Category Archives: Astounding

Astounding Science-Fiction v30n06, February 1943

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_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
The Weapon Makers (Part 1 of 3) • serial by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗∗+
Flight into Darkness • novelette by J. Francis McComas [as by Webb Marlowe] +
Mimsy Were the Borogoves • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
The Man in the Moon • short story by Henry A. Norton [as by Henry Norton] +
Opposites—React! (Part 2 of 2) • serial by Jack Williamson [as by Will Stewart]
Probability Zero:
Blue Ice • short story by Henry Kuttner –
Efficiency • short story by Malcolm Jameson [as by Colin Keith] –
Noise is Beautiful! • short story by Fox B. Holden –
The Anecdote of the Movable Ears • short story by L. Sprague de Camp –

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by William Kolliker (x6), Frank Kramer (x5)
The Silver Lining • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
God’s Footstool
• science essay by Malcolm Jameson
The Analytical Laboratory: December 1942
Brass Tacks
• letters

_____________________

The first part of The Weapon Makers by A. E. van Vogt has Neelan coming back to Earth from an asteroid at the other side of the solar system. He has come home to the find out how his brother Gil died but, when he arrives, there is no record of his brother’s death. . . . His investigations take him to his brother’s last address, where he finds out from the landlady that Gil never stayed overnight in his room, and left a year ago. Later, Neelan goes to see a professor at the Eugenics Building (a childhood connection) who discreetly makes a suggestion:

“Why don’t you,” said Professor Rayburn, “try the Weapon Shops? It is not generally known, but they have an Information Center that has no equal. And now good-by and good luck.”
He turned away, without looking at Neelan, and busied himself with papers on a side desk.
Neelan’s mind was still jumping as he reached the street. Because he hadn’t known. He thought: “And I believed they only sold guns. I should have known. Why, I’ve been all over the solar system, been in several of their shops, had long conversations with that fellow on Europa—”
He felt torn; his personal despair yielded briefly to a sense of immense things, the utter tremendousness of the Weapon Makers establishment, with its stores existing in tens of thousands of cities and towns in the far-flung Isher Empire, an independent, outlawed, indestructible, altruistic opposition to tyranny.  p. 13

The tyranny mentioned is that of the House of Isher’s malevolent Empress, of who more later.
Neelan goes to one of the Weapon Makers’ shops, and we get a variant of one of the scenes from the earlier story The Weapon Shop (Astounding, December 1942),1 but with a different result:

The Weapon Shop was in a glade of green and floral vegetation; it made a restful, idyllic picture between two giant buildings. The great, universal sign of the store told its old, old story to all who cared to see:
.
THE RIGHT TO BUY WEAPONS IS THE RIGHT TO BE FREE
.
The window sign was the same, too, as in all the shops he had seen. The letters were smaller, but the words were just as positive:
.
THE FINEST ENERGY WEAPONS IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE
.
Neelan stood very still, staring at the gleaming display of revolvers and rifles. It wasn’t that there was anything new here. For years he had carried one of those marvelous, defensive guns. The weapon was in place now, fitted snugly in its holster under his left shoulder.
Seven times, in the days when he had lived by his remarkable gambling luck, that supergun had flashed its abnormal power. No, definitely it wasn’t the newness. The only thing was—
The very sight of a Weapon Shop always gave him an eerie sensation. It required a distinct mental reaching to realize that every Weapon Shop was an impregnable fort, and that bloodily earnest attempts had been made by the Isher government in long-gone years to smash the entire organization—unreal picture, amazingly hard to visualize.
Neelan shook himself, and walked toward the door. It wouldn’t open. He tugged at it, startled, thinking: Was it possible that the sensitive door was condemning him because he had so recently come from a government institute? Report said the door worked by thought; and no enemy of the Weapon Shops, no servant of the Empress Isher, was ever admitted. It—
It opened gently like a flower unfolding its petals, only faster. It was weightless in his fingers, like some supernally delicate structure insubstantial. And when he stepped through the opening, it crowded his heels without touching them, and closed behind him silent as a night in space.  p. 13

After Neelan speaks to man inside, the latter manages to get Gil’s last work address, but asks Neelan to let them investigate. However, after Neelan leaves the shop he gets a job interview—and it is at the same address, so he decides to go after leaving a note for the professor.
Matters rapidly become more perilous for Neelan. He goes to the address and finds, after being held at gunpoint by a man called Greer, that the building contains a huge (and later we find, very advanced) spaceship, half the length of which is in an underground shaft.

In a parallel story thread we are then introduced to another character, Captain Hedrock, an immortal who is a third party who acts as a liaison between the Weapon Shops and the Empress of Isher. In his room at the palace he watches a spy-ray showing the Empress condemning him to death, and ordering his hanging after lunch. He then consults with the Weapon Shop High Council, and their no-man Edward Gonish. When Gonish cannot provide any guidance, he decides to attend the meal. There is much verbal sparring at the lunch, which ends when Hedrock states the Weapon Shops can predict the death moment of any person: he tells General Lister that he will die imminently, and then materialises an invisible gun from his ring. The weapon’s vibrations cause the General’s death, but no-one but Hedrock knows what has killed him. The Empress subsequently changes her mind about Hedrock’s execution but he is arrested again before he can leave the palace.

Meanwhile, Greer agrees to let Neelan have the job on the ship but tells him that he cannot leave, and supervises him at gun-point. Neelan learns that Greer plans on selling the ship to the Empress, and that he marooned Gil and the team who developed the spaceship on an alien planet during a test flight.
Neelan soon uses his technical knowledge to overcome and restrain Greer but he can’t make him reveal the whereabouts of his brother, so he goes out to get a Lambeth mind-controller. Shortly after he leaves the ship he is snatched off the street and taken to the palace.

Neelan shortly finds himself in front of the Empress of Isher. She wants Neelan to kill Greer. They give him a projectile gun, an invisibility device, and a telestat so they can watch him. If he does not do as she wants he will die.
This is fast paced and absorbing first half, with what looks like more super-science entertainment to come.2

Flight into Darkness by J. Francis McComas3 is a story that is a thinly veiled look at a defeated Germany after the War—although the country is never explicitly named there are references to a “Leader” and eugenics, and there is this when an oblivious secretary leaves the villain in his office one night:

“Don’t stay late, sir. You’ve been working awfully hard lately.”
“Now, now,” he said. “You run along and don’t worry about me. You must enjoy yourself—not think of an old man like me.”
She shook her curly head.
“You’re not old, doctor.”
She smiled again as she went out. Linkman heard the office door slide shut behind her. The benevolent look was replaced by a scowl.
“Little flirt,” he grated. “Women in industry—bah! Their place is in the home, bearing children for the race!” He shrugged. “Ah, well. That, too, will change.” p. 43

The man is Linkman, a civilianised ex-general from the defeated nation who has been put put in charge of a post-war aviation factory. His own men are in key positions, and they start building a spaceship designed by his younger (and disabled) brother. These diehards will go to Venus or Mars (with a number of women) and start a colony there, and return to Earth one day for vengeance.
Meanwhile, one of the (presumably Allied) psychiatrists briefs Oliver (who is in charge of the occupying administration) and General Mac (who channels General Patton throughout the story) about the questionable results of Linkman’s psyche profile—but Oliver refuses to start an investigation.
Linkman’s project progress; spies are killed. Oliver himself disappears, kidnapped by Linkman’s goons. The story resolves when (spoiler) Linkman’s brother discovers what is going on and frees Oliver. The spaceship launches, and Oliver atones by taking an aircraft up and ramming it, killing himself in the process.
For the most part this isn’t a bad piece, although the melodramatic ending spoils it a little. It is quite gloomy about the probable success of any post-war de-Nazification process. An interesting, if not entirely successful, piece.

Mimsy Were the Borogoves by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore starts off with a similar idea to their recent story The Twonky (Astounding, September 1942). In this one a man from millions of years in the future sends two experimental time machines back into the past, using his children’s cast-off educational toys as ballast. One of the machines—an odd looking box—is found in 1942 by a seven-year old boy called Scott, who is playing hooky from school.

Initially the events in the story are those you would expect from an archetypal two parent, two child family situation and all that entails (the odd questions children ask, the illegible scribbles that Scott’s two year old sister Emma writes—which her brother can understand but the adults can’t, etc.). Eventually the parents begin to notice the children’s increasingly odd behaviour, especially their interactions with the strange toys:

“Any homework?”
“N-no,” Scott said, flushing guiltily. To cover his embarrassment he took from his pocket a gadget he had found in the box, and began to unfold it. The result resembled a tesseract, strung with beads. Paradine didn’t see it at first, but Emma did. She wanted to play with it.
“No. Lay off, Slug,” Scott ordered. “You can watch me.” He fumbled with the beads, making soft, interested noises. Emma extended a fat forefinger and yelped.
“Scotty,” Paradine said warningly.
“I didn’t hurt her.”
“Bit me. It did,” Emma mourned.
Paradine looked up. He frowned, staring. What in—
“Is that an abacus?” he asked. “Let’s see it, please.”
Somewhat unwillingly Scott brought the gadget across to his father’s chair. Paradine blinked. The “abacus,” unfolded, was more than a foot square, composed of thin, rigid wires that interlocked here and there. On the wires the colored beads were strung. They could be slid back and forth, and from one support to another, even at the points of jointure. But—a pierced bead couldn’t cross interlocking wires—
So, apparently, they weren’t pierced. Paradine looked closer. Each small sphere had a deep groove running around it, so that it could be revolved and slid along the wire at the same time. Paradine tried to pull one free. It clung as though magnetically. Iron? It looked more like plastic.
The framework itself— Paradine wasn’t a mathematician. But the angles formed by the wires were vaguely shocking, in their ridiculous lack of Euclidean logic. They were a maze. Perhaps that’s what the gadget was—a puzzle.  p. 56-57

The couple later become so concerned about their children’s behaviour that Paradine asks a psychologist colleague called Holloway for help. Holloway causes them more disquiet with his rambling (and rather unlikely, to be honest) speculations that the toys are from elsewhere in space or time, his musings on non-Euclidean space, and lectures on how children think differently. He does, however, recommend that the toys are taken away from the two children.
However, the children’s thought processes have gone past a critical point, and Emma, the two year old, gets Scott to start collecting various objects for her:

Scott kept bringing gadgets to Emma for her approval. Usually she’d shake her head. Sometimes she would look doubtful. Very occasionally she would signify agreement. Then there would be an hour of laborious, crazy scribbling on scraps of note paper, and Scott, after studying the notations, would arrange and rearrange his rocks, bits of machinery, candle ends, and assorted junk. Each day the maid cleaned them away, and each day Scott began again.
He condescended to explain a little to his puzzled father, who could see no rhyme or reason in the game.
“But why this pebble right here?”
“It’s hard and round, dad. It belongs there.”
“So is this one hard and round.
“Well, that’s got vaseline on it. When you get that far, you can’t see just a hard round thing.”
“What comes next? This candle?”
Scott looked disgusted. “That’s toward the end. The iron ring’s next.”
It was, Paradine thought, like a Scout trail through the woods, markers in a labyrinth. But here again was the random factor. Logic halted—familiar logic—at Scott’s motives in arranging the junk as he did.
Paradine went out. Over his shoulder he saw Scott pull a crumpled piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket, and head for Emma, who was squatted in a corner thinking things over.  p. 68

There is another hint of what is coming (spoiler) in a later conversation between Paradine and Scott:

That night, however, Scott evinced an interest, later significant, in eels.
There was nothing apparently harmful in natural history. Paradine explained about eels.
“But where do they lay their eggs? Or do they?”
“That’s still a mystery. Their spawning grounds are unknown. Maybe the Sargasso Sea, or the deeps, where the pressure can help them force the young out of their bodies.”
“Funny,” Scott said, thinking deeply.
“Salmon do the same thing, more or less. They go up rivers to spawn.” Paradine went into detail. Scott was fascinated.
“But that’s right, dad. They’re born in the river, and when they learn how to swim, they go down to the sea. And they come back to lay their eggs, huh?”
“Right.”
“Only they wouldn’t come back,” Scott pondered. “They’d just send their eggs—”
“It’d take a very long ovipositor,” Paradine said, and vouchsafed some well-chosen remarks upon oviparity.
His son wasn’t entirely satisfied. Flowers, he contended, sent their seeds long distances.
“They don’t guide them. Not many find fertile soil.”
“Flowers haven’t got brains, though. Dad, why do people live here?”
“Glendale?”
“No—here. This whole place. It isn’t all there is, I bet.”
“Do you mean the other planets?”
Scott was hesitant. “This is only—part—of the big place. It’s like the river where the salmon go. Why don’t people go on down to the ocean when they grow up?”
Paradine realized that Scott was speaking figuratively. He felt a brief chill. The—ocean?  p. 67

Before the climax of the story there is a short section which details what happened to the first time machine/box sent into the past: this has a girl telling her Uncle Charles a nonsense rhyme she has made up. The two are Charles Dodgson (“Lewis Carroll”), and Alice Pleasance Liddell (the Alice of Alice in Wonderland): the poem later produced is Jabberwocky.4 This part sets up the end of the story:

Downstairs the telephone stopped its shrill, monotonous ringing. Paradine looked at the paper he held.
It was a leaf torn from a book. There were interlineations and marginal notes, in Emma’s meaningless scrawl. A stanza of verse had been so underlined and scribbled over that it was almost illegible, but Paradine was thoroughly familiar with “Through the Looking Glass.” His memory gave him the words‍
.
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimbel in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe
.
Idiotically he thought: Humpty Dumpty explained it. A wabe is the plot of grass around a sundial. A sundial. Time— It has something to do with time. A long time ago Scotty asked me what a wabe was. Symbolism.
Twas brillig—
A perfect mathematical formula, giving all the conditions, in symbolism the children had finally understood. The junk on the floor. The toves had to be made slithy—vaseline?—and they had to be placed in a certain relationship, so that they’d gyre and gimbel.
Lunacy!
But it had not been lunacy to Emma and Scott. They thought differently. They used x logic. Those notes Emma had made on the page—she’d translated Carroll’s words into symbols both she and Scott could understand. The random factor had made sense to the children. They had fulfilled the conditions of the time-span equation. And the mome raths outgrabe—
Paradine made a rather ghastly little sound, deep in his throat. He looked at the crazy pattern on the carpet. If he could follow it, as the kids had done But he couldn’t. The pattern was senseless. The random factor defeated him. He was conditioned to Euclid.
Even if he went insane, he still couldn’t do it. It would be the wrong kind of lunacy. His mind had stopped working now. But in a moment the stasis of incredulous horror would pass— Paradine crumpled the page in his fingers. “Emma, Scotty,” he called in a dead voice, as though he could expect no response.
Sunlight slanted through the open windows, brightening the golden pelt of Mr. Bear. Downstairs the ringing of the telephone began again.  p. 69

This is a story deserving of its classic status, for its transcendent ending if nothing else, although I note in passing that there are also some interesting and atypical (for SF) observations about children.5 That said, it is a bit baggy in places (Holloway’s comments are probably more discursive than the story needs) and, in general, feels longer than necessary.

The Man in the Moon by Henry A. Norton is an odd, atmospheric story about a strange man who turns up at an observatory with a 200-inch telescope and starts making a bench for his work. It has unusual properties:

The bench was constructed from some plastic metal, rough and pitted, but solid-looking. As Ferris said afterward, it looked like the metal had been chewed into shape. Raven rubbed his hand reflectively over the surface and withdrew it at once.
“Not a very level working plane, Sereda,” he said.
“It will smooth itself,” Sereda ventured.
“What is it?” asked Ferris, touching the bench gingerly. It had a curious feel, a faint resilience. Ferris had a momentary impression that the bench was feeling him, appraising him, as he touched it. Sereda mumbled something incomprehensible in answer to the question, and Raven announced it was time to get to work as though he were glad to dismiss the bench from his mind.
Trouble was, it wouldn’t stay dismissed.
The subject came up again the next night when Raven came in about nine. Ferris was up on the platform, and Sereda was in his corner on the main floor of the building.
“He must have polished on that bench all day,” said Ferris in amusement. “We should turn him loose on some of the brass work. See how shiny he got it?”
“I saw it,” Raven answered shortly.
Bob Ferris looked at him in surprise. It was one of the few times he had ever heard Raven speak abruptly. He followed the direction of the older man’s gaze. The astronomer was looking at Sereda’s workbench. It looked small from that elevation, and every plane of it showed a reflection, as if light were striking it from every direction.  p. 72

As matters progress, it becomes obvious (spoiler) that Sereda is not human. Throughout the story he is obsessed with light and, eventually, the head of the observatory convinces Sereda that he would have constant light on the moon, and he leaves. The moon then becomes brighter and brighter. . . .
This doesn’t entirely work as a story (the direction of travel changes after this last suggestion) but until that point it is, like the McComas story, an interesting piece, in this case because of Serada’s strange obsessiveness.
It has a nice, though inaccurate, last line, “Just imagine, no more dark nights” (presumably the moon would only shine brightly on the nights that it is seen, i.e. dependent on phase and cloud cover).

The second part of Opposites—React! by Jack Williamson does not get off to a good start. Anders and Ann spend more time together as they travel to the Invader/seetee spaceship, during which we suffer from more tin-eared dialogue: Anders now calls Ann (technically his adversary) “bright-eyes”, “darlin’”, and “precious” as well as “beautiful” and “gorgeous”. There is probably a SF convention drinking game to be had out of this—you take turns reading the story aloud and have a drink at every endearment. Paramedics would need to be in attendance as you would get very, very drunk.
When Anders isn’t all over Ann he fends off his first officer Protopov, who appears to be channelling his inner Cro-Magnon man.

Once they are within visual range of the Invader and Martian spaceships (this happens while Anders is having a platonic breakfast with Anne) Anders orders his gunners to open fire on the latter, as you would when there is no apparent movement and it does not seem a threat. This has the effect of driving it towards the Invader/seetee ship, and there is a huge explosion when normal and seetee matter meet. This destroys the Martian ship and leaves the Invader with minor damage. After this dumb move, Anders and Ann (she has seetee handling experience, he does not) go across to the Invader ship, and the story picks up somewhat.
When the pair arrive there they note that the rusty looking side of the ship is normal material and safe to stand on (Ann uses a piece of wire to test it). They then find the normal side of the ship connects to the seetee side by way of a number of disks—base plates—and they find one of them missing, presumably cut away by Rob McGee. Ann tells Anders it will be dangerous to cut out another and, if he attempts this, he will be on his own—she won’t assist an Interplanet man.

Inside the ship they find a motionless spacesuited body:

The searching beam of Anders’ head lamp found the dim figure, where she pointed. It was near the mighty curve of the wall. The dead man wore bulky space armor, blackpainted. He sat on the floor, with steel-clad legs spread wide apart. His arms were closed fast around a massive iron bar, holding it upright. At the top of the bar, just above his dead helmet light, was the thick polished disk of a seetee bedplate.
The sight was grotesque. Anders thought the dead man resembled some clumsy toy, embracing the stem of a queer metal mushroom. He choked back a shocked, mirthless laugh.
The man in the black armor was really dead.
His rigid, unnatural posture made that certain. With the slow escape of body heat from the suit, his flesh was probably already frozen nearly as hard as the iron stalk he supported.
“It isn’t Cap’n Rob.” Ann’s whisper had a shaky relief. “But who could it be? And why was he just sitting there, holding that thing in his arms?”
“S’pose he’s one of the men from the Martian,” Anders said. “Might be von Falkenberg, himself. He wanted one of those bedplates for a model, like your friend McGee. Prob’ly intended to carry it out to his ship. Maybe weld it to the hull—’course he couldn’t take it inside.”
Their lights probed upward.
“There’s where he got it,” Ann whispered suddenly. “He cut it out from under that ramp—” From the quiver of her breathless voiced he knew she shuddered. “But what killed him?”
“Prob’ly ran a hand cutting torch off his own battery pack,” Anders suggested, “Used more juice than he thought. The bedplate has a couple of tons of mass, with that long stem. Maybe he forgot this permanent field. Anyhow, when he got the thing cut loose, he didn’t have power left to lift it.”
Ann’s voice shivered. “And he couldn’t put it down!”
“Not without blowing himself through the roof.” Anders stared at the figure in black. “The ramp was too high to lean it on, and he couldn’t let the seetee part touch the floor. He just had to sit and hold it balanced on the stem, till his batteries gave out and his air unit quit. Waiting, maybe for his friends to come back. Only they didn’t come.”  p. 108

Anne wants to leave the ship as she thinks it is a death trap but Anders perseveres, and Ann later has to grab him before he goes down an ore chute and is disintegrated. They come across more dead bodies, before finding Rob McGee wandering around in the depths of the ship (he is arrested but also saves Anders’ life later by telling him about the ship’s electrical rails.)
When the three of them finally exit the ship (spoiler) they see Ander’s ship Challenger very close, and it fires at them! Ander’s first officer Protopov is really Von Falkenberg, and his Martian men have taken over the ship.

Anders is knocked unconscious during this attack and comes round to find Ann replacing the damaged batteries in his suit. They discuss the consequences of the Martian Reich taking the bed-plate, and then going on to Freedonia to destroy the Drake’s operation. Ann reveals that Rob has told her that the Invader ship is a power plant that can wirelessly transmit energy. They also talk about the disappearance of the seetee people when the Invader planet hit the trans-Mars planet, etc.
Once this data dump is over, McGee returns. He tells them his ship was not destroyed but hidden. They leave for Freedonia, hoping they will get a chance to warn the Drakes.
When they eventually get close to Freedonia they see a blue flash—Von Falkenberg’s ship has hit one of the mines that the Drakes had put in place around the asteroid.
The three land and meet the Drakes. McGee tells them all he has moved the alien ship so that he is the only one that can find it.
I think that, overall, this story is okay but one of its main weaknesses is the character of Anders, who is arrogant, dumb, and permanently moonstruck. Also, the story doesn’t have the same strong narrative arc and ideas as Williamson’s Legion of Time (which shows the writer at the top of his game) and, as I’ve said before, the rest of the field is improving around Williamson while he stands still.

All the Probability Zero stories (brief tall tales) are awful, and a complete waste of four pages: I would rather look at adverts. In Blue Ice Kuttner tells a tall tale of a blind space navy crew going FTL to even the odds with the smugglers they are fighting (the smugglers can’t see the light from their fluorescent tubes either as it can’t catch up with them—maybe they just need a relativity refresher); Keith’s Efficiency has a spaceship fuel system making more fuel than it can use (all the upgrade components give more than a 100% increase in efficiency); Holdens’ Noise is Beautiful! has a surgeon connecting a man’s visual nerves to his auditory ones so he can see sound; The Anecdote of the Movable Ears by L. Sprague de Camp is a time travel story about a man being charged by an animal that is something between a mastodon and an elephant. The contrived ending is like a non-pun Feghoot. This last one was the most disappointing as I’d hoped for better from him.

The Cover by William Timmins is pretty average—his best work would come later. The Interior artwork by William Kolliker and Frank Kramer perfectly illustrates the complaints in Brass Tacks. It just isn’t very good, and too many of the illustrations have people from the 1940s parachuted into scenes with standard SF furniture (look at the hairstyle of the Empress, or the hat that Neelan wears in the illustrations for van Vogt’s story for instance). The title page illustration for the Kuttner/Moore is crude work.
The Silver Lining by John W. Campbell, Jr. is an editorial about the many possible uses of silver in industrial processes, but adds that “The Silver Bloc”6 prevents its industrial use as they see it as a money substitute.
In Times to Come has a big fat lie about next month’s cover story coming from a new writer (it was written by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore):

A new author takes first place in next month’s issue—Lawrence O’Donnell’s story, “Clash By Night,”has the cover plate.
[. . .]
An excellent piece of action science-fiction for a first-timer, or an old-timer, for that matter. I’ve said before that most top-notch science-fiction writers turn in top-notch material very soon after they start trying—the first one, or the second or third, usually. It still holds. It would probably hold for a lot of people who’ve never quite had the urging to try pounding out the yarn they had in mind.
I most deeply wish some of them would now. It’s heartbreaking, though, to have someone write a lovely yarn like “Clash By Night,” raise my hope of one new man to replace some of the men now in the army and navy—and then find that, like O’Donnell, he’s about to enlist. O’Donnell comes for the first time next month; I now find it’s very apt to be his last for the duration. You can expect to hear from him again, though—about the spring of 1944 is my personal guess!  p. 39

I wonder if Campbell was doing this kind of thing (as with Probability Zero) to encourage new writers.

God’s Footstool by Malcolm Jameson is an article on geodesic surveying, whether the Earth is an oblate spheroid, etc. Some of the essay is a little unclear, but it made me go and find a You Tube video of how Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference,7 and I also learned about an interesting surveying error that caused a dispute about the Texas/Oklahoma border.8
The Analytical Laboratory: December 1942 was discussed in the review of that issue.9
Brass Tacks has two interesting letters, both critical of the interior artwork. The first correspondent, Sam Salant, Brooklyn, NY, has this:

Can it be that your interior artists have succumbed to the spell of Flash Gordon? Oh, those monsters! Kramer must work on heavy-duty sandpaper. Nothing else could give his drawings that rough-and-ready look that no comic strip is complete without. However, with the exception of the illustrations for “Not Only Dead Men,” Kramer’s work in the November issue is definitely above par—for him.
Kolliker stands alone and aloof upon his rocky pinnacle. His work is not only scratchy but downright bad. His creations are still distinguished by their perpetual look of naïve astonishment, as if they, too, were surprised at such magnificent incompetence.
The cover was fairly well done, I thought except that it seemed to lack unity. A coherent painting has a greater virtue than one whose brush strokes are technically perfect. On the whole, the cover painting impressed me as being one which was not well thought out.
Final Impressions on Art Work: Distinctly subpar. You need someone like Schneeman, who was not afraid to express himself in broad brush strokes. Finlay is out—his work is too delicate. Wesso’s work is stereotyped—all his men are twins, and all his women are asinine.  p. 92

He continues in an equally trenchant manner about the fiction:

I regret that you have allowed yourself to drift into a pattern in the selection and layout of the material. The lead story is invariably excellent; “Overthrow” is no exception. These “Dawn of Great Promise” stories are right in my personal groove. “Four Little Ships” comes in second, mostly because I liked the way Author Leinster handled a difficult idea. Third place is a scramble between “Not Only Dead Men,” “Minus Sign and “The Gentle Pirates,” with van Vogt skinning through. “Sand” should be buried under some.
Above all, Mr. Campbell, give us fewer ray guns, more Time paradoxes, less blood and thunder, more of Brass Tacks and, most of all, more emphasis on the social sciences and psychology. And, please, no more cowboy stories with Lensmen gallivanting around, shooting up the place, and raising general heck. I have had enough! War stories are all right, but kill as few as possible. Make the bullets go farther, and shoot fewer of ’em. But no parallels about Hitler. He stinks no matter what century you put him in.
More de Camp, please. He can liven up many a dull day.

The second long letter, from Arnold Greenhouse, Leavenworth, KS, is more reflective and starts by looking at the magazine’s development since Campbell’s appointment, giving a thumbs-up to everything apart from the interior artwork (Campbell pre-replies that change is coming). The rest of the letter gives a list of Greenhouse’s best stories of 1942 (you can read most of it in the page image above for Opposites-React!: his first three choices were Asylum by A. E. van Vogt, There Shall Be Darkness by C. L. Moore, and Beyond This Horizon by Anson MacDonald—referred to as MacDonald/Heinlein at the end of the letter).

This issue is more of a mixed bag than last month’s but the van Vogt and Kuttner/Moore are the highlights.  ●

_____________________

1. My review of Astounding, December 1942, and The Weapon Shop is here.

2. I’ve only briefly glanced at the book version of The Weapon Makers, but it seems entirely different from this one. In the book version Hedrock replaces Neelan in the scene in front of the Weapon Shop, before going inside to meet him!

3. I didn’t discover that “Webb Marlowe” was a pseudonym for J. Francis McComas (Anthony Boucher’s future co-editor at F&SF) until after I had read the story.

4. Jabberwocky can be read here.

5. As noted in the review of the last issue, Catherine Moore was pregnant around this time: one wonders to what extent the observations about children (and the anxiety about them growing up different) were informed by this. There is no mention of any children on Moore’s Wikipedia page.

6. “The Silver Bloc” is described on this Google Books page.

7. This YouTube video explains how Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth over 2000 years ago.

8. There is information about the Texas/Oklahoma border dispute on this Texas State Historical Association page.

9. The Analytical Laboratory for this issue appeared in Astounding, April 1943:

I observed in a previous review that Lester del Rey’s Nerves got the first score of “1.00” I’d seen. In this lab there is the first “Special” I’ve seen, for Kuttner/Moore’s Mimsy Were the Borogoves. I wonder how many more, if any, of those there were?  ●

Edited 24th October 2108: minor changes to Neelan/Greer part of The Weapon Makers synopsis.

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Astounding Science-Fiction v30n05, January 1943

Summary:
This is a superior issue that has five stories that I rated as good or better; the best of these is P. Schuyler Miller’s The Cave, a tale about an Earthman who takes shelter in a cave during a storm on Mars—and then finds it is full of native wildlife observing a truce . . . .
There are also no less than four series stories: the third ‘Settee’ entry from Jack Williamson, Opposites—React! (first of a two-part serial); the second ‘Anarchon’ story from Malcolm Jameson, Barrius Imp; Anthony Boucher’s second ‘Fergus O’Breen’ story, Elsewhen; and there is also Time Locker, the first of Henry Kuttner’s popular ‘Gallagher’ series, which feature an eponymous scientist-inventor whose subconscious invents devices when he is drunk (which is often) but who can’t remember what their purpose is when he sobers up. These last three all involve time travel to a greater or lesser extent.
The non-fiction includes the conclusion of an article on armoured vehicles by L. Sprague de Camp, and an interesting review of Anthony Boucher’s Rocket to the Morgue by editor John W. Campbell.
The cover is by William Timmins, and the interior artists are mainly the usual Astounding regulars.
[ISFDB link] [Archive.org link]

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
Opposites—React! (Part 1 of 2) • serial by Jack Williamson [as by Will Stewart] ∗∗+
Backfire • novelette by Ross Rocklynne –
The Search • novelette by A. E. van Vogt
Nothing But Gingerbread Left • short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner]
Barrius, Imp • novelette by Malcolm Jameson
The Cave • novelette by P. Schuyler Miller +
Time Locker • novelette by Henry Kuttner [as by Lewis Padgett]
Elsewhen • novelette by Anthony Boucher

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by William Kolliker (x4), Frank Kramer (x3), Paul Orban (x3), Manuel Isip (x6), Elton Fax
Re Rays • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Get Out and Get Under (Part 2 of 2) • essay by L. Sprague de Camp
The Analytical Laboratory: October & November 1942
Book Review
• by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Brass Tacks
• letters

_____________________

After another set of wonky Retro Hugo Award results1 I thought I’d try and review as much of 1943’s eligible short fiction as I can before next year’s nomination season starts. I won’t even scratch the surface of course, and it won’t make the slightest difference to the voting, but nonetheless . . . .

The fiction opens with the third entry in Jack Williamson’s ‘Seetee’ series, Opposites—React! The previous stories set up a future solar system that has an uneasy truce or ‘Mandate’ between Earth, Mars and Jupiter, etc., with the settlers of the asteroid belt caught in the middle and unable to gain their independence. These latter also have to contend with regular showers of seetee (antimatter) passing through the belt, with potentially devastating consequences (when seetee meets normal matter there is a cataclysmic release of energy and radiation).
The story begins with Captain Paul Anders, one of the characters from the last story, in Austin Hood’s office. Hood is the Chief Commissioner of the High Space Mandate, an unstable planetary coalition, who pressures Anders to withdraw his application for retirement from Interplanet (an Earth based mining company) by pointing out that the planetary truce will eventually fail and that there will be war between Earth and the other planets. Anders agrees and is told to get the asteroid colonists’ secret method of handling seetee for Interplanet (as whoever has antimatter weapons will win any war). Hood also shows Anders a stolen film of an alien ship in space. When the person making the film fires a bullet at it there is an incandescent matter-antimatter reaction. The ship is obviously made of seetee and is therefore evidence of seetee life!
Anders then sets off for an asteroid called Pallasport to quiz one of the four key characters from the previous stories, Rob McGee (who is partners with Jim Drake and his son Rick in a company trying to exploit seetee). While McGee is provisioning his ship Anders quizzes him about whether he has found any seetee artefacts. McKee tells him to talk to Karen (an old romantic interest of Anders, since engaged to Rick Drake) who subsequently distracts Anders at lunch while McGee slips off in his ship.

The rest of the first part takes Anders to another asteroid, Obania, where he tracks down Ann O’Banion and forces her to use her piloting skills to get past a minefield to the surface of Freedonia, an independent asteroid where McKee and the Drake’s seetee lab is located.
Anders then gets the father and son to show him their research into seetee. They show him the seetee material they have collected by use of electromagnetic grapples (these operations were detailed in the first story) but Drake senior states they have failed to find a way to work with the material, demonstrating a hammer and anvil setup that is dangerously unstable.

While Anders is trying to convince the pair to work for Interplanet, McGee photophones the Drakes to tell them he has found the seetee ship and also a bedplate they can use to fix their anvil. However, a hostile Martian called Von Falkenberg has found him and damaged his ship. Anders sets off to rescue McGee, accompanied by Anne.
This first part of the serial is a bit creaky and shows Williamson’s recurrent faults: fairly crude prose—he repeatedly describes Rick’s hair as “bronze” and, similarly, his father’s as “roan”; there is also some quite unsophisticated love interest between Anders and Ann. Anders repeatedly calls Ann, his supposed adversary but someone he spends far too much time mooning over, “gorgeous” or “darling”. I mention this not out of modern-day political correctness but because it shows that Williamson has a tin ear for normal dialogue. The main problem this piece has, however, is that it doesn’t really show any evolution in Williamson’s writing since The Legion of Time (and is some respects this story is a move backwards), and therefore struggles to hold its own against the competition. That said, it moves along well enough, and sets up the story for a potentially intriguing second half.

Backfire by Ross Rocklynne takes place in the year 3555 AD, and is narrated by Bruce, one of that society’s immortals and the person responsible for deciding whether a 20th Century man called Greely will also be allowed to become an immortal (Greely is there, we learn later, by some form of time-travel that is never elaborated on). When Bruce refuses Greely immortality, the latter threatens to use his powers as a demagogue to stir up unrest.
The story explicitly references Hitler at one point after one of Greely’s speeches on radio:

Greeley showed up on the dot, half an hour after the broadcast. He was wiping his heavy face.
“I’ve got ’em yelling now, ‘Down with immortality.’ Sometimes I scare myself. I made a labor chain out of five thousand department stores in the States—back in my time—but that took some talking and pamphlets and banners. All you got to do here is talk; say anything. You’re a bunch of dopes. I got trouble holding them in now.”
He sat down heavily. “Tomorrow they’ll bust loose if I give ’em the word, Cort. Unless I do something about it. What is it about my voice that gets ’em? Must be the same thing that Hitler had. Hitler was a dictator,” he explained, but Bruce nodded. “He was going strong when I was spirited away.” He scowled in memory.
“Whatever happened to him, anyway?”
“He died in Spitzbergen in 1944,” said Bruce. “He was defeated in the spring of 1943.”  p. 41

After more of Greely’s speeches and the consequent social unrest, Bruce feels forced to grant Greely his wish—but the biter is bit (spoiler: a youthful mob kill Greely when they find that he has taken the immortality treatment that he was protesting against).
The problem with the story is that it just does not convince, failing entirely to show why this stable future society (it is no Weimar Republic) would be subverted by Greely’s speeches (the content is waffle, and the explanation of their effect is cod psychology).
This is the worst of Rocklynne’s stories I’ve read so far.

The Search by A. E. van Vogt has its amnesiac protagonist Blake waking up in hospital to find that he cannot remember the events of the previous two weeks. Later his boss tells him where he was during the first week (Blake is a salesman and had placed orders from several locations on a planned route), so Blake picks up the trail at a place called Warwick Junction. There he (conveniently) bumps into a man called Bill Kellie who provides the next piece of the puzzle.
Once they are on the train to Kissling, Blake hears of a previous journey there, and that Kellie had demonstrated to Blake a pen that writes in multiple colours and which never emptied (it still worked after he filled a cup full with ink). After the demonstration a stranger in the seat opposite had asked to look at the pen and it broke in his hands, despite supposedly being unbreakable. Shortly after this, Selanie, the woman who originally sold the pen to Kellie (and who sells other futuristic devices that her father supposedly invents on the train) had arrived in the carriage. When Kellie showed her the broken pen she looked shocked and, when Kellie pointed out the man who broke it, the shock had turned to fear and she had fled. Blake had followed.

After hearing Kellie’s story, Blake goes to Kissling Junction to look for Selanie. He finds out where her and her father live, and talks to a woman and son nearby. They tell him that he was here before and explain that he went into their trailer and looked around (the boy, again conveniently, is a snoop and followed Blake).
Blake goes to the site of the trailer for the second time but it is no longer there, so he takes the train back to Warwick Station. During the journey he hears a man breaking a child’s pen and the mother’s protest. Blake goes to confront the man, and the next thing he knows he is waking up in a huge building. He explores and finds many offices: these contain files about the work of seemingly altruistic “Possessors” in various realities (this organisation seems similar to the ‘Weapon Shop’ in his other series):

First, to one of the offices. Examine every cabinet, break open the desk drawers, search— It wasn’t necessary to break anything. The drawers opened at the slightest tug. The cabinet doors were unlocked.
Inside were journals, ledgers, curious-looking files. Absorbed, Drake glanced blurrily through several that he had spread out on the great desk, blurrily because his hands were shaking, and his brain couldn’t penetrate for a second at a time.
Finally, with an effort of will, he pushed everything aside but one of the journals. This he opened at random, and read the words printed there:
.
SYNOPSIS OF REPORT OF POSSESSOR
KINGSTON CRAIG IN THE MATTER
OF THE EMPIRE OF LYCEUS II
A. D. 27,346— 27,378
.
Frowning, Drake stared at the date; then he read on:
.
The normal history of the period is a tale of cunning usurpation of power by a ruthless ruler. A careful study of the man revealed an unnatural urge to protect himself at the expense of others.
TEMPORARY SOLUTION: A warning to the Emperor, who nearly collapsed when be realized that he was confronted by a Possessor. His instinct for self-preservation impelled him to give guarantees as to future conduct.
COMMENT: This solution produced a probability world Type 5, and must be considered temporary because of the very involved permanent work that Professor Terran Link is doing on the fringes, of the entire two hundred seventy-third century.
CONCLUSION: Returned to the Palace of Immortality after an absence of three days.
[. . .]
There were more entries, hundreds—thousands altogether in the several journals. Each one was a “REPORT OF POSSESSOR KINGSTON CRAIG,” and always he returned to the “Palace of Immortality” after so many days, or hours or—weeks.  p. 53

Although the story is a compelling read up to this point, the second half is weaker with much explaining. Blake wakes up in a bed beside a woman who treats him as if he is a Possessor. She and another Possessor subsequently convince him to go back in time (spoiler) to apply a “glove of destruction” to Selanie’s father, the source of the futuristic inventions sold in Kissling. This is the place where the people who will eventually become the Possessors are all born. If the father’s sales activities are not stopped, and their consequent disruption of normal life in the area, the Possessor organisation will not come into existence.

Blake and Selanie travel back in time and use the glove to destroy the father’s ability to time travel but this also leaves them stranded in the past (there are other complicated reasons for this). A year or so later they manage to get the father to teach them how to time travel back to the present.
This story is perhaps unnecessarily overcomplicated by its temporal structure (the flashbacks and the time travel).

Nothing But Gingerbread Left by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore2 is, like the Rocklynne, another story that touches on wartime concerns, this time explicitly. A Professor of linguistics and his German-speaking honours student develop a semantic weapon (a mind worm, a jingle) to undermine the German war effort. After a short setup the story spends most of its length illustrating the effect it has on the Germans:

It was a minor post in occupied France, and the man wasn’t especially important, except that he was a good marksman. He looked up, watching a little cloud luminous in the sky. He was reminded of a photographic negative. The British planes would be dark, unlike the cloud, until the searchlights caught them. Then—
Ah, well. Left. Left. Left a wife and seventeen—
They had sung that at the canteen last night, chanting in it chorus. A catchy piece. When he got back to Berlin—if ever—he must remember the words. How did they go?
—in starving condition—
His thoughts ran on independently of the automatic rhythm in his brain. Was he dozing? Startled, he shook himself, and then realized that he was still alert. There was no danger. The song kept him awake, rather than inducing slumber.
It had a violent, exciting swing that got into a man’s blood with its LEFT
LEFT
LEFT a wife—
However, he must remain alert. When the R. A. F. bombers came over, he must do what he had to do. And they were coming now. Distantly he could hear the faint drone of their motors, pulsing monotonously like the song, bombers for Germany, starving condition, with nothing but gingerbread
LEFT!
LEFT
LEFT a wife and SEVenteen children in STARVing condition with—
Remember the bombers, your hand on the trigger, your eye to the eyepiece, with nothing but gingerbread
LEFT!
LEFT
LEFT a wife and— ,
Bombers are coming, the British are coming, but don’t fire too quickly, just wait till they’re closer, and LEFT
LEFT
LEFT a wife and there are their motors, and there go the searchlights, and there they come over, in starving condition with nothing but gingerbread
LEFT!
LEFT!
LEFT a wife and SEVenteen children in—
They were gone. The bombers had passed over.
He hadn’t fired at all. He’d forgotten!
They’d passed over. Not one was left. Nothing was left. Nothing but gingerbread LEFT!  p. 66

The climactic scene (spoiler) has Hitler preparing for a (subsequently abandoned) speech, and the story becomes interestingly meta in the last few paragraphs:

Maybe this particular copy of Astounding will find its way to England, and maybe an R. A. F. pilot will drop it near Berlin, or Paris, for that matter. Word will get around. There are lots of men on the continent who can read English.
And they’ll talk.
They won’t believe, at first. But they’ll keep their eyes open. And there’s a catchy little rhythm they’ll remember. Someday the story will reach Berlin or Berchtesgarten. Someday it’ll reach the guy with the little mustache and the big voice.
And, a little while later—days or weeks, it doesn’t matter—Goebbels is going to walk into a big room, and there he’s going to see Adolf Hitler goose-stepping around and yelling:
LEFT
LEFT
LEFT a wife and SEVenteen children in
STARVing condition with NOTHing but gingerbread LEFT—  p. 68

This is a little dated but it is a neat idea and well executed. The mindworm stayed with me for several days . . . .

Barrius, Imp by Malcolm Jameson is the second of three ‘Anachron’ stories (Anachron is the name of a trading company that conducts its business in various historical eras by the use of time-travel). I didn’t much care for the first in the series, Anachron, Inc. (Astounding, October 1942), as it was overlong and had unconvincing time theory explanations—but this one doesn’t have either of these deficiencies.
In this story Mark Barry, a former commando major, is sent back to Roman times to get control of an agent who has gone rogue. When he arrives one of the first things he sees are changes to the way that one of the temples is operating (the messengers are on roller skates and there is a modern cash register on the petitions table).
Later he meets Cassidus, the rogue agent, and learns the extent of the many, many rackets that he runs in Rome.
As the story develops so does Barry’s abhorrence of Cassidus’s corruption, but not as much as his hatred of the carnage at the Coliseum. Barry attempts to ameliorate this by introducing American football to the arena. This doesn’t work out the way he hoped:

The teams consisted of about a hundred men on the side. Each fell in in two ranks, the first crouching, the second standing behind with naked swords in their hands. All wore heavy body armor, spiked steel helmets, gaffs at their heels, and daggers at their belts. A small cloud of retiarii—lithe and agile gladiators armed with nets and tridents—covered each end, evidently for the purpose of discouraging end runs. But it was the back formation that afforded the big thrill. Each quarterback—and judging from the delighted howls from the stands they must have been popular champions—rode a mighty war chariot whose wheels were fitted with murderous revolving scythes. The other backs, of whom there were about a dozen to the side, rode horses. They carried lances and battleaxes hung at their saddlebows.
There was a fanfare of trumpets, then a single prolonged bray. As its hoarse note died, the teams plunged into the fray. The quarterback with the ball—which he carried in a net slung over his shoulders—attempted an end run, the cavalry of his backfield preceding and flanking him by way of interference. Barry’s hands gripped the stone rim of the box as he watched the horror of the scrimmage that followed. His senses reeled . . . the crash of impact as the two lines met head-on . . . the dozens of individual duels . . . the raging juggernaut plunging around the left end . . . the futile efforts of the linemen to break through the fringe of horsemen to complete their tackle by disemboweling a chariot horse. There followed the countercharge of the defending chariot . . . the hideous melee that followed when the two war buggies met head-on only to capsize into a welter of spinning wheels, kicking and screaming horses, slashing, stabbing and gouging men. Many died before the armored referees fought their way into the midst and declared the ball at rest. Barry hardly heard the next braying of the trumpet, or the clarion voice of the umpire calling out, “First down, forty paces made good. Time out for replacements.”  p. 78-79

At the end of the game Barry publicly insults the Emperor before walking out and going to the offices of the newspaper he has set up. There he dictates a story that reveals the corruption in the city. In the finale Barry is forced to fight the Emperor in the arena, a conclusion slightly marred by (spoiler) the former’s somewhat deux ex machina use of tear gas pellets and nitrous oxide. (By the way, if this duel foreshadows the film Gladiator, another scene where he only just avoids dental torture brings to mind Marathon Man).
This is an entertaining read for the most part, but weaker towards the end.

The Cave by P. Schuyler Miller gets off to a slow start with several hundred words of geological description about a cave. During this we learn that it is on Mars:

Most of the planet’s surface had been desert for more millions of years than anyone has yet estimated. From the mouth of the cave its dunes and stony ridges stretched away like crimson ripples left on a beach after a wave has passed. They were dust rather than sand: red, ferric dust ground ever finer by the action of grain against grain, milling over and over through the centuries. It lay in a deep drift in the alcove and spilled down into the opening of the cave; it carpeted the first twenty-foot passage as with a strip of red velvet, and a little of it passed around the angle in the tunnel into the short cross-passage. Only the very finest powder, well-nigh impalpable, hung in the still air long enough to pass the second bend and reach the big room. Enough had passed to lay a thin, rusty mantle over every horizontal surface in the cave. Even in the black silt at the very back of the cave, where the air never stirred, there was a soft red bloom on the yellow flowstone.
The cave was old. Animals had sheltered in it. There were trails trodden into the dry clay, close to the walls, made before the clay had dried. There was no dust on these places—animals still followed them when they needed to. There was a mass of draggled, shredded stalks and leaves from some desert plant, packed into the cranny behind a fallen rock and used as a nest. There were little piles of excreta, mostly the chitinous shells of insectlike creatures and the indigestible cellulose of certain plants. Under the chimney the ceiling was blackened by smoke, and there were shards of charcoal and burned bone mixed with the dust of the floor. There were places where the clay had been chipped and dug away to give more headroom, or to make a flat place where a bowl could be set down. There were other signs as well.  p. 84

The next section has a native grak (an intelligent biped) enter the cave for shelter from an approaching sandstorm, only to find several other Martian animals already there. One is a potentially dangerous zek, but we discover that all Martian creatures are grekka and abide, on certain occasions, by a law of mutual assistance against an inimical universe. So they all settle down and prepare to wait out the storm.
The second half of the story has a human prospector called Harrigan stumble upon the cave after his sand car breaks down in the storm. When he enters the pitch-black cave he hears something move, and uses his lighter to see what is in the cave with him:

The burst of yellow flame was dazzling. Then he saw their eyes—dozens of little sparks of green and red fire staring out of the dark. As his own eyes adjusted he saw the grak, huddled like a woolly black gargoyle in his corner. The Martian’s huge round eyes were watching him blankly, his grinning mouth was slightly open over a saw-edged line of teeth, and his pointed ears were spread wide to catch every sound. His beaklike, shining nose and bright red cheek patches gave him the look of a partly plucked owl. He had a wicked-looking knife in his spidery fingers.
Harrigan’s gaze flickered around the circle of watching beasts. He knew nothing of Martian animals, except for the few domesticated creatures the greenlanders kept, and they made a weird assortment. They were mostly small, ratty things with big eyes and feathery antennae in place of noses. Some of them were furred and some had horny or scaly armor. All of them were variously decorated with fantastic collections of colored splotches, crinkled horns, and faceted spines which presumably were attractive to themselves or their mates. At the far end of the cave, curled up in a bed of dry grass, was a lean splotched thing almost as big as the little native which stared at him with malevolent red eyes set close together over a grinning, crocodilian snout. As he eyed it, it yawned hideously and dropped its head on its crossed forepaws—paws like naked, taloned hands. It narrowed its eyes to crimson slits and studied him insolently from under the pallid lids. It looked nasty, and his fingers closed purposefully over the butt of his gun.  p. 87-88

Initially the uneasy truce is maintained but, later on, Harrigan unintentionally disturbs the equilibrium. Then the situation unravels.
This story has some good (if slow-moving) description at the start and the latter part of it is quite suspenseful: a pretty good piece, even if it does use an outdated version of Mars as its setting.3

Henry Kuttner’s second appearance in this month’s magazine is with Time Locker, the first of his ‘Gallegher’ series.4 You can get a flavour of the story from the first paragraph:

Galloway played by ear, which would have been all right had he been a musician—but he was a scientist. A drunken and erratic one, but good. He’d wanted to be an experimental technician, and would have been excellent at it, for he had a streak of genius at times. Unfortunately, there had been no funds for such specialized education, and now Galloway, by profession an integrator machine supervisor, maintained his laboratory purely as a hobby. It was the damnedest-looking lab in six States. Galloway had spent ten months building what he called a liquor organ, which occupied most of the space. He could recline on a comfortably padded couch and, by manipulating buttons, siphon drinks of marvelous quantity, quality, and variety down his scarified throat. Since he had made the liquor organ during a protracted period of drunkenness, he never remembered the basic principles of its construction. In a way, that was a pity.  p. 100

This is the gimmick that runs throughout the series: Gallegher can only invent things when he is drunk, and can’t necessarily remember what they do or how they work when he is sober.
There are three other elements to this particular story: the first is an associate of Gallagher’s called Vanning, who is an amoral, crooked lawyer (one of his sidelines is renting out a neurological gun that Gallagher invented to various killers—it is popular because it leaves no marks or evidence); the second is another of Gallagher’s inventions, a box that shrinks things put into it as well as changing their form:

“That—locker,” Vanning said, frowning in a baffled way. “What the—” He got up. The metal door hadn’t been securely latched and had swung open. Of the smock Vanning had placed within the metal compartment there was no trace.
[. . .]
Vanning went over and swung a fluorescent into a more convenient position. The locker wasn’t empty, as he had at first imagined. The smock was no longer there, but instead there was a tiny blob of—something, pale-green and roughly spherical.
“It melts things?” Vanning asked, staring.
“Uh-huh. Pull it out. You’ll see.”
Vanning felt hesitant about putting his hand inside the locker. Instead, he found a long pair of test-tube clamps and teased the blob out. It was—Vanning hastily looked away. His eyes hurt.
The green blob was changing in color, shape and size. A crawling, nongeometrical blur of motion rippled over it. Suddenly the clamps were remarkably heavy.
No wonder. They were gripping the original smock.
“It does that, you know,” Galloway said absently. “Must be a reason, too. I put things in the locker and they get small. Take ’em out, and they get big again. I suppose I could sell it to a stage magician.” His voice sounded doubtful.  p. 102

The final element is a bag full of bonds stolen by one of Vanning’s clients and in need of a hiding place. Vanning hides the bag in the locker, but after it shrinks and changes into a small bronze egg he notices a small creature in the locker pick it up. Vanning reaches inside and crushes the creature. When the police search the locker they do not see the bag. After they leave, Vanning checks the locker and both creature and the bag/bronze egg have both disappeared.

Vanning pays Gallagher to investigate, and the latter comes up with a theory (presumably after a few drinks) that the space inside the locker is in the future, where the universe has shrunk in size and different geometric rules may apply: this would explain the size reduction and change of shape. This ‘scientific’ explanation is one of those woolly unconvincing ones but the story has a clever twist ending where Vanning (spoiler) gets his just desserts: when he unexpectedly finds the bag in his office a week or so later, a hand comes down from above to crush him . . . .

Elsewhen by Anthony Boucher is the second story in his ‘Fergus O’Breen’ series. O’Breen, having had a bit part in The Compleat Werewolf (Unknown, April 1942),5 doesn’t actually appear in this one until we are several pages in, and after we have been introduced to an inventor called Mr Partridge and his nagging Aunt Agatha:

“My dear Agatha,” Mr. Partridge announced at the breakfast table, “I have invented the world’s first successful time machine.”
His sister showed no signs of being impressed.
“I suppose this will run the electric bill up even higher,” she observed. “Have you ever stopped to consider, Harrison, what that workshop of yours costs us?”
Mr. Partridge listened meekly to the inevitable lecture. When it was over, he protested, “But, my dear, you have just listened to an announcement that no woman on earth has ever heard before. For ages man has dreamed of visiting the past and the future. Since the development of modern time-theory, he has even had some notion of how it might be accomplished. But never before in human history has anyone produced an actual working model of a time-traveling machine.”
“Hm-m-m,” said Agatha Partridge. “What good is it?”  p. 112

The rest of this setup has Partridge use the machine’s limited ability to go forty-five minutes into the past to commit the locked-room murder of a relative (this will make his aunt the next in line to inherit from an even older relation). However, the murdered relative’s assistant Simon is in the locked room when the murderer vanishes to the past and is blamed for the crime. Simon’s fiancée Linda employs Fergus O’Breen to clear his name.

O’Breen interviews Linda and quickly deduces that Partridge is a likely suspect (he essentially follows the money and a couple of other leads) but then has to work out how to prove it. A game of cat and mouse ensues between O’Breen and Partridge that induces the latter to use his time machine to attempt another murder.
I thought this was going to be so much fluff at the beginning of the story—the initial section is a little affected—but it turns into a clever and slick time-travel cum locked-room murder story.

•••

The Cover is by William Timmins and is his third effort for the magazine: I think it is for the Williamson piece (the balanced gun blisters are in the text, and the spaceship is similar to the illustration on p. 22). The black surround is atypical for Astounding, but it works for what would otherwise be a dark illustration.
The best of the Interior artwork this issue is probably by Paul Orban. I like his strong diagonal for the title page of The Search, and the wide two page spot. This widescreen flexibility is also used to good effect by Frank Kramer in the title page for Elsewhen; he rather phones it in for his other illustrations though. Kolliker’s contributions are fine, just a little old-fashioned, and Manuel Isip’s are, as usual, a little too comic book for me. That said, his ‘three test tubes’ illustration for Time Locker is a striking image, and a favourite of mine from this issue. Elton Fax’s drawing for The Cave is a little amateurish-looking.
Re Rays is a one page editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr. about the advantages of bullets over death, heat, or disintegration rays.

