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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, Serial

[March 28, 1968] Design for effect (April 1968 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

There are all kinds of science fiction stories.  Some explore the human condition, prioritizing people and how they might be affected by emerging technologies.  Others are space or planetary adventures, utilizing an exotic locale as backdrop for classic derring-do.

Analog (formerly Astounding) has always emphasized technological pieces.  They are stories of gadgets, of scientific implementations, not people.  Even better is when the story underscores the libertarian, rather reactionary politics of one editor John W. Campbell Jr.

Sometimes, a skilled writer can get a story into Campbell's mag without that kind of tale.  In this issue, virtually none of them did…

The issue at hand


by Kelly Freas

Secret Weapon, by Joseph P. Martino

The interstellar war against the Arcani is going badly.  Now that the Terrans have doubled their Patrol Corvette fleet, suddenly their losses have quadrupled.  Somehow, the alien enemy is tracking down their gravitational signatures as they zoom through their patrol lanes at four times the speed of light–and even when the human crews manage to intercept the enemy warships, somehow they elude destruction.

Two ships are dispatched to find the answer to this crisis, equipped with a new nucleonic clock that allows the ships to communicate even at superluminary speeds.  Now they can cover each other in case of attack.  When attack inevitably comes, they discover the secret to the enemy's success.

Joe Martino probably enjoyed writing this novella, and John Campbell obviously enjoyed reading this novella, so I suppose the story must be called some kind of success.  However, if you don't enjoy things that read like the centerfold to a particularly dry issue of Popular Gravitics, I suggest you give this one a skip.  This probably could have been a great novel, with time devoted to, you know, characters and prose, as opposed to a thinly dressed up engineering problem whose solution is implied to be beyond the comprehension of the alien foe.

Two stars.

Handyman, by Jack Wodhams


by Leo Summers

A married couple, trapped on a muddy world with virtually no trappings of civilization, try to make even the most basic rudiments of technology to ease their plight.  Eventually, they figure out how to make ceramics, and when a rescue party finally appears, they are now happy to stay on their private world and even to start an export trade of their new kind of china.  Chalk up a win for enforced entrepreneurialism!

I kept waiting for Wodhams to explain how the planet-wrecked pair figured out how to make their ceramic, given that all the ways that didn't work were so lovingly detailed.

Still, the story is at least readable. A low three stars.

Phantasmaplasmagoria, by Herbert Jacob Bernstein


by Kelly Freas

According to the scientists, power from nuclear fusion, harnessing the union of hydrogen atoms to produce boundless electricity, is just twenty years away.  This story details the meandering road to the technology's serendipitous development.

It's a silly piece, and I'm not sure who thought it a good idea to put a fourth of the story in endnotes that one has to constantly refer to.  They aren't worth the pay-off.

Two stars.

Is Everybody Happy?, by Christopher Anvil


by Leo Summers

A hay fever drug has the unfortunate side effect of making everyone extra-friendly.  Society breaks down as folks would rather kibbitz than work.

It says something about Analog and its editor's beliefs that too much friendliness will obviously lead to economic ruin, as opposed to increased efficiency through greater cooperation. Call me crazy, but I work better when I like my co-workers.

Anyway, this is another "funny" piece by Anvil for Campbell, and it's as good as you'd expect it to be.

Two stars.

Incorrigible, by John T. Phillifent


by Leo Summers

A naval officer is up for treason, having facilitated the transfer of technical knowledge to the Drekk, potentially Earth's most dangerous foe.  The implacable lizards, inhabitant of a Venus-type planet (nicknamed "Wet" for its torrid, humid conditions) are incredibly quick studies, and interstellar spaceflight is only a few developments away.

But, the officer notes, at the end of a very long dialogue with his attorney (the sole point of which is to build to the punchline conclusion) the information leak was ultimately to humanity's benefit.  For it involves the ability to teleport water, which the Drekk will use to colonize the nearby planet, "Dry".  And once enough mass is teleported from Wet, the core will explode, destroying the evil aliens.

Well.

I can't imagine this is particularly sound science, this notion that Venus-type planets are at a critical point such that the lost of a few million tons of water can destabilize them, especially coming from a fellow who still characterizes Venus as "wet" five years after Mariner 2.  That notwithstanding, I might have been more tolerant, given the decent writing in this piece, if the author (under his pseudonym) had not used the exact same gimmick to end his recent novel, Alien Sea!

Two stars.

The Horse Barbarians (Part 3 of 3), by Harry Harrison


by Kelly Freas

Jason dinAlt's adventures appear to have come to an end with this third Deathworld novel.  By the end of the story, the Pyrran city has been destroyed by the planet, the horse barbarians of Felicity have been defeated, and Meta and Jason have finally professed their love for one another.

How is Temuchin, highest chief of the Felicitan nomads defeated?  After Jason is found out for the outworlder he is, the barbarian tosses him into a deep pit to die.  Instead, Jason finds his way through a maze of caves, discovering a passage from the frozen steppes to the rich lowlands.  All other methods of toppling Temuchin having failed, Jason tells the warlord the secret of the caves so that the barbarians can finally conquer the whole continent.

Almost immediately, Temuchin realizes his victory is really defeat, for taking all the cities means the inevitable death of the nomad way of life.  The nomads collapse within weeks, and the Pyrrans set up shop.

There are a lot of problems with this book.  Temuchin is supposed to be this awful, violent savage for slaughtering foreign invaders, and for wanting to take out the lowlanders.  Does this justify the Pyrrans in killing and facilitating the killing of far more people than Temuchin ever could have managed on his own?

