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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[October 12, 1969] My country, right or… (November 1969 Galaxy)

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

Justice delayed

The new Supreme Court, whose prime continuity to the old one is the preservation of the name "Warren" in its Chief Justice, is now in session—minus one Justice…for now.

Warren Burger has taken over from Earl Warren, and one can already feel the rightward lurch of our nation's highest judiciary.  Now, President Richard Milhouse Nixon plans to careen the Supreme Court in an even more conservative direction.

Tricky Dick's nomination to fill the seat left when LBJ's nominee, Abe Fortas, didn't get the job, is Clement F. Haynsworth.  Haynsworth is currently a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (Atlantic coast of the Upper South), a position he has held since being appointed their by Ike in 1957.  The Senate Judiciary Committee on October 9th approved 10-7 the consideration of Justice Haynsworth.

The road ahead is far from clement for Haynsworth, however.  For one, he bought 1000 shares of Brunswick (the bowling company) just before publishing a ruling he helped make on said company.  After the heightened scrutiny on ethics that accompanied the Fortas nomination, Haynsworth is under an intense microscope.  Labor groups maintained that he should have recused himself from a case involving a textile mill; he owned shares of a company that did business with the mill.

Critics of the storm say this is just tit for tat after the Fortas fight, rather than for any substantive reason.  What's really at stake is Haynsworth is a reactionary.  He affirmed the decision by local authorities to close the Prince Edward County schools to avoid integration, he upheld the constitutionality of school voucher programs used to fund segregated private schools, and he supported the management of the Darlington Manufacturing Company in South Carolina when it closed down to avoid its employees unionizing.

Will Haynsworth make it on the bench?  It's hard to imagine he will.  If a Republican minority was sufficient to deny Fortas a seat, then a Democratic majority will surely roadblock Haynsworth.  If and when this happens, the question is whether Nixon will double down or conciliate.  At stake this season are decisions on the tax exempt status of churches, the death penalty, punitive drafting of war protesters, and the rights of Black Americans.

Stay tuned…

Entertainment delayed

Just as we're playing the waiting game to see the direction jurisprudence goes in America, so the latest issue of Galaxy science fiction makes it clear that the future of SF, particularly in the pages of the former queen of the genre, is as yet uncertain.


by Jack Gaughan (as are, presumably, all of the other illustrations in this magazine)

Downward to the Earth (Part 1 of 4), by Robert Silverberg

The amazingly prolific Silverbob begins a serial that has elements of Delany (the incorporation of music and the choppy presentation…which may be a printing error knowing Galaxy) and Zelazny (the wild, decadent planet and weary protagonist).

Edmund Gunderson used to run Holman's World, a jungle planet with two sentient races—philosophical elephants and brutish apes—in order to collect the serpent worm venom that is a fundamental catalyst of tissue regeneration.

Ten years later, Holman's World is now Belzegor, reverted to the ownership of the pachyderm nildoror.  The human infrastructure is rapidly succumbing to tropical rot, and who knows how long humanity will keep contact with the world?

Amid this backdrop of decay, Gunderson returns to the planet he ruled…purpose unknown.  All we know is that his mission lies somewhere in the backwoods, and he requires nildoror permission to go there.  We find out Gunderson is a bigot who cannot quite abide the idea that the nildoror are sentient beings rather than animals, but he does seem to be trying to break free of his bigotry.  We also learn that the nildoror are now closely associating with the primate sulidor and even employing them as servants.  Finally, it is revealed that drinking raw serpent venom causes the brief transfer of souls between alien and human.  Whether this is imaginary or real is not yet known.

Silverberg has set up a lot of pieces, but not much has happened yet.  The writing is competent, though not gripping.  As with the Haynsworth decision, the jury is still out on this one.

Three stars.

Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes, by Harlan Ellison

Old man Jedediah Parkman is dead at the age of 82, and all of the people he's helped over the years are coming to his funeral to pay respects.  This includes an alien with the power of camouflage and lethal envelopment, who is passing for human for his survival.  At the funeral, he witnesses a beautiful white woman (most out of place given the part of town and the race of Parkman and the other attendees) who takes the silver coins from atop Parkman's eyes.

What is her motivation?  Why is she there?  And just what connection does our storyteller have to Parkman?

This is one of the few Ellison stories that harnesses the writer's great talent to say something beyond what's on Harlan's mind/heart at the moment.  It's also real SF, unlike so much of his work.

Five stars.

The Dirty Old Men of Maxsec, by Phyllis Gotlieb

Outside: the City.  Cramped, stagnant, spartan.  Its only compensation: the citizens are immortal, thanks to "the J."