Get Out and Get Under is the second part of an essay by L. Sprague de Camp. In this (perhaps slightly overlong) half he examines the history and development of the armoured train, car, and tank.

The Analytical Laboratory: October & November 1942 results will be discussed in the reviews for those magazines (when, if ever, I get around to reading them).6
At the end of Boucher’s story there is a short Book Review of his new murder mystery novel, Rocket to the Morgue, by John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell explains why he is reviewing a non-SF novel in the pages of Astounding:

This is not a science-fiction yarn; it’s straightforward whodunnit, by a whodunnit regular, author of several such. As a mystery novel, it doesn’t get a review in Astounding’s pages. But—H. H. Holmes is writing for us now, a result of having joined the Manana Literary Society, the group of fantasy and science-fiction writers that centered around Bob Heinlein’s home in Hollywood before Pearl Harbor. And the story, straight murder mystery that it is—is laid in and about the Manana Literary Society. Half a dozen of your favorite authors and mine are prime characters in the book. Somewhat disguised, somewhat blended and somewhat distorted by the inexorable necessities of a mystery yarn; you’ve got to have a couple of villains, and several suspicious characters. The only sciencefictionry in the story is the murder method—a rocket does help the victim on his way to the morgue. But that’s as it should be; if the author were free to pull any imaginative gadget out of his hat, neither the detective nor the reader would stand a chance of solving it.
This yarn’s beauty, from the science-fictionist’s viewpoint, is in the characters involved. Knowing the group, I can state that the Manana Literary Society scenes have the air of being straight reporting rather than fiction. A number of the incidents mentioned happened that way, though not always to the characters accredited. The necessity of compression of several people into one “character” changes them a little, but the feel of the whole setup is perfect. If you know the members of the M. L. S., you need the book.
If you know them only through their writing, you can meet them. And if you read Astounding, you know them that way—Bob Heinlein, Cleve Cartmill, Anthony Boucher, Anson MacDonald, Roby Wentz, Lewis Padgett, Will Stewart, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, who is Mrs. Kuttner, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton and half a dozen others . p. 127

Campbell finishes with a brief resume of the plot:

The basis of the story is the literary profiteering of one Hilary Foulkes, sole controller of the literary estate of his late, great father, Fowler Foulkes, author of the Dr. Derringer stories. The Dr. Derringer stories being early science-fiction stories that made a tremendous impression, widely known all over the world. But Hilary Foulkes is sitting tight on the copyrights, charging outrageous and disastrous fees for the use of anything associated with the works of his father. The result is that every writer, agent and editor in the field feels that a fatal accident would bring about a great improvement in Hilary. Since all the members of the Manana Literary Society are active in the field, and each has been directly damaged by some action of the foppish and tight-fisted Hilary, every member is open to suspicion when Hilary starts getting presents of candied cyanide and packages that tick.
Which means that the detective—and hence the reader—is exposed to the Manana Literary Society in full action. Since H. H. Holmes is himself a recently joined member, it’s a good analysis of what makes science-fiction, and why. Oh, incidentally—it’s a first-rate murder mystery, too. p. 127

I’ve haven’t read Boucher’s book but, on the strength of the above, I’m going to dig it out.7

Brass Tacks has only four letters this month but there is a lot of comment about the artwork, most of it negative (a number of the regulars including cover artist Howard Brown have joined the military). Manson Brackney, Minneapolis, MI, has this about clever stories:

First, of course, is “Not Only Dead Men.” Von Vogt really scores a topper with this one [. . .] this well-written, and above all, interesting story. What I mean by interesting is that, while I like to exercise my mind with some of these mental jigsaw puzzles of brain-teasers, I am not able to digest story after story of this type issue after issue. I can’t help but feel that most of the stories in recent issues have only increased my admiration of your writers’ cleverness. I long for the old emotional story and for the “good old days” of heroes and heroines. Don’t misunderstand me, I like a clever intellectual story as well as the next fellow, but I am not able to “lose myself” in this type of story, but can only say, “What a clever story.” p. 128

And Art Saha of Hibbing, MI, has this about war stories:

Well, you ask us if we’d like to see more war stories. I say “No!” Let’s fight this war in actuality, not in fiction. After all that’s all we hear about and read about, so let’s save our magazine for “avenues of escape.” Now don’t get me wrong. It isn’t that I want to get away from all mention of this war, but the thing is that too often time proves the ideas in the story silly. Witness “Final Blackout,” but if you can get another story as powerful as that one, I say print it even though it might be all wrong in its political aspects. p. 129

•••

A superior issue, with five stories that rate good or better. ●

_____________________

1. The 1943 Retro Hugo Awards (awarded in 2018 for fiction published in 1942) went to Waldo by Robert A. Heinlein for best novella, Foundation by Isaac Asimov for best novelette, and The Twonky by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore for best short story. I don’t have a particular problem with the novella or short story choices (although the latter is a clunky effort in a generally weak group of nominees) but it is pretty obvious that the Asimov won due to the name recognition of the entire ‘Foundation’ series. If the voters had gone for Bridle and Saddle (the second in the ‘Foundation’ series and by far the better of the two stories nominated) I wouldn’t have so much of a problem, even though I preferred van Vogt’s The Weapon Shop.
I realise that we are not necessarily supposed to emulate the voters of 1943 but the ‘Foundation’ series produced much better work later on so you would think that it would make more sense to give a later story an award (and, indeed, The Mule won the 1946 Retro Hugo for best novel in 1996). Given that the trilogy has also won a ‘Best All-Time Series’ Hugo in 1966, you have to wonder how many more Hugos the voters are going to give this series? Is it going to win one every time a ‘Foundation’ story is on the ballot?
As well as the above choice there have been previous winners like How We Went to Mars by Arthur C. Clarke (Amateur Science Stories, March 1938) instead of, say, Helen O’Loy by Lester del Rey; and To Serve Man by Damon Knight (Galaxy Nov 1950) instead of Coming Attraction by Fritz Leiber or Born of Man and Woman by Richard Matheson. One wonders if the only three criteria operating here are (a) title recognition, (b) writer name recognition, and (c) teenage reading memories viewed through fifty years of rose-tinted glass.
I note in passing that Locus reports there were 703 final ballots for the 1943 Retro Hugos but only 203 nominating ones. That is not a healthy ratio, and suggests a badly informed group of voters. There is a detailed breakdown of the voting for the 1943 awards here.
There are other comments on the web about the dysfunctionality of the Retro Hugos: here are some from Jason Sanford and Cora Buhlert.

2. Campbell would depend, from 1943 onwards, on Kuttner and Moore (and van Vogt and others) to fill the gaps left by writers who had entered military or related service. Campbell wrote to his friend Robert D. Swisher about Kuttner in a May 1943 letter (Fantasy Commentator #59/60, edited by Sam Moskowitz & A. Langley Searles, Lulu.com):

“Speaking of pen names reminds me to tell you beforehand: Will Stewart is Jack Williamson; Lewis Padgett is Hank Kuttner— and if you think Kuttner’s a hack who couldn’t, can’t and won’t write anything fit to put in a good science fiction magazine, you’re in for a most pleasant shock. The son-of-a-gun’s going to make it distinctly heavy pulling for Heinlein when he gets back. Damned if he didn’t turn out to be a genuinely beautiful writer! ‘Deadlock’ (Astounding, August, 1942), the first Padgett story isn’t extra good—though the writing is worthwhile. But ‘The Twonky’ (Astounding, September, 1942) is a nice piece, and with ‘Mimsy Were the Borogoves’ (Astounding. February, 1943) I think he’s really hitting a nice stride. He’s improving greatly with each one, as he finally throws back the hack atmosphere overboard and writes as if he really wants to and feels.
“He’s a homely little squirt and looks pretty weak. I didn’t see, myself, what Catherine Moore saw in him. I herewith take it back; he evidently has real character and real worth. They’ve been having troubles; they’re in Hollywood you know—were in the Heinlein’s house as renters while Bob and Leslyn were here. They moved out, with the intention of coming East, because Kat was expecting, (first anyone ever heard of C.L. Moore being pregnant) was homesick, and didn’t think an air-raid shelter at a critical moment was satisfactory. Kat evidently had a mild hysteria attack—wouldn’t let anyone but Hank in the house, took to her bed, more or less, and demanded constant attention. Hank, being the breadwinner, had his hands fullish. Also, just as they were about to get started East, after selling their car. Kat had to be hospitalized for a period vaguely diagnosed as a month or so. They’d leased the house—it’s miles from town, and carless.
Hank couldn’t stay anyway. Hank had to have a minor neck operation. He supervised moving day, resettled an apartment and wrote stories. With Kat, from what I can piece together in letters to me, explaining and apologizing for delay on promised scripts. And the Heinleins were complaining that he wasn’t visiting her at the hospital.
“The stories were good. too. The guy’s got more than I thought.
“The appearance of Lewis Padgett (Kuttner) is a godsend.” p. 142

Campbell then goes on to detail what his old writers are doing:

Bob Heinlein’s busy—busier’n hell. He’s got a job in Philadelphia now.
[. . .]
Lieutenant L. Ron Hubbard dropped into the office the other day. He was in the Battle of the Java Sea, and got flown home by reason of some souvenir collecting he did during a bombing attack. They removed the souvenir from his leg, and he seems 100% now—no limp. But he’s most ungodly mad. They’ve kidnapped him into a desk job, and he got a licking out in Java, and he wants almighty bad to get back out that way and give his red hair a chance. Anyway, he’s writing.
De Camp went into the same job Bob’s on a week or so ago, following Isaac Asimov about nine days. The two are now under civil service; Sprague will remain on that basis only a month or so, while his papers making him a Lieutenant Junior Grade are being put through.
“Lesseee—that leaves me van Vogt, who’s Canadian, and can’t be grabbed by the U.S. Navy, and del Rey, who’s classified as 4-F due to the fact that his normal pulse rate of 130 goes to 160 when he jumps up and down 20 times. And Cleve Cartmill, who has full use of his right hand, and can use his left hand and wrist as a hook, having had polio at the age of six months; his legs don’t work at all.
“(Hubert) Rogers in the Canadian Army; we’ve got a new cover artist possibility who looks really good—guy by the highly improbable name of (A.) von Munchausen (did one cover illustrating ‘Lunar Landing’ by Lester del Rey, Astounding, October, 1942). To have something to show us as a demonstration of ability, he did an astronomical cover. He rates; it’s as good as Schneeman’s famous Saturn cover. But he’s working on a camouflage painting method he wants to interest the Army in, so . . . . p. 143

3. I’m pretty sure I’ve read elsewhere that Campbell insisted to his writers that humans were always to win out over aliens (didn’t Asimov famously say that this is why there are no aliens in the ‘Foundation’ series?) but (spoiler) Harrigan doesn’t win in Miller’s story (and from what I can remember of Philip K. Dick’s Imposter, humans also come off worst there).
Miller’s story is in The Great SF Stories #5, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg (DAW, 1980):

7 • Introduction (The Great SF Stories 5 (1943)) • (1981) • essay by Martin H. Greenberg
11 • The Cave • (1943) • novelette by P. Schuyler Miller
30 • The Halfling • [Earth (Brackett)] • (1943) • novelette by Leigh Brackett
57 • Mimsy Were the Borogoves • (1943) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
91 • Q. U. R. • (1943) • short story by Anthony Boucher
113 • Clash by Night • [Keeps • 1] • (1943) • novella by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lawrence O’Donnell]
172 • Exile • (1943) • short story by Edmond Hamilton
178 • Daymare • (1943) • novelette by Fredric Brown
219 • Doorway Into Time • (1943) • short story by C. L. Moore
238 • The Storm • [Mixed Men] • (1943) • novelette by A. E. van Vogt
271 • The Proud Robot • [Gallegher (Henry Kuttner)] • (1943) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
306 • Symbiotica • [Jay Score / Marathon • 3] • (1943) • novelette by Eric Frank Russell
352 • The Iron Standard • (1943) • short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]

All stories are from Astounding apart from the Brackett (Astonishing), Hamilton (Super Science Stories), Brown (Thrilling Wonder Stories), and Moore’s solo effort (Famous Fantastic Mysteries).

4. The ISFDB link for Kuttner’s ‘Gallegher’ series has a quote from C. L. Moore stating, “not a word of any of them is mine.” Another three series stories would appear in 1943 and the final one in 1948, all in Astounding. They were collected in the book Robots Have No Tails, Gnome Press, 1952.

5. The April 1942 issue of Unknown, and Boucher’s The Compleat Werewolf, is reviewed here.

6. The Analytical Laboratory giving the results for this issue appeared in the March 1943 issue:

Reading through Campbell’s comments you wonder why he bothered running the lab at all: if you don’t have enough feedback for whatever reason, hold it over for a month. These results tell us nothing apart from the fact that a few readers thought Rocklynne’s story the worst (and the Kuttner too, surprisingly).

7. Campbell gave Swisher more detail about Boucher’s book in a letter dated October 21st (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“I guess ya got [Rocket to the Morgue]. [. . .] For ‘Austin Carter’ read Bob Heinlein; for ‘D. Vance Wimpole’ read L. Ron Hubbard, but it’s somewhat distorted; White never met him. only heard about him through others. The outstanding fact that White did get right is that he’s unquestionably a major personality—as you know. For ‘Hilary Foulkes’ read A. Conan Doyle’s son (Adrian). For Lt. Marshall read A.P. White and family. For Duncan, read Cleve Cartmill. For Joe Henderson read Edmond Hamilton, 10% and Jack Williamson, 90%. For Phynn read Schwartz (Julius). Veronica was based on a gal that tried to make Jack damned unhappy, to the immense anger of the Manana Literary Society. About 50% of the yarn is straight reporting, and 90% of the gags are. Some had to be cleaned up. The one about the spider’s blood was pulled by Jack Williamson, only he said ‘subconscious conviction vaginae have teeth.’ You can keep the proofs long enough to read, but ship ’em back when finished, please. You’ll have to have the book for the collection anyway.” p. 144 ●

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Astounding Science-Fiction v21n05, July 1938

ISFDB
Archive.org

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.

Fiction:
Voyage 13 • short story by Ray Cummings
The Secret of the Canali • short story by Clifton B. Kruse
Rule 18 • novelette by Clifford D. Simak
Good Old Brig! • short story by Kent Casey
The Men and the Mirror • novelette by Ross Rocklynne
The Dangerous Dimension • short story by L. Ron Hubbard –
The Legion of Time (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Jack Williamson
Hotel Cosmos • short story by Raymond Z. Gallun –

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Howard V. Brown
Interior artwork • by Howard V. Brown (x2), Elliot Dold Jr. (x4), Charles Schneeman (x5), H. W. Wesso (x2), C. R. Thomson
Beyond That Limit—? • science essay
Language for Time Travelers • linguistics essay by L. Sprague de Camp
Contest • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Analytical Laboratory: May 1938
In Times to Come
Giant Stars • essay by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Arthur McCann]
Relativity in Metallurgy • science essay
Science Discussions • letters
Brass Tacks
• letters

_____________________

With this issue Astounding completed its transition to an on-sale date of the fourth Friday of the month.1

The fiction opens with a melodrama, Voyage 13 by Ray Cummings. A young space officer, Jon Halory, is on a ship departing Venus when his colleague points out a good-looking young woman. Halory learns that she is the blind daughter of the recently deposed and murdered Venusian President. She and her brother are escaping to Earth.
Halory later makes her acquaintance and they spend time together: he quotes poetry to her under the star dome while she tells him about the bad feelings she has about some of the passengers. This last (spoiler) telegraphs the baddies murdering nearly everyone on board as they again try to kill the deposed President, who is actually still alive and hiding in her cabin. There are ray-gun fights, and Halory is eventually involved in a hand to hand combat outside the ship with the usurper Talone.
This is well enough told but is far too formulaic.

The Secret of the Canali by Clifton B. Kruse is another mediocre pulp tale, this time set on a Mars that has two cartographers going on a mapping mission. The main problem they have is that the canals are full of inimical vegetation and wildlife:

[They] were plenty dangerous; full of dens and sometimes alive with scaly, crawling, biting things. But they could be crossed. The leader would go ahead, dragging a rope behind him and holding a torch. The flames would sizzle some of the dry stuff and scare off the worst of the insects. When a big enough cavern down in the maze was located, the rest of camp would follow. Then the leader would strike out again, feeling his way down and around. Of course it was weird. The mass of metallike vegetation shut out every vestige of light, and there was always a queer, musty stench. Too, when you stood still and listened, the sounds of thousands of scurrying claws would make the stiff, wiry stuff rasp and whistle as though a wind were tearing through the gorge. There were often sudden drops, and every foot of the way had to be tested, lest a heavy mass suddenly give way, plunging the venturer into a dark well filled with greedy vermin.  p. 23

The narrator starts to sense that his boyish companion has a fear of these spaces but, when they eventually have to cross one of the canals, he manages without any problems.
Later they start to find signs of an ancient Martian civilisation (there are known remnants of a long dead race on the planet) and soon come to a huge wall in the depths of one of the canals.
The last section (spoiler) has them fall into a corridor that has a light at its end. There is then some discussion of an “eternal flame” and speculation that the Martians may still exist. The two men become separated, and there is a last scene where the narrator’s companion does some telepathic explaining before he disappears through the eternal flame to where the Martians have gone.

The quality improves with the next story (which heralds the return of Clifford Simak to the field1), Rule 18. This opens with Earth losing an American football game with Mars for the sixty-seventh consecutive year. One chief sports writer, Hap Folsworth, opines why:

“They just don’t grow them big enough or strong enough on Earth anymore,” he declared. “We are living too damn easy. We’re getting soft. Each generation is just a bit softer than the last. There’s no more hard work to be done. Machines do things for us. Machines mine ores, raise crops, manufacture everything from rocket ships to safety pins. All we got to do is push levers and punch buttons. A hell of a lot of muscle you can develop punching a button.
“Where did they get the famous players of the past? Of a couple, three hundred years ago, or of a thousand years ago, if you like?” Hap blared. “I’ll tell you where they got them! They got them out of mines and lumber camps and off the farms—places where you had to have guts and brawn to make a living.
“But we got smart. We fixed it so nobody has to work anymore. There are husky Earth lads, lots of them—in Martian mining camps and in Venus lumber camps and out on the Ganymede engineering projects. But every damn one of them has got Martian or Venusian blood in his veins. And Rule Eighteen says you got to be lily-pure for ten generations. If you ask me, that’s a hell of a rule.”  p. 34

This passage has more than a whiff of Campbell about it, and one wonders if it was in the original draft.
The story goes on to introduce Alexis Andronovitch, a scientist who has just completed an unspecified project, before cutting to Rush Culver, a football player visited at three in the morning by a strange man.
After all this we get most of the rest of the story from the viewpoint of sportswriter Jimmy Russell, who is sent by his boss Folsworth to find out what he can about Earth’s line-up for the next match. When Russell gets nowhere he snoops around the coach’s office to see if he can find out anything, but ends up going through a time tunnel to a Native American reservation. He finds a number of football players from various time periods training for the next game with the Martians. This is all rather corny, but quite entertaining nonetheless.

When (spoiler) the Earth team beat the Martians, Jimmy turns up at his editor’s office with his time travel story, along with an Native American (“Indian” in the story) he calls Hiawatha. His wild story is dismissed—until that is, the editor is phoned in the middle of the night:

The soft, but insistent whirring of the night phone beside his bed brought the editor of the Rocket out of a sound sleep. He did not take kindly to night calls and when he saw the face of one of his reporters in the visaglass he growled savagely.
“What are you waking me up for?” he asked. “You say there are fires out in the Great Bowl— Say, do you have to call me out of bed every time a fire breaks out? Do you want me to run down there and get the story—? You want to know should we shoot out an extra in the morning? Say, do we put out extras every time somebody builds a bonfire, even if it is in the Great Bowl? Probably just some drunks celebrating the victory while they’re waiting for the football special to come in.”
He listened as words tumbled out of the phone.
“What’s that,” he shouted. “Indians? . . . Holding a war dance! How many of them? . . . You say they are coming out of the administration building? . . . More coming all the time, eh!”
Hart was out of bed now.
“Listen, Bob, are you certain they are Indians? . . . Bill says they are, huh? Would Bill know an Indian if he saw one? . . . He wasn’t around this afternoon when Jim was in, was he? He didn’t see that freak Jim hauled in, did he? . . . If he’s playing a joke, I’ll crack his neck.
“Listen, Bob, you get hold of Jim . . . . Yes, I know he’s fired, but he’ll be glad to come back again. Maybe there’s something to that yarn of his. Call all the speakies and gambling joints in town. Get him if you have to arrest him. I’m coming down right away.”

Jimmy, however, has led the natives through the police lines into the administration building, and they have returned to the past; the time tunnel device explodes after they go through. The inventor, Andronovitch, agrees to work on a new machine when the newspaper owner offers enough money. The scientist is later murdered by gangsters (who now have problems with their gambling operations) after all the footballers return to their own time periods. Jimmy, however, is left stranded in the past.
The last scene is a darker one with Hiawatha dead from a bear attack, and Jimmy up a tree musing about being a white god for the Incas.
In synopsis form this probably doesn’t seem that promising, but this newspaper-room centric piece is light-hearted and amusing (in spite of the last page or two) and the dodgy time-travel explanations don’t detract from that.

Good Old Brig! by Kent Casey is the first of the ‘Private Kenton’ stories. This introduces the long-time private (still at this basic rank due to his perpetual waywardness and malingering) as one of the crew of a tugboat who are repairing targets while their ship does some gunnery practice. Once they are back on board the ship has a gun blow up and the captain decides to take the ship to a nearby planet to make repairs.
When they arrive, Kelton thinks he recognises the planet and convinces one of the other crewmen to jump ship and go to a nearby town for some unauthorised R&R. Several hours into their adventure, Kenton realises that he is on a different planet, and the rest of the story details their adventures with the reptilian creatures that live there. Meanwhile the captain, who has been to the world before and who knows the world is ultimately harmless (if unpleasant), decides to let the two absconders stew for a while.
This is an inconsequential but readable enough story.

Also readable is The Men and the Mirror by Ross Rocklynne, the third of the ‘Colbie & Deverel’ series.3 It starts with Lieutenant John Colbie turning up at Jupiter station and explaining to the dome commander that he is in pursuit of a criminal called Edward Deverel. During this scene we get a data dump that recaps on the two earlier stories in the series:

I caught up with him on Vulcan, near the Sun, and we found it was hollow by the simple expedient of falling through a cavity on its surface. I had Deverel prisoner then, but he proved a bit too smart for me. We were trapped there, well enough, at the center of gravity. But he figured that the gases filling the planet’s interior would expand as the planet came to perihelion, thus forming currents which Deverel used to his advantage in escaping the trap and eluding me at the same time
I found him again, but we were wrecked above Jupiter, fell into a pit with a liquid ammonia lake at the bottom. And Deverel, using, I’ll have to admit, remarkably astute powers of deduction, figured that the lake drained by means of a siphon of some height. He eluded me that way, and I was left in the pit. I finally caught on—from some deliberate hints he had let drop—and followed him through the siphon. But he was waiting for me at the other end, demanded my credentials, and extracted from me a promise that I’d stay where I was for twenty-four hours.” Colbie grinned in slight mirth. “So after twenty-four hours I came on. And now he’s gone.”  p. 76-77

This clunky start didn’t raise my hopes for the rest of the piece, and I expected a poor gimmick story to follow. This is pretty much what I got, but it has a decent middle section.
The first part, however, stretches credibility somewhat. After this interview, Colbie speculates that Deverel has gone to Cyclops, a new planet that has arrived in the solar system, because “He’s curious, insanely curious about all things bizarre, and he won’t be able to resist it”.
Matters become even more risible when Colbie arrives there and finds Deverel suffering from potentially terminal space-sickness:

Colbie knew what to do in cases like this. He went forward to the control room, manipulated oxygen tank valves, and increased the quantity of oxygen in the air. He got all the clean linen he could find, and bathed Deverel from head to foot in luke-warm water. He turned the mattress over, put on clean sheets, and then lifted Deverel lightly as a baby back onto it. Then he stuck a thermometer into the outlaw’s mouth.
He cleaned the room, occupying a full hour in washing dishes with a minimum of valuable water. Then he took meats and vegetables from the refrigerator, where they had doubtless reposed for months perfectly frozen, and started a pot of soup.  p. 81

He should maybe adopt Deverel rather than arrest him.
After Deverel recovers they decide to extend a previously negotiated truce to investigate the mirror on Cyclops (the planet gets its name from a huge highly polished mirror on the surface, almost one thousand miles in diameter). When they get there after a perilous journey, they both fall in. On the way down the bowl and back up the other side they realise there is virtually no surface friction—but there is some as they come to a halt ten feet short of the opposite rim, and slide back down.

The initial part of their time in the mirror bowl going back and forth, and the solution at the end, are interesting but, unfortunately, Rocklynne pads the episode with a lot of pointless bickering between the two men. This is a little tiresome given that most people will probably be able to think of a solution to the problem (but see the next spoiler paragraph).
Colbie eventually suggests (spoiler) an angular momentum idea that has both men spinning around each other on a rope. When they execute the plan at the apex of one of their ascents, Deverel cuts the rope and Colbie goes over the rim and sixty feet into space. He lands and breaks a leg.
We then get a pendulum lecture: the mirror has rotated under them and, consequently, only on every sixth crossing would they arrive at the point they entered the bowl, and thereby be near the ship. Deverel crosses to the other side of the bowl and comes out at their entry point, and then flies across to rescue Colbie. If both had come out at the wrong place they would have died as they would have been too far away from the ship.
At the end of the story Colbie lets Deverel go.
This has a clever gimmick and is an entertaining enough piece, but suffers from the shortcomings listed above.

The Dangerous Dimension by L. Ron Hubbard is his debut in the magazine and a terrible one it is too. This dreadfully padded story is about a professor who formulates an equation which lets him apport to any place he thinks of. The narrative has him bouncing between his study, where he is hen-pecked by his housekeeper; a university lecture hall where he is due to speak, where he is hassled by the dean about his appearance (slippers and ink stains on his housecoat); and various other locales such as the Moon, Mars, etc.
This is a typical mainstream writer’s ‘anything can happen in SF story so I’ll let anything happen’ effort, and I doubt Campbell would have bought this turkey if his bosses hadn’t previously instructed him to accept anything that Hubbard or Arthur J. Burks submitted.4

The last instalment of The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson starts with their annihilation by the gyrane averted when the Chronion materialises directly in front of them in the throne hall. When they are safe in the ship they find the object they have stolen is a v-shaped piece of iron, a simple magnet. They find McLan in the control room, where he tells them he has found the critical point in the timestream:

“The time is an afternoon in August of the year 1921,” whispered Wil McLan. “The broken geodesics of Jonbar had already given us a clue to that. And I have found the place, with the chronoscope.”
Lanning gripped his arm. “Where?”
“It’s a little valley in the Ozarks of Arkansas. But I’ll show you the decisive scene.”
The little man limped to the metal cabinet of the geodesic analyzer, and his broken fingers carefully set its dials. A greenish luminescence filled the crystal block, and cleared. Lanning bent forward eagerly, to peer into that pellucid window of probability.
An impoverished farm lay before his eyes, folded in the low and ancient hills. A sagging shack of gray, paintless pine, a broken window gaping black and the roof inadequately patched with rusty tin, leaned crazily beside an eroded rocky field. The sloping cow pasture, above, was scantily covered with brush and gnarled little trees.
A small, freckled boy, in faded overalls and a big ragged straw hat, was trudging slowly barefoot down the slope, accompanied by a gaunt, yellow dog, driving two lean red-spotted cows home to the milking pen.
“Watch him,” whispered Wil McLan. And Lanning followed the idle path of the boy. He stopped to encourage the dog digging furiously after a rabbit. He squatted to watch the activities of a colony of ants. He ran to catch a gaudy butterfly, and carefully dissected it. He rose unwillingly to answer the halloo of a slatternly woman from the house below, and followed the cows. Wil McLan’s gnarled fingers closed on Lanning’s arm, urgently.
“Now!”
Idly whittling with a battered knife, the boy spied something beside a sumac bush, and stooped to pick it up. The object blurred oddly in the crystal screen, so that Lanning could not distinguish it. And vision faded, as Wil McLan snapped off the mechanism.
“Well?” demanded Lanning, bewildered. “What has that to do with Jonbar?”
“That is John Barr,” rasped the voiceless man. “For that metropolis of future possibility is—or might, be—named in honor of the boy, barefoot son of a tenant farmer. He is twelve years old in 1921. You saw him at the turning point of his life—and the life of the world.”
“But I don’t understand!”
“The bifurcation of possibility is in the thing he stoops to pick up,” whispered Wil McLan. “It is either the magnet that we recovered from Sorainya’s citadel—or an oddly colored pebble which lies beside it.
“And that choice—which Sorainya sought to decide by removing the magnet— determines which of two possible John Barrs is ultimately fixed in the real universe by fifth dimensional progression.”  p. 123-124

This is a great scene (in what is a cracking chapter): not only does it explain the origin of Jonbar’s name (and for SF fans what a “jonbar point” is) but it also has the fate of future empires hinging on the casual action of a farm boy in the middle of Nowhereville, USA (a background perhaps similar to that of many of Astounding’s readers).
McLan goes on to explain that John Barr will take one of two paths depending on whether he finds the magnet or not. If he does find it he will eventually invent the dynatomic tensor, the dynat, a device that will make possible the release of atomic energy under control of human will; if he doesn’t he’ll invent a gambling machine and another inventor, Ivor Gyros, will later invent a less efficient machine called the gyrane, and a new fanatical religion will sweep the world.

Just as they finish discussing this Sorainya’s time ship arrives and they are boarded. There is a bloody fight during which they pull away from the Gyronchi timeship. Halloran advances on Sorainya but is paralyzed by her beauty and dies, leaving Lanning to lapse into unconsciousness.
When he comes to, Lanning hears Sorainya talking to McLan in the control dome. He goes up and they fight. Just when it looks like Lanning is also about to perish (spoiler), McLan throws a silver object from around his throat to Lanning. Lanning crushes the tube and Sorainya perishes in front of his eyes (and we are once again treated to Williamson’s Weird Tales skills):

But the silver cylinder had rolled to his foot. Desperately—and shuddering with a cold, incredulous awareness that, somehow, he was so crushing Sorainya’s victorious beauty—he drove his heel down upon the tube.
It made a tiny crunching sound.
But Lanning didn’t look down. For his eyes were fixed, in a trembling, breathless dread, upon Sorainya. No visible hand had touched her. But, from the instant his heel came down, she was—stricken.
The bright blade slipped out of her hand, rang against the dome, and fell at Lanning’s feet. The smile was somehow frozen on her face, forgotten, lifeless. Then, in a fractional second, her beauty was—erased.
Her altered face was blind, hideous, pocked with queerly bluish ulcerations. Her features dissolved—frightfully—in blue corruption. And Lanning had an instant’s impression of a naked skull grinning fearfully out of the armor.
And then Sorainya was gone.
The woven red mail, for a weird fractional second, still held the curves of her form. It slumped grotesquely, and fell with a dull little thud on the floor. The plumed helmet clattered down beside it, rolled, and looked back at Lanning with an empty, enigmatic stare.  p. 131

There follows an explanation from McLan about how Sorainya was saved from the Blue Death many years ago by using the silver tube of serum that Lanning destroyed, and which McLan had retrieved from the past. McLan further explains that this act is irreversible, but the future of Jonbar is still in peril, and gives a hand-wavey fifth-dimension science lecture that I didn’t entirely understand.
The final scene is almost anti-climactic: the pair arrives at John Barr’s pivotal moment to find Glarath’s ship and the gyrane warrior ants waiting. Lanning attempts to fight his way through but is badly injured. One of the dyons—the far future inheritors of Jonbar—appears to him and gives him strength. Lanning makes one last effort and tosses the magnet towards the pebble. The boy picks it up, the gyronchi and the Chronion disappear.
McLan has meantime taken the ship back to Jonbar to get help but dies en route; others go back in time to rescue Lanning and the rest of the Legion of Time.
Lanning time-travels to Jonbar and sees his friends, all of who have been rescued from their past deaths, and he finally ends up in the arms of his good girlfriend, and possibly his bad one too, in a clever have-your-cake-and-eat-it ending:

“Denny Lanning!”
Lethonee came running toward him, through the flowers. Her violet eyes were bright with tears, and her face was a white smile of incredulous delight. Lanning turned shuddering to meet her, speechless.
For the golden voice of the warrior queen had mocked him in her cry. And the ghost of Sorainya’s glance glinted green in her shining eyes. She had even donned a close-fitting velvet gown of shimmering crimson, that shone like Sorainya’s mail.
She came into his open, trembling arms.
“Denny—” she sobbed happily.
“At last we are—one.”
The world was spinning. This same hill had borne Sorainya’s citadel. Jonbar and Gyronchi—conflicting possible worlds, stemming from the same beginning—were now fused into the same reality. Lethonee and Sorainya, also—? Eagerly, he drew her against his racing heart. And he murmured, happily—
“One!”  p. 139

Overall this is an impressive piece both in terms of its concept and page-turning readability. I’d recommend it to modern-day readers; to those 1938 fans it must have seemed stunning.

Hotel Cosmos by Raymond Z. Gallun is another poor piece. “Easy Goin’ Dave” Ledrack is a policeman/security type who works at a future Earth hotel called the Cosmos. All alien visitors to Earth stay there in their natural environments.
Dave is notified of the arrival of 4-2-5, a particularly untrustworthy type of alien. Shortly after its arrival Dave starts to feel xenophobic feelings towards the guests in the hotel, and it isn’t long until this affects them and the staff to the point of violent disorder. Needless to say Dave suspects 4-2-5 is behind these events, and when (spoiler) he eventually breaks into his room and kills him, all ends well.
There is a bit more to this lamentable story than I have described, but not much.

The Cover by Howard V. Brown is an impressive and original piece of work that stemmed from a suggestion from Robert D. Swisher (a friend and correspondent of Campbell’s) about a spaceship “part in sunlight, part in darkness”.5
I haven’t gone back and checked, but the Interior artwork in this issue seems to have more double page spreads than normal, and they are of a pretty good standard. My favourites in this issue are (probably again) by Charles Schneeman and H. W. Wesso.
I note in passing that the artwork for Cumming’s story isn’t credited either in the magazine or by ISFDB, but it looks like Brown (and he did the cover for that story), and his in the only name on the contents page that doesn’t match up to any of the signed artwork.

Language for Time Travelers by L. Sprague de Camp sounded like it was going to be a rather dull article but I could not have been more wrong: I found it fascinating. That said, I’m not sure everyone will feel the same way (if the English language interests you—I regularly read Oliver Kamm’s The Pedant column in Saturday’s The Times, and keep half an eye on the Language Log blog—you’ll love it).
De Camp covers a lot of subject matter so maybe it is best if I just quote a few passages to give you a feel for the piece:

English of the 1500’s would sound to us like some sort of Scotch dialect, because it had the the rolled “r” and the fricative consonants heard in German: ich, ach (that’s what all those silent gli’s in modem English spelling mean—or rather, used to mean) which have been retained in Scottish English, but lost or transformed in most other kinds of English. We have a fair idea of the pronunciation of Shakespeare’s time because about then people began writing books on the subject. It’s amusing to reflect that if Shakespeare returned to Earth, he’d get along passably in Edinburgh; he could manage, with some difficulty, in Chicago—but he’d be hopelessly lost in London, whose dialect would differ most radically from his! So much for the “language of Shakespeare!”  p. 64

Sounds that have been dropped can be restored by the influence of spelling. An example is the “t” in often, which was dropped long ago along with the “t’s” in soften, listen, castle, but which has been revived by a few speakers, including the President of the U. S. Such an addition of a sound to a word is called a spelling pronunciation and is considered incorrect when first introduced. But sometimes one takes hold and becomes universal, after which it is “correct”.
Examples are the “h” in hospital and the “l” in fault, which originally (when the words were taken over from French) weren’t sounded at all.
We might here dispose of the illusion that there is an absolute standard of “correctness” to which we can refer. There are no tablets of stone stating once and for all what is and isn’t correct, and dictionaries are compiled by fallible human beings and often disagree. The only real standard, aside from individual prejudices, is the actual usage of educated people. The fact is not that we use pronunciations because they’re correct, but that they’re correct because we— or a large number of us—use them. If a hundred million people pronounce after with the [vowel] of cat, that’s correct by definition, even though not the only correct form, dictionaries to the contrary notwithstanding.  p. 67-68

The rate of change of pronunciation is probably dependent, to some extent, on the state of a civilization, and changes should take place more rapidly in periods when illiteracy is high, and schools and spelling have less braking effect. A collapse of civilization in the English-speaking world would make another vowel-shift more likely, and result in more dropping and assimilation of sounds. If our hero knows this, he might be able to make a shrewd guess at the vicissitudes through which the world has passed even before he learns its actual history since his time.  p. 68

Our grammar has been simplified about as much as it can be, so that only limited changes are to be looked for therein. We still have some irregular plurals, such as child:children, mouse:mice, deer:deer; these are hangovers from Anglo-Saxon, which had several declensions of nouns forming the plural differently. (For this undiluted blessing— the loss of a multitude of cases, forms, and rules— we are, probably, indebted to the fact that English was, for some centuries, the poor-man’s tongue. The Normans invaded England, and made their language the tongue of all educated, refined people. For centuries, all who could write, wrote anything but English—usually Latin. The result was that English was freed of all grammarians, conservatives, and formulists. The farmers, peddlers and country people proceeded joyfully to throw out large quantities of unnecessary verbiage that got in their way. By the time the grammarians again laid hands on the language, a lot of useful pruning had been accomplished).  p. 69

There are one or two unconvincing examples in the article (Scottish/British pronunciations which don’t ring true) but I’ll be reading this again after finishing the second part in next month’s issue.
I wonder if this piece influenced the writing of Anthony Boucher’s The Barrier (which is in the September 1942 of Astounding I just reviewed) and which plays with the idea of linguistic drift?6
Contest by John W. Campbell, Jr. is an editorial that floats the idea of a story contest and the prizes before going on to show that this is what already happens with the magazine’s submission process:

So Astounding can announce a contest—a contest for new, good authors, a contest that has neither entry nor closing date, nor is it limited to one prize apiece nor one entry per contestant. We’ve all gained by those past winners; we’ll gain, I know, on new winners. Better stories—new ideas.
The contest is on—and goes on.  p. 73

The Analytical Laboratory: May 1938 and In Times to Come are together on one page this month.7 After a short comment about the former (discussed here in the review of the May issue) the rest of the column is given over to plugging next issue’s contents, which will include Campbell’s own Who Goes There?
Giant Stars by John W. Campbell, Jr. starts with a discussion of Epsilon Aurigae (a supergiant star) and its companion (the sizes given in the article don’t agree with Wikipedia, so I suspect some of this is out of date) and goes on to talk about the partial eclipsing of the supergiant by its partner:

There are also two short science fillers, Beyond That Limit—? about the limits of telescopic vision, and Relativity in Metallurgy, a short piece about the non-history of hardened copper.
Science Discussions has a letter from Norman F. Stanley rebutting Arthur C. Clarke’s space flight equations in a previous issue (no doubt we can look forward to another letter from Clarke rebutting Stanley’s rebuttal), and Campbell writes in as McCann explaining the technology behind the new fluorescent lights which makes them produce a bright white light. It is strange to think that this was new technology in 1938.
Brass Tacks
leads off with a letter from Isaac Asimov, Brooklyn, New York, which says, in part:

I catalogue each story of each issue and have done so since the August, 1936 issue. Therefore the following stories are listed according to my catalogue ratings based on a five-star maximum.
For first place, I consider it a tie between two stories: Nat Schachner’s “Island of the Individualists” and the first part of Jack Williamson’s “Legion of Time” (which was announced beforehand, by the way as “Legion of Probability”. Why the change?). I have given both five stars but think the edge goes to the Schachner yarn. For one thing you can never tell how a serial will turn out, and for another I strongly like the whole “Past, Present. Future” series, having given each of the three stories printed so far five stars. And let me tell you that I don’t hand out five-star ratings right and left either. Since August, 1936 when I began my ratings, only “Galactic Patrol” and your own series “Accuracy” received five stars, aside from these three mentioned above.  p. 158

He goes on to give his ratings for the issue and concludes with this:

And now for stories which I think ought to be “panned consistently and hard”. What in the world induced you to print “Ra for the Rajah”. Do you realize that it has no plot outside of one that would fit it for some future “scienti-love magazine”. The only good point about it— which gave it the one and a half stars it rated—is the aerial polo game Peterson has invented.
And as for “Three Thousand Years”. You may be crazy about it but I’m not. I read it because I always read Astounding from cover to cover but it is only a sense of duty that impels me on.  p. 158

Most of the rest of the letters gives likes and dislikes, sometimes for an issue, sometimes they are lists of the best stories published in the previous year. There is also this, though, from Donald G. Turnbull, Toronto, Canada:

In the last six or seven publications females have been dragged into the narratives and as a result the stories have become those of love which have no place in science-fiction. Those who read this magazine do so for the science in it or for the good wholesome free-from-women stories which stretch their imagination.
A woman’s place is not in anything scientific. Of course the odd female now and then invents something useful in the way that every now and then amongst the millions of black crows a white one is found.
I believe, and I think many others are with me, that sentimentality and sex should be disregarded in scientific stories. Yours for more science and less females.  p. 162

Campbell replies:

Misogynist! Bet you hear from Miss Evans!  p. 162

Although this issue isn’t as good as the last one, I enjoyed it anyway.  ●

_____________________

1. The May issue had a copyright date of April 13th (second Wednesday of the month), the June issue was May 20th (third Friday), and this issue was June 24th (fourth Friday). This information comes from Catalog of Copyright Entries 1938 Periodicals Jan-Dec New Series Vol 33 Pt 2, available here.

2. Simak published five stories in 1931-32, and had one story appear in the intervening six years. His ISFDB page is here.
He was praised in a February 28th letter from John Campbell to Robert D. Swisher (Fantasy Commentator #59/60, edited by Sam Moskowitz & A. Langley Searles, Lulu.com):

“We were having a hell of a time getting stories. Things are looking up. All at once and suddenly, they started coming in from all the regulars, and several new ones that look promising. Among the new ones—at least I thought at first he was brand new, because he hasn’t written in so long—was Clifford D. Simak. I’ve found one he did—in August, 1932 Astounding, I believe it was (There was no August, 1932 Astounding, but its June, 1932 issue had ‘Hell-Hounds of the Cosmos’ by Simak)—and that was good. His present one is even better—a corking good yarn. Called ‘Rule 18’ (Astounding. July, 1938). Has to do with the traditional Mars-Earth football game. Earth, it seems, has been licked 67 years running—42 years without scoring on Mars.
“The Earth coach…collected a team of men…with a time machine, picking the greatest football players of all Earth history. The plot is merely amusing, not strong. But by God, the boy wrote the yarn with a finesse and smoothness that took all humor out of the plot, and made it strong as hell! It’s a swell yarn…smooth as velvet. It bounces along so fast you can’t stop to figure it out. I wrote him right away and told him check on the way—get going on the next one.  p. 82

3. Ross Rocklynne’s ISFDB page is here.

4. The imposition of Hubbard on Campbell by Tremaine is mentioned by Moskowitz in his comments on a June 19th letter from Campbell to Robert D. Swisher (Ibid.):

Some months before he had been discharged, Tremaine had taken Campbell aside and told him he thought the fiction in the magazine was getting [too] heavy. He ordered him to buy some fiction from L. Ron Hubbard, an author who had contributed to several of his other magazines, because he had a light touch. Campbell gritted his teeth at the order, but when he met Hubbard he rather liked him.* He purchased from him ‘The Dangerous Dimension’ which appeared in the July, 1938 issue. It was completely atypical for Astounding or any other science fiction magazine and should not have been bought. The plot dealt with a Professor Mudge who discovers the negative dimension. By wishing or even involuntarily, by thinking, he can transfer himself anywhere instantly, even to Mars or the moon. Appearing and disappearing as he shifted to various destinations, he disturbed his colleagues and housekeeper. He resolved the situation by working out an equation that permitted him to control his movements. In this regard he wrote to Swisher June 19: “Interested in your rating of the mag. Particularly with respect to ‘The Dangerous Dimension.’ I’ve gotten several other guys to rate ’em. including Sprague, Laura (his sister). Dona, and one of the editors at the office. They are all science fiction people, more or less, and all rated ‘The Dangerous Dimension’ highly. Sprague rated the stories on a scale of A. B. C, D, E. and gave ‘Dimension’ the only A in the issue; B’s to ‘Rule 18’ and ‘Legion of Time’. Ray’s vintage piece (‘Hotel Cosmos’ by Raymond Z. Gallun) was, I realized, just that. But as you said, it was passable, average-rate stuff, and Ray’s name is worth something to us. To some extent I’ve gotta be a hard-boiled commercial editor rather than a science fiction enthusiast. Ray gripes me—but pays the mag. ‘Hotel Cosmos’ I’d rated a greenish-blue rather than bluish-green— little higher than you did— because of the basic idea of a hotel for other-world beings and its mechanisms and possibilities.  p. 89

*Hubbard describes what happened at the meeting in his introduction to Battlefield Earth (I’ve previously quoted this in the review for the February 1938 issue, and it is repeated here for convenience):

It will probably be best to return to the day in 1938 when I first entered this field, the day I met John W. Campbell, Jr., a day in the very dawn of what has come to be known as The Golden Age of science fiction. I was quite ignorant of the field and regarded it, in fact, a bit diffidently. I was not there of my own choice. I had been summoned to the vast old building on Seventh Avenue in dusty, dirty, old New York by the very top brass of Street and Smith publishing company—an executive named Black and another, F. Orlin Tremaine. Ordered there with me was another writer, Arthur J. Burks. In those days when the top brass of a publishing company—particularly one as old and prestigious as Street and Smith—”invited” a writer to visit, it was like being commanded to appear before the king or receiving a court summons. You arrived, you sat there obediently, and you spoke when you were spoken to.
We were both, Arthur J. Burks and I, top-line professionals in other writing fields. By the actual tabulation of A. B. Dick, which set advertising rates for publishing firms, either of our names appearing on a magazine cover would send the circulation rate skyrocketing, something like modern TV ratings.
The top brass came quickly to the point. They had recently started or acquired a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction. Other magazines were published by other houses, but Street and Smith was unhappy because its magazine was mainly publishing stories about machines and machinery. As publishers, its executives knew you had to have people in stories. They had called us in because, aside from our A. B. Dick rating as writers, we could write about real people. They knew we were busy and had other commitments. But would we be so kind as to write science fiction? We indicated we would.
They called in John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor of the magazine. He found himself looking at two adventure-story writers, and though adventure writers might be the aristocrats of the whole field and might have vast followings of their own, they were not science fiction writers. He resisted. In the first place, calling in topliners would ruin his story budget due to their word rates. And in the second place, he had his own ideas of what science fiction was.
Campbell, who dominated the whole field of sf as its virtual czar until his death in 1971, was a huge man who had majored in physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor of Sciences degree. His idea of getting a story was to have some professor or scientist write it and then doctor it up and publish it. Perhaps that is a bit unkind, but it really was what he was doing. To fill his pages even he, who had considerable skill as a writer, was writing stories for the magazine.
The top brass had to directly order Campbell to buy and to publish what we wrote for him. He was going to get people into his stories and get something going besides machines.

5. Moskowitz comments on Campbell’s letters of 14th and 18th of March (Ibid.) to Swisher:

Swisher suggested a cover scene to Campbell: a space ship out in galactic space, part in sunlight, part in darkness, with several small space-suited figures on the outside. This was rendered very effectively by Howard V. Brown to illustrate ‘Voyage 13’ by Ray Cummings in July, 1938. Apparently Swisher was to receive the original back after use for his suggestion, to interpret the letter of March 14: “Per your request, I am having the item you asked about arranged for. Mr. H.V. Brown in now at work on the matter which will be finished for the July issue. “Approximately 30 days after publication of that issue, we will be able to supply you with the finished work. I was wondering what in blazes we were going to use for the July issue. Thanks. It was a swell idea. Order in, with reservation attached!’ Apparently Swisher had some further ideas for the rendering of the cover for on March 18, Campbell wrote: “Your amended idea is too late. The painting is now well under way. Also, there are practical difficulties inasmuch as the form you now suggest would make it impossible to accurately convey the full outline of the ship. The way it is actually being done will put the ship across the dim nebulosity of the Milky Way gas clouds, where the unilluminated parts of the ship as black as space save where port-lights shine out.  p. 83

6. My review of The Barrier by Anthony Boucher (Astounding, September 1942) is here.

7. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared two months later in the September issue:

These results mystify me (with the pleasing exception of the de Camp) and, according to a July 6th letter to Swisher (Ibid.), Campbell too:

 “The answer’s in on the July (1938) issue—and am I befuddled! With some hesitancy I tried Sprague’s article on English—which isn’t, strictly, a science fiction subject (‘Language for Time Travelers’). There was a natural expectancy of howls, but the actual result astounded me. The howls rated one ‘not really a science fiction article, but rather interesting.’ The votes for it ranged from ‘best thing Astounding’s ever published’ through ‘superb,’ ‘excellent,’ “highly interesting’ down to a mere ‘good article.’ Approval was practically unanimous. It ranked first place by a nice, fat margin.
“And second—by a nice margin over all others—was, despite your feeling, ‘The Dangerous Dimension.’ I guessed wrong, too. I’d have said ‘Rule 18’ belonged in second or first place. It didn’t. ‘Legion of Time’ came in behind ‘Dangerous Dimension,’ with “Rule 18’ trailing. Incidentally, it was having a hell of a fight for fourth place. Ross Rocklynne’s ‘Men and the Mirror’ gave it plenty of competition. There was nothing the matter with “Hotel Cosmos,’ ‘Secret of the Canali,’ etc., except that they came out the same month. ‘Voyage 13,’ however, got a nice hand at panning. It got 10 goose-eggs and 11 checks and pluses combined. ‘Giant Stars’ got as much favorable comment as ‘Voyage 13.’ The cover rated high—just behind ‘Rule 18.’  p. 92

Interesting to see that there are perhaps only a couple of dozen people voting (“It got 10 goose-eggs and 11 checks and pluses combined”) on some stories.  ●

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Astounding Science-Fiction v30n01, September 1942



ISFDB link
Archive.org link

Other reviews:
Jamie Rubin, Vacation in the Golden Age

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr., Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
The Barrier • novella by Anthony Boucher ∗∗∗
The Twonky • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
Nerves • novella by Lester del Rey
Pride • short story by Malcolm Jameson
Starvation • short story by Fredric Brown
With Flaming Swords • novella by Cleve Cartmill +

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Kolliker (x3), Willy Ley (x4), Paul Orban (x7), Charles Schneeman, Frank Kramer (x4)
Weapons and War • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Death Under the Sea • essay by Willy Ley
The Analytical Laboratory: July 1942
In Times to Come
Brass Tacks
• letters

_____________________

This issue of Astounding contains two of this year’s Retro-Hugo nominees, The Twonky by “Lewis Padgett”, and Nerves by Lester del Rey, hence this review (more or less—I’ve also read Boucher’s story for something else I’m reading, the retrospective ‘Best of the Year’ anthology for 1942, The Great SF Stories #4, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Isaac Asimov).1
Before I get to the fiction I’d like to mention the cover artist, William Timmins, who appears for the first time (with a scene from Boucher’s story) as a result of Hubert Rogers joining the war effort. Timmins would reappear in the December 1942 issue, and would then provide every cover of Astounding until January 1947, except the July 1944 (Fred Haucke) and December 1946 (Alejandro) issues—a run of 48 covers out of 50 (and he would reappear a handful of times over the next few years). Much of Timmins’ work is unexceptional but he nevertheless produced some of Astounding’s best covers.2

The fiction leads off with Anthony Boucher’s debut in Astounding (although he’d previously appeared in Unknown), The Barrier, an ambitious time travel story that makes much of future linguistic drift:

The first difficulty was with language.
That is only to be expected when you jump five hundred years; but it is nonetheless perplexing to have your first casual query of: “What city is this?” answered by the sentence: “Stappers will get you. Or be you Slanduch?”
It was significant that the first word John Brent heard in the State was “Stappers.” But Brent could not know that then. It was only some hours later and fifty years earlier that he learned the details of the Stapper system. At the moment all that concerned him was food and plausibility.
[. . .]
He pondered the alternatives presented by the stranger. The Stappers would get him, unless he was a Slanduch. Whatever the Stappers were, things that Get You sound menacing. “Slanduch,” he replied.
The stranger nodded. “That bees O. K.,” he said, and Brent wondered what he had committed himself to. “So what city is this?” he repeated.
Bees,” the stranger chided. “Stappers be more severe now since Edict of 2470. Before they doed pardon some irregularities, but now none even from Slanduch.”
“I be sorry,” said Brent humbly, making a mental note that irregular verbs were for some reason perilous.  p. 9-10

Almost immediately after this exchange three Stappers appear through a wall and challenge Brent’s interlocutor for “speaking against Barrier”. The man shows them his identity bracelet. When they stun him, Brent does not waste any time in making his escape up onto a balcony.
He then hides in a nearby room, and an older woman arrives who perplexingly recognises him, as does her brother Stephen who joins them later. When he arrives there is a data dump explaining how this static, and therefore anti-time travel, society came into being. This is not entirely convincing. There is also discussion about the “Barrier”, which is supposed to prevent time travel. As Brent has somehow managed to penetrate it they go to see his time machine. The Stappers (a corruption of “Gestapo”) find them; Brent and Martha escape in the machine, and go fifty years into the past.
The rest of the story involves a small group of people (including younger versions of Martha and Stephen) repairing his time machine and plotting to return to prevent the activation of a second Barrier (the reason they only go fifty years into the past is that Brent’s machine destroys the first one—how he got through it on the first occasion without this happening is, if I recall correctly, wobbily explained).
When they arrive back in the future they infiltrate the Barrier activation ceremony only to see the machine generating it explode, an event caused by an attack of future time travellers. These are quickly subdued by the Stappers and arrested.

