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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 10, 1967] Women's liberation! (September 1967 Galactoscope)

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I have lamented for some time that we've been at a nadir of female participation in our peculiar genre.  If this month's clutch of books be any indication, that trend is finally reversing, to the benefit (for the most part) of all of us science fiction readers!


by Victoria Silverwolf

Wordplay

Two new science fiction novels arrived this month with one-word titles that don't show up in my dictionary. No doubt that's meant to intrigue the potential reader, and create the sense of strangeness associated with much SF. Let's take a look at them and see if we can figure out what the titles mean.

Restoree, by Anne McCaffrey


Anonymous cover art.

Sara is a very ordinary young woman, maybe a little less content with her life than most. She considers herself unattractive, and is particularly sensitive about her large nose. She runs off from an unhappy home to take a job in New York City.

While walking through Central Park one night (not a wise thing for an unaccompanied woman to do, I'd think) she is abducted and taken aboard an alien spacecraft. The opening of the novel is a chaos of strange and disturbing sensations, so we don't really figure this out for a while, but it becomes clear later.

In a way that isn't explained until late in the book, she winds up in a
new body. For some time, she's in a dazed, zombie-like condition, only slowly coming to full awareness. The good news is that she's beautiful, with golden skin and a perfect nose. The bad news is that she's enslaved as a sort of nursemaid to a fellow in a mindless state.

Eventually, she figures out that the fellow has been drugged into catatonia by the bad guys. She helps him return to normal by reducing the amount of drugged food he consumes. The two escape from the hospital/prison and a tale of palace intrigue and space opera adventure begins.

The plot gets pretty complicated, and there are lots of characters with odd names, so I got lost at times. (The drugged man's name is Harlan, by the way; a reference to one of the author's fellow writers? Anyway, he's got the only name I've ever seen before, other than the heroine's.)

Suffice to say that Sara is on another planet, although the inhabitants are completely human. Harlan is the Regent for the planet's young Warlord. The bad guys drugged him, faking it as insanity, in order to control the government in his place. Add in aliens that Harlan's people have been fighting for millennia and rival factions for the throne. A further complication is that Sara has to hide the fact that she's a restoree (there's that word!) or she is likely to be killed as an abomination.

Besides all this science fiction stuff, there are a lot of romance novel aspects to the book. The beautiful, virginal heroine and the dark, mysterious hero fall in love, finally consummating their passion in sex scenes that are far from explicit. I also found a fair amount of subtle humor in the novel, as if the author has her tongue firmly in her cheek. What the evil aliens do to the people they capture stirs in a bit of gruesome horror as well.

The characters, for the most part, are either all good or all bad. The only ambiguous one is the brilliant physician who gave Sara her new body, in the forbidden and universally reviled procedure that made her a restoree. (If he hadn't, she would just be dead.) He does seem to be genuinely concerned with healing the afflicted, but he also works with the bad guys.

Kind of a silly book, really, but mildly entertaining if you turn your brain off. It's the author's first published novel, so let's just say that she shows promise.

Two stars.

Croyd, by Ian Wallace


More anonymous cover art.

The explanation for the title is simple enough; Croyd is the hero's name. He has no other, as far as I can tell.

Croyd is some kind of agent for the galactic government. He is also a Van Vogtian superhuman, with a brain that allows him to do things like go back and forth in time. While waiting to hear the details of his latest assignment, he saves a lady in distress from an abusive man.

There's a lot more to the woman than he realizes. It seems that an alien from another galaxy, bent on conquering the inhabitants of the Milky Way, has her mind inside the woman's body. Next thing you know, her mind is inside Croyd's body, and his is inside the woman's.

The woman's mind is still inside her body as well, so she and Croyd share it as they track down the alien who stole Croyd's body. Meanwhile, a gang of beatnik terrorists are planning to send the asteroid Ceres crashing into Nereid, one of Neptune's moons, where there's a government base. The alien in Croyd's body has to deal with this, to convince people that she's really Croyd.

Things get really complicated. There are alien agents among the government staff, with the ability to hypnotize people into turning against humanity. There's another group of aliens that wants to destroy the entire Milky Way rather than conquer it. Both Croyd in the woman's body and the alien in Croyd's body have to fight their nefarious scheme. There's even a second Croyd mind that shows up inside his purloined body. This one is a stupid brute, intent only on animal pleasures.

With all this going on, and characters rushing back and forth in space and time, this is definitely a wild roller coaster ride. I didn't believe any of it for a second. If McCaffrey's book often has the feeling of a stereotypical woman's romance novel, with science fiction trappings, Wallace's frequently seems like a stereotypical men's adventure novel, with the same decorations.

Two stars.


by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

With the New Wave such a strong force in British science fiction at the moment there is a real blurring of the boundaries of what is speculative and what is literary experimentation.

6 Covers: Squares of the City, Greybeard, The Assassination Weapon, The Magus, The Third Policeman, The Master and Margarita
Science fiction or experimental literature? Which is which?

If they had not come of Science fiction publishers and\or from science fiction authors would we consider Squares of the City, Greybeard or Ballard’s cut-up tales to be speculative? By the same token if Fowles’ Magus, O’Brien’s Third Policeman or Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita had been published as Ballantine Paperbacks from Cordwainer Smith or Daniel Keyes, would they be on the Hugo Ballot?

This leads into probably one of the most interesting edge cases of recent years, where the author says she had no intention of writing science fiction but it is hard for the SF community to see it as anything else:

Ice, by Anna Kavan

Cover of Ice by Anna Kavan

In contrast to some recent writers, Kavan’s move into the speculative realm is not as much of a leap. She has been writing since the twenties and her works have often made use of experimental and surrealist techniques, commonly looking at madness and incarceration.

As anyone who has read the stranger side of science fiction, such as Philip K. Dick, these kind of ideas are often played with in the speculative space. However, in this work it definitely feels like she walks over the 49th parallel into SFnal Canada.

In Ice we follow our unnamed protagonist (no one has names here) through a world where society is collapsing under the weight of a frozen disaster. Our narrator seems to be in pursuit of a young woman near the start but the full motivations remain obscure as, even though written in the first person, it is narrated in a very matter of fact style.

In many ways this reminded me of Ballard’s elemental apocalypses, where The Drowning World flooded the world and The Drought boiled it, this one has frozen it. And all involve the characters moving through the disaster riven Earth in a dream-like state, as we get to see insights into their state of mind.

However, where Ballard does more direct exploration of his inner-space, Kavan keeps everything very cold and clinical, written in sharp fragments such as this description of the aftermath of a rape:

Later in the day she did not move, gave no indication of life, lying exposed on the ruined bed as on a slab in a mortuary. Sheets and blankets spilled on to the floor, trailed over the edge of the dais. Her head hung over the edge of the bed in a slightly unnatural position, the neck slightly twisted in a way that suggested violence, the bright hair twisted into a sort of rope by his hands.

There is no mention of our narrator’s feelings on this, it is treated in a disassociated manner, as if he is outside the events being described. This in itself gives us insight, but predominantly by the absence of explanation than by the paucity of it.

Yet, it remains dreamlike in another way, for it follows through in a manner that feels coincidental and directionless. They move between scenes in a way that often led me to look back if I had missed anything. In addition there are regular hallucinations throughout, meaning that we have extra questions as to the reality of what we are seeing.

But I believe this is the point: we are meant to feel isolated and abstracted, just as the protagonist does. To see what we as the reader are appalled and terrified by this world, yet we see someone completely numb to it all as our guide.

I could take you through various sections but really it is one of those books you need to experience, to delve into the atmosphere and feelings (or rather lack thereof) in order to truly understand.

