Tag Archives: Virgil Finlay

Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

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

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Ain't Gonna Study War No More

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


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

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

They Shall Beat Their Swords Into Plowshares


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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


Lars and the mechanical oracle.

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

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


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

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

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

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

Four stars.

Me, Myself, and Us, by Michael Girdansky

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


Cover art by Emsh.

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

Two stars.

Last of a Noble Breed, by Mack Reynolds


Illustrations by Normal Nodel.

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

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


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

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

Two stars.

The Sightseers, by Thomas M. Disch

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

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

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

Three stars.

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

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

No illustrations!

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

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

Two stars.

Worldmaster, by Keith Laumer


Illustrations by John Giunta.

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

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


And there are flying cars.

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


And there's a big fire.

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

Three stars.

Mother, Is the Battle Over?

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


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




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[April 12, 1965] Not Long Before the End (May 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Still Bleeding

Another month, another civil rights murder.  Viola Liuzzo lived in Detroit and participated in civil rights activities there.  Horrified by the carnage of the “Bloody Sunday” attack on civil rights marchers on March 7, she went to Alabama, where the Southern Christian Leadership Conference put her to work on administrative and logistical tasks, including driving volunteers and marchers from place to place as needed.

On March 25, Liuzzo drove some marchers and volunteers from Montgomery back to Selma.  On her way back to Montgomery, with a Negro associate in the car, she was passed by a car full of Ku Klux Klansmen, who fatally shot her in the head.

This murder was well publicized, even in remote places like my small town in Kentucky, where it was briefly a major subject of conversation.  The consensus: “She should have stayed home with her kids.” The notion that Americans should be able to travel safely in America and that people shouldn't murder other people seems somehow to have been forgotten.

Of course she was not the only one killed by the anti-civil rights forces, though her killing received more publicity than most.  The Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, was beaten with clubs by segregationists on March 9 and died of his injuries in a hospital.  In February, Jimmie Lee Jackson was beaten and shot by state troopers who attacked civil rights marchers and then pursued marchers who took refuge from the violence in a cafe.  His death prompted the Selma-Montgomery march.

Looks like there’s a long way to go.

The Issue at Hand


by Gray Morrow

The end is much nearer for the departing regime at Amazing.  This next to last Ziff-Davis issue is fronted by one of the more ill-considered covers to appear on the magazine.  It features what looks like a theatrical mask, with several items of disconnected clockwork behind it, against a sort of green starscape.  Well, the colors are nice.  It illustrates or represents in some fashion Poul Anderson’s two-part serial The Corridors of Time, which begins in this issue (though there’s no corridor to be seen on the cover; probably just as well).

The Corridors of Time (Part 1 of 2), by Poul Anderson


by Gray Morrow

I will await the end of the Anderson serial before commenting, as is my practice.  A quick look indicates that it is a time war or time policing story, in the general territory of Asimov’s The End of Eternity and Leiber’s The Big Time, not to mention Anderson’s own Time Patrol stories, and the protagonist is dispatched to Northern Europe around 1200 B.C.  More next month.

The Survivor, by Walter F. Moudy


by Virgil Finlay

Walter F. Moudy, who has published a novel but whose first magazine story appeared only last month, contributes the novelet The Survivor, another in the growing genre of future violence-as-entertainment.  That roster includes last month’s lampoon by John Jakes, There’s No Vinism Like Chau-Vinism, a couple of Robert Sheckley stories, Charles V. De Vet’s energetic Special Feature from Astounding in 1958, and no doubt others.  In the future, Moudy proposes, the US and Russia are still antagonists, but now they channel their rivalry into the Olympic War Games: each side puts 100 armed soldiers into an arena 3000 meters long and 1000 meters wide, and they fight it out until one side is eliminated, and the viewers out in TV-land see every drop of blood.

The author alternates between a fairly naturalistic account of the thoughts and experiences of the clueless Private Richard Starbuck as he fights, wonders why he is doing it, is grievously wounded, and nearly dies, and the performances of the commentators and their special guests, which treat the event just like the sporting matches we are all familiar with.  This is 99% of a pretty good story, with the TV commentary close to pitch-perfect, and the effects on the protagonist of immersion in pointless and terrifying violence are well rendered. 

Unfortunately Moudy trips over his feet in the last paragraph with a gross departure from Show Don’t Tell, beating the reader over the head with his message rather than letting events speak (or scream) for themselves. This is the sort of rookie mistake that editors are there to save writers from, and they didn’t.  This provides at least a scintilla of support for the charge by Science Fiction Times that the editors seemed to have lost interest.  Three stars, unfortunately; it was on its way to four.

The Man from Party Ten, by Robert Rohrer

Robert Rohrer embraces cynicism unreservedly in The Man from Party Ten, a characteristically well-turned, quite short story about factional warfare in the ruins of an extraterrestrial Earth colony, as brutal within its shorter compass as Moudy’s longer story, though also more obviously contrived.  Nonetheless, well done.  Three stars.

Over the River and Through the Woods, by Clifford D. Simak

Relief from brutality arrives in the issue’s last story, Clifford D. Simak’s Over the River and Through the Woods, an unassuming small masterpiece.  A couple of strange kids appear at a farmhouse in 1896 and address the older woman working in the kitchen as their grandma.  It is quintessential Simak: Ordinary decent person confronted with the extraordinary responds with ordinary decency.  It’s plainly written without a wasted word, deftly developed, asserting its homely credo with quiet restraint, all in eight pages.  Wish I could do that.  Wish more writers would do that.  Five stars.

Yardsticks in Space, by Ben Bova

This month’s nonfiction piece is Ben Bova’s Yardsticks in Space, about the measurement of stellar distances. It's typical fare from this writer: reasonably interesting material rendered in a fairly humdrum style under a humdrum title.  Perfectly readable but a far cry from the better efforts of Isaac Asimov and Willy Ley.  Two stars.

Summing Up

So, not bad: one excellent story, one that’s quite good until the very end, and one capable story, plus a reasonably promising-looking serial by a prominent if uneven author, and no Robert F. Young or Ensign De Ruyter!  Maybe Goldsmith and Lobsenz will go out on a relatively high note.

We had so much success with our first episode of The Journey Show (you can watch the kinescope rerun; check local listings for details) that we're going to have another one on April 11 at 1PM PDT with The Young Traveler as the special musical guest.  As the kids say, be there or be square!




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Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 6, 1965] Plus C'est La Même Chose (February 1965 Galaxy)

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[If you have a membership to this year's Worldcon (in New Zealand) or did last year (Dublin), we would very much appreciate your nomination for Best Fanzine!  We work for egoboo…]


by Gideon Marcus

Things in Flux

I read an article yesterday about how America was retiring all of its first-generation nuclear missiles, the hundreds of Thors, Jupiters, Atlas Ds, Es, Fs, and Titan Is.  It's astonishing when you think how short their operational lifespan was.  The first Atlas D base came online in 1959; the first Titans were activated in 1962!  Yet there they go, replaced by just two types: the solid-fueled Minutemen and the liquid-fueled Titan IIs, both of which can be launched straight from atom-proof silos. 

It reminds me of the big science fiction magazine boom at the end of the 1940s.  After the War, Amazing and Astounding were among the few genre mags remaining in publication after the big pulp bust.  But around the turn of the decade, Fantasy and Science Fiction came about, and New Worlds and Galaxy…and the floodgates were opened.  By 1953, there were some forty magazines in more-or-less regular production.

Well, there wasn't enough talent to fill those pages, and probably not enough readers either (I remember struggling to keep up with seven mags in 1957), and by the end of the '50s, we were back down to six.  That number has grown a bit since then, but it's nothing like the old "glory days".

Even the magazines that still exist have changed substantially.  Astounding changed its name to Analog and went "slick".  F&SF is now on its fourth editor, and the quality of its contents is markedly diminished since last decade.  Amazing and its '50s born sister, Fantastic, not only got new management under Cele Goldsmith, but she recently got married and changed her name to Cele Lalli!

But Galaxy, my favorite since its establishment in October 1950, seems virtually unchanged.  Sure, it went to bimonthly in 1959, it's a little thicker, a little more expensive.  Fred Pohl, one of the magazine's primary contributors, now runs the show.

Nevertheless, Willy Ley still does the science column, the contents are still more thoughtful than technical (though less toward the extreme than F&SF), and the names remain familiar: Cordwainer Smith.  J.T. McIntosh.  James H. Schmitz.  Robert Silverberg (though he was in short-pants when the magazine first started.)

And quality-wise, I think it's still, pound-for-pound, the best sf mag on the market.  Is it perfect?  Hardly, but always worth a subscription.  Check out the February 1965 edition, and tell me if you don't agree.

An Island of Stability


A fascinating cover by newcomer "Wright" — it's not connected with any of the stories, as is common for Galaxy.

On the Storm Planet, by Cordwainer Smith

The neat thing about Smith's Instrumentality series, detailing an odd far future, is that it has been around long enough to have a near infinite number of plot threads.  In Storm Planet, we are reintroduced to Casher O'Neill, an exile from the planet Mizzer, who had previously searched for aid and arms on a planet of jewels.  Now, he has come to Henriada, a tempest of a world where cyclones run amok, and where once 600 million lived, just 40,000 remain — deterred by economic failure in the distant past. 


by Virgil Finlay

Upon arriving, Casher is offered a powerful cruiser by the planet's Administrator.  The price?  Casher must kill a girl.

