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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 22, 1965] Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (November 1965 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Days of Our Lives

I'm stealing the name of a new soap opera, due to premiere on NBC next month, because it sums up the way that past, present, and future came together in the news this month.

Yale University put an item known as the Vinland Map on public display on October 12. This is a map of the world, said to date back to the Fifteenth Century, which seems to indicate that Norsemen visited the Americas long before Christopher Columbus. In case you're wondering about the date, it was Columbus Day, in a nice bit of irony.


A detail of the Vinland Map. That's Greenland to the right, and a chunk of North America to the left.

As you might expect, there's controversy over whether this is the real thing or a forgery. Today, nobody knows for sure if this visitor from yesterday is genuine, but maybe we'll find out tomorrow.

If authentic, the Vinland Map is a voice from the past. In a similar way, folks in the present are trying to send a message to the future.

On October 16, the penultimate day of the New York World's Fair, a time capsule was lowered into the ground. (A similar object was buried nearby, during the 1939 World's Fair.) It is scheduled to be opened in the year 6939. (I'm a little skeptical as to whether such a thing can really survive and be found nearly five thousand years from now, but I like the idea.) The contents include . . . well, see for yourself.


People in that distant era will also know that we weren't very careful about spelling.

The Beatles seem destined to represent the artistic achievements of our time, if somebody actually finds the time capsule, opens it, and figures out how to play a record. They are once again at the top of the American popular music charts this month, and show no signs of leaving that position any time soon.

The latest smash from the Liverpool lads is, appropriately, called Yesterday. Unlike their other hits, it's a slow, melancholy song about lost love. Paul McCartney plays acoustic guitar and sings, backed by a string quartet. The other Beatles do not perform on the record, so it's really a McCartney solo performance.


By the way, Act Naturally is a remake of a Number One song by Buck Owens. The Beatles go Country-Western!

Flipping Through the Calendar

Given the peculiarities of the publishing business, it's no surprise that I'm reading the November issue of Fantastic in October. With their policy of filling about half the magazine with reprints, it's also not a shock to discover that we go back in time to fill up the pages. First up, however, is a new story set in a strange world that mixes up the past and the present.


Cover art by Julian S. Krupa. It's actually taken from the back cover of the July 1939 issue of Amazing Stories.


Look familiar? We'll hear more about the Space Devastator later.

Axe and Dragon (Part One of Three), by Keith Laumer


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

Our hero is one Lafayette O'Leary, an ordinary working stiff, living in a crummy boarding house. He has a lot of intellectual curiosity, performing experiments in his tiny room and reading obscure books. He happens to find a Nineteenth Century volume on hypnotism, and learns about a technique whereby he can experience a dreaming state, while remaining aware that he is dreaming, and exercising some control over it.

(This isn't so crazy a premise as it might seem. More than fifty years ago, the Dutch psychiatrist Frederik Willem van Eeden coined the term lucid dream for such states of mind.)

Of course, he gives it a try. He winds up in a world that seems to be a bit medieval, a touch Eighteenth Century, a tad modern, and partly straight out of a fairy tale. The limitations on his ability to alter this dream world — if that's what it is — show up when he tries to give himself a set of fancy modern clothes, and winds up dressed like somebody in a swashbuckling movie.


Lafayette, ready for action.

At first, he enjoys the situation, happily replacing the lousy wine in a tavern with fine Champagne. Thought to be a wizard, he gets mixed up with the local equivalent of the cops. Still thinking this is just a dream, he tries to disappear, with only partial success.


Our hero tries to vanish, but can't quite do it.

Lafayette winds up in the palace of the King, where he is thought to be a prophesized hero, destined to save the realm from an ogre and a dragon. He also meets the King's magician, who seems to know more about what's going on than he admits. For one thing, he's responsible for the steam-powered coaches and electric lights in this otherwise nontechnological world.


The magician looks on as Lafayette admires himself.

Eventually, our hero meets the King's beautiful daughter, as well as the master swordsman who is her current boyfriend. Jealousy rears its head, and a challenge to a duel arises.

Lafayette assumes that his opponent, like everybody else in this world, is just a product of his imagination. Therefore, he reasons, the foe can't really be any better with a sword than he is. It looks like he might be in for an unpleasant surprise.


Tune in again for the next exciting chapter!

So far, at least, the tone of this novel is very light. Laumer almost seems to be parodying his own tales of the Imperium, with the protagonist finding himself in alternate realities. Unlike those serious stories, this one is a comedy. The people inhabiting the dream world speak in a mixture of archaic language and modern slang. The police are about as effective as the Keystone Kops. It's entertaining enough to keep me reading, but hardly profound.

Three stars.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Ray Bradbury

The rest of the magazine consists of stuff from the old days, both the prose and the art. First we have a piece with a title that is fitting for my chosen theme. It comes from the May 1947 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones, for what looks like a very odd story.

The protagonist is a would-be writer, reduced to pawning his typewriter due to his failure to find his way into print. (Surely based on the author's own early years, I assume.) He comes home to find a strange device. It sends him messages from the far future.


Illustration by Virgil Finlay.

Tomorrow's world is a dreary place, under the rule of a brutal dictator. A woman sent the machine back in time, insisting that the writer kill the remote ancestors of the tyrant. If he doesn't, the woman will be executed. If he does, the future will change, and she won't remember him at all. Since he's fallen in love with her, he will lose her either way. Besides this dilemma, he faces the moral crisis of murdering two innocent people.