A very high four stars.


by Gideon Marcus

Bringing up the Rear

Ace Books, regular as clockwork, releases a monthly double dose of adventure in the form of the luridly composed Ace Doubles.  In the past, these bundled short novels had a reputation for being rather shallow and adventure-focused, while also being subject to the mercurial editorial whims required to ensure the stories fit in the prescribed lengths.  Over the last few years, however, these volumes have become some of my favorite sources of entertainment, and they've launched the careers of many a new and promising author.  This time around, we've got a veteran paired with a newcomer:

The Winds of Gath, by E.C. Tubb

Earl Dumarest awakens from cold sleep several days prior to his destination.  He is one of the fortunate ones: 15% of the interstellar travelers who take Low Passage on a starship never revive.  But Dumarest's luck ends there–instead of being dropped off at Broome, he must debark on the hell planet of Gath.  On that tidally locked world, the Low Passage travelers are trapped without sufficient funds to leave, exploited by the Resident Factor of Gath despite the efforts of the local enclave of the Church of Universal Brotherhood.

What fuels the economy of this blighted planet?  It is the winds that blow from the baked day side to the frozen night side.  As they whistle along twilight mountain ranges, they set up resonances in the human mind, facilitating all manner of hallucinations: some pleasant, some insanity-inducing.

This natural phenomenon is the least of Dumarest's troubles as he has been plopped down into a budding conflict between the Matriarchy of Kund, the cruel Prince of Emmered, and other miscellaneous galactic forces. Can he thread the needle before the looming tempest envelops them all?

Truth be told, I was not expecting much from E.C. Tubb, a writer who almost invariably merits three stars.  Even more so as the story reminded me strongly of Dune, with its sweeping setting, frequently shifting viewpoint, and its almost mythological character.  The problem, of course, is that Dune was also a three-star tale for me.

So I was quite surprised that this tale grabbed me by the throat and did not let go until I finished, quite soon after I started.  I think the main reason Tubb succeeds where Herbert does not is that Tubb can write!  There are few wasted words, and his prose is sensual and visceral (perhaps he overuses "blood-colored" a touch; crimson would do occasionally).  If Dumarest is a bit too superhuman, he is at least consistent in his abilities, and the limitations thereof.  And such a vividly drawn world–it is clear that Dumarest will have more adventures in the future.

Four stars

Crisis on Cheiron

Carl Race is a Federation junior ecologist brought into investigate an agricultural blight on Cheiron.  The garden-like world is home to a race of primitive but industrious centauroids working with the private enterprise Consolidated Enterprises (humorously abbreviated to "Con En").  There is concern that Con En caused the global catastrophe, which threatens the planet's legume and honey industries, potentially destroying the entire ecosystem.  Should Con En lose its contract to trade with the Cheironi, its rival, Trans-Galactic, will swoop in.

Very quickly, Carl, with the assistance of a human teacher, Marcy, and a precocious Cheironi teen, Nubi, determine not only that the blight is artificially caused, but that there is a nefarious conspiracy involved.  Much rushing around, near-miss assassinations, chase scenes, scientific explanations, and spelunking ensue.  Don't worry–it's got a happy ending.

Author Juanita Coulson is probably better known to the world as half of the editing team of Yandro, a prestigious fanzine that has garnered nearly a dozen Hugo nominations and one win.  This is her first foray into novel writing, and she's not nearly as polished as Tubb.  The first 20 pages are quite rough sledding, and probably could have been pared down to perhaps a page.  In fact, the whole first third is quite padded, and I have to wonder if this was an editorial decree to fill space (this particular Ace Double has very compressed pica, resulting in more words per page).  But I stuck with it, and ultimately I found the book to be decently enjoyable.  It feels pitched at a much younger audience, what was once called "juvenile" and is now coming to be termed as "young adult".  You will probably guess the phenomenon that is the culprit before it is described, but that's fine.  One should be able to solve a mystery from the clues provided.

I appreciate that Marcy is vital to the plot and Carl clearly finds her attractive, but no romance develops between the two leads.  The aborigines are depicted as equals to humans (with good and bad examples of the species), which I would expect as Coulson has been a strident civil rights booster since her college days in the early 1950s.

So, three stars, and congratulations Juanita!



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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 6, 1967] New Look, New . . . ? (October 1967 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The October Amazing is the second instance of what may prove to be the magazine’s New Look.  Like the June issue, it is fronted by a pleasantly garish and nouveau-pulpish cover that, though uncredited, is known to the cognoscenti as another by Johnny Bruck, reprinted from a 1963 issue of the German Perry Rhodan magazine.  Farewell Frank R. Paul?  We’ll see.  And maybe the contents are being updated as well.  Of the five reprinted stories here, all are from the late 1940s or the ‘50s, at least in publication date.


by Johnny Bruck

That is not necessarily good news; Amazing published plenty of dreck through most of its history.  Selection is all.  But this issue’s selection is pretty decent.  Also Harry Harrison’s book reviews are still here, with a fillip.  In addition to Harrison’s own reviews of a new Edgar Rice Burroughs bio, the latest Analog anthology, and an Arthur Sellings novel, there is Brian Aldiss’s review of Harrison’s own The Technicolor Time Machine—back-slappingly complimentary, as one might expect from these close collaborators.  Harrison and Aldiss edited this year’s Nebula Award Stories, due out just about now, and it appears that they will be joining the party with their own “year’s best” anthology next year.

Santaroga Barrier (Part 1 of 3), by Frank Herbert


by Gray Morrow

Frank Herbert’s new novel Santaroga Barrier begins its three-part serialization in this issue.  As usual, I will withhold comment until it’s finished.  A cursory rummage indicates that it seems to have something to do with people in California taking drugs.  It will be interesting to see what Herbert can develop from such an unlikely premise.

The Children's Room, by Raymond F. Jones

Raymond F. Jones is the very model of a modern science fiction writer.  He checks all the boxes.  His career is so generic as to be paradigmatic, or maybe vice versa.  He started out in Campbell’s Astounding, just in time to join new writers George O. Smith and Hal Clement and retread Murray Leinster in keeping that magazine going when such mainstays as Heinlein, Hubbard, Williamson, and de Camp were lost to military service or war work.  After the war, when paper shortages loosened and the pulps returned from wartime quarterly schedules to monthly or bimonthly, Jones—along with Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt, George O. Smith and other Astounding writers—began helping to fill them as well as continuing to appear in Astounding. When specialty publishers began to muster the large backlog of magazine SF for book publication, Jones was there with his Astounding novel Renaissance and a collection of his 1940s stories, The Toymaker.  When Galaxy appeared in 1950 and instantly broadened the range of the field, Jones contributed the shocking A Stone and a Spear, which would likely have been unpublishable anywhere else.  When “juvenile” (the term is becoming “young adult”) science fiction became a big item, Jones provided the well-remembered Son of the Stars and its sequel Planet of Light to the John C. Winston series.  When SF started to be big box office, Jones’s novel This Island Earth was turned into a mediocre but high-profile movie.  But somehow his recognition never kept pace with his resume, and now he seems to have given up and been largely forgotten, with only five new stories since 1960.

The Children’s Room, from the September 1947 Fantastic Adventures, is only the third story Jones published outside Astounding.  It’s about super-people—hardly an unusual theme in that magazine—but it pursues some of the implications of that idea that Campbell may not have found too palatable.  Bill Starbuck, chief engineer at an electronics company, picks up one of the books his IQ-240 son checked out from the university library’s children’s room, and finds himself captivated by a particularly subtle fairy tale.  Next day the kid is sick and the book is due so he returns it, only to be told “We have no children’s department.” But on the way out, he sees the children’s room, returns the book, and the librarian there (having learned that Bill has read the book), gives him more to take home.


by Rod Ruth

So what gives?  Time-traveling mutant super-people, of course—what else?  In the future, humanity is up against an alien species that is out-evolving them!  So they must scour the past for those people with beneficial mutations who never had a chance to amount to much, contact them and get them used to their exalted status (groom them, you might say), and then carry them off to their grand destiny in the future, never to see their time or their families again.  Only the mutants can even read the books, or see the time travellers’ children’s rooms.  Bill’s an exception—he can read the books and see the rooms, but has none of the other talents of the mutants, so he’s not invited to the future; and Mom’s a total loss. 

So the kid gets on board with the plan, and the parents both come around, since there’s not much else they can do.  But there’s a consolation prize for the parents (otherwise they would have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do to the Bureau of Child Welfare), and here Jones twists the knife in this formerly mild story.  (Read it and see.) Or, about as likely, Jones is just naively working out the plot, and it is only we mutants reading it who can perceive its monstrousness.  As, no doubt, Campbell did, and rejected the story, or so I surmise.  Four stars, even if the fourth may have been accidental on Jones’s part.