Not just any girl.  She is an underperson, a rightsless animal shaped into human guise to be a servant.  Yet, somehow she is the most powerful person on the planet, someone who has resisted countless assassination attempts.

Who T'ruth really is, and why she holds such sway, are the central mysteries of this excellent novella, to which I find I must award five stars.

A Flask of Fine Arcturan, by C. C. MacApp

An interstellar whiskey company has a rather spectacular failure when the aliens responsible for the bottling go on an unplanned jag.  A cautionary tale against poor interdepartmental company communications, this epistolary is something of a throwaway.  Barely three stars.

Forerunners of the Planetarium, by Willy Ley

If you're of my generation, you grew up during the great planetarium boom, when every educational facility of merit was getting its own interior star chamber.  And over the last two decades, they've gotten cheap and portable enough that they're practically everywhere now.

Willy Ley does his usual competent job of explaining the origin of the planetarium and its ancestors, the orrery, the armilla, and the astronomical clock.

Four stars.

The Sixth Palace, by Robert Silverberg

The greatest treasure in the galaxy is guarded by a clever robot who, sphinxlike, demands correct answers to its questions.  Two men believe they have an ace up their sleeve that will let them prevail where others have failed: a little computer that knows everything.

Can it be that simple?

There's not much to this tale, but it's told very well.  Four stars, I think.

The Man Who Killed Immortals, by J. T. McIntosh


by Gary Morrow

McIntosh has already written about immortality, in his excellent Immortality for Some from five years ago.  This time, he adds an interesting twist.

Several hundred years from now, a costly operation enables those who undergo it to live forever — unaging, unchanging.  But the downside is enormous: they are unable to heal from any wounds.  These "elsies" (for LC or Living Corpse) accumulate great wealth, but they mostly use it to cocoon themselves in exquisite safety.

But someone who calls himself The Avenger, wants to change the status quo.  He's begun demanding millions of dollars of elsies lest he slice their vulnerable skin.

A fairly unremarkable whodunnit, it lacks the deep interest of his last story of immortals.  Three stars.

Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer, by Richard Wilson

Mr. Protagonist sells mental taps on four astronauts so that the American population can vicariously experience the first Mars Landing.  Unforseen events interfere.

This joke tale falls pretty flat, though I did appreciate this line:

The Marsbound astronauts…each had an I.Q. no lower than 130 and no higher than 146 (the NASA director's I.Q. was 147).

Two stars.

Fin's Funeral, by Donald H. Menzel

Frederick I. "Fin" Nolan is a brilliant physicist who passes away at the age of 68, just after coming up with a theoretical way to reverse the passage of time (something to do with Steady State expansion of the universe).  His will includes the curious request that his coffin be left sealed, and that, at his funeral, the dials on it be set just so.

I'm pretty sure you can guess what happens.  It's a pretty prosaic story, the sort of thing I'd expect of a first-timer who hasn't been reading our genre for decades.

(Interestingly, I understand the fellow is actually a brilliant theoretical astronomer — his nonfiction is probably pretty good; Funeral isn't badly written, just novice plot material.  Also, I'll put good money down that that the Steady Staters are going to lose to the Big Bangers.  Any takers?

Two stars.

Planet of Forgetting, by James H. Schmitz


by Jack Gaughan

Last up is a piece by an old pro.  Schmitz is inclined to storytell through exposition, which suits this first-person thriller.  It starts intriguingly enough, with a special agent awakening on a wilderness planet with only gradually returning memory of how he got there.  The novelette then meanders through a workmanlike adventure story of no particular interest, but the interesting ending brings things back into three-star territory. 

All's Right in the Galaxy

As you can see, Galaxy is amazingly consistent.  Any of these stories would have been suited to any of the issues over the last 15 years of publication.  I'd worry about stagnation, but with a 3.5 star aggregate rating, I don't mind things remaining as they are for a while.

Analog and F&SF, however…they could afford a little change!




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Magazine, Serial

[December 13, 1964] Save us from Yourselves (January 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

That Low

The uproar at the University of California at Berkeley continues, with student leader Mario Savio becoming instantly famous for his cri de couer: “There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

Ever see that corny old silent movie Metropolis, with its oppressed workers desperately struggling against the gigantic levers of a future civilization’s industry?  Do you think Mr. Savio might have had those scenes in mind?  Is our culture now to be dominated by the imagery of old science fiction, recycled through late-night TV?  It can’t come soon enough for me.

The Issue at Hand


by Michael Arndt

Speaking of retrograde imagery, the January Amazing leads off with what seems a striking misjudgment.  Though it features the first installment of a serial by the up-and-coming Roger Zelazny, his longest work to date, the cover is a cartoony though well-executed depiction, by newcomer Michael Arndt, of an extraterrestrial boxer being knocked out of the ring, with a Damon Runyonesque audience looking on, clearly illustrating Blue Boy by the determinedly mediocre Jack Sharkey.  Zelazny’s story is relegated to smaller type above the magazine title, with his name hard to read against a bright background.  Amazing is clearly leading from the wrong side.  (Can’t anybody here play this game?)

He Who Shapes, by Roger Zelazny


by George Schelling

Promising as it seems, I will withhold reading and commenting on Zelazny’s serial He Who Shapes until the concluding installment is at hand, as is my practice.  A look at the first few pages indicates that the story involves psychiatric treatment by mental projection—not exactly a new idea (see Peter Phillips’s Dreams Are Sacred from 1948 and John Brunner’s more recent The Whole Man), but not overly familiar either.  Zelazny also seems to be making the most of his theatrical background in this one.  We will see the results next month.

Blue Boy, by Jack Sharkey

Blue Boy is even worse than I expected.  The protagonist, formerly involved in the boxing world, has been drafted, and is sent with a large crew on a mission to Pluto, where they encounter blue-skinned humanoids, whom they clap into the brig, and hastily head back towards Earth.  The Plutonians are quite muscular and have a knack for footwork, so our protagonist gets the idea of sneaking onto Earth with one and turning him into a boxer. 


by Michael Arndt

That’s about as far as I got (halfway) in this offensively stupid and also interminable screed (34 pages but seems like much more), which is written, and padded, in a stilted and circumlocutory style which seems pretty clearly intended as a pastiche of the above-mentioned Damon Runyon.  “Why?” one might cry, but the wind only whispers . . . “one cent a word.” One star.  No stars.  Heat death of the universe.  Cessation of all brain activity.  Bring back Robert F. Young!

A Child of Mind, by Norman Spinrad


by Virgil Finlay

We return at least to the semblance of sentience with Norman Spinrad’s A Child of Mind, a clever variation on a stock SF plot.  Three guys from Survey land on a planet which seems idyllic, but of course there’s something wrong; there always is.  This time, the majority of the females of the various local fauna have cell structures indicating they are really different organisms under the skin. 

Turns out they spring from “teleplasm,” an inchoate life form whose modus vivendi is, whenever a male of any species passes by, to discern and produce his ideal mate.  Why this all-female survival strategy?  As the hero, ecologist Kelton, Socratically explains to one of the other guys:

“Who pays for a wife’s meals?”

“Her husband, of—Oh my God!”

Er . . . that’s not always how it works.  If a lioness could speak, she would have a rather different account of things, as would many other females of other species.  But never mind, because, of course, very shortly, all three crew members have their own cocoon-grown dream girls: the thuggish one has an adoring slave, the mama’s boy has a sexy mama figure, and well-balanced Kelton has a merely supernaturally beautiful mate who understands his every desire.

This road leads nowhere, of course—to species extinction, since teleplasm doesn’t breed in the usual fashion, and not even to short-term satisfaction for Kelton, to whom

“. . . Woman had always been Mystery.

“And a creature of his own mind could hold no mystery for him, only the unsatisfying illusion of it.”

So Kelton does the only sensible thing, which you can probably guess.  While Kelton’s devotion to the autonomy of Woman may be creditable, there are hints of some pretty strange attitudes drifting through the story.  At one point, as Kelton is musing about how the teleplasm women are custom-made for their men, he thinks, “Swapping them would be like swapping toothbrushes.” Earlier, Spinrad quotes a “saying among Survey men: ‘Planets are like women.  It’s not the ugly ones that are dangerous.’”

Well, let’s reserve the psychoanalysis and give the author credit for a reasonably well-turned story—but meanwhile, Mr. Spinrad, you might think about putting some women on your space crews.  Three stars.

The Hard Way, by Robert Rohrer

Robert Rohrer’s growing competence suffers a setback in The Hard Way, a one-set psychodrama starring the sadistic Lieutenant Percy, who is delivering several prisoners from a penitentiary on Earth to one on Mercury.  Unfortunately they missed the turn towards Mercury and are heading towards the Sun, to die of heat on the way.  May as well have some fun with it! thinks the Lieutenant, and offers the prisoners a choice between slowly roasting to death and opening the airlock for a faster and cleaner exit.  Contrived, cliched, scenery-chewing.  Two stars, barely, and mainly to distinguish it from the abysmal Sharkey story.