This early work shows Bradbury developing his style, although it is not yet fully formed. You may think that's a good thing or a bad thing. Either way, it's got some emotional appeal, some passages of poetic writing, some implausibilities, and some lapses in logic. The ethical problem at the heart of the story — would you kill Hitler's ancestors? — is an important one, but here it's mostly used as a plot point.

Three stars.

I'm Looking for "Jeff", by Fritz Leiber

From the Fall 1952 issue of Fantastic comes this horror story, created by a master of the macabre (and other things.)


Cover art by Leo Summers. The Capote story is his very early work Miriam, which is a fine, eerie tale.

A bartender claims that a mysterious woman shows up regularly, although the owner of the joint can't see her. The reader is aware right from the start that she's a ghost.


Illustration by Emsh.

She uses her feminine wiles to pick up a customer, offering her affection in return for a promise to do something particularly violent to somebody named Jeff. The fellow, entrapped by her seductive charms — even the scar that runs across her face doesn't mar her beauty — agrees. He encounters Jeff, and makes a terrifying discovery.

There are no surprises in this variation on the classic theme of vengeance from beyond the grave. What elevates it above the usual ghost story is truly fine writing. The woman's first appearance, when she is a barely detectable wisp, is particularly fascinating.

Four stars.

Wild Talents, Inc., by Robert Sheckley

The September/October 1953 issue of Fantastic supplies this comic yarn.


Cover art also by Leo Summers, what little you can see of it.

As you'd expect, the company named in the title deals with people who have psychic powers. It's pretty much an employment agency for such folks. Their latest client presents a problem.


Illustration by Emsh

It seems the fellow can observe anyone, at any location. Unfortunately, he's very much an oddball. His only interest is in recording their sexual activities in excruciating detail. The guy in charge of the company has to figure out a way to protect the public from this Peeping Tom, while making use of his peculiar ability in an acceptable way.

The whole thing is pretty much a mildly dirty, mildly clever, mildly amusing joke. You might see it as a spoof of the kind of psi-power stories that appear in Analog far too often. A minor effort from an author who is capable of much sharper satire.

Two stars.

Tooth or Consequences, by Robert Bloch

Another comedy, this time from the May 1950 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Arnold Kohn

It starts off like a joke. A vampire walks into a dentist's office . . .. It seems even the undead need to have their cavities filled. The vampire also swipes blood from the supply kept refrigerated in the same medical building. When the red stuff is then secured under lock and key, to prevent further thefts, the vampire tells the dentist he better get some of it for him, or else. There's a twist at the end you may see coming.

I suppose there's a certain Charles Addams appeal to the image of a fanged monster sitting in a dentist's chair. Otherwise, there's not much to this bagatelle.

Two stars.

The Eye of Tandyla, by L. Sprague de Camp

We go back to the May 1951 issue of Fantastic Adventures for this sword-and-sorcery yarn, one of a handful of stories in the author's Pusadian series. (The best-known one is probably the novel The Tritonian Ring, also from 1951.)


Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones

The setting is far back in time, long before recorded history. (The story goes that de Camp wanted to create a background similar to the one appearing in Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan, but in a more realistic fashion.) A wizard and a warrior must steal a magical gem from the statue of a goddess for their King, or be executed. Their plan involves disguising themselves with sorcery and sneaking into the place.


Illustration by Virgil Finlay.

To their amazement, it proves to be really easy to grab the jewel. So simple, in fact, that they smell a rat. They cook up a scheme to put the gem back in its place, steal a similar one from another place, and present that one to the King instead. Complications ensue.

You can tell that this isn't the most serious story in the world. The plot resembles a farce, with its multiple confusions and running back and forth. It's got the wit often found in Fritz Leiber's work of this kind, but not quite the same elegance. I'd say it's above the level of John Jakes, or even — dare I say it? — Howard himself, if not quite up to the very high standard of Leiber.

Three stars.

Close Behind Him, by John Wyndham

The January/February issue of Fantastic is the source of this chiller.


Cover art by Robert Frankenberg. The so-called new story by Poe is actually Robert Bloch's completion of a fragment.

Two crooks rob the house of a very strange fellow. The guy catches one of them in the act, so the hoodlum kills him.


Illustration by Paul Lundy.

The pair make their getaway, but are followed by blood-red footprints wherever they go. You can bet things won't go well for them.

This is a pretty decent horror story, nicely written, although — once again! — not up to the level of Fritz Leiber, particularly since we've got an example of his excellent work in the field of tales of terror in this very issue.

Three stars.

Space Devastator, by Anonymous

I'm not sure if I should even mention this tiny article, excerpted from the pages of the July 1939 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Robert Fuqua.

Anyway, it's less than a page long, and speculates about a huge station in orbit, equipped with a bunch of big mirrors.


Illustration by Julian S. Krupa

The notion is that such a thing could destroy entire populations from space by focusing the sun's rays and burning up cities. Casual mention is made of the fact that it could supply solar energy as well. I suppose it's imaginative for 1939, but it's so short — the original version was probably somewhat longer — that you can't get much out of it.

Two stars.

What Day is Good for You?

Today comes out a big winner over Yesterday and Tomorrow in this month's Fantastic. Leiber's contemporary ghost story is clearly superior to tales set in the future or in the legendary past. Otherwise, this isn't that great an issue, ranging from OK to below average.

You might well get more entertainment out of an award-winning film, such as this Italian comedy, which got the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film last year. Sophia Loren plays three different women, and Marcello Mastroianni three men, in a trio of lighthearted tales of love.


For some reason, every poster I've seen for this movie features Loren in her underwear. I wonder why that might be.

