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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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

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by John Boston

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

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


by Johnny Bruck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


by Dan Adkins

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

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

The Monsters, by David R. Bunch

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

Try Again, by Jack Wodhams

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


by Jeff Jones

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

This Grand Carcass, by R.A. Lafferty

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

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

The Dwarf, by Ray Bradbury

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


by Sanford Kossln

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

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

The Traveling Crag, by Theodore Sturgeon

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

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


by Lawrence (L. Sterne Stevens)

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

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

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

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

He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse

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

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

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


by Leo Morey

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Last Day, by Richard Matheson


by Robert Kay

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

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

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

Three stars.

Summing Up

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

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




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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

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by John Boston

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


by Frank R. Paul

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

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

Where's Horatius?, by Mack Reynolds


by Jeff Jones

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

Manhattan Dome, by Ben Bova

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

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


by Dan Adkins

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

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

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

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

Idiot’s Mate, by Robert Taylor

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

Time Bomb, by Ray Russell

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

The Patty-Cake Mutiny, by Winston Marks

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

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


by Tom Beecham

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

"Labyrinth", by Neil R. Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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


by Leo Morey

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

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

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

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

Paradox, by Charles Cloukey

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


by Wally Wallit

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

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

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

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

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

Summing Up

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

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




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[April 12, 1968] Darkness (May 1968 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

These are dark days.

I need not remind you of the recent shocking murder of a genuinely great man who dedicated his life to nonviolence. Nor is it necessary to mention the wholesale slaughter of soldiers and civilians in Southeast Asia, which shows no signs of abating.

As if the heavens wish to mourn for the horrors humanity unleashes upon itself, there will be a total eclipse of the Moon tonight, visible from almost all parts of the Western Hemisphere.


An visual depiction of the phenomenon.

It is tragically appropriate that light reflected from Earth makes the eclipsed Moon appear reddish; an event known as a Blood Moon.

Even in the frivolous world of popular music, we are reminded of tragedy. At the top of the American music charts is the melancholy ballad (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay by the late Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash last December. It holds the unhappy distinction of being the first posthumous single to reach Number One.


Recorded just three days before Redding's death.

Better to Light One Candle Than to Curse the Darkness

It is tempting to sink into silence and depression. Instead, let us take what comfort we can from small pleasures. One such anodyne, at least for me, is reading science fiction and fantasy. Let's take a look at the latest issue of Fantastic and see if we can draw any solace from it.


Cover art by Johnny Bruck.

As has happened a few times before, the image on the cover comes from an issue of the popular German magazine Perry Rhodan.


That seems to mean The Little Men from Siga, presumably a fictional planet.

High Road to the East, by Christopher Anvil


Illustration by Gray Morrow.

In this trivial bagatelle an Admiral (clearly supposed to be Christopher Columbus) has a scheme to sail west from Europe to the Indies without bumping into the new continent in the way. He uses gunpowder to send his ship into the air.

Can you guess this won't work out the way he thinks?

This is a weak joke, hardly the outstanding new story promised on the cover. At least it's short and inoffensive.

Two stars.

The Little Creeps, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

The December 1951 issue of Amazing Stories is the source of this tale of the Cold War turned Hot.


Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones.

We start off with an odd scene in which a huge number of tiny glowing things invade the Tokyo home of an American General at night. Only light drives them away. They manage to talk to the officer by invading his phonograph and manipulating the needle. These are, of course, the Little Creeps.


Illustration by Leo Summers.

China and the USA are in a shooting war. The Soviet Union is supposedly neutral, but gives aid to its Red ally. The Little Creeps tell the General not to do three things.

1. Don't fire a Japanese servant.

2. Don't listen to a visiting General from the front lines.

3. Don't bomb Chinese installations along a river that serves as the border with the USSR.

You can probably predict that the General doesn't listen to the annoying Little Creeps, and things go from bad to worse.

This is a strange story, with a strong antiwar message mixed up with bizarre science fiction content. The latter never really made sense to me.

The visiting General is a loathsome character indeed. Not only does he love war, he also endlessly harasses a WAC Sergeant. I understand that he's the story's villain, but he really gives me the creeps (if you'll excuse the expression.)

Very mixed feelings about this one. The author has his heart in the right place, and the escalating tension of the situation creates a great deal of suspense, but the Little Creeps are kind of goofy.

Three Stars.

Dr. Immortelle, by Kathleen Ludwick

From the Fall 1930 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly we have the only story, as far as I can tell, this author ever published. I managed to take a look at a copy of the yellowing pages of the old magazine, and the table of contents lists her name as Luckwick. The introduction to the story refers to her as Miss Ludwick. I don't know which one is correct.


Cover art by Leo Morey.

Anyway, this is a horror story about a Mad Scientist who discovered a way to extend his life way back in the 18th century. (Did the title give you a clue?)


Illustration also by Morey.

He and his mulatto slave have kept themselves alive and young by transfusing the blood of children into their bodies. Even more improbable, and embarrassing for the modern reader, the transfusion of blood from white children has made the mulatto completely Caucasian!

Sometimes the children don't survive the sinister procedure. Justice finally catches up with the evil scientist and his servant (who developed a conscience about what they were doing over the decades) in the form of the grown sister of a little boy who died because of the transfusion.

It's easy to tell this yarn is nearly four decades old. Besides the stuff about the mulatto turning white, there's a lot of flowery language. The author uses a narrative technique I've seen in other antique works. We start with a narrator, who then quotes at length from another narrator. (In this case, the dying servant.)

Thirty-odd years ago, this could have been very loosely adapted into a cheap Boris Karloff movie, of the kind I eagerly seek out on Shock Theater. In print form, the years have not been kind to it. Whatever became of Miss Ludwick/Luckwick, she does not appear to have been a major loss to the literary world.

Two stars.

Spawn of Darkness, by Craig Browning

Never heard of Craig Browning? That's because he's really Rog Phillips, who gave us this story in the May 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


Cover art by H. L. Blumenfeld.

Guess what? Gregg Conrad, whose name appears on the cover, is also Rog Phillips! The guy gets around!


Illustration by Edmond Swiatek.

In a future war, two death rays meet, causing an entity to appear out of nowhere. It takes the form imagined by a soldier; namely, a genie.

Forget the futuristic stuff. From this point on, we've just got a story about a guy and his genie. He might as well have found it in an old bottle in the desert.

Anyway, he wishes his way home. Things seem fine, but then the military sends his mother a telegram, stating that her son is missing in action and presumed dead. I guess the mother is pretty superstitious, because a self-proclaimed psychic convinces her the young man is a ghost. Complications ensue when the guy rather foolishly uses the genie to perform practical jokes that seem like the work of a poltergeist.

I don't know what to make of this thing. As I've indicated, the science fiction content is pointless. I guess the author is making fun of parapsychologists and such, but nothing particularly funny happens.

Two stars.

Spartan Planet (Part Two of Two), by A. Bertram Chandler


Illustration by Jeff Jones.

Let's recap. Chandler's series character John Grimes, a female ethologist, and a bunch of other folks have arrived on a planet without women, as far as the bulk of the population knows. The elite Doctors actually have a secret cache of women hidden away.

Our protagonist is a military police officer native to the planet. He becomes a secret agent for the head of Intelligence, assigned to keep an eye on the new arrivals while also investigating the Doctors.

In this installment, the officer finds himself strangely attracted to the ethologist, although he thinks of her as an alien. On a tour of the planet, they come across the place where girl babies (considered to be deformed) are left to be eaten by predators. Of course, the ethologist rescues the sole surviving infant.

Meanwhile, another woman from Grimes' spaceship is raped (blessedly, this is obliquely described) by a gang of locals. The implication is that men who have no idea that women exist, and who imagine the strange visitors to be bizarre creatures of another species, are irresistibly drawn to them.

Eventually, there's a huge mob of men trying to get at the women hidden by the Doctors. After the battle, Grimes offers a long speech explaining how the planet developed its unique society.

As you can see, this half of the novel is a lot darker in mood and a lot more violent than the first half. After plenty of action, Grimes' expository speech slows things down quite a bit. Overall, I didn't mind reading it once, though this segment is somewhat distasteful.

Three stars.

Something for the Woman, by Ivar Jorgensen

As you may know, Ivar Jorgensen is a name used by a whole bunch of different writers in various science fiction and fantasy books and magazines. In this case, my research tells me it's really Randall Garrett hiding behind the name, in the March/April 1953 issue of Fantastic.


Cover art by Richard Powers.

A family (Mom, Dad, and two little kids) go through the process of selling everything they own except the clothes on their backs and a few other small items. They're going on a long, long journey.


Illustration by Ed Emshwiller, often known as Emsh.

The story mostly deals with the woman's fear of leaving home for the unknown. A small gesture from her husband makes the impending voyage less terrifying.

I think I like this story more than it deserves. Yes, it supports the stereotype that women are timid creatures. (There's reference to a few rare women who are as eager for adventure as men.) But it's sensitively written, and it was a welcome novelty to read something that was unashamedly sentimental.

Four stars.

Brave Nude World, by Forrest J. Ackerman

A hint in the introduction to this reprinted article led me to track down the publication where it originally appeared. I hope you appreciate the effort and embarrassment it took to secure a copy of an old nudist magazine. Namely, the August 1961 issue of American Sunbather.


I have cut off the lower half of the cover, which features the young lady with the big smile completely unclad, in order to spare the delicate sensitivities of any Journeyers who might be offended.