Beyond that, the historical "lesson" at the end of the story is specious.  Sure, the Chinese sinicized the Mongols, but not all of them, and not in a matter of weeks.  And as for the Goths and Huns (also cited), the former were invited to settle the Roman Empire rather than becoming Roman after conquering, while the Huns were simply defeated in fight after fight.

Thus, I find Jason's actions and motivations more ruthless and inhuman than Temuchin's; they are also out of keeping with the peacenik environmental message so beautifully expressed in Deathworld.

All that said, there's no question that Harrison is a terrific writer (he almost makes you accept the unrealistic extents to which Jason pushes his body).  I turned to this serial first each of the last three months, and I finished each installment in a sitting.  As a result, while I give this segment three stars, and even though I find the premise repugnant, I still am giving the novel as a whole three and a half stars.

Local Effect, by D. L. Hughes


by Leo Summers

An alien space drive discarded near Earth's moon has drastic effects on human scientific development.  It turns out that the speed of light is not a constant…except around Earth.  Thus, Einstein's theory of relativity only describes a local phenomenon, not the universe as a whole.  Alien anthropologists from a faraway star survey humanity and note this local aberration with interest.

This is an interesting premise, but Hughes, knowing his audience (a certain editor named Campbell), turns it into an anti-scientific-establishment polemic, noting that, if only humans were a little more broad minded, they might not have gotten stuck in their rut.  After all, how dare we assume that the rules that hold locally apply to the whole universe?

Except, of course, that is the very soul of the scientific method.  Moreover, observations this century make it clear that relativity does hold throughout the universe–as early as 1919, just four years after the publication of General Relativity, light was seen to have been deflected around the sun's gravity well, pursuant to theory.

This could have been a fascinating story of aliens assuming that all beings should follow an "obvious" course of scientific development, deluded by their own understanding of all the facts.  Instead, we get…this.

Two stars.

Doing the math

If it's a race to the bottom, Analog has won handily, scoring just 2.3 stars this month.  This accomplishment is all the more sad when one realizing that this is a better score than it got last month!

Luckily, the other magazines of the month were somewhat better, including New Worlds (2.8), New Writings 12 (3.1), Famous Science Fiction #4 (2.9), Famous Science Fiction #5 (2.5), Famous Science Fiction #6 (2.7), Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.7)
IF (3.1), and the best, Galaxy (3.3).

Women penned just 4% of the new fiction this month, and even with all the issues of Famous (lumped due to logistics into this one month), there was still only 2.5 to 3 issues' worth of superior stuff.

I guess we'll see if the Pohl mags continue to reign, or if all fortunes oscillate.  I think it's safe to say, though, that Analog could definitely use a loosening of its editorial prescriptions.  Hope springs eternal!




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[January 31, 1968] Too much and too little (February 1968 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Too much

Last week, we watched the evening news with mounting dread and anxiety as President Johnson ordered 15,000 reservists into action in response to the seizure of the U.S.S. Pueblo by North Korea.  The U.S.S. Enterprise was already in the Sea of Japan ready to initiate a retaliatory strike.  It looked like the Cuban Missile Crisis all over again.  Lorelei turned to me and worried that things couldn't possibly get any worse.

Then the North Vietnamese launched an all-out assault on seven provincial capitals in South Vietnam.  Fighting reached the streets of Saigon, and the America embassy itself was overrun for six hours.  The conflict is still raging.  So much for the Tet holiday week of peace.  So much for armistice overtures.

So, 1968 is already shaping up to be a scary year in the mundane world.  Let's see how we're doing in the SFNal realm.  The latest issue of Analog starts off strong, from its Kelly Freas cover, to Harrison's name on the masthead.  But does it deliver on its promises?

Too little


by Kelly Freas

The Horse Barbarians (Part 1 of 3), by Harry Harrison

Don't let the title or the cover throw you–this latest serial is, in fact, the third installment in Harrison's Deathworld series.  In the brilliant first story, we are introduced to Jason dinAlt, a psychically adept gambler and roustabout who comes to Pyrrus, the most hostile planet in the galaxy.  Using his ESP talents, as well as his fine brain, he deduces that the reason the world is so antagonistic to humans is due to a kind of psychic positive feedback loop: as the colonists came to regard the planet as their enemy, the planet's flora and fauna responded in kind.  The key to living at peace with the world is a change in mindset, to work with the planet rather than try to conquer it.  It was a lovely ecological message, predating Silent Spring by two years.

The second dinAlt story, The Ethical Engineer is a Deathworld story only in name, with dinAlt captured and taken to another world in Chapter One.  This novel, more than any other, caused me to confuse Harry Harrison for Keith Laumer (as dinAlt and Retief are rather similar in nature and tone) everafter.

This third piece is a little more closely bound to the original.  The premise: all of the city-dwellers of Pyrrus who could make peace with the planet have already left the original settlement for the countryside.  What's left is the hard-core who cannot change their mindset.  Eventually, the planet must defeat them.

Jason has a proposal that may appeal to this remainder.  The planet Felicity has resisted all attempts at establishment of a mining colony.  Specifically, the northern half of the planet's sole continent is peopled by savage horse barbarians who steadfastedly resist any attempt at civilization.  dinAlt suggests that the Pyrrans form a planetary exploration and pacification company; after all, who in the galaxy could be tougher than a Pyrran?  About 400 city-dwellers agree to the plan.

