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by John Boston

Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye

The May Amazing presents a new face to the world.  That is, the cover was actually painted for the magazine, as opposed to being recycled from the German Perry Rhodan.  It’s not by one of the new artists editor White was talking up in the last issue, but rather by John Pederson, Jr., who has been doing covers on and off for the SF magazines since the late 1950s.  Ditching the second-hand Europeans is a step forward in itself, though this particular cover is not much improvement: a slightly stylized picture of a guy sitting in a spacesuit on a flying chair with a disgruntled expression on his face, against an improbable astronomical background.

by John Pederson, Jr.

But it is an interesting development for a couple of reasons.  First, in the letter column, White goes into more detail than previously about the European connection, in response to a question about why the covers are not attributed.  White says: “The situation is this: an agency known as Three Lions has been marketing transparencies of covers from Italian and German sf magazines and has sold them to a variety of book and magazine publishers in this country, including ourselves.  These transparencies were unsigned.  One of our competitors credited its reprint covers to ‘Three Lions;’ we felt that was less than no credit at all.  Therefore, unless the artist’s signature was visible, we omitted the contents-page credit.  As of this issue, however, Amazing returns to the use of original cover paintings by known U.S. artists.”

So much, then, for Johnny Bruck, and a hat tip to the diligent investigators who have identified all his uncredited reprint covers as they were published.  In addition to Pederson, White says, he’s obtained covers from Jeff Jones and Gray Morrow, and in fact a Jones cover is already on last month’s Fantastic.  Further: “I might add that, beginning with our last issue, the art direction, typography and graphics for the covers of both magazines has been by yours truly.” So White has pried one more aspect of control of the magazine from the grip of Sol Cohen, presumably all to the good, though the visible effect to date is limited.

The editorial this issue is a long response to a letter about the state of SF magazines, from a reader who gets a number of things wrong.  White sets her straight, describing at length the economic and other constraints of publishing SF magazines, though little of what he says would be a surprise to the sophisticated readership of the Journey.  He also notes that Alan Shaw will be the new Assistant Editor and will take over the proofreading, and not a moment too soon.  White has acknowledged that spelling is not his long suit and regularly proves it, e.g. by beginning a story blurb “Scenerio for Destruction.”

In this issue’s book reviews, the chief bloodletter is Alexei Panshin, who says of Robert Silverberg’s three-novella anthology of stories on a theme set by Arthur C. Clarke that “there is no reason why the . . . book should be so mediocre.” He says Silverberg’s own story is “cheap science fiction,” while Roger Zelazny’s is “merely cheap.” James Blish’s entry, though, “is something else and something better”—but Panshin then says because it’s only novella length, it “carries the joke out to thinness but does not allow true in-depth examinations” of character and motive.  A few pages later, he says of the Wollheim and Carr World’s Best Science Fiction 1969, “This is not a book that I would recommend to the uncommitted.” But the problem is not with the editors.  “The trouble is that the science fiction short story is the limited corner of an extremely large field.  It is an almost inherently trivial form used for forty years for the illustrations of moralities, for the drawing of fine scientific distinctions, and for the building of psionic sandcastles.  There simply seems to be no room left for much beyond restatement or a trivial refinement of the already trivial.” The fault is not in the editors but the whole enterprise!  I guess everyone should quit and go home.

Less flamboyantly, Greg Benford offers measured praise for Bob Shaw’s The Palace of Eternity, Richard Lupoff gives less of the same to Dave van Arnam’s Starmind, Richard Delap provides a very mixed review to Burt Cole’s The Funco Files, and Lupoff is about as nice as possible to a 67-page vanity press book authored by a high school student.