Inside: MaxSec.  A maximum security community populated by criminals whose only punishment is to be deprived of immortality.

The paradox: the people of MaxSec are reportedly happier, freer, and more innovative than the people of the City.

The story: Fenthree is a somewhat cynical citydweller, blackmailed into infiltrating MaxSec to find its secrets.  He is quickly found out and imprisoned, to be an unwitting vessel for MaxSec's revenge on the outside world.

From there, the perspective of the story grows, now including Corrigan, strongman of MaxSec who is the architect of the retribution plan.  To Linnaeus Ganzer, nearly 400 years old, developing the creeping death for Corrigan's plan.  To Luz, the last lovely woman in MaxSec, catalyst to plans within plans.

A meandering, occasionally flippant, occasionally opaque piece, Gotlieb's is an interesting counterpoint to last month's "The Rock", covering the concept of a coordinated prison exile a la Australia of a couple centuries ago.  That it also manages to make some interesting comments on the effects of immortality on society at the same time is impressive, although the two speculative threads do not interweave perfectly.

Three stars.

How to Kidnap a Moon, by Robert S. Richardson

Richardson is an astronomer whom we normally find in the pages of Analog.  This article details the energy concerns for bringing the two moons of Mars into orbit around the Earth for easier access.

There isn't much discussion of how one might practically arrange such things—it's all just orbital mechanics and erg tabulations.  It is also unclear how it would be easier to bring the rocks here for investigation rather than exploring them in situ.  On the other hand, if we're ever to mine Phobos and Deimos (or by extension, any of the asteroids), I suppose there might be merit to bringing the planetoids home.  If anything, they could be hollowed out and turned into natural space stations.

Anyway, three stars.

Broke and Hungry, No Place to Go, by Ron Goulart

A man whose job is to tell the computer which unnecessary mouths on the dole to eliminate (in the pursuit of efficiency) finds that he is now on the chopping block.

This is the kind of minor tale we might have found in one of the minor magazines last decade.  Ron is phoning it in.

Two stars.

For Your Information (Galaxy Magazine, November 1969), by Willy Ley

In this posthumous piece, Willy Ley discusses the suggestion that the death of the dinosaurs was caused by an excess of radiation—from the periodic flipping of the magnetic poles or the explosion of a nearby supernova.  He seems unconvinced, and he even goes so far as to say that the extinctions might not even have been that sudden.

Three stars.

Dead End, by Norman Spinrad

Another bleak man-on-the-dole story.  This time, a fellow who is dissatisfied with having nothing meaningful to do, decides to go to the last natural preserve in the country.  It is a 10 mile by 10 mile stretch of wilderness with none of the comforts of home.  When he decides he isn't enjoying being cold and hungry any more than he was enjoying being bored and fed, he tries to summon a recovery robot.  But his call bracelet doesn't work…may never have been designed to work.  A trap to weed out malcontents?

Mack Reynolds has extrapolated this kind of world with far more success, and Bob Sheckley has written satires like this with far more wit and barb.  Spinrad can be great, but this is lesser Spinrad.

Two stars.

Dune Messiah (Part 5 of 5), by Frank Herbert

Last up, a very short final installment of the third (or second, depending on how you count them) Dune book.  The plotters against Paul Atreides offer him a ghola (resurrected clone) of the newly dead Chani, Paul's true love.  Knowing this will make Muad'Dib a thrall to the shadowy interests of a myriad of anti-Imperial organizations, Paul refuses.  Then he goes out into the desert to die, as is the fitting end for blind Fremen.  The Emperor leaves behind a newborn pair of twins, one male and one female, both fully sapient in the same manner that Paul's sister was conceived, Alia's mother having been high on the spice melange at the time.

In the end, this is very much a bridge book.  All of its bits could have been condensed to a five-page faux encyclopedia article included at the beginning of the next book, with very little action and not a whole lot of interest, save the mildly engaging Duncan Idaho/Hayt bits in the last installment.

So, two stars for this bit and two stars overall.  Just read the summarizing precis (almost as long as this last installment!) and the few pages of the story in this issue, and you'll be fine.

A Cautious Look to the Future

It's even harder to read the tea leaves when it comes to the future of Galaxy.  On the one hand, by the numbers, this issue didn't crack three stars.  On the other, the Silverberg could become a knockout, the Herbert is (blessedly) over, the Gottlieb was interesting, if not stellar (and the first woman-penned piece in how long?), and the Ellison was unusually excellent.  Ley is dead, and that is a blow, but perhaps Richardson will replace him.  His article certainly seems like an audition, though it wasn't as good as other pieces by him I've read in, say, Analog.

