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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[November 2, 1965] Revolution! (December 1965 IF)

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by David Levinson

Americans have an odd relationship with revolution. They’re quite proud of their own, but extremely leery of anyone else’s. But revolution seems to be the natural order of things in the 20th century. Not all of them have been violent, nor have all of them been political. And no doubt we will see many more – political, scientific, economic, social and even sexual – before the decade, let alone the century is out.

Revolution turned upside-down

Since the end of the War, the major colonial powers of the 19th century have been gradually handing over control of their colonies to the native people. It hasn’t always been voluntary, nor has it always been smooth. But the British seem to be doing better than the others at handing over power. Most transitions have gone smoothly, though not perfectly. Until now.

Negotiations have been ongoing with Rhodesia since last year. The sticking point has been an improvement in the status of Black Rhodesians and an end to racial discrimination, insisted on by the United Kingdom. The white Rhodesian government led by Prime Minister Ian Smith is vigorously opposed the idea of equality for Blacks.

Talks broke down on October 8th over the issue of majority rule. With rumors circulating that Rhodesia will declare independence, the U. N. General Assembly voted 107-2 to call on the United Kingdom to use military force to prevent such an event. Ten days later, the Organization of African Unity passed a similar declaration. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson has gone to Rhodesia to continue negotiations, apparently without success. On the 30th, Wilson gave a press conference before returning home in which he stated that a unilateral declaration of independence would be treason, but that the United Kingdom would rely on trade sanctions and ruled out the use of military force against “kith and kin”. A peaceful resolution does not seem to be at hand.


Harold Wilson (l.) and Ian Smith (r.)

Revolutions start to finish

Americans may not like the idea of revolution in the real world, but as part of their national mythology it turns up frequently in fiction. This month’s IF is filled with revolution, both political and otherwise.


There’s no clue what this odd revolutionary slogan means. Fred Pohl promises an answer next month. Art by Morrow

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Part 1 of 5), by Robert A. Heinlein

In 2075, the Moon has been a penal colony for nearly a century. A prison without walls or guards, because there’s nowhere to run, and after just a few months, permanent physiological changes caused by the low gravity mean no one can go back to Earth. That means that many people living there are free men and women descended from former prisoners, but still subject to the Lunar Authority.

One such is Manuel Garcia O’Kelly-Davis. Mannie, who lost his left arm in a mining accident and has several interesting prosthetics, is a computer repairman. One of his jobs is maintaining the Lunar Authority’s central computer, a High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluation Supervisor, Mark IV – a HOLMES FOUR. Somewhere along the way, so many different modules were added to the computer it gained consciousness. Only Mannie has noticed and dubbed this new “person” Mycroft, Mike for short, after Sherlock Holmes’s smarter brother. Mike is quite the joker, with a fondness for practical jokes and puns, but he’s lonely, since everyone else is too stupid to have figured out that he’s alive.

At Mike’s request, Mannie attends a political meeting where he is introduced to Wyoming Knott, a rabble-rouser from Hong Kong Luna, and runs into his old teacher, Professor Bernardo de la Paz. After Wyoh (as she prefers to be called) gives a stirring speech encouraging revolution against the Authority and the Prof agrees with her goals but pokes holes in her methods, the meeting is broken up by the Warden’s goons and turns deadly.

Mannie helps Wyoh escape and, while they’re hiding out, introduces her to Mike, who eventually creates a feminine personality called Michelle to talk to Wyoh. The next day, they meet with the Prof and have a discussion about revolution. Mannie and Wyoh exchange a knowing look when the Prof points out the importance of communications; that’s one of Mike’s bailiwicks. After the Prof expounds on the idea of revolutionary cells, Mannie suggests a few improvements and suddenly finds himself nominated to head the revolution. To be continued.


Mannie wearing his Number Three arm. Art by Morrow

All but the most rabid Heinlein fans will agree that his last few novels have been uneven at best. But this is Heinlein at his best. We have the standard Heinlein characters here: Mannie, the competent man who mostly goes along to get along until pushed to do more by circumstance; Wyoh, the strong, beautiful, brilliant woman who does the pushing (though not a love interest so far); and the Prof, the older man who loves teaching and the sound of his own voice. Mike is a bit different. He obviously has a role to play, but we need to see more.

Not much really happens in these 50 pages, but Heinlein keeps you reading, even through long discussions of Lunar marriage customs and revolutionary organization. And once again, Heinlein has slipped a minority protagonist into his work. Mannie is not only Latin as his name suggests, but he probably counts as Black, with a grandfather deported from South Africa. When he first sees her, Mannie notes that pale, blonde Wyoh is clearly first generation since the genes tend to get all mixed up pretty quickly, so most of the people we meet are probably of mixed race.

Four stars and I’m eager to see more.

Security Syndrome, by Gerald Pearce

Professor James Brown has arrived at the regional headquarters of the Society to report someone as politically unreliable: himself. Despite his double-A rating, he feels that his sensitive position and his exposure to older texts full of “unescoism” have rendered him unfit. To say more would give the whole story away.

The United States has clearly undergone a revolution prior to the time of this story. The unnamed Society merely advises the government on the political reliability of citizens, and we hear of a second Bill of Rights, which includes a guarantee of “freedom from seditious, false and heretical doctrines”. It also seems that Brown’s actions are going to trigger another revolution.

This is a good story, though not without problems. I had some difficulty keeping the various Society members straight, and the story sagged in places. Still, a solid three stars.

Toys for Debbie, by David A. Kyle

Six-year-old Debbie Curtis likes to play with toys for both girls and boys, but she does have a tendency to break them. Insurance salesman Mr. Black has offered her father some excellent terms and occasionally drops by with a present for Debbie. What could be the harm?

I often complain that an author has attempted a “Twilight Zone ending”, an ironic twist that hasn’t really been set up. Long-time fan David Kyle (who most recently appeared in these pages as an artist) has written what would be an excellent episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s easy to imagine Rod Serling popping up at the end to offer a terse epilogue. Every moment is earned, and it ends not with a twist, but a shudder. Three stars.

St. George and the Dragonmotive, by Robert F. Young

Lieutenant George St. George of the International Pastpolice has gone to sixth century England to investigate an anachronism. There he meets a few knights, including one from Camelot, hunting for a dragon which has devoured a fair maiden and several peasants, who miraculously remain “on live”. The dragon proves to be a train, resembling the Stourbridge Lion, driven by a young woman he dubs Cassiana Jones. Train-lover George must work his way into her favor to track down the source of this industrial revolution.