The Handyman, by Leo P. Kelley


by George Schelling

Leo P. Kelley’s The Handyman is a pleasantly inconsequential dystopia about a small town where everything seems pretty nice except for the medical facility, the Hive, which spirits sick people away to its sterile and overlit premises and forbids any medical practice but its own.  Old Doc Larkin must ply his profession covertly, masquerading as a handyman and carrying his instruments concealed in a loaf of bread newly baked by his wife.  Three stars, also barely.

The Men in the Moon, by Robert Silverberg


by Virgil Finlay

The second of Robert Silverberg’s “Scientific Hoaxes” articles is The Men in the Moon, concerning the hoax perpetrated by journalist Richard Adams Locke, who published a series of articles in the New York Sun concerning the observations of profuse flora, fauna, and people on the Moon, supposedly made by famed astronomer William Herschel from his observatory at Cape Town, South Africa.  Herschel was indeed in Cape Town but of course made no such observations and didn’t know Locke was making these claims until years later.  Like its predecessor, it’s an interesting story capably told.  Three stars.

Summing Up

So: another dose of mediocrity from this historic magazine that hasn’t done much of anything for us lately, and owes us big time, at least those of us putting down good money for it each month.  Maybe the Zelazny serial will be its redemption.  Hope springs eternal, but it’s getting tired.

[Holiday season is upon us, and Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963), on the other hand, contains some of the best science fiction of the Silver Age.  And it makes a great present! Think of it as a gift to friends…and the Journey!




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 9, 1964] Shall We Gather At The River? (January 1965 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

You Only Live Twice


Cover art by Richard Chopping

I trust that the spirit of the late Ian Fleming will forgive me for stealing the title of the last James Bond novel to be published during his lifetime. (Rumor has it that at least one more may be published posthumously.) Those evocative four words bring to mind the notion of life after death.

Since the dawn of consciousness, human beings have pondered the possibility of an afterlife. From reincarnation to oblivion, from Paradise to Gehenna, countless visions of an existence after death have filled the imaginations of poets, prophets, and philosophers.

But what about science fiction writers?

Few SF stories dealing with the subject come to mind. There are, of course, many tales of fantasy about survival beyond the grave, often comic versions of Heaven or terrifying visits to Hell. Science fiction, with its disdain for mysticism (despite a weakness for pseudo-scientific premises that are just as fantastic) generally ignores the question.


This 1962 novel is a rare exception.

It is remarkable, then, that almost half of the latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow consists of a novella with a large cast of characters who have all died and been resurrected, without the need for a supernatural explanation.


Cover art by George Schelling.

Wanted: Dead or Alive

In fact, a few of the other pieces in the magazine feature characters who may have died, and who may have come back to life, although these are more ambiguous than the lead story.

Day of the Great Shout, by Philip Jose Farmer


Illustrations by Virgil Finlay.

A man who knows he died finds himself alive, nude, hairless, in a young and healthy body, floating in empty space, surrounded on all sides by countless others in his condition. After falling through the void and having a dream about an encounter with God, he wakes up on a new world.

(The author never gives this planet a name. The fact that the stars are different, along with other details, make it clear that it's not Earth. For convenience, let's call it Riverworld, based on the most notable physical feature of the place.)

All around him are other naked, bald people, mostly in a state of panic. One can't blame them, since this afterlife doesn't resemble anything they imagined. When they calm down a bit, it becomes clear that they are now in the valley of a wide river, surrounded on both sides by impassible mountains. A curious device, obviously making use of extremely advanced technology, provides them with food, and even luxury items such as tobacco and lipstick.


A fellow who has an unfortunate encounter with the device proves that it's possible to die a second time.

By this time, we find out that our protagonist is the famous Victorian adventurer Richard Francis Burton. It might be a good idea to list the other characters who play major roles during his adventures on Riverworld.

Dramatis Personae, in order of appearance:

Monat Grrautuft, an alien who died on Earth during the Twenty-First Century.

Kazzintuitruuaabemss, an ape-man who died sometime during the dawn of humanity. Fortunately for the reader, he'll be called just Kazz for the rest of the story.


Kazz in battle.

Peter Frigate, a writer born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1918. If that sounds familiar, that's because his time and place of birth are identical with the author's. Given that he has the same initials, it's clear that's he meant as a fictionalized self-portrait. He died during the same incident that led to the death of the alien.

Alice Pleasance Hargreaves, the woman who inspired Lewis Carroll to write Alice in Wonderland.

Lev Ruach, a man who also died at the same time as Frigate and the alien. (It turns out that a grave misunderstanding between aliens and Earthlings led to both being wiped out. The main reason for this apocalyptic incident, I think, is so the author doesn't have to deal with people from the far future. Everyone who has ever died on Earth is now alive on Riverworld, so limiting the timescale from prehistory to the Twenty-First Century makes his job a little less daunting than it might be.)

Gwenafra, a seven-year-old girl who died in ancient Gaul. We find out later that children who died before the age of five are somewhere else, not specified.

These are just the good guys. After some time passes, given the nature of humanity, war and slavery develop on Riverworld. Burton and his companions battle the forces of the infamous Nazi leader Hermann Goering and Tullios Hostilios, a legendary king of Rome, long before it became a Republic and then an Empire.

After this violent conflict, our heroes find out that a man is not what he seems to be, and we learn something about the origin and purpose of Riverworld.


The discovery involves the ability of Kazz to see things that the others can't detect.

The premise is a fascinating one, and Farmer develops the setting in convincing detail. There's plenty of action, and a generous number of science fiction concepts to hold the reader's interest. My only complaint is that the story is open-ended, with Burton ready to continue exploring Riverworld. I suspect that a sequel or two is in the works, perhaps leading to a full novel.

An anticipatory four stars.

Field Weapons Tomorrow, by Joseph Wesley

The first of two nonfiction articles in this issue imagines what the equipment used by an ordinary foot soldier of the near future might be like. Sensitive radar detects enemies, and small missiles of various kinds serve to identify and destroy targets. The author makes use of a couple of fictional characters to demonstrate the technology, enlivening a rather dry subject.

An interested three stars.

Retreat Syndrome, by Philip K. Dick


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

Starts with a guy stopped for speeding in his futuristic vehicle. This mundane beginning soon turns weird as the fellow moves his hand through the dashboard of his one-wheeled car as if it weren't there. We're firmly in the territory that the author explored in previous works; what is reality?

Flashing back reveals that the man remembers killing his wife with a laser gun when she threatened to reveal plans for a revolution against Earth by colonists on Ganymede. His psychiatrist advises a visit to the woman, who is apparently alive and well on Earth.


Did this happen or not?

The guy thinks he's been brainwashed, and that he's not on Earth at all, but still on Ganymede. A mind-altering drug may be involved.

The truth is a little more complicated than that. The fellow winds up committing what promises to be an endless cycle of attempted murders that might not be real.

Touches of what Simone de Beavuoir might call (sexual) 'oppression' make reading an otherwise intriguing story uncomfortable. We're told that the woman intended to betray the revolution out of petty spite and female bitterness. Another direct quote from the protagonist:

Like all women she was motivated by personal vanity and wounded pride.

That's a pretty wide-sweeping indictment of half the human race, even if we accept the fact that the main character isn't in his right mind. Trying to ignore this unpleasant part of the story, I found it to be compelling, with one of the author's more accessible plots.

A slightly offended four stars.

The Pani Planet, by R. A. Lafferty


Illustration by Norman Nodel.

The commander of a military expedition on an alien planet dies. The only native inhabitant who bothers to speak to the humans offers to fix the broken man. Rejecting this as ridiculous, the new leader buries the dead officer, who treated the aliens decently, and initiates a new, harsher policy. You won't be surprised to find out that the deceased commander returns to life. Of course, not all is what it seems to be.

Typical for the author, this story combines whimsy with tragedy. There's comedy in the broken English of the alien, and the tale ends with a joke, but there's also torture and death. The details of the plot are gimmicky, but it's worth reading.

An ambiguous three stars.

Stella and the Moons of Mars, by Robert S. Richardson

Our second nonfiction article rehashes material that appeared in the December 1963 issue of the magazine. Once again, we go over the remarkable fact that Jonathan Swift seems to have predicted that Mars would prove to have two moons, long before they were discovered, in his satiric classic Gulliver's Travels. After talking about the history of the sighting of the satellites, and discussing their known and speculative properties, the article half-seriously suggests that Swift might have seen them through a telescope and slyly announced the fact in the pages of his book. At least the author is honest enough to admit that this hypothesis is impossible, given the limitations of telescopes in Swift's time. We learn a little about the moons of Mars, but the rest is old hat.

An overly familiar two stars.

The Dead Ones, by Sydney van Scyoc

Once again we have death and revival, of a sort. A man is horribly injured in an industrial accident, and is presumed to be near death. Not much later, he turns up perfectly fine. His son-in-law smells something fishy, and finds out the truth about the mysterious health care system of this future world. There's a twist ending you may see coming.

This story features some of the most implausible happenings I've ever read. First of all, you have to believe that one secretive company controls all health care. Secondly, you have to accept that nobody minds the fact that they experience loss of memory during routine physical exams. Thirdly, you have to presume that the hero is the only person who has ever questioned the fact that many people approach death from disease or injury, yet are completely healed right away in some unseen manner.