Big Name Fan Ackerman chatters away about his experience of nudism, while also mentioning a few science fiction stories that deal with the topic. Notably, the original magazine featured drawings by another well-known fan, Betty JoAnne Trimble, universally known as Bjo.


Ackerman claims this is the title of a story by Spencer Strong (Ackerman himself), but I can find no reference to it. Maybe it appeared in a fanzine.


On the other hand, this is a famous story by Robert A. Heinlein. (Galaxy, March 1952.)

This tale appeared in the December 1956 issue of the girlie magazine Caper, attributed to Spencer Strong (Ackerman again) and Morgan Ives (Marion Zimmer Bradley.)

The author indulges his love of puns throughout. There's not really any point to this look at nudism in science fiction. It's kind of like Sam Moskowitz without the scholarship. Too bad Fantastic didn't reprint Bjo's cute cartoons, so I had to dig them out for you.

Two stars.

A Portfolio: H. G. Wells' When the Sleeper Wakes, by Anonymous

The magazine fills up a few pages with illustrations from the Winter 1928 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly, which reprinted the famous novel in full.


Cover art by Frank R. Paul.

The drawings were themselves reprinted from the 1899 hardcover edition.


Cover art by . . . indulge me a while as I explain how I solved a mystery.


The introduction in Fantastic says the artist's identity was lost.


In fact, it says that even Amazing Stories Quarterly didn't know the artist's name.


I'm not sure I believe that. Maybe the magazine just didn't bother to give credit where credit was due.


Fantastic just attributes them to an English artist.


In fact, my research revealed that the artist was actually French, a fellow named Henri Lanos who often illustrated scientific romances.

Nice drawings, and the enigma of the artist's identity piqued my curiosity.

Three stars.

Fantasy Books, by Fritz Leiber

The master of sword and sorcery reviews books of that kind (Conan and King Kull) by Robert E. Howard, with much additional material by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp. Leiber doesn't talk much about the two modern authors, and generally praises Howard while pointing out his poorest stories and offering an example of his worst prose.

No rating.

Light at the End of the Tunnel?

This issue offers only mild diversion from the terrors of the real world. Most of the stories were poor to mediocre, with only Jorgensen/Garrett rising a bit above that level. Maybe that's enough for now.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Uncategorized

[April 10, 1968] Things Fall Apart (April 1968 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Entering the Stengel Zone

The April 1968 Amazing displays a deep incompetence at the most basic tasks of assembling a magazine.  For starters, this April issue—identified as such in two places on the contents page—is dated June 1968 on the cover, a blunder that will likely cost the publisher when the next issue appears.  Further, Harry Harrison’s editorial, titled Unto the Third Generation, has apparently been accidentally truncated.  It describes “first generation science fiction, or SF-1” (up to the early forties, relying on novelty of ideas), and then “second generation science fiction, SF-2” (starting in the forties with—it says here—Kornbluth, Pohl, and Wollheim, and reexamining old themes), and then . . . stops.  Abruptly.  What happened to SF-3, the Third Generation of the title?  There’s no continuation anywhere in the magazine, nor is there any hint that Harrison meant to stop short of this third generation or continue the editorial in some future issue. 


by Johnny Bruck

Other evidence of chaos in the composing room is that the texts of two items in the magazine conclude on the inside back cover, which is usually devoted to advertising.  This inside cover has microscopic top and bottom margins, suggesting a last-minute effort to correct earlier miscalculations and cram everything in (except, of course, the end of the editorial, seemingly lost to follow-up).  And the proofreading, which has been routinely abysmal since before Sol Cohen took it over, if anything seems to be getting worse.  In particular: The very first sentence of the editorial reads “In the beginning there was the word, and it was scientifiction.” Except as printed it actually reads “scientification.” You’d expect in this specialist magazine that someone—especially the editor who wrote it—would notice an error that blatant if they looked at it.  Apparently, no one is looking.

Legend has it that Casey Stengel, manager of the hapless 1962 New York Mets, asked in exasperation, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” Amazing now prompts the same question.

The news is no better with respect to the magazine’s content.  Rumor has it that Harrison upon taking the editorship worked out some amicable arrangement with the Science Fiction Writers of America concerning Cohen’s use of reprints—presumably getting him to pay the authors something.  But reprints continue to dominate—they comprise six out of seven of the stories here.

There is new non-fiction material—another “Science of Man” article by anthropologist Leon Stover (see below), and a lively book review column by James Blish, under his pseudonym William Atheling, Jr.  Blish virtually disembowels Sam Moskowitz’s book Seekers of Tomorrow, which collects essays on major science fiction writers, earlier published in Amazing before Cohen.  Blish’s judgment: “inaccurate, prejudiced, filled with false assumptions and jejune literary comparisons, very badly written and utterly unproofread.  If this is scholarship, we could do with a lot less of it.” He makes his case in detail.  About the only defense remaining to the book is that it’s better than the competition, since there is none.  Blish also reviews Harlan Ellison’s anthology Dangerous Visions with measured praise.

And, on the front, there is another Johnny Bruck cover taken from Germany’s Perry Rhodan magazine, badly cropped, and featuring guys in spacesuits running around with ray guns.  Bruck’s work is colorful but cliched, and that is getting old.

All that, before we even get to the fiction!  Sheesh.

Send Her Victorious, by Brian W. Aldiss


by Jeff Jones

The only non-reprint story is Brian W. Aldiss’s Send Her Victorious, which at first seems like a slapdash, thrown-together story, but proves to be about a slapdash, thrown-together world.  It’s minor Aldiss, odd but quite funny in places.  Three stars.

The Illusion Seekers, by P.F. Costello

The Illusion Seekers, a “complete short novel” from the August 1950 Amazing, is bylined P.F. Costello, which is a “house name”—a pseudonym belonging to the publishing company and used by various authors as convenient.  This name is said to have been used often by William P. McGivern, but I don’t think this one is his, since McGivern is rumored to be a competent writer.


by W.H. Hinton

The story opens in a small and isolated colony of people suffering from deformities such as soft bones, woody skin plaques, and multitudes of miniature fingers growing from the backs of their hands.  But young Randy is normal.  Down the road from the east comes a guy named Raymond who calls himself an Illusion Seeker, but won’t explain what that means.  He warns that “death will breathe through the trees” in three days, but throws golden dust into Randy’s face and says he will be saved.  Sure enough, three days later everybody but Randy is dead.  So Randy sets off west following Raymond, discovering that the golden dust has left him with enhanced physical prowess as he fights off wild dogs with an axe.  He encounters two survivors from other groups who, hearing his story, tell him Raymond is responsible for the deaths.  They all continue west and catch up with Raymond.  Randy’s companions kill Raymond.  Then they start heading back east in a state of mutual murderous mistrust, have other picaresque but wearisome adventures, and eventually Randy gets the real story of how his world works, which of course makes very little sense. 

This story is both repellent and remarkably incompetent, written in a dead, flat style, with a pseudo-plot that rambles on and gives every indication of being made up as the author goes along, all set against a sketchy and implausible background.  Overall, it’s a reading experience sort of like the world’s least interesting bad dream, or like listening to a long and tedious monologue by someone who you gradually realize is not all there.  It made me wonder whether it’s Richard S. Shaver, Amazing’s foremost ex-psychiatric patient, making a few bucks behind the pseudonym.  In any case—one star, a burnt-out husk of a black dwarf.

The Way of a Weeb, by H.B. Hickey


by Robert Gibson Jones

H.B. Hickey contributes The Way of a Weeb (from Amazing, February 1951).  A Weeb is a frail humanoid creature native to Deimos who is always scared and always whining about it.  They’ve got one on space ship Virtus, to the great disgust of all the crew except Crag, who takes pity on him.  But things get tight when the evil Plutonians come after the Virtus, and the Weeb comes through and saves the day.  It’s a dreary bag of cliches, professionally rendered.  Two stars.

Stenographer's Hands, by David H. Keller, M.D.

The issue’s “Classic Novelet” is David H. Keller’s Stenographer’s Hands, from the Fall 1928 Amazing Stories Quarterly.  In broadest outline it follows the template of the earlier-reprinted Revolt of the Pedestrians and A Biological Experiment: humanity’s traditional ways of life get drastically altered, the results are disastrous, and there’s an upheaval to set things right (though the upheaval here is a little milder than in the others).


by Frank R. Paul

The president of Universal Utilities is bedeviled by the number of errors his ditzy stenographers make (apparently his business runs on non-form letters), and demands that his house biologist come up with a solution.  Easy-peasy: they’ll breed the perfect stenographer, by the hundreds or thousands, firing the less competent of the current flibbertigibets to make room for an army of promising males to balance the sexes.  Stenographers who marry and breed will get a free house in a special stenographers’ suburb among other perks.  There will be certain other undisclosed manipulations such as providing special food for the kids to help them grow up faster.

Two hundred years later, Universal has achieved world domination economically, with a torrent of flawless letters flowing out from a work force that matures at age 9, marries at 10, and reproduces quickly thereafter.  But the daughter and heir apparent of the current company president, having flunked out of college, says she wants a job as a stenographer.  She is then appalled at the sterility (metaphorical, of course) of the stenographers’ lives, and says when she’s in charge she won’t stand for it.  Conveniently, it is discovered that the stenographers have become so inbred that they are all starting to display nocturnal epilepsy.  Never mind!  The great experiment is reversed and once more the company's letters will be haphazardly produced by flighty young women of normal upbringing.