And you'll definitely enjoy the next exciting musical guest episode of The Journey Show, October 24 at 1PM Pacific!




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Magazine, Serial

[September 12, 1965] So Far . . . Well, Fair (October 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Amazing, A.L. (after Lalli)

The shape of the post-Ziff-Davis Amazing and the new publisher’s reprint policy become much clearer in this October issue.  There are seven items of fiction here, and five of them are reprints, comprising about 55% of the magazine’s page count.  If this issue is typical, Amazing is drastically shrinking as a significant market for original fiction.

The two new fiction items are the first part of a two-part serial by Murray Leinster, whose future seems mostly to have been behind him for some years now, and yet another Ensign De Ruyter short story by Arthur Porges.  There is also another in the series of scientific hoax articles by Robert Silverberg. 

There’s an editorial, this time by managing editor Joseph Ross, rather than by Sol Cohen, “editor and publisher” on the masthead.  Ross shows himself to be as boring a writer as Cohen in his paean to Murray Leinster, the Dean of Science Fiction.  The letter column, now just called Letters, reappears, with one very long letter praising the new Amazing by someone who has bought the first Cohen issue, but hasn’t actually read it.  The point is elusive.  The mediocre cover is by Frank Kelly Freas, probably bought at a rummage sale or something; Freas has never appeared on Amazing’s cover before.


by Frank Kelly Freas

With all these inauspicious signs, it’s a bit surprising that the contents of the issue are a considerable improvement over the previous one, the first of the Cohen/Ross regime. 

Killer Ship (Part 1 of 2), by Murray Leinster


by Nodel

As is my practice, I’ll withhold comment on Killer Ship, the Leinster serial, until it’s finished, pausing only to note that Leinster seems to have taken up a hoary theme: space pirates!  And he begins on a determinedly vintage note: “He came of a long line of ship-captains, which probably explains the whole matter.” Hope struggles with trepidation.

The Eternal Eve, by John Wyndham

John Wyndham’s The Eternal Eve, from the September 1950 Amazing, begins as the protagonist Amanda sees a man approaching the cave she is living in and shoots him with her rifle.  She then pushes his body over the nearby cliff to be eaten by the giant crabs that live on the beach below, this being Venus.  From there, a flashback: Amanda has come to Venus for an 18-month job assisting an anthropological expedition.  But Earth blows up, leaving nobody alive but the modest colony on Venus and those humans who were on Mars or in space at the time.


by Rod Ruth

Order starts to erode in the obvious ways, one of which is pressure for Amanda to pair off with one of the men.  She’s not interested, and creates a diversion allowing her to slip off with her rifle and some supplies and set up housekeeping on her own, with the help of the childlike Venusian griffa.  Eventually she realizes she can’t live happily completely outside human society, so she gives in and comes back, facilitated by the appearance of Mr. Right, but not before she shoots him too.  Not fatally, though: think of it as romantic comedy, cordite replacing the flowers.

I’ve made this story sound a bit reactionary; not so.  Wyndham is actually pretty sensitive to the dilemmas posed for independent-minded women by the demands of male-dominated society, even if he doesn’t solve them in this story.  He's continued to chew on this theme in his later work, most notably the novella Consider Her Ways from the mid-1950s.  He is also a much more capable writer at the word and sentence level than most Amazing contributors, new or old, making this story a pleasure to read.  Am I really saying four stars?  Guess so.

Chrysalis, by Ray Bradbury


by McClish

Ray Bradbury’s Chrysalis, from the July 1946 issue, is much better than the execrable Final Victim from the last issue, though considerably cruder than the stories he puts in his collections.  Man here (Smith) has turned green and his skin has become a hard shell; also his metabolism has slowed almost to nothing.  He is being watched over by Dr. Rockwell (the sensible and inquiring one), Dr. Hartley (the near-hysterical one), and Dr. McGuire (the nebbish of the bunch).  Young Mr. Bradbury seems to have been spending a bit too much time at the movies, or else he’s aspiring to work for them, since the story proceeds mainly through scenes of these characters swapping reasonably sharp dialogue, while Smith continues being green and seemingly unconscious as strange transformations continue underneath the green shell.  Dr. Rockwell broaches the possibility of superman, or super-something, and shortly, the story’s title is enacted, unfortunately a bit anticlimactically.  The story is a bit too long, but the author moves it along capably.  Three stars.

The Metal Man, by Jack Williamson

Jack Williamson’s first published story, The Metal Man, from the December 1928 issue, has not worn well.  There’s a very lifelike metal statue of a man standing in the Tyburn College Museum—lifelike because it used to be Professor Kelvin of Geology, who got rich prospecting for radium.  Now he has been delivered in his statuesque form to his old friend, the narrator, in a wooden chest, along (of course) with his manuscript.  This recounts the Prof’s journey to El Rio de la Sangre, the River of Blood, which is highly radioactive.  He’s looking for the source, resorting to a small airplane whose parts he assembles on-site when he gets as far as a boat will take him. 


by Frank R. Paul

He winds up in a strange, colorful lost world.  Very colorful.  The river is like a red snake, and it goes underground and emerges in a mountain crater that holds a pool of green fire, extending to the black ramparts of the other side of the crater, while “the snow-capped summits about were brilliant argent crowns, dyed with crimson, tinged with purple and gold, tinted with strange and incredible hues.” A silver mist begins to descend.  The green lake rises up to a shining peak, and from it emerges—“a gigantic sphere of deep red, marked with four huge oval spots of dull black,” its surface “thickly studded with great spikes that seemed of yellow fire”!