Five Years in the Marmalade, by Geoff St. Reynard


by Bill Terry

Geoff St. Reynard, a pseudonym of Robert W. Krepps, contributes Five Years in the Marmalade (Fantastic Adventures, July 1949), an inane joke.  Two guys walk into a bar—Muleath and Dangeur, who just returned from Alpha Centauri—and after they’ve had a drink, a Martian teleports in, just returned from a stay on Mercury.  The boys call him over, and he tells them about his “single-trav,” which will take him anywhere he can think of, through (of course) the power of thought.  So they recommend he head off next to Marmalade, which Muleath has made up and which exists only in his brain.  Connect the dots.  It's as skillfully executed as it is silly, and remarkably, Everett F. Bleiler and T.E. Dikty thought enough of it to put it in The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1950.  Two stars, barely.

The Siren Sounds at Midnight, by Frank M. Robinson

Frank M. Robinson’s The Siren Sounds at Midnight (Fantastic, November-December 1953) is entirely contrived: “they” have set a midnight deadline to resolve “their” differences, and if things don’t work out, the bombs will be flying and it’s all over for everybody, or close to it.  The story is redeemed by Robinson’s quiet good writing, following a long-married couple as they spend what may be their last hours together.  Three stars.

Largo, by Theodore Sturgeon

“More lyrical science fiction from the typewriter of Theodore Sturgeon,” says the blurb for Largo (Fantastic Adventures, July 1947).  All those terms are debatable except probably “typewriter.” Here’s the alleged science involved, from the opening of the story: “The chandeliers on the eighty-first floor of the Empire State Building swung wildly without any reason.  A company of soldiers marched over a new, well-built bridge, and it collapsed.  Enrico Caruso filled his lungs and sang, and the crystal glass before him shattered.”

The style is not so much lyrical as swaggering and demonstrative.  Here’s the next stretch of text:

“And Vernon Drecksall composed his Largo.

“He composed it in hotel rooms and scored it on trains and ships, and it took more than twenty-two years.  He started it in the days when smoke hung over the city, because factories used coal instead of broadcast power; when men spoke to men over wires and never saw each other’s faces; when the nations of earth were ruled by the greed of a man or the greed of men.  During the Thirty Days War and the Great Change which followed it, he labored; and he finished it on the day of his death.”


by Henry Sharp

That is, “I’m gonna tell you a story and I’m just the guy who can do it.” And, of course, Sturgeon is that guy, on his better days.  The striking thing about this story is the conspicuous confidence and cadence with which he lays out what is actually a pretty hackneyed plot—an extravagant revenge drama.  Drecksall is an eccentric musical genius with an all-consuming work in progress.  He works at menial jobs so support himself and his violin. Then he falls in love with the beautiful but vapid Gretel.  A crassly entrepreneurial type, Wylie, recognizes his genius, exploits it and him, and also ends up marrying Gretel himself. Drecksall continues to perfect his Largo, though it’s sounding darker all the time.  He builds his own auditorium to perform it in, invites Gretel and Wylie to hear it, and then . . . fade to black. 

There’s more, but it’s all in the telling, which is worth reading as a conspicuous demonstration of craft if nothing else.  This is Sturgeon’s fourth SF or fantasy story to be published by someone other than John Campbell, and it contrasts sharply to Blabbermouth, the second such, from Fantastic Adventures a few months earlier.  That one was told in an off-the-rack style that fit Sturgeon like an embarrassing Hallowe’en costume.  This is Sturgeon being himself, performing a circus act of the redemption of hokum by style.  Splitting the difference, three stars.

Scar-Tissue, by Henry S. Whitehead


by Robert Fuqua

The antique of the bunch is Henry S. Whitehead’s Scar-Tissue, which came from the July 1946 Amazing, but was posthumously published; the author died in 1932.  It begins unpromisingly, with the narrator asking his friend the ship’s doctor, “What is your opinion on the Atlantis question?” This becomes a frame story in which one Joe Smith, with Harvard and Oxford’s Balliol College on his resume, describes his past lives in prehistoric times, in Africa under the Portuguese (“Zim-baub-weh,” the place was called), and then Atlantis, where he was a gladiator, and he’s got scars to prove it.  It’s a perfectly readable old-fashioned story.  Three stars.

Summing Up

Not bad, a readable issue of this ill-conceived incarnation of Amazing, and better than not bad if the Herbert serial pans out.  We'll see.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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

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by Gideon Marcus

Reversed metaphors

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

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


by Kelly Freas

The King's Legions, by Christopher Anvil

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


by Kelly Freas

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

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

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

Two stars.

The Pearly Gates of Hell, by Jack Wodhams


by Rudolph Palais

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

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

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

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

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

No thanks.  One star.

Fiesta Brava, by Mack Reynolds


by Kelly Freas

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

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

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

I guess Reynolds' travels never took him to Haiti.

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

Important Difference, by E. G. Von Wald


by Kelly Freas

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

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

Another low three star.

Lost Calling, by Verge Foray


by Leo Summers

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

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

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

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

Bad data

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

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

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

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

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




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 20, 1967] Hugo Gernsback, 1884-1967

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by John Boston

The legendary Hugo Gernsback died August 19 at the age of 83.  He started the first science fiction magazine—the first seven of them, in fact.  He is memorialized every year in the Hugo Awards for the best SF of the year.  Sam Moskowitz once proclaimed, “Everyone today knows that the real ‘Father of Science Fiction’ is Hugo Gernsback and no one can ever take the title away from him.” (Moskowitz, A Profile of Hugo Gernsback, Amazing Stories, Sept. 1960, p. 38.)


by Frank R. Paul

But it’s an odd sort of paternity, since plenty of what we think of as science fiction—works by Verne, Wells, Poe, A. Conan Doyle, M.P. Shiel, and Mary Shelley, among others—preceded Gernsback’s involvement, and in some cases his birth.  Opinions are also mixed concerning the merit of much of Gernsback’s SF-related activity.  But before passing any judgments, let’s step back and look at Gernsback’s life and career, relying heavily on Moskowitz’s above-quoted article and its revised version in his book Explorers of the Infinite.  (A more thorough exploration of Gernsback’s rather full life might make a substantial book for some future scholar.)

Gernsback was born in 1884 in Luxembourg, came to the United States in 1904, quickly got into the electrical business manufacturing automobile batteries, and later started an electrical import business.  He devised a low-cost home radio set which was sold widely, followed by the first working walkie-talkie.  In 1908 he started Modern Electrics, the first magazine of its kind.  He started the Wireless Association of America in 1912, which soon had thousands of members.  He founded a new magazine, Electrical Experimenter (later Science and Invention) in 1912, and another one, Radio News, in 1919.  In 1925 he started a radio station, WRNY, which also made some of the earliest rudimentary television broadcasts.  Someone with Gernsback’s cornball sense of humor might say that during those two decades, he was quite a live wire, and encountered little resistance.


Gernsback demonstrating his "Isolator," designed to aid concentration by preventing distraction from external stimuli (Science and Invention, July 1925)

Gernsback also dallied with science fiction early on.  (Gernsback’s own more detailed account of these activities is in his Guest Editorial: Science Fiction That Endures in the April 1961 Amazing.) He wrote the novel with the punning title Ralph 124C41+ (say it out loud), subtitled A Romance of the Year 2660, and serialized it as he wrote it in his own Modern Electrics in 1911.  I haven’t dared try to read it, but it is reputed to be short on literary elements but quite long on predicted future inventions and discoveries, including both radar and space-sickness.  He published others’ fiction as well as his own in Modern Electrics and in Electrical Experimenter and its successor Science and Invention.  His series Baron Munchausen’s New Scientific Adventures began in Electrical Experimenter in 1915. 

In fact, before Gernsback published the first SF magazine, he published the first SF magazine issue: the August 1923 Science and Invention was blurbed “SCIENTIFIC FICTION NUMBER” and left us such treasures as G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s The Man from the Atom.  And in 1924, he made his first abortive attempt to start an SF magazine, Scientifiction, but his large mailing soliciting subscriptions fell flat.