So, an obviously terrible idea is belatedly discovered to be terrible and is abandoned.  This is not a particularly dynamic plot and nothing else about the story is especially captivating.  Two stars.

Lorelei Street, by Craig Browning

Craig Browning is a pseudonym of Roger Graham Phillips (“Rog” to the readership), and Lorelei Street comes from the September 1950 Fantastic Adventures.  It's a facile but insubstantial fantasy involving a cop named Clancy who is asked by a passer-by for directions to an address on Lorelei Street, which he provides, later realizing that there is no such street.  There are more funny happenings about Lorelei Street.  A man who bought a big bag of groceries there was found later in a state of near starvation despite eating them.  A woman bought a suit which later disappeared, leaving her on the street in her underwear.  A Mr. Calva is the apparent proprietor on Lorelei Street, and Clancy arrests him for fraud.  Calva says he’ll regret it.  Next day the newspapers describe the arrest of “Calva the Great,” a “hypnotist swindler.” Calva vanishes from court on the day of trial, and when Clancy tries to go home, he finds himself on Lorelei Street, and it’s curtains. 


by Edmond Swiatek

There’s more to the plot than that, but not better.  Like Phillips’s “You’ll Die Yesterday!” from the previous issue, the story displays considerable cleverness to no very interesting end.  Two stars, barely.

Four Men and a Suitcase, by Ralph Robin

Ralph Robin’s byline appeared on 11 stories in the SF magazines from late 1951 to late 1953, most of them in Fantasy and Science Fiction or Fantastic, plus one in Amazing in 1936.  Later he made an appearance in Prairie Schooner, a literary magazine published at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; the story wound up in Martha Foley’s annual volume The Best American Short Stories 1958.  He seems to have quit while he was ahead; he has not been heard from since that I can discover.

Robin’s story Four Men and a Suitcase, from Fantastic for July/August 1953, is about some Skid Row drunks discussing what to do with a mysterious object one of them has found.  It looks like a giant hard-boiled egg, and when yelled at threateningly displays diagrams on its . . . skin?  (No shell.) The first one illustrates the Pythagorean theorem.  After several further iterations, one of the characters slaps the egg, with large and regrettable consequences.  The main point here seems to be how hilarious poverty-stricken alcoholics are.  Sorry, can’t get with it.  One star.

The Mechanical Heart, by H.I. Barrett

The issue’s fiction winds up, literally, with The Mechanical Heart by one-story wonder H.I. Barrett, from the Fall 1931 Amazing Stories Quarterly.  Inventor Jim Bard has just learned that his heart could conk out any minute.  But he wants to complete his telephoto machine! (Actually more like television.) The solution?  Make an artificial heart!  His assistant Henry, trained in a Swiss watch factory, hops to it.  It’s a beauty!  And his doctor is persuaded to install it.  Jim will carry a case in his pocket with two six-volt flashlight batteries and a watch to time the impulses that drive it. Just wind the watch, and don’t forget to change the batteries!


by Leo Morey

After the surgery, Jim convalesces, and experiments with increasing the blood flow, which he finds highly stimulating.  “Have to be careful or he’d have himself cutting all sorts of didoes.” (Dido: “a mischievous or capricious act : prank, antic,” says Merriam-Webster.) But he can’t resist, and starts increasing the flow so he can stay up all night working on the telephoto, and then so stimulates himself that he scandalizes Hilda the Swedish maid and has to be restrained and briefly disconnected by Henry.

At the Associated Scientists’ meeting, to demonstrate both the telephoto machine and the heart, Jim gets stage fright, cold sweat and the works, and then realizes he can increase his blood flow.  He sets up the telephoto for a demonstration and discovers—he’s forgotten the C batteries!  In desperation, he snatches the batteries powering his heart, and the show goes on, with his machine relaying the picture from a distant movie theatre, while his unsupported heart races . . . for a while.  And then, time’s up.

This is the best of a bad lot of reprints—corny, but with at least a bit of period charm, while the others lack charm of any sort.  Three stars, grading on the curve.

Science of Man: Dogs, Dolphins and Human Speech, by Leon Stover

Dr. Stover takes on John Lilly’s claim that dolphins can learn to speak English in addition to their accustomed clicks and clacks.  He starts out with dogs, which communicate vocally, he says, “but the level of signaling is that of a call system, quite distinct from that of language.  A call system is no more linguistic than the system of visual signals dogs communicate to each other by means of facial expression, body movement, and position of the tail.” However: “Language and only language is a symbolic form of communication,” one which allows meaning to be assigned arbitrarily to symbols. 

Dolphins?  Same story. Their large brain size has more to do with body weight than with intelligence.  “How the brains of dolphins function to meet the demands of their environment is not yet known, but it is a sure thing that research will show that symbolic behavior, like language and culture, is not part of that adaptation.” And there’s the rub—“it is a sure thing that research will show.” Stover continues with arguments about the evolution of human intelligence in ways that exclude dolphins, but there’s no way for the lay person to tell how much of it is supported by research and how much is his admittedly informed supposition.  Two stars.

Summing Up

Editors change, formats change a bit, but the consistent mediocrity of this magazine abides, firmly rooted in the dominant and seemingly immovable prevalence of reprints of only occasional merit.  One wonders how long this can last.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[December 10, 1967] Give 'Em Hell, Harry! (January 1968 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

There'll Be Some Changes Made

According to a story that may be apocryphal, somebody in the crowd shouted the phrase I'm using for the title of this article during one of Harry Truman's campaign speeches. True or not, we'll see how it relates to a major change in Fantastic magazine. Just to build up the suspense, however, let me digress and talk about another big change.

A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss

The British rock 'n' roll band known as the Rolling Stones, famous for gritty blues-driven music, went in a different direction recently. The new album Their Satanic Majesty's Request, released just a couple of days ago in both the UK and the USA, is full of the surrealism and dreamy psychedelic tunes to be found in the Beatles' groundbreaking Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.


Even the cover looks similar. Note that lack of words. If you don't know who these guys are, you must not be a fan.

I don't know if this album represents the future of the Stones, or if they did it just to gather some green (and I don't mean moss.) At least the groovy song She's a Rainbow is worth a listen while you stare at your lava lamp.

Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun

With a new editor at the helm of Fantastic, there are certain to be changes coming, although it may take a while. The mills of the publishing world grind slowly, to be sure, so the latest issue probably doesn't yet reflect the taste of the current boss. If nothing else, however, it's got two new stories instead of the usual one. Thank goodness for small favors.


Cover art by Frank R. Paul.

One change that hasn't yet happened is using new cover art. This issue recycles the back cover of the July 1945 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


Please excuse the faded, wrinkled, beat-up copy of the old magazine I had to use. Twenty-odd years haven't been kind to it. At least you can see the two big suns at the top and not just the two little ones to the side.

When Brahma Wakes, by Fritz Leiber


Illustration by Jeff Jones.

The fellow depicted above is none other than God. The God of the Bible, indeed, but also all the other deities. He hasn't checked on His creation for a while, and it seems to have been messed up by the Adversary, so he gets ready to take a look.

This version of the Almighty seems like a weary old man, wandering around His shabby surroundings, not sure what He should be doing. If you don't mind this kind of literary blasphemy, the main problem you'll have with this story is the fact that it comes to a dead stop when it becomes most interesting.

God never does take a look at things down below. It's almost like the first chapter of a much longer work.

Leiber is incapable of writing a bad sentence, of course, so it's not painful to read. I just wish there were more of it.

Three stars.

A Darkness in My Soul, by Dean R. Koontz


Also by Jones.

A fledgling writer — he's only had a couple of stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, both this year — offers this disturbing vision of the future.

After a quarter of a century and countless failures, a project to create superhuman beings has produced only two successes, if you can call them that. One is the main character, a outwardly normal man but with telepathic powers. The other is much more grotesque, a being that looks like a child with the face of a very old man. The latter is immensely intelligent, but his scientific discoveries are buried deep in his subconscious. The telepath dives into his mind in order to dig out vital information.

There's a lot more to the story than that. We've got the protagonist's Freudian sessions with a computer therapist, revealing the meaning of his dreams. The main character has a relationship with a woman who writes scandalous books. The author uses typographic tricks and symbolic fantasy sequences, adding more than a touch of New Wave writing. There's one heck of an ending.

The author displays great skill at creating an eerie mood. Maybe he should try writing out-and-out horror stories instead of creepy science fiction. In any case, this complex nightmare of neurosis shows great ambition for a newcomer.

Four stars.

Reservation Deferred, by John Wyndham

From the May/June 1953 issue of the magazine comes this wry tale of the afterlife.


Cover art by W. T. Mars.

A teenage girl is dying. She's not at all upset about this, because she's absolutely certain she's going to enjoy the bliss of Heaven. For some reason, the ghost of a slightly older woman appears.


Illustration by Charles J. Berger.

The dead woman has taken a peek at the various paradises created by men, and she doesn't much care for them. This changes the dying girl's attitude.

This featherweight jape has a pleasing feminist aspect to it. (Despite the fact that the ghost is wearing only a brassiere and underpants.) Like the Leiber and the Koontz, it may raise the hackles of folks who take their religious faith very seriously.

Three stars.

The Metal Doom (Part 2 of 2), by David H. Keller, M. D.

As I mentioned last time, this serialized novel first appeared in three issues of Amazing Stories back in 1932. Dig through the archives if you want to see the covers of those old magazines.