This is all in the space of a few paragraphs.  After a brief respite, Prof. Kelvin finds his plane and himself covered with a pale blue luminosity, he is drawn down into the green (gaseous) lake to land, stumbles around and trips over a bird that has turned to metal, foreshadowing his own fate.  He has more adventures (also very colorful, but enough of that) as he blunders around in this strange world created by lots of radioactivity, becoming more metallic as he goes.  Unfortunately there’s not much more to the story than this parade of menacing wonders, made possible by the fact that back then nobody really knew that much about the effects of radioactivity.  Two stars. 

It should be noted that Williamson went on to produce The Green Girl, Through the Purple Cloud, The Stone from the Green Star, Red Slag of Mars, In the Scarlet Star, and Golden Blood, all within the next five years.  The visible spectrum seems to have been a good career move for him.

The Time Jumpers, by Philip Francis Nowlan


by Leo Morey

Philip Francis Nowlan, perpetrator of the Buck Rogers Yellow Peril epics, is here in a lighter mood with The Time Jumpers (February 1934 Amazing), a mildly amusing period piece (albeit with certain period attitudes) about a guy who invents a time car and, with his platonic girlfriend, first narrowly escapes from marauding Vikings, possibly Leif Ericson’s outfit, then makes a longer foray into the Colonial period, narrowly escaping from marauding Indians, briefly meeting the young not-yet-General Washington, and then narrowly escaping from a French officer and his marauding Indians.  Two stars.

Dusty Answer, by Arthur Porges

Dusty Answer is yet another of Arthur Porges’s tales of Ensign De Ruyter, notable chiefly for the excruciating tedium they achieve in relatively few pages.  Their formula is clever Earthmen outwitting stupid and primitive aliens through elementary science tricks, this time the ignition of dust suspended in air.  One star, if that.

The Kensington Stone, by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg’s scientific hoax article, The Kensington Stone, concerns the finding and subsequent career of an inscription found in Minnesota which purported to show that the Norse Vinland settlement of Leif Erikson (yeah, him again, spelled a little differently) had sent an expedition as far as Minnesota.  This one is just as well written as its predecessors, suffering by comparison only because the underlying story is less captivating, with no picturesque fraudster at its center.  Three stars.

Summing Up

So: whatever one thinks about the new reprint policy at Amazing and Fantastic, new editor Ross has managed this month (or bi-month) to put together a decently readable issue.  Question is how long he can keep it up.

[Speaking of books, Journey Press now has three excellent titles for your reading pleasure! Why not pick up a copy or three? Not only will you enjoy them all — you'll be helping out the Journey!]




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Magazine

[May 10, 1964] STUCK IN THE MIDDLE (the June 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Regression to the Mean

The June Amazing is . . . middling — a relief compared to some past performances—with nothing outstanding, nothing appalling, and much of it at least mildly interesting.


by Alex Schomburg

Tin Lizzie, by Randall Garrett

Like the previous issue, this one starts off with a hardware opera, but a much more agreeable one than last month’s.  Randall Garrett’s Tin Lizzie is a conscious throwback to older SF, say the late ‘30s just after John Campbell took over at Astounding but before any great transformation took hold, with the writers soberly exploring the engineering challenges of space travel to the inner planets.  No doubt it was too old hat for present-day Campbell, accounting for its appearance here at the bottom of the market rather than in Analog, Garrett’s most regular abode.  Nowadays you’re more likely to find this sort of thing in Boy’s Life than in the SF magazines, or by revisiting the older Winston juveniles you took out of the library years ago.


by Virgil Finlay

Our heroes are piloting a tugship back from Jupiter towing a big bag of a nitrogen compound, mined from Jupiter’s atmosphere and destined for the factories of Luna, when they get a Mayday call from Mars.  Turns out there’s a scientific expedition stranded on the surface in a damaged spaceship and needing help fast.  But the tugship can’t land there because it has no landing gear and its cupro-aluminum hull won’t stand up to an atmosphere anyway, especially the dinitrogen trioxide of the Martian atmosphere.  (Read that aloud in front of a mirror and practice looking authoritative.)

But!  On Phobos are a couple of abandoned “space taxis,” 80-year-old rocket-powered vehicles made for nothing but landing and taking off.  Only problem is that in this day of gravito-inertial engines, nobody knows how to fly a rocket any more . . . except for the centenarian General Challenger, about the only surviving rocket pilot, who is pleased to instruct the boys long-distance from the Moon so they can rescue the stranded scientists.  There’s an added fillip at the end about the primitive Martian life forms.

The story is very capably done, full of technical lectures which I am not competent to assess but which are slickly rendered for the lay person.  This sort of thing would get tiresome quickly if the magazines were full of it, but they aren’t, so it makes for a refreshing change from the usual more sophisticated (or pseudo-) fare.  It’s a moldy fig, but reasonably tasty.  Three stars.

Condition of Survival, by Barry P. Miller


by George Schelling

Garrett's is followed by a considerably longer novelet by Barry P. Miller.  Who?  A Barry P. Miller had a couple of stories in Ray Palmer’s Other Worlds Science Stories in 1956-57, just before the end—not an auspicious sign, if it’s the same guy. 

He certainly knows the drill; the story begins: “For a Greenwich Month, the BuGalEx ship, Wotan’s Beard, had maintained an observation orbit three hundred kilometers above the fourth planet of a G2 class sun near the base of the galactic limb of which Sol was a part.” And, on further exploration, it’s a pretty ambitious story, if ham-handedly rendered.