Upon landing on Felicity, Jason is immediately konked on the head and made a captive of Temuchin, leader of the dominant barbarian tribe.  This chief has slowly gained the vassalage of all of the other tribes, cementing his control over the windswept northern steppes.  dinAlt manages to escape, making a trek across the barren wastes.  But the trip back to his ship, the Pugnacious, is only the beginning of his worries.  In order to topple Temujin, Jason and his fellow Pyrrans will have to playact at being a new barbarian tribe, and subvert the chieftain from within…

The tone flipflops between light and deadly serious, and the horse barbarians are a thinly disguised retread of the Mongols (look in your encyclopedia for the birth name of Genghis Khan), though made redheads for some reason.  That said, I read the whole thing in two quick sittings, and I'm enjoying it more than Engineer so far.

Four stars for this installment.

To Make a "Star Trek" by G. Harry Stine

You know our favorite TV SF show has made the big time when Analog makes it the topic of the nonfiction science article!  Stine, a model rocket enthusiast, offers up a fascinating bit of background on the program, including praises of its implementation of technology, and some behind-the-scenes information that must have come straight from show-runner Roddenberry (indeed, this schematic of the Enterprise has been reprinted in current Trekzines.

Four stars, and a must read for Kirk/Spock buffs.

"If the Sabot Fits … " by Leigh Richmond and Walt Richmond


by Kelly Freas

The psychic man-and-wife author team returns with this mildly diverting piece.  A series of catastrophic computer failures in a Midwest town coincides with a particular broadcast at a public education station.  Could there be a connection?

I'm not sure if the science is sound, but it might be–Walt is an electrical engineer (Leigh, reportedly, just types his mental emanations, but I suspect she is actually the storytelling talent of the pair).

It's not bad.  Three stars.

Peek! I See You! by Poul Anderson


by John H. Sanchez

A freelance helicopter pilot spots a flying saucer out in the southwest desert.  The aliens, who have already made contact with a local population, do their best to avoid widening their diplomatic contacts.

I appreciate the idea of alien relations with individual nations/groups as opposed to with planets as a whole.  Science fiction writers tend to forget that planets are big places, and they can house more than one embassy/colony/climate.

But.

The story is twice as long as it needs to be, and Poul really doesn't do "light and funny" competently, certainly not in the same league as Laumer, Harrison, or Sheckley.

Two stars.

Dowsers Detect Enemy's Tunnels, by Hanson W. Baldwin

"American soldiers find tunnels in Vietnam, a country riddled with underground passageways.  ONLY DOWSERS CAN BE THE REASON!"

Seriously, John?  One star.

The God Pedlars, by Jack Wodhams


by Kelly Freas

The ugh continues.  An interstellar corporation is selling computers to primitive tribesmen.  The pitch: they are actually idols representing a great and wise god.  These "gods" tell the indigenes how to live their lives, build technology, etc.  Of course, it's all for the good of the natives.

In addition to being a rather specious premise, this isn't really a story.  It's a mouthpiece and a straw man having a conversation such that the point is beaten into the reader with a mallet.

Editor Campbell would give this story five stars.  I give it one.

Optimum Pass, by W. Macfarlane


by Leo Summers

Last up, a sequel to Free Vacation, in which Layard and his fat partner (he never gets a name, but his girth is an important aspect of his character) manage to get themselves thrown in the pokey again such that they can get another free trip to an alien world.  Their official mission is to tough out 30 days to determine the suitability of the planet for colonization.  Their personal mission to look for evidence of "The Prodromals", the original galactic civilization.

More light fun, albeit a bit less coherent than the last tale.  Still, three stars.

Unbalanced scale

Despite the auspicious beginning, this month's issue of Analog finished at 2.7 stars, making it the least of the February 1968 magazines.  Even Amazing scored slightly higher (still 2.7 when rounded), followed by IF (2.8), Fantasy & Science Fiction (3.1), New Worlds (3.3), and Galaxy (a slightly higher 3.3)

It was actually a good month for good fiction: out of six magazines released, one could fill two, possibly three with exceptional (four and five star) stuff.  Women, on the other hand, continue to be underrepresented, with just 7% of published new fiction.

So, while Analog was a mixed blessing this month, all in all, the pages of the digests made for much more pleasant reading than the newspapers.  Would that we could have good news in both.  I guess we'll see how February fares.  It is my birthday month; surely that counts for something!

If you want to see more of my beautiful face (made for radio!) tune in for the latest edition of KGJ news!



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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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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[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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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[September 30, 1967] Ain't that good news! (October 1967 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

End of Summer

The long, hot summer is over, and with it a general cooling across the country, both in temperature and in tension.  While San Francisco enjoyed a summer of love, with folks as disparate as Eric Burdom and Scott McKenzie coming to just be-in, the rest of the nation was rocked by civil strife, strikes, and protest.


Ashes in Cambridge, MD


Teachers on strike

And why not?  The cities have been bubbling kettles for a long time, and too many mayors and councilmen are ignoring the problem.  Too many workers have been stiffed and neglected.  Too many young men, too young even to vote, have lost their lives in Vietnam.

Now, the strikes are largely settled in the workers' favor.  The racial problems, well they're still there, but harder to ignore, and with the departure of sultry weather, tempers are a little less frayed.  Vietnam…well, they had a free election didn't they?  Surely things must be getting a little better.

Surely.

In any event, enjoy the respite.  We're going to need our strength.