An unusual comic style for Gray Morrow, but the best thing about this story. Art by Morrow

Typically for Young, the protagonist is an addlepated twerp. Worse, though he falls in love with the engineer, it’s clear he’s more in love with the idea of driving a train. Worse than that, she doesn’t get a name in her own right until the very end. It’s also far too long for such a thin story. Two stars.

The Girls on USSF 193, by Stephen Goldin

Astronauts are coming back from their tours of duty in space with weakened hearts, because they won’t do the cardiac exercises prescribed by the National Space Agency. Director Jess Hawkins came up with a plan that is dubious to say the least, morally questionable and probably illegal.

You sometimes hear the phrase “sexual revolution” about changing attitudes towards sex. In the past it’s sometimes meant being open about what people are doing anyway, and sometimes it’s about real changes in sexual attitudes. This story dabbles in the latter, but is highly implausible. It hinges on a career bureaucrat making a move that puts his job on the line, a job he knows others are gunning for.

Goldin is this month’s first time author. The writing here is decent, despite the implausible plot, but the attitudes towards women are deeply questionable. Two stars.

LONCON II or Through a Monocle? Darkly, by Robert Bloch

Bloch’s report on this year’s Worldcon was allegedly written on a hotel typewriter between the end of the con and his departure for home. I believe it. This rambling nonsense reads like it was written by a man short of sleep with his brain in a different time zone. You’ll learn much more about the con from our colleague Kris Vyas-Myall’s report. One star.

Mercury, by J. M. McFadden

Mercury is an alien predator with an unusual hunting style. She is captured by an expedition and brought to an Earth zoo. There will be consequences.

The story is quite obvious and depends on some rather stupid behavior, but it’s short and not a bad read despite all that. This is McFadden’s second sale, and I’m not averse to seeing more from him. Three stars.

Retief’s War (Part 3 of 3), by Keith Laumer

Retief continues his search for Fifi. Unable to find his army, he joins forces with the remaining Terries and prepares for a last stand against the Voion hordes. Rescue arrives at the last minute in the form of the Federated Quoppina army led by Fifi, who is none other than Retief’s cousin Princess Fianna Glorian Deliciosa Hermione Arianne de Retief et du Lille. A typical Retief plan is put together to save the rest of the CDT mission, knock Ikk and his Voions out of power, quash Groaci schemes and get Retief mostly out of trouble.


Tief-Tief rides to the rescue. Art by Gaughan

What a disappointing ending. A number of things happen that make little or no sense, but happen to move plot forward. Back in the first part, I noted that there was more room for things to develop, but Laumer seems to have run out of room anyway and it all rushes to a slam-bang ending. Two stars for this part and a very low three for the novel as a whole.

Summing up

There’s lots of revolution in these pages, political, industrial and sexual. But there’s nothing revolutionary. IF is by no means mired in the past like Analog and the outward forms often acknowledge the changes happening to the genre, but the bones are still those of a decade ago or more. IF is still worth reading, and Fred Pohl has never struck me as averse to change, but he really needs to pick one of his three magazines to at least experiment with bringing them into the 1960s and beyond.


Nothing here looks terribly new either.




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Days of Our Lives

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

Flipping Through the Calendar

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


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


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

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


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

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

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

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


Lafayette, ready for action.

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


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

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


The magician looks on as Lafayette admires himself.

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

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


Tune in again for the next exciting chapter!

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

Three stars.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Ray Bradbury

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


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

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


Illustration by Virgil Finlay.

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

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

Three stars.

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

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


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

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


Illustration by Emsh.

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

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

Four stars.

Wild Talents, Inc., by Robert Sheckley

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


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

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


Illustration by Emsh

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

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

Two stars.

Tooth or Consequences, by Robert Bloch

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


Cover art by Arnold Kohn

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

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

Two stars.

The Eye of Tandyla, by L. Sprague de Camp

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


Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones

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


Illustration by Virgil Finlay.

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

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

Three stars.

Close Behind Him, by John Wyndham

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


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

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


Illustration by Paul Lundy.

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

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

Three stars.

Space Devastator, by Anonymous

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


Cover art by Robert Fuqua.

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


Illustration by Julian S. Krupa

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

Two stars.

What Day is Good for You?

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

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


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

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




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[September 16, 1965] Blessed Are The Peacemakers (November 1965 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Ain't Gonna Study War No More

As my esteemed colleague David Levinson recently noted, war is currently raging, as it so often does, in various places around the globe. Fortunately, voices are beginning to be raised against this lamentably common human evil.


Benjamin Spock, the famous baby doctor, leads a group of folks protesting the conflict in Vietnam on a march to the United Nations in April of this year.

Whether these peace-loving people will have any effect on the escalating presence of American forces in Southeast Asia remains to be seen. Meanwhile, we can turn to the pages of the latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow for a fictional look at an unusual way to change war into peace.

They Shall Beat Their Swords Into Plowshares


The cover reproduces, in shrunken and edited form, various illustrations from the pen of Virgil Finlay, subject of an article within the magazine. I recognize the one in the middle, showing the face of a ape-man, as coming from the January 1965 issue. Maybe some of you clever readers can tell me the sources of the others.

Project Plowshare (Part One of Two), by Philip K. Dick


Illustrations by Gray Morrow. I don't know if that artist also came up with the rather eccentric, pseudo-archaic introductory paragraph shown here. Maybe it's the work of the author, or possibly editor Frederik Pohl. In any case, it's very odd, not really in keeping with the mood of the novel.

The time is the early twenty-first century. There are references to space travel within the solar system, but that's way in the background. We have the usual flying cars and such that we're used to in tales of the fairly near future.


Like I said, flying cars. Also, people wear capes and funny-looking hats.

Our main character — I can't really call him the hero — is one Lars Powderdry. I assume his peculiar name is an allusion to the phrase keep your powder dry, attributed to Oliver Cromwell. The intent must be ironic, as Lars does the exact opposite of getting ready for battle (the literal meaning) and is not otherwise prepared for future events (the metaphoric meaning.)