Illustration by Leo Morey.

Last time we saw how civilization fell apart when all metals dissolved into dust. Some folks set up strongholds in the country, where they could defend themselves against packs of desperate criminals.

This half of the novel wanders around quite a bit. One sequence involves a group of female physicians and other professionals living on their own. As soon as one of the male characters meets them, you know we're going to have a love story. You may not predict the fact that it involves a tiger.

In the most bizarre plot development, a horde of Tartars shows up, and we get a big battle scene. There's an explanation, of sorts, for how these landlocked nomadic warriors wound up in New England. The way the good guys defeat the bad guys is implausible, to say the least.

Eventually, our heroes figure out how to turn the dust back into metal. You'd think somebody would have discovered the secret long before, but what do I know. Interestingly, the main motivation for producing small amounts of metal is to make surgical instruments so childbirth isn't so dangerous for mother and baby.

The author seems to believe that city life is inherently corrosive to the human spirit, and suggests that society was ready to fall apart even if metal things hadn't crumbled away. I'm not convinced.

Overall, I didn't find the development of the apocalyptic premise as interesting as its introduction.

Two stars.

Undersea Guardians, by Ray Bradbury

This early work from a writer who is now something of a household name comes from the December 1944 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by James B. Settles.

A handful of the people killed when a German submarine destroyed their passenger ship turn into water-breathing ghosts or zombies, for lack of a better word. They spend their non-lives preventing Nazi subs from attacking Allied ships.


Illustration by Arnold Kohn.

This is something more than just wartime propaganda, although there's certainly some of that. The undead characters have their own motives and personalities. The most interesting are two women, one of whom is out for revenge, gleefully killing Germans, the other trying to protect the man she loves, who is sailing on a convoy.

We don't get much of the Bradbury touch, love it or hate it, with the exception of a few metaphors here and there. If I hadn't see the author's name, I never would have suspected it was his work.

Three stars.

They Fly So High, by Ross Rocklynne

This outer space yarn comes from the pages of the June 1952 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Walter Popp.

A spaceman holds a Mad Scientist prisoner aboard his vessel. The taunting genius has already rigged the ship to blow up, so the two of them go flying off towards Jupiter in their spacesuits.


Illustration by David Stone.

What follows is a strange odyssey on the surface (more or less) of the giant planet, and a change in the relationship between the two characters.

This is an odd story. It combines melodramatic space opera, vistas of a bizarre environment, and philosophical dialogues. I suppose the author is trying to say something about human thinking while telling a rattling good yarn, but much of its meaning escapes me.

Two stars.

The Sex Opposite, by Theodore Sturgeon

This tale of love, death, and biology comes from the Fall 1952 issue of the magazine.


Cover art by Leo Summers.

The plot begins in gruesome fashion, as a couple are murdered by street thugs. A coroner (male) reveals the weird thing about the bodies to a reporter (female). (I mention their sexes because it's relevant to the story.)

The two victims are Siamese twins, bound together at the chest. (You may have already guessed that this isn't quite true.) When an eerie, inhuman scream draws the protagonists out of the building, somebody destroys the bodies in a blazing fire.


Also by David Stone.

The coroner meets a woman with whom he shares an intimate but nonsexual evening. The reporter has the same kind of encounter with a man, but we only get to hear about it second-hand. What does this have to do with the bodies? And why should the reader run to the dictionary and look up the various definitions of the word syzygy?

This is an intriguing work that always keeps the reader's interest. It's a mystery, a romance, and good science fiction to boot. Maybe you should stir in a touch of horror as well. In any case, it's a solid work from one of the masters.

Four stars.

Never Go Back, by Charles V. De Vet

The magazine finishes with this time travel story, reprinted from the August/September 1953 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Gaylord Welker.

A guy goes back in time to prevent a childhood friend from drowning. The weird thing is that there's no sign of his own younger self, and even his mother denies such a child exists. When he returns to his own time, the scientist he worked with claims he never saw him before. What the heck is going on?


Illustration by Ernie Barth.

The author makes up some pretty weird rules about time travel. I have to admit they're unique, even if they don't make a lot of sense to me. The ending is gruesome enough for any horror fan.

Two stars.

I'm Just Wild About Harry

That's an overstatement, although I am hopeful that the new editor will bring some freshness to a magazine that has been dragging its feet for a while. This issue doesn't show any evidence of a major shift in policy yet. Time will tell. Meanwhile, just having double the usual amount of new fiction is enough to make me want to be kind to small animals.


I can't tell you anything about this drawing, which follows the Sturgeon story, except that it doesn't appear with the original publication of that work. It's probably a reprint from somewhere, but I have no evidence for that one way or another.



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[October 8, 1967] Things Fall Apart (November 1967 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

P.O.P. Sends Out An S.O.S.

The seaside amusement area known as Pacific Ocean Park, opened in 1958, closed its doors forever a couple of days ago, due to decreasing attendance and failure to pay back taxes and rental fees.


Pacific Ocean Park in happier days.

This aquatic rival of nearby Disneyland offered such futuristic and nautical delights as the House of Tomorrow, a Sea Circus, Diving Bells, the Sea Serpent Roller Coaster, and even a Flight to Mars, to name just a few out of dozens.


Artist's impression of the entrance to the defunct wonderland.

Long Time Passing

The vanishing of this Southern California landmark brings thoughts of the way in which almost everything disappears sooner or later. Pete Seeger's classic folk song Where Have All the Flowers Gone? (perhaps best known in the version recorded by Peter, Paul, and Mary a few years ago) could serve as appropriately melancholy background music for such meditations.


It's on the trio's first album, by the way.

Appropriately, the latest issue of Fantastic contains a number of stories dealing with the passage of time and the decay of technology and culture.


Recycled art by Johnny Bruck.

The painting on the cover, as usual, has already appeared elsewhere. In this case, it's from an issue of Perry Rhodan, the popular weekly German publication named for the heroic space adventurer who appears in its pages.


Working from a German/English dictionary, the caption seems to mean something like Robots Please Allow . . . Far Is The Way To Noman's Land — A New Arlan Story. I'm sure my German-speaking fellow Galactic Journeyers can supply a better translation.

The Housebreakers, by Ron Goulart

Before we get to all the doom and gloom stuff dealing with vast expanses of time and the breakdown of society, let's have a little comic relief from a writer who specializes in funny stuff. If nothing else, it's the only new story in the issue.


Illustrations by Jeff Jones.

A mercenary gets his latest assignment from a talkative computer riding in an unreliable automated car. It seems there's a planet that essentially serves as a suburb. Folks commute from it to other planets to work. Some of the inhabitants are criminals and other lowlifes dumped there. (That seems like a really bad idea to me, but it sets up the plot.)

Crooks are appearing out of nowhere, grabbing loot and then disappearing. Since they don't have the gizmo necessary for teleportation, this seems impossible. The last guy to investigate the case is missing in action and presumed dead. Our hero has to contact the wife of a fellow who has joined the robbers in an attempt to track them down. Could it have anything to do with the planet's only real city (as opposed to bedroom communities), thought to be abandoned?


And what about this guy?

Maybe this sounds like crime fiction or an adventure story, but it's almost pure slapstick. There's not a lot of plot logic. The bad guys show up on horses, which doesn't make any sense in this high-tech setting. I guess the author wanted to spoof Westerns. The explanation for teleportation without a device is completely anticlimactic. Without giving too much away, it boils down to plot convenience.

Two stars.

Hok Visits the Land of Legends, by Manly Wade Wellman


Illustrations by Jay Jackson.

Speaking of vast amounts of time, let's go way, way back to the Stone Age. We've met the mighty caveman Hok a couple of times before. This yarn comes from the April 1942 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


Cover art by Malcolm Smith.

Hok decides to kill a mammoth all by himself. He manages to wound the beast badly, and track it down through heavy snow to its place of dying. (This is similar to the legend of the elephant's graveyard.)


Note the very modern-looking snowshoes.

This turns out to be a deep valley, where the weather is nice and warm. The first thing you know, Hok is attacked by a pterodactyl.


Yes, this is an extreme anachronism; but what's a few million years between friends?

He also has to fight off a nasty critter, sort of like a rhinoceros, that doesn't belong in his time either. Poetic license, I guess.

A tribe of folks live in the treetops of this hidden tropical jungle. They're ruled by a brutal dictator. Hok has to deal with this guy as well as the animals that are out to kill him.

Even more so than in previous stories in this series, it's impossible to take this outrageous tale as a serious look into the remote past. The hot weather in the valley, the presence of beasts that died out millions of years before humans showed up; none of it makes sense.

There are tons of footnotes, as if we're supposed to accept this as scientific speculation rather than pure fantasy. These get in the way of just enjoying an exciting adventure story. Perhaps the most unbelievable thing about this exercise in pseudo-scholarship is the notion that Hok is the source of legends about Hercules.

Two stars.

That We May Rise Again . . ., by Charles Recour


Illustration by Julian S. Krupa.

From the remote past we jump forward into the extreme far future, in this apocalyptic tale from the July 1948 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Arnold Kohn.

A really long time from now, Earth is ruled by gigantic telepathic ants. They keep a few human beings around as servants. Our hero's master is a relatively kind ant, it seems. It lets him wander through a library of ancient books, learning how humanity used to dominate the planet. Apparently, the huge ants were created by radioactivity during the atomic war that destroyed civilization (The author anticipated the flick Them! by a few years.)