By Furies Possessed (Part 2 of 2), by Ted White

The main event here is the conclusion of editor White’s serial By Furies Possessed, which starts out like a standard Heinlein-flavored SF novel (“It was a routine run.  We made liftoff at 03:00 hours and were down on the Moon three meals and two naps later.  I always slept well in freefall.”).  But then it turns into another flavor of Heinlein, or two: The Puppet Masters vs. Stranger in a Strange Land.  Which will win?  Will everyone grok?  Or will it be “Death and Destruction!,” as Heinlein so elegantly put it in The Puppet Masters?

The first-person narrator Dameron, field investigator at the Bureau of Non-Terran Affairs (and rather far down in the hierarchy), is on the Moon for the arrival of the Longhaul II, returning from the colony of Farhome, which has been isolated for generations.  He’s to meet Bjonn, the Emissary from Farhome, and show him around on Earth. 

Bjonn is a weirdly impressive character—tall, with white-blond hair, burnished walnut skin, pale blue eyes.  When he shakes hands with Dameron, “[t]he contact was electrical.” Bjonn hangs on to his hand and looks into his eyes.  Dameron is flustered.  Later: “his movements had a cat-like grace. . . . There was something more there than simple suppleness—he had a body-awareness, a total knowledge of where every part of his body was in relation to his immediate environment.” Dameron mentions the fact that Bjonn’s friends and family will all be 30 years older when he returns, and he remarks, strangely and without explanation: “True.  And yet, I am the Emissary.  I could not have stopped myself from coming here, even had I wished.”

At this point, plausibility problems begin to emerge.  When they arrive on Earth, “a Bureau pod was waiting” for them—but no higher-ranking welcoming dignitaries, functionaries, or spies.  Dameron takes Bjonn to his hotel suite, and Bjonn suggests ordering up room service for two.  “I felt the blood leave my face, and my limbs went watery.  I all but collapsed into a handy chair. . . .” It seems that on Earth nowadays, as Dameron puts it, “The act of food-partaking, like its twin and consequent act, is man’s most jealously guarded privacy.  It is an unbroachable intimacy.  I shall say no more.  It is not a subject I can or care to discuss.” We later learn that eating and “its twin and consequent act” are actually done together, sucking pureed food through a tube while sitting on a glorified toilet seat.

Now this is happening in a seemingly ordinary default American-style mid-future, though it’s called “NorthAm” and not the U.S. of A.  The population has grown and sprawled; transportation is faster and easier (Dameron commutes to his job in Megayork from Rutland, Vermont, where he can still see trees out the window of his high-rise).  There are a few flamboyant details from the playbook, such as women going bare-breasted in public.  But the eating taboo?  How did we get there from here?  There’s not a clue.  Religious movement?  One is mentioned, but has nothing to do with alimentation.  Cataclysm after which civilization had to be rebuilt?  Nope.

But onward.  Dameron has fled to his office, where he gets a call from his boss Tucker telling him that Bjonn is out on the town.  Dameron suggests his work buddy Dian come with him, and they find Bjonn easily because he’s had a surveillance device planted covertly under his skin.  Dameron shortly departs leaving Dian with Bjonn.  Later he learns Bjonn also propositioned her for a meal in order to share a “customary ritual” with her.  Dameron suggests to her that maybe she should see Bjonn again and consider accepting his offer.  She’s repelled, but she’s thinking about it.  Later, she calls and asks Dameron to come to Bjonn’s room.  When he gets there:

“Something had happened.
“Dian was changed.
“ ‘It’s so marvelous, Tad—so wonderful,’ she said.  ‘We want to share it with you.’ ”

It’s a meal she wants to share, of course, and Dameron flees again, throwing up on his shoes in the elevator.  And he goes home without reporting to anyone.