That requires some explanation. You see, Lars has a most peculiar job. He's a weapons fashion designer. This is even weirder than it sounds. It involves going into a trance, with the aid of mind-altering drugs, in order to enhance his natural psychic abilities. While in this state, he perceives images of complex designs for very strange weapons. These are passed along to military folks, who in turn give them to manufacturers.

Why, then, do I say that Lars is not keeping his powder dry? That's because the so-called weapons are nothing of the kind. The elites make the ordinary folks think they are, but in reality the designs are used to make unusual consumer products, generally of a trivial, frivolous nature.


Here's an example, taken from a sidebar in the magazine. Again, I don't know if this is the work of the author or the editor.

In order to fool the public, the manufacturers produce faked films showing the phony weapons in action. This situation came about because of a secret agreement between the two sides in the Cold War. The ignorant masses believe their governments are ready to attack the other side, while their rulers avoid the possibility of a real, destructive war.


An example of the deception in action. The zombie-like guys, supposedly criminals subjected to the mind-destroying guns shown here, are really robots.

Lars has a counterpart on the other side, a woman named Lilo Topchev. Although he doesn't know anything about her, having only seen a photograph so blurry that it doesn't reveal anything at all, he feels an unexplained attraction to her. (The author doesn't say, but maybe this has something to do with their extrasensory powers.)

There's another woman in his life as well. Maren Faine runs the Paris office of his weapons fashion house. She's also his mistress. They annoy each other much of the time, but there seems to be genuine affection between the two. Their relationship has a touch of sadomasochism to it. Maren enjoys mocking her lover, who is well aware that he's not as smart as she is.


Maren Faine. The artist nicely captures her personality. Intelligent, capable, self-assured, cynical, and maybe a little bit cruel.

While visiting her in Paris, Lars finds a device made from one of the ersatz weapons he dreams up in his trance states. The gizmo is a sphere that answers questions. For most people, it's just a toy, sort of like a super-fancy version of those Magic 8 Ball things most of us have fooled around with.


Did I have one of these things? Reply hazy, try again later.

Lars treats the sphere more seriously, asking it about himself. He gets some uncomfortable answers, discovering that his reservations about the way he's helping the elite deceive the public aren't really a matter of ethics, but due to his own fears of losing his psychic powers.


Lars and the mechanical oracle.

As if that were not enough of a painful look into his soul, Maren is a bit psychic herself, able to detect her lover's subconscious emotions. She knows about his obsession with Lilo, for example, explaining it in Freudian terms.

Things get complicated when satellites appear in orbit, not launched by either side. Robots sent to investigate the objects are destroyed. The assumption is that they are the work of hostile aliens. Faced with the possibility of an attack by extraterrestrials, the elite bring Lars and Lilo together in Iceland. Their mission is clear. Work together, using their psychic abilities to come up with a design for a real weapon, or face the consequences.


An agent for the other side shows Lars what the consequences will be.

There's lots of other stuff I haven't mentioned. In particular, an important subplot involves an unpleasant fellow named Surley G. Febbs, who is drafted to become one of the six average citizens who work with the military, dealing with the designs envisioned by Lars. It's not yet clear what part he'll play in the plot, but I suspect it will be a vital one.

Although not a comedy, there's a strong satiric edge to this novel. Both sides in the bloodless Cold War engage the services of the same private espionage agency, which gives them just enough information to keep them paying for more.

The many characters are complex and varied, with flaws and quirks that make them seem real. (A notable exception: There's one minor character whose only function seems to be to have the author describe her breasts.) I'm definitely interested enough to wonder what's going to happen two months from now.

Four stars.

Me, Myself, and Us, by Michael Girdansky

This nonfiction article deals with the connections between the two halves of the brain, and what happens when they are cut. The author goes on to describe a highly speculative way in which to give someone two separate personalities in one body, making reference to the well-known story Beyond Bedlam by Wyman Guin. The suggestion is that such a person would be the perfect spy.


Cover art by Emsh.

Although there's some interesting information here, I found it distressing to read. Not only is the suggested creation of a human being with two minds disturbing, but the author describes real surgical experiments on animals that are horrifying. Maybe that's only my squeamishness, but I wish he had just talked about those unfortunate people who have had the link between the hemispheres of their brains severed.

Two stars.

Last of a Noble Breed, by Mack Reynolds


Illustrations by Normal Nodel.

We begin in the city of Estoril, Portugal, a luxurious resort community. A couple married for only six months is there for business as well as pleasure. The husband, a nuclear engineer, is trying to win a position by meeting with various members of the European upper class.

In this future world, being an aristocrat is vital to one's success. Annoyed by the snobs and a little drunk, the man half-jokingly announces that his wife's grandmother was the hereditary Sachem of the Cherokees, which is true enough. This leads to a worldwide movement to have the United States government restore tribal lands to her people, even though the woman is only one-quarter Cherokee, at most. (Her grandmother, whom she met exactly once, might not have been one hundred percent Cherokee.)


Uncle Sam faces a problem. I'm not sure what that sign is supposed to say. Unfair to what? Queens? That doesn't make sense, as a Sachem is not at all a monarch.

This isn't the most plausible premise in the world, even for a comedy. There are some enjoyable bits of satire, and the author provides some accurate information about the Cherokee people, as far as I can tell. But the lighthearted mood doesn't match well with the truly tragic history of the Cherokees. The husband has a habit of calling his wife a squaw, which annoys me as much as it does her.

Two stars.

The Sightseers, by Thomas M. Disch

Rich people have themselves placed in suspended animation for thousands of years at a time, emerging to enjoy a lavish lifestyle for a while, then jumping back inside their time capsule. Oddly, things never seem to change. These time tourists stick to the fabulous hotels and restaurants that cater to them, which remain unaltered over millennia.

The only other people they encounter are the Nubians who serve their every whim. The suspension device breaks down, and a couple of the tourists, more curious than their much older consorts, investigate the world outside their sumptuous lodgings.

You'll probably predict the true nature of the Nubians, and why vast amounts of time appear to have no effect on the world. Although there are no surprises, the story is decently written. Disch has a knack for this kind of sardonic tale.

Three stars.

Virgil Finlay, Dean of Science Fiction Artists, by Sam Moskowitz

Here's a detailed biography and account of the career of a great talent. I don't know where the author dug up all of this information, but you'll learn a heck of a lot about the artist's life and work. There's only one problem.

No illustrations!