The ants want this fellow to take a ride in their only rocket ship, so he can act as a sort of double-check on their navigation systems. They don't want to go into space, but they want to take a look at things up there. Meanwhile, the guy meets the only other human being he's ever seen. Wouldn't you know it, she's a woman, and they fall instantly in love out of pure instinct.

Suddenly the prospect of taking a trip into the void doesn't sound so appealing. The lovebirds set out on their own, despite the opposition of the massive brain that rules over all the ants and their human slaves.

This is kind of a silly story that tries to create pathos in the fate of the two humans but winds up seeming ludicrous instead. The love story is implausible, to say the least, since these folks have never encountered one of their own kind before. It almost makes the giant ants seem realistic.

Two stars.

Make Room for Me!, by Theodore Sturgeon


Illustration by Gerald Hohns.

The May 1951 issue of Fantastic Adventures supplies this story featuring one of the author's favorite themes.


Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones.

As in his famous novel More Than Human (1953), Sturgeon presents us with a kind of group mind. Three college students form a triangular relationship. One, the only woman in the group, supplies the emotional and esthetic aspects of their lives. One of the men is an intellectual, and the other performs physical tasks. They drift apart over the years, but inevitably come back together. There's an unexpected reason for this.

An alien who consists of three symbiotic parts inhabits their minds. Those of its species have been acting as mental parasites on the simple lifeforms on the moon Titan. Now they intend to move to Earth, because the creatures they prey upon are running out. Working as one, the humans come up with an alternate plan to benefit everyone.

Despite its rather melodramatic science fiction aspects, this is a moving account of people who find themselves drawn together mysteriously, often against their conscious wills. As you'd expect from Sturgeon, the characters seem like real, complex people. It may be something of a stereotype to have the only woman be the emotional member of the group, but this doesn't seriously detract from the story.

Four stars.

Full Circle, by H. B. Hickey


Illustration by Ed Valigursky.

The premiere issue of the magazine (Summer 1952) is the source for this brief bit of irony.


Cover art by Barye Phillips and Leo Summers.

Once again, we're in the very far future, after human society has disappeared. The world is inhabited by robots. After an extremely long struggle, they have finally produced the ultimate being.

Well, just a glance at the illustration gives away the story's twist ending. Despite that, it's fairly effective. A minor piece that nevertheless accomplishes what it sets out to do.

Three stars.

The Metal Doom (Part 1 of 2), by David H. Keller, M. D.


Illustration by Leo Morey.

This Kelleryarn (Kellernovel?) originally appeared in three parts in the May, June, and July 1932 issues of Amazing Stories. All cover art also by Leo Morey.


Another physician in the issue.


This time there's a Ph.D. included.


Keller gets his name on all three covers.

For no apparent reason, all metal rots away. Naturally, this wipes out civilization. A husband and wife, with their infant daughter, escape the city early enough to find an abandoned farmhouse where they can live off the land.

A wealthy fellow not too far away sets up a group of folks who work together in order to fight off the bands of desperate criminals roaming around, now that no prison can hold them. After some violent battles, the first attempts to form some kind of loose confederation with other communities for mutual defense begin.

This is a grim story, not always pleasant to read. The main character changes from an ordinary citizen into somebody willing to kill dangerous people in cold blood. There's a disturbing subplot about the physician in charge of an institution for the so-called feebleminded, who has to make a terrible decision about what to do about them.

Three stars.

Order Out Of Chaos?

This wasn't a very good issue, with only the Sturgeon worthy of notice. I wonder if the magazine and its sister publication Amazing are going to slowly wear away into nothing, given the way they're both raiding back issues for the dregs. Maybe it's about time to look around for some better reading, like a classic novel.


From 1958, a groundbreaking work of modern African literature.

Or you could turn on the radio instead, and listen to KGJ for all the hits, all the time!




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[August 8, 1967] Distant Signals (September 1967 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Rock Around the Clock

If any more proof is needed that rock 'n' roll now dominates the American popular music scene, here it is: a couple of days ago, radio station KMPX in San Francisco (106.9 on your FM dial, for those of you near the city by the bay) started playing a wide variety of rock music (as opposed to the usual Top Forty hits) twenty-four hours a day. As far as I know, it's the first station in the USA to do so.


Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue, programming director for KMPX.

I live a very long way from Frisco, so I won't be able to pick up their signal.

Appropriately, the lead story in the latest issue of Fantastic features the inability to establish contact over a vast distance as a major plot point. As we'll see, other stories in the magazine also deal with difficulties in communication.


Cover art by Frank R. Paul.

As usual, the image on the front is taken from an old magazine. In this case, it's the back cover of the January 1941 issue of Amazing Stories.


The reprinted version omits the pink flamingo in the bottom right corner.

The Longest Voyage, by Richard C. Meredith


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

Three spaceships carry the first astronauts to Jupiter. Incredibly bad luck strikes the mission. Freak accidents destroy two of the vessels and badly damage the third, leaving only one person alive. Seriously injured, the fellow faces a slow and lonely death.

It seems the crippled ship is now in orbit around Jupiter. The sole survivor has enough food, water, and air to last many years, but no way to contact Earth. (As I've indicated above, he's as far out of range as I am with KMPX.) Can our intrepid hero find a way to make his way back?


He also grows a beard.

This technological problem-solving story would be right at home in the pages of Analog. The protagonist makes use of some basic science and a lot of tinkering to overcome a seemingly impossible dilemma.

It's pretty well written for this kind of thing. The author really made me feel the character's suffering and desperation. I'm not sure I believe that a future society advanced enough to send spaceships to the far reaches of the solar system wouldn't figure out a way to talk to them. Without that plot point, the story would boil down to the hero sending out an SOS and waiting for rescue.

Three stars.

Same Autumn in a Different Park, by Peter Tate


Illustration also by Gray Morrow; he seems to be the only artist doing new work for the magazine.

Remarkably, this issue actually has two new stories. This one comes from a Welsh author usually seen in New Worlds. As you might expect, it has more than a little flavor of New Wave SF to it.

In another example of limited communication, a mother and father only talk to each other via teletype. In this grim future, the authorities have decided that the way to prevent violence is to have children raised apart from their parents. For that matter, the boy and girl in the story don't have any contact with anyone except each other and the machines that watch over them.

The devices give the children dolls representing the victims of nuclear war and a sample weapon, in an attempt to warn them about the horrors of violence. It's no surprise that this idea doesn't work out very well.

Typical of the New Wave, this story isn't as clear or linear as I may have made it sound. You have to read carefully and be patient to understand it. The premise is more effective as dark satire than as plausible speculation.

There's a strange scene in which the girl turns into a bird made from a hedge, through some kind of technological miracle. This weird transformation doesn't seem to have anything to do with the rest of the story, unless I'm missing something. It's a striking image, anyway.

This is an intriguing work, but one more to be admired than loved, I believe.

Three stars.

The Green Splotches, by T. S. Stribling

From the January 3, 1920 issue of Adventure comes this early example of interplanetary science fiction.


I'm guessing the cover artist's name is H. Tidlie, but maybe somebody with sharper eyes can make out the signature better than I can.

It was reprinted in the March 1927 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Frank R. Paul, of course.

The magazine is careful to tell me twice that Stribling went on to win a Pulitzer Prize after he lifted himself out of the pulps. For the record, it was for his 1932 work The Store, a novel about the southern United States after the time of Reconstruction.


Illustration by somebody called Gambee, about whom I have no other information.

A scientific expedition heads for a remote area of Peru. The place has a very bad reputation. So much so, in fact, that the only locals willing to guide them there are two condemned criminals who would otherwise face execution.

The first eerie sign that something strange is going on comes when they find a series of carefully articulated skeletons of various animals, including a human being. Pretty soon, one of the two criminals shoots at and chases after somebody, disappearing in the process.

The others receive a visit from a strange person, who treats them as inferior beings. You'll figure things out, from the illustration if nothing else, although the human characters never do.

Although it's a little old-fashioned (this is one of those stories where radium is pretty much a synonym for magic), this is a very readable yarn. What most distinguishes it is a subtle note of satire. Although not comic, and sometimes even horrific, there's a sardonic tone throughout. There's a running joke, of sorts, about the expedition's reporter and his self-published book about reindeer.

Three stars.

The Ivy War, by David H. Keller, M.D.

The May 1930 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this Kelleryarn.


Cover art by Leo Morey.

An aggressive, swift-moving, deadly form of ivy emerges from a pit and overwhelms a small town. Soon the seemingly intelligent plant invades larger cities, moving from place to place via water. Can anything stop it?


Illustration by Leo Morey also.

This reads like a science fiction monster movie of the last decade, with ivy taking the place of a giant bug or some such. It's even got one of those endings where Science discovers the only thing that will stop the menace. There's not much to it other than the premise. For what it is, it's adequate.

Three stars.

Beware the Fury, by Theodore Sturgeon

From the April 1954 issue of the magazine comes this work from one of the masters of imaginative fiction.


Cover art by Augusto Marin.

An astronaut seems to have betrayed Earth to invading aliens, making him the most hated human being in existence. A military type has the unenviable task of interviewing the traitor's wife, in an attempt to understand his actions. He learns of the man's unusual personality quirks, and of the couple's very strange marriage. With this knowledge, he tracks down the fellow when he returns to Earth and goes into hiding.


Illustration by Louis Priscilla.