Most writers would probably wrap up the story here by sending Brent away on his time machine—Boucher, however, is only about two-thirds of the way through and in the rest of it he tries to outdo van Vogt.
Brent becomes a government interpreter, and interrogates three of the time traveller prisoners (Kruj speaks in an Elizabethan English variant, Mimi the Amazonian in a future-slang type speech, and the Venusian Nikobat in a language that is a meld of all Earth ones) :

Brent picked Tiny Beard as the easiest-looking start. “O. K. You!” He pointed, and the man stepped forward. “What part of time do you come from?”
“A pox o’ thee, sirrah, and the goodyears take thee! An thou wouldst but hearken to me, thou might’st learn all.”
The State linguist moaned. “You hear, young man? How can one interpret such jargon?”
Brent smiled. “It bees O. K. This bees simply English as it beed speaked thousand years ago. This man must have beed aiming at earlier time and prepared himself. . . . Thy pardon, sir. These kerns deem all speech barbaric save that which their own conceit hath evolved. Bear with me, and all will be well.”
“Spoken like a true knight!” the traveler exclaimed. “Forgive my rash words, sir. Surely my good daemon hath led thee hither. Thou wouldst know—”
“Whence comest thou?”
“From many years hence. Thousands upon thousands of summers have yet to run their course ere I—”
“Forgive me, sir; but of that much we are aware. Let us be precise.”
“When then, marry, sir, ’tis from the fifth century.”  p. 23-24

Brent beckoned forward the woman. She strode forth so vigorously that both Stappers bared their rods.
“Madam,” Brent ventured tentatively, “what part of time do you come from?”
“Evybuy taws so fuy,” she growled. “Bu I unnasta. Wy cachoo unnasta me?”
Brent laughed. “Is that all that’s the trouble? You don’t mind if I go on talking like this, do you?”
“Naw. You taw howeh you wanna, slonsoo donna like I dih taw stray.”
Fascinating, Brent thought. All final consonants lost, and many others. Vowels corrupted along lines indicated in twentieth-century colloquial speech. Consonants sometimes restored in liaison as in French.  p. 24

He beckoned to the green-skinned biped, who advanced with a curious lurching motion like a deep-sea diver.
“And you, sir. When do you come from?”
“Ya studier langue earthly. Vyerit todo langue isos. Ou comprendo wie govorit people.”
Brent was on the ropes and groggy. The familiarity of some of the words made the entire speech even more incomprehensible. “Says which?” he gasped.
The green man exploded. “Ou existier nada but dolts, cochons, duraki v this terre? Nikovo parla langue earthly? Potztausend Sapperment en la leche de tu madre and I do mean you!”
Brent reeled. But even reeling he saw the disapproving frown of the State linguist and the itching fingers of the Stappers. He faced the green man calmly and said with utmost courtesy, “‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble over the rivering waters of the hitherandthithering waters of pigeons on the grass alas. Thank you, sir.” He turned to the linguist. “He says he won’t talk.”  p. 24

Added to the mix is a Stapper called Boko, who proves he can time-travel by mind control when he closes his eyes for a second and a copy of him appears at the door. Later, a bodiless time-traveller reveals herself (she is initially resident in Martha’s brain but jumps around).
The climatic insurrection scene (spoiler) has Martha’s brother Stephen possessed by this bodiless time traveller, who convinces him to kill himself to end the war. He does so, and all the future time travellers disappear—there is a third Barrier.
This ambitious and novel piece has some interesting ideas but it goes on for too long, and some parts of it are either a bit of a mess or are not entirely convincing.

The Twonky by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore also starts with a time traveller, this one with amnesia, unintentionally arriving in a radio-phonograph3 factory. His job in the future is building ‘Twonkies’ so he uses the material at hand to build one, and then has a nap. His amnesia clears shortly after he wakes up, and he disappears on his time machine, leaving behind the modified phonogram/Twonky behind.
The phonogram is bought by a university lecturer and his wife and, after the latter leaves to visit her sister, things start to get weird: the phonograph starts acting like a robot, lighting the man’s cigarettes, doing the dishes, etc. However, (spoiler) matters take an ominous turn when it stops him reading certain books, listening to certain music, and generally prevents him from doing things it does not approve of.
The couple eventually try to destroy it but come off worse.
Despite its ‘classic’ status4 I found this, at best, an okay gimmick story, and thought it read like a rehearsal for the superior Mimsy Were the Borogroves (Astounding, February 1943).

Nerves by Lester del Rey is a prescient story which tells of an accident at a “National Atomic Products Co. Inc.” plant which, in parts, is eerily similar to some of the real events that occurred at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl (or Fukushima if you are younger). This story is pre-atomic bomb, of course, and the knowledge we now have about nuclear power is considerably different from then—as can be gathered from this early conversation that Doc Ferrel, the folksy head physician of the atomic plant (and narrator), has with one of the other doctors:

“What was it, anyway?”
“Same old story— simple radiation burns. No matter how much we tell the men when they first come in, most of them can’t see why they should wear three ninety-five percent efficient shields when the main converter shield cuts off all but one-tenth percent of the radiation. Somehow, this fellow managed to leave off his two inner shields and pick up a year’s burn in six hours. Now he’s probably back on No. 1 [reactor], still running through the hundred liturgies I gave him to say and hoping we won’t get him sacked.”  p. 55

There’s quite a bit of this ‘slap a bit of salve on your radiation burns and get back to work’ stuff in the story, as well as a fairly cavalier attitude to the catastrophic results of things going wrong, or possibly going wrong:

And besides, once the blow-up happened, with the resultant damage to an unknown area, the pressure groups in Congress would be in, shouting for the final abolition of all atomic work; now they were reasonably quiet, only waiting an opportunity—or, more probably, at the moment were already seizing on the rumors spreading to turn this into their coup. If, by some streak of luck, Palmer could save the plant with no greater loss of life and property than already existed, their words would soon be forgotten, and the benefits from the products of National would again outweigh all risks.  p. 78

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The story begins with Doc Ferrel talking to his junior, Dr Jenkins, about a new process the company is running in reactors 3 and 4 that evening. During this they are informed about an accident—the account of what has happened is rather vague and, when the first casualties come in, they are found to be people that were outside the reactors, injured by exploding debris. Ferrell calls in another doctor.

An exciting second chapter follows, during which Ferrel learns that Palmer, the plant boss, has blocked access to the outside phone lines. More injured men arrive, and they may be contaminated:

Jenkins joined Ferrel on the last patient, replacing Dodd at handing instruments. Doc would have preferred the nurse, who was used to his little signals, but he said nothing, and was surprised to note the efficiency of the boy’s co-operation. “How about the breakdown products?” he asked.
“I-713? Harmless enough, mostly, and what isn’t harmless isn’t concentrated enough to worry about. That is, if it’s still I-713. Otherwise—”
Otherwise, Doc finished mentally, the boy meant there’d be no danger from poisoning, at least. Isotope R, with an uncertain degeneration period, turned into Mahler’s Isotope, with a complete breakdown in a billionth of a second. He had a fleeting vision of men, filled with a fine dispersion of that, suddenly erupting over their body with a violence that could never be described; Jenkins must have been thinking the same thing. For a few seconds, they stood there, looking at each other silently, but neither chose to speak of it.
Ferrel reached for the probe, Jenkins shrugged, and they went on with their work and their thoughts.  p. 62

Jenkins’ wife (a nurse turned newly qualified doctor) makes it into the medical section with reports of the military being mobilised and the city possibly being evacuated. She goes to triage the injured near to the reactor, treating the radiation burn casualties there and sending the shrapnel cases back to Ferrel and his surgical team.
Throughout all this del Rey creates a remarkably convincing and tense narrative, drip feeding bits of his made up nuclear physics in between the medical procedures that are taking place, against a background of an escalating serious accident.
As well as being better informed about nuclear physics than the writer, we also expect our physicians to behave differently nowadays: Ferrel and Blake have a snifter of brandy after several hours of work, and the doctors later resort to shooting up morphine to keep awake! Meanwhile, their ambulance driver gets drunk to cope with the traumatic stress he endures ferrying all those casualties around, and crashes his ambulance.

Matters become even more tense in the next chapter when Palmer (the plant manager) and Ferrel go to one of the atomic converters and organise the men to search through the molten slag for Jorgensen, the only one who understands the process that was running in the plant before the explosion (as well as its risk assessment, the plant may want to review its ‘key man’ and data retention policy).

They find him in an armoured suit in a locker, but he is badly contaminated and stops breathing. Ferrel cracks open Jorgennson’s chest and starts manual heart massage.
Unfortunately, after a cracking start to the story, these events signal a rather padded, potboilerish middle section during which there is much running about and threatening of guards so Ferrel can phone a nearby hospital for an experimental heart and lung machine. There is also a lot of guff about Jenkins thinking he has “cracked” under the strain, Ferrel’s heart to heart with him, and chunks of both men’s backstories.
The last part of the story is a partial return to form: Jorgennson is saved but is of no use to them as his vocal nerves are compromised by widespread radioactive contamination (which, as we have seen previously in this world, affect the nervous system and cause convulsions); Palmer arrives saying the whole place will explode in ten hours and they must evacuate, but Ferrel points to the problem of the contaminated (and also soon to be exploding) men; Hok, the Japanese plant scientist (this in a post-Pearl Harbour America), comes up with a process to transmute the material in their body into something harmless, but it must be done at the plant as it requires I-713. Finally, the underconfident Jenkins comes up with a theoretical solution that will stop the converters exploding, and reveals he is the step-son of a great, and dead, theoretical atomicist.

This has a cracking start but the middle section is padded and the story drags from then on (albeit to a much lesser extent in the final part). This piece should have considerably shortened. That said, you can see why it was so popular at the time.

Pride by Malcolm Jameson is about Tom, a beaten up robot who works in a heavy industry factory:

Everybody, both his fellow workers and the men who operated the great Alberta plant, said Old Tom was slipping—that it was a shame to see a creature let himself go so completely. And it must be admitted that there was something to the gossip. For he never bothered with body oils any more or went to the burnishers. He would go the whole ten-day working period without so much as giving himself a wirebrushing, and on Repair Day he would usually sit quietly on the veranda of the club and take the sun, heedless of the fact that he dripped rust at every move and that wisps of gasket often trailed from the places where his plates were joined.  p. 92

The reason he skips on maintenance is because he is saving all his money and, in the second part of the story, he uses this wealth to have a new robot built. However, Tom will need to donate his own brainbox for use in the new model, which will mean his end. As the story closes Tom refers to this replacement as his son.
This crystallises the story’s problem, which is that Tom behaves like an old man and not a robot. Asimov’s decidedly non-human robots would soon make this type of story seem quite outdated.

Starvation by Fredric Brown (reprinted in his collections as Runaround) isn’t really SF, but is an okay mood piece about the last T. Rex trying to catch something to eat, failing (everything is too fast), and ultimately dying.

With Flaming Swords by Cleve Cartmill is actually my favourite piece in the issue. I know this will cause howls of outrage but I liked it more than the Boucher and del Rey: it is a well done if minor story rather than an uneven but ambitious one.
It starts with this:

You could shock men, I thought, and suffer no consequences. Men were merely slaves. Slaves allowed to serve us, to bring their produce to Eden, to give us their arms and backs and brains.
But these were Saints, here in the big hall. Their massed auras were a blaze of blue against which I narrowed my eyes. We were Saints, with three hundred years of traditional conduct behind us.
And what I had said was not condoned by tradition. I had called them men.
They took it in silence for a few seconds and stared at me, beside the throne of the Patriarch. Then they began to yell, and I felt a sick shame for them. They lost their dignity.
I yelled into their hubbub.
“I invoke the rule of silence!”
The Patriarch raised his glowing arms. Quiet fell. “Against my will,” the Patriarch said, “I command silence. We will hear the rest of Saint Hanson’s heresy.”  p. 109-110

This future world is ruled by the Saints, an oppressive order of men who use humanity as serfs and a source of wives. They are held in religious awe and feared by the rest of humanity, partly because of their blue auras, and partly because they have the power to make men drop dead by the power of their will. As to that latter ability, Hanson knows that what really happens when they raise their hands to the turbans they wear is that they are firing ray guns concealed within. Hanson also knows that a larger version of that ray gun is responsible for the Saints’ altered germ plasm and blue aura:

Here is the truth. Nearly three hundred years ago, a new weapon was introduced into warfare. It was fired only once. The destruction was so great and terrible that nations by common consent outlawed it, for it destroyed friend and foe indiscriminately. Thousands were killed within the radius of its effect. It was silent death, for the gun was a ray gun. But listen. On the edge of that area of destruction, people were affected by that ray. Their germ plasm was affected so that male children born of those individuals were born with an aura.  p. 111

We learn the above later in the story as Hanson is prevented from continuing his speech by another Saint called Wakefield, who suggests that the council shunt the matter into committee because of the febrile atmosphere in the Temple. Hanson feels ostracised and leaves to go home. During the journey he reflects on the advice his human partner Jennings would give him, which is to turn the modulator he has developed on the council (we learn from this passage that, during his research, Hanson has made a device which neutralises the blue aura). We discover more about this world and its history when he arrives home a gives his fiancée, Ellen, a mini-lecture about the situation.
The next part of the plot is not entirely credible: Wakefield visits Hanson, who shows him not only his research but the modulator, and its aura nullifying effect on Hanson’s blood. Needless to say, Wakefield turns the modulator on Hanson, which destroys his aura, and Wakefield then destroys the modulator.
The next day Hanson goes to the council and, as he arrives aura-less, is denounced by Wakefield. Hanson is later excommunicated in a ceremony televised world-wide, and driven from the temple. Outside the common people stone him and he only just escapes.
The rest of the story involves Hanson’s escape to the desert with Jennings and his wife, his involvement with the resistance, and his development of a device that will provide protection against the Saints’ ray guns (and which produces a blue aura around the wearer). They test this on a giant desert terrapin that had previously wandered into their cave:

We placed the box on Methuselah’s broad back. Jennings brought the turban gun.
“Wait!” Magda cried. “Are you certain it’ll work, Bob?”
“No,” I said. “I think maybe, though.”
She got a leaf of lettuce for Methuselah. “Here, fella. If you die, you’ll be happy. He loves it,” she said to me, “if it has a touch of salt.”
Jennings added his farewells. He patted the patterned shell. “So long, mascot.”
I hadn’t seen much of the ugly and somehow awesome creature. I’d been busy. But the Jenningses had made a friend of him.
I touched the button of the little box, and joined in the exclamations. For Methuselah had an aura, bright and blue like a Saint’s.
“There’s a bona fide Patriarch,” Jennings said.  p. 121

After this they plan to confront the Saints at an upcoming ceremony at the Temple, which is going to be televised to the world. The climax at the Temple (spoiler) involves Jennings and Hanson proving immune to Wakefield’s ray gun. Wakefield then dies in a fight with Jennings, and the Patriarch’s aura is neutralised. A hundred men of the resistance arrive and switch on their auras, and the end comes when Magda and the terrapin enter the Temple, also with auras, thus disproving the Saint’s God-given powers. The Patriarch laughs. The conflict is over.

I can understand that the synopsis above is unlikely to convince anyone of the story’s merits and I would not expect it too—the setup and plot are the parts I would label as ‘minor’. What they don’t convey is that I found the strange religious order of supermen intriguing, and that the story is very readable—I was reminded in parts of the slick delivery of Heinlein. The character detail is pretty good for the time as well, particularly the exchanges between Jennings and his wife Magda, and there are a number of observations from Hanson about love and life that ground the story. There are these one-liners, for example, on Hanson’s troubled relationship with his fiancée:

You can take an emotional blow. It won’t kill you. But sometimes you wish it would.
[. . .]
You can be sick with emotion, too. But you don’t die. It just seems that way.  p. 121

And his envy of the Jennings’ relationship:

As this blond giant and his wife bickered in this friendly fashion, I forgot that I was being hunted. Nobody had ever spoken to me like that, and I missed it suddenly. All those years of being set apart rushed over me again. I wanted to be on terms of tender contempt with someone. Perhaps that would be possible with Ellen, now.  p. 118

And, yes, I liked the Terrapin, especially when it glows blue at the end!

I’ve already mentioned Timmins above: this is a Cover of his that puts me neither up nor down. As to the Interior artwork in this issue, my favourites are the Schneeman (for the Jameson) and the Kramer (for the Brown), although I also liked a few of Orban’s for the del Rey.
Weapons and War by John W. Campbell, Jr. is another rambling editorial, this time starting with the topic of shared scientific knowledge and then going on to discuss the problems of scaling up certain industrial processes. I am beginning to get the feeling that when Campbell wrote his editorials he just started typing about whatever was on his mind at the time.

Death Under the Sea by Willy Ley is a science history essay (accompanied by four illustrations/diagrams by the author) which looks at underwater naval warfare, specifically the development and use of mines, torpedoes and submarines through the ages. There is some interesting historical information in this (a lot of the development appears to have taken place during the American Civil War), and I learned where the torpedo got its name from:

The man who coined a name for underwater charges was Robert Fulton. His term was “torpedo” which then did not mean a weapon of naval warfare but simply the electric eel of South American rivers.  p. 45

The Analytical Laboratory: July 1942 puts Simak’s Tools ahead of Will Stewart’s (Jack Williamson) first ‘Seetee’ story Collison Orbit.5
In Times to Come starts by correcting a cover attribution error for the July cover:

A number of kind friends pointed out our slight slip on the crediting of the July cover. Quite right; it was not done by Rogers—but we all make mistakes, and “Cover by Rogers” has been a pretty steady thing for Astounding now. But Rogers is no longer doing covers—he’s in the Canadian army.

It is correctly attributed to Charles de Feo in Brass Tacks.
The rest of the column promises an astronomical cover by von Munchhausen, and stories by Lester del Rey, George O. Smith (the first of the ‘Venus Equilateral’ stories), Murray Leinster, and A.E. van Vogt.

Brass Tacks opens with a letter from Rosella Rands, Washington, D. C., prophesising another war in twenty years, and that they will get all their new ideas for weapons from SF magazines.
Earl C. Smith, Corpus Christi, TX, claims he is a veteran of the SF field, and has a couple of things to get off his chest:

FIRST: Every time an author dreams up a theory on sunspots, cosmic rays, or why, in the final analysis, there is no solidarity—including their theory—does he have to contaminate good reading material by filling page after page with DETAILED EXPLANATIONS? Not that I haven’t an imagination, or that I don’t want an explanation, but, PLEASE, does the author have to convince himself by going to such an extent?
SECOND: Why not give us something different occasionally? The best story I’ve read in any of the current issues was Van Vogt’s “Asylum.” Perhaps I’m contradicting myself on a point here, by liking his story, but I feel the general make-up, the atmosphere, the not bringing out of so many technical details, were points raising his story far above any I’ve read recently.  p. 105

There are also letters from Milton A. Rothman (about a ‘Probability Zero’ story), and Anthony Boucher (about van Vogt’s Secret Unobtainable and the assassination of Reinhart Heydrich). Edward C. Connor, Peoria, IL, didn’t like the van Vogt as because it is set in Germany and concerned the Nazi Party. James Dial, Chicago, IL, ends the comments (on what seems a mixed July issue) with a letter containing this more general observation:

There seems to be one flaw which has grown worse rather than better as time goes on. I speak of the feeble endings of most of your serials and many of your shorts. My idea of a perfect ending is certainly inadequate, but I think that the best I have seen is the one from “Uncertainty.” The suspicion has been growing that perhaps you have been getting work on assignments, and the endings have had to be rushed through. The ending of “Beyond This Horizon” is a case in point. This story has a structure worthy of three serial installments, possibly four, but it ends abruptly, unsatisfyingly, just when the full background has been painted in and the story has attained momentum.  p. 107

This is a pretty good issue, with three good or better novelettes.  ●

_____________________

1. The Great SF Stories #4, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg (DAW, 1980) contains:

7 • Introduction (The Great Science Fiction Stories Volume 4, 1942) • (1980) • essay by Martin H. Greenberg
11 • The Star Mouse • [Mitkey • 1] • (1942) • novelette by Fredric Brown
32 • The Wings of Night • (1942) • short story by Lester del Rey
50 • Cooperate – Or Else! • [Rull] • novelette by A. E. van Vogt (variant of Co-Operate – Or Else! 1942)
77 • Foundation • [Foundation (Original Stories) • 1] • (1942) • novelette by Isaac Asimov
110 • The Push of a Finger • (1942) • novella by Alfred Bester
150 • Asylum • (1942) • novella by A. E. van Vogt
205 • Proof • (1942) • short story by Hal Clement
222 • Nerves • (1942) • novella by Lester del Rey
295 • Barrier • (1942) • novella by Anthony Boucher
347 • The Twonky • (1942) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
369 • QRM – Interplanetary • [Venus Equilateral] • (1942) • novelette by George O. Smith
403 • The Weapon Shop • [Weapon Shops of Isher] • (1942) • novelette by A. E. van Vogt
442 • Mimic • (1942) • short story by Donald A. Wollheim

Apart from the Brown (from Planet Stories) and the Wollheim (from Astonishing Stories), all the rest are Astounding stories.
I’ll review this volume in due course. By the way, there is a groups.io newsgroup that has been set up to discuss these volumes at The-Great-SF-Stories-1939-1963@groups.io. There are only a handful of active commenters, so it won’t wear you out.

2. There isn’t much information about Timmins on the web but there is a page at Pulpartists.com, and links to his covers on his ISFDB page.
Here are two of my favourites taken from Siren in the Night’s Flickr page for Astounding (very slightly touched up to remove the odd crease, scratch, etc., and resized). This is the best of his conventional work:

And this one is the best of his impressionistic covers:

Also worth a look is the Through a Shattered Lens page, especially the last image, which is a striking cover for The Shadow magazine. An occasionally brilliant artist.

3. A radio-phonograph was a wooden box that combined a radio, record player, and speakers. Here is a page of them on Pinterest.

4. The Twonky’s ISFDB page is here. Note its early reprint appearance in Adventures in Time and Space by Raymond J. Healy & J. Francis McComas in 1946.

5. The Analytical Laboratory with the results for this issue appeared in November:

The score of 1.00 for del Rey’s story is extraordinary (and, I originally thought, probably unprecedented and unrepeated, but see Walker’s comment below). Every reader who voted marked it first or joint-first!  ●

This magazine is still being published as Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA or physical & digital copies.

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Astounding Science-Fiction v21n04, June 1938

ISFDB
Archive.org

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.

Fiction:
Men Against the Stars • novelette by Manly Wade Wellman –
Below—Absolute! • short story by Harry Walton ∗∗
The Legion of Time (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Jack Williamson +
Philosophers of Stone • short story by D. L. James –
Seeds of the Dusk • novelette by Raymond Z. Gallun
Isle of the Golden Swarm • short story by Norman L. Knight
Three Thousand Years! (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Thomas Calvert McClary

Non-fiction:
Men Against the Stars • cover by H. W. Wesso
Interior artwork • H. W. Wesso, uncredited, Charles Schneeman (x2), Jack Binder (x2), Eliot Dold (x3), uncredited (x2), Howard Brown (x2), Olga Ley (x4)
Fantastic Fiction • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Great Eye • science essay by R. DeWitt Miller
Monstrous Twin • science filler
In Times to Come
The Analytical Laboratory: April 1938
Witnesses of the Past • science essay by Willy Ley
Mars • cover artwork essay
Science Discussions • letters
Brass Tacks
• letters

_____________________

This issue has the second astronomical cover that Campbell commissioned, produced by Wesso for the Manly Wade Wellman story Men Against the Stars. The top and bottom colour bars that were missing on last issue’s cover are back. John Campbell provides an accompanying essay to go with the cover:

As for the story itself, Men Against the Stars by Manly Wade Wellman1 starts with spaceship fifty-one on its way from the Moon to Mars. However, the atomic hydrogen fuel they are using is not stable and, as the crew are discussing their chances of surviving the trip, the ship explodes.

The story then switches its point of view to Tallentyre, the lunar base’s second in command, who has watched the ship explode and is now arguing with his hysterical superior. The latter is trying to deal with the mutinous crew of ship sixty-one, who are refusing to leave and, in any event, he doesn’t want to send another crew to their deaths. After some speechifying from Tallentyre about the sacrifice required to travel in space (I note that when this subject comes up it is usually someone else’s sacrifice), and the problems with atomic hydrogen and jet tubes, he knocks his boss out and goes to deal with the mutineers. Things do not go well:

Tallentyre’s right hand rested easily in the pocket of his tunic. The cold, gray eyes watched the big spaceman steadily. “You think you could get away with violence?”
The big man took a step forward with a hamlike fist clenched before him. “Think, brother? Hu-uh. I know I can,” he said softly. “You tried it yourself inside there.” Without turning his head, he spoke to the men behind him. “Come on, boys. Grab this guy. And one of you tail for the ship and that gun.”
Without relaxing his moveless, wooden face, Tallentyre drew his hand from his tunic pocket. Space volunteers have to have a queer, reckless courage. With a bull roar, the giant captain dove forward with outstretched hands, his face twisted with sudden hate. Tallentyre shot him between the eyes. The big body fell with exaggerated slowness under Lunar pull. p. 10-11

The other four crewmen, appropriately motivated, go on their flight: their spaceship blows up.
A female assistant, Noel, appears and tells Tallentyre she did love him but doesn’t anymore (he never knew that she did). Police arrive from Earth to arrest him for the killing but he escapes outside the base, giving Noel a chance to relent—she called the cops—and tell them what really happened with the mutineers. Tallentyre comes back and finds he is no longer being pursued for the killing, and that a ship is returning. He orders the police to arrest the returning mutineers—Tallentyre is nothing if not single-minded.
The last scene (spoiler) reveals that the arriving crew have actually returned from a base on Mars and, not only that, they have discovered what the problem with the spaceship jet tubes is (this is analogous to the properties of Prince Rupert’s Drop,2 a hard/brittle glass phenomenon mentioned briefly at the start of the story).
This is pretty dreadful fare, and it’s hard to believe that it comes from the author of Pithecanthropus Rejectus (Astounding, January 1938).

Below—Absolute! by Harry Walton starts with two spacemen providing a short data-dump about a dark spot between Alpha Centauri and Earth that they are going to investigate.
As they approach the anomaly there is an interesting description that is similar to the one you would expect for a black hole:

For space before them was empty, with an emptiness not of space. A black meteor, or a swarm of particles, they were ready to face, but sight recoiled from the sheer vacuum of non-spatial darkness which gaped ahead of the ship. This was nothingness made tangible, a canyon of blackness in which the stars were lost, incredibly empty and hostile in its very negation of all things normal.
[. . .]
This was no dark body blotting out the stellar field beyond, no long-dead sun hurtling its cold way unseen through the burial place of the stars, no obscuring cloud of cosmic dust. Of that they presently felt certain. Its outline against the tapestry of the stars was that of an enormous, perfectly circular disk, and—although neither man would have admitted it—both felt it possessed of motion within itself. It crossed Holm’s thought that this was an all-absorbing funnel draining into unknown space and tune, a sucking vacuum of nothingness alien to space as they knew it. p. 24-25

As they approach they discover that the disc is sucking heat out of the universe, and the pair only just avoid freezing to death.
Aliens later take control of their subconscious and start talking to them with their own voices. The aliens are in another universe on the other side of the disc, one that has a lower energy state than ours, and which is dying. The reason that they have opened a passage between the two is to let energy flow from our universe to theirs: as a result of this Earth and the solar system are doomed.
The rest of the story (spoiler) concerns the two men’s struggle to fly their spacecraft into the Passage to destroy the link between the two universes. During this the aliens attempt to physically control them.
This is fairly standard pulp stuff, but there are one or two interesting ideas.

The middle part of The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson continues the story of the battle between the two possible timelines of Jonbar and Gyronchi, and it starts with the time ship Chronion struggling to reach Jonbar—the Gyrane have somehow reduced the probability of its future existence. The ship finally arrives at Jonbar two weeks later.

Lanning finally meets Lethonee, and they have dinner that evening on an outdoor balcony. She tells Lanning that Jonbar has only one night of existence left, but before they can discuss this further, Sorainya and Glarath, high Priest of the Gyrane, arrive to witness the end of the city. Lanning runs to the Chronion as Lethonee fades out of existence.
On the ship, McLan tells Lanning the reason Jonbar has flickered out of existence is that the Gyrane have managed to build a time ship too. With it they have gone back in time and taken someone or something, thus altering the future and assuring their existence. McLan also states that whatever they have taken will be kept under guard in Sorainya’s castle. The Chronion heads for Gyronchi. En route the Gyrane ship appears beside them in the time stream and they find themselves heavily outgunned. One of their crew is killed and two wounded before they manage to escape (the serial is notable for the large number of casualties).

In the next chapter they climb up a cliff to Sorainya’s citadel and gain entry. They move through the dungeons and come upon the guards, who raise the alarm.
This section (the climb up the cliff and the fight through the dungeon) is a great boy’s own adventure, fast-moving, bloody, and with lots of atmospheric description. One of the scenes shows Williamson’s Weird Tales licks:

A dreadful silence filled most of the prison. But from one cell came an agonized screaming, paper-thin from a raw throat, repeated with a maddening monotony. Glancing through a barred door, as he passed, Lanning saw a woman stretched out in chains on the floor. A crystal vessel swung back and forth, above her, pendulumlike. And drops of cold green fire fell from it, one by one, upon her naked flesh. With each spattering, corrosive drop, she writhed against the chains, and shrieked again.
The half-consumed body, Lanning thought, might once have been beautiful. Could this have been some rival of Sorainya’s? A cold hate turned him rigid, and quickened his step. A muffled shot echoed behind him, and the screaming stopped.
Mon coeur!” whispered little Jean Querard. “She shall suffer no more.”
In another cell was a great squeaking and thumping commotion. And Lanning glimpsed huge, sleek rats battling over a body in chains, newly dead, or dying.
Once, beyond, that situation was reversed. A sightless, famished wretch had bitten his own wrist, to let a few drops of blood flow upon the floor. He crouched there, listening, and snatched again and again, blindly, with fettered hands, at the great wary rats that came to his bait. p. 46-47

The instalment finishes with another bloody fight in the great hall, which only Lanning and his old friend Halloran survive. They make their way to the trapdoor in Sorainya’s chambers, and in the vault below they find her embalmed ancestors, treasure beyond measure, and the object (a black brick) they are looking for.
On their way out they find Sorainya and her insect-like kothrin guards waiting. . . .
This serial continues to be a lot of fun and, given its age, a surprising page-turner.

Philosophers of Stone by D. L. James is a pretty awful story that has an inventor called Voorland regain consciousness to find that his transportation machine has malfunctioned and stranded him on an alien planet. The large crystal rock he had previously gathered as a specimen starts talking to him telepathically, and he learns that he will be taken to the Sigarians. On the way (the journey is by means of pseudopods that come out of the ground) the crystal chats away.
Voorland later discovers (spoiler) that the rock is actually using him to gain access to a spaceship that has crash-landed and is buried underground. He manages to escape, and finds that the spaceship crew are humanoid. They need “red metal” to refuel their ship before they can escape—which is conveniently provided by the copper cable of Voorland’s machine.

Seeds of the Dusk by Raymond Z. Gallun1, 3 starts off in third-person omniscient, and describes a spore drifting between the orbits of Mars and Earth in the far future. The spore eventually lands on Earth and starts growing:

The spore had become a plant now. First, it was no bigger than a pinhead. Then it increased its size to the dimensions of a small marble, its fuzzy, greenbrown shape firmly anchored to the soil itself by its long, fibrous roots. Like any terrestrial growth, it was an intricate chemical laboratory, where transformations took place that were not easy to comprehend completely.
And now, perhaps, the thing was beginning to feel the first glimmerings of a consciousness, like a human child rising out of the blurred, unremembering fog of birth. Strange, oily nodules, scattered throughout its tissues, connected by means of a complex network of delicate, white threads, which had the functions of a nervous system, were developing and growing—giving to the sporeplant from Mars the equivalent of a brain. Here was a sentient vegetable in the formative stage. p. 78-79

The point of view then switches to Kaw, an intelligent crow. As the bird is flying overhead the plant he sees it begin to spore and goes down to investigate. There are dead ants all around the plant, and Kaw receives an electric shock from one of its spines. As the plant sends out more spores Kaw realises the threat to life on Earth and flies to the Iterloo, the descendants of humanity. After he tells Zar, one of their irritable representatives, he gets shot for his trouble.

Zar goes to see the plant for himself. When it shocks him, he promptly flames it to the ground with his pistol. He returns to his underground home where the remnants of humanity are preparing to leave the dying Earth for Venus. Despite this, and after discussions among the Iterloo, they decide to build generators to irradiate the surface and kill the plants (and all other life as well).
Meanwhile, we find out that Kaw isn’t dead but only injured. He slowly makes his way back home and, one night when he goes into a ravine to sleep, he does not notice the alien plants that are there and ends up under their hypnotic power. The plants then use Kaw to lure Zar to them, and the Iterloo in turn comes under their hypnotic power. After being encircled by vines for days he eventually escapes, and goes back to the city where the preparations for a move to Venus continue, as do the plans to irradiate the surface.

The story ends (spoiler) some time in the future, with Kaw and all the other surface life still alive: the plants infected Zar with a plague that subsequently wiped out humanity.
This is quite a good piece, and one that I enjoyed for the detailed writing and the far-future Earth setting. However, I wondered why the humans were bothering to make the effort to wipe out the plants when they were planning on going to Venus anyway.

Isle of the Golden Swarm by Norman L. Knight starts with a passenger on a ship watching two natives help a badly injured man aboard:

McGrath came aboard the ship at Port Said, in the middle of an afternoon of withering heat. Two swarthy, white-turbaned men carried him up the gangplank and into his cabin; his legs dangled inertly as if paralyzed. They passed within a few feet of my deck-chair, where I lay baking and sweltering in the shade of an awning. McGrath’s appearance shocked me out of a semi-stupor and into a state of observant wakefulness.
He seemed a youngish man, and yet he was extraordinarily emaciated. His hands were bony talons resting on the shoulders of the two porters. His clothes hung and flapped loosely upon him. Half of one ear was missing, and the tip of his nose had been sliced oft obliquely. The scars were dark red, and obviously recent. His face was the thinly masked face of a skull, the eyes retracted into cavernous sockets and haunted by the shadow of some abysmal fear. p. 97-98

The narrator later meets McGrath on deck and they talk. He listens to a story about the injured man’s adventures in a remote part of the jungle, where he had gone to study apes. After his tribal guides left him (with a warning to keep out of a nearby part of the jungle called the “haunted forest”) he had set up camp in a cave, and later established a relationship with a young male gorilla, “Gunga Din”. They spent a lot of time together and, strangely, the creature forcibly prevents McGrath from entering the “haunted forest”.

Needless to say, the gorilla finds a mate and spends an increasing amount of time away. At this point, McGrath makes another attempt at entering the forbidden area. He is successful, but there is a strange atmosphere there, and a number of animal skeletons with a spiral hole bored in their skulls. The story comes to a climax (spoiler) when he stumbles on a lake with bone-littered shores, and an islet covered in tiny alien buildings. As he watches, a swarm of golden insect-like beings take flight towards him. They shoot tiny, paralysing darts at him when they arrive:

“They were insects! They were giant hornets, the size of humming birds, and their bodies and limbs seemed wrought of burnished gold. They walked upon their two hinder pairs of limbs, but held the fore part of their bodies upright, in the manner of a praying mantis, and were very dexterous with their third and forward pair of limbs. The first squadron to arrive was armed with little crossbows of silvery metal.
[. . .]
A half-dozen of them trotted over me in an exploratory fashion, seemed to confer, then amputated a bit of my nose. The operation was painless; the venom of their darts must have been an efficient local anesthetic as well. They immediately applied a styptic paste to the wound. Then they retired with the fragment to a point just on the edge of my range of vision, where I could not see exactly what they were doing. But my impression was that they—devoured it! p. 106

The insects spend the rest of the day examining McGrath then, when night comes, they go back to their nest. Gunga Din the gorilla arrives to rescue him. The final paragraphs have McGrath display a number of small hypodermic needles, and a miniature cutlass and crossbow.
The first part of this is quite well written, and it reads like a good Weird Tales story, but the ending is a little unconvincing, and too straightforward.

The third and concluding part of Three Thousand Years! by Thomas Calvert McClary gets off to an entertaining start as Gamble the scientist discovers that his ideals conflict with the realities of human nature:

Gamble delivered his promised feast to the clan—fourteen cases of food. Three thousand people looked at the small pile with astonishment.
Gamble smiled. “Concentrated. I assure you, it is sufficient.”
His four assistants prepared the lavish feast in a special catalytic stove. Twenty-three hors d’oeuvres occupied a space about one inch square!
But—the course was delicious. So was the half gill of soup. At the end came a striped pill about the size of a peanut.
“What’s this ?” Prescott grunted skeptically.
Gamble smiled. “A complete banana split. Twelve trimmings.”
The copper man leaned over to Lucky. “I’m not hungry, but I’ll be damned if I et yet! A dinner just don’t seem right unless you got something to wade into.”
Later Lucky found him nibbling joyously on a piece of dried fish. p. 112-113

After this the novel meanders somewhat. There is a grisly chapter where they start making glass, and one of the glass makers has to sacrifice himself by going under the mould, which is full of molten material, to crack it open. There are also critical problems trying to get into a bank vault:

Gamble did not know how men had first built their weary way through ten thousand years to civilization. Gamble could not find that road again, nor could his experts. If that gold vault defied them—if that slim chain of vast science his laboratory preserved should break—Gamble would be broken. He had no second string. Drega could work with raw rock and brute power, could build again. Gamble could not. He knew it. p. 120

Later there are sections detailing other production problems, and attempts to trade with Drega and steel makers in Pittsburgh. There are cannibals and the outside world to contend with as well. Ultimately, a malaise starts to affect Gamble’s society. People defect to Drega, and Gamble is eventually put on trial for putting the human race into suspended animation. Drega acts as the judge, and he ultimately frees Gamble: the two reconcile.
In conclusion, this is a rather uneven piece, and it overdoes the detail of the various industrial processes required by a modern society (although I did go away with a greater realisation of the problems of restarting civilization after an apocalyptic event). Also, McCleary’s premise about the human need for work isn’t convincing (I suspect many people who are in jobs they don’t like would feel the same). Overall though this is an interesting and, at times, highly entertaining novel.

I’ve already mentioned Wesso’s cover above, but he also contributes Interior artwork for the Wellman piece and, I think, the Walton story on p. 23 (it is uncredited but it looks like his work). There is other credited work by Charles Schneeman, Jack Binder, Eliot Dold, and Olga Ley. This leaves Brown and Coughlin from the list of artists on the title page to claim the illustrations for the McClary and Knight stories. Howard Brown did the cover for the McClary in the April issue, and the interior illustrations for all three issues look like that, therefore Coughlin is presumably the artist for the Knight story on p. 97.
I like a number of the illustrations in this issue, the Wesso, Schneeman, Coughlin, Ley, and the first of the Dold pieces for Gallun’s story.
Fantastic Fiction by John W. Campbell is an interesting editorial about how technological changes creep up slowly on society as they are perfected. The last couple paragraphs are prescient in their observation that spaceships and atomic power will “come together” and that their discoverers are “here today”.

The Great Eye by R. DeWitt Miller (who contributed March’s novelette The Master Shall Not Die!) is an interesting science article about the intended uses of the new Mount Palomar 200” telescope, and the problems that will need to be overcome in operating it.
Monstrous Twin is a short filler about the similarities between the “twin elelments” sulphur and selenium. It grimly outlines the problem in certain agricultural situations:

In certain regions of the West, the ground is poor in sulphur. Plants growing there, unable to get the “badly-needed sulphur, take the near-twin element, selenium, instead.
Then the deadliness of the element begins. Cattle and horses, chickens and similar animals eat those plants. Their growing cells require sulphur, and the selenium slips in instead. Hair-cells, trying to manufacture that sulphur-containing protein, first find that the substitute won’t work. The hair-cells are poisoned, die, and ulcerous sores appear. The hair drops out in ugly patches. Sores, cuts, bruises fail to heal, as the growth-stimulating functions of the tissues fail for lack of sulphur. The wounds spread and fester. The animal’s brain is affected.
But selenium-fed hens laying eggs somehow manage to get the selenium into the proteins that should contain sulphur. And it works—somewhat. The things that hatch out live, for a while at least. But they aren’t chickens. They are monstrous things. Growth of young, new cells—where sulphur is most vitally needed—goes on somehow—but it goes wrong. Calves and colts born to cattle and horses fed on that poisoned fodder are monstrous, the degree of wrongness increasing with the proportion of selenium the mother animal ate. p. 96

In Times to Come plugs next issue’s new novelette by Ray Cummings and the associated cover, as well as heralding the return of Clifford D. Simak.
The Analytical Laboratory: April 1938 presents the story-ratings for the April issue, which I commented on in that review.4

Witnesses of the Past by Willy Ley is a fascinating article about “living fossils”, biological oddities such as the duck-billed platypus and the lungfish, etc., and the consternation these animals caused scientists at the time of their discovery.

The accomplished illustrations for this article are, according to the issue’s ISFDB page, “by Olga Ley, per editor response to Isaac Asimov, Astounding, Aug. 1938.”
I’d be interested to know what corrections or additions, if any, a modern biologist would make to this article.
Science Discussions has the usual half-baked and semi-incoherent contributions punctuated by a couple of letters of interest. D. R. Cummins, of Sacramento, CA, comments on favourably on the astronomical covers that the magazine has started using, and has suggestions about others he would like to see:

[How] about some lunar scenery in its probable real colors? The Moon is one of the most-pictured extra-terrestrial objects, but after all, it is the closest and the easiest to examine and will be the first landing place for space travelers. My impression is that the apparent uniformity of color on the Moon is due to the conditions under which we see it. Yesterday it was cloudy here but we could see the snow-covered Sierra Nevada Range sixty miles away illuminated with bright sunlight. It had a silvery brightness curiously like a lunar landscape as seen through a telescope. There was the same lack of variety in coloring, yet in the mountains there is great contrast between the snow and light-gray granite and the green of the trees (pine, fir, cedar, etc.) and the dark, volcanic rock. p. 149

There are a couple of letters that should probably be in Brass Tacks, including one by A. S. McEckron, Galvaston, KA, who provides an amusing description of that column:

It was with considerable surprise and some apprehension that I noted the rather uproarious emergence of Brass Tacks from its well merited banishment to the limbo of obsolescence. Such a department could and should be of inestimable value as a symposium of the opinions and preferences of your readers—if all readers could be persuaded to present their mental reactions as opinions rather than pearls of wisdom from the treasure house of omniscience. Brass Tacks, for some time previous to its banishment contained more stridence than science, more concussion than discussion. It was about as interesting and instructive as a cacophonous wrangle between a covey of quail and a flock of crows; the quail perpetually interrogating “But why? But why? But why?”: and the crows raucously “Because! Because! Because!” And its short sojourn in the editorial hoosegow appears to have improved neither its temperament nor its technique. p. 151

Brass Tacks starts with a couple of correspondents expressing a preference for Dold’s artwork over Wesso’s, which I find rather baffling (Dold has another admirer towards the end of the column). Elsewhere, there are positive comments about the beginning of McClary’s serial Three Thousand Years!
There is one particularly negative letter from James S. Avery, Skowhegan, MA:

In the few short months that you have been editor, you have destroyed practically all of the marvelous work that Tremaine had done for several years before you. You have broken up and disfigured every point that he strove to uphold. The magazine has now absolutely no tradition to look up to. From the first of your issues, the magazine has had a rushed, slapped-together air about it. Even the printers seem to sense it.
My last few issues have been loosely bound, raggedy cut, covers set up unevenly— all in all a general slovenly appearance.
Truthfully, I can say the mag is not one quarter as good as in 1934, and not a fifth as good as in 1937—certainly not very complimentary to you. Its stories have declined in quality—each issue is just a bit poorer than the preceeding. Its art work has gone down frightfully. Brass Tacks has been neglected, heavy science articles have increased. All these signs point to a slow but sure break-down of the old policy. Worst of all— or perhaps it seems the worst to me—is the disgracing placement of Brass Tacks. In the March issue its position was excellent. Why couldn’t it have been left there, instead of being shoved among columns of advertising? Science Discussions is good and should be kept, but in moderation. Why is it today we rarely see any more of the highly enjoyable letters of the type once printed in the old Wonder Stories? That was a department to be proud of! p. 156

I suspect this may be a solitary outlier—but Campbell liked an argument.
With two good serials and a novelette, and a couple of okay short stories (not to mention an unprecedented three science articles I liked!), this issue is probably the best of the early Campbell Astoundings I’ve read so far. ●

_____________________

1. In Campbell’s letter of 28th February 1938 to his friend and correspondent Robert Swisher (in Fantasy Commentator #59/60—recommended, and available at Lulu.com), he talks about Wellman’s and Gallun’s stories, and the changing publication date of the magazine:

“In June we’ll have another astronomical cover—Mars. I’ll have to show it as seen from Diemos, the outer moon, because Phobos is so close you can’t see the whole planet from there. It illustrates ‘Men Against the Stars’ by Manly Wade Wellman, who, incidentally, is coming along damn well. ‘Pithecanthropus Rejectus’ and ‘Wings of the Storm’ both received a way-above-average reception. ‘Men Against The Stars’ had a fine idea, but needed some rewriting. Wellman took a crack at it, and still unsatisfied, I took a hand. See if you can tell, when it appears, where the joinery was done. I rewrote about one third of the story.” p. 82

“Gallun’s a funny one. Once in a while he hits a high-spot like ‘Old Faithful’ and deserves a lot. Most of the time he rides along. He’s gotten three accepts in the last three weeks. One weak, hut not too weak. One medium good. One that almost reaches ‘Old Faithful’ ‘Seeds of Dusk’ is the latter. p. 83

“They’re playing hide-and-seek with Astounding’s publication date,” Campbell complained. “You noticed the nice banner line about ‘second-Wednesday-of-the-month’? But the June issue actually comes out the third Friday. The July issue will come out the fourth Friday. And the fourth Friday thereafter. Don’t ask me why—they, not I, conceived the shift.” p. 83

2. Prince Rupert’s Drop at Wikipedia.

3. It’s not only me (and Campbell) who thought that Gallun’s story was a good one—it was anthologised in (among others) Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy & J. Francis McComas, 1946, and in The Astounding-Analog Reader Volume 1, edited by Harry Harrison, Brian W. Aldiss, 1972.
The story has a sequel, When Earth Is Old, written in the same period but rejected by Campbell according to a note for the story on ISFDB (it quotes p. 86 of Gallun’s Starclimber: The Literary Adventures and Autobiography of Raymond Z. Gallun). It eventually appeared in Super Science Stories, August 1951.

4. The Analytical Laboratory for this issue appeared in the August one:

The success of the Wellman novelette and the poor showing for the two serials, especially Williamson’s, perplexes me. At least the Gallun novelette was appreciated. For the record: the Walton, James and Knight stories were never reprinted. ●

Edited 15th November 2019: Archive.org link added.

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Astounding Science-Fiction v21n03, May 1938

ISFDB
Archive.org

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.

Fiction:
The Legion of Time (Part 1 of 3) • serial by Jack Williamson ∗∗∗+
The Incredible Visitor • short story by Clifton B. Kruse
Island of the Individualists • novelette by Nat Schachner
Procession of Suns • short story by R. R. Winterbotham
Three Thousand Years! (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Thomas Calvert McClary
Static • novelette by Kent Casey
Ra for the Rajah • short story by John Victor Peterson
Niedbalski’s Mutant • short story by Clifton B. Kruse [as by Spencer Lane]
The Brain-Storm Vibration • short story by Moses Schere

Non-fiction:
Cover • Charles Schneeman
Interior artwork • Charles Schneeman (3), Jack Binder, Elliott Dold, Jr. (5), C. R. Thomson (2), H. W. Wesso, uncredited (4)
Not ‘The’ But ‘A’ • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Catastrophe! • science essay by Edward E. Smith
Science Discussions • letters
Brass Tacks • letters
In Times to Come
The Analytical Laboratory: March 1938

_____________________

The first part of Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time leads off this issue.1 It starts with Lanning, a college student, reading a paper on space and time in his shared undergraduate flat when a woman appears in his room:

A clear silvery voice had spoken his name. Dropping the book, he sat upright in his chair. He blinked, swallowed. A queer little shudder went up and down his spine. The door was still closed, and there had been no other sound. But a woman was standing before him on the rug.
A plain white robe swept long to her feet. Her hair, a glowing mahogany-red, was held back with a blue, brilliant band like a halo. The composure of her perfect, classic face was almost stern. But, behind it, Lanning felt agony.
Before her, in two small hands, she held a thing about the size and shape of a football—but shimmering with splendid prismatic flame, like a colossal, many-faceted diamond. p. 6
[. . .]
“I am Lethonee,” she said. Her voice, Lanning noticed, had an unfamiliar musical rhythm. “And I am not really in your room, but in my own city of Jonbar. It is only in your mind that we meet, through the chronotron,”—her eyes dropped briefly to the immense flashing gem—“and only your study of Time made possible this complete rapport.” p. 6

She shows him a vision of Jonbar, her city:

The lofty, graceful pylons of it would have dwarfed the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Of shimmering, silvery metal, they were set immensely far apart, among green park-lands and broad, many-leveled roadways. Great white ships, teardrop-shaped, slipped through the air above them. p. 7

Lethonee explains to Lanning that he will have a pivotal role in ensuring the future existence of the city, and that he should guard himself against other forces:

“There is the dark, resistless power of the gyrane, and black Glarath, the priest of its murderous horror. There are the monstrous hordes of the kothrin, and their savage commander, Sorainya.”
The white beauty of Lethonee had become almost stern. A sorrow darkened her eyes, yet they flashed with a deathless hatred.
“She is the greatest peril.” It was a battle-chant. “Sorainya, the Woman of War! She is the evil flower of Gyronchi. And she must be destroyed.”
[. . .]
“Or,” she finished, “she will destroy you. Denny.”
Lanning looked at her a long time. At last, hoarse with wonder, he said: “Whatever is going to happen, I’m willing to help—if I can. Because you are—beautiful.” p. 7-8

Before she leaves him she warns him not to go to the flying club the next day with Halloran, his friend and flatmate: the latter is killed in an accident.
The second chapter continues at an equally brisk pace. Lanning graduates and takes a job reporting in Nicaragua. He travels to his new post by ship and, while on deck one night, he receives another visit:

Velvet night had fallen on the tropical Pacific. The watch had just changed, and now the decks were deserted. Lanning, the only passenger, was leaning on the foredeck rail, watching the minute diamonds of phosphorescence that winged endlessly from the prow.
[. . .]
And it startled him strangely when a ringing golden voice [. . .] called: “Denny Lanning!”
His heart leapt and paused. He looked up eagerly, and hope gave way to awed wonderment. For, flying beside the rail, was a long golden shell, shaped like an immense shallow platter. Silken cushions made a couch of it, and lying amid them was a woman.
Sorainya—Woman of War!
Lethonee’s warning came back. For the long-limbed woman in the shell was dad in a gleaming, sleeveless crimson tunic of woven mail that yielded to her full lissom curves. A long, thin sword, in a jeweled sheath, lay beside her. She had put aside a black-plumed, crimson helmet, and thick masses of golden hair streamed down across her strong, bare arms.
The white, tapered fingers, scarlet-nailed, touched some control on the shell’s low rim, and it floated nearer the rail. Upraised on the pillows and one smooth elbow, the woman looked up at Lanning, smiling. Her eyes were long and brilliantly greenish. Across the white beauty of her face, her mocking lips were a long scarlet wound, voluptuous, malicious.
Flower of Evil—Lethonee’s words again. Lanning stood gripping the rail, and a trembling weakness shook him. Swift, unbidden desire overcame incredulity, and he strove desperately to be its master. p. 9-10

If Lethonee is Good Girlfriend then Sorainya quickly reveals herself to be Bad Girlfriend. Sorainya tries to lure him on to the craft but Lethonee arrives just as he moves towards Sorainya and tells him to look below: there is a shark is in the water, and as his hand passes through Sorainya’s he realises that she is a projection too, and that he would have fallen to his death in the water. With a final warning Sorainya departs.
Lethonee tells Lanning that if he ever yields to Sorainya then Jonbar will never exist, and explains why:

“The World is a long corridor, from the Beginning of existence to the End. Events are groups in a sculptured frieze that runs endlessly along the walls. And Time is a lantern carried steadily through the hall, to illuminate the groups one by one. It is the light of awareness, the subjective reality of consciousness.
“Again and again the corridor branches, for it is the museum of all that is possible. The bearer of the lantern may take one turning, or another. And so, many halls that might have been illuminated with reality are left forever in the darkness.
“My world of Jonbar is one such possible way. It leads through splendid halls, bright vistas that have no limit. Gyronchi is another. But it is a barren track, through narrowing, ugly passages, that comes to a dead and useless end.”
The wide solemn eyes of Lethonee looked at him, over the slumberous flame of the jewel. Lanning tensed and caught his breath, as if a light, cold hand, from nowhere, had touched his shoulder.
“And you, Denny Lanning,” came the silver rhythmic voice, “are destined, for a little time, to carry the lantern. And—yours is the choice of reality.”

It’s a breath of fresh air to find a story that explains the maguffin in such a concise and elegant way—most other stories of this period would have a lone inventor banging on about etheric potentialities for a page and a half. This part is the cherry on the top of two crackingly paced chapters.
After this eventful beginning, Williamson uses the next section to rearrange the furniture. Years pass. He is visited once more by Sorainya, who tries to make him kill himself. He receives another treatise on time from his old college roommate McLan, and then one from Chan, the fourth of his roommates, after which he leaves to join him in China.
There, Lanning and Chan work as pilots in an unspecified war. During one raid they get their aircraft airborne but it is badly damaged. As they plummet towards the surface a spectral ship—with the dead Barry Halloran aboard—materialises beside them. They are plucked from the aircraft and Lanning later wakes on board to find Halloran watching over him.
Lanning finds out he is on the Chronion, a time-ship, and meets other military men plucked from various years to fight Sorainya. He then meets the ship’s captain, who is his old friend Will McLan, but finds him much changed:

Lanning climbed metal steps. Standing behind a bright wheel, under the flawless shell of crystal, he came upon a slight, strange little man—or the shattered wreck of a man. His breath sucked in to the shock of sympathetic pain. For the stranger was hideous with the manifold print of unspeakable agony.
The hands—restlessly fumbling with an odd little tube of bright-worn silver that hung by a thin chain about his neck—were yellow, bloodless claws, trembling, twisted with pain. The whole thin body was grotesquely stooped and gnarled, as if every bone had been broken on a torture wheel.
But it was the haggard, livid face, cross-hatched with a white net of ridged scars that chilled Lanning with its horror. Beneath a tangled abundance of loose white hair, that face was a stiff, pain-graven mask, terrible to see. Dark, deep-sunken, the eyes were somber wells of agony—and of a deathless, brooding hatred.
Strangely, those dreadful orbs lit with recognition.
“Denny!” It was an eager whisper, but queerly dry and voiceless.
The little man limped quickly to meet him, thrust out a trembling hand that was thin and twisted and broken, hideous with a web of scars. His breath was a swift, whistling gasp.
Lanning tried to put down the wondering dread that shook him. He took that frail dry claw of a hand, and tried to smile.
“Wil?” he whispered. “You are Wil McLan?”
He choked back the other, fearful question: What frightful thing has happened to you, Wil?
“Yes, Denny,” hissed that voiceless voice. “But—I’ve lived forty years more than you have. And ten of them in Sorainya’s torture vault.”

The rest of this section details McLan’s torture at the hands on the Gyronchi. Lanning is also shown their brutal world, and the civil war that has destroyed humanity leaving the Gyronchi and their ant warriors in control.