I know there are probably legal and budgetary reasons why this article doesn't include any examples of Finlay's drawings, but it's really frustrating to read about his artwork and not see it. In particular, Finlay's illustration for Robert Bloch's story The Faceless Gods, from the May 1936 issue of Weird Tales, is talked about quite a bit. We're told that readers were excited by it, and that H. P Lovecraft even wrote a poem about it. At least we get half of the poem, but we have no clue what the illustration looked like.

To save you from the same agony I underwent, I dug deep into piles of moldering old pulps and pulled out the drawing, as well as the complete poem. You're welcome.

Two stars.

Worldmaster, by Keith Laumer


Illustrations by John Giunta.

The narrator is the sole survivor of a huge space battle. Both sides were completely destroyed. It turns out that this was deliberate on the part of the admiral who directed his side of the battle. He held back his gigantic flagship, which would have won a victory without the loss of the other vessels in his fleet.

His plan is to return to Earth in command of the only remaining warship, and thus take control of the planet. (Apparently this takes place at a time when the Cold War has heated up, but only in space. We're told that planetary forces are of little importance.)


And there are flying cars.

He offers the narrator the opportunity to join him, but our hero refuses. A couple of goons try to kill him, but he overpowers them and manages to get back to Earth through trickery. What follows is a series of chases and fight scenes, as the narrator tries to stop the admiral's fiendish plan.


And there's a big fire.

Typical for the author in his action/adventure mode, this story moves at a breakneck pace, and features a protagonist who overcomes all obstacles with wits, fists, and not a little luck. It's an efficient example of that sort of thing.

Three stars.

Mother, Is the Battle Over?

We started off with peace disguised as war, and wound up with the aftermath of war. Was it worth fighting for? Well, Philip K. Dick's novel-in-progress definitely piques my interest, although I suspect it will not appeal to all tastes. The rest of the issue is something of a disappointment, like a hasty retreat after an inconclusive skirmish. At least the only casualties of the conflicts inside these pages are imaginary ones. There are far too many in the real world. I wish you all peace.


The design scrawled on this guitar case, spotted on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley this year, was created by British pacifist Gerald Holtom, as a symbol for the nuclear disarmament movement. It has since shown up a lot of places, as a sign for peace in general. I like it.




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[November 5, 1963] Beginning to see the light (November 1963 Gamma)

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by Gideon Marcus

There's a change brewing, slowly but surely.  If you've been anywhere near a radio, TV set, or newspaper, you know that the spark lit by the Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education has kindled into a fire, a burning energy to make Black people in America "Free at Last."  We've seen it in countless marches, integrating schools, the new civil rights legislation slowly working its way through Congress, and (sadly) the deplorable counterattacks by reactionary white supremacists.

The battleground also exists on television.  Black people have been few and far between on the little screen: Jack Benny's assistant, Rochester; the dispatcher on Car 54 Where are You?; Ethel Waters playing a dying blues star on Route 66 (and not a dry eye in that house); non-speaking Marines on the set of The Lieutenant. 

Last week marked a refreshing change in the right direction.  First, there was an episode of East Side/West Side, a dramatic look at social workers in New York City.  A Black actor was cast in the role of a psychiatrist, diagnosing the outlook for a mentally impaired individual.  It was a breakthrough for me because it was the first time I saw a Black man cast as the erudite smart one of an ensemble cast.  Moreover, I believe I've seen this character before, which would make him semi-recurring. 

This week's episode of East Side/West Side did not feature the psychiatrist, but (even better) focused on a Black family and the hardships they endured after they lost their young child.  It starred James Earl Jones, whom I know from his stage work, as well as several other actors and actress with whom I was not familiar, but who all turned in excellent performances. 

Last week, there was an episode of The Great Adventure, an educational series spotlighting important moments in American history, depicting the story of Harriet Tubman, who helped thousands of slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad in the 19th Century. 

And this week, actor/playwright Ossie Davis appeared on the game show, To Tell the Truth!

It's happening, little by little, in all walks of life.  There is light at the end of this tunnel.

And speaking of welcome surprises, I'm happy to present the second issue of the science fiction quarterly, Gamma.  After last month's dreadful line of mags, it was such a relief to have reading material I could look forward to. 

Gamma styles itself as a kind of F&SF plus, getting the best stories with the highest literary merit.  So far, they're doing great.  Gamma 2 is, despite the gorgeous cover by Dollens, really more of a fantasy/horror mag, as befits its publication date, occurring as it did just before Halloween and Dia de los Muertes.  So light the hearth, put a kettle on, and prepare to enjoy a fiendishly pleasant experience:

The Granny Woman, by Dorothy B. Hughes

Novelist Hughes offers up an evocative tale of the Ozarks in which a professor from the city investigates the recent death of The Granny Woman, widely rumored to be a witch.  Was it natural causes, or did the village-folk hex the reputed hexer?  Not sf, not even really fantasy, but a lovely tale just the same, and suitably spooky for the holidays.  Four stars.

The Old College Try , by Robert Bloch

An over-eager colonial administrator is dispatched to an alien world to oversee the native mine workers, ignoring the advice from his laid-back predecessor that it is often better to get along than steam headlong into the winds of tradition.

It's a competently written, Sheckley-esque satire with a joke ending you'll see a mile away.  Bloch, the author of Psycho, is one of the more effective horror writers out there, but he didn't strain his talents making this piece.  Three stars.

Michael, by Francesca Marques

Every five year old dreams of going on an adventure, but are the aliens calling Michael real or a sign of his mental instability?  Told from the point of view of his older sister, this is a beautiful vignette with an excellent sting in its tail.  Well done, Francesca, especially for a first tale!  Four stars.

Deus Ex Machina by Richard Matheson

Robert Carter, 34, accountant and father, lives a perfectly normal life until the morning he simultaneously bumps his head and cuts his throat — exposing the wires and oil that betray his robotic origin.  Has Carter gone mad or is he on his way to discovering the truth of the world? 

It's not a bad piece, but like Bloch, Matheson (possibly the finest sff screenplay writer in the business) did not devote much effort this passable but forgettable work.  Three stars.

The Kid Learns, by William Faulkner

Where Gamma 1 featured an early genre piece by Tennessee Williams, this time around, it's William Faulkner's turn.  The Kid Learns dates back to 1925 and involves a young crimelord aspirant who tangles with a rival and ends up on a date with death.  Good, not great, but I did appreciate that I had to read twice to understand what had happened.  Three stars.