Which brings us to 1926 and the birth of Amazing, this time with no advance solicitation.  The first issue, dated April 1926, included nothing but reprints and foregrounded Wells, Verne, and Poe, but original fiction began to appear quickly enough, with G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s The Man from the Atom (Sequel) in the May issue and his The Coming of the Ice in June.  By late 1928, almost all of the magazine’s contents were original material.


by Frank R. Paul

Gernsback quickly expanded his empire with the very large Amazing Stories Annual in 1927, featuring a specially commissioned Mars novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and followed it with Amazing Stories Quarterly, which also ran a complete novel in each issue.

But a rude awakening was in store.  Gernsback liked to make money, but he was less fond of paying it out, to his authors or anyone else.  H.P. Lovecraft dubbed him “Hugo the Rat” for paying so little for The Colour out of Space, one of his best stories, and H.G. Wells refused further reprint permissions because of Gernsback’s low rates.  Though Gernsback was very far from broke, in 1929 his company was forced into bankruptcy by creditors who had not been paid on time, as permitted by the law at the time.  Its assets were sold, with Amazing going to Teck Publications.  Ultimately the creditors were paid $1.08 on the dollar (“bankruptcy de luxe,” as Moskowitz quotes the New York Times). 

Undaunted, Gernsback announced by mass mailing that he would publish Everyday Mechanics in place of (and to compete with!) Science and Invention, Radio-Craft in place of Radio News, and Science Wonder Stories in place of Amazing.  This time, his solicitation worked.  He received thousands of subscriptions and was quickly back in business.  The last Amazing listing Gernsback as editor was April 1929; the first issue of Science Wonder Stories was dated June 1929.  He promptly added Science Wonder Quarterly, Air Wonder Stories, and Scientific Detective Monthly to his stable, though only the quarterly lasted more than a few issues.


by Frank R. Paul

Gernsback’s new ventures were successful.  For much of the early ‘30s, Wonder Stories (“Science” was dropped in 1930) was reckoned the best of the SF magazines.  By 1936, however, Depression economics had defeated Gernsback, and he sold Wonder Stories to Standard Magazines, where it became Thrilling Wonder Stories, a relatively juvenile pulp magazine.  For the first time in a decade, Gernsback was out of the SF business. 


Unattributed

Gernsback's attempts to get back into the game were abortive.  He started Superworld Comics, an SF comic book, in 1939, but it quickly failed.  In 1953, he started Science Fiction Plus, in the same large size as the early Amazing, bringing back artist Frank R. Paul and some of the writers from his earlier magazines as well as more current fare, but this largely reactionary venture lasted only seven issues.  Though he continued to publish other magazines, notably Sexology and Radio Electronics, his contact with the SF world diminished mostly to the occasional convention visit. 


by Frank R. Paul

Most SF readers from the mid-‘50s on probably know of Gernsback, if at all, from his postage stamp-size photo and endorsement that appeared irregularly on the back cover of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, along with those of such other 1950s celebrities as Clifton Fadiman and Spring Byington.  His message, as seen on the October 1960 F&SF: “Plus ça change, plus c’est le meme chose—is a French truism, lamentably accurate of much of our latter day science fiction.  Not so in the cyclotronic Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction which injects sophisticated isotopes, pregnant with imagination, into many of its best narratives.” Sure.


F&SF, April 1959

So—the “father of science fiction”?  Not by decades.  But Gernsback certainly was the father of the commercial marketing category of science fiction, or, some would say, SF’s ghettoization.  Before Gernsback, SF or proto-SF could be found regularly if not frequently in general fiction magazines of the US and the UK and in the lists of book publishers.  But Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, begun in 1926, was the first periodical devoted entirely to “scientifiction”—the first of what eventually became a legion.

It’s easy to overstate Gernsback’s significance here.  It is nearly certain that there would have been science fiction magazines quickly enough had Gernsback never existed.  From the late 1920s on, pulp fiction magazines multiplied rapidly, specializing to satisfy every conceivable interest—westerns, romances, western romances, “spicy” (mildly suggestive) stories, crime fiction hard-boiled and soft, sports stories, horror and “weird menace” stories, aviation and air war stories.  The quest for market niches led to even narrower specialization: Zeppelin Stories (1929, four issues); Prison Stories (1930-31, six issues); The Wizard: Adventures in Moneymaking (1940-41, seven issues, three under a new title); Civil War Stories (1940, one issue). 

And new ventures required little encouragement.  Astounding Stories of Super-Science, the first SF magazine started by anyone not named Gernsback, was apparently launched after William Clayton, publisher of 13 magazines, realized that he could add more titles cheaply because pulp covers (a major part of the publishing cost) were printed in sheets of 16, and he had blank spaces available.  The self-interested machinations of Clayton editor Harry Bates then tipped the scale towards Astounding and away from the competing proposal, Torchlights of History.  (Bates, “to begin” (sic), Editorial Number One in Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding (1964)).  In Gernsback’s absence, others besides Clayton would surely have found and filled the niche for scientific fiction magazines.

But it is also easy to understate Gernsback’s contributions.  One of them was his facilitation of SF fandom—initially, simply by printing letter-writers’ addresses in Amazing’s letter column, so they could communicate with each other, and later by creating the Science Fiction League with its organizational framework and local chapters.  SF editors have expressed mixed feelings about fandom’s activities and influence, but at the least it has been valuable to have a semi-organized claque to speak up about the worst tendencies in SF publishing, such as the “Shaver mystery” featured in the mid-‘40s Amazing and finally dropped under pressure. 

Gernsback’s other major contribution was his pretenses.  From the beginning, he proclaimed “scientifiction” to be a means of scientific education and speculation—as exemplified in his own Ralph 124C41+ and its exhausting parade of future inventions—and he continued to express that view in Wonder Stories, notwithstanding his dropping “Science” from the title.  I say “pretenses” because much of the fiction he published was not especially scientific or educational, such as the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt that appeared in his magazines as early as 1927.  That is no surprise, since regardless of his preferences he had to attract enough readers to keep his magazines going. 

But still, he would raise the flag now and then, such as in his editorial in the first Science Wonder Quarterly: “In publishing a number of science-fiction magazines, the editors feel that they have a great mission to perform; their mission being to get the great mass of readers, not only to think what the world in the future is likely to become, but also to become better versed in things scientific.” (Science Wonder Quarterly, Fall 1929, p.5) And sometimes he broadened his prescription.  Commenting on the Technocracy movement of the ‘30s, which proposed to reorganize society along more scientific lines, he wrote: “. . . [T]he great mission of science fiction is becoming more recognized, day by day.  This is the triumph of our readers over those who scorned science fiction.  If science fiction can make serious people sit up and take notice, and THINK about the future of humanity, it will have accomplished a tremendous good.” (Wonder Stories, March 1933, p. 741)

The idea that SF should be held to higher standards and purposes than the run of pulp fiction may have made a considerable difference.  One need look no further for a counter-example than the first new non-Gernsback competitor, Clayton’s Astounding Stories of Super-Science.  Alva Rogers says in his informal history A Requiem for Astounding that the Clayton magazine “was unabashedly an action-adventure magazine and made no pretense of trying to present science in a sugar-coated form as did, to some extent, the other two magazines.”


by Hans Wessolowski

You can bet that little of the social speculation and satire, somewhat featured in Gernsback’s magazines and considerably more prominent in the SF of the ‘40s and ‘50s and later, showed up there either.  Had Clayton’s magazine rather than Gernsback’s become the template for magazine SF, we would likely have had a much different and less interesting genre in the ensuing decades.

So—hail and farewell, Pops.