So, for news on Haynsworth and news on Galaxy… I guess we're playing the waiting game!

See you then.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[December 2, 1967] Women and Men (January 1968 IF)

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by David Levinson

Small steps towards equality

It’s been almost 50 years since women in the United States were given the right to vote. But while things have come a long way, there’s still a long way to go for real equality for women, especially economically and financially. For example, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible in some places, for a woman to have a bank account in her own name. It’s like that in most of the First World, so imagine how much worse off women are elsewhere. On November 7th, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously approved the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. It’s non-binding, but it has set the U. N. on the path towards improving the rights of women around the globe.

Closer to home, the Johnson administration has been taking steps to do something about the economic inequality of women. In October, the president issued an executive order which adds sex as a category that cannot be used as a basis for discrimination. This affects the federal government and contractors that work for the government and is much broader than the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and other civil rights legislation regarding sex discrimination. Then on November 8th, President Johnson signed a law which allows women in the military to be promoted to flag rank (generals and admirals) and eliminates caps on the number of women officers at all levels.

President Johnson signing the law allowing women to rise in the ranks.

Women actually doing things

Time was, lots of women wrote science fiction, and not all of them hid their sex behind their initials. In 1967, IF has published a grand total of four stories by women. Two were by fans with no or very few previous professional sales, and neither was all that good. The third was an average story by Andre Norton. The fourth is in this month’s issue (and that’s dated 1968). How was it? Read on to find out.

What are these people doing in these blobs? Art by Pederson

The Peacemakers, by John Rankine

Dag Fletcher is the new captain of the Inter-Galactic Organization corvette Petrel and a bit of a maverick. The group his ship has been assigned to is on its way to the neutral world of Garamas, ostensibly on a diplomatic visit, but intending to free some I. G. O. nationals who are interned there, one of whom is a spy. Since Petrel isn’t expected, it falls to Fletcher to sabotage the planet’s power grid and then get the spy off the planet. Fletcher’s skill at improvisation will stand him in good stead.

Not the sort of spy you expect to find behind enemy lines. Art by Virgil Finlay

Rankine writes primarily for the British market, and I’m not really familiar with his work. The first two-thirds of this story could have come from someone like A. Bertram Chandler, though written at a level Chandler rarely achieves. Things go a little off the rails once the spy enters the story, particularly since I’m not convinced Fletcher would undertake the side mission she suggests. On the other hand, she’s a good character who’s more than just a reward for the hero. I especially liked the way Rankine dealt with her ability to read the surface thoughts of the men around her (looking like she does) and how she handled them.

A very high three stars.

From Distant Earth, by Basil Wells

Mal Harker has been betrayed by Dorn Tate, who has kidnapped Mal’s wife and marooned Mal and Tate’s own wife Esme. They manage to reach the planet Naron, which seems to be a desert. Strangely, they can feel vegetation around them, and there are invisible creatures, both prey and predator, around them. Eventually, much that was hidden will be revealed.

I’m not keen on the way IF is integrating the art into the titles lately. Art by Morrow

Wells has been around since the ‘40s, and the bones of this story could easily be from back then. He’s tacked on a couple of bits and bobs to make it seem more modern, but has largely failed in that endeavor. At least the writing is serviceable.

Barely three stars.

The Taste of Money, by R. V. Humphrey

Eminent biologist Charles Darwin Skroot has been sent to the planet Gloomer by the Planetrade Corporation to figure out why Tastybushes are dying out. Tastybush-blossom extract is the hottest new taste since chocolate was introduced to Europe, and if it vanishes, it will take the company with it. Skroot’s fee is exorbitant, but the conditions on the planet are difficult at best.

Are these caterpillars part of the problem or the solution? Art by Gaughan

Humphrey is this month’s new author. This is in some ways a fairly standard problem story, though stories that involve entire ecological systems are rare. As in a lot of problem stories, the situation is contrived, but the telling is mostly well done. Where it really fails for me is in the attempt to be funny. Humor is subjective, but I think a seasoned pro could have made this funnier with all of the same elements. Humphrey shows skill, but he would have been better served by telling this one straight.

A low three stars.

Foreign Fandom, by Lin Carter

Our Man in Fandom continues his world tour. After a quick look at fandom in Japan and South America, he drops in on the annual science fiction film festival in Trieste and a fan club in Calcutta, India with 1,500 fans. Then it’s off to Bristol for a look at the big convention in the United Kingdom over Easter weekend. Finally, grieve for poor Denmark, which has a single active fan who can’t find anybody else.

Three stars.