A skeptical two stars.

Manfire, by Theodore L. Thomas


Illustrations by Jack Gaughan.

The bizarre, and probably imaginary, phenomenon known as spontaneous human combustion becomes a worldwide plague in the near future. (The author calls it pyrophilia, but that seems like a very misleading term. The victims of this horrible death certainly don't love it!) Governments make use of all possible resources in an attempt to solve the problem.

Off to secure the remains of a victim.

The United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare contacts an eccentric, reclusive genius to see if he can help.


Our hero.


A victim.

The fellow investigates things in his own way, eventually setting up a team of experts to work on the mystery from a strictly theoretical viewpoint.


He also makes sure that they have plenty of booze.

Other than some gruesome scenes of people being consumed by flames coming out of their bodies, and investigators collecting the grisly remains for study, there isn't much to this story other than the main character's method of attacking the problem. The point seems to be that throwing a bunch of highly intelligent people in a room and having them come up with speculative hypotheses is superior to the methodical collection of data. I'm not sure I agree with that, since both are important. The explanation for the rise in spontaneous combustion reveals some ingenuity on the part of the author, but is rather anticlimactic.

A disappointed two stars.

Can These Bones Live?

Like people, most stories have a limited lifetime. A lucky few gain something like immortality, reprinted in anthologies that survive when others fade away. The two authors named Philip have a good chance of seeing their creations resurrected from the pages of the magazine, into new bodies in the form of books. The other writers, maybe not as much. Only time can tell, and, like the afterlife, nobody really knows anything about the future.

[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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[October 24, 1964] Nothing Lasts Forever (November 1964 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

This Too Shall Pass

There is an ancient fable of Persian origin, retold many times over the centuries, about a monarch who asked the wisest sages in the realm for a statement that could apply to all possible situations. The answer, of course, is the title of this piece.

It is impossible to deny the ephemeral nature of all Earthly things, even if we speculate that the universe may be eternal. (The truth of that is still a matter of scientific debate, as to whether the cosmos will expand forever, or eventually collapse into itself.)

Evidence for the temporary nature of politics, for example, came with the unexpected fall of Nikita Khrushchev from power in the Soviet Union, as discussed by our host in detail.


Americans were caught by surprise, it seems.

Obviously, the most common evidence for the fragility of humanity is the universality of death. To mention just one recent example, Herbert Hoover passed away this month, at a more advanced age than any other former President of the United States.


Let him be remembered for his extraordinary work providing supplies of food to millions of starving Europeans during and after World War One, rather than his failure to deal with the Great Depression.

In a less sober way, the 1964 Summer Olympics, the first to be held in Asia, came to an end as well, with a memorable closing ceremony in the Tokyo setting.


Why summer games in October? To avoid the heat and typhoon season.

Few things are as short-lived as popular music, as shown by the fact that two songs reached the Number One position on the American charts this month. First came Oh, Pretty Woman, a tribute to feminine beauty by singer and guitarist Roy Orbison.


I'm used to seeing him with dark glasses.

This was quickly replaced by the nonsensically titled Do Wah Diddy Diddy by the British group Manfred Mann.


Confusingly, the name of the band is the same as the name of the keyboard player.

In Search of Eternal Life

Fittingly, the two lead stories in the latest issue of Fantastic deal with futile attempts to escape the ravages of time.


Cover art by George Schelling

The Knocking in the Castle, by Henry Slesar


Interior illustrations also by Schelling

We begin with a chilling tale set in modern Italy. A widow attends a party, during which the host suggests an excursion to a nearby castle, said to be haunted. The woman reluctantly goes along, only to scream in fear when a knocking emerges from within the dungeon. A flashback reveals the reason for her horror at the sound.

In the United States, she married a man whose ancestors built the castle. Once a year he goes back to the family estate, where his sister lives year-round, rarely emerging from seclusion. We soon discover that the man is well over two hundred years old, despite his youthful appearance. He returns to the castle for an annual dose of the liquid which keeps the siblings from aging.


The magical elixir, a few drops of which drives back the Grim Reaper.

A violent quarrel breaks out between brother and sister when the man wishes to share the potion with his bride. Driven to extreme measures, the sister hides the key to the chamber holding the supply of liquid in a particularly macabre way.


Extreme measures, indeed.

What follows is a grim account of the man's desperate attempt to find the key before time runs out. It all leads up to the frightening conclusion, explaining the woman's terrified scream.

I found myself imagining this story as one of those Italian Gothic horror movies that make their way to the USA in badly dubbed and edited form. That's one reason I enjoyed it, to be honest. I pictured Barbara Steele, veteran of such films, in the role of the mysterious sister. I could see the gloomy interior of the castle in glorious black-and-white, and hear the spooky violin music on the soundtrack.

From a fan of Shock Theater and Famous Monsters of Filmland, a very subjective four stars.

Elixir for the Emperor, by John Brunner


Illustrated by Virgil Finlay

Our second account of a quest for eternal life also takes place in Italy, but goes back thousands of years to the days of the Roman Empire. A general and a senator plot against the life of a popular emperor. Their subtle plan involves offering a large reward for an effective elixir of immortality, convincing the emperor that it really works, thanks to the deceptive aid of the ruler's trusted slave, and substituting poison.

Complicating matters is an old man, saved from death in the arena by the emperor's mercy. In gratitude, he manages to create a genuine potion granting endless life, but is too late to prevent the emperor from being murdered. He hatches his own plot against those who slew his savior.

This is mostly a story of palace intrigue and vengeance, with just a touch of fantasy. The ancient setting is convincing, and there's a bit of philosophical musing at the end. It's very readable, if not particularly memorable, and not quite up to the author's usual high standard.

A middle-of-the-road three stars.

The Man Who Found Proteus, by Robert Rohrer

The gods of mythology, with some exceptions, enjoy the freedom from death sought by the protagonists of the first two stories. This comic romp features the god Proteus, famous for being able to change into any shape.

A grizzled prospector encounters the deity, first as a moving rock, then in the form of a talking mule, and later as a series of letters appearing on the ground, allowing the god to announce his desires in writing. His wants are simple enough; he's eternally hungry, ready to devour anything the prospector can provide. As you might imagine, things don't work out well for the old sourdough.

For the most part, this is a silly comedy, more notable for a certain amount of imagination than for belly laughs.

A slightly amused two stars.

Seed of Eloraspon (Part 2 of 2), by Manly Banister


Illustrations by Schelling again

The hero of this thud-and-blunder yarn may not be immortal, but it sure seems that way some times. As you may recall from last month, he set out to find the ancient city of the long-vanished, technologically advanced inhabitants of an alien world, accompanied by a warrior princess, an enemy turned friend, and a fellow Earthling. After many battles with the wicked Tharn, and a strange encounter with their mysterious rulers, the Bronze Men, they were about to be killed by huge flying monsters.

The author cheats as badly as any old movie serial, by setting up a cliffhanger from which there seems no escape, and then offering a disappointing way out. It seems that the hero, because he's got the advanced mental powers of what the story calls a magnanthropus, is able to communicate with the creatures. It seems that they're on his side, and want him to fulfill his quest. (There's a weird explanation that the flying beasts, along with other beings on this world, are the incarnation of emotions. That seemed really goofy to me.)


A typical battle. I like the use of the circle.

After getting out of that scrape without any effort, our quartet of adventurers fight the Tharn, get captured, escape, and so on. Eventually the hero discovers the secret of the Bronze Men, which will come as no surprise to anybody who has ever read any science fiction, and triumphs over all challenges. This pretty much just involves pulling a lever, which is pretty anticlimactic.


A defeated Bronze Man, although it sure looks more like a stone statue to me.

I got the feeling that the author really rushed through this half of the story. Things move at a breakneck pace, but without much purpose or meaning. The whole thing just sort of fizzles out at the end, leaving the reader exhausted and unsatisfied.

A disappointed one star.

Hell, by Robert Rohrer

(The Table of Contents credits the story to somebody named Howard Lyon. As best as I can figure out, this is a pseudonym meant to disguise the fact that the author has two pieces in the same issue. Rohrer and Lyon, get it? The Table of Contents also lists the author of The Man Who Found Proteus as Robert H. Rohrer instead of plain Robert Rohrer, so I guess there was some confusion around the editorial offices.)

A man finds himself, as the simple title implies, in the infernal regions. He passes some damned souls lying immobile on a beach under a cloudy sky, then takes a ride across the water with a demonic boatman assumed to be Charon. The fellow has no fear of eternal punishment, because he feels ready to face any psychological torment Hell might provide. As you expect, his attitude turns out to be badly mistaken. In a way, he faces the worst kind of immortality, if only in a spiritual sense.

The ending of this brief tale is not surprising. I never did figure out what the point of the motionless bodies on the beach was supposed to be. The story is decently written, but there's not much to it.

A confused two stars.

The Mermaid and the Archer, by Barry P. Miller


Illustration by Robert Adragna

The title characters in this romantic fantasy are two department store manikins, unable to move but conscious and able to communicate through a kind of telepathy. They were crafted by a master puppet-maker, whose affection for his creations gave them life. A violent storm threatens their physical existence, but a painter is able to preserve their love in his art.