I may have made this sound like a space war yarn, and there's certainly that aspect to the plot. However, the psychology of the characters is of much greater importance than the melodramatic aspects of the story. Sturgeon excels at this sort of thing, of course.

Four stars.

No Charge for Alterations, by H. L. Gold

The former editor of Galaxy offers this work from the April/May 1953 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Barye Phillips.

A doctor arrives on a colony world to study under a local physician. Medical technology exists that can change the patient not only physically, but mentally.


Interior illustrations by Henry Sharp.

He's shocked to see his mentor use the device to alter the mind of a young woman so she'll give up her dream of moving to Earth and becoming an entertainer, and instead be happy to do farm labor and raise children.


The After, in contrast to the above Before.

The new arrival decides to escape what he sees as an insane perversion of medicine and go back to Earth.  The local doctor contacts the retired physician under whom he studied, in an attempt to keep the new guy from leaving.  He learns something about his own time as a student.

I suppose this is supposed to be an ironic tale, maybe even humorous.  I found the premise distasteful.  The way in which the young woman at the start of the story is brainwashed to be a content farm wife is rationalized as being necessary to support the colony, but it gave me the creeps.

Two stars.

Signal to Noise Ratio

Well, that was a middle-of-the-road issue, rising above and sinking below average in a couple of places, but otherwise mediocre.  It's notable not only for having two new stories, but for having only science fiction and no fantasy.  The whole thing is like a radio station subject to bits of static now and then; worth tuning in for a while, but tempting you to turn the dial to something else.  Something like a corny pun, that may amuse you for a while, but otherwise forgettable.


Like this one, from the same issue as the Sturgeon story, by somebody known only as Frosty.

Still, while I may not be able to tune in to KMPX, I can at least turn the dial to the similarly formatted KGJ. That's some comfort!




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[July 14, 1967] The Beat Goes On (August 1967 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The August 1967 Amazing looks out on the world through one of Frank R. Paul’s later and less interesting works, trimmed of course from its original pulp size.  This one, titled A City on Uranus, is from the back cover of the April 1941 Amazing, as usual cropped to fit the lower half of this smaller magazine.  The issue’s overall contents and presentation are also as usual: one new story and a bunch of reprints, with Harry Harrison’s intelligent book reviews taking a few pages.


by Frank R. Paul

La de da de de.

The Man from Zodiac, by Jack Vance

Once more I say—at the risk of repeating myself repeating myself repeating myself—when a first-rate author shows up at the bottom of the market, there’s a reason for it.  The one non-reprinted piece of fiction here is Jack Vance’s “Great New Short Novel,” as the table of contents has it, The Man from Zodiac.  Zodiac Control, Inc., is a corporation that sells government services to colony planets across the galaxy, or galaxies (there is ambiguous reference to Andromeda), with competitors like Aetna, Fidelity, and Argus. 


by Gray Morrow

The eponymous Man is Milton Hack, a Zodiac employee (and also a minority shareholder, a fact which ultimately has little significance), who is charged by the main owners with getting and supervising a contract with the Phrones of Ethelrinda Cordas.  The Phrones are cartoon barbarians who have (or whose elite has) little interest in schools, sewer systems, and the other usual appurtenances of government; they wish only to obtain weapons with which to smite their neighbors and enemies, the equally cartoonish Sabo. 

Hack engages in a course of bamboozlement and chicanery and ends up representing both the Phrones and the Sabos with identical contracts, and persuading them to live in something resembling peace, outsmarting everyone in sight at every opportunity since they are all utterly stupid.  It’s frankly pretty crude, devoid of Vance’s usual sharp satirical wit; worse, it’s thoroughly boring, and gives the impression that the author is as bored as the reader.  Or maybe he is attempting to emulate the literary and commercial success of Christopher Anvil.  Two stars.

Martian and Troglodyte, by Neil R. Jones

The reprints are the usual mixed bag, slightly better mixed than in some issues.  The longest and oldest—a “Special—Short Novel” per the contents page—is Neil R. Jones’s Martian and Troglodyte, from the May 1933 Amazing.  Jones is best remembered for his protracted “Professor Jameson” series, about a scientist who is revived from his orbiting tomb and who goes chasing around the universe for a couple of dozen stories with the robot-bodied Zoromes.  In this one, Thrag, a cave guy who has been chased out of his tribe in a dispute over possession of the winsome Tua, is saved from becoming lunch for a cave bear by visiting Martians on a voyage of discovery.  (Jones’s Earth has many perils.  In addition to cave bears and saber-tooth tigers, tyrannosaurs and pterodactyls are still around.) Thrag learns not to be afraid of the Martians and they help him out in his quest to recover Tua from her brutal usurper by lending him lethal Martian technology.  Thrag’s and the Martians’ efforts to figure each other out are surprisingly well done. 


by Leo Morey

Overall, this is a pleasant antique, though Jones’s peculiar verbosity is sometimes a distraction.  (Any resemblance to the present commentator is entirely illusory.) A sample:

“In the depths of space between the earth and its contemporary planet, known to present day man as Mars, a small space ship sped at an inconceivable speed across the millions of miles of space towards the earth.  It was now very close, having been upon its journey through the stellar void for the period of time in which it had taken the great globe it was approaching to turn upon its axis forty times.  Forty times the topographical features of the planet earth had swung lazily before the eager eyes of the two space navigators within their interstellar craft as day by day, according to the rotation of the cosmic sphere, the planet grew larger in proportion as they drew near.”

Two stars; it probably would rate higher by the standards of its time.

Blabbermouth, by Theodore Sturgeon


by Malcolm Smith

Theodore Sturgeon’s Blabbermouth, from the February 1947 Amazing, is about a captivating woman who is telepathic and compulsively blurts out people’s secrets to those from whom they are being kept secret.  This brings ruin to her husband’s career as a prominent New York radio emcee, but by the end he figures out how to make lemonade (i.e., money) from this particular lemon.  The story is told in an affected semi-Damon Runyonesque style that bespeaks a writer trying to execute the cliches he thinks his market requires.  And maybe it did.  Or not.  This is only the second published story Sturgeon sold to an SF or fantasy editor other than John W. Campbell, and maybe he didn’t have much confidence about following his own bent anywhere else.  Two stars.

The Roller Coaster, by Alfred Bester


by Bernard Krigstein

There are two stories here from the magazine’s brief high-word-rate renascence of 1953-54.  Alfred Bester’s The Roller Coaster, from the May-June 1953 Amazing, is also told in an affected style, but it’s Bester’s own affectation, so it’s a lot more convincing than Sturgeon’s off-the-rack costume in Blabbermouth.  It starts with a slap to the reader’s face of Spillaneish violent sadism—quite appropriate in context, as it turns out—and continues without letup or wasted words to retell a familiar SF story.  It’s as if somebody said, “You read Vintage Season?  Here’s how it really goes.” Four nasty stars. 

One Way Street, by Jerome Bixby


by Augusto Marin

In the other renascence item, Jerome Bixby’s One Way Street (Amazing, December 1953-January 1954), the protagonist has a split-second blackout, drives off the road, and wakes up in a wrecked car and a slightly different world—phone numbers are different, his dog is different, there’s no Hamlet, Shelley, Keats, or atomic power, and Stalin’s alive.  His wife’s a little different too, but he likes the differences and is trying to make a life in this new world when he gets a chance to try to go home via an experimental procedure.  The surprise ending is about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning, but overall the story is sharply and economically done.  Three stars, pushing four.

North God’s Temple, by Henry J. Kostkos


by Leo Morey

We dip back into the archaic with Henry J. Kostkos’s North God’s Temple (Amazing, August 1934), in which a Professor Challenger-type blowhard, Professor Norton of the Cosmopolitan Museum, receives a telepathic summons from the historians of the People of the Magnetic God, who live undersea near the North Pole.  So he fakes up a pretext for an expedition to seek out the magnetic pole.  Once there he is summoned alone and sucked underwater and then underground in a rowboat, and finds the Temple of the Magnetic God (it must be, since he’s pinned to the wall until he manages to work his steel revolver out of his pocket).  This Temple landed on Earth after the breakup of the former fifth planet that became the asteroids.  Then Norton gets sucked back underwater in a contretemps that apparently is intended to explain the migration of the magnetic poles.  Two stars for this tiresome period piece.

Vis Scientiae, by Miles J. Breuer, M.D.

But there’s still one more piece of archaic to eat: Vis Scientiae, a poem by Miles J. Breuer, M.D. (Amazing, May 1930), which seems to be a lament by the ancient gods that they’re no longer in charge of those pesky humans.  It must speak for itself:

“They have chained the livid lightning that goes hurtling down the sky,
Made it slave for them and pass them scatheless as it hurtles by;
They have trapped the furious tempest at whose breath the forest reels,
And the angrier it rages all the merrier turn their wheels; . . .”

Et cetera, though the meter varies.  The substance of Tennyson and the accidents of Robert W. Service?  The best to be said for it is that it could have been worse.  Two stars.

Summing Up

A couple of stories well worth reading, a couple more at least readable, and a couple of wastes of time.  La de da de da.




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[June 10, 1967] Music To Read By (July 1967 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

So May I Introduce To You The Act You've Known For All These Years.

The Beatles, that is.

I know, I know. By now you're a little tired of the Fab Four. Well, the release of their latest album in the USA early this month may change your mind.

(Those lucky folks in the UK got it late last month.)

After evolving from catchy, expertly crafted pop songs into new musical territory with the albums Rubber Soul and Revolver, the Liverpudlians have taken a giant leap.