McLan also tells a Lanning of his temporal work (undoing the earlier elegant explanation a little), and how atomic power eventually let him build the Chronion and travel in time. At the end, Lanning goes and swears the rest of the men to the service of Jonbar.
A pretty good start to the novel.

Most of the rest of the fiction is, sadly, not up to the standard of the Williamson. The Incredible Visitor by Clifton B. Kruse, the first of two stories from this writer in this issue, is about a tiny, incredibly dense spaceship which comes to Earth from Sirius and causes a certain amount of turmoil, including the capture of two humans. The aliens, after their observations, decide they want to communicate with us.
One of the human scientists tries to tell the military that this is what the aliens are attempting, but (spoiler) he is overruled and, when the aliens attempt to return the two captives, they are attacked with a neutron ray. The ship is unaffected, but the humans (spoiler) are only saved by being recreated with alien bodies. They will be brought back to consciousness after the long journey back to Sirius.

Island of the Individualists by Nat Schachner is the third (of five stories) in the ‘Past, Present and Future’ series. I was going to read the first two but, after reading this one, I was glad I didn’t bother. This has three characters in a rocket ship running out of fuel over the Pacific. Fortunately, there is a data dump that brings us up to date:

“How far is it to land?” asked Beltan.
“As near as I can calculate,” said Sam, “almost a thousand miles. Too far to swim, as friend Kleon has justly remarked.”
The Greek shrugged. “I never did like the sea,” he declared. “I prefer solid ground underfoot, where I can brace myself and charge the enemy with my good sword flashing. It is my fault. Had I not remarked about the sleeping Gymnosophists in the mountains of Tibet, this would never have happened.”
“No more your fault than mine,” Sam Ward told him warmly. “They were our last chance. We ranged over most of North America seeking evidences of other cities, other civilizations. Aside from Hispan we could find nothing. And always behind us, hemming us in, hunting us like rabbits, were the rocket hordes of Harg, headed by Vardu. Our only chance lay in escape across the Pacific, to find the sleepers who had given you the life-immobilizing formula.”
“It is a pity that there was a leak in the tank,” observed the Olgarch with calm indifference. “Otherwise we could have made it. As it is, I regret nothing. I have lived more completely this past six months with you two as comrades, than in all the prior years of purposeless luxury within the neutron walls of Hispan.” He smiled reflectively. “A strange thing, our association. A Greek from the time of Alexander—an American from the twentieth century—and I, an Olgarch of Hispan, who once thought myself the proud apex of the ninety-eighth century.” p. 44

They see a strange island in the distance, and are scanned as they come into land. They find a race of men with really big heads who spend their time in contemplation.

One of the Heads talks to the three but, bored, retreats behind his force screen. Another Head talks to them, and feeds them before doing the same. A third speaks but then disappears. This one returns with the pursuing forces of Harg. There is a climactic battle on the island.
A poor pulp potboiler.

In Procession of Suns by R. R. Winterbotham a female pilot lands in an isolated mountain valley where a man is hiding from the rest of the world. After he destroys her plane (to stop her escaping and revealing his whereabouts) they become engrossed in an astronomical puzzle.

“I fled to these mountains and made my home in this crater of an extinct volcano. It was here that I found among some old books I had rescued in your land, certain vague references to a science called astronomy—the study of stars.”
Banna nodded. “I know,” said she. “It was the stars and astronomy that caused the latest upheaval—the stars that promised the end of the world.”
“You mean those twenty flaming suns up there?” asked Fao with a smile, pointing to the sky. Although the sun had not set, a long streamer of stars was visible, trailing across the heavens behind the Earth’s primary—twenty flashing stars of more than first magnitude. p. 65-66

The rest of the story is little more than a lecture, ending with Fao’s deduction that the Earth is acting like an ion in a capacitor—or some such scientific nonsense, I forget. This is an awful non-story.

The second part (there are overlapping serials in this issue) of Three Thousand Years! by Thomas Calvert McClary provides a temporary respite from the dross.
This section details the first attempts by Drega’s group at organising themselves in the post-apocalyptic world into which they have awakened. Food is short, and an attempt by the mob to eat a horse is stopped when a sailor turns up with a three-pound fish. Drega starts organising the men:

The fish pools had been stretched for two miles, with lengthy necks reaching into the river. At high tide the necks were bottled up. Birch and some sugar maple had been found. A poor grade of clay yielded a few pots which did not leak too badly. Birch and maple tea were the camp drink, both made by steaming twigs. There was no way to boil as yet. The inferior clay pots couldn’t stand it. A little coal had been discovered buried beneath hard packed mud. It was dug out with sticks and broken laboriously with heavy stones.
Drega’s clan had grown to two thousand, but increasing deaths from colds and infection threatened to reduce the number. The meager diet of fish and roots and dandelion greens was not sufficient to build up starved bodies. There had been an attempt to eat green berries which proved almost fatal. Some oysters and clams had been discovered. For the first time, a bird had been caught with enough meat on its bones to eat.
No dogs had come to this camp, but five cats were protected by Drega’s order. An onslaught of rats had threatened the camp’s very existence, and not until the arrival of the cats had this menace been curbed. p. 77-78

Some of the men go out to scout, and they later return on two elephants, with grim tales of colleagues lost in accidents and to huge bands of savages. There are also reports of widespread cannibalism, including one episode among their own expedition when they were desperate.

Some of the scouts do not return and Llewelyn goes out to find them, discovering Steve trapped in an underground tunnel with a group are living there. Steve and the eight hundred survivors go back to the camp.
Drega meantime has organised food for the winter, and the defence of the camp. Lead tokens are made by a smelting pit process for use as currency. For all his planning food starts to run short as winter approaches, and riots are only just supressed.
At the end of this instalment, Gamble (who caused the three thousand-year ‘sleep’) turns up with the offer of a better life:

Passionately, [Gamble] gave them a picture of the world science could create for them—corn high as their wall in five days from planting. Clothing in such quantity they could throw it into refabrication when it grew shoddy. Cars and private baths for every member of the family, luxuries for all and poverty for none. It was a beautiful picture. It left them silent and stunned.
“It will take a little time,” Gamble said. “But not long. There is only one condition. You all work and there is no money. At least money of the kind you know. In return, you get everything you can wish for. There will be no need for money.”
A cheer rose and fell dead into stunned silence. There could be no doubt Gamble spoke at least some truth. Look at his shining boots and the presents he had brought! Even bolts of silk and woolens!
“Mr. Drega,” Gamble went on, “does not agree with my views. He will probably wish to withdraw from any part of them.”
If Gamble had expected Drega to capitulate, he was disappointed. Drega was white but firm. He said to his people, “A world cannot exist without money! There must be trade.”
His clan was silent. p. 93

Most go with Gamble but a few decide instead to go with Drega to set up their own society.
This part doesn’t have the startling events of the first instalment and is a more traditional post-apocalypse piece with some interesting parts.

Static by Kent Casey is the second of the ‘Dr. von Theil and Sgt. John West’ stories. I had hopes for this one as I liked aspects of the previous tale, but this just recycles it in another conflict with the Uranians. This time the latter’s spaceships are impenetrable to the weapons used by Earth, so the General summons von Theil to find out how their shields work. Von Theil picks up the now Lieutenant West (promoted for valour after the opening space battle scene), and they head off for Mars with one of von Thiel’s inventions. This is a very long setup for a weak and unconvincing ending that involves (spoiler) a thought scrambler. The story doesn’t really make any sense (how did Von Thiel’s thought scrambler work away from Mars?), and it has an uncomplicated and straightforward ending. The cornball humour is very weak.

Ra for the Rajah by John Victor Peterson2 is narrated by Ward Jetland, the Freshman President at Royal Astrotech College in 2039 A. D. When he is introduced to a new student who is Martian royalty, his Royal Highness Ianay Fonay, it does not go well:

I was Freshman President by virtue of what was termed brilliance in prep school polo when the exclusive Coloe Palus prep Godsped the Rajah across to Royal.
His knee bent in homage, a Sophomore Martian introduced us: “Frosh prexy Ward Jetland, this is his Royal Highness Ianay Fonay, eldest son of Lanay Fonay, Over-Rajah of Syrtis Ma—”
“I-am-a-phoney!” I punned softly and chuckled. Consciousness was concurrent with the discovery that my aching mouth tasted of Martian knuckles and the realization that even a Martian can be insulted.
Tradition went smash! For a common frosh can’t sock the prexy, even if he is a Rajah’s heir-apparent. It’s worse than mutiny on a space-trajectory; it’s worse than a privately tutored youngster prancing innocently into the Blaster’s Dive on Ganymede and asking for milk!
Naturally, I promptly recovered my pugilistic prestige, and for three years afterward we had secret rendezvous behind the polo hangars and nurtured black eyes, skinned knuckles, acid burns and whatnot. We rounded the final pylon sound-limbed and going strong. Then radium, atomic energy, rockets, thrust-dispersion, polo, and—last and most important—Rosalie Ames, came cometing into our bittersweet lives and things really got serious! p. 110

The last sentence telegraphs the arc of the story. While they are working in the same lab on a rocket thrust dispersion problem they are both introduced to Rosalie Ames, a beautiful heiress:

She swept in like a queen, surveyed the Rajah and me haughtily and then swooped to our level with an even, white smile that made my heart surge like a hypoed jet-blast and keep going faster than a Perseid. I ogled at the Rajah; he ogled at me.
“Canal frogs peeping on a June night!” he sighed, which, if you’ve been to Mars, is a beautiful thing, “a vision!”
Of course, he said it just loud enough to hear—
She dimpled prettily and I decided that those telepix didn’t do the darling justice; then Widdlemere introduced us. Simultaneously something short-circuited in the unattended cyclotron—atoms disrupted in a hot, white, snapping flash—the durite vacuum tank cracked in twain.
“Damnation!” I yelped. “Voila: my next month’s allowance gone with the proverbial wind!”
“I will pay all,” sighed the Rajah ecstatically. “It is as nothing compared with meeting the famous and beauteous Rosalie—”
Shakespeare really had nothing on Fonay! p. 110-111

After she leaves, their truce ends:

“Listen, Rajah Phoney,” I growled, “all hands clear. The deck’s mine and you’re just a third-grade blaster. She gave me the orbs first, so just arc for Callisto and keep your unlovely proboscis clear of the heart-shiverin’ until I slap an I-do around the pretty’s fin—
“Listen, Vacuity Jetland,” he snapped back, “the dame’s mine. But if you must fight over everything, I’ll make you a bargain. Seeing that you’re Captain of the Royal American Varsity and I’m Cap of the Martian Varsity—well, when the annual Commencement Game comes off, the winner takes the spoils. In other words, the beauteous Rosalie is to be escorted to the Reception by the winning Captain, and the age-old custom of the engagement announcement will be preserved, all parties willing. Okel-dokel ?” p. 111

The rest of the story is about their rivalry, and concludes with a game of rocket polo.
The story is enjoyable but a little unclear at times due to its unusual and colourful style: one wonders what readers of the time thought of passages such as those above.

Niedbalski’s Mutant by Clifton B. Kruse is his second (and pseudonymous) story in the issue, and it is narrated by a sentient plant that can ‘hear’ the thoughts of its scientist creator and later matches this to his speech. The plant teaches itself to speak and attempts to communicate, only for the scientist to react with horror and leave, never to reappear. This plot loop is repeated with a woman who comes into possession of the plant. With its third owner, a botanist, the plant remains silent until it comes into bud, at which point it needs a viola tricolour for pollination. Once again the owner disappears but this time the plant learns that its attempts at communication are blanking the minds of the recipients.
There are some interesting aspects to this story, but its tragic arc is overlong and a bit pointless.

The Brain-Storm Vibration by Moses Schere occurs after the events of his earlier story Anachronistic Optics (Astounding, February 1938), but is independent of it. This one has Joshua the handyman becoming the subject of an experiment to increase intelligence (or “ratiocinative ability” as the story puts it). After they retire to the library a burglar breaks into the house; he is subdued and later used as a test subject which, of course, turns him into a criminal mastermind. There is a lot of explanatory dialogue and hand waving science explanation in the final act of this weak piece.

The Cover by Charles Schneeman (it is uncredited but is a colour mirror image of the first internal illustration) is for Williamson’s serial and is okay, I suppose, but not as good as his internal work which is probably the best in the issue. I note in passing that the coloured banners at the top and bottom of the previous covers are absent in this issue but will be back in the next. The rest of the Interior artwork is by Jack Binder, Elliott Dold, Jr., C. R. Thomson, and H. W. Wesso. A few are uncredited (I suspect the illustrations for McClary’s serial are by Brown, as they are similar to last issue’s, which were in turn similar to the credited cover). After Schneeman’s illustrations I like Wesso’s best. They look old-fashioned but are nicely detailed. The longer I look at all the different parts of the picture (look at those immaculately drawn skyscrapers in the background, the arches under the far stand) the more I think it is the best illustration in the issue. I have a grudging appreciation of Dold’s work (who illustrates three of the stories) even though it is rather crude.
John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Not ‘The’ But ‘A’ is an editorial that focusses mainly on the time-travel plot variant in Jack Williamson’s serial:

Jack Williamson has opened up another field for time-travel plots. The Legion of Time is itself a memorable story. It has a new plot. But more than that—it has a new concept—a mutant plot. If the future can follow either of many paths—and that, I feel, must be so, if our modern science is reasonably sound—then there is a new possibility. In the year 5938, for instance, either of two civilizations might exist. A time-traveler going down the paths to Tomorrow might reach either one or the other.
But, as Williamson points out, those two cannot be real to each other. If either can exist, and if they have the power, the knowledge to see through Time—then they may struggle for existence! But they cannot attack each other! p. 107

I don’t see why the latter should necessarily pertain, or why Campbell is getting so excited about Williamson’s twist; he goes on to say that this “completely new idea” “can give rise to a hundred plots.” I hope not, I don’t want to read the same story a hundred times. 3

Catastrophe! is a science article by Edward E. (‘Doc’) Smith about the formation of our solar system. As with most of these pieces it is outdated—the nebular theory it discounts (because of angular momentum concerns) is the one that is now supported.4 Smith finishes with a lively description of another theory—a wandering star striking or coming very close to a binary system, where one of the two stars was our sun.
Science Discussions has three letters, the first from Arthur C. Clarke (Hon. Treasurer of the British Interplanetary Society) which takes issue with the rocket flight equations in Leo Vernon’s article in the January issue.
Brass Tacks has letters defending ‘Doc’ Smith’s Galactic Patrol against comments made in an earlier issue, including a letter from Doc Smith himself:

What broke through my customary lethargy is not the mere fact that these sprightly and courteous gentlemen did not like “Galactic Patrol”—I cannot even hope, and certainly do not expect, to please everybody; and their tastes are their own. Nor is it the tone of the communication, the weapons they have chosen—I have been bawled out before, by experts, without undue or unseemly urges to violence.
What got my dander up to writing pitch is the accusation—by inference, it is true, but none the less clearly connoted—that I am sailing under false colors by using the Ph. D. Since Edward E. Smith is my real name, the thing is of course on record.

He goes on to give details, and challenges the original correspondents to state which passages of this novel show scientific knowledge incompatible with holding a Ph. D.
As for the other letters, there a couple who thought (as I did) that the ending to Galactic Patrol was abrupt, and there are the usual comments about the artwork. One of the readers, Mary Rogers of Muskogee, OK, compliments Smith’s novel and the new mutant cover, and finishes with “Keep up the good work and next time I’ll send orchids.”
Campbell’s reply is, “We’ll expect orchids when the May Astounding appears.”
In Times to Come announces a new feature, the Analytical Laboratory,5 and goes into matters in some detail—I’m not entirely sure what all the symbols mean:

Once again we have an issue that has a few items of note, and a lot of what can only be described as dross. ●

_____________________

1. In Campbell’s letter of 28th February 1938 to his friend and correspondent Robert Swisher (in Fantasy Commentator #59/60—recommended, and available at Lulu.com), he talks about the writers and material of this period:

“You know. I swear….we ought to get an appreciable and real circulation increase during the next three months. I think we’ve gotten some damn good stories, along with the ones that are just a bit weak. ‘Three Thousand Years and ‘Legion of Time’ are good yarns. Those Kent Casey shorts are good and (Clifton B.) Kruse has dropped his lousy W62 series (space adventure stories) for some rather nicely handled pieces. The competition from the author’s viewpoint, is getting fierce. I’m betting a number of those who appeared begin to drop out. Eando Binder has been in a bit of a slump, and his beat was never too strong. He may be retired gradually. (R.R.) Winterbotham is improving gradually and just fast enough to keep up. But he may not.
“Gallun’s a funny one. Once in a while he hits a high-spot like ‘Old Faithful’ and deserves a lot. Most of the time he rides along. He’s gotten three accepts in the last three weeks. One weak, hut not too weak. One medium good. One that almost reaches ‘Old Faithful’, ‘Seeds of Dusk’ is the latter. p. 82-83

Later on in the same letter Campbell has this to say about the artwork the magazine uses:

“By the way, any originals (covers and interior drawings) you’d like? We pass ’em out fairly liberally because they just get thrown out. You can even get a cover original after it’s about three months old—provided you don’t ask for an astronomical cover. Schneeman’s work is really neat in the originals. Binder’s originals aren’t as good as the reproduction—because he draws for the reproduction, not the original. The April cover is already bespoke—by Tom McClary. He can have it when we have the June cover to hang in the office. Wesso is doing that original astronomical plate. p. 82

2. I couldn’t find out much about John Victor Peterson. According to his ISFDB page, he wrote eight stories (one a collaboration) in the late-1930s/early-1940s and was then out of the field for over a decade, returning in the mid-1950s with another eleven works. There was a final novel in 1970, Rock the Big Rock.
I did find one snippet in Space, Time, and Infinity: Essays on Fantastic Literature by Brian M. Stableford, Borgo Press 2007, (Amazon) which has this:

I have before me as I write a battered copy of the first-ever issue of New Worlds—not the one which Ted Carnell and Frank Arnold persuaded Stephen Frances (alias Hank Janson) to launch under the Pendulum Publications imprint in 1946, but the March 1939 issue, the first of what turned out to be a run of four produced by means of a primitive duplicator. It contains a story by John Victor Peterson, a British writer who had already made five appearances in the American SF pulps, and a discussion of his writing methods by one “Thornton Ayre.” p. 94

3. Sam Moskowitz mentions one story that may have been inspired by Williamson’s in Fantasy Commentator #59/60:

The identical plot would be used with great effectiveness and poignancy in C.L. Moore’s ‘Greater Than Gods’ (Astounding Science Fiction, January, 1939), possibly urged upon her by Campbell. It was the ‘Branches of Time’ plot used several times previously, even as early as Edward Everett Hale and Mark Twain (‘Hands Off, Harper’s, March, 1881 and ‘The Mysterious Stranger’, Harper’s, 1922, respectively). p. 68-69

4. Wikipedia’s Formation and evolution of the Solar System page.

5. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in July:

I agree with the top two, but the next three are among the four worst stories in this issue; the Kruse stories are better, and Peterson’s definitely so, but I can see how the latter split opinion. ●

Edited 15th November 2019: formatting, archive.org link.

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Astounding Science-Fiction v21n02, April 1938

ISFDB
Archive.org

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.

Three Thousand Years! (Part 1 of 3) • serial by Thomas Calvert McClary ∗∗∗+
Matter Is Conserved • short story by Raymond A. Palmer
Hyperpilosity • short story by L. Sprague de Camp
Negative Space • novelette by Nat Schachner
The Faithful • short story by Lester del Rey +
Iszt—Earthman • novelette by Raymond Z. Gallun
Jason Sows Again (Part 2 of 2) • serial by Arthur J. Burks

Cover • Howard V. Brown
Interior artwork • Howard V. Brown (2), Jack Binder, Elliott Dold (4), Charles Schneeman (4), H. W. Wesso (3)
In Times to Come
Of the 500 Known Elements • science filler
Detail—But Immensely Important to Engineering • science filler
Radiation in Uniform • essay by Herbert C. McKay
Democracy • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Ignition Point • science essay by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Arthur McCann]
Science Discussions • letters
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

This issue sees incremental progress by Campbell in his quest to change the magazine into what he wants it to become. The most notable evidence of that here is the début of Lester del Rey and a second appearance by L. Sprague de Camp.

The first part of Three Thousand Years! by Thomas Calvert McClary gets off to a rather dull start with an argument between Drega, a wealthy industrialist, and Gamble, a scientist. The latter wants to release a number of his discoveries and inventions, which will provide cheap food for the masses, etc., but the businessman disagrees:

Heaven knew, their vaults were loaded with secret formulas Drega did not dare release because of the economic chaos which would ensue. Certainly they were progress! One would wipe out the Bessemer steel industry overnight. Another would crash the wool, cotton and pulp wood industries in weeks. p. 9

The story then leaps forward ten years, and picks up with a journalist called Lucky, who is discussing an end of the world story with his copy-editor when he suddenly thinks he is made of mud. Before this inexplicable event is explained there are a number of other bizarre episodes described:

A psychiatrist sat with a “client” overlooking a green inland valley. His client was under the delusion that there was no world except the imagination.
“If your theory were correct,” the psychiatrist explained simply, “we could imagine that the ocean rolled up to the foot of this cliff and it would be there.”
“Well,” insisted the client simply, “it is.”
The psychiatrist smiled tolerantly. His smile froze. From the foot of the cliff came the hollow thunder of surf. A sea broke in mottled spume.

At a famed university a renowned scientist held indignantly, “Prophecies are rubbish!” and led the way into another room. He stopped, batting his eyes rapidly. The other room had somehow become a field of rampant violets. A brook ran at his feet.

The Reverend Percival Tweedy stepped forward to the cement parapet of the stage. “I would like to give a graphic illustration of the shockingness of modern dress.”
There was a burst of applause from hatchet-faced dowagers. The applause broke into startled gasps. Mrs. Hildebran said sharply, “Really, Reverend, it is highly unnecessary to be so graphic!”
But Reverend Tweedy could not bring his mind to dwell on that statement. Mrs. Hildebran was staring at him indignantly through lorgnettes. She was wholly unclad! Even in his amazement he thought, “Skinny old wretch!” p. 11-12

Lucky the reporter he finds that he isn’t actually made of mud but encased in it:

He moved his body slowly. Joints popped and creaked. Muscles cramped. He went through a series of simple exercises, but his motions were very limited and uncertain. Gradually, they became easier. Then, for a long time, his body was afire with prickling sensations and infinite small cramps. He knew that he should be in agony, but the sensations seemed very far away—as if they might be in another body.
He turned to careful inspection of himself. He found he was naked. There were numberless questions about how he got that way, but for the time being he simply accepted the fact. His nostrils were completely caked and closed, but only at the tips. He cleared them of chunks of rock-hard dirt. He found his whole body covered by a coating of peculiar mud, varying from one-eighth inch to two-inch thickness.
The hair on his legs was eight to twelve inches long. But it was brittle and broke off. His skin was peculiarly white and colorless and dry, so dry that he peeled off a three inch strip of flesh before realizing it. Blood began to ooze through the raw gash. The blood of a dead man might look like that, just before it turned to water.
[. . .]
A lock of hair fell across his chest. It was fully three feet long, and broke off in a bunch with a slight yank. It was gnarled and filthy and lifeless. It made him think of cadavers he had seen. Systematically, he pulled off all his hair. He kept scratching himself by accident, and suddenly noticed his finger nails were three inches long. His toe nails had been long, too, but most of them had broken off while he shambled about. He bent his finger nails and they snapped. Dry—brittle—dead. It was unpleasant, this deadness of a living body. p. 14

Although these events are not explained at the time, it becomes clear that all life has been in suspended animation for three thousand years (later, Gamble the scientist takes responsibility for this), hence the people encased in dirt with long hair and nails, and the changed landscape. There are myriad other environmental changes: buried buildings, steel and clothing has rotted away, etc.
The rest of this far-fetched but intriguing instalment follows Lucky’s subsequent adventures in this new world which include, at one point, a hand coming out of the soil and grabbing his leg! After digging the man out, Lucky swims across the bay (sunken city buildings can be seen at the bottom) to find Drega the businessman.

Once Lucky finds Drega, he describes what he has seen. Drega takes charge:

Drega clapped Lucky on the shoulder. “It’s marvelous, my boy!” he boomed lustily.
“What?” asked Lucky.
“The opportunity to build!” Drega said glowingly. “Look at it. A whole city, maybe a whole world, to rebuild. And this time we’ll build it right.” p. 23

Drega organises a team of workers he comes upon and leads them all back to the city.
The beginning of this installment could have been better structured but, if an unlikely start to the novel, it is also an intriguing, original, and enjoyable one.

Matter Is Conserved by Raymond A. Palmer1 starts with a data dump (albeit a well done one involving a talking parrot) about the gravitational lensing of light proving the existence of aether. A lone scientist has developed a machine to see into the past, but when used he finds himself in the future, materialising in an alien body. When he returns to his own time he still that form.
Subsequently his friends burst into the laboratory and find the ‘alien’ there but their friend missing. They think the ‘alien’ has stolen the machine and left their friend in the future, so they force it to take them there.
This is a poor pulp potboiler but it has (spoiler) a neat twist ending (the pair take some of the dust from the floor of the machine during their search for the scientist—the remains of Byrne’s body upon him taking alien form—and when they reverse the process he is left dead of a chest wound—the missing dust).

Hyperpilosity by L. Sprague de Camp is de Camp’s second story for the magazine.2 It has a man at a poker game telling of The Great Change, a historical account of a flu virus which had the side effect of causing permanent body hair growth on all humanity. De Camp uses this maguffin for occasional comedic and political purposes:

“In July Natasha, the gorilla in the Bronx Zoo, escaped from her cage and wandered around the park for hours before anyone noticed her. The zoo visitors all thought she was merely an unusually ugly member of their own species.” p. 43

“The destitution in the South intensified the ever-present race problem, and led eventually to the Negro revolt in Alabama and Mississippi, which was put down only after some pretty savage fighting. Under the agreement that ended that little civil war the Negroes were given the present Pale, a sort of reservation with considerable local autonomy. They haven’t done as well as they claimed they were going to under that arrangement, but they’ve done better than the Southern whites said they would. Which I suppose is about what you’d expect. But, boy, just let a white man visiting their territory get uppity, and see what happens to him! They won’t take any lip. p. 43

When the narrator and his boss finally create a cure (there is talk about alpha, beta and gamma proteins) there is no interest in returning to the status quo ante.
A smart if minor story told in a breezy style.

Negative Space by Nat Schachner has Space Commander Dan Garin getting things off to a fairly dire start:

“By the Beard of the Comet,” he roared suddenly, “I’m getting fed up with this silly patrol duty and sillier transportation of distinguished space tourists from one end of the Solar System to the other. I’m a fighting man, and the Arethusa’s a fighting ship. It ain’t natural for us to shuttle back and forth like brood hens clucking over blasted little chicks. I think I’ll ground me and spend my declining days in the Martian pulque-caves, mumbling over my drink and telling tall tales to the gaping tourists.” p. 50

Two other characters are quickly introduced, Jerry, a young scientist en route to a new job on Callisto, and his girlfriend Sandra. As the three are talking on the bridge, they watch a freighter fly towards what looks like a cloud of fireflies. Jerry tells Greer to issue a warning. He does so but the freighter ignores it (the freighter captain responds on the radio like a truculent fourteen-year-old) and it flies into the cloud and perishes. Greer, thinking this a new pirate weapon, attempts to attack but Jerry fires the rockets and they avoid the same fate.
Jerry’s research reveals that the sparkles are a huge negative energy space (there is another Dirac positron mini-lecture here, similar to the one inserted by Campbell into Kent Casey’s story last issue). If the cloud continues on the same course the Earth will be annihilated.
The Planetary Council ignore Jerry when he warns them. Thereafter it is just a matter of waiting until the Council’s science expedition gets fried before they give him dictatorial powers to sort the problem out. The rest of the story describes the seemingly losing battle they fight firing massive rockets into the cloud to annihilate the positrons. When no more suicide volunteers are available (spoiler), Space Commander Dan Garin forsakes his boozy retirement in the pulque-caves to make the Final Sacrifice.
The last part is marginally better than the beginning but, overall, it is pretty bad.

The Faithful by Lester del Rey is his first published story, and it is a pretty impressive début. Written in response to Manly Wade Wellman’s Pithecanthropus Rejectus in the January issue,3 it is narrated by an intelligent dog called Hungor in a future where mankind—after a nuclear war, plague and poison gas attacks—appears to have died off.
After the fighting stops, Hungor becomes the leader of his people. They eventually meet another group and, when they hear that the poison gas covering Chicago has dissipated, Hungor leads an expedition to the city. Once the wild dog packs are dealt with they set it in motion again.
While engaged on this project—problematical because of the dogs’ lack of proper hands—a man called Paul Kenyon arrives: he has survived because of the biological experiments he performed on himself before the war. He suggests to Hungor that the hands they want are in Africa: men were creating intelligent apes there, although they had not gone as far as they had with dogs. Hungor agrees that they should send an expedition and, after they have trained pilots and repaired aircraft, Kenyon and a team leave.
In Africa they search for the apes and eventually meet their leader, Tolemy. Nine hundred or so of the thousand apes eventually agree come to Chicago (attracted in part, no doubt, by the coffee and cigarettes they are given!)
Time passes, and matters progress successfully. In the last few pages Hungor talks of changing the apes to become more like men:

Today I have come back from the bed of Paul Kenyon. We are often together now—perhaps I should include the faithful Tolemy—when he can talk, and among us there has grown a great friendship. I laid certain plans before him today for adapting the apes mentally and physically until they are men.
Nature did it with an ape-like brute once; why can we not do it with the Ape-People now? The Earth would be peopled again, science would rediscover the stars, and Man would have a foster child in his own likeness.
And—we of the Dog-People have followed Man for two hundred thousand years. That is too long to change. Of all Earth’s creatures, the Dog-People alone have followed Man thus. My people cannot lead now. No dog was ever complete without the companionship of Man. The Ape-People will be Men.
It is a pleasant dream, surely not an impossible one. p. 84

A mature, sober, and affecting work.

Iszt—Earthman by Raymond Z. Gallun starts with the alien Iszt climbing into a human-like robot and going to Earth—the planet is going to be used by his race to prevent two suns crashing into each other and imperilling the galaxy. The rest of the first half has him driving a car to his base. Sitting next to him is ‘his’ girlfriend Anne (Iszt has previously put the original Curt Shelby, who the robot was built to replace, in suspended animation). A farmer takes a pot shot at the car as they are driving along (don’t ask) and Iszt’s robot shell is damaged. They only just make it to the underground lair, where Anne learns that her boyfriend is an alien-controlled robot. She is given an amnesia drug.

The second half starts with descriptions of a variety of natural catastrophes that Earth is undergoing. Iszt has caused these so humanity will appoint him world dictator (that’s two world dictators in this issue so far). When he is successful he starts his plan to save the Galaxy, although by now he has decided to protect the cities and give Earth a second chance.
The final act has Earth and two hundred worlds being moved through space to stop the suns colliding (this requires burning off the top two hundred feet of the surface of the Earth). Iszt threatens to wreck the plan unless the rest of his kind help him give Earth a second chance after the collision is averted.
There is a glimmer of some super-science sense of wonder in the last part, but it is smothered by all the badly written and unconvincing pulp nonsense that precedes it. This story is even worse than the Schachner.

The second and last part of Jason Sows Again by Arthur J. Burks actually improves somewhat in quality (from the preceding dismal level) about a chapter in, by which time Jarl Strang has made ten copies of himself. They all depart by aircraft with the plan of photographing the newly arrived Emperor with the replication machine atom-cameras. The next part has some interesting, and prescient, comment about the enemy they are facing (and some boilerplate ‘Yellow Peril’ material, it must be said):

Hopelessness hung over the fortifications of the American army, as Jarl Harvey and Daryl Strang faced each other behind locked, soundproof doors, in a room off Strang’s headquarters office. The arrival on American shores of His Majesty Hetira had turned every Yellow Girdle soldier into a starry-eyed, invincible fanatic. To die for his Emperor was the greatest glory a member of the Yellow Girdle could attain. Thousands, receiving the word that their God-Emperor had landed, raced to die on American bayonet points, before American bullets, in the midst of bomb-bursts, from sheer exuberation—from sheer exaltation.
Their God-Emperor had landed! The Godhead under whose inspiration Japan, China, all the races of color in the Orient, had been welded together into one vast whole, that whole the Empire of the Yellow Girdle.
Napoleon, long ago, had fired men to great deeds with a little piece of red ribbon on their left breasts. Hetira, copying everything that conquerors before him had used to inspire men and make themselves great in history, caused his followers to wear belts of yellow. And thousands went into battle and died, because they believed that while they wore the yellow girdles they would not die.
And those who wore them saw men die all around them, and still believed in the efficacy of the yellow girdle. Those men died, perhaps, because their hearts were weak, or evil, or their faith in the yellow girdle faltered. If a man died, sure of his faith, and his belief in the girdle, he could not tell the living that the girdle had betrayed him.
If the girdle itself, a mere yellow strip of cloth, could inspire men to such deeds, all America realized what the actual physical presence of His Majesty Hetira would do to them.
Nothing could stop those soldiers! p. 129-130

Harvey thought, as he flew, how the chickens of many white powers were coming home to roost.While Japan had been fighting China, white nations had furnished China with their best scientific brains, in a vain effort to keep Japan from winning. Japan had won over and subdued China, and with her had conquered the fruits of white man’s teachings. And while Japan almost never created or invented anything, she could take anything invented by others, and adapt it, or advance it, to a state of marvelous perfection.
Give Japan a plane, and she would develop that same plane into one of her own that could fly twice as fast and far, twice as high, and on half the fuel the original would have needed. Then she could further develop her own plane—
Well, there seemed no end to it. And after conquering China, Japan had taken all other nations of color in her stride, because her Chinese vassal had the manpower she had always lacked. And so—the army of fifty millions which Hetira could expend without thought p. 132-33

Bombs burst, and where they burst clouds of mist came forth, to creep along the ground. It caught at those who fled, and they were gone. So that everywhere were the thousands and millions, fleeing from the creeping mist.
And the Yellow Girdle varied its attack. In many places, especially in cities, where “regional strongholds” had been more carefully constructed, and so withstood assault for longer periods, the Yellow Girdle released bombs which exploded—and freed in the crisp air the horror of disease!
Disease which was worse than any gas. Disease of which medical authorities knew nothing. Disease bred in Oriental tarns and swamps, in eastern slime, from the bodies of eastern carrion. Disease which mottled bodies of babies and women, and ate them slowly away— p. 136

While Jarl Harvey and his copies fly towards the Emperor, the war continues around them, and the men eventually parachute down on to enemy soil. Shortly after they land, and when the Yellow Girdle soldiers realise they all look the same, the Emperor arrives. The surviving Jarl Harveys are granted an audience, and manage to convince him to let them build replicator machines to produce gold.
What they actually do, of course, is (spoiler) make four copies of the Emperor who, with the original, descend into civil war. Nonsense, but quite a clever ending.
This isn’t a good story, but there are parts of this instalment that are interesting, compelling, and clever, and I came away with an inkling of why Burks was such a popular writer.

At first glance, the Cover by Howard V. Brown for Three Thousand Years! didn’t really appeal, but when you look at a larger cleaned-up image it is striking to say the least. It depicts the ‘resurrection’ scene: look at those apparently elongated fingers, which look that way due to three-thousand-year old nails!
The Interior artwork is by Howard V. Brown (uncredited, but the illustrations for the serial are presumably his as he did the cover—and the figure in the ‘drowned city’ scene matches), Jack Binder (again uncredited but it looks like his work for the Palmer), Elliott Dold, Charles Schneeman, and H. W. Wesso. Hard to pick a favourite this issue but probably Brown (for the previously mentioned underwater scene) followed close behind by Wesso/Schneeman/Dold.
In Times to Come trails a new three-part serial starting next issue, Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Probability (retitled The Legion of Time on publication). Campbell says it will be “our first mutant, new-concept story,” and that Williamson’s story embodies “a completely new fundamental idea, an idea that permits of dozens of other plots.” He also mentions a science article from ‘Doc’ Smith. The closing section has Campbell reiterate that the ‘mutant’ tag is only used for new concepts and ideas, and that he thinks it may be as long as six months before the next one.
Of the 500 Known Elements is a chemistry filler which states that isotopes are “different physical elements”.
Detail—But Immensely Important to Engineering is the second science filler, which is about new electrical motors and their glass tape insulation.
Radiation in Uniform by Herbert C. McKay is a science article on polarised light. I gave up on it after a few pages: it is unintelligible (and I say that as someone with a degree in physics and chemistry).
In this month’s editorial, Democracy, John W. Campbell, Jr. states “a magazine is not an autocracy” but a “democracy by the readers’ votes”. Mmmm . . . for now, maybe. He adds that, while he can’t print all the letters he receives, he will publish a representative selection, and that the letters received are helpful in “forming and directing” the magazine’s expansion.
Ignition Point is another short pseudonymous science filler by Campbell which examines the energies required to produce atomic reactions.
A pseudonymous Campbell also contributes a ridiculous letter about the evolutionary pressures of modern living on man to Science Discussions:

Man had prehensile toes once, and he probably had a nice prehensile tail. I’ve seen worker in a steel-mill who worked controls on a special open-hearth furnace loading machine by using both hands, both feet, and by pushing controls with the side of his head. Just think how darned handy a man with prehensile, individually controllable toes, and a really useable monkeylike tail would be!
And eyes! Not a few creatures have eyes capable of individual operation. Give a man eyes that could at will, operate either as two separate units of vision or in stereoscopic cooperation, and you’d have something. A little development of brain tissue already available, and he’d be watching indicating meters, and the operations he was performing at the same time.
That is, if a change does occur in Man so that a slightly variant type arises, he’s apt to get his chance pretty quickly. That little thing like the two-way eyes, for instance. A workman who developed that knack would get a pretty good salary, because his efficiency would be higher.

A man with two-way eyes would probably not do that well on Tinder, and thus fail to reproduce and pass on his mutation.
After another letter about evolution, there is a request for an astronomical cover of Earth as seen from the Moon. The final letter is about escape velocity.
Brass Tacks has letters from a couple of names I recognise (Robert A. Madle, the long-time bookseller, and Langley Searles, the future editor of Fantasy Commentator). As well as the usual comments about the stories4 there are quite a few that mention the artwork, and their like or dislike of various artists.

An interesting issue, with the appearance of del Rey the highlight. ●

_____________________

1. Ray Palmer was just about to start, or had just started, at Ziff Davis, taking over the editorship of Amazing Stories from T. O’Conor Sloane (Palmer’s first issue was the June 1938 issue).

2. De Camp’s first story for the magazine was The Isolinguals (Astounding, September 1937). He would become an important contributor to the magazine.
Alexi & Cory Panshin’s The World Beyond the Hill (Chapter 12) (Amazon UK; ebook on iTunes) has three or so pages about Campbell meeting de Camp and their early relationship. It includes this:

It didn’t take Campbell long to see that de Camp had a highly developed sense of a universe of interconnection, a universe in which all things hang together. And Campbell was able to recognize this as the same in essence as the universe of his own vision—the universe of underlying operating principles.
De Camp became Campbell’s right-hand man. In 1938, Campbell would publish only three short stories and one article by de Camp. But in 1939, the figures would be two two-part articles, two novels, and six stories, and Campbell would also use de Camp as a script doctor to do a complete revision of another author’s not-quite acceptable novel.
It would be hard to overstate the value de Camp held for Campbell in those early years. It was a complex and interrelated program of change that Campbell was attempting to engineer in 
Astounding through 1938 and 1939, and the writing that best exemplified the modern science fiction that Campbell was striving to bring into being was the work of L. Sprague de Camp. Until other writers finally showed up with their own versions of the new Atomic Age vision, it was de Camp who served as Campbell’s corroboration and proof.

3. Del Rey describes how his first story came to be written in The Early Del Rey by Lester Del Rey, Doubleday, 1975:

I was busy reading [Astounding] a few days before Christmas [1937] when my girlfriend dropped by to see me. She lived a couple of blocks away, and the landlady knew her and liked her enough to let her go up to my room unannounced. So she appeared just as I was throwing the magazine rather forcibly onto the floor. I still do that sometimes when a story irritates me, though I’m somewhat more tolerant now.
I can’t remember why I was so disgusted. The story was one by Manly Wade Wellman, “Pithecanthropus Rejectus,” in the January 1938 issue of Astounding Stories, in which normal human beings were unsuccessfully imitated by an ape; I suspect my dislike was at the unsuccessful part of the idea.
[. . .]
Anyhow, my girlfriend wanted to know what all the fuss was about, and I responded with a long and overly impassioned diatribe against the story. In return, I got the most irritating question a critic can receive: “What makes you think you have the right to judge writers when you can’t write a story yourself?”
My expostulations on the great critics who couldn’t write fiction got nowhere.
“So what makes you think I can’t write?” I wanted to know.
“Prove it,” she answered.
That was something of a stopper. But I couldn’t back down at that stage. So eventually, I talked her down to admitting that maybe even successful writers couldn’t sell every story, and that if I could get a personal letter from the editor, rather than a standard rejection slip, I would win the bet.
When she left, I sat down to do a little hard thinking. I was pretty sure I could win, partly because I knew that John W. Campbell had just been made editor of the magazine; I’d written some very nice things about his stories in my letters to the editor, and I was sure he’d remember my name, which would help. That was cheating, a bit, but I still didn’t think the challenge was fair, either. Anyhow, I’d stuck my lip out, and now I had to make good: I have always enjoyed challenges, and I meant to enjoy this one.
Well, I’d read an amazing number of articles on how to write fiction in the old Writers’ Digest—splendid articles by many of my favorite pulp writers. I’d read them because it helped me to enjoy their fiction even more, but I must have learned something out of them. And I’d also come up with a number of ideas for stories during the years of reading. I hadn’t written any of them down, even in notes, but I remembered the best of them.
In the end, however, I decided that the best idea was to rebut the story I’d disliked by writing one in which man failed and some other animal took over. Wellman had used an ape, so I chose dogs as my hopefuls. So far as I could remember, few science fiction stories had used dogs, though a lot had messed around with the apes.
During that evening and the next day, I figured out what I hoped was a plot. Then I sat down at my old three-row Oliver and began writing steadily. It took me about three hours to finish. And looking at the results, I wasn’t at all happy. It was too wordy in style, and too long. I knew that editors get too many long stories and are usually most interested in fiction that is under five thousand words in length. Mine ran to eight thousand. So I sat down with a pencil and began slashing out and shortening. When I finished, I had only four thousand words left, but the results were much better. I’d also learned a tremendous amount about the art of writing fiction—so much that I never had to resort to that business of slashing again; thereafter, I slashed mentally as I went along.
So I shoved the old 1909 Oliver under the bed and dragged out my modern four-row Woodstock. (There was something about the old machine that suited it for composing; but the Woodstock made much neater copy.) I retyped the story neatly in approved form, put it in an envelope with the required stamped, return-address envelope, and mailed it off to John W. Campbell the day before Christmas, 1937.
The story was entitled “The Faithful,” and I thought it a little too simple to sell, but good enough to get a personal letter.
[. . .]
I’d read enough about manuscripts from unknown writers to expect a long delay before I received any notice of my story. But to my surprise, there was an envelope from Astounding Stories in the mail of January 8. And it was a small envelope, instead of the large return one I had sent to hold my manuscript. There was no personal letter from the editor—but there was a check for $40.
It’s a little hard to find the right word to describe my reaction. Perhaps ecstatic delight is the best description; and from other writers, I’ve heard that this is a sort of standard, normal feeling. There seems to be something about having one’s first work of fiction accepted for publication that is not equaled by any other success on earth!
Naturally, I called the girl friend, who agreed that I’d won the bet—and who never again questioned my right to throw a magazine across the room! Then I called my uncle, who had sold a lot of pulp fiction himself; I think his reaction was fully the equal to mine when he finally figured out what I was saying.
But I was far too practical to frame the check; that got cashed at once, leaving me with more money in one lump than I’d had for several months. And then the second reaction began. How long had all this been going on? Forty dollars was a lot of money in those days; and I’d earned it for only a couple of days of fairly easy work that had been fun. Aha! Mr. World, here I come!

I’ve read very little of Del Rey’s work, but the early stories of his that are always mentioned are Helen O’Loy (Astounding, December 1938) and Nerves (Astounding, September 1942). That said, The Faithful placed fifth in the 1939 Retro Hugo short story awards (Helen O’Loy placed second behind Arthur C. Clarke’s How We Went to Mars).

4. The Analytical Laboratory (a story-rating feature that begins next month) in the June issue reveals what readers thought of the stories in this one:

The pecking order is close to my own: I would swap the del Rey/McLeary and the de Camp/Burks. It is interesting to note that the readers of 1938 also clocked the Palmer, Schachner and Gallun stories as the weak material in this issue. ●

Edited 15th November 2019: formatting, archive.org link.

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Astounding Science-Fiction v21n01, March 1938

ISFDB link

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.

Something from Jupiter • novelette by Raymond Z. Gallun [as by Dow Elstar] ∗∗
Flight of the Dawn Star • short story by Robert Moore Williams
The Master Shall Not Die! • novelette by R. DeWitt Miller
Duel in the Space Lanes • short story by William C. Beckett –
Jason Sows Again (Part 1 of 2) • novella serial by Arthur J. Burks –
Wings of the Storm • short story by Manly Wade Wellman
Martyrs Don’t Mind Dying • short story by John Victor Peterson –
Vibratory • short story by Nelson Tremaine [as by Warner Van Lorne]
Flareback • short story by Kent Casey
Eye of the Past • novelette by Otto Binder [as by Eando Binder] –

Cover • by H. W. Wesso
Interior artwork • by H. W. Wesso (4), Charles Schneeman (4), Jack Binder (3), Elliott Dold, Jr. (3)
In Times to Come
Science-Fiction • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Power Plants of Tomorrow: Putting the Moon on the Job • science essay by Willy Ley
Science Discussions
Brass Tacks • letters
Heavy Elements are not Necessarily Inert • science filler

The major change this issue is a significant change of title, from Astounding Stories to Astounding Science-Fiction.1 There is an accompanying editorial, Science-Fiction, where Campbell gives his reasons for the change, before continuing with missionary zeal:

Something from Jupiter by Raymond Z. Gallun has a lot happening in its first few pages. Gregory Cross lives on an Earth suffering from an overactive sun and, meantime, has been communicating by Morse code with aliens on Jupiter, hoping to get their help. A spherical spaceship arrives and splits open to receive him. He feels compelled to enter, and is soon on his way.

After his arrival on Jupiter Cross wakes up in different chamber, and rubs the frost on the inside of the window—his skin has changed colour and the frost feels hot—and sees an alien outside. They communicate by Morse and Cross learns the Jovians have changed the biochemistry of his body so he can survive on the planet. He is taken out of the chamber and through a transparent tunnel to another part of their city:

Confronted thus by the vivid reality of the giant planet’s eternal, raging holocaust, Greg almost forgot his present position. He could see little through that blinding maelstrom, it was true; but from that little, one could still construct a mental picture that was more complete.
Wind. Lightning. Rain. Rain of liquefied ammonia, it must be. Greg could not smell its acrid pungence; but this, he decided, was natural. The sensitivity of his olfactory nerves had been changed, along with his flesh. On Earth, the water vapor in the air is almost odorless, too, as a result of human conditioning to its constant presence.
The rain thumped against the clear roof of the tunnel with the maddening roar of an avalanche. It was reddish, mucky rain, filled, no doubt, with the powdered ejecta of volcanoes. Not hot volcanoes such as existed on Earth, for Jupiter must be cold almost to the core. This vast world was composed largely of gases. The great cloud from which it had been formed, torn from the Sun by the passage of another star, had contracted slowly because of its low density.
Cold, however, does not deny the possibility of violent physical and chemical changes. On Jupiter there was still heat enough to produce tremendous explosive forces. Differences of high pressure in the vast atmosphere still could create winds that hurtled along at speeds of hundreds, even thousands of miles an hour. And deep in this planet’s solid core there was still warmth enough to change liquid ammonia to gas, creating pressure that could move masses of rock huger than the Earth. Thus Jupiter must still have belching volcanoes, erupting not molten lava and steam, but cold, speeding vapors, and the muck of silicious dust. p. 12-13

Cross doesn’t have time to contemplate the Jovian landscape for much longer, or the huge chamber the tunnel debouches into. He is taken to a spherical room, and watches a screen which shows the chamber he is in (as well as two others) take off and go to Ganymede.
When they get to the satellite, Cross sees a transformed Jovian disembark. Cross learns that Ganymede was the Jovians’ original home but, when the sun cooled ages ago, they had to change their form and go to Jupiter. When the sun resumed its former activity they could not return as they had lost the secret of the change technology—hence Cross’s presence: the study of his biology taught them what they needed to know. Cross asks if they will help Earth and, when he does not receive an answer, plots to steal their ship.
Later, Cross is taken by a Jovian for conversion back to his original form so he can disembark on Ganymede, but he escapes and hides on the ship. He destroys a robot and gains access to the control room.
He learns to fly the ship, and sets off for Earth. En route there are various struggles with another robot onboard until he is converted back to human form and put on a smaller vessel. It leaves the mother ship, which is moving too fast to land on Earth and crashes into the moon and blows it to smithereens. The rubble will end up orbit around Earth and shelter it from the sun’s heat. The story ends with a message of friendship from the Jovians.
This story is, as you can probably tell from the synopsis, a bit unlikely, but it moves along with a certain superscience verve and the aliens and the descriptions of Jupiter are quite well done.

The highlight of the issue is Flight of the Dawn Star by Robert Moore Williams.2 In this one a pair of spacemen land on a planet after accidentally passing through a warp. They leave their spaceship and see a deserted futuristic city. Later they hear voices, a find a group of people who seem like teenage youths but are in fact near-immortals.
The two spacemen try to adjust to their hosts’ pastoral existence but, when they find out one of the immortals can help them, they decide they want to return to Earth. They go to a room with a machine that simulates all the planets in the universe. After synchronizing the machine to the Earthman’s time, Nard searches for Earth but is unsuccessful. He quizzes the pair again as to the characteristics of Earth. After making an adjustment he eventually finds the Earthmen’s solar system. He then breaks the news that (spoiler) they can never go home as they are already on Earth, but a million years in the future. They have passed through a time warp, not a spatial one.
The synopsis of this probably makes it sound rather ho-hum, but it is a well-written mood piece.

The Master Shall Not Die! by R. DeWitt Miller3 starts with the eponymous Master contemplating his longevity (he has lived a thousand years), and the ennui that has begun to afflict him. We then find out that he is in charge of the world, assisted by the body of scientists under him (although limited political autonomy allowed to the populace). The reason he has to serve as the world’s Master is because a normal lifespan is too short to absorb the amount of knowledge required to run the system.
We later discover he has extended his life is by receiving complete blood transfusions from a young donor every thirty years (there is a lot of waffle about new and old blood, and associated ageing processes which was most likely nonsense at the time). The Master rejuvenates after the new blood; if the young donor receives the old blood they die.
The rest of the story concerns his interaction with Barrett Norgard, his prospective donor. The Master reveals to Norgard that, unknown to anyone else, all the other donors are in suspended animation along with jars of his old blood. The Master also reveals that he believes that he has discovered how to turn old blood into new (more gobbledygook).
Complications arise when the Master finds that the rat he has experimented on has died, and he decides he has had enough; Norgard tells him he must go on for the sake of humanity. A scuffle ensues, and the Master is knocked unconscious.

For all that the politics and science of this one are ridiculous, Miller does a good, if sometimes ponderous job of telling the story, and produces quite a good ending (spoiler: Norbert completes the Master’s rejuvenation process, potentially sacrificing himself. When the Master wakes he nonetheless decides to kill himself, but his mind is changed by a note left by Norbert telling him that he owes it to humanity to continue his search for a cure, referring to an earlier conversation about the “focal length of his mental lens”: a reference to taking the longer view. If it wasn’t for the dodgy science I would have rated this one higher.

Duel in the Space Lanes by one-shot wonder William C. Beckett is an awful story about one spaceman betraying another to aliens, and “emanations” from Jupiter. It is full of writing like this:

Thorp grasped a heavily armored cable, inserted its triple-pronged plug into a receptacle on a shining new panel above the instrument board. Plunging shut a switch, he watched as the frequency poured into the outer shell built up.
“If the equations are correct,” he mused, “the electromagnetic wave of the seventeenth octave should neutralize the emanation by interference. If it doesn’t—good-by, Theodore!” p. 62

One that escaped from the slushpile.

Next is the first half of a novella by Arthur J. Burks, Jason Sows Again.4 This story has America attacked by the “Yellow Girdle”, an unnamed Asian country. Fifty million soldiers launch a surprise attack in the American continent:

They struck like thunderbolts of doom on a certain morning never to be forgotten. Monsters rose from the deep off the West Coast of North America, over against San Diego, and San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver—nor did the enemy care for a single instant that the attack on Vancouver automatically forced Great Britain into the holocaust. They gave no thought to Great Britain at all, for world conquest was their goal, and they would swallow all nations as they declared war, or whether they did or not.
Great shells smashed into the coast cities. Sounds so great and dreadful the mind of man could not believe them—sounds which drove the hearers instantly mad, so that they turned on one another and fought like dogs in the streets, until the vast projectiles fell among them, leaving only piles of bloody human clay where the mad ones had fought. p. 65-66

There are several pages of this generalised destruction to start (and many more throughout the story, all described in a portentous and distant third person voice) before a twenty-five-year-old becomes a four star general and asks for a miracle from his Rockies redoubt.
The miracle appears in the form of Jarl Harvey:

Yet there would be a miracle, at that. It was even now moving up the mountainside, in the shape of a man with a small black box in his arms—a thing that looked like a camera.
But his hand, both of his hands, were hideous, for they had no fingers. And he must have been a man of great courage, for he tottered along on the stubs of his ankles, because his feet were gone.
And he couldn’t see where he was going, because his eye-sockets were empty.
Yet this caricature, this horror of a man, was the miracle for which a nation prayed— p. 70

This unlikely figure eventually manages to get to the Rockies stronghold (even more unlikely) with his superweapon. When they arrive the soldiers who rescued him leave him with his box—although they haven’t ascertained what the device is—and happily send for the General to speak with him. Jarl writes out his messages in the sand using his stump (his tongue is missing as well).

“The box must be guarded with all our lives until I have done my work! It is our salvation! It means defeat for the enemy!”
[. . .]
Maybe I am your miracle. There is a way to find out. I must have a room to myself, immediately. I must have a box of any size, so long as it is bigger than six by three, and deeper than two feet, inside that room. The box must contain ration components—300 pounds in all—in any form obtainable—meats, metals, condiments—and must be made radioactive. Your chemists will know. And hold the enemy at all costs until I am ready. p. 76-77

The General tells his men to hop to it. To cut a long story short, the box creates a healthy copy of Jarl, who then organises a demonstration for the General—just as the Yellow Girdle launch an attack on the Rockies. The General points out the flaw in Jarl’s plan: to make a million equipped men would take 300 million pounds of raw material! Which they don’t have.
This is pretty awful, but is of minor interest for its depiction of total war. I assume at the time there was a fear of something much worse than WWI occurring if the world fell into conflict again (due to technological developments, and what was seen in the Spanish Civil War, etc.).