Rogue’s Gambit, by Phyllis Gotlieb

Spacelights perform a vital service, receiving and relaying messages and calls for aid. Out on the edge of nowhere, Spacelight 599 has gone silent, messages are backing up, and the Hendrickses, the couple who maintain the remote station, can’t be raised. Full time maintenance engineer and part-time policeman Stannard has been sent to investigate. With him is Dr. Ramcharan and nervous pilot Bugasz. They find Cornelius Hendricks dead and no sign of his wife Iris, much to the distress of Bugasz. Worse, the station computer appears to have been imprinted with Hendricks’ personality and gone mad.

Stannard and the others confront the computer. Art by Gaughan

This is a very well done story. Dr. Ramcharan could have been given a bit more to do than just be a highly competent woman. Bugasz, meanwhile, is clearly modeled on Peter Lorre in one of his more nervous roles. But Gotlieb brings it all together and somehow makes it work, even the insane computer. That said, the story didn’t really stick with me or make me think, which are part of my criteria for a four-star story. I think this is as close as is possible to get to four without achieving it.

A very high three stars.

Starsong, by Fred Saberhagen

They call it Hell, a Berserker research station deep within the Taynarus nebula. There, the anti-life robots study the brains of captured humans. Ordell Callison was the most famous musician in the systems near the Taynarus nebula until his new bride was captured by the Berserkers during a game of spaceship tag. Mad with grief, Ordell entered Hell in an attempt to get his beloved back.

Ordell confronts a three-headed monster in Hell. Art by Gaughan

The writing is lovely, but Saberhagen makes mistakes I wouldn’t have expected from him. First and foremost, he clings much too tightly to the Orpheus myth. This results in some strained attempts to shoehorn in various elements that don’t really fit.

Three stars.

Interstellar Travel and Eternal Life, by E. C. Ettinger

America’s preeminent supporter of freezing as a means of beating death offers some maundering thoughts on the greater implications of immortality and human expansion into interstellar space. Said thoughts are disorganized at best and head in some strange directions.

Two stars, barely.

All Judgment Fled (Part 2 of 3), by James White

After a mysterious object entered the solar system from interstellar space and took up orbit between Mars and Jupiter, an expedition was hastily cobbled together to investigate. The six men discover life aboard the alien ship, but one’s suit was destroyed in an encounter. Exploration of the ship continues until an attack by the starfish-like Type Two aliens results in one alien dead, one man injured, and three spacesuits rendered unusable. As a result, they are no longer able to recycle water. More is sent from Earth along with one suit (which is damaged in transit), but the men will have to spend days aboard the ship.

McCullough, the expedition doctor, becomes convinced that the Type Two aliens aren’t intelligent, but isn’t sure what to do with that information. Eventually, it is decided to explore deeper into the ship. As this installment draws to a close, the commander is killed, leaving the indecisive McCullough in charge. As he tries to deal with his new responsibility, word comes that the engines are starting up. The ship is preparing to leave, with four of the five survivors trapped aboard. To be concluded.

Things begin to go very wrong. Art by Morrow

The tension that cramped the first installment is largely gone here, but without any real release. I suppose it’s due to the men having more room to move around, but something to break that tension would have been nice. We get an interesting look at more of the ship and the aliens aboard it, with the intriguing idea that those we’ve seen so far aren’t intelligent. It’s even possible that the language-like sounds coming from loudspeakers are recorded. White has gone out of his way to heap troubles on the heads of his characters, maybe too far. I’m not clear why McCullough is now in command, even though he was subordinate to the man captaining the probe he was on. In any case, I’m eager to see where this finishes.

He That Moves, by Roger Zelazny

Humanity is dead, wiped out in an atomic war. The great and famous from throughout history were revived by another race, itself now dead. Yet another race is deciding what to do with the humans, whom they believe were the gods of the first race. An escape artist named Eric Weiss discusses all this with a woman named Sappho while they await the outcome of that decision.

More boring title art. Art by Gaughan

Another one that’s very pretty and full of allusion and misses the mark. This is Zelazny trying too hard to be artistic. I usually have a pretty high tolerance for that, but this one just didn’t work for me.

Three empty stars.

Summing up

And so IF returns to the mean once more, maybe a little improved. If nothing else, we’re given a few good woman characters and a good story from a woman writer. In the final tale, editor Fred Pohl also gives us exactly the sort of New Wave/Thing story he railed against just a few months ago. The times they are a-changing. Fred also teases us with some new features coming in 1968. I’ll settle for better stories.