This gentle, bittersweet fable suggests a kind of immortality in the works of gifted artists. Written in a introspective, poetic style, it is sure to touch the reader's emotions.

A sentimental four stars.

Daughter of the Clan, by Wilton G. Beggs

A teenage girl, who was adopted as an infant, experiences a gnawing, unsatisfied hunger. An attempted rape leads to the discovery of her true nature, and she meets others of her kind. A particular kind of immortality is implied.

Despite a certain moody intensity in the author's style, this is a simple, predictable tale, which ends just when it starts to get more interesting. Like the lead story, it attempts to produce old-fashioned chills, but not as effectively.

An unsatisfied two stars.

From Here to Eternity

Although none of the stories in this issue are likely to win undying fame, a couple of them should remain in the reader's memory for quite some time, if not forever. It makes me wonder how long copies of the magazine are likely to exist; if not in paper form, maybe on microfilm or some other medium. Whether anybody will be reading this issue in the distant future is an unanswerable question. Let's just be grateful we can enjoy the best of it here and now.

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Book, Magazine

[October 12, 1964] Slow Cruising (November 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

It’s a cliche that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  What can one say about those who don’t learn even from what they see around them?  At the University of California at Berkeley, a city within a city in which many thousands of people study, work, and in many cases live, the administration recently decided it will strictly enforce rules prohibiting political advocacy and speech, appearances by political candidates, and recruitment and fundraising by student organizations at a heavily-travelled area (an intersection of the city’s main street!) where such activities were routinely conducted.

Let’s pause for station identification.  This is 1964.  All over the United States, people are standing up for the rights and freedom of individuals, including political rights, most notably the right to vote.  Most of them are Negroes, but you’d think people in responsible positions would realize that a few white people (as apparently are most of Berkeley’s students) might get some funny ideas too—like the ideas of direct action and civil disobedience that they have been seeing on TV, and in some cases in person, for several years. 

You’d also think they would be aware that a significant number of their own students and some faculty members just got back from the Freedom Summer activities in the segregated South, where they lived daily with the risk of physical assault and even death, and are unlikely to be too fearful of university administrators.

So on October 1, the campus police arrested a guy named Jack Weinberg—one of those who went south this past summer—who was sitting at an information table for the Congress of Racial Equality and refused to show his identification.  A crowd formed around the police car, preventing it from moving, and the car became a speaker’s podium for a crowd said to have swelled to three thousand people.  This went on for 32 hours until the university agreed not to press charges against Weinberg, and also agreed to . . . what else? . . . form a committee!  This is to be a student/faculty/administration committee to discuss “all aspects of political behavior on campus and its control, and to make recommendations to the administration.”

What next? Nobody knows.  But one thing seems to be clear: increasingly, infringement on the rights that politically active Americans have come to expect to exercise will be challenged using the tools we all see on TV every week from the civil rights movement.  Authority is no longer its own justification, and those in positions of power, some of whom seem to look to Louis XVI as their role model, will need to change their approach to survive.  As that folksinger put it—I forget his name, the one with the frizzy hair and nasal voice—“you’d better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone.”

The Issue at Hand


by Alex Schomburg

More prosaically—back to science fiction.  The November 1964 Amazing is distinguished by being the second consecutive issue with a cover depicting a guy in a flying chair, calling to mind the observation of the Hon. Jimmy Walker, erstwhile Mayor of New York City, before fleeing the country to avoid a corruption prosecution: “Never follow a banjo act with another banjo act.” Alex Schomburg’s rather static and solemn depiction of the device contrasts amusingly with Virgil Finlay’s interior illustration, which attempts to imbue the same gadget with all the energy and drama that the cover picture lacks.  Can we say Apollonian versus Dionysian?  I thought not.  Forget I mentioned it.

Rider in the Sky, by Raymond F. Jones


by Virgil Finlay

The story itself, Raymond F. Jones’s long novelet Rider in the Sky, is unfortunately pretty inane, a hardware opera that reads as if it had been dumbed down for prime-time TV.  In the near future, private enterprise is starting to get into the act in space, and Space Products, Inc., has developed the Moon Hopper, essentially a rocket-propelled chair in which a space-suited person can sit and fly over the lunar surface, untroubled by the quantities of fine dust covering it.  But how to market this device?

The Space Products boys (usage highly intentional) decide on a publicity stunt—they’ll get somebody to fly the Moon Hopper from Earth orbit to the moon.  Who?  They’ll ask for volunteers from within the company!  They get one—Sam Burnham, a company accountant and secret space buff, who knows he doesn’t have the right stuff but has indulged his fantasies to the point of installing a centrifuge and an imitation space capsule in his basement. 

Sam’s wife Edna, who spends her copious spare time supporting the cause of the orphans of Afghanistan, is appalled, and leverages her Afghan-symp connections to start a national movement to keep Sam Earthbound.  This, and Edna, are presented in a spirit of condescending sexual oppression of the sort one finds in, say, True: The Man’s Magazine.  I forget if the author refers to “the little woman,” and I’m not going back to look, but that’s the attitude.

After much machination, with the President getting into the act, Sam goes, and his trip takes an unexpected turn, plot mechanics unwind reasonably cleverly, and he and the story are brought to a soft landing.  But the treatment of women, and the smarmy faux-folksy style in which a lot of the story is told, make it difficult to appreciate the admittedly limited virtues of the story.  Two stars, barely.

Enigma From Tantalus (Part 2 of 2), by John Brunner


by Ed Emshwiller

John Brunner’s two-part serial Enigma from Tantalus concludes in this issue.  While it’s not the pretentious mess that his previous effort The Bridge to Azrael was, Brunner has not regained the form of (as I keep saying) his sequence of smart and well turned novellas in the UK magazines. 

Here, humans have discovered Tantalus, a planet inhabited by a singular intelligent life-form with separate units linked telepathically and capable of being molded into a variety of forms and functions.  The crisis that drives the plot is that the Tantalan is believed to have made a fake human (presumably disposing of the real one) and dispatched it on a spaceship to Earth; we can’t let it loose on our planet!  (There is an acknowledgement along the way that the Tantalan appears to be studying humanity just as humanity is studying it.)

So, there’s a bunch of people confined in a small space, and we must learn which is the alien!  This is not exactly an original plot, but Brunner plays it more in the style of a country-house mystery than that of its distinguished and horrific predecessor, Campbell’s Who Goes There?, spiced up by the fact that the passengers are as eccentric a bunch of freaks and neurotics as one could wish for.

Brunner manages the latter parts of the plot capably and trickily enough, but overall the story has two sore-thumb-level problems.  One is that by far the most interesting part is the discovery and opening of communication with the Tantalan, all of which happens off-stage—in fact, before the story opens—and we learn about it only in fragments.  In that sense the story is much too short. 

In another sense, it’s too long.  The other big problem is that here as in The Bridge to Azrael, Brunner wants to wrestle with Big Thinks, in this case chiefly that technological development and affluence have left the run of humanity with a sense of helplessness and lack of purpose.  But his attempts to integrate this notion into the story are perfunctory, or worse; for example, he invokes it to explain the manipulative and nymphomaniacal female journalist who is confined in the spaceship and chewing the furniture.  (This is a conspicuous sour note from a writer whose prior work is notable for strong and relatively cliche-free female characters.) So this exercise in speculative social psychology in the end contributes nothing to the story but verbiage.

Another problem, at least to my mind, is that when something comes up that the machines can’t handle in the ordinary course, Earth is essentially governed by a tiny elite called the “Powers of Earth” (a particularly arrogant and irascible specimen of which conducts the inquiry of the spaceship passengers).  These “Powers” apparently exercise unchecked authority based on their extraordinary powers of deducing correct conclusions from limited information. 

This seems to me a sort of magical thinking, no better than (not much different from, in fact) the recurring notion in another magazine that the future will be dominated by a psionic elite, and about as plausible and useful for thinking about the future as the depiction by Edmond Hamilton and others of galactic empires ruled by hereditary nobles with pompous titles.

One might ask if this criticism is too big a demand to make of popular fiction in newsstand magazines, but Brunner invites it by posing the questions himself.  I don’t want to be hard on the guy for essaying too much, but his ambition is outrunning the format he is writing in, and he will have to find better ways to integrate them, or move on to a different kind of writing.  Anyway, three stars for a nice but flawed try.

Your Name Shall Be … Darkness, by Norman Spinrad


by George Schelling

Norman Spinrad displays his own brand of ambition with Your Name Shall Be . . . Darkness, about an Army psychiatrist captured and subjected to sophisticated brainwashing in the Korean War. He is repatriated, seemingly intact, but . . . .  This is essentially The Manchurian Candidate as applied social psychology, and pretty clever, though done in an overly bombastic style for my taste.  Still, it’s effective: three stars verging on four.

The Seminarian, by Jack Sharkey


by Virgil Finlay

And, last of the fiction, Jack Sharkey . . . is Jack Sharkey, with The Seminarian, about a guy, the son of missionaries, reared on a South Sea island without significant technology who comes to the States to conduct his own missionary work.  It’s a tribute to Sharkey’s superficial skills that his facility distracts one from the story’s complete implausibility.  Two stars.  Sure you don’t want to go into advertising, Jack?