by Gray Morrow

So let’s review the bidding.  Earth establishes contact with a lost colony after generations, and brings back an emissary who acts and talks in a strange and overbearing manner.  When he arrives, he is met and escorted to Earth by a single low-level government agent, who takes him to a hotel room and leaves him there.  There’s no other escort, protection, or surveillance other than his subcutaneous tracer, and there are no meetings or ceremonies planned or conducted for him with any higher-level officials.  Bjonn offends his contact with an offer that violates this society’s most fundamental taboo, which, as already noted, is not explained at all.  This can’t have been an ignorant mistake since (as Dameron notes) Bjonn has been on a spaceship with a crew from Earth on a several-month voyage to Earth, but there’s apparently been no report to Dameron’s agency of his not knowing of the taboo or seeking to breach it.  Dameron's superior now knows about this (though not yet about the last encounter with Bjonn and Dian) and hasn’t put on any greater security or surveillance, and as far as we know hasn’t reported it up the chain of command (his position is not stated but it’s clearly middle management at best, and we don’t see anyone higher up). 

This is some pretty major and implausible contrivance, the sort that might ordinarily warrant throwing the book across the room.  But White is a smoothly readable writer, so disbelief or exasperation gives way to wanting to see what happens next.  Which is: Dameron’s supervisor Tucker wakes him up in the morning demanding to know what happened to Dian.  He tells Tucker that she’s gone over to Bjonn—has shared a meal at his suggestion and has become “alien.” Tucker is not pleased, especially since Dian and Bjonn have vanished and Bjonn has removed his tracker.

Turns out, they’ve split for the Coast.  Dameron gives chase, doesn’t find them, gets called back East, and goes back to his routine work.  So no one, it appears, is paying attention to the mystery and potential menace of a weird alien with the power to transform human personality running around loose.  This changes only when Dameron attends a decadent high-society party which features (in addition to much corporeal sex ‘n drugs) erotic 3-D projections, one of which features Bjonn and Dian.

So, back on the trail!  Dameron gets on his infomat (seems like a miniature computer with a radio or telephone connection) and learns easily that Bjonn and Dian are still in California, just north of Bay Complex, and have set up a religion called the Brotherhood of Life, which offers the Sacrament of Life.  Dameron goes out and visits them, gets nothing but doubletalk as he hears it, and leaves, grabbing a girl named Lora from the lawn and taking her forcibly back to the local Bureau office for a biological examination.

Now somebody pays attention.  Dameron and Tucker are called to Geneva where they are informed that Lora's examination showed that she has been invaded by an alien parasite which has “created a second nervous system, directly parallel to her own.” So what are they going to do about it?  “Religious freedom is always a touchy issue.  Instead, we want you, Agent Dameron, to join his Church.”

Here I will stop with the plot synopsis, and say only that Agent Dameron returns to carry out his mission in an atmosphere of growing paranoia, and ultimately essays a far-fetched, long-odds, last-ditch plan to save humanity—though, of course, things don’t go as planned, nor are they as they seem.

But one more thing.  Along the way, White has sown clues that Dameron, though useful for his intuitive talent at making sense of fragmentary information, is—and is regarded as—a bit flaky and unreliable, possibly related to his upbringing (father dead, mother relinquished him to a “den”—a futuristic orphanage, not much better than present and past literary orphanages).  Just before he’s summoned to Geneva, he makes an appointment with a psychiatrist—his mother.  I have mixed feelings about how successful White is in developing the motif of Dameron’s psychological issues and how they affect his perceptions and actions (the Furies of the title have more than one referent). But it’s an interesting effort to wrap around the frame of an otherwise conventional SF novel.

So—an ambitious but flawed attempt to upgrade yer basic mid-level SF novel, whose flaws are smoothed over by capable writing.  Nice try.  Three and a half stars. 

As I mentioned last issue, the protagonist’s name is a slight variation on that of a distinguished jazz composer and musician.  The novel also contains a fair amount of “Tuckerization,” the practice initiated by Wilson (Bob) Tucker of using names from the SF community in SF writing—starting of course with Dameron’s boss, Tucker.  More elaborately, when Dameron goes looking for the roommate of disappeared Dian Knight, the names over the doorbell are “Knight—Carr.” The very well known fan Terry Carr, now an editor at Ace Books as well as author of a story in this issue, was once married to a woman named Miriam, who later became Miriam Knight.  When we see Ms. Carr’s full name, it’s Terri Carr.  There’s more: e.g., reference to the old Benford place, and later to Benford's son Jim (Greg and Jim Benford are brothers).  Exercise for the reader: Bjonn.

