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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[December 31, 1969] …for spacious skies (January 1970 Analog)

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[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]

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

Pan Am makes the going great!

Thousands turned out in Everett, Washington, for the roll-out of the first jumbo jet ever built.  The "wide-bodied" Boeing 747 can carry a whopping 362 passengers; compare that to the 189 carried by the 707 that inaugurated the "Jet Age" a decade ago. Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) took delivery of the aircraft, which flew to Nassau, Bahamas, thenceforth to New York.

photo of an enormous jet, parked on the ground on a sunny day. There are also observing members of the public, of which there seem to be about 4. The top half of the jet is white with a horizontal turquoise stripe that extends all the way around. Above the stripe, there are the words PAN AM in large black letters. The bottom half of the plane is polished, reflective metal, and there is an open hatch on the left side, closest to the photographer. On the right side of the image, we can see the stairway allowing passengers to depart. On the left side of the image, there is a small barrier of folding wood signs between the photographer and the jet. The barrier surrounds a group of 3 trucks and 8 or so technicians, as well as the platform ladders that reach from the ground to the open hatch.

Originally scheduled for regular service on Dec. 15, things have been pushed back to January 18.  That's because 28 of the world's airlines have placed orders for 186 of these monsters, including American Airlines, which has ordered 16.  Since their shipment won't arrive until June, and as air travel is strictly regulated in this country by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), which ensures fairness of rates, routes, and other aspects of competition, the CAB ordered a delay until Pan Am leases American one of its fleet.

As impressive as the 747 is, it constitutes something of a bridge, aeronautically speaking.  Very soon, we will have supersonic transports plying the airlanes.  Eventually, we may even have hypersonic derivatives of the reusable "space shuttle", currently under development at NASA.  The jumbo jet will allow for economical, subsonic flights until passenger travel goes faster than sound, at which point, the 747 will make an excellent freighter. 

These are exciting times for the skies!  And with that, let's see if we've also got exciting times in space…

John Campbell makes the going… hard

A beautiful color photo of the Saturn V launch, a syringe piercing the grey heavens, and a beam of fire below. The great orange cloud created by takeoff forms sharp relief against the Florida trees.

What Supports Apollo?, by Ben Bova and J. Russell Seitz

Apropos of the aeronautically pioneering theme, the first piece in this issue is a science article on what supports the Apollo, literally: the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building, where the three stages of the Saturn V are put together; the crawler that the rocket rides to the launch pad, and the 30-story gantry at the launch pad.

photo of a gantry tower constructed of metal struts. In the background, there is the Saturn V, attached to a similar structure. They are both on large platforms that seem to float above the ground.
The mobile launcher (left) and the Saturn on the crawler (right)

It's a lot of numbers told in a wide-eyed fashion, but I enjoyed it.  The pictures are nice, too.

Four stars.

The Wild Blue Yonder, by Robert Chilson

Illustrated by Vincent DiFate. Two-panel illustration, light dusty black linework on white background. On the right panel there is a White man in a white suit with a dark tie, facing the viewer. He looks like a pimply Ronald Reagan, and is awkwardly holding a fantastical gun as though it is a cigarette holder. On the left panel, there is a White man in a black suit, sitting at a computer console, facing away from the viewer. In the background of these images is a dusty cloudform meant to represent an atomic blast, but looks more like a hurricane.
by Vincent diFate(right)

Engineer Ted Halsman had bought an old mine in rural Ohio and stuffed it with all kinds of advanced equipment.  When the mine explodes with the force of an atomic blast, Halsman goes on the run, asserting that his discovery will warp the future of humanity if it escapes his clutches.

Told in documentary fashion, this story goes on waaaaay too long.  Along the way, much speculation is made about the nature of the blast, and how it might require rewriting the laws of physics.  That the speculations are patently absurd does a bit to foreshadow the joke ending.  On the other hand, that ending is also rather implausible.

Beyond that, we're meant to sympathize with Halsman, who idly dreams of returning to civilization, decades after successfully escaping from it.  That he murdered half a dozen people in cold blood while fleeing is glossed over.

Two stars.

The Proper Gander, by A. Bertram Chandler

Illustration by Leo Summers, black linework on white background. A White man in Western wear has pulled his pickup truck to the side of a road in the Southwestern United States, and has ended up stuck in a gulch. He has stepped out to look at the Black woman in Star Trek robes who has stepped out of a flying saucer-type spaceship. There is a cactus between them.
by Leo Summers

A thoroughly humanoid flying-saucer pilot is reprimanded for being too showy about his jaunts to Earth.  His bosses decide the best defense against discovery is hiding in plain sight: a saucer is ordered to land in front of a commuter, and out strolls a vivacious, thoroughly humanoid "Officer's Comfort Second Class" who claims she is from Venus.  Since modern humans know Venus is uninhabitable, the saucer people figure that future sightings will be written off as gags or delusions.