The Lying Stones of Dr. Beringer, by Robert Silverberg


by Virgil Finlay

There’s a new byline on this month’s non-fiction: Robert Silverberg (also now the regular book reviewer) contributes The Lying Stones of Dr. Beringer, apparently the first of a series—it’s labelled “Scientific Hoaxes #1.” It’s about a 16th-Century German scholar who was taken in by a large aggregation of fake fossils, an interesting story in itself (especially in the hands of Silverberg, a much more capable writer than the usual suspect Ben Bova) and one which contributed to a shift in understanding of what fossils actually are.  Three stars.

Summing Up

So, business as usual at Amazing: a couple of nice tries, one dreary failure, one lighter-than-air piece of trivia, plus a better article than usual.  Steady as she goes.

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 24, 1964] Looking Backward (October 1964 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

The Past is Prologue

The closing of two amusement parks in recent days caused many to look back nostalgically on the innocent fun of yesteryear.

Freedomland U.S.A., only four years old, shut its doors for good this month. Located in the Bronx, this Disneyland-with-a-New-York-accent featured several theme areas, including fun-filled, if not very accurate, recreations of the past and the future.


The world's largest, but not the most successful.

Only a few days later, the Coney Island attraction Steeplechase Park, which opened way back in 1897, received its last visitors as well.


Were you there six decades ago?

Popular music also turned to the past, as a new version of the folk song The House of the Rising Sun by the British rockers The Animals reached the top of the American charts early this month. It is still Number One as I type these words.


That's really lousy cover art for such a great song.

It's not unusual for a remake of an old number to become a hit, but this is an extreme example. Musicologists tell us the song's origins may go back as far as Sixteenth Century England, although this is a matter of debate. In any case, I was stunned, in a pleasant way, when I first heard this version. Eric Burdon's powerful vocals and Alan Price's compelling electronic organ solo make this a new classic, if you'll pardon the oxymoron.

In a similar way, the two longest stories in the latest issue of Fantastic seem to have come out of the yellowing pages of an old pulp magazine.

Gimme That Old-Time Sci-Fi, It's Good Enough For Me


Cover art by George Schelling

Beyond the Ebon Wall, by C. C. MacApp


Illustrations by Michael Arndt

This yarn starts off with the hero making a routine survey of a distant solar system. He finds a bizarre planet, half of which is missing, cut away from the other half by a black wall. Don't expect a hard SF story in the tradition of Hal Clement, with a scientific explanation for the weird phenomenon. Once the guy lands on the planet, the story becomes pure fantasy, of the sword-and-sorcery kind.

He meets four men, one of whom is an elderly fellow with a scarred face. There is also a pair of naked men fighting near the black wall. These two vanish into the wall, and the hero rather foolishly follows them. He finds himself trapped in another world, where he encounters another scarred old man, who seems to be the twin of the first one. We also get our first strong clue that we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto, when a magpie recites a prophetic poem to him.

What follows is an adventure story, full of action, and yet somehow leisurely. The hero is captured, and becomes the slave of a seafaring merchant who treats him decently. He becomes good buddies with a huge guy, who serves as our source of exposition. The two of them act as bait during the hunt for a dangerous animal. Surprisingly, the creature becomes as loyal to him as a friendly dog.


Does this look like a good house pet to you?

Stir in a pirate captain, a sorcerer, battles, escapes, and chase scenes. The hero eventually winds up where he started, and the story ends with a confusing time travel paradox.

The space exploration opening adds nothing to the plot, and even the time travel theme could have been the result of black magic. Other than the awkward blending of genres, this is an old-fashioned swashbuckler right out of Weird Tales. The hero and his giant pal are likable enough, but their adventures don't lead to very much.

Two stars.

The Grooves, by Jack Sharkey


Illustration by George Schelling

A foolhardy young man tells his grandmother that he's going to go into the underground lair of a troll and steal its gold. The old lady warns him that he must never kill a troll. We also find out that trolls have inverted souls, so they walk on the ceilings of their caverns. (No, that didn't make much sense to me, either.)

At this point, I thought that the trolls were going to turn out to be aliens, or maybe people in spacesuits. Nothing of the kind happens. The story is pure fantasy, and the plot is as simple as can be. The stupid protagonist discovers why he shouldn't kill a troll, and learns the meaning of a couple of marks on the wall of the cave, the secret of which is neither surprising nor interesting.

Two stars.

Seed of Eloraspon (Part One of Two), by Manly Banister


Illustration by George Schelling

Allow me to indulge in a little reminiscing of my own. My very first article for Galactic Journey, almost exactly three years ago, was about the October 1961 issue of Fantastic. Included in the magazine was the second half of the short novel Magnanthropus by Manly Banister. For reasons I cannot explain, this work was very popular with readers. Here comes the sequel.

In the first novel, the main character crossed over from a future Earth to the planet Eloraspon when the two worlds somehow collided with each other across dimensions. As far as he knew, Earth was destroyed. He also found out that he was a Magnanthropus, which is a kind of superman with special mental powers.

The sequel begins with the hero traveling from the northern continent of Eloraspon to the southern one, in search of the city of Surandanish, the ancient capital of an advanced civilization, now vanished. (His Magnanthropus powers direct him to seek out the place, for reasons not yet clear.) Along the way he meets the fairy-like beings we saw in the first story, although they don't have anything to do with the plot, so far.


The charming but irrelevant butterfly people.

He rescues a beautiful warrior princess from a monster and they fall in love so fast it'll make your head spin. Interfering with their romance are the Tharn, a bunch of nasty, ugly folks who live only to kill and enslave. The hero battles one Tharn who used to be a regular fellow, but who lost his good looks when he consumed some of the addictive substance that makes the Tharn so hideous and mean. (Take a look at the cover art for a portrait of a Tharn. The real thing isn't anywhere near that big, however, only a little larger than a non-Tharn.)

Defeated in battle, the Tharn-who-wasn't-always-a-Tharn becomes the hero's loyal companion. Together they set out after the princess, who was captured while they were fighting. They get thrown in a dungeon, but the hero uses his convenient Magnanthropus abilities to travel through walls and attack their captors.


Take that, Tharn scum!

He also acquires another ally, a fellow Earthman who tells him that the world wasn't really destroyed, although it was badly shook up. They meet the mysterious Bronze Men, who are supposed to be immortal, although the hero apparently kills one of them pretty quickly. Our trio of Good Guys wind up captured again, and this half of the novel ends as they are about to be slain by a flying monster, while the princess is held captive by the leader of the Tharn.

Like the lead novelette by MacApp, this is an old-fashioned fantasy adventure with some science fiction trappings. I suspect that fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs made up a good portion of those who praised the first novel, with a comment like they don't write 'em like that anymore. Frankly, I'm glad they don't.

Two stars.

Home to Zero, by David R. Bunch

Nobody will ever accuse this author of rehashing old-time stories. His latest offering is a typically opaque and depressing bit of prose, written in his usual eccentric style. As far as I can tell, it has something to do with a being who used to be a man, but is now all machine. He, or it, or possibly humanity in general, sent probes out to the ends of the cosmos. Now it, or he, seeks only nothingness. Maybe. Your guess is as good as mine. At least it's weird enough, and short enough, to avoid boredom.

Two stars.

Encounter, by Piers Anthony


Illustration by Robert Adragna

The protagonist lives in an ultra-urbanized future, where most people never leave their homes. He travels an incredibly long road through a deserted area, inhabited by packs of feral dogs and hordes of rats. Although the setting is the Atlantic coast of North America, he also encounters savage peccaries, and, most amazingly, a tiger. The man and the cat become wary allies in their mutual battle against the wild pigs.

It was a relief to read a story that was neither corny nor incomprehensible. It's a reasonably enjoyable little tale, which achieves its modest goals in an efficient, if unspectacular, way.

Three stars.

Midnight in the Mirror World, by Fritz Leiber


Illustration by Virgil Finlay

One of the easiest ways to look back at things is to gaze into a mirror. It's not a coincidence, I believe, that the word reflection can refer to an image seen in a shiny surface, or to the act of musing over one's experiences. Such were my thoughts, anyway, when I read the newest creation by a master of imaginative fiction.

The protagonist is a man in late middle age, divorced and living alone, who sleeps during the day and enjoys his three hobbies of astronomy, correspondence chess, and playing classical music on his piano at night. (Sounds like a pretty nice lifestyle to me, to tell the truth.)

As part of his nightly routine, each midnight he passes between two parallel mirrors on his way to the piano. As many of us have experienced, this creates the illusion of an infinite number of selves within the glass. One night, he sees a dark figure touching one of his reflections, which seems terrified. Each night the figure comes closer, until he recognizes it. Inevitably, the figure emerges, leading to a final encounter.

The synopsis I've provided makes this sound like a supernatural horror story, and that's certainly an accurate description. Will you believe me if I tell you that it's also a love story, and that the frightening ending can also be seen as a happy one?

Beautifully written, with the author's elegant style and gift for striking images on full display, this quietly chilling tale draws the reader into its world of darkness and light. The conclusion may not be completely unexpected, but it's a fine story nonetheless.