So goes the nation…

The nation of science fiction, that is.  SF had a rocky summer, with a slew of lackluster magazines, inconsistent books, and of course, endless reruns on TV.  I'm happy to report that the dog days are over, at least for now: not only has it been a good month for SF mags in general, but the latest issue of Analog is the best in more than a year and a half.


by John Schoenherr

Weyr Search, by Anne McCaffrey


by John Schoenherr

Jack Vance and Frank Herbert have made sweeping, quasi-fantastic tableaus the in thing.  Universes that feel thousands of years old, with venerable, somewhat tattered institutions vying for power in a decadent setting.  Now Ann McCaffrey, best known for her The Ship Who series, has tossed her hat in the ring.

Pern is a planet somewhere in the galaxy, once settled by Earth, but long since forgotten.  It is a verdant, pleasant world save for one feature.  Every few hundred years, a rogue planet comes close enough in its eccentric orbit to launch deadly spores of "thread".  These burrow into Pern's soil, destroying native life, scourging farms and people.

To combat them, humans formed a sort of treaty with the native intelligent life: sapient dragons, with whom their riders bond telepathically.  These dragons not only breathe fire, but they can teleport.  This makes them formidable defenders, indeed!  Clearly, they once dominated Pernian politics.  Long ago, there were six "Weyrs"–barren fortresses wherein lived the dragons and their human brethren.  From these strongholds, Pern was kept safe from the baleful "red star".

But humans have short memories, and when Weyr Search begins, it has been several centuries since the last orbital conjunction.  Human politics have supplanted other concerns, and the "Holds", fortresses against human incursion, reign supreme.  Only one Weyr, called Benden, remains in operation–a shabby shadow of itself.

Nevertheless, with the rogue planet approaching, and the queen of dragons recently dead, it is imperative that the Benden riders find a new rider for the next queen, one who has the requisite psychic talents and the necessary strength of character.  Can any such person exist in these fallen times, when even proud Ruatha hold, whose royal family's blood once ran with a strong vein of dragon talent, has become a wreck under the cruel ministrations of Lord Fax of the High Reaches?

Well, of course the answer is yes.  It's obvious from the first page, told from the point of view of Lessa, Ruathan scullery girl, who is secretly scion of the dead lineage.  Weyr Search is not a story to surprise, a tale of twists and turns.  It is not even really a complete story; it is clear there will be sequels.  What it is, however, is an intriguing setup for a story.

As such, it really succeeds or fails on its writing.  McCaffrey is better at her job than Herbert, whose reach regularly exceeds his grasp.  She is less talented than Vance (who wrote a somewhat reminiscent tale several years ago called The Dragon Masters).  The first portion of the story is a bit stiltedly told, and Lessa comes across as something of a caricature, a wish-fullfilment vehicle akin to Cinderella ("I may seem a nothing, but I'm really a secret princess-queen!") Not that this kind of character can't work–after all, look at Roan in Earthblood, but Laumer and Brown did a better job with it.  And, of course, there are the tics that sold the work to Campbell: psionics and the idea of people being genetically special.

Nevertheless, the writing gets better as it goes along, and the concepts are interesting.  I've read some great stuff by McCaffrey, and I've read some tepid stuff by McCaffrey.  This installment gets four stars.  We'll see how the serial (in all but name) does as a whole when its done.

(Note: There's a bit in the prologue where Pern's "Yankee" colonists are mentioned.  I'll bet my bottom dollar this was a Campbell edit, as nowhere in the rest of the story is the race of the colonists suggested.  Heaven forbid anyone but WASPs settle the galaxy…)

Toys, by Tom Purdom


by Leo Summers

I'm always happy to see a piece from my good friend, Tom.  This one involves a cop duo (male and female) taking on a gang of pre-teenage kids, who have taken their families hostage using a host of homegrown weapons: genetically engineered apes and tigers, chemistry-set psychedelic drugs, erector-set shock guns.  The work of the police is complicated by their standing directive to minimize casualties.

A little insight from the author:

I have a lot of thoughts on Toys. I gave a talk on it at a Philadelphia Science Fiction Society meeting this month.

Basically, it's built around three ideas.

The first came from a John Campbell editorial I read around 1950 or 51.  What are you going to do, Campbell asked, when an angry teenager can blow up a city merely by twisting a pair of wires in a certain way?  It's a thought experiment that gets at the heart of some of the issues raised by technology.  I reduced the problem to a world where children have access to all kinds of potentially lethal technologies.

The second big idea is economic growth.  I got interested in that years before, and it figures in many of my stories. The standard of living in the industrialized nation has been doubling two or three times per century since about 1700.  The children in my story are lower middle class or might even be considered poor, but they have access to things like home genetic kits.  They are poor in land, however, living in a five story house on a narrow plot.  And lots of other kids have a lot more.

The third element is a Utopian police force.  In a world with so much potential for violence, you need a first class police force and a society willing to pay for highly trained, well educated cops.  Edelman [the viewpoint character] understands that he is supposed to resolve this situation without harming the kids.  He takes bigger risks than he has to because he is responsible for the kids' welfare.

Thus, both utopian and anti-utopian predictions.  Purdom excels at these concepts, painting a future world with realistic touches.  For instance, complete equality of the sexes (exemplified by the cop partners), and one of the few stories that takes monetary inflation into account ($50,000 a year is a poor salary; $200,000 is pretty good.)

Where Tom always has trouble is combat scenes.  It's no coincidence that his best works, like I Want the Stars and Courting Time, focus on people rather than fighting.

Toys is essentially a non-stop fight sequence.  Thus, three stars.

Political Science—Chinese Style, by Research Group of the Theory of Elementary Particles, Peking

Editor Campbell offers up the preamble to a Chinese paper on subatomic particles, the realm of the "quark".  The actual paper is not included; instead, we get many pages of explanation as to the philosophy that let to the composer's discoveries–all guided by the pure thought of their leader Mao Tse Tung.