This story is both stupid and sexist, both in spades.  One star.

Curfew, by Bruce Daniels

A young Martian by the name of Matheson comes to Earth for the reading of his uncle's will.  Said uncle was an inventor and a corporate spy, and his legacy includes some rather valuable patents that could be explosive in the wrong hands.  Others are already after the secret, and in addition to dodging them, Matheson must meet with a shady unknown at night, outside the safety of his hotel.

Therein lines the inspiration for the story's title: as a solution to the crime problem, there is a night-long curfew enforced by mechanical beasts and aircraft.  Can Matheson brave the rigors of his homeworld long enough to claim his prize?

This piece is somewhat juvenile in tone, but not bad.  Three stars.

The Pyrophilic Saurian, by Howard L. Myers

Illustration by Leo Summers. Black lines on white background depict an enormous sauropod, either formed out of vegetation or with vegetation growing all over its body. In the background, there is a second sauropod, rubbing against a rocket ship. A palm frond the size of the rocket ship has fallen against its side. In the foreground, there is the legend
by Leo Summers

This story appears to take place in the same universe as "His Master's Vice", because that's the other place we've seen Prox(y)Ad(miral)s.  In this tale, we've got a prison escapee named Olivine who has made a break with four other convicts.  He heads out to a planet that he knows (as a former ProxAd) has been restricted and bears a resource of great value.  Of course, the suspicious ease of Olivine's escape suggests that the authorities have a reason for letting him and his band scout out this world for them…

It's cute, in a Chris Anvil sort of way, though the space patrol must have been close to prescient to anticipate all of the twists and turns the story takes.  Three stars, barely.

In Our Hands, the Stars (Part 2 of 3), by Harry Harrison

Illustration by Kelly Freas. Two-panel drawing. Left panel is a paunchy person in a too-tight black wetsuit-spacesuit, firing a ray gun at unseen pursuers. Right panel is another person wearing a wetsuit-spacesuit, carrying something over their shoulder that could be a grey sack, a person, or a large dead animal. The right panel wetsuit-spacesuit person appears to have a very large set of buttocks. The figures are in pools of light, next to something that looks like a jet. In the background there is a city at night, but it is drawn so dark and smudgy that it is impossible to make out much detail
by Kelly Freas

And now, Part 2 of the serial started last month, in which an Israeli scientists flees to Denmark to develop anti-gravity.

In this installment, Denmark builds a proper anti-grav spaceship, adapted from a giant hovercraft.  We learn that its pilot likes to sleep around, and his wife is being leaned on by the CIA to steal secrets from the project.  In all of this issue's 50 pages, the only scene that really matters is when the discoverer of the effect, Leif Holm, newly minted Minister for Space, gives a speech from the Moon.  The rest is superfluous building scenes or bits with the pilot's wife, who exists solely to be weak, vulnerable, and jealous, so she can be traitorous.

"Did you read about our Mars visit?" is a line that is actually in the book, and I thought at that point, "No!  But I'd have liked to!"

Also, can a diesel tractor really work on the Moon even with oxygen cylinders?  And are the Danestronauts doing anything to sterilize their equipment, or are they just blithely contaminating the Moon?

I'm really not enjoying this one very much.  Harrison is sleepwalking.  Two stars.

The Reference Library: To Buy a Book (Analog, January 1970), by P. Schuyler Miller

Miller prefaces his book column with a fascinating piece on how books are distributed.  In short, they aren't…not for very long, anyway.  The titles sit on shelves for a vanishingly brief time, and unless the booksellers know they can sell a bunch, chances are they won't bother ordering any.  The profit margin's just not there.  This is a phenomenon I know very well as an author, and I don't imagine the paradigm will change for the next half century or so (until we all switch over to digital books, computer-delivered, as Mack Reynolds predicts).

There's also a nice plug for Bjo Trimble's Star Trek Concordance, a comprehensive encyclopedia of all topics from the show.  Then Miller gushes over a trio of reprint Judith Merril novellas, Daughters of Earth, the recently novelized Leiber serial, A Specter is Haunting Texas, and the very recently novelized Silverberg serial, Up the Line.  His praise is slightly muted for Alexander Key's juvenile, The Golden Enemy.

Having reservations

photo of a young brunette woman, sitting at a computer and wearing a headset. She is wearing a short-sleeved ribbed sweater, and is smiling over her shoulder at the camera.
Thérèse Burke checks reservations for the Irish airline, Air Lingus.

Well.