A new Niven novel and the return of Bob Sheckley. That’s promising.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[April 18, 1967] Bright Lights (May 1967 Fantasy and Science Fiction

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by Gideon Marcus

Tinsel Town

Last weekend, the world's greatest stars and movie-makers assembled in Santa Monica for the annual celebration of the best the silver screen has to offer.  It was a cavalcade of prominent names, from Sidney Poitier to Lee Remick to Julie Christie to Omar Sharif.  Some of the contestants were unfamiliar (Herb Alpert has a short animated film?) Some were surprising but welcome in their inclusion (like The Wargame for best documentary).  Some were inevitable (If Grand Prix hadn't won Best Sound and Best Editing, I'd have written letters…) Two titans towered all the rest (Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf and A Man for All Seasons–both of which I still haven't seen yet).

And throughout it all, Bob Hope was host, narrator, and satirist.  Lorelei observed that this time, the jokes about recognition still eluding the aging comedian seemed more pointed and bitter than usual.  Maybe it's time he got some kind of lifetime achievement award, as did Isaac Asimov at a recent Worldcon…

Print City

The latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction features a similar assemblage of luminaries–and it's not even an "All-Star Issue"!  Presented in a format that has been standard and familiar since 1949, this month's read was as comforting and entertaining as two primetime hours at the Oscars.

With the added benefit that one can reread favorite stories!


by Ronald Walotsky

Planetoid Idiot, by Phyllis Gotlieb

Our first star is Phyllis Gotlieb, a woman writer who joined the SF ranks one year after Mses. Rosel George Brown, Kit Reed, and Pauline Ashwell.  Her latest is a fine novella in the Analog tradition–indeed, it reads like something Katherine MacLean might have penned.

A mutli-species spaceship has landed on the ocean planed of Xirifor.  Their goal is to save the indigenous race from a pandemic of gill rot such that they can better represent themselves when representatives of the Galactic Federation come to negotiate for the pearls the aliens harvest.

The crew of the contact ship are a beautifully heterogenous group: Hrufa, an eight foot telepathic amphibian is their leader, keeping the rest of the team in order, if not harmony.  Thlyrrh is a protoplasmic being with a shape-shifting carapace; it can do almost anything…except compose an original thought.  And then there are the two humans, or "solthrees" (I really like that phrase): Olivia the exobiologists, and Berringer, the generalist.

Despite their vast collective knowledge, they are hindered in their task by politics, internal and external.  But in the end, working together, they deduce a solution that is completely scientific and plausible.

It's all very satisfactory, and if I have any complaint, it is only the title, which I found misleading (I thought "planetoid idiot" would be a play on "village idiot").  Definitely a candidate for the next volume of Rediscovery.

Four stars.

Sleeping Beauty, by Terry Carr

It's nice to see Ace Books publisher, Terry Carr, slinging the pen again.  His latest story is a beautifully written if rather inconsequential tale of a landless prince, galloping across Europe looking for that most endangered of modern creatures: the single (and wealthy) princess.  There is, of course, a sting in the story's tale.

You'll forget it soon after you read it, but you'll enjoy the journey.  Three stars.

Safe at Any Speed, by Larry Niven

If Ralph Nader has his way, all cars of the future will be like the one presented in this, the latest tale to take place in Niven's "Known Space".  It's his most humorous piece, almost Sheckleyesque, and it accomplishes a lot in a brief space.

Four stars.

Fifteen Miles, by Ben Bova

Two years ago, Air Force astronaut Chet Kinsman was tested in orbit when he had to go mano-a-mano with a Communist spacewoman.  Now Kinsman is on the moon, haunted by the memory of the lady he had to slay.  Will his guilt get in the way of his rescuing a fellow astronaut trapped in a lunar crevice?

This is another grounded SF tale I'm surprised (but pleased) to find in F&SF.  I've not yet found Bova brilliant (though Victoria Silverwolf has), but I always enjoy him.

Three stars.

The Red Shift, by Theodore L. Thomas

Thomas explains in his nonfiction vignette how quasars, which must be extragalactic yet near objects, give lie to the Doppler shift, and thus rewrite physics. Specifically, he says that the redshift of quasars indicates that they are far away, but that radio astronomy locates them much closer to Earth.

I do not know how he makes this assertion, as it is radio astronomy that detects these quasars at all–including their red shift.  According to the article I read in Britannica's 1966 year book of knowledge, quasars are very interesting in that they point up an asymmetry between the young universe (quasar-rich) and the curent universe (quaser-poor).  But there's nothing that suggests quasars exist close by, or that there's anything wrong with Doppler.

There does seem to be something wrong, however, with Thomas.

One star.

Cyprian's Room, by Frances Oliver

Onward to the second woman-penned story, by an author about whom our editor knows virtually nothing.  A pity, because her first story is a good one.  Romantic Hilda Wendel takes a room in the big city hoping to meet someone interesting in her boarding house.  She finds a tubercular artist whose views on art are maddeningly contradictory, yet irresistably compelling.