It's pretty obvious that such folderol is necessary to get anything published in China.  I'm sure the Nazi and Stalinist publishers had to do the same.  What's special about this paper is that the science is reportedly "first-class".  Which makes me sad that the whole paper wasn't included.  Subatomic physics is fascinating stuff.

Anyway, it's short and interesting for what it is.  And given the quality of fiction in this mag, I didn't miss the (hit and miss) science column too much.

Three stars.

The Judas Bug, by Caroll C. MacApp


by Kelly Freas

C.C. MacApp, using his first name rather than an initial for some reason, offers up this tale of a colony in peril.  Two settlers of a new planet have been found dead in the field, their faces, throats and hands gnawed away.  The fauna of the planet just don't seem harmful enough to be the culprit; Mechanic James Gruder worries that a human conspiracy is involved.

This is a perfectly competent story, although I found the resolution a little rushed.  Three stars.

Free Vacation, by W. Macfarlane


by Leo Summers

I really liked the concept behind this story: Terran convicts are offered a choice–imprisonment, or teleportation to a roughhewn world as conscripted explorers.  Day Layard, a brand new draftee, is paired with an old hand, who proves invaluable in keeping him alive.  It turns out Layard's partner is particularly happy with his lot in life; it gives him the opportunity to seek out signs of the "Prodromals", the race of beings that preceded humanity in the galaxy.

This is another tale that runs along just fine until the somewhat rushed ending.  An extra page or two would have perhaps garnered a fourth star.  As is, a pleasant three.

Pontius Pirates, by J. T. McIntosh


by Leo Summers

The planet of Molle is a rich, advanced world, with nothing to hide.  So why is it the moment Jack Sheridan makes planetfall from Earth, he is under 24 hour surveillance?  Nothing formal, mind you–just subject to the attentions of four jovial fellows eager to get him drunk, and a pretty young girl employed to spend the night with him…or at least tell him she did when he wakes up with no memory of what went on the previous day.

Could it be that Molle is actually the home base for the piratical Buccaneers, and the surveillance is to make sure no one gets too close to the secret? That's certainly why Sheridan, actually an Interstellar Patrolman, was dispatched to the planet.

On the surface, this is just a secret agent thriller.  The plot is interesting, but nothing noteworthy.  The average reader will probably enjoy it and move on.

As a writer, I found much to admire.  The thing is, Jack Sheridan is never wrong.  He has his working theories, he tests them, and they always turn out to be more or less as expected.  There are plenty of stories with characters like these, from Retief to James Bond, and they quickly run into one or both of two issues:

1) When you know the hero is always right, where's the tension?

2) When the hero knows he's always right, he tends to become insufferable.

McIntosh, who has been writing for two decades now, neatly avoids both pratfalls.  The mystery is unfolded piece by piece, and at each juncture, Sheridan is plagued with doubt.  He doesn't know if he's right, he lists all the reasons he could be wrong, and he explains what he'll do in that event.  The thing is, he isn't some schnook like Bond who stumbles upon the truth.  He lands on Molle with enough information to be pretty sure it's the Buccaneer base.  After that, it's logical and plausible deduction.

We also learn a lot about Sheridan, his character and his values, without ever explicitly being told about them.  It's a lovely piece of oblique writing, all showing and no telling.

So, well done, Mr. McIntosh.  Perhaps others in Campbell's stable can learn from your example (*ahem* Chris Anvil).  Four stars.

Doing the math

With a star-o-meter rating of 3.4 stars, Analog tops its competition.  But competition it did have!  New Worlds and Fantasy and Science Fiction both scored 3.3, and even Amazing got 3.0.  Only IF and
Galaxy lagged, with 2.8 and 2.7, respectively.

If you took all the four and five star stories, you could fill two slim digests.  The only really sad statistic is that, out of 33 new pieces of fiction, just one was written by a woman.  Looks like women have struck out for books and screenplays, where the money's better.  A smart move, but not a happy sign for magazines in general.

Nevertheless, let's dwell on the positive.  Good job, Analog, and thanks for a happy punctuation to the month of September!

Speaking of books by women…

You've probably heard of Marie Vibbert, one of the biggest names in SFF magazines (of the far-future year 2022).  Her book, The Gods Awoke, is what I've been calling "a new New Wave masterpiece":

Do check it out.  You'll not only be getting a great book, but you'll be supporting the Journey!




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 31, 1967] I wouldn't send a knight out on a dog like this… (September 1967 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Reversed metaphors

As we speak, I am packing for my trip to this year's Worldcon.  I'm not sure what to expect other than I understand I'll be on a lot of panels.  I'm mostly looking forward to seeing friends like Tom Purdom, Larry Niven, Ted White, and more.

My excitement is somewhat alloyed by the most recent magazine I've just finished.  After reading this month's Analog, I find myself asking, "Is this the state of science fiction?"


by Kelly Freas

The King's Legions, by Christopher Anvil

This month in Science Fiction Times, Norm Spinrad talked about how every editor has their pet authors.  Chris Anvil is the one who panders the most to Campbell's sensibilities, producing story after story of farcical garbage.  Legions continues the tale in which three planetary exploiters, who dealt with a planet controlled by robotic overlords by developing a emotional control nerve agent. 


by Kelly Freas

Last installment, said trio dealt with the collapse of society that ensued by assuming the roles of agents of competing feudal overlords, creating the illusion of a threat too big to contest by the planet's ragged revolutionaries.