King's Jester, by Jack Matcha

An overagitated corporate executive hires a Court Jester to lighten the mood, but the contract only serves to facilitate a complete breakdown — of the president and the company.  A overly heavy piece that thuds to an ending, I wasn't particularly impressed.  Two stars.

Here's Sport Indeed! by William Shakespeare and Ib Melchior

Ib Melchior, son of opera star Lauritz Melchior, has combed the works of The Bard to assemble the damnedest tale of planetary exploration you ever read.  An utterly insane exercise, and one that tickled me in all the right places.  Five stars.

Portfolio by Burt Shonberg

Here's something nifty: The fellow behind the weird paintings in the film, The House of Usher, has provided several new weird compositions just for this issue.  Worth a look.  5 stars.

The Undiscovered Country, by William F. Temple

History is filled with episodes wherein rapacious foreigners kidnap the local princess.  In this case, her highness is a telekinetic from Pluto, and Earthers are the bad guys.  A well-told story marred by the utterly human form of the aliens despite their wildly differing climate, as well as the moral implications: we should be rooting for the girl, but the story is written sympathetically to the terrans.  Three stars.

The Gamma Interview: Robert Sheckley

You better believe I turned to this piece first, and I was not disappointed.  Bob, now situated in Italy and sustaining a shamefully low output to our genre, discusses his views on science fiction and his role in it.  Five stars of goodness from one of the field's greats.

Castaway, by Charles E. Fritch

Gamma's editor once again takes up the quill for his own publication, much to the benefit of the issue.  His story about a shipwrecked Earther, whose planetary imprisonment outlasts the endurance of his physical body, is just beautiful.  Five stars.

Something in the Earth, by Charles Beaumont

As with the last issue, both of Twilight Zone's most featured guest writers make an appearance here (Matheson is the other one).  Sadly, Beaumont's tale of Earth's last patch of forest and the fellow who appoints himself its defender is overly sentimental and not particularly insightful.  Two stars.

I'm Only Lonesome When I'm Lonely, by William F. Nolan

For some people, drifting from cocktail party to cocktail party, living on scotch and the company of others, is a way of life.  But as Nolan's story demonstrates, it's always possible to have too much of a good thing.  An impressively dialogue-reliant piece.  Four stars.


artwork by Luan Meatheringham

Sombra y Sol, by Ray Bradbury

Sadly, the mag ends with the softest of whimpers as everyone's (but mine) favorite "sf" author presents a sort of prose poem, likening the death of little Raimundo during the Day of the Dead to the bull's inevitable end in the arena.  Dry, affected, and just plain bad.  One star.

Well, I hate to end on a sour note.  The fact is, this issue is well worth the 50 cent price, rough patches aside.  Get yourself a copy while you can.

Based on the quality of this and the last issue, I'd get a subscription, too.  And perhaps you can catch reruns of The Great Adventure and East Side/West Side next summer.  That would make your 1964 quite bright, indeed!

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[November 12, 1962] HEADS ABOVE THE CLOUDS (the December 1962 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Science fiction becomes science fact!  Well not quite, fortunately for us all.  It appears that we came to the brink of nuclear war last month but our leaders on both sides had sense enough to turn back from it.  These grave events reverberated even here, far from any population center or promising military target.  We were herded to a school assembly to be addressed by the principal, very briefly.  It went more or less like this:

“We, ah, don’t think . . . er, anything . . . is going to . . . ah, happen, but if, er, . . . something . . . ah, happens . . . classes will be dismissed and you will return to your homes” (these last clauses delivered with accelerating confidence, unlike the earlier ones).

Shortly thereafter, I was outside in gym class (physical education, as they call it here).  In a corner of the large outdoor area, the school’s paper trash was burning in a concrete enclosure.  (Isn’t there a better way of disposing of this stuff than burning it in the open air?  There ought to be a law.) The wind shifted, and fine bits of ash began drifting down on us.  “Fallout!” someone yelled.

So much for existential terror, at least in the so-called real world.  There’s a fair dose of it in the December Amazing, however, and this issue is noticeably wider awake than its recent predecessors.

Raymond F. Jones contributes the lead story Stay Off the Moon! Jones is an intermittently prolific 20-year veteran who has produced a lot of cut-to-specs product but sometimes comes up with clever oddball ideas, and here’s one of them.  Our guys at Mission Control succeed in putting a remote-controlled mobile laboratory device on the Moon to take soil (i.e. rock) samples, analyze them, and transmit the results.  Turns out the atomic weights and energy levels are different from the matter we know.  How can that be?  The Moon must have originated a long, long way away, in a place where the laws we thought are universal don’t quite work.  Well, what else is going on up there?  Finding the bizarre but logical (and terrifying) answer is the rest of the story.  This is the kind of thing only an SF fanatic can appreciate, but within those bounds it’s imaginative and well done.  Four stars.

Roger Zelazny’s Moonless in Byzantium—his second Amazing story, fourth published—might have a broader appeal.  It’s a surreal riff on one of the more familiar plots in the warehouse, the lone rebel face to face with an oppressive regime, in this case the Robotic Overseeing Unit.  In this dystopia, machines are in charge, people are mostly machines, and our protagonist is charged with writing Sailing to Byzantium on a washroom wall.  He is also charged with illegal possession of a name—William Butler Yeats, which he appended to Yeats’s poem.  This is the world of Cutgab, in which language itself is drastically restricted and simplified, and writing forbidden.  ROU accuses: “You write without purpose or utility, which is why writing itself has been abolished—men always lie when they write or speak.” The outcome is inevitable save for the accused’s final and futile defiance.  This is one that succeeds on sheer power of writing; in theme and style, it suggests Bradbury with sharper teeth.  Four stars for bravura execution of a stock idea.

This month’s Editorial indicates that some readers thought that this Roger Zelazny was himself a fictional character, and prints Zelazny’s reassurance that he exists; his Polish ancestors were armorers and the name comes from the Polish for “iron”; he’s 25, and possesses an M.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, military training as a guided missile launcher crewman, and his old copies of Captain Future.

