and the reader’s task is to appreciate them without becoming too distracted to figure out what the hell is going on. Here, the basic idea is one you hear every day on Top 40 radio, 30 or 40 times if you leave it on long enough: guy wants his baby back. Another guy, a Lord of the Instrumentality, has figured out a way to exploit this desire into a world(s)-changing discovery. To get there, you navigate a series of flash-backs and –forwards; an absurd if lively series of events at a hospital of the future, which offers some of the more bizarre medical techniques ever proposed; and a court of inquiry of the Lords of the Instrumentality, along with a rather alarming expository lump about how the Instrumentality actually operates. Much of this is told in a rather affected style that lies somewhere between saga and baby-talk. (First sentence: “Perhaps it is the saddest, maddest, wildest story in the whole long history of space.”)

The problem is the center doesn’t hold.  The distractions overcome the story rather than seasoning it; it’s basically out of control. On the other hand, maybe that’s the point: the main character (the guy looking for his love) is called Artyr Rambo, seemingly named after a French poet who I gather was pretty far out of control himself. He was also fond of absinthe, which may have something to do with the story’s title (otherwise very poorly accounted for).

Anyway, three stars for the entertainment value of sorting it all out. A nod also goes to cover artist Lloyd Birmingham, who picks up on the story’s overtones of childishness with a cover that reflects a close reading of the story and is done in a style reminiscent of what children might do with scissors, construction paper, and glue, though of course much more complex and better executed.

The other novelet represents (be very afraid) the Return of the Classic Reprints, in the form of The Prince of Liars by one L. Taylor Hansen, from the October 1930 Amazing. The L is allegedly for Louise, though Sam Moskowitz says in his introduction that it’s not clear whether Louise actually wrote the several stories under this byline or whether she was fronting for her brother. This question might be more interesting if the story were. It starts out with a disquisition on relativity, then turns into a drawing-room frame story in which the narrator recounts what he was told by a mysterious character whose rooms are full of old books and artifacts.

The story proper starts out with more about relativity, then segues into one about a young Greek man, kidnapped by pirates, who escapes and takes refuge in a temple, where he encounters an extraordinarily beautiful woman, who isn’t what she seems, and soon enough he’s on an alien spaceship, and relativity comes back into play, etc. etc. It’s quite well written and is more the stuff of 1900-vintage scientific romance than of 1930s magazine SF, halfway between Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs I suppose, but lacking the intellectual incisiveness that keeps Wells interesting even at this late date. Three stars for literacy and readability, but pretty dated.

Philip K. Dick is here with his first short SF in almost four years, Stand-By . He’s been busy in the interim with his Hugo-winning novel The Man in the High Castle and with All We Marsmen, now being serialized in Worlds of Tomorrow.  He's also, rumor has it, made a few unsuccessful attempts at contemporary novels. Stand-By starts with a brilliant small notion: the news clown (can’t you just see it down the road?) but then mostly throws it away. Instead, we are shown a world in which the American Presidency is occupied by a computer, with a stand-by President in case Unicephalon goes out of commission.

Stand-by dies, and his place is taken by lazy schlumpf Max Fischer, because he’s next on the union seniority list. Then Unicephalon goes on the blink, so it’s Max into the breach just as an extraterrestrial invasion fleet breezes into the Solar System. Unqualified President Max learns to enjoy power and its abuses in ways that I am sure could never happen here. News clown Jim Briskin becomes his completely serious antagonist, and upon Unicephalon’s resuscitation, Max is out and the alien invasion fades into the background. This reads more like a rambling stand-up routine than a story, but nonetheless it’s clever, amusing, and readable enough. Three stars, and a hope that Dick regains the form of some of his older and more penetrating stories like Autofac and The Father-Thing.

Roger Zelazny is back with The Misfit , a minor item on a familiar theme that might seem better if we didn’t know he’s capable of more. Protagonist is trapped in an artificial reality; he wants out to the real one; how will he know if he’s found it? Zelazny has the good sense to keep it very short. Three stars for insubstantiality well turned.

Larry Eisenberg contributes his second SF story, The Fastest Draw, which is clever but contrived and a bit turgid. An electronics genius is hired to perfect a simulated old-West gunfighter game for an eccentric millionaire and succeeds too well. For something this trivial, Eisenberg should take lessons in brevity from Zelazny—then maybe he’d rate more than two stars.

Sam Moskowitz has another SF Profile, this one of Edmond Hamilton, which is well below his usual standard both in substance and execution. It ignores major stretches of Hamilton’s career (all of the 1950s,  and most of the 1940s, and his entire engagement with comic books) and is also execrably written, even for klunkmeister Moskowitz. Consider this sentence: “Romance and marriage was approached via many delays and detours.” Two stars, Sam, and you’re getting off easy. Don’t come back until you take some remedial English!