Wings of the Storm by Manly Wade Wellman5 starts with an elderly science teacher reading something in a child’s essay that catches his attention:

“Many scientists believe that the smallest of the insects, such as the ants, are not aware of human beings near them. Human beings appear too big for ants to see or understand; they are like big shadows on the sky. When we step on an ant hill, it is like a hurricane to them, only harder for them to understand than for us to understand a hurricane.” p.88

He initially dismisses this out of hand, but later the thought returns and he speculates that there may be a huge creature that causes storms and hurricanes. Before much longer he is experimenting with a substance that will increase his size (both H. G. Wells and Ray Cummings are explicitly referenced at this point) and he transforms himself into a two hundred mile high being:

He gazed down at himself, and saw his naked body as it had always been, but misty, as though glimpsed through a light cloud of smoke. His hand, for instance, was recognizable in every crook and knob—but its nails had no clarity of outline. When he touched his face, the tag of moustache felt artificial and amorphous, like a single piece of fabric instead of a close-grown strip of separate hairs. p. 93

When he nears the hurricane he sees the massive creature:

What hovered between him and South America?
Mogollon’s first sensation was of looking an elephant in the face. There was a gray expanse that might have been the front of a smooth skull, with an earlike flap stirring gently to either side and a trailing proboscis at the bottom. Patently it was three-dimensional, and patently it was alive. Its bulk was as great as his own or even greater and—relatively speaking—it was as close as though on the opposite side of a wideish street. Mogollon narrowed his faulty eyes for a better view, and made out that the head had no body, was in fact a body in itself. What he had seen as ears were wings, or served as such. Wings of the storm—the hymn had been right about it! And the trunk was rather a neck or throat, as thick at the base as his calf and rather smaller at the tip than his wrist. p. 94

Battle commences.
If you can swallow both these unlikely ideas—the science teacher’s size change and the hurricane monster—there is some entertainment here.
A year or so later a story of this type would have appeared in Unknown.

Martyrs Don’t Mind Dying by John Victor Peterson is a breathless melodrama about a time-traveller called Duhamel, who vanishes in front of the worldwide viewing public and never returns. Several imitators come to grisly ends and further experimentation is banned.
The story picks up with one of the students of Duhamel, Bara Lowndi (and sister of one of the failed travellers who died a particularly grisly death, legs left behind, etc.), who has built another machine. She and her boyfriend Russ are arguing about the risk to her life when he is called by an assistant who tells him a metal capsule has been found among fossils near the site of Duhamel’s first attempt.
Russ jets over and telepathically receives the combination (never explained) to the capsule. Inside there is a note written in blood stating (spoiler) that he will return to Bara’s lab, argue with her, lose his mind, and shoot her in the head. He will then go back in time, meet Duhamel, and bash in his skull while being shot in the lung.
Russ jets back to Bara’s lab and it looks like this scenario will melodramatically play out:

But the madness—the stark, chilling insanity—had conquered whatever there was of culture, refinement, and decency within him. He thrust her savagely from him. She struck against a sharp edge of the helix and he laughed jerkily at the cry of pain that came from her lips.
“You can’t!” he screamed. “Can’t—wrong, utterly wrong! Time message—must kill—kill—” His pupils were dilated; he clawed the gun from its holster, aimed it at her white, terrified face—“KILL!” p. 195

The assistant who discovered the capsule intervenes, however. He is the aged Duhamel and provides a ‘many worlds’ explanation as to how he managed to change the course of history in this one timestream.
Another slush pile effort.

Vibratory by Nelson Tremaine6 starts with yet another loner scientist, this one a professor who has created what appears a technologically advanced organ capable of producing very specific frequencies. Having discovered how to “duplicate the vibrational chord of any object by mechanical means” he moves it to a deserted factory to experiment further and, during one of the testing sessions, one of the supporting beams of the factory disappears. He goes to inspect the area:

There was a hole in the foundation, as well as in the ceiling overhead. It was curved like a bowl and sunk about six feet below the surrounding level. The vibration in the pillar affected everything around it for a certain distance. The size of both openings were identical.
As his gaze wandered up through the opening, he saw the blunt end of the hissing steel beam hanging from the second-story ceiling. It appeared as if it had been sheared off about the same distance above the top of the pillar in the first story as the depth of the opening in the foundation. There was vague unreality about the missing section, almost as if the empty space between the two openings was cloudy. As Ernest bent forward to peer closer at the hole in the floor, his head hit something solid!
It threw him off his feet, as if he had been shoved back by some fast-moving object! His forehead was burned where it had made contact, and for a moment he couldn’t see. p. 126

When his vision clears he can see that the beam is beginning to rematerialise and he sees there is a living creature in the pillar. He falls into unconsciousness. When he comes to he sees the creature is trapped:

In the vibrational state the creature must have been more solid than the steel of the support. When the steel returned to the present form, by the elimination of vibration, the creature had come with it—and was alive in the pillar!
It was covered with thick hair, of a bronze hue, and wore no sign of clothing. He might have been an ape of the jungle, except that his hands were enormous—with twelve fingers on the one which was free of the pillar. His foot had nine digits.
His arm and leg seemed to be of about the same length, and were both long in proportion to his body. But his general proportions were similar to those of a man. He would stand about nine feet tall, and weigh about three hundred and fifty pounds.
The light was poor, but Ernest was able to see that his face was smooth and very pink. Suddenly he realized that he was watching an intelligent creature. The thing was motioning for aid to escape from the imprisoning metal! p. 127-8

The last section (spoiler) has the professor bond with the creature (he builds a structure to support it while he works out how to release it, feeds it, etc.). He then fires up the machine again after leaving notes to say that he is off to the creature’s world to support it in its recovery, and that his machine should not be used again until he returns, etc.
The last half of this is the best of what is still a pretty creaky story (this is largely due to the dated ‘lone inventor’ and ‘weird made-up science’ vibes) and it takes a long time getting there.

Flareback by Kent Casey7 is the first of four ‘Dr von Theil and Sgt John West’ stories. This origin story does not get off to a promising start with West, a college graduate and spaceman doing some pulp grumbling to himself:

“Just a space bum, that’s what I am. And now that the lanes are closed for duration of the war even bums like me can’t roam around. Free lance, huh! ‘Aye, aye, Sir! Sergeant West reporting for orderly duty, Sir!’ Phooey! I can’t even get to the front, but have to stick around here running errands for Colonel Brumby, the old Miss Nancy! Sit here twiddling my thumbs and opening doors for whiskery little goats like that Dutchman who just came in. I’ll bet I have to convoy him safe home and make sure no big, bad Uranians bite him after he’s through chewing the fat with the Colonel. Wotta life, wotta life!” p. 133

The Dutchman turns out to be Professor von Thiel, and West’s colonel tells him to take him out in a ship and to obey his orders. The rest of the story (spoiler) has them vaporise an asteroid with an experimental device, and then go to a station on Mars to repair some minor damage to their ship. While they are on the planet a Uranian ship lands and steals the professor’s device. West is knocked out during the first skirmish with the Uranians and, when he comes to, Von Theil freely admits that he knew the Uranians followed them to Mars. Just as West is about to rough him up, the Uranians attempt to use the weapon on the pair but destroy their own ship instead—as the professor expected.
This isn’t a particularly good story, but there are promising signs: there are passages of this that are quite lucid and concise (the explanation of how the device works mentions Dirac, and the creation of electron-positron pairs from space—but see footnote 7) and there is an attempt at some complexity of plot. The ‘buddy’ relationship works reasonably well, too.

Eye of the Past by Otto Binder is the sixth or seventh story in the issue that has a lone inventor or scientist at the centre of it. This one starts with a prologue that details a twenty year war on Earth that is so devastating that Earth becomes a pacifist world. Then, of course, the aliens arrive and start razing all the major cities of Earth to the ground.
Cut to our inventor, who is working on a machine to examine the insides of atoms to see into the past:

The young scientist’s voice became a sharp hiss. “Within the atoms of all the matter around us lie the records of the past, in the form of ether vibrations. An instrument that can reach down within the atom and translate those vibrations into visible light waves would make the past an open book. In plain words—television of the past!”
Tanya, womanlike, tried to hide the deep admiration in her eyes as she looked at the man she loved.

He eventually tracks down the inventor of an atomic ray device that was destroyed, along with the creator’s notes, after the twenty year war. Earth is saved.
This is very poor, and I was surprised that this came from the writer who would produce I, Robot (Amazing Stories, January 1939) less than a year later.

The Cover by H. W. Wesso, illustrates Gallun’s story Something from Jupiter. He also provides some of the Interior artwork along with Schneeman, Binder and Dold. Schneeman and Dold provide the best of the illustrations for my money; Binder’s aren’t of the same quality as the other three and look quite dated.
In Times to Come is, initially, In Times Present, as it starts by mentioning that the Burks’ serial in this issue arrived so late they couldn’t announce it last issue. After that there is mention of a couple of science articles before the big news:

Jack Williamson has submitted an outline for a story to be called “The Legion of Probability.” It isn’t finished, and I can’t be certain until it is— but I think Williamson is going to be the author of our first new-concept mutant story. He’s a corking good author under any circumstances, but he has a completely new concept to work on, and I’m expecting another, really great serial from him. p. 4

Power Plants of Tomorrow: Putting the Moon on the Job by Willy Ley is a fairly dull piece about using the seas as an alternative power source (tidal, temperature differential, etc.). It could do with more illustrations.
Science Discussions8 leads off with a letter from ‘Arthur McCann’ (Campbell’s science writer pseudonym) about lightweight magnesium alloys. The others are a decidedly cranky bunch (cranky-eccentric rather than the usual cranky-irritable) that includes stuff like this from George Trott, Bronx, NYC:

Anthropologists do know that homo-sapiens have advanced very little if at all in the past five or six thousand years. So you can imagine how long it must have taken to evolve up to then. I am of the opinion that the Bible was not so far wrong in its story of the creation of man, that is, in so far as the length of time it took to form mankind. Let me explain myself; today, scientists are experimenting with the mutation of species, which mostly consists of subjecting the eggs or female lower forms of life to X-rays, ultraviolet rays, radium rays, etc. The offspring of the parents in many cases are totally different species. p. 114

In Brass Tacks a number of the letters address Campbell by name, including one from Mark Reinsberg, Chicago, Illinois, who says this about the January issue in the first of his two letters:

The magazine shows the influence of its new editor a mile away.

With this kind of comment, and various other mentions of the new editor, it’s hard to see how you could say, as some do, that this is Campbell’s ‘first’ issue. There are various story comments: Fearn’s Red Heritage gets a number of positive mentions, likewise Van Lorne’s (Nelson Tremain’s) Ormoly of Roonerion.
Heavy Elements are not Necessarily Inert9 is a half-page filler that starts off with some facts about uranium (denser than lead, reacts with water, etc.) before mentioning other metallic elements.

A mediocre issue with a lot of pulp filler. ●

_____________________

1. Alexi & Cory Panshin’s The World Beyond the Hill (Chapter 12) (Amazon UK; ebook on iTunes) has this comment about the title change:

It was Campbell’s intention to gradually shift the name of the magazine from Astounding (which he didn’t much care for, perhaps thinking it imitative of Amazing—which, we may remember, it had been) to the generic Science Fiction. He would be forestalled when, early in 1939, one of the many new SF pulps then springing up was named Science Fiction first.
And still, Campbell had established a point. The first magazine to specifically present itself as science fiction—using those words as part of its title—was the Campbell Astounding.

In late 1946 the cover design changed (there had been previous alterations) to one that minimized the “Astounding” part of the title (and would until early 1953). This is the July 1949 cover:

The above (original image from Siren in the Night) is also an example of one of the magazine’s sober and occasional ‘fact’ covers.

2. As ever, Fantasy Commentator #59/60 by A. Langley Searles and Sam Moskowitz (recommended, and available at Lulu.com) has a number of letters from Campbell containing comments about these stories (with additional commentary from Sam Moskowitz). This is from his letter to Swisher of 11th November 1937:

“Robert Moore and Robert Moore Williams (‘Beyond That Curtain’, Thrilling Wonder Stories. December. 1937) are the same guy—and he’s sent in one that I’m taking that’s a definite try at a Don A. Stuart style. The sunuvagun positively cribbed—but did it delicately and very nicely. ‘Flight of the Dawn Star’, scheduled for February [. . .] Well told, but not new even for 1938.” p. 68

Now you know what Campbell and I thought about the stories, here is the reader vote from the first Analytical Laboratory in the May issue (bottom of page):

3. Letter from Campbell to Swisher dated 11th February 1938 (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“We—Astounding—are announcing to authors a new policy. Actually, strengthening an old one. Tremaine started, about 14 months ago, using more of the human interest type, definitely slanting toward human stories. The latest circulation figures show that we upped 30% in 12 months.
“We want more stories of the type of ‘The Master Shall Not Die!’ (by R. DeWitt Miller, March, 1938. This author [Moskowitz], while visiting Campbell in the Spring of 1938 was challenged to name one story in the entire history of science fiction better than Millers, so sold was Campbell on that story)— which I thought was darned good. I know you like heavy science, but you’ll have to part with it this time, because the readers don’t. I did notice you said it was an ‘impressive’ story, but gave it a blue rather than a gold. What was your reaction to the yarn? Why did it not merit a gold? (Despite Campbell’s personal promotion of that story it was never anthologized. Its scientific premise, that a complete change of the blood from a young man to that of an old man could renew youth was known to be false at the time the story was written, but possibly not to Campbell.) p. 81

The novelette was later expanded, in collaboration with Anna Hunger, to a 38,000 word novella that was half of Ace Double D-162 (the other half was Jerry Sohl’s The Mars Monopoly):

P. Schyuler Miller had this to say about it in Astounding (November 1956):

This is about the low point in the series of double novels that have been coming from Ace recently. “The Mars Monopoly” is a western transplanted to the future and to Mars, with villainous industrialists, heroic asteroid miners, misunderstood natives, and a least-suspected bad man. The Miller-Hunger effort is just another story about someone who keeps on living for the good of mankind, even though he has to slaughter a long series of young stalwarts to do it. I’m growing allergic to books in which the chief character is The Master. I’ll have to write one myself, to take the curse off and get a fresh point of view . . .

Anthony Boucher had this in F&SF (August 1955):

D-162 is easy to skip: THE MAN WHO LIVED FOREVER, by R. DeWitt Miller and Anna Hunger, is a mildly amusing romantic melodrama of 3097 with no relation to science fiction, and Jerry Sohl’s THE MARS MONOPOLY IS the ultimate example of labeling a routine western as s.f. because it is set on Mars. p. 108

The novella is available on Amazon. I’m not sure how many they are likely to have sold given the sample they send out has the complete text.

4. Letter from Campbell to Swisher dated 16th December 1937 (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“A week ago Friday, I gave Arthur Burks the idea of a duplicator machine to duplicate the enemy General and so cause confusion. Told him we needed a two-part serial. Monday morning—three days—or daze—later, he brought in ‘Jason Sows Again’, a very acceptable action story based on that, 30,000 words long. He hadn’t fixed it so it’d divide and hold interest, as I told him, in a letter sent Monday. Tuesday afternoon he showed up, said he’d rewrite parts. Wednesday, he brought it in. Thursday, we paid him $450 for the finished, nicely-done yarn. He sorta pounds ‘em out, kinda. But it’s a good enough yarn, with at least a different slant on the duplication idea. And—Arthur Burks’ name on the magazine means something to the regular readers—because they’ve praised him quite a bit—and it means a lot to people who never read Astounding. Furthermore, for those readers it (the story) will be satisfying, because it is almost wholly straight adventure, with a rather weird twist, and a logical solution to a problem raised at the end of the first half. p. 75

5. Letter from Campbell to Swisher dated 7th February 1938 (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“Personally, I’d give ‘Wings of the Storm’ a blue for being nicely handled, and considered as a pure fantasy.

6. Letter from Campbell to Swisher dated 7th February 1938 (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“‘Vibratory’ was, I agree, very pinkish (by Warner Van Lorne, March, 1938). But ye Gods, they just don’t send in enough blue stuff. It just makes me blue. We accept about one in 10 to 15—but we gotta fill the mag. I’d like to make the issues all outa stuff like ‘The Master Shall Not Die,’ ‘Flareback,’ etc., but there isn’t that much. If I culled the stuff submitted for six months, picking all the blues submitted for one issue. I’d have one super issue, and a bunch of tripe issues. I was lucky this time to get near half a point above average.

7. Letter from Campbell to Swisher dated 7th February 1938 (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“I hadn’t thought of the positron aspect for ‘Flareback’ and the [Nat Schachner] announcement. It (Kent Casey) is NOT Nat, however. The author is actually Capt. Kenneth Casey McIntosh, USN. retired of New Orleans. We have four yarns on hand—bought two—and they’re all blues. He’s got style, and his latest one, ‘Good Old Brig!’ shows definitely that Nat could never have been the author. He’s got a space-navy scene that could have been written only by a military man. McIntosh has been writing for Atlantic. North American Review, and similar mags, plus some for the Navy magazine. He’s got a son at Michigan who’s supplying the science background. Son slips sometimes; he did in ‘Flareback,’ wherefore I went over it with some changes and modifications. Agreed that other energy forms could have done the same. I still think positrons make it somewhat more interesting.”

. . . and more from a letter dated 28th February 1938 (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“You might be interested to know how the check chart (March, 1938 issue) stands. ‘Flashback’ by Kent Casey stands two points in the lead of ‘The Master Shall Not Die!’ which leads its nearest competitor, ‘Wings of the Storm’ by five checks. “But ‘Flashback’ fascinates me. That’s a first story of an absolute unknown, and everybody is piling on the bandwagon. ‘Duel in the Space Lanes’ (by William C. Beckett, March, 1938) which is almost the same plot, when you come to it, is getting as many goose-eggs as checks. But Casey’s yarn is going over stronger than any other first-time story we’ve published in 18 months.”
[. . .]
(The positron material, taken from Swisher’s article, was actually written in by Campbell, which probably influenced his enthusiasm for the story.) p. 82

I think the writer’s name is actually Kenneth Chafee McIntosh. There is a list of other (non-fiction) work at unz.com. His ISFDB page is here.

8. Letter from Campbell to Swisher dated 7th February 1938 (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“The letter department got shifted to the middle of the mag (March, 1938) because the advertising section was too darn long. I couldn’t get enough material to fill all those half-pages, and I had to run a story back
there. Thus, I had to put the letters in the middle. The front wouldn’t do— that’s much too valuable for display purposes (though Thrilling Wonder Stories used to break up the front of their book with reader’s columns).

9. Letter from Campbell to Swisher dated 14th January 1938 (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“Due to the impositions of the advertising department. I had a swell time making the March (1938) issue fit together. I had to do some trickiness, which may be noticeable to the practiced reader. Including the writing of a filler (“Heavy Elements are not Necessarily Inert’). Astounding hadn’t used fillers for a long time, but I had to this time. I may go so far as to reinstitute them. You know, brief paragraphs of supposed-to-be-interesting material.
[. . .]
The present example of the ‘genus fillersis’ concerns the non-inertness of heavy metals. Witnesses called: uranium, radium, tungsten, etc. Also iridium is much more inert than the familiarly inert platinum. These facts introduced in the hope that authors will cease from pulling the unnecessary type of boner indulged in by (Jack) Williamson in ‘Galactic Circle’, (Astounding Stories, August, 1935), where they ate off of U plates.” p. 76

Edited 15th March 2018 to add Analytical Laboratory results (footnote 2). ●

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Astounding Stories v20n06, February 1938

ISFDB
Archive.org

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.

Fiction:
The Degenerates • novelette by John Russell Fearn [as by Polton Cross]
Anachronistic Optics • short story by Moses Schere ∗∗+
The Fatal Quadrant • novelette by Arthur J. Burks –
Galactic Patrol (Part 6 of 6) • serial by E. E. Smith, Ph.D.
Mercutian Adventure • short story by Raymond Z. Gallun
Wayward World • novelette by Otto Binder [as by Gordon A. Giles]
The Anti-Weapon • novelette by Otto Binder [as by Eando Binder]
Thunder Voice • short story by Raymond Z. Gallun [as by Dow Elstar]

Non-fiction:
Mercutian Adventure • cover by Howard V. Brown
Interior artwork • by H. W. Wesso (6), Charles Schneeman, Elliott Dold, Jr. (3), Jack Binder
In Times to Come
The Rainbow Bridge • essay by Herbert C. Mackay
Mercury • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Power Plants of Tomorrow: Harnessing Earth’s Heat • essay by Willy Ley
Science Discussions and Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

The main event this issue1 is the cover, Mercutian Adventure, by Howard V. Brown. Although not that attractive an effort, it was an attempt at a more sober and scientific cover than that used on some of the other SF pulps of the time. Campbell discusses it in his editorial, Mercury:

The fiction leads off with The Degenerates by John Russell Fearn.2 It concerns Cambridge, a space pilot who is hired for an expedition to Jupiter’s moon Io, the purpose of which is to retrieve a type of tree that can produce a particularly tough form of iltuion, a material used for spacesuits.

The team includes the businessman funding the trip and his daughter Ada (businessmen in stories like this are always accompanied by their attractive daughters); Ludwig Reid, the expedition leader; Charteris, the co-pilot; Hu Ling, the Chinese cook (!); and, finally, the Ionian alien who made the discovery in the first place, Kiol. Cambridge takes an instant dislike to Reid and, sure enough, he turns out to be a rum ’un.
The ridiculous plot (so much so that I cannot be bothered going through its multiple idiocies) involves (spoiler) a lot of them getting killed on Io before a city full of degenerate Martians are wheeled out at the end.
I believe this was Fearn’s last story in Astounding, to which I can only say “good riddance” (although I should add there is evidence of this author’s inexplicable popularity in Campbell’s letters and in the letter column).
Anachronistic Optics by Moses Schere3 is about a town handyman who is digging a hole for a local builder when he comes upon a strange set of bones and an assortment of metal parts. The handyman takes the material home. Later, he and a retired college head put the metal parts together and realise they have a time-machine.
After they make a couple of short trips in it (which takes them four years into the future), the belligerent builder interrupts, demanding the return of the metal. The builder is a nasty piece of work, and manages to send himself into the future during an altercation—apart from his eyes that is, which stay in the present day, floating in mid-air. All the handyman and the college head can do is wait for his eyes to eventually catch up with his body.
The operation of the time machine is rather unconvincing but the story raises a smile or two, and its subtitle, ‘An unusually well-told light science fiction story,’ is an accurate description.4

The Fatal Quadrant by Arthur J. Burks5 is similar to the Fearn story in that the narrator (this time a newspaper editor) signs up for an expedition to the Antarctic with a millionaire inventor (this guy is younger so there is a sister that comes along and not a daughter). Once they arrive at the base, the inventor reveals his plans, which involve using robots to map the continent, but there is also talk about weather control, and melting the ice to reveal whatever is thousands of feet below.
The robots go off in due course on a radial survey, illuminating their path with eye headlights (a striking scene which Wesso chose to illustrate).

They send video back to the lab where two robots compile maps and charts. When the mapping robots get to a wide valley that looks like it was excavated by mechanical means, the sister suddenly gets the vapours :

Beside me Zora was breathing audibly. I glanced at her. Her eyes were wide. Her bosom was heaving. She couldn’t be afraid of what might happen to the robots, surely, for there were extras we hadn’t yet unpacked, and they were merely pieces of machinery, after all. No. it wasn’t that. I thought, and a moment later I knew I had been right.
For Zora whirled on her brother and screamed: “Bring them back, Sherm! Bring them back, for my sake. I can’t stand it any longer! I’m terribly afraid that—”
“Afraid?” said Geddes softly. “Of what? Nothing that might possibly trouble our robots can reach us here!”
“I’m afraid of— Please, Sherman, let’s call a halt. You can stop them, leave them right where they are! Do it for me. Let their eyes die, so that they can hide from—”
“Hide from what?” yelled Geddes. “Zora, you’re nuts! What can there possibly be to hide from? Rocks? Hills? Glaciers? Crevasses? I’ve never known you to be so childish, so imaginative.”
“I ought to be ashamed of myself, Sherm, I know. But I can’t help it. The feeling keeps growing on me that soon in those
—at least of the nine robots in the plain, maybe even in all the others—we’re going to see things that may be so tremendous—so maddening—”
“Nothing in this world can drive you mad.” said Geddes. “You’re my sister!”
“Jud! Jud!” said Zora, flinging herself into my arms. “Say something to him! You feel it, too; I can see it in your eyes—in the sweat on your cheeks and in your hair. Ask him to delay his investigations, even for an hour.”
“I agree with her, Sherm,” I said. “Let’s call a halt for a little while.”
“Nothing doing!” In his two words of refusal there was finality that I couldn’t gainsay. Well, there might be some other way. I put Zora aside, rose, stepped toward Sherman Geddes. “Sherman,” I said, “stop it, right now. Give the command, or so help me—”
“Sit down, Mr. Draper,” said a cold voice to my right rear, “or it will be my duty to force you to!”
I whirled, stared. Standing within two feet of me, radiating power against which I knew I’d be less than a babe in arms, was [Robot] Thirteen.
p. 52

Up until this point it wasn’t too bad—the remoteness and the then mystery of Antarctica is quite well done—but from this point on it all goes a bit megalomaniac super-scientist, and not in a good way.
The robots come to an ice wall and Geddes has the other machines join them. When they look down they see a perfectly ordered city buried deep in the ice. Geddes sees that the inhabitants are perfectly preserved, and uses some hand-wavey science to speculate that they are alive. The robots evaporate all the water and sink to the level of the city. Number twenty-one ignores an order to go into one of the buildings and his video relay screen goes white.
From this point on the story just becomes dafter and dafter: the ice that has melted starts causing floods and hailstones and worldwide climactic change; the three destroy the lab and head south to avert further catastrophe but, when they get to the city, it is even deeper in ice than before, an event that is unexplained (that, or I’d started skimming). Finally, Geddes kills himself on the ship home. The problem with all of this is that it isn’t a story, just an arbitrary succession of unlikely wonders.
I liked the last part of Doc Smith’s Galactic Patrol, even if it sometimes appears as if it is written in another language:

 “Um-m-m.” Crandall stared at Kinnison, new respect in his eyes. “I knew that unattached Lensmen were good, but I had no idea they were that good. No wonder Helmuth has been getting his wind up about you. I’ll string along with any one who can take a whole base, single-handed, and make such a bally ass to boot out of such a keen old bird as Helmuth is. But I’m in a bit of a dither, not to say a funk, about what is going to happen when we pop into Prime Base without you. Every man jack of us, you know, is slated for the lethal chamber without trial. Miss MacDougall will do her bit, of course, but what I mean is, has she enough jets to swing it?” p. 78

Not even the problems with child health and safety put me off:

In his hidden retreat so far from the galaxy’s crowded suns and worlds, Helmuth was in no enviable or easy frame of mind. Four times he had declared that that accursed Lensman, whoever he might be, must be destroyed, and had mustered his every available force to that end, only to have his intended prey slip from his grasp as effortlessly as a droplet of mercury eludes the clutching fingers of a child. p. 80

In this final instalment Kinnison goes to Helmuth’s base, only to discover that the latter has meanwhile worked out what Kinnison’s powers are, and has ordered thought shields for all personnel. Kinnison, stymied, goes back to Tellus and consults Admiral Haynes, who plans a huge attack to take place in ten weeks’ time. Meanwhile, Kinnison has an armoured suit constructed and has twenty thousand bullets fired at him to learn how to operate it under attack!

Kinnison then goes to Trenco, where he telepathically communicates with a ‘flat,’ a local turtle-like alien, and manages get them to agree to harvest and manufacture thionite, a powerful drug, in exchange for sugar.
Kinnison returns to the pirate base and hides in a cave. He gets a dog to disconnect a battery pack and takes control of an operative who lets him in. He releases the thionite into the air and then starts taking control of others, using them to disconnect others’ thought shields:

Thionite, as has been intimated, is perhaps the worst of all known habitforming drugs. In almost infinitesimal doses it gives rise to a State in which the victim seems actually to experience the gratification of his every desire, whatever that desire may be. The larger the dose, the more intense the sensation, until—and very quickly—the dosage is reached at which he passes into such an ecstatic stupor that not a single nerve can force a stimulus into his frenzied brain. In this stage he dies.
Thus there was no alarm, no outcry, no warning. Each observer sat or stood entranced, holding exactly the pose he had been in at the instant of opening his face plate. But now, instead of paying attention to his duty, he was plunging deeper and deeper into the paroxysmally ecstatic profundity of a thionite debauch from which there was to be no awakening.
p. 92

The Galactic Patrol attack the dome. Kinnison has a climactic superscience battle with Helmuth, who dies in the line of fire. This scene has a rather abrupt ending, but the instalment is a good end to an entertaining novel.

Raymond Z. Gallun has two stories in this issue. The first is Mercutian Adventure, this issue’s cover story. A newlywed couple buy a spaceship and head for Mercury, planning to run a business that sells photographs of the planet. While they are on the surface their fuel becomes unstable, but before it explodes they escape with oxygen bottles and a canvas sheet. They burrow into the topsoil and wait.
The science in this one is a mixture of (a) out of date (Mercury’s thin atmosphere) and (b) wonky (the canvas initially stops oxygen getting out but later allows it to diffuse in). At least the story is an honest attempt to put some science into science fiction and not the usual procession of unexplained pulp wonders.

The other Gallun story is Thunder Voice. This is a gimmick piece where a far-future Earth and Moon need to simultaneously activate their gravity beams to avoid collision, but cannot communicate due to etheric interference or some such. The chief scientist (spoiler) connects a telephone handset to one of the beams and points it at the moon, using variable gravity waves to vibrate their walls and send an audio message. Contrived, but it is a clever solution.
Otto Binder6 also has two stories in this issue. The first (under his Gordon A. Giles pseudonym) is Wayward World. This has a two-man spaceship whose drive malfunctions, causing a forced landing on a newly discovered planet between Saturn and Uranus. On the planet they discover metal based life, some of who attempt to drag their ship away. One of the crew enters a cataleptic trance to try and communicate with them, although that doesn’t work as expected.

The plot and the science are weak but it is written in an entertaining way, with some banter between the two pilots, Wade Welton and Archibald Quinsley Osgood, enlivening the story, such as when they first set foot on the planet and Welton exits the ship to do a recce:

Welton jumped the five feet to the ground and landed with enough of a jar to realize surface gravity was at least Earth’s equal. The gravity gauge in the ship had not been awry then. He swept his flash around. The ground was of a loamy texture, dark purple in color. He moved a few steps forward in his micro-mesh garment, to get out of the shadow of the Thunderbolt. He winced a little at the pain in his bruised hip. Then he glanced around. It looked much the same through his glassite helmet as it had from the ship’s ports—an endless, flat stretch of barrenness, without detail in the light of the somber stars.
Welton caught movement in the corner of his eye and turned swiftly. A tall figure loomed up in the dark. Welton limelighted it with his flash, then gasped and staggered back a step.
“Howdy, Columbus!” greeted Osgood cheerily. He was dressed in a Ganymedian parka, only the circle of his face exposed, but with his nose free to the atmosphere. He took a deep breath of air and thumped his chest while exhaling.
“Jumping Jupiter!” said Welton, gagging.
“Glorious to breathe fresh air for a change, Wade old stuff. Stuff is right, in that vac-suit. Why the devil are you wearing it?” Osgood doubled up in pantomime mirth.

It turns out that Osgood has spent the morning analysing the air, and it is breathable . . . .
The second of the two is The Anti-Weapon,7 which takes place during a future war on Earth. Elson is a pilot who has his plane damaged in a dogfight, but manages to land it behind enemy lines:

An hour later he felt better, though bruised and shaken. He looked around. The ruined city all about seemed utterly deserted; not a sound came from its battered environs. Alpha-charges, proton-blasts, neutron-beams, deuteron-flames and other agents of demolition had done a thorough job. Undoubtedly, electron-rays had swept the streets and byways to heap up the electrocuted dead.
Elson knew the city—knew where he was. This had been an enemy city, razed by His Side. But they had not succeeded in capturing this salient. He was about thirty miles back from the lines, in enemy territory. He would be shot on sight, when discovered. The Atom War was one stripped of all humaneness; a struggle to the finish between the world divided into two great camps, with fighting going on interminably on a dozen fronts.
Elson’s only chance of life was to get back to his own lines. A thirty-mile jaunt through the thickest of enemy forces was unthinkable. He must repair his ship.
p. 129

During his search for food he comes across a young woman called Lorna and, even though she is one of the enemy, he gives her some of the provisions he has found. He then accompanies her back to her father, Professor Davidson, who has perfected an anti-weapon in his basement laboratory.
Later, after some food and conversation, the Professor powers up the weapon, a wire globe that forms a sphere of ebony ultraspace which absorbs all forms of energy. After a demonstration showing the uselessness of Elson’s raygun, he agrees to fly the plans for the device to the Pacifist League in the north, before going to one of the conflict zones to demonstrate its power.

The science in this is rather fanciful, as is Elson’s readiness to commit treason, but it is an interesting story for its descriptions of the ravaged city and the resulting brutality, not to mention it contains what I suspect was then a widespread hope that another global conflict could be avoided.
The final scene (spoiler) has Elson attempting to land his plane while watched by the professor and his daughter, but he sinks below ground level before climbing up and away into the night: Elson has realised what the professor is explaining to his daughter—the anti-weapon has drained most of his substance, and he is now stranded in ultraspace.

The Interior artwork is mostly by Wesso and Jack Binder (Otto Binder’s brother) in this issue, although there are also illustrations from Charles Schneeman and Elliott Dold, Jr.
In Times to Come mentions that putting a magazine together is like working on a jig-saw puzzle—the reason why promised stories are sometimes left out of an issue after being promised. He then goes on to list the stories that will definitely appear in the next issue and those that may.

There are two short science articles: The Rainbow Bridge by Herbert C. Mackay is about the increasingly widespread use of spectroscopy, and Power Plants of Tomorrow: Harnessing Earth’s Heat by Willy Ley is about geothermal power.
I actually found parts of  Science Discussions quite interesting this time around. There is a letter on evolution from John D. Clark, Philadelphia, which has this at the end:

So here’s the final result of my cogitation—partly probabilities, partly wishful-thinking. In a million years or so Man will be larger, averaging perhaps six and a half or seven feet tall. He will be much more intelligent, making mental solutions of the three body problem. He will be able to see ultraviolet and infrared, and to see with much more detail than at present, due to an increased number of cells in the retina. His fingers will be perhaps twice as long as the present ones, with infinitely flexible joints. He will be quite capable physically, cleaned out as he will be. of the vestigial remains such as the appendix that clutter up our internal economy. And finally, he will be able to communicate telepathically with his fellows at will, and will be able to know the universe around him without the intervention of his other senses. But, he will still be a man, recognizable as one. Control over human heredity will very probably accelerate evolution to a considerable degree. As for the direction, as I said before—all bets are off.
If anybody has any ideas on the subject, let him bring them forth. Destructive criticism will be available in unlimited quantities.
p. 148

There are also interesting letters from John James Logue from New York, upbraiding Eando Binder for the science in The Time Contractor among other things, and D. C. Beere, a cadet at West Point, about nuclear particles and scientific theory in general.
Brass Tacks
has a letter from Sam Youd (the real name of the well-known writer John Christopher) from Eastleigh in Hampshire. He starts by criticising Wesso’s artwork, while praising Brown, Dold and Binder (Jack). After praising Smith’s serial and lambasting Schachner (‘Can’t you get rid of him, or is he under contract?’) he includes his top ten for the year:

1. “Forgetfulness”. [Campbell] Ranks with the superb “Twilight”. A grand plot.
2. “Galactic Patrol”. [Smith] Far and away better than ‘‘Valeron” or “Triplanetary”.
3. “Seeker of Tomorrow”. [Russell/Johnson] Entertaining, original and exceedingly well-written.
4. “Sands of Time”. P. S. Miller at his best.
5. “The Endless Chain”. [Macfadyen] An old plot, but I like the strain of mysticism.
6. “Fires of Genesis”. Gallun is now consistently good.
7. “Out of Night”. Stuart can do much better, nevertheless, good.
8. “Great Radio Peril”. [Russell] Good humorous satire.
9. “Saga of Pelican West”. [Russell] Blood and thunder, but reminiscent of Weinbaum.
10. “Frontier of the Unknown”. [Knight] Rather slow. Boring in places.
p. 155

The other letters includes plaudits for some stories and brickbats for others. Some of the comments are as blunt as Youd’s, such as the final one from Arthur B. Dawson from Plano, Illinois:

In closing let me repeat my appreciation of the improvement you have wrought, but you will be the first to admit that there is room for more. Please deliver us from the “one man whips the universe at the last minute” stuff. Williamson take notice for one. Get your authors to take a good course in English composition somewhere, and we will all be happier. p. 159

An interesting issue that illustrates the gulf between those writers who look likely to survive under Campbell’s editorship and those who won’t.8

_____________________

1. I intended for this review to appear on the 70th anniversary of publication but it took me longer than I expected to write. The copyright dates for this and other issues of Astounding are here.

2. In Fantasy Commentator #59/60 (Lulu.com), Moskowitz mentions the Polton Cross story:

On the same date [27th January 1938] Campbell sent out a letter which concerned ‘The Degenerates’ by Polton Cross (Astounding Stories, February, 1938). He did not appear to know at the time that Polton Cross was a pen name for John Russell Fearn.
[. . .]
Campbell receives a letter from a reader claiming that he had read the identical plot some years past. Campbell writes to Swisher the following description for possible identification: “Tribulations of ye Ed. Remember “The Degenerates” by Polton Cross? Somebody says Argosy published a yarn some years back—four or six parts about an amphibian plane expedition to upper Amazon for untearable rubber. Hero hated villain on sight. Expedition of hero, villain, backer, daughter, cook and native. Hero and girl shot at. villain locks up weapons, backer gets fever and daughter kidnapped. Degenerates here descendants of Atlantians. Science-secret was statue of Poseidon and chariot with horses which had anti-gravity secret. Daughter to be sacrificed under hooves of horses.
“You may remember it, you may have a tear sheet of that yarn. If you kept it. I’d like to see it. At any rate, can you remember anything about it, or did you miss it completely too?” Underneath the letter Swisher had jotted
The Lost Land of Atzlan by Fred Maclsaac, Argosy, six parts, beginning August 2, 1933.
Campbell responded February 2, 1938: “The research department [Swisher]—and the system—slipped a bit that time. I got hold of all six copies of the
Argosy containing the Maclsaac’s yarn. ‘The Lost Land of Atzlan’, and it wasn’t the one.
“That story’s about a gang, bound for a Mexican city. Fog comes in, they’re lost, and sit down where they can in a valley, where Aztecs have maintained a slight civilization. “But not our gang at all. I want one that takes place in the Amazon country. Any more suggestions? If it is what our informant in California claims, take an outline of the plot of ‘Degenerates’, transform it to the Amazon country and Atlantians instead of Martians, and you’ve got the exact same story.”
[. . .]
That Campbell’s informant was able to so precisely remember the plot and not the title of the story, its author or place of publication is indicative of an entirely false lead. There is no question that the plot of the story could easily have been transferred to South America. Campbell never discovered the alleged ‘original’ but he did not use the name of Polton Cross again. He continued to appear in a variety of science fiction magazines until 1948. It is also a fact that John Russell Fearn was not a copyist. He had an immensely fertile mind when it came to plots, writing and selling literally hundreds of works of science fiction without once being accused of plagiarism.
Campbell was still searching for that elusive story February 7, 1938, when in response to a query by Swisher asking if he had read Maclsaac’s story he responded: “No, I didn’t read ‘Atzlan’, just the synopsis. We called in Julius Schwartz, and he didn’t remember the story referred to, either. So it wouldn’t have been in his
Fantasy column. I read ‘Balata’ myself, and I do not believe that that was the story. Right now, it’s vague and I can’t remember the details. Just an action story in the jungles and about a guy that had found a whole grove of balata trees. I’m gonna try to find one issue of the yarn—preferably one of the last issues—and see what the synopsis has to say.” p. 78-79

3. Schere sold another few stories to Astounding before ending his short career in a number of minor, late 1950s SF magazines. His page at ISFDB.
4. In Fantasy Commentator #59/60, Campbell had this to say about Schere’s story in a letter to Robert D. Swisher dated 11th November 1937:

We got a real nice little yarn from one Moses Schere—and it was titled ‘A Hot Time in the Old Barn’! Despite that handicap we bought it rejoicing, because it was good. We’re retitleing it ‘Anachronistic Optics’ p. 68

5. There is evidence that Burks (and Hubbard) were foisted on Campbell by the management at Street & Smith. Sam Moskowitz says this in Fantasy Commentator #59/60:

Some months before he had been discharged, Tremaine had taken Campbell aside and told him he thought the fiction in the magazine was getting to heavy. He ordered him to buy some fiction from L. Ron Hubbard, an author who had contributed to several of his other magazines, because he had a light touch. Campbell gritted his teeth at the order, but when he met Hubbard he rather liked him. He purchased from him ‘The Dangerous Dimension’ which appeared in the July, 1938 issue. p. 89

Hubbard describes what happened in greater detail in the introduction to Battlefield Earth:

It will probably be best to return to the day in 1938 when I first entered this field, the day I met John W. Campbell, Jr., a day in the very dawn of what has come to be known as The Golden Age of science fiction. I was quite ignorant of the field and regarded it, in fact, a bit diffidently. I was not there of my own choice. I had been summoned to the vast old building on Seventh Avenue in dusty, dirty, old New York by the very top brass of Street and Smith publishing company—an executive named Black and another, F. Orlin Tremaine. Ordered there with me was another writer, Arthur J. Burks. In those days when the top brass of a publishing company—particularly one as old and prestigious as Street and Smith—”invited” a writer to visit, it was like being commanded to appear before the king or receiving a court summons. You arrived, you sat there obediently, and you spoke when you were spoken to.
We were both, Arthur J. Burks and I, top-line professionals in other writing fields. By the actual tabulation of A.B. Dick, which set advertising rates for publishing firms, either of our names appearing on a magazine cover would send the circulation rate skyrocketing, something like modern TV ratings.
The top brass came quickly to the point. They had recently started or acquired a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction. Other magazines were published by other houses, but Street and Smith was unhappy because its magazine was mainly publishing stories about machines and machinery. As publishers, its executives knew you had to have people in stories. They had called us in because, aside from our A.B. Dick rating as writers, we could write about real people. They knew we were busy and had other commitments. But would we be so kind as to write science fiction? We indicated we would.
They called in John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor of the magazine. He found himself looking at two adventure-story writers, and though adventure writers might be the aristocrats of the whole field and might have vast followings of their own, they were not science fiction writers. He resisted. In the first place, calling in topliners would ruin his story budget due to their word rates. And in the second place, he had his own ideas of what science fiction was.
Campbell, who dominated the whole field of sf as its virtual czar until his death in 1971, was a huge man who had majored in physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor of Sciences degree. His idea of getting a story was to have some professor or scientist write it and then doctor it up and publish it. Perhaps that is a bit unkind, but it really was what he was doing. To fill his pages even he, who had considerable skill as a writer, was writing stories for the magazine.
The top brass had to directly order Campbell to buy and to publish what we wrote for him. He was going to get people into his stories and get something going besides machines.

Hubbard would become a prolific contributor to both Astounding and Unknown.
6. From ISFDB:

Eando Binder stood for “Earl and Otto Binder” until Earl stopped contributing in late 1935-early 1936. See Otto’s letter to Earl “on Earl’s decision to no longer participate in the “Eando” pseudonym”, 20 January 1936.

Otto Binder would only contribute another few stories to Astounding.
7. In Fantasy Commentator #59/60, Campbell had this to say about Binder’s The Anti-Weapon in a letter to Robert D. Swisher dated 30th October 1937:

Binder’s new story ‘The Anti-Weapon’ [. . .] happens to have an inconsistent, but actually unimportant explanation—as motivation for an interesting story [. . .] I think you’ll find [it] a pretty decent yarn. p. 65

8.  As previously mentioned, Fearn would contribute nothing more to Astounding. Burks would contribute another half-dozen stories, and Otto Binder three. All of these appeared before the end of 1939. Gallun survived the longest, albeit at a reduced rate, contributing seven more stories to the end of 1939, and four more from then until 1952 (and he even appeared in Analog three times between 1977 and 1983).

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Astounding Stories v20n05, January 1938

ISFDB
Archive.org

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.

Fiction:
Ormoly of Roonerion • novelette by Nelson Tremaine [as by Warner Van Lorne] –
The Voice out of Space • short story by Clifton B. Kruse –
Dead Knowledge • novelette by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Don A. Stuart] ∗∗∗
Pithecanthropus Rejectus • short story by Manly Wade Wellman ∗∗∗+
Red Heritage • novelette by John Russell Fearn ∗∗
Whispering Satellite • short story by John Russell Fearn [as by Thornton Ayre] –
Galactic Patrol (Part 5 of 6) • serial by Edward E. Smith ∗∗
The Mental Ultimate • short story by John Russell Fearn [as by Polton Cross] –

Non-fiction:
Cover • by H. W. Wesso
Interior artwork
• by Jack Binder (7), H. W. Wesso (4), Elliott Dold, Jr. (2)
In Times to Come
Power Plants of Tomorrow: Harnessing the Sun’s Rays
• essay by Willy Ley
Rocket Flight • essay by Leo Vernon
Mutation • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by The Editor]
Science Discussions and Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

When I recently wrote a review of the October 1937 Astounding, it was with a “70th anniversary of the beginning of John W. Campbell’s editorship” fanfare, only to discover that Alva Rogers’ claim that it was Campbell’s first issue was incorrect.1
With this issue, however, Campbell is a visible presence—one of the letters in Brass Tacks is addressed to him by name, and the writer, Louis Kuslan, mentions that he heard of the new editor’s appointment in The Science Fiction Fan.
On p. 4 there is also a new feature started by Campbell (and one that still runs in the magazine today), In Times to Come:

There is also an editorial by Campbell, Mutation:

Normally an editor’s first issue is described as the one that has their name on the masthead of the magazine (the part that lists the editors, publishers, etc.), regardless of whether they acquired the stories or prepared that issue for publication.2 However, at that time Street & Smith did not print a masthead on their magazines. My contention is that—given the above—Campbell’s name would also have been on the masthead of this issue if there was one. Your view may vary.3

The fiction leads off with Ormoly of Roonerion by Nelson Tremaine, who presumably used the Warner Van Lorne pseudonym as he was the brother of the previous editor, and the then new Editorial Director at Street & Smith, F. Orlin Tremaine.4 The story’s protagonist, Jack, sees a strange light in the sea and he is repeatedly drawn back to search for it over the next few days. When he eventually spots it again he realises that it is coming from a tiny cigar-shaped vessel:

Slowly the water receded until the bright spot lay on the sand — and it was growing larger! It expanded as the man watched until it was several inches long. It seemed to draw slowly away at the same time, and Jack took several hurried steps forward.
He almost fell and discovered he was standing on rocks larger than his feet! He could not understand; there was little room for anything in his mind, but that he must absorb as much of the strange light as he could.
When the object had grown in size, so that he looked straight ahead, he stepped forward again. It appeared to be metal now, and almost cigar-shaped. The light came from many small openings in the silvery material.
Once more Jack started forward, but now he had to climb over boulders so huge that the ship was almost out of sight when he dropped into the hollows between. A few feet from the ship he stopped on top of the highest. The strange hull was enormous now. It stood fully sixty feet high and several times that length.
Port holes, a foot in diameter, were visible, with rays coming from several. As the ship ceased to expand, the lights faded until they gave only a faint glow.  p. 9

What is really happening here is that Jack (spoiler) is shrinking. This is eventually revealed as a surprise twist at the end but is obvious from the detail here and further on in the story.
When Jack finally goes on board he meets two green-skinned, golden-haired people (an older man and attractive woman). There is then a long undersea journey where Jack learns their odd customs and language and, later, how to run the ship.

When the ship reaches its home port they find war has broken out with the neighbouring Salikans. Jack plays a pivotal role in defeating them before he is told that he is the Ormoly, the man chosen for the woman on board the ship (apparently their ‘vibrations’ match).
This is relatively clearly written but uninspired, formulaic stuff.5

The Voice out of Space by Clifton B. Kruse is another clunker, although it starts quite well with two scientists in a high-altitude balloon taking photographs of the stars. Then they hear an odd sound shortly before they are hit by a meteorite and lose one of their ‘helium-radiants’ (balloons).
The rest of the story is about their return to Earth and the discovery of an electrostatic alien life form in the recovered meteorite.

Dead Knowledge by John W. Campbell, Jr. is about three spacemen who come upon an abandoned city on an alien planet.6 When they start exploring they find that the humanoid inhabitants have committed suicide by poisoning themselves. They fly to another two cities and find a similar situation.

They retreat back into their spaceship and lift into orbit, where they discuss the situation, and agree that they should spend three months exploring and investigating the planet before returning to Earth. However, just as they are away to eat a long overdue meal, two of them find the third dead. He has used the same poison that the aliens used in the cities . . . . Later, another of the two also kills himself.
The climax comes when the last crew member realises (spoiler) he is being taken over by an alien intelligence. There is no poison left for him, but we find out at the end that (a) he had booby-trapped the ship to explode when the FTL drive shut down on arrival at Earth and (b) he has left a message about the alien menace in a heat proof container.
On the plus side this is an atmospheric and at times eerie story; the negatives are that it is a bit slow-moving to start, and the last couple of pages are a little unclear.
Note that this idea of an almost undetectable alien menace taking possession of humans would reappear a few months later in Campbell’s classic story Who Goes There? (Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1938).

Pithecanthropus Rejectus is by Manly Wade Wellman, whose work of this period was standard pulp fare, or at least that was what I thought from both the little I’ve read and what I’ve gleaned from Science Fiction Encyclopedia. This story belies that assumption with a work that is not only the stand out of the issue, but which is also an early example (possibly one of the earliest) of an ‘Uplift’ story (Science Fiction Encyclopaedia: “[Uplift] tends to denote an assisted leap of Evolution – specifically, the raising of nonsentient or otherwise handicapped beings to a level of Intelligence or technological capability comparable to or exceeding humanity’s.”)7
The narrator in this story is a surgically altered ape called Congo, who is raised in a human family by the doctor who performed the changes. The doctor is an unsympathetic character, but his wife isn’t:

Once or twice Doctor scowled, and once I overheard him talking to Mother just beyond the nursery door. I understood pretty well even then, and since that time I have filled in details of the conversation.
“I tell you, I don’t like it,” he snapped. “Showering attentions on that creature.”
She gave him a ready laugh. “Poor little Congo!”
“Congo’s an ape, for all my surgery,” he replied coldly. “Sidney is your son, and Sidney alone. The other is an experiment—like a shake-up of chemicals in a tube, or a grafting of twigs on a tree.”
“Let me remind you,” said Mother, still good-natured, “that when you brought him from the zoo, you said he must live here as a human child, on equal terms with Sidney. That, remember, was part of the experiment. And so are affection and companionship.”
“Ah, the little beast!” Doctor almost snarled. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t begun these observations.”
“But you have. You increased his brain powers and made it possible for him to speak. He’s brighter than any human child his age.”
“Apes mature quickly. He’ll come to the peak of development and Sidney will forge ahead. That always happens in these experiments.”
“These experiments have always been performed with ordinary ape-children before,” said Mother. “With your operations you’ve given him something, at least, of human character. So give him something of human consideration as well.”
“I’m like Prospero, going out of my way to lift up Caliban from the brute.”
“Caliban meant well,” Mother responded, reminding him of something I knew nothing about. “Meanwhile, I don’t do things by halves, dear. As long as Congo remains in this house, he shall have kindness and help from me. And he shall look to me as his mother.”  p. 68-70

Nevertheless Congo is eventually sold to the world of show business and tours the world as an exhibit. At one point he escapes into the African bush and finds his own kind:

After more days, I found my people, the Kulakambas.
They were as they had been in the dream, swinging in treetops, playing and gathering food. Some of the younger ones scampered through the branches, shrilling joyfully over their game of tag. They talked, young and old—they had a language, with inflections and words and probably grammar, I could see a little village of nests, in the forks of the big trees; well-made shelters, with roofs over them. Those must have been quickly and easily made. Nothing troubled the Kulakambas. They lived without thought or worry for the next moment. When the next moment came they lived that, too.
I thought I would approach. I would make friends, learn their ways and their speech. Then I might teach them useful things, and in turn they would teach me games. Already the old dream was a reality and the civilization I had known was slipping away—like a garment that had fitted too loosely.
I approached and came into view. They saw, and began to chatter at me. I tried to imitate their sounds, and I failed.
Then they grew excited and climbed along in the trees above me. They began dropping branches and fruits and such things. I ran, and they followed, shrieking in a rage that had come upon them from nowhere and for no reason I could think of. They chased me all that day, until nightfall. A leopard frightened them then, and me as well.
I returned, after many days, to the town by the sea.  p. 73

The climactic scene occurs when Congo is playing the part of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Before one of the performances the Doctor visits, and he tells Congo of his plan to repeat his experiment with many more subjects. Congo (spoiler) kills the doctor and the police take him away. The fact that he is only an animal and not subject to, or protected by, human law leads to his tragic end.
This is an impressive piece, and holds up quite well. Apart from the mature treatment of the theme, and a repeated reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the prose is a definite cut above the usual pulp product.

The second half of the magazine has no less than three stories by John Russell Fearn, two under pseudonyms. They are all pretty awful so I will try to be brief.8 The first, Red Heritage, is under his own name, and starts with two chapters where an alien scientist on Venus speaks to an assembled group about the environmental disaster they are experiencing. Rather than move to Mars (which may involve fighting the locals), the plan is to steal their water and air instead:

At length Kil-Dio spoke: “Gravity, as we well know, is as much a force as cosmic rays, light or heat. It has definable limits and its power can be increased or decreased at will—that we know from our levitators, which lift easily against the pull of gravitation. Also, we know it from our space machines which shield gravity and hurl us away from any gravitational field. We know that, even as ordinary radio waves can be heterodyned, so can a correct force operate to ‘heterodyne’ gravitational fields and render the part in question entirely free of gravitation. This, then, is our plan:
“Across space, directly to [Mars], we shall project a heterodyning beam, which, when it strikes [Mars], will encompass some one thousand miles of surface area. This heterodyning beam will be the exact center of what we might call a sudden uprushing vortex of water and funnel of force. That is to say, this funnel will be a beam having walls of vibration solid enough to withstand the sudden uprushing vortex of water and air. Obviously, with part of [Mars] degravitated and this force funnel immediately over that part, the air and oceans will be sucked up our force tunnel by the normal process of following the line of least resistance. But for our force tunnel they would spew Sunward, hence the presence of the tunnel to hold them in one fixed path, until they deluge down on the surface of this world.”  p. 80-82

Fortunately, this turgid data-dumping stops when the third chapter switches to the viewpoint of a Martian called Petlo, who is underground when the force tube strikes. He gets home to find his wife and son sheltering in the cellar.
After the attack ends, Petlo organises the survivors. In time he works out what has happened, and plots his revenge. A rocket is sent to Venus’s moon to blow it up, and send the spore infested debris to Venus. Meanwhile, Petlo puts huge anodes and cathodes into the poles of the planet and sends a pair of survivors to Earth with a racial memory that will enable them to trigger the device many generations later.
The last part of the story has one of the descendants recover those implanted memories. He watches Venus, and then, conveniently, sees the post-spore survivors of Venus head for Mars, where they aim to settle and this time hoover off the atmosphere of Earth. The Earthman sends a radio signal to turn on the polar battery: the remaining Venusian survivors fry.
The Martian section is more readable than the beginning and has a certain narrative verve, but the ridiculous plot has more holes than a colander.