This time around, a cadre of pirates, lured by the treasure said planet might offer (as well as the representatives' ships) have arrived bent on conquest. 

I'll be honest.  I got about four pages into this, flipped through to see that the damned thing is nearly 70 pages, and decided for once I would abrogate my responsibilities.  To quote Buck Coulson in this month's Yandro, "I can't read all this crap, and this seemed to be a good one to miss."

Two stars.

The Pearly Gates of Hell, by Jack Wodhams


by Rudolph Palais

Lurid account of a man's endless attempts at suicide, thwarted by a society that really wants its members to stay alive–forever.

Of course, even if one is successful, that doesn't mean surcease…

Bit of a tired one-note, this one.  Two stars.

The Usefulness of Nicotine, by Professor J. Harold Burn, FRS

This month's science article is a reprint, cacklingly presented by John W. Campbell, inveterate smoker.  Oh sure, the article writer concedes, smoking might kill you, but look how happy and productive you'll be before cancer does you in!  And here are all the gruesome details of the cats and rats vivisected to prove our point.

No thanks.  One star.

Fiesta Brava, by Mack Reynolds


by Kelly Freas

The misadventures of Section G, whose task is to ensure none of the United Planets gets too backwards lest they be easy prey for the (yet unmet) alien menace, continue.  This time, the agents sent by Director Sid Jakes are a botanist from a heavy gee planet, a cordon bleu chef with a talent for object throwing, a colorless matron with a photographic memory, and a diminutive 25 year-old who looks like she's eight.

This quartet is sent off to Falange, a colony of Spanish emigrants who have elected to preserve the police state of Francisco Franco long after his passing.  High jinks ensue.

Fiesta reads like Heinlein writing a Retief story, with Reynolds' patented history lessons thrown in.  To wit, this time we learn about bullfights (which Mack presumably saw when he was in Spain), the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and why slaves really are happier than we give them credit for. After all–it's not as if there were ever any slave revolts.

I guess Reynolds' travels never took him to Haiti.

Anyway, it's not very good, but if you go for this sort of thing, it is readable.  I guess I'll give it a three.  I'm trying to be nicer these days.

Important Difference, by E. G. Von Wald


by Kelly Freas

Humanity has been at peace for 500 years, but this tranquility is disturbed when (putatively) bug-eyed aliens appear and start shooting.  One three-man scout becomes the first recon ship to successfully engage the enemy…and discover their true shape.

The "twist" is telegraphed as loudly as "What hath God wrought?" but I did appreciate how our race might evolve to the point that, even if our enemy looks like us, we could find a warlike nature so repellent as to mark a drastically different species.

Another low three star.

Lost Calling, by Verge Foray


by Leo Summers

Ingenuous young Dalton Mirni is picked up by a tramp freighter after being (so he says) in the captivity of aliens for 16 years of his life.  The problem is there are no aliens, at least that humanity knows of.  Not only that, but there is a big blank in his memory.  He knows he was being trained for a singular profession, but he has no idea what it was.

Still, he looks on the bright side.  After all, he is universally liked, by the crew that picks him up, the planet of Fingal (enemy of Earth), and the Earth people themselves.  And Mirni has the uncanny ability to solve people's interpersonal problems.

Of course, there can't be any connection between this skill and his lost memories…

I appreciated the tone of this story, and it's also pretty well done.  Definitely the best thing in the magazine, though I don't think I'd give it a fourth star.

Bad data

All in all, pretty grim.  Even being generous with my ratings, Analog clocks in at a dismal 2.3 stars, beaten by every other magazine and short story collection this month.  In order of decreasing badness, we have Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.8), IF (2.9), Orbit 2 (3), Fantastic (3), New Worlds (3.2), and The Devil His Due (3.2).

You could take all the four and five star stories and fill two digests (or thin books), which is pretty bad given we had seven to choose from.  It was a bright spot for women, though, as they contributed nearly 16% of the new stories published.

So is all hope lost?  Not necessarily.  I've already started on next month's Galaxy, and Budrys' book column discusses how the New Wave of authors (Aldiss, Ballard, Zelazny, Delany, et. al.) are revolutionizing the field.

They just aren't doing it in the pages of Analog.  So long as Campbell remains in the editorial chair, I suppose the revolution will remain untelevised.

We'll see how long that lasts.  Even Alabama integrated…




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 31, 1967] Canceling waves (August 1967 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Phase shift

Every science fiction magazine has a stable of regular contributors.  Maybe there just aren't enough good writers to fill a magazine otherwise.  Perhaps it's a reflection of the conservative tendency to stick with what works.  Occasionally, you'll see a mag make an effort to recruit new talent, with mixed results.  Others, like Analog are famously steady.

Thus, it is usually with a heavy sigh that I open each new issue of John Campbell's mag.  It's not that his stable is bad per se.  But reading the same authors, month in and month out can get monotonous.  Also, because they are guaranteed spots, quality can be somewhat, shall we say, variable.

On the other hand, that variability means that it's rare that any single issue of Analog is all bad (or all good).  August 1967 Analog is no exception, with the bad turns being more than counteracted by the good ones.  Throw in an excellent science fact article from a newcomer, and this issue is one of the better mags of the month.

Interference pattern


by Chesley Bonestell

Starfog, by Poul Anderson

The latest Poul Anderson story inspired by a lovely Chesley Bonestell painting (this one of a planet around a red supergiant), is pretty neat.  The Makt, an incredibly primitive hyperdrive ship, makes planetfall at the farflung human colony of Serieve.  The crew are human, though of a somewhat radical type, far more resistant to radiation than baseline homo sapiens, and with a taste for arsenic salt.  More remarkable, they claim that their homeworld, Kirkasant, lives in another universe.  This universe is just a few hundred light years across, and jam packed with bright young stars.