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




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 18, 1967] The Best and the Brightest? (September 1967 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

3 Comments


by Gideon Marcus

Inside baseball

In the latest issue of Science Fiction Times, author Norman Spinrad complains that with just four science fiction magazines left, under the helm of three editors, it is impossible for the 250 members of the newly formed Science Fiction Writers of America to make a living at short story writing.  Spinrad also says that the editors have their chosen pet authors (Spinrad calls them "whores"), and because they are gauranteed slots, other writers are left in the cold. This, Spinrad maintains, is why so many folks are turning to novels or TV to make ends meet.  He feels this is a shame since you can do things with short stories and novelettes you can't do with novel-length pieces.  Spinrad notes that we'll never get another Sturgeon, Bradbury, or Cordwainer Smith under the current situation (I note with some amusement that Cordwainer Smith was one of Pohl's so-called "pets", which I guess makes him a brilliant "whore", according to Spinrad's definition).

Spinrad ends his piece urging that writers demand that Amazing and Fantastic end their mainly-reprint policy (they don't pay for them, which has provoked an SFWA boycott) and that Pohl be fired from at least one of his magazines.  This, Spinrad asserts, will create more slots, which will encourage more writers, which will generate audience demand, which will promote the creation of more short length outlets, whether magazines or paperbacks.

A name Spinrad does not specifically mention as having a pet policy is Ed Ferman, editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Ferman is fairly new to the job, and F&SF has typically cast a wider net to gather its stories.  There are also more slots per issue, as F&SF tends toward shorter pieces.

I would thus conclude that, if any place in science fiction would still offer a quality selection of stories, it would be F&SF.  They can, after all, print the best of the best that the 250 SFWAers can offer.

Let's open up this month's F&SF and see if that be the case.

Off the slush pile


by Richard Corben

Out of Time, Out of Place, by George Collyn

The lead piece is by a fellow we normally see in mags on the other side of the pond (Spinrad did not mention the UK mags as potential markets, but to be fair, there's only one left).  Collyn's tale features a spaceman returned from a fifty year voyage to find the world completely changed.  He is but ten years aged thanks to relativity, and so he is a young, lonely man utterly divorced from society.

But one day, he finds the most extraordinary woman, and they marry and live in bliss.  Until he discovers what she does for a living, and how it relates to an advance in mass media technology called "altrigo"…

The problem with this story, aside from the disturbing ending, is that it's just been done by Kate Wilhem in her piece, Baby, you were great!, which just appeared in Orbit 2.  Thus, I knew what was coming miles early.  Very distracting.

Three stars.

The Cyclops Juju, by I. Shamus Frazer

The next two stories involve African magic clashing with Westerners.  I'm always leery of such tales.  They smack of parochialism and usually hinge on a pretty narrow idea of what goes on in the vast continent that straddles the equator.  Neither of these pieces disabused me of this view.

Juju takes place in an English boarding school.  One of the students has brought a wooden statue of a cyclops, apparently modeled on the prow of an old slaver ship and worshiped as a totem by an African tribe.  All of the students who sleep in the same room with it begin experiencing a sequential dream, that they are captive slaves on the ship who break free and land on an island with the slaver crew as captives.  Over time, the totem exerts greater and greater control over the students until it is uncertain what is dream and what is reality.

Of course, stories like this depend on willful ignorance on the part of the authority figures so things can get sufficiently out of hand.  In the end, this is a reasonably well told horror/fantasy that feels like it would have done well in a prior decade.  It feels out of touch here.

Three stars.

Night of the Leopard, by William Sambrot

Faring worse is this piece, involving missionaries sent to Sierra Leone on a peace-corps-esque endeavor.  Opposing them is a witch doctor with a draconian control over a starving village and the putative ability to turn into a leopard.  The linchpin to defeating him is Eunice Gantly, an American of African extraction (specifically Masai).  The witch doctor's attempts to seduce and subvert Eunice end up backlashing.  The result is pure Twilight Zone corn.

The problems with this story are several-fold.  For one, it was done before, and better, by Richard Matheson in 1960.  For this same magazine.  Moreover, I take umbrage at the idea that people have these racial memories that can be unlocked.  And even then, Eunice and the witch doctor are as related as me (Eastern European Jew) and my wife (Western European mutt).  That is to say, we might be the same color, but I doubt our genetics have been within a thousand miles of each other.  The idea that all Africans, or even all Sub-Saharan Africans, belong to a single society is laughable and a bit offensive.

Two stars.


by Gahan Wilson — I think his feature does not better this magazine

The Saw and the Carpenter, by J. T. McIntosh

SF veteran McIntosh offers up this serviceable murder mystery: the son of a space station commander is murdered by a robot.  Since robots must be programmed, the culprit must be human.  A robot expert is sent to investigate.

The story is reasonably executed, even if the characters all have exotic names like "Bob" and "John" and "Lucy" (one wonders if they were placeholders the author forgot to modify).  The ending is…interesting.  Apparently, Asimov's Three "Laws" don't always apply.

Anyway, three stars.

A Thousand Deaths, by Jack London

Because there are so many writers submitting pieces to F&SF, it follows that the editor would run…a 70 year old reprint.  This early London tale is about a seaman who is subject to a hideous series of experiments in resurrection.  Captive of a mad scientist, said sailor is murdered again and again, only to be brought back by a wonder process.  But is a life of dying really what you'd call living?

It's all very breathless and pre-pulp, and while fun to an extent, and valuable historically, I'm not sure I'd rather have it than a new story.

Three stars.

Donny Baby, by Susan Trott

A married couple, part of the avocado tree crowd, have a baby the same day their seed finally sprouts.  The sapling and the infant seem to have intertwined lives.

Had I read this as I was putting together Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1953-1957), I might have given it three stars.  Ten years after the fact, I'm afraid it merits just two.

The Great Borning, by Isaac Asimov

The science article by Dr. A is something of a highlight.  I had grown up with all of the names of the geological eras, periods, epochs, etc., but I'd never grasped their meaning.  This is an informative etymological piece.

Four stars.

A Secret from Hellas, by I. Yefremov

Finally, another reprint, though it is probably more accurate to call it an import.  A sculptor feels compelled to make a particular kind of statue, though he is hampered by an injury to his hand sustained in the war.  This piece bears some kinship with the African duo earlier in the piece, although the dreamscape and racial memories in this tale are of Greek origin rather than African.

It is the definition of forgettable but inoffensive.  Three stars.

Throw it back

One of Spinrad's points was not only that writers can't find enough short story slots to make a living, but that writers are so discouraged that they aren't even trying to write SF short stories anymore.  I suppose that could be the explanation why the once proud Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is reduced to publishing tired clichés and reprints.

But it's a chicken and egg thing, right?  If there's no supply of good stories, demand wanes.  Once demand wanes, how do you build it back up?  Maybe Damon Knight has found the answer with his Orbit series.  It may well be time to think about new media for shorter pieces.  I think I'd rather have several paperbacks of excellent stuff than a dozen issues of mediocrity.  Sure, I'll miss the attendant quirks of each publication — the science articles, the lettercols, the editorial comments, etc., but I think I'd rather just have the good stories and save the auxilary stuff for fanzines and Scientific American.

What do you think?

Better stories from the heyday of science fiction magazines can be found in the two Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women volumes.  Highly recommended!




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 12, 1967] Planetary Adventures (August 1967 Galactoscope)

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by Gideon Marcus

Five against Arlane, by Tom Purdom

As you may know, I am a big fan of Tom Purdom.  He's a very nice fellow, and his first book, I Want the Stars, was a stand-out.  Thus, I was quite excited to see that the new Ace Double at the local bookstore featured my writer friend.

The first two chapters do not disappoint.  We are thrown into the action as Migel Lassamba (explicitly of African descent; no lily-white casts in Tom's books) holds up a rich man and his personal doctor.  His goal: to get an artificial heart for his companion and love, Anata.  Why doesn't he just get one for free from the government hospitals?  Because Migel, Anata, and three others are rebels whose goal is to topple Jammett, dictator of the planet Arlane.  Five against Arlane, you see?

Thus ensues a ever-widening conflict between the outnumbered but canny rebel troops and Jammett, who resorts to increasingly draconian methods to retain control.  His biggest ace in the hole is his ability to slap mind-control devices onto citizens.  These "controllees" are fully conscious, but their bodies belong to the dictator, obeying his every whim.  As Migel's cadre begins to turn the tide against Arlane's leader, the abuse of the controllees gets pretty grim.