Whispering Satellite is the second offering by Fearn and appears under his Thornton Ayre pseudonym. This actually has a good hook:

“Rocked in the cradle of the deep, I lay me down in peace to sleep—”
The flawless, basso-profundo voice ceased. Clark Mitchell stopped humming the tune that had prompted those notes and looked up across the crude table toward the great, heavy-stemmed flower standing in the Saturnshine streaming through the window.
Sometimes he rather regretted the time two earth-years before when he had taught this particular product of Titan’s Whispering Forest to sing. He knew it did it by air suction through its broad yellow face, vibrating in turn on hairlike vocal cords, but he’d never quite gotten over the uncanny effect of it.  p. 97-98

It then goes downhill with one of Fearn’s characteristic opening astronomical data-dumps (there is one in the previous story, too: “Venus, revolving once in 720 hours, was a world without clouds, without protection from a Sun only 63,000,000 miles away”):

Two years on Titan had done much to orient Clark into the strangeness of this little satellite flying round its primary in 15 days, 22 odd hours—a little desert island of a world, bathed in the torrid heat of Saturn 770,000 miles distant. Unlike Jupiter, the ringed world has cooled less swiftly and pours its warmth on its whole retinue of moons.  p. 98

The potboiler plot involves Clark’s crashed spaceship, his having been framed for murder on Earth by a woman he still loves, her appearance on the planet with her drunken father, and their perilous journey to the latter’s spaceship before the native ‘blue-biters’ nibble them to death.

The last Fearn story, this one as by Polton Cross, is The Mental Ultimate. This is another potboiler with a lot of makey-up super science, this time about a man with a massive intelligence who works his way through all the sciences, making various profound discoveries. Later, the narrator finds he can kill with a thought and manipulate matter. He then time-travels before eventually ending up in the far-future where he meets the last man on Earth, who proceeds to drone on about the narrator’s intelligence before telling him why he is shrinking—oh yes, I should have mentioned that daftness earlier.

This penultimate part of Galactic Patrol by Edward E. Smith has a mixture of good and bad parts, but mostly the latter. Kinnison passes out when he gets back to his ship after fighting the wheel-like aliens, but manages to contact the Admiral who organises a rescue. When Kinnison wakes up he finds himself in hospital, where he is a terrible patient (and, it would seem, a fourteen old one at that):

In a few days Kinnison was fully and alertly conscious. In a week most of the pain had left him, and he was beginning to chafe under restraint. In ten days he was “fit to be tied,” and his acquaintance with his head nurse, so inauspiciously begun, developed even more inauspiciously as time went on. For, as Haynes and Lacy had each more than anticipated, the Lensman was by no means an ideal patient. In fact, he was most decidedly the opposite.
Nothing that could be done would satisfy him. Ail doctors were fatheads, even Lacy, the man who had put him together. All nurses were dumb-bells, even—or specially?—Mac, who with almost superhuman skill, tact and patience had been holding him together. Why, even fatheads and dumb-bells, even highgrade morons, ought to know that a man needed food!
Accustomed to eating everything that he could reach, three or four or five times a day, he did not realize—nor did his stomach—that his now quiescent body could no longer use the five thousand or more calories that it had been wont to burn up, each twenty-four hours, in intense effort. He was always hungry, and he was forever demanding food. And food, to him, did not mean orange juice or grape juice or tomato juice or milk. Nor did it mean weak tea and hard, dry toast and an occasional softboiled egg. If he ate eggs at all he wanted them fried—three or four of them, accompanied by two or three thick slices of ham.
He wanted—and demanded in no uncertain terms, argumentatively and persistently—a big, thick, rare beefsteak. He wanted baked beans, with plenty of fat pork. He wanted bread in thick slices, piled high with butter, and not this quadruply-and-unmentionably-qualified toast. He wanted roast beef, rare, in great chunks. He wanted potatoes and thick brown gravy. He wanted corned beef and cabbage. He wanted pie—any kind of pie—in large, thick quarters. He wanted peas and corn and asparagus and cucumbers, and also various other worldly staples of diet which he often and insistently mentioned by name.
But above all, he wanted beefsteak. He thought about it days and dreamed about it nights. One night in particular he dreamed about it— an especially luscious porterhouse, fried in butter and smothered in mushrooms—only to wake up, mouth watering, literally starved, to face again the weak tea, dry toast, and, horror of horrors, this time a flabby, pallid, flaccid poached egg! It was the last straw.
“Take it away,” he said, weakly; then, when the nurse did not obey, he reached out and pushed the breakfast, tray and all, off the table. As it crashed to the floor, he turned away, and, in spite of all his efforts, two hot tears forced themselves between his eyelids.

It’s hard to know what to make of this ridiculous (but highly entertaining) passage, and I don’t know if I was more struck by (a) that hundreds of years in the future humans are still eating exactly what they did in the late 1930s, or (b) the image of a Lensman lying in a hospital bed blubbing because they bring him a poached egg on toast for breakfast and not something more to his taste. That said, I would wager this food fantasy passage read very differently to Astounding’s post-depression era audience.
After Kinnison recovers he goes to speak to Admiral Haynes:

“Well, sir, I am feeling a trifle low, but if you and the rest of them still think—”
“We do so think. Cheer up and get on with the story.”
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and before I go around sticking out my neck again I’m going to—”
“You don’t need to tell me, you know.”
“No, sir, but I think I’d better. I’m going to Arisia to see if I can get me a few treatments for swelled head and lame brain. I still think that I know how to use the Lens to good advantage, but I simply haven’t got enough jets to do it. You see, I—” He stopped. He would not offer anything that might sound like an alibi; but his thoughts were plain as print to the old Lensman.
“Go ahead, son. We know you wouldn’t.”
“If I thought at all, I assumed that I was tackling men, since those on the ship were men, and men were the only known inhabitants of the Aldebaranian system. But when those Wheelmen took me so easily and so completely, it became very evident that I didn’t have enough stuff. I ran like a scared pup, and I was lucky to get home at all. It wouldn’t have happened if— “He paused.
“If what? Reason it out, son,” Haynes advised, pointedly. “You are wrong, dead wrong. You made no mistake, either in judgment or in execution. You have been blaming yourself for assuming that they were men. Let us suppose that you had assumed that they were the Arisians themselves. Then what? After close scrutiny, even in the light of after-knowledge, we do not see how you could have changed the outcome.”
It did not occur, even to the sagacious old admiral, that Kinnison need not have gone in. Lensmen always went in.
“Well, anyway, they licked me, and that hurts,” Kinnison admitted, frankly. “So I’m going back to Arisia for more training, if they’ll give it to me. I may be gone quite a while, as it may take even them a long time to increase the permeability of my skull enough so that an idea can filter through it in something under a century.”
“Um-m-m.” Haynes pondered. “It has never been done. They are a peculiar race, incomprehensible—but not vindictive. They may refuse you, but nothing worse—that is, if you do not cross the barrier without invitation. It’s a splendid idea, I think; but be very careful to strike that barrier free and at almost zero power—or else don’t strike it at all.”  p. 126-127

When Kinnison gets to the planet, the Arisians let him through the barrier and he then undergoes a period of mental gladiatorial training, until such time as he can block his Arisian sponsor’s mental attacks. This section is the best part of the instalment as we find out more about the enigmatic Arisians.
Kinnison then goes and tries out his expanded powers on a nearby pirate base, as well as back home, where he mind-wrestles four other Lensmen and wins. Later, he tries two other men for murder, reading their minds and executing the guilty one. This latter is another example of the almost casual brutality of the so-called good guys in this novel, a trait I’ve mentioned before in a review of an earlier instalment.

The last chapter has Kinnison back at the pirate base, where he overhears that a hospital ship has been captured. He discovers, by mentally taking over the comms guy, that Mac the head nurse is on it. He rescues her from the captain while letting Mac know it’s him. He then foments a fight between the base commander and the comms guy.
One of the weaker of the six instalments.

The crude Cover is by Wesso, who also contributes Interior artwork along with Jack Binder (brother of Eando Binder), and Elliott Dold, Jr. Wesso’s illustrations look the best to me but I also liked a couple of Binder’s.

Power Plants of Tomorrow: Harnessing the Sun’s Rays by Willy Ley is an interesting science article looking at, believe it or not, alternative power sources, and for the usual reasons:

Professor Bernard Dubos had studied the problem of harnessing solar energy for many years before he delivered his famous lecture. He had studied the steadily increasing energy demands of civilization. He knew that the natural resources were dwindling rapidly. At the World Congress of Geologists, in 1913, it had been estimated that there would be no coal left in about a thousand years. In England and in Germany the resources would last only for about 200 years; in America for a little over 1500 years; in other countries for even shorter periods of time. This statement had been called pessimistic by others, because there are certainly still large unknown coal deposits in Africa, Asia and possibly on the Antarctic Continent. On the other hand, the demand for power had increased much more rapidly than it had been thought. It appeared probable that the World Congress of Geologists had even been optimistic.  p. 64

An estimate which has to be called conservative says that 1,000,000,000 h.p. will yell for fuel in 1970. Another 1,000,000,000 h.p. in automobiles, airplanes and ships is to be added to this figure. In 1970 there will be hardly any natural oil left and the coal deposits will probably be reserved for the chemical industries that need them much more badly than anybody else. In short, the situation is serious. New sources of power will have to be found and exploited to the utmost.  p. 65

The article concentrates on two proposed solar power projects, one of which is a direct application:

His power plant utilizes the fact that air on a hot plain, say an African desert, is hotter and denser than that one or two miles above the plain.
Actual measurements show that there is a difference of pressure of not less than 6.5 inches of mercury between sea level and 6500 feet altitude. If it were possible to build a large chimney, 6000 feet high, on such a plain, the “compressed” air at set level would try to escape through it. It would rise upward in the chimney with a speed about three times as fast as that of the strongest natural cyclones.
Such a chimney is a technical impossibility, if one thinks of it as standing free. But Dubos does not propose a free-standing chimney, even though his demonstration before the French Academy of Sciences may suggest the thought. He thinks of a long tube leaning against a steep mountain slope. The wind tube is to have a diameter of about 35 feet. At its bottom it is to flare out into a glass roof like that of a large hothouse, so that additional heat is built up. Since it is essential that the air, while rushing upward in the tube, does not lose much of its heat, the tube should not be constructed of metal. Light concrete suggests itself, therefore, because it has all the features desired: heat insulating properties, low price, light weight and sufficient resistance.
Dubos’ invention is not only amazingly simple, it also has the advantage of being easy to construct. There are no technical difficulties at all involved in the construction of wind tube and glass roof. One might only say that wind turbines of the size and of the capacity needed have not been built before. Unfortunately, the invention is not generally applicable. It assumes a mountain of medium height in the immediate vicinity of a deep-lying hot plain.
But these conditions prevail on many parts of the Earth where electric power would be welcome; Dubos himself thought principally of the Atlas Mountains in North Africa.
The session of the French Academy of Sciences ended with unanimous approval of Dubos’ ideas and a recommendation of his plans as a feasible means to harness solar power.  p. 65-66

The other project involves pumping water from the Mediterranean over the mountains to the Sea of Galilee (208 meters lower) or the Dead Sea (394 metres lower), producing hydroelectric power on the way down, with the water finally evaporating from the Dead Sea, or being used for irrigation.

Rocket Flight by Leo Vernon is another interesting article, this time on the mathematics of space flight. I didn’t follow all the algebra (my differential calculus days are long behind me) but it is fascinating to see this pre-spaceflight number-crunching, and the practical conclusions the author manages to deduce from the math:

First we might try putting more fuel in the rocket, but probably everybody will agree that it would be unreasonable to have more than the original weight made up of fuel. The second is that it will be best to try to increase the exhaust velocity. The third is the observation that it is advisable to get up and away as quickly as possible. The slower the rocket starts, the better chance gravity has to act on it and pull it back—with the consequence that still more fuel will be needed to build up to a high velocity.
It really looks as if the vital factor is exhaust velocity. With the present experimental values given by Ley, it would be possible to get a rocket up at fair velocity. But it couldn’t go very far out and have enough fuel left to make a decent landing. That won’t prevent us, though, from using our imaginations. It is always possible that in the not-too-distant future experimenters will find that higher exhaust velocity.  p. 112

A practical conclusion drawn by the author is that for actual flight into space, with a chance of getting back safely to Earth, he would want to be guaranteed an exhaust velocity of at least 160,000 feet per second before entering the rocket. p. 114

I looked to see if I could find an exhaust velocity figure for Vostok 1, but the data provided uses different measures. In any event the author’s calculations are challenged in later letter columns.

In Science Discussions there is a letter about time-travel, followed by Campbell’s reply (as Arthur McCann) to his own article on atomic power plants. He discusses the economics of power supply before philosophically musing about the benefits of research:

Research is not wasted human effort, because it can never be truly called unsuccessful. Though the desired goal may not be attained, the knowledge that the attempted course is a blind alley is valuable wisdom; it may, for instance, prevent the building of that unsuccessful atomic power plant that would stand a useless monument to human effort honestly expended, and forever lost to Man’s advancement.
Capital is concentrated human effort: interest the measure of its return in lightened labor. That is the only way to determine whether a thing is an advancement or a retrogression in Man’s evolution.  p. 153

Brass Tacks has a number of letters welcoming the return of the column (which has not appeared recently), and there are comments about the fiction and artwork. Galactic Patrol, and Arthur Burke’s novella, The Golden Horseshoe (November 1937), draw praise; de Camp’s The Isolinguals (September 1937) gets a couple of pans.

In conclusion, not a particularly good issue but an interesting one.
P.S. The reason there is a seasonal advert below is that I had originally planned this post on the 21st of December, which I thought was the magazine’s 70th anniversary until I noticed that I’d looked up the copyright date for the January 1939 issue and not the January 1938 one (the 15th December 1937). There is nothing like a missed deadline to take the wind out of your sails. . . .

_____________________

1. Alva Rogers states in A Requiem for Astounding:

The September, 1937 issue of Astounding was to be Tremaine’s last as editor.
[. . .]
At first there was nothing to intimate to the average reader that a change in editors had taken place: the magazine in those days did not list the name of the editor on the contents page as it was to do later. The “flavour” of the magazine in the last three issues of 1937 was still that of Tremaine, and remained so, substantially, until Tremaine left Street & Smith in May of 1938 and his backlog of stories was used up.  p. 48-49

There is much more specific information about Campbell’s early editorship in Fantasy Commentator #59/60, Spring 2011, by Sam Moskowitz and A. Langley Searles (available at Lulu.com and highly recommended). It has one article, Inside John W. Campbell, which uses his letters to Searles between 1936 and 1952, ‘as interpreted and annotated by Sam Moskowitz’:

For the sake of history, Campbell establishes beyond rebuttal the date he became editor of Astounding Stories. On Astounding Stories stationary, labeled “Editorial Department”, dated October 5, 1937, a letter was received by Swisher which said simply: “Dear Mr. Swisher; Hiya, Bob!” and signed “Sincerely, John W. Campbell, Jr., Editor.”
Swisher, his closest friend, had no indication that Campbell had been negotiating for the position. Tremaine, promoted out of the editorial capacity, needed a replacement in a hurry. Campbell was always under foot, and having been tutored by Mort Weisinger in some of the technical aspects of editing, as well as known to be on an almost desperate search for a job, was a likely candidate. Later information indicated that his starting salary was $30 a week.  p. 60-61

2. Avram Davidson’s first issue as editor of F&SF (April 1962) used stories bought by the previous editor Robert P. Mills. See footnote 4 here.

3. Fantasy Commentator #59/60 has this on what Campbell was doing in his first weeks in the job:

[Oct. 24] “I’m working on the editorial for the January, 1938 issue (apparently the first that Campbell had any editorial involvement with) and I’m announcing that the next issue, February, 1938, will be a ‘mutant’ issue, and the first of others to come. Watch for it! Ballyhoo! Hey-hey! And so forth…The change in this case is going to be the cover: For some months, I’m going to try to run a series of covers that will be genuine art-work, first-class work with none of the lurid-color idea that mags have been using. The subject of the first cover will be, for instance, Saturn as seen from Mimas (a moon) in accurate, astronomically calculated representation. It will illustrate a story, too (That cover was actually the Sun as seen from Mercury illustrating ‘Mercutian Adventure’ by Raymond Z. Gallun).”  p. 61-62

[Oct. 24] “I have finished Galactic Patrol.
[. . .]
“You know, one of the problems of editing is correction of the author’s manuscript. Now, what should one do with ‘space ship’? Should it be spaceship, space ship, or space-ship? And rocket tube? And rocket ship? And should “Earth” be capitalized? And can you have an earthquake on Mars? And do Martian plants grow in rich, black earth? And is Kinnison Kimball a gray Lensman, or a Gray Lensman?
“For awhile, I’m tied down by editing policy used in Galactic Patrol, which must be consistent, and with which the mag has to be consistent. But after February (1938). I’m going to cut loose and do some high and mighty deciding.”  p. 62

[Oct. 24] “We’re running a Fearn novelette in the January (1938) Astounding (‘Red Heritage’). It isn’t perfect, we know— I’ve tried to eliminate most of the utterly cracked ideas—but remember, we have to fill the mag, and that a lot of birds who pay two solid silver dimes for it like Fearn’s stuff.”  p. 62-63

[Oct. 30] “Re Fearn: I delighted in bouncing one of his wilder maunderings, “Wanderers of Ray” in which he had a super-science race build the solar system as a matter of convenience, then gave them space-ships so weak they had a helluva time pulling out of the gravity of Saturn. I took one of his, ‘Red Heritage,’ (Astounding Stories, January 1938), that really wasn’t too bad.
[. . .]
“I’m going to pass some. I know now I’ll have to. For instance: Binder’s new story, ‘The Anti-Weapon’. Actually, I’m allowing his anti-weapon—which happens to have an inconsistent, but actually unimportant explanation—as motivation for an interesting story.”  p. 65

Moskowitz’s observation about the January issue being the first that Campbell had any editorial involvement with is contradicted earlier in the same letter:

[Oct 30] “That ‘Time Contractor’ thing was purchased, edited, and set in type before I came along (by Eando Binder, Astounding Stories, December, 1937). Tremaine didn’t realize that (Dr. Ernest Orlando) Lawrence was a genuine, living character (the inventor of the cyclotron, 1931). I went over the pages and did some drastic and expensive rearranging on that thing as it was. What came out was real mild to the little honey Binder originally had (the entire incredibly dull story read like one of Campbell’s scientific explanations in one of his super science epics). Binder had his character discovering radio-elements, positrons, and various other things several years before Lawrence, and beat the Englishman to the neutron (the Englishman was named— I’ve forgotten it) . . .”  p. 65

So there is also an argument for the December issue being Campbell’s ‘first’. Other people point to the March 1938 issue—when the magazine changes its name from Astounding Stories to Astounding Science-Fiction (see also Campbell’s comments from October 24th about his intention to ‘cut loose and do some high and mighty deciding’ after the February issue). You could also point to later in 1938:

[May 18] “Street & Smith got a new president. The new president tired Mr. Blackwell, ex-Editor-in-Chief and Mr. Tremaine, ex-assistant-Editor-in-Chief. Rearrangements and changes followed, naturally, with the result that I am now all of Astounding. There isn’t any more. No assistants, no readers, no nobody. For a week or so me and the cat with flypaper on all four paws were about equally busy.
“Anyhow, that began to simmer down and quiet, when I found it necessary to stir it up a little more and wish some work on the ‘staff.” (That meant that until October, 1938 the strong influence of Tremaine’s direction would continue to be felt, after that it would be predominantly Campbell. His letters confirm what I wrote in my article ‘The Face of Facts,’ in Redd Bogg’s magazine. Skyhook, for Summer, 1952. At the time it was believed that Tremaine had left Astounding when Campbell was brought aboard in October, 1937. Tremaine extended his stay until May, 1938. This was also supported by an interview included in the above-cited article. Until Tremaine left, Campbell was acting as first reader on the choice of stories, submitting those he thought best to Tremaine who made the final decision. Of course, if Campbell slipped up on a good story and rejected it without ever showing it to Tremaine, a competitor got it. Tremaine’s reasons for leaving were exactly those stated in Campbell’s letters.)  p. 87

4. According to ISFDB F. Orlin Tremaine also used the Warner Van Lorne pseudonym on one occasion.

5. Whether it was the quality of his work or other factors, Nelson Tremaine’s short career as an Astounding writer was coming to an end: he would appear once more in the magazine with The Blue-Men of Yrano in the January 1939 issue. There were a few appearances in other magazines and that was it.

6. Fantasy Commentator #59/60 has Campbell explaining to Swisher the genesis of his story in this issue:

[Oct 04] Tremaine, when I last called on him, suggested that he needed a 12,000 word story within six days—would I please oblige. Ye Gods! I hadn’t an idea on tap—having just finished ‘Cloak of Aesir’, and having it home waiting, I felt all caught up. Stewed for three of the six days trying to get an acceptable idea to start with. A Don A. Stuart story plot wanted—in a hurry. Try it sometime. The harder you want ideas, the blanker your mind gets. Finally I got one, and set to work. High pressure work, but working kinda latish. Of course, to add to the fun Dona rejected the first five starts, by which time we were both groggy with words.  p.59

7. The ‘Uplift’ page at SFE is here. Wellman’s story doesn’t get a mention but last issue’s Mana by Eric Frank Russell does, even though the Uplift theme only surfaces at the end of what is essentially a last-man-on Earth piece. I’d also reference Wellman’s story ahead of de Camp’s soon to appear (and also mentioned at SFE) ‘Johnny Black’ stories too.

8. Fearn has three stories in this issue and one in the next, then, as far as I can see, never appears in Astounding again. Initially, I thought this was Campbell dumping all the pulp writers he didn’t like (as mentioned before Van Lorne was another who would contribute only one more story) but Campbell’s comments above would seem to belie this idea.  ●

Edited 18th November 2019, added artwork and links, and changed formatting.

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Astounding Stories v20n02, October 1937

ISFDB link

Editor, F. Orlin Tremaine

Fiction:
Out of Night • novelette by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Don A. Stuart] ∗∗
Mr. Ellerbee Transplanted • short story by Jan Forman ∗∗
Rule of the Bee • short story by Manly Wade Wellman
Galactic Patrol (Part 2 of 6) • serial by Edward E. Smith ∗∗
A Menace in Miniature • short story by Raymond Z. Gallun
Penal World • short story by John Russell Fearn [as by Thornton Ayre]
Stardust Gods • novelette by Raymond Z. Gallun and Robert S. McCready [as by Dow Elstar and Robert S. McCready]

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Howard V. Brown
Interior artwork • by uncredited (x2), Elliott Dold, Jr. (x3), H. W. Wesso (x3),
Into the Future • editorial by F. Orlin Tremaine
Ra, the Inscrutable • science essay by R. DeWitt Miller
Sleet Storm • science essay by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Science Discussions • letters

With this issue of Astounding Stories the magazine started to change. F. Orlin Tremaine1, who had been the editor for five years and had made it the leading SF magazine of its day, was promoted to become an editorial director at Street & Smith, the publisher of the magazine. Between this issue and the November one John W. Campbell2 took over the editorial reins. At the time Campbell was one of SF’s major writers, and he would go on to become probably the most important editor that the science fiction field would ever have. That said, the changes he made at Astounding were gradual, and the next few issues saw only minor alterations.3 The Golden Age period that started in July 1939 was still some way off.

The Cover by Howard V. Brown is a fairly garish, crude affair that was, for the time, a fairly typical Astounding cover. It would be a year or so before Campbell managed to improve the quality of the magazine’s cover and interior art.4
On opening this issue I was struck by the amount of advertising—apart from the contents page there are eight pages of adverts before you get to the first story, and for the usual stuff, ‘Train for a Good Job in Radio,’ correspondence schools, medication for your prostate, fistula, kidney, ‘glands,’ and so on.

The fiction leads off with Out of Night by John W. Campbell, Jr., writing under his Don A. Stuart pseudonym, a story presumably bought (like the contents of the rest of the issue) by outgoing editor F. Orlin Tremaine. It takes place on a far-future Earth dominated by the alien Sarn. It opens with Grayth, the representative of humanity, being told by the alien Sarn-mother that, to limit the future population of humanity, from now on there is to be a five to one ratio of women to men. There are two pages of talking head data-dumping done during this meeting, and I initially missed a key part, which is Grayth’s warning to the Sarn-mother about the ‘Aesir:’

Grayth looked at her steadily, deep-set iron-gray eyes unwavering on jewel-flecked golden ones. He sighed softly. “Your race does not know of the ancient powers of man; you are a race of people knowing and recognizing only the might of the atomic generator, the flare of the atomic blast as power. The power of the mind is great.
[. . .]
“But a crystallization has taken place during these forty centuries, a slow uniformity has built up. The mighty, chaotic thought wills of five hundred million men during three thousand generations were striving, building toward a mighty reservoir of powers, but their very disordered strivings prevented ordered formation.
“During a hundred centuries of chaotic thought, turbulent desire, those vast reservoirs of eternal, indestructible thought energies have circled space, unable to unite. During these last four millenniums those age-old forces have slowly united on a single, common thought that men destroyed by your race during the conquest have sent out.
“We of our race have felt that thing in these last years, that slowly accreting oneness of age-old will and thought, developing reality and power by the gathering of forces generated by minds released by death during ten thousand years. He is growing, a one from many, the combined thought and wisdom and power of the fifteen hundred billions of men who have lived on Earth. Aesir, he is, black as the spaces in which he formed. p. 12

Grayth returns to the human settlement, sets up a jamming device to prevent the Sarn-mother from listening in, and meets with the other leaders. After some discussion they conclude that she hopes to foment a civil war that will decimate humanity, and will then intervene to impose her will. Grayth knows that the other side will be led by Drunnel, an old rival in politics and love, and realises the only way to stop the Sarn-mother is to develop a device that will augment humanity’s developing telepathic powers.
In due course Drunnel gets various weapons from the Sarn, and discovers that the headbands they have received project a force-field that will protect the user not only from other humans but from the aliens as well. Civil war breaks out between the two sides, and this is engagingly described in a good fight scene where glow wands and force shields are repelled by a hail of bricks and rocks, and water, which short circuits the headbands providing the force shield. The fight continues but Grayth’s side cannot win. He agrees to surrender and stand trial if his men are freed.
Needless to say, at Grayth’s trial, Aesir finally turns up. Despite all the energy weapons the Sarn have, Aesir prevails. The Sarn mother changes her mind; all ends well.
Overall, this is a bit of a mess: the Aesir idea isn’t placed in the story particularly adroitly, and his appearance at the end couldn’t be more of a deux ex machina. Also, why is the Sarn mother allowed to survive? For the sequel? On the other hand, these shortcomings are offset by some good action, and the appearance of the Aesir at the end is quite dramatic. This was more of an action tale than I had expected from Campbell’s ‘Don A. Stuart’ pseudonym.

Mr. Ellerbee Transplanted by Jan Forman5 has a Mr Ellerbee at an exposition with his wife when he decides to slip off on his own:

Not only was he tired, not only was it hot, not only did his feet ache, but he thought that he was ill, and angry, too. Perhaps the last batch of hateful rollercoaster rides?, accompanying his flushed and shrilly screaming wife—she had a passion for roller coasters—had indeed upset his stomach. Or perhaps it had been the stifling heat at the dress parade his wife had made him sit through, possibly pleasant enough if he had been nearer to the models. Or perhaps he was irked at his wife’s attitude toward his suggestion that they go and visit Mlle. Sonia, who danced sensationally in the midway.
But now there was respite. For a brief and all too fleeting moment his wife was nonexistent, having retired to fix a shoe buckle which had given way under her enthusiastic promenading. Mr. Ellerbee stood ruminating, holding his hat in his hand and wiping the sweat from his nearly bald head with a large crimson handkerchief. And now, suddenly, his mind was made up. Very well, then, he would go and see this Mile. Sonia. And he sincerely hoped this dereliction would goad his wife. Frightened by this last thought he hurriedly put his hat back on his head and ducked into the crowd.
As he headed in the general direction of the midway, his spirit slowly ebbed. True, there was the midway, with its glamour, the raucous voices of its barkers, and the shrill confusion of its music; but afterward there would be questions, cross-examinations, there would be anger and recriminations, and, above all, his tearful wife in agonies of martyrdom and deep self-pity. Better to return, better to put temptation far away. But already in his mind’s eye he could see her sweeping out of the rest room, looking for him, and finding not a trace of him ; he could see her mouth harden into the familiar thin line, and the cold, glittering look come into her eyes; and he knew it was much too late to retrace his steps. In for a penny, in for a pound, thought Mr. Ellerbee, furtively advancing in the direction of Mile. Sonia. p. 40

He ends up not at Mlle. Sonia’s, but in the Future City exhibit next to it. He ends up at the top of the Power Tower in a room marked ‘Private,’ where his nosiness takes him to the actual future.
Here he runs in to varying degrees of trouble, and his strange behaviour eventually gets him taken to a ‘Euthanatkin,’ before he is arrested and put on trial. The interrogation he undergoes from the judges has one or two interesting aspects—they are disgusted by his claim to have been born naturally—and they eventually send him away to be used for experiments:

So much had happened to Mr. Ellerbee during the last forty-eight hours that he was numb. Nothing mattered any more, neither the pain nor the fear. Even his memory was slowly fading from his consciousness. He barely remembered being dragged out of the courtroom, the terrifying journey in the rocket plane, halfway round the earth it seemed, the cold wastes that surrounded the tall towers of the First City, the grim buildings of the First College of Science, the humiliating tests, the countless pricks of hypodermics, the strange rays that made him reel and faint. Even the incredible sight of seeing all his entrails spread out along a table was fading into the growing haze of his subconscious. p. 48

At the end he somewhat arbitrarily ends up back in the present, where he learns that a madman placed what he claimed was a time machine in the Power Tower. His wife is not impressed by his absence.
This is a fairly standard plot but it’s a well told and very well written story with a some nice touches, and it reminded me of the little H. G. Wells I’ve read.
Rule of the Bee by Manly Wade Wellman is a reminder (to me anyway) that this writer was writing pulp SF long before he became better known for the likes of his ‘Silver John’ folklore fantasy in F&SF.
Unfortunately this story shows little if any of his later prowess—it is mostly a load of nonsense about a Dr Geiger and an experiment to increase the size of a honeybee to that of a horse. Geiger does this with a ray device:

The ray burned for another hour. Twice during this hour Geiger went to a bench stacked with bottles and there mixed carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and other materials. Carefully weighing and checking them, he poured them into the great tank just above the glowing lens. In proportion as the bee grew to kitten-size, cat-size, dog-size, the mixture in the tank dwindled. When the doctor again switched off the power, the prisoner had increased to fill its soap box. p. 52

The enlargement takes place in stages, and Luther (Geiger’s black assistant) suggests to the doctor three times that they remove the creature’s sting. Needless to say, the Good Doctor pooh-poohs this suggestion, stating bees are ‘social animals,’ ‘easily domesticated,’ etc., etc. After this it is just a matter of waiting to see who gets shanked first, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying it isn’t the Good Doctor . . . .
There is a moderately interesting twist at the end where the bee hypnotises Shimada (Geiger’s other, Japanese, assistant) with its big multifaceted eyes, and it later brings back a beehive so the occupants can receive the same treatment. An acid attack by Geiger stymies its plans.
This is written in a readable enough style even if it does ignore the inverse-square law and, initially at least, have an idiot plot.

The undoubted highlight of the issue for fans of the time would have been the start of the new ‘Lensman’ series by ‘Doc’ Smith. Galactic Patrol began in the previous issue, and recounts the graduation and further adventures of Kimball Kinnison, a Lensman and member of the Galactic Patrol. He is implanted with a Lens, a pseudo-living telepathic jewel matched to its wearer by the enigmatic Arisians. Lensmen (eventually) have unlimited authority and scope to combat crime in a galaxy overrun with pirate ships that are controlled by the evil Boskone.
I was curious to see how I would get on with this as in my teens I picked up a copy of Triplanetary and made no progress. When I recently started reading some of the Golden Age Astoundings I deliberately started not with the July 1939 issue but the February 1940 one, so that I wouldn’t have to read the sequel to this, Gray Lensman. Now I am sort of looking forward to it: I was pleasantly surprised with this one; not only did I find it a reasonably easy read (it probably helped that I only read one of the half-dozen twenty to thirty page instalments every few days), but some parts are quite entertaining. You can actually lose yourself in some of it—the story can be quite breathless and exciting—and I also found out where a lot of those fan expressions came from (‘Clear Aether,’ ‘have the jets for it,’ ‘Boskone,’ etc., etc.). On the other hand Smith has a multitude of bad habits: excessive violence, squirm inducing banter between Kinnison and his allies, a habit of describing things as ‘undescribable’ so he doesn’t have to bother, etc., etc.

This episode places Kinnison on the planet Delgon after he and his sidekick VanBuskirk have managed to get vital information about the new power source that the pirate spaceships have, and which is causing problems for law enforcement. The pair are pursued by many pirate ships and are trying to hide on the planet. However, they are attacked by Catlats, before being unexpectedly saved by Worsel, a dragon-like alien. He is a scout for his species, who live on the neighbouring planet of Valentia, and who the sadistic Delgonians prey upon. Worsel soon teams up with Kinnison and VanBuskirk.
The pair listen to Worsel’s account of how all of the earlier scouts from Valentia have disappeared, and Kinnison uses his Lens enabled telepathic power to find out what happened to them. This passage shows the degree of violence in the novel, which sometimes tends towards the sadistic:

In a dull and gloomy cavern there lay, sat, and stood hordes of things. These beings—the “ nobility” of Delgon—had reptilian bodies, somewhat similar to Worsel’s, but they had no wings and their heads were distinctly apish rather than crocodilian. Every greedy eye in the vast throng was fixed upon an enormous screen which, like that in a motion-picture theater, walled off one end of the stupendous cavern.
Slowly, shudderingly, Kinnison’s mind began to take in what was happening upon that screen. And it was really happening, Kinnison was sure of that. This was not a picture any more than this whole scene was an illusion. It was all an actuality—somewhere.
Upon that screen there were stretched out victims. Hundreds of these were Velantians, more hundreds were winged Delgonians, and scores were creatures whose like Kinnison had never seen. And all these were being tortured; tortured to death both in fashions known to the Inquisitors of old and ways of which even those experts had never an inkling.
Some were being twisted outrageously in three-dimensional frames. Others were being stretched upon racks. Many were being pulled horribly apart, chains intermittently but relentlessly extending each helpless member. Still others were being lowered into pits of constantly increasing temperatures or were being attacked by gradually increasing concentrations of some foully corrosive vapor which ate away their tissues, little by little. And, apparently the piece de resistance of the hellish exhibition, one luckless Velantian, in a spot of hard, cold light, was being pressed out flat against the screen, as an insect might be pressed between two panes of glass. Thinner and thinner he became, under the influence of some awful, invisible force, in spite of every exertion of inhumanely powerful muscles driving body, tail, wings, arms, legs, and head in every frantic maneuver which grim and imminent death could call forth. p. 65

The three of them subsequently go to the city and, as a result of various pitched battles (which are nearly all fights to the death), they manage to destroy the Delgon overlords. Then they take their ship to Valentia. On arrival they set work building a communications jammer (a device that didn’t exist before they dreamt it up), capture half a dozen pirate ships (more fights to the death), and set off for Earth.
This section isn’t the best part of the novel6 (the episode on Delgon is little more than an unnecessary subplot) but, overall, it is okay.

I’ve never been that impressed by the little I’ve read of Raymond Z. Gallun (too crude, too pulp), and the two contributions he has in this issue didn’t change my mind. His solo effort is A Menace in Miniature, which starts with an overwrought data-dump from one of the members of a spaceship crew who are exploring a rogue planet that has entered the solar system:

“Paxtonia is just another name for hell!” he whined into his ether phone, addressing his two companions. “It’s just a broken piece of an inhabited world that exploded maybe ten billion years ago! It was shot away from that world’s parent star! Why did it have to wander into our solar system, and establish itself in an orbit around our sun? Nothing could live on it except the spirit of death!
“That’s what it must be—the spirit of death! Those ships that blew up when they got too close to Paxtonia— Some smart people think that maybe there’s an intelligent agent here who did that by exploding the old-type rocket fuel. But there’s nothing here that anybody can find, except the ruins of buildings and machines, and a lot of empty silence! Still, a week ago there were twelve men in this expedition—and now there are only three of us left alive. Please! There isn’t any sense in our staying on Paxtonia! We’ve got to get out of this devil’s paradise—at once!” p. 88

His forebodings prove prescient as he is almost immediately killed, leaving two crewmembers alive, the pilot and a scientist. As the atmospheric pressure is dropping they deduce they must be under attack from tiny projectiles, so they retreat to the war turret with the Scarab, their mini-probe. They use this to build a tiny, sand grain size probe to hunt for the invaders. They release this into the spaceship and find, and partly destroy, them. This, of course, completely overlooks the fact that a tiny probe looking for similar objects in a spaceship would be nigh-on impossible to find given the vast relative volume to be searched.
The pair then follow the few surviving projectiles back to the tiny alien operators, at which point the scientist trots out some eugenics nonsense about how they bred themselves to their diminutive size. Pretty awful.
Penal World by John Russell Fearn is almost as bad. A prisoner on Jupiter sees a small ship land some miles off and decides to make for it and escape the planet. The rest of the story details his journey to the ship. He meets the governor’s daughter along the way—who also has plans to leave the planet—and saves her from the local wildlife. Later, they meet an intelligent telepathic Jovian who helps them on their way: his payment is the smelling salt crystals that the prisoner used to revive the daughter.
Stardust Gods by Raymond Z. Gallun and Robert S. McCready starts with a meteorite, a ‘green star’ landing beside a small town. It knocks out the power, suspends all life and movement, and makes a ‘copy’ of the town which it then takes into deepest space. There it meets up with three other green stars that have been to Venus, Mars and Jupiter.
Meanwhile, Bill, who lives outside the town, wakes up to the whiff of phosgene, something he recognises from his time in the Great War. He goes outside and sees a changed environment:

Now Bill surveyed what lay beyond the smeary window. The mountains were there beyond doubt, even though, to the best of his knowledge, they must have sprouted overnight. At their bases, visible through a greenish-yellow murk, was a jagged plain of gray, pumicelike stone. Nearer, the plain ended in an abrupt drop, forming a sort of cliff, the face of which was glassy and smooth, as if fused by terrific heat.
[. . .]
Then he saw a sun, huge and red, rising in the gap between two monster mountain peaks. A little higher up, and apparently smaller, though this latter condition was probably due to a greater distance, was a second orb, quite like the first. Both were fuzzy and blurred; nor was this entirely an atmospheric phenomenon, caused locally by the murk in the air. These twin, or binary, suns were not ruddy because they had passed the hot glory of their prime; rather, as the age of stars is measured, they were very new, having just contracted from the tenuous nebular stage. Wispy rings of nebulous matter still belted the equators of both. In ages to come, these suns would contract farther and grow hotter. p. 128

The rest of the story falls into two sections. The first has Bill teaming up with a neighbourhood inventor to solve the phosgene problem. After this they go to organise shelters for the townspeople.
The second section forms the bulk of the story and has Bill, the scientist and his female assistant travelling by car to a nearby airfield (fortunately the inventor is also a pilot). At this point a swarm of flying crystal like aliens appear and one breaks a window and enters the car. During this contact, and a later one, we learn that the aliens have brought the townsfolk here to torment them for a bit of ‘fun.’
As they explore the other domes they have various adventures until, eventually, their gas mask filters become contaminated. Fortunately Bill’s dog turns up wearing a gasmask (!) with a bottle of chemicals to refresh their filters. How the dog manages to smell anything in a mask, or cover the distance and terrain so quickly, is not explained.
Finally, the aliens get bored and leave—which was pretty much how I was feeling by this point.
Despite the description above, the first three-quarters of this is an okay read, but when the dog turns up any remaining credibility vanishes.

The Interior artwork, like the cover, is primitive stuff although I thought there were a few illustrations by Wesso7 that have a certain charm, and maybe one of Dold’s. (The illustrations here are all Wesso’s apart from the uncredited illustration for Campbell’s own story.)
Into the Future by F. Orlin Tremaine is a rather high flown editorial:

Ra, the Inscrutable by R. DeWitt Miller is a science article on Radium that is full of hyperbole but not much detail. There is some interesting information on the uses of Radium to treat cancer, but some of it is just mad:

Atomic bombs are not yet a reality in warfare of man against man, but they are already in use in the struggle of man against cancer. Strangest of all, patients who have had within their bodies the ultimate force—subatomic power—feel no pain. In fact, some patients seem to feel a strange exhilaration. One woman in whose body four grams of radium had been placed overnight, refused to sleep. “I didn’t want to lose a moment of that strange feeling of joy and exhilaration,” she explained. p. 105-106

Sleet Storm by John W. Campbell, Jr. is an interesting science article about meteorites and whether they will be a threat to spaceships during their voyages.
Science Discussions hasn’t yet become Brass Tacks, and is exactly what it says. It is subtitled ‘An Open Forum of Controversial Opinion.’ The letters begin with discussion about Atlantis, pro and con. Other subjects include déjà vu, magnetic pole location, and lightning. There is a lot of amateur theorising going on.

Overall, reading this essentially Tremaine-period issue7 was an educational as much as a pleasurable experience. If the Golden Age of SF interests you then it is probably worth reading a few of these transitional issues to see the changes that occur between Campbell’s first issue and the acknowledged beginning of that period, the July 1939 issue of Astounding.

  1. F. Orlin Tremaine at SFE.
  2. John W. Campbell Jr. at SFE.
  3. As Alva Rogers notes in A Requiem for Astounding, p. 49:
    At first there was nothing to intimate to the average reader that a change in editors had taken place: the magazine in those days did not list the name of the editor on the contents page as it was to do later. The “flavour” of the magazine in the last three issues of 1937 was still that of Tremaine, and remained so, substantially, until Tremaine left Street & Smith in May of 1938 and his backlog of stories was used up.
    Mike Ashley offers more details in The Time Machines, p. 107:
    Campbell began at Street & Smith in October 1937, which meant that he started to have an editorial impact from the December issue, although he did not take over the full editorial reins until March 1938. Nevertheless his presence was rapidly noticeable in a variety of changes. In the January 1938 issue Campbell instigated ‘In Times to Come’, whetting readers’ appetites for the next issue. With the March issue he began ‘The Analytical Laboratory’, reporting back on the popularity of stories in previous issues.
    There are other changes that have been pointed out to me. The January editorial mentions that the February issue will be the first of a series of occasional ‘mutant’ ones, an example of evolution in practice. These issues will test out ‘genuinely new’ ideas, the Brass Tacks letter column will be used to validate them, and any successful ideas will be retained. More significantly perhaps, the magazine changes its name from Astounding Stories to Astounding Science-Fiction with the March issue.
  4. If you look at the ISFDB galleries of covers for 1937, 1937, 1938 and 1939, you will see a huge improvement in quality at the end of 1938, helped by a more modern cover redesign on the December issue of that year.
  5. A cursory search revealed no further information about Jan Forman. It is hard to believe that this is the only story from this writer.
  6. For the record (as I’ll probably never read the all of these mags) the sections of the serial I liked the best were the first (an almost Leni Reifenstahl-ish graduation ceremony followed by space battles with pirates), part three (this one has a couple of chapters that are from Boskone’s henchman Helmuth’s point of view, and has an interesting part where he meets the Arisians), part four (more space battles) and part six (more interesting aliens on the way to a satisfying conclusion. The ending is rather abrupt though).
  7. According to SFE, Campbell eventually replaced Wesso with other artists. According to ISFDB, after a short spell illustrating elsewhere he appears to have stopped altogether. This may have been partly to do with a 1940-onwards staff artist job at the New York Times, which is mentioned in his Pulpartists page. Just over a decade after these illustrations appeared he died, age 53.

This magazine is still being published (as Analog Science Fiction)! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA or physical & digital copies.

Revised 17/09/2017 to remove the references about this issue being Campbell’s first as editor.

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Astounding Science Fiction v51n05, July 1953

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Tpi Klo, Tpi’s Reading Diary

_____________________

Editor, John Campbell; Assistant Editor, Kay Tarrant

Fiction:
Enough Rope • novelette by Poul Anderson ♥♥♥
Solution Delayed • short story by Mark Clifton and Alex Apostolides ♥♥
Survival • novelette by Don Green ♥♥
Mission of Gravity (Part 4 of 4) • serial by Hal Clement ♥♥♥+

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Walt Miller
Interior artwork • by Walt Miller, Orban, Dreany, Van Dongen
“Our Catalogue Number…” • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Analytical Laboratory: April 1953
Locum Tenens • essay by Wallace West
The Reference Library: Man, the Improbable • book reviews by P. Schuyler Miller
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

This issue’s fiction starts with Enough Rope by Poul Anderson, the second of his ‘Wing Alak’ stories, a series about a Galactic League Patrol who operate as a department of dirty/slick tricks. In this one the Galactic League is being threatened by an external alien race called the Ulugans. Alak returns to Earth from their home planet and states they need to be stopped now, even though they will not necessarily cause a war for centuries to come.
The ensuing story tells how the Patrol fleet makes a number of feints in the alien’s neighbourhood (settling temporarily on nearby planets, etc.), and thereby lure the Ulugan commander into responding. These Patrol manoeuvres are just diversions, however, and they cause the Ulugan forces to chase shadows, harming their own forces and economy in the process.

The medical officer halted at the entrance to the tent. The steady, endless rain dripped off his shoulders and made a puddle about his muddy feet. By the one glaring lamp inside, he noticed that the fungus had begun to devour this tent, too. It would be a rag before the eight-day was out. And you couldn’t live in the metal barracks left by the Patrolmen—they were bake-ovens, and air-conditioning units rotted and rusted too fast to be of help.
He saluted wearily. The commandant of Garvish Base looked up from his game of galanzu solitaire. “What is it?” he asked listlessly.
“Fifteen more men down with fever, sir,” said the medical officer. “And ten of the earlier cases are dead.”
The commandant nodded. Light gleamed off his wet bald head. The blue face was haggard, unhealthily flushed, and the smart uniform was a sodden ruin. “The sanitators don’t work, eh?” he asked.
“Not against this stuff, sir,” said the doctor. “It seems to be a virus which isn’t bothered by the vibrations, but I haven’t been able to isolate it yet.”
“We just aren’t built for this climate.” The commandant wagged his head, and one shaky hand reached for a bottle. “We’re cold-world dwellers.”
A beast screamed out in the jungle.
“Poison plants got several more this eight-day,” said the doctor.
“I know. I’ve begged and pleaded with headquarters to send us air domes and space armor. But they claim it’s needed elsewhere.”
A faint hope flickered in the medical officer’s eyes. “When that planet Umung really gets to producing—”
“Yes, yes. But we’ll probably be dead then, you and I.” The commandant shivered. “ I feel cold.” His voice as suddenly high and thin.
“Sir—”  The doctor took a nervous step forward. “Sir, let me look at you—”
The commandant stood up. For a moment he leaned on the table, then something buckled within him and he went toppling to the floor. p. 26

A straightforward but entertaining story.
Solution Delayed by Mark Clifton and Alex Apostolides does not get off to a good start with its talking-heads introduction. However, it picks up somewhat with a story about a group of non-conformists planning to steal a spaceship to escape from a stultifying future Earth. At the end of the story, of course, the technicians and administrators (spoiler) are shown to have set the whole thing up as they realise that only the non-conformists in their society will have the drive to spread humanity throughout the universe. I can’t say that this premise is particularly convincing, but overall it is an OK story.
You rather get the impression that Survival, by Don Green, is the product of a writer from outside the genre,1 given its central idea of a spaceship crashing onto an asteroid with an atmosphere. The story starts with one of the passengers regaining consciousness on the spaceship, and then proceeds to describe his activities in and around the crash site. He finds food, oxygen, spacesuits, etc., but no survivors. He disposes of the bodies and later explores the asteroid.
At the end of the story (spoiler) he finds an engineer alive but injured at the back of the ship. The narrative then turns into an astrogation lecture as they try to work out where to point their communications beam to get rescued. This was initially intriguing but got a little boring at the end so OK overall, I guess.
The last instalment of Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement brings matters to a suitable conclusion, with the expedition getting past the cliff, and also solving the problems of food supply, navigation, and finding the space probe.
It isn’t hard to appreciate why this novel was so popular when it first appeared: interesting aliens, a series of (almost endless!) scientific problems to overcome, and an eventful journey through the hugely varying gravity and terrain of the planet Mesklin. The flaws it has (two-dimensional characterisation, authorial info-dumping and some unclear description) are minor in comparison. I would suggest that this classic still holds up for modern readers.

The Cover 2 by Walt Miller illustrates the Poul Anderson story. A painting of a blue-skinned alien is accurate but seems a little juvenile to me.
The Interior artwork by Walt Miller, Orban, Dreany, and Van Dongen is all competent to good. There is a nice illustration by Van Dongen3 on p. 143 but, as it is in advance of the story, it rather spoils the final scene.
“Our Catalogue Number…” by John W. Campbell, Jr. is an editorial about the things that used to be SF but are now becoming reality. He lists a number of devices that are now available in the technical catalogues, cyclotrons, X-Rays, etc.
The old joke about Astounding/Analog is that it is the SF magazine ‘with rivets.’ We get a flash of that here with Locum Tenens by Wallace West, another dull article, this time about the development of metal technology with an emphasis on the history of the steel industry. It also examines other metals and materials at the end, and also quotes from a 1952 report from the President’s Materials Policy Commission which predicts what the future will hold in this field.

The report forecasts that domestic production of petroleum will start to decline in the 1960s. Eventually, it thinks, crude oil may be conserved for use in petrochemicals and fine lubricants while liquid fuels are synthesized from our tremendous supplies of shale, tar sands and low grade coal. Or the coal may be burned right in the ground to produce gas that can be liquefied under pressure.
Atomic fission may provide about a fifth of the world’s power until the uranium runs out a century or so hence. Then, unless the fusion of hydrogen has become practicable, more and more dependence will be placed on sun power, tidal power and warmth obtained from the earth itself by means of heat pumps.
Land and sea will be farmed with equal intensity, particularly if the world’s population keeps climbing at the present rate. Eroded soil will be rebuilt with synthetic resin conditioners and with synthetic ammonium nitrate and sulfate fertilizers made from oil and coal. The weather will be at least partially controlled to get the greatest benefit out of rainfall, delay frosts, et cetera.
Forests will be allowed to grow only the most useful varieties of trees while chips, bark, sawdust and roots will be made into chemicals, playwoods or food.
Magnesium, vanadium, salt and hundreds of other materials will be extracted from sea water. The fresh water obtained in the process is almost certain to be used in vast irrigation projects. Such projects are becoming vital even now because of the steady drop in the underground water table all over the world.
Fishing and the collection of kelp and other sea foods certainly will not be done On the present wasteful hit-or-miss basis. The PMPC report thinks the sea itself may be fertilized.
But the greatest visible change in the world of the not-so-distant future may be its use of glass and other silicon products to make everything from fabrics to highways; to replace many structural metals and to coat those that remain so they can resist corrosion indefinitely. Such products will remain as plentiful as the sands of the sea. They may well provide the substitutes to end all substitutes, the shining ones that, in the end, will make it forever unnecessary for mankind to creep back into- the cave in search of warmth and shelter.
p. 99

Taxes well spent on futurology.
The Analytical Laboratory: April 1953 reports on the ongoing process of moving to an absolute rather than relative scoring system. Campbell reminds readers of his payment system:

For newcomers: The magazine pays a normal 3ȼ a word rate for stories. Yarns I think exceptionally good I’ll pay 4ȼ on. But if I underrate a story, and the reader-vote shows it earned the bonus . . . my error, and the author gets an extra check. (If I paid on one that you readers didn’t think earned it, the author doesn’t have to pay back the bonus, just to settle that question! But it’ll encourage me to make better predictions of reader response!) p. 100

The clear winner of the poll is the first part of Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement, followed by Chad Oliver, Alan E. Nourse, Charles Dye and April Smith, and W. T. Powers. This is pretty much as I had it, except I’d put the Dye/Smith in last place.
The Reference Library: Man, the Improbable by P. Schuyler Miller has a couple of interesting snippets after a long discussion about two books on evolution. One is that Andre Norton edited (‘into a neat whole’) Malcolm Jameson’s ‘Bullard’ stories for book publication; there is also this information about the anthology The Petrified Planet:

The “petrified planet” of the title in this Twayne “Triplet” is Uller, second planet of Beta Hydri, whose life-forms have evolved around a silicone metabolism, assimilating assorted minerals and excreting them as CO2, H20 and silica armor. It has a neighbor, Niflheim (Nu Puppis IV) with a fluorine economy. Both were invented for the occasion, and described in considerable detail, by Dr. John D. Clark, who lives at being a chemist but once sank so low as to sell two stories to this magazine in 1937 and to work out a biography of Robert E. Howard’s utterly unscientific hero, Conan.
Three skilled writers have then built stories around the chemistry of these two worlds: Fletcher Pratt in “The Long View,” H. Beam Piper in “Uller Uprising,” and Judith Merril in “Daughters of Earth.” The first two stories appeared in current magazines, while the book was in press. If the third did, I missed it, though it’s the best of the three.
p. 162

Brass Tacks has a letter about solving mazes that runs for several pages.

A solid, if uninspiring, issue.