The Zelazny is followed by Far Enough to Touch, by Stephen Bartholomew, who had a couple of stories in If and one in Astounding a few years ago.  A space mission is returning from the Moon, and suddenly one of the crew—the young one who seemed most entranced by space—has gone out the airlock in his spacesuit.  Rescued, he’s in an ecstatic delusional fugue, and stays that way.  And the point?  It escapes me, but the story is very smoothly written.  Two stars.

Stewart Pierce Brown contributes an equally well-turned but insubstantial story in Small Voice, Big Man, in which the voice of a washed-up singer suddenly is emanating from radios everywhere, to benign effect.  And the singer, Van Richie, is trying to make a comeback, but had a hard time singing loudly enough until the producer’s electrician rigged up an amplifier for him to wear.  OK, clear enough, but so what?  Two insipid stars—but this one is also smoothly written, not surprisingly from a writer who’s been in Bluebook, Collier’s, Playboy, and the Saturday Evening Post.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, who served up a dish of broken glass in the last issue, is back with something more soothing.  Measureless to Man takes place on yesterday’s Mars, where explorers travel on foot through the mountains with tents and sleeping bags, people get around by flagging down the mail jet, and the fauna include cute scaly sand mice and banshees, giant, stupid but dangerous flightless birds.  I suspect that this story was at least started a decade ago in hopes of a sale to the now-deceased pulps that Bradley admired.  Anyway, it concerns an expedition into the said mountains to the ancient city Xanadu, abandoned ages ago by the seemingly extinct Martians, from which no previous expedition has returned, and you can more or less guess what happens, in broad outline at least.  This used furniture is rearranged agreeably enough, with a slightly ironic, newer-style ending.  Three stars.

Sam Moskowitz’s “SF Profile” this issue is “Psycho”-logical Bloch, which is a little puzzling; Moskowitz readily concedes that Robert Bloch is a fairly inconsequential SF writer and that his main credentials are in horror and psychological suspense, at this point chiefly in film and TV.  Apparently Bloch is here in this series featuring the likes of Asimov and Heinlein because he’s popular among fandom.  But for a relatively pointless article, it’s perfectly readable and informative.  Three stars.

Finally, Frank Tinsley is back with The Mars Supply Fleet, doing his best to make space travel pedestrian again.  Two stars for making interesting information boring.

But still, cause for hope: two items in this issue poke their heads above the cloudbank of routine, in very different ways…

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[May 26, 1962] Home is the Sailor (June 1962 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

In recent days the eyes of the world were focused on the most important event yet during the administration of President Kennedy. No, not Scott Carpenter’s successful, if suspenseful, orbiting of the Earth, so ably reported by our host. I’m talking about Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to the leader of the free world in a skintight beaded dress that drew at least as much attention as her little girl's voice.

In other musical news, after three weeks at the top of the Billboard's Hot 100 with their smash hit Soldier Boy, the Shirelles, pioneers of the girl group sound, have yielded the position to British clarinetist Mr. Acker Bilk with his performance of Stranger on the Shore.  (Bilk is only the second artist from across the pond to make it to Number One on the American pop charts. The first was just slightly less than a decade ago, when Vera Lynn reached that position with Auf Wiederseh'n Sweetheart. I suppose we'll have to wait another ten years before the British invade the Yankee airwaves again.)

Bilk's haunting, melancholy melody could easily serve as background music for the cover story in the June 1962 issue of Fantastic.

Another beautiful painting from young artist George Barr graces the latest offering from editor Cele Goldsmith.  It perfectly suits – and, I imagine, provided the inspiration for – Robert F. Young's lead novelette The Star Fisherman.

The protagonist's profession takes him deep into interstellar space, where he uses nets to capture small meteors which are used as jewels to be worn in women's hair.  Already the reader can tell that this is a romantic and poetic tale with the mood of a legend.  I was reminded, to some extent, of the work of Cordwainer Smith.  The fisherman captures the body of an old man in a spacesuit and a photograph of a young woman in the severe clothing of a religious cult.  He instantly falls obsessively in love with her and uses the clue of her attire to track her down.

The author takes many risks here.  He deliberately offers us a science fiction story which has the mood of fantasy.  He walks a very thin line between heartfelt emotion and sentimentality.  He creates a character with whom one must empathize, but who sometimes does terrible things.  I believe that he succeeds, as well as constructing an intricately designed plot which leads to an inevitable conclusion.  For all these reasons I must award a full five stars.

I wish I could say the same about Ended by David R. Bunch, since I have generally been a defender of his unique style.  Unfortunately, this story begins in such an opaque manner that I had no idea what was happening.  Eventually it becomes clear that two very strange characters who were about to fight each other instead dig down to a region where they are offered the opportunity to pay for hedonistic pleasures.  Apparently the author intends a satire of the modern world ignoring the possibility of universal destruction and instead wasting time in pursuit of escapism.  With a character named Glob Gloul the Gloul and a place called the Hall of Hedo-and-a-Ho-ho, it's hard to take the allegory seriously.  Two stars.

A step up is the first half of Poul Anderson's short novel Shield.  It's a fast-moving, action-packed adventure story set in a thoughtfully worked out future which is only revealed slowly as the plot progresses, much in the manner of Robert A. Heinlein.  The protagonist has just returned to Earth from one of several missions to Mars, which is inhabited by intelligent life.  (The author is wise enough to provide only a glimpse of these aliens, leaving the rest to the reader's imagination.) With the help of a Martian friend, he has invented a device which creates a force field around the wearer.  Anderson provides a plausible explanation for this technology, and describes its abilities and limitations in realistic detail. 

Although the hero is intelligent and capable, he is young and somewhat naïve about political realities.  Not realizing the full importance of his invention, he is soon pursued by American Military Security agents, who are the most powerful force in a world where the United States, after a nuclear war, has forced all other nations to disarm.  He is also the target of Chinese spies.  (The Soviet Union is not mentioned, and the reader may presume that it was the loser of the war.) As if that were not enough, he has to fight off low level crooks as well as a sinister crime lord and his beautiful assistant.  It all reads like a futuristic version of one of Ian Fleming's bestselling spy novels.  The author writes in a vivid, clear style and draws the reader into the story right from the beginning.  Although the crime boss is a bit of a stereotype, his female aide is a complex, fully realized character.  Four stars.