So, once more, this magazine seems to be looking up. But . . . from the Coming Next Month squib: “From the long-locked safe of Edgar Rice Burroughs comes a never-before-published manuscript” in which the protagonists “sail the fiery seas of Molop Az in the search for Hodon the Fleet One and Dian the Beautiful”! I’m scheduling my lobotomy now.

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[August 12, 1963] WET BLANKET (the September 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

[Want to talk to the Journey crew and fellow fans?  Come join us at Portal 55! (Ed.)]

Just as I feared, the September 1963 Amazing marks the return, after too short an absence, of Robert F. Young, who in Boarding Party moves on from his twee recapitulations of the Old Testament to, I kid you not, Jack and the [REDACTED] Beanstalk.  Alien space traveler needs to enrich the soil in the on-ship farm, finds an out-of-bounds planet with the right kind of dirt, and lowers a big tube to suck it up; but one of the natives (those protected by the out-of-bounds designation) climbs the tube, and makes off with a “Uterium 5 Snirk Bird, a Toy Friddle-fork, and Two Containers of Yellow Trading Disks,” it says here.  The aliens all have names of four syllables separated by hyphens, and you can fill in the blanks for this one.  One guttering star—a tiny red dwarf at best.

But the issue opens with Poul Anderson’s Homo Aquaticus, illustrated on the cover by a swimmer with a menacing look and a more menacing trident, next to a nicely-rendered fish, in one of artist Lloyd Birmingham’s better moments.  This is one of Anderson’s atmospheric stories, its mood dominated by Anglo-Saxon monosyllables.  No, not those—I mean fate, guilt, doom, that sort of thing.  The story’s tone is set in the first paragraph, in which the protagonist “thought he heard the distant blowing of a horn.  It would begin low, with a pulse that quickened as the notes waxed, until the snarl broke in a brazen scream and sank sobbing away.”

This is rationalized as the wind in the cliffs, but we know better.  The good (space)ship Golden Flyer and its crew have been sentenced to roam the galactic hinterlands after some of their number betrayed other ships of the Kith, a starfaring culture separated from planetary cultures by relativistic time dilation.  Right now they’re looking at what used to be a colony planet, but all they see is ruins, until their encounter with the colony’s descendants, as given away by the title.  In the end, doom and fate are tempered with rationality and mercy.  Three stars, but towards the top of Anderson’s middling range.

After these two short stories, there is only one other piece of fiction in the issue, A. Bertram Chandler’s long novella The Winds of If, an entry in what now seems to be a series about goings-on on the Rim (of the galaxy), with a couple of magazine stories and a novel, The Rim of Space, already published.  The plot: tramp space freighter is about ready for the knackers, or breakers, or whatever, but the crew gets hired by a Commodore Grimes to take an experimental ship on a long flight—a lightjammer, propelled by the pressure of light against large sails. 

Two women, a journalist and an engineer, are added to the crew, which already includes one woman.  Soap opera ensues, and one of the women decides to present her inamorata with a really special gift—genuine faster-than-light travel.  The lightjammer is by now at 0.9 per cent of light speed, so a little push should put it over, right?  Like a bucket of gunpowder detonated at the stern?

I’m really not the one to judge—hey, I’m still a couple of years away from high school physics—but hasn’t Chandler stumbled into a sort of relativistic Fool’s Mate here?  There’s an obvious arithmetical problem; wouldn’t you need a lot more 9s after that decimal point to get close enough to c for such a little push to put you over?  But more importantly, doesn’t matter get more massive the closer you get to c, meaning a corresponding increase in inertia would defeat any attempt to sneak over the line with a little added acceleration?  Where’s Julio Gomez when you need him?

Anyway, in the story it works, and it precipitates the characters into a series of strange experiences which I won’t detail, save to say that the soap opera intensifies and permutates, and we get a good dose of low-level male-chauvinism as the women prove slaves to their emotions.  Aside from that, it’s smoothly written and perfectly readable if you don’t have anything better to do, but that and the cartoon science get it two stars.  Also, the characters smoke cigarettes.  A lot.  On board an enclosed vessel that has only the air it can bring with it or manufacture in flight.  How likely is it that smoking would be tolerated on a long-haul spaceship?  Inquiring minds think that’s about as silly as the gunpowder-bucket FTL drive.

This month’s non-fiction piece is Ben Bova’s article Neutrino Astronomy—reasonably informative but dull, and briefly worse than dull as he unveils the Useless Simile of the Month.  One section of the article is headed The Stellar Pituitary Gland, and it says here: “Neutrinos might well control the aging process in the Sun, much as the pituitary gland is suspected to regulate aging in human beings.” P’tooey!  Two stars.

So, once again, Amazing brightened up for a month, with several excellent stories last month, but now as usual the wet blanket of mediocrity has descended again. 




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