The Balance, by Terry Carr

by Michael William Kaluta

And here is the real Terry Carr himself, whose story The Balance displays a kind of schematic cleverness entirely too characteristic of the SF magazines.  Alien planet has two intelligent species, and the only thing they can eat is each other, so they have a cooperative relationship in which each hunts and eats the other only after their respective breeding seasons to avoid exterminating one and thereby starving the other.  They call this way of life the balance.  But there’s now a substantial human population on the planet, and some of them, including the protagonist, are trading knives and guns, which threaten to make the hunting and killing all the more efficient.  How to preserve the balance then?  There's only one logical response.  The protagonist gets a hint from a human tourist he’s dating and hastily leaves the planet, trying to warn “the local Federation office” but without much success.  A reluctant three stars—well turned, but entirely too formulaic.

Blood of Tyrants, by Ben Bova

Ben Bova’s Blood of Tyrants is presumably a satirical allusion to Thomas Jefferson’s pronouncement that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Boffins develop a program to take urban gang leaders off the street, hook them up to teaching machines so they can learn to read competently, instruct them in civic values, and prep them to go back into their communities and provide a more constructive sort of leadership.  It doesn’t quite work out that way, though the program certainly succeeds in making some of its subjects more effective leaders.

by Michael Hinge

This is essentially a Christopher Anvil-style reactionary fable, except competently written.  Bova presents it in movie-treatment form: “STILL PHOTO . . . Fast montage of scenes . . . Establishing shots. . . .,” etc. etc.  My first reaction was “Oh no, another casualty of Stand On Zanzibar,” but he makes the technique work, and it permits him to cut out a lot of connective tissue in service of a crisp narrative.  Three stars and a hat tip. 

Nobody Lives on Burton Street, by Greg Benford

Greg Benford’s Nobody Lives on Burton Street is another in the vein of Blood of Tyrants, but it suffers from the comparison.  The main characters are police supervisors who manage Burton Street, which is a sort of mock-up, like a Hollywood set, for people to riot in.  So who’s rioting today?  “The best guess—and that’s all you ever get, friends, is a guess—was a lot of Psych Disorders and Race Prejudice.  There was a fairly high number of Unemployeds, too.  We’re getting more and more Unemployeds in the city now, and they’re hard for the Force to deal with.  Usually mad enough to spit.  Smash up everything.”

by Jeff Jones

So as the rioters pour down the street, our heroes send in the AnCops, and later firefighters, who are all androids, and whom the rioters are allowed to abuse without limit, and after they all mix it up for a while, the rioters move on and the reclaim crew comes in to clean things up.

The idea seems to be that people who engage in disorderly protest are just angry in general, and all you have to do is provide a fake outlet for their anger and they’ll calm down until the next round.  There is a sort of contemptuous depersonalization here—the rioters are reduced to capitalized categories—which contrasts poorly with Bova’s story, cynical as it is.  There, at least, the bad guys are recognizable human beings.  There’s also another theme lurking here: apparently there’s a means for the more respectable elements like the police characters to manage their own anger and frustration; whether it’s chemical, psychosurgical, or other is never made clear.  Anyway, two stars.

A Skip in Time, by Robert E. Toomey

by Michael William Kaluta

Robert E. Toomey’s A Skip in Time is the kind of jokey and trivial story that has saved the back pages of SF magazines from blankness since Gernsback started receiving manuscripts.  Protagonist is drinking in a bar when there’s a commotion outside: a brontosaur is running loose and wrecking things.  He meets a guy on the street who explains he did it with his time displacer.  He invites protagonist to come see the time displacer.  After some more drinking, protagonist agrees to go back in time and try to scare away the brontosaur so it won’t be (or won’t have been) picked up by the time displacer.  Etc., with more drinking.  I’ve been tired of this kind of stuff for years, but this one is slickly done.  Three stars for competence.  This is Toomey’s third professionally published story.