There's a lot to like about this book.  Arlane is a nicely drawn world, mostly tidally locked so its days last forever and only the pole is inhabitable.  The descriptions of technology and society are largely timeless.  Purdom is excellent at conveying material that will not be dated in a decade.  As in Tom's other stories, we have intimations of free love and even polygamy/andry, and there is no real distinction between sex or race.

Sadly, where the book falls down is the execution.  After those exciting first chapters, the chess-like contest between the rebels and Jammett feels perfunctorily written, as if Tom had to get from A to C, and he wasn't particularly interested in writing B.  It almost reads like a chronicle of a homebrew wargame (ah, what a wargame this novel would make!) If I'd been the editor, I'd have sent it back and asked for…more.  More emotion.  More characterization.  More reason to feel invested.  And a more fleshed out ending (but perhaps that was a fault of the editing, not the writing).

I noted that the weakest parts of I Want the Stars and Tom's latest short story, Reduction in Arms, were the curiously detached combat scenes.  Where Tom excels is the thinky bits.  I suggest he either work harder on the fighting pits, or stick to thinky bit stories (like his excellent Courting Time).

Three stars.

Lord of the Green Planet, by Emil Petaja

Emil Petaja is a new writer perhaps best known for his science fiction sagas based on the Karevala, the Finnish body of mythological work.  Now, Petaja plumbs Irish myth for this truly strange, but also rather conventional science fantasy.

Diarmid Patrick O'Dowd (a fine Jewish name) is a scout captain for X-Plor, Magellanic Division.  His flights of exploration frequently take him close to a mysterious, green-shrouded object.  Finally unable to resist, he becomes the first of his corps to pierce the viridian veil.  His ship crashes and disintegrates, leaving him stranded in a Celtic nightmare.  On one side, the towers of the islands, inhabited by Irish lords whose beautiful works are created on the backs and tears of countless generations of peasants.  On the other, the fetid swamps of the Snae–froglike magicians who seem to predate the human colonists.  And up in the tower of T'yeer-Na-N-Oge resides the Deel, Himself, who rules over the world with a song whose lyrics none can deviate from, enforced by a panoply of beasts, flying, swimming, and creeping.

Of course, there is a personal element as well.  The beautiful but utterly rotten-hearted Lord Flann plans to unite the islands and lead a crusade against the Nords.  But first, he would marry his fair and kind cousin, Fianna.  Fianna, on the other hand, has other designs.  After rescuing Diarmid upon his arrival, she falls for the fellow, teaches him swordplay, and helps him fulfill his geassa to save the planet from the domination of the Deel.  Along the way, there is plenty of swashbuckling, mellifluously articulate sentences, weird foes, and a twist.

It's pure fantasy, more akin to Three Hearts and Three Lions than anything else.  But it's fun.  And it has warcat steeds (Purdom's book has watchcats–I guess oversized felines are in this year).

Three and a half stars — and I'll wager Cora and/or Kris would give it four.

Triads


by Victoria Silverwolf

Two new science fiction novels deal with the relationships among three characters. As we'll see, in one of these the trio is very intimately connected. First of all, however, let's take a look at the latest book from an author known for prolificity.

Thorns, by Robert Silverberg


Cover art by Robert Foster.

The novel begins and ends with the same words, spoken by two very different characters and having different implications.

Pain is instructive.

In this way, the author announces his theme from the very start. Thorns is all about suffering. Physical pain, to some extent, but, more importantly, emotional pain.

Duncan Chalk is a grotesquely obese, incredibly rich man who controls just about all forms of entertainment throughout the solar system. Secretly, he is also a kind of psychic vampire, feeding off the misery of others.

Minner Burris is a space explorer who, against his will, was surgically transformed by aliens. His two companions died during the procedure and he barely survived, monstrously changed outside and in. As a result, he is a loner, seen as a freak by other people.

Lona Kelvin is a teenage girl who had a large number of her ova removed and fertilized outside her body. The resulting babies were developed inside other women, or in artificial wombs. Although her physical appearance remains unchanged, the resulting publicity made her as much of an outsider as Minner.

Duncan's plan is to bring these two miserable people together, both as a form of voyeuristic entertainment for an audience of millions and to feed on their suffering. To win their cooperation, he promises to give Minner a new body and to allow Lona to raise two of the infants produced from her eggs as her own children.

At first, the pair simply share their mutual pain, sympathizing with each other. As Duncan sends them on a luxurious vacation to all the pleasure spots in the solar system, they become lovers. As he predicted, however, their differences soon lead to ferocious arguments. Minner sees Lona as an ignorant child, and Lona comes to hate Minner's bitterness and anger. Can they escape from Duncan's scheme, and find some kind of peace?

Reading this book is an intense, almost overpowering experience. It is the most uncompromising work of science fiction dealing with human suffering since Harlan Ellison's story Paingod. Although set in a semi-utopian future, the settings — a cactus garden, Antarctica, the Moon, Saturn's satellite Titan — are almost all stark and bleak. There are other characters I have not mentioned — an idiot savant, abused by his family; the widow of one of Minner's fellow astronauts, obsessed with him in a masochistic way — who offer more examples of the varieties of pain.

In addition to offering a vividly described, detailed future, Silverberg writes in a highly polished style, full of metaphors and literary allusions. I believe this is his finest work since the outstanding story To See the Invisible Man. With this novel, and his highly praised novella Hawksbill Station, I think we're seeing a new Silverberg, adding greater sophistication and more serious themes to his inarguable ability to produce an unending stream of fiction.

Five stars.

The Werewolf Principle, by Clifford D. Simak


Cover art by Richard Powers.

Andrew Blake is a man with a problem. First of all, that's not even his real name. He picked it at random.

You see, Andrew (as we'll call him in this review) was discovered in deep space, after having been in suspended animation for a couple of centuries. He has no memory of his past, although he is familiar with Earth the way it was two hundred years ago.

In order to discuss this novel at all, I need to talk about something that the author reveals about one-third of the way into the book. I don't think that gives too much away, but if you'd rather dive into it without knowing anything about the plot you should stop reading here.

Still with me? Good.

Andrew is actually an android, an artificially grown human being with a mind taken from another person. He was designed to copy the mental and physical forms of aliens he encountered while exploring other star systems. The idea is that he would record this information, then revert to his previous condition. It didn't quite work out that way.

Andrew shares his mind with two other beings. One is a wolf-like alien, although it has arms that allow it to carry things and manipulate objects. The other is a sort of biological computer, a relentlessly logical entity that often takes the form of a pyramid.

Andrew's body changes shape, depending on which mind has control. After a brief period of confusion, during which these alterations happen at random, Andrew recovers some of his memory. The three minds and bodies work together, evading the folks who think he's some kind of monster.

There's a lot more to this book than the basic plot. Simak throws in a lot of futuristic details. Notable among these are talking, flying houses, and aliens who are essentially the same as the brownies of folklore.

Not all of these concepts mesh together smoothly, although they provide proof of a great deal of imagination. The overly solicitous robot house offers some comic relief, and the so-called brownies may seem too whimsical for some readers. Otherwise, the novel is quite serious, even offering a mystical vision of the unity of all life in the universe.

My major complaint is a plot twist late in the book, revealing the true nature of a character I haven't even mentioned. It comes out of nowhere, depends on a wild coincidence, and creates an artificial happy ending.

Despite these serious reservations, I actually liked the novel quite a bit. It's not a classic, but it's well worth reading.

Three and one-half stars.




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[August 10, 1967] Badger Books: A Farewell and an Introduction

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by Fiona Moore

The great British pulp imprint Badger Books ceased trading earlier this year. This is a mixed blessing, but nevertheless a significant event. So it seems like a good time to provide a brief introduction for people who, like me, have a taste for schlocky and pulpy science fiction. Stuff which can make you wince and laugh by turns, but which has its heart, broadly speaking, in the right place.

This is what we're losing.