Is he just an avante-garde…or something otherworldly?

A high three.

Interview with a Lemming, by James Thurber

This putative dialogue between man and lemming, to indulge in adjectives solely beginning with "i" is inconsequential, irritating, and inspid–particularly the thinks-itself-clever ending.

Two stars.

Where is Thy Sting, by Emil Petaja

One of the last fertile men in a post-atomized Earth, racked with suicidal desires, must be kept alive at all costs, even if it means subverting his reality.

I'd have liked this story more had I not read one so similar to it (The Best is Yet to Be) in the pages of this same magazine not many months before.

Two stars.

Times of Our Lives, by Isaac Asimov

All about time zones.  I actually found this atlas-derived article educational and interesting.

Four stars.

Fill in the Blank, by Ron Goulart

Finally, the return of a perennial star with a series with more installments than James Bond.  Max Kearney is dragooned into investigating what appears to be an infestation of poltergeists.  The culprits are all-too-temporal…but it doesn't mean magic's not involved!

It's funnier in the latter half.  Three stars.

House Lights Return

By strict mathematical computation, the latest F&SF only scores an average three star rating.  Nevertheless, the brilliance of the first piece, the general competence of most of the rest, and the edification provided by the Good Doctor leaves a most pleasant impression.

Let's keep our stars around for a while.  They make good illumination.


by Gahan Wilson



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Magazine

[July 14, 1964] TO THE MOON, ALICE (the August 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Long Hot Summer, Barely Begun

So, we have a new civil rights law, one which should transform life in the segregated South—not to mention the less overtly segregated North—if implemented.  Note the last phrase.  Meanwhile, in Mississippi, three civil rights workers involved in voter registration efforts have been missing for three weeks, after being pulled over for speeding by a local sheriff, then released.  Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner: remember those names.  I wonder if we will hear them again. 

The Issue at Hand

This August Amazing features on its cover Robert F. Young’s The HoneyEarthers, on its face a depressing prospect.  After his tiresome rehashes of Bible stories and fairy tales, is Young now sending Ralph Kramden into space?  Fortunately, no.  This time, Young has actually tried to write a story.  It’s pretty terrible, but still, the effort is there.  Attention must be paid to this man . . . briefly.


by Richard McKenna

The HoneyEarthers, by Robert F. Young

Young essays a rather complicated plot, and if you have any interest in reading the story, you might want to do so now.  Okay, back?  It begins with an unnamed kid working as an ice miner in Saturn’s rings, and he gets into fatal-looking trouble.  Next, there’s an older man, Aaron, escorting a younger woman on the HoneyEarth Express to the Moon—his son’s wife Fleurette.  His son Ronny (Aaron Jr.) has left her and is fleeing prosecution for tax evasion.  The father is in love with his son’s wife, but this trip is to be entirely chaste, even though the voyage is typically for honeymooners, some of whose amatory antics on the flight are mentioned with disapproval. 

On the Moon, Aaron discloses that Ronny was the doomed ice miner, whom Aaron rescued in the nick of time and then adopted.  But Ronny experienced space fright and developed space fugue and can’t remember anything before the rescue.  And there’s more!  In the interim, Aaron went to the stars, spent a number of years on two different planets, and made a bunch of money.  Now, he says, Ronny (having fled to space) is about to have a second space fright episode, which will bring back his memory of the years he lost to amnesia from the first episode, while cancelling out his memory of the intervening years, including Aaron and Fleurette. 


by George Schelling

By this point it seems clear that Aaron and Ronny, decades apart in age, are the same person.  But . . . where’s the necessary time travel?  As mentioned, Aaron traveled to two extrasolar planets, then came back to Mars, and headed for Saturn to rescue Ronny.  Now I know what you’re thinking—this guy has confused time dilation from faster-than-light interstellar travel with time travel! 

But no.  Young has instead relied on that time-honored technique of the field: just making stuff up.  In this case, it’s called “circumventing the space-time equalization schedule,” a phrase that is not explained but which the author apparently thinks means he can bend time to his will and the needs of the plot.  And after Aaron’s long anguished confession of all this history to Fleurette, it looks like he’s going to get his just reward.

All this takes place in the overarching context of Young’s familiar overbearing sentimentality about beautiful young women, which reaches a crescendo, fever pitch, or something like that.  To wit:

“A girl stepped into the room.