The BuGalEx folks have landed now and discovered small humanoids, whom they call the Elves.  Their attempts to establish communication with the Elves aren’t going well, so it’s time for Hillier, the Transferman, to do his stuff.  He has his consciousness projected into that of an Elf to figure out what’s going on, and meets a sort of demigod of the Elves’ consciousness, which transforms itself into his heart’s desire and tries to recruit him to help it (or, as he perceives, her) fend off the grasping Terrestrials.

Meanwhile, Hillier’s girlfriend, Linguist Betty Lee, has been fending off her ex, who tries to lure her back with a means of converting aural sensation to tactile sensation, i.e., to have sex somehow melded with or choreographed by Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, because on Earth these days, sexual prowess, born or made, is apparently all anybody cares about.  But Betty is really an old-fashioned girl looking for Mr. Right, whom she sees in Hillier, the naive guy from a colony planet, who seems to want more or less what she does, though it takes a while for them to figure it out.

Miller tries to integrate these two plots, with less success than one would like, partly because he is a glib but clumsy writer whose scenes of interpersonal interaction are nothing short of soap-operatic.  One longs to shout “Rewrite!” and get somebody in who could handle this material more coherently and with more plausible affect.  Theodore Sturgeon?  Sorry, he’s busy.  Anyway, three stars for a nice try and an interesting one, even if the author can’t quite bring it off.

The Pirokin Effect, by Larry Eisenberg

From the attempted sublime to the accomplished vaudevillesque: Larry Eisenberg, who perhaps has been reading too much Robert F. Young, proposes in The Pirokin Effect that the Lost Tribes of Israel ended up on Mars and are communicating by impulses detectable in restaurant kitchens in New York and Philadelphia.  It’s amusing enough and has the virtue of brevity, and is told with a strong ethnic flavor.  Three stars, or maybe the author would prefer three bagels with a schmear.

The Sphinx, by Robert F. Young


by George Schelling

And here is Robert F. Young himself with another silly Robert F. Young story, The Sphinx, which the editor introduces: “Continuing his series of up-dating Terran mythology and folklore. . . .” No brevity here—it’s almost 30 pages.  Protagonist Hall is scouting the area before a big space battle between the Earth and Uvelian space fleets, loses control to something unknown and crashes on a planet.  He reconnoiters and finds a Sphinx and several pyramids.  This Sphinx is alive and explains that she contrived the creation of the Sphinx and pyramids of Earth thousands of years ago, and her sister did the same for the Uvelians, and because this is Young there’s also an Egyptian girl (sic) whom the protagonist decides is (of course) the most beautiful he has ever seen. 

The space battle, which threatens to destroy the planet, starts, but then stops—that’s the Sphinxes’ contrivance too.  Etc., etc.  The best that can be said for this . . . well, contrivance really is the word . . .  is that it is less annoying than Young’s usual, told straightforwardly and not in the overtly arch, coy, cloying, or precious manner that we have come to expect from him.  He is a competent writer at the word-and-sentence level whatever one thinks of what he does with his competence.  I guess that’s why he is published so prolifically; can’t think of any other reason.  Two stars, barely.

SF Profile: John Wyndham, by Sam Moskowitz

Sam Moskowitz is back with another SF Profile, this one of John Wyndham, which as usual presents implausible praise and detailed plot summaries of his pulp stories of the 1930s.  It does give more attention than usual to his more sophisticated work of the 1950s, then reverts to form with two sentences about his most recent novel, Trouble with Lichen.  This one is lighter on interesting biographical detail than many of its predecessors.  Two stars. 

Statistical analysis

So: the issue is a good enough time-passer for those who have time they need to pass.  For anyone else, its attraction may be limited… 

[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

[February 12, 1963] HOPE SPRINGS (the March 1963 Amazing)

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[If you live in Southern California, you can see the Journey LIVE at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego, 2 p.m. on February 17!]


by John Boston

Well, hope springs eternal, and a good thing for certain SF magazines that it does.  The March Amazing has a rather distinguished table of contents: a novelet by John Wyndham and short stories by veterans Edmond Hamilton, H.B. Fyfe, and Robert F. Young and up-and-comers like J.G. Ballard, rising star Roger Zelazny, and variable star Keith Laumer. 

But we must temper optimism with realism: since Amazing is about the lowest-paying of the SF magazines, top-market names are probably here with things they couldn’t sell elsewhere.  So, prepared for all eventualities . . .

Edmond Hamilton’s Babylon in the Sky is a simple morality tale for SF fans.  Young Hobie lives in the sticks, where there are no jobs and people survive on doles and make-work, seldom make it past the eighth grade, and resent eggheads and know-it-alls—especially the decadent ones in the orbiting cities that Hobie’s preacher father rails against.  So Hobie runs away to the spaceport and stows away to one of these satellites, planning to sabotage the power plant and blow it up.  He doesn’t get far, and the sane and reasonable people there explain to him that they are not living sybaritic lives but working hard at research to benefit everyone.  We didn’t rob you, Hobie, the home folks did.  So they’re just sending him back, but Hobie, you’re a smart kid, if you go to the Educational Foundation near the spaceport, they’ll take care of you, and then maybe you can join up and come back here.  Hobie buys it.  Well, yeah, that’s more or less my life plan too if I can swing it, but I don’t read SF for homilies even if I agree with them.  It’s slickly enough done, but two stars for unearned propagandizing.