Ranger Daven Laure and his sapient ship, Jaccavrie, are dispatched to Serieve to deduce just where Kirkasant is, and, if possible, to get the crew of the Makt home.  Easier said than done — how does one go looking for a pocket universe?  And if it posssess the properties described, then navigation in that electromagnetic hell would be virtually impossible.


by John Schoenherr

This is one of those highly technical stories that Anderson likes, but done with sufficient characterization that it doesn't require the Winston P. Sanders (Winnie the Pooh) alias that Anderson's lesser works go under.  Laure's solution to finding Kirkasant requires a bit too much overt hiding from the audience, but it is pretty clever, at least in a society of libertarian worlds motivated by little more than personal profit (a society that does make sense, in the context portrayed).

Four stars.

Babel II, by Christopher Anvil


by Rudolph Palais

Chris Anvil, on the other hand, is at a low ebb.  This piece is less of a story than a series of examples of how technical speak makes advanced technology all but inaccessible to anyone but the most arcane experts.  I suppose this is a point to be made, but I disagree with the conclusion that a user of technology must know everything about the technology.  That is, after all, the whole point of the new programming language, BASIC.  One can avail themselves of the nearest Big Iron computer and make sophisticated calculations without having the first clue how to IPL an operating system from a DASD.

Two stars.

The Misers, by William T. Powers

This month's science article is unusually excellent.  It's about the latest advances in digital imaging for astronomy, and how it might someday supplant the astronomical photograph.  Chatty and engaging, but not dumbed down, its only sin is length.  To be fair, there is a lot to cover.

Five stars.  An invaluable resource.

The Featherbedders, by Frank Herbert


by Leo Summers

Here's a real surprise: a Frank Herbert story I unreservedly like!

The Slorin are shapeshifters bent on infiltrating Earth's society for possibly sinister, but mostly benign purpose.  When a scattership breaks up before it can safely land, two members of the crew, Smeg and his son, Rick, go off looking for a rogue comrade who has gone native.

And how.  Using his mind control powers, this renegade has taken up residence in a small Southern town as a sheriff, maintaining order with an iron fist, thought control, and the use of hostages.  But when Smeg finally confronts the sheriff, he encounters an even deeper secret — one that threatens the entire Slorin operation.

Aside from the final twist, which I found a little superfluous, the only other off-putting issue is the use of the exact same poem that ends this month's F&SF story, Bugs.  One wonders if the poem was prominently featured a few months ago or something.

But all of Herbert's typical tics, including copious italics and ever-shifting viewpoints, are completely absent from the piece.  It's light rather than ponderous, but not overly frivolous.  I'd not have been surprised to find it in the pages of Galaxy in the first half of the last decade (when that magazine was at its zenith).

Four stars.

Cows Can't Eat Grass, by Leigh Richmond and Walt Richmond


by Kelly Freas

Galactic Surveryor Harry Gideon (great surname, by the way) is marooned on a planet that should have killed him.  Somehow, he has managed to find sufficient edible foods to sustain himself until relief arrives.  But all of their tests show the alien life to be completely toxic.  What's Gideon's secret?

The Richmond combo has produced some of the worst stuff Analog's printed, but they've gotten better of late (and I quite enjoyed their first book, Shockwave.  This latest piece is on the good end of things.

Three stars.

Depression or Bust, by Mack Reynolds


by Leo Summers

Reynolds, on the other hand, offers up another one of his history lessons wrapped in a throwaway story.  When Marvin and Phoebe Sellers decide to return their brand new freezer, it starts a chain that results in a national depression.  The only way to fix it is by reversing the trigger.

This is not only a rather pointless piece, it is so clumsily exaggerated, the characters made of straw (the President has never heard of the Depression, and it must be explained to him by an adviser).  And Reynolds can't help making a dig at Indians.  Reynolds has an issue with Indians.

One star.

Plugging in the oscilloscope

What have we got?  Two clunkers, one decent piece, and two good long ones, not to mention a great article.  That puts us at 3.2 on the star-o-meter.  Not bad at all! That barely beats out Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.2) and roundly trounces Galaxy (2.9), IF (2.8), Famous Science Fiction #1 (2.7), Famous Science Fiction #2 (2.4), and Amazing (2.4).

Only New Worlds (3.3) and Famous Science Fiction #3 (3.4) score higher.

For those keeping score, women wrote 9% of the new fiction pieces this month (including all the back issues of Famous). 

Last week, I wondered if a copy of a copy could be better than the original.  Thus far, it looks like the answer is no.  Keep it up, Analog!



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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[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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[March 28, 1967] At last, a drop to drink (April 1967 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Back to Basics

Our family recently went to the movies to see the latest war epic, Tobruk.  It's the story of a British commando unit teamed with a company of German Jews charading as a unit of the Afrika Korps.  Their goal: to destroy the supply depot at Tobruk and stop Rommel in his tracks.

The first half was decent, but the second devolved into Hollywood schlock.  Particularly when one knows one's history: there was such a raid, but it ended in abject failure.  Tobruk is not so mind-numbingly mediocre as TV's Rat Patrol, but they are in the same genus.