Saturday’s Child, by Bill Warren

Saturday’s Child, by Bill Warren, is a cliched tear-jerker.  It’s the one about the old space dog who wants nothing more than to blast off again, but he's too old and sick.  In this variation, 600-plus-year-old Captain Dorn, and his telepathic hunterbeast (who adopted Dorn on some planet long ago) are rusticating on an unnamed and barely inhabited planet when an “earnest young man in Space Force black” informs him that the sun’s going nova, time to go, and by the way we’ve already packed up your possessions and taken them to the ship.  Dorn of course is having none of it, but they kill the hunterbeast and bundle Dorn up and the takeoff kills him, but not before he forgives them all and gets a final look out the window into space.  Cue the violins.  Well, it’s competently written.  Two stars.

Master of Telepathy, by Eando Binder

by Robert Fuqua

This issue’s Famous Amazing Classic is Master of Telepathy, by Eando Binder, from the December 1938 Amazing.  Professor Oberton, a psychologist, is studying extrasensory perception, having picked up quickly on the 1934 researches of Prof. J.B. Rhine, who is given due credit in the text and a footnote.  Young and shabby Warren Tearle shows up because he needs the five dollars that Oberton is paying to anyone who makes a high score on his tests.  Tearle aces them and, now better paid, becomes a daily fixture in Oberton’s lab, rapidly developing his powers not only of telepathy but also of clairvoyance and command.  Or, as he puts it to Darce, the professor’s beautiful assistant (you knew that was coming):

“I have reached the third level of psychic perception!  I now have practically unlimited clairvoyance and telepathy.  It was like having dawn come, after the dark night.  Professor Oberton had some inkling of what it would mean, but he had no idea of how much power it gives.  I can read thoughts, Darce, as easy as pie.  But more than that, I can give commands that must be obeyed! . . .
“My mind is not in direct contact with what the professor called the main field of the psychic world.  It is a sort of crossroads of all thoughts, all ideas, all minds, all things!  I can see and hear what I wish.  But more, I can force my will where I wish, carried by the tremendous power of the third level!”

So the world is at the mercy of an omnipotent megalomaniac!  But Professor Oberton figures out a way to use his own invincible powers against him, and the world is saved until the next issue.

This is actually a pretty well-written and developed story in its antiquated way, probably well above average for its time (well, maybe better five or six years earlier).  For ours . . . three stars, generously.

Where Are They?, by Greg Benford and David Book

Greg Benford and David Book contribute another “Science in Science Fiction” column, this one titled Where Are They?—Enrico Fermi’s famous question about intelligent extraterrestrials. They start by knocking off the notion that we are extraterrestrials, survivors of an ancient shipwreck or emergency landing.  Next, they point out that interstellar exploration would be fabulously expensive and extraordinarily boring, since faster-than-light travel is not in the cards or the equations.  Why bother?  And why keep at it after you’ve found a few other solar systems?  Colonization?  Forget it; if that were realistic, it would already have happened.  Exploitation of raw materials?  Too expensive.  Knowledge and ideas?  Now we’re talking.  Send probes, not space travellers, and if anybody’s there, try to open communications.  But this assumes the aliens are like us; if they are sea dwellers, would they look on land?  And what about the time scale?  If there’s life, but not usefully intelligent life, probes could wait and listen for radio signals.  Etc.  That’s a little over half the length of this dense and fertile run-through of possibilities, imaginative and thorough if long on speculation.  Four stars.

Summing Up

The issue is not bad, not great, but then what is among the current SF mags?  Even if there’s nothing here for the ages, the news about White’s progress in getting control over the magazine’s visual presentation is encouraging.

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