Speaking of slick, here’s Robert F. Young again.  When last he appeared, I said he “knows so many ways of being entirely too cute,” and boy howdy was I right.  In Jupiter Found, the protagonist’s brain, after an auto accident did for the rest of him, is installed in a giant mining and construction machine on Jupiter—a M.A.N. (Mining, Adapting Neo-Processor), model 8M.  He is shortly joined by model EV, who is of course a W.O.M.A.N. (Weld Operating, Mining, Adapting Neo-Processor).  They work for Gorman and Oder Developments, which has strictly forbidden them to process an ore called edenite, and they’ve also been warned to beware of a guy who has been cast out of a high place in the company and is now in business for himself, who will be sending down a mining unit called a Boa 9.  By this point in Young’s arch and labored rendition of the Old Testament I was thinking longingly of some of the more bloodthirsty passages in Leviticus.  One star.  What kind of rubes does this guy think he’s writing for?  Even Hobie wouldn’t go for this.

John Wyndham is best known for his chilly novels of the 1950s, from The Day of the Triffids to The Midwich Cuckoos, less so for Trouble with Lichen (1960), intelligent and readable but much less incisive than its predecessors.  His novelet Chocky is unfortunately in the latter vein.  The protagonist’s kid seems to be having conversations with an imaginary friend, except anybody who’s read a lick of SF will know immediately that he’s communicating with an extraterrestrial intelligence.  So we get the worried parent routine, and the marital tension, and the visit from the child psychologist friend, the rather subdued climax, and then . . . some explanation and it all goes away.  The whole 38 pages worth is so low-key as to be near-comatose.  One wonders if Wyndham is taking some of the new tranquilizers that psychiatrists hand out these days.  It’s benignly readable but there’s not much to it.  Two stars.

Roger Zelazny’s short The Borgia Hand is livelier but insubstantial, about a young man with a withered hand in generic fairy-tale country who chases down a pedlar (sic) reputed to traffic in body parts.  Yeah, he’s got a hand in stock, and here’s a quick gimmick and it’s over.  Two stars.  Snappy writing is nice, but as one noted critic put it, where’s the bloody horse?

But relief is in sight.  There’s nothing especially original about Keith Laumer’s The Walls: future overpopulated Earth with people living regimented lives stuffed into tiny spaces in big apartment complexes; protagonist’s husband is on the make and brings home a Wall, i.e. a TV screen that covers one wall.  You can turn it off but then you’ve got a wall-sized mirror.  Next, another Wall; then another; then . . . .  The story is the wife’s psychological disintegration stuck all day with a choice of all-directions TV-land or a hall of mirrors, but—as with It Could Be Anything from a couple of issues ago—Laumer’s knack for concrete visual detail brings it off and keeps it from being a print version of one of those lame Twilight Zone episodes which end with somebody going crazy.  Four stars.

J.G. Ballard is back with The Sherrington Theory, his most minor effort yet in the US magazines.  Protagonist and wife are at a beach cafeteria terrace, watching the remarkably dense beach crowd (no sand visible), and intermittently discussing the theory of Dr. Sherrington that the imminent launch of a new communications satellite will trigger certain “innate releasing mechanisms” in humans, which of course it does.  This one frankly reads a bit like a self-parody; in fact, the idea is a sort of domesticated knock-off of the one he developed much more effectively in The Drowned World.  Of course it’s written with Ballard’s usual flair (or mannerisms, as you prefer), e.g.: “. . . this mass of articulated albino flesh sprawled on the beach resembled the diseased anatomical fantasy of a surrealist painter.” The situation is more skillfully developed and built up than in Zelazny’s story, bringing it up, barely, to three stars.

The stars hide their faces as we come to H.B. Fyfe’s Star Chamber, a shameless Bat Durston in which a parody of a despicable criminal has crash-landed on an uninhabited planet and a lone lawman has come after him.  It reads like something Fyfe couldn’t sell to Planet Stories until the mildly clever end, which reads like something he couldn’t sell to Analog because they were overstocked on Christopher Anvil.  Two stars, barely.

And here is earnest Ben Bova with Intelligent Life in Space.  Haven’t we seen this already?  Not quite—this time he’s going on about the definition of intelligence, touching base at ants, dolphins, and chimpanzees, and suggesting that we’re not likely to find it in the Solar System but likely will do so farther away.  This one is a more pedestrian rehash of familiar material than most of his earlier articles.  Two stars.

So: one very good story, one amusing one, and downhill—pretty far downhill—from there.  Hope may spring eternal, but one takes what one can get.

[P.S. If you registered for WorldCon this year, please consider nominating Galactic Journey for the "Best Fanzine" Hugo.  Your ballot should have arrived by now…]




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[June 22, 1961] HOME COUNTIES SF (a report from the UK)

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By Ashley R. Pollard

Let me explain my title to you.  The British Home Counties surround London, where I live, and consists of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Surrey, and Sussex.  I mention this apropos of probably the most well known of Britain’s science fiction novels: the apocalyptic War of the Worlds by Herbert George Wells.

The story is a veritable march through the Britain’s heartland, describing how the Martian tripods march from Woking in Surrey to Essex, wrecking all that’s nearest and dearest to the heart of the British people.  Though I should point out that this was a very English-centred story (Scotland, Wales and Ireland are left out), and regarding the rest of the world or our former colonies, Wells has little to say.

War, arguably, was where British science fiction was born.  I say "arguably" because Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein can probably lay claim to being the first British SF story; however, its roots seem to me to be more firmly in Gothic Horror.  I believe that Wells set the scene for British SF in a way that Shelley’s story has so far not.  Though perhaps now that we are in the swinging sixties, her influence will be felt more as women’s emancipation moves forward.