You could spend hours just studying the cover art.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is extraordinary. It takes rock 'n' roll, mixes it up with other forms of popular music, adds more than a little modern psychedelic surrealism, and comes up with a genuine work of art. I'm afraid I'm going to wear out lots of phonograph needles listening to it over and over.

Because I've already got the songs from this album stuck in my head, let me suggest the ones you might listen to while reading the latest issue of Fantastic.


Cover art by Johnny Bruck.

The image on the front is stolen from one of the weekly German magazines featuring the adventures of space explorer Perry Rhodan.


Perhaps one of our German Journeyers can supply a translation.

The Narrow Land, by Jack Vance


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

The only new story begins with the birth of our hero, forcing his way out of an egg and fighting off others of his kind. He then grows up swimming in swampy water with other amphibian youngsters.

You can tell he's not a human being, can't you? All of the characters are of his species, but there are different kinds. The number of ridges on their heads indicates what variety they are.

One-ridge folks are the most common, and exist as fully developed males and females. Two-ridge types are sexually neuter. Three-ridge individuals are invariably male. As we'll learn later, there used to be a lot of them, but war with the two-ridge kind left only one alive. There's also one four-ridge being, a monster that preys on the one-ridge children.

Confused? So is our hero, as he tries to understand his world. As the title implies, it's a thin strip of inhabitable land between a region of cold, dark mist and an ocean of constant thunderstorms.

(The editorial blurb states that this is a planet with one side always facing its sun. This is not explicitly stated in the text. It explains why it's always twilight.)


There are also birds, but they are barely mentioned.

We'll get a detailed explanation for the various subtypes of aliens. Suffice to say that the main character leaves the water and is taken in by the two-ridge folks as one of their own. Later, however, he is labeled a freak, and has to escape to the realm of the three-ridge being. He learns a lot more about what's going on from that fellow, and comes up with a plan.

The story's setting and exotic alien biology is fascinating. The author does a good job of seeing things through the eyes of a character very different from a human being. The end comes rather suddenly, suggesting the possibility of a sequel.

Four stars.

(Suggested listening: Fixing a Hole, because the protagonist is trying to fill the gaps in his knowledge of the world.)

The Ship Sails At Midnight, by Fritz Leiber


Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones.

This lovely and sad story comes from the September 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


Illustrations by Henry Sharp.

The narrator is one of a quartet of jaded, world-weary intellectuals in a small college town. He's a writer. One is a philosopher, another is studying physics. The only woman in the group is a sculptor. They're all fairly skilled in their various fields, but far from brilliant.

The four meet a strikingly beautiful woman working as a waitress at an all-night diner. She doesn't say much, and reveals almost nothing about herself. Somehow or other, she brings out the best in each of them. They lose their cynicism, and produce works of genius.


She claims her name is Helen, suggestive of the ancient Greek myth of the Trojan War.

It's obvious from the beginning that she's from another world. If the illustration wasn't enough of a clue, the story starts with reports of a meteorite falling to earth and sightings of a UFO.

The narrator falls in love with Helen, and she returns his affection. A strange man shows up, telling her it's time to leave. She chooses to stay. It turns out that the other two men are in love with Helen as well, and had also won her heart. Jealousy rears its ugly head, leading to sudden violence.

(As a side note, it seems to me that the author very subtly suggests that the sculptress is in love with Helen too. This is somewhat disguised by the fact that she is engaged to be married to the physics student. I may be reading too much into this, but I would not be very surprised if Leiber, a sophisticated writer always ahead of his time, meant to offer hints of a lesbian romance.)

This is a beautiful and heartbreaking tale of joy won and lost.

Five stars.

(Suggested listening: Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, because Lucy is as transcendent a creation as Helen.)

The Remarkable Flirgleflip, by William Tenn


Cover art by J. J. Blumenfeld.

The May 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures supplies this futuristic farce.


Illustration by Leo Summers.

At some unspecified time in the future, human activities are controlled by time travelers from an even more distant future. In particular, they forbid a researcher from inventing time travel, because it's not supposed to be invented until a later time.

(I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Time travel stories are confusing.)

The guy decides to invent it anyway, and to heck with the consequences. He tricks the narrator into getting sent to the Twentieth Century. The fellow just wants to go back to his own time. Complications ensue, partly because people of the future don't wear clothing.

After hiding in a garbage can for a while, he winds up with a wisecracking newspaper reporter. It seems his story makes for hot news, even if nobody really believes him.

This is a silly story, without much of the satiric edge often found in Tenn's sardonic yarns. As you can tell from the title, it's full of goofy invented words. That always annoys me in a science fiction comedy.

Two stars.

(Suggested listening: Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!, because it's the most whimsical song on the album.)

From This Dark Mind, by Rog Phillips


Cover art by Vernon Kramer.

The November/December 1953 issue of the magazine is the source of this look at tomorrow's psychiatry.

Using a device that gives a patient a word association test and analyzes it, the headshrinker is able to determine that a woman needs psychological surgery. This consists of altering her memory of an incident in her past.

As a secondary plot, another patient fails to show up for an appointment, and the psychiatrist suspects he's going to kill somebody. This part of the story turns into a kind of mystery, with a twist ending of sorts.

The background assumes that psychiatry is going to take over many of the functions of medical care. An outbreak of influenza among children, for example, is said to be caused by their anxiety over an event in the Little Orphan Annie comic strip!

At that point, I thought the author's intent was satire. As far as I can tell, however, the story is meant to be serious. The premise reminds me of the pseudoscience of Dianetics. (There's even a reference to pre-birth experiences as a source of mental disorders, which sure sounds like part of L. Ron Hubbard's nonsense to me.)

Setting aside my disdain for Dianetics, this isn't a very exciting story. There's some banter between the psychiatrist and his receptionist to fill up space. The two plots never come together, and they're resolved pretty much as you'd expect.

Two stars.

(Suggested listening: A Day In The Life, because the story takes place during one long day and night for the psychiatrist.)

The Man with the Fine Mind, by Kris Neville


Cover art by Robert Frankenberg.

This chiller comes from the January/February 1953 issue of the magazine.


Illustration by Leo Summers.

A man is at a party with his fiancée. He's drinking pretty heavily, and he doesn't seem to be too happy. He even thinks about killing her.

(Don't ask me why these two are engaged. They seem like a very unlikely couple indeed.)

She makes some remarks about how it's a shame he has to leave. He insists that he's staying. Things get weird when everybody at the party acts like he's gone. They ignore him completely. Figuring that this is some kind of cruel prank, he gets angrier and drunker. The situation ends badly.

I have to admit that I didn't fully understand this story. I wasn't sure if the guy had actually left, and some kind of unseen doppelganger was left at the party, or the other way around. Despite my confusion, and an unpleasant lead character, it held my interest.

Three stars.

(Suggested listening: With A Little Help From My Friends, because the protagonist was in desperate need of assistance from his acquaintances.)

The Ant with the Human Soul (Part Two of Two), by Bob Olsen


Cover art by Leo Morey.

Here's the conclusion of a novella that appeared (in one part) in the Summer 1932 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly.


Illustration by Morey also.

Last issue, we met a fellow who attempted suicide because his loss of religious faith led to his girlfriend leaving him. (Oddly, the guy remains a rather jolly, wisecracking sort.) A Mad Scientist rescued him. In return, the man agreed to undergo a bizarre experiment.

Part of his brain went into the body of an ant, so he could experience its sensations. (This involved a lot of shrinking and growing. That's one talented Mad Scientist.)

In this half, the guy's mind goes into several different kinds of ants. We learn about gentle farmers of fungus, aggressive warriors that enslave other ants, herders of aphids that live on the liquid they secrete, and so forth. It all winds up with the fellow regaining his faith in God, based on life among the ants, and going back to his sweetheart.

As in the first part, the main appeal of the conclusion is in the detailed description of the ant colonies. The author must have done a lot of research. Some of this stuff is a little too anthropomorphic, but otherwise it seems very accurate.

The subplot of attempted suicide and loss of faith seems way out of place with the rest of the story. It's not a comedy, but it's very lighthearted. (The man gives whimsical nicknames to the other ants, such as Sherlocka Holmes.) The premise is outrageous, of course, but go along with it and it's not a bad read.

Three stars.

(Suggested listening: When I'm Sixty-Four, because this is the oldest story in the issue, and the song is also a featherweight piece of fluff.)

Mr. Steinway, by Robert Bloch


Cover art by Augusto Marin.

From the April 1954 issue of the magazine we get this bit of dark fantasy.


Illustration by Bill Ashman.

The narrator is a woman who falls in love with a pianist. The musician practices an odd sort of meditation, in which he enters a trance. In this unconscious state, he communicates with everything, including inanimate objects.

In particular, he has a special relationship with his piano. Nicknamed Mr. Steinway, it was a gift from his mother, now deceased. The instrument has its own preferences. It doesn't like certain composers, for example.

As the two lovers grow closer, Mr. Steinway displays signs of jealousy. As you might imagine, this doesn't end well for anybody.

On a superficial level, this is just a spooky yarn about a haunted piano. There's a bit more to it than that, I think. The author does a pretty good job of writing from a woman's point of view, which is not always something you can say about a male writer. What happens to the narrator is more subtle and disturbing than you might expect.

(If they made this into a movie, her fate would be a little more openly violent, I think.)

Three stars.

(Suggested listening: She's Leaving Home, because the narrator is never going home again.)