“She had dark-brown hair. She was tall and slender. She had gray eyes and a round full face. The girlish dress she was wearing began below her shoulders, and the firelight had
already fallen in love with her smooth clear skin. Meadow flowers grew around her, and her mouth had the redness of the wild raspberries that grew in the fields of his youth. Spring resided in the dew-brightness of her eyes; her cheeks held the hue of frost-kissed leaves. Spring, summer, fall and finally winter in the snow-whiteness of her hands. . . .

“She came like a summer wind across the room and kissed him, and he knew the fields once again: the fields and the woods and the warm summer sun, and the red and succulent berries that had stained his lips and filled his mouth with sweetness.”

I believe the critics’ technical term for this is “icky.” There’s plenty of it.  There are also other comment-worthy items, such as the notion of space fright, which causes amnesia, but a second episode of space fright will bring back the errant memories, a height of contrivance equal to the “space-time equalization schedule.” But enough.  One star, with a ribbon for the labor this confection obviously required.

Selection, by Ursula K. Le Guin


by George Schelling

This jokey short story is in some ways the antithesis of The HoneyEarthers (by being jokey, for starters).  On a colony planet, marriages are arranged by computer, and there’s no appeal.  The protagonist, Miss Ekstrom-Ngungu, intensely dislikes her designated husband, Mr. Chang-Oliver, but in the absence of other options, they go through with it, and the bottom line seems to be that people get over things fairly easily in the face of a little danger and the need to get on with life.  The selection process is presided over by a Mr. Gosseyn-Ho; appropriating the name of the protagonist of van Vogt’s The World of Null-A seems to be a dig at the long history of pseudo-rationality in SF.  The story is a lightweight satire but is less cartoony than most of its type, with more density of detail than usual about the colony planet and the work of the colonists.  Le Guin is a very solid writer even in her more relaxed moments.  Three stars.

Valedictory, by Phyllis Gotlieb


by George Schelling

Phyllis Gotlieb, author of the rather overblown but underperforming serial Sunburst, is back with a miniature, Valedictory, in which a woman in training to be a time-traveling researcher thinks she needs to go back and comfort her younger self.  Like Le Guin’s (and unlike Young’s!), this is a story about getting over things, rendered with nice economy.  Three stars.

Furnace of the Blue Flame, by Robert Rohrer


by Robert Adragna

The precocious Robert Rohrer (b. 1946), who I would guess has just graduated from high school, contributes Furnace of the Blue Flame, but might as well not have bothered.  It’s a capably written but terminally cliched post-apocalyptic story—you know, the kind that refers to “the still-scorched fields south of Nuyuk . . . the rocky wastes surrounding Bigchi . . . the plains of baked clay north of Lanna,” and so forth.  Morg, a lone wanderer and apostle of knowledge, disposes of a local petty tyrant who keeps his people in ignorance. Morg uses the surviving nuclear reactor of the title to beat the bad guys.  Two stars.

Zelerinda, by Gordon Walters


by George Schelling

The last item of fiction is Zelerinda, a long and turgid novelet by Gordon Walters, said to be a pseudonym of George W. Locke, who has published a few scattered stories under the two names.  Zelerinda is a planet that is missing half the elements in the periodic table and has a temperature of 600 degrees F., so life on it is impossible—or so one would think.  There’s been a series of nuclear explosions, which aren’t exactly natural, are they?  So two guys are sent to investigate, one of whom possesses a poorly defined psi talent called delvining, or possessing a delvin, which he thinks he has to hide, though that idea is quickly forgotten.  It’s quite badly written and about three times too long, though the ultimate revelation is at least mildly clever.  Two stars.

Mort Weisinger: The Superman Behind Superman, by Sam Moskowitz

Sam Moskowitz’s SF Profile is Mort Weisinger: The Superman Behind Superman, which immediately raises two questions: who cares, and why bother?  Meaning no disrespect to that shallow debasement of the conceptual armory of science fiction—er, let me try that again.  While Superman in all his incarnations is no doubt of interest to students of popular culture, broadly speaking, one would think that Moskowitz would find higher priorities in this series on prominent SF writers.  That said, it’s a perfectly adequate summary of a low-profile brief career in SF leading to a more substantial one in comics.  Most interestingly, during World War II, the government found it necessary to suppress two Superman strips concerning atomic energy.  Two stars.

Summing Up

So Amazing continues to idle, with the occasional loud backfire from the likes of Robert F. Young, and intervals of smooth humming from, this time, the very competent Ursula K. Le Guin and the getting-the-hang Phyllis Gotlieb.  Next month, Edmond Hamilton and James H. Schmitz are promised.  Expect no sudden shifting of gears.