Badger Books was an imprint of publisher John Spencer and Co., which started off publishing pulp magazines in a variety of genres including SF, but branched out in the 1950s to publishing pulp novels. Badger Books are cheap as chips; they have no copyright pages, and they do have two to three pages of advertisements salted through the text, usually for items like good luck charms, muscle building systems or creams that magically affect your body in some way (cheekily, bust enhancement and reduction creams are usually advertised on the same page).

Badger’s output covers all popular genres, but the two lines most of interest to Galactic Journey readers are the science fiction and paranormal ranges, which are almost entirely written by a single person under a variety of pseudonyms. That person is Lionel Fanthorpe, schoolteacher, mystic and general eccentric, also known as Pel Torro, Leo Brett, Bron Fane, Robert Lionel Fanhope, Mel Jay, Marston Johns, Victor La Salle, Oben Lerteth, Robert Lionel, John E. Muller, Elton T. Neef(e), Phil Nobel, Peter O'Flinn, Peter O'Flynn, John Raymond, Lionel Roberts, Rene Rolant, Deutero Spartacus, Trebor Thorpe, and Karl Ziegfreid.

Even Mr Fanthorpe isn't always sure who he is

Fanthorpe has written as many as 250 books, by some estimates, for Badger between the early 1950s and 1967 (though some credible sources indicate his wife deserves some of the credit). Exact numbers are hard to tell, because other writers share the same pseudonyms, but he is estimated to have written one 158-page book every twelve days at the height of his productivity. Another reported detail is that the books are generated by the publisher sending Fanthorpe a copy of some cover art and asking him to write a story based on the images: sometimes, also, these images come from previously-published Ace or Avon books.

Knowledgeable readers may be able to identify the source.

Sometimes these inspirations make more sense than others: Exit Humanity, for instance, is based on the cover of John Brunner’s The World Swappers, which depicts a crowd of humans going into a giant spaceship; Fanthorpe’s story involves a race of aliens deceiving humanity into thinking that the sun is about to go nova, and enticing them into what the humans think is a rescue ship that will take them to a new home. Sometimes the connection is more opaque: Space Trap, a story where two alien spaceships crash-land in medieval China, for instance, has a cover featuring a caveman and a man in an iron lung.

Yes, this really says "medieval China" to me too.

Reportedly Fanthorpe dictates his stories onto tape and sends them out to be typed, though this only partly explains the lackadaisical nature of his work. Character names change from page to page; subplots are abandoned or introduced depending on the needs of the word count; books change focus and plot without warning. World of Tomorrow, for instance, which opens with a pitched space battle, goes on to have the Earth stricken with plague courtesy of a misfired missile from the space battle, and then shifts to the story of an Earth astronaut who comes aboard one of the space ships and has to find his way back. The titles are often only tangentially related to the story inside the covers.

Don't expect it to make sense.

Ethnic stereotypes regrettably abound. For instance, there are the long, painful sections of Exit Humanity which feature a stereotypical Englishman, Irishman, Welshman and Scotsman musing in embarrassing dialect about the abandonment of the Earth by humanity. Arguably even worse is the homicidally excitable Chinese scientist in World of Tomorrow (named, I am very sorry to report, Hi Mi Fun), and the frequent use of the word “yellow” to describe East Asian characters in Space Trap. Asteroid Man features a Barsoom-like society divided into Black, Red, Green and White members, but the essentialism by which these are described is a little too reminiscent of the less enlightened literature of our time.

And yes, Fang Guy really *is* in the story.

However, Fanthorpe is not your typical dreadful pulp writer. He is also literate, imaginative, possessed of a distinct sense of morality, and seemingly determined to have fun. There’s a lot to like in Space Trap, for instance: two sets of combatants from a galactic war between a species that look more or less like humans and a tiny insect species are stranded in medieval China. The first one deceives a local peasant boy, one Aladdin, into trying to retrieve the spaceship of the second, which looks surprisingly like an oil lamp, and whose denizens are able to win Aladdin over by seemingly doing miracles. Familiar hijinks ensue.

In Micro Infinity, a story about the human race encountering an intelligent species of bacteria with a gestalt mind, all the characters are based on ones from The Canterbury Tales, and the reader can have great fun spotting the references. At an exciting point in The In-World, Fanthorpe ratchets up the tension with, erm, a historical geography of the city of Amsterdam. For the fans, he’ll throw in mentions of the likes of Quatermass and the Pit when you least expect it. Fanthorpe will also work ideas from paranormal research even into his SF novels, for instance in Exit Humanity, where a plot point revolves around the Fortean idea that humans are naturally telekinetic.

The stories can also have a strong, and generally positive, moral streak. Despite the lurid Orientalism of the cover of The Face of Fear, for instance, the story itself features an ecumenical and diverse group of paranormal researchers—- including a Church of England vicar, an Irish Catholic priest, a Buddhist, an implied-to-be-Jewish woman secretary and a Black boxer—- coming together to defeat a villain who is not, in fact, Oriental, but faking his identity. The good aliens in The Space Trap briefly provide a lecture on the evils of slavery and advise Aladdin to purchase slaves in order to free them. In World of Tomorrow, only smokers are affected by the alien plague, and humanity can be saved by people giving up that filthy habit.

He's a fake fakir.

On the one hand, a lot of these stories would be improved with an editor, or two, or three. On the other hand, part of what makes Fanthorpe’s work so irresistible is its spontaneity, its sense of someone throwing down words in a way that gives them pleasure, sharing jokes with readers in the know, not caring if it makes sense in the final analysis. For all their awfulness, Badger Books will definitely be missed.

Postscript: The copy of World of Tomorrow which I purchased from Porcupine Books arrived with an advertisement for family planning services tucked into the pages. Perhaps Fanthorpe readers really do have more fun?

Yes, this really happened.



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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Rock Around the Clock

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


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

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

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


Cover art by Frank R. Paul.

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


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

The Longest Voyage, by Richard C. Meredith


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

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

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


He also grows a beard.

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

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

Three stars.

Same Autumn in a Different Park, by Peter Tate


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three stars.

The Green Splotches, by T. S. Stribling

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


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

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


Cover art by Frank R. Paul, of course.

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


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

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

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

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

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

Three stars.

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

The May 1930 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this Kelleryarn.


Cover art by Leo Morey.

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


Illustration by Leo Morey also.

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

Three stars.

Beware the Fury, by Theodore Sturgeon

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


Cover art by Augusto Marin.

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


Illustration by Louis Priscilla.

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

Four stars.

No Charge for Alterations, by H. L. Gold

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


Cover art by Barye Phillips.

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


Interior illustrations by Henry Sharp.

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


The After, in contrast to the above Before.

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

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

Two stars.

Signal to Noise Ratio

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


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

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




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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

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by Gideon Marcus

Phase shift

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

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

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

Interference pattern


by Chesley Bonestell

Starfog, by Poul Anderson

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

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


by John Schoenherr

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

Four stars.

Babel II, by Christopher Anvil


by Rudolph Palais

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

Two stars.

The Misers, by William T. Powers

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

Five stars.  An invaluable resource.

The Featherbedders, by Frank Herbert


by Leo Summers

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

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

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

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

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

Four stars.

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


by Kelly Freas

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

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

Three stars.

Depression or Bust, by Mack Reynolds


by Leo Summers

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

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

One star.

Plugging in the oscilloscope

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

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

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

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



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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 20, 1967] An Analog of Analog (August 1967 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Imitation is…

I think it's safe to say that, for almost twenty years there have been three Big Science Fiction Magazines.  Each aims at a specific branch of the scientification fandom.  For instance, John Campbell's Analog (formerly Astounding) is at once the hardest of the Big Mags, focusing on near-future gizmo tech or sweeping galactic epics with a scientific core, and also one of the softest, given John's weakness for psi stories.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction covers the literary end of the STF spectrum, and it also veers into the outright fantastical (q.v. the masthead).  Galaxy navigates a sort of middle path between the two.