Four stars.

Nostalgia Ain't What It Used To Be

So how was this literary trip down memory lane? Disappointing, for the most part. I suppose it's only natural to yearn for the things one enjoyed at a much younger age, but science fiction and fantasy have progressed, I think, over the past several decades. It's no longer enough to have mighty heroes combating fiendish villains in an exotic setting.

The avant-garde writings of Bunch warn us, however, that's it's possible to go too far the other way, and throw out the baby of clarity with the bathwater of familiarity. Leiber, and to a lesser extent, Anthony, understand this, and manage to provide readers with something new, while paying the proper amount of tribute to literary traditions.

I wonder if, sometime in the Twenty-First Century, SF fans will look back at the stories of the Sixties with a wistful sigh, and crack open the brittle pages of an old magazine in an attempt to bring back the sensations that felt so new at the time.


An old science fiction classic worth revisiting.

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[September 18, 1964] Split Personality (October 1964 IF)

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[Don't miss your chance to get your copy of Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963), some of the best science fiction of the Silver Age.  If you like the Journey, you'll love this book (and you'll be helping us out, too!)


by Gideon Marcus

Which one is it?

It's election season, and the commercials are already out in force.  Maybe it's just my neighborhood, but it seems that LBJ is crowding the airwaves a lot more than Barry Goldwater at this point.  One effective ad notes several times the GOP candidate has made mutually contradictory statements and asks "How is a Republican supposed to note on his ballot which Barry he's voting for?"

This piece is a pretty low blow.  Make no mistake — there's no way I'm voting for a reactionary this November, but if there's one thing one can say for Barry, he's consistent.  I'd rather see some positive messaging.  Lord knows LBJ has plenty of successes to run on.

But while Goldwater's split personality may all be a Madison Avenue construct, the schizophrenic nature of IF, Worlds of Science Fiction magazine is very real.  IF has always been Galaxy's experimental little sister, the place where the more offbeat stories, the lesser known writers are featured.  As a result, it is the more variable mag, with higher highs and lower lows, often within the same issue. 

This dual nature is perfectly represented in microcosm with the latest October 1964 issue:


by Paul E. Wenzel (note the obscured "September 1964")

The first thing you might notice is that the issue was clearly intended to have a September date.  IF went to a monthly schedule in August (after years as a bi-monthly), but there was trouble at the printers, and things got delayed.

When the issue finally came, it was very much a mixed bag, with trouble appearing right from the start:

The Castle of Light, by Keith Laumer


by Jack Gaughan

Within the pages of IF, Keith Laumer's name is inextricably linked with that of his creation, Retief, that sardonic super-spy in diplomat's clothing.  What began as a more tongue-in-cheek version of Harrison's "Stainless Steel Rat" is becoming a tired series of retreads.  This particular story involves an invasion by the squamous Groaci, who take legal possession of a planet by landing 50,000 troops in cities abandoned by the native populace during a global religious ceremony.  The piece rambles, and the jokes — like the characters — are flatter than usual.

Two stars.

Mad Man, by R. A. Lafferty

The ever-whimsical Lafferty offers up a piece about androids who only attain genius capability when given their daily dose of anger enzyme.  Said extraction is provided by a group of human individuals kept thoroughly miserable through poor working conditions and constant aggravation by paid actors.  But when one android develops a kinship for her donor, the formerly angry man's heart melts, and his biochemistry becomes useless.  Can a replacement be found?

I imagine some will like this story.  I found it contrived, cruel, and rather pointless.

Two stars.

Gremmie's Reef, by Hayden Howard


by Virgil Finlay

In which a teenage surfer is delighted to find a perfect wave break on a formerly unpromising beach, thanks to a new reef.  Turns out the reef is an alien biological probe, and as might be expected, it's not a friendly one.

The surfing scenes are nicely rendered, but the third-person omniscient viewpoint, the shrieky characters, and the Twilight Zone ending all suggested a young novice of a writer.  Imagine my surprise when I checked my notes and found that Hayden Howard has been writing for more than a decade, and I've even covered one of his stories before!

Nice try, but it's another two.

Rescue Mission, by Kit Reed

Science teacher goes on sabbatical to the mountains and finds his cottage besieged with bugs.  Turns out they are the servants of Mavna, the alien beauty who resides one cottage over, and she is using the crawlies to send the prof a message: (paraphrased) "Help me fend off these three oafs I'm staying with so I can sacrifice myself for the operation of our interstellar matter transmitter!"

Reed, an author I'm quite fond of, has written exclusively for F&SF since she started half a decade ago.  This rather silly piece would fit better in that magazine.  That it wasn't published there is not surprising — it's probably the weakest story Reed has produced.

Two stars.

Monster Tracks, by Robert E. Margroff

The last piece of short fiction in the issue is by a genuinely new author, about a boy raised in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by aliens.  They came in "peace", disguised as tourists, bringing gifts and cute pets, but it was all a ploy.  Their gifts were bombs, their luggage was guns, and their pets are poison.  Our young protagonist is almost taken in by a cute rabbit-like creature before being saved by his savvy uncle.

Not much to this one.  Two stars.

Farnham's Freehold (Part 3 of 3), by Robert A. Heinlein


by Jack Gaughan

"Where's the split?" I hear you ask.  So far, this issue has been a solid disappointment — how could it be a mixed bag?

Well, editor Fred Pohl got a ringer.

Robert Heinlein is one of the masters of the field with dozens of classic titles to his name.  To be sure, his record has been tarnished a bit lately by such substandard works as Stranger in a Strange Land and Podkayne of Mars.  Moreover, the first installment of his latest serial, Farnham's Freehold, got off to a stultifying start.

But then it got better.  In Part 1, Hubert Farnham and his family (including his house-servant and his side-girlfriend) are whisked thousands of years into the future thanks to a new Russkie bomb.  That first bit reads like a cross between a libertarian screed and the Boy Scout Handbook.  But in Part 2, we meet the inheritors of the atomically ravaged Earth, the dark-skinned peoples of Africa and India.  Hugh and co. are made privileged slaves — except for Joseph, Hugh's servant.  His Black skin makes him a de facto member of the ruling caste, and he is afforded the privileges thereof.  We learn a lot about the new society, and this section is genuinely interesting.

Part 3 more-or-less sticks the landing.  It is all about Hugh's attempt to escape his gilded cage along with mistress Barbara and their newly born twin sons.  While his first attempts end in failure (and this part is not unlike the middle section of Have Spacesuit Will Travel — thrilling but ultimately pointless), Hugh's kindly master ends up sending him and his family back in time to just before the Bomb goes off, and they have a second chance at life.

It's a thrilling page-turner, and I liked the central message: decadence and depravity have nothing to do with color or national origin.  It all boils down to Lord Acton's dictum, "Power corrupts".  I especially appreciated that the story recognized the unequal status of Joseph, and does not condemn him for throwing his lot in with America's new rulers.  Whatever loyalty Joe had to Hugh, he has found his Earthly paradise — unfair to others, perhaps, but wasn't that just after a lifetime of discrimination?  Hugh is dismayed, but not surprised.  After all, whatever his libertarian aspirations, he was part of the problem.

I'd give this last part five stars except that the ending is awfully abrupt.  All told, I think the novel earns an aggregate of 3.75 stars and, if you can get through the beginning, suggests a return to form of the author.

Making Whole

This latest issue of IF reminds me of Analog a few years back, when the serials were generally good and the other material sub-par (I note with bemusement that while Heinlein's Farnham would fit stylistically in Analog, the editor of said mag would never allow a storyline where the Whites are slaves…) When all is computed, the magazine actually scores above the 3-star middle, which tells you how good the second half is compared to the first.

In any event, the vice of a split-personality magazine is also its virtue: if one can always count on one or more stories not being very good, one can also expect at least one nugget of gold. 

And wasn't my entire state founded on the search for such nuggets?

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[September 12, 1964] A Mysterious Affair of Style (October 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Georgia on My Mind

We’ve just seen that standing up for civil rights in the South is a hazardous business from the murder of the civil rights workers Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner.  It looks like merely being a Negro passing through the South can be just as hazardous, even in the service of one’s country. 

Lemuel Penn was an assistant superintendent in the Washington, D.C., school system, a decorated veteran of World War II, and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve.  There’s an annual summer training camp for reservists, and Colonel Penn went to Fort Benning, Georgia, for the occasion.  Driving back to Washington on July 11, Colonel Penn and two fellow reservists were noticed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, who followed them and killed Penn with two shotgun blasts.

The Klansmen were easily identified and brought to trial remarkably quickly—and acquitted last week by an all-white Georgia jury, according to the local custom. 

But the last word may remain to be spoken.  Days before the murder, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which authorizes prosecution of such civil rights violations in federal court by federal authorities, was enacted.  Will it make a difference, before another Southern jury?  And will the federal government reconsider a practice that requires Negroes to travel to the South where their mere presence may provoke local racist whites to homicide?