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Book, Magazine

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

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by John Boston

Melting Down

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


by Schelling

Boiling Point

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

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

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

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

Sunburst (Part 3 of 3)


by Schelling

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal


by Schelling

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

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

“And I mourn Man!”

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

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

The Artist


by Schelling

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

According to His Abilities


by Schelling

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

For Every Action


by Adkins

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

Planetary Engineering

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

The Verdict

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


by Schelling

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Book, Magazine

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

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by John Boston

Within Narrow Constraints

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

Prisoner in Orbit, by Henry Slesar

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

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

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

The Chair, by O.H. Leslie

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

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

The Other Inhabitant, by Edward W. Ludwig

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

A Question of Theology, by George Whitley

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

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

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

Spectroscope

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

Post-Mortem

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

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Magazine

[Dec. 13, 1960] Ringing In a bit Early (January 1961 IF)

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1961 began on November 10, 1960.

I see some of you are scratching your heads in confusion; others are nodding sagely.  It's a long-held tradition in the publishing industry that the date printed on magazines is the date through which they are expected to be on the bookstands, not the date they are first displayed.  IF Science Fiction, a bi-monthly, comes out a full two months before it's "expiration date."  Thus, I picked up a copy with a January 1961 stamp well before Thanksgiving 1960!

Since IF was acquired by the folks who bring us Galaxy Science Fiction, it has been something of a weak sister to that elder magazine.  This month's issue may turn all that around.

First, though, we have to get through the lead novella, Absolute Power, by the wildly inconsistent J.T. McIntosh.  I imagine he got top billing because he is the most famous of the crop appearing in this issue, but what a stinker.  Power features a smug man dispatched by a wealthy magnate to a backward planet in order to improve the consistency of production of a luxury foodstuff.  The aboriginal inhabitants never time their deliveries with the arrivals of the freighters, you see, and the stuff perishes quickly.  That part of the set-up is fine.  But said smug person is also tasked with making docile the magnate's intolerable daughter, who is sent to the planet, too.

When I was a kid, I enjoyed The Taming of the Shrew, but as I've matured, I've found it increasingly offensive and decreasingly humorous.  McIntosh's version is no improvement on the formula, and by the end, you'll want to give that supercilious "hero" a sock in the jaw just to wipe the smile off his puss.  One star.

Now, observe the smile on my puss.  Once you get past that kidney stone of a story, it's all good-to-amazing. 

Take Assassin by Bascom Jones, Jr., for instance.  A man is sent to wipe out the entire population of Earth, relying on subtlety and spycraft.  While not a brilliant story, Jones (who has only written one other story, for Galaxy) does an excellent job of dropping hints of the story's context rather than dumping it on the reader in a heap of exposition.  Three stars.

The off-beat R.A.Lafferty is back with The Polite People of Pudibundia.  Why is it that the humanoid Pudibundians are so incredibly polite, to the point of shielding their eyes with tinted goggles so as never to affront each other with direct gaze?  And why has every Terran who ever visited Pudibundia died shortly thereafter?  You'll have to read it to find out!  Three stars.

Then we have Vassi, by Art Lewis.  I've never heard of this fellow before, but if this novelette is any indication of what we can expect, good God, man, keep writing!  It is really the intersection of two tales, one of personal grief and tragedy, the other of exploration with a tinge of desperation.  Uniquely crafted and very poignant, the last pages are something of a difficult read, but I promise it's worth it.  Five stars.

Jack Sharkey is an author whose work has increasingly attracted my admiration.  His The Contact Point is an interesting tale of the first meeting between alien races.  Can you guess the kicker?  Three stars.

On to a pair of woman-penned short stories.  The first is Gingerbread Boy, by Phyllis Gotlieb (who has, hitherto, stayed in Cele Goldsmith's magazines), an excellent tale about the troubles faced by a race of androids, created as offspring substitutes, when they are superseded by "real" children.  Four stars. 

Number two is the fun The House in Bel Aire by the expert Margaret St. Clair.  Be careful whose house you break into—you may offend the Mistress of the Palace.  Reminiscent of the third Oz book (for Baum-o-philes).  Four stars.

Finally, Joseph Wesley (whom you may know by his pen-name, L.J. Stecher) has an engaging story, A Matter of Taste, wherein an invulnerable interstellar insurance adjuster is called in to avert imminent conquest and enslavement by a powerful race of mentalist aliens.  Nicely done, though the ending is a bit pat.  Three stars.

That leaves us with a book that scores a touch over three stars (and if you skip the opening novelette, a solid 3.5).  Moreover, there were none of the editing errors that have come to plague even the best of the scentificition digests these days.  Fred Pohl is definitely shaping IF into something to look forward to six times a year!

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