But the most recent issue of FS&F had me wondering exactly which magazine I was reading again, for this month, Ed Ferman's publication feels a lot like Campbell's.  Perhaps writers have finally answered FS&F's plea for harder works, or maybe Ferman finally had a sufficient number of such pieces to fill (most of) an issue.  Either way, it's an interesting departure, especially with the increased art throughout.  Does it work?  Let's find out!


by Ronald Walotsky

Nuts, Bolts, and Dragons

Reduction in Arms, by Tom Purdom

My good friend Tom Purdom offers up this fascinating piece set in the early '80s.  The superpowers have bound themselves by the Treaty of Peking to curtail the development and implementation of terrible weapons.  But there is always the suspicion that one side or another is working on some version of a "ninety-five plus virus"–one that will wipe out most of a non-incoluated population.

Sure enough, American agents are tipped off when a Soviet biologist, supposed to be a patient in a specialized "role-play" treatment center, is found cavorting with ladies at a bar 30 miles away.  A raid is authorized.  Between hostile Soviets and rogue team members, the investigation quickly becomes fraught with peril.

Tom himself has this to say about the tale:

After I got out of the army in 1961 I became very interested in arms control and disarmament.  I did a lot of reading on the subject and ended up writing two articles for the Kiwanis magazine (a good middle market for a new writer).  An opportunity to write an article for Playboy didn't work out but I got to interview some of the people I'd been reading.

Fred Pohl suggested I write a story on the subject for Galaxy.  I didn't think I could handle the technical stuff needed for a story about detecting nuclear weapons so I decided to write about biological weapons which seemed like they might be the next big threat.  Microbiology labs, in addition, can be hidden in all sorts of small spaces.  I decided to focus on a treaty banning secret research because I had come to the conclusion we tended to run the arms race against ourselves.  Our people thought up a possibility and we had to work on it because the Russians might be working on it.  If we could determine they weren't, both sides could avoid another cycle in the arms race.

I picked a mental health facility as the hiding place because it raised interesting human and moral issues.  The story revolves around ethical and political issues instead of a duel between inspection technologies and evasion technologies.  The programmed environment therapy seemed like a natural extension of Pavlovian conditioning.

Fred Pohl rejected the story.  My agent, Scott Meredith, tried it on Redbook and Esquire with near misses at both places.  The fiction editor at Esquire said he wanted to buy it but he was overruled by higher ups.

The story was a novelette, about ten thousand words.  Playboy said they'd buy it if I could cut it in half.  I did but they rejected it.  Ed Ferman at F&SF liked the short version but felt it needed to be longer.  So I expanded it to its original length.  He bought it and now it's the August cover story.  One of the peak moments in my writing career, so far.

The story grew out of intense, solid research and some deep thinking on the whole problem of arms control.  When I finished it, I felt I had summarized and dramatized the key issues and dilemmas.  Perhaps the sweeping treaty in the story isn't very plausible.  We live in a time when the advance of technology makes serious arms control seem a necessity–so necessary even the politicians will have to see it.  Science fiction explores What might happen if?  The If may seem unlikely, but is still worth exploring.

I originally called the story "1980".  Ed Ferman asked for a change and I thought Reduction in Arms had a nice military clatter.  I also suggested War and Peace and A Farewell to Arms but he preferred Reduction in Arms.

There's no question that Tom has gotten a feather in his cap for the placement of this tale.  I will say that, although I found the concept interesting, it suffers for being an action piece told in third-person by a largely uninvolved party.  Visceral immediacy would have given the story more punch.

Still, it was interesting to see a Reynolds-esque thriller outside of Analog— and without the nardy slang Reynolds employs.

Three stars.


by Gahan Wilson

The Conflict, by Ilya Varshavsky

Here is an import from the Soviet Union, about the large and small scale strife between humans and their increasingly sapient "servants".

I think it loses something in translation.  Two stars.

The Baron's Dog, by L. J. T. Biese

When an unemployed governess in Italy is offered 25,000 lira a month to walk a Transylvanian wolfhound, what's a girl to think?  Especially when the employer is tall, dark, handsome…and strictly enjoins against photography of his pet?

I found this tale delightful, such a nice contrast from all the creeping horror that such a setup normally would have entailed.  It's not quite Analogian, but it is good.  And if L.J.T. Biese isn't a woman, I'll eat my hat.

Four stars.

Soft Come the Dragons, by Dean R. Koontz

Koontz is a brand new author, and he offers up the tale of a far-off world, the miners who live in fear upon it, and the gossamer dragons that turn beholders to stone.  It's all rather metaphorical and lyrical and not quite sensical, rather as if Koontz spent the night reading Zelazny's works and then tried his hand at it.

I'd say it works more than it doesn't, but Koontz' rawness definitely shows through.  Three stars.

Earthwoman, by Reginald Bretnor

Will Adamson, born on a distant world, is human in all qualities save one: he and his race are possessed of telepathy, knit into a consciousness collective.  He is sent to Earth to discern how it is that we can love without the possibility of true connection.  And if we truly be human, is there an innate telepathic skill just waiting to be awakened?

Bretnor usually write silly stories or bad puns, so this more serious piece is a welcome change.  I found it a touch too affected, but otherwise enjoyable.  And definitely something that could have appeared in Analog.

Three stars.


by Ed Emshwiller

Mosquito, by Theodore L. Thomas

F&SF's story seeder suggests mosquitos might be laden with vitamins and inoculants such that their bite becomes a beneficial distribution method.  As usual, he misses some important aspects of his invention.  To wit, mosquito bites are not controllable in distribution or quantity.  And even if they provide needed drugs and nutrients, they still aren't pleasant to receive.

Two stars.

Bugs, by Charles L. Harness

Speaking of bugs, Charles L. Harness (who used to team up with Thomas under the pen name Leonard Lockhard) has authored this story of living bugs employed as espionage bugs.

There's a lot of "as you know" explanations, and the smugness with which the Americans subvert their KGB counterparts is pure Analog.

Mildly interesting, but just a bit too glib as well as prolix.  Two stars.

The Bubble, by J. W. Schutz

The destruction of humanity's first and only space station has spooked the government, and now they've decided to pull the plug on space investment.  Deane Aircraft, the largest space contractor, is faced with a pivotal decision: retool back to making conventional vehicles, or become the first private space presence.  The linchpin to the success of the operation isn't Theodor Deane, President of the company, nor the thousands of engineers he employs.  It's certainly not Theodor's greedy wife, Lillian, nor her paramour, Briggs, who is also Theodor's financial wiz.

It's Georgia Lighton, Theodor's secretary, who comes up with all the brilliant, cost-saving ideas.

The whole thing reads like a cross between Silverberg's Regan's Planet and a soap opera.  Again, very Analog.

Not great, but Analog.  Three stars.

Moondust, the Smell of Hay, and Dialectical Materialism, by Thomas M. Disch

The first man on the Moon, Mikhail Andreivich Karkhov, is dying.  Does he die for science?  For love?  For the state?  Or something else entirely?

A beautiful, moving piece, made all the more poignant by the recent twin tragedies that claimed the lives of three astronauts and one cosmonaut.

Five stars.


by Ed Emshwiller

Argent Blood, by Joe L. Hensley

A man is being treated in a ward for the incurably insane.  Between fits of "disturbance" he begins to mistrust the charitable nature of his doctor and nurse.  But he has a plan…

A good, atmospheric piece.  Three stars.

Kaleidoscope in the Sky, by Isaac Asimov

In a rare return to topics astronomical, Dr. A. submits a nonfiction piece on the moons of Mars, and how these extremely low flying rocks would appear to a surface observer.  If, indeed, they are even suitably placed to see them, for unlike our Moon, Phobos and Deimos orbit so close to their planet that Martian pole-dweller could not see them.

Good stuff.  Four stars.

Quick with His Hands, by Avram Davidson

Capping things off, this vignette of sibling rivalry on Mars, ably told and with a tearjerking finale.

Four stars.

Doing the math

So, did F&SF's experiment in apery succeed?  Well, there were high points and low points, but the overall impression I was left with was favorable.  We'll just have to compare it to the real thing in just over a week to see if Brand X beat the competition!

(Speaking of kooky stunts, it looks like F&SF is joining forces with several other organizations to hold a writing contest.  I wish them the best of luck, although the last time a magazine (Galaxy in that case) did this, in the early '50s, they got bupkis, and Fred Pohl had to write as a novice under a pseudonym to give them anything worth publishing.)



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