How to get the taste out of my mouth?  As it turned out, local channel 9 was airing the old Bogart movie, Sahara, filmed in 1943 as the war was going on.  I'd seen it when it first premiered, and so I knew to circle the listing and bake the popcorn so my family and friends could enjoy it with me.  If you haven't had the pleasure of this amazing saga of a lone M3 tank in the African desert, and its ragtag crew it collects from nearly a dozen different nations, well, give it a watch next time it airs.

Old Standby

Just as I found the antidote to modern bloat in a classic production of the '40s, this month, the answer to the rather lackluster science fiction being turned out of late was found not in a magazine of the '40s, but in one that, for many, peaked in that "Golden Age."  Indeed, the April 1967 Analog was one of the finest examples of Campbell's editorial output in a long time.


by John Schoenherr

To Love Another, by James Blish and Norman L. Knight

First, a case of eating words.  Please pass the mustard.

James Blish and Norman L. Knight have composed a number of novellas in a particular setting.  A few centuries from now, humanity is bursting at the seams, shoulder to shoulder on a severely overcrowded planet.  The science of tectogenetics has created a new race of humans, the Tritons, one perfectly at home in the oceans.  Against this backdrop, the asteroid "Flavia" is on a collision course with Earth, threatening tremendous damage when it hits.  Efforts are being made to minimize its impact (pardon the pun).

Two stories have been set in this timeline: The Shipwrecked Hotel and The Piper of Dis.  I rated both of them two stars.  They were dull, plodding tales, and after the last one, I stated, "I hope this is the last piece in the series."

I take it back.


by Kelly Freas

To Love Another is a vivid tale of love between Dorthy Sumter, head of Submarine Products Corporation, and her lieutenant, the Triton Tioru.  It's hard to describe it as having a plot, in the strictest sense of the word.  Rather, it is a pair of viewpoints at a particular juncture in humanity's history, one of its most momentous.  It is a gentle adventure that runs from the depths of the ocean, to the hive of a Habitat '67-type city, to… well, to the place In-Between.


Habitat '67 in Montreal

Not quite five stars, but excellent stuff.

The Enemy Within, by Mack Reynolds


by Leo Summers

What's a mother to do when her eager little boy winds up locked inside a psuedo-intelligent spacecraft, and all her efforts seem only to make the problem worse?

This is an effective, well-drawn tale by Mr. Reynolds, though if there is anything to be taken away from it, it's that spanking is an outdated punishment that ultimately does more harm than good.

Three stars.

The Feckless Conqueror, by Carl A. Larson

If humans are to settle other planets, they will either have to adapt to new environments or adapt their enivronments.  Larson examines the adaptibility of the human species, noting our tolerance to oxygen pressure, heat, cold, gravity, and magnetic fields.

It's pretty good.  Three stars.

To Change Their Ways, by Joseph P. Martino

On the planet of New Eden, where the men grow wheat and the women…turn it into bread and noodles…famine threatens.  Seems the hardheaded farmers refuse to give up their tailored grain, which cannot tolerate the seasonal cooling that is gradually chilling the planet (seasons last decades on this long-orbit world).  A sector administrator is sent to help out the planetary coordinator, mostly to harangue him about being tougher with the recalcitrants.

If ever there was a story with no drama, no plot beats, no there, it's this one.  Two stars.

The Time-Machined Saga (Part 2 of 3), by Harry Harrison


by John Schoenherr

Last month, I was a little hard on Harrison's newest serial, in which a time machine is put to work for cheap on location shooting in the 11th Century.  It's better this time around, as the production of the film goes underway.  The beefcake hack of a star gets a broken leg and refuses to work.  Luckily, Ottar, the native Viking, is more than willing to work for a bottle of whiskey a day and a silver mark a month.  And he's a natural for the part!

But while the scenes filmed in Norway and the Orkneys go well enough, a wrinkle is introduced when it is discovered that there are no colonies in Vinland–not in the 11th Century or ever.  Only one solution for that: found Vinland (with cameras rolling, of course).

It's rollicking fun with a lot of good encyclopaedic data.  My only quibble is that the timeline of Harrison's book is clearly all of a piece; the first installment had the film crew seeing themselves from a "later" time trip in the past.  But if the timeline exists with all travels baked in, why didn't they find themselves filming the landing at Vinland?  Perhaps this will be explained next chapter.

Either way, it's still worth four stars.

Ambassador to Verdammt, by Colin Kapp


by Kelly Freas

Imagine a race of aliens so bizarre that the human mind can barely register their existence, let alone make meaningful contact.  The science team on Verdammt knows the Unbekannt are intelligent beings, but prolonged interchange leads to a psychotic break.  It will take a very special kind of ambassador to bridge the species gap.

This is a story that would have fared better in the hands of a true master, a Delany or a Cordwainer Smith.  As it is, there's a bit too much artificial delaying of shoe-drops to heighten drama.  The scenes from the perspective of the character meeting the Unbekannt lack the lyricism to really make them shine. 

That said, it is a neat idea, it is at least competently rendered, and it made me think. That's what an stf story's supposed to do, right?

So, a solid three stars.

Compare and Contrast

For the second time this year, Analog has topped the pack of magazine (and magazine-ish) offerings, clocking in at 3.2 stars.  Thus, it beats out New Worlds (3.1), IF (3), Path into the Unknown (2.6), Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.5), Galaxy (2.3), New Writings #10 (2.2), and Amazing (2.1).

It was a pretty peaked month, in general, with the best thing outside this issue probably a fourteen-year old reprint by Judith Merril (which was, in fact, the only piece published by a woman this entire month).

Still, it's nice to know that oases can still sometimes be found, even this often bleak desert of a modern magazine era.  Here's hoping it the hot spring doesn't turn into a mirage next month…



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