What is the point of all this?  Why, to set the stage for the introduction of one of our latest SF writers: John Wyndham, pen name of John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, also known as John Beynon and a host of other pseudonyms made through different combinations of his name.

Wyndham became widely known to British readers after his disaster tale, The Day of the Triffids, was published in 1951.  The story centres on the survivors of the passing of a comet, most of whom were blinded by the show (perhaps caused by coincident nuclear explosions of satellites in orbit around the Earth).  The plot doubles the calamity by featuring the deadly eponymous plants, piling agony on top of misery.  The Triffids are genetically modified constructs that are being farmed for their oil, and which have to be kept fenced in because they can walk.  They also come equipped with stingers to blind their prey.  You can see where this is going?  Like Wells’ tripods, the Triffids rampage across England blinding people and generally being unpleasant weeds that thrive on the dead.  Also like War, it is a disaster story for British readers, set in the familiar setting of England’s green and pleasant land.  If any of these topics appeal to you, you'll enjoy the book.

Wyndham’s second novel was The Kraken Wakes, a story of aliens who invade our oceans.  A pointless war breaks out that ends with the melting of our Polar regions.  Much of the Earth is flooded — most importantly, London!  The debt Wyndham owes to Wells for creating the genre is explicitly made by Kraken's protagonist, who contrasts the course his aliens' invasion takes compared to the one described by Wells.  Serendipitously, the book came out in the same year as George Pal’s film adaptation of War of the Worlds, which may have added to Kraken's success, the public being primed for invasion stories.  Though one could argue that what sold the story was the resonance between the state of Britain at the end of World War Two and the situation the protagonists find themselves in at the end of the novel.

With these two books John Wyndham cemented his position as a writer of very British science fictional tales.  But it should be said that Wyndham liked to refer to his novels as logical fantasies rather than SF.

Following on from his two breakout novels came my favourite novel, The Chrysalids.  It’s a different story because even though it’s set in a post-apocalyptic future, after a nuclear holocaust that has devastated the Earth, the focus has moved from middle-class English people to a xenophobic community that enforces purity laws to prevent the spread of mutations.

On reflection, perhaps its not that far removed from the culture of the British Isles after all and the anti-German rhetoric that colours films and comics.

The Chrysalids tells the story of children born with telepathic powers who must hide their abilities because their society abhors all mutations.  The plot unfolds as the children flee after one of the children is discovered to have six toes.  Wyndham leaves it up to the reader to imagine what happens after the ending.

Wyndham's third book was The Midwich Cuckoos.  Aliens choose a number of villages around the world, render the inhabitants unconscious, and afterwards it’s discovered all the women are pregnant.  The alien hybrid children have strange powers and things do not bode well for the rest of humanity.

The book was made into a film called The Village of the Damned, which was filmed, funnily enough, in Hertfordshire — one of the Home Counties.  At the film premiere, there were queues all around Leicester Square to get in.  And for those who like memorabilia, Penguin released the book with a still from the film on the cover.

His next book is a novel made from short stories called The Outward Urge (what I believe is called a fix-up in America).  Those who know me know that I like hard SF and The Outward Urge delivers in spades, telling the tale of one family's expansion into space.  It is told as a future history spanning 1994 to 2194.  The future indeed, one where Britain has a space station in 1994, for which we are going to have to pull our socks up if that’s going to happen: given what I know and told you last month about the British space programme so far.  Still, The Outward Urge is an exciting read, and I found it quite gripping.

His latest novel is the Trouble With Lichen.  This book treads a different path from his earlier works, not being a tale of alien lichen taking over the world that the title might first suggest.  The story's central character is a woman biologist who discovers that a rare lichen has life-extending properties.  From it, she produces the drug, Antigerone, that can extend peoples' lives two to three hundred years.  Wyndham uses the story to explore the effects this will have on society, for instance, the liberation of women by extending their fertility, and thereby allowing them the time for a career before choosing to bear children.

I’m not totally convinced by his extrapolations of the effect a life prolonging drug would have on women’s reproductive cycle — or the societal effects thereof; we'll know more once the Enavid (Enovid 10mg) oral contraceptive becomes widely accepted.  But, I will give John Wyndham credit for at least trying to put himself into women’s shoes and presenting a strong female character, even if I find his treatment at times a tad clumsy because he describes woman from a particularly male perspective that irks me.

That being said, if you haven’t yet come across John Wyndham’s work, and you want to have a taste of a British sensibilities towards the future I can’t recommend his work too highly.

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Magazine

Feb. 15, 1961] Variable Stars (March 1961 Fantasy and Science Fiction

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I want to tell you about this month's "All Star" issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but I'm too busy tapping my heels to a groovy new song I was just turned on to.  Last year, I thought the instrumental group, The Ventures, were The End, but after hearing the new disc from The Shadows, Apache, I may have to change my vote.  Is it too late to rejoin with England?

Back to our show.  Every year or so, Fantasy and Science Fiction releases an "All Star" issue in which only Big Names get published.  It's a sort of guarantee of quality (and, presumably, sales).  I'll tell you right now that, with the notable exception of the lead novelette, it's largely an "All Three Star" issue.  Perhaps it's better to leave things to the luck of the draw.  That said, it's hardly an unworthy read, and Zenna Henderson, as always, makes the issue a must buy.