It is appropriate that, on the eve of the dawn of a new era of air travel, Analog is continuing a serial about a new era of space travel.  But despite that subject matter, this issue is straight out of Dullsville, continuing a flight into mediocrity that has been going on for many years now.

With a score of 2.5, this month's issue is only beaten to the bottom by the perennial stinker, Amazing (2.4).  It is roughly tied with New Worlds (2.5), and exceed by IF (2.7), Vision of Tomorrow (3.2), and Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.5).

Aside from that superlative last magazine, it's been something of a drab month: you could take all the 4-5 star stuff and you'd have less than two full magazine's worth.  And women wrote just 4% of the pieces.

Is this any way to run a genre?

[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[November 30, 1969] Capstone to a decade (December 1969 Analog)

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

Atrocities in Vietnam

The news has been brewing for a while, and now it's on the front page: 1st Lieutenant William J. Calley Jr., a 26-year-old platoon leader stationed in Vietnam, has been "life or death" court martialed for the murder of 109 South Vietnamese civilians "of various ages and sexes."

head shot of a smiling Lieutenant Calley, in uniform

This so-called "My Lai incident" took place northeast of Quang Ngai city on March 16, 1968 in a village called Song My—code-named "Pinkville".  Calley, enraged at the death of his chief sergeant, appears to have ordered his unit to eliminate everyone in the hamlet.  Several of his men went on a bloody spree; others did what they could to avoid involvement.  One even shot himself in the foot so he could be medivaced out.  A number came forward with the story, which was investigated and then dismissed by the 11th Infrantry Brigade.  Letters to Congress have prompted the reopening of the case and investigation into the original investigation.

If Calley is convicted, he faces no less than life imprisonment, and death by firing squad is on the table.

The court martial comes on the heels of the July 21, 1969 charge of Green Beret commander, Col. Robert Rheault, and six of his officers with murder and conspiracy for the secret execution of a Vietnamese spy suspect.  Those charges were dropped two months later when the CIA, whose operatives were key witnesses, refused to cooperate.  Whether the government's tacit support of brutality increases or decreases the odds of Calley facing the music remains to be seen. 

Mediocrities in Print


by Kelly Freas

December's final magazine is Analog.  Let's hope this makes for pleasanter reading that the newspapers.

Turning first to the book review column, and skipping the editorial (for those who want recapitulations of Campbell's latest blatherings, go buy the collected volumes that have recently come out), P. Schuyler Miller offers up some nice coverage of translated Perry Rhodan books from West Germany.  He goes on to cover a Silverberg collection of antediluvian tales called The Calibrated Alligator.  They were written back when Silverbob was writing 50,000 words a week and rapidly killing himself.  The quality of his work was moderate; he devoted most of his energies to the kinds of books once sold below the counter, but which are now on brazen display in New York newstands.

Miller liked Timescoop, though he thought it lesser Brunner (but not least Brunner).  Pretty much what Jason said when he wrote about it.  He also thought much of Isle of the Dead, by Roger Zelazny, as did Victoria Silverwolf early this year.  Finally, before dispatching a bunch of reprints, he gives middlin' praise to Mack Raynolds' Time Gladiator, which is really just the serial Sweet Dreams, Sweet Princes, a People's Capitalism story so old, it still has Joe Mauser in it!  I liked the story, but I find Reynolds' near-future predictions fascinating, even if his writing is often just workmanlike.

This, by the way, is why I like Schuyler so much—he agrees with us!  (And he doesn't play favorites; coming out first in Analog doesn't automatically increase the score).

In Our Hands, the Stars (Part 1 of 3), by Harry Harrison


by Kelly Freas

That dopey looking sub-ship on the cover and as the headline illustration is, in fact, a submarine turned into a spaceship.  How did it happen?

Arnie Klein is an Israeli researcher who develops…something.  So explosive is this secret (literally—the story begins with his invention blowing up his laboratory) that he flees to Denmark, seeks asylum, and enlists the aid of his friend, Nobel Prize winner Ove Rasmussen.  The two work together to build a woking model of the contraption, and then install it in a submarine.

Pretty early on, it's obvious what the thing will do: generate antigravity.

All of this takes us to about Page 40 of the serial, and none of those pages are necessary.  The information conveyed in those dry ~10,000 words of text could easily have been woven into an in media res beginning—and Harrison is fully up to the task.  That he padded things out so much, with uninteresting characters and inconsequential events, suggests he's in it for the per-word rates.

Anyway, after the Blæksprutten is commissioned, a trio of Soviet cosmonauts find themselves marooned on the Moon with a limited oxygen supply.  Klein and Co. take their ship up to Luna and rescue them.  Meanwhile, down on Earth, there's some Cold War spy machinations of limited interest.