_____________________

  1. ISFDB gives this as Don Green’s only SF story.
  2. The source for the (since edited) cover image is Siren in the Night.
  3. An illustration from Van Dongen:
    And one from Orban:            

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Astounding Science Fiction v51n04, June 1953

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Editor, John Campbell; Assistant Editor, Kay Tarrant

Fiction:
“… And A Star to Steer Her By” • novelette by G. Harry Stine [as by Lee Correy] ♥♥♥
Quiz Game • short story by Frank M. Robinson ♥
Impostor • short story by Philip K. Dick ♥♥♥♥
Mission of Gravity (Part 3 of 4) • serial by Hal Clement ♥♥♥+

Non-fiction:
Cover • photograph by Lee Correy
Interior artwork • by H. R. Van Dongen, J. Dreany, Pawelka
The Villains of the Piece • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Reference Library: “Modern Science Fiction” • book reviews by P. Schuyler Miller
In Case of Fire • science article by Wallace West
Whirligig World • science article by Hal Clement
Brass Tacks • letters
The Analytical Laboratory: March 1953

“… And A Star to Steer Her By” by G. Harry Stine was his second published story for Astounding (and third in all),1 and it is the kind of thing that would have appealed those readers of the magazine who felt the outward urge—or as the first (and also last paragraph) puts it:

In every age, in every time, there have been those who are not content to settle down. They miss the kick of the wheel, the wail of the wind in the rigging, the exotic sights and smells of a harbor half across the world, the roar of engines cutting through the slipstream, and the powerful, body-shaking thunder of the jets. It is to these restless men with the wanderlust that the human race owes a priceless debt as the wanderers push the horizons out to the stars— p. 47

The story opens on Mars with a jetman called Garver talking about his new mechanical arm to the Captain of a spaceship he used to work on. He tells the captain that he will return to Earth as, after his accident, he has no future career in space. As he reflects later:

He knew his power and jets, but a one-handed jetman was worse off than a one-handed piano player. Most skippers would rather have the Venusian Wet Rot.
He might sign on a liner as a master-at-arms or a steward, but he did not have the decorum necessary for such a job. As a first mate, he’d handled people differently. “Besides, you fool,” he told himself, “you know you’d go nuts sitting midships while some other guy brought her down on her tail.”
p. 9-10

Garver eventually gets a job in a bar until he gets a lucky break and is employed by a ship that has lost their jetman during an emergency landing. Much of the remaining story is about the detail of the trip back to Earth, and the nuts and bolts of what spaceflight might entail (as least as viewed from the 1950s). Some of this is fairly mundane stuff but it has its moments, such as when the ship’s cat plays with a ping-pong ball in zero gee, or the take-off for Earth after a lot of repair work:

He nudged four switches, and the power room was filled with the incredible noise of the pumps. He checked back-pressures as the needles climbed out of the red segments of the dials.
“Forty-five seconds!” The pumps were up to speed and the fuel pressure normal.
“Minus-30 seconds!” The flick of a switch dropped the magnetic clamps of the ground tackle. The
Fafnir was now free to lift.
“Steady, now . . . steady,” Garver soothed over the scream of the pumps.
“Minus-20 . . . 19 . . . 18 . . . 17. . . 16—”
“Come on, baby! We’re going home!” he whispered to the heart of the
Fafnir.
“10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7—”
He didn’t pray; it seemed useless against the radioactive fire below him.
The ship was suddenly a straining entity of its own instead of a complacent fabrication of metal.
“Five!” He threw a switch. A relay whacked closed.
“Four!” Automatic controls, now out of Garver’s jurisdiction, raised the firebox temperature.
“Three!” Another relay threw. The tank valves snapped open.
“Two!” The pumps took up the load and shifted into main stage, “One!” Lights winked solid green
across his board.
“UP SHIP!”
p. 21

This passage appealed to me considerably more than it probably should have . . . .
When the crew get back to Earth the skipper retires and Garver opens a restaurant. After a period of successfully building his business (spoiler) he decides to buy the skipper’s ship and go back into space. We later discover, of course, that the skipper had deliberately not sold the ship as he knew that Garver would eventually want to buy it from him.
This story is a little creaky but it’s quite good for the time,2 and it is perhaps notable for its diverse crew: apart from Garver being partially disabled, they have a Dutch skipper, and their electronics man is a Muslim from Greater New York (who needs to regularly know where Earth is while they are in flight for his daily prayers).

Quiz Game by Frank M. Robinson starts with a scientist at a family meal. His son asks him about the aliens who have just landed, as the father is in charge of asking the questions that will be put to the aliens when their language is deciphered. The rest of the story is an extended (and fairly dreary) set-up about the questions that are going to be asked. When they find that the aliens are dying the list is winnowed down considerably. The weak ending (spoiler) is that the aliens spend all their remaining time asking us questions.
Impostor by Philip K. Dick is a very good early piece that, with its war-weariness and suspenseful paranoia, is perhaps an archetypal 1950’s SF story.3 Moreover, it deals with one of the recurrent themes that can be found in Dick’s work: the reliability of memory and identity.
Olham, a research scientist on an Earth at war with the Alpha Centaurans, is abducted by a work colleague and security officer and taken beyond Earth’s protec-bubble as they believe he is a robot-bomb. Oldham is convinced he is human. . . .

In this issue’s instalment of Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement, the crew are powerless before the tidal swell of a hurricane and end up beached miles inland. On their way back to the sea the glider-flying race they encountered earlier encircle them, and demand to know who they are and what they are doing. The majority of the instalment is about this encounter. There is an amusing observation from one of the crew about the gliders when Barlennan considers acquiring one for his collection:

“The day I climb onto one of those flying machines will be a calm winter morning with both suns in the sky.” p. 137

I don’t know why but this made me smile. Quite a good instalment.

The Cover is a photograph is credited to ‘Correy,’ and looks like something that would be more at home on an astronomical or aviation publication: it is a bit dull for an SF magazine.
The Interior artwork is by H. R. Van Dongen, J. Dreany, and Pawelka, with the best coming from, as usual, Van Dongen.4
The Villains of the Piece by John W. Campbell, Jr. is an editorial that makes a couple of obvious points about the limitations of statistics. He then goes on to do some axe-grinding about telepathy, and how we should not write it off because the research statistics don’t provide evidence to support the phenomenon.
The Reference Library: “Modern Science Fiction” by P. Schuyler Miller starts with a look at Modern Science Fiction, edited by Reginald Bretnor. Miller discusses the essay by Philip Wylie, and quotes him at length:

“Science fiction potentially can abet human wisdom but . . . the bulk of its present production has the opposite effect,” he states. We have created a psychologically invalid false mythology of stereotypes and cliches with about as much relation to reality as Conan’s world has to the real past—or to real myth. “The bulk, unlike the old legends, contains no germ of human truth whatsoever.”
These are bitter truths to face, if they are truths, and I do not intend to do more now than face you with them and leave you to think about them. Perhaps we can then come back to them and examine them with more leisure. But first I must let Mr. Wylie speak for himself a little further: “If science fiction plays any large part in leading the minds of men toward new goals, the goals toward which it has led most of its addicts to date are more evil than those of their less well-informed forebears . . . wild adventure, wanton genocide . . . gigantic destruction and a piddling phantasmagoria of impossible nonsense . . . . The fiction is of a perverse order in that it departs from what is scientifically known of man’s nature.
The science is most commonly employed either ignorantly or for sadistic melodrama . . . .
“(Writers) are nearly all ignorant of one area of science as large as all the rest: psychology . . . Yet, without (this) science . . . what they write is irresponsible, in the sense that it pretends to be ‘modern’ whereas it is contemporary
in detail only—and inevitably, in meaning, archaic . . . . They but create a new and sinister folklore, in which the latest facts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are superimposed on a human insight hardly more developed than that of Bushmen.” p. 76-77

In the review of The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1952 edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty , Miller states:

The 1952 collection—stories printed in 1951—outdoes the three that have gone before, and the vast strides science fiction is taking are shown by the fact that for the first time none of the eighteen selections comes from ASF. Undoubtedly when the next edition of the “Year’s Best Science Fiction Novels” appears, the omission will be remedied, for this magazine shines in its longer stories. p. 77

I found the lack of representation from Astounding a little surprising.5
In Case of Fire by Wallace West starts with this rather startling statement:

Three-quarters of a billion dollars’ worth of homes, factories and materials went up in smoke throughout the United States last year. That is a stiff levy on a country already saddled with huge foreign aid payments and Cold War costs, even if one discounts the eleven thousand or so lives lost and the additional thousands of persons who were maimed by fires.
There are, however, two even more disturbing factors involved: the uninterrupted rise in the fire loss rate and the fact that it seems next to impossible to get people to do much about the situation.
p. 82

There is another interesting quote at the end, but unfortunately the two are separated by a long and ultimately boring article about the history of fire brigades and various modern methods of firefighting.

Skyscrapers are not “fireproof.” No man-made structure can be. But they are highly fire-resistant and liberally equipped with hand extinguishers, hose and plentiful supplies of water. Most of them have automatic sprinkler systems. The proof of their safety came when a B-25 bomber dived into the Empire State Building several years ago and drenched the interior with gasoline. There was a nasty fire, of course. It gutted most of the seventy-eighth and seventy-ninth floors. But, because only the furnishings burned and because the New York Fire Department had drilled itself for years to meet just such an impossible situation, it brought the flames under control within nineteen minutes! p. 1006

Whirligig World by Hal Clement is an interesting article about the research for his novel Mission of Gravity. There are a number of interesting snippets, including the fact that Mesklin was inspired by the then current data about the object 61 Cygni C (subsequently shown to be spurious7). He also made a model of the planet Mesklin:

The model I have of it is six inches in diameter and not quite two and a half thick; if I added the ring, it would consist of a paper disk about fourteen inches in diameter cut to fit rather closely around the plastic wood spheroid. (The model was made to furnish something to draw a map on; I like to be consistent. The map was drawn at random before the story was written; then I bound myself to stick to the geographic limitations it showed.) I was tempted, after looking at it for a while, to call the story “Pancake in the Sky,” but Isaac Asimov threatened violence. Anyway, it looks rather more like a fried egg. p. 110

He finishes with this:

The trouble was, I couldn’t possibly think of [everything] in advance; time and again a section of the story had to be rewritten because I suddenly realized things couldn’t happen that way. I must have missed details, of course; that’s where your chance to win the game comes in. I had an advantage; the months during which, in my spare hours, my imagination roamed over Mesklin’s vast areas in search of inconsistencies. Now the advantage is yours; I can make no more moves in the game, and you have all the time you want to look for the things I’ve said which reveal slips on the part of my imagination.
Well, good luck—and a good time, whether you beat me or not. p. 114

Brass Tacks is pretty dull as usual, or at least I can’t remember anything about the letters and forgot to make notes. A couple of them are about February’s stories (mostly about Null ABC by H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire, although I note that both correspondents place Walter Miller Jr.’s Crucifixus Etiam in third place).
The Analytical Laboratory: March 1953 has Thou Good and Faithful by John Loxmith (John Brunner) as the winner of the March issue.

This is easily the most interesting of the three 1953 issues of Astounding I’ve read so far; I suspect that will still be true after I’ve read the entire year.

    1. G. Harry Stine at ISFDB.
    2. SFE states that, under his Lee Correy pseudonym, ‘it is his best known tale.’
    3. Imposter, as well as perhaps being an archetypal 1950’s SF story, was (it was pointed out to me) the only one that John W. Campbell Jr. bought from Philip K. Dick. The writer recalls his dealings with Campbell in the story notes for Oh, To Be A Blobel! (The Minority Report, Citadel Twilight, 1991):
      At the beginning of my writing career in the early Fifties, Galaxy was my economic mainstay. Horace Gold at Galaxy liked my writing whereas John W. Campbell, Jr. at Astounding considered my writing not only worthless but as he put it, “Nuts.” By and large I liked reading Galaxy because it had the broadest range of ideas, venturing into the soft sciences such as sociology and psychology, at a time when Campbell (as he once wrote me!) considered psionics a necessary premise for science fiction. Also, Campbell said, the psionic character in the story had to be in charge of what was going on. So Galaxy provided a latitude which Astounding did not. However, I was to get into an awful quarrel with Horace Gold; he had the habit of changing your stories without telling you: adding scenes, adding characters, removing downbeat endings in favor of upbeat endings. Many writers resented this. I did more than resent this; despite the fact that Galaxy was my main source of income I told Gold that I would not sell to him unless he stopped altering my stories—after which he bought nothing from me at all. p. 379
      (Thanks to Fred on the Classic Science Fiction Yahoo Group for finding the quote.)
    4. A double page spread from Van Dongen for “… And A Star to Steer Her By”:
      And one from A Mission of Gravity:
    5. The contents lists for the two Bleiler & Dikty volumes for 1952 can be found on ISFDB: The Best Science-Fiction Stories: 1952 and Year’s Best Science Fiction Novels: 1952. The latter collection, as Miller suggests, has contributions from Astounding: three of its five stories are from the magazine. It is instructive to compare the contents lists of the two Bleiler & Dikty volumes with the later The Great SF Stories #13, edited by Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg. There is only one story (!) that appears in both volumes. If I ever manage to read all (or the vast majority) of the stories from 1951 it should make for an interesting essay comparing the contents lists. Well, an interesting essay for about half a dozen people on the planet maybe . . . .
    6. It is worth reading the Wikipedia article about this horrific accident. One of the injured women was transported in a lift that had weakened cables and plummeted seventy five floors when they broke. She survived!
    7. The section ‘Claims of a Planetary System’ in the 61 Cygni Wikipedia article states that the idea of a massive third body was shown to be spurious in 1978.

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Astounding Science Fiction v51n03, May 1953

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Editor: John Campbell; Assistant Editor: Kay Tarrant

Fiction:
Medicine Show • novelette by Robert Moore Williams ♥♥
Multifarious • short story by Algis Budrys ♥♥
Lady with a Past • short story by Irving E. Cox, Jr.
Operating Instructions • short story by Robert Sheckley ♥
Mission of Gravity (Part 2 of 4) • serial by Hal Clement ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Austin R. Baer
Interior artwork • by J. Dreany, Pawelka, Paul Orban, Schecterson, H. R. Van Dongen
Thinking Machine • essay by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Space, Time and Education • essay by John E. Arnold
The Analytical Laboratory: February 1953
Pi Equals Anything But 3.14159 . . . • science essay
The Reference Library: First Reader • book reviews by P. Schuyler Miller
Brass Tacks • letters

This issue leads off with Medicine Show by Robert Moore Williams, which is about a small town doctor and a medicine show that rolls into town. When the doctor finishes his rounds he goes to visit and is taken by one of the men to be examined by a strange machine. He is then given two pieces of metal, one to put in each pocket, to cure his hay fever.
The rest of the story is very predictable—another of the town’s doctors is hostile to the show and gets the sheriff to arrest the men. Meanwhile, a young girl develops a life-threatening infection. It’s considerably more accessible, readable and convincing than the other stories in the issue, and has the occasional piece of quite effective writing, such as when the young girl has a fever:

In the corner, the puppy whimpered. On the bed, the little girl moaned and twisted. She was not in contact with this world but with some other world in which strange shapes came and went like ghosts across a wasteland. In this other world were sights that frightened her. p. 39

. . . although you could probably get rid of one of those repeated ‘worlds.’

Multifarious by Algis Budrys is about an alien arriving on Earth. He quickly meets a human, and there follows a game of cat and mouse. The alien wants to get as much information as possible from the Earthman, including details of the helmet he wears—which among other things provides shelter and food—before he kills him. It materialises (spoiler) that the humans have discovered the secret of matter transmission, and they are happy to provide the technology to the aliens to help them overcome their competitive culture.
This is generally an OK piece, and the avoidance of an ending where the Earthman kills or otherwise bests the alien makes a change.
Lady with a Past by Irving E. Cox, Jr. is set several hundred years after the Suicide War, and starts with the narrator seeing a rocket or asteroid plunging into the forest he is monitoring. He goes to the crash site and finds a woman there. After much running around we find out (spoiler) she is part of an offworld colony that was set up after the war, and has come back to set up ‘receptors’ that will enable her colleagues to take over Earth. How this is supposed to happen isn’t explained convincingly as the story is more interested in the minutiae of the logical and well-adjusted post-war society that has developed. This is an unconvincing piece that verges on the ludicrous at times (the scene concerning the operation of the receptors, for example).
Operating Instructions by Robert Sheckley is about a psi being taken on a (normally) three man spaceship to assist the engines on a trip to Mars.1 The story makes much of these rules in handling the unreliable psi:

“Operationally, the psi may be considered a unit of tricky, delicate, powerful machinery. Like all machines, certain maintenance and operating rules must be observed. To function, any machine must be:
1. Well-seated.
2. Fueled.
3. Oiled.
4. Regulated.
Taking these in order we find:
1. In order to function at all, a psi must feel at home, secure, wanted.
2. Praise must be afforded the psi at frequent intervals. Since the psi is unstable, his ego must be periodically boosted.
3. Understanding and sympathy must be used at all times when dealing with the psi.
4. The psi must be allowed to run at his own pace. Excess pressure will break him.”
Powell looked up and smiled. “That’s all there is to it.” p. 78

Except that, of course, it isn’t: the psi pushes much harder than expected and the spaceship ends up beyond the orbit of Saturn. The rest of the story is mostly about the histrionics of the psi when he discovers he can’t ‘push’ any more, and the captain’s attempts to get him working again. The very weak resolution is (spoiler) that the captain eventually treats him like any other piece of equipment, i.e. orders him to push. I’m sure this went down a storm with Campbell, given its ‘men-as-reliable-as-machines (if only we can get them sorted)’ theme.
Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement has a weaker second part, but I still enjoyed it. The expedition encounters a strange bowl-shaped city with tunnels. The natives, after a spot of trading, try to roll rocks down onto the crew, who are all forced to confront their fear of heights and jump on the tank to save themselves. This section struck me as rather contrived encounter.
Better is the episode where they encounter a sixty foot cliff-edge just before the river, and with no way around. The raft has to be dismantled, winched down—with the crew!—and Lackland and his tank are left behind. Finally, Barlennan and his crew meet another set of natives, who again cause the crew problems.

The artist for this Cover is Austin R. Baer, a student at MIT2 and one-time contributor to both Astounding and the SF field. I’m not sure what happened to Astounding’s covers in 1953 but they were of a very variable standard.3
A number of artists contribute Interior artwork this issue, and the best of it comes from long time contributors Paul Orban and H. R. Van Dongen.4
The editorial, Thinking Machine, by John W. Campbell, Jr. suggests these components for an ideal thinking machine:

Suppose we have the following components to start with:
1. An infinite data-storage device.
2. A set of perceptic devices, specifically including a device capable of searching the data-storage system and perceiving the data there stored.
3. A logic computer, working on binary digital mechanisms.
4. A GG unit (explained below).
5. A set of actuator units.
I propose that such a device, started with bad data, having faulty actuators, and faulty perceptors—save the internal data search mechanism—will, given time, be able to solve all the problems of the total Universe.
p. 6

This ends up being one of those exhaustingly reasoned and unconvincingly contrived Campbell editorials. A GG unit is a ‘good guesser’ unit by the way, or ‘magic box’ to you and me.
Space, Time and Education by John E. Arnold is an interesting article about a course MIT has started to teach creative thinking to engineering students. Part of the course gets them to build vehicles for aliens on a planet different from ours. There are a number of eye-catching passages, including the following:

No man today can defend the democracy that Washington and Jefferson established, because America has developed, has learned greater wisdom and invented new social ideas, the “heritage” of Washington and Jefferson is forever gone!
For example, in their day, their concept of democracy held that no man who owned less than five thousand dollars worth of property had a right to vote. Their concept of democracy has long since been changed; they would never have accepted the idea of woman voters.

The very fact that men are idealists, and will fight for their ideals, makes social inventions extremely difficult under our present-day understanding of what actually constitutes “our heritage.” The more strongly and deeply idealistic a man is, the more genuinely and sincerely he holds his honest beliefs, the more valiantly he will defend these “truths” that are, to him, self-evident.
Social inventions are most desperately needed today— and are hardest of all to make, because each man, within himself, has limited his own creative thinking. By failing to find the fundamental core of his ideals, he may sacrifice everything in a pointless defense of a nonessential.

Fifty years ago, the engineering student was considered something of a second-class citizen of the college campus; only the Liberal Arts student was considered a true student. A social invention was making its way, however. Where major corporations and businesses were uniformly directed by lawyers and Liberal Arts students only one generation ago—today the technical man is taking a bigger and bigger part in executive control.
Educational methods, more than any other single factor, will determine what our world is like in another half century. Of all possible forms of education, it seems to me that the most critical is education to understand, use, and evaluate creative thinking.
p. 9-10

The Analytical Laboratory: February 1953 not only gives the results for the previous issue but suggests a more intelligent, if more complicated, scoring system for stories:

In the March Brass Tacks we published a letter from Charles Leedham suggesting a new system of rating stories; several of the readers who voted for their choices in the March issue used that system, scoring stories on an all-time basis, rather than on a relative-to-this-issue basis.
I’m in full agreement that we do need a scoring system which would be based on a long-time relative basis, rather than the this-issue basis; the problem is to get enough of the readers to agree on it. Temporarily, at least, I’ll have to continue to use the simple system of voting for relative standing of best, next best, etcetera, in the current issues—but I ‘d very much like to have those of you who will take the trouble to do so, rate stories also on the long-term basis, where rating a story 10 means you feel it’s an all-time, long-term classic, 9 means an exceptionally fine story, and so on down to 0, meaning it should never have been published. On this basis, a story rating 8 should mean “a good story, and worthy of first place in any ordinary good issue of the magazine.” Then in some exceptional issue, a story might rate 8, and still not be first, because of some 10-point classic.
If this were Heaven, of course, I’d print issues full of nothing but 10-point stories, and all authors would always write classics. Since it isn’t, an 8-point story deserves a bonus; when reader letters indicate that the situation of a 10 point classic and an 8-point bonus-worthy story both appear in one issue—both stories will get a bonus.
p. 47

Pi Equals Anything But 3.14159 . . . is a half-page filler that looks at the value of pi for non-uniformly curved surfaces.
The Reference Library: First Reader by P. Schuyler Miller starts off with a long review of a book about space medicine, Physics and Medicine of the Upper Atmosphere by Otis Benson and Clayton S. White, before covering a number of others, including one by Schuyler himself and, more puzzlingly, Asimov’s The Currents of Space, which the magazine had just finished serialising four months earlier.
Brass Tacks has a couple of letters that have interesting snippets in them. John Gilson of Minneapolis, MN finishes his letter with this:

Your articles are the first thing I read when I get the magazine—right after I read the editorial and Brass Tacks. The editorials, together with your fine articles, form almost a pocket education.
Your editorial on “The Laws of Speculation” will probably start a lot of speculation so why not start a department of—or for—the practice and advancement of speculation? Call it the Spec Dept.—John Gilson

The Spec Dept. is called “Astounding Science Fiction.” [Campbell] p. 154

There is also a long letter from new reader Herbert Taylor from Duluth (also MN) which has, amongst other things:

During the last two weeks, while invalided with a broken leg, I have read fourteen back numbers of ASF from cover to cover. It was my maiden experience with your magazine, or any like it, although I have read a quantity of hard-cover stf previously. Like Mr. Keats perusing Chapman’s Homer, I felt like “some watcher of the skys when a new planet (in this case, several dozen planets) swims into his ken.”
[. . .]

Fiction: The best to be found between soft covers. But I am in consistent disagreement with the Analytical Lab. For me, the short stories pack the biggest punch, say most with least verbiage, are more thought-provoking than the longer pieces. I think the readership often votes for quantity instead of quality. I think your format is well-balanced, however, and I enjoy the novelettes and serials; I am merely stating a preference. p. 157-8

He finishes with a pitch for verse in Astounding, which Campbell appears open to, and he asks for reader feedback.

A mediocre issue saved from being even worse by only the serial and some decent internal artwork.

  1. Sheckley would use to the idea of humans as ‘pushers’ much more fruitfully in one of his best stories, Specialist, which was published in Galaxy in the same month.
  2. A Requiem for Astounding, Alva Rogers, p. 202
  3. You can see all of Astounding’s 1953’s covers at ISFDB. A motley crew apart from the four Van Dongen contributions and the classic October contribution from Frank Kelly Freas (and maybe the two from Miller). The March cover from Pawelka must be in the running for the worst Astounding cover ever.
    This varying quality was probably due to the retirement of artist Hubert Rogers from the field in 1952. He had been a mainstay of the magazine, contributing seven covers in 1951.
    Also, note the three changes in typeface for the magazine title. This issue’s design seems to have won, although I personally prefer the typography on the March and April issues.
  4. The illustrations from Paul Orban:
    And from H. R. Van Dongen:
  5. Lest you think I am being harsh, the only short fiction from this issue that has been reprinted is the Sheckley, and not in one of his own collections. See ISFDB.
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Astounding Science Fiction v51n02, April 1953

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Editor, John Campbell

Fiction:
Mission of Gravity (Part 1 of 4) • serial by Hal Clement ♥♥♥+
Settle to One • novelette by Charles Dye and April Smith
Allegory • short story by William T. Powers ♥
The Ant and the Eye • novelette by Chad Oliver ♥♥
Family Resemblance • short story by Alan E. Nourse ♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • by H. R. Van Dongen
Interior artwork • by H. R. Van Dongen, Pawelka
The Fallacy of Null-A • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Nature Didn’t Make It • science essay
In Times to Come
The Analytical Laboratory: January 1953
The Reference Library: Science Fiction and Fictitious Science • book reviews by P. Schuyler Miller
Brass Tacks • letters

Although I picked up a copy of Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement decades ago it was a novel that I never got around to reading—probably because of an aversion I developed at the time for really hard SF.1 I decided that it was time I got around to reading it, and figured an added benefit would be a snapshot four-issue look at what Astounding was like in the early 1950s, a period when both Galaxy and F&SF were really hitting their stride.2
Clement’s novel takes place on the alien planet Mesklin. This planet is unique in that, due to its mass, shape, and rapid rotation rate, it has a gravity of around three G at the equator, where the story starts, and several hundred G at the poles. The South Pole is where an Earth expedition has lost a data-gathering rocket. Enter Barlennan, a centipede/caterpillar-like Mesklinite a few inches high, who is an adventurer, explorer and trader that captains a raft and crew that sail the liquid methane that forms the seas of this world. Barlennan has learned to communicate with a human called Lackland, who is stationed at the equator, and who is working with the Mesklinites to undertake a rescue mission to recover the probe: the natives can survive at the poles of Mesklin, unlike humans, and are the only chance of recovering the data.
This first installment is generally scene setting for the journey to come and covers quite a lot of background information as well as some incident: when Lackland’s tank breaks down the Meskinlites rescue him by dragging him back to his camp by using a raft made of sheet metal. This gives them the idea for Lackland to use a back-up tank to tow the Bree, their ship/raft, over land to a point where they can refloat on a river that will take them to the South Pole and the probe.
Another scene—the best in this installment— involves Barlennan being placed on top of the tank by Lackland and establishes the visceral fear that these aliens have for heights: this is because a fall from a few inches at the poles is terminal because of the massive gravity there:

The man’s armored hand swept out and picked up the tiny body of the Mesklinite. For one soul-shaking instant Barlennan felt and saw himself suspended long feet away from the ground; then he was deposited on the flat top of the tank. His pincers scraped desperately and vainly at the smooth metal to supplement the instinctive grips which his dozens of suckerlike feet had taken on the plates; his eyes glared in undiluted horror at the emptiness around the edge of the roof, only a few body lengths away in every direction. For long seconds—perhaps a full minute—he could not find his voice; and when he did speak, he could no longer be heard. He was too far away from the pickup on the platform for intelligible words to carry—he knew that from earlier experience; and even at this extremity of terror he remembered that the sirenlike howl of agonized fear that he wanted to emit would have been heard with equal clarity by everyone on the Bree, since there was another radio there.
[. . .]
And yet he did not go mad. At least, he did not go mad in the accepted sense; he continued to reason as well as ever, and none of his friends could have detected a change in his personality. For just a little while, perhaps, an Earthman more familiar with Mesklinites than Lackland had yet become might have suspected that the commander was a little drunk; but even that passed.
And the fear passed with it. Nearly six body lengths above the ground, he found himself crouched almost calmly. He was holding tightly, of course; he even remembered, later, reflecting how lucky it was that the wind had continued to drop, even though the smooth metal offered an unusually good grip for his sucker-feet. It was amazing, the viewpoint that could be enjoyed—yes, he enjoyed it—from such a position until sunset shut it off. Looking down on things really helped; you could get a remarkably complete picture of so much ground at once. It was like a map; and Barlennan had never before regarded a map as a picture of country seen from above. It was simply a graphic means of setting down surveying results so that they made sense when compared with each other.
An almost intoxicating sense of triumph filled him as the crawler approached the rocket and stopped. The Mesklinite waved his pincers almost gayly at the emerging McLellan visible in the reflected glare of the tank’s lights, and was disproportionately pleased when the man waved back.
The tank immediately turned to the left and headed for the beach where the Bree lay; Mack, remembering that Barlennan was unprotected, thoughtfully waited until it was nearly a mile away before lifting his own machine into the air. The sight of it, drifting slowly upward apparently without support, threatened for just an instant to revive the old fear; but Barlennan fought the sensation grimly down and deliberately watched the rocket until it faded from view in the light of the lowering sun.
p. 29-31

Generally, this is all pretty well done, and is much better than I had been expecting. There is some authorial info-dumping and telegraphing of future events that could have been better handled and/or omitted, and I didn’t find the description of the terrain/maps that clear. However, I can already see why this is regarded as a classic: you have intelligent and resourceful aliens, scientific problem-solving, and a journey set against the backdrop of this unique high-G planet.

Unfortunately, the other fiction isn’t even remotely close to the Clement serial in terms of quality: Settle to One by Charles Dye and April Smith is a particularly painful read. An alien ship arrives on Earth and when the occupant disembarks it turns out to be a woman called Melandra, who all the Earthmen are immediately attracted to.

The small alien paused a long moment after the colonel’s greeting, then shook her head. A series of meaningless, jumbled sounds issued from her lips in a low musical timbre. Kathryn watched desire struggling to show itself in the colonel’s stern eyes, and this time she knew she was not mistaken. Shifting her glance, she let it flicker over the faces of the men around her and those further back in the surrounding area. On not one face could she find the attitude of curious, dispassionate scientific interest in the alien that she herself was feeling. Instead of reacting to her as an alien, they were reacting to her as a woman!
Staring back at the tiny creature who seemed to be turning an assembly of sober scientific men into a group of adolescents, she saw with amazement the same enraptured look on the woman’s own face. She was staring back at the men thronged around her with eagerness, fascination, desire. Her lips were parted and she had a smile of delight on her face.
p.65-66

She is assigned Kathryn as a liaison, and the colonel in charge of the reception party suggests that the visitor stays with her and her husband, as you would. We later find that Melandra has been sent instead of a man as there is a shortage of them on her planet due to a radiation from a new lighting system damaging their genes.
The rest of the story will satisfy any Mills & Boon readers who have stumbled upon this issue by mistake, as illustrated when Kathryn’s husband relates a near-encounter with Melandra:

His eyes stared into Kathryn’s, searching for some understanding.
“Look, you know I love you. I’ve always loved you and been proud of you. But there’s something about her—”
He shook his head, confused. “Kathryn, I . . . it was all right this time, but—I can’t promise for the future. I can’t. I don’t want anything to happen, but . . . I felt as though I had been waiting for those moments with her all my life . . . and for the moments that didn’t come. It was as though she were something I had dreamed in a dream long ago and forgotten, and longed for years without knowing it, as though she were a goddess, an unattainable goddess suddenly within reach of my arms. She seemed to fulfill all the wild, restless longing I’ve felt on still nights when the sky and the moon and the whispers of sound reached out and enveloped me in some nameless yearning. She’s what music is, she’s—”
He broke off for a moment, and stared unseeingly through the window. “It’s not that she’s so beautiful . . . it’s the way she moves, I think. And that soft voice blending in with her gestures. Something about the way she moved—it seemed to catch the rhythm of my blood and do strange things to it. I suddenly couldn’t think at all. I felt like a tree stripped of its leaves by a high wind. I’m turning into a poet, but no words are like what I felt. Compared to it, everything I’ve felt before—it’s like listening to amateur fiddling all your life and suddenly hearing Heifetz—”
He stopped short, as Kathryn made a low, strangled sob. “What an awful thing for me to say!” He looked at her in dismay and put his head in his hands.
p.70-71

Methinks that Kathryn’s husband will be sleeping in the spare room for some considerable time . . .
On quizzing Melandra about this episode, Kathryn finds that marriage is not exclusive on Melandra’s planet and that she wanted to take back some healthy germ plasm. Later, Kathryn finally has a meltdown at an official ball when she finds that her husband has volunteered to go the planet as part of the first expedition. She confronts Melandra about how he females of her race are going to steal away all the Earthmen, and ends with this plea:

“To a woman there’s very little of importance compared to love—I say this even though I am a scientist and fascinated by my profession. I know that if I lost Ron my work that I care about so much now and am so proud of would become empty and meaningless.” p. 79-80

Melandra (spoiler) does the right thing and leaves without telling the colonel the location of her planet. This is so bad it is almost worth reading.

Allegory by William T. Powers is about a future computer data processor dealing with correspondence from a man who claims that he has invented an anti-gravity device. Initially, this account of the inventor bouncing off inflexible rules and regulations is quite entertaining, but the computer-controlled bureaucracy ends up being too simplistic a target.
The Ant and the Eye by Chad Oliver concerns an operative in UNBAC (a United Nations quango) who is tasked to fix an election as there is a man who, if elected, will cause the end of free society.
The story unnecessarily starts off-world and has Quinton travelling back to Earth for his assignment but, for all that, this and the rest of the first half is told in a leisurely and quite engaging manner. However, the second half is non-specific about the science used to both identify this man as a potential problem, and to stymie his chances. It starts to drag because of this. Definitely a game of two halves.
Family Resemblance by Alan E. Nourse is a light-hearted piece about a lowly academic discovering that man is more closely related to pigs than apes. Unfortunately it just isn’t very good.

I initially thought the Cover for this issue (illustrating Clement’s serial) was by John Schoenherr, but I’m three years too early: it is by H. R. Van Dongen, who also contributes some nice internal artwork as well.3 The other artist contributing Interior artwork is Pawelka, and there is also some nice heading art by Ed Cartier for the book review and letters columns.4
The non-fiction content is the usual selection. The Fallacy of Null-A by John W. Campbell, Jr. is a short editorial about Aristotelean and Null-A logic and how, although we may think in the latter multi-valued way, our actions are always Aristotelean.
Nature Didn’t Make It is a short science piece—probably cobbled together by Campbell, I would have thought—about various man-made materials: nylon, Teflon, silcone coating, etc.
The Analytical Laboratory: January 1953 states that:

Beginning with the stories in this April issue, the stories which are voted tops by reader opinion will get Astounding’s one cent a word bonus; if an author does a top notch job, your applause will have the effect of doing him a real favor in return for the favor he’s done you by giving you some genuine pleasure. p. 147

I assume that this is the start of this long-running practice?
The Reference Library: Science Fiction and Fictitious Science by P. Schuyler Miller has a number of long reviews, starting with a similarly lengthy introduction about the intersection between SF and pseudoscience.
Brass Tacks is rather dull this issue, given over almost entirely to science discussions.
Finally, and not on the contents list, there is an advertisement for Peter Hamilton’s Glasgow-based UK SF magazine Nebula, available from the ‘sole US agent’ Frank A. Schimd (50¢ versus Astounding’s 35¢ for a single copy, 30/38¢ versus 25/28¢ per copy—various options—if you take a subscription).

A rather poor issue apart from Hal Clement’s serial.

  1. I am pretty sure something put me off Clement’s work back in the late seventies, hence my first read of this classic. I can’t remember if it was a novella of his that I read and didn’t like or some other hard SF stories—I didn’t care much for Niven’s Hugo-winner Neutron Star, nor some of the harder (and more tedious) SF stories found in the late 70s Analog.
  2. This four issue run doesn’t look that promising: apart from the Clement the only other likely prospects are stories from Algis Budrys (already read and OK), Sheckley (poor), Philip K. Dick (Imposter) and Poul Anderson. Galaxy looks more promising with three titles from Sheckley I recognise, and stories from Leiber, Dick, Simak, Shaara and others. F&SF has Ward Moore’s Lot, a couple from Dick (The Preserving Machine and Expendable), and stories by Sheckley, Porges and Bester.
  3. Some of the internal artwork by H. R. Van Dongen:  
  4. Ed Cartier’s artwork for the columns:
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Astounding Science Fiction v54n05, January 1955

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Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
James Blish, The Issue at Hand, p.102-103
Lähettänyt Tpi Klo, Tpi’s Reading Diary

Fiction:
The Darfsteller • novella by Walter M. Miller, Jr. ♥♥♥♥
Armistice • short story by John Brunner [as by K. Houston Brunner]
Field Expedient • novelette by Chad Oliver ♥♥
Without Portfolio • short story by James E. Gunn ♥♥
Nothing New • short story by Eric Frank Russell ♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Frank Kelly Freas
Interior artwork • H. R. Van Dongen, Frank Kelly Freas
Meaning Wanted • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
The Analytical Laboratory: October 1954
On Atomic Jets • essay by John R. Pierce [as by J. J. Coupling]
The Reference Library: Lost Adventure • book reviews by P. Schuyler Miller
Brass Tacks • letters

This issue of Astounding has the second Xmas Cover that the magazine used (the first had been the year before on the January 1954 issue). Perhaps Campbell or his art department had been encouraged by the use of these on Galaxy magazine. Whatever, this pleasant effort is by Frank Kelly Freas, the first of three he would contribute to the magazine.

The Darfsteller by Walter M. Miller, Jr. is set in a theatre of the future where programmed mannequins have replaced actors onstage. The central character of this piece is Thornier, an out of work actor working as a janitor in one of these theatres. The first part details his tempestuous relationship with his boss D’Uccia, and his friendship with Rick who services the Maestro, the machine that controls the mannequins:

Rick finished feeding in the script tape, closed the panel, and opened an adjacent one. He ripped the lid from a cardboard carton and dumped a heap of smaller tape-spools on the table.
“Are those the souls they sold to Smithfield?” Thornier asked, smiling at them rather weirdly.
The technician’s stool scraped back and he exploded: “You know what they are!” Thornier nodded, leaned closer to stare at them as if fascinated. He plucked one of them out of the pile, sighed down at it.
“If you say ‘Alas, poor Yorick,’ I’ll heave you out of here!” Rick grated.
Thornier put it back with a sigh and wiped his hand on his coveralls. Packaged personalities. Actor’s egos, analogized on tape. Real actors, once, whose dolls were now cast in the roles. The tapes contained complex psychophysiological data derived from months of psychic and somatic testing, after the original actors had signed their Smithfield contracts. Data for the Maestro’s personality matrices. Abstractions from the human psyche, incarnate in glass, copper, chromium. The souls they rented to Smithfield on a royalty basis, along with their flesh and blood likenesses in the dolls. p.19

Later on that day Thornier bumps into the producer of the play that is about to start its run. Jade Fern is an old friend and she wants to speak to him later, but in the meantime she sends him to pick up a spare mannequin and tape.
While waiting to get the truck keys from his boss D’Uccio he hears him arranging for a new robot cleaner: Thornier feels a twinge of sadness. Even as a janitor he feels part of the theatre and will miss it when he goes. During the drive to the depot to pick up the mannequin he decides to sabotage the tapes for one of the mannequins in the hope of giving one last performance….
This is all developed at a leisurely pace as Miller introduces a number Thornier’s relationships throughout the story: after the antagonistic scenes with his boss (Thornier highly polishes the floor under his doormat after a disagreement, and D’Uccia later reciprocates with a robot cleaner), and those that have been mentioned already such as Rick and Jade, there is also an old relationship with an actress called Mela.
Running parallel to the story of these relationships is a significant amount of commentary about acting and, in particular, the method-acting technique that Thornier was known for—Miller coined ‘darfstellar,’ a corruption of the German word for actor, dafstellar, to describe a practitioner of that method. Another German word for actor, schauspeiler, is also used later in a different context. This is from an exchange between Thornier and Jade the producer, when she suggests he works for Smithfield, the tape company:

“Sorry, but you know me better than that.”
She shrugged, sighed wearily, closed her eyes again. “Yes, I do. You’ve got portrayer’s integrity. You’re a darfsteller. A director’s ulcer. You can’t play a role without living it, and you won’t live it unless you believe it. So go ahead and starve.” She spoke crossly, but he knew there was grudging admiration behind it. p.35

And there is this later:

When Rick rang the bell for the second run-through, it would be his entrance-cue, and he must be in-character by then. Too bad he was no schauspieler, too bad he couldn’t switch himself on-and-off the way Jade could do, but the necessity for much inward preparation was the burden of the darfsteller. He could not change into a role without first changing himself, and letting the revision seep surfaceward as it might, reflecting the inner state of the man. p.36

Although Miller perhaps fudges the ending, and is slightly sentimental or melodramatic at points, it is a sympathetic and engaging account of one man’s obsolescence in the future, and how he has singularly failed to adapt. Indeed, the final scene has a passage that is prescient even today:

“It’s too late to find a permanent niche.”
“It was too late when you were born, old man! There isn’t any such thing—hasn’t been, for the last century. Whatever you specialize in, another specialty will either gobble you up, or find a way to replace you. If you get what looks like a secure niche, somebody’ll come along and wall you up in it and write your epitaph on it. And the more specialized a society gets, the more dangerous it is for the pure specialist. You think an electronic engineer is any safer than an actor? Or a ditch-digger?” p.65

This story would go on to win Miller the first of his two Hugo awards.

The other long piece of fiction in this issue is Field Expedient by Chad Oliver. This starts on a peaceful future Earth that is run by a world government. However, humanity has become static and inward looking and desirous of protecting the status quo. There are signs like ‘Don’t rock the boat’ projected onto the sky.
A wealthy man called James Murray Vandervort has started a secret project that sends adopted children to Venus to start a different type of civilization, and this is done under the supervision of a select team and a number of androids. Keith Ortega is sent by Murray to Venus to personally supervise the project and report back.
Ortega goes there with his wife and the bulk of the rest of the story is about their time there and, later, what happens when an Earth Government spaceship arrives to investigate what is going on. At this point (spoiler) Ortega takes the Earth representative (and the reader) on a tour of the different settlements, the hunters, the industrialists, the ethicists, etc. He shows him the rituals that make all these tribes brothers, and brothers who will one day spread out to the stars ending the stasis of humanity….
The last section has Keith and his wife returning to Earth (and leaving their robot doubles behind with their sons) where they visit Vandermort, who is now 120 years old and dying. They finally discover his motivation for funding the project: he wants to be remembered.
This an OK piece overall but it is something of a curate’s egg: the Earth society setup at the start is clunky and unconvincing; the societal setup on Venus seems a little naïve. However, the final deathbed scene is quite good so it ends on a high.

Armistice by John Brunner is about Kerguelen being arrested and taken away for interrogation by Talbot. About half way through the story it turns out that Kerguelen is an alien with a plan to guide the human race, but Talbot does not react the way he hopes. Or something like that. Too long, too talky, too boring.

Without Portfolio by James E. Gunn tells of America and Eurasia on the eve of war and the American Secretary of State taking Mr Judy into a Senate hearing. When the committee questions Mr Judy (“Call me Stephen, or Steve…”) they find the government have contracted out diplomatic relations to his firm and he has declared war on Eurasia. The rest of the story is about how business methods bring the Eurasian government to heel. This is an OK satire and I imagine it was right up Campbell’s street.

Nothing New by Eric Frank Russell concerns a spaceship crew who are headed for an unexplored planet. En route they discuss the reason for their trip which is the possibility that the planet’s occupants may be immortal. Once they arrive they find a rural society and are met by a very slow moving alien who takes them by multi-cycle to an administrator (this section is the best part of the story).
The punchline (spoiler) is that this is not the first time they have been visited by Earthmen. This very slight premise is set up previously in the story by the ship’s archaeologist musing about what the state of human civilisation was before the Flood, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating.

The Interior artwork is by H. R. Van Dongen and Frank Kelly Freas. My favourite illustration comes from Freas.1
Meaning Wanted by John W. Campbell, Jr. would appear to be, at the start, an editorial about science and facts, but it isn’t long before it turns out that this is a prelude to him doing a bit of axe-grinding about his latest hobbyhorse, Dr Rhine’s ‘psi effects’, and how the latter’s work is not being accepted by the scientific establishment.
This is a fairly tortuous read, a daisy chain of statements, analogies and half-baked assertions. I’m pretty sure there is a project here for someone who wants to go through these editorials and annotate all the errors of fact and reasoning.
In Brass Tacks Campbell’s editorial is followed by more of the same. Manly Banister contributes a three and a half page letter that is full of passages like:

Deduction is the work-horse that carries the burden of human thinking. And a sorry, idiotic work-horse it is, at that, for it labors just as genuinely on a false premise as it does on one that is accurate. For instance: All thieves have bushy hair. Joe has bushy hair. Therefore, Joe is a thief. p.157

Ah, no: your first premise would need to be ‘All people with bushy hair are thieves’ for you to deduce Joe is one. I think this letter is eventually (it meanders around all over the place) about conscious control of the human body’s processes but to be honest I’m not sure. The other two letters are equally as unrewarding (especially as both refer to previous ‘fact’ articles). One wonders to what extent readers of the time were buying the magazine only for the fiction and just ignoring Campbell’s editorials and the letters in reply.
In Times to Come plugs a new ‘Paratime’ story by H. Beam Piper and a cover by Frank Kelly Freas (his famous man-in-a-ladies’-bonnet-holding-a-knife one for a James H. Schmitz story called Grandpa).
The Analytical Laboratory: October 1954 has part three of Mark Clifton & Frank Riley’s (Hugo-winning) They’d Rather Be Right beating Poul Anderson’s The Big Rain by a nose; the other three names don’t mean anything to me.
On Atomic Jets by John R. Pierce is a science fact article that talks about space travel in the solar system. It examines (with formulae and graphs for those that like that sort of thing) the physics of this and concludes that we will probably require chemical engines to get into orbit, and atomic powered ion jets thereafter.
The Reference Library: Lost Adventure by P. Schuyler Miller leads off by reviewing an immortal woman/lost people novel called Lost Island by Graham McInnes and asks what has happened to the adventure in SF. Miller posits that after two world wars it may be something to do with people wanting security in their lives.

If you already have Miller’s story in a collection or anthology there isn’t anything else here worth reading the issue for.

  1. A lovely illustration by Freas:ast195501freasx600
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Astounding Science Fiction v30n04, December 1942

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ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Jamie Rubin: Vacation in the Golden Age, Episode 42 (forthcoming)

Fiction:
The Weapon Shop • novelette by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗∗∗
The Flight That Failed • novelette by A. E. van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull [as by E. M. Hull]
Some Day We’ll Find You • novella by Cleve Cartmill
Interlude • short story by Ross Rocklynne
To Follow Knowledge • novelette by Frank Belknap Long
Johnny Had a Gun • short story by Robert Moore Williams
Piggy Bank • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
Probability Zero:
True Fidelity • short story by William M. Danner
The Human Bomb • short story by Stanley Woolston
Valadusia • short story by Jack Bivins
O’Ryan, the Invincible • short story by T. D. Whitenack, Jr.
My Word! • short story by Frank J. Smythe
Take-Off • short story by L. M. Jensen

Non-fiction:
Cover • William Timmins
Interior artwork • Kolliker, Paul Orban, Elton Fax, Charles Schneeman, M. Isip, F. Kramer
Power Supply • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
Get Out and Get Under (Part 1 of 2) • essay by L. Sprague de Camp
Brass Tacks • letters

As I have may have mentioned before, Jamie Rubin has been reviewing Astounding on his blog with the intention of covering its ‘Golden Age’ of July 1939 to December 1950. In late 2016, after a prolonged break from posting any new reviews, he copied the posts to a separate site (link above) and was going to continue to review another one every fortnight (but never did). At the time I noticed that the proposed upcoming issue was relatively self-contained in that it had no serials or series stories, bar the van Vogt (which I’ve read a couple of times before and know is standalone), so I thought I’d have a look.

This edition of the magazine is one of the large bedsheet format ones and so there is a lot of reading here, containing as it does a novella and four novelettes plus some short stories.1 The fiction leads off with the classic—and still impressive—The Weapon Shop by A. E. van Vogt, the second in his ‘Weapon Shops of Isher’ series. This begins with an opening paragraph that gives us several pieces of information:

The village at night made a curiously timeless picture. Fara walked contentedly beside his wife along the street. The air was like wine; and he was thinking dimly of the artist who had come up from Imperial City, and made what the telestats called—he remembered the phrase vividly—“a symbolic painting reminiscent of a scene in the electrical age of seven thousand years ago.” p.9

The couple’s pleasant evening walk is soon interrupted when Fara notices a newly opened Weapon Shop, which has appeared overnight in a side street. Fara, a loyal supporter of the Empress, is enraged at this desecration of his timeless home by an organisation that does not recognise her authority. As a crowd gathers outside the shop he becomes even angrier when neither the townspeople nor the constable take any action. The constable states it is impossible to break into the shops, so Fara goes home and returns with an atomic cutting torch which he uses to no avail in trying to gain entry.

One of the bystanders says the door will only open for those who will not harm the occupants and Fara, though he ridicules the statement, reaches forward and attempts to open the door. It opens. However, when he urges the constable to quickly go in and effect an arrest the door slams shut again. Fara grabs the doorknob once more, which gives us one of the story’s great images:

Fara stared stupidly at his hand, which was still clenched. And then, slowly, a hideous thrill coursed along his nerves. The knob had—withdrawn. It had twisted, become viscous, and slipped amorphously from his straining fingers. Even the memory of that brief sensation gave him a feeling of unnormal things. p.12

He tries the handle again but the door remains locked. His mood rapidly changes from anger to fear as he realises that maybe even the soldiers of the empress would be powerless in this situation. At that point he tries again and gains entry.
Inside there are more unsettling events for Fara. He meets a silver-haired man and, quickly collecting himself, tells him he wants to buy a gun for hunting. He is met with a recitation of the bye-laws that the Weapon Shops impose. When Fara eventually gets hold of the weapon and turns it on the silver-haired man, the latter barely reacts, but starts discussing Fara with a man standing to the rear. The pair conclude that his one-sided outlook about the Empire would be difficult to change. They finish by showing him a disturbing vision: the Empress is in the metropolis arranging for the murder of one of her ex-lovers. Fara is then ejected out of a side door. Worse is to come: when Fara gets home he finds out that the Weapon Shop has put out black propaganda on the telestat about him being the shop’s first customer.
All of this is a great start to the story. Having started with a couple enjoying an evening walk in a bucolic village, we are swiftly introduced to the enigmatic Weapon Shops with their near magical technology and shown the dark underbelly of the Empire.
The subsequent narrative arc (multiple spoilers) has Fara fall slowly from grace: his son (there is ongoing familial strife that helps ground the story) ends up taking a huge amount of money from his account. Fara takes a loan from the bank to cover this and then loses his business to a large competitor, Automatic Atomic Motor Repair Shops, when they buy the loan and foreclose.

After the local court treats him badly, and his mother-in-law refuses to offer any financial support, he ends up going to back to the Weapon Shop to buy a gun so he can commit suicide. After his purchase he finds himself transported to the off-world site and finds himself standing in front of a huge machine:

A machine, oh, a machine—
His brain lifted up, up in his effort to grasp the tremendousness of the dull-metaled immensity of what was spread here under a summer sun beneath a sky as blue as a remote southern sea.
The machine towered into the heavens, five great tiers of metal, each a hundred feet high; and the superbly streamlined five hundred feet ended in a peak of light, a gorgeous spire that tilted straight up a sheer two hundred feet farther, and matched the very sun for brightness.
And it was a machine, not a building, because the whole lower tier was alive with shimmering lights, mostly green, but sprinkled colorfully with red and occasionally a blue and yellow.   Twice, as Fara watched, green lights directly in front of him flashed unscintillatingly into red.
The second tier was alive with white and red lights, although there were only a fraction as many lights as on the lowest tier. The third section had on its dull-metal surface only blue and yellow lights; they twinkled softly here and there over the vast area.
The fourth tier was a series of signs, that brought the beginning of comprehension. The whole sign was:
WHITE — BIRTHS
RED — DEATHS
GREEN — LIVING
BLUE — IMMIGRATION TO EARTH
YELLOW — EMIGRATION
The fifth tier was also all sign, finally explaining :
POPULATIONS
SOLAR SYSTEM 19,174,463,747
EARTH 11,193,247,361
MARS 1,097,298,604
VENUS 5,141,053,811
MOONS 1,742,863,971
The numbers changed, even as he looked at them, leaping up and down, shifting below and above what they had first been. People were dying, being born, moving to Mars, to Venus, to the moons of Jupiter, to Earth’s moon, and others coming back again, landing minute by minute in the thousands of spaceports. Life went on in its gigantic fashion—and here was the stupendous record. p.23

This is a scene that has perhaps become more credible in the age of meta-data than it was when I first read it many years ago.
A passer-by tells him he is at Information Center, the home of the Weapon Shop courts. The subsequent interviews and court procedure provides justice and restitution to Fara for a conspiracy he was unaware of between the bank and the company that bought his shop. We also find out a lot more about the Weapon Shops and what they do.
The most intriguing thing I found about this section was that Van Vogt doesn’t go for the easy option of the Weapon Shops as a government-in-waiting, or a resistance movement waiting to usurp the Empress and take over, but paints them as an near-omnipotent, altruistic and almost neutral organisation. As well as being warned off about any future bad-mouthing of Her Majesty, they tell him:

It is important to understand that we do not interfere in the main stream of human existence. We right wrongs; we act as a barrier between the people and their more ruthless exploiters.
[…]
People always have the kind of government they want. When they want change, they must change it. As always we shall remain an incorruptible core—and I mean that literally; we have a psychological machine that never lies about a man’s character—I repeat, an incorruptible core of human idealism, devoted to relieving the ills that arise inevitably under any form of government. p.26

I liked this story a lot, in particular its almost dreamlike progression. One of his best.
The rest of the fiction in this issue, unfortunately, is pretty poor. Whether this is just a one-off or whether this is the result of much of Campbell’s talent being called up for war service (this issue appeared about a year after Pearl Harbour) remains to be seen.

The Flight That Failed is another story that comes from van Vogt, this time in collaboration with his wife E. Mayne Hull, although I rather wonder if he revised a story that she wrote. It tells of a wartime flight over the Atlantic in unusual moonlit conditions. A stranger comes into the cockpit and starts talking to the captain before he is arrested and put in chains. He escapes from these not once but twice and, while this is going on, we learn he is from a possible future and warns of an imminent attack by German aircraft. He further states that he needs to man one of the machine guns to prevent his particular Nazi-dominated future occurring. When he is not believed he vanishes.
Until this point the story was OK but afterwards goes rapidly downhill. They (spoiler) are attacked by the German aircraft and, in the middle of this, the captain has a rather unconvincing conversation with a professor on board. The latter is later killed. The pilot returns to the cockpit and shoots a ray gun at one of the attacking aircraft and destroys it. He then realises he is onboard some sort of spaceship in a reality caused by the death of the professor. This unbelievable ending just shakes the story to bits.