I've Got To Admit It's Getting Better, A Little Better All The Time.

Well, that was a pretty decent issue, with only a couple of poor pieces, a very good new story, some readable reprints, and one great classic. Not as perfect a masterpiece as the latest Beatles album, but enough to keep smiles on our faces.


Mustaches and band uniforms optional.



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Book, Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[May 6, 1967] Stirred?  Shaken? (June 1967 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Is something stirring at Amazing?  After several issues devoid of non-fiction features, this one starts a book review column by Harry Harrison, whose brief stint as nominal editor of the British magazine SF Impulse ended a few months ago.  Is a remake in order?  A change of guard in the wind?  There’s no hint.


by Johnny Bruck

The cover itself is also a change, not having been looted from the back files of Amazing or Fantastic Adventures.  The pleasantly lurid image of space-suited men watching or fleeing a battle of spacecraft is not credited, but other sources attribute it to a 1964 issue of Perry Rhodan, Germany’s long-running weekly paperback novella series, artist’s name Johnny Bruck.  I wonder if the publisher is paying him, or anyone.

Also perplexing is the shift in presentation on the cover.  Last issue, the display of big names was ostentatious.  Here, the only thing prominently displayed is “Winston K. Marks Outstanding New Story Cold Comfort,” sic without apostrophe.  Marks is one of the legion who filled the mid-1950s’ proliferation of SF magazines with competent and forgettable copy.  After a couple of stories in the early ‘40s, he reappeared with a few in 1953, contributed a staggering 25 stories in 1954 and 20 in 1955, and trailed off thereafter; he hasn’t been seen in these parts since mid-1959.  But here he is, name in lights, while Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, and Philip K. Dick are relegated to small type over the title.  Odd, and probably counter-productive, to say the least.

The Heaven Makers (Part 2 of 2), by Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert’s serial The Heaven Makers concludes in this issue.  Imagine an SF novel oriented to the reference points of Charles Fort, Richard Shaver, and soap opera.  And then imagine—this is the hard part—that it’s nonetheless pretty readable.

First, we are property!  Just like Charles Fort said.  You may think you understand human history, but everything you know is wrong!  Earth is secretly dominated by the Chem, a species of very short, bandy-legged, silver-skinned alien humanoids who have been made immortal, and also connected tele-empathically, by a discovery of one of their ancient savants—Tiggywaugh’s web (definitely sic).  Only problem is . . . they’re bored.  Eternity weighs heavily on them.  They must be entertained and distracted!

So, the Chem send Storyships around the galaxy, though Earth’s is the only one we see.  This ship rests on the bottom of the ocean, from which vantage the Chem shape history in large and small ways both by direct intervention and by remote manipulation and heightening of human emotional states.  The result: wars that might be settled quickly at the conference table can be prolonged and intensified, and susceptible individuals can be driven as far as murder.  These events are recorded, processed, spiced up with their own emotional track, and broadcast to pique the jaded souls of the Chem. 

One of the stars of this industry is Fraffin, proprietor of Earth’s Storyship, but he’s suspected of letting hints drop to Earthfolk about what’s going on, a major crime among the Chem.  Kelexel, posing as a visitor, has been sent by the authorities to get to the bottom of things, after four previous investigators have found nothing and, suspiciously, resigned.  But Kelexel is quickly corrupted himself.  Fraffin shows him a “pantovive” of a man manipulated by the Chem into murdering his wife, which Kelexel finds quite gripping.  He also becomes obsessed with the woman’s daughter, Ruth (the Chem are quite captivated by the physiques of humans, and can interbreed with them).  Fraffin, having found Kelexel’s vulnerability, sets out to procure her for him.  So three dwarfish figures show up at her back door, immobilize her with some sort of ray, and carry her away to be mind-controlled and ravished by Kelexel.

At this point, the nagging sense of familiarity I was feeling came into focus.  Herbert has reinvented Richard Shaver’s Deros!  Shaver, a former psychiatric patient, wrote up his delusions of sadistic cave-dwelling degenerates tormenting normal people, which (with much reworking by editor Ray Palmer) boosted Amazing’s mid-1940s circulation to unheard-of levels, until the publisher put an end to the disreputable spectacle a few years later.  Now Herbert has gussied up the “Shaver Mystery” for prime time!  The distorted physical appearance . . . check.  The mind control rays . . . check.  The underground caverns . . . not exactly, these characters are underwater instead.  But that’s a minor detail.


by Gray Morrow

Oh, yes, the soap opera part.  Up on dry land, Andy Thurlow, a court psychologist, is Ruth’s old boyfriend; she threw him over for someone else, who turned out to be a low-life.  Andy’s never gotten over it.  Her father, holed up after his Chem-driven murder of her mother, won’t surrender to anybody but Andy.  Meanwhile, Andy, who is wearing polarized glasses as a result of an eye injury, has started to see what prove to be manifestations of Chem activity, invisible to anyone else.  Andy also gets back with Ruth, who has moved out on her husband; he takes her back to the marital house and waits so she can pick up some possessions.  But the Chem snatch her as described, and her husband falls through a glass door and dies. 

Back at the Chems’ submarine hideout, Kelexel is having his way with the pacified Ruth, who, when he’s not using her, studies the Chem via the pantovive machine, learning more and more, while Kelexel harbors growing misgivings about the whole Chem enterprise.  Andy, up on land, is trying to persuade Ruth’s father the murderer to cooperate with an insanity defense while wondering if the strange manifestations he has seen account for Ruth’s disappearance.  The plot lines are eventually resolved in confrontations among Kelexel, Fraffin, Ruth, and Andy with dialogue that is more reminiscent of daytime TV than Herbert’s turgid usual.  In the end, Herbert actually makes a readable story out of this sensational and largely ridiculous material.  Three stars.

Cold Comfort, by Winston K. Marks


by Gray Morrow

Winston Marks’s "Outstanding New Story" Cold Comfort is an amusing first-person rant by the first man to be cryogenically frozen for medical reasons and revived when his problem can be cured.  He’s pleased enough with his new kidneys, but isn’t impressed by this brave new world in which corporations now overtly dominate the world, there’s a nine-million-soldier garrison in East Asia, etc. etc. E.g. , “I am only now recovering from my first exposure to your local art gallery.  Who the hell invented quivering pigments?” It’s at best a black-humorous comedy routine, but well enough done.  Three stars.

The Mad Scientist, by Robert Bloch


by Virgil Finlay

After Marks it is downhill, or over a cliff.  The Mad Scientist by Robert Bloch, from Fantastic Adventures, September 1947, is a deeply unfunny farce about an over-the-hill scientist who works with fungi, who has a young and beautiful wife with whom the protagonist is having an affair. They want to get rid of the scientist with an extract of poisonous mushrooms, but he outsmarts them, and what a silly bore.  The fact that the protagonist is a science fiction writer and the story begins with some blather about how dangerous such people are does not enhance its interest at all.  One star.

Atomic Fire, by Raymond Z. Gallun


by Leo Morey

Raymond Z. Gallun’s Atomic Fire (Amazing, April 1931) is a period piece, Gallun’s third published story, in which far-future scientists Aggar Ho and Sark Ahar (with huge chests to breathe the thin atmosphere, spindly and attenuated limbs, large ears, a coat of polar fur—evolution!) have discovered that the Black Nebula is about to swallow up the sun and kill all life on Earth. The solution?  Atomic power, obviously, to be tested off Earth for safety (the spaceship has just been delivered).  Unfortunately, their experiments first fail, then succeed all too well; but Sark Ahar’s quick thinking turns disaster into salvation!  As the blurb might have read.  Gallun had an imagination from the beginning, but the stilted writing makes this one hard to appreciate in these modern days of the 1960s.  Two stars.

Project Nightmare, by Robert Heinlein


by William Ashman

In Robert Heinlein’s Project Nightmare, from the April/May 1953 Amazing, the Russians deliver an ultimatum demanding surrender, since they’ve mined American cities with nuclear bombs.  The only hope is a colorful and miscellaneous bunch of clairvoyants to locate the bombs before they go off.  It’s a fast-moving but superficial, wisecracking story, a considerable regression for the author.  Some years ago he published an essay titled On the Writing of Speculative Fiction, and presented five rules for the aspiring writer.  I think this story must illustrate the last two: “4.  You must put it on the market.  5.  You must keep it on the market until sold.” I suspect Heinlein intended this one for the slicks, and when none of them would have it, started down the ranks of the SF mags until it finally came to rest in Amazing, which, compounding the indignity, managed to lose his customary middle initial.  Two stars.

The Builder, by Philip K. Dick


by Ed Emshwiller

Philip K. Dick’s The Builder (Amazing, December 1953/January 1954) is from his early Prolific Period—he published 31 stories in the SF magazines in 1953 and 28 in 1954, handily beating Winston K. Marks’s peak.  How?  With a certain number of tossed-off ephemerae like this one, in which an ordinary guy is obsessed for no reason he can articulate with building a giant boat in his backyard.  A rather peculiar boat too, with no sails or motor or oars.  And then: “It was not until the first great black drops of rain began to splash about him that he understood.” That’s it.  Two stars for this shaggy-God story which is unfortunately not shaggy enough.

Summing Up

Well, that was pretty dreary.  The issue’s only distinction is the unexpected readability of Herbert’s novel, which is the best, or least bad, of the serials this publisher has run.  The most one can say about the reprint policy is that it has its ups and downs, and this issue is definitely the latter.

[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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