The Issue at Hand

The October 1964 Amazing is fronted by an Ed Emshwiller cover that is, if anything, more hideous than the one on the July issue, though more capably rendered.  It looks like something a non-SF artist might do satirically for a mainstream magazine article trashing SF as silly and juvenile; more charitably, like a failed attempt at an Ace Double cover that Emshwiller found in the back of his closet.  I wonder if it was meant for one of A.E. van Vogt’s Null-A books.  The guy in the shiny white flying chair (notice how much it looks like he’s sitting on a toilet?) has a forehead high enough to accommodate an extra brain, or two or three.  The contrast between this and Emshwiller's much more sophisticated work for Fantasy and Science Fiction (for example, the April 1964 issue) is nothing short of . . . amazing.

Enigma From Tantalus (Part 1 of 2), by John Brunner

by Ed Emshwiller

The cover story is John Brunner’s Enigma from Tantalus, a two-part serial beginning in this issue, which per my practice I will read and review when it is complete.  Of course its mere presence is a source of trepidation.  Which Brunner are we getting?  The Brunner of the capable and intelligent novelets and novellas he has been publishing for years in the British SF magazines, some of which have been fixed up into fine books such as The Whole Man and Times Without Number?  Or the pretentiously befuddled Brunner of his last appearance here, February’s The Bridge to Azrael?  Stay tuned.  Stars, hold back your radiance.

In the Shadow of the Worm, by Neal Barrett, Jr.

Once past the serial, the major fiction item is In the Shadow of the Worm, a long novelet by the unevenly talented Neal Barrett, Jr.  The blurb telegraphs this one: “The Beautiful Lady . . . the Android who does but may not love her . . . the Mad Villain . . . the Unutterable Menace . . .  These are stock (almost laughing-stock) figures of science fiction.  Now Neal Barrett . . . takes them and makes them vibrant with suspense, with poetry, with meaning.”

Uh-oh.

Well, the bad news is that the story is in large part an exercise in bombastic oratory and striking of poses.  The mitigating news is that Barrett sort of brings it off, at least in its own terms.  The Lady Larrehne (am I the only one tired of a human future festooned with titles of nobility?), with her non-man Steifen, an artificial person programmed to serve and obey her, have crossed space in the good ship Gryphon (“Oh, fearsome and great she is!  A league and a half of terror and love from silver beak to spiked bronze tail—a’shimmer with golden scales from steel-ruffle neck to dragon wings; and each bright horny shield as wide as fifty humans high.”).

They are now on Balimann’s Moon, presided over by the Balimann (sic), which orbits around a planet called Slaughterhouse, which apparently produces meat for the rest of the galaxy, in the form of parodic engineered animals without much to them except the edible (“terrible blind herds stumbling toward death before birth could register on feeble brains”).  Slaughterhouse in turn is ruled by one Garahnell, who ostentatiously stages phony space battles for the visitors.

But why are Larrehne and Steifen here anyway?  To see the Worm, a/k/a the Eater of Worlds, an entity, force, effigy, or something between our galaxy and Andromeda and heading our way, and Balimann’s Moon is the best vantage point (“the last sprinkled mote of sand before the great sea begins”). 

They are also here to visit Slaughterhouse, though somehow that goal gets lost in the proceedings.  Everything is symbolic, of course, as the characters point out in case you missed it.  Says the Lady: “Is there a more cutting parody of the Good and Evil we have known back there, than Garahnell’s mock war—or the birth-death of Slaughterhouse?  When I think of the life we left—Oh, Steifen, it’s hard to say which nightmare mirrors the other!”

There’s more, much more, including but not limited to the fate of humanity, all saved from terminal tiresomeness by Barrett’s sure touch with his contrived and gaudy style.  This is not at all my cup of tea, but I must concede it’s well brewed.  Three stars.

Urned Reprieve, by Arthur Porges


by Robert Adragna

Next is the trivial and annoying Urned Reprieve by Arthur Porges, another contrived little story of Ensign Ruyter triumphing over adversity with very basic science.  Ruyter is about to be sacrificed by primitive aliens to their jealous god but saves himself with a demonstration of air pressure that wows the savages.  This is dreary enough to start, but Porges notes in passing that these aliens “were quite primitive, roughly on the level, it would seem, of the Red Indian tribes of Earth’s infancy.” Doesn’t this guy know anything besides junior high school science?  Maybe he should start with Edmund Wilson’s Apologies to the Iroquois (1960), about some “Red Indians” who were arguably more civilized than the people who subjugated them.  Two stars, grudgingly.

The Intruders, by Robert Rohrer


by Blair

The suddenly prolific Robert Rohrer is here, for the third consecutive issue, with The Intruders, an improvement over its predecessors.  It’s a jolly romp about a maniac with a meat cleaver trying to avoid and defeat his pursuers, from the maniac’s point of view, set in a spaceship rather than a haunted house (and being in the spaceship is what drove him mad—that’s what makes it science fiction and not just an updated rehash of Poe).  (That’s mostly a joke.  Sort of.) The hackneyed extremity of the plot is made tolerable and quite readable by an economical style that focuses on mundane physical detail and agreeably contrasts with its loony content.  This Rohrer is getting pretty good; if he sticks with it he may produce something memorable.  Three stars, towards the high end.

Demigod, by R. Bretnor


by Virgil Finlay

The last piece of fiction here is Demigod, by R(eginald) Bretnor, who has not previously appeared in Amazing, being most frequently found in Fantasy & Science Fiction, with the occasional foray into Harper’s, Esquire, Today’s Woman, and the like.  The Demigod is a giant golden-green humanoid who emerges from his spaceship at “the isle and port of Porquegnan, where Lucullus Sackbutt’s yacht, the Grand Eunuch, swam at anchor in an emerald sea and an atmosphere delicate with hints of duck and truffle and whispered music.”

We are quickly introduced, inter alia, to Mr. Sackbutt, the Mayor Hippolyte Ronchi, “a large, middleaged woman named, of all things, Mme. Bovary, who had come to deliver Lucullus Sackbutt’s more intimate and finer laundry,” Sackbutt’s “little friend,” Prince Alexei Alexandrovitch Tsetsedzedze, “known familiarly as Poupou . . . but who had nonetheless found his way to Lucullus Sackbutt via dress-designing and interior decorating.” Sackbutt has only just come from his bath, with “a pair of lithe, young, naked Nubian girls, whose duty it was to wash him, and who had long since learned that nothing at all exciting was going to happen to them while at work,” while Prince Poupou read to Sackbutt from his projected biography of Sackbutt, patron of the fine arts and arbiter of taste.

So Sackbutt appears to be a stereotyped homosexual, and the story continues in its arch and mannered fashion to parody what was undoubtedly a parody to begin with.  The Demigod approaches Sackbutt and stares at him, from which Sackbutt infers that he has been selected to parade for this first alien visitor all the achievements of Earthly high culture, while the rest of the world looks on, until the Demigod decides he has had enough and carries Sackbutt off to a summary end.  Bretnor is adept enough at this artificial style (reminiscent of an overstimulated P.G. Wodehouse) to keep it amusingly readable enough, as long as one can ignore the fact that the whole thing is an exercise in exploiting the last prejudice that seems to be acceptable everywhere.  Two stars for execution discounted for silliness, a burnt-out cinder for moral stature.

Jack Williamson: Four-Way Pioneer, by Sam Moskowitz

An almost welcome note of the prosaic is sounded by Sam Moskowitz, with his SF Profile, Jack Williamson: Four-Way Pioneer.  This one begins by quoting a New York Times review stating that Williamson’s writing is “only slightly above that of comic strip adventure”—a review which netted Williamson a job writing a comic strip, Beyond Mars in the New York Daily News Sunday edition.  This may not be the credential Mr. Williamson would most like to see heralded.

Aside from this promotion by pratfall, Moskowitz recounts Williamson’s childhood in the wilds, or at least the farmlands, of Mexico and the Arizona Territory, his discovery of this very magazine in 1927, his success at selling A. Merritt pastiches to it starting in 1928, and his development as a more versatile writer in the 1930s.  Moskowitz describes Williamson’s 1939 novella The Crucible of Power as “a giant step towards believability in science fiction” (read it and draw your own conclusions).  As usual, Moskowitz focuses on Williamson’s material of the ‘20s and ‘30s, with less emphasis on the ‘40s and none at all on his post-1950 work (two novels on his own not worked up from earlier writings, plus one in collaboration with James Gunn and four in collaboration with Frederik Pohl, and a dozen-plus short stories); his sole comment is “But science fiction stories continue to trickle out.”

Oh, the four ways?  “He is an author who pioneered superior characterization in a field almost barren of it; new realism in the presentation of human motivation; scientific rationalization of supernatural concepts; and exploitation of the untapped story potentials of anti-matter.” You might think becoming an academic with a specialty in science fiction was one, too.  Anyway, three stars; this one is a little meatier than Moskowitz’s usual.

Summing Up

Who would have thought it?  An issue of Amazing in which the merit, such as it is, of most of the fiction contents turns on the authors’ mastery of style: in Barrett’s and Bretnor’s cases, their ability to maintain a grossly artificial style consistently enough to keep the reader going, as opposed to laughing at their lapses, and in Rohrer’s, his ability to recount bizarre and grotesque events in the plainest and most matter-of-fact language so the story will not seem as far around the bend as its protagonist.  Well, you take what you can get with this hit-or-miss magazine.

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