Some Day We’ll Find You by Cleve Cartmill is about a company called Trading Posts, which has a monopoly in inter-solar system trading. The owner Bradley is looking for two men called Wellman and Stopes as they have invented a space drive that may threaten his business. He hires a man called Craig Marten through Hunt Inc., an investigative firm, to find them. Bradley also tasks a woman called Jennifer Jones to get close to Craig for reasons revealed later in the story.

There isn’t really any point in saying more about this: there is no real science fiction content here, just a number of one-dimensional characters being moved around an overlong and quite boring plot. You can tell what is going to happen from the synopsis above. To add to the suffering Cartmill can’t even write half-decent prose, and the story is full of material like this:

Thorne Raglan didn’t look like a hunter. He was moon-faced, with a glow like that goddess of the night. This effect, perhaps, was wrought by small blue eyes that twinkled over mounded pink cheeks. His short pug nose was almost lost in an expanse of geniality. p.39

Craig looked steadily at the pink face of his employer. “This case must be important.”
“That mounting sound you hear,” Raglan chuckled, “is our bank balance. If you get a hot lead, let me know instantly.” p.44

Pulp filler, and not even good pulp filler at that.

Interlude by Ross Rocklynne is about a Neanderthal who is transported into a totalitarian future where people are controlled by collars locked around their necks. He later (spoiler) breaks free of a reservation and kills the dictator. This is obviously a ridiculous plot but, unlike the Cartmill, at least the story moves along at an entertaining clip and has better prose.

To Follow Knowledge by Frank Belknap Long begins with three old friends getting together at an exhibition. One of them, Morrison has built a time machine, which generates some eye-glazingly dull conversation:

She paused an instant, then resumed. “I was a problem child in physics at Vassar, but I seem to remember that only time on Earth would stand still. If you moved with the speed of light and looked back at Earth, everything would appear to be standing still. If you moved faster, events on Earth would unhappen.”
“That’s right,” Temple said. “People who don’t think things through imagine that events would repeat themselves in little jerks. Come to a head, so to speak, and then unwind feet foremost. Actually they would unhappen continuously, roll backward until all history repeated itself in reverse.”
“But only on Earth,” Joan reminded him. “We could observe that reversal only by moving away from Earth in the direction of motion faster than light. And we could move about and grow older while watching it if we were traveling in a time machine. Our motion would not be relative in relation to the machine. That seems sort of tautological, but you get what I mean.”
“I get what you mean,” Temple said. “And without realizing it you’ve put your finger on the crux of our predicament. We don’t know what reality would be like in a higher dimension than we can perceive with our limited endowments of sight, touch and hearing, but it seems unlikely that a time machine would just move away from Earth with the speed of light. p.90

Temple then starts the time machine, off the back of a dare if I recall correctly, and this catapults them into a number of strange realities. He is the only one that can move between the several realities that they are scattered between. This situation develops for a while before switching to Temple explaining what had happened to ‘grandpop’ for several pages. I say explaining but I mean more pseudoscientific babble about time travel, faster than light travel, multiple dimensions, etc., which makes it read like a really bad Weird Tales super-science story from the 1930s.

Johnny Had a Gun by Robert Moore Williams is about a small time criminal interrogated by police after he kills a gangster with a strange pistol that appears not of this time and/or place. The story seems more interested in the hard-boiled detective aspects than the SF, although this does produce some well-done gore:

In spite of himself, the lieutenant shuddered. He had seen violent death in many forms, men with their heads caved in, with all bones broken, with their guts dragging on the sidewalk, but he had never seen anything like this. He had been in a squad car near the scene and a radio call had sent him hurrying to it. He had found a totally bewildered young criminal in the clutch of an equally bewildered patrolman and he had found bits of flesh scattered all over the street, splattered against the walls of the building, draped over Neon signs. Bone, pieces of intestines, blood—Nelson quickly lit another cigarette. p.100

An intriguing story but one that goes nowhere.

I had higher hopes for the next piece given that it is one of two ‘Lewis Padgett’ stories that were published between The Twonky (an entertaining gimmick story in Astounding, September 1942) and Mimsy Were The Borogroves (the classic that would appear in Astounding, February 1943). Alas it was not to be.
Piggy Bank by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore is set in a future world where rival business tycoons seek to put each other out of business. One of these business men is suffering repeated diamond robberies so he gets his scientist to build him a robot studded with diamonds that can’t be caught. This scientist also makes artificial diamonds for the businessman by a secret process, and he doesn’t trust his boss . . . .
Once the robot is built (spoiler) the businessman double-crosses the scientist and has him killed, and discovers what the patent number for the diamond manufacturing process is; he also discovers that the scientist has changed the pass-phrase that allows anyone to get near the robot. Meantime, one of his business rivals has started putting the squeeze on him financially so he needs to get hold of the diamonds.
As you can gather from the description, this is another contrived and unlikely pulp tale. The ending isn’t that impressive either.

There are a further half-dozen short-shorts that come under the Probability Zero umbrella, an idea Campbell dreamt up to allow aspiring writers to break into Astounding with SF tall tales. These six include stories about FM radio programs and a portal that opens; a man parachuting through the Earth destroying a Nazi city and causing a tidal wave in Japan; a nightclub planet that has plants which provide drink and music ruined by a swing band that causes a musical civil war; a man leading limbless aliens through poison ivy and driving them insane as they can’t itch;, fire-walking as training for a later expedition to the sun; and, finally, the assembly of a spaceship in record time for a race to Alpha Centauri. They are all uniformly awful and should have been left in the slush pile. According to ISFDB, none seem to have been reprinted. No surprise there.

The non-fiction this month isn’t as bad as most of the fiction but there is nothing special here either. The Cover for Van Vogt’s story by William Timmins is rather bland, but having looked at a number of Astounding covers of the time this may have been intentional: a deliberate contrast to the lurid pulps.
Orban’s illustrations are the probably the best of the Interior artwork but it is a pity that his rocketships, etc. look like they have flown in from the 1930s.
Power Supply by John W. Campbell, Jr. is an editorial that initially talks about the desirability of getting electricity directly from atomic fission before talking about other power sources, solar, wind, etc. It ends with this:

If and when men develop an efficient way of using low-potential energy sources, the problem of unlimited energy, costless, fuelless, totally and continuously available, is ended. Solar energy is so vast in total amount that any drains man might put on it would be completely indetectable; the trick we lack now is a method of using the already existent immense area of sun-energy absorber, the nicely designed absorber that acts also as a reservoir for the energy during the night when solar energy isn’t available. Figure a way to turn the thermal energy of the Earth’s atmosphere, and of its seas, into electric power directly, and there won’t be any real need for atomic power plants here on Earth. p.4

In Times to Come states that this month’s story ratings will appear next month along with the third ‘Seetee’ story by ‘Will Stewart’ (Jack Williamson)—his last for a while as he is doing weather observation for the Air Corps.
Get Out and Get Under by L. Sprague de Camp is the first part of a two-part article about vehicles in warfare. This part covers five vehicles: the chariot, the helepolis, the war elephant, the ribauld, and the battle car. It does tend to go on, especially in the elephant section where there are endless examples of their use in warfare.
Brass Tacks is unusually dull this time around: this was not helped by my not having read the few stories mentioned in the letters.

With the singular exception of Van Vogt’s classic, a very poor issue. The next few look like they contain some promising items (The Weapon Makers, Mimsy Were The Borogroves, Clash By Night, Gather, Darkness!) but I wonder what the overall standard will be like. ●

_____________________

1. With the January 1942 issue Astounding went from being 164pp. pulp to 132pp. bedsheet format. When Campbell was talking about Unknown making the same change he said the amount of fiction would increase from 80,000 words to 110,000 words per issue. ●

Revised 31st January 2018 to add artwork and de-italicise quoted material. Minor edits also made.

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Astounding Science Fiction v25n04, June 1940

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Other reviews:
Jamie Rubin: Vacation in the Golden Age, Episode 12

Fiction:
The Roads Must Roll • novelette by Robert A. Heinlein ♥♥♥♥
Deputy Correspondent • short story by Harl Vincent ♥♥♥
The Carbon Eater • novelette by Douglas Drew
The Testament of Akubii • short story by Norman L. Knight ♥
Final Blackout (Part 3 of 3) • serial by L. Ron Hubbard ♥♥♥+

Non-fiction:
Cover • Hubert Rogers
Internal artwork • Charles Schneeman, W. A. Kolliker, R. Isip, M. Isip
The Old “Navy” Game • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
The Analytical Laboratory, June 1940
Unseen Tools • science essay by Leo Vernon
Introduction to a Nameless Science • science essay by Peter Van Dresser
Permanent Electret • science essay
Brass Tacks • letters
Slip-Stickers’ Department • essay by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Science Discussions

This issue of Astounding is one of the few physical copies I have of the magazine so I thought I’d spend a little time describing it. First impressions are that it is a big magazine—it looks like a digest on steroids—the size of an iPad and a 160 pages thick. The paper cover is uncoated and so are the pages inside, which are trimmed unlike the ragged edges of many pulp magazines. The paper is of what seems to be a reasonable quality stock: imagine the paper of a quality colour tabloid newspaper perhaps. The pages of mine are lightly tanned and have the wonderful smell of paper with a hint of dust. The print is of a reasonable size with generous space between the lines and around the borders. Every few pages (the maximum I counted was nine) the text is broken up by artwork or advertisements. The only minor criticism I have is the size of the type which is used in the letter column, which is tiny (probably 8 pt.) but that is probably due to a desire to cram in as many comments in as possible.
It is a quality product and I would imagine that it would be very satisfying to have entire years of these on one’s bookshelves.1

Moving on to the contents of this issue, the cover by Rogers is quite good but dated. No doubt the idea of leather flying helmets and jackets and silver vehicles all seemed quite futuristic at the time but it looks rather quaint now. As per my comments last issue about the cover story-title block I note that the helmet of the rider is superimposed on top of it to avoid being clipped. The internal art is mostly by Schneeman, who again contributes the best work for Hubbard’s novel. The title illustration for the lead story has spot colour, which is something new, and this is also used in a couple of the adverts.2

The fiction leads off with The Roads Must Roll by Robert A. Heinlein. This novelette is about an America crisis-crossed by high speed moving walkways which were introduced after the use of cars became untenable because of their number and the resultant congestion, among other reasons:

They contained the seeds of their own destruction. Seventy million steel juggernauts, operated by imperfect human beings at high speed, are more destructive than war. p.14

Told from the viewpoint of Chief Engineer Gaines, who is showing a visiting Australian politician around, this tells of a rebellion by Functionalist inspired workers who shut down the high speed 100 mph lane of the rolling roads but leave the other slower lanes running. Gaines and his guest are at a restaurant situated on this strip when it comes to a halt. They go outside to see what is happening on the stationary roadway:

The crowd surged, and pushed against a middle-aged woman on its outer edge. In attempting to recover her balance she put one foot over the edge of the flashing ninety-five-mile strip. She realized her gruesome error, for she screamed before her foot touched the ribbon.
She spun around and landed heavily on the moving strip, and was rolled by it, as the strip attempted to impart to her mass, at one blow, a velocity of ninety-five miles per hour—one hundred and thirty-nine feet per second. As she rolled she mowed down some of the cardboard figures as a sickle strikes a stand of grass. Quickly, she was out of sight, her identity, her injuries, and her fate undetermined, and already remote.
But the consequences of her mishap were not done with. One of the flickering cardboard figures bowled over by her relative moment fell toward the hundred-mile strip, slammed into the shockbound crowd, and suddenly appeared as a live man—but broken and bleeding—amidst the luckless, fallen victims whose bodies had checked his wild flight.
p.20

The rest of the story is an exciting account of Gaines and the paramilitary transport engineers putting down the revolution.
Id have to say that the rolling roads idea isnt completely convincing at first but it grows on you as the story develops, and by the time I finished the passage above I was hooked!
If I have one minor criticism of this it is the slightly unconvincing climactic encounter between the ring-leader, Van Kleeck, and Gaines. By the by it is also interesting to note an echo of If This Goes On— in that Gaines uses psychological information from his opponents personnel file to manipulate him. Another is a reference to mob psychology:

Personnel did not behave erratically without a reason. One man might be unpredictable, but in large numbers personnel were as dependable as machines, or figures. p.34

Head and shoulders above everything Ive read in this years Astounding so far, bar Requiem perhaps.

Next up is Harl Vincent’s Deputy Correspondent. I wasn’t a fan of his High Frequency War in the February issue so this was a pleasant surprise. It is a humorous story that has three science expedition correspondents on Callisto: one Terran, one Venusian, and one Martian. As war breaks out on Earth the Venusian describes events in the form of a dispatch back to Earth but in his own particular form of English:

Respected Gentlemen:
In above manner I was instructed to address you and advise, with his authorizing, I undertake duties of Steve Bowdoin, your special correspondent until very recent date. Gladly I do this extra to my work with Saffron City Chronicle, which, surely you are aware, is foremost Venusian daily. You have my permitting to use this copy at regular space rates or suggest any differing arrangement you desire. Stephen Bowdoin is out of picture and I elucidate reason hereinafter. p.38

He goes on to tell of the fights that break out in the local bar when hostilities start on Earth:

Forrester and von Teufel, those Terrestrian scientists, were impossible of persuasion to return to Pioneer, being engaged in convincing large and hairy Scandinavian and Eurasian of crew adversely to hereditary allegiance. Question of Nordic supremacy, religious freedom, and Yellow Peril so hopelessly involved starting a Mediterranean, a Pan-German, and one Australian of crew actually physical combatting to accompaniment of loud retraction from mad radio of earlier announcement of allying nationalities. Before violently commencing combat accomplish smashing glassware, it was learned participants no longer enemies but of new alliance. By now our Chinese valver and Jap galley boy asleep, embraced lovingly in one rear booth of Barngril, unaware they are again enemies.
“I’m getting out of here,” growled Steve. When I endeavored to steady him he turned amazingly to von Teufel, the scientist. “And if you think North America is going to watch any Pan-Germanic vandals overrun Terra, you’re nuts!”
Von Teufel, florid of countenance, tugging his enormous mustache, shouted: “Schwein! We shall see what—”
That was when your erstwhile correspondent smote von Teufel and was taken from Barngril by his two colleagues of power of press to frigid outer air.
p.40-41

After the scientists sober up, the expedition splits into three teams and start their exploration of Callisto. It is then that they find a pyramid and the Terran correspondent, Steve Bowdin, is acclaimed as a god by the native inhabitants. The rest of them are locked in the pyramid. The two correspondents are later released and find out from Steve that the pyramid is what is left of the lost Pacific continent of Mu, which was transported through space in the past to Callisto. The natives want Steve to pilot them back to Earth. He has other ideas as he doesnt want all the advanced weaponry they have to fall into the hands of the warlike Terrans….
This holds up not badly at all for a seventy-five year old story and I’m a little surprised it has never been reprinted. It vaguely reminded me of Gary Jennings’ ‘Reverend Crispin Mobey’ stories that used to run in F&SF in the seventies and I think it is worth a look.

After such a strong start to the issue, I was initially optimistic about The Carbon Eater by Douglas Drew as it gets off to a promising start with the female commander of the First Field Chemical Corps, Holly Webster, not only holding her own but getting the better of her male underling, Bucky:

“Listen, Buck, if you don’t like the way I conduct my life, why don’t you concentrate on someone who suits you better?”
There was an edge in her voice that made me squirm, but I couldn’t do what she said any more than could those other four saps. We were just like trained seals under her whiplash. Only it was worst of all for me, because I’d been her trained seal ever since we were kids together.
“Listen, yourself, Holly Webster! I’m not trying to order your life for you, though some man ought to. But I am yelping because you’ve given me a dirty deal!”
A neat, practical little hand rose to soothe her throat, which softly palpitated in mock fright. Blue eyes gazed in round wonderment. “Who, me? What do you mean, Bucky?”
When she said that I got mad. “You never gave anybody a fair break in your life. I don’t know why I ever helped you get into our outfit. You’ve kept five of us miserable ever since.”
“And since that time you’ve all done better work,” she came back, cool as ice. “Besides, I would have joined this outfit eventually whether you helped me or not.”
“They didn’t want a woman on the First Field Chemical Corps.”
“An antiquated prejudice. Still I’d have made it.”
“Yeah, by your looks—sex appeal.”
Her lovely shoulders lifted in an almost imperceptible shrug. p.52

This is the start of an unlikely tale of Martians poisoning Earth people on Mars. The First Field Chemical Corps fly to Mars and trace the source of the corrosive poison gas to a bubbling pool and attempt to stop it. However, this is problematical as it eats through nearly every material they have in quite a short period of time.
At this stage the story goes beyond unlikely to plain confusing as a team is assembled to descend into the depths to blow up the vents that the gas is supposedly issuing from. Bucky witnesses one of the teams suits dissolve and kill the occupant after a short test period in the fluid, and then, back in the spaceship, he realises from viewing photographs that the gas is a by-product of electrolysis. At this point an unknown person locks him in the cabin and he is held incommunicado. Who does this and why is never explained, or maybe by that point I was skimming and missed the explanation.
Normal 1940’s mores are also resumed later on, as Buck talks to another crewmember Luke about Holly:

Luke again. Just couldn’t help it. I said to the punk: “Don’t ever let a girl try to mix up in a man’s work. No matter how much brains she’s got, no matter how good-looking she is and no matter how much you like her. She just don’t act like a man. She don’t reason like a man, either.”
It was hard for me to generalize in particular. “As a girl she’d make somebody a swell wife, but as a pal she’s a lousy, rotten, stinking, double-crossing smarty.”
p.74

The Testament of Akubii by Norman L. Knight is a short story about two space travellers, a human and an alien, who have a problem with the carbon dioxide scrubber on their ship: it is not producing enough oxygen. They land on a nearby planet but cannot find any oxygen so later depart. One of them (spoiler), the alien, then sacrifices himself, but in a convoluted way: leaves a fake message, puts a hypnotic command into the human on board, etc.
All of this seems a bit random, and it also has a waffley one page introduction about the historical veracity or otherwise of this story.

The last (and biggest) part of Final Blackout, L. Ron Hubbard’s notable serial, falls into two sections. The first deals with the brigade sailing to England and the engrossing game of cat and mouse that is played out with the communist defenders in the fog of the Thames estuary and river. After some well-described manoeuvring the Tower of London is captured and Hogarthy, the communist leader, killed. Peace reigns for the next few years and the country gets back on its feet. The lieutenant is the benign dictator of a low-tech society.
Later, a US cruiser arrives with two senators. After the lieutenant rejects their initial offer of aid they show their true colours: they want to install General Victor as a puppet leader and start mass immigration from the US: the country badly needs the lebensraum. The Lieutenant is forced by circumstances to agree with their terms—their cruiser with its cruise missiles and helicopters is massively technologically superior to anything the English have:

They’re like rocket planes and they go up out of chutes and they fire at any range up to a thousand miles. p.144

The Lieutenant arranges for a signing ceremony. After relinquishing command (spoiler), he kills Victor and his deputy and in turn is cut down and killed along with several of his men.
The only quibble I have is about this last part: why would the Lieutenant think that the Americans would honour the agreement where power then passes to a council of UK Army officers?
Apart from the straight plot synopsis there are other aspects of the work that deserve comment. The first is the vague feeling of unease that I felt while reading this. For most of the novel the Lieutenant is in sole control and probably rightly so given that they are in a war situation, but this continues into peacetime and it is seductively portrayed as desirable. Of course this kind of thing resulted in the work subsequently drawing criticism for having fascist undertones (and as someone smarter than me pointed out, it is quite a good illustration of the ‘Leader Principle’ in action). Indeed, there is some If This Goes On— like political speechifying in the final scenes, e.g. when the Lieutenant replies to the American’s initial offer of aid:

“Captain Johnson,” said the Lieutenant, “at one time this nation was densely overpopulated. The weak and stupid were supported by the king with a dole. We shipped in great quantities of raw materials and manufactured them. We shipped in our food or starved. But this land is fertile and this nation can support itself. Empire was a mirage. With it this land was involved in war. With it this land starved. We have lost all our weaklings now. We are fifteen thousand people, and not until almost a century has sped will we begin to take up the available land. Perhaps then we will go all through the cycle once more. But just now we see ahead a century of plenty and therefore a century of internal peace. Then, perhaps, war will come again. But it will not come until we again have so little that people will be foolish enough to listen to the harpings of political mob makers. A new influx of population now will restore that chaotic stupidity which your civilian friend here calls ‘culture.’ The only good government is that government under which a people is busy and content. Such a government exists. We want no machines, no colonizers, no foreign ‘culture.’ We are not an exhausted people, but a small, compact band that was strong enough to survive bullets and bombs, starvation and disease.
“I am neither a politician nor a statesman; I am a soldier. I know nothing of the chicanery which goes by the name of diplomacy. But I learned long ago that there is only one way to rule, and that is for the good of all; that the function of a commanding officer of a company or a state is to protect the rights of the individual within the bounds of common good, but never to trifle with the actual welfare of any man or to attempt to carry any man beyond his own ability and strength, for to do so weakens the position of all and is not for the common good. A state, gentlemen, is not a charity institution. p.140

However, it may not be as simple as opining that this novel has fascist undertones. Alva Rogers in A Requiem for Astounding notes that the novel ‘precipitated a very bitter name-calling controversy in the pages of “Brass Tacks,” and elsewhere’ and the issue in dispute was whether it was communist propaganda or fascist propaganda. Hubbard maintained that it was apolitical in intent and was an attempt to extrapolate a pessimistic future based on the best evidence of the day.3
Another comment I have about this is that I don’t think that it is the same kind of beast as Herbert Best’s novel The Twenty-Fifth Hour at all (I’ve seen them shoe-horned into the same box a couple of times). Although they both have strong military men as central characters, I would say that the Best novel is about the depths of savagery that man is capable of whereas the Hubbard is essentially about a strong leader.
Notwithstanding all the above, this is certainly one of the significant stories of the year.

The non-fiction is the usual mix in this issue with slightly more of an emphasis on the science than normal. The editorial, The Old “Navy” Game, notes that four Astounding writers have some degree of connection to the Navy and none to the Army and then goes on very tenuously from there:

Risking the cracks about to descend upon me, I’ll guess as follows: The navy has more of a literary tradition than the army. Thereafter, a man well trained in military work is well trained on one very essential factor—details. p.6

The Analytical Laboratory, June 1940 is more a non-Analytical Laboratory this issue as, instead of giving any ratings, Campbell states the April issue has only been out a short time and says that so far four of the stories are slugging it out for first place (the Hubbard, Jameson, Van Vogt and del Rey).

The science material comprises of two articles, a shorter piece and Science Discussions.
The first article is Unseen Tools by Leo Vernon, which is about the use of mathematical tools and how they are used to predict real world phenomena, e.g. the discovery of the positron from Diracs work. It finishes with a section on symbolic logic. Introduction to a Nameless Science by Peter Van Dresser is an article on the upper atmosphere (mesosphere/exosphere/ionosphere) concentrating mostly on the ionic/electrical and radio effects of those layers. Of course, 75 years ago they still hadnt put a satellite into space so a lot of this research still had to be done. Permanent Electret is a short squib, presumably by Campbell. Permanent electrets like permanent magnets. You have voltage but they deliver no current. Slip-Stickers’ Department is another short piece by John W. Campbell, Jr. about a ‘Reaction Motor’ that looks to have the same effect as the Dean Drive (unidirectional motion) but would seem to conserve energy. I am not sure about conservation of momentum though, and given the number of daft ideas that appeared in Astounding over the years, don’t want to waste my brain cells thinking about it much further.

As to this month’s Brass Tacks, I must confess I am beginning to find the letters more and more interesting as my knowledge of the writers and artists of the time grows. There are several snippets of interest this time around. Harry Warner of Spaceways (a fan magazine or a novel name for a house?), Hagerstown, Maryland mentions a UK reader endeavouring to get the magazine:

Inclosed you’ll find twenty cents in stamps, which have traveled a very devious route just to get the December, 1939, Astounding to a fellow in England. He wanted it; asked a friend to try, the friend bought the unused U.S. stamps from a dealer over there and smuggled them over here to me; now I send them to you to send the magazine to the original bird. (Don’t ask me why he didn’t send direct.) If the postage to abroad is extra, let me know and I’ll make up the difference. p.154

Hopefully the magazine made it but there were 62 allied ships sunk by U-boats in June 1940, of which at least half a dozen were outbound from the USA and about the same number from Canada.4
Bob (Wilson) Tucker of Bloomington, Illinois plugs his 1939 Yearbook, an index to fantastic fiction listing 703 stories and all the magazine contents pages for 20 cents.
D. Price of Balbba Heights, Canal Zone didn’t like If This Goes On— and amongst the general praise for Smith’s The Gray Lensman has this:

“The Gray Lensman” was magnificent for the first three issues, but the strain of composition was evidently far too much for Dr. Smith, because the conclusion was a shambles. The Eich, who had hitherto been so methodical and careful, and who had just suffered heavily for their underestimation of the Arisians and should therefore have been even more on their guard, abruptly threw caution to the wind and were absolutely unprepared and helpless before the might of the Patrol. Only by plumbing the depths of a degenerate space rat’s vocabulary could I express my opinion of this ultratrite ending. p.155

Elsewhere there are a number of ‘likes’ for Nat Schachner’s Cold, another few top tens for 1939, and some early comment on Hubbard’s serial from Max Moore of New Orleans, Louisiana:

Maybe I’m just a sucker, but I’m actually half-believing that “Final Blackout” is going to be good. But—it’s by Hubbard. And Hubbard is one of those fellows who believes that if he doesn’t turn out 50,000 words a month he gets stale. “Slaves of Sleep” is the best argument I can cite against that theory. p.156

Lew Cunningham of San Ysidro, California complains that when authors are taken to task in Science Discussions they can come back the next month with their retort whereas when the illustrators get panned they can do nothing about it. He suggests a closed season on illustrators for a while. The last letter of note is from W. K. Vemiaud of Michigan City, Indiana and it is a considered and interesting one about the religious overtones of current day sociological and economics belief which I am ill-equipped to paraphrase successfully. Read the magazine….

Finally, there is an advert5 for Unknown in this issue with this text:

Starting with the July issue, UNKNOWN makes its appearance as the high-type literary fantasy magazine that it is—its new cover is as dignified as a member of parliament. And you’ll find it on the newsstands among the general magazines, not among the all-fiction group. p.8

I can’t remember seeing many of these Unknown house ads in Astounding—they certainly haven’t been appearing monthly, that is for sure. In the likes of Galaxy/If/Worlds of Tomorrow and Amazing/Fantastic, you would always find ads for their related magazines in every issue, usually listing the contents. Also, that ‘member of parliament’ part is a little odd: what would that mean to your average 1940s US SF reader?

Overall, a worthwhile issue.

  1. Satisfying—and potentially lucrative—to have years of these Astoundings on your shelves: I think this issue cost me about £40-45 a couple of years ago.
  2. The spot colour works well on a couple of the adverts but doesn’t do much for either of Schneeman’s illustrations for the Heinlein story—this the best of the two:AST194006art2x600
  3. Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding, p.77-78: “Final Blackout” by L. Ron Hubbard, a novel in three parts, began with the April issue. This novel precipitated a very bitter namecalling controversy in the pages of “ Brass Tacks,” and elsewhere. The story was essentially a simple one of survival in a Europe almost totally devastated after several generations of war. The hero (identified only as “the Lieutenant”) was a man born during a bombardment who grows to manhood in the environment of total war. Leading a brigade of “unkillables” the Lieutenant fights his way to military dictatorship of England and [spoiler] ensures his great triumph, the preservation of English independence from the United States, by arranging his own death.
    Hubbard assumed two key premises on which he based the development of events in his story: that the war in Europe would grind on to the point where governments and national boundaries disintegrated, communications broke down, and the war devolved into localized skirmishes between roving bands of armed and uniformed brigands and that the United States would remain neutral and completely uninvolved in the conflict.
    To more fully understand the controversy this novel aroused it might be well to examine briefly the picture of things as they were at the time this story was written and published. Hubbard (always an incredibly fast and sure writer) wrote this during the first weeks of the war, as Poland was being destroyed by the German blitzkrieg, its army with its outmoded cavalry and inept strategy ground into the mud by Nazi panzer divisions, its cities pulverized by Stukas. It was a horrifying nightmare of total war. And to add to the madness, on November 30th, mighty Russia invaded tiny Finland. It seemed certain now, with the four great powers of Europe involved in war, that the Armageddon for European civilization that had, since World War I, been predicted as the end result of any future European war was a predictable certainty.
    At the time the story was published most American radicals and liberals were actively urging more positive action by the government in opposing fascist aggression, and giving greater aid to the Allies; the anti-war, neutralist movement was at its peak, particularly amongst students.
    The point at issue with “Final Blackout” narrowed down to this: was it communist propaganda, or was it fascist propaganda? Was it pro-war, or was it anti-war? It was none of these, basically, but depending upon one’s political leanings, which in those days, and in certain circles tended to the extremes, the battle lines were drawn and charges of “communist” and “fascist” flew back and forth for months. Despite the political significance read into “Final Blackout” by partisans of the Left or Right, Hubbard maintains that it was apolitical in intent, and merely an attempt on his part to anticipate a future—grim as it could be—based on the most pessimistic interpretation of the evidence at hand and the best experts of the day. The fact that his future failed, in the main, to materialize doesn’t at all lessen the merit of “Final Blackout” as an outstanding work of science fiction. And who knows? The future he erronously predicted for World War II looks like a fair bet for a possible future to World War III.
  4. Uboat.net
  5. The advertisement for Unknown:AST194006art1x600
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Astounding Science Fiction n25n03, May 1940

Astounding

Other Reviews:
Jamie Rubin: Vacation in the Golden Age, Episode 11: May 1940

Fiction:
Space Guards • novella by Philip Francis Nowlan ♥♥
The Last of the Asterites • short story by Joseph E. Kelleam ♥♥♥
Rim of the Deep • novelette by Clifford D. Simak
Space Double • novelette by Nat Schachner
Hindsight • short story by Jack Williamson
The Long Winter • short story by Raymond Z. Gallun ♥♥
Final Blackout (Part 2 of 3) • serial by L. Ron Hubbard ♥♥♥+

Non-fiction:
Cover • Hubert Rogers
Internal Artwork • Charles Schneeman, Paul Orban, Frank Kramer, Rey Isip,
The Perfect Machine • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
The Analytical Laboratory: February & March 1940
Astrochemistry? • science article
Whacky Design Inevitable! • science article
Brass Tacks • letters
Science Discussions • science letters
Hot Filament • science article by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Arthur McCann]

There is a change in the cover design with this issue and it is an inelegant one. Previously the magazine name has been imposed on top of the cover art and the title of the lead story has been at the bottom of the page: now we have the magazine name against a solid colour bar, with a rectangle containing the title story and author awkwardly sitting astride the colour bar and the artwork below. This cover design persists until the end of 1941 where it is, from what I can see, replaced by something worse.1 More moaning about this as and when I see fit.
As to the cover art itself, it is a fairly muddy looking and poorly detailed piece: certainly not Roger’s best work. Schneeman and Kramer once again provide the best of the internal artwork.2

The cover story this issue is Space Guards, the last work by Philip Francis Nowlan, writer of the Buck Rogers series. This tells of Bob and Linda, members of the Space Guard, who are on Venus looking for the criminals Tiger Madden and Valita Lenoir. There follow a number of adventures: their space glider is stolen, they are captured by the natives and then freed to watch their spectacular victory over Madden’s forces. Subsequently, the pair encounter a dinosaur-like ‘luimok’ en route to Madden’s lair and scare it away using a heat ray, whereupon it attacks an enemy camp. After being forced to kill the creature they discover a survivor, Ainetsu, who turns out to be a Martian agent who knows where Madden’s secret city is.
This takes us about halfway through the story and, as you can probably tell, it continues like this for the remainder. It is all competently enough done but there isn’t a moment where you fear for Bob and Linda’s lives. And there are far too many instances where matters conveniently work in their favour: this is the explanation given by Ainetsu when they meet up after being separated in Madden’s secret city:

“The indicator showed the car was down. So, as quickly and silently as I could, I slid the door open enough to slip inside, and closed it quietly after me. I know it sounds unbelievable. But nobody noticed. So up I came!” p.48

It is also quite cheerfully grisly on a number of occasions:

“It’s not her own blood,” I explained, “but that of that animal there.”
Ainetsu turned to stare unbelievingly at the ghastly hole in the side of Linda’s last adversary. “But what did you do it with?”
“My knuckle-knife, of course,” Linda said testily, holding her arm away from her side with an expression of disgust.

I showed Ainetsu my own knife, which wasn’t quite so gory, and she marveled at its peculiar construction, with its razor-sharp blade of impervium running across the width of the fist. I told her it was standard equipment with the Earth Space Guard for in-fighting.
“What a viciously effective weapon!” she exclaimed. “And clever! Whoever thought it up? Martian recorded history goes back about twenty-five thousand of your years, but I never heard of a weapon like this.”
p.31

The Last of the Asterites is by occasional writer Joseph E. Kelleam.3 It is a fairly vivid story about Alph, a member of the mutant Narg species of humanity that inhabit a degenerate Ceres asteroid:

Below him, nearly twoscore of men and women, all of them tall and long-limbed and slant-browed like Alph were leaping and shouting about something that was writhing and roaring amid the flames. “A captive Trog,” thought Alph, and shuddered when the screams of the tortured one rose higher and higher and were cut off in a thin, bubbling squeak. Since infancy, Alph had been taught to hate the Trogs, but he could never bear to take part in their burnings. p.53

He is later saved from a man-eating plant in the jungle by a woman who would appear to be a normal human, or perhaps a cross between the Nargs and Trogs. He eventually reveals to her the secret of the asteroid control room that his dead guardian entrusted to him. This and other machinery had been used to put Ceres closer to the sun where it had originally functioned as a food factory. At the end of this (spoiler) he loses the woman to the rest of his tribe and decides to set the asteroid’s controls for the heart of the sun….
Overall, the quality of this was such that I initially wondered if it was a more established name writing under a pseudonym. If the rest of his work was of this standard it is a pity he didn’t write much more.

The next three stories are pulp dross. Rim of the Deep by Clifford D. Simak has a hard drinking newsman in a universe where there are prisons on Ganymede but you can still find newspapers with damp ink on them. He ends up under the ocean looking for (as in the Nowlan story) an escaped criminal. Well, it is supposed to be undersea but this is the newsman’s first couple of conversations with a man he meets called Gus:

Old Gus talked as he brewed the coffee. “A man gets sort of lonesome down here once in a while,” he explained, “and you like some company, even if it ain’t nothing but a thing like Butch. Sharks, now, are downright friendly once you get to know them, but they ain’t no account, as pets. They wander too much. You never know where they are. But octopuses are home bodies. Butch lairs out in the cliff back there and comes a-humping every time he sees me.” p.69-70

He goes on to detail the problems in the area:

“There’s been too dang many robberies,” said Old Gus. “Too much helling around. This country is getting sort of civilized now and we ain’t going to stand for it much longer.”
“You think there’s a gang of robbers down in that deep?” asked Grant.
“That’s the only place they could be,” said Gus. “It’s bad country and hard to get around in. Lots of caves and a couple of canyons that run down to the Big Deep. Dozens of places where a gang could hide.”
Gus sipped gustily at the coffee. “It used to be right peaceable down here,” he mourned. “A man could find him a bed of clams and post the place and know it was his. Nobody would touch it. Or you could stake out a radium workings and know that your stakes wouldn’t be pulled up. And if you found an old ship you just slapped up a notice on it saying you had found it and nobody would take so much as a single plank away. But it ain’t that way no more. There’s been a lot of claim jumping and clam beds have been robbed. We kind of figure we’ll have to put a stop to it.”
p.70

I think I’ve said enough about this pardner, so I’ll just mosey on to the next campfire yarn.

Space Double by Nat Schachner is not only poor it is actively bad in places. Two gangsters commission a robot copy of a space captain taking some bullion to wherever. After a while the second in command begins to suspect that all is not well. At the end there is a ludicrous scene where he dives for a control for the robot double—which just happens to be lying on the floor—while the gangsters have a raygun trained on him. Quite unbelievable. I’ll be interested to see how much longer Schachner survives in Astounding before he is tossed overboard for the new generation.
The other thing I noticed about Schachner’s writing is the variability in style and tone. One moment he is in standard pulp mode and the next minute he is writing like this, a scene that happens after the original space captain has escaped from captivity:

Out on the highway, heedless of the figure he cut, he waved his arms violently. An aerocab was skimming by, close to the ground, its yellow pennant streaming to show it was empty. It twisted violently and dropped beside him.
Dow yanked the door open, darted in. “To the airport,” he rasped, “and in a hurry!”
The cabby’s eyes popped. In his game he ran across plenty of unusual sights, but a bloody madman in a pair of shorts was a bit thick.
Dow yelled at him. “Hurry, you blithering idiot. I’m Captain Dow of the Jovian Line. My ship’s past blasting time. I’ve been shanghaied; my clothes snatched by a brace of blankety-blank horse thieves.”
p.89

Apart from anything else, that kind of attitude isn’t going to do much for your Uber rating.
Hindsight by Jack Williamson is an awful super-science tale about an Earthman, Brek Veronar, who left his best friend and a girl to work for the tyrannical Astrarch, originally an asteroid pirate or some such who has taken control of the solar system. Years later, they inform Brek they are planning a rebellion against the Astrarch. As you would.
Brek ends up in the Astrarch’s fleet and they lose the space battle as their weapon auto-sights aren’t as good as the rebel’s ones. Brek then tells the Astrarch he can alter events in the past so they do not lose….
I’ve remarked before about the poor quality of some of the stories in these 1940s Astoundings, but it is a bit of a surprise to find three of them in a row.

Matters improve with The Long Winter by Raymond Z. Gallun. Viborg, a member of an expedition to Uranus, decides to kill all the other members of the team so all the glory will be his. He opens a small hole in the wall of their shelter to allow frozen methane to enter and eventually be ignited by an electrical short circuit. Matters do not proceed as he planned.

The last piece of fiction in the issue, the second part of L. Ron Hubbard’s serial, is also the best. Final Blackout is a completely different work from the other stories, even the better ones. It has a seriousness of style and tone as well as a grimness that the others don’t come close to. This passage occurs as the Lieutenant makes his way to GHQ through a Europe where hundreds of millions have died:

The lieutenant caught sight of the Weasel’s runner signaling him ahead from the side of an overturned railroad car. He quickened his pace and followed the fellow up to the vanguard.
Weasel, his small self very still, pointed mutely to a crazily suspended railroad rail which jutted out from a wall like a gibbet. And it was a gibbet.
Four soldiers, their necks drawn out to twice their length, were rotting in their uniforms, swaying to and fro in the gentle wind. Below them was a painted scrawl upon the stone:

SOLDIERS! MOVE ON!
“British,” whispered Pollard, coming up. p.124-5

The Lieutenant eventually arrives at GHQ and, as expected, is relieved of his command. When he returns to his billet he finds two other officers who have had the same happen to them. Subsequently, his men mutiny and take control of the underground fort. The Lieutenant later reveals to his men that his willingness to go to GHQ was so that he could increase the size of his brigade and get better equipment and munitions.
As they leave the fort, and the staff officers and troops the Lieutenant didn’t want, Colonel Smythe tells the General that he thinks that the brigade is heading for England and that they should warn them.

The non-fiction this issue is the usual assortment.
The Perfect Machine, the editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr., is about how machines should become simpler to use as they become more advanced. Tell that to any grandparent with a new smartphone. Campbell, under his McCann pseudonym, also contributes a science article, Hot Filament, on the failure of two hypotheses of planetary formation (contracting sun and star collision theories). There are a couple of short science squibs, Astrochemistry? and Whacky Design Inevitable!, which are probably by Campbell too. ‘McCann’ also has a letter in Science Discussions alongside a couple of letters taking the science in Ross Rocklynne’s and A. M. Phillip’s stories to bits. Interesting that the correspondents then say they really enjoyed the stories!
In Times to Come is mostly a puff piece for a science article on a new science, but also mentions the new Heinlein and Knight stories.
The Analytical Laboratory: February & March 1940 is quite annoying.4 Both the February and March stories are ranked almost exactly in length order. Also, how does de Camp’s The Emancipated manage to place behind Schachner’s Cold for goodness sake?
Finally there is an interesting Brass Tacks letter column. Ralph C. Hamilton of Wooster, Ohio has a long letter about the improving quality of the magazine:

There has been a gradual evolution of the old into the new; and although it is impossible to say just when the new arrived, the awareness has come that it is here. p.148

He puts this down to the fact the stories are well written, mature, realistic and original. He also mentions the illustrations:

On the whole, however, the Illustrations are better balanced, saner and of a higher artistic quality, although they have not yet reached the level of the stories. They are probably the weakest point of the magazine. p.148

Lastly, he mentions his reservations about Heinlein’s If This Goes On—:

But I can’t escape the feeling that someone performed a major operation and amputation on the last part of the story; it was bowling along in great style, giving promise of many things yet to come—when it staggered, slumped, and fell with a thud. p.148

An interesting letter, and Campbell mentions there is a sequel in hand, Coventry. A couple of the other correspondents single out Heinlein and de Camp for praise.
The back page has a cigarette advertisement5 which, by today’s standards, seems quite incongruous.

Overall, an OK to poor issue.

  1. Astounding cover index at Galactic Central.
  2. A fine grisly piece by Charles Schneeman:Astounding
  3. Joseph Kelleam’s bibliography is at ISFDB. Three stories in Astounding and one in Avon Fantasy Reader in the thirties and forties, a couple of stories and a couple of short novels sold to Cele Goldsmith at Amazing and Fantastic in the late fifties/early sixties, and a couple of other novels was pretty much all there was.
  4. Analytical Laboratory ratings for February in ranked order:
    If This Goes On—, Robert A. Heinlein
    And Then There Was One, Ross Rocklynne
    The Professor Was a Thief, L. Ron Hubbard
    Locked Out, H. B. Fyfe
    Bombardment in Reverse, Norman I. Knight
    Analytical Laboratory ratings for March in ranked order:
    If This Goes On—, Robert A. Heinlein
    Cold, Nat Schachner
    The Emancipated, L. Sprague de Camp
    A Chapter From The Beginning, A. M. Phillips
    In The Good Old Summertime, P. Schuyler Miller
  5. That cigarette advertisment (I am having a fag….):Astounding
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Astounding Science Fiction v25n02, April 1940

Astounding

Other Reviews:
Jamie Rubin: Vacation in the Golden Age, Episode 10: April 1940

Fiction:
Final Blackout (Part 1 of 3) • serial by L. Ron Hubbard ♥♥♥
Unguh Made a Fire • short story by Ross Rocklynne ♥♥
Repetition • novelette by A. E. van Vogt ♥
The Treasure of Ptakuth • short story by Leigh Brackett
Reincarnate • novelette by Lester del Rey ♥♥♥
Admiral’s Inspection • novelette by Malcolm Jameson ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Final Blackout • cover by Hubert Rogers
Interior artwork • Charles Schneeman, Don Hewitt, Frank Kramer, Hubert Rogers, W. Kolliker
Let’s Make It Stronger • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
The Magic Bullet • science essay by Willy Ley
Brass Tacks • letters

This issue leads off with L. Ron Hubbard’s serial Final Blackout. I was looking forward to this after reading Herbert Best’s The Twenty-Fifth hour,1 as I’ve seen a couple of reviewers mention both novels in the same breath. Having now read both of them I don’t think this is particularly accurate comparison and I’ll explain why in later instalment reviews.
The first thing I noticed about Hubbard’s novel is that it is quite a short work: it is a three part serial and this first instalment, minus the illustrations, runs to 26pp. The introduction starts with the lieutenant’s harsh childhood and early life:

He was born in an air-raid shelter—and his first wail was drowned by the shriek of bombs, the thunder of falling walls and the coughing chatter of machine guns raking the sky.
He was taught in a countryside where A was for Antiaircraft and Z was for Zeppelin. He knew that the improved Vickers Wellington bombers had flown clear to Moscow, but nobody thought to tell him about a man who had sailed a carack twice as far in the opposite direction—a chap called Columbus.
War-shattered officers had taught him the arts of battle on the relief maps of Rugby. Limping sergeants had made him expert with rifle and pistol, light and heavy artillery. And although he could not conjugate a single Latin verb, he was graduated as wholly educated at fourteen and commissioned the same year.
His father was killed on the Mole at Kiel. His uncle rode a flamer in at Hamburg. His mother, long ago, had died of grief and starvation in the wreckage which had been London.
When he was eighteen he had been sent to the front as a subaltern. At twenty-three he was commanding a brigade. p.9-10

It goes on to tell of the long European war with its hundreds of millions of casualties, the loss of nearly all war munitions, the great starvation and the ‘soldier’s sickness’.
Due to this installment’s brevity not much happens in this first part. After some establishing scenes with the Lieutenant and some of his men they are joined by an officer from the communist directed GHQ, who has orders to take the Lieutenant back to their commanders. The Lieutenant suspects this may be because of his failure to establish soldier’s councils.
Subsequently, the Lieutenant’s troops mount a successful attack against Russian soldiers they encounter. Once they have surrounded them they negotiate a surrender that sees the Russian troops leave with their personal arms but leave the bulk of their equipment behind. They are the last of the White Russian Army and are looking for somewhere to settle in the wasteland that is Europe.
The unit then comes across an underground settlement. It refuses to surrender so they stop the chimneys with leaves and smoke them out. They subsequently find the villagers have been using soldiers as slave labour and the Lieutenant turns over the village leader to them. As well as these events there are a couple of ruthless killings along the way, which gives this work a gritty and realistic start.

Following the serial is Unguh Made a Fire by Ross Rocklynne, which is an OK piece about the last few remaining Martians fleeing their plague ridden planet for Earth. They settle and teach a primitive Earthman the secret of fire….
The next two stories are not very good at all. Repetition is the first ‘Rull’ novelette by A. E. van Vogt, although there is nothing to suggest that it is going to be the start of a series. It is about an Earth ambassador on Europa and his guide attempting to murder him by tampering with his rocket suit. After the ambassador crash-lands he wakes to find the guide has given him first aid but has sent their flight suits towards Jupiter. The guide says he could not murder him but wants to make sure he can’t survive and return to base.
This is all motivated by an Earth plan to let Mars assume control of Europa. The ambassador subsequently explains why agreeing to this is better than war by going into the finances behind the value of the metals that Earth and Mars want control of Europa for:

The value of the entire thousand years’ supply, at an average of twenty dollars per ton, is four thousand billion dollars. I need hardly tell you that a war between Earth and Mars would cost ten times that much for each year that it lasted, not counting the hundred to two hundred million lives that would be destroyed in every conceivable horrible manner, the brutalizing of minds that would take place, the destruction of liberty that would ensue. Did the leaders of your community consider that in their deliberations?” p.59

Given the war going on in Europe, and the fact that Hitler wasn’t doing a cost benefit analysis, I don’t how this could have been received as anything other than excessively simplistic. The only plus points among the contrived plotting, simplistic politics and two dimensional characterisation are a couple of inventively grisly ways of killing the local wildlife (including the ominously named gryb2).
Much worse than van Vogt’s story is The Treasure of Ptakuth by Leigh Brackett. This is about an archaeologist and an adventurer on Mars looking for the lost city of Ptakuth. There is also a native tribe, a beautiful girl and a cyclotron ray that confers immortality amongst the general nonsense:

The cyclotron fired hydrogen bullets against a screen of yttrium. Using rubidium filters, the scientists of Ptakuth generated a ray with a wonderful property; the property of making the human bloodstream radio-active with a gamma-principle. This gamma element in the blood gave a power of regeneration to the body cells, but most of all, being in itself a germ-destroying element, it made the human body immune to all disease. You can see how this would extend the life span. p.84

This reads like a throwback to the early thirties.3

Fortunately, things pick up for the rest of the issue. Reincarnate by Lester del Rey is the second novelette and, for the most part, it is a pretty good account of a scientist injured in a reactor explosion who is turned into a cyborg. After some pulp-ish establishing scenes before the explosion with his fiancé and a fellow scientist, this turns into quite a detailed and convincing account of him learning to communicate from within his mechanical shell. He does this initially with Morse code:

If he made no reply, they might realize he could not understand.
There was a conference of noises, and the clicking again, all short this time. One click, space, two clicks, space, three— They were running over the numbers in the simplest of codes. Clumsily he repeated, and the numbering left off. Then the clicker reverted to a series of mixed short and long sounds, with spaces coming in irregular order. He counted the sounds between spaces, and made out twenty-six. As the signals started again, he checked. The fifth was E, the eighth H, and the others fitted in. They were sending the alphabet for him to memorize. He selected the most necessary letters and concentrated on them until he was sure he could make an intelligible sentence.
“Where am I?” p.108

Eventually he learns to speak and see and eventually use the new body he inhabits.
It is slightly marred by an obvious and rather pulp ending but it is worth reading for the convincing central section which seems well ahead of its time. I would add that SFE states that ‘the most common form of cyborg portrayed in the early SF Pulp magazines was an extreme version of the medical cyborg (see Medicine), consisting of a human brain in a mechanical envelope.’ Del Rey’s story is not mentioned so maybe the other stories cited are better examples.4
The last story is Malcolm Jameson’s novelette, Admiral’s Inspection. Like the van Vogt, this is the first story in a series, ‘Bullard of the Space Patrol’.5 The main character in this story is Lieutenant Bullard, a newcomer on a spaceship called the Pollux. The story opens with him and a handful of the crew playing meteor ball, which sounds like fun as it seems to be a rocket propelled handball in space. The game is interrupted and they are recalled to the ship as a signal has come in informing them they will shortly undergo an Admiral’s inspection. The rest of the first half of the story details the ship and Bullard’s preparation for this.
When the inspection gets going the crew perform well until Bullard is the only left officer left ‘alive’:

He dashed down the passage toward sub-CC, a little cubbyhole abaft Plot, not wasting a second in a futile stop at the Plotting Room. What he had seen in CC, would doubtless, be repeated there. As he passed the door of the wardroom he caught a glimpse of the officers crowded in there, and what he saw made him pause a moment and take a closer look. Peering through the glassite panel he was astonished to see most of the officers of the Pollux in there, either out of their spacesuits or in the act of taking them off. Chinnery, whom he thought in temporary command, was one of them. p.144

He copes well but then events take a more serious turn as a genuine emergency occurs.
This is quite good to start with, and honest about the fact it is essentially a naval story in drag: it openly refers to historical naval tradition and then extrapolates from there. The second half drags slightly: it goes on too long, and the scientific improvisations designed to repair their equipment during the emergency are a little unconvincing, applied as they are to hypothetical future spaceship equipment. I’ll be interested to see how this series pans out though.

As to this issue’s non-fiction there is some decent artwork from Schneeman (for Hubbard’s serial) and Kramer (for the van Vogt).6 As for Hubert Rogers cover, well to begin with I didn’t think much of it one way or the other. However, the more I look at it the more it grows on me.7 I don’t know if it is the little details like the skull-helmet in the bottom right hand corner or the line of silhouette figures on the left. Perhaps it is the dark, almost shadow like structures in the foreground contrasting with the promise of the warm light in the distance. More frivolously, it occurred to me that the tank that appeared on February’s cover only seems to have lasted two months in active service….

Campbell writes a short editorial, Let’s Make It Stronger, to solicit science articles (at a cent a word).
In Times to Come ends up being a eulogy for Phil Nowlan (author of Buck Rogers), as it announces his death from a stroke and also the upcoming appearance of Space Guards, which Campbell states was to be first of a series. Campbell also states his work from a decade ago stands up to that being produced today.
Willy Ley’s science article on poison gas warfare, The Magic Bullet, is an interesting but somewhat grisly piece that tells you more than you ever wanted to know about the subject. And there are some surprises in there too:

The prospect of poison gas, it may be added, is really not as terrible as some writers want the world to believe. Strangely enough poison gas is a very humane weapon of war. I admit that the term “humane war” bears a suspicious resemblance to “painless torture.” But there certainly are degrees of inhumanity and violent explosions and flying steel splinters are evidently less humane than chemical agents. If soldiers are afraid, they are not afraid to die, they are afraid to be mutilated and crippled for life. Poison gas does not cripple its victims. Very careful and complete surveys have shown that there were neither more cases of pulmonary tuberculosis among phosgene victims than there are normally among an equal number of ungassed people, nor were there more cases of blindness among mustard gas victims. Even if all the doubtful cases were ascribed to gas, the number of cases of blindness was far less— in fact, a very small fraction—than that caused by other weapons. It is true that gas blinds all unprotected victims for a short time, say three days or a week, but unless they actually got drops of the liquid into the eye, recovery is usually complete. p.97-98

This is well worth reading even now, and it certainly modified my opinion about the effects and results of gas warfare in WWI.
Finally, Brass Tacks begins with Isaac Asimov’s letter listing his top ten stories of 1939 (and one other correspondent gives theirs as well).8 The first part of Heinlein’s serial was well received and the artists take another pounding.

Overall a mixed issue but with one or two things of interest.

  1. Herbert Best’s The Twenty-Fifth Hour is reviewed here.
  2. One of the variant titles of Repetition is The Gryb.
  3. But what do I know? Brackett’s story Martian Quest (Astounding, February 1940) is a finalist for the 1941 Retro Hugo Award. I have no idea what is going on there.
  4. http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/cyborgs
  5. This was the first of nine ‘Bullard of the Space Patrol’ stories published between 1940 and 1945. According to SFE, Jameson ‘began producing fiction only after cancer forced him to retire from a nonwriting life which had included a career in the US Navy.’ He was 47 when he sold his first story to Astounding and would be dead by the time he was 54. Sometimes it is a little depressing reading these old mags….
  6. Artwork by Schneeman:Astounding
    Artwork by Kramer:
    Astounding
  7. Jamie Rubin’s review made me reconsider the cover. Normally I don’t read other reviews until I’m absolutely finished but I read his just before finishing this one.
  8. Isaac Asimov’s top ten for 1939: One Against the Legion, Jack Williamson; Lifeline, Robert Heinlein; Gray Lensman, E. E. Smith; Cosmic Engineers, Clifford D. Simak; Day is Done, Lester del Rey; Rope Trick, Eando Binder;  Nothing Happens on the Moon, Paul Ernst; General Swamp, C. I. C ., Frederick Engelhardt; Rust, Joseph E. Kelleam;  Smallest God, Lester del Rey.
    Whereas Tom Wright of Martinez, California (and editor of something called The Comet) picked: Cloak Of Assir, Don A. Stuart; Crucible Of Power, Jack Williamson; Greater Than Gods, C. L. Moore; One Against The Legion, Jack Williamson; Black Destroyer & Discord In Scarlet, A. E. van Vogt; Cosmic Engineers, Clifford D. Simak; The Morons, Harl Vincent; The Luck Of Ignatz, Lester del Rey; Maiden Voyage, Vic Phillips.
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