This issue's so-called Fantasy Classic is less than a decade old.  The Past Master by Robert Bloch is reprinted from the January 1955 issue of Bluebook.  Three different viewpoint characters are used to tell the tale of a mysterious man who arrives out of nowhere with immense amounts of money.  He attempts to purchase many great works of art.  When legitimate methods fail, he hires criminals to obtain them.  The man's motive may not come as a great surprise to readers of science fiction, but the story is effectively told.  The author's ability to write in a trio of distinct voices is a nice plus.  Three stars.

By coincidence, both Fantastic and this month's issue of Analog offer stories about weather control.  "Rain, Rain, Go Away" by James A. Cox deals with the political effects of such technology as well as its unintended consequences.  It's fairly predictable and not very engaging.  Two stars.

***

Robert F. Young's tragic love story alone is worth paying a dime and a quarter for the magazine.  Whether Poul Anderson is able to maintain the suspense of his novel remains to be seen.

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[September 8, 1961] What makes a Happy?  (October 1961 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

It doesn't take much to make me happy: a balmy sunset on the beach, a walk along Highway 101 with my family, Kathy Young on the radio, the latest issue of Galaxy.  Why Galaxy?  Because it was my first science fiction digest; because it is the most consistent in quality; because it's 50% bigger than other leading brands!

And the latest issue (October 1961) has been an absolute delight with a couple of the best stories I've seen in a long while.  Come take a look with me – I promise it'll be worth your while.

First up is A Planet Named Shayol, by Cordwainer Smith.  Smith's is a rare talent.  There are few writers who not only excel at their craft, but they somehow transcend it, creating something otherworldly in its beauty.  Ted Sturgeon can do it.  I'm having trouble thinking of others in this class.  Almost every Smith story has this slightly lilting, 10% off-plane sense to it. 

Shayol is set in the far future universe of the "Instrumentality," a weird interstellar human domain with people on top, beast creatures as servants, and robots at the bottom of the social totem pole.  This particular novelette introduces us to the most peculiar and forbidding of Devil's Islands, the planet Shayol.  Just maintaining one's humanity in such a place of horrors is a triumph.  The story promises to be a hard read, yet Smith manages to skirt the line of discomfort to create a tale of hope with an upbeat ending.  Plus, Smith doesn't shy from noble woman characters.  Five stars.

Robert Bloch comes and goes with little stories that are either cute, horrific, or both.  Crime Machine, about a 21st Century boy who takes a trip back to the exciting days of gangster Chicago, is one of the former variety.  Three stars.

Another short one is Amateur in Chancery by George O. Smith.  A sentimental vignette about a scientist's frantic efforts to retrieve an explorer trapped on Venus by a freak teleportation mishap.  Slight but sweet.  Three stars.

I'm not quite sure I understood The Abominable Earthman, by Galaxy's editor, Fred Pohl.  In it, Earth is conquered by seemingly invincible aliens, but one incorrigible human is the key to their defeat.  The setup is good, but the end seemed a bit rushed.  Maybe you'll like it better than me.  Three stars.

Willy Ley's science article is about the reclaimed lowlands of Holland.  It's a fascinating topic, almost science fiction, but somehow Ley's treatment is unusually dull.  I feel as if he's phoning in his articles these days.  Two stars.


Art by Dick Francis

Mating Call, by Frank Herbert, is another swing and miss.  An interesting premise, involving a race that reproduces parthenogenetically via musical stimulation, is ruined by a silly ending.  Two stars.

Jack Sharkey usually fails to impress, but his psychic first contact story, Arcturus times Three, is a decent read.  You'll definitely thrill as the Contact Agent possesses the bodies of several alien animals in a kind of psionic planetary survey.  What keeps Arcturus out of exceptional territory is the somehow unimaginative way the exotic environs and species are portrayed.  Three stars.

If you are a devotee of the coffee house scene, or if you just dig Maynard G. Krebs on Dobie Gillis, then you're well acquainted with the Beat scene.  Those crazy kooks with their instruments and their poetry, living a life decidedly rounder than square.  It's definitely a groove I fall in, and I look forward to throwing away my suit and tie when I can afford to live the artistic life.  Fritz Leiber's new story, The Beat Cluster is about a little slice of Beatnik heaven in orbit, a bunch of self-sufficient bubbles with a gaggle of space-bound misfits — if you can get past the smell, it sure sounds inviting.  I love the premise; the story doesn't do much, though.  Three stars.

Last up is Donald Westlake, a fellow I normally associate with action thrillers.  His The Spy in the Elevator is kind of a minor masterpiece.  Not so much in concept (set in an overcrowded Earth where everyone lives in self-contained city buildings) but in execution.  It takes skill to weave exposition with brevity yet comprehensiveness into a story's hook – and it does hook.  Westlake also keeps a consistent, believable viewpoint throughout the story, completely in keeping with the setting.  I find myself giving it five stars, for execution, if nothing else.

Add it all up and what do you get?  3.3 stars out of 5, and at least one story that could end up a contender for the 1961 Hugos (I really enjoyed the Westlake, but I feel it may not be avante garde enough for the gold rocket).  Now that's something to smile about!

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[June 19, 1960] Half Measures (July 1960 IF Science Fiction)

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I'm glad science fiction digests haven't gone the way of the dodo.  There's something pleasant about getting a myriad of possible futures in a little package every month.  You can read as much or as little as you like at a time.  The short story format allows the presentation of an idea without too much belaboring.

Every month, I get several magazines in the mail: Astounding and Fantasy and Science Fiction are monthlies; Galaxy and IF are bi-monthlies, but since they're owned and edited by the same folks, they essentially comprise a single monthly.  I don't have subscriptions to the other two digests of note, Amazing and Fantastic (again, both run by the same people); they just aren't worth it, even if they occasionally publish worthy stuff.

This month, IF showed up last; hence, it is the last to be reviewed.  As usual, it consists mostly of moderately entertaining stories that weren't quite good enough to make it into Galaxy.  Let's take a look:

In a Body is the lead novella by J.T. McIntosh, and it's frustrating as all get out.  I often like McIntosh, though others find him competently forgettable.  This particular story has all the makings of a great one: shape-changing alien is shipwrecked on Earth and must find a soulmate to survive.  She adopts human form and chooses a man afflicted with leukemia to be her husband–but he's already betrothed to another.  In the hands of Theodore Sturgeon, this could have been a classic.  Even had McIntosh just given it a good rewrite, showing more and telling less, it would have easily garnered four of five stars.  As is, it is readable, even compelling, but it could have been much more.