Harrison can do much better.  This is like cut-rate Mack Reynolds, really.  Anyway, 3 stars, I guess, but if it's all like this, we're going to end up in the 2.5 zone.

Is Biological Aging Inevitable?, by Capt. John E. Wrobel, Jr.

This is an interesting piece on what we think causes mortality (lots of options), what's being done about it (not that much, surprisingly), the effects of immortality on society (only positive ones listed), and the mythological underpinnings of mortality acceptance (quite interesting).

I found the article quite graspable, and the use of chapter divisions greatly improved readability.  Let's hope this becomes a feature for future nonfiction pieces.

Four stars.

Mindwipe, by Tak Hallus


by Vincent DiFate

"Tak Hallus" returns for his sophomore tale (his first, also appeared in Analog.) In this one, space-hand Ernest Schwab is on trial for a heinous crime: blanking the mind of the Terran governor of the planet Paria.  It turns out Schwab is one of the very few telepaths known to humanity—even he didn't know he had this power.  Now it is up to Public Defender Benson to prove that he was manipulated into action by another telepath rather than acting of his own volition.  Doing so will take Benson on an adventure, from the courtrooms of Earth to the tunnels of the burrowing indigenes of Paria…and place a bullseye on his own head for meddling!

This is a pretty neat piece.  It suffers for being rather workmanlike in execution, as if it were a little rushed, and I found the society of the future a bit too similar to that of the present (particularly the role of women).  Nevertheless, it captures interest and offers up a decent mystery as well as, in the process, presenting an interesting alien race.

Three stars.

Testing … One, Two, Three, Four, by Steve Chapman


by Leo Summers

A bird colonel, stuck in service to an electronic brain, is given the task of overseeing a trio of servicemen who are undergoing computerized tests qualifying them for extraterrestrial deployment.  What he doesn't realize (but what is obvious fairly early on) is that this assignment is, in fact, a test of his capabilities.

Not bad.  The sort of thing Chris Anvil might have come up with.

Three stars.

Superiority Complex, by Thomas N. Scortia


by Leo Summers

Things fall off a cliff for these last two vignettes, probably accepted more for their useful length than quality.  This one takes us to a time several generations after The Bomb wiped out half of humanity.  Researchers are trying to revitalize the race through eugenics, specifically tracking down the descendants of "Phil Jason", an exceptional man who wrote screenplays in old Hollywood until he blew his own brains out.  If society could manufacture more of his type, then perhaps it could be rejuvenated.

Turns out that "Phil" was really "Phyllis", and the spirit of her genius lives on throughout the human race…explaining why women always seem to rule from the shadows, preferring the power behind the throne rather than the throne itself (this is the story's contention, not mine).

A dumb, sexist piece.  One star.

Any Number Can Play, by Richard Lippa


by Vincent DiFate

A meteorologist man-and-wife team investigate anomolaus weather off the coast of Florida and find the wreck of an enemy warship that had been creating the storm.  Portentous intonations of "could this be happening globally?"

Weather control is all the rage these days, in fiction and nonfiction.  Personally I can't buy that all the silver iodide crystals and laser beams will have half the effect that, say, a century of industrial society is having on the Earth.  But I also take issue with attibuting harmful weather to malevolent foreign entities.  That road leads to Silly Science.  We had enough of that with folks like Lysenko.  What's next?  Railing against vaccinations?

One star.

End of the line

And so ends the last magazine of the calendar year—not with a bang, but with a 2.7 star whimper.  This puts it above Vision of Tomorrow (2.8), Fantastic (2.1), and the shockingly bad New Worlds (1.9), but well below Galaxy (3.1), If (3.2), Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.4), and The New S.F. (3.6)

Now that all the magazines are done, I can give you a sneak preview of what the Galactic Stars will look like.  Here are all of the mags/anthologies in order of average:

  1. New Writings 3.679824561
  2. Fantasy and Science Fiction 3.102574451
  3. IF 3.070572755
  4. New Worlds 3.030241097
  5. Galaxy 3.005917367
  6. Vision of Tomorrow 2.921091331
  7. Venture 2.824404762
  8. Analog 2.688902006
  9. Fantastic 2.645528083
  10. Amazing 2.622086594
  11. Orbit 2.571428571
  12. Famous 1.897435897

As you can see, Analog finished pretty close to the bottom, barely acing out the Ted White mags (which are on their way up).  Campbell's going to have to do better than this if he wants to keep his ~170,000 readers, I imagine.

In other statistics, women wrote just 3% of the new fiction this month, and the four and five star pieces would fill three small digests (out of the eight published).  Not an auspicious way to end the decade, but perhaps the '70s will offer up a New New Wave.

See you on the other side!

[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]


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