Ms. Henderson is best known for her stories of The People, now spanning a decade of publication, and to be released on March 17 of this year as a compilation anthology!  The People are humans from another world, with the ability to do all manner of psychic tricks that look to us Outsiders as akin to magic.  Henderson's stories are generally bittersweet tales of misfit refugees from the stars attempting to make do on a primitive, often unfriendly, but nevertheless beautiful world.

Last time we saw The People, in F&SF two years ago, the Earthbound had finally been rediscovered by their star-dwelling brethren, and many had elected to return to more familiar surroundings.  But many also chose to stay in their adoptive home.  In Return, one of the People who left, Debbie, yearns to go back to Earth.  Her homesickness becomes a palpable thing, and weeks before her baby is to be born, she convinces her new husband, Thann, to make the journey back to Earth to live with her kind there.

Things don't go as planned.  There is now a lake in the valley where the People had made their home.  Debbie and Thann crash land, the latter dying soon after.  What follows is a beautiful story of a lost, lonely, somewhat selfish woman on the eve of motherhood, and the old human couple that offers her shelter.  It's a lovely complete story arc of a woman's maturation impelled by crisis–the kind of story only a woman (a remarkable one like Ms. Henderson) could give us.  Five stars.

The rest of the magazine, while never bad, never lives up to the standard of that first story.

Jay Williams, writer of the Danny Dunn franchise (which I quite enjoy) has a slight, if evocatively bitter piece, about a murderous man who gets his comeuppance after doing away with a romantic rival.  It's called The Beetle, and it's strong but not novel.  Two stars.

Saturn Rising is a pleasant nuts-and-bolts piece from one of the fathers of modern science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke.  A teen builds his own telescope, espies Saturn in all its ringed glory, and then his father cruelly breaks the instrument.  The youth grows up to become a wealthy hotel magnate, but that first-hand glimpse of a celestial body remains the seed for an undying dream–to build a resort in full view of the sixth planet.  I visited a telescope store today, and the story made a fitting tale with which to regale my daughter as she perused the reflectors and refractors.  Three stars.

John Wyndham offers up a time travel tale in A Stitch in Time wherein an old woman, spending her last years in the same home in which she was raised, is at last reunited with her high school beaux–some 50 years late for a date.  It's nicely written, and who doesn't have a space where time seems to have stood still for decades, in which, at any time, some memory might resurrect itself?  And yet, it's a thin idea despite the fine characterization.  Three stars.

I quite enjoyed Dr. Asimov's The Imaginary that Wasn't, all about "imaginary numbers", i.e. multiples of the square root of negative one.  Not only is a cogent description of their origin and utility (though he never mentions electric circuits, in which they are invaluable), but the anecdote in the beginning is priceless: Some 20 years ago, Isaac showed up a smug philosophy teacher with his mathematical knowledge, earning the latter's rancor forever.  Said teacher asserted that mathematicians were mystics for they believed in imaginary numbers, which have "no reality."

Asimov contended that imaginary numbers were just as real as any other.  The teacher pounced.  "Show me a piece of chalk that has the length of the square root of negative one."  Asimov replied that he would–provided the teacher gave him a one-half piece of chalk.  The professor promptly broke a piece in half and handed it to Asimov in triumph.  What ensues, Asimov describes thusly:

"Ah, but wait," I said: "you haven't fulfilled your end. This is one piece of chalk you've handed me, not a one-half piece."  I held it up for the others to see.  "Wouldn't you all say this was one piece of chalk?  It certainly isn't two or three."

Now the professor was smiling.  "Hold it. One piece of chalk is a piece of regulation length. You have one that's half the regulation length."  I said, "Now you're springing an arbitrary definition on me.  But even if I accept it, are you willing to maintain that this is a one-half piece of chalk and not a 0.48 piece or a 0.52 piece?  And can you really consider yourself qualified to discuss the square root of minus one, when you're a little hazy on the meaning of one-half?"  But by now the professor had lost his equanimity altogether and his final argument was unanswerable. He said, "Get the hell out of here!"

This parallels my experience, also some 20 years ago, when I showed up a smug anthropology professor.  He, trying to shock his students with an amoral argument, asserted that cannibalism was abandoned simply because it was economically inefficient, not for any cultural reasons.  I decided to call his bet and pointed out that raising any meat is inefficient–if we really liked the taste of people, we'd still be eating them.  The teacher made it clear that I was not welcome in his class.  Why do instructors never recognize the genius of their students?

Four stars, from one smart-mouth to another.

Philip J. Farmer's Prometheus takes up most of the rest of the issue.  This is the sequel to A Father to the Stars starring the corrigible Father Carmody, an ex-con cum hapless priest…with an alien egg symbiotically stuck to his chest.  In this new story, Carmody goes to the planet of the horowitzes, a sentient but uncultured race, one member of which expregnated the monk.  A much more serious story, it depicts Carmody's attempts to enlighten the horowitzes by bringing them language, technology, science, and ultimately, religion.  Three stars because, while it was fun reading, I never got the impression that the putatively alien horowitzes were anything other than feathered people.  Moreover, the profundity of the final revelation was insufficiently profound.

Against my better judgment, I am distributing the Ferdinand Feghoot pun of the month.  Perhaps I'll make it "a thing." 

Wrapping up the issue is John Berry's very short The One Who Returns, a subtle story about a priest who is educated in the true faith by an Indian lama, and the measures another member of the flock goes to so as to avoid seduction by the compelling heresy.  Four stars.

Three and a half stars overall.  Respectable, but not what I'd expect from an "All Star" issue. 

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