Psycho writer Robert Bloch's Talent, on the other hand, is perfect as is.  Featuring a boy with an extraordinary talent for mimicry, Talent is one of those stories that starts intriguingly and descends slowly into greater horror.  The style is nicely innovative, too.  This piece is easily the highlight of the issue.

It is followed by one of the lesser lights: Time Payment by Sylvia Jacobs, a rather incoherent tale about a device that allows one to time travel to the future.. sort of.  Really, one just lives one's life normally, but with no lasting memory of living, until the destination time is reached.  Then, the recollections all flood in.  It doesn't make a lot of sense.

The prolific and not-untalented Jim Harmon offers us The Last Trespasser, a 3-star tale about the humanity's encounter with a race of beneficial symbiotes and the one fellow who finds himself unable to take on an alien "Rider."  It's a little uneven, and the reveal doesn't quite make sense, but I liked his creative prediction of future slang.

Usually reliable Fred Pohl has an uninspired entry called The Martian in the Attic, about a rather nebbishy would-be blackmailer who discovers that the inventor behind many of the wonders of the Modern Age actually had help from a pet alien.  It feels archaic. 

The Non-Electronic Bug, by newcomer E. Mittleman, is a bog-standard psi-endowed card sharking tale better suited to the pages of mid-1950's Astounding than a modern magazine.  It is in English, however, and perhaps Mr. Mittleman will improve with time.

Capping off this issue is Hayden Howard's Murder beneath the Polar Ice, a talky, technical thriller involving an American Navy frogman and the Soviet listening post he investigates in the Bering Strait.  Howard has been in hibernation as a writer for seven years after a short stint penning tales for the defunct Planet Stories, and Murder doesn't herald an auspicious re-awakening. 

And that brings us to the end of our journey through July 1960's magazines.  F&SF is the clear winner, at 3.5 stars to IF's and Astounding's 2.5s.  It's hard to award a "best story"–it may well be Bloch's Talent, but it might also be It is not My Fault from F&SF.  I think I'll give the nod to the former.

Finally, out of the 20 stories that appeared in the Big Three, just three were penned by women.  Unless it turns out "Mr." Mittleman is a woman.  That's actually a number we haven't seen since February.  Here's hoping we break 15% in the months to come!

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[Nov. 17, 1959] Dead Center (December 1959 Galaxy and wargames)

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Hello, fellow travelers!  As promised, here's a round-up of this month's Galaxy magazine.

Or should I say Galaxy Science Fiction?  According to editor Horace Gold (and I somehow missed this), Galaxy was misprinted last month with the old logo and the old price!  They really lost their shirt on that issue, sadly.  On the other hand, Gold is going to try not being ashamed of what he peddles and see if it affects sales positively or adversely.  I'm hoping for the former.

Diving into the stories, George O. Smith continues to write in a workmanlike fashion.  His The Undetected is part thriller, part who-dunnit, part romance, and features a psionic detective looking for a psionic criminal.  And you thought it could only happen in Astounding.


Virgil Finlay

The often-excellent Phillip K. Dick has a lackluster story in this ish: War Game.  In the future, the tricky Ganymedians are constantly trying to sneak subversive toys past our customs censors.  In this case, they succeed by occupying the attention of a pair of said censors with a sort of automated toy soldier kit.  It's the sort of throwaway tale I'd have expected ten years ago.


Wallace Wood

On the other hand, it provides an excellent segue to an exciting new arena of gaming.  A hundred years ago, the Germans invented sandbox "wargaming," wherein they simulated war with a set of rules and military units in miniature.  A half-century later, H.G. Wells proposed miniature wargaming as a way of scratching the human itch for violence without bloodshed.  Fletcher Pratt, popularized the naval miniature combat game in World War 2, playing on the floor of a big lobby.

A fellow named Charles Roberts has taken the concept of miniature wargaming and married it to the tradition of board-gaming (a la Scrabble and Monopoly or Chess, perhaps a prototype wargame).  Thanks to his revolutionary Tactics, and its sequel Tactics II, two players can simulate war on a divisional scale between the fictional entities of "Red" and "Blue" using a gameboard map, cardboard pieces, and dice.  While perhaps not as visually impressive as facing off thousands of tin soldiers against each other, it is far more accessible and inexpensive. 

War leaves me cold; I am a confirmed pacifist.  But there is fun in the strategy and contest that a wargame provides.  I look forward to seeing what new wargames Roberts' Avalon Hill company comes up with.  Perhaps we'll see games with a science fictional theme in the near future—imagine gaming the battles depicted in Dorsai! or Starship Soldier! 

To the next story: Jim Harmon is a fine writer, and his Charity Case, about a fellow hounded by demons who cause his luck to be absolutely the worst, starts out so promisingly that the rushed ending is an acute disappointment.  Maybe next time.


Dick Francis

Fred Pohl's The Snowmen is a glib, shallow cautionary tale covering subject matter better handled in Joanna Russ' Nor Custom Stale.  In short, humanity's need to consume compels it to generate power from heat pumps that accelerate the process of entropy leaving Earth in a deep freeze. 

I did like Robert Bloch's Sabbatical, about a time traveler from 1925 who quickly determines that the grass is always greener in other time zones, and one might as well stay home.  I enjoyed the off-hand predictions about the future—that Communism will no longer be the big scare, to be replaced with Conservativism; the patriarchy will be replaced with a matriarchy; the average weight of folks will be dramatically higher.  I guess we'll see which ones come true.

Finally, we have Andy Offut's Blacksword.  I had hoped for an epic fantasy adventure.  Instead, I got one of those satirical political romps wherein one man plays chess with thousands of inferior minds, and things work out just as he planned.  And then it turns out he's just a pawn (or perhaps a castle) in a bigger political chess game.  Inferior stuff.


Wallace Wood

All told, this issue tallied at three stars.  The problem is that this issue wasn't a mix of good and bad but rather a pile of unremarkable stories.  With the exception of the Sheckley and the Ley article, and perhaps Bloch's short story, it was rather a disappointment.

Of course, this month's Astounding prominently features Randall Garrett, again.  Out of the frying pan, into inferno.

See you in two!  Try not to get involved with any rigged quiz shows…

—
Note: I love comments (you can do so anonymously), and I always try to reply.

P.S. Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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